Reflecting Pools

I have never liked my birthday. Not for fear of getting older, or leaving things to the past as the always unknown future beckoned. I think it was the attention, I don’t like the attention. I have always enjoyed celebrating those around me much more than celebrating myself. Also, there is the fact that I am an observer and it doesn’t feel right to be observed. Still there is no feeling on earth so good as knowing my life is populated by so many intelligent, loving, and fun friends and family.

The blink of an eye that has been the last 55 years has come at a price. I am missing so much of my childhood. The tide of time that flows behind starts out a full river from today, but when it hits my first 15 years it has shallowed and is broken by water rounded stones and sandbars. My early years exist as little more than countless unconnected tidal pools. Still, the reflections found in these pools do provide insight into who I am, how I came to be.

For the past 32 years I have worked in the rail industry as consultant and researcher. A result more of lucky happenstance than choosing. But I have a certain love of trains in my earliest days. I have pictures of me playing with toy train sets, there is a film that has me whirling some coupled rail cars above my head when I was just a toddler. There was a story my father told me over and over of me mimicking his hand gestures and sound effects when showing how a grade crossing worked when I was just in a high chair. And then finally, memories I will always cherish are those of going to the train station to pick up my grandmother when she would visit for holidays in the 60’s. What I do remember most about that is looking down the track and seeing the parallel rails merge in the far distance and thinking that is where Connecticut must be.

There are images in my mind of sneaking into my parent’s bedroom when they were not around. I would look around and sometimes snoop in Daddy’s things. Mainly I went in there for the security it provided to me. Being among Mom’s and Dad’s possession, the bed they slept in, the toiletries they groomed with brought me to the bedrock that was their love and support. It made me feel safe. Such memories often have bitter sweet ties, because it also brings back the time we small children were gathered about our parents in the living room as they told us that they were separating, and even though they got back together, their bedroom, my bedrock never felt quite as concrete.

I remember the birthdays of others when I was growing up. As a small person once, Mom was taking me to John Wilson’s birthday party. We had gone to Eckerds Drugs and picked out what I thought was a neat toy for John and wrapped it up. On the way to the party I cried because I couldn’t keep the toy and had to give it away to my friend. There was a birthday of my best friend Ben Lovejoy one year where in tribute to our favorite SNL skit, I made for him a model of George and Yortek’s (two very wild and crazy guys) industrial vacuum cleaner, and gave him a Hulk-head bank with a mock check for one million dollars to put in it. When I told my father about these gifts, he was genuinely shocked and told me that even written on scrap paper the check I had drawn was legal tender. I never worried, Ben knows I am good for it.

There are a million more fragments that have formed me. Recollections of sailing, vacationing at Calloway Gardens, playing baseball and football with the Griffiths next store, visiting grandparents and cousins in Atlanta, seeing ball games, stealing through the woods and swamp that were so close to our home, the vine kingdom, running through culverts, laughing, running with packs of friends on the warm, humid nights in South Carolina. There were the fears that helped mold me like my early (and not completely resolved) fear of heights, frightened of being sent to Vietnam because my draft lottery number was 5 (even though I was only 7), fear of the police looking for me after some insensitive adult yelled at me and threatened me because I was putting dirt clods on the road and watching cars run over them. My life to me is an impossibly complicated puzzle of countless pieces, that have assembled into a life I am blessed by and could never have imagined. In observing others, I guess I hope to make sense of the observations I see in me. Then again, miraculous outcomes are made to be accepted and not explained.

An ERA to Remember

There are some dreams from our youth which are so innocent and pure they return at the barest nudge. Spring is finally here and the flowers color a brief and fragrant period before summer brings a survivalist mentality to all things striving to be green and alive. The lawn is awake and mowing is the weekly homage paid, leaving the grass blades neat and even.

As I was walking in the yard after the day’s labor of ritual beautification, the feel of the grass beneath my work shoes brought my memories immediately to a time when I was young and the grass beneath my feet was not of my yard. The feeling of transubstantiation from present to past was as long as a dream, lasting only an instant. I was ten years old again and my tender young feet were in cleats, there was a glove on my left hand, and my head was clouded with visions of being a major league ball player. When I was little, I wanted to be a short stop just like Bert Campaneris of the Oakland A’s. It is such a natural thing for every boy to want to be something most boys could not be.

I was not a very good ball player. I knew that then, and I know that now. I was a little too timid to be a good batter, I was too slow to be an agile base runner, and I was and ever will be cursed with a weak throwing arm, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was the fun of being part of the game. During my brief little league time, I played whatever position I was told to. I was a catcher (ordered not to attempt to throw out a runner because it was hard enough for me to get the ball back to the mound), a short stop, and a second baseman - my arm being so poor, outfield was usually not a consideration. I didn’t care about any of that. I was a member of a team playing the greatest sport I could imagine.

Anyone would admit that baseball is a game of infinite statistics. Those of us that love the sport cling to the statistics, embrace them, marvel at each new nugget mined by the statisticians and reported through the announcers telling us that such-and-such player has a 0.350 batting average against pitchers whose name end in a silent “e” during months with 31 days when playing a Wednesday day game. We can also tell you at least one statistic from what constituted our time spent on the diamond - whether it be high school, college, or (for me) Albergotti Park. In the dugout or on the field I never felt inconsequential or below average, I was simply part of the game.

My thoughts tumble easily back to playing little league and having my father as coach. I don’t think my dad knew that much about the game, but he was willing to give his time always to his children. When providing instruction, his swing and throws were awkward, and though it pains me to admit, this made me embarrassed. I loved him and was proud of him, but I should have realized then what I know now, his awkwardness was a badge of his strength.

On one occasion it was late in the game and our starting pitcher was flagging. I was on the bench anxious to see the field in any capacity. With one out, my father looked to the bench to send in a relief pitcher. He must have seen something in me, because he picked me to go out and take the ball. Me! I had never pitched in a game before and my father (one in constant fear of the cry nepotism) still picked me to go to the mound. I took the ball and accepted my charge.

Needing only two outs, I looked to my catcher. The first batter came to the plate, and through luck more than prowess I struck him out. Confidence swelled up until the second batter entered the box. He was a lefty. Really? Who bats left handed so young? I was shaken. Four pitches later, he was at first and I was having doubts. Batter number three came up and I could swear he was swaggering. Heart in my throat, I went into my wind-up and threw. Contact was made, but it was a grounder to the short stop (someone with a better and more accurate arm than I would ever have) and the inning was over.

My father must have seen something in me, something in my performance on the mound that gave him no hesitation about the position I should play. I never pitched again. But you know what? My statistics to this day showed that I pitched two thirds of an inning, gave up no hits, only one walk, had one strike out, and an earned run average of 0.00. No one can ever take that away.

Elephants on Parade

I am sitting in my kitchen on Sunday morning, sipping my coffee and nibbling on a piece of toast. I was wondering what I could write as the blank screen stared back at me. Then I bit into some butter seared into the bread by my toaster oven. I don’t get butter with every bite; I toast my bread with three small pads of butter on each slice – two at the top and one near the bottom. It is the same pattern every time. In this way each bite of the bread can be a little bit different, some with less butter, some with no butter, and some with a lot of butter, a small tasty adventure for breakfast.

There is even a name for making toast this way, it is called elephant toast. I would love to claim this whimsical name for my own, but it was invented by my father and perfected in mass production by my mother. Dad said the three spots of butter were in the pattern of an elephant’s foot print. There being no elephants wild or in captivity in my native Orangeburg, South Carolina, and since the family had never been on safari beyond the confines of our imaginations, there was no way to verify the veracity of my father’s words. Now at fifty, I prefer to let the mystery remain, keeping my eyes raised when greeting pachyderms at the zoo, and leaving Google un-queried.

As you may immediately see, elephant toast cannot be made in a traditional vertical toaster. The butter would melt, run, cause a fire, burn down the house, and likely get me grounded. It must be made horizontally. This was how my mother always made toast, flat on a cookie sheet under the broiler. Does this sound like a waste of energy? She had no choice, there were five children in the family (we blamed our dad for such a large grouping, with some careful planning and selection, I’m sure my parents would have been satisfied with just me and perhaps one or two of the others). Particularly on school mornings we would take our places at the breakfast table and sit there squawking with heads upturned, mouths opened, eyes bulging like a large nest full of chicks clambering for the early bird out hunting the worm.

To my mind, we must have gone through most of a loaf of bread every morning. Each slice was laid out carefully, toasted on one side, flipped, and then the elephant’s foot print added to the other before being popped back in the oven. Everyone got to have elephant toast, but in the spirit of waste-not-want-not, my mother also made toast from the heels of the bread. I was only aware much later in life that many people think of heels as disposable or suitable only for bread crumbs. We were made to believe that heels were special, and they were! Because it was curved, it didn’t look like a normal piece of bread, because it was the remainder of the loaf some sections of the heel were thinner and cooked a little unevenly and a bit faster than its fuller cross-sectioned neighbor. We begged for the heels. It was commotion each morning for five thundering pairs of feet to rush down the stairs, their owners hoping to lay claim to one of the coveted slices of heels. We never called them heels though, they were “bended toast”. There were almost always two pieces of bended toast and the first person downstairs would scream loudly, “I call for the first best burnt piece of bended toast!” The second would exclaim (and you guessed it), “I call for the second best burnt piece of bended toast!” These were treasures more than on a par with calling shotgun for the drive to school, or claiming control of the TV (it wasn’t until I left for college that we got a color TV with a remote, so if you had control of the TV, you were the one responsible for getting up and down and changing the channel . manually – but this is a tale for another time).

The point being is that my mom and dad were not only the raiser of children, they were the makers of magic, they were the progenitors of imagination for five growing and ravenous minds. We went to school to learn the facts, mom and dad openly participated in our memorization and understanding of these facts, but they also pushed us out the door to play in woods covered in vines and filled with blackberries. They sent us to run and make believe with our friends in the neighborhood, exercising both body and mind.  They would take en masse to the library, and shared with us the marvel of books.  They would seat us at a long table littered with blank paper, crayons, and water color paint leaving the rest to us.  They did all this for us, and along the way they nourished us with plenty of love and elephant toast.