Mom Jeans

1959--Rugby, ND

My mother had a thing about bluejeans. She didn't like them. Still doesn't.

I was reminded of this recently when I came across the photo you see at the top of the page. It was the summer of 1959, and my two brothers and I were headed with our parents out to Oregon, where we would visit my dad's very large family. Left to right: Dave (10), Dan (14), Richard (17). My older brother had just graduated from Hiram (Ohio) High School (valedictorian, a distinction he would later share with Dave, but not with me), and I think you can tell from the look on his face that he wasn't exactly delighted about posing for the photograph.

Dave is wearing his red Hiram little league baseball cap (actually, it was the Hot Stove League, but let's not cavil); dangling around his neck is an old Brownie camera. He's also wearing a shirt my grandmother Osborn made with material she'd acquired in England when she and my grandfather were there for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1952, seven years earlier. All three of us had them; we called them our "coronation shirts." Well, either Dave hadn't grown much in seven years, or he's wearing one that had once belonged to one of his older brothers.

I--in the middle--appear to have had a very recent haircut, a very close haircut. Fashionable. Back then. I also don't seem too concerned about having my shirt tucked in. Snazzy wristwatch.

But what this picture really reminded me of is that not one of us is wearing bluejeans. Here we are--on a cross-country road trip--hours every day in the car--visiting national parks and such--and not one of us is wearing bluejeans.

Three guesses why not.

1. Mom  2. Mom  3. Mom.

Back when we were littler, living in Oklahoma, we wore jeans around--though mine seemed always to have the knees ripped out. (In early elementary school, wearing an over-tight pair, I bent over too quickly, ripped out the rear seam, and got to go home for the rest of the day. My delight at being home trumped my embarrassment of, briefly (get it?), having publicly visible underpants.)

I never saw Mom and Dad wear jeans--except when we were camping, or Dad was going fishing or something--or doing yard work--though he often wore his old army khakis for those enterprises. Mom--when she was doing work around the house--would wear what were called "pedal-pushers," a design so popular that they made the cover of LIFE magazine the year I was born. Mom's were tighter than what you see in the photograph (fashion had moved on--can you believe it?), and I think I remember that she had two pair: one pink, the other pale blue. They were not denim.

I don't know what turned Mom against jeans. I think it might have been a class thing, though. She was beginning to perceive herself (and the rest of us) more and more as members of the Intelligentsia, and bluejeans (in those days) communicated something much different.

Her animus deepened and calcified as the years went on. Back in the mid 1980s--I was forty, for Pete's sake!--out in the Northwest again for a family reunion, Joyce, son Steve, and I were staying in same Walla Walla, WA, motel with my folks (not in the same room!). We were about to head out for a get-together at my uncle John's, but when Mom saw me--in bluejeans!--she said, You're not going to wear those, are you?

I mumbled something about it's being a picnic ... but her silent Arctic glare sent me back into our room, where I raged, raged, against the dying of the jeans and changed into some chinos. I was pissed. And, later, annoyed when I saw that all my cousins, uncles, aunts were ... in jeans.

Later, now living in a stages-of-care place in Lenox, Mass., Mom tells us not to wear jeans (or shorts) in the facility because they won't allow it in the dining room. Hah! Brother Dave and I have defied her wishes (ain't we brave? and thoughtful?) and often wear either/or when we visit. No employee has ever questioned us--denied us sustenance.

A further defiance: I wear jeans or shorts almost every day of the year. I am wearing jeans as I type these words.  What a rebel!

My Boomerang Won't Come Back

I have a former student--and current Facebook friend--who likes to post amusing sayings every day. The one he posted this morning brought back a high school memory:

I couldn't quite remember how to throw a boomerang, but eventually it came back to me.

I had that problem once--big-time.

For some reason my family had gone to New York City ... was it to meet my older brother, who was returning from a college year abroad in France? If so, I was in college at the time, and the story I'm about to tell is even more egregious, for it reveals a ... uh ... lack of judgment that's fairly severe.

Anyway, in NYC we visited the UN building, where, in the gift shop, I bought a boomerang that looked a bit like the one in the photo at the head of this confession. My younger brother, Dave, also got one. I remember going with Dave up to the old football field at Hiram High School (RIP) and throwing them around until we (sort of) got them to the point at which they would wheel in air and whirl back toward us. I was never dumb enough to try to catch it, though--perhaps it never really came close enough to do so?

One fine day I was hanging out with Paul Dreisbach, a year younger, whose father, Dale, was a chemistry professor at Hiram College (my dad chaired Hiram's Division of Education); Paul's mom, Ruthana Dreisbach (I never called her anything but "Mrs. Dreisbach," by the way, even when, later on, she became a colleague in the Aurora Schools), had been my choir director for four years at Hiram High and had directed me in three musicals/operettas: The Mikado (I was Pish-Tush), Masquerade in Vienna (based on Die Fledermaus; I was Dr. Falke), and Trial by Jury (I was the judge). Paul was also in those shows and later starred in Hiram High's production of H.M.S. Pinafore).

Anyway, we were hanging out on the mean streets of Hiram. I had my boomerang. We were near his house. His house had a large picture window.

Do I need to tell more?

Toward his house I whipped the boomerang. It didn't come back. (Here's a link to YouTube, to "My Boomerang Won't Come Back," a 1961 hit by Charlie Drake, a song I now realize, listening for the first time since the 1960s, is grotesquely un-PC.)

Anyway, my boomerang, decidedly not coming back, made an uninvited entry into the Dreisbachs' house--via the picture window. The sound alone was impressive.

Had Paul not been with me, I probably would have run--not realizing at the time, of course, that the boomerang itself, lying on their living room floor, would have been the noose around my neck: There were only two such devices in all of Hiram, I'm sure.

So Paul and I walked over to his house and confessed (well, I did; Paul had done nothing wrong). And Mrs. Dreisbach was incredibly calm (maybe in a state of shock?) and did not at all make me feel worse about what I'd just done.

I had to go home then, confess again. And Dad and the Dreisbachs worked out the details of the repair.

Years later, when Mrs. Dreisbach retired from the Aurora Schools, I spoke at her retirement dinner. I told the boomerang story. Lots of people laughed. I was too afraid to look at her to see if she were sharing in the mirth. I hope she was ...

Shame in the Night

Last night I woke up with a memory of something I wish I'd permanently forgotten. In the darkness I blushed.

I was 9, maybe 10, living in Enid, Oklahoma, attending Adams Elementary School at 2200 East Randolph. Our playground--in the back of the school--was rough Sooner State red clay, baked hard by Sooner sun and covered with pebbles.

This picture above--from GoogleMaps--is from 2013, and the exterior looks very similar, although the grass is greener. The winged A on the front lawn was Adams' symbol--our school always dominated the city-wide Little Olympics, a track-and-field competition among Enid's various elementary schools. The event still is going on, still sponsored, as it was in my day, by the Kiwanis Club. (Link to the site.)

And here I am, dressed for competition, in my grandparents' back yard. I was in the shuttle relay. We came in second, a finish that I assured when in my turn (I was the first to run for Adams), I came in ... second.

Anyway, I'm avoiding things.

I was about this age and size when the event happened that bolted back into my memory last night with such ferocity that I woke up.

Each day at Adams we had both recess (15 minutes? 20? can't remember), and we played outside after lunch, as well. The games could get rough. We played "Smear the Man with the Ball"--which, after we moved to Hiram in 1956, I learned had a different name in the Buckeye State: "Smear the Queer." Sometimes we divided into Confederate and Yankee and re-enacted the Civil War. We'd form two lines on opposite sides of the playground--then charge. And grapple with the "enemy." Our teachers actually let this go on for a while--unthinkable now. I saw wrestling matches, fistfights. The more quiet kids would make for the trees that lined the west side of the playground--or wander to the playground equipment--and hope the rougher bunch would leave them alone.

One boy in my class--whose name I am changing to Victim--took a lot of crap from the rest of us. He was, well, challenged. Very slow in class and elsewhere. Most of the time we ignored him, but every now and then we would see Victim and, deciding his life was not hard enough, would do things to make him miserable. Teasing, taunting. Bullying is the word now.

I don't remember if our teachers just ignored it, or if we were cruelly clever enough to do it when they weren't looking. I prefer to think it was the latter.

One day--the day that I remembered last night--a group of us found Victim hanging around the northeast corner of the building. There was a large tree there then, with branches low enough that it was easy to climb, even for Victim.

We started tossing pebbles at him, crying out things I am forever grateful that I cannot remember. And Victim, cornered, started climbing the tree.

We circled below, throwing harder now. Yelling.

I fired one that hit him in the corner of the eye.

He screamed as if hit by a bullet. I froze while the other boys scattered like chaff. Victim clumsily descended from the tree, and I walked slowly over to the weeping boy. I was weeping now, too, and apologizing--probably more from fear (Had I blinded him? How much trouble was I in?) than from compassion.

His hand was over his eye, but I asked if I could look. And there was the pebble I'd thrown, lodged in the corner of his right eye--but it had not hit the eyeball. I gingerly reached up and touched it. And it promptly fell out, and Victim's cries slowly transformed to shudders.

"You're all right," I told him, again and again and again. "You don't have to tell anyone ...."

And he didn't.

And I never bothered him again.

But he bothered me--rather, the memory of what I'd done bothered me. It took me a long, long time to forget Victim--and what I'd done. Decades flew by.

And then I woke up last night, that memory as sharp as a fresh knife wound.

I don't know what happened to Victim. We moved to Ohio a couple of years later. I just tried to find him on Google and Ancestry.com, but didn't have any luck. I didn't really look too hard, though. Maybe if I can't find him, I will forget again ...?

Frankenstein Sundae, 116

Bysshe Shelley has been in London for about six weeks--meeting with one of his literary idols, William Godwin, whose 15-year-old daughter, Mary, was out of the country at the time.

About six weeks after their trip to London in the fall of 1812, Bysshe and Harriet returned to Tremadoc. This time they lasted three months. He was not popular in that Welsh community. His radical social and religious ideas—many of which were Godwin-inspired—did not set well with the locals, who had a far more conservative bent.

On February 26, 1813—following a stormy, unpleasant week—an … episode, one that caused controversy among early Shelley scholars, even as it had among Bysshe’s friends, more than one of whom concluded that his experience was nothing more than another of his wild fantasies or hallucinations or nightmares. Let’s follow what Richard Holmes says about the events:

The external events seem clear. During the night the house [Tan-yr-allt] was twice disturbed; several shots were fired; at least two, and possibly more, of the large glass windows on the ground floor were smashed; the lawn outside the east front of the house was trampled and Shelley rolled in the mud; Shelley’s nightgown was shot through; and one pistol ball was found embedded in the wainscot under one of the windows in the main drawing-room. By the next morning the whole household was in a state of terror and exhaustion. Shelley especially was in a state of severe nervous shock, amounting to something like nervous breakdown, and his stomach seems to have been strained or kicked during a violent struggle.[1]

Other scholars have weighed in over the years, the major ones concluding, as Holmes does, that the attack occurred pretty much as Bysshe had described.

Edward Dowden (Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1896) offered reasons for disbelief (has been a perplexity to Shelley biographers)—but eventually settled for this: sufficiently disproved are the theories that the attack existed only in his fertile imagination.[2]

Roger Ingpen (Shelley in England, 1917): … the account of it given by Bysshe … [has] now [been] proved to have been correct ….[3]

Walter Edwin Peck (Shelley: His Life and Work, 1927) just reports the events as if they were fact—gives no credence to the accusations that Bysshe had manufactured a wild excuse to leave Tremadoc because of debts and his constitutional restlessness.[4]

Newman Ivey White (Shelley, 1940): … Shelley’s wild story … [is] entitled to almost literal belief.[5]

Because these exciting events in Bysshe’s life occurred in Tremadoc, I knew I had to go there—to see Tan-yr-allt, the place where gunshots could have ended his life.

---

[1] Shelley: The Pursuit, 188.

[2] 187-90.

[3] II, 399.

[4] I, 291–92.

[5] I, 281.

Dripping Skies, Funeral Home ...

Johnson-Romito Funeral Home
Hudson, OH

It's dark. It's rainy. We live next door to a funeral home. An event is going on there as I type. What else do you need to know about my mood?

Joyce has written eloquently about living next to a funeral home, and just now I did a quick Google search to see if I could find that essay so I could post a link to it. But right at the top of the search results was something that stunned me: a notice from another funeral home with information about a service for one Joyce Ann Dyer, who died in 2007.

Joyce Ann Dyer ... that's my wife's name!

Terror immediately replaced Depression in my mind. (I know, I know: irrational.)  I left my study for a minute, walked to the bottom of our stairs, listened for Joyce working in her study. I heard nothing. Up the stairs I went as fast as my old legs could carry me. Not at her computer.

But I heard her shower running. I took a peek. There she was--and you get no additional details about that.

Imagination can be a boon companion, asking, as it ever does, What if ...? And so we picture living in a fine home we pass, owning a rare first edition (I'd take a First Folio, wouldn't you?), being young and lithe again, being as slim as we ought to be, having ...  You get the picture.

But he can also be a grim companion, a Debbie Downer (remember Rachel Dratch on SNL?). And the What if's? assume a horrifying aspect. Like just now ... thank you so much, Google.

I just did a smarter Google search--placing "Joyce Dyer" in quotation marks, and I found that essay--"Funeral Home"--was in the Fall 2011 issue of the little magazine Stoneboat. And the magazine's website reminded me that Joyce had earned a Pushcart nomination for that piece. (Link to more information.)

And now, I see, that--as usual--I've gotten off the subject. I was going to write about the oddest feeling I had this morning as I walked back from the coffee shop. It was dripping rain as I arrived at the funeral home parking lot (adjacent to our house), and I saw a young man, a former middle school student of mine, standing outside with a woman. Both, I know, are employees. The event was about to begin, and they were there to manage parking and greet the arriving mourners. We called greetings to each other.

And it was right afterwards, taking the steps up to our front porch, that I realized that in all likelihood that young man will one day (not soon, I hope) be managing traffic and greeting mourners I will never see for an event I will not realize is even going on.

That provoked a small shudder--but nothing near the one that arrived when I did that initial Google search for my wife's essay.

What Is Our "Common Core" in Cartoons?

There was a little piece in the New York Times today about some filmmakers who are shooting some short films about Shakespeare's sonnets: 154 sonnets, 154 short films--all shot it in New York City. (Link to article about the project.)



It's astonishing, really, that Shakespeare, dead since 1616, still lives in so many ways, in so many media--from stage to screen to MP3 to T-shirt to coffee mug to ... newspaper cartoon. You can still find in the pages of newspapers (remember them?) cartoon images from the plays re-designed to evoke a laugh. Take this recent Bizarro comic from a couple of years ago. The cartoonist was confident that everyone knows the first few lines of "To be or not to be." Safe joke. Every now and then you'll see, as well, a cartoon playing with Hamlet-and-the-skull-of-Yorick, too, although I'm fairly certain that most people nowadays could not really explain that situation; they just know that in Hamlet there's a skull thingy going on with our dark protagonist.

Anyway, all of this got me to thinking even more about something I'd been thinking about anyway: the assumptions that cartoonists can make about our common literary knowledge, assumptions that will probably weaken and eventually disappear, for the most part, as time and advances and public knowledge of our Western literary heritage evanesces.

When I was on Facebook, I used to upload cartoons with literary content all the time. And there are still a lot of them. Cartoonists still employ images from Frankenstein (though they're almost always images of the creature from the 1931 film with Boris Karloff, not the 1818 novel), from Poe (ravens remain common), from A Christmas Carol, Dracula (again--almost always from the 1931 film with Bela Lugosi). The Headless Horseman from Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" often rides back into the funnies during Halloween--and sometimes after (as this cartoon shows). Irving's Rip Van Winkle also appears from time to time.

Every now and then I'll see a reference to something that seems so specialized that I feel the cartoonist seems to be saying, Screw it. I know that a majority of my readers are not going to understand this, but I think it's funny! In this Frazz comic from a couple of years ago the characters are talking about Cormac McCarthy. A popular writer, sure--but among a generally limited readership. I'm guessing it's the recent films based on McCarthy's works that made the cartoonist go for it--No Country for Old Men and The Road.

Among the most common literary cartoon subjects is Moby-Dick. Melville's white whale, the one-legged Captain Ahab--these continue to give cartoonists an almost endless source of possibilities. This recent one from The Flying McCoy Brothers is the tiniest sliver of the Moby-Dick pie.

Ahab and the white whale. The images remain familiar to virtually everyone (like Hamlet's skull, like Frankenstein's creature), but I wonder how many people these days--beyond English majors and graduate students--read Melville's novel? I taught for some years at Western Reserve Academy with a wonderful colleague, John Haile, who loved the novel and taught it often. (A couple of times he even arranged all-night read-throughs of the novel with his students and other faculty.) But I would guess not many high schools teach the novel these days. It's so long, for one thing--and so rich in complexities of language and theme.

As the years and decades proceed, I'm guessing the last to linger will be the whale, Frankenstein's creature, Dracula, perhaps Poe's raven? The Headless Horseman?

But I'm guessing, as well, that our actual knowledge of these works will continue to diminish. Most of the juniors I taught at WRA--bright, college-bound, wonderful young people--had read neither "Sleepy Hollow" nor Irving's other classic, "Rip Van Winkle." But they sort of knew the stories.

That's the natural history of literature--and of us, as a matter of fact. Our loved ones know us intimately. Our descendants sort of know our stories. Our further descendants perhaps recognize a photograph, Then ... oblivion.

And on that happy note ...

BREAKING SKY: A New Novel from an Old Friend

A few years ago--when the Twilight madness was at its height--I decided I would read the novels, just so I wouldn't feel culturally illiterate. I should say also that I was teaching high school English at the time at Western Reserve Academy, and most of the young women I taught (11th graders) had read and/or were reading the novels. (A few denied it; one, especially, condemned the novels--on literary terms, not religious ones--when I asked who had read the books. I'll add that no boys in the room confessed to any Twilight hours.)

As a literary critic and book reviewer--and an adult (an old one!)--I felt a little odd reading Twilight in public places--places like coffee shops where others could see me. (I know: I'm a coward.) So I used the modern form of reading deception: Kindle. I started it on July 13, 2009, and recognized within the first few sentences that I was not the audience for the book. (Duh.) But as I read through (and finished) the first volume (the only one I would read), I certainly understood the appeal of the book for young readers. Especially young women.

I felt the same way, of course, reading the opening pages of Cori McCarthy's new novel, Breaking Sky. But I knew that "going in," as they say. YA novels are, well, for YAs, not for seventy-year-old retired English teachers. Teens are invariably the heroes in teen fiction; many (most) adults are messed up--or worse (see Harry Potter).

But I read Breaking Sky with pleasure for a variety of reasons. For one--there's some personal history. I taught her older brother Evan in 8th grade at Harmon Middle School in Aurora (he's now a diplomat in Russia), and Cori herself was in 8th grade the year I retired from the school (the 1996-97 school year--but I didn't know the 8th graders well that year. I had a student teacher in the fall; I no longer taught all the eighth graders (the school had hired another teacher, a very bright young man); I retired in mid-January. So ... I knew who Cori was, but I did not know her very well, not at all. My loss.

I had read (and enjoyed) Cori's first novel, Rain, and I was eager to see how/if she had changed and/or grown as a writer.

I also am very interested to see in her work how the boundaries of YA fiction have expanded since the days when I was teaching it to youngsters. Mild cursing, explicit mentions of (but not too many details about) sexual encounters--these were largely unthinkable in the days of yesteryear. Cori's first novel, a futuristic one, dealt with human sex trafficking (off planet); this one features a prominent gay character and some hanky-panky among some of the principals.

A few details about the plot of Breaking Sky. We're a bit in the future (2048); the USA is no longer the dominant military force on the planet. That ranking belongs to China, whose military has developed "red drones," planes that fly so swiftly and acrobatically that they can easily defeat the more traditional jets of the US (and the West's) arsenal. But the US has secretly developed a new design--planes called the Streakers--that possibly, just possibly, can compete with the red drones.

Because the Streakers fly at unthinkable speeds (Mach 4 and beyond), the Air Force is experimenting with teen pilots, young men and women whose reaction times are greater than those of adults. Our hero (heroine)--named, appropriately, Chase  Harcourt, is freaky talented (she's the best of the young pilots), but her life is cluttered with "issues," as well--including an estrangement from her father, a general. Anyway, don't want to spoil it for readers, so I'll just say that international relations heat up in Breaking Sky--and very quickly so. And Chase plays a key role in the conflict.

I enjoyed Cori's occasional allusions (stated and tacit) to Star Wars and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (not that it's relevant--but her brother Evan was a Tolkien-freak). And she has written some very emotional scenes whose content I will not mention for obvious spoiler-alert reasons. I was interested, too, that she opted not to use/create new slang but had her young cast use locutions that today's readers will instantly recognize. It's as if our colloquial language had frozen in the years between now and then. (Same thing with cultural allusions.) Characters use expressions like talking trash and I need more space.

I think young readers will love Breaking Sky--readers of both genders. Computer-game guys will like the aerial acrobatics and warfare, et al.; young women who loved Twilight and The Hunger Games will find much to relate to here, as well. And many (most?) young readers who learned through Harry Potter that adults are complicated rather than one-dimensional will find more of the same here.

I'm proud to know Cori McCarthy and wish I'd hung around Harmon School another year to get to know her better. She might have taught me a few things.