Old-School Daze

Today, I gained entry into a storage area that was probably last entered by a human late in the previous century. I was on the hunt for a file divider for a drawer in my desk, and as I've aptly acquired the nickname The Moocher from my old buddy Sam over in Campus Stores, I was hoping to get it for free. Don't look at me like that, I'm trying to save you some tax dollars here. So far I've had no luck in getting Sam to sing "Minnie the Moocher" when I walk in, but I think I'm wearing him down. At any rate, he sent me on a snipe hunt in a remote corner of a dilapidated Quonset hut out in the weeds on the north forty of our facility, by the railroad trestle. 

The inside was hot and dusty, like the attic at grandma's house when you're looking for that picture from that time. It was like a graveyard of obsolete office supplies, with cases of typewriter ribbons and white-out stacked on wooden in/out trays, all awaiting the slow advance of entropy in forgotten silence. After a moment's awe at the spectacle, I started digging around, almost having forgotten what I came in for. I didn't find any dividers, though I came across an old warhorse Okidata printer and a million of those little hole-protectors for three-ring-binder paper. But the best part was the pencil sharpener.

It wasn't one of the electric ones that can reduce a Tioga #2 to sawdust in 1.3 seconds, but rather an old-school hand-crank Berol Giant, screwed straight into a bare stud on the open-framed wall. The spindle was rusted tight, and didn't turn anymore, which was disappointing because I wanted to watch the precision gears do their highly-specialized, but somehow feral work. On the plus-side, there were still desiccated shavings in the reservoir, and their faded aroma smelled like the ghost of 5th grade, when I would sharpen my pencil unnecessarily, just to get a hit off the ground-cedar fumes. And maybe to be just a little closer to Mr. Koepke, whom I idolized.

So, literally... Old-School. 

In looking at that sharpener I was reminded of the hilarious antics of Kara Millar, who used to go to the pencil sharpener in Mr. Arena's 7th grade Algebra class and slowly grind an entire, brand-new pencil all the way down to the eraser, just because she hated him. I think we all hated Mr. Arena, but she lacked the gene responsible for an aversion to detention, so she just went right on, no matter what he did. 

Mr. Arena was one of the few teachers I recall really disliking in school. Ms. Binci was another, but I'd have to try pretty hard to remember any others. Maybe if I broke out all of my yearbooks I could come up with another. Conversely, I could start at first grade with Miss Brimie's class at La Mesa Elementary in Monterey, CA and go all the way to Joe Perruccio's history class my Senior year at Long Beach Polytechnic, and rattle off a dozen that I really liked, right off the top of my head. 

Clockwise from top right: Paula Bentz, Carol Felize
Downtown Gary Brown, and Joe Perruccio

I still think of Miss Brimie as my first love; willowy Miss Brimie, unfailingly patient and kind, in whose class I lost my first tooth. She taught us to make bread and candles, so we'd be set for post-apocalyptic times. You'll want me on your team, believe me. We even grew our own lentils and then made soup from them. To this day, lentils are the same as love to me. But let's not talk about the serious paste-eating problem I had to kick after we finished the Thanksgiving Craft Fair.

I'm not sure if she was my favorite teacher of all time or not, though. The competition in the field is tough. Ms. Felice was a firecracker; she taught 8th grade science, and took a wicked delight in flames, goggles, and chemical reactions. In 7th grade, Mrs. Bentz gave me books to expand my mind, like "1984," "Old Man and the Sea," "Red Badge of Courage," and "Great Expectations." She even had me house-sit for her a few times. Ms. Thompson had a TV cued up to watch the launch of The Challenger live, and cried with us when tragedy struck before our eyes. For the love of her, I organized The Great Freshman Walkout of '86, and was suspended for three days as ringleader. The payoff was that I got to ask the Principal of Washington Junior High if I could see his permanent record. Neither he nor my Mom were amused, but I sure was. To this day, I still put that shit on my résumé when applying for jobs.

Jerold King

The list of the truly great ones goes on and on: Downtown Gary Brown had a certain stern, robotic charm that somehow generated affection in us, and made Geometry seem like an education in detective skills. Mr. King's noteworthy acting skills breathed scandalous subtext into the part of Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee Williams' "The Glass Menagerie," making a living thing from the bones of dry words. Joe Perruccio taught me to drive, ended my brief flirtation with witchcraft, and caught a budding school shooter with his bare hands. 

Still, my favorite just might be Mr. Koepke. I guess I could call him Terry today, just as I could call Miss Brimie Pat. I'm officially recognized by both the State of Oregon and the Federal Government as an Adult, so I'm pretty sure it's allowed. But it still seems wrong somehow, you know? No, I think I'll carry on calling him Mr. Koepke the rest of my days. He was the kind of teacher who had found a job that would finance the holy calling on his life to mentor, enrich, and catalyze the life of kids. He was put on Earth to build minds, and propel little humans into a future they couldn't even imagine.

In my mind's eye I remember him being a kind of amalgam of Mr. Kotter and the Dead Poet himself, Robin Williams. He taught with his whole being; often imaginative, sometimes controversial, but always memorable.

Thanks to him, the Scholastic book catalogue and Arrow Book Club News were on par with the Spiegel's toy catalogue at Christmas. He and my Mom worked together to get the author Nancy Robison to come into our 5th grade class and do a reading from her book "The Other Place," which was like having J.K. Rowling do a Harry Potter scene. I was so star-struck.

Halloween, 1981, Mr. Koepke dressed up as the anonymous narrator from Poe's "The Telltale Heart," complete with wig, cloak, and ashen makeup. Then, lights off and blinds down, he read the complete text by guttering candlelight, with all the flair of a Broadway show. What we didn't know was that he had a student hiding over in the corner of the room under a desk who was making an increasingly insistent "bum-bump" sound of a heart, creating a truly haunting rendition of the story. Seriously, Vincent Price had nothing on Terry. Whoops! I mean, Mr. Koepke.

The theatricality and imagination with which he taught was absolutely mesmerizing, but he excelled in other ways as well. He invented a game he called Boomer Bat that allowed even the worst athletes (right here!) to compete, while still remaining super-fun for the rest of the class. If it was up to him, no one was ever left out or made to feel "less than." If Mr. Rogers had a Gothic streak in him, I think he and Mr. Koepke would have gotten on like gangbusters. 

But perhaps most importantly, Mr. Koepke trusted us. Throughout the year we worked our way through Judy Blume books, from "Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing" and "Superfudge" to "Forever." That last one was a sexual coming-of-age story, full of complicated, nuanced emotions, and some risqué elements, which I think my parents would have objected to, had they known. Perhaps even to the ABC Afterschool Special he showed in class about teens and family alcoholism, called "She Drinks a Little." Even at ten years old, I could tell that Mr. Koepke was pushing the boundaries of what might be deemed appropriate, but it also seemed like he was endorsing us as mature and emotionally complex enough to grasp the ideas, and rise to the level of what he expected of us. So we did. I can't describe how important that made me feel.

Today, thirty five years later, a whiff of pencil-shavings in an abandoned store-room at the University where I work brought back the world of Mr. Koepke and all the great teachers I've had over the course of my life, and I was filled with such gratitude. We are largely the sum of our experiences, and I feel so blessed to have been cared for and attended to by these giants, and allowed to stand on their shoulders all of my days. It made me realize how many educators there are in my family and the circle of my friends. College professors, special education, elementary, and high school teachers. Even a Principal (Whose permanent record I would dearly love to see). I was suddenly in awe of the company that I keep, and filled with a desire to buy school supplies. 

And so it's to each of them that this bit of bonhomie is dedicated. I would send you all a boquet of sharpened pencils if I could. Because as the turning of the leaves and the advent of Fall sends you back to the hallowed halls, I admit that I don't envy you the stress, criticism, underfunded-and-overworked status of your daily life, but there is something I absolutely envy you. A life that matters, like no other. I wonder who will be thinking about you thirty-five years from now, and saying to themselves that they never would have made it without you. 

Because thanks to a Berol Giant pencil sharpener in the Secret Tomb of Forgotten Office Supplies, I followed my nostalgic little heart way down amnesia lane and learned today that Mr. Terry Koepke has a plaque at Camp Hi-Hill, in the Angeles National Forest, to honor him. It reads: "Teacher, Conservationist, Friend to All."

That's damn straight.

Sacred Stones

In the breathless way that only five-year-olds have, she explains to me the importance of each of the rocks in her box of precious things, held inviolable in the secret spot in the top drawer, under all the socks. Since I well recall the totemic power of sea-glass and flat, smooth river stones for warding off evil and standing as sigils of fate’s approval of my existence, I listen to her recitation of each stone’s biography in the absent-but-present way that loving uncles have about them. 

Her words wash over me, tumbling from her in little bursts of enthusiasm, rife with wandering asides and non sequiturs, and sighs of frustration at her own inability to articulate in words the ocean of meaning inside her. To the casual listener, it sounds like a grocery-list of items being ticked off in a sing-song litany. It sounds like that to me, too, except that I love her. So I listen past the tuneless song of “…and then…and then…and then” until I don’t hear it anymore, and that’s when I can actually listen instead. 

She’s too young to affect the body language, intonation, cadence and rhythm of a story-teller. The rise-and-fall, tension-and-resolve musical qualities of a story well-told are beyond her, for now. But the need to convey, to be understood, for her truth to be recognized… these things are well within her grasp, and they animate the story of her stones until it’s as riveting as any epic ever told. But not if you saw it written down. A transcript of it would be boredom itself, filled with “…and then…and then…and then." 

I’ve grown into the mantel of a storyteller in the midst of a clan of storytellers. To stand out from among the group of Bards and Bullshitters I hail from is a feat unto itself, believe me. So I listen with a different kind of attention to the tale of her sacred stones, hearing the story beats like a drum out of time, implying the shape of truths buried in her. Witnessing her evolution from Sunday to Sunday is something to behold. Soon this little one with her earnest “…and then…and then…and thens” will be gone, replaced by a big-time first grader with a grasp of relevant conversational threads, and a developing instinct for social cues to tell which story when. And her tales will rise to take their place on the long arc of the living narrative made up of every story ever told. 

But for now she stumbles forward, leading with intention and meaning in the absence of all the words—as we ever have, as we ever will—for they are the millennial predecessors of syntax and grammar. When our ancestors grunted and gestured with stone knives and bear-skins, their meaning and intention was still plain to each other, and so we arose. As we ever have, as we ever will.

I know well the frustration of words that fail, that cannot contain the life they describe. When my own stories lay flat on an imaginary page, lifeless as a recitation from any randomly chosen page from the phone book, their content as stilted as a grocery-list of unrelated events, strung together by grammar and syntax, “…and then…and then…and then." When all the editorial tricks are just tricks that cannot hope to animate the lifeless heap of characters we made up so we don’t have to grunt anymore. And I stare at them until it seems hopeless, all these meaningless squiggles on a page that doesn’t actually exist outside the uncreated space of charged particles they inhabit. So it is that tens of thousands of my words disappear into digital nullification, as recycled ones and zeroes reserved for better purpose. Delete.

But some days, when I'm lucky, the love comes in. 

When it does—when everything seems to shine, and even the wrong words seem to rhyme—and I’m out on the street and the 3/4 time of my steps counterpoints the 7/8 time of my heart, and every dog’s bark and shoddy muffler Dopplering away from me sings a song; the play of light and shadow is a game that the whole world is hoping I’ll notice and join in. I’m a drop of water having rejoined its vast ocean at last, yet still a drop. The breeze chases my heels along, blowing the cherry blossoms before me, and I am subsumed by a love of every single thing, ever. 

Every person on the street, every distant soul in far-away lands—my flesh and blood; my family and friends like a fire in my bones. Even those that have betrayed me, every person that has ever cheated me, every criminal that has ever stolen from me, are separated from me only by their own illusion of “otherness." And all the heartbreak in the world—even this I love, in the way that you love a willful child who must learn in their own way; regretful that they must, but content to walk alongside while they do.

Then everything unnecessary passes away, and the words that remain—that actually tell the story, that do hold the essence of the life they describe—are animated by the love of what I’ve beheld. So the breath of life comes across the dry bones of mere words, anima whetting their marrow, such that they rise up to join the long arc of the living narrative. The one that God Himself is writing about each one of us, and literally everything else. A story of every attosecond of existence, every tear fallen, every dream dreamt; about the orbit of subatomic particles, and the beat of a butterfly’s wing in China.

A brokenhearted story of love and sacred stones.

Night Church

The evening of December 7, 1980 I was sitting in an uncomfortable pew, sweating like a hooker in Church, and waiting for Ronald Reagan to end the world. Back then Pluto was still a planet, 8-Tracks were fading, and Mikhail Gorbachev was clearly the Antichrist because of that thing on his head. Still, I would have welcomed the whole Apocalypse thing if it meant not having to go to Night Church anymore.

Perhaps I should explain.

We went to a pretty conservative Church that spent most of its time exercising crowd control and emphasizing the importance of not listening to music with a syncopated beat, or voting for the wrong candidate, like that war-monger Reagan. I really didn’t mind it that much during a Sunday morning, in spite of the collared shirt and dress shoes I was forced to wear. The shoes were slick and uncomfortable, which made horsing around almost impossible, but all the other kids had to wear similar attire because it was important to bring God our best, out of respect. In spite of that, I liked Sunday School because there was always a fun macaroni craft and for some reason, I kicked ass at Bible Trivia.

The main service was a bit dull, but I was allowed to sit with my friend’s family and his mom always had paper for us to draw on, except during the prayer when we had to keep our eyes closed, again out of respect. She usually had some candy, too, which was frowned upon in my house. We were never bribed into good behavior; you toed the line out of obedience and integrity. Or some shit like that.

But going to Church in the evenings was a whole other animal. There were two evening services per week, one on Sunday night and one on Wednesday night, and they were interminable. Technically, they were of shorter duration than a standard Sunday morning service, but seemed much longer. There was less singing, and the pastor’s prayer time went on much longer, which would often put me to sleep. 

And there was just something about the sanctuary at night that bothered me. The cheery stained glass windows that lit so prettily during the day depicting different images of Jesus as shepherd, martyr, and risen savior took on a different tone at night. There were lights outside the sanctuary in the hedges that bordered the windows which shone on the glass tableaus to light them for the service, but they had a hard yellow tint to them that filtered through the heavy leaden glass like gaslight and cast Jesus in a sallow pallor which was far from comforting. 

Night Church was what separated the faithful from the dilettantes. Any Good-Time-Charlie can swing in to Church to launder their karma on the way to Sunday brunch, but only a true devotee would be in Church during Prime Time television. Which, honestly, was my biggest problem with night Church. Sure, I hated the pews, which doubled as a means of keeping you awake as the pastor droned on and as a torture device to help you do your penance for a week’s worth of sinnin'. And yes, I hated the Wednesday night Thunderdome of Christian Cadets, a variant on Boy Scouts taught by a three retired Marines determined to make men out of us. But the thing that really upset me about night Church was that both sessions conflicted with something awesome on TV. 

Sunday nights I missed out on CHiPs and Wednesday night it was Battlestar Galactica. This seemed like the paramount injustice in all of human history, which generated a loathing in me that persists to this day, even though I have Netflixed those shows and am well aware that they suck. Imagine my confusion back then when I came home a little early one Wednesday night to discover that Starbuck and Apollo had found Earth! When did that happen? While I was doing pushups for the fascists… uh, I mean Cadet leaders…  as punishment for forgetting to wear my neckerchief as part of my Cadet uniform, no doubt.

Calvinist Cadets.

So the service was actually shorter, and casual dress was allowed because apparently it’s not disrespectful to the Almighty to wear sneakers to Church at night, but none of that made up for the sense of cultural deprivation and forever being left out conversations about those shows the following day at school with my nerd friends.

There were a few times when we missed going to night Church over the years, which occasions felt like some kind of national holiday and always inspired me to create scenarios wherein we wouldn’t have to go on a given night. I probably faked sick more to get out of night Church than for all the times I tried to get away with that on a school day and with equal amount of success, which was virtually none. But on December 7, 1980 I wasn’t faking it. 

Pale, sweaty and laying there all listless and limp as a ragdoll on that medieval pew, my Mom could tell this was no ruse. They whisked me out of the service early and straight home, where they discovered I was running a fever of 103, which is a personal best, even to this day. Turns out I had my first case of strep throat. Swollen, bleeding tonsils, aches and pains, and a persistent fever requiring dreaded antibiotic pills the size of a brick to be shoved down my gullet at regular intervals for days on end. All of which I still found preferable to night Church, so I counted it as a win.

For reasons that escape me now, Mom and Dad had to leave me with neighbors for that first day of the next three that I spent in bed. The following two days one of them stayed home to attend to my medication schedule and bring me ice cream, but that Monday morning, December 8, 1980 I was left in the care of our neighbors two doors down, Herb and Mary Grund.

Herb and Mary were in their seventies, and had adopted me almost immediately upon our arrival in Long Beach. They were first generation, meat and potatoes immigrants of scandahoovian origins who always had a slice of pie, a piece of hard candy, or a little chore for a kid my age. I probably made a buck or two a week from them crushing soda cans and stacking milk crates; a king’s ransom for an eight or nine year old, which I mostly spent on pewter Dungeons & Dragons figurines at the Sprouse-Reitz five and dime.

Herb was a fine figure of a man, even at his advanced age; a Teutonic frame barely beginning to bend, with a thicket of silver hair that hadn’t thinned at all. He was always puttering about in the hedges with hand shears, sanding something in his garage shop, or tending the giant ecosystem he’d made for his Koi. They were monstrous in size, and he’d often have me feed them if he and Mary were going to be out of town for the weekend. Herb had a catch-phrase that he would always ask me, “Get the picture? Is it in focus?” To which I always nodded and smiled, even though it usually wasn't true.

Mary was diminutive, but still held powerful sway in their house. She would generate a honeydoo list to keep Herb busy all day, while she kept the house full of cookies and all her glass figurines dusted and arranged. She had a zany sense of humor and enjoyed playing comedy albums from Bill Cosby and Steve Martin on the record player.

She and Herb spoke with a noticeable Germanic accent, although they'd moved to America as young children and were as patriotic and proud as only an immigrant can be of their adoptive home. Herb had fought the Japanese in the Pacific, while his bride waited for him. She once showed me the box of letters she saved from that time, bundled up in a thick rubber band. 

Sometimes when I was passing their house on my bike I would come up the driveway to see if Herb was messing around with the Koi, because they seemed like primeval cousins of Megalodon and were equally fascinating and terrifying to me when they boiled the water in ravenous frenzy for any food dropped into the network of concrete pools Herb had built for them. Other times Mary would call from the house through the screen door to see if I wanted to listen to Bill Cosby do his impression of Noah being told to build an Ark. Between the two of them it’s a wonder my teeth didn’t rot out of my head; he always had a butterscotch in his pocket and she kept caramels in her purse. They never had kids of their own, so I think they liked having a tyke around to spoil when they could, and since I rarely saw my own grandparents, and had a complicated relationship with both my grandfathers, it was nice to be the object of that kind of affection. Loved for the mere fact of my existence.

So it was alright with me to spend a day on their couch being doted on by Mary, who had a lovely voice as she sang what I think were German folk songs that floated out to me from the kitchen. She wouldn’t hear of me watching TV on the couch all day like my folks would, but brought me crayons, scissors and construction paper and played Neil Diamond records. Herb had a collection of dumb jokes to make a kid laugh which I then shamefully plagiarized to tell to other adults in my life who all groaned or laughed. I took the laugh and the credit every time, even though I was always only pretending to get the jokes when Herb told them. "When is a door, not a door? When it’s ajar." Ba-dump-kssh!

That was as good a day as a kid could have with a high fever and a burning pit of gravel in his throat, being force-fed horsepills every couple of hours. Or it was, right up until Herb came into the house in what seemed like a dazed stupor, appearing confused and disoriented. Today I might have concluded that he was suffering a stroke, but in 1980 I only knew enough to be scared. Mary had one look at him and guided straight him to the kitchen table to sit. I followed, hovering at the kitchen door, sensing that I was an intruder in that moment, but feeling too freaked out to not discover what was going on. Mary cajoled him for a moment, her concern amplifying my own.

Without looking up, he simply said, “John Lennon has been shot.”

I didn’t know who John Lennon was. Really, at 9 years old, I only knew who my parents liked: Barry Manilow, Dionne Warwick, Paul Anka, and The Carpenters. My universe was defined for me by what other people told me was so. Syncopated music was bad, tennis shoes are disrespectful to God during the day, and Ronald Reagan was going to take us to war. So I had no idea why I should care that John Lennon was dead. No sense of the earthshaking legacy he left, the radical notions he promoted, or the legions of souls he inspired. No, I found out about John Lennon the same way Clyde Tambaugh discovered Pluto, by the anomalies created in its invisible passage. 

When Herb—this robust titan of a man, unbowed by war or the weight of decades—found himself barely able to stand, when tears formed in eyes that had only ever laughed before, when the ready jokes were nowhere to be found and the smile ran away from his face, I was introduced to John Lennon. Someone whose absence could so affect a man over thirty years his senior, whose presence I was blissfully unaware of until this day when his passing implied the gravity that could shake such a man as Herb Grund. Which in turn shook me from places of safety and certainty that were so taken for granted that I could have no name for them until they fled for those minutes. 

“Who was John Lennon?” I asked. 

For a moment, I think he must have wondered what was wrong with my parents that they could have a nine year old son who didn’t know who John Lennon was. Perhaps I was intruding on a grief that was private, somehow lessening the passing of Lennon by my ignorance of his existence. But in the next second the kindly giant who had given me my first Swiss Army knife regained a form of composure, recognized a teachable moment in my life, and found a brief respite from grief in opening the eyes of a boy to a larger, more beautiful world. He took me to the living room, pulled a record sleeve from amongst Mary's comedy albums, then dropped the black circle onto their turntable to play “Imagine” for me for the very first time. 

I wish I could say that I instantly got it, that I’d had a transformative moment and my eyes were opened, but I was nine and John was saying that he wished there was no Heaven, which I didn’t want to be true. But I liked that he wanted me to join him in dreaming, and thought that maybe that’s why Herb was so sad. Like maybe a dream he’d been dreaming was over, and he wished it wasn’t. When the song finished Herb asked me if I got the picture. If it was in focus. I said it was, even though it wasn’t, because I wanted it to be true. And because I didn’t want him to look at me like he knew the world I was growing up in wasn’t going to be as good anymore. 

Today I’ve got the picture, and it’s in focus. Sure, sometimes I’ll hear “Imagine” and it will go in one ear and out the other, another in a long cavalcade of dreamy folk songs written by a generation whose revolution was forestalled by running shoes and personal computers. But the other day I heard a cover of it by Eddie Vedder in honor of John's Birthday, and while Eddie is no John Lennon, he is someone who's shouldered the load of heavy burdens with me many times, and I have a life-long affection for him. So him singing “Imagine” in a high, quavering tenor with a slightly out of tune acoustic guitar instantly transported me to the day a nine year old boy watched a giant of a man fold up at his kitchen table like the light had gone from the world. And while I still don’t want to imagine that there’s no Heaven, I’m happy to dream with John and Herb both that there will be nothing to kill or die for, no need for greed or hunger, no religion, too. Just a brotherhood of man. 

One without need for Night Church.