losing everything would have been a disaster (fire, the author’s deep fear, can engulf a building in five minutes – thirteen, we counted) and then once outside, realizing smoke in a neighboring apartment was turning to flames within the building no explanation why the threat of losing my worldly goods didn’t upset me as much as the basic ineptitude that causes delays like that to happen goodbye, manuscripts, notebooks, early drafts, letters, addresses . a writer’s constant fear against the slow art itself, you know, civilly
Tag: Friendships
Holy granola, honey
the summer I thought we’d vacation out West we instead moved there to a new workplace just as I’ve dreamed the parking brake won’t hold the car in place some things don’t change that much and once again, there goes our hard-earned cushion, this time, six steps later, it’s New England and a more faithful spouse, all the same, just as we paid off the barn-repair loan, I was mistaken to think I saw the end coming
Also worthy of note
School teachers in the classroom aren’t the only instructors I’ve had in life. Some have definitely been mentors, others more guides, even in passing, and then there were crucial colleagues.
Here’s a sampling:
- Scoutmaster Bob: He loved nature with a childlike awe while insisting on the Old Way when it came to camping and hiking. The lessons made me far more independent in the coming years.
- Joel: An ambitious youth pastor who made room for a lost adolescent. I learned a lot about politics from him.
- Gene and Doris: A girlfriend’s parents who raised my vision beyond my side of town and its status in life.
- Marcy: Ace photojournalist who heightened my appreciation of masterful image and its graphic arts presentation. Her photos had a distinct style. And eventually she won a Pulitzer.
- Kurt: Two Buckeyes discovering the wonders of the Cascades at the same time. He had his own way with a camera, too, as well as an editor.
- Howard and Myrtle: Opened the Bible to me in a personal way.
- Bill and Fran: They helped me bridge my intellectual world with the Wilburite Quaker tradition.
- Bob and Ruby: The central Mennonites in my theological and choral music expansion in my Baltimore years.
- Jack and Sarah: Originals in more ways than one, in their leap from tenured university positions to Old Order dairy farmers. Her gentle touch as an elder touch was a blessing in a difficult personal time.
- Paul: The other Quaker in my mostly Mennonite circle and a fine musician, to boot. We were two bachelors trying to navigate a social scene safely.
Ask me when it begins snowing
what did I know beforehand?) unpacking, making each room orderly, scrubbing and waxing floors, vacuuming, reorganizing files, going to the laundry with all my woven possessions, running errands, and without warning things fall into place
Finally, finito
cleansing is more than mere output or holy observance to be done would require not noticing dampness along the wall disclosing leakage what can I then breach anew or newly demolish in the storm churning up from some underside of an altar or anvil? air thickens and clears as a matter of practice with desiccated houseflies or wasps or shards of chimney brick in the attic
Happening, Mel
yes, you know what they say of bread and roses (well, that gilt-edged smoked gouda’s still in the refrigerator, a rare indulgence from last week’s after-inquest) and legitimate French bread (the stuff in this town only is regular dough inside; what a delight to know immediately with the first knife stroke that THIS was the genuine crusty article) (dinner tonight onion soup with gobs of cheese toasted under the broiler, leafy salad, and baguette slices heaped with Vermont butter. if she’d only been with me) Parbleu, this is weird!
Returning to high school and its misery
I thought I’d left all this behind me.
After high school commencement, most of my buddies headed off to campuses elsewhere, while I was stuck living at home and attending a local commuter school while working part-time. I didn’t even have a car of my own, unlike the assumption of so many kids these days. Well, after I graduated there was a hot round of romance with someone a year behind me, but then she, too, headed off before I finally made my own escape. I’ve always missed her, though my biggest regret was in not responding to her desire for me earlier. Yes, too late, as it turns out. Always turns out?
Eventually, my zig-zag career across the continent put all of that far behind me. So I thought.
Even so, I did ponder attending the 50th anniversary reunion, maybe just to brag, but complications came up. It would have involved a long drive or costly flight, and then a bunch of embarrassing pictures with old people who were nothing like me. As well as a high probability of a fatal heart attack, as I learned later. End of the book, right?
Except that in the past year I heard from someone I’d emailed a dozen or more years ago but never heard back. Maybe a good thing, considering how gushy it likely was.
And now? It’s opened an emotional can of worms, as well as some conversations we should have had then but didn’t. Or should I say couldn’t? We were so uptight. Period.
Ours was a largely middle- and working-class, all-white, high school, and in retrospect I’ve realized how whitewashed our indoctrination was. In my innocence or ignorance, I had no sense of how many pregnancies happened, even in our college-prep circles, just for starters. Not that I had any clue how to interact with a girl or any life in the other levels of our classmates, even in our homeroom, which was never exactly homey.
The new communications have sent me back to the yearbooks, where I see half of our classmates already probably never had a chance. Let’s be honest, breeding starts to show, or maybe the dull look in front of the camera, in contrast to the good-lookin’ ones, who also have all kinds of activities behind their names. I suspect I was walking a fine line between the two camps, not really belonging to either. As for the in-crowd, we never would have gone into the secrets of their home lives, although all of that becomes more suspect today.
Naturally, you know who I avoided or maybe never, ever, really saw or considered. It was a fine line we never explored. Besides, I was being told I belonged in the big city, far from where I was growing up. Now I see that as another way of saying I didn’t fit in, not fully. Still, I tried. Oh, my, did I.
That seemingly out-of-the-blue phone call and then emails led to Facebook, a platform I usually avoid, though this time with a raft of new contacts. A blast from the past, as we would have said back then.
So this is where they are now? But where are how many others? WTF have we done with our lives? All of that, and more.
The biggest kick in the gut came from an FB public figure page called the Disillusioned Bell-Ette, outrageously funny and caustically humorous. It quickly spun me into a depression.
You have to understand that the Bell-Ettes were our high school’s elite girls, a marching corps perhaps modeled on the Rockettes in Manhattan and sexier in general than our wholesome cheerleaders, not that I would have discounted any of them. For full disclosure, I even took one to the prom.
The anonymous Disillusioned Bell-Ette displays a prodigious talent in montaging images of the corps’ members and our school mascot, a bison – here I had been wondering if it even had a nickname, though she insists it was Bucky, uh-huh. Not so sure on this end, which makes it even funnier. Especially when she has a special, uh, affinity for him. I’m impressed by the sheer labor in putting these together, as if anyone’s actually watching. Or is she venting?
Beyond that, there’s the candor of being disillusioned after being at the top of the social pyramid, the destructively adolescent structure.
More to the point, what about the innuendoes regarding a faculty member’s sexual proclivities?
How provocative!
And I had already been wondering about that. Coincidence?
And I had also already been wondering about one Bell-Ette, two years older than me and the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper as well as a member of our church, who was engaged to be married after she graduated. Was she the disillusioned but very talented host of the site? For now, I’m inclined to say not. But don’t rule it out altogether.
Missing is the wonder of how we ever came to have a buffalo as a mascot in the first place or how our drill marching team came to be widely known as cowgirls. We were in an industrial city so far from the Wild West. How weird!
All of this had me recalling some dreams – literally, visions in the night – where upon awakening I imagined how I would have redone the Hilltopper, the school newspaper, to include everyone. I would have condensed the club stuff to an Eye or Ear on the Hill column, with snarky comments. And then had a focus for each edition: Food, Transportation, Personal Style, Jobs/Working, Free Time, Survival (advice to the underlings and to the future), Favorite Teachers (a sly way of suggesting who to avoid, if you could), Engaging the Arts & Entertainment, Electives, Dating & Relationships, Personal Style, Living with Siblings, Prepping for Summer, Graduation and Moving Up. That sort of thing, inviting entries for the next issue, too, open to all. The focus would have been on the whole possibility of having fun rather than trying to meet the standards imposed from elsewhere, including in the paper’s case, a remote scholastic press association and its judges, who misplaced our entries for a whole year, anyway, thus failing to give us any useful guidance or feedback along the way. So much for my failings as ed-in-chief, not that I would have had any backing in attempting such a revolution.
Oh, well, a few more missed opportunities in my life. And a few more letdowns from those who were supposed to support us.
Vampire
instead of sleeping late as planned, awoke about 8, brewed coffee, stared at the penicillin growing inside my refrigerator, and returned to bed, hoping to figure out what to do the rest of the day eventually showered but went back to the prostrate meditation then launched into one of those days of starting on one pile, jumping to something else, jumping to something else, then realizing I’d done nothing with the first pile or my routines so I finally escaped down along the river to check on ripples and wildlife, at least anything that’s moving besides traffic
Tootsie, Lena
it’s autumn when the nine-volt battery for my clock radio keeps time in a power outage so the alarm will go off when it’s supposed to rather than umpteen hours later died in the tropical heat wave during my absence and the warning light kept driving me nuts so I walked to the corner grocery for a replacement and on the trek home stopped at the farm market and picked up a quart of fresh cider full of Vitamin C (how rational!) overlooking the windy interplay of sunlight and clouds just down the street of shape notes with the earlier version of “Morning Star” lyrics
Father and son, mostly
while strolling crushed-shell pathways and boardwalks in an indigenous archive of Florida, the elder child of the eldest child from Ohio returns to an aviary with its two injured bald eagles and several owls and large hawks before all this hovering, the anticipation, the tentative rediscovery of some way of pleasing each other, the way sons do, step by step, in feathered conversation with an occasional flight, mostly
Jnana's Red Barn 