At School

At School

2.20.19

I was in second grade when I asked my dad the big question.  He had just come home from work and was taking off his tie when little bowl-cut-sporting, brown-eyed me asked, “is F*ck a bad word?” Dad’s eyes bulged out of his head a little.  Not because he hadn’t heard it before, but because he didn’t expect to hear it coming from his little bowl-cut-sporting, brown-eyed me, standing in the burnt-orange living room on Rosebrier at the end of his workday.

“Yes it is.  Where did you hear that?”

“At school,” I replied.

Granted, it wasn’t Mrs. White who said it (although she did point to the chalkboard with her middle finger, but it was an innocent gesture. She wasn’t flipping us off, or the alphabet.) I was calmly encouraged not to say it again or throw it around like diamonds. That was the end of it.

I was in 2^nd or 3^rd grade, walking down the sidewalk in front of the school, when I saw what I thought was a balloon on the sidewalk.  My class’s equivalent of Dennis the Menace or that red-haired bully in “A Christmas Story” encouraged me to pick it up. I did.  When the nearby bus erupted with laughter I immediately threw it down and ran like hell.  I didn’t say I was smart or worldly.  Nope!  But I did touch a condom for the first time on that fateful day while my classmates howled.

It was probably in 3^rd grade when I barricaded myself in the school bathroom stall to learn all about menstrual cycles from Judy Blume’s Are You There God, it’s Me Margaret.

And I was an adult hauling a charter bus full of high school debaters home from St. Louis when the bus broke down on I-44 around 1am and we had to unload the entire contents of said bus on the side of the interstate and wait for another bus to come fetch us.  During that time, one girl in the back of the bus flashed her boobies and another boy mooned the lot of those awake or not freezing with me on the side of the road.

Stuff happens at school.  My dad didn’t storm the school demanding justice for his little angel; and I may have scrubbed my hands furiously after my brush with the “balloon.” They didn’t strip the bathroom of stall doors because the female reproductive system and I made a literary match of understanding therein. And charter busses weren’t banned because of some stupid T & A on I-44. (The culprits were punished Monday morning after my interrogations by bus headlights in the wee hours, by the way, and thank you very much.)

Dangers abound. Knowledge is out there. I don’t mean to trivialize the daunting task of protecting little Johnny and Trixie on the school grounds—from sidewalks, to hallways, to bathrooms, to busses, to ChromeBooks.  There are ways to address issues, and I don’t have all the answers. 

But I do know this:  I learned a lot at school.  I learned that some people have more than I do and some have less.  I learned that some are mean (myself included) and some are unfailingly kind. I learned how to think, write, debate, deal with people, consider opposing views, play B team second string, make a Best Choice wedding cake with Tammy, sing with Tiff, trade crappy lunch food for Leslie’s Star Crunch and do just well enough in Algebra to get a Jolly Rancher from Mrs. Wherry.  I learned that a big gold barrette and corduroy walking shorts with matching tights won’t get you a date but hard work and some pluck will get you a life.

I learned a lot at school. Schools of Springtown? Thanks.  I will support you forever.

Truth and the Doc

Truth and the Doc

February 16, 2019

I was asked recently if everything is all right, because I’ve been absent from blog land.  I doubt anyone has been marking the days since my last offering on their Big Ships of the Navy calendar, but the mood has struck.  And yes, everything is more than all right, thank you very much.

In the late night and early morning I watched two documentaries.  I am an addict of true stories delivered by Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and the like. Lately I’ve been on a steady diet of crime shows, but the kids are gone this weekend and I get spooked hoping I don’t wind up on “Forensic Files” with posthumous testimonials from friends who embellish the truth about me to tell the tale. You know, “she was the kind of girl who just lit up the room!” Yeah, right. And I will admit that I did watch “The Ted Bundy Tapes” in the car in the dark in a sketchier we-could-be-filming-“The-First-48”-part-of-town while waiting for Drew to get out of indoor baseball practice a week or two ago, but I digress.

The first doc was the story of two columnists.  The second was the story of a neighbor.  The tales couldn’t be more different, the men more different.  But in the wee light on this icy morning, under a pile of covers, I found myself confronted with impactful lives divergent but true.

Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hammill were voices of New York and beyond in a time when writing was in print, newsmen worked the streets, and columns cut a swath undiluted.  The 24-hour news cycle had not yet emerged to drown quality with quantity, and the art of the written word was ingested with regularity in subways and on city streets.  The styles of Breslin and Hammill were different, but they saw things. Through their lens readers saw them, as well. Agree or don’t agree with what shone through the glass. So be it.

Fred Rogers was a staple of my brief time as a child, before Dallas and Days of our Lives and all other manner of distractions swooped in when they perhaps should have waited a bit or never swooped at all.  This was a kind man who saw children as valid. He spoke to them with dignity.  It is a big world, he observed.  He was a guide. He believed that one of the greatest mistakes we make when we grow up is that we expect children to be grown up; and we forget what it is like to be small in this big world. 

Believe it or not, a common thread runs through the lives of these three fellas, and don’t think for a second it was a fluke that I viewed these documentaries in close succession.  It may be in 2019 in the middle of the night, it may have been in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s while riding the subway or by watching the trolley scoot through the neighborhood, but they had truths to tell.

Of course, so does forensic evidence, I suppose.  Hmmm…where is the remote?