Sandpiper ( seeing the mystical
light )
I discovered it a few years ago on one of my annual
visits back to the East Coast. It was sitting quietly on top of an old dresser,
up in the attic of my Aunt Mildred's house on the
Silver, with red and black trim, and a red plastic
handle. I had given it more of a customized look by spelling out the name
"STEVE" in large gold decal letters, running diagonally across the
front. As a final artistic touch, I had added two, maroon and white, stickers
of flying roller skates from The Fordham Skating Palace. The winged skates suggested
a much greater skating speed than I had ever managed to reach, and stickers of
ripped pants, creative falls, and floor burns would probably have been a little
closer to truth.
Luckily for me, I had no professional
ambitions as a roller skater. It was just something I did for fun on Saturday
afternoons. Even with that, I'm actually a little surprised that I stuck with
it for as long as I did, since, obviously it wasn't my thing. Even after years
of practice, I was still never able to develop anything much in the way of a
skating repertoire. My greatest accomplishment, in fact, probably came when I
mastered the art of skating backwards tentatively. I probably looked about as relaxed and flexible as Frankenstein did when he
got off the table for the very first time and was asked to skate backwards.
Part of the problem was that I could never really develop the knack of glancing
over my shoulder to be able to see where I was going. As a result, I found
myself constantly bracing for a fall. I was always afraid of being surprised by
a stray piece of chewing gum or a sticky puddle of Coke, and both were pretty
realistic possibilities at The Fordham Skating Palace.
Although I didn't really appreciate it at the time,
learning how to skate backwards probably helped me to learn some really
valuable lessons about life. First and foremost, of course, I learned never to
throw gum on wooden floors, and, as a rule of life, this has always
served me well. More importantly, I learned a little
something about hurtling myself backwards into the
great unknown, and this would
prove to be excellent training for my later work as a
psychotherapist. As a matter of fact, it almost qualified as my job
description.
Putting aside my flashbacks for the moment, I,
excitedly, unlatched the cover and looked inside. The box was filled with
stacks of old love letters from my cousin Carol to her future husband, Perry.
More importantly, however, the lining was still in remarkably good shape, so,
without giving it much thought, I automatically dumped the letters into a
cardboard box.
As I stood
there, insensitively going about my work, I couldn't help being struck by the
timing of it all. Only just recently I had been feeling a strong need for some
tangible links with my past, and now, suddenly, out of the blue, my old metal
skate box turns up. And, here was something that was, finally, light enough for
me to carry back on the plane. My first bookcase and desk could stay behind in
And the skate box was actually in pretty good
shape, all things considered. A little scratched and rusted around the edges
maybe, but hey, who wasn't? I was even beginning to feel a little scratched and
rusted myself. Since l969 I had been working as a psychologist for the
"Fighting Aztecs" of
Sometimes, particularly during the peak seasons for
human agitation, life would start to look like an endless series of crises, and
our office would start to take on the look of an emergency room for the
human spirit. And
things would usually come in bunches for our clients too. Somehow you just knew
that after their relationship went
belly-up, that they'd also be having some car trouble in
the very near future.
Although most of the time I found the work to be
generally fulfilling, sometimes it could really get to me. Like the cop on the
beat, or the air traffic controller up in the tower, we all knew that we were
paying a price for doing our particular kind of work, we could feel it taking it's physical and emotional toll. But we were hooked on it.
Cops need robbers, and, apparently, counselors thrive on clients with problems.
But, sometimes, when things would really start to
build-up, I'd really start to wonder where the upside of this business had
gone. It could then become a constant challenge just to keep your perspective,
and not drown in a sea of negativity. Part of the problem for us, of course,
was that there was a major imbalance in terms of what our clients were
bringing-in to talk about. There was a tremendous negative surplus of
confusion, despair, and anxiety, and little in the way of celebration or
positive ritual to balance things off. In some ways, we were almost like
clergymen who only got to do funerals, and never any weddings.
Since my students were usually depressed, they
rarely popped-in to tell me how great they were feeling about themselves or
about how wonderful life could really be. In truth, many of my clients actually
felt constantly shortchanged by life. All too often their rewards felt like
punishments, and their punishments felt like rewards. It was an easy mistake to
make, and one that I was personally very familiar with. Even with all that, I
sometimes found myself wishing that we could change the name of our counseling
center to "Our Lady Of Perpetual
Disappointment."
But, sometimes it was really hard not to get down.
These were troublesome times, and rapid change and painful upheaval seemed to
be everywhere. From the global level to
the more personal or human level, nobody seemed immune. Even my old metal skate
box had to go through a few rough times. Since its liberation from my Aunt
Mildred's attic, it had actually been forced to go through a rather difficult
mid-life career change of its own. It was now working as a door stop in our old
Spanish house on
It now stands quietly in our den, holding-open a double-glazed
French door which leads out to our second-story redwood deck. The large
L-shaped deck affords a beautiful view of rolling hills, tree tops, and
colorful drought-resistant plants, while a slatted overhang provides some
welcome relief from the
The whole scene gives us the welcome illusion of
country living, even if it might, technically, be more like the suburbs. But
there are no sidewalks here, only some narrow winding roads, and we don't have
sewers yet, just septic systems. There's even a little wildlife to be found
that you wouldn't necessarily associate with a suburban habitat. We have plenty
of birds, everything from hummingbirds to hawks, and there's no shortage of
lizards either. In some sort of low-budget Darwinian festival, the slowest of
them are systematically weeded-out by the cats who stalk them around our yard.
And, the cats are kind of amazing in their own right. Somehow, through some
unexplained, mysterious process, they are able to intuitively sense that we
humans love to receive decapitated lizards as presents.
And there's a lot of other action around the
neighborhood. Some of our neighbors raise bees, and we seem to be raising ants,
although not intentionally. During the
hot, dry, Santa Anas they
invade our house in their desperate search for water. Seeing
giant black swaths moving into my kitchen propels me into a desperate search of
my own -
a search for Diazanon spray. It goes against my nature to
have to resort to chemical warfare, but these ants don't seem to want to play
it any other way. Sometimes I try leaving them a little drinking water outside
the house, but it never seems to work.
Even if the whole scene might be somewhat of an
illusion, it's still a very attractive and comforting one to us. There's been a
steady stream of people just like us who have also been discovering "
So, at least for the time being, we still had a
little space and serenity, and we appreciated it. My wife, and I had both come
from humble beginnings as apartment dwellers in the
Early Memories
The story actually begins only a few short blocks
from the very same
In many ways the
Although we didn't get to see any cats stalking
lizards, the view from 2401 still had its own share of action and high drama.
There were stickball games, squealing brakes, people screaming, sirens blaring,
and the constant backdrop of horns, traffic, and trains. It was an environment
of concrete, metal, and noise. There was little in the way of softness, an aloe
would not have survived.
I spent a lot of time looking-out on this festival
of sight and sound; contemplating it all. I remember being impressed, almost
astonished, at how everyone was getting-on with the business of life; how they
all seemed to know just what to do. Under the circumstances, they seemed to
have a surprisingly clear sense of purpose. Like drones in the hive of life,
all the players seemed to know their roles. They all seemed to know the ropes
and the routines.
But, as for me, I remember feeling very perplexed
about the whole thing. I just didn't really get it, and a growing uneasiness
seemed to be settling-in rather early in life. Almost as soon as I could think,
I probably began to question it all. How come they all know what to do with
themselves? How do they know what this is all about? Instead of sitting in my
high chair, and quietly eating my mashed carrots, I, apparently, thought it was
important to reflect-on the death-denying quality of much of contemporary
American life.
Other than
being an incredibly deep, and existentially-savvy
newborn, like most babies, I think I also must have been cute. I remember my
extreme self-consciousness when people would make a fuss over me, and how very
ill at ease I felt from all the kvelling and cheek-pinching. Flashbulbs
going-off in my eyes startled me. I felt a little like King Kong - dragged into
the city, taken far away from my natural habitat, and gawked-at by strangers on
the other side of the bars. Some thirty years later I came to realize just how
true this really was, and just how much I still wanted to go home.
I had a small collection of stuffed animals in my
room, and, for a while, I had some glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling.
Although I never had a dog or cat in our apartment, at any given time I might
be playing host to fish, turtles, parakeets, or even rabbits. Depending on the
year, there might also be anything from marbles and baseball cards to stamp
collections and chemistry sets. Most of the stock got regularly rotated, but
sporting goods and musical instruments were usually in there somewhere.
Like most kids in those days, I also went through
my cowboy and Indian stage. The Lone Ranger was one my biggest heroes, and I tried to be just like him, even if they didn't
allow horses into our apartment building. I loved the fact that he wore a mask,
and did good deeds anonymously. And I loved how he would be heading-off into
the sunset just as the townspeople were looking at the silver bullet, and
trying to figure out just who that masked man was, anyway.
My favorite Indian was Straight Arrow.
He could usually be found on the cardboard cards separating the layers of
Nabisco Shredded Wheat. Straight Arrow always seemed to know amazing things
about how to survive in the wilderness, and he could travel through the forest
without making a sound. Even if he was walking on dry leaves, nobody could hear
him coming. When I would try this myself, it sounded like I was walking on
boxes of shredded wheat with microphones in my shoes. Straight Arrow was also
the ultimate wilderness handyman. With only a few twigs and rocks he would,
somehow, be able to construct an entire Indian village and feed it for a year.
I envied his
uncanny ability to
find wooden sticks that were just the right length, and had notches in
just the right places.
Straight Arrow may also have been the one who
inspired us to get into archery. My friends and loved to go into the woods and
shoot our bows and arrows. And once there, we didn't always bother to use
traditional targets either. Sometimes when we were a little bored we might
shoot an arrow into the air, straight-up, directly above our heads. It would
completely disappear into the sky so we'd have to stay alert and try to spot it
before it pierced our skulls or blinded us. It sure was a great way to get the
old adrenaline going, and was probably great preparation for the hazards of
dating.
There was really so much for us to do growing-up in
Converse Allstars were my favorite sneakers. One of
the regular highlights of my childhood came when we would head over to the
local sporting goods store on the Grand Concourse to buy a new pair of
Allstars. We had a choice of white or black in canvas or canvas. For that
customized look you could add a pair of colored laces, and there was sometimes
tremendous anguish on deciding on a color.
The white Allstars looked a lot better, but it was
pretty hard to keep them that way. It was always open-season on any new pair of
white footwear, so, if you chose them, you'd have to be constantly on your
guard. The biggest targets, of course, were any new pair of white bucks. Show up in some and
be prepared to run for your life if you didn't want them covered with black
stomp-marks. In those days they even sold little bags of rub-on chalk powder to
hide the marks and blemishes on your wounded bucks, and they sold a lot of
them.
But, even if your friends did try to step all over
them, it was still nice to get a new pair of sneakers or shoes. I, actually,
felt very lucky just to have them. These
days it seems to take a lot more than that to do the trick. It's not like we
were feeling poor or deprived in any major way. We actually thought of
ourselves as middle-class in those days, much as we still do now. But in those
days we would compare ourselves to the less fortunate ones, on the bottom of
the scale. And, compared to the people in Harlem or
Now, of course, I can still manage to feel deprived
even while owning three cars and living in a mini-hacienda. Now, for some
reason, I tend to envy people who can travel at will, even though I really
don't enjoy traveling all that much, and, at the moment, there's no place in particular that I
really want to go. I guess it was a lot nicer, and a lot cheaper, when all it
took was a new pair of sneakers to make your day. It appears as though the
secrets of human satisfaction are still a bit elusive to most of us. No matter
what we have, somehow, we always seem to want more.
But, I digress. Turning back to the Converse
Allstars for a minute, once we got them we didn't just sit around worrying
about getting them scuffed-up or dirty. We used them, and we used them for just
about every kind of sport imaginable. .
As younger kids, we'd usually start-out with your
basic rubber ball, the classic pink "Spaldeen", and we'd get a
surprising amount of mileage out of it. It could be used in your room, in the
hallways of your apartment building, out on the sidewalks, stoops and curbs in
front of your house, and down by the handball courts, schoolyard and parks. We
played everything with it from "hit the penny" to stoopball and
stickball.
My baseball
interests died in junior high school, I remember the exact day. My friend Victor
and I had gone up to the school yard to hit a baseball around. I lofted a fly
ball out to him, and he pretended, I thought, to lose it in the sun. Always the
joker, Victor dropped to the ground grabbing his face. After a minute I
realized he wasn't joking, and that he had actually caught the ball with his
nose which was now broken and rapidly losing a lot of blood.
After Victor's nose healed we decided to stick with
bike riding for a while. We enjoyed taking day trips on our 3-speed English
Racers. In the morning we'd buy a roast beef hero from the local German
delicatessen, and head North into
Sometimes we'd get up early and take a ride up to
the cemetery in Tarreytown, the scene of "The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow." We'd ride up and down through the cemetery, and try to terrify
each other with sightings of the Headless Horseman. And it didn't, actually,
take all that much to terrify us. We were already quite paranoid about being
unwelcome visitors from the
But, let's face it, if you had to associate one
sport with
I practiced constantly, and the game, eventually,
became the major focus for my energies, and a great outlet for blowing-off a
little steam. At a simple level, the game gave me a much-welcomed feeling that
I was actually good at something; that I had a special skill that I could call
my own. I, also, grew to love the artistic or creative dimension of the game that involved
things like intuition and teamwork. Over time, this facet of the game became
totally intriguing to me.
Although basketball may have been a
great game, it wasn't always easy getting a court, particularly when you were
younger and smaller. If I got there early enough, or if the weather was
miserable enough, I might get lucky and find a free basket to practice on. But,
once the bigger kids came out, your basketball career would have to be put on
hold for a while. They usually kicked you right off the court without even
thinking twice about it. You and your basketball were a minor annoyance to
them, and they, basically, just treated you like you didn't exist. They'd just
begin playing, and assume that you would be clearing-out momentarily. Depending
on their mood, of course, they might also just fling your ball over the fence
into heavy traffic. It was really nothing personal, just a little jungle
etiquette in action. Every once in a while,
though, you might get lucky. If they were short-handed enough, they might,
actually, let you play with them until one of the elite arrived. It was always
a good idea to try to make the most of the opportunity.
Years later, after moving out to San Diego, I could
never quite get used to seeing all those beautiful schoolyards with all those
empty basketball courts. Perfect weather but no basketball
players. And, nobody seemed to be having all that much fun either, in
basketball or in anything else. All the sports in suburbia seemed to be organized
into leagues by adults who wore high white socks, and emphasized things like
healthy competition and sportsmanship. To me, it’s always seemed like this
adult-organizational overlay took the fun right out of it.
Besides basketball, music was my other main outlet
as I was growing up. I studied the accordion for a number of years and became
fairly proficient at it. This would have been great if I had been living in
Not wanting to live as a social leper, I quickly
switched to the guitar, and took lessons from a fellow named Ronnie Lee, A.K.A.
Ronald Leventhal. He was a terrific guitarist and an excellent teacher, but
after a year or two I was getting tired of playing the pop and classical pieces
that he had been teaching me. So I bought a solid-body electric,
and spent countless hours playing along with records and tapes in my room. I
spent a lot of time playing along with people like Buddy Holly, The Everly
Brothers, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Speaking of Rock and Roll, some of my greatest
boyhood memories came in catching some of those classic acts at the early rock
and roll shows put on by Alan Freed and Murray the K. My friends and I would
get up in the middle of the night, and hop a subway into
Speaking of
tensions and conflicts, sometimes it was hard not to notice some of the other
ones that always seemed to be simmering just below the surface. Just growing-up
watching the local news in
At the neighborhood level, these conflicts and
tensions were often aggravated by bullies or other key players, who had been
significantly tweaked by life. Some of them had a somewhat perverted sense of
curiosity. One kid in my high school was experimenting with tossing burning
objects from his roof when he accidentally set a little old lady on fire.
Gravity had already been discovered, so I'm really not sure what he was trying
to prove. I’m pretty sure that he never experienced any legal consequences for
this act, but he did come out of it with a great nickname - "The Torch."
In
And then there were others who managed
to draw a crowd even if it really took a bit of doing. Occasionally, it might
even come in the form of suicide. Once, while we were on our way to school one
morning, we came upon the police just as they had finished placing blankets
around a major intersection under the tracks of an elevated train. We were
afraid to find-out what was happening, but, as it turned out, the blankets were
all covering the widely scattered parts of an unfortunate soul who had just
been splattered by a train. Even more horrifying was my experience as a young
child while I was waiting for a subway train with my mother. As people
inched-up to position themselves for the doors, the man next to me did a sudden
swan dive into heavy metal and steel wheels.
Not everything was that dramatic, of course, but
even the little stuff tended to add up. There seemed to be no shortage of
people hassling you over one thing or another.
Dr. Brown
Luckily, however, everything wasn't always this
grim and tense.
One of my earliest
Plenty of local color could be found at
the neighborhood delicatessen. You could
hardly find a bad one, and most would probably qualify as state of the art.
Pastrami on club with mustard and coleslaw was always my favorite, topped-off
with a Dr. Brown's Cream Soda and a knish. The waiters, with their black shoes
and smartly contrasting white socks always added nicely to the ambiance. The
rest of the outfit consisted of a small hand towel draped over the arm, and a
very unthrilled look on the face. If any of these waiters had ever said
something like, "Have a nice day," you'd wonder if they had a fever.
And, speaking of unthrilled looks, I was no
stranger to giving them myself. Like many others, I too had my share of
unglamorous jobs, and was probably a lot less gracious in them than the average
deli waiter. For a while I had an after-school job as a stock boy in the local
Daitch supermarket. For a while, at least, it was kind of exciting to actually
be getting a behind the scenes look at any type of operation, but, before too
long, unloading boxes of dairy products and canned goods started to lose some
of its intrigue. On the other hand, it was good to get a feel for what those
kinds of jobs were actually like. People also needed to pay their dues, and the
Daitch job certainly helped me to appreciate why people were always telling you
to stay in school and get a good job.
Although people who know me find it very hard to
believe, I also worked for a time down at Lord and Taylor's in
The View From the Stand
My longest-running part-time job was at my
grandparents’ newsstand. It was just like the ones you saw in the movies, the only difference was that we didn't give out a
lot of tips to private detectives. Grandpa Herman, my mother's father, was able
to get the stand because he was blind, and my Grandma Sarah was there most of
the time to help him. For a while their stand was located at a bus stop in a
tunnel under
After a number of years in the tunnel, they,
eventually, were able to move to another stand which was up at street level in some
daylight and fresher air. The new stand was located at the end of the elevated
line at
Although the green wooden stand
sheltered us from the rain and snow, it could still get damp and bitter-cold
inside. And it wasn't easy making change or rolling pennies while you were
trying to keep your hands warm with fingerless gloves. You had to be fast with
your calculations, and fast with your fingers too, and
frozen fingers weren't always that nimble. The commuters, in particular, were
always in a tremendous hurry. They would all let-off the bus at the same time, and descend on the
stand in a giant shock wave, attacking us with their pennies. They'd grab their
papers, and want their change before they even handed us the money.
There were a few other tensions as well. We might
be huddled around the heater and suddenly hear the loud screeching of brakes
from a truck which was obviously going to crash into us and cripple us for
life. While we braced for the impact, a voice would scream out,
"News!" And, only then would we realize that it was only the Daily
News delivery truck which was already speeding-off into the distance on its
never-ending mission of terror. But, although our lives may have been spared
this time, we still had to bolt-out the door, and rescue the newly bundles of
newspaper from the slush out by the curb. It didn't take long for newspapers to
become water-logged, and our customers weren't really into paper mache.
The attacks of the killer delivery trucks were
almost unrelenting, and they were always tremendously unsettling. Being on the receiving end had to be the polar opposite of quietly
enjoying tea in a Japanese teahouse. But things, somehow, have a way of
evening out. For many years my father, who handled used trucks and truck parts,
made a lot of money junking old Daily News delivery trucks. The quicker these
drivers could destroy them, the better it was for us.
Also helping-out at the stand was Louie, the old
Macedonian, who was
about sixteen hundred years my senior, and looked a lot like an
aging Kojak. He spoke with a thick Macedonian accent
that must have sounded very much like Alexander the Great's,
whom, I'm sure, Louie must have known personally. An incredibly hearty fellow
with the strength of a much younger man, Louie wouldn't take anything from anybody.
If someone short-changed him a penny, he might leap-up from behind the counter
and chase after the guy, running up hundreds of stairs while screaming,
"Stop, stop you bestit!"
The stand
would quiet down dramatically when it wasn't the rush hour, and during those
slack times, working at the stand gave me a great opportunity to catch-up on my
reading. We carried just about every newspaper and magazine in town, and
eventually there'd be enough time to get to most of them. The stand also
provided an incredible observation point for people-watching. And the variety
pack of life that passed before us ran the entire gamut, in terms of wealth,
achievement, and personality refinement.
For some strange reason, I found myself
becoming particularly intrigued with the successful-looking one's who came down
from
As embarrassing as it may sound, I found
myself becoming almost totally obsessed with this London Fog - New York Times
combination. I sensed that there was
something terribly significant hidden in this, but the link continued to elude
me. And then one day it suddenly dawned on me that I had accidentally broken
the code. Somehow, I had managed to stumble upon the two secret qualifying
events that would automatically guarantee your admission into the world of
success. I wasn't quite sure where they
held the tests, but I became firmly convinced that all they had to do was to
show their London Fog, complete the eight compulsory one-handed maneuvers with
The New York Times, and they would then be set for life. They could then go on to meet all the right
people, travel in all of the right circles, and be able to walk into places
like The New York Athletic Club with total confidence.
When I
wasn't uncovering the secret life of the
Other signs of personal and interpersonal neglect
could also be seen around the bar. One that really stuck vividly in my mind was
the sight of a young father who, on his way to the park with his kids, just
stopped in for a quick beer with the guys. He wound-up spending a few hours
drinking and socializing while his kids were running out of ways to kill time
in the nearby luncheonettes. How many times, I wondered, could this guy
come-out and give them some change for a cone or some Italian ices? Of course
they shouldn't have any doubts as to how special and loved they really were! It
was trauma in the making, and future generations of bartenders, mistresses, and
therapists would be hearing all about it.
Just to make things even more confusing
for me, everyone who passed by the stand wasn't neglectful, abusive or even
depressing. There were a lot of other people who were friendly, considerate,
and basically very nice. Many of them were just on
their way over to Van Cortlandt Park, and had nothing
more shady in mind than a tree. As I pieced things together, it was beginning
to look like people were capable of just about anything, from the very worst to
the very best, and with all of these apparent contradictions it made it tough
to reach any firm conclusions about the human race.
Van Cortlandt Park itself
had just about everything you could want, including a golf course, a lake with
row boats, a stadium and track, handball and basketball courts, and acres and
acres of grassy fields. During the winter, they'd even convert one of the
fairways into a small ski slope, and there was always something incongruous
about seeing people getting-off the subway with their skis and poles.
With vivid images of a broken bone poking through
one of my pants' legs, I never took advantage of the ski slope, but I did play
the golf course at Van Cortlandt whenever I got the
chance. It was usually pretty empty during the week, so playing a quick nine
holes before or after school wasn't all that difficult. And, it was cheap too.
In those days we could buy a golf permit each year, and play on public courses
all around the city for just a token fee.
Of course, you had to remember that this was still
De Witt C.
De
The whole atmosphere at
But, despite some of the animal antics, De Witt
Clinton really wasn't such a bad place to go to school. Although it was easy to forget, many of the
other city schools were, in fact, even rougher, and the education at
As for me, I had been practicing like crazy ever
since I had taken-up the game in grade school, so in my sophomore year I
decided to go- out for the team. But, height, among other things, was a bit of
a problem. A few years later a growth spurt would bring me up to 6'2", but
in my sophomore year of high school I was a lot closer to 5'2". I was
every coach's dream - slow, white, and short. I was the kind of kid that
announcers liked to refer to as an "intelligent" player, meaning that
I had all of the necessary physical tools to become an owner.
The
The coach probably had the best talent in the city
to choose from, but I still managed to feel rejected and ripped-off when he
didn't want me. My ego was crushed as my dreams of glory vanished in five
short, humbling minutes. But, I was surprisingly resilient, and quickly
regained my perspective. Realistically, I had to admit that I came up a little
short in size and ability, and the coach had, actually, made the right
decision.
If I couldn't be Mr. Basketball I
decided that I might as well fall-back on my second glamour career - sports
reporting. Like most of my friends, I followed the world of sports very
closely, reading the sports section in The Post every afternoon, and listening
faithfully to Howard Cosell on the radio. Following in these traditions, my
friend Stuart and I, long since reunited after our forced separation in front
of The Garden, teamed up as cub reporters for the Clinton News. We wound-up
covering football and basketball, but, unfortunately, we found ourselves forced
to write in a style that may have been journalistically correct, but was also
incredibly sterile and uncreative. I guess we were supposed to come-up with something
that looked like a news release on one of the major wire services, and, we
routinely did just that. Eventually, we perfected our journalistic talents to
the point where we were able to make an exciting game sound dull.
But the
glamour of traveling with the team and being part of the De Witt Clinton sports
scene really made it all worthwhile. There were many treasured moments for us,
both home and away. Football games were always the most exciting, probably
because they always had the greatest potential for a large-scale riot. For show
and tell, our students would sometimes see who could come back with the largest
knifed-off piece of an opposing school's jacket.
Basketball games had a similar potential for
volatility, but they were contained in a much smaller area. So, for the
reporter or spectator, it became a question of personal preference. Would you
rather get crushed to death on a football field, or have your head smashed-in
in a gymnasium? Sometimes it was hard to
decide.
On the
whole, Stu and I came to prefer the gym. The games
were great, and the team had more than its share of interesting characters. The
relationship between the players and the coach was also pretty interesting, and
it gave us a lot to not write about. At that particular time in
But, every so often, the coach would get fed-up
with the lack of respect he was getting from his players, and he'd try to take
more of a strong-handed approach with his team. On one memorable occasion,
Charlie, one of his star players had shown-up late for the game, and the coach
had finally had it with Charlie's irritating habits. This time, he decided, he was, finally,
going to put his foot down, and show them who was really the boss. So, just
before game time, the coach announced to the team that he was benching Charlie
for the entire game for disciplinary reasons. The team responded with - "Charlie don't play, we
don't play man!" Charlie played.
The team probably wondered why the coach
was making such a big deal out of it. Maybe Charlie wasn't your classic
scholar/athlete, but why single him out? Sure, he could be a little irresponsible at
times, or perhaps even menacing, but he also had his arrogant and pugnacious
side as well. Sometimes, in fact, when
he would get tired of picking-on people, Charlie enjoyed throwing liquor
bottles out of moving trains, and he wasn't always that particular about
whether or not the windows were open either. His aptitude tests may have shown
that he had terrific potential as a felon, but, while he was with us at
Their team was composed of sensitive and talented
kids who were kind of like the kids from "Fame''. Unfortunately for them,
our team was kind of like the kids from
But, it was even worse than we had expected. We
rolled over Music and Art unmercifully, scoring almost at will, and pouring it
on in every possible way. It was always nice to see your team win, but this was
starting to get embarrassing. Music and Art had a one-armed center who wasn't having a particularly good game. In my opinion,
he was showing tremendous courage just by wearing a shirt with no sleeves, and
trying to play basketball with only one arm. But, instead of respecting this
guy's guttiness, our center held his only arm or hand whenever he could get
away with it. As a result, he found himself constantly off-balance and reeling
wildly out of control. From the press box it was a bit like watching someone
trying to row a boat with only one oar. Apparently sports didn't always build
such great character.
Another journalistic highpoint came when we were
covering an away game at
Terrified, and
very much fearing for our lives, we made it to the gym and showed our press
cards to a rather unfriendly-looking group of brothers who were guarding the
entrance. Somehow we had the feeling that they would be rooting for Boys High.
Even though we were the only two white guys in the vicinity, race wasn't really
the most important factor. In truth, just being from
As I remember it, the dialogue went something like
this:
-“What you want man?”
-“Er, gulp, Clinton News.
Here to cover the game? Here's our, our press cards?”
(I know that these are statements, but they came out sounding a lot like
questions)
-“Your momma!”
-“Ahh. Excuse
us I think we must, must have the wrong entrance.”
The highpoint in our journalistic careers probably
came in covering
the city championships at
The Garden itself had its own mystique, filled with
powerful images of basketball history and heroism. The old wooden floor had
soaked-up the sweat and footprints of all the great ones, and it now radiated
an awesome presence of its own. And, for
Stu and I, our fantasies
were in overdrive. Maybe, we wondered, it really wasn't all that farfetched
after all. Maybe we really could become like
But in our
hearts we knew that this particular dream would be ending shortly. We viewed
journalism as a highly-prized and glamorous field, but one in which jobs only
went to the very cream of the crop. And, neither of us could picture ourselves
in that kind of select company. So the time was ripe to come up with a more
realistic back-up plan. Stu decided to become a
lawyer, but, as for me, I had no idea what I really wanted to do with myself.
Sensing this lack of direction, my mother thought
it would be a good idea to have me tested. So she hired a psychologist who came
over to our apartment and administered some psychological tests. He gave me an
interest test and some aptitude tests, but the one that I remember most vividly
was the intelligence test. As I was taking it, I remember becoming completely
intrigued with the whole procedure, from the stopwatch that he was using to the
test itself. I was particularly fascinated by the jig saw pieces that you were
supposed to make into the shape of a hand, and the cartoons that needed to be
placed in the proper sequence for them to tell a story.
I thought it was absolutely amazing that he could
tell all about a person in just a few hours simply by using these tools. I, on
the other hand, didn't have the foggiest idea about why anyone did anything,
even after I had talked with them for years! From what I could tell, this stuff
was really pretty cool.
When we went over the results from my interest
test, I remember him telling me that my scores on the social service
occupations were a bit low. Actually, my scores fell kind of
half-way between Grizzly Adams and Sonny Liston.
I was your basic hermit who could become belligerent if pushed. It wasn't,
exactly, the profile of your classic "people person". According to the psychologist, the results
suggested that I might not want to rush into an occupation that involved a lot
of personal contact with other people. It sounded good so far.
He also expressed some concern about my generally
negative attitude towards others. People, he told me, weren't as bad or as
untrustworthy as I thought they were, and he hoped that someday I could learn
to give people more of a chance. I thought it was a nice, well-meaning
sentiment, but I wondered where this guy had actually grown-up.
Even though the test results didn't
really matter all that much to me, it turned out to be a great idea to have me
tested. The most important thing about the whole experience for me was that it
had introduced me to one very interesting occupation. Someday, I thought, maybe
I too could get a stopwatch, and find out what makes people tick. Now, of
course, I realize that I would have been a lot better-off going into watch
repair and trying to find out what made watches tick.
But, even with some of his questionable advice, the
psychologist had still managed to hook me on his profession. When it came time
to fill-in our intended occupations for our senior yearbooks I found myself
filling-in: Psychologist. It had a nice ring to it. I wanted to understand the
secrets of the human mind; I wanted to be all-knowing. And this would be the
path for me to take.
The Rest of the Family
My Grandma Anna lived on the other side of the
Grandma Anna
always seemed very old to me, and always talked like she was on her last legs.
Every time we visited her, she would express tremendous amazement and gratitude
that she had actually lived to see us one more time. After about twenty or
thirty years of this, I finally began to take it with a grain of salt. It was,
after all, a pretty long time to be lingering at death's door. Constantly
defying her own actuarial predictions, she, actually, managed to hang-on for
another forty years or so. And, not only did she live through years of bonus
visits with me, but, eventually, I even brought my own children to visit with
her as well.
It may have been a long time to linger at death's
door, but Grandma Anna could still be pretty convincing. If I was debating
whether or not I should pay her a visit, I'd always picture her as postponing
her own death so we could see each other one more time.
Once, before we got married, Marianne and I were trying
to decide if we should go over there for a visit. It was during a
record-setting cold snap, and the wind-chill factor must have been horrifying.
People were being warned to stay home, if at all possible, for their own
safety. But, after thinking it through, we decided that we had better not risk
staying home. We didn't know how many more visits would be possible, and the
subsequent guilt might be too much for us to bear. As we pulled-up to her
apartment building we were stunned to see Grandma Anna venturing-out into the
bitter cold on her way to a card game. She was startled to see us.
Grandma Anna spent her final years in an old age
home in the
It was very hard to believe that this stage of life
was positive or meaningful in any possible way. It was hard to feel good about
it. The whole process of aging and death seemed like a painful and rather
absurd conclusion to one's life, and if this was the grand finale, it made life
even more questionable than ever. To cap it off, the whole thing also seemed to
place a tremendous financial and emotional burden on the children, and a lot of
the children were senior citizens themselves at that point.
For Grandma Anna, the quality of her life had
deteriorated to such an extent that living had become a curse. Of course, she
had been expressing that opinion for the past forty years, but now she seemed
to mean it more than usual. And who was to say that she wasn't right?
Ironically, she lived to the age of ninety nine.