I went to a kids hockey game tonight, the son of some friends from college. I'm happy to report my friends were good, mellow hockey parents (yes, "mellow hockey parents" is not always an oxymoron). No surprise to me, then, that when their son came out after the game, a tough loss, he smiled and thanked me for coming to the game. A family who gets it.
Reminds me of an incident a few years ago when I was teaching, which I just had to turn into a high-horse poem:
Smile, Margaret
Smile, Margaret
The father commands in a whisper
From the back of the room,
Urging his eleven-year-old daughter
Who takes the stage with classmates to sing.
Not perform or entertain
But to sing simply.
As if she wouldn't.
And if I weren't ignorantly childless
I'd turn and say,
Talk is cheap, dad.
Beget smiles with yourself,
Not your pointed finger words.
Create joy rather than expect it.
Smiles are natural
Not conditioned reflexes like language.
Is there anything
As lonely
As impotent
As joyless
As to demand a smile?
Or as pathetic?
Remodel your life now.
I know it's just business, nothing personal. I know he'll be coming back shortly. I know the Cavs are better with Antawn Jamison. But still I'm sad the Cleveland Cavaliers traded away Z, Zydrunas Ilgauskas.
For a couple years now I've placed Z at the top of my list of all-time favorite Cleveland athletes. Not that I know any of them personally, but through forty years of being a diehard Cleveland sports fan, I can think of no classier act than Z. What he's gone through physically and emotionally over the years would have sidelined most others. But he's still here (sort of, for now). He's tough and good. He's a great teammate. He's just about the funniest athlete around. What isn't there to love about the man?
I sure hope the first home game he's back, in about a month, the Cavs roll out the red carpet and pull out all the stops for a "Welcome Home Z" night. When he gets into the game, I hope there's a long and loud standing O that stops the game. We put up with all the bums, so let's raise the roof for a real king.
We miss you already, Z. Hurry home and claim that championship you deserve most of all.
What is it about nuns? Even I can't resist a little shot at them. I say even I because I have known nuns all my life: I have been taught by them and I have worked with them and I can say truthfully I've never had a problem with them. In fact, I'm quite fond of them. As far as any group of people goes, they're no quirkier than the rest. So why are they always the butt of jokes and the subject of gross exaggerations in popular culture? Unfamiliarity, perhaps. But if you've been around nuns since you can remember, like I have been, they become familiar and pretty ordinary (in the best kind of way). If a little more dedicated and less worldly than most of the rest of us.
I remember the nun we had in second grade, who was pretty young (I think she played guitar and probably played and sang at the so-called "hippie masses" that were popular in the early 1970s [appropriately held in the basement of the church, the hippie mass featured guitars and not the celestial organ; I'm sure my first exposure to the music, even the name, of Bob Dylan--Dye-lan to me then and for a few years after--came at a hippie mass: "Blowin' In the Wind," "Kumbaya," "My Sweet Lord" {minus the hare krishna chants, naturally}, and even "Let It Be" were staples of the hippie mass songbook]), who one day, obviously frustrated, let out a "you damn kids," in the middle of a reading lesson. Of course we were scandalized, though looking back at who some of us were, I now tip my hat to the nun for her accuracy and even restraint in word choice.
That same nun was one of the few who at the time wore her skirt short, as in about half-way down the calf. Most still wore their black habit-skirts all the way down to the floor; thankfully the younger ones, by showing some dark-stockinged leg, removed at least one mystery for us with regard to "what's going on under all that." The biggest mystery to me was the head, covered up by the wimple (and what a waste of a potentially great word, wimple; especially now that wimples are pretty much archaic). Our nuns wore ones that snugly clung to their faces (there were pins on the side that for years I swear had to stick into their cheeks); most of them had a little flap that covered the hair at the top of the forehead. Again, thankfully, some of the more liberal ones went without the flap, so at least we knew they had human hair. Most if not all had long black sleeves, which hid anything from kleenex to rosaries to pens to maybe even a couple of aces. Besides the utter confusion that now reigns with nuns walking around in "civilian" clothes (I don't know how non-nun-upbrought people react to learning that the woman they're talking to is actually a nun, but for me, it still rattles me a bit, instantly sweeping me back to the age of eight: yes sister, no sister, and inevitably, I'm sorry sister...), I just think there was something very stately about nuns in habits, that I now miss.
We didn't have any nuns who could fly (what in the world was going on in TV land to okay the idea and then actually produce a show about a nun who could fly? and they say reality TV is nuts?), but we had some great characters. One very much loved and revered nun was confined to a wheelchair. She was of course known affectionately as Sister Mary Hot Wheels (to her face, though? I kind of doubt it; but she must have known; I hope it gave her a chuckle). Another nun was kind of the Jimmy Durante of nuns; everybody loved her. They might not have been able to do much with their hair back in those days, but it seemed that every nun was issued a loud clicker (another thing that went up the sleeve, I believe). Nothing said "on your knees" with more alacrity and authority than a nun clicking her clicker loudly in church; instantly 35 kids would genuflect, make the sign of the cross, and be back up standing upright before the echoes of the click faded away amid the cavernous church. I'll bet you five holy cards if you walked into a Catholics-only old folks home and clicked the right clicker, there would be people who usually could hardly move snap to a crisp genuflection in seconds.
One observation about nuns in the post-habit-wearing world: an observation I made years ago and still stick to. You can always tell a nun (even an ex-nun) by her shoes. Now not being a shoe fanatic, I can't really describe for you the types of shoes nuns/ex-nuns wear, I just know them when I see them. Ultimate case in point: A few years ago I was with a group of people, some I knew, others I didn't. We chatted for a half hour or so. There was one woman in the group I didn't know, who was pleasant enough, but there was something about her I couldn't quite put my finger on. After a while, in the course of the conversation, she said that she was a former nun. Like a Pavlovian dog, my eyes instantly went down to inspect her shoes and, well, let's just say thank the Good Lord I'm such a reserved individual, otherwise the entire group would have witnessed me smacking my forehead and yelping, "A nun! I should have known! Just look at the shoes!"
Here's to all the nuns I've known and know: thanks for all the lessons, the laughs, and the prayers.
Working retail in the middle of a relentless winter can be quite the drudge. Today seemingly offered no relief. The district boss paid us a visit, obviously indifferent to the fact that it's very difficult to stay on one's toes when one has been slogging through slush in steel-toed boots for weeks. And everyone was complaining about the weather, strangers and friends alike. Two people told me, not so jokingly but pretty seriously, to do something about the weather (as if I'm A. J. Colby). Naturally, I passed the buck to the Outlandish Hat Lady. She comes in the store frequently, always sporting a different, completely ostentatious hat with some creature or cartoonish pop icon crowning her head. I was in no mood for the wintry, brownish large animal she had donned today: an elk or moose or bison or something. So I told her to help us all out and get some summery looking thing on her head. "Don't you have a surfer dude hat you could wear, anything to maybe change our luck around here?" She chuckled but didn't seem too optimistic; all her winter hats, she said, were rather wintry (thus my million dollar prod to creative haberdashers: there's a market out there for outlandish winter hats with summery themes; pay me later).
But then it all turned around in just a couple seconds, which is one reason why working retail, after all, can be quite fun. I must preface this true account by admitting up front my several (pretty harmless, I think) stereotypes and prejudices; I'm human, I contain unpleasantries. At the time, I was walking through the store, back to my lair in the warehouse, with about seventeen different things to do; I didn't need an eighteenth, namely, "to do" customer service. But there was a customer staring into the computer screen at the info desk, without another bookseller in sight. Being Catholic (i.e., guilt-ridden), I of course had to look over at the customer to see if he was in desperate need of help (whiplashing his eyes at anyone walking by, hungry for the crumb that is "can I help you?"). He didn't seem to notice me so I could have kept going with a (somewhat, as much as twelve years of Catholic schooling will allow) guilt-free conscience. But having already satisfied (and then some) the "fat" part of Fat Tuesday by happily consuming some of the treats various co-workers brought in today (nothing that would have made Jack LaLane proud), I gave into the hefty pull of Lent and asked the customer if he needed help (full-disclosure, before you start to measure me for a hairshirt and nominate me for martyrdom: I instantly sized up the customer [African-American male, fifty-five, maybe sixty] and "consumer profiled" him as relatively risk-free: in need of maybe a mystery, a diet book, a war history book, a CD to commemorate the late Teddy Pendergrass--nothing too onerous; believe me, if the customer had "profiled" as extremely high maintenance in my warped book [un-unh, no public peeks inside that gnarly tome], I would have Dionne Warwicked him: just walked on the hell by).
"Can I help you find something?"
"Um," sizing me up, trying to suss in a second whether I could help him in the search for his cultural holy grail of the moment. "I'm looking for a certain song by Foreigner."
"Um," going through my mind's playlists, trying to match the guy in front of me with the half dozen or so Foreigner songs I know, and trying to decide if I could get away with half-singing a few bars of each one without inciting the wrath of Mother Nature and calling down six more months of ceaseless winter on all our asses.
"I think it's called 'Just What I Needed.'"
"That ain't Foreigner," histrionically and playfully waving my arms, and already leading the guy back to the CD racks. "That's The Cars."
"The Cars!" Frustration, relief, eureka. "I've bought four Foreigner albums looking for that song." Doing my best not to say something like, "well, that's at least three-and-half more than anyone should ever have to own." "I was beginning to think it might be Journey or something."
"I can see that." And I can. "All those bands kind of lump together. You're just lucky you asked me, who was fifteen at the time 'Just What I Needed' came out." Yep, through no effort whatsoever, I'm doomed to live the rest of my life knowing acutely the differences between Foreigner, The Cars, and Journey, (not to mention REO, Styx, et al.) thanks to the sorry state of radio in the late 1970s. "Here you go," handing him The Cars Greatest Hits, track one, "Just What I Needed."
The guy beamed as he pulled out of his pocket an obscure Foreigner album (alas, not quite a redundancy for a child of my age), "This is the last one I bought, looking for this song," now happily patting the Cars CD. "Thank you so much." Genuine. As were the half dozen other thank you's and the firm handshake he gave me before purchasing the CD and heading off to a day of aural bliss. What a job, to be able to so thoroughly, and easily, make somebody's day like that (let alone cure the guy of obsessively buying every extant Foreigner CD in the county).
That's why I love so much the mystical, unprejudiced, horizon-less, healing beauty of music--to make possible such a great moment between two strangers, one of whom just happens to have the taut guitar blasts and woozy keyboard riffs of "Just What I Needed" embedded in his nurtured DNA. And kudos to The Cars, for concocting such an intoxicating pop confection more than thirty years ago; sue me, boys, for spreading some of the love from my humble nook in this electronic inter-web.
And, uh, winter--piss off. Ever since that wonderful moment this afternoon, it's been nothing but sipping rum in Maui, working happily on my sunburn, for me.
Chester A. Arthur, 21st President of the United States, is this year's recipient of the Spitoutyourgum Our Kind of President Award. He was James Garfield's Vice President, succeeding to the presidency after Garfield's death. Despite the fact that Garfield had been assassinated, and the fact that Arthur suffered from Bright's disease, a serious kidney ailment, he served nearly four years without a vice president. He was widowed less than two years before he became president and vowed never to marry again, even though when he left office, four women immediately offered to marry him. He died less than two years after leaving office. Mark Twain, no stranger to criticizing politicians, praised him. He was known for his fashionable dress, his re-decorating of the White House, and for civil service reform.
A while ago when trying to get to sleep one night, I tried listing all the presidents. Arthur was the only one I couldn't remember. My bad, he seems like a decent man and not-bad-at-all president.
In honor of Valentine's Day, I share with you the fruits of years of research into the murkier vagaries of love.
An Anecdotal History of Love Potion Nos. 1-8
Love Potion No. 1
Just a prototype. Never meant to be disseminated to humans. Initial dosage uncertainties resulted in extreme cravings and anti-social behavior. Everybody involved in the project's favorite lab rat, Seismic, succumbed while humping a petri dish atop a flaring Bunsen Burner. Data were collected, hypotheses discarded, Science forged on.
Love Potion No. 2
"Ah, the best of all the batches," sighs defrocked doc Herm Kepter, over ninety now and still boisterously playful. "The FDA wouldn't know a miracle drug if it made their elbows shit," Kepter continues, nostalgically and then some flipping through pages of floosie pictures in a thick album titled LP2! "Viagra Schmiagra," Kepter smirks and drools.
Love Potion No. 3
The so-called "Russian Experiment," which in alleged fact never made it off the drawing board. More than a few higher ups lost their careers over the debacle. When questioned to this day, certain old timers palsy and mumble, "heathen," when asked to comment on rumors of shock therapy, organ transplants, rabid dogs, and white slavery.
Love Potion No. 4
A tainted batch at best, in the mid-Fifties it somehow got into the hands of a bunch of girls at all-girls Marymount College in Tarrytown, New York. Supposedly worked wonders on cops (Irish and otherwise) at the New York City Saint Patrick's Day parade, but then a wayward-leaning nun got ahold of it. A Jesuit I know claims to have seen a small bottle of it in the Vatican, hidden in some back storeroom amid gallons of that Lourdes stuff. Disregard the e-Bay listings; the child-proof cap wasn't introduced until 1974.
Love Potion No. 5
Aficionados up and down the line swear 5 is the shit. Buried in Arthur Miller's obscure one-act, The Clock Pleads the Fifth, is a passing reference to the venerable No. 5. Which explains Marilyn, I believe.
Love Potion No. 6
Beggars can't be choosers. The potion my buddy Somie copped for me during his U.S. Army psychiatric testing days. It didn't work on Judith, but her sister swooned. Hence, the break-up of my life. Had a bit of a Vernor's after-kick, I recall. Spots fade over time.
Love Potion No. 7
The commercialization begins. Madame Roux's Johnnycomelately entrance into the plot. Ignore the nonsense about the Maltese girl losing her soul. Wilt Chamberlain's staggering amorous appetite has been attributed to No. 7, though the unfairly maligned Kimbiss Chutz begs to differ (see Bad Mojo Rising Journal, vol. xii, winter, 1982).
Love Potion No. 8
The John the Baptist, as it's known in Mandeville circles. Madame Roux takes over, goes the party line, and I know a guy who knows a guy who's seen the bones to prove it. Worked better on firemen than cops, it seems. Who'd a thunk it?
I thought it was a bad dream. But, no, it was real. This morning the radio woke me up to a commercial that broke my heart. Now longtime readers here know my affinity for Cleveland's chocolate paradise--Malley's Chocolates--especially after their Sweetest Day bombshell: bacon, covered in chocolate! Naturally I've been waiting anxiously for what would be up their sleeve come Valentine's Day. Unfortunately, this morning I found out, chocolate-covered Twinkies. What a disappointment. It's tough enough with Lent starting soon, but to wake me up on a cold morning to news of Twinkies covered in chocolate? Torture.
Of course I realize that for about six weeks when you're nine years old, Twinkies are pretty much the definition of perfection, and I realize that given the right coalition of about two dozen various forces, natural and supernatural, a Twinkie might hold some momentary appeal for anyone older than nine, but come on, Twinkies? They're like the Joey Heatherton of snack foods: pleasing to the senses for half a minute or so, then it's like, what? Chocolate-covered Twinkies are like getting someone a present, putting it in a gift bag, then wrapping the whole thing up. Overkill.
And for Valentine's Day? If your loved one gave you a chocolate-covered Twinkie there are but two reactions: 1.) my lover is trying to kill me, or 2.) my lover is passively-aggressively trying to get me to end the relationship. I'd be happier with a bottle of Mr. Clean.
Times are tough, I guess, and I suppose even the great Malley's makes a mistake every now and then. Just keep your chocolate-covered Twinkies away from me, and all will be forgiven. Excuse me while I ring up my old flame, Little Debbie.
Dan Rourke is a Creative Workforce Fellow. The Creative Workforce Fellowship is a program of the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture. The Fellowship program is supported by the residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture. Dan writes, reads, and listens in Cleveland, Ohio. Contact me: spitoutyourgumblog@gmail.com
