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.

7,584 Wakeup Calls

Over the years I’ve received some truly disappointing gifts, mostly as a kid. Of course I’ve probably given more than my fair share of half-hearted duds myself, but this is about how I been done wrong, not the other way around. Anyway, I quickly learned to feign enthusiasm and gratitude, having sussed out early on the implied obligation to do so.The first systematic lies I learned to tell were all for the sake of others, and I’ve since discovered that the turning of the world’s massive social gears is made possible solely by the lubrication of alcohol and palatable lies. 

As a kid, sometimes the gratitude was sincere, even if the gift was a bust. I felt kind of sorry for parents trying to guess what to get a kid when they themselves were so helplessly uncool.  So when I knew they got me something lame out of a sense of total mystification at what I might  have preferred, it was easier to mime excitement. But if you are the kind of person who gives a kid socks and underwear as Christmas or Birthday presents, you will be roasting weenies with Hitler and Pol Pot around the campfire in Hell. 

Perhaps the most disappointing gift of all time came at Christmas of 1980, when I was 9. We were making our semi-regular pilgrimage from our house in Long Beach, CA up to my Aunt and Uncle’s place in Springfield, OR. It’s about a 16 hour trip, and we were preparing to pile into our giant International Harvester Travelall, named Lurch, packed to the gills. We were bringing presents for my Aunt, Uncle, three cousins, and two Grandparents, as well as the full complement of our immediate-family Christmas gifts and random decorations and ornaments that would allow us to keep some of our particular Christmas traditions intact even at a home not our own. Needless to say, the old behemoth would be loaded down with luggage, presents, festive pastries, and a handful of toys and diversions to keep us occupied for what felt like an eons-long trip to a 9 year old. 

While we were loading the cargo hold of Lurch with presents I inspected each one, looking for those emblazoned with my name, trying to surreptitiously weigh and/or shake them to divine their contents. This kind of behavior was frowned upon by my Mom, as was any effort to communicate what I wanted for Christmas. My friend Shane, an only child, would take his Mom to the store to pick out his own presents in advance, which I thought was the coolest thing ever. My Mom did not agree with my assessment, and became quite irritated when I suggested we should also do that. I suppose being treated like a vending machine is somewhat off-putting for most people, so I would try to be subtle by marking pages in the Spiegel’s Catalogue with stuff that I wanted. But it either fell on deaf ears or annoyed her enough to guarantee that, whatever else I got for Christmas, it sure wasn’t going to be the items I’d circled on the heavily dog-eared pages of that tantalizing catalogue. 

Still, I had high hopes that year for a present I’d both marked in the catalogue and asked for outright at Target. I knew exactly what size and weight the box was, having picked it up in the store and turned it over so many times with the most unmitigated avarice. So as I helped to load the cargo area, imagine my excitement when one with my name on it came through my grubby little hands which seemed to be of the exact size and weight. Not wanting to be too obvious about it, I packed it up behind where I would be sitting so that I might occasionally check on it on the sly during the long trip, perhaps “accidentally” rip a corner to confirm my suspicions. I was never able to get away with this because I was nowhere near as clever as I thought myself to be at 9 years old. Imagine that. Still, I wiled away much of the journey imagining the adventures that I would have with that coveted prize: the Rebel Armored Snowspeeder from that year’s megahit movie “The Empire Strikes Back”. 

I was convinced that this present would strike a decisive blow against both my cousin, Chucky, with whom I had a silent competition to see who would get the best gift, and my best friend John, who never failed to get the rarest, most expensive Star Wars toys. When I got a huge Jeep for my Steve Austin action figure to drive, Chucky got a pool table. When I brought home an X-Wing, John brought home the Millennium Falcon. So just this once, I was gonna have the win. And if that ain’t the true meaning of Christmas, what is?

Owing to my nuanced use of foreshadowing, I’m sure you know that I did not, in fact, open any box that year that contained a Snowspeeder. Apparently there is one other thing in this world that is of the exact size and packaged weight as the Rebel Armored Snowspeeder, which would be the General Electric 4659-B Clock-Radio. If there is anything in the world more antithetical to a Rebel Armored Snowspeeder, I don’t know what it is. 

That year the Best Actor Oscar went to Henry Fonda, for “On Golden Pond”. I was totally robbed. After the performance I gave of pretending to be happy to have received a fucking clock-radio in place of a Snowspeeder, I definitely aced Fonda out and never even got nominated. Imagine that. 

I eventually got the Snowspeeder, bought with some money I got for my 10th birthday. John, in turn, landed himself an Imperial AT-AT Walker, so I was assed-out again. But that damned clock-radio turned out to be the gift that kept on giving. Despite 8 moves across 4 states and 1 foreign country, despite the fact that I routinely used it as a step ladder when I needed to be a few inches taller, the thing always kept decent time and woke me up every morning for the next 7,584 days, eventually being retired only when my wife and I got married and merged our stuff. Can’t fault GE for their craftsmanship, that thing was virtually unbreakable. 

By the end of our time together it only picked up a few AM stations, and just the most annoying, old-timey religious ones, to boot. I spent my 29th year on earth being brought to life daily by organ renditions of “How Great Thou Art” and “The Old Rugged Cross," which were interspersed with a lot of “Thees” and “Thous” as septuagenarian preachers menaced me with the Good News in their tired, ancient voices.

Even though that old brick deserved to end up in the great tech-graveyard, I sent it out into the ether via the world’s longest running rummage sale, The Salvation Army. I like to think it’s on some piece of crappy cinder block and plywood furniture with a bedside bong tattooing water rings into its faux wood finish to compliment all the ones I put there with mine. Perhaps it’s strapped together with duct tape while the flashing blue numbers proclaim it to be permanent midnight, even as it somehow still wakes a stoner up for his job cracking packs at Michael's, serenading him with “Blessed Assurance”. Who knows, maybe it’ll teach him the error of his ways. What can I say? I’m a romantic.

I guess you don’t always get what you want, and even when you get what you need it can still be a bit of a let down. Although the Snowspeeder was the thing I so desperately wanted, I gave it away when I was 16, having only really enjoyed it from 10 to 14 or so. It just seemed wrong to curate an archive of dusty toys in a steamer trunk when the kid I babysat would actually love it the way I once had. 

I hated that clock radio for every minute of the 21 years I owned it, mostly because it tirelessly delivered the Bad News that it was time to get up. Hell, it was really telling me every day that it was time to grow up, and I could never outgrow that reality the way I had my enjoyment of the Snowspeeder. One gray night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more…

But things come round and round, don’t they? Another toy I had longed for in my youth—which that blasted Shane had sitting on his end table along with every toy he'd ever coveted—was the Magic 8-Ball. You know, ask it a question, shake it up and it will tell you that the answer is unclear? I yearned for it desperately, but was denied it for religious reasons owing to the evils of Mattel's plastic soothsayery. Then a friend gave me one last year, and it was like resolving a suspended chord that had been resounding for decades. 

So go ahead and buy that E-Z Bake Oven or Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine you’ve had your eye on since you were 6. I promise you’ll feel much better. And please, never, ever give your kids something useful for Christmas. They’ll be grownups soon enough and all the socks, underwear, and clock-radios will not be remembered fondly. Get them the stupid thing they’ll outgrow. Because life is one giant phase, and all we ever do is outgrow everything that once seemed so crucial.

And because the things you don’t outgrow are mileposts along the road to somewhere you probably don’t want to go.

How To Count To A Million

It’s been officially calculated that counting to a million aloud takes 5.2 hours, but I know for a fact that's wrong because I did it one day when walking home from school in the 4^th grade in about twenty minutes.

Birney Elementary was 3,132 feet from my house in Long Beach, CA and after spending most of the 3^rd grade wheedling at my Mom to let me walk to and from school, instead of being embarrassed to be dropped off in front of the 6^th graders, I got my wish at the start of 4^th grade. Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before I learned to loathe every one of the 1,441 steps it took to get home. Like Oscar Wilde said, “There are only two tragedies in life: when one doesn’t get what one wants, and when one does.”

Even though my Mom made sure that I knew the route and walked it with me in preparation the Sunday before the start of 4^th grade, it seemed so much farther the first day I did it alone. I did not vary one inch from the prescribed course for fear of losing my way, never to be found again. I still remembered missing my bus stop in kindergarten, getting off only one stop later, probably not more than two blocks from my home, and having no bearing at all as to which way I should go, or how to even tell anyone where I lived. I sat down under a tree in our Virginia suburb and cried until my Mom came and found me after seeing that I didn’t get off the bus. So I stuck to the course she laid out for me in the most rigid fashion, which is how I came to watch the Wedding of Luke and Laura on General Hospital with a mysterious girl named Adrienne St. Clair.

Home sweet home

The walk home along the route my Mom laid out was divided up into distinct zones in my mind, with numbered streets running east-west and named avenues running north-south. Birney Elementary lay at the corner of Maine Avenue and Spring Street, so I walked south along Maine to 28^th Street, and then east down 28^th to Cedar Avenue, then south down Cedar to 2721. Home, sweet home.  Five blocks over, three blocks down, essentially an ersatz 'Z’. Six tenths of a mile, 3,132 feet, 1,441 steps.

The neighborhood seemed safe enough, what little I knew of it, since my world was circumscribed by busy streets that I wouldn’t cross without compelling reason. Spring and Willow Streets were my north-south boundaries, and Magnolia and Pacific Avenues my east-west. Within that defined grid of prewar stucco bungalows, I’d only ever run into trouble once. A teen had tried to steal my bike out from under me, but a little old Korean lady came charging out into the street almost instantly, brandishing a broom like a samurai sword, screaming at the kid like a banshee and fearlessly charging him head on. He’d naturally turned tail and run, never to be seen in our neighborhood again. So the thing I took with me was not the attempted crime, but the sense that we were all in it together and anyone that tried anything was gonna get it.

Inside my little snow-globe universe, each avenue of the trip had its own character, its own smells, and its own perceived threats. Most notably were the two dogs that were constant terrors to me, Butler and Duke. Butler lived on 28^th, between Daisy and Magnolia; Duke also lived on 28^th, but between Chestnut and Cedar. So the numbered streets seemed like twilight borderlands where anything could happen.

I felt especially anxious about crossing Magnolia Avenue because of the volume of traffic and higher speed limit, and would not traverse it unless compelled to do so by scholastic imperative; never during play times or even to visit a friend. Outside of my defined grid, it was as if nothing and no one existed. Even within my grid I hated Eucalyptus Avenue because it smelled funny, and Chestnut Avenue because it always seemed kind of sketchy. It was overshadowed by huge trees whose roots pushed the sidewalks up into broken jumbles and it was always dim, no matter how sunny the day was. Plus, on the unpredictable occasions that Duke the German Shepherd came for me, it was always at Chestnut and 28th.

The daily detour from my fixed route.

In spite of all that, it never occurred to me to change my course to avoid either of my canine nemeses because of my fear of losing my way. Like there was only one way home and even the slightest deviation would divert me into some alternate dimension I could never return from. I was held so tightly in the grips of that anxiety that I refused to even walk on the opposite side of the same street, brooking no deviations of any kind, for any reason. So I stuck to my guns and brazened my way past Butler, the massive Great Dane who stood on his hind legs behind his gate and snarled, barked, and slobbered on you if you came within reach. And I just ran like hell when I saw Duke.

Right up until the day that I didn’t.

I don’t know how many months I spent robotically plowing through what felt like a trek across all of Middle Earth before Adrienne found me, but it seemed like an eternity. Sometimes I would look down the length of a street that seemed like it went out to the vanishing point and then dropped off the edge of the Earth, and I could not imagine how I would ever make the impossible journey. It just seemed so far and each step whittled away so little. This feeling was perfectly captured for me years later in Freshman philosophy class when I came across Zeno’s Paradox of Locomotion.

The ancient Greek philosopher said that in order to cross any distance –say…3,132 feet– one must first complete the task of crossing the halfway point. After all, you can’t go 3,132 feet without first going the initial 1,566, right? Fair enough. By that same logic, before you can reach that halfway point, you must cross the quarter point of the distance, or 783 feet. No argument there. And before that an eighth of the distance, and before that the sixteenth, and a thirtysecond, and so on. Since the distance can be divided in half an infinite number of times without ever becoming zero, mathematically this creates an infinite set of distances to traverse, which is clearly an impossibility. So not only was it impossible for me to cross the vast distance of 3,132 feet, but technically it was impossible to even start, since we can’t ever establish the smallest distance necessary to begin the journey. Zeno made perfect sense to me as a Freshman, as long as I totally ignored the evidence of my daily success in completing the arduous journey.

As a kid, intuitively sensing Zeno’s words to be true, I would just look down at my feet and count the footfalls, as opposed to watching a horizon that never seemed to get closer. I tried ardently each day to keep an exact count of my steps, as if by quantifying the journey I could form a defense against the unknown that I had been so eager to venture into, just to escape the imagined disapprobation of 6^th graders who would never even know my name. But somehow I always lost count along the way; sometimes because of the thunder of Butler’s bark, or the second my feet grew wings at Duke’s approach, or simply by forgetting where I left off while waiting for there to be no traffic in sight all the way out to the vanishing point in either direction on Magnolia Avenue, so that I could safely cross without fear. But even though the horizon always seemed forever away, never getting closer, somehow I always made it home, in spite of having lost count of the steps that it took to cross that technically infinite space.

And then one day, somehow, that infinity became just a little smaller because Adrienne St. Claire intersected with it.

Kind of like this.

Adrienne was a willowy brunette, in the vein of Winnie Cooper but minus the bangs and with longer, wavier hair. I only knew her because she was also in Old Mrs. Erbe’s class, sitting on the far side, kitty-corner of the room from me, where she was my only real competitor in our weekly game of State Capitals. Otherwise she kept to herself, even on the playground where she was probably the nicest dressed girl, but never seemed to run and play. Instead she gathered with a couple of other girls on the bench by the water fountain and either talked or drew mysterious doodles in a notebook, while I was busy being a daredevil gymnast or getting chased by packs of wild girls who said I had to marry them if they caught me on Wednesday Wedding Day.

Adrienne always seemed above such puerile games, and above me as well, with her patent-leather Maryjanes, plaid skirts, polo blouses, and prim blue windbreaker. So imagine my surprise when she caught up with me one day on my way home as I was approaching Magnolia and my dreaded encounter with Butler, and diverted me from my destination like it was the most natural thing in the world.

“Hi, O’B,” she began in an innocent fashion, like we talked all the time. She must have read the confusion on my face as me not recognizing her—as opposed to me having no idea why someone so classy would be talking to me—because she went on to introduce herself. “It’s Adrienne, from Mrs. Erbe’s class?”

“I know. You got Montpellier wrong in the game last week,” I responded stupidly, blanking on anything else to say.

“I just spelled it wrong, is all,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I still knew the answer.”

She was almost an inch taller than me, and her stride was long in her flat dress-shoes and navy blue tights. I was a ratty kid in holed-out Toughskins that had as many Star Wars iron-on patches on them as I could convince my Mom to apply. The front of my Garanimals shirts always had jelly or Kool-Aid stains on them, and I wore Pro-Wings like they were the exclusive sponsor of my childhood. Even though, at nine, none of the social strata had names for me yet, I still knew that someone like her should not be talking to someone like me. 

So while it was not at all unpleasant, it was still confusing to me somehow. What could she possibly want? I had the sense that I shouldn’t point out to her that spelling Montpellier correctly was at least as important as knowing the answer, although every nerdly, inflexible, unimaginative, never-going-to-depart-from-the-prescribed-course bone in my body told me to do exactly that.

I’m guessing that if I had, she never would have said, “So, um…  My Mom said it would be OK to have a friend over after school for a little while before I do my homework. So you could come over and watch General Hospital with me sometime, if you want.”

The lack of preamble or explanation, along with the note of bashful insecurity, was confusing to me for a moment. She always seemed so perfectly at ease and confident all the time that I couldn’t understand if she was asking me to come over, or if she was informing me that I was going to come over.

“Uh… OK. I guess,” I stammered, groping for some excuse to get out of it politely, like I’d been taught. But I was totally unprepared for this eventuality and was thus without defense, so before I knew what was happening she slipped her arm into mine like it was an assumed protocol between us. I was alarmed until I realized it wasn’t Wednesday Wedding Day, so I didn’t technically have to marry her. Whew, close one!

Then she told me, “This is how a gentleman does it.” I wondered if a gentleman also wore counterfeit Vans from Payless Shoe Source, high-water bellbottoms, or anything with an image of Chewbacca on it, but said nothing.

But more like this.

She walked me across Magnolia Avenue as though it were not the River Styx and then made a right, guiding me off the beaten path and toward her home, less than a block—yet still an entire world—away.  When I expressed my reservation about deviating from the only path I knew, she looked at me like she couldn’t believe she’d ever lost a game of State Capitals to me, but she just said, “Don’t worry, I’ll tell you how to get back home.”

She lived atop a second-story rental, and the entrance was set into the barrel of a turret. It seemed like the tower a princess would live in, like Rapunzel. I'd never met anyone that didn't live on the ground floor. When we went inside I discovered that her Mom was not home, and wouldn’t be until after 6:00 that night, which sounded illegal to me for some reason. I was never home alone past 4:00, which was about an hour and a half by the time I finished the Bataan Death March every day. It turned out that her parents were divorced, which seemed like a mythical condition, like saying they were in Narnia for the day. I knew what divorce was, but had never actually met anyone whose parents had gone through with it.

The fact that she was a child of divorce, who was being left alone until late in the evening, made me think that I should feel sorry for her, but nothing else about her supported that idea. In fact, I got a little jealous when she went to the refrigerator and pulled out a tray of cucumber sandwiches and some cans of Hawaiian Punch, because it immediately made it seem like somebody not only cared for her, but even curated her every moment with loving attention to detail, even in their absence. As the days wore on I realized that there were always snacks for two waiting for us, and not just prepackaged stuff thrown together, like Twinkies or Ho-Ho’s, but nutritious things arranged on a china plate and covered in cellophane. Her unseen Mother clearly knew about my visits, and made sure I would feel welcome.

The cucumber finger-sandwiches were my absolute favorite, which probably explains why they appeared as often as they did, but the pigs-in-a-blanket and pepperjack cheese & crackers were also a hit. Aside from water and milk, Kool-Aid was the only drink that we had at my house, so anything that came from a can seemed like a treasure from an exotic land, almost forbidden even. I’m sure I must have seemed an absolute savage by the way I oafishly gulped down those Hawaiian Punches day after day, with no couth at all.

That first day, though, I remember feeling like a deer in the headlights; saying nothing, barely moving, wide-eyed and befuddled at how I came to be trapped by rules of etiquette into listening to her relate the plot details of the General Hospital story arc that I didn't care about at all. But I sat there and listened to her until one day I did care, and we watched fictional lives unspool slower than I would have thought possible. Sometimes a single conversation could last all week long. Day after day, mere minutes would pass in their lives while I seemed to be living orders of magnitude faster than them; ten minutes of my life were spent for every one of theirs. At least.

I had learned at my Mother’s knee that some things in life were absolutely déclassé, and beneath even a scalawag like me. Among the host of these things were: gum chewing, eating in front of the television, and soap operas. Within that first week of being lassoed by Adrienne, I was doing all three of those things daily. After the first day of meeting on 28^th near Magnolia, she tried to catch up with me right outside of school. But she soon discovered that I was embarrassed to be seen with a girl there because, you know, they’re gross.  So without taking any apparent offense, she adjusted her strategy and would meet me in front of Butler’s house, near where she first stopped me.

Butler would hop up on his hind legs, leaning hard on his gate, and give with a ferocious baritone of a bark. But while even Adrienne wasn’t daring enough to try and pet him, because he stood a full eighteen inches taller than us, she somehow knew his name and used it to shoosh him and he let us go by in peace. Then she would offer me a stick of Big Red gum, which I always took and pretended to like even though I hated the intense, burning cinnamon flavor, which seemed like a punishment to me for chewing gum in the first place. Then we would walk arm-in-arm to her house, with her essentially leading, but allowing us both the illusion that I was escorting her.

We would arrive at her house and ascend her tower each day a few minutes before the show’s start-time. She would change into her at-home outfit, like Mr. Rogers, then get out the food for us while we talked for a bit, waiting for the slow motion lives of Luke and Laura to play out in snow-globe time. The minute the show was over Adrienne would, without ceremony, promptly dismiss me, informing me that it was time for her to do her homework before she made her Mom’s dinner. I took no offense, and would then head directly home, following her simple instructions back to the yellow brick road.

I was glad to have passed the challenge of Butler by that point in the day, but still dreaded the random lottery of Duke’s possible attack ahead. When I got home I would work on my times-tables, which I was terrible at by nines, and would pretend to have been home the whole time when my Mom got there, never even mentioning Adrienne to my family at all. To say nothing of the gauche gum-chewing, soap opera-watching ways I’d spent my afternoon, eating in front of the TV like the unwashed. That world was a secret all my own.

As our own days unspooled at the pace of children everywhere, we would talk for our two block walk together, and in the minutes before the show, and during all of the commercials, but never once at school. She would ramble on about life, while I often sat in silence, nodding occasionally, perhaps commenting on Old Mrs. Erbe, or asking for more food. I learned that her Mom was some kind of executive working her way up in the Coca-Cola Corporation, a very important job that kept her away much of the time.

She never talked about her Dad at all, but she did show me the secret doodles that she made in that notebook at recess, which turned out to be some amazing fashion sketches. Not at all like the crude renderings I attempted of Star Wars X-Wings or Vipers from Battlestar Galactica. Like everything else about Adrienne, they seemed preternaturally advanced, demonstrating a mature understanding of anatomy, proportion, and texture. In many ways her calm, self-possessed affect made her seem like an adult trapped in a child’s body. Like maybe she had Freaky-Fridayed with her Mom, and was stuck going to Birney Elementary while her daughter tried not to lose the important Coca-Cola job before they could  reverse the magical mixup.

I don’t know if that’s what actually happened or not, but the day came when Adrienne wasn’t in school. And then another, and another. After a week, I inquired of Old Mrs. Erbe as to Adrienne’s whereabouts, thinking I might bring her the homework she was so dedicated to. But she told me that Adrienne had moved, and didn’t go to our school anymore. I asked where Adrienne had gone to, but she had no idea. If Old Mrs. Erbe noticed at all how crestfallen I was, she didn’t offer any sign or comfort.

Adrienne St. Clair left my life the exact same way she came into it; without preamble or explanation. On the way home that day I shooshed Butler as a matter of routine, strolling by without even flinching. There was no one to see how brave I was to cross Magnolia all alone, and I realized then that I couldn’t have proven that Adrienne and I had even met if my life depended on it. I went to Adrienne’s tower, even though I could see the ‘For Rent’ sign in the yard from down the avenue. I ascended to her door anyway and knocked, knowing full well that it wouldn’t open, and then turned to go, grieved in a way that I didn’t know you could be.

That was the wrong day for Duke to make a sport of chasing me, because I finally took my Dad’s advice to confront my nemesis. I did it just like he told me; I let Duke chase me across one yard, barking and snarling, then whirled, dropped to one knee, and laid my Sunday Punch on him, Southpaw-style. I’m not sure which of us was more surprised when I connected square with his nose so solidly. I hated the sound of his yelping as he turned tail and fled, but I never had to run again.

Without Butler or Duke to mess me up, or Adrienne to distract me, I got back to the business of counting off my footfalls through my little fifteen square block universe. Eventually the day came that I successfully counted every step from Birney’s door to my own, and I felt a strange release from the compulsion to do so. I’d finally done it, counted off a million steps and then some, and suddenly I felt OK. Like I knew my way. I even became so bold as to trace different paths home along varying streets, zig-zagging through every permutation of routes, looking for a shorter way home. Although I finally felt confident in my bearings, I’d obviously failed to understand the linear nature of the distances, which could not be shortened except by cutting a straight line through people’s yards and houses along a hypotenuse effectively impossible to traverse.

I’m sure it’s equally obvious that I didn’t understand the nature of counting too well, either. I did just fine from 1 through 100, but failing to grasp the concept of orders of magnitude, I went on to counting by hundreds and then by thousands. So instead of 101, 102, 103, I counted off those steps as 100, 200, 300 and so on. The same with thousands; not 1001, 1002, 1003, but 1000, 2000, 3000, etc. Somehow I knew that I couldn’t count by hundreds of thousands though, so I counted off 101,000, 102,000, 103,000 etc. And so I reached a million in one thousand, three hundred and one easy steps, rolling my mental odometer over and solving the problem of my first steps toward independence. Life goes by a lot faster when you’re counting by orders of magnitude, until even crossing technically infinite distances becomes possible. Take that, Zeno!

But when you're covering a thousand strides in every step, you’re bound to miss a few things as well. I never saw Adrienne again. But when I got over being angry with her for disappearing into a world outside my fifteen block universe, I would think fondly of her and wish her well wherever she was. Because she provided me with something I hadn’t known I needed: a waystation along the path of the infinite journey home.

I wonder sometimes if I didn’t give her something she needed as well, in the form of someone to fuss over. Someone who didn’t feel sorry for her because he was too clueless to see that she needed help, too. Which, in the fussing itself, was all the help she ever needed from me. I like to think that today she’s a fashion designer, no doubt graciously shepherding a business and a family in the way they should go. Maybe somewhere in Montpellier.

These days life seems to go by faster and faster, but I’m starting to think that maybe I’ve never really understood time at all. I mean, I thought it was going fast at nine, when Luke and Laura took a week of my life for a single conversation in which he asked her to marry him, but immediately afterward a ten minute walk home seemed like eons of snow-globe time.

Math never really was my forté either, but thanks to my engineer Dad I maintained at least B’s all the way through Algebra II. Although there was one notable exception, Pre-Algebra, where I got a D, faltering in my first steps into an abstract world. I suppose it’s not that surprising from someone so clearly enamored of rigid paths through life.

Admittedly, the answers still come slowly when I’m multiplying by nine’s, but otherwise my counting skills have improved dramatically. Of course they had nowhere to go but up, but I take my victories wherever I can find them. I’ve since discovered that when you count your steps one at a time you start using a different kind of arithmetic anyway. The only kind that can teach you what really counts.