The Little Boy

This is a story about a little boy.  Like all children, he was magic.  The stars spoke to him through his window.  His feelings were color.  His father was a bright, intensive yellow, like the sun.  His home was a cool blue.  Every time he left his room the world was new.

There was a giant weeping willow tree in the large yard of the rich people who lived at the corner of his street.  Every day as the little boy passed the tree on his way to school or to the schoolyard to play, he stopped for a moment beneath its drooping branches which almost touched the ground.  Going under, he was the son of his parents.  He emerged with new attributes and eyes, as a fearless warrior or a dreamer within a dream.

Blue Suit in Boston

This is a story about being invisible, or about being so completely visible that no one can see you, like a lamp post at noon. Or, perhaps it’s a story about a blue suit or about rock and roll. But I doubt it.

Many years ago, I was in Boston on a business trip. I took a cab to my hotel after an afternoon meeting and was interested to see a great many young adults and elderly teens walking quickly in the same direction. They all seemed to be part of a counter-culture, non-conformist crowd since they wore indistinguishable jeans, shirts and hair styles.

The doorman at the hotel told me that they all were heading to a free rock concert that was about to start in an outdoor amphitheater just a few blocks away. So I followed the crowd, even though I was wearing attire that was completely conformist, which meant that it was strikingly unlike what everyone else wore.

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.