I, Cookie Monster

20 March 2020

I grew up in a small town.  Was taught the fear of Jesus in a small town, at the First Baptist Church in particular. I can still hear the choir in their red robes singing. John Mellencamp’s song Small Town resonated with me.  The former Johnny Cougar may have grown up in Seymour, IN, but his small-town experience was not that different than mine growing up in Pedricktown, NJ.  Farms, dirt and people who knew your business and who all supported the team.

Pedricktown had open fields and stake trucks hauling produce.  We had produce warehouses.  We had one cross road with stop signs on the east/west axis.  We had an old classic Army Corps of Engineers bridge that rattles and shook when you went across it. We had migrant camps for Puerto Ricans who picked the peppers, tomatoes and asparagus. Still have an asparagus knife with its well-worn wooden handle and v shaped blade out in my garage. Got some crab traps, too.

In our small town we all went to the same grammar school with the same kids that would be with from kindergarten to 8^th grade.  We had some kids from the army base that would be there a year or two and then move on.  But for the most part we knew each other well. We all knew who was related to who.  In a small-town chances were your grandmother and an aunt or two, maybe an uncle or a cousin lived nearby.  You went to church with your family each Sunday and many Sundays you had dinner with a whole passel of cousins, aunts, uncles and hanger on types at your grandmother’s place.  

On a typical day Pedricktown’s grammar school got out at about 3:30 pm.  I remember watching those big round clocks up on the wall with their black hands, white faces and brown rims. The innards of the clock would tick and the hands of the clock would twitch down to the moment the agony of school would be over.  

You could feel the energy pulsing with kids who had one desire, to be out of the building and out in the sunlight. My house was six buildings away from school and pushing and shoving everyone would ignore the safety patrols yelling go slow down the stairwells.  Once out the doors I would fly home.  My mother who taught at a different building, because the kindergarten and one first grade section were located a couple of miles away from the big grammar school building, would get home a few minutes after I did.  

By the time my mom got home I had gotten the mail from our small-town mailbox, Box 48 and I still remember the old combination.  When she walked through the side door into the house, I had already scrounged around and eaten something.  I often had a piece of bogus white bread (just one) with a slice of white American cheese and a slice of Lebanon bologna.  Might have had a little bit of a Pennsylvania Dutch birch beer.  Used to love that stuff.  And if there were any Tastykakes, well, just one wouldn’t hurt. Trust me I was a large child.

When Mom got in, she was beat. Teaching first graders sucked the essence of life right out of her. Almost instantly she was on the couch and watching The Edge of Night. God, soap operas with the exception of Dark Shadows drove me up the wall.  Watching is a euphemism, it didn’t talk long for Mom’s snoring to start. But a ½ hour later when the closing music would play, she would wake up and begin dinner.

Invariably shortly after the soap started, I would bail out of my house and head down West Mill Street to my grandmother’s house. I can list the houses I passed although my spelling may suck.  There was the Post Office, the Bishops, the Niebuhr’s, the Johnson’s, Mr. Johnson’s workshop, the Grey’s, I don’t know, the Groff’s, the Wilson’s, the Lindell’s, a field, the Pedrick’s, the Schiffer’s, Pedrick’s Seed House, Jack Bouvier’s, Hazel’s house (she did not like me one bit-“Get off my lawn you little monster”) and then my Grandmother’s place.  The sidewalk alternated between dirt, concrete and stones. Once you got into April the air was warm and the grass was so bright green. A walk on a sunny spring day was pure joy.

At the very start of my walk I would stope at the post office and empty my grandmother’s mailbox.  Taking the mail down the street to grand mom was a my little job.  I was her home delivery service.  Then as now, most jobs required payment and this one was no different. Despite already eating at home I knew there would be a snack to be had at grand mom’s.  Put it this way, when I got to grand mom’s I knew there would always be a treat awaiting. 

My grandmother and my Aunt Popsie were often cooking things.  Cookies were created on a regular basis.  When you entered the kitchen, if my memory serves me correctly there was some kind of cabinet to the right-hand side of the room.  The sink was on the left near the steps to the basement. Under it resided the rock and rye and a gallon jug of King’s wine.  Got under there one day but that is a whole different story.  You could smell the baking that happened in this room.

Well, on the counter to the left, near the door that led to the back porch, was a ceramic container.  I am not sure know if it was supposed to look like a barn or a Dutch house but when you pulled the roof off there were usually golden brown, perfectly baked, one inch tall and three inches wide cookies.  Great, wonderful cookies that smelled of honest work, love and heaven.

Over the years I have read many stories where a dying character remembers a particular food and describes it in the precious moments right before the end.  In English novels they talk of trifles and puddings. In southern novels they talk about smoked meats and side boards groaning with yams, greens and pecan pies.  When they describe the food, it is with great detail given about the smell and the texture and the setting in which the food was prepared and eaten. Food it seems, especially those foods we really loved in our lives, stay in our memories right up to the end.

Truth be told I don’t know what went into those cookies.  Some had currants or raisins and some had chocolate chips and nuts.  Chocolate chips and nuts have always been my favorite. I do remember the cookies' taste as amazing and I do remember the experience of eating the cookies. In the kitchen I would get a couple cookies out and have them with a glass of whole milk at the Formica topped kitchen table.  At some point after I was done, I would ask or be cajoled into taking Rusty, my grand mom’s wiener dog, out for a walk.  When I got back my Aunt Popsie would often shuffle off to her house across the street. 

If my grandmother was in a good mood, she might let me watch cartoons.  Watching cartoons at her house was a big deal because her kids had bought her a color TV.  We did not have one at my house. There was nothing as great as watching Tom Slick, Super Chicken and Roger Ramjet on the Captain Philadelphia show (Stu Nahan starring) in color. Channel 48 Kaiser broadcasting. Color made the super chicken intro so much better. Eventually, well about 4:50 pm, I would head out to make sure I got home in time for dinner.

This ritual lasted for a number of years.  It lingered on even into my high school days.  In high school I fear I may have drifted a bit from the shore.  It was the 1970s you know and when you got off the school bus from high school there was the temptation of the dread marijuana.  So, maybe I inhaled once or twice behind the produce house with a friend or two, and then went and got my grandmother’s mail.  

I may have lingered a bit in my travels down that path staring at odds and ends along the way. The chrome on Hazel’s DeSoto’s fins was pretty eye catching.  The one real issue of smoking pot was that my cookie consumption went way up.  My guess is that while emptying grand mom’s cookie jar to satisfy the munchies somebody noticed. So, it goes.

There are moments in our lives that are like bubbles blown on a spring day.  These bubbles of time are gossamer thin and they last only a very short while.  But when you are captured within those bubbles you think they could go on forever.  Those walks to my grandmother’s, stoned or not, are experiences that can no longer exists in the real world, but which in my mind will exist until I cease to be.

In my middle American novel the smell of those cookies while be part of the final paragraphs. The cookies will be center but there will also be the smell of the growing green peppers in the fields. And there will be the scent and taste of South Jersey dirt, the stuff that has always grown great tomatoes. The soundtrack will probably be the congregation at the First Baptist Church singing “How Great Thou Art” with Mrs. Siegrist playing piano and Mrs. Trostle and Charlotte Carty singing out from the choir in their red robes. But the smell of the cookies will be primary as will the taste they had when consumed with a big gulp of cold rich milk.

I am the once and future cookie monster. 

Sunday Morning Ritual

8 March 2020

Horace Silver “Peace” (1959)

Doesn’t happen every Sunday morning, but it does happen some Sunday mornings.  What is it?  Well, I wake up first and take my shower.  Having dressed in soft clothing like jeans, a sweatshirt and bunny slippers I make my way down to the kitchen. Once in the kitchen I set about making an old-fashioned coronary inducing breakfast.  

The oven is turn to 410F and allowed to heat.  A quarter sheet baking pan is taken from a cabinet and then covered with roughly 12 strips of bacon.  A box of riced potatoes is opened and filled with scalding hot water up to the line marked out on the carton.  Two or three eggs are set out on the counter while I retrieve a non-stick frying pan.  When the oven dings, an alert that it has preheated, I throw the bacon into its cavernous belly.  Two pieces of bread (olive oil and sea salt) are removed from the bag purchased yesterday at whole paycheck market. Into the toaster they go. But they do not get pushed down, not yet. Said act is one of the last things to be done in this ritual.

10 minutes on, the oven timer goes off.  At this point I take the quarter sheet out carefully and with mitts.  Then I flip the bacon and put it back in. Noticing too much silence I turn on the music, probably a playlist off apple music.  Today the opening tune was Peace by Horace Silver.  I drop a dab of bacon grease into the frying pan and turn the heat on. Now hydrated potatoes start cooking in the pan at 375F.  I take out the OJ and pour glasses to point about ½ full, about 4 ounces.  The potatoes get flipped about ever two three minutes.  Ding.  The bacon is retrieved and put on some paper towels to drain off.  The oven is turned off.

At about this point the potatoes are shoveled into a ceramic bowl and put in the oven to keep warm.  The bacon is put into a pie tin and placed in the oven to stay warm.  Another dab of bacon grease into the frying pan.  Now I drop two freshly cracked eggs into the bacon and they begin to sizzle.  I grab two forks, two knives and two plates and put them near my work surface.  Carefully I flip the eggs because the eaters of these fried ova like their eggs over easy.  Me I am a sunny-side up kind of guy.  The toast is pushed down right at this moment. 

Keeping an eye on the eggs as Linda Ronstadt sings Poor, Poor Pitiful Me I grab the 365-blackberry jam from the oven. Separating the plates, I drop one egg on each. I grab two strips of bacon from the oven for each plate along with about a half cup of the potatoes.  I put the plates and flatware on the dinning room table.  I grab the toast and juggling the hot slices I add them to the plates.  I pour coffee I have somehow made in the midst of this process into thermal mugs.  I put the jam on the table, too.  

As the Boz-man sing Lido Shuffle I yell up the stairs, “BREAKFAST!!!”.  And the day has begun and my first meditation has been completed.

For further thoughts on the meditation that occurs when cooking here is an article from Tricycle Summer 1993.

ZEN MONASTERIES have traditionally had six officers who are all Buddha’s disciples and all share buddha activities. Among them, the tenzo is responsible for preparing meals for the monks. Regulations for Zen Monasteries states, “In order to make reverential offerings to monks, there is a position called tenzo.”

Since ancient times this position has been held by accomplished monks who have way-seeking mind, or by senior disciples with an aspiration for enlightenment. This is so because the position requires wholehearted practice. Those without way-seeking mind will not have good results, in spite of their efforts…

The cycle of the tenzo’s work begins after the noon meal. First go to the director and assistant director to receive the ingredients for the next day’s morning and noon meals—rice, vegetables, and so on. After you have received these materials, take care of them as your own eyes. Zen Master Baoning Renyong said, “Protect the property of the monastery; it is your eyeball.” Respect the food as though it were for the emperor. Take the same care for all food, raw or cooked…

When you wash rice and prepare vegetables, you must do it with your own hands, and with your own eyes, making sincere effort. Do not be idle even for a moment. Do not be careful about one thing and careless about another. Do not give away your opportunity even if it is merely a drop in the ocean of merit; do not fail to place even a single particle of earth at the summit of the mountain of wholesome deeds.

Regulations for Zen Monasteries states, “If the six tastes are not suitable and if the food lacks the three virtues, the tenzo’s offering to the assembly is not complete.” Watch for sand when you examine the rice. Watch for rice when you throw away the sand. If you look carefully with your mind undistracted, naturally the three virtues will be fulfilled and the six tastes will be complete.

Xuefeng was once tenzo at the monastery of Dongshan Liangjie. One day when Xuefeng was washing rice, master Dongshan asked him, “Do you wash the sand away from the rice or the rice away from the sand?”

Xuefeng replied, “I wash both sand and rice away at the same time.”

“What will the assembly eat?” said Dongshan. Xuefeng covered the rice-washing bowl.

Dongshan said, “You will probably meet a true person some day.” This is how senior disciples with way-seeking mind practiced in olden times. How can we of later generations neglect this practice?…

Personally examine the rice and sand so that rice is not thrown away as sand. Regulations for Zen Monasteries states, “In preparing food, the tenzo should personally look at it to see that it is thoroughly clean.” Do not waste rice when pouring away the rice water. Since olden times a bag has been used to strain the rice water. When the proper amount of rice and water is put into an iron pot, guard it with attention so that rats do not touch it or people who are curious do not look in at it.

After you cook the vegetables for the morning meal, before preparing the rice and soup for the noon meal, assemble the rice buckets and other utensils, and make sure they are thoroughly clean. Put what is suited to a high place in a high place, and what belongs in a low place in a low place. Those things that are in a high place will be settled there; those that are suited to be in a low place will be settled there. Select chopsticks, spoons, and other utensils with equal care, examine them with sincerity, and handle them skillfully.

After that, work on the food for the next day’s meals. If you find any grain weevils in the rice, remove them. Pick out lentils, bran, sand, and pebbles carefully. While you are preparing the rice and vegetables in this way, your assistant should chant a sutra for the guardian spirit of the hearth.

When preparing the vegetables and the soup ingredients to be cooked, do not discuss the quantity or quality of these materials which have been obtained from the monastery officers; just prepare them with sincerity. Most of all you should avoid getting upset or complaining about the quantity of the food materials. You should practice in such a way that things come and abide in your mind, and your mind returns and abides in things, all through the day and night.

Organize the ingredients for the morning meal before midnight, and start cooking after midnight. After the morning meal, clean the pots for boiling rice and making soup for the next meal. As tenzo you should not be away from the sink when the rice for the noon meal is being washed. Watch closely with clear eyes; do not waste even one grain. Wash it in the proper way, put it in pots, make a fire, and boil it. An ancient master said, “When you boil rice, know that the water is your own life.” Put the boiled rice into bamboo baskets or wooden buckets, and then set them into trays. While the rice is boiling, cook the vegetables and soup. You should personally supervise the rice and soup being cooked. When you need utensils, ask the assistant, other helpers, or the oven attendant to get them. Recently in some large monasteries positions like the rice cook or soup cook have been created, but this should be the work of the tenzo. There was not a rice cook or a soup cook in olden days; the tenzo was completely responsible for all cooking.

When you prepare food, do not see with ordinary eyes and do not think with ordinary mind. Take up a blade of grass and construct a treasure king’s land; enter into a particle of dust and turn the great dharma wheel. Do not arouse disdainful mind when you prepare a broth of wild grasses; do not arouse joyful mind when you prepare a fine cream soup. Where there is no discrimination, how can there be distaste? Thus, do not be careless even when you work with poor materials, and sustain your efforts even when you have excellent materials. Never change your attitude according to the materials. If you do, it is like varying your truth when speaking with different people; then you are not a practitioner of the way.

In a traditional Zen monastery, the position of tenzo, or head cook, is held by a monk who is considered to “have way-seeking mind, or by senior disciples with an aspiration for enlightenment.” Here, Japanese Zen Master Dogen (1200-1253) instructs his monks on the importance of the position of the tenzo as it had been established in Regulations for Zen Monasteries, a Chinese collection of guidelines for monastic life written in the early twelfth century.

Art and the Rapier Word *

8 March 2020

On Saturday, the Washington Post ran a story on legendary photographer Stephen Shore.  The paper was who deemed him legendary, not me. I reserved judgment because I really don’t know if he is legendary. According to the paper he had previously published a couple of volumes that were impliedly masterpieces and seminal. 

Apparently in the 1970s when he was generating his seminal works, he used a large format camera.  Concurrent with those photos he was also capturing images with a 35mm camera.  A book has recently published containing some of these prints from the 35mm.

The reviewer in the Post gushed about what these photos represented.  Seemed a bit hyperbolic, but hey most critics are earnest dispensers of hyperbole. I looked at the three or four samples found in the article and I liked them.  If a show of these images were to come to my local art museum, I would go see them.

To me the pictures were images of a vanished world. In bright colors the photographer had captured an America of small businesses and the people who used them.  Liquor stores with moving neon signs, the ones where at night the neon bottle tips over and fills a martini glass, were present.  Also present were a couple standing across from a local eatery with an enameled sign advertising its existence and the food it sold. These were images of the realities of the 1970s and 1980s.  Much of that world is gone, just empty store fronts now.

Had I not skipped to the comments section I would have moved on without another thought on the article. But I did read the comments and good golly gosh were they just something. Kitty Wumpus seems to have gotten the ball rolling with the following, “Applaud and worship these all you want, but none of them rise above poorly composed, poorly photographed ordinary subjects that really carry no meaning to the rest of the world. Back to trying to identify the automobiles, a far more worthy project than looking at the rest of the photo.” Yeah, that is what got said. 

Thereafter came an engaged and engaging discussion of the appropriateness of calling photography an art form. Notes were posted about the commenter’s approach to criticism. Others debated about the real artistic value of these images. It was a dogfight plain and simple. I could not figure out for the life of me why the writers seemed to have some much invested in an art critic’s almost hagiographic note.  

Social media has screwed us up.  We in our anonymity have lost our civility.  There seems to be almost a gleeful joy, the kind a miscreant kid would get from throwing a rock at another person while well hidden behind a large leafy bush. Knowing that no retributive personal pain will result from such an antisocial and nasty action these folks just hurl their barbs.  We collectively are inflicting pain for our individual pleasure.  I don’t know how we get beyond this.

If the coronavirus doesn’t get me the evil in human hearts will.

[Note well, the photo above is not one from the photographer in question.  This image was used to simply illustrate a photograph of the mundane that was visually interesting.]

The Unknown and the Cloistering

7 March 2020

Took a picture of the moon last night.  Bright it was with circles surrounding and some clouds moving by. Extended naked fingers of trees reached up toward this milky white prize. The image captured what a late winter night should be. At eleven in the evening on a Midwestern March night, the natural world was following long established cycles.

When I had made my way to bed about twenty minutes later, I skimmed across the stories, purportedly news, on my personal information device.  Bernie bros versus Bernie brothers popped up first. So what?  Then came the sad tale, for numerous reasons, of missing children and a mother who seemed not to care they were gone.  So troubling. Finally, I dove into the aggregation of stories on the coronavirus. So conflicting, confusing and concerning.

The Center for Disease Control offered this up yesterday:

What to do if you are at higher risk:

·      Stay at home as much as possible.

·      Make sure you have access to several weeks of medications and supplies in case you need to stay home for prolonged periods of time.

·      When you go out in public, keep away from others who are sick, limit close contact and wash your hands often.

·      Avoid crowds.

Higher risk means older than sixty and with any of the diseases that people over 60 in America will almost certainly have, heart disease, lung disease, diabetes or a weakened immune system. So, Boomers pursuant to the CDC’s guidance we are to disassociate from each other, cancel our travel plans, and make sure we have alcohol, bleach, and plenty of toilet paper.  We also need to stock up on our maintenance medications and Tylenol.

This is not the Black Death nor is it a walk in the park either. So, how do we really respond? I didn’t just retire to become a prisoner in my own home. However, I also don’t want to be that guy that they say, “He would have been okay if he had just washed his hands and not chewed contemplatively on his finger while thinking.” 

How do we really avoid crowds? Any person who shops knows that whatever hour of the day you shop, there will always be two less open registers open than are needed. This lack of store staff will cause you to queue up with that wheezing, coughing stream of wretches in front and behind you. Most prescription plans, if you are on maintenance drugs, do not allow you to stock up. Therefore, you are going to have to go to pharmacies where sick people congregate. 

What I am really trying to say is that the suggestions for limiting the spread of the coronavirus are totally at odds as how we live, are forced to live, by the realities of modern American life. Yes, grocery stores have delivery services but they are expensive and spotty in performance.  Yes, you can buy drugs by mail order but setting it up is a pain in the ass. Thus, we must shop and thus we will be exposed to people.

Building an informal survival stockpile of canned soups and frozen veggies goes only so far.  Yes, we can Facebook for a form of interpersonal contact, but we do have to use the mechanisms of modern life like ATMs. These will have been touched by other people. And then there are handrails on public buildings, what is the greater risk a fall or the virus? I am concerned and I am confused but my guess is so is everyone else.  But I don’t see the cloistered life for people 60+ really being successfully implemented going forward.

I guess I will stock up on lots of ramen noodles and take loads of pictures of the snow drops as they poke their heads up in my back yard. Stay healthy my friends. Here is the CDC link,

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/specific-groups/high-risk-complications.html?fbclid=IwAR1VPqiFRF9L6O3tq8BIc3RVV18gPovmdhBRaubufBE38wltgJjRPJRfaqI

2020's Warm Breeze

Winter, still sunshine falls warm cutting through this cold day. Down vest buttoned as I walk, I will gladly take the warmth. I accept the gracious gift in this moment at this place of the sun’s glow. The world around me hopefully accepts my soft steps across this land. 

Snow has retreated from the landscape. In the daylight, the white ground cover has withdrawn from it earth bound position back into the sky.  Or it may have fallen into drains to be taken back to a reunion with some distant sea. White snow pack has become brown earth with tips now of green protruding.

I have lived this moment so many times over decades. Each time my heart changes, my mood lifts. Each time I am wary of the promise, yet each time I surrender to the hope of spring.  You know, you must believe in spring. A warm moment can melt my heart of stone chiseled into its hardened shape by the artic winds of January and February. I must believe in spring.

Warm Tears

29 February 2020

Sometimes, it must seem my Facebook posts are totally random. Really, they are not. Most of my postings result from conversations I have with myself arising from stimuli in my home environment, or from the news I read on internet-based sites.

For example, having retired together with my wife, we are engaging in offloading a great many possessions that we no longer need.  One of the real battlegrounds between us is what to do with the books.  I am a pack rat and it is very, very hard for me to let go of a single volume. 

This is true of even the most dog eared and ragged book, perhaps something I picked up in the basement library of Pedricktown Grammar School during a Scholastic Book Fair.  Emptying out one box of paperbacks I came upon a book called Across Five Aprils. Across Five Aprils was one of the first books I ever bought with my own money. I purchased it probably in 1965 or 1966.  The book is for a preteen audience and is a Civil War narrative, but this particular work introduced me to the power of the novel. How do I get rid of that?

And then there are the Boyton baby books.  The Barnyard Dance and the Going to Bed books stand out.  For the first couple of years of my children lives I would read the books to them at bedtime.  As anyone who has ever raised a child knows “reading” really doesn’t capture the experience.  For my kids the night time tuck me in tale was more theatre than not.

When reading the Barnyard Dance there were hand motions and changes in voice tone required at different points in the store.  The motions had to mimic the story, to and fro, left and right, etc. For the Going to Bedbook, a stuffed animal would be used to show the trek up the stairs and down the stairs set out in the book.

Pulling those books out of a box and seeing them made my eyes tear up.  How quickly that period of childhood flies by.  Sacred are those moments when you were snuggled into bed with a two or a three-year-old and they were asking you the endless “what is” and “why” questions. Such moments are only memories now, fond memories. Back then it was easier in some ways because you could make those statements, true or not, that you would always be with them.  In your heart you had hope that you could fix the problems they would face. Such hope fades as the years wear on.

Immersed in those memories I recorded the Moo, Baa, Fa La La book and posted it to Facebook.  Personally, I didn’t really care if single person sussed out why I had read the book, or read it in the way I did. Maybe, just maybe, after I am gone my kids will do a search of electronic media and find that bit.  Maybe, and this is really a maybe, they will remember that moment in the year 2002 when we read that book and others, like Jessie’s Journey, Chugga Chugga Choo Choo and the one that ends with I love you to the moon and back. Perhaps they will smile.  Perhaps they will remember the unconditional love they had from both their father and their mother.

The Baby Jay books were another story. Around here there is the informal network of friends and acquaintances who engage in the hand me down rituals. Trousers, winter clothing, toys and books, if their kid has outgrown it your kid gets it offered to them. I know who gave me Baby Jay, she is one of my dearest friends. Seeing the book, (and I put the glasses on baby Jay), reminded me of the good in the world that we can have if we believe in people and share our lives with them. Although the donor lives miles and miles away now, I know she is good people I can rely on if need be.  Baby Jay stands for everything our world does not stand for now.  It stands for the open hand and heart and for congeniality and hospitality. Baby Jay in its gifting stands for love and friendship

I don’t miss dealing with foul diapers, runaway children in malls and trying to calm a child who repeatedly had night terrors.  But I do miss the overarching feeling of love and community that you have in those early years.

Rocketman, The Myth of Elton John (or The Cosmos is Smaller than you Would Think)

16 February 2020

  

Prologue

Being a fourteen-year-old boy was just a horrible thing.  Why? Acne, changing schools and losing familiar patterns of interaction with hometown peers stand out. After I left eighth grade, they put me on a bus and sent me 7 miles away to a regional high school. I was thrown into a population where people from my little burg made up maybe 1 in 10 of the school’s population. Who to trust and what to do, God these were seemingly unanswerable questions.

To be a fourteen-year-old boy who had lost forty pounds over the summer between eighth grade and freshman year, to have grown six inches in the same period so that I now stood six feet tall and to have had my braces off after four years of orthodontic torture meant I was lost. 

Nothing was the same. The people from my old school just knew me as fat, weird and ugly; the black horn rim glasses did not help.  And yes, having looked at my photos from back then and remembered how I behaved, I was stone weird. My hometown contemporaries treated me as they always had, with disdain. People from the new school don’t understand why I ducked every time someone raised their hand. They didn’t know how many times I got punched just for existing back in your old school.

And then there were the teachers who just didn’t like my mouth and my attitude.  There was my homeroom teacher who gave me a detention four out of five nights of the week.  That was a great number of missed bus runs home.  If only I could have shut my mouth and not always needed to have the last word, things might have been so much different.  But Ira Riddle did not like my attitude.

Then there was my science teacher. Round Ron.  I did not come up with the name. A kid name Hillman whispered in my ear and it stuck forever.  Mr. Nixon too did not like my smart-ass nonstop mouth.  It did not take long for him to twist my name up from Todd to Toad.  And from there it was only a short step of pedagogical sadism to my having my own green chair with a Dymo’d label that said, “The Toad Stool”.  If I tried to switch out that chair Round Ron gave me another detention.

But science class was almost bearable because that girl with the black hair, blue eyes and freckles. Always smiling she was always nice to me. She seemed to think I was funny. She treated me like a human being; she didn’t see the baggage of the weight and braces that was stacked up high in my soul. And as all fourteen-year-old boys do, having been shown kindness I developed a crush, a major crush.

One night I had taken a ride with my aunt because she has some business at the town hall in the town where I went to school. I might have been on the weaning end of high.  Not sure on that though, but it would have par for the course.  I leaned up against the front of my aunt’s big Ford station wagon and just starred up into space as the minutes ticked by.  The astral gazing is one clue I was kind of, sort of high. Suddenly someone right next to me said, “What are you doing me?” I almost jumped out of my skin because I didn’t hear her the black-haired girl from science class come up and move next to me as I leaned against the solid metal grill of that Motown built monster family mover. This shock and lack of attention to my surroundings is a second clue I was mildly high.

Sputtering I spewed out that I was waiting for my aunt who was in the municipal building and I didn’t know how long she would be. The blue-eyed girl with the infectious laugh told me she was happy I wasn’t a pervert just hanging out in the park.  She volunteered she was walking home from the YMCA. 

And then we just talked and talked because my aunt was apparently caught up in a long conversation in the municipal building. We talked about people we knew in common.  We talked about books we liked and I promised to give her your copy of Slaughterhouse Five. 

We talked about music and I rambled on about the Grateful Dead and she talked about Elton John. In twenty minutes, we had shares lifetimes of personal history. We moved to the back of my aunt’s car so I could smoke a cigarette.  Finally, my aunt came out and we said goodbye. She shrugged and said it looked like I had to go.  With the heavy metal sound of that station wagon’s doors opening the moment was over.  But that 20 minutes has changed the arc of my high school experience.

Truth be told I was madly in love with her in that high school horny puppy dog way.  For me she was and the unobtainable image of romance and lust.  I can’t minimize the lust angle here.  But what unrolled in reality was that we became fast friends. Hell, we had more shared experiences than most couples who dated all the way through high school did.  She was with me the night Richard Nixon was unceremoniously booted from the White House.  She smoked dope with me and then stomped through muddy fields singing hymns and songs by the Dead and by Elton John. We shared filthy jokes. For four years she was a point of light that kept high school from being hell. 

And then we went off to different colleges.

In the summer 1974 I was living at the beach, in Ocean City, NJ.  Elton John’s music was everywhere.  He had released all those monster singles from Your Song to Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.  A day never went by when you didn’t hear Daniel or Goodbye Yellow Brick Road on a jukebox or a radio, or blasting out of a fun arcade.  Prep’s pizza at 34^thstreet had a pretty decent jukebox; I mean they had Sugar Magnolia by the Dead on it.  But if you went in there later in the evening somebody would always play something or maybe more than one something by Elton John.

I had several of Elton’s albums including one well-worn copy of his debut American album, the one with Your Song.  I loved that record and I loved Tumbleweed Connection. I had consumed the Kool-Aid and I was a completest for his music.  Well, I didn’t buy Friends but nobody did.  It was in cut-out bins for a decade marked down to 99 cents for a new copy.

Well, in Ocean City there was a record store that was situated on Asbury, between 9^th and 10^th Streets on the west side of the street.  The records were way over priced but that had an interesting selection. I would always go and check to primarily see what the Dead and the Airplane were doing, and what might have come out from any of the members of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. But when I was in that record emporium I would flip through each and every bin. There were no shorts visits to a record store for me in 1974.

One day as I was going through the bins there were two copies of Empty Sky, an import Elton John album.  I asked the guy at the counter about it and he said he had a special deal for imports and what I was holding was Elton’s real first album.  I shelled out several days’ worth of pay for that record.  Later that night, after I finished my shift on the boardwalk selling ice cream novelties, I ended up at my cousin’s apartment and played the thing end to end on some very fine speakers. To me Empty Sky was awesome. The high point was a song called Skyline Pigeon.

As I listened to the record again and again, I thought of that lass with black hair, blue eyes and freckles, the big fan of Elton.  Knowing that I would be going off to the Midwest to university and she to Rutgers I decided to buy her a copy of the rare album and give it to her as a kind of farewell gift.  She told me she loved it.  In return she gave me later gave me a copy of Aztec’s Two Step’s Almost Apocalypse.  I treasure that gift with all my heart.  It is one of the few perfect albums I own.

Now on to Rocketman

Sadly, and with shame showing on my face I must admit I have been consuming a great deal of media.  Turns out my local public library has an ample supply of Blu-Ray discs of recent releases.  In the past week I have watched Stuber (simple and stupid), MIB International (the same), The Art of Racing in the Rain (gag, ugh, ptewe), and last but not least Rocketman.  

My expectation of Rocketman was that it would be a biopic of the life of Elton Hercules John.  Not so much.  Instead it was a treatment for a fantasy Broadway show that has yet to be produced. If you have seen it, tell were those musical numbers designed for anything but Broadway? Rocketman was also a myth.  At no point in the movie did the subject of the picture ever move from being framed as the good guy or victim to being the bad guy. As depicted, Elton at his worst was a morally neutral and that occurred only when he married a woman knowing he was gay.

I was a fan back in the day.  I read Crawdaddy, and Creem and Rolling Stone from cover to cover. Make no mistake Elton John was a first-class arse, a bastard of the highest order to quite a number of people. People are not just good and not just bad, and Elton was just another person.  Don’t get me wrong I enjoyed the film immensely.  Those song and dance numbers were amazing.  I really enjoyed the music and even the narrative, but it was a fable, a fantasy.  The lack of assigning to Elton responsibility for the darker parts of his history bugged me.

When I go to see a movie that impliedly is based on a true story, I kind of, sort of expect more truth.  Rocketman is more a Gabriel Garcia Marquez telling of Reg’s tale.  Rocketman is magical realism than biopic.

But there was a moment in the film that sent me tripping down the corridors to those days when I, and most everyone else, loved Elton. It was the scene where he goes to see his father, his cold and distanced father.  Elton’s old man asks Elton to autograph an album cover, the one pictured above, the one discussed above, Empty Sky. When I saw that LP Cover it me to summer 1977 and one of those moments of odd congruence of events that don’t really happen, but sometimes really do.

In fall 1974 I went Michigan State and the black-haired girl went 60 northeast to Rutgers. We wrote a few letters back and forth.  We agreed to catch up at the Christmas holiday.  I really don’t remember when it happened that freshman year, or what exactly happened, but this truest friend decided that university was not for her.  We got together a couple of times before I returned for my sophomore year.  In one of those meetings she let me know, probably because I asked her to play it, she no longer had her copy of Empty Sky.

When I asked what happened the story was murky but she implied some skullduggery that only happens in college had occurred.  She told me she had loaned, or maybe he had borrowed, the LP to a guy named Eric. According to her Eric was her Resident Assistant in the dorm. Although she wanted the LP back, she never had retrieved or received it, from him. Hey, I had spent hard earned money on this disc and I was not happy about this.

Several years pass

So, at the end of 1977 I was elected the president of the undergraduates of the MSU Department of Communication.  Probably the biggest perk I got out of the election, besides something to put on my grad school application, was that I was given an office to share on the second floor of the new wing of the Kedzie building on MSU’s campus.  The office was to be shared but to this day I have no idea who with, they never showed up.

While I didn’t meet my officemate, I did meet were the two hairy freaks that had the office next to mine.  One of them was Ron, another exile from the Delaware Valley.  He was a graduate student in Communication but he was so very cool.  He had worked on South Street in Philly.  He had worked at the Trocadero. 

The other guy was from New Jersey, just like me.  His name was Eric and he too was a graduate student in Communication.  Over the weeks we did all the things people do to get to know each other.  We talked about the old home country, the Garden State.  We talked about favorite books; I think mine by this time was Frank Herbert’s Dune. We all need the spice.

One day in my office got around to music.  We talked about the Dead, the Who and eventually got to Elton John.  I bragged that I had Elton’s first album and import.  Eric told me he owned it too.  At that point things began to click in my head.  Eric was from New Jersey.  He went to Rutgers.  He owned a copy of Empty Sky.

I very clearly and unambiguously said, “You don’t own a copy of Empty Sky.  You stole it from Kathy and she wants it back.”  I believe his response was the ever popular, “How the fuck did you know that?”  He just looked at me flummoxed.  After a few seconds he offered up that I must be that guy from south Jersey that gave it to her and that he didn’t steal it, he just didn’t have the chance to give it back.  Quickly, he made me come into his office while he searched the books on his shelves.  Eventually he pulled down one and opened it up and there was her signature, he had bought the book from her.

Eric and I became good friends.  My now wife even took a class from him, Com 100 I believe, or as she describes it Mastering Underwater Basket Weaving.  To this day she has disdain for what she asserts was my puffball major. Eric and I did the Jersey thing and when Springsteen came and played our 5,500-seat hockey arena we went and saw him. Twice.  Two of the greatest concerts ever.

I lost touch with the blue-eyed freckled girl, but life is such that people drift in and drift out of your life and there is nothing you can do to stop it. I still keep up with Dean Eric on Facebook. And my wife loves Aztec Two Step’s Almost Apocalypse as much as I do My wife was a big Elton fan too. When I was in law school we went and saw him. The concert was a great show, Elton still had his voice then. Due to a tip I received in line while waiting at the Ticketmaster outlet in the old downtown Detroit Hudson’s were the closest people in Joe Louis Arena to Elton due to an odd stage configuration.

A copy of a record flashed in a movie reminded me of how many times I have found the world smaller that I thought it ever could be. Two guys shooting the shit 600 miles from home talk about a record and find there are connected by a person they both thought was a wonderful human being. Small world but I wouldn’t want to paint it.