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Well, school started for a lot of kids this week – and it got me thinking about my first day of school many years ago.
Mind you, it was grad school, but “The First Day of School” seems to have the same connotations no matter where you go or how old you are. I got in touch again with a friend the other day, and she was telling me how nervous and antsy she was about the first day of school.
Then I found out she was a teacher.
I guess those “First Day of School” jitters never really go away, huh?
So the first day of school I was thinking about was when I went to Grad school in Athens, Ohio, and I got there in September, a number of years ago.
You know that song, “Try to remember, the kind of September… when life was sweet, and oh so mellow…”
Honestly, I don’t remember this particular September as being quite the gentle one mentioned in the song. This one involved moving across the country, to a place I’d never been, and doing something that everyone but me thought I was really good at, and learning to be better at it.
I was graciously given a ride down from the Cleveland Airport from my friend Renee’s parents, who were a nice transition from leaving a place where I knew everything to arriving at a place where it seemed I knew absolutely nothing. We got there in the evening, with enough light to take my suitcase and pack up to the third floor walk-up apartment (a semi-finished attic that was being rented out). I turned the radio on I’d had shipped ahead on to hear something familiar, only to hear stations from Chicago to West Virginia.
Wow – They were a far cry from what I was used to. Everything was so new, and I suddenly felt so very far from home. In fact, not only was everything new, but there was just so much of it to absorb. On top of that, aside from Renee’s parents, the closest person I knew was a minimum of 2,000 miles away. The adventure of it all seemed to pale in comparison to the enormity of the distance from all things familiar.
The closest phone was a phone booth at the grocery store a couple of blocks away, so I walked over there and called home to let my folks know I’d arrived and was getting settled, (and, honestly, to hear a familiar voice).
The next day I decided to explore my surroundings, since I was expecting to be there for at least a year, possibly two, so I went for a walk. I’d been writing a letter, so I took the clipboard I had the paper on, slung one of my cameras over my shoulder and headed out. I was more than a little astonished at people’s reactions to that. I’d be walking along, taking pictures of the campus, writing in the letter that I had on the clipboard about what I’d seen, and people would see me and give me a really wide berth, like they didn’t want anything to do with me. Later I realized that I must have looked very official, and people just wigged out a little, not realizing that at the time, that all I was doing was taking pictures for a letter I was writing to my folks.
Oh well.
One thing I learned on that walk was that the humidity in southeast Ohio was a little different than it was in Seattle. I won’t say it was humid, but I will say that if you had a potato chip that was too large, you could fold it in half before you gnawed it to death. It was so humid you really didn’t get much wetter if you jumped into a pool, a shower, or a bathtub. The apartment I was in had an air conditioner, but all that did was change the climate in that attic apartment from hot and sticky to cold and clammy. In a nutshell, it went from plain uncomfortable to just plain gross.
I also began to understand the concept of big porches, which we don’t really have much of in the northwest. You might spend time inside, and you might spend time outside, but that halfway point between the two, the front porch, really doesn’t exist where I come from, so it’s a whole different culture, just by that very little architectural thing, and one of the things you do on a porch is just sit there and watch the world go by.
Now, given that my place had no porch, and because there were very few places in it where you could actually stand up all the way, I found myself staying there mainly to sleep, and the first quarter there I did surprisingly little of that. The girls on the second floor downstairs smoked, so there was this constant stale smoke smell that permeated everything. Well, not everything. If you got close enough to the air conditioner to be cold and clammy, the stale smoke smell lost out to the slimy, mildewy, air conditioner smell.
Ummmyeah… an olfactory experience not to be missed, I tell you…
Not.
On the walls was this old (actually kind of pretty) pine paneling. But the one thing I really liked about the apartment was the location. It was literally across the parking lot from the school of art, where I had most of my classes. I could be in class in 2 minutes flat, assuming I was in the apartment. Usually I was in one of the studios, the darkroom, or the computer lab. Like I said, I used the place for sleeping and that was about it.
And so, like many other people in the area did in the evening, I went for a walk, just to get out of the house. And that early evening, while walking up the street, no cars moving anywhere, I saw a guy, sitting on his porch, at his house, across the street.
Alone.
He was rocked back on a chair, gently fanning himself with a ratty old hat, watching the world go by, which at that moment, consisted of just me.
“Hah!”
(Hah?)
I looked around.
He clearly couldn’t be talking to me.
I mean, he was all the way across the street from me.
In Seattle, where I’d been, there was always traffic. You wouldn’t dare talk to someone across the street without looking both ways to see if you’d be interrupted or hit by a car or truck or bus coming by.
I looked left and right.
Still no cars.
In fact, no trucks.
Or buses.
Not even a stray cat to make life interesting.
“Haaaayadoin?”
(Haaaayadoin?)
(oh… “How are you doing?”)
I looked back at him – he was looking right at me and obviously talking only to me.
“Uh, fine?”
“Naaas weather, ain’it?”
Nice?
Nice?
I started thinking of that potato chip I mentioned earlier. It wasn’t – oh, he’s making conversation – I get it. I’d lived alone for the last year. I was completely out of practice of simply making conversation, but I gave it a try.
“Um… a little humid.”
He smiled and waved the ratty hat at me.
“Have a naaas dayie”
I waved back, pondered the whole exchange for a bit and kept going… There was something about the way he waved that would repeat itself a couple of years later in a totally different setting, but that wave, and the willingness to just say hi to a stranger, was something worth more than I realized at the time.
I’d rented the apartment sight unseen from a lady I only knew through several other people. In fact, I rented it from a payphone at the Safeway on top of Queen Anne hill in Seattle. I’d never done anything like that before, but it worked out well. She’d mailed me a key to the place, so I was able to get into the apartment, and when I was all settled in there in Athens, I called her, and she came by to show me around. I didn’t realize that “around” would include a guided tour of the whole town, but it did.
She took me for a ride in her old metal flake green convertible that, honestly, reminded me of a cross between split pea soup, and the worst cold I ever had. For some reason known only to her and God himself, she had eye shadow to match the car.
She was an absolute sweetheart, but being driven around in a huge convertible snot green 1972 Cadillac with white leather seats by a little old lady, (and I mean little, my gosh, if she was 5 feet tall I’d have been surprised. She had the seat all the way forward, an old pillow tucked behind her, and was driving this behemoth with her toes) just wasn’t what I was expecting as a young college student ready to take on the world.
I clearly had a lot to learn.
She took me for that tour of town, showing me where everything was. Most places have a “downtown”. Athens has an “uptown”.
We stopped at a traffic light, in the left lane, the big V-8 engine in front of us almost silent, and were talking a bit about town when another convertible pulled up beside us. Actually, “pulled up” is far too gentle a word. This was a bright, fire engine red, convertible VW Rabbit, and I, who had been living alone for over a year, was suddenly faced with four – um “college women” who just, for lack of a better phrase, simply materialized beside us with a little ‘scritch’ of their tires. The girls were, let’s just say they weren’t the “California Girls” in the Beach Boys song, but Lordy, they would sure have found a place in it… I think somewhere between the “Southern Girls” and the “Midwest farmer’s daughters” – they would have fit just fine… They were dressed for the weather, full of life and fun, laughing and giggling. I was just getting my mind, and, admittedly, eyes around what I was seeing, the girls laughed, said, “Hi!” The light turned green, and they were gone.
Um.
Wait?
I looked left, and a thought crossed my mind. The little old lady peering under the steering wheel hadn’t always been old. It made me wonder if, at some point, this little old lady with the green eye shadow, driving the green Cadillac with her toes had been a young college student once, and what stories she might have to tell about times when she was young.
I didn’t know, at the time, that my life would forever be changed by the things that happened there in Athens.
I didn’t know that I’d work so hard that even eating 4 meals a day I’d still lose 30 pounds in 10 weeks.
I didn’t know then that I’d do things, make friends, and have adventures in the next few years that I still smile about today.
I didn’t know then whether the dreams I had of being a globe-trotting photojournalist would pan out, but I was sure going to try.
There was so much, that fall, that I didn’t know, and as I think now about sitting there in that green Cadillac, I realize that the little old lady must have been able to look back at the kind of September that I – well, not that I was about to experience, but the kind of September I’d remember, too. She, by driving me around, was sharing her own memories, her hangouts, her little secrets, and in a way, allowing me to be a part of her reliving her own youth. It was, I realized years later, an honor, and a privilege, to be allowed to be part of that moment in her life.
All during the writing of this, I’ve been drawn back to the song … (listen – or read the music and lyrics)
(music © by Harvey Schmidt, words © by Tom Jones)
Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow.
Try to remember, and if you remember,
Then follow.
Follow, follow, follow, follow, follow,
Follow, follow, follow, follow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That no one wept except the willow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That dreams were kept beside your pillow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That love was an ember about to billow.
Try to remember, and if you remember,
Then follow.
Deep in December, it’s nice to remember,
Although you know the snow will follow.
Deep in December, it’s nice to remember,
Without a hurt the heart is hollow.
Deep in December, it’s nice to remember,
The fire of September that made us mellow.
Deep in December, our hearts should remember.
And so, as I hum the words above, I think back with fondness on the memory of a very little old lady in a very big car, who allowed a young student’s September to be a part of the December in her life.
Hey all, another story with some help from my “guest author” – my dad, who left me a couple of stories that I’d convinced him to write before he passed away. They’re rare because he printed them, before the computer they were stored on was stolen, so these are the only stories I have that he actually wrote. I think that’s one of the reasons I’m doing my own writing – so my kids can see and read some of the stories that are part of their history and that they’ve heard over the years.
The other day I was watching the news, something I rarely do anymore, and it got me to thinking about relationships, and that got me to thinking of this next, actually, the third of the four stories that he wrote about his times in the Air Force.
Dad’s sweatshirt from Keesler AFB, Mississippi
We have to travel back in time to about 1953, when my dad was in his early 20’s, in the Air Force, and just past basic training at Keesler AFB, in Mississippi, and had been in the technical training as a radio operator (and some things he wasn’t allowed to talk about) that formed the beginning of his career. If we were to set the stage, we’d have to do so with the understanding that World War II was still very much in people’s minds, the Cold War between the former allies of the United States and the USSR was just ramping up, and the Korean War was in full swing.
Outside of the military, this was just before the whole civil rights thing really got underway, and being in basic training in Mississippi, things became apparent to my dad there that hadn’t been apparent where he’d grown up, in northern California.
At the time, the Air Force was training thousands of new recruits every month, on an assembly line basis at a quantity that was as mind numbing for the recruits as it was for those trying to train them. While in the outside world (as in ‘Civilian life’) the color of your skin mattered a great deal, and there was prejudice at pretty high levels, especially in the south, inside the military, it didn’t seem to matter so much, as long as you could follow orders, and one day, dad, unaware of what life outside the airbase was like, found out just a touch of what prejudice was really like by seeing it firsthand.
So with that, let’s go to a hot August afternoon down at Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi, where my dad and his friend had some rare time off and wanted to leave the base for an afternoon at the movies. They both left the base with thoughts of the movie, popcorn, and cokes on their minds.
They learned that they had to change their minds. I’ll let dad tell the rest of the story, unedited, in his own words:
I had a friend down there. His name was George, and I could see it was a really different experience for him than for me, for he was black and I was white. I’ve never had that sort of a problem before. We wanted to see a movie in our free time and I even said I’d pay for it. We went downtown and went up to the ticket seller, and I offered to pay for the tickets. She’d let me pay alright, but we couldn’t sit together because of the color problem, so we separated, and he sat in one row and I sat in the next one up. When we got out of the movie I wanted to take him and buy him a coke, but we couldn’t even do that. We never went downtown again, though we did keep in touch for several years.
And it got me thinking – I learned something from dad about what was important in friendships. Years later my wife and I were invited to my friend Al’s wedding. She’d grown up in a very segregated part of the country, and I hadn’t. (Dad, as mentioned above, had been in the Air Force and we’d been stationed all over the world.) I had told her about Al, and I’d told her about his friend Oscar, who, with his looks (well north of six feet tall, black, sculpted shoulders, and the last time I saw him, shaved completely bald) was able to use his looks and physique to his advantage in his profession.
As we were heading for the wedding, she asked, trying to remember my description, “Now Oscar’s the black one, right?” –
And I realized that I hadn’t said anything about Al, and had to tell her, “Um, they’re both black, why?”
Where she grew up, things were different.
When she grew up there, things were different.
For me, I’d known Al and Oscar since junior high school, and – well, Al was Al, and Oscar was Oscar.
And the color of their skin didn’t matter a bit.
Well, it’s that time of year when the kids visit the grandparents back east, and it got me thinking of the year they did that and I had to do some rat sitting.
See, at the time, the only pets we could have that – well, that you could pet, that no one in the house had any weird allergic reaction to, were of all things, rats.
I know, I know… there’s big, ugly rats, and then there’s – well, small, icky rats… but somewhere in there there are pet rats – and they’re usually white with some spots on them, and we got one for our son, who absolutely adored her.
He called her Sonic, and after a while, she kind of grew on us. We’d let her out of her cage for some time every day, closely supervised, of course, and she’d run around and we’d train her or play with her, and have fun with her.
One of the things she liked to do was sit on the arm of the couch and either watch me as I read a book, or watch as I worked on the laptop. I’d have my right arm up on the arm of the couch, and she’d be there, just watching, and then invariably, she would decide that she needed to run across to the other side of the couch, where my wife or son was sitting.
But it’s what she did, EVERY time that eventually just got to me. She’d run down my right arm, across my hands, and then off to wherever she was going that time. But the constant was that she would piddle on me on the way across the back of my hands, and it became a tremendous source of amusement for the rest of the family, while I was just kind of stewing… After even a little longer, I realized that I was upset, in large part because – well, she only “blessed” me with her piddling, and no one else. You’d think it would be predictable, you’d think I’d be able to prevent it, but as regularly as it happened, she always figured out a way to make it *JUST* a little different, and I could never catch her without inadvertently propelling her straight up toward the ceiling.
Every time…
She wasn’t too hot on getting frequent flier miles, so I had to be extra careful.
At one point, I realized that the reason I was – well – “pissed off”, is because I was constantly getting pissed on. The evening I came to that conclusion pretty much brought the house down.
Sonic was a dear – if you can think of a rat as a ‘dear’ – to my son. She gave him hours of amusement, companionship, and friendship, of the kind you can’t get anywhere else. We learned from her, what exactly a “pack rat” was, because she would literally find things she was interested in, and put them in places only she knew about.
If she could, she’d run off with car keys because they jingled, but most often it would be a receipt, or a scrap of paper, or in the case of my son, she gave him new ways to come up with excuses for his teacher…
“Um… my rat ate my homework…”
And by golly, I saw her do it once, too – he was working on something, laying on the living room floor, with her and some papers, and she found this piece of full sized notebook paper, snagged it in her mouth, and jumped across the living room like she was Pepe Le Pew, and before we could catch her, she’d scampered under the couch, where at some point, she’d managed to chew a little hole so she could get at the INSIDE of the couch, where it was far more comfortable for her.
Right.
So one year, the family went back east to visit grandparents, and I had to stay home and work. My job was to go to work, come home, let the rat out, play with her, feed her, clean the cage, etc…
No problem… she’s just a rat. I figured, in the immortal words of Jeremy Clarkson, “How hard can it be?”
And… just as they find out on the show, Top Gear, where the quote comes from, I found out, precisely, how hard it could be.
So the night they were to leave, I took the family to the airport, where they flew on a redeye east, into what became the great power outage that gripped the East Coast that year (that’s another story, for another time) – and then I went home…
After I got home, it was late, she was fine, and everything was cool for a couple of days or so, but after one long day, I let her out, played with her a little, and then she, like oh so many females, decided to be coy. She’d run out to see me, as if to say, “Come get me!” and then when I did, she’d run away… She wanted to be chased, she just didn’t want to be caught. (It’s funny, both Bill Cosby (in his Adam and Eve sketch, if you can find it) and Sir David Attenborough comment on this coyness, even though they’re referring to different species…)
Anyway, back to Sonic the rat, who decided, at that moment, to hide.
Not under the couch, IN the couch.
This was not good.
I tried getting her out.
I tried encouraging her to come out.
I got treats.
I got toys.
It didn’t matter.
She didn’t care.
What got me was that she just disappeared. She had this penchant for chewing on things, (the couch being evidence of that) and I was well into what would become an 80 hour week at work at the time, so I didn’t have a whole lot of bandwidth to be thinking rationally about a rat that had gotten loose in the house. I know, some people would have just trapped her, but she wasn’t taking any bait of any kind and since she was our pet, trapping was out of the question.
But making the inside of the couch uncomfortable wasn’t.
I took the cushions off and tossed them aside and started beating on what was left, yelling, making noise, and in general making the inside of the couch a pretty miserable place to be. I wanted her to think that coming out of the inside of the couch would be a most excellent idea.
She had no ideas of the kind.
In fact, she was quite happy where she was, deep inside the couch.
This had to change.
So I started rolling the couch across the living room.
Understand, the couch had no wheels, which made rolling it – well – a bit different, but I did, truly, roll the couch, (thump, thump thump, across the living room. It didn’t faze her at all. In fact, I had to take a breather myself with the couch upside down and her ‘treasures’ from inside scattered all over the floor to listen to where she was. While I was standing there looking at the it all, off to my right I saw her stagger out from under the couch…
… over to under the love seat, which apparently was her vacation home.
Well, given that rolling the couch had gotten her out of it, I figured that trying it again with the love seat would be just as effective, and so I took a couple of deep breaths and started rolling it across the living room, too. To be honest, I was mad, I was tired, I had so much I had to do, and just didn’t have time for this, so that kind of narrowed my whole ability to creatively deal with the problem of her getting loose. However, she wasn’t interested in coming out, no matter what I was doing, and I was getting awfully tired, and while I wanted to make her uncomfortable enough to get her out of the couch, dang it, I liked her, and had no desire to hurt her.
After a few rolls across the living room, I figured we’d both had enough, and since I had a long day ahead of me the next day, I had to give up, so I put all the furniture back to where it had been, and went to bed, not sure what evilment she’d get herself into overnight.
I got up the next morning, and was sitting on the couch, already starting my day, when she warily poked her head out from under the couch I was sitting on, wondering if Armageddon was over. I reached out, picked her up, petted her (just a bit) and put her in her cage, where she stayed until the family got back. She was fed and watered, the cage was cleaned, but for her safety and my sanity, it was better that way.
And it’s funny, looking back on it, – well, you’ve seen police shows or heard of reports where the police are called, and they determine that there was “evidence of a struggle.” Had they stood on the front porch and listened, they would have thought, with the sound of the couch bashing its way across the living room, followed by the love seat doing the same, that there were two big guys really going at it in there, and that it was a life and death struggle.
Um… No… it was just me… and Sonic the Rat.
When the family got home, we (Sonic and I) were both glad to see them, but I think Sonic was really glad to see Michael.
We had her for about two years, loved her to pieces, and then she, bless her, went to Rat Heaven (I’m sure there is one.)
And even though I don’t miss getting piddled on, I do miss the little fuzzball that did it.
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