(like my dad--the dude in the blue visor) and my kid (the schmoopie next to him in orange shirts) with 5,000 of your neighbors may sound kinda kooky but it's been a tradition in my family for 27 years. We have not missed one Turkey Trot in almost three decades. The GITB and I did the one-mile mosey. But it still means I get extra pie. 'Cause, hey, I walked a mile this morning, dammit.
I graduated from high school in 1979. Nineteen-seventy-fucking-nine, people and I still can't get away from it.A girl I knew in high school died of breast cancer about a month ago and it felt like the right thing for me to do to attend her memorial. I didn't really know her as an adult, but as a teenager, Sarah was a super cool chick, very much into jazz and organic peanut butter and foot massages and just being whoever and whatever you felt like being back in high school and I really can't imagine that as an adult she changed all that much. She was a genuine free spirit and didn't give a damn what people thought.
Some people thought she was a weirdo back then and some folks still do, I suppose. I was at the community theatre the other night and as I casually shot the breeze with one of our musicians before the show I asked him if he knew Sarah and he said "Yeah. She was a strange woman. A great musician but a strange chick." I didn't feel the need to argue with him about it because his reality is his and mine is mine and whatever. Sarah was her own person and she was not like most people so it doesn't offend me that someone would think of her or refer to her as strange. She probably would have found it funny.
Sarah graduated a year ahead of me and we were never close but I always liked her. I heard when she finished undergrad she decided against med school even though she got accepted and instead spent a few years travelling around the world making a living as a street performer. We did not stay in touch after high school and went our own ways as we all do but I've always thought of her with fondness on the rare occasions that I do think about those days. When I read in the newspaper about a year ago that she was battling breast cancer and some area musicians were holding a benefit concert to help her with medical expenses it made me really sad. I decided to send a check but I never got around to it. She was always warm and I remember her kindness to me at a particularly dark time in my life when I was incapable of being kind to myself. So I wanted to acknowledge that in some small way which is why I decided to go to her funeral. I felt like Sarah would know I stopped by to say thanks and I liked the idea of that.
So I went to the memorial which was a rocking music-filled celebration that Sarah had planned at a Presbyterian church in the old neighborhood. I was surprised to learn during the service that Sarah had become an elder in the church in recent years. I sat in the back row of the sanctuary, and as the church filled up before the service started, the guy seated next to me greeted a lot of people who walked by us as they made their way to pews up front. He seemed to know a lot of people who looked vaguely familiar to me. Some I recognized but others had faces that I knew I knew some 30 years ago but could not now attach names to. It was a very odd feeling. I also noticed that the guy turned and smiled warmly at me several times but I shrugged it off--he probably figured I was there alone and he was being nice. Then midway through the service it dawned on me who he was. I sort of leaned a little toward him, looking straight ahead and said "John?" and he whispered back "Ell?". John and Sarah and I had all been band geeks. I remember him most for his Prince Valiant hair and the way his ears stuck out like handles on a trophy. He played the trombone in high school and dated a girl named Claudette who had a wicked unibrow but a rocking body. John is married now, has two kids and is a firefighter. He'd printed a bunch of photos from a trip the marching band had taken in 1977 and brought them with him. He wordlessly handed me the envelope and I browsed through them. It seemed like yesterday. And it seemed like someone else's life a million or so years ago.
After the service John and I hung out, I chatted casually with a few more acquaintances from high school and John and I exchanged e-mail addresses and I left. I'm glad I went.
But I had the distinct feeling that a few of my high school acquaintances were no less thrilled to see me than I was to see them. That reality came to me with some discomfort--resigned discomfort but a queasiness nonetheless. Teenagers can be such fucking assholes and I certainly was no exception. John seemed thrilled to renew our acquaintance (I guess I was never a bitch to him, I don't know, I really don't remember a lot about high school and a lot of what I do recall with clarity I really wish I didn't). I was no angel as a teenager but I wasn't evil. At least I don't think so. But I may have been. I think some people who are assholes as young people either get their shit together and finish the job of raising themselves into adulthood and become decent grown-ups and others just remain assholes. I am definitely the former. I have gotten my shit together and I am a decent human being now but there was a time many moons ago when it could have gone either way. Knowing that I have been granted a longer life than Sarah, who so deserved it more, humbles me and makes me want even more fervently to be as decent and kind and productive of a human being as I can possibly be.
Which brings me to my last story. Remember the show I mentioned? It was a god-awful musical that was miscast and badly directed and badly sung by most of the cast but it did have it's brilliant and moving moments and the audiences loved it.
One of the girls in the cast approached me last Sunday--the final performance of a three-week run that felt like an eternity in hell's coffee bar--and asked me if I had gone to ____ high school. I said that, yes, I had. She said "My mom wanted to know because she recognized you by your bio in the program." Which is flabbergasting to me because there is really no identifying info about me in my theatrical bio that could in any way connect me to the high school I attended. It was weird. Her mom must have recognized my headshot in the marquee in the lobby and because I really pretty much do look like I did in high school (my ass not included), that must have been it. But this woman would have eaten broken glass before she admitted it. And I had seen her in the lobby on opening night and had recognized her but chose to keep walking because she was a total bitch to me in high school so why the hell would I want to chat her up now, you know?
So what I wanted to say at that moment was "Tell your mom to kiss my ass." But I didn't. I said, "Oh! Wow! Small world! How is she?" even though I don't give a rat's ass how she is. The only thing the daughter could come up with was "Well, she's divorced and she's kind of unemployed right now." I stood there looking at this girl thinking that she looked very much like her mom which isn't a compliment, and it didn't make me feel good. It made me feel like I need to work harder on being kind.
I have a notation on my to-do list that reads "Donation to charity in Sarah's name." I need to do that first thing tomorrow.
we are two months into the annual hurricane season with nary a tropical storm or even significant rains lately. Which makes me nervous. The last real ass-kicker of a hurricane we had close to home was Elena in 1985 and that was bad. The worst ones seem to kick up around Labor Day so I'm wondering if the unusually quiet summer storm season is more of the proverbial foreboding calm before a major ass-kicking from mother nature. I hope not.
On other fronts, Schmoopie is preparing to enter her freshman year of high school. I am stunned that she will be a HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT in a week and more depressing--that the time we have with her here at home with us is winding down. In four years she'll be gone. Argh.
Did I mention that the small, familial mom and pop operation I've worked for for 5 years was recently purchased by an entrepreneur from Seattle? It's been painful. It's been entertaining. I fear we will not exist a year from today. I hope I am wrong. But I don't think I am.
This is my Uncle Pete. He owns a small family restaurant in the downtown district of a rust-belt city. The restaurant smells exactly the same as it did when I was a kid, and my first sharp memory of being in Uncle Pete's restaurant is Christmas, 1966. My Dad had just returned from his first 12-month tour in Vietnam and we drove all night to spend the holidays not with family we are related to by DNA but the family we are related to by memory and affection, loss and shared history.
Uncle Pete isn't my genetic uncle (actually, he is my Godfather, I have the fading black and white pictures of him holding me in his meaty paw like a football on my christening day to prove it). Uncle Pete and my Dad met in basic training before they shipped off to Korea in 1956. They formed the core of a tight posse of Rangers who hung together through something harrowing enough to bond them for low these 50 years (but of which they have never spoken outside of their circle), made it back to the U.S., some stayed in and some rotated out (my Dad went back and finished college and OCS and re-upped as an officer and did another tour in Vietnam and later, Thailand and Cambodia).
Pete went back to his big fat Greek family in the northeast but he and Dad and their gang remain tight, through marriages, kids, divorces, the loss of two of their buddies in Southeast Asia (the only two times I have ever seen my father cry), illness and now, the assault of age.
Uncle Pete has always been like a second Dad to me. He's the kind of guy I can call at 3 a.m. and tell him I need $5,000 no questions asked and he's there. He wears Aqua Velva and always carries a little black comb in his back pocket. He goes to mass every Sunday and calls women "broads" and he cried when Roy Orbison died. They don't make guys like my Uncle Pete anymore. Happy Birthday Uncle Pete and congrats on the new heart valves. May your heart beat a gazillion more times.
