How Many Times?
"You aren't planning on doing this every day, are you?" asked my wife. Well...no, not really. Deep down, I knew that a $3-a-day, six-days-a-week habit was, like current state and national spending schemes, unsustainable. Yet so long as I had money in my wallet, I was finding it hard to resist the siren call of the newspaper rack and coffee machine of our local grocer. After all, what was three dollars on any particular day? Not much. Still, there was no denying that my little indulgence was putting an $18 dent in our weekly budget. No matter how much I enjoyed it, it was absolutely unnecessary.
It all started rather innocently earlier this month. We were heading out to stock up on groceries, but I was feeling uncharacteristically sluggish, as though I might be in danger of swooning over the produce bins and falling into a deep sleep. Caffeine, that wonder drug that I had managed to purge from my daily consumption for months, seemed to be in order. I wondered if there was a way that I might procure a coffee that I could enjoy whilst perusing the aisles. As it happened, there was just such a service in place.
You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away
From the Hunt Museum: It was under this dresser, in 1981...
"What...is...this?!" my mother sputtered, and even though my back was turned toward her, I knew what she had found. The blood drained from my face as a nauseating wave of guilt, shame, and fear came crashing down upon my senses. It was the horrible feeling of knowing that one has just arrived at the very beginning of a long and unpleasant ordeal, brought upon by oneself. I was, as I recall, an obedient and honest child with few exceptions (perhaps my memory is selective), and this rare transgression was downright felonious in comparison to anything else I had done. I chastised myself for my stupidity. Emboldened by a successfully executed illicit scheme, I had flown too close to the sun with my wax wings, and now there was nothing to do but plummet helplessly to Earth.
As is the case with many a tale of innocence lost, the path that led to my downfall was a long and circuitous route. It began nearly a year earlier, and it was indirectly set in motion by my freshly developed preoccupation with the Beatles. I turned 12 in the summer of 1980, when Paul McCartney's Coming Up was getting frequent airplay. Having recently realized that a number of tunes that I liked were penned by the lad from Liverpool, I took the plunge and bought a copy of McCartney II. A month later while on vacation, I found discounted picture discs of Sgt. Pepper and Abbey Road. The music was a revelation to me, and as I gained an appreciation for the Fab Four, I began to particularly hold McCartney in high esteem.
If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be Africa
There is something truly disconcerting about a one-ton beast staring down your vehicle from a mere yard away. He stands there, feet planted firmly upon the dirt road and head cocked to one side, his massive horns tilted like a pair of sharpened goalposts set askew after a rowdy collegiate victory, and you are forced to confront your own shallow materialism. Because rather than reacting rationally with a measure of concern for your personal safety, you are instead preoccupied with a silent plea: Please don't hurt my car.
The creature lumbers forward toward your window, which you have left down because you have already become addicted to the thrill of witnessing large animal heads poke into your car in search of grain pellets and carrots. Like a trained dog, that is all this immense quadruped is really after - a treat. Yet he cannot insert his gigantic head very far into your vehicle, as those enormous horns will not allow it. You hear them clatter and scrape against the roof, and as you reach for a carrot, you repeat your prayerful mantra: Please don't hurt my car.
Altar Boys Gone Wild
There was that moment of silence just before Mass began, when the altar boys stood with lit candles behind the priest in a narrow hallway to one side of the altar, concealed from the congregation by a brick partition. I always felt a twinge of nervousness akin to waiting backstage before making a theatrical appearance, for in seconds we were to walk in procession along a side aisle to the back of the church, take a right past the baptismal font, and solemnly traverse the center aisle. After ascending some steps and placing our candles on either side of the altar, we would simultaneously bow beneath the crucifix and then take our seats on either side of throne-like chair that accommodated the priest.
As self-conscious adolescents, we were well aware of the potential for public embarrassment that was offered by participating in the ritual. All eyes were upon us, and were we to trip over our cassocks or drop a wine cruet, it would not go unnoticed. So there was always a bit of tension as we waited in the wings, just the sort of mildly anxious anticipation that inspires one to create a healthy distraction. That is the only explanation I have for why I smiled at Alberto, yanked out a hair from the top of my head, and placed it in the flame of my candle.
Future Shock
My ten-year-old self would have died at the revelation that this was coming one day.
Dear Bob:
If this letter reaches you sometime around the summer of 1979, then you have already wondered what it would be like to receive a letter from your future self. Well, wonder no further, because this is it. That's right, Bob - I am you in 2011, thirty-two years in the future. As I recall, your summer days consist of reading a lot of MAD Magazine, listening to Alice Cooper, and watching as many Brady Bunch episodes as you can find on TV. They say the child is the father of the man, and in our case it's true. You'll still be enjoying those same interests in 2011. But you won't believe how things have changed.
Some of what I say may be hard for you to understand, because the technology you use is going to change so fast that whatever dazzles you in ten years will be obsolete a decade or two after that. For example, take your record collection. By the time you're in high school, most people will listen to their records less and less, preferring instead to take their music with them on portable cassette players. In college, you'll see your first compact disc, a little silver record smaller than a 45 that is read by a laser instead of a needle. The sound will be incredible, and you won't need to flip a disc over to hear the whole album anymore. What could be better than that, right? But that's nothing. In 2011, I hardly use compact discs anymore. I have an mp3 player, a little box about the size of a wallet, and it has far more music on it than you currently have in your entire collection.
Focus Study
The photograph was a surreal, black and white portrait, just the sort of clumsy stab at art that one might expect from a college student in an introductory photography course. Its subject was a young woman whose eyes were obscured by the pair of oranges she held before her face. Perhaps it was its humor that earned it a spot on the wall of Haskett Hall, where I stopped to regard my handiwork each day after class. Passers-by might have mistaken my look of concentration for the solemn focus of critique, but my motivation was shallow. The truth was that I had something of a crush for the model, and standing for a moment in front of her portrait allowed me stare at her captivating image and daydream of impossibly good things.
Making films and videos interested me far more than capturing stills, but having declared my major as Photography and Cinema, I was obligated to learn the rudiments of picture taking and photochemistry. The lecture section of my introductory class was taught by Tony Mendoza, who was known at the time for a whimsical series of black-and-white photographs featuring his cat, Ernie. His artistry was inspiring, but as I was to discover, creativity was only a fraction of what was required to produce good photographs. The technical side of it - everything from light meter readings to focal lengths to maintaining the proper temperature for photochemical solutions - was daunting. I was long on ideas but short on technique.
Off The Grounds
It took me over thirty years to become a coffee drinker. My java abstinence was an inconspicuous trait for the first eighteen years, as few of my peers cared for a cup o' joe either (although one good friend did try to pull an all-nighter by eating coffee beans). Nor did things change at college, where coffee was surely one of the least preferred beverages. Once I joined the working world, however, I grew a tad self-conscious about my aversion.
Laboring under the fluorescent lights of a windowless office environment, I was surrounded by coworkers who were preoccupied with the status of the break room coffee maker. It was tended to with great care, as an auto enthusiast might treat a prized vehicle. Occasionally someone with little competence in the areas of filter usage and serving measurement would run afoul of those who knew better and henceforth be banned from making coffee. It was serious business, second only to our actual, what-we-were-being-paid-for business. Such is the power of a communal caffeine dependency.
The Lost Art Of The Long-Form Obituary
The brothers LeProwse, circa 1922: Barzillai, Glendower and Trevelian
As relatives go, Glendower LeProwse is as distant from me as a third-generation relation could be. My mother's maternal uncle died fifty-one years before I was born. He lived his brief life across the Atlantic as a native of Cornwall, England. I know very little about him, and yet I feel a meaningful connection to Great Uncle Glen, thanks to one of the lengthiest and most detailed obituaries I have ever seen.
Born in 1913 to Phillip and Asineth LeProwse, Glendower was the youngest of three brothers. Trevelyan, known informally as Trevy, was the middle child. The eldest, with the impressive moniker of Frederick J. Barzillai LeProwse, would emigrate to the United States in 1922 and marry the woman who would become my maternal grandmother. The three siblings grew up in Ludgvan on the family farm, which was christened Bar-Tre-Glen in their honor.
Kill The Wabbit
King of the beasts.
Expectations are founded on previous experience, so when we welcomed Tony into our home, we had no reason to believe that he would behave much differently from the recently deceased Sam. Sam had been something of a Halloween miracle, an emaciated stray who appeared during Trick-or-Treat and boldly leapt onto my lap as I sat outside distributing candy. We put out some food for him, and he soon became a fixture below our front window. Plummeting temperatures eventually persuaded us to let him in one night, and with the exception of visits to the vet, Sam never left the comfort of the great indoors. For two years, he was the gentlest and most contented house cat. Then one Sunday morning, we found him inexplicably dead on the kitchen floor.
Julie and I did our best to console our young daughters, who had become accustomed to Sam's comforting presence. Not long afterward, we heard of another stray that looked similar to Sam and had been hanging around our friends' house, agitating their house cat. It sounded like taking him in would be a win-win-win situation. Little did we know that there was no such thing as "taking in" this cat, nor was his personality anything like that of his predecessor. Perhaps the fact that he hissed at us during our initial encounter should have alerted us to that fact.
A Great Summer
The rain in Maine falls mainly on the...um...rocks, I guess.
The school year is now well underway in central Ohio. Students have settled into familiar routines, teachers are dutifully plowing through the curriculum, and the specter of statewide standardized achievement testing is but a faint glow on the distant horizon. It's the season when the world of a teacher begins to contract like a closing camera aperture. Our collective focus is narrowed on academic objectives and the welfare of our students, leaving comparatively little time for our own extracurricular pursuits. That is why I am especially grateful that I enjoyed a totally fulfilling and restorative summer break.
If you are of the currently fashionable conservative ilk who resent educators as bloated, public-sector leeches sucking the monetary lifeblood out of taxpayer coffers, then read no further, unless you want to risk being provoked into a jealous and indignant rage. For while you were slaving away, trying to prime the sluggish circulation of our torpid economy, I was enjoying the better part of June, July and August in a leisurely existence free from the annoyance of a weekday clock alarm. Seething yet? You might just want to give this lucrative education thing a try.