Bi-Cultural in Cleveland

Like all of you, my ancestors arrived on the Mayflower.  We ate sweet potato pie and jellied cranberry sauce straight from the can with smiling and subservient red folk. We brought civilization from the East Coast westward to ever more barbarous lands until we reached San Francisco, which was, strangely, already here and already quite civilized.

Like almost all of you, I also came from somewhere else entirely.  In my case, my father immigrated from a small shtetl-like Greek village in the heart of Asia-minor; my mother’s family from Sparta, the only town in Greece to resist 400 years of Ottoman domination, primarily because it was so hard to get to and nothing grew there anyway.

Flat Track Bobsledding

When I was in high school, a friend of mine and I invented a wonderful new sport. As I look back on it, I’m shocked that it has not yet become an Olympic favorite. Although we never managed to name the sport, it could have been called ‘autobob’ or ‘flat track bobsledding’. It was a winter sport so I can imagine young American autobob athletes traveling to exotic ski resorts every four years to compete against the best flat track bobsledders in the world. Perhaps it’s not too late. Let me describe the sport to you.

During the winter in Cleveland, Ohio, home of the original flat track bobsled courses, the snow frequently lay heavy on the ground. When the roads became impassable, city trucks would plow the main roads and, if we were lucky, the residential streets. We’d wait for the trucks to come down side streets near our homes and push the snow to both sides of the roads, forming four foot high continuous embankments that sealed driveways, covered fireplugs and made the sidewalks disappear beneath the mounds of snow. Perfect autobob courses!

My First Two Crashes

I’m pretty sure that I had only two car crashes when I was in high school. I may be wrong about that. I remember these two because they involved girls. That was the memorable part.

The first crash occurred as I drove my mom’s little Anglia (an English Ford about the size of a VW Beetle) to a school picnic. A friend was riding shotgun and two girls were in the back seat. This wasn’t a double date or anything; we were just all going to the picnic. At least I don’t think it was a date, but one of the girls may have been putting a different spin on the situation.

First Day of School

It was the most important day of my young life and I was bursting with anticipatory energy. I was no longer a baby, no longer a toddler, no longer just a small, purposeless person. I was finally old enough to go to school! My mother was taking me enroll in kindergarten. I was very proud.

My mom helped me put on my new long pants (real long pants!) and shirt and my new shoes and socks. She combed my hair and made extra sure that I finished all my breakfast. It was very difficult for me to allow this lengthy preamble to the great activity of the day. I wanted to get my coat and hat on and begin the long journey around the corner to the school.

Scooters

We are a two scooter family. I ride a 1988 50cc Honda Elite; my wife a 1988 50cc Yamaha Jog. This pleasure can be traced to our wedding trip in 1996. We were staying in a little inn somewhere on the southwestern coast of Costa Rica, sharing our meals at the outdoor bar/restaurant with the monkeys that lived in the trees above the bar. We'd take a sort of taxi down to the beach and sit in the Marlin Bar, which, for some reason, we called 'Marilyn's'.

On one such taxi ride, I noticed a place that rented motor scooters. We stopped and rented one for a day, with me driving and Susan riding behind. Well, that arrangement lasted for a couple of hours before Susan wondered aloud why she didn't have her own scooter, even though she had never driven one. So, we parked at Marilyn's and I sat drinking coffee and watching Susan slowly pilot the scooter along the beach road, disappearing first around the bend heading back to the inn and then, on the way back, disappearing behind some trees that bordered a campground.

Fathers and Sons

Let me tell you a story about a man I know. I’ve known him all my life and am trying, day by day, to know him better. You may know someone like him.

About thirty years ago, his life blew up and left him in a state of quiet and relentless rage. He longed for a kind of oblivion, for respite from the tortures of his life. He gazed at the old men who bagged his groceries and marveled at their seeming happiness. His greatest aspiration was to enjoy the life of a bagger, free from responsibility other than to keep the eggs on top of the Miller High Life and the shopping carts lined up

A Simple Gift

When I was three or four years old, I’d spend hours each day sitting in a great rusting metal glider sofa on the screened-in front porch of our house in Cleveland.  I’d rock back and forth, listening to the squeak of the hinges and watching the light post across the street disappear and reappear from behind the frame of the screen. 

I was fascinated by the angles and shifting perspective of the window, the line of the downspouts of the house across the street, the older kids on their bicycles flashing by, the color of the road matching the roof shingles of the house next door, the mail slot remaining immobile, except for that one second when the mailman makes his drop, the low branches of the tree in our front yard moving in and out of sight as I rocked.  I touched each finger of my hand to my mouth as I rocked, running through the four fingers on the upswing and the same four fingers on the backswing.

Integrating the Balcony

In my first year of college, I had the ignoble task of working in the freshman dining hall, cleaning up after my classmates who weren’t on scholarships and didn’t have to do manual labor in order to afford college. It was a humbling experience. Some folks might insist that this work is ennobling rather than ignoble, enriching rather than humbling, but those folks weren’t there.

I spent twenty hours a week washing dishes. (We had this enormous dish washing machine, a conveyor belt that we’d load with dirty dishes at one end and remove clean dishes at the other in a continuous process.) Once the dishes were all re-stacked for the next meal, I and about five other guys would wipe down the tables, fill the salt and pepper shakers and straighten the chairs.

The saving grace of this work was that I met a classmate who became a life-long friend. He and I shared a compendium of knowledge of the great American songbook, classics by Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, George Gershwin, Harold Arlen, Jerome Kern and others. We could sing, and did sing, the classics as we remembered them from recordings by Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. The major difference between us was that whereas I couldn’t sing worth a damn, he was a classically trained pianist who could keep in key when we sang.

The Fight That Wasn't

I don't remember ever getting into a fight. Not on the playground as a kid, not in high school or college and, certainly, not later in my life. I think of myself as fairly athletic. I wrestled on my high school varsity team and was a noticeably aggressive (although fairly short) pick-up basketball and squash player until I got too old. I instigated and enjoyed free-for-all random mashups on the lawn in college and graduate school, with beer flowing and multi-student pileups designed to relieve stress. I enjoy physical activity even now, but I never fought. Not once.

An incident when I was in high school stands out in my memory and I really don't know what to make of it. It seems now to be one of those defining moments, but I have no clue about how it defines me. If I think about it too much, I'm not sure I like what it helps me understand about myself.

The Fountain Pen Event

Fountain pens have been a source of anguish for me as they have been, I suspect, for you. I don’t know anyone who actually likes fountain pens. (That’s not true. I know a guy who collects the damn things but I always hoped it was just to get them off the street and out of the hands of gangbangers and other miscreants.)

A fountain pen, of course, is an old fashioned hybrid between a quill and a Bic. Instead of dipping your quill in a bottle of ink before splattering the ink on parchment, you’d syringe ink into a leaky bladder inside the pen before splotching it as you wrote on vellum paper. Now, of course, the ink is already inside the Bic, where it remains until it leaks into your shirt pocket.