paulmuses

What a discovery!

They’re all there, in one blast from the past. I threw everything away, as did my mother, so I have nothing left from my high school years, not even my red-and-black-sleeved letter jacket with the large white A.

Fortunately, my old high school didn’t. It had the good sense to put its Yearbooks online. So I’m writing this morning with ALL my teachers looking at me, surely from the teacher’s lounge in the great beyond, as this photo was taken in 1965. I’ll be joining you someday. Save a donut.

I went to a Catholic high school that separated the boys from the girls, except for the 17-minute lunch period. The boys were in wings A and B, and the girls in C and D. You can see the boys’ faculty in the picture.

Here are four vignettes from my sophomore year. The names are real, as are my memories. Can you put a name to a face?

Sister Laurent taught Algebra. Strangely, she liked me. I never knew what to do with a teacher who showed me favor. She returned tests with the lined papers folded vertically, with the grade inside and circled in red. B- repeated ad nauseam, a phrase I didn’t learn in Latin, open only to the highest achievers. She occasionally admonished the boys, who had just returned from gym class, to keep their knees firmly touching.

Mr. Loras Schiltz taught Spanish and American History. In first-year Spanish, he accused me of cheating on a quiz. I hadn’t, and that night I called him at home and explained. That was the only time I ever phoned a teacher. I don’t recall the conversation, but he let me retake the test.

I also took History from him, with a book the size of a Bible. Schiltz, an assistant football coach, patrolled the six aisles of thirty boys with military vigilance. Joe Graham’s head was resting against a wall when Mr. Schiltz whacked Joe’s left ear with the text. I knew what would happen next, as I had gone to grade school with Joe.

His false right eye popped out onto the desk, after which he gathered it up and popped it back in.

I always felt sorry for Mr. Robert Grenier, who taught English and was my homeroom teacher. Empathy does not come easily for a 16-year-old. He seemed too sensitive to be in charge of hormone-charged teenagers. His biggest weakness was that he didn’t seem to like us.

Looking back from my own fifty-year teaching career, I may have learned this lesson through osmosis, years before I could imagine myself in the front of the classroom. My final image of Mr. Grenier was on the last day of school, when he stood helpless as his class of gangsters charged out of the classroom, overturning desks at the sound of the final bell. He didn’t return the next year.

Oh, Mr. Raymond Ambrose, I’m sorry, you were a good man, but your Civics class was so dull. Duller even than typing, where I pounded out 22 words an hour on the first day and 21 words an hour on the last day, for a well-deserved D-, the same grade you offered me. It was a gift, I know, so I didn’t have to retake the class. You could have punished me for those 0’s on the dreadful Friday quizzes, but you didn’t.

Perhaps you saw, beneath the pimply surface, an inkling of the future college teacher of Politics, who would learn from his biography to see beyond the immature moments of the young men and women sitting before him.

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Let me tell you a little story about a man, well, you know it’s me, don’t you?

It was his fourth day in the central Florida motel breakfast room. By this point, he had established a routine and thus felt safe, comfortable, and secure. The space, just off the lobby, opened at 6 am, and he was usually the first in line for coffee.

Before he got his cup of Dark Roast, he had staked a claim on his favorite table, with an open computer and notebook.

From this perch, he could observe other creatures making waffles, one of his favorite breakfast foods, and he thought, if he can do it, so can I.

So he did. Malted vanilla was his choice. Two minutes and 30 seconds later, he settled into his seat. Even the sealed butter and syrup lids with the perforated corners came loose with surprising ease, pinched by his 76-year-old thumb and index finger. And today, another preference, link sausage. He readied the knife and fork, as waffles cool down quickly. Everything in his little world was perfect.

Until they showed up. He was bent over, shuffling with a walker. She, also stooped, was scouting out tables close to the waffle machine. An even older-looking couple had alighted on the only other open table.

The woman kept scanning the room, and her husband lingered next to the griddles.

What should the man do? He thought, Why me, Lord? Am I my brother’s keeper? Out, out damned spot. It’s her vulture eye. And, damn!

Finally, the man gathered his breakfast, computer, and notebook, and moved to a counter chair and made contact with the woman whose actual eye was more dove than vulture.

The man’s first bite of waffle was cold, which served him well.

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Everything feels brown, unless you look closely.

But today, I prefer the long view. So I can see clearly, through the debris of my imagination.

Sometimes, I look backward.

I know what you’re thinking. The past is dead. Yet, it really isn’t.

Yesterday, I enjoyed a chicken and avocado sandwich again, the other half, a day later. Yes, it was a bit dry. Even so, I thought, I like sandwiches of all sorts.

At 76.

For years, I denied this trivial truth, repeating a thoughtless mantra about my mother’s cold lunches every day through high school. Does this work for you? Blaming a parent who can no longer defend herself.

Recognizing this is the danger of an early spring walk in the park. One naturally continues to interrogate. Inevitably, before the wire under the fingernail, you become a blabbering turncoat.

And, of course, it doesn’t stop with sandwiches.

It was a cold, blustery March day in northeast Iowa for No Kings 3. I had returned in time from my 7th Bob Dylan concert with my son, Ben. What keeps us coming back to Bob are the words. Always, the words. What keeps us marching are the lies, always the lies.

Ben discovered Dylan at 14 and reintroduced him to me. Twenty-three years later, we’re aging together, the three of us. I wish I could show you a photo of him on stage in his white hood, but they lock our phones in a soft bag, unlatched as we leave. The main purpose of this phone-free atmosphere is to experience the songs in the moment.

So as to relive later.

Number three on Friday night’s setlist was All Along the Watchtower. Like many of Dylan’s lyrics, it was made famous by another artist. In this case, Jimi Hendrix.

Someone once said the Dylan version is best in the morning, and the Hendrix cover around midnight. The links let you decide, very democratic, like a protest.

As I marched down Decorah’s Water Street in the 3rd iteration of resistance to the lawlessness, corruption, and incompetence of the Trump gang, I thought of these words from the Watchtower that my son repeated on the way home.

There are many among us who feel that life is but a joke

But you and I, we’ve been through that and this is not our fate.

So let us not talk falsely now.

The hour is getting late.

And when I took the photo, the sky reminded me of another poet-songwriter, Leonard Cohen, and of these words from Anthem.

Ring the bells that can ring.

Forget your perfect offering.

There is a crack in everything.

That’s how the light gets in.

Finally, I will leave you with the words from another lyricist popular in this Lutheran community.

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I don’t close cupboard doors, vacuum my car floors, sit in a kayak with oars, or speak the language of the Azores.

I did, however, enjoy listening to Brazilian colleague Pedro speak Portuguese.

Just as I love watching and listening to murder mysteries in Spanish, Italian, Finnish, French, Norwegian, Russian, Polish, Italian, Romanian, Icelandic, Arabic, Czech, Slovak, Hebrew, and Navajo with English subtitles. Never, under any circumstance, dubbed in English.

My favorite early-teen pop song, which I first heard in 1963 on my tiny orange transistor radio, was “Sukiyaki” by the Japanese singer Kyu Sakamoto.

So too, I’ve seen the complete listings of Akira Kurosawa’s Japanese and Ingmar Bergman’s Swedish films.

Sadly, I know, at 76, I’ll die monolingual in a multilingual country and world.

And I hope you won’t.

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My mother let the cup of coffee cool in front of her. She had forgotten how much she loved this drink that she first tasted on the knees of her father.

This was one of a hundred sad images from her two years in a memory care facility at 95.

My father, who loved and appreciated well-prepared food like no other member of our family, lost his taste buds to radiation treatment for sinus cancer.

For Pat, my youngest brother, who died of liver cancer last fall, the worst symptom, by far, of the six tumors and the chemo, was the unfathomable deprivation of energy.

My remaining brother, Peter, on the day of his death in January, told his caregiver he was going to see his wife, Pamela, who had died five months earlier.

Subtraction, from the 4th grade onward, was always more complicated than addition.

Today, it’s natural.

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Grey-haired, stooped Mrs. Thompson always wore a dark sweater when she gardened in the summer. I wouldn’t have noticed except she occasionally retrieved a “foul” wiffle ball from her garden’s crocuses and peonies, with never a scold.

Her backyard bordered the driveway we shared with our neighbors, the Bartoski’s, with their garage serving as the backstop and our garage the pitching mound. An ancient, bowed wire-link fence served as the left-field foul line.

Like many major league baseball players in the fifties and sixties, I had an off-season job as a newspaper carrier for The Daily Times. Mrs. Thompson was one of my 44 customers, which meant on every Thursday evening, I would collect a weekly sum.

As a proper business boy, I carried a small three-ring notebook with a page for each client, containing perforated stamp-sized receipts. For change, I attached a coin changer to my belt.

Collecting gave this impressionable 12-year-old access to the early evening lives of adults other than my parents. Most invited me into their living rooms, including Mrs. Thompson. As far as I knew, she lived alone. My mother told me her husband had died years earlier.

I remember her front room was always warm and dark, with the shades down on each window. Once, it must have been late summer, early evening, she took me through the house to her kitchen in the back, with side and back windows that looked over the garden that bordered our play area.

I don’t remember what she said or what kind of cookie she offered. But I do recall the openings with rolled-up blinds that overlooked her backyard and our ballpark.

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The only square inch of territory Emmy Lou didn’t snuffle was next to the red-topped fire hydrant. She snifaris to the spots less traveled.

As to Benji, when we visit during the winter, and his paws get cold, I’ll pick him up. Sort of a Footprints in the Sand deal, except he’s Jewish.

Rebecca’s son, Jonathon, and family live with Emmy Lou in St. Louis. A daughter, Emily, plus clan are in Marblehead, Massachusetts, along with cats Wilbur and Orville. They adopted Benji after husband Aviv’s mother died last year.

The household of Rebecca’s oldest, Libby, in Washington, DC, lost Flash, an ancient Beagle, last year, who, unBeagle-like, allowed me to lead.

Another venerable hound, Sam, helped raise my two brothers and me. We discovered him in a turkey box under the Christmas tree in 1955.

One Saturday morning in 1971, our dad took Sam away.

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Last night, Rebecca’s son-in-law, Jonathan, came into the house with a photo he had just taken of a beautiful sunset. I set aside Why Bob Dylan Matters by Richard Thomas and hurried outside to capture my version. Something about twilight broke the spell of my nestling in.

Picture 11,687 lay fallow overnight until early this morning, when I read this terrific story by Maria Rattray about growing old that included the idiom ‘at the end of the day.’

Half-light, aging, day’s ending, I know what you’re thinking. And you are right. I’m 76. Sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar. But that’s not the end of the story.

I stole everything for this essay except for itself.

Even the last line, which I purloined from Mr. Dylan, that concludes the aforementioned book.

Try to create something original, you’re in for a surprise.

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My mother let the cup of coffee cool in front of her. She had forgotten how much she loved this drink that she first tasted on the knees of her father.

This was one of a hundred sad images from her two years in a memory care facility at 95.

My father, who loved and appreciated well-prepared food like no other member of our family, lost his taste buds to radiation treatment for sinus cancer.

For Pat, my youngest brother, who died of liver cancer last fall, the worst symptom, by far, of the six tumors and the chemo, was the unfathomable deprivation of energy.

My remaining brother, Peter, on the day of his death in January, told his caregiver he was going to see his wife, Pamela, who had died five months earlier.

Subtraction, from the 4th grade onward, was always more complicated than addition.

Today, it’s natural.

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