CONTINUED: First Gig

First Gig

Damn!  Damn!  Damn!  I mashed my finger!  Who’d have thought pushing the old piano out from the music room to the back of the stage was dangerous, for crying out loud.  When Hank and I went around the corner, he didn't stop pushing when I told him to stop.  I have to find a Band-Aid.  I've got blood on my clean white shirt cuff.  I'll be the only guy in the band with my sleeves rolled up.

And  like I was telling Hank, I don't know how the hell we're supposed to look like a rock and roll band if we're wearing Perry Como sweaters.  And Mike certainly needs to look older.  We’re all 15 and sixteen, but he looks like he’s 12 in that sweater. 

Earlier today the five of us piled into Jimmy's mother’s brand new ’58 Chevy  and drove out to the new shopping center ... the one they built on our old ball field, for crap's sake ... to buy outfits for our first gig tonight.  We all have black chinos, so we needed some kind of shirt and jacket.  But Mike talked us into this sleeveless sweater thing that has only a couple of buttons on the front at the bottom.    And white shirts.  No tie, thank goodness. But to be funny I suggested we get bow ties.  If  the crowd didn't like our rock and roll music, we could switch to Barbershop.

I know what Mike was thinking about ... girls.  I wanted us to buy the orange colored jackets.  But it's too warm to wear coats in school this time of year.  The Principal wouldn't let us wear 'em anyway, but Mike probably figured we could wear the red sweaters and impress the girls.  They would ask, "Hey, why are you guys all dressed alike?"  And we'd have to answer, "Got an early gig tonight.  Hittin' the highway right after school."  In other words, "Aren't you impressed?"

The girl I'm dating, Mary Ellen, doesn't believe I'm a rock and roll musician.  She says I'm just a teenager.  Well, so are Dionne and Fabian, I tell her.  "They've got talent," she says.  But she hasn't heard me sing For Your Love yet.   If she comes to the dance tonight, she'll change her mind when she hears my terrific rendition of the song.

To tell the truth, I don't feel like a rocker.  I don't have much of a beard yet and I don't play the piano all that well.  And the DJ who hired us for tonight doesn't like me.  He goes by the name of Mr. Personality on the radio.  He heard me call him Mr. Puke under my breath when we met him last month and he told me to get a haircut.  I suppose I should be grateful he asked us to come along to the dance and play a few songs, especially since no one has hired us yet. 

Hopefully, this gig will get us some attention and we'll get better paying jobs every weekend. We can save the money for more professional outfits, like those orange tuxedos, or the blue plaid dinner jackets worn by bands like Red Rovero and the Rockin' Pneumonias.  Jimmy doesn't like the orange tuxes and says we'll be mistaken for a baseball team from Florida   But I'd feel more like a real musician in a tux with a gold cummerbund.

We’re setting up the drums and amplifiers behind the curtain on the stage of the school auditorium and we're laughing nervously as we get closer to that dreaded moment when Mr. Puke will announce us.  I've got  butterflies leaping around in my stomach and I am not feeling like a lead singer at this moment. I'll admit it: I'm just a 15 year old kid who plays mediocre piano and has trouble singing high notes.  I can't remember why I agreed to sing to an audience of kids who know me and will probably laugh their asses off.

I listen to the DJ out in front of the curtain and am amazed how friendly his voice sounds.  He's a bully, but does a good job covering it up.  He orders  us around like he owns us.  We thought we were invited to be a major part of the show.  I'll bet he opens the curtain for us to play and then closes it after one song.  The last time he came back while a record was spinning he began to tell us how to play our music and threatened to not let us go on. Screw him.

I hear another record begin and Mr. Puke comes behind the curtain again.  I wish he'd just stay out front and do his job and leave us alone.

"You guys ready?" he asks

"Get ready to hear the next national sound sensation ... The Bel Airs!"  shouts Jimmy. 

Thank God for Jimmy's bullshit.  He lives life pushing against the wind.  Jimmy will go chest to  chest with anyone who stands in his way.  If he hadn't talked me into this … well, I'd be sitting  home with Gunsmoke playing on the TV, I guess.  Being a rock and roll musician has gotta  be more fun than watching Marshall Dillon look down the front of that old broad’s dress.  Kitty’s got more spots on her face than a Dalmation..  

I'll be OK if I don't sing off key or forget the chords and riffs I practiced on the piano over and over  all week.  I hope I get the feeling back in my finger and the Band-Aid doesn't get in the way.

I don't play the piano when I sing  For Your Love.   I'll be up in front singing into the mike.

Between records I can hear the crowd getting larger as more teenagers arrive at the dance.  I take deep breaths to keep my hands from shaking. 

"Davey, give me a B flat," says Lowell, our sax, wanting to get us tuned up together.

I tap the key on the old piano and a searing pain shoots up my finger.  It's not getting any better.

"That's not a B flat," says Lowell.

"Lowell," I say, "I'm on the brink of becoming an international rock and roll star, and I would never forget where the B Flats are on the keyboard."

"Then we're in trouble," says Lowell.

It's me who's in trouble, not the rest of the band.  Mike has his little blow-through guitar tuner and we quickly conclude the piano is about a mile and a half away from standard scale.  The songs I play in E will tonight have to be in A-flat.  A-flat?  Who the hell can play a piano in A-flat?  I can transpose quickly enough, but the riffs and runs I've practiced all week are out the window. Holy Crap!  A-freaking-flat!

"You're on at the end of this record." shouts Mr. Puke as  his head pops through the curtain.  We all glance at each other as if we've just been found guilty of a major crime.

"Dave," Mr. Puke calls to me, "when I announce you guys, pull the rope and open the curtain.  Then come out and join the band."

 What the hell!  We planned to start playing as the curtain opened.  I'll be running on stage after they start our first song, a Duane Eddy instrumental called Raunchy.  I'll look like hired help or a fill-in who isn't really part of the band.

Jimmy steps toward the DJ and says, "We're changing our first song. We'll let Dave do  For Your Love first. 

"I think the Duane Eddy is a better opening," says Mr. Puke.

"Nope," says Jimmy, "For Your Love's  got a long intro and that'll give Dave time to get out here to the mike."

Mr. Puke rolls his eyes and his face disappears back through the curtain.

"Are you kidding?" I say.  "I'm gonna pull on the freaking curtain ropes, then run on stage and start singing?"
"We'll do a big build up to give you time," says Jimmy.  "While you're coming on stage, I'll introduce you.  "And now, directly from the Men's Room at the Waldorf Astoria ... Deadly Dave!"  He breaks up laughing.

Buddy Holly's "Oh Boy" ends and we all look at each other like we're about to be shot.  I turn and run to the side of the stage and pull on the curtain rope.  Jimmy plays two chords from Raunchy, realizes his error, and not too smoothly slides over to the opening chords of  For Your Love.  I keep pulling down on the rope and the curtain slowly separates.  My hands are so sweaty they slip.  I imagine the kids down on the floor watching the curtain open in spurts, stopping and starting, as if the stage isn't sure it wants to be part of this disaster.

The curtains are only halfway apart when the music stops and Jimmy speaks into the mike.  He glances over his shoulder at me. Then he waves "c'mon" and launches into an impromptu monologue.

"Our piano player has arrived from his hospital bed," he says. "But he insisted on singing that fabulous hit song, "For Your Love," in honor of the pack of elves he killed when he came around a turn too fast on the Frankfort Gorge road in his father's Buick and swept them all into the creek and drowned a dozen of them."

No one is laughing. The kids might believe him.

I let go of the rope when the curtain is most of the way open and take off for the front of the stage.  The band laughs wildly, but the kids in the audience sense something is going wrong and have that deer-in-the-headlights look on their faces.

Rounding the Hi Hat cymbals, I jump over the cables and reach the front of the stage terrifically out of breath, hardly prepared to sing my first song in public.  Jimmy gives me the chord.  I grab the mike-stand and pull it toward me.   The worst feedback I ever heard in my life erupts from the speakers, squealing like a pig with distemper.  Jimmy and I back away from each other and I begin to sing.

The key … whatever the hell key we settled on using Mike's guitar tuner … is a little too high for my voice.   I don't think I can hit the high notes when I get there. 

A few couples down on the floor attempt to dance, but since the audience is mostly junior high kids, many stand around in groups whispering,  girls looking over at the boys.  I hit the first high note square and with volume, then drop down two notes to huff out a low note, just like Brook Benton, just like I practiced it at home in the bathroom while  my younger brother lurked outside the door and answered with animal sounds,  laughing at my efforts.  I long for the old days when I punched him and he stayed punched.  One good one on his shoulder and he'd run and hide under his bed.  But now he's bigger and he hits back.

When I push out the second high note, a girl screams.   She is probably testing out her vocal chords to get them greased up for a future of teenage rock concerts.  Or maybe she spotted a rat running across the floor. 

Or ... damn!  Maybe she smells smoke and the school is on fire!  I can't sniff the air as I sing "more foolish I grow,” but I wonder if the band has to stay until everyone gets out of the burning building, like the orchestra on the Titanic.  I don't think I want to remain behind while the other kids escape the fire.  Do I need to?  After all, I'm not really a professional musician.  I haven't even joined the union yet.

More girls scream.  For me, I guess, but they're twelve years old and I feel completely silly. 

I don't see Mary Ellen and I hope she hasn't taken this opportunity to go to the girls' room with half of her classmates.  I’ll never understand why girls go to the bathroom in packs.  It seems odd the entire group of young women are all on the same fluids regimen and bathroom schedule.  They must start synchronizing themselves in the afternoon before the dance, calling each other up on the phone and announcing, "OK, we're all going to try to go potty at 4 o'clock, and only one glass of water with supper."

Oh, here she is!  Shoot!  She missed the parts of the song I do best.

For Your Love is  soon over, but not before we do the tune's hallmark ending where the accompaniment stops and the singer croons a final "For-or-or-or-or ... Your-or-or-or-or  … Luh-uv.  I can never get the ending right.  Sometimes I put in an extra "or"  and this throws the rest of the band off.  Instead of one final crash of all the instruments on the last note, when I get the number of syllables wrong the drums and rhythm guitar and sax dribble in separately like weary travelers.  This time I count the beats on my fingers and get it right.  But there's a pause after "For-or-or-or" while I breathe before “Your Love."  As I inhale, Jimmy loudly hiccups.  Hank and Mike and Lowell laugh and I stand there looking stupid.

The audience applauds anyway, maybe  enthusiastically.  The young girls are still screaming, but now their classmates tell them to shut up. 

Hey!  I feel pretty good about my performance.  In no time I’ll be sharing the stage with Frankie Avalon.  I might get asked by Dion to join the Belmonts as a backup singer!

Back to the piano for the rest of our set, I still can't figure out what key everyone is in, so I lightly tap on the keys and smile without playing a single note.  Hank says I'm at my best when I fake it and no sound comes out of the piano.

When someone … I don't know who … closes the curtain, we all whoop and slap each other on the back.  Mr. Personality says to us,  "That was terrific!  I mean the introduction of Deadly Dave. And the hiccup!   Jimmy, you were born for the stage!"

He never mentions my singing.  I got upstaged by a hiccup.

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29576

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CONTINUED: Nowhere

Well, to begin with, Pine Nut Circle, our new neighborhood, might be styled country living in the whimsical brochure, but it more closely resembled camping.  If you fired a rocket from the middle of the housing development to any point on the compass, the payload would come down somewhere in the vast countryside populated only by cows and people who made their living raising them.  On our first visit, I saw only one car on the narrow lane during the last mile or two of the trip.  After what took forever, Dad pulled the Ford off into the grass and came to a stop, cheerily calling, “We’re here.”  Out the window we could see a handful of half built houses in a hay field.  Mechanical monsters hissed and groaned down a muddy path Buzzy had named  “Monticello Avenue,”  Mounds of dirt and mud were being heaved  up as if in readiness for a replay of  trench warfare.

Grandma crawled out of the back seat, looked around and began to mumble to herself.  She would later describe the scene to her cousin Mabel as “what it must be like living on the face of the moon … in February."

Everyone was excited about the move but me and Grandma.   I liked my neighborhood and enjoyed walking to school in the morning, sitting in my miniscule garden in the spring and enjoying all the conveniences of living in the Cornhill section of the city.  Plus, I’d miss the little girl in my class at Blessed Sacrament School who sat in the fourth desk back in the third row.    At age nine, I could depend only on my feelings to tell me this move would come to no good, but I also had Grandma’s opinion to go by.  And for all her peculiarities, when it came to disasters, most of the time the old woman called the ball in the right pocket.

Life on Pine Nut Circle turned out to be very different from city living.  For one thing, no public transportation ever came out our way.  And there was no mail delivery.  Letters and packages could be picked up only at the Post Office in the village before the 5:00 p.m. closing time.  Dad didn’t get out of work in Utica until after five, so we got our mail only when we could pick it up on Saturday, a full week’s worth.  I remember the extra wait for a secret decoder ring to arrive.  It wrote underwater and I mailed away for it using the coupon cut from the back of a corn flakes box. 

The promised garbage removal never materialized, either, and instead the men in the neighborhood all met together on Saturday morning to pick up everyone’s refuse, drink beer, haul the garbage to the dump in someone’s open trailer, drink more beer, come home acting silly and take naps.  The womenfolk turned surly by Saturday evening. 

As autumn came upon us, it was apparent the little furnace was too small for the little house.  It was a high efficiency unit, we were told, and you couldn’t get warm standing near it like the old octopus coal furnace back in Utica. Turns out you also couldn’t get warm cranking the thermostat up to a hundred.  I didn’t mind sitting around on cold evenings wearing two sweaters while watching television, but to read a book I had to take my hands out of my pockets and wear gloves.  Had we been back in the city with a broken furnace, we would have found excuses to visit neighbors or relatives and take advantage of the free heat.  But on Pine Nut Circle, a warm room wouldn’t occur again until July.

Dad took us out to the movies a few times to get warm, but funds were scarce and he couldn’t keep that up.  Besides, Grandma was always a problem at the theater.  She would sit tsk’ing or crying or laughing uproariously when she thought something was funny that no one else in the theater found amusing.  An entire platoon of U.S. Marines being wiped out at Guadalcanal would somehow tickle her funny bone when the sergeant barked out an order with a southern accent.

We were all sorry she went with us to see the movie "Destination Moon." Very impressionable, the old woman believed just about everything she saw on the silver screen. All the way home after the movie, she could be heard in the back seat muttering, "How could they just leave him behind there on the moon? There's nothing to eat!"  And after she saw “The Sands of Iwo Jima” she had wanted to buy War Bonds, even though it was six years after the war ended.

Once winter set in on our windswept prairie … the last week in September … life took on the flavor of a snow-bound military base, just like the one in the 1950’s classic film Ice Station Zebra.  Trying to scare my 4 year old little brother, my main form of amusement at the time, I told him to never walk near the edge of the ice pack or he’d be lost forever in the Arctic Sea.  When he refused to go outside the next morning and told my mother why, I was labeled a troublemaker and would have been sent to my room, but I didn’t have one.  I shared a bedroom with my older brother and he’d just negotiated an hour for himself in there to play his Les Paul and Don Cornell records on the small phonograph we shared.

In the village, my brothers and I marched into a large brick school building and found the principal’s office.  Ordered to wait and sit on polished wooden chairs in our winter coats near a radiator, the stifling office felt like an oven.  I saw myself as one of those two guys in the Bible who was put into the furnace by a nasty King.  They survived by some miracle.  I wondered if I would.  It was the first time in my memory I had been forced to go somewhere I did not want to go.  I was lost and anxious.  I had begun to have trouble falling asleep at night. Through the transom over the door, I heard the principal’s gruff voice bark out an order to someone and I was ready to run out of the office and back down the stairs and out into the street.  Maybe I could find the Police Department and tell them I was lost and they’d take me home. Just then we were called into the office.  We found The Principal wearing a three piece suit that had evidently been serving him well since before the war.  He seemed about as interested in our arrival as he might have been had a toboggan salesman dropped by. 

We were about to have a personal encounter with the unholy, the profane world of non-Catholics known as Public Schools.  Attendance at this institution mounted a terrific assault on my long held philosophy that a basic goodness pervaded the world and the people in it. Life as a sheltered Catholic boy was coming to an end.. 

My school mates swore in public and told dirty jokes within 5 miles of the school grounds.  They were disrespectful to the teachers.  Had they tried any of their antics on the nuns back home at Blessed Sacrament, they would have landed in an orthopedic ward.  Many of my new mates didn’t even care about their schoolwork, nor how well they did on tests and quizzes.  When I explained to a classmate that the “J.M.J” I had written at the top of my test paper stood for Jesus, Mary and Joseph and invoked their blessing on my work, she looked at me as though I was a member of a cult.  Now that I think of it, the Irish schoolboy version of American Catholicism in the 1950’s was nothing if not a cult.

Back at Ice Station Zebra, isolation continued to flank us.  Once Dad left for work each morning in the family car, we were all marooned for the next 9 hours if school wasn’t in session.  On school days, which began to feel like holidays, the arrival of the school bus in the morning was greeted like a long awaited Coast Guard cutter steaming up to rescue  drowning sailors.  Housewives and live-in grandmothers bribed the bus driver to take them into town along with the kids.  But I hated that damned bus, so full of raucous children that it gave me a headache.

Halfway through the winter, Dad was becoming disenchanted with our new home on a frozen slab of concrete, ten miles from Utica and seemingly not too far south of Iceland.  The tiny ranch house was indeed small, and didn’t easily accommodate 3 adults and 3 growing boys.   Outside among the still heaped up mounds of dirt, most of the folks living around the circle seemed strange and secretive.  Grandma had begun to keep a list of suspicious neighbors for Senator McCarthy, who she wrote to monthly.

Myself, I missed Italians.  They had constituted half the population of the neighborhood we had forsaken in Utica.  For some reason, they were not well represented out here on the tundra.  Oh, for those golden warm days on Cornhill, with the smell of tomato sauce cooking,  black olives on a plate spattered with oil, vino flowing across festive tables at the Villa Restaurant on Leah St and down on Taylor Avenue at Audette’s Ristorante. Lovers sang O Sole Mio and Italian smiles lived on the faces of everyone, no matter what their nationality.  Just to see the vegetable man sleeping in his horse drawn wagon or the rag man singing his way up from Eagle St.  Or to hear Mrs. Nicotera lean out from her house and scream at her 7 children playing in the street, finally sighing aloud, “Ooo fah!” and slamming down the window. I couldn’t imagine that Tuscany was any better.

But I put on a happy face and braved the rigors of a future on the ice.  At least we had new surroundings to explore.   On weekends, all the neighborhood kids would walk up the road searching for igloos and polar bears.

My baby brother wound up sharing the tiny room with my grandmother.  He always said he was glad he was too young to remember bunking in with his first roommate.  My father’s  commute to work in the morning was bothersome, too.  He worried about the car not starting, and if it did, he worried about the coming winter and snow covered roads.  My mother missed running down to the corner for a loaf of bread.  And she found annoying having to count the number of telephone rings which would tell us if the call was for us or one of 12 other neighbors.  She’d lose track after five or six rings, and we were number eleven.  Heat had to be delivered in the form of fuel oil.  Once it didn’t arrive on time and Dad had to drain all the plumbing for the night and drive us through a snow storm over to our Aunt Toot’s house.  But especially grievous to my father was that we boys couldn’t go to a Catholic school, something he felt was his solemn obligation to provide for us, and something I needed for my feeling of well being.

All of this soon proved too much for Dad’s limited sense of adventure.  He stopped by the Pine Nut Builder’s office on a Saturday morning and gave back the house.  We  had to be out by the end of December.  My mother wanted to be settled somewhere by Christmas.  We moved on Christmas Eve, landing in West Utica, a mile’s walk to O.L.O.L

Even though the billboard on Whitesboro Street proclaiming “Welcome To Utica” was plainly visible as we snuck back into the city on the day before Christmas, I would have been forgiven for entertaining the possibility that we had landed in Post War Europe or a Polish Immigration Roundup.  Behind Faxton Hospital, as the terrain ran downhill toward Lincoln Avenue, the only neighbors who spoke English did so with difficulty.  We had dropped down into a demilitarized zone between the mostly Irish parish of Our Lady of Lourdes and the White Eagle environs of the Polish Holy Trinity Church.  Because we were technically in Holy Trinity territory, and because Dad was a stickler for following the rules, he set out to apply for our admission to the Holy Trinity Parish School.  But when he could find no nun with a good command of the English language … so he said … he high-tailed it up to Lourdes and begged sanctuary for his sons.  O.L.O.L quickly took us in and happily accepted Dad’s tuition check.

My feelings upon arriving at the school on Barton Ave. wouldn’t have been much different than those of the Pope coming home to the Vatican .  The building was constructed in the architectural style of  a 12^th century castle and fortress that Ivanhoe would have been proud to own, and I’m sure he would have sworn allegiance to Rome on the spot had he been offered the keys.  The hallways were darkened in monastic reverence and the entire building smelled of sacred candles.  Statues of the saints, wall mounted crucifixes with palm branches affixed all brought back peace in my soul.  All the kids were in school uniforms and the nuns softly padded the halls in their medieval regalia.  God was in his heaven as the sun shone bright (figuratively) and everything was Roman Catholic all over the place. 

At Lourdes, I quickly became lost in an ocean of children.  Fourth grade teacher Sister Clementia managed 56 children in a classroom built for 26.  That’s not a typo; fruitful Catholic parents,  heeding their Church, were hard at it procreating in those years and the schools were bursting at the seams.  Mothers were worn out and fathers worried about  money, but the Bishops were evidently happy.

Up until I lost it years ago, I had a photo of our fourth grade class, Sister Clementia sitting up front near the camera and myself way back on the horizon of the fifth row, my finger just coming out of my nose.   The nun looks pensive as she sits there under a huge Flying Nun hat called the  Cornet, dressed as a typical nun of the time in floor length garb that might have been considered a cute little outfit in 15^th Century France.  She may be wondering if a jungle outpost in Borneo would be more to her liking than bronco-busting tens of boys and girls each day.

I think the photo may have been taken on a Tuesday, and if it was the third Tuesday morning of the month, Father Fudzniak, who absolutely hated children and cared even less for nuns, was probably then walking from the rectory over to the school to preach at us.  Without asking, Father always chose his topic with no regard to what we were studying in our Religion lessons.  He might lecture us nine year olds on the evils of birth control or he might summarize the major points of the Third Lateran Council, which took place about two hundred years before Sister Clementia's clothes were designed.  Father Fuddy was an overly serious man, having lost his sense of humor in the war while assigned to an outpost in Borneo.

Still, I was relieved to be back in a more militarily crisp environment where the order of the day was set by the nuns rather than the ping-pong precepts of modern child psychology.  Little man that I was, I appreciated someone being in control.  Whatever weapons were used …. rulers or blackboard pointers or “the back of me hand”…..  it didn’t matter to me.  What did matter was a predictable environment I could enjoy for six hours each weekday.

At lunch time, we were all sent to the basement to eat, a symbolism that was not lost on me.  Students up through the fourth grade ate in a low ceiling room filled with small tables seating eight, with tiny little chairs that were too small for the smallest of us.  Light streamed in the high cellar windows and outside I could see telephone wires that I pretended was the barbed wire fence I’d seen in the prison camp movie, “Stalag 17.”   Swaggering forth like a young William Holden, I approached the black attired SS prison guard (Sister Mary Gertrude) and asked if I could join my fellow prisoners outside on the stalag’s parade ground.  She grabbed the brim of my hat and pulled it down over my eyes, then spun me around twice and pointed me toward the door, just like Pin The Tail On The Donkey.  Staggering forward like I had been on rice-only rations for six weeks, I proceeded out through the sally port.  Sister Trudy would have had a good time in the Hitler Youth when she was a kid, I imagined.

I climbed the stairs from the basement and stepped out into the damp frigid air, letting my ears delight in the sound of traffic passing on Genesee St.   My young soul had now been saved from the remote desolateness of a small town.  Lourdes School and its environs were to me much preferred over the eerie frozen quietness of that other village. Here there was slush and cars caked in road salt.  Even in winter puddles sometimes formed when the temperature peeked just above thirty two degrees.  Fog abounded most days, thrilling the heart of this winterized boy.  Everything was grey and wet, damp and cold.  But not frozen solid and below zero, thanks be to God.  Most days were pleasantly balmy in the low twenties.  By the time we returned, winter’s end was in the air with the temps headed toward thirty.  I didn’t need a thermometer; spring beckoned with the smell of melting dog poops as they began to warm up underneath the snow.

Now returned safely to my hometown, I’d had a long trip to nowhere, a scary detour on my journey upward.  As I walked the mile home after school, slogging through slush covered sidewalks, I could not but thank all the saints in heaven that I no longer had to ride a school bus home across the tundra and put up with all those noisy and profane children.  I could walk home by myself, and when I arrived, feet and gloves and seat of my britches wet with the slop of winter in the city, I would head for the cellar and change into dry clothing while standing before the immense roaring octopus coal furnace, the winter god of my childhood.  It was good to be home.

copyright 2010 by David Griffin

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Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

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CONTINUED: Forever

I think my son and I have a similar relationship, although we’re probably more sensitive to each other and we’ve enjoyed days working closely together on projects around his house or mine.  But we’re individuals following our own paths.  I stood next to him at a time of unimaginable loss, unable to do anything to help him. His life was his to live, and no amount of fatherly compassion or caring could change that.

My daughter, too, has her own life, and now a family.  Though she bristles at hearing it, I like to joke that she’s now owned by another man.  I remember sitting in an ER waiting room, hoping to hear good test results on the afternoon they rushed her to the hospital.  She was in the capable hands of doctors and a professional staff at a regional medical center.  She was safe and I knew her husband would later care for her and wait on her when they returned home.  Luckily, the emergency was not too serious and she was soon home feeling relatively comfortable. 

My son-in-law’s large family quickly mobilized and soon my daughter’s house was teeming with cooks and cleaners and babysitters and whatever else was needed while she recovered.  I told the oldest sister of the clan that I was also ready to help out with any and all chores.  The woman sort of looked over my shoulder, smiled wanly and was quiet.   She had no doubt assessed my capabilities.  So I guessed I wouldn’t be called to active duty very soon.  I’d be able to stand around looking patriarchal and not wear myself out.

In reality, there has never been much I could do for either of my children when they met tough times.  I’m not a doctor.  I’m not their spouse.  I’m an adequate babysitter, but I can’t cook anything more complicated  than  hot dogs.  I can’t even lift much anymore, but I remember throwing one or the other of them up on my shoulders years ago and carrying the little kid around the park all morning.   Just like I’ll carry them in my heart … forever.   I’m their father.

My children deserve all of me … my love, my prayers, and eventually … if there’s any left …  my money.  There probably won’t be much of it and  I haven’t always been terrific at providing either of  the first two.  But that doesn’t negate the perfectly reasonable claim they have on me.  And my heart.

I brought my daughter and her brother into this world … with the able assistance of my wife, of course …  and I will never stop being in some way responsible to them. 

When years ago I fell in love with the woman who would fill in the blanks of my life without insisting I change very much, I never thought about having children.  And yet, just as naturally as all of my ancestors, I became a father.  In my case, the father of two children who I can add to the short list of those who own my heart.  What a loss it would be for me to not love them as much as I can.  Forever.

David Griffin         copyright 2007/2016

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CONTINUED: Dream World

At a local trash dump when I was ten years old I frequently found used household objects that to me were treasures.  Visitors to the dump regularly pulled wonderful things from the trunks of their cars and threw them onto piles I would walk through on my way home from school in the late afternoon.  Broken mechanisms and industrial baubles sat there in all kinds of weather waiting to be rescued.  I never met a piece of trash I couldn’t imagine in some other use.

When I found a toilet seat on my wandering path through the piles one day, I separated the top lid and discarded the seat.  The oval shaped lid made an excellent shield, like a Knight of the Round Table might carry.  Later, searching for anything resembling a sword, I came across a piece of angle iron that was a few inches longer than my height.  It had no cross piece to serve as the hilt, but a scrap of wood and some stiff wire found elsewhere in the dump soon remedied that problem.   I now had an almost complete Knight's outfit, but I needed a handle on the toilet lid to hold it in front of me for protection against enemy arrows and lances.  No problem, I thought, a solution would eventually materialize from somewhere in this limitless sea of gadgets and trash that filled the dump. Meanwhile, in order to array myself in my new Knight's outfit, I tucked the lid under my left arm and wrapped my right arm around the angle iron under the hilt and dragged it along the ground, the tip bumping and scraping along behind me.  

As far as I was concerned, my toilet lid and angle iron were reasonable facsimiles of a sword and shield.  It’s always hard to explain the psychology of an imaginative mental improvisation.  Intellectually I knew my treasures were scrap iron and a toilet lid.  But I could bring my mind to temporarily see them as a sword and shield. I didn’t really believe it … I was not hallucinating … but I sort of believed it.  I had the ability to let a piece of trash act as a surrogate for the real thing, as long as its shape or color or surface texture realistically mimicked what I wanted.  If there was some similarity I could imagine almost anything I desired.

Growing older, I noticed this ability begin to markedly decrease, but so did the need to create my own universe.  Today I wonder if the dwindling of my "magic powers" was indeed progress. 

Without realizing it, as I advanced in years, I caught myself practicing the same kind of alchemy on people.  I don't necessarily mean I imagined a person to be who he was not, but on occasion I’d combine a friend into a mixture of his true self and  other traits I borrowed from elsewhere to paste onto his personality.

Imagining a person as slightly different is not always a bad thing, by the way.  For example, I once found it difficult to be outgoing and friendly at a job I held as a young man. I was just too young and too shy.  An older, wiser fellow insisted on treating me as if I were the friendliest person in the office.  He often told me I was an amicable companion and he mentioned my congeniality to others in my presence in a perfectly believable manner.  In a short time I began to believe him.  Soon I fulfilled the role and went out of my way to be nice to people.  They in turn began to think of me as friendly and treated me quite cordially.  Wittingly or not, my older co-worker transformed me by first imagining a better part of my personality that was covered by a blanket of shyness.  I'm pretty sure he knew what he was doing.  And his method was much more effective than had he taken me aside for a talk and explained how to converse with adults, a new challenge for me at that age.

And yet the transformative effort wasn’t all his doing.  On my own I began to adopt new parts to my personality.  They may have been natural for me and latent, but I had not practiced them before.  The openness and trust I began to exhibit to people seemingly came from nowhere.  In actuality, I began to imitate others.  Just as I had used stiff wire to tie a wooden hilt to my sword back at the dump, I somehow tied a personality trait I wanted to my behavior in the office. It would bump along with me just as my sword did years before.  And as it began to work for me, it became a part of me.

The development of a personality as one matures … one might call it a persona … is really a complicated process where we borrow pieces from others to use as our own, and where we are imagined by others to fulfill some need they want to find in us.  In the case of my older coworker, he was imagining me as someone better than I’d been acting.  But I was also imitating and playacting the person I wanted to be.  Together we all formed a process by which my public persona was built.

For those who consider me a friend, I hope this disclosure won’t make you feel unappreciated.  I don’t have many real friends and so I would hate to lose you.  Still, you may wonder why I need to change you into someone different.  I don’t.  I really don’t change you into anything.  As friends, we morph for each other. 

Each of us has the opinion … and rightly so … that we should remain who we believe ourselves to be.  And yet our association will change us, if only in small ways.  It will depend upon how close we are.  The closest person to me on earth, my wife, has changed me in a multitude of ways and I have probably done the same to her.

When you like me as a friend, your brain fills in my missing parts.  And if all the stars line up and your vision roughly fits who I am, I might even begin to act like you’re treating me.

We may live in a dream world, but how well we live will be as good as the dreams we have for each other.

 

copyright 2016, David Griffin

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The Windswept Press

Murrells Inlet, South Carolina

dave@windsweptpress.com