Casey and the Bat

June 1969

“Lookit this,” Lenny said, handing me the bat.
“So?” I said, unimpressed. It was a little heavier than most bats, and its color was a darker blonde than most.
“So?” he said incredulously, snatching the bat out of my hands as if I were unworthy.
“It’s a bat. We going to Verdugo?”
I suddenly did not want to go to the park if it was baseball he had in mind. Usually we played basketball and in the fall we would play tackle football in our jeans and sweatshirts. The football games were interminable marathons and when we were at the point of utter and complete exhaustion, Lenny would declare halftime and I don’t know why the rest us didn’t just quit on him but instead we would go to the drinking fountain, then return to battle for a few more hours until the score of the game became incalculable or forgotten, and Lenny—we ended up dubbing him The Commissioner—would announce that next touchdown would win. I much preferred football or basketball to baseball; I was no good at baseball and my ineptitude drove Lenny crazy.
“No way. We’re not playing baseball at Verdugo. Not until you learn how to swing a bat. You swing like you’re…”
“Chopping wood. ‘Sokay with me, I hate baseball. Let’s play some basketball. At least I know give and go.”
“We got some other business today.”
“What?”
“This bat,” he said, holding it aloft like it was the staff of Moses, “is worth a fortune.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“This is a real old bat. Real old.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Look at it, Jack. It’s in clean shape. It’s a pro bat. A collector’s item.”
“Where’d you find it?”
“A tenant left it when he moved out.”
“Aren’t you gonna send it to him or something?”
“No. Are you kidding? Finders keepers.”
“If it’s so valuable why’d he forget it?”
“Cause he probably didn’t know it was valuable. Probably got it in a junk store from somebody else that didn’t know.”
“How you gonna prove it’s an old bat?”
“Look at the writing right there. What do you see?”
“Looks like scribbles.”
“Hold it this way. Looks like Phil Rizzuto.”
“Who’s he?”
“He played for the Yankees.”
“I can’t tell. Looks like a P but it might a A.”
“No, Jack. Look, that says Phil right there. And that right there, that’s the R for Rizzuto.”
“How you gonna prove it?”
“That’s what we’re doing today. You got a bike?”
“No.”
“You don’t have a bike?”
He started laughing.
“I had a bike. It was purple. A Huffy.”
“A Huffy?” he said, laughing louder.
“I got it for Christmas when I was like 10.”
“They didn’t get you a Schwinn?”
“No. Mom bought it used from Morey across the street. It was purple and gigantic.”
“Pitiful. What happened to it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s in the garage. I’m not riding it though, even if it is.”
“I got a bike you can use.”
“Where are we going?”
“We’re gonna take the bat to a baseball expert.”
“Coach Libman?”
“Yeah, right. I said an expert. The guy who used to be the manager for the Yankees, not a high school coach.”
“Oh you mean Yogi Bear?”
“Yeah we’re gonna go steal picnic baskets.”
“Ok, very funny. I meant Yogi Berra.”
“Better than him. Come on, let’s go.” He grabbed a fistful of sunflower seeds and we went and got his bike under the lemon tree and then found the spare bike in the carport.
We never biked anywhere that I can remember and we never did after that day. Not that it was bad or that anything bad happened that day; it’s just that it wasn’t a sport, it was just a mode of transportation and we walked everywhere, all over Burbank. But this was something new and I was looking forward to it. We got on the bikes and headed east down Verdugo Avenue. I didn’t bother to ask Lenny where or how far or who the baseball expert was. We rode almost a mile and were coming up to Victory Boulevard before I spoke.
“Where are we going?”
“We’re going to Casey Stengel’s house.”
“Who’s he?”
“Did you just say who’s he?”
“Yeah.” The name was familiar but I wanted some clarification.
“Oh. Nobody, just some guy who managed the New York Yankees to like 10 World Series, that’s all.”
I went silent for another mile. We were on Glenoaks Boulevard before I decided I would speak. I didn’t know much about baseball. I realized that day that although I loved the Los Angeles Dodgers I could only name three of them: Sandy Koufax; Don Drysdale and Maury Wills, and Koufax was retired. I tried to dredge up some face-saving factoid about the Yankees, but all I could think of was Babe Ruth and a pitcher by the name of Whitey Ford. I only knew Whitey Ford because I had heard my brother talk about him. I don’t know how the brain works exactly but a name came to me that was out of my mouth before I even realized I had said it. I think that I was probably trying to make amends for my Yogi Bear gaffe.
“I thought Leo Durocher was the Yankees manager,” I said with an understated authority.
“No, Jake. Durocher managed some other team called the Brooklyn Dodgers. Ever heard of them?”
Why was baseball so essential? Football and basketball are so much better; they were fluid where baseball was static. Football is the best sport of them all. I recalled a question in a kids’ magazine asking which sport is known as the King of Sports. I was sure it was football and stared in disbelief at the answer: Horseracing. I hated baseball. All that standing and waiting and sitting and waiting. I couldn’t hit, field or throw and standing in the batter’s box trying to not make a fool of yourself was like attending church naked and hoping to go unnoticed. Nevertheless, I was intrigued at the prospect of meeting a famous major league baseball manager from a legendary baseball team.
“Where the heck does he live anyway?”
“Glendale.”
“Glendale?”
“Relax, we’re almost there.”
“If he’s from New York what’s he doing in Glendale?”
“Whatever he wants. He’s retired. There’s lots of old people in Glendale, so he’s in the right place.”
We turned on Glenview Avenue. The houses were nice but not at all ostentatious. It seemed to me if you were a well-paid famous person you would live in San Marino or Newport or maybe Los Feliz—I always thought it would be cool to live in one of those houses on the way to the Griffith Park Observatory—but Glendale, well Glendale wouldn’t be at the top of anyone’s list. I was 15 and didn’t know circumstances and choices of adults any more than I knew baseball history.
“There it is.” Lenny called out, pointing at the house with the bat.
“Who told you where he lives?”
“Marty.”
“Marty? Who’s Marty?”
“Fat Marty. He played football at Verdugo a few times. You liked blocking him because he was blubbery.”
“Oh yeah, Marty. How’d he know?”
“He’s got connections.”
“Huh.” I couldn’t imagine anyone our age having “connections,” even in LA.
We dismounted and walked our bikes up the driveway. We stood on the porch and looked at each other, laughing with joy, quietly. Lenny pressed the doorbell which after a moment’s delay chimed in a humble, modest tone.
“Do we call him Mr. Durocher or Leo?”
“Don’t say anything,” Lenny answered, shaking his head in disbelief.
We stood on the porch for what seemed an inordinate amount of time but I was impatient and didn’t want to get chased away.
“Nobody’s here. Let’s go.”
“Just wait.”
A moment later we heard footsteps inside the house, followed by the unlatching of latches and unbolting of deadbolts. When the door opened an elderly woman stood before us, smiling, waiting for one of us to speak.
“Um, hello,” Lenny began tentatively, “we were in the neighborhood and just wanted to say hello to Mr. Stengel.”
I pondered the notion of being in the neighborhood from five miles away but concluded that our two towns were the neighbors. I raised my eyebrows and nodded my head enthusiastically, accustomed to playing the role of Harpo. The woman looked at us like we were little cherubs hovering on her front porch bearing good news for the Stengels. Lenny had the bat resting on his shoulder.
“Well, isn’t that nice? Why don’t you come in boys?”
“Thank you,” Lenny said, smooth as glass,“I hope we’re not disrupting your Saturday.” He had suddenly morphed into a decorously mannered young man I had no idea he was capable of imitating, let alone becoming. There was no Eddie Haskell in him at the moment; he was sincere.
“Oh why, it’s no disruption at all,” she chuckled at either the word or the notion. “Wait here, I’ll see if Casey wouldn’t mind some visitors. I’m sure he wouldn’t.”
“Thank you, ma’m. I’m Lenny and this is Jack. We won’t stay long.”
“Nice you to meet you, both. I’m Edna, Mrs. Stengel, Casey’s wife. I’ll be right back.”
We stood in the dark, quiet entryway. Lenny took the bat off his shoulder and simply held it at his side. I felt like we were getting away with something because Mrs. Stengel was treating us like were adorable little kids who came to see their hero but we were in fact too old at 15 to be adorable, and my heroes—Roosevelt Grier, David Deacon Jones, Lamar Lundy and Merlin Olsen—were football players. Casey Stengel was too old to be our hero; Lenny knew about him because his dad grew up in New York and was an avid sports enthusiast. And while the visit would mean more to Lenny than it did to me, he was still there on business.
“If the bat is valuable are you going to sell it?”
“No way.”
“Then you have a bat worth a lot that you’ll never sell.”
“You don’t get it.”
I was going to ask Lenny to explain what it was I didn’t understand when Casey Stengel appeared from the back of the living room, appraised us for a moment and then moved toward us, slowly. I knew he was old but I somehow had expected him to still look athletic. He was old but not frail. He moved slowly but with certainty, greeted us amiably and invited us to follow him to the den where we stayed for half an hour listening to stories of the glory days of baseball. He showed us his trophy case but shrugged nonchalantly when we made sounds to express our awe. Lenny was able to carry a conversation with Casey—they talked about the Mets, the Yankees and how the game had changed over the years. I stayed in Harpo mode, mugging, nodding, and putting my hand on my head at what I thought might be appropriate moments. Just when I thought Lenny was going to pass on asking about the bat, he held it up and presented it to Casey.
“Mr. Stengel…”
“Casey.”
“Casey, I found this bat and it looks pretty old. It’s autographed and I was wondering if you could look at it,” Lenny said as if it didn’t matter much to him.
“Huh? Oh yeah,” he said, holding the bat in both hands as if he were weighing it. “It’s a bat all right.” He looked at one end and then the other.
“What do you think?” Lenny asked, unable to maintain his matter of fact tone.
“Well, I’ll tell ya. This bat? It’s just a bat. It’s not rare or nothing.”
“But…”
“It’s not special or nothin’, but it’s especially not worth nothin’ to you.”
He smiled and then nodded with finality and handed the bat back to Lenny. No one knew who should speak next but Mrs. Stengel arrived as if on cue. We all stood up and made ready to leave. We thanked him, we thanked her and in a moment we were on the front porch picking up our bikes, the door closing behind us. Lenny was in a funk but I knew if I said something sympathetic he would take the opposite point of view and shake it off.
“Oh well,” I said as we rolled down Grandview Avenue.
“The bat doesn’t matter,” he said with conviction, “we had a visit with Casey Stengel. The bat was just our excuse to go see him.”
“Yeah.”
We rolled downhill, I took my feet off the pedals, and for a moment I had that memory of riding a bike for the very first time.

Dating Game

I was sitting on the curb in front of the dingy waiting room. It was as bad as any waiting room where car maintenance or repair is involved: the windows were yellow and scratched; the furniture was torn and lopsided; the magazines were dog-eared and concerned themselves with car rebuilding or restoration minutia; and no one spoke to or looked at each other. I wasn’t about to wait in the waiting room. If I had known how much time in my life I would spend waiting for a ride home after dropping off a car or waiting for the service to the car to be finished over the next 41 years, I might have taken up biking. But I didn’t mind it much at the time; I liked it in a way because I was doing something an adult did. I just wasn’t about to wait in that waiting room with a room full of tired, angry, worn out and overwhelmed people with their arms folded across their chests or their hands on their hips or back pockets. I was young, I had a million tomorrows, so I could easily waste one morning sitting on the curb in front of an ugly waiting room full of unhappy, stressed out people. I had a job but at $2 an hour I could hardly say that time was money. Besides, having or not having a job was of no consequence to me at that time. It was just something to do, and just about everything was something to do at the time.
I sat on the curb in my blue tennis shoes, Levi’s and white t-shirt with my arms on my knees and my fingers interlaced. I cracked my knuckles one at a time wondering if I would get arthritis like Grandma Ruth said I would. When I cracked all my knuckles as many times as I could I tried to do the same to my neck—make that noise and feel that relief, that looseness—and I torqued my chin until I heard and felt a satisfying pop. There was nothing else to do so I listened to the songs in my head, starting with The Band’s version of “Don’t Do it.”
My cheeks were flattening out and falling asleep from sitting on concrete when the black, brand new, sparkling 450 Mercedes pulled up. I didn’t notice it at first; I was singing Loudon Wainwright’s “Red Guitar” in my head. The window glided down and I heard the driver say, “Hey” but I assumed he was talking to someone else. He didn’t give up though.
“Excuse me,” he said, as if he were lost.
“(Used to have a red guitar but I smashed it one drunk night)”
“Hey, on the curb.”
He waved his multiple-ringed hand to get my attention.
“Me?”
“No, the fifth guy on your left there.”
“What?”
“You wanna be in a movie?”
He wore aviator sunglasses on an impassive face.
“What? Me?”
“You know more than two words? But don’t worry it’s not really a speaking part. A guy quit on me this morning.”
“Really?”
He had my full attention now; just like every teenager in the San Fernando Valley, I was sure that I was an actor waiting to be discovered.
“Yeah. Come on, get in the car. I’ll take you to the set.”
“Uh, well, I’m waiting for my brother. I’m, I’m getting some tires for the car and he’s gonna pick me up here. But after that I…”
“Won’t take long. Bring you right back.”
“Well, I’d have to wait till my brother came back, then I could tell him where I was going.”
He drove off. When Charles showed up I told him about the black Mercedes and the guy in the sunglasses.
“So he goes ‘Get in the car. I’ll take you right back.’ And I’m like no, I’m waiting for my brother. And he just takes off.”
“No, you don’t want to get involved in that,” Charles said, using a lower register that he reserved for serious matters.
“Yeah.”
“Guy just shows up, doesn’t identify himself. Coulda been anything.”
“True.”
I was at Sears in North Hollywood. Coulda been anything was code for could have been a predator or a porno mogul. North Hollywood was, after all, the Sodom and Gomorrah of Southern California. I sighed in relief; my brother was watching out for me, even on matters that were unspeakable.
A month letter I got a letter in the mail. The return address was ABC Studios, Hollywood. I opened it and saw the logo on the letterhead. The greeting included my name. Apparently I had been selected to audition for “The Dating Game.” My first thought was someone, somewhere had observed me at a party and saw how funny I was, quick with the quips and well, good looking (in my monkeyshit brown hounds tooth leisure suit) and made a recommendation. I immediately dialed the number at the bottom of the letter to find out who this person with such gifted insight might be, and was told that there was no way of knowing, and the woman I spoke to kept giving me that answer no matter how many times I re-worded and resubmitted the question. I knew one thing though and that was this was for real, not like the guy in the black Mercedes; I had a letter, a letterhead a date and a time. Two weeks from Tuesday at 5pm.
I decided not to tell anyone until I won, and I was sure I would win the audition because I believed I was the funniest guy I knew and I knew I could make a girl laugh with my cleverness and wordplay, and just riffing in general and I could do it even without eye contact or proximity to the girl. All my insecurities rushed together to inflate my ego to approximately the size of Texas. Walter Mitty had nothing on me; he was a piker, an amateur. When the divider rolled back so I could see my date, she would be a beautiful blonde, Julie, in a short skirt and when she looked at me she would fall back, and then look up to the heavens, then clap her hands and jump up and down. Jim Lange would stand there in amazement at the instant chemistry between Julie and I; he would become the first game show host in the history of game shows to be left with a paralyzed tongue
That summer I was working for a crazy Armenian man and his crazy family in downtown Los Angeles, around Los Angeles and 3rd Street. Azod, the proprietor, received seconds and broken merchandise of all sorts by the zillions and turned them around and sold them. My job was to unload and move boxes of the various items from here to there, or open hundreds of boxes, or seal hundreds of boxes. Azod was in the habit of shouting at everyone, usually along the lines of “Please! Go to work! You are KILLING me!” and he would shout it while we were working. Or if a box broke and a thousand cheap cassette tapes spilled on the floor he would really flip out and holler, “MMMONEY!! That is MMMONEY on the floor! Please! KILLING me!” which at least made more sense than yelling “Go to work!” when we already were.
Each day at noon I would walk three blocks to a very grungy looking short order joint and get a grilled cheese sandwich and a glass of water. I figured these items were the least likely to be infected by the dirt and disease of defeat engulfing the place. The cook was a gigantic man wearing all white except for his black work shoes. He had a strange tattoo of a knife and a cross between his thumb and forefinger, which I would glance at and try to decipher on the days when he would bring me my meal himself. He had a Paul Bunyan-esque beard, long curly hair that was so greasy it shined, but at least he had it in a ponytail. His skin color looked different from day to day. He might have a reddish hue one day, a very dark brown the next and by the end of the week, a kind of greenish grayish complexion might take over. I ate there because it was close to work and I wanted to spend the maximum amount of my one hour off seated as opposed to spending precious time walking and walking to get to a better place. The floor was dirty, the counter was greasy, the seat had much more grime than vinyl, the air conditioning never worked and the place was packed with some very pungent smelling people whose odors I would absorb while I ate my grilled cheese. I did eventually came to trust the place enough to order root beer instead of water, though.
After lunch there were more boxes to move, open and close and then there was the task of taking the trash to the alley, and the challenge there was to complete the task without getting sick to your stomach because the alley routinely smelled of raw sewage, puke, piss, feces and dead, decomposing varmints. Then there were the homeless men. Usually they were passive and made funny comments like when they would ask to be introduced to one of the girls who worked for Azod, but every once in a while they would fly off in a rage about some unjust experience in their lives when they were in the regular world. And even when they were in a good mood they frequently smelled worse than the alley, and when they wanted to befriend you or entrust you with some morsel of their personal tragedy, they would tend to lean closer and closer to their audience. And it was not just a matter of taking out the trash; often there were stacks of cardboard boxes that needed to be flattened in order to toss them in the bin. I would punch them at the bottom, and then step on them to flatten them and fling them to their destiny. I learned to work as quickly as possible to get back to the haven of the dark, dingy old warehouse that looked like it was built before The Great War and might fall over sooner than later.
So, when the second Tuesday arrived—my date with the Dating Game—I went to work on a summer day that started out cool but a little after lunch there was a considerable jump in the temperature and the downtown smog was bearing down so hard that I felt like I was being smothered in dirty mattresses. Azod was more manic than usual and he didn’t disappear into his office, which meant we couldn’t slow the pace at all. We were upstairs shuttling boxes here and there, nonstop. The perspiration had not only soaked my t-shirt, but my jeans were feeling quite swampy as well. I was happy at first when I was instructed to go out and flatten the boxes, but when I got out there the boxes were stacked eight feet high and ten feet wide. I wanted to finish the task as quickly as possible because Azod had begrudgingly consented to letting me leave 10 minutes early, if everything was done.
I threw myself into a box flattening frenzy, punching, stomping and gagging on the smog and the revolting odors of the alley, which were intensified by the heat. I was moving along at a pretty good pace when I gashed the top of my hand on an enormous staple at the bottom of a box. I cleaned off the cut on my t-shirt figuring that the sweat would help heal it. I switched my punching to the other hand and continued wounded, bleeding hand and all.
Halfway through the task Derrick, one of the homeless men, approached me, ready to tell me stories about how the Army abused him. Derrick was never hostile but the scent of him made the alley smell good and the waves of heat were acting like bonding agents causing all the odors to attach themselves to my perspiration soaked clothes. It was a lengthy story and everywhere I turned, there was Derrick, right in my face. When I was done I ran back to the office to tell Art.. He raised his chin at me, which in Armenian body language means, “You’re ripping me off ten minutes, but go ahead. Hope you can sleep at night.”
I dashed out the door and ran to the Impala and pointed the car north into the usual bumper to bumper traffic jam. With my wounded hand I punched the radio buttons looking for a decent song. “Little Willy” ugh, no way; “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” they should tie a rope around Tony Orlando’s neck; “Drift Away” very tired of that song. I was about to punch the radio and put it out of its misery when “Reeling in the Years” came on and I calmed down a little. The traffic was worse than I imagined it would be but I figured they wouldn’t mind if I was a little late. I checked the glove box and the letter from ABC Studios was still there.
It was well after 5:30 by the time I rolled into the main gate. An elderly man in a uniform came out of the booth and looked at me with a puzzled look.
“Can I help you?”
“Yeah. I’m here for The Dating Game.”
“How’s that?” he asked, gazing at me as if I were an alien.
“I’m auditioning for a bachelor on The Dating Game,” I shouted.
I smelled like a farm animal, my hair was disheveled, there was a gash on my hand and bloodstains on my dirty t-shirt, and I had no idea why he was looking at me disdainfully, pointing at me and then pointing at the street.
“No you’re not,” he said simply.
“But I’ve got a letter here,” I said, waving it like a magic wand.
“I don’t give two shits what you got, man,” he said, his voice gurgling with ire.
“Can I just go in so I can turn around?” I said.
“No you can’t. Just back the hell out,” he said with finality, and he turned back to the booth.
I backed out and drove away, telling myself it was their loss while at the same time feeling hurt and annoyed that he used the word “man” and he was old. I had been punched, stomped and flung to a destiny I didn’t think was mine. I snapped the radio off and began singing “Oh well a young man, ain’t got nothing in the world these days!” I made random lefts and rights and found myself on Highland Avenue and pulled into Jack in the Box. I bought two tacos, the ones that had some kind of brown paste to represent the meat. I ate them and then bought two more and ate them on the long, slow ride home, still convinced I would have been selected, even appearing as I was.

The Concert Plan

           

The thing about parenting is you run the program for a long time. Then one day they come to you with a plan of their own. The deal with Kat was she was negotiating from the age of three.

“Can I have a cookie?”

“You can have a cookie after dinner.”

“Ok. What about a cookie before dinner?”

I thought I could out maneuver her; I had read a book that said you had to empower them while still controlling the outcome.

“Kathleen, after dinner which would you like a brown cookie or a white cookie?”

“I want both.”

“Both?”

“Yes. Both before dinner and both after dinner.”

And so it began. When her started junior high I told her seven or eight years things would be a little crazy but there would still be room to be crazy in a safe way, that she could be crazy unless she was breaking a school rule, the law or otherwise endangering herself or others and that I would be placing invisible borders and if she bumped one of them I would let her know. She listened and I could tell she was processing the information but she didn’t say much more than “Ok.”

A little while later she came to me with a plan.

The plan was for a sister of a friend of Kat to drop them off at Selland Arena for a concert and then bring them home when it was over. Kat was 12 at the time. The name of the band she and her friend wanted to see was No Doubt. I had plenty of doubt though. I suddenly found myself in the position of protective parent, skeptical of any new phase that might remind me of unsuspecting dangers I managed to dodge more or less. I now was the person responsible for not letting my own kids get through things ramble-tamble, helter-skelter, hit or miss. I had to suspect and detect dangers for them, even if it meant I would become the old, out of it, fuddy duddy, buzz killer.

            “No Doubt? Never heard of them,” I began.

            “Dad, they’re good. You’d like them,” Kat answered.

She was out to make her case. Point one: they are musically worthwhile.

            “Yeah?”

            “You know that song, I’m just a Girl?”

“I think so.”
            “I’m just a girl, living in captivity
Your rule of thumb
Makes me worry some
Oh I’m just a girl, what’s my destiny?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said vaguely, “I’ve heard that song.” A teenybopper feminist anthem, well, I thought that’s better than objectionable, sordid subject matters that other bands were exploring.

“They’re good, Dad.”

She put their cd on the kitchen table as if it were exhibit A.

“Tragic Kingdom, huh?”

A slam on Disneyland. Couldn’t be that bad, I thought.

“Yeah,” she answered, enthusiastically.

“She looks Armenian,” I said.

“Really?”

“Gwen Stefani, hmm. Probably Italian.”

“Might be Stefanian,” she said hopefully.

“Huh.”

I tried to think back to when I was 12. What concert would I have liked to go see? The Beatles at Candlestick, of course. Not that No Doubt was the Beatles of 90’s. But then again, who was? Prince? No, he would be more late 80’s. Besides, ugh.

“Dad,” Kat said, calling me from back my despair over what a musical wasteland the 90’s were.

“Huh?”

“So can I go?”

            “Well how old is your friend’s sister?”

            “Seventeen,” she answered, making the word sound quite matronly.

            “Hmm.” I wasn’t against her going. Maybe No Doubt would be the musical equivalent of the Monkees. Very popular in the moment and later on utterly disposable. But the lyrics sounded pretty good, better than anything the Monkees came up with. They didn’t even write their own stuff or play instruments. Well, except for Mike Nesmith.

“Dad!”

“Seventeen, huh?”

I was sure I had heard the song somewhere.

            “She drives a Mustang, Dad.”

            “Cool.”’

            “Black.”

            “Nice.”

            “So?”

            “Your mom and I are going to talk it over.”

            And we did. We talked it up, down, sideways and inside out. We didn’t want to make a mistake. This was our first kid, our test model. We had heard parents of older kids say they made all their mistakes on the first kid. We didn’t want to do that. There was the possibility that we would err on the side of caution, but on the other hand if we said ok and something happened we would end up blaming ourselves for not being cautious enough to say no. We had some concerns because we didn’t know the girl or her sister. Or maybe it was that I didnt know them. ‘t had other concerns because of what happens at concerts. But she was going to attend a concert at some point in her life. I knew she definitely wouldn’t want either one of us tagging along and neither of us wanted to do that anyway. We decided to roll the dice and let her go.But I had a conversation with her a few minutes before her ride came.

            “Kat. When the lights go out just before the show starts, something will happen.”

            “What?”

            “Half the crowd will light up a joint.”

            “What?”

            “Yeah.”

            “They can’t do that. It’s against the law.”

            “They can’t but they will.”

            “Why don’t they just arrest them all?”

            “Well, because. I don’t know. Because there’s too many of them, I guess. Not enough cops. Overcrowded jails.”

            “Really?’

            “Yeah, it’s like it’s been going on for a long time. They just let it go.”

            “Huh.”
            “And there’s this other tradition.”
            “What’s that?”

            “Well, people who smoke dope like to share.”

            “Yeah?”

            “Yeah, so what happens is they’ll take a hit and pass the joint down the row. And so if it comes to you just take it and pass it on. You don’t have to say anything. No one will mind that you didn’t take a hit.”

            “Who wants to?”

            “Right. I’m just telling you, ok?”

            “Ok.”

            “Ok, so other than that it’s going to be fun. It’ll be loud but a lot of fun.”

            “I know, Dad.’

            “Of course.”

            It was a school night and there was a delay and Kat called to let us know. I took that as a good sign. She got home a little after one in the morning. I poured her a bowl of cereal.

            “So, did the lights go out?”

            “Yeah.”

            “And?”

            “It was just like you said.”

            “Things haven’t changed much.”

            “It was like a big cloud.”

            “And did people share?”

            “Yeah.”

            “On your row?”

            “Yeah, and I passed it on, Dad.”

            “Good.”

            “That stuff stinks.”

            “Yeah.”

            “It smells horrible.”

            “What about the show?”
            “They were good.”

            “Great.”

            I went to bed. She said she didn’t smoke and I believed her. I still believe it. There would be other days, slippery slope days, but everybody has to figure out where they fit in this world and how much of the world they want in them. There’s a point where they choose their own slopes and shoes and hiking partners and destination. At 12 years old though, Mom and Dad are obliged to insert themselves in the picture. The concert plan went well. Later on, when they were 19 or 20 and Grace and I would be in bed, saying, Don’t really know where they are, what they’re doing, or what they’re saying yes or no to. That’s when you hope and pray that all the input, via stories, advice, declarations, demands, rules, Bible verses, restrictions, recommendations, examples and confessions comes to them as they begin their own journey into adulthood. And I have to say we have been truly blessed with the results. 

Tricycle

The tricycle was a deep, dark red, with white trim and white spokes. It did not have a horn or streamers at the end of the handle bars like I had seen on other trikes, but I didn’t care. I didn’t even know that it was used. I was four years old and didn’t know the difference between new and used. I only knew that it was mine, not my brother’s or my sister’s. It was mine and it wasn’t even Christmas or my birthday. I stood on the back porch staring at it with a joy that made me shake a little. Dad stood by me, arms akimbo, and his glasses sparkling in the afternoon sun.

“Take care of your bike,” he intoned. “Don’t leave it out. When you’re done riding it, put it back on the patio. Oil the wheels once in a while.” We walked together to the garage where he found the oil can, then came back to the trike. He turned it upside down and put three drops near each wheel. “Not too much. Just three drops – one, two, three. Know how to remember that?”

“Uh-uh,” I shook my head vigorously. I loved the deep, clicking sound of the oil can.
“Father, Son, Holy Ghost. One drop for each, get it?”
“Uh-huh.” I didn’t know what he was talking about but I was afraid if I said I didn’t understand he wouldn’t let me keep it.
“Good. Now, go ahead and get on the trike.” I approached it carefully, my beachwalkers clicking, arms shaking, heart beating. The seat had been warmed by the June sun and I jumped up a second after I sat down.
“You have to sit on the seat!” he snapped.
“Okay,” I whined.
“Put your feet on the pedals. And your hands on the handles. That’s it. That’s how you steer, okay?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Now push the pedals. That’s how you go,” he said gently.

With my head down to concentrate on the business of pedaling, the trike began to move forward. I was doing fine until I crashed into a patio chair.

“Watch where you’re going! You have to look up! Do you want to crash all the time?” he shouted.
“No.”
“Come on; let’s go out to the sidewalk.” I followed his brisk strides through the white gate, walking the trike, unwilling to take any chances with it.
“Okay now, get back on. You can’t ride it standing there.” He straightened the wheel, roughly. The shade of the apricot tree and the smell of its ripe fruit was comforting. I felt better and was more determined to master the art of trike steering.
“Now just go straight. Ride down to Mr. Auperle’s driveway and then turn around and come back.”

And so I took off. The wheels squeaked mildly. I moved past our white fence, picking up speed as my confidence grew. By the time I was approaching Mr. Auperle’s driveway, I was moving fast enough to create a breeze. It was exhilarating.

“Now turn around,” Dad shouted. So I stopped, and suddenly scared I wasn’t going to be able to navigate a turn properly, I got off the trike and turned it around then got back on and headed back toward Dad.
“No! Not like that! Make your turn while you are riding! What’s the matter with you?”

I pedaled furiously to get back, my eyes not on the pedals but low enough to avoid Dad’s eyes which I presumed were angry. At the same time though, I felt good. I may not have turned at all but I did complete a journey from our back gate to our neighbor’s driveway and back. When Dad spoke it seemed that his annoyance with my lack of turning skills had dissipated.

“Take care of your trike. Don’t leave it out. Don’t break it. Oil the wheels. If you do that it will last a long time.”
“Okay.”
“Good boy. Don’t ride past Mr. Buckley’s house. When you see his house, turn around and come back. Don’t ride on the other side of the street, stay on this side. Understand?”
“Yes.”
“Alrighty,” he began.
“Alrighty, one!” I answered
“Alrighty, two!” came the reply.
“ALLLLLLLLLLLLRIGHTY!!!” we shouted together.

It was a game we played when he wanted to know if I was on board with his instruction. He must have been convinced by my enthusiasm because he turned and went back to the house, leaving me with my trike and half a block of Catalina Street.

I rolled down my block, overjoyed. I alternately went fast, then slow, then fast again. The sky hugged me, the sun kissed me; the trees tickled my nose with a peppery smell as I went by. I went past the Auperles, past their neighbor who was blind, past the friendly old man all of us on the block called Grandpa Davis.

Kids and adults were out, standing and talking. I waved at them and they waved back. At the house before the Buckleys’ several adults shouted at me in an alarming voice. I stopped. The adults ran to where I was and were clamoring about something but they were all talking at the same time and I didn’t understand what they were saying.

I got off the bike, trying to appease them, but the clamor increased. They pointed at me, at the trike, and at a car in the driveway.

Instead of getting the picture that I had stopped in the path of the car which was about to back out, I stood frozen, not sure what to do next. A man got out of the car — he was a neighbor I had never seen before — and began saying something to me in an angry voice.

My knees turned to Jell-O, my eyes watered, and my heart was pounding in my throat. I tried to assemble what was before me — the trike, the driveway, the angry man, the neighbors — and come to some conclusion, but the emotional climate was clouding my thought process. Much to my relief the man stopped shouting, shrugged his shoulders, and returned to his car. I walked away from my trike, in the direction of the cluster of neighbors but they were silent now.

They seemed to be waiting for something so I turned in the direction of the driveway and waited with them. The man got back into his black car, the enormous chrome bumper glittering as he backed the car out. I was standing by Mrs. Strang who lived next to the angry man, and when she gasped I looked up at her and she put her hand over her mouth. When I turned to see what was upsetting her, the car crushed my tricycle.

Except for the murmuring of the muffler, all was silent. It was like a dream about being in church, but the church was outside and the congregation was waiting for God to speak. The man got out of his car, closing the door nonchalantly. He walked slowly to the back of the car and wrenched the trike free, tossing it aside.

“I told you,” he sneered, but I didn’t hear anything else he said. I tried to right the bike but the frame was bent so severely I couldn’t even wheel it away. I dragged it away from the driveway and he backed into the street then took off down Catalina, heading for the second half of the block.

It took quite some time to get back home; I had discovered that in order for it to move at all I had to lift the front end of the trike as only the back wheels were functioning. My arms though were not up to the task so I would alternate between wheeling it in that fashion and dragging it. I was sad but not angry. I believed I had done something wrong that I didn’t understand, or maybe not understanding was what I had done wrong. Adults were hard to figure sometimes.

When I made it back I put the trike in the middle of the patio, sat on the edge of the chaise lounge, and stared at it. I was hoping that if I looked at it long enough it would fix itself. I felt the same when I stuck a hole in Bobo the inflatable punching clown. One moment it was working, the next it wasn’t, and I discovered that some actions are not retrievable. At first I didn’t notice that Dad was standing on the back porch assessing the situation. Then I heard his steps coming off the porch, but he walked right past me, waved his hand in a derisive way and said, “That’s how you take care of your bike?” He kept walking, went to the garage, and never mentioned the incident again. I felt like Bobo the Clown with the air seeping out. Dad had given good advice but he, like the man in the middle of the block, had also taught a lesson, and it may or may not have been the one he intended to teach. But it would take a long time to unlearn it.

Couple of Dogs and a Beer

We went to Chicago and this is my impression of our trip there. It is long but has some moments of clarity, and I guess that’s what all blogging and story telling is about. Those of you who complete the marathon, I thank you. Those of you who don’t, I understand. Most of the things I post here on The Talking Wall is from the vaults. This was written over the last three days. So it is fresh but it is also not worked over. In any case hope you like it.

 

 

Chicago’s pulse is steady, waiting for you to make your first move in a gracious kind of way.

May 2014

 

Good news, Grace and I are adorable. We were on the plane to Chicago and sat together even though our tickets had us apart. We figured all we needed was a less than full plane, or maybe someone who wouldn’t mind sitting somewhere else. I was sitting in 38E, the seat that wasn’t mine. The plane filled up and at last it appeared no one else was boarding.

“Looks like that’s it,” Grace said.

“Oh, cool. I don’t want to not sit with you.”

“Yes, Dear, me too.”

“Uh-oh, here comes a guy.”

“But I think there’s still a few seats before yours.”

“Where?”

“Up front there.”
“Hope so.”

But he kept moving closer and closer. He was a middle aged Asian American in a sports and a tired dour countenance.

“Oh darn, looks like he’s the guy,” Grace said.

I decided to surrender before he had to approach his seat and look at me and look at his ticket until I said, “Oh sorry” or something along those lines.

“Thirty-eight E?” I said, rising out of my seat.

He looked at me as if I had offered him a strychnine cocktail.

“No,” he snapped, scowling, “I’m not Mr. Lee!”

“Thirty-eight E !” Grace and I shouted.

“Oh,” he laughed, “no. I’m up a couple more I think.”

He moved past us, a little less dour, chuckling at something.

“Hope we’re not too much of a bother,” Grace said to the young woman next to us at the window seat.

“Oh look,” she said, like we were kids hoping not to get bumped out of line to see Santa Claus, “you two are fine. Nothing to worry about at all. You two are just adorable.”

“Well, thank you,” Grace said, smiling.

“We’re adorable, Dear,” I said.

“Yes, Dear,” Grace replied.

That’s right, we’re adorable. I suddenly and finally felt 60 years old, but it was ok. We have, after all, been together since Jimmy Carter was president and the world was a different place, and we do have an endearing back-and-forth to our conversations and we did want to sit together.

A moment later the rightful owner of seat 38E approached us, saw we were an adorable couple and gladly took my assigned seat. I found myself believing both she and the woman next to us in the window seat were from the Midwest and from that I knew we would have a wonderful time there.

            The first thing I noticed about Chicago was it made me start humming Led Zeppelin tunes. First nine days I hummed the likes of “Misty Mountain Hop” and “Kashmir.” Actually I didn’t even notice I was doing it, but Jeremy, my son-in-law, did. He knows I don’t like Led Zeppelin and he laughed about it. Even that didn’t stop me. I hummed different Zep tunes all week.

“Been a long time, been a long lonely, lonely, lonely time….”

“You’re doing it again.”

“Huh. That’s weird.”

“Yeah, right?”

“Never liked that band.”

“And yet…”
“Here I am.”

I can’t explain it. And the humming stopped when we touched down in Fresno. Shouldn’t I have been humming “25 or 6 to 4” or some other Chicago tune? But I didn’t, not even when I saw the CTA logo on the trains and buses. Maybe Chicago, the city, is tired of being connected to Chicago, the rock band. Maybe I should delete that part of it and name drop Kanye West; he’s from Chicago, but I don’t anything about him. I couldn’t identify a single tune of his. I would mention Paul Butterfield but does anyone still know who he is? And anyway, when he passed away he was living in North Hollywood. So I’ll stick with the Chicago reference, and anyway, the point is I had Led Zeppelin tunes in my head and was humming their awful tunes. And the Zep consciousness was not because Chicago is some rough and tumble city. It might be a rough and tumble city, but that wasn’t my impression of it. My impression would begin with the buildings and houses. Sharp, clean, tight. That’s not rough and tumble. And it’s not a matter of toughness. It’s strength. Bricks laid down solid and orderly aren’t budging. They don’t need to budge. Some of the apartment buildings are set not parallel to the street but angled back a bit on one side, and the effect is like something that borders on defiance, but in a quiet way. The buildings and the houses weren’t built to endure the worst winter in the history of the Midwest, after going through 50, 60 or 70 before this last one; they were built to be oblivious to winters. The buildings are not crazed, frenzied, chattering linebackers; they are lineman, stolid and certain. And the churches are built so high and so wide that it was as if they expected God Himself to attend and they didn’t want Him to stoop or hunch when He entered the church. The spires point straight up to heaven in the event you needed to know which way to go. The windows of the churches are looking at all who pass, watching like a gentle giant, the message in the window eyes of the magnificent churches is “God is,” and the churches seem to be everywhere and the smaller ones are no less majestic.

Chicago, the city and the suburbs, and its people, have a kind of acceptance of things. It’s a patience that you don’t see in other big cities. New York City is excitable and impatient and has a pulse that always revved. In LA cool is king and they don’t want you to know their pulse because everyone there is auditioning some way or another. But Chicago’s pulse is steady, waiting for you to make your first move in a gracious kind of way.

There are churches everywhere but it doesn’t look or feel like an obsession. It feels natural. The only other kind of building in Chicago that appears more often than churches— well except for the astounding office buildings Downtown—would be places to eat. Somewhere in suburban Chicago I saw three restaurants in a row, with two more restaurants across the street, and it was midweek and they were all full of patrons. In Chicago meat is the meal. Steak, sausage, hot dog, burger, pork or lamb chops—they ignore the more recent attitude about too much meat and too many heavy meals and eat it all with a unabashed vigor. Wherever we went to eat the servers were very enthused and overjoyed that we were dining at their place. For a moment I thought the woman at a burger joint was going to hop the counter high five us if not hug us.

“How you doin’ how you doin’ how you doin’ toDAY?”

I thought she was singing some kind of song and tried to place it.

“Pretty good thanks,” Grace replied.

“That’s great, that’s wonderful. You gonna have a hamburger today? They are fanTAStic!”

“I was thinking about a hot dog. How are they?”

“Lemme tell you, the hot dogs are out of this world. You just can’t go wrong. Get a hamburger, it’s great. Get hot dog, it’s great too.”

“That’s good,” I said, “because I think I’m gonna have a hamburger.”

“That’s perfect because everybody gonna be happy.”

She clapped her hands like there was a jumping gospel tune playing that no one else could hear.

“Great,” Grace said.

“Where you from?”

“Fresno, California.”

“All right. That’s all right. Yeah, I got some cousins in California. Don’t see them much though. I’m so glad you came to visit Chicago.”

“We’re happy to be here.”

“Oh you gonna have a good time. Now just go ahead and sit wherever you like and you hotdog and hamburger will be ready in a little while.”

The thing was, she was real. She was happy we were visiting Chicago, she was happy to take our order, and she believed she had some delicious, wonderful food to offer us. There is something real in the heart of Chicago. They are a city of true believers. I kept thinking, “I’m in America, now.” Not Rockwell’s America, but something better, something more real. But real in a good way, not a gritty way. In other states they’ll take your order and stay whatever is on the script in the training manual. Everywhere we went in Chicago people were real. They believed in things like work, service, food, sincerity and civility. They were all colors, all faiths, all backgrounds, but they had that same grounded, guilelessness about them.

I think it was Monday night when Sam, Jeremy’s Uncle and our friend from well, I’ve know Sam since we were in our early teens, took Jeremy and Kelsey and Grace and I out to dinner. Sam’s generosity is the stuff of family legend. We found ourselves at one of the finest steakhouses in a city famous for fine steakhouses. The meal was fit for royalty. I can say without much reservation that eating there may have been one of the very best places I have ever dined. Sam was in fine fettle. I believe Sam would be a great talk show host. You can’t help but dial in and follow along to his high-spirited, informative, wide-ranging, often hilarious occasionally ribald, running commentary. Sam loves life. Sam wants to wrestle the world and expects to emerge victorious and if he doesn’t he will figure it was better than a life of caution. When you’re rolling with Sam you’d better be up for good times, you’d better be quick-witted enough to keep up with him, and you’d better appreciate and not have the slightest trace of disdain for “kef,” an Armenian word for, like a party or good times. Everything that Sam loves and everything that Sam hates he does with conviction and passion. He is a man fully alive, living life and getting something out of every moment. He has been this remarkable person all of the 45 years that I’ve known him. The thing is this: the restaurant, the food, the service, the wine, the Chicago skyline at night were all fantastic and Sam wanted us to have that memory. I am grateful for it and the only thing that tops it is the fellowship, joy and love.

We had lunch with our friends Tom and Carolyn and their daughter Brittany at a Turkish Deli. We had lahmajoon and it was pretty much the same. I can’t remember if they called it lahmajoon or not. We had something Turkish that was bread with melted cheese on it. It essentially was pizza without sauce. It was good though. We heard about it from someone at Jeremy and Kelsey’s church, although we were advised not to go there because it would be giving money to Turks. I think that’s when we figured we would go. We just don’t function that way like it some tribal feud or something. I think Grace may have even that we were Armenian but the man behind the counter just smiled and nodded. I’m not at war. I don’t want to carry anger and bitterness with me. And I’m not waiting until the day that the Turkish people and the Turkish government acknowledge their crime. I’m pretty sure that day will never come, anyway. I do know that my mom’s side of the family was hidden from the Turkish Army by a Turkish neighbor. Because of that man, 119 years later we sat in plastic white chairs at a small card table in a designated dining area with Tom and Carolyn and Bridget and told stories and jokes and broke bread maybe not with Turks but in their deli. The Bulgers are really my first impression of Midwestern hospitality. They are the most tenderhearted people you would ever want to meet. Soft-spoken, humble, kind, thoughtful. Tom Bulger me helped become a better person just by hanging out with him. He helped me expand my definition of cool. As a kid cool was hip, with it, doing and knowing the latest “in” thing. But I came to see the awesome coolness in Tom. I began calling him the coolest man on the planet. Finally he got me to stop when one day he said, “Jesus is the coolest man on the planet, Brother Jack.” Of course he was right. The Bulgers though are very, very cool people. In any event, it was a good day. I just want to say that If I knew that Turkish man’s name who saved my Grandmother’s life that day, I would have given his name to my son.

After lunch we went to a local ice cream parlor and I put my dietary restrictions on hiatus and had a bowl of banana fudge ice cream. It was delicious, even if it caused a light breakout of the guilts. It was a perfect day.

There was also an Armenian deli and an Assyrian deli in another suburb (there were so many suburbs I couldn’t keep track of them) and we went to the Assyrian one first. Grace took my picture standing in front of it, and I was supposed to take her picture in front of the Armenian one but I forgot. In any case I didn’t really see that much difference between the two except the items in the Assyrian store were a little higher in price. I didn’t tell the clerk that I was Assyrian but I think Grace engaged him in conversation and I think it turned out that his mom was Armenian. I found that it was difficult for me to imagine a town with an impressive representation of Assyrian-Americans. There are only 4 million of us world-wide but in Chicago there are enough Assyrians that they have there own deli right across the street from an Armenian one and a few blocks from some Eastern European delis. God bless America! Dad used to say that there were lots of Assyrians in Turlock, California and much more in Chicago. I recently found out that Assyrians have been in Chicago for over 100 years. I have always considered Assyrians the smallest of minorities. When I was growing up, all the Assyrians I knew were relatives. Over half a century later Kelsey is approached at the local gym and asked these words, “Are you Assryian?” When she told us that story on Skype one night, I was struck by the notion that, well, that we have distinguishable features. I always thought that we looked pretty much the same as Armenians but apparently not.

Of course I wasn’t going to Chicago and not attend a Cubs game and that’s what Jeremy and I did. Wrigley Field is a wonderful ballpark. My loyal to Dodger Stadium has been a blind one, having only been to Candlestick and Yankee Stadium and the stadium for the San Diego Padres. I didn’t like Candlestick, I disliked Yankee Stadium even more. The stadium for the Padres was beautiful, a great place to see a game, even if they did name it after a pet store. The thing about Dodger Stadium though is it started out as a beautiful, comfortable, sharp-looking place to gather and watch a baseball game and the last few years or so it is more akin to a kind of sports oriented Disneyland. It’s no longer a baseball game for baseball fans; it’s an event for event seekers looking to make the scene. And the hot dogs, which were worthy of Vin Scully’s praise, became skinny, ugly and awful. But at Wrigley, it’s still 1963. Or maybe even 1951 or 1947. The people there go to see baseball. The team has not had a championship season in 100 years, but the fans have a most notable and admirable kind of loyalty, and the hot dogs are good and you didn’t have to take out a second mortgage to buy one. The people of Chicago have a self-awareness makes the keeping of traditions alive. It was a perfect day for baseball—sunny but comfortable with high clouds and a little bit of a breeze to keep the stars and stripes moving languidly. The Yankees were in town and it was a full house. The Cubs jumped out early to a 2-0 lead and there was a buzz in the place. There were quite a few Yankee fans there and they sat watching the game with puzzled looks on their faces. But in the row in front of us were to young men in their Cubs gear. The one with the goatee turned to his bald-headed friend.

“Dah fuck, man,” he said contentedly, “dogs and a beer.”

“Yeah,” his friend replied.

And they tapped their plastic glasses of Bud and toasted all things good at a midweek afternoon ball game at venerable Wrigley Stadium.

The Yanks climbed back in the game in the 8^th and tied it. The crowd got quiet and the weather changed. The heat pressed us, hinting that summer was on its way. I thought of “Raisin in the Sun” when Ruth says that if you don’t like the weather in Chicago, just wait a while and it will change. While we were there the weather was hot, warm, clammy, cool, coolish and cold—sometimes all in the same day. I’ll get to the thunderstorms in a little bit.

The game went into extra innings. The closers on both teams weren’t that good and it appeared that neither team seemed very interested in winning the game. We got to the sixth hour of the game and we were planning to meet Grace and Kelsey for dinner and it was getting pretty deep into 6 o’clock. It was a tough call to make because Jeremy is a Yankees fan and I had a strong feeling that the Yankees were going to win it. Not that the Cubs didn’t have their chances—they had the bases loaded a couple of times—but there was just that feeling that was present in the crowd after the Yankees tied it. I had to call it even though the odds were against it going on much longer. It was one of those things where if you leave in the 13^th and it goes on another 5 or 6 innings you feel like you did the right thing, but there is also the dread that the exciting finish will happen while you’re just outside the ballpark, and well, we were on the train when Jeremy checked the score and said, “The Yankees just scored two runs,” and even though the Cubs still had their last at bat, I said, “That ought to be enough.” We missed the end of the game by 15 minutes. We had a great time and I hope Jeremy has forgiven me.

We ate that night at place called Blind Faith. The heat from the last half of the baseball game had dissipated and it was cool and comfortable again. We sat outside. Blind Faith was a vegetarian restaurant. My second guess was it had something to do with the Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood band from 1969. My first guess was that it took Blind Faith to open a vegetarian restaurant in Chicago. The waitress was gregarious and genuine. I asked her to tell the story of the tattoo of a hammer she had on her arm and she told it. Not that that’s proof of her gregarious and genuine nature, but in any case it didn’t bother her that I had asked. She was in a dance troupe and some of them got a hammer tattoo to represent their unity, although others chose not to.

The food was excellent and the blessings were even better. We hadn’t seen Kelsey and Jeremy in their new digs and it had been four months. They were happy with their new station in life and happy to hang out with us, and just happy overall. Everyone was sampling everyone else’s meal. We laughed and joked and took pictures. The waitress came to check on us.

“Tell me one more story,” I said to her.

“What is it?” she asked, smiling.

“Tell the story of how the place got its name.”
“Blind Faith? Oh, you’re in luck. I just heard the story last week.”

“Ok, great.”

“A lot of old, uh well, older people think it’s that band, Blind Faith?”

“Now, I have to say that’s not what I thought. Well, it was the second thing, but not the first.”

“Well, what happened was the two original guys got together and took out a huge loan.”

“Right.”

“And it was like 30 years ago and there was no such thing as a vegetarian restaurant, I mean, in Chicago?”

“Ok.”

“And they were like, what are we crazy? Finally one of them said, no it’s just blind faith.”

“That was my first guess.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, because Blind Faith, I mean they only did one album.”
“And then they broke up.”

“Exactly, they…”
“All right, Dear,” Grace said.

“Well thank you for telling us the story. And the other one, too.”

“Oh sure, no problem.”

I believed her, too, that it was no problem.

Oh, about the thunderstorm. We were having dinner with our friends Fred and Nancy. I have known them for 40 years and 30 years ago they moved to Chicago. It is one of those friendships that even if in has been a a bunch of years since we last saw each other, the conversation and the friendship picks up wherever it left off. It doesn’t always work out that way but in the case of Fred and Nancy, I’m glad it did. So we’re in a place called Chinese Bistro in a strip mall. I was thinking what makes a Chinese restaurant on a strip mall a bistro? Don’t bistros have French origins? Or doesn’t bistro really mean “we’re giving ourselves hip creds in a downtown area”? Maybe they play jazz and serve wine? They weren’t in a downtown area though. Turned out to be a Chinese restaurant, a better than average one. They did serve wine but we didn’t have any. No jazz that I remember.

When we got there Fred and Nancy had already ordered hors d’oeuvres, which was good because I was hungry and we don’t usually order hors d’oeuvres because we think of them as the meal before the meal and don’t want to add to the bill and dull our appetites for dinner at the same time. It was ok though. Like a really rare treat. We were having a great time catching up on our respective life journeys—the kids, their adult lives, and all the changes—when I looked out the window to the parking lot and God had left the bathtub faucet running. It was gushing rain and the parking lot was turning into a a swimming pool outlined with cars.

“What the heck!” I said.

“I was wondering if it was going to rain,” Grace said.

“Don’t worry,” Nancy said.

“It’s pretty common here,” Fred added.

“Yeah,” Nancy said, and reached for some pot stickers.

“But I mean, look at it,” I said.

“It’ll stop before dinner’s over,” Fred said, waving at it as if it were inconsequential.

We ate a delicious dinner, featuring a lamb chow mein, and told stories both old and new for another hour. Fred was right; it rained for 15 minutes and then stopped and then when we went to the parking lot it was as though it had never rained at all. On the way back to Jeremy and Kelsey’s though nature put on a light show. The lightning was spectacular, right in front of us and not just one bolt but a crazed array, like a big lady’s varicose veins, a mile wide. Never saw anything like it in California. In bed that night I had the side next to the window and late, late at night, at 3 in the morning, there was more lightning. I watched it through the window. My heart was beating slow and steady but there was something else moving through me that I couldn’t figure out. In my sleepy mind I made it related to the lightning. I had a sense of peace and fell back asleep.

Oak Park, Illinois is the birthplace of Ernest Hemingway. We decided visiting the house he was born in was something good to do. I taught A Farewell to Arms for years and years and more years after that. I didn’t stop teaching it, even when I didn’t have enough readers to get a class conversation going. Finally, the last four years that I was a high school English teacher I shut it down because even the handful of readers I had in a given class wouldn’t or couldn’t get in to it. I don’t know if they changed or I changed or society changed, but it wasn’t the novel that changed. It is brilliant and it is both simple and complex, and that is what I always liked about it, I guess. I also taught “A Clean Well Lighted Place,” mostly because I liked it so much in college and hoped that they would see what I saw in it. In any case I like Hemingway and his stories, especially A Farewell to Arms, are a part of me and like the Sgt. Pepper album, always will be.

There was the museum and a block away there was the house. We walked into the museum and met Claire, the docent. She was dressed comfortably and looked like a fifth grade teacher on a field trip. She took a shine to us almost immediately.

“I’m so glad you came in today. How’s the weather today, is it warming up? It’s cool in here.”

I didn’t tell her that we had left our ice tea outside hidden behind a pillar of the museum when we saw the No Drinks Allowed sign. Didn’t want to throw away our half full, just purchased drink and odds were good it would still be there when we got back and no one would disturb or discard it where we had placed it.

“We’re glad to be here,” I said.

“I’m Claire. Welcome to the Hemingway Museum. The house is just block the block a ways. You can come and go as you please. The house tour begins every hour on the hour until 4 o’clock.”

“I’m Grace and this is my husband, Jack.”

“Wonderful. Do you like Hemingway? I began reading Hemingway when I was just a teenager. Fourteen years old. I read most of his work before I came here. My favorite is Moveable Feast. It’s beautiful. His days in Paris.”

“I haven’t read that one. A Farewell to Arms is my favorite.”

“He was a high school English teacher. He taught that one.”

“Yes, I sure did. They loved it, too.”

“That is wonderful. You know I just may have a surprise for you.”

“A surprise?” Grace said.

“We like surprises,” I said.

“Yes, I may have a surprise. Now tickets are $11, but you get to see the museum and the house as well. You say you taught Hemingway?”

“I did. Farewell to Arms, and some of the short stories. “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” “Big Two-Hearted River.”

“Oh yes, I may very well have a surprise.”

“That’d be great,” Grace said.

I had forgotten the names of the other ones. One was “Hills Like White Elephants,” and the other was “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” I fell into a haze trying to remember the titles. Claire turned her attention to Grace.

“Were you a teacher, too?”

“I am a teacher. I’m still working. Jack retired just last year. I’m working three more years.”

“Yes, it just may be a very nice surprise. Do you teach Hemingway?”

“Well,” Grace said.

“Well,” I said.

“I…I may have touched on some of his ideas.”

“She…” I said.

“I’m not an English teacher. I’m a Home Economics major and I teach a Careers in Education Class,” Grace said.

“For kids who want to become teachers. She’s a very effective teacher,” I said.

“Very nice,” she said, “and are you a senior citizen?”

Grace and I looked at each other.

“I’m 59,” Grace said.

“Ah-huh. Now have you seen the t-shirts?”

We went over to the shelf and found Old Man and the Sea and For Whom the Bell Tolls, but not A Farewell to Arms. I was a little crestfallen.

“They’re nice,” I said as we went back to where Claire stood.

“Well, the surprise is that when we have someone such as yourself, a teacher who taught Hemingway,well we are so glad to hear that and his work still have merit of course 80 years later. When that happens, I cover the cost of your admission ticket.”

“Well, you… I mean that’s very nice. Wow.”

“Thank you,” Grace said.

“Oh, you’re welcome. I’m glad to do it. Someone teaching Hemingway, you know.”

I immediately began thinking of it as my last retirement perk as we walked from one display to another. I still have gift cards for restaurants and bookstores that I haven’t finished using though. A documentary was playing loudly in the background and I heard the narrator reading, “I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out….” It was the passage where Frederic is wounded when their trench was hit by a mortar shell he feels his soul come out of his body and he dies for a moment but then his soul slides back into his body. I never failed to read that section to every class that was assigned that novel. It was authentic because Hemingway had lived it and captured it in prose perfectly. I felt good that I had picked a page to read to my students that the documentary makers also thought was one of his very best passages. I sat in Hemingway’s chair at Hemingway’s typewriter and Grace took a picture. Grace also took a picture of the two of us in front of the “In Love and War” poster, a movie I used to show the students to try to teach perspective. It was the real life love story of Ernest and Agnes as opposed to the fictional counterparts, Fred and Kat. The difference is amusing but I could never quite get the kids to see it. Oh well. I picked up our drink on the way out. I know it was unmolested because when I set it down I made a mental note of which way the logo faced.

We were hungry so we walked a couple of blocks to get something to eat. I had stir-fry chicken without the chicken and it was good. Grace had something equally tasty. It sounds silly but we sat outside and took pictures of each other. I got this one picture of her that is perfect. She is looking directly into the camera, smiling, content, secure, and very, very lovely. She does not age. One of these days a stranger will say to her, “Oh, you’re taking your dad out to lunch, how nice!”

We walked three blocks back to Hemingway’s house, arriving a few minutes before the three o’clock tour. Our tour guide was a very nervous woman who fretted because there were 13 of us, and only one of her. Apparently he co-worker had not shown up for work yet. She apologized and explained the situation about a half a dozen times. The tour was interesting but we were getting tired and 14 of us upstairs in a tiny bedroom with no air conditioning isn’t something you want to do for very long. I did pick up some tidbits about Hemingway’s life that shed light of his writing. His mother’s side was very religious, while his father’s side engaged in secular, questionable things like drinking, smoking and card-playing. That was the gist of it, anyway. You get that push me, pull you feel in A Farewell to Arms and many of the short stories. Also, while he did grow up in a very nice suburb, Hemingway was also walking distance to the woods and a river and often went hunting and fishing with his grandfather, which would explain all the outdoors stuff in his stories. My impression of the Hemingway side was a kind of Teddy Roosevelt bravado. I was satisfied with what we gleaned about his life as a child and we left before the nervous woman got any more nervous. We were close to the Frank Lloyd Wright home and studio and we intended to go but we felt tired and as we drove by it I sang, “So long, Frank Lloyd Wright.” We’ll be back.

I took Jeremy to the record store. I picked out Don McLean and a few others. Jeremy picked some out, too. When we were ready to go I reached for his records.

“No,” he said, “it’s ok. I’ll pay for mine.”

“Yours?”

“Yeah. What you have there? Don McLean, eh?”

“I got these for you and Kelsey.”

“What? Don’t you have a record player?”

“Heck no. Not since Bush Senior was president.”

“Well, we’ll get you one.”

“What? I came to the record store today to buy you and Kelsey some records. Now gimmie those.”

“Thanks, Jack. I really appreciate it.”

For lunch we picked the trashiest, grubbiest looking Chinese restaurant dive we could find. It was so dingy and rough looking not even Robert De Niro’s scruffiest, low-life character would not have gone in there. We love these kinds of places and our wives definitely don’t. It was awesome though. The eggrolls were so ossified they could have been used as nun-chucks. My vegetable chow mein was stale and the rice was crunchy and swimming in grease. The patrons were suspect, especially since I asked one when we first walked in if the food was good and he nodded his head in affirmation vigorously.

We were back in the same suburb the next day and when Grace and Kelsey went to a dress shop Jeremy and I went back to the record store. When the women caught with us, I bought a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young album for Kelsey and she took a picture of me holding it up like it’s an archeological find. She posted that one on Facebook.

We had tough time picking a place to eat. We showed them Tom Lee’s fine establishment but they declined. We ended up at a bar and grill, and the food was very good there. We sampled each other’s beer because we had asked for locally micro-brewed beers. They were all pretty good. I didn’t expect anything vegetarian in a bar and grill but they had a veggie sandwich and it was very good. Sometimes the most important thing a family can do is to be together, dine together, talk and hang out. On the way back to the car we passed a bar where the patrons were very involved in a playoff hockey game. The beloved Blackhawks were playing the Los Angeles Kings. I have no interest in hockey but I yelled into the bar, “GO KINGS!” just for kicks. Jeremy looked at me and laughed. Fortunately for us, the patrons either ignored me or didn’t hear me over the din in the bar.

Grace was our entertainment concierge and she proposed a play. She found Blue Man Group, which has been running in Chicago since 1997, and “Hair” the 1968 musical about the hippie movement from that era. Both sounded good to me I had no real preference, although I had my reservations about “Hair” because even 46 years after the fact I never bothered to find out what it was. To me even then it was a sign that the movement had been co-opted by the system. I figured—at the time and all those years afterward—that if it was something to put on Broadway it was going to be compromised. I didn’t care if it won awards or had four hits singles; it was what was called “commercial” at the time. I mean the artists that covered the big hit songs were fake, commercially manufactured pop groups like The Cowsills for instance had a hit with “Hair”, or pop-rock bands like Three Dog Night who struck gold with “Easy to be Hard.” There was also the fluffy soul-pop group 5^th Dimension who blended two songs “Aquaris/Let the Sunshine In” and took the second half to church, and the one name, one hit wonder Oliver got to #3 on the charts with “Good Morning Starshine.” I had nothing against them, but I had no reason to take them seriously, not when there was Bob Dylan and The Beatles and all the hugely talent artists they inspired out there changing everything. In my mind whoever came up with “Hair” was more interested in making money off a legitimate social movement than in presenting the questions and issues raised in the movement.

Well, I was wrong. “Hair” has been through several revisions. It went from off-Broadway to Broadway to “Hair” the movie and 46 years later it was showing in North Chicago in a small theater with some might good acting and singing. The play, in this version of it anyway, was over two hours long and the issues presented were not glossed over or oversimplified or seen through rose-colored glasses. Not at all. The hippies didn’t agree on everything, and neither did the “straight” people. Everything was complicated and messy. And we have the opportunity to look at it, knowing the future, knowing both the blessings and consequences of the choices that were made in those tumultuous times.

Afterwards I thought they should have had a time to have a conversation. But it was after all, a play. Still though it caught me off guard and stirred a lot of feelings and thoughts. And I think that for those born after the late 60’s it was an opportunity to understand what was going on. It was nothing like anything that we expected. I know for sure Jeremy was caught off guard because he thought we were going to see “Hairspray.”

At dinner that night (I think it was the night of the bar and grill dinner—this essay is a lot of things but one thing it is not is sequential) we had a cross-generational conversation about the issues raised in the play. Those issues included war, the draft, societal obligations, faith, hope, truth and love. After dinner we went to a cupcake place. I went to a frozen yogurt shop and had that instead, thinking or hoping it might have less sugar than a cupcake. When I caught up with the other though I saw that they had divided one cupcake into four so it turned out that I probably had more sugar than anyone else. Would they have divided one cupcake into five though?

Most people don’t go to the movies when they’re on vacation, but we do. We’ve been to the movies in Maui, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, LA, and wherever else we’ve been. Some people say why go to the movies when you can do that at home, which is fair enough but we like it. We like seeing different theaters, and sometimes we see movies that, for whatever reason, didn’t come to Fresno. We saw a movie called “The Immigrant” in Chicago. It was in a suburb where Michael Jordan’s gated mansion is. Several people I met at Jeremy and Kelsey’s church mentioned Jordan’s mansion, mostly they told me it has number 23 on it and he’s selling it or it has already been sold. Also, they told me or I figured it out on my own that his Chicago suburb was a pretty ritzy one. I think it’s Highland Park and the price for the mansion is $16 million. So we went to the movies in MJ’s neighborhood, and that theater was no ordinary theater. There were only 30 seats and each one was a leather recliner. The popcorn was fresh and lightly salted. At one point Grace got so comfortable in her recliner she curled up and turned on her side and I was sure she fell asleep but she insists she did not. I sent a picture of our arrangement to my brother and he texted back “Available in LA. Comes with Dinner.” Don’t think I’d want to eat a meal in a recliner but it’s interesting how a new trend travels and now with cell phones everyone can report out to anyone the moment something reportable happens. Anyway we settled in—oh, and Kelsey had a glass of wine—and the previews began. The sound system was extraordinary by the way and all I could think was “this is probably what Jordan has in his mansion.” All for ten bucks, and the movie was very good.

We talked about the theme of forgiveness in the movie. The movie really wasn’t about the immigrant, it was about the man who abused or took advantage of her. I joked about renaming the movie, but really the idea of the power and importance of forgiveness really shone through. There were examples of forgiving those who were remorseful and forgiving those who didn’t think they had done anything wrong. This has been a point of contention among Armenians who debate forgiving the Turks for the genocide. Some say that forgiveness cannot happen unless the perpetrator of the sin is remorseful, while others say it can and should happen even without repentance. Although I understand the feelings of the former, I am with the latter group. I believe this even though it is the more difficult thing to do because Jesus left the example from the cross when He said, “Forgive them; they don’t know what they’re doing.” If Jesus left that example, no less is expected of us. I used to tell my students that forgiveness is the most powerful force in the universe. They would just look at me passively, not responding one way or another and I couldn’t read them, but I think some of them caught it and let it resonate.

Another thing I told my students over and over was who they were and how they were and why they were was Roosevelt. You see, some of them made fun of their own school, but what they needed to know was they were representatives of their school and their behavior was the impression of their school. In Chicago, it worked the same way. Everywhere we went there were ambassadors of the city. On the trains, theaters, stadium, the streets, the restaurants, museums—people had an openness and were considerate. When your youngest gets married and then they moved 2100 miles away, well you hope it’s a safe and comfortable place, and that they are well received wherever they go. When they first got married and were living in Studio City I thought, “Oh, they’re living in the Valley. That’s nice.” But they hated it. The people there thought everyone around them had some glaring deficiency. The people in their apartment complex would not speak to them. People in the restaurants had scripts in the works or were in need of a better agent, or were acting as if. Then they moved to South Pasadena and they loved living there. They were in one of the most gorgeous areas in Southern California and were walking distance to cute, nice restaurants. For a while it looked like Kelsey’s declaration, “We’ll go wherever God sends us, but NO SNOW!” was going to stand. But then they ended up in Chicago in and their first three months there happened to be the worst winter in that city’s history. As a parent there are some nights when you get into bed worrying and say, “Well Lord, you know what you’re doing,” and you hope and trust for the best, even when your kids are adults, you can’t help it. But having stayed in the city for 9 days and gone where they go and met the people they socialize with I have peace about where they are. The open spaces—even Downtown Chicago’s buildings seem generously spaced—and open hearts of the people are impressive. I am glad that they are friends with David and Margaret and their kids. They are kind, thoughtful, supportive, energetic, enthusiastic, considerate, generous, faithful, loving people you don’t imagine are around anymore. We had dinner at their house after the movie.

We had hamburgers, salad, and the best homemade apple pie I believe I’ve ever had. We sat in the backyard eating and talking, laughing and joking and telling stories. We ate watermelon. They had a fire pit and made a fire so big we had to move our chairs back a bit. The kids were funny, bright, polite, sociable and a joy to be around. They were fully alive and connected to the source. I sipped my beer and thought, “If this is Chicago, I wouldn’t mind living here at all.” Except for the snow. It makes that crunching noise when you walk on it. Overall though, Chicago seems to have held on to a part of the American ideal that other parts of the country have lost.

On the second Sunday we were in Chicago my white dress shirt was wrinkled and a little stale. I was going to do some laundry but didn’t get around to it and I figured I would wear something else, although I had no idea what. I rummaged through the clean shirts in the suitcase and found a black knit collarless shirt. I put it on with my grey coat and pants and I looked good enough. I looked like a guy pitching a script in Hollywood or an Armenian selling tires in Glendale, dressing up so you’d know he was the owner, except I didn’t have any gold chains or pinkie rings.

We sat together in church and it was like resting after a run. Attendance was down 50% from the Sunday before but that was Ordination Sunday and this was the week after, plus it was the day before Memorial Day and I remembered that Jeremy told me many of the families go out of town on Memorial Day weekend. Jeremy was calm. He was now officially the guy in charge, “Badveli” in Armenian, Reverend in English. He had been ordained, which is to say called to be set apart by God. I thought about this while sitting in church, and was thinking that we are all called to be set apart by God in some way or another but I guess ordained means called specifically for the purposes of serving the church, both the body of believers and literal physical, building church, which in this case was the Armenian Evangelical Church of Chicago or actually Mt. Prospect in the Greater Chicago area. I’ve been saying Jeremy and Kelsey’s church and in fact it is God’s church and they are pastors of it. I include Kelsey because while every pastor’s wife may have varying degrees of feeling inclined to be involved, I’m betting it will be something that comes naturally to her. “God is an overwhelming responsibility” Ian Andersen once said, and that element of entering people’s lives at a spiritual level and guiding or helping them somehow is a huge, serious responsibility, and it makes the job not just a job but a calling, a mission. I tell you, I considered being a minister at one point in my life. I was about 20 years old and thought about it for two or three weeks. It didn’t even take that long for me to realize that I had enough of a task just keep my own spiritual life on track, let alone leading a group of people on theirs. Besides, I did not want to learn Latin, Hebrew or Aramaic, and I didn’t want to decide on doctrinal things that may or may not have a final answer. I am proud of Jeremy, I hold him in high regard and I have much respect of his answering the call to ministry, and I know Kelsey will be right there with him, even as she is mapping out and traveling her own career journey.

On that second Sunday, all the other family and friends were already back home, back to their regular routines. I felt as though Grace and I were getting a look at what normal Sunday would look like for them. Jeremy’s sermon, like the one before it went something like this: All right, I have my arrows, here’s my bow, and over there, that’s the target. Now I draw back the bow and we let it fly. Bam! Well, that’s a bullseye. Now let’s sing the Armenian Lord’s Prayer. Amen and God bless you. Succinct. No wasted or repeated words because you are trusted with the responsibility to be paying attention the first time. Some sermons are like songs with a refrain or a chorus or both, and you get a phrase or an idea over and over and over. Not so with Jeremy. I’m convinced there will be a church full of people every Sunday who appreciate his approach.

After church was coffee hour. A man approached as if we knew each other. I forget introductions the way good pitchers forget a homerun they gave up just one pitch ago, so I wasn’t sure if I had already met him but the way he was walking toward me with that ah, there he is look, I tried to think of what his name might be.

“Are you Kelsey’s dad?”

“Yes, I sure am.”

“Ah, I saw your picture on Facebook. You like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young?”

It was the picture Kelsey had posted of me holding up the Déjà vu album.

“Yes, that was one of my favorite albums.”

“Are you a musician?”

“No, I just really like music.”

“Oh, that’s right. You’re an engineer.”

“No, that’s my son.”
“Oh?”

“Yes. I’m a, I’m retired. I’m a, I was a high school English teacher.”

“Oh! I see. That’s great. Retired?”

“Yes.”

“Enjoying that?”

“Oh, yes. Get to listen to more music.”

“You like Dylan?”
“Yes, very much. I saw Dylan three times in fact.”

“Pfft. I’ve seen him 20 times.”

“Wow, that’s great. You win the been-to-see-Dylan contest!”

“Ha-ha. Yes. He’s great. You must like The Band too, of course.”

“The Band is one of my favorite groups of all time. They still sound good to me.”

“True. Do you know that next month I will be going with a friend to Hibbing, Minnesota?”

“You’re going to Abe’s Hardware store? I think Abe Zimmerman is dead.”

“The hardware store is still there.”

“And there’s Dylan’s high school.”

“Right.”

“A pilgrimage.”

“Exactly. Yesterday was his birthday, you know.”

“Oh I forgot. Let’s see, that makes him 73.”

“And still touring.”

“Yes, but I saw him last year at the Hollywood Bowl. The touring band was aces but his voice was shot.”

“I saw him here on that tour. Are you talking about the one Mark Knopfler opened?”

“Yeah. Knopfler was lights out. Great band. Dylan though. I mean, people were actually walking out. Walking out on Bob Dylan.”

“Knopfler was fantastic. Dylan was too. You should join us.”

“On the pilgrimage to Hibbing?”

“Yes.”

“Well, much as I have enjoyed Chicago I don’t think I would be able to stay another month. But next year I will come back to visit Kelsey and Jeremy and I will join you on your second pilgrimage.”

“Really?”

“It would be great. I’m sending you and your friend out next month like scouts, and then the second trip you will be better informed.”

“Yes. It will be great. I’m looking forward to the second trip as much as the first.”

“That’s really cool.”

We talked more. He invited us to go hear a live cover band that afternoon, but we already had plans. He didn’t look like a rock enthusiast, but at this point none of us in the baby-boomer age bracket look like rock fans, and neither do our rock heros look like rock gods. But that is just one of life’s tougher verities. Suddenly you don’t like looking at really old pictures as much. The race goes to the swift and the swift are always young.

The first Sunday was a long day. We went to church then had a luncheon, and then had the ordination ceremony. But while it was a long day, it was not a tedious day, not at all. It was eventful and there was nothing to leave out. Jeremy’s sermon was on point, while Kelsey’s sat in the last row of the church point the lyrics to the hymns on the screen before us and finding the appropriate musical accompaniment from her laptop. It’s a small church. No choir, no pianist, no secretary. But the facilities—the church and the social hall are less than 10 years old, very well designed and appointed and there is a future there and a determination to go forward. I spoke to a woman after the luncheon.

“We’re so glad to have Jeremy and Kelsey.”

“Well, I miss them but they are happy to be here.”

“We believe they are the right people for our church.”

“I also feel they are in the right place at the right time.”

“All in God’s hands.”

“Yes, that’s true,” I said, my heart overjoyed that all the pieces were in the right place.
“It’s time to move forward.”

“I have felt that here from many people.”

“A few people though…”

“Sometimes people get stuck.”

“Yes. There are stuck.”

“They face backward, not forward.”

“Amen. That’s so true.”

“But I believe there are enough people here who want to move forward to make that happen.”

“Yes, there is,” she said, nodding her head.

“All the pieces are in place.”

“You’re right. That’s so true.”

“I’m glad I talked to you. Now I know that the congregation and Jeremy and Kelsey have the same vision.”

“Yes. Thank you. It’s a pleasure meeting. We are definitely in agreement.”

I walked away feeling pretty good but then I remembered I hadn’t even asked what her name was. Still though the conversation gave me a good feeling about how things are going there. Our trip to Chicago was a success in every way, on every level. Ok, I did overcook the barbecued chicken for a get together Jeremy and Kelsey hosted but only by a few minutes, and it took me forever to do it because the coals went out. But other than that the soiree was a hit and so was the previous one when they had pizza and salad the first night we were there. And there was another get together when Marina, a dear friend who has love for all and treats everyone like family and in fact in related to Grace somehow or another and is an encourager and a real-life cheerleader, made sure that there was wine and food where friends and family became one and the same. On that night, or one of them, I met a man who makes documentaries and was very knowledgeable about the history of the Armenians arriving at and living in the Boston area. He had that manic energy that many of my Armenian brothers have. It’s an urgency that things have to be done, that the past has to be respected and recorded, that the truth must be told, and every detail and remembrance is important. Always admired brothers like that and sisters like Marina, too. And this is my story of love, truth and details. Chicago’s nice and life’s good my friends, and that’s the short and long of it.

To The Bitter End

I retired a year ago. I was a high school English teacher. Today’s story is actually lifted directly from the journal I kept of my last year. This portion of it is dedicated to the teachers who this week are battling their way to summer vacation trying to talk sense and responsibility to high school seniors suddenly desperate  enough to simply ask for a grade to be magically changed.

 

June 6

I always want to get to the place where everyone is signed out and happy with the grade they earned. I was hoping it would be today but on my way to lunch Missy called out to me. Her counselor had asked me in the morning if I had given Missy “makeup work” to raise her grade.

“She has a D,” I said to Miss Lorenzo a calm and patient counselor who works well with teachers and students as well.

“I know but she was thinking to raise it higher still.”

“No, not now. Semester’s over. I gave her extra credit last week. That got her to a D.”

“I know. She’s going to Fresno State.”

“She was absent 28 times. That’s half the semester. I’m sure you know about that.”

“Yes. I don’t know how many times I told her.”

“I am not giving her any more extra credit. It wouldn’t be fair to the students who attended regularly.”

“I understand and agree with you fully.”

Apparently though, Missy decided to take things into her own hands.

“I have all this extra credit work I did for you.”

“There must be some kind of misunderstanding. It’s over. The only extra credit I’m giving is for juniors.”

“It’s all right here.”

“I’m sorry, but the semester’s over. You were absent 28 times.”

“I know.”

“I let you do the extra credit work last week so you could catch up to a D. That’s it. You’re passing.”

“But that’s not an acceptable grade to me.”

That stopped me.

“Not acceptable?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I could change it back to an F if you like.”

“What? NO!”

“You were absent 28 times and got an F. I let you make up some work and got it to a D. The semester ended. You get to walk. That’s all there is to it.”

“DON’T WALK AWAY FROM ME!”

“I’m going to lunch.”

At lunch with Jeff Bowman, I railed against society, institutions and parents creating the circumstances in which I had to have stress with a senior when the seniors had checked out. I wanted that relaxed feeling. But it wasn’t going to happen when it could have.

After school I was taking stuff off the walls and dumping files from the file cabinets. I would go 10 minutes or so and sit down another 10. I was sitting at my desk listening to a Kinks song I didn’t recognize—they sang la-la-la-la on the fadeout—and thinking about how once I retire I’d have time to get to know all the cd’s I bought, played once and uploaded, when I heard someone rapping manically on the door. I knew it was Missy. Half the lights were off because the class that left had been watching a movie. Maybe she’d think I wasn’t here. She knocked again. I waited. She would be more inclined to give up tomorrow; when we get this deep into it, each day that passes even the most stubborn kids give in. Then I thought, “Let’s finish this.” I went to the door and saw through the window that she was stepping off the porch. I opened the door.

“Ha, Mr. Chavoor, I was about to leave.”

“I know.”

“Can I come in?”

“What’s on your mind?”

She talked without a break for 20 minutes, covering her life from elementary school to her last day as a senior in high school. She touched on everything—good and bad friends, teachers, relatives—and was still I’m sure, leaving plenty of stones unturned.

At the beginning of her talk I was thinking of a former student years ago who had GATE (“Gifted and Talented Education”) level capabilities but chose to take a “regular” class and coast through it. She was a hippe-girl or a product of parents with a hippie like perspective and we got along well. I kept reminding her that she was cruising at altitudes way below her potential. But she would say, “Oh, Mr. Chavoor, what’s a grade? It’s only a letter on a piece of paper.” So her grade dropped down to a low C. And in June she was ok with it. This was way back when I first got seniors, late 80’s or very early 90’s. In the middle of summer vacation I got a call from the office at school. A student wanted to contend a grade. I went to school and there she was, wanting me to change her grade to a B so she could attend some acting school that required at least a B in high school English. Now that the grade meant getting in or not getting in, she suddenly cared. I dug up the files there in the office, found my grades for that class and looked at her grade. Nothing had changed, of course. I showed her every graded entry, showed her how many points she earned and showed her what her percentage was. Her argument was since I knew she could have done the work I should give her a B to get her in this school. I declined. She was not happy.

A couple of months later the new school year was about to begin and I went to the office and checked my mail. This girl who let her grade slide, and told me “What’s a grade? It’s only a letter on a piece of paper” was so angry that I didn’t change her C to a B decided she would drop a seven page missive on me, shaming me for not being cool enough to enable her. She even told me I shouldn’t have long hair. I got to page three and I thought, “I have no reason to read this ridiculous crap,” and I tossed in the trash and went to the first faculty meeting and never thought of it—or her—again.

But Missy was different. I felt as though I could explain why I wasn’t changing her grade and that she would accept it. So when she was done I told her everything I believed to be true. How I would be cheating the students who came and battled for their grade. That it was time for her to stop looking behind her and face forward and take care of what was in front of her. It was, I told her, the choices she made that put her in this predicament and that she had to accept the responsibility for her choice. I told her that when she got to college there would be no deal-making and that the challenge before her was to get more A’s than B’s and that there was no such thing as a C and that she could not live off of her potential because she might be as talented as Kobe Bryant but if she didn’t show up for the games, it didn’t mean anything. She agreed that this was true. But then she said she needed to live in the dorms at Fresno State because her neighborhood was bad and she didn’t want to be surrounded by people who might want to do things that weren’t good, although she cared about the people in her neighborhood. I told her that living in the dorms meant there would be a lot of people who would rather party than study. She said they might party but not as hard and crazy as the people in her neighborhood. I told her that there were always going to be people from every class, race and lifestyle who would party themselves and anyone else with them right out of college, especially freshmen in college.

I went to the board. I was going to teach a one-student seminar on Life 101. I began with a Dylan quote. There are certain individuals, I said, “who care not to come up any higher, but rather pull you down in the hole that he’s in.” There are people who don’t want you to succeed. You will have to avoid them. That calls for discipline, I told her. Being absent 28 times is not a sign of discipline. Then I erased that and put a Beatle quote on the board, this one from George Harrison, “There’s people standing ‘round who screw you in the ground. They’ll fill you in with all the sin you see.” She said that was true. Then I erased that and put my mom’s words of advice to me, “There are two things in life, memories and hope.” I told her that the memories represent the past and there may have been some unpleasant memories in her past but the hope, well that represented the future, which can be better if you make good choices. She might have said something like I was dropping wisdom but I’m not sure now. But she was nodding her head in agreement. She thanked me when she left.

 

June 7, 2013

 

I was starting to feel good. The seniors were gone and I had only 5 juniors and they were all in one class. My last week was going to be pretty easy, and I’d have plenty of time to clean out my room.

I was back in my room tossing stuff and giving other stuff away when the phone rang. It was the secretary, asking me if it was ok for Brenda to come to my room. I okayed it but as I hung up I couldn’t understand why Brenda, a senior, would want to see me, especially since she was ok with her grade. I opened the door and she strode in with a kind of purpose I couldn’t suss.

“Mr. Chavoor.”

“Yes?”

“Mr. Chavoor, I’m here on behalf of Missy.”

“What?”

“Missy. I’m here to talk about Missy.”

“Well, I don’t have anything to say. I’m not changing her grade.”

“You don’t understand.”

“I don’t?”

“No. She can’t get in to Fresno State. Mr. Juarez said…”

“Wait a minute. Mr. Juarez sent you?”

“No, Mr. Chavoor! No, not at all.”

I wasn’t sure I believed her. But once you believe one ridiculous thing—a student advocating for her friend two days after everything was done—then you could believe a dozen other, even more ridiculous things, like a vice principal sending the friend of the student.

“Ok. Well, that’s good. But I’m not changing her grade. The semester is over. Seniors have checked out. She was absent 28 times. The subject is not open for discussion.”

“But…”

“No.
“Ok, but give me a dollar.”

“What?”

“A dollar.”

“You want me to give you a dollar.”

“Yeah.”

“What for?”
“I’m thirsty. I want some water. Cold water.”

“Here. Here’s a dollar.”

“Thanks, Mr. Chavoor.”

“You’re welcome.”

It was not the right thing to do to give her a dollar just because she asked for it but it was the most expedient way to get her out of the room without further absurd conversations regarding her friend’s grade.

At lunch I railed against the insanity of everything, and my friends Jeff and LJ listened sympathetically and added stories of their own. When I said I had half a mind to ask the vice principal if he had anything to do with it they both thought it was a good idea. I’ll admit it; I was worked up. I signed those senior check-out papers big and bold, in red ink just like they asked, because I was done with it and it felt good and I wanted it to stay good.

“Mr. Juarez, did you send Brenda to advocate for Missy?”

“What?”

“Did you send Missy’s friend to advocate for her to get me to change her grade?”

“Absolutely not. Why would I do that?”

“I’m not sure.”

“No. I stand by what you said. That you weren’t going to change her grade.”

“That’s good. Missy’s friend mentioned your name and I…”

“No. I would never do anything like that.”

I was about to apologize when a voice from out in the hall interrupted our conversation.

“I told you, Mr. Chavoor!”

“What?” I hollered.

“I told you Juarez didn’t send me. I can’t believe it.”

Juarez was laughing in a polite way. I went out into the hall and there I found Brenda and Missy both.

“What are you doing?” I asked Brenda.

“Your voice is so loud I couldn’t help it.”

“So Missy, why would you send Brenda?”

“I didn’t.”

“She didn’t have anything to with it. I went on my own. Nobody asked me to do it.”

“Well, look. Listen, Missy, I got nothing but love for you, girl. But you made these choices, see?”

“Yeah.”

“And the grade you don’t like is a result of those choices, ok?”

“Yeah I know, Chavoor.”

“Ok then.”

I walked out of the office and went back to my room.

 

 

June 12, 2013

My 6^th period was not slated to meet today. I came in to finish the business of cleaning my room and gather sign out signatures. I was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, a custom I started on the 2^nd to last day of school almost from the beginning. My iPod had gone missing and knew that it would show up eventually—either I would remember where it was or I would come across it when I had given up hopes of ever finding it—and so I signed on to YouTube and played different concert albums, starting with “Live at Leeds” by the Who, and then “Rock of Ages,” by The Band. English Department was hosting a farewell lunch for Paula Fansler and I. Paula was the brilliant, devoted, relentlessly hard-working teacher; I was good-time Charlie. Everyone has a role to play. I was happy to retire with someone I admired and respected. I was looking forward to lunch.

A little before 10 there was a knock at my door. I opened it expecting one of my juniors or a senior coming to say goodbye. Instead, there stood Missy.

“Hey, Missy. How you doing? Come on in.”

“Thanks.”

“What’s up?” I asked, pretending not to know why she was there.

“Mr. Chavoor,” she said, tipping head and looking at me in a way that suggested she shouldn’t be made to say why she was there.

“Yes?”

“I need to go to Fresno State.”

“I’m sure you will.”

“No, I mean this year.”

I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stay calm. This was a ton of nonsense and foolishness and it wasn’t on me that she didn’t see that yet.

“Well, you should have thought about that during the school year.”

“I know.”

“Missy, I’m not changing my mind. So if that’s the only thing you came to talk about then you should go.”

“Really, Chavoor?”

“Yes.”

“But the other teacher let me make up that grade and I was absent 33 times.”

“That’s on him, not me.”

“But…”

“Missy we’re done. The matter has been over for a while. Your grade is already in. You may not understand it now, but maybe you’ll understand it later on.”

“Mr. Chavoor, I…”

“No, stop. I can’t believe you’re here two days before the end of the year, and eight days after seniors checked out. I’m retiring. That’s it. It’s supposed to be a happy day today and you…”

“Whatever, Chavoor.”

And she left.

One last student had battled for a grade she didn’t deserve but I stood my ground to the bitter end. I decided not to go home and rest before the Everyone Club dinner; I already had my celebratory shirt on. I stayed in my room in the afternoon and worked on the journal. I was a little worried that Missy might make her final appearance but I also felt that by staying in my room I would prove to myself that the incident was over and done. Hours went by like minutes. I listened to “Thick as a Brick” and “Passion Play” by Jethro Tull, and then I just let everything stay quiet while I wrote. The next time I looked up it was five minutes to six. It was a potluck so I took my vegetable platter that I bought at Winn Co in the morning and headed for the cafeteria and found Grace already there even though she had had a busy day and said she thought she would be late.

I was a little more relaxed but still it had that dream like quality to it. I was just a guy coming to work, doing my thing, which was good on some days and not so good on others. I did grow into the job and there was definitely an arc to it. I was good at what I did. I felt funny though when Mike Spencer and Paula Mr. Wells gave speeches and said such nice things. And Jeff Bowman and Amber, his former student played a blues number they said was dedicated to me. I don’t know, how do you act when people doing stuff like that? I imagined it to be something akin to what they called a love-in. Everything was wonderful. The food, the people, the program, the smiles and hugs, the laughter. I think I may have overused the word wonderful but there isn’t another word that comes to mind. I didn’t want to leave. I stood around talking to friends and acquaintances and picked pieces of watermelon out of a near-empty bowl.

I drove home. My head was so full of thoughts, memories and emotions that it went blank. When I came home Grace and I talked about what a great evening it had been. Then we talked about regular stuff and watched TV. When I went to bed I slept better than I had in quite a while.