True Talk

Tino may have been a Bulldog. He showed me the secret handshake that ends with a bark. His face wasn’t hard and angry though like so many I had met, and neither was it chillingly blank and indifferent. His face had the look of a grade school kid hoping he answered correctly. His speech was soft and slurred, but the cadence of it was accelerated. He was skinny and angular and made me think of the mechanical spiders in the film version of “Minority Report.” In brief, if there was a casting call for central California gang members, Tino Reyes would not be called back.
Most mornings I would greet him at the door. Sometimes we shook hands but other times we just nodded. No self-respecting gang member or associate would want to be considered a “school-boy.” Those who could read and cognate effectively were cautious about revealing their skills publicly. Typically, Tino would give a vociferous smart-ass answer followed by a softer, correct answer.
“Why is that money so important to Walter?” I would ask the class.
“’For he could buy him some WEED with it!” he shouted,and then while the class was laughing, he would murmur the answer which revealed the fact that he was paying attention, “Because he could get at his dream with it.”
He was always on the verge of doing ok, which is where he wanted to stay, I think. He liked being comfortable and he like being able to be in control of any given situation. One day though he didn’t come to class. I stood by the door a full minute after the bell rang. Whatever faults he may have had, not being at school wasn’t one of them. I had the feeling that he was one of those kids who would rather be at school than at home. Two days later Tino shook hands with me at the door in the conventional manner.
“Where’ve you been? You’re never absent.”
“Sorry, Mr. Chavoor.”
“You ok?”
He looked different, as if that grade school kid was no longer interested in getting the right answer but instead wanted to go home and sit in his mother’s lap and fall asleep or at the very least, if he had to stay at school, put his head down on the desk and not be disturbed.
“I’m just tired.”
“You got a job?”
“Nah.”
“You staying up late? You know you can’t pretend to not be a schoolboy if you don’t get your sleep!”
“That ain’t it,” he said wincing suddenly.
“What is it? What’s wrong?” He was listing to his right, holding his side. I thought it was his appendix.
“I got stabbed, Mr. Chavoor.”
“What?”
“I got stabbed.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Yeah I did. Hurts like hell, too. Wanna see it?”
“No, I believe you.”
But he pulled his shirt up anyway, and there right above his right hip was a three inch square gauze pad secured with white tape on all four sides.
“You called me a liar, Chavoor.”
“Sorry.”
“See? Here, look. Wanna put your hand on it?”
He started to peel off the pad.
“No. How’d this happen?”
“I told you like three times already, I got stabbed.”
“No, I mean…when?”
“Last night.”
“What were you doing?”
“I was at a kickback and it got late, and I was close to home so I started walking .”
“Yeah?”
“I was about half way there when these guys came up to me.”
“Ok.”
He stood with his back to the wall, staring up at the lights in the hallway.
“And they say like what’s up and I say what’s up, you know?”
“So then?”
“They’re all older than me but I wasn’t gonna be nobody’s punk so then this guy just hits me in the face.”
“What for?”
“Nothing. These guys just come up on me.”
“Did you talk shit to them?”
“No. I was just walking home, that’s all, and they surrounded me. They’re the ones that were talking shit.”
“How many of them were there?”
“Five, get it? Me, one—them five. Ok?”
“All right, go ahead.”
He pushed away from the wall, staggered a bit and then decided leaning on the wall was his best bet.
“The one guy who hit me, I hit him back real hard. But then this other guy hits me with a bar. See? See the lump?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty big.”
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed a sizeable bump above his left temple.
“So I went down and then I tried to get up but they were all kicking and stomping me.”
“And where were your homeboys?”
“Exactly, Mr. Chavoor. When you don’t need them, they’re all around but when you need them they’re nowhere.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, so I got up somehow and that’s when this one guy, the oldest guy, he had a knife and he stabbed me.”
“When was this?”
“Last night.”
“Last night?”
“Yeah.”
He sighed and looked at me.
“You went to the hospital?”
“Yeah. That’s why I’m tired. I had to wait forever in emergency.”
“They stitched it?”
“Yeah.”
“Did they give you anything for the pain?”
“Just while I was there. Right now though it hurts bad.”
“You wanna go to the nurse?”
“No. She can’t do nothing. Lay down or go home.”
“Yeah well, go home. You’re in pain and your body needs to rest.”
“I ain’t going home.”
He said it with so much conviction I started to wonder why he wouldn’t.
“Does your mom know?”
“Not yet.”
“Well how did you manage to not tell her?”
“I woke up my older brother when I got home. He took me.”
“Who were those guys anyway?”
“Nortenos, Mr. Chavoor.”
“Oh.”
“They don’t like Bulldogs. We don’t like them.”
“Mexicans hurting Mexicans. What for?”
“You know, Mr. Chavoor. It’s just one of those things that goes a long ways back.”
We were quiet for a while, lost in our own thoughts.
“Tino, don’t you think you get enough misery with white folks who are racist?”
“Mostly all whites are racist.”
“No they’re not.”
“Yeah they are.”
“Tino, where do you live?”
“You know where I live at– in Calawa, Mr. Chavoor.”
“There are neighborhoods where this stuff doesn’t happen.”
“That’s for whites, though.”
“There’s Mexicans living in those neighborhoods, too.”
“Look, Mr. Chavoor. The way it is for us, is the way it is.”
“What?”
“It ain’t gonna change. Stabbings, shootings, drug dealers, gang-banging. That ain’t gonna stop.”
“Maybe, but you don’t have to live where it’s happening.”
“Know what, Chavoor? If me and my homies moved somewhere else it would start up over there. That’s true-talk.”
“I can’t believe what I’m hearing. What do you think this school stuff is all about?”
“I’m just telling you how it is. Go ask Juan, or Marissa, or Julio, or Jose. Lettie, Berto, Carlos. They’ll all tell you the same thing.”
“I’m not gonna convince you in one day. You have to see it for yourself. But remember what I’m telling you– the worst kind of failure is failing to try.”
“That’s true, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“’Cept one thing. In Calawa the main thing is survival. Everything else comes in second place.”
“Ok, well, let me write you a note to the nurse. Laying down isn’t a waste of time.”
“No. Can we go in though? It’s easier sitting than it is standing. It don’t hurt as much.”
“Yeah, ok. Come on. And one more thing.”
“Yeah?”
“Payback won’t get you anything but in trouble. You hear me?”
“Yeah”
I yanked the door open and we walked in. All his Calawa friends were chatting amiably as I began to take roll, I wondered whether they would be interested in reading more of A Farewell to Arms. It was a tough semester to finish. I saw them all stuck in the morass of bad neighborhoods and bad choices, and if they had the same passive acceptance to it all that Tino said they did, there was no getting out of it. Two years later though I was at a football game—it was homecoming—and Tino greeted me and told me he was attending Fresno State and doing ok. You know that feeling when you find a twenty dollar bill in your jeans that you didn’t know you had? It was like that, except more like a hundred dollar bill.

The Freckled-Face, Red-Headed Boy

March 1998

The race was over. We had talked about it briefly, but Kat was ready to leave. She was coming up on 14, 8th grade, the tides were of her life were swirling and shifting. Sometimes she wanted to get something to eat, other times she just wanted to go home; sometimes she would chatter, other times, silence.

It was cool and the clouds were trying to rain. Kat had done all right, which is to say neither awful nor terrific, but just out there, enjoying it, like adults enjoy a good, normal day at work. We walked briskly, hurrying against the wind. Large scattered drops of rain began to fall.
I was looking down at our feet as we walked and when I next looked up, there was a skinny, freckled, red-headed boy moving toward us with a determined look on his face. As he came closer he began to pump his arms as if he were about to power walk right through us and break us apart. He had his head down and was picking up the pace, and then he slowed down, put his head up and changed his steps to a cheerful skip.
“Hey!” He spoke as if he knew us. I looked at him but Kat looked straight ahead. The boy continued as if we had greeted him warmly.
“My friend likes you. He wants to meet you.” I looked at Kat but she made no response. About six feet behind us was a man who apparently was the boy’s father. He looked like a Hell’s Angel member who somehow got separated from the pack. He was 6’ 5” and he appeared to be creeping up on 300 pounds. His red beard was shaggy and his hair was tied down with a bandana. There was a tattoo on his arm that had something to do with wings but I didn’t want to stare. The boy meanwhile, pressed on.
“My friend wants your phone number so he can call you. He’s shy.”
“No,” Kat answered flatly. She would not look at him. I was curious to see how she would handle this.
“Well, it’s for my friend. He wants your number. He’s a nice guy.”
“No.”
“Ok, it’s not really for my friend. I just want your phone number so I could call you.”
“I don’t think so.” Kat was annoyed but she wasn’t changing her strategy: straight ahead; brisk pace; not looking at him.
“Ah, come on. Why not?” I felt bad for the kid. I knew how hard it was for a middle school boy to approach a girl, let alone ask for her number. We moved along in silence for a bit, the big red bear trailing us amiably. I started to worry that I hadn’t spoken to her about boys but then I recalled a conversation when she was 12. I had told her that there were boys who were good and there were boys who pretended to be good. She cut me off, saying that she could tell the difference. I wondered if she were now engaging that gift right now.
“Why not?” the boy persisted. That was it for Kat. She wheeled around, facing him and pointed her finger at him for emphasis.
“Because! I don’t know you, I don’t like you and you better get away from me.” She spoke clearly and with precision. I had wanted both my girls to be tough when they needed to be but I was still taken aback a little. I was proud of her though and I felt that maybe she would have no problems with boys, at least the ones she didn’t want. The boy melted and what was left of him retreated to papa bear. She might chase off some good boys, or her system– as for all of us– might fail her and tell her bad was good or good was bad, but at the moment it didn’t matter. This was all dress rehearsal, after all. Smart, tough, and straight-forward was a pretty good calling card. Sometimes life is a just a crapshoot and God sees us through the stuff we do.

I looked at the boy’s dad, wondering if he knew what had transpired and how he would feel about it. He jerked his head back and his stomach caved in like he had just heard something funny. The boy’s head was down though and I doubted he was telling Dad any jokes at the moment.

Kat and I looked at each other but we didn’t speak. We got to the parking lot, jumped in the car just ahead of the rain and headed off to Rally’s for some burgers.

The Monkey

“Rugrats” was a successful cartoon show that upheld the the notion that kids will be kids despite their parents’ best efforts to make them into miniature adults. And like any TV show that is white hot, the industry gods made it into a feature length film hoping to draw the faithful and their parents into the theater. So one Saturday I picked Kelsey up from a birthday party and we scooted over to the Manchester Theater only to find ourselves 20 minutes ahead of schedule, which is why they have all those games waiting for the unsuspecting in the lobby. Kelsey was drawn to one of those Pick a Prize with a crane like device. A dollar got you two tries.

But a boy was taking his turn ahead of us. He was giving it his best shot, working with a kind of fascinating intensity not usually devoted to games in a theater lobby, but coming up empty again and again. He had a stack of dollars bills and he seemed determined to get that prize. I thought about his mother, dropping him off at the cheapest theater in town—perhaps to save a few bucks—only to have him plunk down all his allowance, maybe more, on this game. I thought maybe he was spending his popcorn money on the game but with that stack of bills he could have bought his weight in popcorn, even at inflated theater prices. He had brought his money here just to beat the game. “The house wins” I said to myself, murmuring my personal caveat about gambling and life.

As if on cue, Kelsey began bugging me for money to play the game. It was the last thing I wanted to do. Odds were against Kelsey doing what this kid, who had probably been working at it for months, could not do. But Kelsey is relentless. Her pleads became louder and more demonstrative. Next thing I now, the boy invited himself into our little drama, offering Kelsey not only his place but a buck to play as well. Kelsey declined demurely.

The boy shrugged but returned to his mission more determined than before. It came to me slowly, like waking from a dream and recalling it a little at a time: the boy was trying to impress Kelsey. She was 10 years old and I found that to be a little unsettling, at least until I remembered a crush on Diana Mitchell I had in the 4th grade. Something about how she tipped her head when she was listening.

Meanwhile, the boy’s new found inspiration must have driven him to new heights of eye-hand coordination because on his very next try he snagged a toy monkey by the head and deftly dropped it into the bin, then offered it to Kelsey. She was startled but intrigued, and maybe a little scared, and she shook her head no. He was apparently over his attempt to impress Kelsey and resumed feeding dollar bills into the machine. Kelsey resumed pestering me about getting her chance. I came up with what I thought was a good plan.

“Hey” I said to the kid, “I’ll buy the monkey for a dollar.” He stuck his hand out immediately. Now I thought I would try and teach everyone a lesson. I held back on the bill.

“Are you gonna save it or spend it on the game?” The boy knew proper answers for adults.

“I’m gonna save it,” he said sincerely and jammed it in his left pocket, apart from his stash in his right from which he procured more bills and resumed playing. In a few minutes, the lad was tapped out, and broke his promise and used his last one from his left pocket. Now I had my lesson for sure.

“Look, Kelse,” I said gently like Papa Berenstain Bear, “the boy spent ten bucks and won nothing; we spent one buck and got the monkey.” But Kelsey had a lesson for me. She patted the monkey as if to agree but then said simply, “But I didn’t get to play.”

There’s always a monkey in the works. The house does indeed win, but apparently– against all odds– we all need to play anyway.

Hannah’s Unspoken Journey

I don’t remember much about the house on Poplar Street, just fragments. I remember Dad trying to teach me the numbers on the clock in the kitchen. I remember the free-standing tub with the claw feet. The front yard was shady and there were flowers, but except for the hydrangeas, I can’t picture the front of the house; when we arrived at Grandma’s house the driveway was behind the back door, and it wasn’t paved. The dirt smelled sweet on warm summer mornings. Just inside the back door was a chest of drawers, and in the bottom drawer, there were toys and books. I was delighted to know about the drawer because the house had only two grownups living in it, Grandma Ruth and her mother,Hannah Sadoian,“Big Grandma.” Grandma Ruth had five grandchildren, but I believed that the drawer was meant for me, or at least my sister and me. I knew Charles, 10 years older than I, had no interest in it, and our cousins, Debbie and Kirk, had their own toys in their house which was a duplex adjacent to Grandma’s.

The most cherished item in the drawer was a story about a magic pot that would produce with the command: “Little pot cook!” and would not stop until given the command: “Little pot stop!” The poor owner of the pot would forget the words to stop the pot and it overflowed and kept producing rice until the kitchen, the living room, the house, and eventually the entire village had rice up to its eyeballs. The story was read to me so many times that I began reading it myself, improvising the words according to the illustrations as I went along. I always imagined Grandma’s pilaf flooding the streets of Fresno, California.

In 1961 though, Grandma Ruth and Big Grandma moved into their triplex on Yale. There, Big Grandma would sit in her upholstered rocking chair, sometimes reading her Bible, other times just sitting with a contemplative look on her face. Her life offered her much to reflect upon. Her husband, a shoemaker in Harpoot, Turkey, had come to the United States alone to learn about sewing machines that might help him make more shoes in a shorter amount of time. When he heard that the Turks were causing trouble in Armenian villages, he wrote his wife and said: “Sell everything and come.” Hannah arrived in Worchester, Massachusetts in 1897. I didn’t know any of that about her at the time though; I only knew what I saw: a very old woman with veins showing on the tops of her hands, sitting in her rocking chair. And what I learned later, what my mother and grandmother told me about Big Grandma wasn’t the entire story. The untold story was something I didn’t learn about until I was nearly 60 years old.

I can’t say Big Grandma and I had a relationship because we didn’t speak the same language and we were 85 years apart. I was a little afraid of her and I’m not sure she knew what to make of me. I would say that we merely existed in the same space and only for a brief time, but there were some moments we shared that demonstrated some kind of familial communication.

We were passing in the hall one afternoon at Grandma’s triplex. She was going into the bathroom while I was heading to the kitchen. She stopped me and spoke to me in Armenian. I didn’t even understand that there were languages other than English, and so I assumed something was wrong with my ears. I decided to take my chances and nod my head yes. This pleased her, and she said: “Goot boyee.” It was one of the few phrases that she knew or employed, along with “Bat boyee.” I never knew for certain whether she would deem me good or bad because the litmus test was always in Armenian. If I shook my head when I should have nodded, or vice-versa, I got knocked on the head with her cane, not too hard, but hard enough to remember.

I also remember watching her one morning at breakfast eating a soft-boiled egg. I had never seen a soft-boiled egg or a soft-boiled egg holder. The egg cup looked like some kind of unfinished toy, or something that might hold a very small spinning top. She would take her spoon and tap, tap, tap near the top of the egg as if she were gently knocking at someone’s door. With the top cleanly off and set aside, she took the salt-shaker and shook it steadily, pouring so much salt on the egg that I could barely see it anymore. Then the spoon, with its generous load of the gelatinous contents would waver on the journey to her open mouth, while her eyes—frighteningly huge from her coke bottle lenses—kept careful watch. Each spoonful was an adventure, but, in the end, she did not spill, not even once.

The moment that I remember best came one day while I was watching TV at Grandma’s. I sat on the couch, and Grandma Ruth turned the TV on to a western, then went into the kitchen. Big Grandma emerged from her room, looked at the TV screen for a moment, and then came to the couch—instead of going for her rocking chair—and sat down next to me. I didn’t like westerns and Big Grandma had a funny smell of old sweaters, mothballs and sorrow to her. I was not miserable, but something akin to it. She said something to me, in Armenian of course, but this time with a little more urgency than usual. I decided to nod yes. This agitated her, but she didn’t reach for her cane. Instead she pointed at the TV screen.

“You…eh-see…dat?”

“Yes,” I lied, not wanting to disappoint her. “Look…der.”

“At what?”

“Der.”

She pointed at the screen again. “Something on TV?”

“Dat.”

“You want me to change the channel?”

I got up; I would be happy to do it, although Grandma Ruth had told me not to touch the TV, but when I reached for the channel knob she almost lost her mind. “NO! NO!” she shouted. “Look you!”

“Um, I see a cowboy, a horse.” I was shaking.

“Yah. Look, you.”

She apparently wanted me to name things. “Uh, the cactus, the sky, a wagon?”

“HA!” One of the last three was the magic word, and she waved her hand like she was hailing a cab in a snowstorm.

“The cactus?”

“NO!”

She burst into a tirade in Armenian, and I felt lucky to be unable to understand her. The commotion drew Grandma into the living room from the kitchen. Mother and daughter then had a short conversation.

“She wants you to look at the wagon on the TV show,” Grandma Ruth explained.

“Ok, I see it.”

They talked again, a little more extensively this time.

“She wants you to know that when she first came to the United States, on her journey out of the old country, she traveled in a wagon like that.”

“Oh.” I looked at the wagon and then at her dark, oval face. She was nodding and pointing. She spoke again to Grandma.

“She wants you to know that she was there in a time before cars, and that you will live in a time after cars. She says that . . .”

Grandma Ruth stopped short.

“Ok, but can I change the channel? I don’t like westerns so very much.”

Grandma Ruth looked at me for a long time and let out a small sigh. Then she spoke to her mother at length during which Big Grandma nodded. When she was done speaking, Big Grandma touched my face with her hand and murmured something in Armenian that her daughter either didn’t hear or chose not to translate.

That untold story goes something like this: Gabriel was well-respected by Armenians, Assyrians and his Turkish neighbors as well. In 1895 while he was in the United States, one of his Turkish neighbors approached Hannah and suggested that she and her daughter stay at their house . She agreed to do so. He had prepared a room for them in the attic and he suggested they just stay there for a few days. After a day of it though, Ruth got restless and demanded to go outside to play.

Hannah took Ruth outside to play. In a short while though there was a very loud whistle, and Hannah grabbed her daughter, ran back to the house, ran upstairs to the attic, closed the door and drew the curtain to the window. There was much commotion outside though so she opened the curtains and peeked out at the neighborhood.

The Turkish Army was ransacking the Armenian houses, setting them on fire and taking the residents away and sometimes killing them on the spot. Hannah looked for her sister’s house and saw it was burning, and passed out. Later, the Turkish neighbor’s wife came and revived her.

Hannah had, months before, received a letter from Gabriel saying to sell everything and come to the United States; he also said he was not coming back to Turkey. She contacted an American missionary and they soon made a “you help us, we’ll help you” arrangement. Hannah was to pose as a mother of 15 children who had lost their parents in the attack of Kharpert. The missionary gave Hannah a horse and wagon and supplies. If she would take the children from Kharpert to Istanbul and drop them off at the orphanage there, she would be in a port town and could board a ship wherever she needed to go. She accepted the deal.

The journey took several months and covered a distance of 750 miles. I learned this from Grandma Ruth’s journal entry that my wife found when we were getting ready to paint the living room just a few years ago. She only wrote a page and a half, and it was the page that Grace happened to open. All my life up to that point I believed that they were lucky enough to leave before the 1915 genocide, and even when I learned of the 1895 “smaller” genocide, I assumed that Kharpert was not one of the cities that was attacked at that time. But they were. The proud city of 30,000 Armenians no longer exists and there has been no hint of Armenians. There presence has been wiped away, as if the Armenians were never there.

 It has been said that in at least one of the protestant churches there the people gathered at their church one last time as the Turks were arriving and sang the hymn “God Be With You till We Meet Again,” to prepare meet their fate. There is no record of how Hannah, her daughter Ruth, and the 15 orphans devised a route that managed to avoid the Turkish Army which was pillaging Armenian towns without restraint.

The only other story Grandma Ruth wrote down was that one of orphans, a boy her own age, was severely traumatized because when the Turks came into his house they asked where his father was and the boy pointed at the fireplace. His father, a prominent doctor in Kharpert, was hiding in the chimney. The Turks pointed their pistols up the chimney and fired until his body fell out. They left the boy there with his dead father.

From Istanbul Hannah and her daughter eventually boarded a ship to France and from France they came to the United States.

I didn’t know any of that in 1961. I only knew that Big Grandma got excited one day over a horse and wagon and wanted me to know that she rode in one once. I just wanted to get Grandma Ruth the let me watch cartoons.

“So can I? Can I watch cartoons?”

Grandma looked at me without speaking for a long time.

“You mean may I?”

“May I, please?”

She was silent again.

“No. Password is coming on at two.”

Grandma Ruth went back to the kitchen, Big Grandma went to her rocking chair, and I continued watching the western, but something was different from the moment before and it was over 50 years before I fully understood. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZHrtHdbdOE

The 20 Minute Moment

Of the two times being called to the counselor’s office, the first was quite nerve racking. I made it to Mr. Raine’s office only to be escorted to Mr. Lloyd’s office. Mr. Lloyd was the vice-principal, and it was said that if you went there you were, “dead meat.” Mr. Raine did not simply drop me off; he entered the office with me. He and Mr. Lloyd both crossed their arms across their chests.
“Jack, these two gentlemen have some questions to ask you.” The two gentlemen were police officers, both standing at what seemed to me at the time at about 7 feet tall. The room felt very crowded and I was filled with the urge to bolt but Mr. Raine seemed to sense my thoughts moved from my side to just behind me where he blocked the door.
“Jack,” the one standing closest to Mr. Lloyd began, “you play football, right?”
“Yeah,” I replied, although I was willing to deny it to stay out of trouble.
“Would you mind telling me your jersey number?”
“My jersey number? Fifty-two. Just like my….”
“Ok. Can we see the bottom of your shoe, please?”
“Uh, yeah.” I lifted my left foot and held it in my hands. Both officers looked carefully at it and then looked at each other. I felt like a horse getting ready to shoe myself. I looked at it, trying to see what they saw, but there was nothing but the sole of a Chuck Taylor All-Star, the same as at least half the male student population at Burroughs.
“Too big,” one of them muttered.
“Yeah,” the other one returned.
“What is it? What’s going on?” I asked. But no one spoke, and for a moment no one even moved. Then Mr. Lloyd reached under his desk and took out a football, and a football jersey, number 52.
“This your stuff, Jack?” Mr. Lloyd asked, like he was about to lower the boom.
“No.” My heart was beating loudly in my ears as I tried to get ahead of where they were going.
“Where were you last Saturday night?” one of the cops asked.
“Last Saturday? I don’t know. Watching TV, I guess.”
“That’s your jersey number there, right?” the other cop asked, putting his hands on his hips.
“Yeah but that’s a Bee Reserve jersey. I don’t play Bee anymore and I never played reserve.”
The three men looked at each other. I couldn’t see Mr. Raine as he was still behind me, barring my escape. The picture was getting clearer to me—something about stealing jerseys, maybe—but I knew I was ok because I had not stolen one and I was pretty sure I was home watching TV on Saturday. But what if they didn’t believe me? What if they made this illogical leap and cuffed me right there? Finally one of the cops spoke.
“Someone broke into the print shop Saturday night, Jack. You know anything about it?”
“No. You think I would know about it because my jersey number was there?” It was risky to point out to adults how stupid they were but it got out of my mouth before I could stop it.
“Someone did quite a lot of damage, broke a window to get in, destroyed school equipment, and they left a jersey and a football behind.”
“Well, it’s not my jersey.”
“They left some footprints behind. Chuck Taylor’s.”
“Well they weren’t my footprints. You said mine were too big, didn’t you?” They lapsed into silence again. Then Mr. Lloyd spoke.
“Ok, Jack thanks for coming in.”
“We didn’t think it was you, we just had to make sure,” one of the cops said. I walked back to class feeling smarter than two cops and a vice principal.
My second visit to Mr.Raine’s office, over a year later, was less stressful but much more momentous than I realized at the time. When I walked into his office he was on the phone but he gestured for me to sit down. While he finished his conversation with what sounded like a disgruntled parent, I wondered if we were about to take a walk to the vice principal again, for old time’s sake. I was in my last 9 weeks of school and I pretty much didn’t care what he had to say. He hung up, made a note to himself and then looked at me.
“So, Jack, what are you doing next year?”
“Next year?”
“Yes, next year. You won’t be here at Burroughs, you know. What will you do? What are your plans?”
“Wow. Never thought about it, really. I don’t know.” I shrugged.
“Don’t you think it’s about time you do?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Haven’t your parents talked to you about it?”
“Yeah.” But truth of the matter was they hadn’t. He was looking at what must have been my cumulative file; then he opened a desk drawer, took out a form and handed to me.
“Here, fill this out.” He turned it so it face me.
“Ok.” I retrieved a Bic from my front pocket and found Name, Address, Phone Number at the top of the paper.
“Aren’t you gonna ask what it is?”
“What?”
“I said aren’t you gonna ask what it is. You didn’t even look to see.”
“Oh, yeah.”
“For all you know I could have signed you up for the Marines. There’s still a war going on you know. You could end up hip deep in rice paddies.”
“Is that what this is?” I put the pen down.
“No.”
“Oh.”
He was waiting for me to figure out what it was.
“You shouldn’t put your name on anything unless you know what it is.”
“Los Angeles Valley Junior College?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m going there?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Uh…” I resumed filling it out. I figured I had nothing to lose, but I had no idea what I would gain. When I was done I looked up and Mr. Raine sighed.
“Here, let me have that. I’ll send it off for you. You should expect something in the mail.”
“Ok.”
“Go ahead and go back to class.”
“Ok, thanks.”
All together I spent not more than an hour with Mr. Raine, but those last 20 minutes changed my life for the better in a multitude of ways. By the time I completed by college journey I became a teacher, got married, had three lovely children, and all the rest of best things in life, all kicked off by filling out that form in Mr. Raine’s office. I am and will be forever grateful.

Four Truths and Lunch

A few days ago I had lunch with Tedd, Ed, Ken and Harry. It’s like this: Tedd, Ed and I have been meeting for 30 years. We all know Ken, and Ken is a friend of Harry, who is a man I know because he taught at Roosevelt a long time ago. It was an interesting mix.
“I have a question,” Harry said when we were done eating.
“Here we go with questions,” I murmured to Tedd.
“Yeah,” Tedd replied.
I wasn’t sure if he got my reference to our regular lunch group just two weeks earlier when we—after 30 years of monthly gatherings—decided to add some substance to our being together. We decided to let each member ask one question for discussion. Ed got to be first and the question had something to with Isis and why they have such sociopathic behavior. That resulted in an interesting conversation, but at this point in human history geopolitics are getting very heavy, if not kind of scary, and almost too much to bear, let alone have it for a lunchtime topic. And now here we were just a few weeks later, and Harry, who isn’t in that group, had a question for us. I was full of walnut shrimp, sweet and sour pork, lemon chicken and broccoli beef, which Ed had picked for us; I didn’t feel like thinking. Then Harry asked the question.
“What is truth?”
That’s the question that always makes me start singing the song by the same title. “And the lonely voice of youth cries, what is Truth?” I think it was by Johnny Cash. I didn’t feel inspired to start singing though. I just had my 61st birthday so I was no longer a youth, and I wasn’t lonely, and I don’t think I was lonely back then, but I was susceptible to suggestion so I might have said or believed I was lonely at some point or another. And the thing is, while I still have a brain-imbedded ap that matches topics with lyrics, perhaps it was time to stop doing that, lest people started looking at me like some strange old fool muttering things. I generally thought that breaking out in song with insightful lyrics was clever and entertaining; what if it was neither?
“Apples and oranges, absolutely,” Tedd was saying.
I had missed out on the purpose of Harry’s question, and now I had to catch up. Harry’s point was that there was objective and subjective truth and there was also absolute truth and relative truth, and you couldn’t pair off let’s say objective and relative truth; that was the apple and orange part. I found this to be interesting because I might have crossed an apple and an orange talking about truth at some point, and in fact the more I thought about it I eventually came to recall that as a high school kid I was inclined to claim that my subjective truth happened to be an objective truth which, I suppose, is a claim that can’t exist in the logical world. I might have even claimed that subjective and objective were on a circular continuum, not a linear one, or was that what I used to say about politics Left and Right, that they curved around and touched if you followed one far enough. I can’t remember anymore.  But I was pretty sure I was on to something at the time. It was most likely a case of I was so much older then….
“I guess so,” Ken said about apples and oranges.
At least back then I was using subjective and objective in the matching set, two apples or two oranges, but I probably ended up saying or thinking that God was an absolute truth. But still God being relative doesn’t sound right, either. The thing is though I don’t want to bother anybody about God, so where does that fit in? If God is love than I am obliged to be a loving person, and loving means kind, helpful and well, yeah, kind and helpful is a good place to start. Forgiving. A person looking for the good and calling it out whenever it can be seen. It didn’t matter which of the four truths God was, just what I decided to do about God. The others were talking but my self-chatter was drowning them out.
“That’s true,” Ed said, massaging his forehead.
I had missed another point. Ed sounds like the Armenian Jimmy Stewart. Why do I keep drifting off? Old age, it can’t be avoided and won’t be denied. Maybe I’m bored. No, you were intrigued by four ways to look truth. I just went off on my own, traveling somewhere inside my head. Doesn’t mean I’m old. Yeah, you are. You know, you tripped and fell the other day, or do you even remember? Yeah, I remember. It was some firewood. A log. So, why didn’t you see the log, and did you notice how you fell? Like in slow motion, and I was saying to myself, “No. I don’t allow this. What the hell, I’m still falling!” Right, and how is that different from when you were young? I’d probably say, “Oh shit, I’m falling.” See the difference there? When you’re young it’s embarrassing; when you’re old, it’s scary.  But wait I know what they’re talking about. I can jump into this conversation right now if I wanted.
“You can’t argue someone into believing in God,” I said.
“Exactly,” Harry exclaimed.
There, I’m still in on this. Think so? Maybe you are. Don’t look now but you just noticed something about Harry. Yeah, that I haven’t seen him in 15 years but he hasn’t aged, not a bit. And he is still enthused with stuff he wonders about.
“Apologetics,” Tedd, the man who married Grace and I 34 years ago, said scornfully.
What would I say to my 21-year-old self? It was a question I heard on one of those story podcasts Grace played for me the other day. Um, Stop wishing you had played college football. You probably would have bruised your brain. Is that all? You’re not writing enough. You were telling Grace you were gonna be a writer and you hadn’t even written anything, except letters to Grace, and your tangents in those letters aren’t that interesting; she was just being nice. Then Harry’s voice broke through.
“That’s my point! That’s exactly my point! It’s all in my book, but I haven’t finished it yet,” Harry said, looking like a boy approaching the gates of Disneyland for the first time.
“I used say to my kids all the time….” I started.
“What’s that?” Harry said.
“Your testimony about God is how you treat others.”
“Yes, that’s very true,” Ken said, patting the table with both hands as if I had just called gin.
There was truth again, but something couldn’t be very true, right? It was either true or not. Or what kind of truth was that? It was just his opinion. Why do we say true when we mean I agree with you? I used to feel I needed to answer all these things. Now it’s just, no, it’s not just relative, and neither is it something I can verify. Truth should be measured by our actions or response to it, and the merit of what you chose.
“That’s right,” Ed said. I have been convinced for long time that if Ed, with his voice, the down home voice of everyman, ran for office anywhere in the Midwest he would win and no one would believe he was born and raised in California.
“And it’s how you live your life,” I said, “I mean people will figure out you go to church and what denomination it is. But how you treat others and how you live your life, that’s the real deal. That’s what I told them.”

Was it all of them, or just Greg? I talked about it a lot though. Or was I just ruminating most of the time?
“It’s in the 2nd chapter of James,” Tedd said, “ ‘I will show you my faith by my works’ and ‘faith without works is dead.’”
“Yep,” I said. I did not say that James was my favorite book in the Bible. I had said it for most of my life and I was tired of saying it. It should be everyone’s favorite book in the Bible. That may not be any of those four kinds of truth, but it seems like more than just my opinion.
Tedd left first. He was meeting someone else and didn’t have much time to get across town. I was sad that our get together was about to bust up. I wanted to keep hanging out. Ken was the only one of us not retired. He was the next to leave. He came late and had to go back to work. I was hoping the others would stay longer.

I didn’t want my day to end up stuck in the middle of nowhere. I was thinking that it was weird that usually if one person says he has to leave, everyone else leaves anyway. But it was different for this gathering. I talked to Ed and Harry for a while until I realized I was the one who was going to be next to leave. When I got up and said thanks I gotta go, they left as well.
I was tired, and it was almost 2 in the afternoon. There was nothing ahead and the MSG was making my heart quiver. I was the youngster in the bunch at 61, but just a few days earlier I had told my son that 61 was a pretty big number. Knee pain, shoulder pain, heart issues and catching cancer early, and I just keep slogging along. The not so good stuff gets heavy sometimes, but other times it teaches you to appreciate life moment by moment.
I tried to think of what else I might have told my 21-year-old self. Maybe “Some people would rather be right than happy.” Ideology seemed to be driving everybody to one side of an issue or another and driving people crazy and creating an environment where no one is listening to anyone else. I was glad everyone at lunch would rather be happy. Harry had a notion and we batted it around. Then we left it there. At 21 it would have been different. It would be Saturday night, and we would be drinking beer. Somebody would have to be right before we ran out of beer.
I started the car and picked AM radio, then FM, then disc 6 of the CD player, and the Harmonizing Four started to sing, “Say a word for me tonight when you bow.” Maybe someone would; maybe someone has. But being 61 was ok. I had heard about four truths and had lunch. Harry was 70 and writing a book. Now I had nothing to do. I decided to buy some gas before the price went up again.

At the station there was a guy in a black Ford pickup truck at the pump across from me. We acknowledged each other. He had boots, blue jeans, and a polo shirt. He was a my age or maybe a little older. I was figuring that he was still wearing a wristwatch, and these days everyone checks the time on their cell phones. He either didn’t know or didn’t care. I turned my attention to the task of pushing all the right buttons, but I noticed that something on his face was changing. He was gathering himself to speak.

“How you doing today?”

“Fine.”

“That’s good. I was wondering if I could ask you a question.”

I was going to say depends on the question, but I wanted to get to the question sooner than later.

“Sure.”

“Do you know if you’re going to heaven?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going?”

“Yes, I am.”

This seemed to throw him.

“How do you believe that will happen?”

“When I die my spirit will separate from body and my spirit will go to heaven.”

He appeared puzzled. I was thinking maybe my answers weren’t on the flow chart.

“Do believe that Jesus is God?”

“I do.”

“And that His death on the cross was for remission of sin?”

“It was.”

I wasn’t annoyed with him. Ok, maybe I was a little. I wanted to tell him that I had just come from lunch with friends and we concluded that loving the people around us was better than approaching strangers, but I didn’t want to get entangled in his paradigm of what responding to God was supposed to look like. And even deciding whether he was a was blessing or a pest wasn’t for me to figure out.

“Well, God bless you then, and have a nice day.”

He turned to get into his truck.

“Thanks, you too,” I said, and he waved as he drove off.

I got in the car wondering if there was something about me that appeared to need saving. I was just an old man in rumbled clothes in need of a shave, who hadn’t slept well the last few nights and was now full of Chinese food, just a few days after my 61st birthday. Maybe I’d just go home and do laundry or shave  or take a nap. Or maybe I would just have a tangerine and read something.

Tuesday’s Child

On the day after four Puerto Rican Nationalists, led by a woman, opened fire on the House of Representatives, Mom was watching “Queen for a Day.” The show was a pity contest; the woman who had the saddest, most desperate story would win things that would help make her life less tragic, like a washing machine for instance. It turned out that my mother—in–law was on the show—probably not the same show the day I was born, but you never know—and she is convinced that she lost because she did not cry, as opposed to the eventual winner who did. The show was so awful that the host, squint-face Jack Bailey, couldn’t do it without being sufficiently hammered. He muttered and slurred his way through the show, feigning interest and compassion. Not to take anything away from Mom’s political acumen or to call her TV choice into question; she was probably just tired, or maybe she felt a stronger alliance with American women struggling to stay afloat anyway they could. Mom had a considerable capacity for empathy. A lot of cool things were happening in 1954: A doo wop group, The Chords, had a hit called “Sh-boom”; in Germany, the first microbus VW rolled off the line; and in Burbank, at Saint Joseph’s Hospital, I made my debut on the stage of life via c-section. The story goes that in the middle of the Queen for a Day, Mom’s water broke, and she sent my sister–four at the time– next door to fetch Sue Darling, who came over and must have watched Shamera while Mom called Dad. That very morning Dad had been assured by the doctor that their baby would not arrive for at least three more weeks; he was so mad about my early arrival that he almost did not come to pick up Mom. It was tax season and the deadline in those days was March 15. One way or another Mom got to the hospital. It was a pleasant day—58, high clouds, mild breeze. Mom had picked out a name, June. She wanted a girl and when she awoke and was told she had a boy she said, “A boy? Take it back! I wanted a girl!” I never took this personally; after all they do say ether has funny side effects. When her head cleared, she knew what a great kid I was and would be. I wasn’t supposed to be born. Mom had just turned 40 when she got pregnant and already had two kids. The doctor told both Mom and Dad, no more kids. But things happen. I heard the phrase surprise regarding my entering the world many times at a relatively young age. Surprises were a good thing though and so I assumed I was extra special, not merely unexpected. One cool fall Burbank day in it was suggested by close relatives that Mom should have an abortion. An appointment was made by one of them and that relative arrived at our house to take Mom. Now, Dad was always respectful to relatives, but the audacity so enraged him—and he was a volatile man—that he told this person to get the hell out of the house. So it turned out that I did not meet that person until I was 3 months old, when things had blown over and my cuteness had won the day. So it was that I came into the world, named Jack Francis by Dad, Jack being a variation of Jacob, his father, and Francis the male spelling of Mom’s name. The name was much later a source of some problems. Jack, when coupled with a certain adverb, resulted in a certain obscenity, and as for the middle name, no matter how many times I explained the gender-spelling rule for Francis, I was told I had a girl’s name. When I complained to Mom about the Francis dilemma she told me about Sir Francis Drake who commanded the British Navy in the 16th Century, and I discovered Francis Scott Key on my own one Saturday morning while thumbing through the World Book Encyclopedia. Alas though my peers were more familiar with Francis, The Talking Mule, the movie series from the 1950’s, than they were of any real Francis, historically notable or not. My sister’s favorite baby Jack story is that I broke the bars to my playpen in order to escape the confines. Mom’s favorite is that I crawled to the end of a bleacher while we were attending my brother’s baseball game in the summer of ‘55 and fell off but landed safely on my diaper, a little stunned but ok. I remember my crib and the map of the United States on the wall adjacent to it that I thought was a picture of an animal– Texas being the hind legs and Florida the front legs. Dad played airplane with the spoon so I would finish all my oatmeal. My brother told me that lizards grew into alligators. It was a wonderful, crazy, glorious, tragic, beautiful, amazing world, with beautiful mountain ranges on the horizon, which hugged us all like God’s arms, there were breezes from the south on your face, games to play, jokes to make, watermelon to eat, backyard barbecues to host, bicycle calamities, tears to shed, apricots to pick, friends to make and lose, songs to learn by heart– all of which added up to great stories to hear and to tell. I was Tuesday’s Child, full of grace, and I hadn’t even met her yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBgQezOF8kY