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.

Not My First Dance

A few years ago I was inundated with emails enthusiastically proclaiming the joy I would feel as I reconnected with old friends in the gala setting of my fiftieth high school reunion. I remained steadfastly unmoved to action. I never responded, not even to fill out the contact information form they included. I didn’t want to encourage communication. I had very carefully abstained from participation in any high school alumni activity for almost fifty years and wasn’t about to change at this late date.

There was a little tug, however, when I noticed that the girl who first captured my heart as we sat across from each other in the sixth grade was one of the organizers of the event. I remember her as being cute, athletic and what I would now call strong of character.

The Littering Vagrant

I’ve got my priorities straight. My priorities should be your priorities. What I think is important is what you should think is important, at least in the public arena. In the privacy of your own home, I guess, it is probably okay for you to watch the Macramé Channel instead of the NFL Network, which is what I watch. But out in the world where your actions affect others, most notably me, you ought to act exactly as I act. This truth, in the callowness of my youth, I held to be self-evident.

I now know that my priorities need not be, and probably aren’t, yours. Self-evidence is, I’ve learned, a shifting proposition.

Take, as an example, littering. I place a high priority in littering abstinence. Discarding unwanted items willy-nilly debases parks, beaches and the rural landscape, reduces the pleasure of walking city streets, creates more work for overburdened clean-up crews and is generally rude. (By the way, I’ve always wanted to use the term ‘willy-nilly’. Do you know the origin of that phrase? Well, it seems that in the olden days… Oh.... Perhaps we can discuss that later.)

I Don't Eat Lamb

Here's a story from my early childhood that either happened or didn't happen, depending on who you're talking with. In the Spring of my fifth year on Earth, I lived happily in a small house on the west side of Cleveland with my parents, an older brother, and at least one or two distant cousins, recent immigrants from Greece who occupied roughed-out bedrooms in our attic.

It came to pass in those days that I arrived home from kindergarten on one occasion and found, to my great joy, a baby lamb living in our basement, next to the old coal furnace.  My new pet greeted me with soulful eyes and munched on straw that I fed him.  My life, at that time, was a constant series of surprises so I didn't question the lamb's presence.  It was just a new fact of the world that I had encountered.  I sensed an unease, however, an undefined sense of impermanence, in my new pet which, since that was already my own constant state, I didn't find unusual.