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A Valentine Memory Revised

Thursday, February 14th, 2013

In a Valentine’s Day post I made here in 2010 (A Valentine Memory: Art, Love, and Pain in the First Grade) I recalled an incident from back when I was in the first grade. At least I thought it was the first grade. I went back and forth trying to decide whether it was the first or the second, finally deciding to go with my longstanding conviction that it had been the first grade. My mind has evidently continued to work on the problem in the unconscious background, and I am now almost completely sure that I combined two strongly remembered events, separated by a year, into one, which was the source of my uncertainty. I recommend to anyone that wants to understand fully the rest of this post that they go back to the original post, linked to above.

The emotional truth remains. The terrible dread I felt as I had to make and then present the “I love you” cards to all the girls in the class was real. The pain of disappointment I felt as Carol tossed my card aside disdainfully was true, and I can still feel it. My mind knitted together the two events into a narrative that enhanced the story in a way.

I did have to make the cards for the girls in the first grade, but Carol was not the girl I “claimed” in the first grade. Linda Jane was. Linda Jane had moved across town before the second grade and attended a different school that year.

Carol was the girl whose esteem I most valued in the second grade, which seemed right as I was trying to decide before, since I knew Linda Jane had been every boy’s dream girl in the first grade. But in order to sensibly make the two events become one, I had pretty well convinced myself that by the second semester my affection had been transferred to Carol. The thing that really made me realize I’d been wrong is that I clearly had the feeling that I was in my second grade classroom, as I watched Carol look through her stack of Valentine cards. I am totally sure of that now, in a way I could never explain. Somehow that vague feeling of the room I was in kept getting stronger to the point of certainty. Yes, I was seven years old, and not six.

I was tempted not to make this confession of my having joined together into one the two episodes from my early life, but the very fact that my mind came up with a plausible way to do it is interesting, and full adherence to the truth demands disclosure to the few that have actually read the original reminiscence. I imagine—not saying I remember now—that I did give special care to the card I made for Linda Jane, wanting to please her and gain her attention.

I also imagine that there was something special about the card I gave to Carol, something that would distinguish it from the silly “Bee mine” cards, even though it was not handmade, as all the first grade cards had been. Yes, I’m feeling that. It must have been a more expensive and expressive card of the type a boy would give to his girl friend. I would not have been watching so expectantly for her reaction otherwise. That makes it even worse, as the intent would have been more obvious. Yes, I feel pretty sure that was the case now. There’s really no reason for me to have been so interested in her response otherwise.

So, all I got wrong was my hope that my artistic talent would win favor with Carol, but that is only wrong for the imagined card. I certainly did hope to impress with my drawing ability. Naturally, the only boy in the class that could draw as well as or better than I was Philip, the boy Carol really liked. I might as well illustrate that with another memory involving Carol and Philip. We learned cursive handwriting in the second grade, and our ability to form the letters beautifully was a great point of pride. Cursive writing, as we saw it, fit into the category of artistic achievement. I know we also viewed it as a step into maturity to master handwriting.

Philip, Carol, and I must have had seats in the classroom very close to each other. I recall a time we were working on our cursive writing. I was evidently very impressed with my results as compared with Phillip’s and saw an opportunity to gain an advantage over him in Carol’s eyes by drawing her attention to our writing and asking her to judge which was better. This was entirely my doing. Though only seven years old, Carol was diplomatic. They were both really good, and she really couldn’t choose one over the other. I knew she was just trying to spare Phillip’s feelings, but I was not letting this opportunity slip by. I insisted that she choose which got the prize. Seeing that I would not relent, she reluctantly admitted that Phillip’s was just a little better. I was dumbfounded.

That is the merciful end of the memory. I have no memory of any expression on Phillip’s face. Or Carol’s. If I argued the point further, the memory of it has been mercifully obliterated. Nor can I begin to make out what our writing samples were like. Probably they were similar. At the time I was sure Carol’s decision just showed how much she preferred Philip to me, since I could see, as anyone could, that my handwriting was clearly superior to his. Thus gross injustice was added to the disappointed hope of winning favor, which made it even more crushing, because it meant there was no hope for me with her.

But did I really abandon hope? Which came first—the handwriting contest or Valentine’s Day? In any case, I know I really fell for Carol Ann, Snow White to my Prince Charming (walk on role), in our class’s stage production of Books Are Our Friends before the year was over. Sadly, she moved out of town in the summer. But the memory of regret is weaker than the memory of rejection.

So strange to enter again into my seven-year-old mind and feel once more the staggering smackdown of the handwriting judgment. I can never know how my life would have been different, if in any significant way, but for that hard lesson, but I know that it taught me not to be so sure of myself, perhaps at the everlasting expense of my self-confidence. In any case, those memories of painful disappointment (along with those of great joy) are among the few that persist.

ADDENDUM (February 15, 2013): My mind has not stopped trying to complete my memory of those long ago Valentine’s Days and has come up with yet another version that brings the two events closer to the single one I described three years ago. I have come to believe that I did make a Valentine card for Carol in the second grade. I’m sure it wouldn’t have said “I love you,” but it might have said “Be my Valentine.” It would have been the only one I made by hand that year. It’s a little hard for me to imagine myself having the courage to do that, but when I think about how I watched to see Carol’s reaction and how crushed I was when she tossed it aside with hardly a glance, I feel that it had to have been a rejection of more than a card I had bought. As I mentioned above, I did rate my artistic ability highly, never mind how accurately. It would also explain how I so easily conflated the two events when I first wrote about them. As of now I’d say I’m 95% sure that the making of cards for all the girls at the insistence of my mother was in the first grade and 95% sure that the watching for Carol’s reaction when she looked at my card was in the second grade. I’m at a somewhat shakier 90% certainty that it was an artistic creation of mine that Carol disdained. And that is the last I will have to say about it.

Tags: childhood, grade school, love, memory, rejection, Texas, Valentine’s Day
Posted in Early | No Comments »

Conned in Cannes

Saturday, July 7th, 2012

A Facebook friend’s posting of a picture of Les Beaux-de-Provence has reminded me of a trip I took to the South of France by rental car from Torino back when I was working there for a year (see The Perfect Italian Woman for a little about that) and how I have had in mind that someday I’d write here about a couple of incidents in that short trip for this totally neglected blog. I know no one is actually coming to this blog expecting to find anything new by now, but I will apologize to such an imaginary person for having dropped out of the blogosphere for so long. The reasons are twofold: my tweeting away (i.e., on Twitter as @onscrn) all the pent up desire to communicate something about my thoughts to others and my spending time developing apps for the iPhone and iPad. Enough about that.

Anyway, it was late March and a time when I was feeling alienated from Italy and desperate for a change of scenery and culture. I rented a car and took off after work on a Friday without a very clear destination, but knowing the South of France was a place I’d been wanting to visit, so it didn’t matter exactly where I went when. I had some regional Michelin guides to refer to. The drive did nothing to make me regret my decision to take a break from Italy. Almost all the roads were toll roads, which raised the cost of the trip considerably above what I had estimated. There were carabinieri stroking their machine guns at one of the toll entrances. Those kids with the lethal weapons always made me nervous. Fortunately, they were only stopping traffic and searching cars going the other direction.

My first interaction with people in France wasn’t encouraging. I pulled over at a truck stop outside of Nice for supper and got steak, fries, and a beer. I swear the piece of meat had gone bad before cooking. The people there weren’t friendly, and I couldn’t help wondering if they’d knowingly pulled out the spoiled meat for the American traveler. I ate only a bite or two of the meat and left without saying anything about it, feeling dissatisfied with myself for having accepted the inedible meal without protest, but not having it in me to demand a new steak or my money back, especially in French. If the proprietor had been interested in having a satisfied customer or had any pride in what he served, I think he would have said something to me on seeing how little I’d eaten. I imagined the laughter that had followed my exit. By the time I got to Cannes I was really tired after five or so hours on the road and was glad to find a cheap hotel there for the night.

For what follows I should explain that I have a tendency to hypoglycemia or low blood sugar. This trait is most strongly manifested in the morning, where I operate at a low level before I’ve had a good breakfast, by which I mean protein: ham and eggs, for example. I’m able to prepare my own breakfast easily on auto pilot in my own kitchen, but if I’m traveling I need to find a place that serves a real (not “continental”) breakfast before I can do anything that requires much in the way of brain use. Finding such an “English breakfast” as it seemed to be called on the tourist trail in Italy had sometimes been difficult on my travels there, but I had usually been able at least to find a coffee bar that sold panini with ham and maybe hard-boiled eggs. I sometimes carried a few small tins of tuna fish for an emergency protein breakfast. I had no such backup for this whim of a trip, but when I’d been in Paris I had been able to get a couple of eggs nature (sunny side up) in the morning, so I wasn’t too worried about finding breakfast in France.

The Cannes hotel I stayed in had no restaurant, so I set out the next morning in the car to find something to eat before heading on to Arles, where I planned to spend the next night. It was a beautiful day as I recall, though cool. This was too early in the year for there to be a beach scene, not that I would have been a part of it anyway. The beach was deserted, which suited me fine, and the sea was smooth, the sky clear. Driving along the beach, I came to a good-sized café that I figured must have something to eat. The pickings turned out to be very slim. I bought a café au lait and a couple of croissants, which to my dismay were quite sweet. A sweet croissant was worse than a regular one, which, being heavy on the carbohydrates, was bad enough. Sugar, for one that’s hypoglycemic, stimulates overproduction of insulin, which in turn leads to the sugar level dropping to a level even lower than before the eating of the sugar.

I was in a familiar slightly dizzy and definitely dumber than usual state as I got back into my rental car and proceeded on to the Cannes Bureau de Change to convert some more of my Italian lire into spendable French francs. This was of course before the Euro came into use, or my adventure would never have occurred.

It was late enough for the Bureau de Change to have opened, but there was no one about on the street as I walked to the Bureau after parking the car. Then an irritatingly friendly guy suddenly appeared, intercepted me in the street with a greeting, and started up a conversation with me. He began in French, then switched to English when I didn’t respond immediately. Was I English? From London? Oh, American. He had a sister in Washington DC. It was so expensive to live there. How did I find prices in France compared to those in the US? I told him I hadn’t had a chance to find out yet. I believe I would have probably said I was in a hurry and gone about my business if I had had a decent breakfast, but there’s no way to know.

Not surprisingly, given his flood of attention on me, the guy turned out to be a kind of salesman. He imagined I was on my way to exchange my money for French francs, and was in the business of exchanging money himself, but on the “black market,” which was the way he described it. He could give me a great exchange rate on my dollars.

I told him I had no dollars, but any disappointment he had at this news was fleeting, as he assured me that Italian lire were also in great demand by the French. He said that Mitterand limited the amount of French currency that could be taken out of the country, presumably thus limiting how much French travelers could purchase in other countries. He mentioned things such as Italian leather goods French tourists liked to buy in Italy. I didn’t quite understand this, but I assumed if a black market for lire existed there must be a reason for it, even though I knew the lira was supposed to be “weak.” He was ready to give me an exchange rate for my lire that was well above the official rate.

He showed me his French money and offered to let me go purchase something small with one of the banknotes to demonstrate its genuineness. I seriously doubt the possibility of counterfeit bills would have occurred to me, but I suppose his offer made the whole scheme seem more credible, though it could have had the opposite effect of raising suspicion of trickery. The guy was probably in his mid twenties, and his general appearance was a bit sleazy, but that was probably to be expected in his line of work.

I would never have thought to go looking for a way to get a few extra francs for my lire. But here the guy was, so maybe I should take advantage of his offer. Maybe I’d be foolish not to. Was the official rate just for chumps? He was just doing his job, so why shouldn’t I help him out? Maybe everybody in the know did it. My political orientation in those days was such that I had no scruples about violating a bourgeois rule governing the exchange of money.

Still, since the guy was working outside the law and I had no great interest in a marginal gain, why should I perhaps put myself at risk? And why should I trust someone that was in the technical sense a criminal after all? I didn’t focus on those practical aspects of the situation that much though. I think the black market for lire idea still sounded a little fishy to me, so I wanted to make sure there wasn’t trickery involved in his offer. With my brain practically running on empty, I struggled to quickly do the exchange rate computations in my head to be sure he wasn’t making me an offer that was actually lower than the official rate. What was the catch? Was he really planning to cheat me? This should have been an easy comparison of one rate to the other, but what does the rate mean anyway? Which way does the rate need to change for me to be coming out ahead? Was it francs per lira or lire per franc? I kept doing the calculation wondering if I wasn’t after all making a mistake. Was he actually quoting a price that was a factor of ten off? Maybe the guy just relied on people not knowing how to calculate the difference.

So there I was, somehow stuck talking to the guy and repeating the calculation in my head, as though that was what really mattered. Looking back at it, the episode had a certain dreamlike quality to it, the kind of dream I sometime get stuck in right before I’m completely awake in the morning, condemned to repeat a calculation or computer task over and over in an endless loop.

The illegality of the proposed transaction and its inherent risk was suddenly emphasized when he said to me “She’s watching us!” I didn’t turn to look to see who “she” was since he told me not to look. He led me around the corner, presumably out of her sight. I thought maybe he was a little paranoid. He continued to be concerned about this woman he assumed to be with the police the rest of the time we were together, mentioning that she was watching us a couple of times more.

I agreed to sell him 100,000 lire. He dismissed this as “nothing.” Inexplicably in his spell, I agreed to double the amount to 200,000, which was worth about $125 at the time. So now it was time for money to change hands. And indeed “she” was still watching.

He had a standard way of proceeding, of course, and told me not to hand him the Italian money yet, but to keep it in my pocket. Perhaps, I assumed, due to some experience of his with disputes with “customers” after a transaction or just having the wisdom to eliminate the possibility of such disputes, he insisted that I count, bill by bill, the wad of French money he was about to give me, just to verify it was the correct amount. And it seemed a good thing I had counted, for the sum did turn out to be short by 100 francs. But he took the money back and pointedly added a 100 franc bill to make up the difference before handing me the French money. Having the francs safely in my pocket, I handed him my Italian money, which he didn’t bother to count. This was done very quickly to be sure no one would see us. I did wonder about the money counting exercise. Had he deliberately left one bill off? And if so, why? Perhaps he just wanted to demonstrate how right he had been that the counting was necessary?

He was in a great mood at the end of our business, really on top of the world it seemed. He walked with me back around the corner in sight of the Bureau. He asked me what I was going to be spending all those francs on, mentioning I think, some of the food and wine it might procure. He asked me how long I was going to be in Cannes, and I answered truthfully that I was leaving right away. He shook my hand with great pleasure, once again telling me to enjoy spending my French money. I was glad to be rid of him, and went on to my original destination, the Bureau de Change to get yet more French money in exchange for my Italian.

Once inside the office, I pulled out the dozen or so bills he had handed me and glanced down at them. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been quite as shocked as I was to see that my big wad was, except for the the outer bills, composed of cut up newspaper! I was, however, dumbfounded.

What a laugh! Here I had only been worrying about whether the rate made sense as a win for me, never suspecting that I would be so completely cheated. Conned! Everything he had done and said had been directed to getting me to swap the money quickly (she’s watching us!) without looking at it. Except he had given me the illusion of having checked it carefully, bill by bill. He had obviously made a quick switch of the wad of fake bills for the wad of real ones when he added one real bill after I had had my hands and eyes on the real ones. Fortunately, something had kept me from giving him all my money. He had never convinced me that there was no way he could be cheating me. I had never considered the possibility of a switcheroo though.

As I sat down to write about this incident, the most important detail seemed to be my state of lowered mental capacity due to having low blood sugar. That’s why I explained how eating sweet croissants had made it worse than if I’d skipped breakfast altogether. Now I’m not so sure. Perhaps I would have just passed on by the annoying salesman if I’d had my usual breakfast, but would I really have been less susceptible to his techniques of manipulation? Yes, my diminished capacity made me struggle to calculate whether the rate he was offering was really the great deal he claimed it was, but my willingness to make that effort meant that I had already agreed that having it be true was desirable and that I was inclined to complete the deal as soon as I confirmed it. I would probably have been no more capable of catching on to what was happening once I had landed in his web than any other naive person.

The man was a pro. Let’s review his technique a bit more. First he sought to engage me in friendly conversation, but every question had a purpose. Of course I was on my guard, knowing he was almost certainly wanting to sell me something, but I, like most people, find it difficult to be rude even to someone with an unwanted proposition for me. Once the guy knew where I was from he would likely know what kind of money I had. He missed that one, but quickly switched to saying Italian lire were also in demand by the French. I imagine the question about how I found prices in France compared to those in the US was to give him an idea of how much money I was planning to change based on what kind of items I compared prices on, or perhaps to see how long I had been in the country.

He quickly moved on to the subject of money changing, using the term “black market,” which is something Americans have heard of but are likely to have little or no experience with. It has the ring of something that is outside normal channels, but probably so widespread that it’s basically condoned. It’s something the average tourist may not get to participate in, so it has a certain allure from that standpoint. At this point all of his emphasis was on the big advantages and the commonplace nature of dealing with him.

As an aside, I just found through google an article online advocating that travelers (and I mean currently) take advantage of black market rates of exchange in countries with overpriced currencies. Evidently there are illegal banks set up for these transactions.

The offer to have me make a test purchase with one of his banknotes was probably designed more to draw my interest in the potential transaction than to reassure me of the authenticity of the money. Anything that could engage me on the path to a final deal was to his advantage. Once he had me well on the road to a black market transaction, which was really not that big a deal to the authorities, he could inject the reality that what we were doing was not without jeopardy, since illegal, and thus speed the transaction along. By giving me the idea our actions might be being watched, he made the quick, hidden exchange of money seem prudent.

His raising possible ways an unscrupulous black market dealer might cheat someone (using counterfeit money, short-changing me) and then satisfying me that those were not an issue with him were also no doubt designed to give me confidence and keep me from considering the one true way he was about to rip me off. In my case the raising of the cheating possibility worked to his advantage since it diverted so much of my attention to checking the reality of the advantage from the exchange rate he was quoting. Of course the ruse of first giving me the banknotes to count and then showing me the one he was supposedly adding to the ones I had just counted was crucial. It’s the classic misdirection of attention every magician uses when making a quick switch.

Beyond his techniques, the psychology of the con man is something I find interesting. I think there must be kinship between the con artist and the compulsive gambler. The gambler may lose all his money, the con man may go to jail. For each, success brings the elation of having gotten something for nothing by having taken a risk that the contemptible ordinary lot of humanity is too cowardly for. But the successful con artist has a bonus in knowing he has succeeded not by being the darling of fortune but by manipulating a person into doing his will, thus demonstrating his superiority to that dupable one.

I can’t help thinking that it was the success of his trick that elated him more than the monetary gain that verified it. He had outsmarted the gullible, hence contemptible, foreigner. He definitely took joy in knowing that I was there with scraps of newspaper in my pocket which I would soon discover. Why else would he talk about the wonderful things I’d soon be buying with it? Perhaps he would regale his partners in crime with the story. But beyond that he knew that I would recall his words as a derisive twist of the knife. I think this reveals some additional malevolence in the con artist’s feeling of superiority over the one he has duped.

But let’s not forget the con artist’s kinship with the actor! No wonder he prolongs the parting from his latest sucker with handshakes and congratulations. They have to take the place of the applause from the audience and his bows of acknowledgment.

I don’t think I could be taken in by a scheme like that again no matter how low my blood sugar was, and not just from having learned my lesson, for the truth is that had I not been willing to break the law the guy wouldn’t have gotten me that time, and my general principle is to obey the law now, even if I don’t think it’s a good or important law. Well, I drive a little faster than the speed limit, but that’s not a crime. Really. Is it? Just a few miles per hour?

I was mad when I discovered the expensive trick that I’d fallen for, but mainly at myself for having been so stupid. I took perhaps an overly charitable view of the swindler’s behavior, since it was, after all, his way of making a living. I hardly considered the possibility of hanging around in Cannes hoping to catch the guy and demand my money back. He probably had a contingency plan for that and could pretty well count on my not going to the police with a complaint. It was sort of like my response to the bad meat I’d been served the day before. Put it behind me and hope for a better time to come.

Ah, another realization just came: how neatly my possibly having been served inedible meat on purpose and possibly having been the object of derision after my departure from the truck stop foreshadowed the undeniable cheating and derision that followed the next morning. My congratulations to the comic novelist that was authoring my life at that time! Things did start to look up in Arles, though there was disillusionment in store there also. That story may yet be told.

It has occurred to me that the other actor in this story, though by now far from young, might still be running through his act outside the Cannes Bureau de Change. Or perhaps someone else has taken over the business, as I’m having trouble picturing my old friend being able to pull off his trick as old as he must now be. The techniques have surely been developed over many years, so there must be a sort of school for con artists to get all the details down. If anyone reading this happens to go to Cannes, I’d love to hear if the game goes on.

Tags: con games, France
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A Memorable, Otherwise Worthless, Evening

Saturday, February 12th, 2011

I have a list of possible blog subjects, mainly memories of events in my life that made a sufficient impression on my mind to endure at least in outline, while most of my life has faded from memory. There is no plan or ordering of when, if ever, I’ll choose one to write about. Some are of events in my life that are hard to take up because I know I can’t really do them justice.

The memory I turn to today is not one of those. It comes from an aimless time in my life in which one day was much like another, in the actual living as well as the memory. Why this atypical, yet far from momentous, evening with a barroom setting has come to the top of the list today I cannot say. Yet there it is, and it will get its few words now and be checked off the list for good.

Although I can’t be certain of the time, I believe it was during the winter after I returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts from Italy, some twenty-six years ago. Now that I think about it, the heaps of snow everywhere outside now as I write may have helped turn my mind back to an earlier similar setting. In truth I can’t be sure whether it was before or after my year in Italy. I’m only sure it was a time when I was without girlfriend or wife and thus totally adrift.

I started the evening out in a certain restaurant and bar in Harvard Square. It was a weekend night, probably Saturday, and the place was already crowded when I got there, with no stools free at the bar. I drank my beer standing. I really wasn’t there with any purpose; I wasn’t planning to meet a woman or engage in conversation or get drunk. It was just a place to be amidst people that to me were neither intolerable nor very interesting. Nor likely to turn violent, which is a consideration when choosing a bar. Being there was more appealing than being home alone, though I can’t even say where that was at the time.

Standing near me was a rather small fellow who evidently felt our proximity called for conversation, as though we were guests brought together for the first time at a party. I didn’t really care to talk, and I can’t remember how the conversation started, but I do remember that the man’s name was Seamus, which was a name I’d never encountered before. Seamus was not a man to put one at ease, because he didn’t look to be at ease himself. I don’t know how long we’d been talking before the subject turned to baseball. That made a big difference. Seamus told me how relieved he was to hear I was interested in baseball, because he had been anxiously searching for a subject of mutual interest, and now, having found one somewhat unexpectedly, he could relax. I would have preferred to silently drink my beer in the semidarkness, thinking about nothing, interacting with no one, but I give Seamus credit for not accepting such a sorry situation. I don’t remember anything else about my time there that night, but I must have been there for hours.

This bar had an earlier closing time than some. It’s not much fun to be at a bar when it closes. I can’t remember if I ducked out before that happened or not, but I do know that instead of going home I headed on foot for a nearby bar that had a later closing time.

The other bar, which doesn’t exist anymore, was called the Ha’penny. It was a small bar I seldom went to, and I seem to recall that it was somewhat below the street level. There weren’t many people in the bar this night, but the atmosphere was convivial. The young bartender (whom I doubt I had ever seen before) greeted me and straightaway introduced me to the man next to me at the bar, or rather announced to me who he was: Seamus, the poet. Two Seamuses in one night! How strange to have gone through my whole life without hearing a name, and then to meet two with it on the same night. I think the bartender may have said Seamus taught at Harvard. This Seamus seemed calm and self-assured, in contrast with the first Seamus I’d met.

There were only a few people in the bar, among them two young women with a male friend, and another guy sitting silently alone. There were probably others, but those are all I remember. It was a much more intimate and friendly scene in the Ha’penny than the one I’d just left. Soon I was engaged in a conversation with the women and the poet. I can’t remember talking to the man who was with the women, but I don’t have the feeling he was attached to either of them. The women were both nurses.

One of the nurses lived in a town across the Charles River. She was not unappealing, but her looks couldn’t compare with those of her blonde friend, who was visiting from Colorado. She was gorgeous. The women were seated around the corner of the bar from where Seamus and I were standing.

As we all talked, the woman from Colorado leaned back, knees above the bar level, revealing lovely thighs. “Look at that,” I said to Seamus sotto voce, which wasn’t exactly poetry, but spontaneously expressed what I felt must be a shared sense of awe for the feminine beauty before us. It was not something I would normally have said to a stranger, or anyone for that matter, so I must have felt a quick rapport with this poet, though the effect of the beers I’d drunk can’t be discounted.

I don’t remember anything of our conversation beyond the facts already related, but I know we must have talked with the nurses for some time after that. The next thing I do remember was an eruption of ugliness that broke the evening’s spell. The previously silent, sullen young man at the bar, whom we had all ignored, was on this feet shouting “You’re all a bunch of assholes!”

He stood there looking around hatefully through his drunkenness as though waiting for someone to challenge his assertion. The suddenness of the outburst and its striking contrast with the prevailing spirit it so quickly chased away was stunning really. I think he may have continued to repeat his proclamation. A response seemed necessary, yet none of us responded. Seamus obliquely excused our inaction by saying to me “The man might be a poet,” and I nodded my concurrence, but without really pardoning myself. What should one’s response be to the equivalent of a mad man’s raging? Perhaps if I myself had been totally sober it would have been easier for me to shrug it off as merely something to get away from.

I don’t remember the bartender intervening in any way with the aggressively unhappy drunk. Maybe it wasn’t unusual. Maybe it was nearly closing time anyway. The next thing I can recall is being outside in the cold shortly after the nurses and their male companion had left the bar, driven out basically. We were parting with no plans to meet again.

The two women and the man crossed the street to where their car was parked, while I headed up the street toward home, wherever that was. There was snow piled up beside the streets. Then one of the nurses is shouting. “Bob! I love you, Bob!” I look back, see it’s the local one, wave to her, and walk on. It was one last thing I’d remember from that night, something that could boost my ego a little (and counter the shame I was feeling for my passivity in the face of loutishness), even if the way my apparent conquest had been announced pointed to the local nurse’s having been more than tipsy.

So far as I know I never saw either of the nurses again. I may never have returned to that bar. I think I must have seen the first Seamus again, but never the second, though I did meet someone later who had taken a writing seminar with him. I wonder if his memory of that night is better than mine, if he remembers details I don’t? A poet might.

Tags: bars, Cambridge, poets
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A Valentine Memory: Art, Love, and Pain in the First Grade

Sunday, February 14th, 2010

Since Valentine’s Day is here it seems the appropriate time to delve into my past and relate one of my first memories of that holiday, one that has stuck with me through more decades than I care to think about. St. Valentine’s Day is a quasi-holiday, not really a day on which anyone gets out of work or school, but which is still widely celebrated because it relates to ineradicable (wonderfully animal) feelings between individual human beings. It’s a very old holiday that to this day sometimes mentions its “Saint.” We learned in elementary school of St. Valentine’s celebrated love for his friends, though the holiday is much more devoted to romantic love than to the kind they were saying St. Valentine was known for. I seem to recall he wrote letters to his friends from prison, which was supposed to be the origin of Valentine cards, a tradition that figures crucially in the memory related below.

As anyone that has read any of the reminiscence posts to this blog before will have already noted, my memory is very selective, which is another way of saying it’s totally blank for most of my past. I don’t remember anything in any detail at all except events that made a strong impression at the time they happened. As it turns out, a lot of those memories are painful ones. Since a good portion of the others are of the sort I’m not going to write about, readers may obtain a false picture of my satisfaction with the life I’ve had, but that’s not something I’ll worry about.

The Valentine memory I’m about to relate is a painful one, but I wouldn’t want to give the impression that all my early Valentine associations are bad ones. My father would always get a red, heart-shaped box of chocolates for my little sister and me to give our mother on Valentine’s Day when we were little. The special shape of the box and the pleasure of giving it and then of sharing in the eating of the candy, each individual piece a new mystery to be solved by taste and sight after we’d bitten into it, made this family ritual one whose memory I cherish enough to have renewed the tradition with my current family.

When I started to write this piece I had no doubt the memory in question was from my first year of school. Then, as I began to dig the details out, I started to wonder if it hadn’t actually been a memory from the second grade. I went back and forth on the year, using clues of the details to try and nail it down. In the end I realized that process was not only futile but foolish. Why try to determine the year by clues and reasoning when I really had no doubt that over the years my memory had always placed the event in the first grade? Trust the earliest record.

There was never any doubt about which girl was the central figure in the story. It was Carol. One of the things that characterized the nascent social life of those first years of school was that the concept of “claiming” a girl was presented to a boy (and that of claiming a boy to a girl). “Who do you claim?” was a question of great interest. There was not in fact anything at all proprietary in these claims, as it required no acknowledgement or even knowledge by the person being claimed, and any number of boys could claim the same girl without antagonism. Actually, most boys did claim the same girl. In the first grade that girl was Carol. It seemed obvious that only one boy—Philip—had actually won her heart, and Philip is one of the few people that I must admit to having envied in my life. I always kept secret from everyone, even friends, the name of the one I claimed, I suppose from not wanting to be seen as one entertaining false hopes, though uncertainty as to what might be required of me should the girl I claimed claim me back may have played a role.

Carol lived near the municipal swimming pool. I think her father was the pool caretaker or something. I can halfway picture her house up on the hilltop across the road from the pool. I vaguely remember attending a birthday party there once. Naturally, Carol could swim like a fish. That fact and her being so completely comfortable at and in the pool, which I liked to go to, but could not yet actually swim in, was somewhat intimidating. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear she was athletic in her high school years, but my family moved away in the fifth grade, so I have no knowledge of her after that. I really have no memory of her after the second grade, now that I think of it, which just means she doesn’t figure in any more intense memories. I don’t believe I was ever completely comfortable with Carol, who was more mature and self-assured than I. Though I was never one to make public whom I claimed, I secretly joined with the majority in asserting my wishful title to Carol.

The question of what “claiming” a girl meant to me is not an easy one to answer now. I can’t remember having had a strong crush on Carol really, and I had experienced that phenomenon at an even earlier age. It’s just that somehow my embryonic yearning for the female of the species had become focused on her. This was, from the standpoint of my consciousness, a presexual phase of my life, in that I had no inkling of even the existence of copulation as a phenomenon of human or animal existence. I knew girls liked boys and vice versa (no other possibilities were mentioned) and that there was some silliness involved in their pairings, and that they kissed and of course got married. I even knew that my friends and I were fascinated by pictures of pretty women without much clothes on, but I had no idea why. All this is worth a lot more contemplation, but now I just want to make the point that, while it was a time of innocence, yet I felt a sort of attraction to members of the opposite sex of my own age and was susceptible to their charms. In addition to this attraction there was a prestige that went with being liked by the prettier, higher status girls. And at the top of that list in the first grade was Carol.

While I was still trying to decide on the year in which this story took place, one of the strongest arguments in favor of the first grade was that I didn’t think my mother would have been able to make me do what I’m about to relate by the second grade. Since I was in the minority that hadn’t gone to kindergarten, which was not mandatory then, I had not been assimilated into the general culture of my small Texas town’s children before I started first grade. I had to contend with being slightly different from and uncomfortable with the other kids. In some ways my mother made it harder. She had her own ideas about what a first grade boy should wear, for example. I was one of only two boys (the other being the son of one of my mother’s friends) sent to school wearing shorts and sandals. It was hot in the fall in Texas, so this was a reasonable choice from the standpoint of the weather. And no doubt I was “cute” wearing them. The problem was that every other boy except for Billy (I was so grateful there was one other!) was wearing blue jeans and tennis shoes (as we called sneakers in those days, assuming anyone still knows what sneakers are). I felt intense discomfort from this deviation in my attire from the standard and was eventually able to get my mother to buy the regulation outfit, to my great relief.

Unfortunately, as my first grade Valentine’s Day approached, my mother had an idea which my strong and prolonged resistance proved unable to overcome. She had somehow arrived at the notion that I should make every girl in the class (not to hurt any of their feelings for having been left out, always one of her prime concerns) a Valentine card. I mean literally a hand-made Valentine card, a heart cut out of red construction paper and with a lace border. That was bad already. Very bad. Hand-made was bad. Heart was bad. Just for the girls was bad. A hand-made heart to each and every one of the girls was very bad. The final detail that made the proposal insufferable was that each card was to bear the hand-printed message “I love you.” I don’t know how my mother could have been so out of touch with the reality of first grade life as to think that was something for a boy to do. The charm of the idea was so great for her that she would not yield to my objections, and I, a six-year-old, had to accept this unfortunate whim of hers.

How I dreaded that day when Valentine cards would be distributed in class! All of the cards other children were giving were of the five-and-dime store humorous sort: silly puns like “bee mine” with a bee pictured. I’m almost sure I only had cards for the girls. It’s my duty to say that a big part of my reluctance to giving such cards was my dread of the ridicule and teasing I might receive from having given “I love you” cards to the least esteemed of the girls. Anyway, there was that fear of ridicule which went beyond the already strong desire not to be the odd, possibly sissy, boy with the hand-made cards for the girls. I dreaded hearing one of the boys say to the class “Hey look! Bobby gave a card with ‘I love you’ on it to Thelma!” (Not a real name.)

The fateful day of our class Valentine party arrived. Full of dread, I dutifully took my cards to school and handed them over for distribution when the time came. Did I actually meet with ridicule for my cards? I can’t remember anything distinctly about it, which probably means I didn’t encounter much, and none from a class opinion leader. But there is a very strong memory associated with the cards which has flooded other details, leaving them submerged under murky water.

The absurd thing about this Valentine card episode is that, despite my struggle against having to make and present these cards to the girls, at some point, possibly at the last moment, I had begun to hope that it might actually turn out to be a blessing in disguise in regard to Carol. Here was the opportunity, though one I would never have chosen, to show off my artistic talent to Carol through my card. Certainly hers was the one I had truly taken care with, while striving to make it beautiful. Surely hers was the one for which the words in some sense spoke truth. I had no doubt that the card was beautiful. How could Carol not be struck by that beauty? What a thrill it would be if she looked over at me and smiled with pleasure after admiring my card! I could picture her complimenting me on it as she thanked me for having created it. Perhaps my card would so impress her that its message of love would be met with favor. Perhaps she would even start to “claim” me. What a boost it would be to my status in the class when her new fondness for me became known!

I watched intently as Carol went through the pile of Valentine cards on her desk, casually examining each one. Anxiety, anticipation, and hope mounted in me as she came to mine—and instantly tossed it aside! Discarded my masterpiece with scarcely a glance! It was hand made. It was ugly and unworthy of a second’s contemplation. It had a contemptible message from an insignificant boy.

I don’t know how far away I was from the scene of my secret rejection or whether Carol had been aware that I was watching. There was no look my way. I’m sure she never gave it a second thought or had any idea of the pain her indifference had caused. But to me it was a rejection, and nothing is worse for a man’s ego than being rejected by a woman, even when the “man” and “woman” in question are only six years old. Nothing had really changed, but, in the split second it took to dash my unwarranted hopes, the acid of disappointment became so concentrated that it etched the memory deeply in my mind.

The memory of Carol’s indifference to my art work and its message of love is still painful, much as my baseball misadventure related in Show Me Where It Hurts is painful; but it’s pretty much the nature of my lasting memories that, as the song goes: “If it wasn’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have no luck at all.” So I’m grateful for this memory that is strong enough to place me back in my first-grade classroom, once more that six-year-old boy full of watchful hope—even unreasonable hope that I know now is about to be demolished.

ADDENDUM: Since I wrote this I have realized that I almost certainly combined two events into one, which was the source of my uncertainty about which year I was trying to recall. See my later thoughts at A Valentine Memory Revised.

Tags: childhood, grade school, love, memory, rejection, Texas, Valentine's Day
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Thinking of One Who Died on September 11, 2001

Thursday, September 10th, 2009

A number of my posts here have noted the way my memory of past events is quite restricted. Only memories of certain events in my life—exceptional in the impression they made on me—have survived the decades, and even then in fragment and mist. I talked about this phenomenon in Something on Memories. I’ve actually become much more aware of it through my writing here, and I can’t say how typical it is.

As the fatal date September 11 approaches, I’m moved to write of one of those memories from my childhood that is dreamlike and without clarity of detail, yet definitely grounded in real events and with strong, undefinable feelings and impressions attached.

I know the setting, though not the exact date, of this memory. It was at my Uncle Herman’s house in rural Northeast Texas. Herman was one of my maternal grandfather’s younger brothers, perhaps the youngest. Although the two brothers lived only a short distance apart, there wasn’t much social intercourse between the two families, at least whenever I was there for summer vacation and holiday visits. The little community’s Methodist church was very important to my grandfather, but I don’t recall seeing Herman there, even though he and his wife lived close to it, on the same road. It could be that they went to a different church, but their failure to attend the same church as my grandfather would have made them seem less a part of the family and the community. In any case, we would see Uncle Herman in my uncle’s general store on a fairly regular basis. Almost everyone in the surrounding area would be there sometime or other during the week if only for the society.

As I recall him, my uncle Herman was a lively, outgoing man who liked to kid a lot. But in my memories of him from childhood a couple of things stand out more than his personality. One is that he had had his larynx removed due to cancer, which made his appearance quite singular and rather disturbing to a child that only saw him occasionally. I can remember him before the operation though, and before that alteration in his appearance and speech, the main thing that made him stand out in my mind was his hound dogs. On the few occasions I went with my grandfather to visit Herman, it seems we always saw him outside the house instead of going inside, as one would do on a normal visit. He had numerous coon hounds which he kept in an enclosure not far from his house, and the dogs were always part of the picture when we were there. I suppose he kept the dogs for his own hunting pleasure, but for all I know he bred them for sale. They were a noisy and undisciplined lot, and I did not like being close to them. I don’t know how many there were of them, but there were more than enough to intimidate a town boy who wasn’t used to semi-wild canines who lived for the thrill of the hunt in the company of men experiencing the same primal pleasure. I don’t know if they became agitated at the sight of strangers or from seeing my uncle, with whom I imagine they shared delicious memories of hunts and kills.

The event I am now seeking to recall was a large family gathering at Uncle Herman’s house. Perhaps it was a family reunion, though I have a vague feeling it might have been a wedding anniversary. It may be the only time I was actually inside the house. Large gatherings with relatives that one barely knows are not a great pleasure to children. This one was exceptional though, because among those present was a cousin I had never met before, a boy about my age named Jimmy, one of Uncle Herman’s grandsons, presumably just visiting for this special occasion. Jimmy and I hit it off immediately. Perhaps he had inherited something of Uncle Herman’s exuberance. All I’m sure of is that Jimmy and I had a great time playing together and that I liked him a lot. I think we must have run through the unfamiliar house a few times, because I have a tantalizing sense of what it felt like to jump onto and off the porch and can vaguely picture the room that opened to the porch. Cousins of my generation were not numerous in my family, and the unexpected discovery of a new one my own age was exciting, with its implicit promise that we would have many more days of fun together.

That was not to be the case. As far as I know, this was the first and only time I ever saw Jimmy. I have no memory of what he looked like. I’m not sure how old we were when we met; my guess is about ten. The very singularity of our meeting and the thrill of discovery must have preserved from that day a small pool of feelings and impressions deep in the cavern of my memory, long after the details of the event had evaporated. I know I would have wanted to see more of Jimmy, but I don’t remember wondering about him. Perhaps such fleeting encounters are not unusual in childhood, as grownups determine the where and when of our lives. Given the loose connection between our grandfathers, Jimmy and I may well have been in the same small area at the same time both before and after that day without being aware of it.

Now I need to say how the September 11 attacks brought me back to that day long ago when I met a new cousin. Talking to my mother on the telephone sometime after 911, I was surprised to learn that one of my cousins, whose existence was news to me, Jimmy Nevill Storey, a Houston businessman, had been killed in the World Trade Center, a trip to New York City having been timed with the worst possible luck. He was one of Uncle Herman’s grandsons. It was quite some time later that the memory of the family gathering at which I had met a delightful new cousin came creeping into my consciousness. Yes, he was the one, it had to be so.

There’s a lot to ponder in this: the way we led our separate lives, only crossing paths once, my presence at his grandfather’s on just that day being almost as much a matter of chance as his being a victim in the events of September 11, 2001; and the way my recalling our single meeting was only the result of the circumstances of his death, which made me search my memory for some recollection (for if I’d heard that a cousin I didn’t know had died of a heart attack it probably would barely have registered and wouldn’t have set the wheels of my memory into motion).

I wonder what it would have been like to have met Jimmy as an adult? Would we have remembered our first encounter from so long ago? Would we have had enough in common to have felt even a small fraction of the rapport we’d felt our first meeting? He was a businessman and a graduate of Texas A&M, whose students—”Aggies” then and forever after—have traditionally viewed and defined their school as the polar opposite of my alma mater, the University of Texas (with its “tea-sip” students). I think A&M at that time was still all male, with military training a requirement for everyone. That was definitely not my cup of tea. Given that we were roughly the same age, we would have been cheering for opposite sides in the big rival games between our two schools. Scratch “cheering.” Aggies make a point of saying they don’t cheer; they yell, and have yell leaders. Jimmy and I probably would not have agreed on the Vietnam War had we met while it was going on. Perhaps those accidental facts of our lives would have been insurmountable barriers to connection. Such thoughts can make me long for the simple days of boyhood.

As with other victims, a few details of Jimmy’s life can be found on the internet. I came across a web page that had the text of an article from the Houston Chronicle, which had details I found touching. It was transcribed on September 26, 2001, but the actual date of publication wasn’t stated. The memorial service for Jimmy reported in the article was held only after the family had given up any hope that he could have survived. He had been on the 99th floor that morning. The article implies that he must have lost his father at a rather early age; and a cousin of mine has told me Jimmy’s father died at around the age of forty. Jimmy’s mother is quoted in the article as saying “He was kind of thrown from boy to man real fast, but he handled it well. He was a very devoted son, a very, very good father to his children.” Jimmy Storey was just one of many who died that day, but he’s the one I’ll be thinking about this September 11.

Tags: 911 victim, childhood, Jimmy Nevill Storey, September 11, terrorist attacks, Texas, world trade center
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Show Me Where It Hurts: Memory Illuminates a Few Moments of My Baseball Career

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

This is going to be another brief example of how the survival of ancient memories depends, not on the real significance of the remembered events, but on the intensity of the feelings associated with them at the time they took place, a subject I’ve touched on before (Something on Memories). I was fourteen years old on that evening of which some small portions have stuck in my mind. Few, few are the moments that come to memory from that far back.

The occasion was a baseball game. I was on a Pony League team, which in my Texas town near Dallas was the step above Little League, played on a bigger field, but one which I believe was still smaller than a full-sized one. Despite my having come to love baseball (listening to the 1952 World Series between the Yankees and Dodgers was the turning point at age ten) a few years before, I had never played in an organized league before the age of thirteen, not having lived any place that had organized youth baseball until I arrived in my new town for the seventh grade. Baseball was a big sport in this town, the Little League all-star team having made it to the State tournament the summer before I arrived to start school in the fall.

Before then, I had done my best to acquire baseball skills without the benefit of organized play or coaching, most of the time without the benefit of a partner to play catch with. I was not that bad at fielding and catching. My arm was weak though, and I had never batted against fast pitching. My hitting skill level was low, and my confidence in it was even lower. In truth, I had been one of those kids that hoped for a walk whenever I was at the plate in a game important enough to have an umpire, such as the sixth versus fifth grade softball game with a teacher umpiring. Yes, I can remember a painful called third strike I took in a crucial situation!

Despite being conscious of my below-average baseball skills, a condition which I still hoped was temporary, I was eager to play at last on a real team, so I had signed up at the first opportunity and had gone to the tryouts, which were conducted on a real field under the lights and open to the public. I don’t remember much about the tryout beyond being nervous, dreading to hear my name called, and then getting ready to field ground balls from one of the league officials, as all the coaches waited to judge my performance. I recall no details of the tryout, just the feeling that went with the knowledge that I had done poorly, worse than I had hoped, and being relieved it was over.

In addition to making the jump to a high-level baseball culture, I had experienced substantial culture shock in this new town and school due to the advanced boy-girl relationships compared to what had known before. There were lots of couples going steady. They danced to “cat music” (more on that some other time). I was not part of this social scene and had slipped into a low status slot, which I was not accustomed to, having the previous year been, in a small school, very popular with the boys and girls alike. I was really quite intimidated by the social scene, and my self-confidence had been battered.

But in that spring of my first year in the new town, I recall that my mere trying out for baseball had evidently impressed one of the fairly high-status girls, who was a baseball enthusiast (perhaps a bit of a baseball groupie). She had approached me with a smile and a glowing face saying she’d heard (I think) that I was playing baseball. Rather than accepting this as a good icebreaker, I had evaded the subject, though I can’t recall the awkward details of how. I felt ashamed of how poorly I had done, and I think I was afraid that she had only heard I had tried out, without getting a performance report, so that it would be better for her not to view me as a “real” baseball player, especially since she valued baseball so highly. I was realizing just how far I was behind the good players in my new league. But for all I know—it would not be surprising—she had been in the stands during the tryouts. Perhaps just being on a team (like playing in a rock band for some) was enough to give me prestige in her eyes. Or maybe she had been wishing for a way to approach me before. Maybe she just relished any chance to talk about her favorite subject. I’ll never know. Though I can picture very well how she looked those many years ago, I can’t recall her name. I do feel a certain tenderness toward her now, though; and retrospective gratitude.

When I started writing this piece I thought that the remembered events I was going to relate had occurred in my first year in Pony League, but on reflection I feel sure they were in the second year. That’s the strong feeling I got from picturing the catcher on my team on the night in question and then remembering who the catcher was on my first team. Catchers are central to the game, so I guess it’s not surprising I can remember them.

Speaking of memories, I might as well relate another that just popped up. It was during an intra-squad game of some sort on that first team, so that half our team was playing the other half. I had just come to the plate to face one of my teammates, a pitcher from the previous year’s all-star team. The catcher was into the game and said to the pitcher the same thing he would have said when an opposing batter came to the plate in a real game: “OK, this guy can’t hit!” Then he must have realized just how true that statement was in my case, and that I might be stung by those words, so he quickly added “Just doubles, triples…” Of course, I understood what had gone on in his mind, and it would have been better for my ego for him to have treated me like anyone else, since the change revealed just how lowly he estimated my batting prowess. It was an attempt at kindness that made things worse, leading me to mutter something in protest of the supposed compliment to show I knew better. Still, I had to appreciate the tough thirteen-year-old catcher’s consideration for my feelings, and I haven’t forgotten it. Thanks, Gary.

After I had been in town for a while and gotten to know more neighborhood kids, I started playing baseball with some of them in a vacant lot practically every day. I enjoyed that a lot more than the organized baseball. I got plenty of batting practice in those games, but our rule was not to throw full speed. We could only try to get people out with pitch location. Other than that it was like batting practice. I’m sure my batting eye and swing improved over time. I was comfortable hitting in those pickup games. Of course a real game with fast pitching and game pressure was something else.

Anyway, the Pony League game I’m going to talk about was one of those in which the other team only had eight players show up. As a coach, I’ve always hated those games and tried to make sure the game just got rescheduled before teams showed up at the field. That only works for anticipated absences though. Once the players, coaches, and umpires have arrived at the field, possibly for a night game which requires a lot of electricity for the lighting, it’s hard to just leave and reschedule. No, if one team is short and the other has more than it needs to field nine, the frequent solution is for the team with a surplus to lend a player to the other team for the night. On this night, I was that player. As a coach, I made it a point not to choose the worst player on the team as the automatic substitute for the other team, but that’s not the way it usually goes.

On this night long ago I was certainly being offered as a substitute because I was deemed by my coach (whose name and face even are lost to me, though I can remember those of my first-year coach) as the worst on our team. It was embarrassing, of course, to have that distinction, even though I imagine I was asked to volunteer and probably thanked for agreeing to. I was performing a service and I would definitely get to play the whole game this way. I can’t remember any details about the team switch; just the fact that it happened and that it was embarrassing. Nor can I remember anything about the game until the first time I came to bat.

So here I was on this night facing a pitcher named Bud, who was wearing the same uniform as I. I can’t be sure if I only remember one pitch or if it was in fact the first pitch I was thrown (as it seems) which I lined into right field for a clean single. I do remember it was very satisfying to be standing at first base, especially under the circumstances. I remember the coach of my temporary team saying “He wasn’t supposed to do that, was he?” to my regular coach.

The next thing that I remember distinctly is being on third base after that hit. I can’t recall the exact details of how I got from first to third base: some forgotten sequence of events drawn from the possibilities of hit, walk, error, and wild pitch. I just remember being on third when the batter took ball four to bring me home: yet another contribution I was about to make to this my adopted team-for-the-night.

As I proceed in my trot toward the plate, the catcher (my “real” team’s catcher) evidently decides to start playing psychological games with me. Or is he just having a little fun with a teammate? But he looks serious and irritated, as though I were rubbing it in that I was helping the other team. It’s not my fault. I’m just playing the game! He’s glaring at me and faking throws to third base. What’s the point of that?

Soon, but not soon enough to escape the terrible destiny Fate had prepared for me, I realized my situation. The bases had not been loaded! I could not walk home. The throw was made to the third baseman. I was tagged out. Shame and ignominy fell on me like heavy shrouds! The Earth did not open up to let me escape through an underground passageway, so I must have trotted to the dugout, but I have no memory of anything beyond the realization of my mistake, not of the tag nor of who was playing third. Did anyone on either team or any coach say anything to me? Did I bat again that night? Did I make any plays in the field? Who won the game? All of these details have been wiped clean from my memory.

All that remains is the humiliation of being the player given to the other team, the brief glow of satisfaction from my clean hit, and the anguish of comprehending my boneheaded mistake. Was there no third base coach? I suppose not. Did anyone suspect that I had deliberately made an out to help my real team? I would probably have preferred that to the felt certainty that everyone had clearly seen my mistake, one that a “real” player would never have made, so that in the commission of it I had thereby amply justified my selection as the giveaway player, my blunder having effaced that beautiful single. I don’t remember anything about the rest of the season, before or after that game. Just those few moments have survived. Such is the way of memory.

Tags: baseball, memories, memory, Texas
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A Painful Christmas Blessing

Sunday, December 28th, 2008

Among the strong emotions that can make an event stick in the mind is that of shame, the intense recognition of one’s failings, especially that of selfishness, even when the shame is completely internal and private. One of my strongest such memories is associated with a short time after Christmas many years ago, when I was eight or nine years old.

My family was not well off back then, to say the least. We lived in a small Texas town in a small apartment, which was in one of only two clusters of apartments I know of in town, not counting a group of houses I mention below. We had one side of a single-storey structure, separated from two other apartments by a long hallway that ran the length of the house. We had the comparatively luxurious apartment, not only larger but with its own bathroom. The tenants in the apartments on the other side had to share a single bathroom in the hall. Despite our very modest dwelling place, I never thought of us as poor; this was just where we lived, and it seemed fine. There was one other apartment house of a similar design close by. The landlord’s house was on the corner, flanked by the two apartment houses, one on each of the intersecting streets.

Our family always had a Christmas tree: a very small tree, smaller than any that I see on tree lots these days. I can remember our having a tree on top of the radio (radios were big pieces of furniture back then), placed in the front window so people going by could see the colored lights. How big was the tree? I’m guessing it was about three feet tall, if that. When my sister and I were very young, any tree in the house that we decorated and put lights on was wonderful; but, as we grew a little older, we either saw pictures of bigger trees or encountered them in friends’ houses and began to complain about the small size of our trees and to beg for a bigger one. Whether from space or cost reasons, my parents did not buy one of the bigger trees; and the Christmas tree was no longer such a perfect source of joy. I suppose we were coming to sense our lowly status and suffer from it. We had made a fuss about the tree to the point of reducing everyone’s pleasure in having one.

Now, Charles, one of my best friends, had a paper route. He delivered the Fort Worth Press, an evening paper, which he was able to do after school. Charles was only a year older than I, as I recall. There were a few times that I went with him on his paper route, which took us through parts of town that were otherwise foreign to me. Among his subscribers were African-Americans in the section of town where the streets were far inferior to those in the rest of town. It felt a little funny to be going through the area in which all the residents were Black, though I don’t recall being afraid to do so. Somewhere by the railroad tracks was housing for railroad workers. These houses were painted in special colors that designated them as railroad-owned buildings. The first colors I remember were yellow with black trim, though that changed later to some other combination, I think green with red trim. The railroad workers tended to be Mexican-Americans. I knew that the families living in the railroad houses were poorer than mine.

Sometime after the Christmas that was marked by my sister’s and my complaints about the smallness of our Christmas tree, long enough after Christmas for it to seem well in the past, I had occasion to accompany Charles on his paper route. We paused among the railroad workers’ houses for Charles to throw a paper on one of the porches. Unexpectedly, there on that porch I beheld an object, evidently cast aside and waiting to be disposed of, the sight of which suddenly brought my deepest inner self to its knees in shame and guilt. It was the tiniest Christmas tree I have ever seen, less than half the size of the smallest my family had ever had. I could not imagine anyone would consider such a tiny thing as even a candidate Christmas tree. And yet, there it was, bearing witness to the fact that one family had made do with it, had likely found it a source of joy. Pitifully, pitifully small it was. And yet I had complained about having to do with so much more. I don’t know that I have ever felt more ashamed about anything. No, I didn’t run home to tell my mother I was sorry for my complaints. As always seems to be true for me in these cases of sudden soul-jarring experiences, I didn’t say anything about this to anyone at the time and have mentioned it only to an intimate few until now, partly, I suppose, because one’s shame is not something one likes to publicize.

What was the source of the shame? To what standard was I comparing myself and why? I don’t fully know the answer to that question. I imagine I may already have been somewhat conscious of how petty it had been of me to have lessened our family’s enjoyment of the marvelous custom of bringing a tree into the house to decorate for Christmas. Certainly my mother had always made a point of not letting us look down on anyone less fortunate than ourselves; and by making such an issue of the tree, I had been doing that without knowing it. In essence it was the comparison between my own petty behavior with what I imagined to be that of the poor family, and the consciousness of my ingratitude for what I had that shamed me. Before whom was I ashamed? My parents weren’t aware of it at all. So, it was before my own conscience, and in some sense before God that I was ashamed, though I don’t remember thinking of it in religious terms at the time.

It seems that feeling shame as the proper response was something innately obvious, like recognizing some very basic principle of arithmetic or logic. I had no choice in the matter, that’s for sure. Unfortunately, I did not become a saint as a result of the experience, since selfishness can take many forms and is very adept in its use of rationalization; but the rebuke I received from that tree may have spared me the worst tortures of covetousness. I don’t know that I can say that I’ve never envied anyone’s material possessions since that day, but I know that the vision of that pathetically small tree shamed me so deeply that it changed me; and I count it a true Christmas blessing. To me, that tiny little tree seems as emblematic of beautiful dignity in poverty as a baby lying in a manger.

Tags: childhood, Christmas, Christmas tree, poverty, shame, Texas
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Souvenirs of the Pacific War

Friday, December 12th, 2008

I was born during World War II, less than seven months after Pearl Harbor. For those as old as I, the name of the place is all that’s needed to specify the event, whose sixty-seventh anniversary just passed. The war was over before I was aware of very much beyond my extended family circle; it was nonetheless a dominant presence in my early life because everyone talked about it, and almost everyone’s father or uncles (my case) had served in the military. References to “during the war” were constant. A couple of my grade school chums had lost their fathers in the war. (Joe and Ronny, I never made any better friends, and I’m sorry we lost touch so long ago.) I was fascinated by war, though of course without much understanding of it. I can remember, for example, asking my mother where the battlefield was, imagining that this word I’d heard must refer to a special place where soldiers and tanks and airplanes from warring countries went to fight, just as football teams met on a football field.

Even though my father had been 4F, I viewed fighting in a war as the natural goal of a male of our species, and I fervently hoped there would be one going on by the time I was old enough. About that 4F, the physical evaluation that meant he was unfit for military service, my father probably had mixed feelings. Although it had saved him from the risk of being killed in battle (and I have no idea how much he desired to serve his country militarily, as he had been called up in the draft), it must have made him feel uncomfortable knowing that his brothers were serving and that people probably looked at him and wondered what a young man with no obvious disability was doing out of uniform the whole war. I imagine he must have felt less a man to some degree.

The 4F decision came as the result of a urine test that showed an elevated sugar level. Although, much later, his mother would develop diabetes and die at a relatively young age because of it, my father never showed any symptoms of the disease that I am aware of. He seems to have thought the urine test was a false positive. Did he ever follow up on it with a doctor? I really don’t know. The impression I got was that he felt it was a mistake, verging on an injustice, with the implication that it was an irrevocable mistake, though I would think if he were determined enough he might have had the decision reversed should he have been able to present test results that contradicted the one from the induction line. Bureaucracy is hard to overcome though. I remember my father recounting how the doctor had been stubbornly adamant, saying my father would require a special diet, which was impossible in the military. He had probably had to tell that story many times during the course of the war.

Perhaps the doctor liked to spare some men. Assuming my father was not one of those called up in the early lottery-selected group before the US was officially at war, then I was already either born or on the way by the time my father was drafted, which, if the doctor was aware of the fact, might have influenced his decision on a borderline reading. I should add that I never really asked my father for details about how it all happened, so exactly how he responded at the time and what he thought about it are unknown to me. I know he had a great deal of respect for those who had served in the war and would never have been a draft dodger.

One of those who did go to war was my Uncle Bryant, my mother’s sister’s husband, who had been taken by the US Army out of rural Northeast Texas and sent to fight the Japanese in the Pacific. I first became aware of his existence, at least as I remember it and while he was still in the Army, when I tasted for the first time the candy my grandmother called Divinity. Although I didn’t know the meaning of the word, and it was my first time hearing it, I would have concurred in the choice of a transcendent word to denote that candy. My grandmother had made some to send to my uncle “overseas,” and I was fortunate enough to have been there during the candy making to get my share. Forever after, I’ve associated divinity candy with my uncle, so I’m sure my memory is true.

There was at my aunt’s and grandparents’ (they lived in the same big old house in the country) a bird dog named Wewak (called Wacky) after the place in New Guinea where my uncle was. I may be wrong, but my memory is that the dog was there before my uncle came back from the war. My uncle was a quail hunter, so he put bird dogs to good use, and the dog might have been obtained in anticipation of and as promise of his safe return, as well as for the companionship. In any case, the awareness of someone important being absent because of the War was no doubt one of the first ways I came to know that the War, whatever that meant, was in progress.

It’s very unlikely that I was really there for Uncle Bryant’s homecoming, but I think that in my childish understanding of things, I took the first time I saw him as the day he returned from the War. Pictures of him wearing his uniform have made me imagine seeing him arrive in it. Or perhaps it’s a real memory.

Uncle Bryant was every child’s favorite person pretty much. No use to restrict it to children, he was probably the best-liked man in the county, esteemed by Black and White alike as a friendly, fair, and compassionate man, outgoing and giving of himself to a degree far beyond the norm of humankind. I’d have to say he was the best man I’ve ever known.

He had been a supply sergeant in the Army, so he was not carrying a rifle most of the time, but he lived amidst death nonetheless. He brought home a few war souvenirs. The most impressive was a Japanese officer’s sword. It had a push-button release mechanism to allow the sword to be removed from its sheath. So many times I have unsheathed that sword and held it high! There were also photographs. The women of New Guinea went around bare-breasted we saw. That was novel and amusing.

There was also an item taken from the body of a Japanese soldier: a black and white photo, as almost all were then, of a pretty, smiling, young woman and one or two young children. Strain as I might, I can’t make the children out across the years, though I know that there was at least one child and probably two. I can’t quite see the face of the young wife in my mind’s eye, but my heart sees her well enough.

My uncle had thought it noteworthy that the “Jap” soldier had carried a picture of his family just as “we” did. It was almost as if he were pointing out another unexpected cultural trait, like the attire of the New Guinea women, only this time one that was surprisingly the same as ours rather than different. It was another interesting thing to know. This was certainly no solemn lesson, nor was any moral teaching meant, as far as I know. I think my uncle was passing on important information which had struck him, perhaps as a discovery—information about our shared humanity with this enemy of a different race, portrayed to us only as cruel and treacherous.

My family visited my grandparents’ home, where the war souvenirs were, during school vacations. Those objects from that enormously important thing called The War and the distant place called the Pacific, where there were names like Wewak, had a great prestige for me as items in a private museum collection and as proof that my uncle had truly been involved in The War, where some men with Asian features had carried swords in battle. For years, I would always ask to see them again soon after we arrived for a visit.

I don’t know if it happened the first time I saw the dead soldier’s family photo or not, but during one of these examinations of the war souvenirs, probably when I was four or five years old, in one of those moments of epiphany that I’m realizing I must be prone to (or should I say I’ve been blessed with?), I came to see war permanently in a different way. My mind was jarred by the recognition that this was a picture of a real woman, who had lost her husband, and of her young children, who had lost their father; and I felt a great pity for them and for the man who must have treasured the images, now transported so far from the place in which they had been captured. The “Japs” were real people who had families, suffered, and, most importantly, felt love for one another. The soldiers looked at pictures of loved ones and longed for them. When they were killed, families grieved. I had understood none of this before. War was not the simple grand game I had imagined. This new knowledge, deep as it was, didn’t totally replace my idea of war and the enemy, but it revealed another reality to exist side-by-side with the romantic and heroic picture of battle, a reality in which dead bodies, rather than being a way of keeping score, recorded tragedy and grief. I wondered what had become of the young woman and the children.

The fate of the Japanese soldier’s family during the war could have been as bad as his, of course. For all I know they perished in a Tokyo firestorm or the nuclear bombings that ended the war. Otherwise, the kids, if they still survive, are a few years older than I, which means pretty old. Damn old. I hope they got through their trials all right, and I wish there were some way I could meet them; and, in a sense, be reunited with them.

Tags: childhood, Pacific War, souvenirs, Texas, war, World War II
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My Appointment with the FBI and a Long-Delayed Connection

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

You don’t just open the door and walk into the Berkeley FBI offices. You don’t get into the offices at all. You ring a bell and someone opens an inner door, which he closes, certainly locked, behind him. Then he opens the outer door and you are let into a sort of antechamber, which contains a small table and a couple of chairs. It was May 17, 1974, and I was there by invitation.

A couple of days before, or perhaps the day before, I had gotten word from the secretary of my group at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab (still called the Rad Lab by most of us), where I was a grad student research assistant, that someone had called and left a message for me to call him: someone from “the government” he had said. I thought she emphasized the word a little ominously, but it was probably just the word itself. What government agency would refer to itself as the government? That didn’t sound like an income tax question. It made me a little apprehensive.

My fears were not groundless. The man whose call I returned turned out to be with the FBI, and he was asking me to come talk to him about something, which he didn’t go into, and soon. I took whatever appointment he suggested, which, when I started to write this, I thought I remembered as having been in the morning. Based on some research into other events with a known time, I reason it’s more likely to have been in the afternoon. I remember waiting in a cafe or drugstore across the street from the offices for the appointed time to arrive.

Why me? Why now? I tried to think of any possible reason for the FBI wanting to talk to me. True, I belonged to a radical socialist group, but I was not by any stretch a leader at that point, nor could I think of anything that would have made me or my group stand out. The days in which our group had served briefly as a point of contact between the Berkeley student movement and the early Black Panther Party were well in the past. Our small organization’s leading role in organizing the Peace and Freedom Party (PFP) and the drive to get it on the 1968 ballot in California had been a major achievement, and members of our group had also been instrumental in bringing the PFP and the Black Panther Party into an electoral alliance. There was nothing illegal about it, but with J. Edgar Hoover still in charge of the FBI, it’s a safe bet that we had gathered a lot of attention from the FBI back then. We had been involved in some illegal demonstrations over the years. No one doubted that our office’s telephone was tapped, and we pretty much assumed our own phones were too. But I had never heard of anyone being called in to talk with the FBI. So why me now?

By May 1974 the mass student movement was long since dead and so was the Black Power movement. US troops had been withdrawn from Vietnam. There were a few organized remnants of the student-based movement, largely made up of people who had decided to devote their lives to political activism when it was exciting and seemed historically important, and who were now faced with mass political apathy and smaller memberships.

Since our group was for overthrowing not only capitalism but also bureaucratic communist rule and thus had no more allegiance to Mao or Fidel than to Richard Nixon, we had always been a small minority on the left and were scarcely acknowledged as being part of it by the Maoist groups and Maoist-flavored “crazies” that had dominated the movement and who would have certainly put us up against the wall, along with many others, if some catastrophe had ever put them in power. The group I was in probably wasn’t significantly smaller then than it ever had been in the past eight years (excepting a few brief periods of recruitment, which had always been followed by sectarian splits to reduce the number again).

Our “purist” positions for democratic rights such as free speech, free press, and the right of workers to strike (real socialism as we and Marx, we thought, viewed it) and belief that revolutionary change had to come through the activity of the working class had never held much appeal to many student radicals. We didn’t even like Che, and most student radicals didn’t like workers or any Americans, really, that weren’t oppressed minorities or student radicals like themselves. The worst of them basically thought that any white American that hadn’t thrown off “white skin privilege” (as they had) by joining the Black Struggle was a “pig,” worthy of being murdered and mutilated, a sentiment so memorably captured in the Bernadine Dohrn (soon to be a visitor in the White House?) “dig it” speech eulogizing the Manson gang murderers.

It’s probably hard for people that didn’t live through it to understand how deeply pathological was the hatred toward almost every aspect of “AmeriKKKa” by many in the American student left; or to understand at what a low intellectual level, despite their academic credentials, those people operated—truly a Nazi level of both hatred and intellect. Directing their hatred against the overwhelming majority of their fellow countrymen was not likely to be a winning formula, but I think they equated destruction with winning and overestimated their own strength by several orders of magnitude.

The recent appearance of the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a violent, radical microcult with a charismatic (to them anyway) Black leader, Donald DeFreeze (SLA name Cinque), a convicted armed robber recently escaped from prison, showed that the militant slogans were still capable of inspiring in 1974 a few fringe characters—heroic in their own eyes and those of a lot of spectator radicals—to acts capable of gaining enormous publicity. In relationship to the mass upheavals that had occurred a few years before, they were like the last kernel of popcorn that pops a few seconds after all the rest have finished popping in a sustained eruption. They had in a short time assassinated Marcus Foster, Oakland’s popular first Black school superintendent (agent of the oppressor to them for his “fascist” decision to require student identification cards), and kidnaped Patty Hearst. They were very audacious and cruel, if not overly bright.

The organization I belonged to had decided to “industrialize,” that is to have everyone get jobs in important unionized industries such as auto and steel in order to attempt to influence and recruit workers, largely through supporting or starting rank-and-file organizations to fight for union democracy and militancy. Some in the group had already moved to a few industrial centers such as Detroit, where the national headquarters was now located. Yes, it sounds extremely quixotic, but it was at least logical from the Marxist analysis of the working class as the key actor in this stage of history. I didn’t think I was going to go to work in an auto plant, but I had been helping put out and distribute a dissident Teamster newsletter, while still trying to finish my Physics PhD thesis at Berkeley. It would soon turn out that my estimate of how much political work I could do would not meet the standard of some others, who of course were feeling their own personal conflicts about sacrifices, and I would leave the group.

I knew that several years earlier the FBI had visited a woman who had just broken up with our group’s most prominent leader, hoping that they might catch her in a weak moment in which she might be willing to reveal a few secrets out of spite, I suppose. It had been pretty creepy that they had that kind of knowledge in the first place. Also, a year or two before, my landlady had told me the FBI had come by looking for the previous tenant who was also a member of the organization, a real (as opposed to a converted student) worker with a skilled trade. I had made a long distance (payphone to payphone) call to pass that information on. I never knew why they were checking on him; maybe they just didn’t like to lose track of some people. I doubted this coming interview had anything to do with that. But I was worried because there had to be some reason they wanted to talk to me, and I figured it had to be about something political, yet I didn’t have a clue what it could be. Was the Teamster paper the best bet? It seemed too insignificant by far. The situation seemed more than a little Kafkaesque, to use a term that used to be in vogue.

Although I can’t remember whom in the organization I talked to about the interview beforehand, I know that I talked to some experienced person in the leadership both to get advice on how to proceed and to let them know about something that might turn out to be important. I definitely don’t remember being given any hint of what it could be about, and I don’t remember any advice anyone gave me. It never even occurred to me to consider getting legal advice. I was going to have to play it by ear.

The FBI agent was friendly and motioned for me to sit down. He sat down opposite me and pulled out a stack of what turned out to be photos and put them on the table. Who? What a relief! They were pictures of SLA members. Of course I knew who they were, as almost everyone did then, both real name and SLA name, because of the enormous publicity around the Patty Hearst abduction and the subsequent public demands and responses.

I thought the FBI was being awfully thorough though to have brought me in to talk about the SLA, as I had never had any contact with any of them that I knew of. All I could think of was that, since one of them, Nancy Ling Perry (SLA name Fahizah), had worked as a lab assistant in the same lab in which my wife (from whom I was now separated) had done graduate research at Berkeley, they had made some sort of computer match of all conceivable connections between members of known radical groups and SLA members. My wife did of course know Ling, as she called herself then, and had mentioned her having quit her job to do political activity or something and having said goodbye to everyone, quite some time before the SLA had gone public with the Foster murder. But I had never even met Ling. I remember my wife saying “There’s Ling” once as we were driving down a Berkeley street, but I didn’t see anyone and didn’t slow down.

Ling had been a Berkeley student but had never been involved in politics at all during the height of the student movement when many thousands in Berkeley were drawn in. About the only thing I can remember hearing about her, and it’s quite striking, considering her future path, is how terribly she agonized over the necessity for killing animals (very primitive ones, I think) for some of the lab’s experiments. I knew my wife had not had any involvement whatsoever with Ling’s new associates and hadn’t talked to her since she’d gone underground, so I didn’t have to worry about what I should say from any standpoint I could think of.

I clearly remember my feeling of relief upon seeing the SLA photos, but I can’t remember whether the sight of the photos came as a complete surprise, as presenting something I hadn’t even considered. Given the prominence of the SLA in the news, such a possibility, however unlikely, may have occurred to me, since everything seemed unlikely. Thirty-four years leaves little of certainty. In any case, it turned out I was wrong, once I’d seen the SLA pictures, to have assumed they’d called me in because of that distant secondhand connection.

The FBI agent asked me if I recognized any of the people in the pictures, and I told him that of course I recognized them as the same ones that were in the news every day, but that I didn’t know any of them personally. The next question he asked me took me by surprise. “Can you think of any reason why your name and place of work would be in Nancy Ling Perry’s handwriting on a slip of paper left behind in an SLA safe house?” He may have said telephone number or room number as well; I’m not sure. Well, that explained why he had called me at the Rad Lab. Despite being totally surprised by this news, I was able to come up with a plausible answer pretty quickly by telling about the lab connection and how Nancy Ling Perry could easily have heard where I worked and what my name was.

The FBI guy seemed satisfied immediately. “Yeah, we already knew about the lab connection,” he said. “But for all we knew she could have been your girl friend.” We were done, and it had been so easy. He was definitely in a good mood, and, before I left, he added that, from what he was hearing, they had the SLA cornered in Los Angeles at that very moment. I think he was basically viewing it as a closed case already.

I had heard, as everyone had, about the previous day’s bizarre events in which the SLA had surfaced for the first time in Los Angeles. One of the SLA members had been caught shoplifting a pair of socks and had only escaped along with his wife when Patty Hearst, now known as Tania and acting as an SLA member herself, had shot up the front of the store. Luckily no one had been hurt then, and the inept SLA group had left a parking ticket on the van they’d been driving, which gave away the location of the gang hideout. After stealing a couple of cars, the SLA trio found a new place to stay rather than returning to the original place. Before the police arrived at their haven, the other six SLA members in LA, including Ling and Cinque, alarmed by the failure of the foraging party to return, had fled in the wee hours of the morning and forced their way into another house, which seems to have been a place for people to wander in at all hours to get drunk or high.

I’m sure I first heard from the FBI man that the police definitely knew where the SLA members were hiding. As I mentioned before, I first thought I recalled my meeting at the FBI offices as having taken place in the morning, but from some online research it doesn’t seem the police discovered the exact house the SLA members were in until early in the afternoon, when the mother of the woman in whose house they were called the police to report it. They had already learned in the morning the general neighborhood since they had identified the SLA members’ parked vans. In any case it was late afternoon before the press knew anything, so it’s likely I got the news early from an FBI agent that saw no need to keep it a secret, and possibly couldn’t restrain himself from telling someone.

I’ve been imagining the FBI man could have just been going through the motions in an interview that now seemed to him less significant than it might have before. He had asked me no follow-up questions that I can recall, not even what my wife’s name was. Now that I think about it, he could well have reviewed a couple of files before the interview, learned of the connections, and have thus been waiting for me to give the expected answer, watching only to see if I got flustered and seemed trying to hide something. Who knows?

Insightful PS to the above paragraph: The more one writes and thinks about something from the distant past, the more one remembers, and the more one may then understand. I only just now added the word “connection” to the end of the statement recorded four paragraphs above “Yeah, we already knew about the lab connection” because that final word had became very distinct to me in my memory, and its absence in the written report of my meeting was something I felt I had to rectify. I heard the FBI man say “connection,” but its significance had never been apparent to me. He was saying that he had known that I had a connection to the lab Ling had worked in even before he called me. From the time he said it until just before this moment, I had not realized the obvious meaning of his words, and had interpreted them as equivalent to “We knew Ling worked in a lab. So that makes sense.” So my speculation (made before I added the “connection” and understood what it meant) in the previous paragraph can now be taken as proven, as it is the obvious way to interpret his words. The dumb thing is that I had always realized that there was something funny about the way he’d expressed himself, since that “connection” didn’t exactly fit with my interpretation.

Why didn’t I analyze this logically at the time? I guess that I was just so relieved to be out of there so easily that I wanted to leave the whole thing behind me, even mentally, as soon as possible. The surprise revelation about how my name had come up probably played a role also. It was confusing new information presented in a stressful situation. I had to find a reasonable explanation that would satisfy the FBI man. I was really only interested in that result, and my mind set about solving the puzzle. It was an easy puzzle, but, under the circumstances, probably all I could deal with.

How many other words that didn’t quite fit at the time I heard them spoken are waiting to be understood? How many readers immediately understood what the meaning of “Yeah, we already knew about the lab connection” was when they first read it? Probably all or almost all, I’m now guessing. Yet I, the only one to whom it was relevant, have waited thirty-four years to get it. I feel like shouting Eureka! And then Duh!

Why had Ling, whom I had never met, written down my name and workplace anyway? She may have had nothing specific in mind. Maybe it was just something she’d thought might come in handy in case they ever wanted to plan an attack on the Rad Lab, which was falsely viewed as some kind of weapons research place by some radicals, who probably mixed it up with the other Lawrence Lab in Livermore, also run by the University of California, which was indeed used for designing and building thermonuclear weapons. In any case, there is no doubt that some people would have liked to bomb the Rad Lab as a symbol of an oppressive system if nothing else. The very fact that it was a large government-funded facility up on a hill overlooking the Berkeley campus was enough to make it an appealing target. Perhaps a fake id card with a real person’s name on it would have been thought useful? I can’t see any use my name could have had really, and I guess they didn’t value the information very highly or they wouldn’t have left it behind.

I distinctly remember one other thing about that day so long ago. I heard the news on the radio that all the SLA members that had been in the house in LA were dead, either shot or burned to death, while I was riding across the Bay Bridge to a meeting in San Francisco that evening with a few others, one of whom felt one of the deaths personally.

Tags: Black Panther Party, FBI, memory, Peace and Freedom Party, SLA, student movement, Symbionese Liberation Army
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The Second Most Important Event in My Life

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

Excluding from consideration my birth, the two most important events in my life have been moments in which I have suddenly and for the first time become fully aware of something fundamental and wonderful about reality which has permanently changed my perception of the world. The first of these (second in importance) occurred when I was sixteen years old, some forty years before the other (which was, I now see, actually the long-delayed completion of the first). This event from my high school days was not connected with any notable historical event or outwardly impressive occurrence. It was personal and internal, purely intellectual and unaided by any drug; and it affected the future course of my life in manifold ways.

There have of course been key events involving people and personal relations in my life which have determined the unique details of it, including those most important ones—in regard to earthly happiness—of wife and offspring; but none of these events, even those that seem to have been ordained by benevolent providence, changed my basic understanding of the world in the way the two I’ve called most important did.

The dramatic (though secret at the time) change I am writing about today occurred early in the fall semester of my junior year when I was one of a group of students gathered around our physics teacher’s desk at the front of the classroom. We were there to watch our teacher (then, I believe, in her second year at our school), a young woman, imposing by virtue of both her appearance and intellect, go through a physics demonstration.

That I was taking physics that year as a junior was pretty much an accident. I can’t recall if this was usual or not, but I clearly remember that my father had helped guide my decisions on which courses to take that year. He had recommended that I take physics. I think the idea was to get a hard course out of the way before the other hard courses that would be coming up my senior year. Whatever the reasoning, I had written physics in, and no one had suggested I switch, though somehow everyone else seemed to know that the standard path was to take chemistry in the junior year followed by physics the next. I remember being surprised to discover on the first day of school that all the other students in the class were seniors with whom I had never taken a class before.

Anyway, once I had signed up for physics, I remember expressing my dread of it. It wasn’t that I didn’t like natural science; I was very interested in biology, mainly from my fascination with the diversity of life. I was also interested in the stars, solar system, and planets. But I just didn’t like the sound of physics, about which I had somewhere obtained the vague notion that it dealt with how machines worked. Machines were neither alive nor celestial, and I think I held their being man-made and functional against them. From all I can remember, I seem to have had no idea that physics was a quantitative, as opposed to a merely descriptive, science; and I don’t think that concept even existed in my mind.

I recall a fellow student trying to sell physics to me as a great way of increasing my understanding of how automobiles worked. However, I really had no interest in the actual workings of any machines, including those most highly esteemed ones around which social life and status in our high school revolved. I had had to learn a certain amount about how cars worked, or at least the terminology used in discussing modifications for speed, just to avoid being seen as irredeemably ignorant in the most important area of knowledge (at least of those unrelated to sexual matters) in the male adolescent culture of my group. But when that fellow student tried to convince me that physics would be valuable because of the insight it would give me into the internal combustion engine, it only made my heart sink lower at the thought of having to endure a year of such boring stuff. Even accounting might have been more attractive.

Before I go on, let me briefly sketch what kind of place I was in emotionally, academically, and socially. The central fact of my life and that of my family was that my father was an alcoholic on the way down. That affected our family in numerous negative ways that anyone can easily imagine. For my mother, my sister near me in age, and me, it meant a good deal of anger, embarrassment, shame, stress, fear, worry, and resentment; which is not to say that we never shared good times with my father (for example the choosing of courses I mentioned), just that we could not depend on him for anything; and the bad times were frequent.

A few years earlier I had fallen in with a group of boys, among the leaders of which were a couple (one of whom I considered a good friend) that had an antisocial streak, which I didn’t share but which I was too weak to reproach or reject. It was a good feeling to have a group to “run around with,” and I enjoyed a greater status being with these kids than I had felt before, having come to this town in the seventh grade and found myself lacking the friends or standing I might have acquired in elementary school.

As a result of some thrill-seeking (for them, not me) illegal acts with my companions, I had gotten into a little trouble with the law also (hinted at in Times I Might Have Died). My milieu was basically a semi-delinquent one that overlapped with that of kids that had already dropped out of school and who carried switchblades. My companions liked to go looking for fights (which I hoped we wouldn’t find) and drive fast. We all smoked cigarettes, and we regularly found ways to purchase beer illegally, so that I may have been placing myself in danger of following my father down the path to alcoholism.

The year before I had skipped school many days. For example, in those days when World Series games were played during the daytime, I hadn’t missed watching a single one on television though the series went to seven games. My fellow baseball-watching friends and I got caught for that and made a short gesture toward running away from home to avoid facing the consequences. To my shame, I reflect that none of the others finished school, lacking the academic capital to fall back on that I had.

I was in no danger of flunking out of school, but my grades were not great, certainly not what they should have been; and I had been something of a class comic going back to the second grade, partly as a way to gain respect as one willing to go against authority, risk punishment, and take it like a man when it came in the form of getting “busted,” as we called paddling. I had decided it was time to get serious about school and had definitely ruled out getting involved in any illegal activity (with the exception of alcohol possession), but I was still without any real purpose or idea about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I had no girl friend and had trouble envisioning that situation changing. To say I was not a happy lad, would be an understatement.

As I try now to remember back fifty years, I wish I could see my old physics text to see what subjects came first in it, so I could tell if we had gone through other topics before coming to the way the pressure in a fluid depends on the depth; for that was the subject of the demonstration on this momentous day. It may have been the very first thing we dealt with in that class, though I have a feeling it was not. I can’t remember if this was the first classroom demonstration.

Physics demonstrations can be quite dramatic, and there are high school teachers and college professors who go to a lot of effort to make entertaining shows for students out of them. These demonstrations can have a certain magic show quality, as things can occur that go against the students’ expectations, sometimes accompanied by impressive sounds and visual displays.

The physics demonstration I was to witness that day was not of that dramatic type. It might even be the most boring of all physics demonstrations, as it is merely a series of measurements, with no motion or visible phenomena occurring, except for the adjustment of the measuring device to the different conditions. Nothing visibly exciting happens in the statics of fluids.

How I wish I could remember in detail the actual steps my teacher went through in the demonstration! But those are lost forever. I can only remember what the demonstration was about, but not what the apparatus looked like in detail. The demonstration was designed to show how the pressure in a fluid depends on the depth below its surface. The specific details are not really important in the context of the story. The apparatus must have consisted of a manometer for measuring pressure differentials, a flexible tube to connect one side of the manometer to a means of probing the pressure under water, and a vessel containing water.

Here is a plausible guess at the steps I must have witnessed my teacher carrying out. The teacher lowered the probe into the water, and we saw the fluid in the manometer adjust to the new pressure it was experiencing on the side connected to the probe. The fluid level in the manometer column on the probe side went down, and that on the other side went up. My teacher recorded the difference in the two levels, which is a measure of the pressure in the water, and also recorded the depth in the water at which it had been observed.

She moved the probe lower into the water tank, and we saw the manometer fluid levels respond once more, this time with a greater difference between them. My teacher recorded the new pressure and depth and went on to repeat the procedure at several more depths in the water. Then she made a graph of the measured pressure versus the depth, to show that the points traced out a straight line. She thus showed us that the measured pressure p followed a simple formula: p = constant • h, where h is the depth. It was the same linear relationship that we had in our books.

Alternatively (and, as I’ve said, I don’t remember), she may have started with the equation we had in the textbook and for each depth calculated a predicted pressure measurement, which she would then compare to the actual measurement to show that it was very nearly the same.

Whatever procedure she followed, she certainly had my full attention and could not have made a more successful demonstration from my perspective. Thank you, Virginia Rawlins, dear first physics teacher!

What had I seen? Changing the depth of the probe had caused the manometer fluid levels to change, and to change in a very precise way. The measured values of the real-world quantities of pressure and depth were related through a simple algebraic equation in the abstract world of mathematics. As I pondered what was being demonstrated to me, my mind’s eye must have looked back and forth from the physical to the mathematical. From the real to the abstract back to the real. From the predicted to the measured back to the predicted. What is going on? There is new and important information here, but I can’t tell what it means.

I suppose only a few milliseconds elapsed between the powerful seismic disturbance, which must have occurred deep beneath the surface of my consciousness, and the resulting tsunami of revelation that slammed into my conscious mind and swept away its previous view of the world, now revealed to have been pathetically inadequate.

I remember that I walked back to my desk totally stunned by that first look into the deep mathematical order of the physical world. I knew I was in my physics class, but everything and everyone around me seemed distant, muted, and temporarily irrelevant, as my mind worked on reconstructing its view of reality.

Here was a mystery deeper than any I could have imagined; and a power greater—the ability to know what a physical measurement was going to be before it had been made! The physical measurements I had seen carried out in the real world with real physical objects and fluids had been written down and the corresponding numbers shown to fit almost perfectly with a particular relationship that existed only in an abstract world having no connection with the physical one I lived in. Or so I had thought until that moment. This unexpected, undreamt of connection between those two independent worlds—one the physical world as I haphazardly experienced it, the other a precise realm that existed only on paper and in people’s heads—was the most astounding fact I had ever encountered.

The world was describable by mathematics! I had to know all about it! I had to learn all the physics there was. At first I assumed everything to be known had already been discovered; that it was just a matter of learning it. While it was a disappointment to find out that not everything was known, it also meant there was still an opportunity to help finish the job. As soon as I heard about relativity and quantum physics I wanted to know why we weren’t learning them, not realizing that would require math and physics far beyond what I knew.

Later that year, when my mother and I visited the physics classroom during the school open house night, my teacher said to me “Bobby, we’ve got to get you a scholarship,” and to my mother “He’s the most brilliant junior student I’ve ever had.” Now, for all I know my teacher had never had a single junior physics student before, but it filled me with joy to hear her words, as I had had no idea she thought so highly of my abilities. Now I knew for sure what my next step in life was going to be. I was going to major in physics in college and go as far as I could with it. Thank you again, Mrs. Rawlins!

This personal discovery of my passion in life and my teacher’s encouragement gave me a new focus and goal. I decided I needed to make all A’s from then on and almost did. With the help of (in retrospect, almost laughably small) student loans and family support, I found a way to pay for college, which was pretty cheap at the University of Texas back in those days, and successfully got physics and math degrees there. I fulfilled a dream by going on to get my PhD in Physics from the University of California at Berkeley. I imagine I will write more about my experiences both as a physics student and a physicist later. There are a couple of posts already here about my time in Berkeley.

Looking back at how adrift I was at the beginning of my junior year in high school, I can say that my discovery of physics may have saved me. I never said anything about my experience to my teacher or anyone else back then that I recall. It was personal, possibly a little crazy-sounding, and ultimately incommunicable. A number of questions have arisen in my mind during the course of my writing about that life-changing experience of long ago. Why me? Why then? Why with such suddenness? Maybe I’ll return to them at a later date.

From my current outlook on the world, I believe that what was so stunning about the universe’s being describable by mathematical laws was that it hinted at the Divine Intelligence behind that mysterious order. I did not make that connection at the time, however, and instead came to adopt the viewpoint that the perfection of physical laws governing the universe (as I would have put it) only showed the superfluousness of the God concept. Now I view my recognition of the beautiful mystery and power of physics as a gift from God which launched me on a trajectory that led eventually to my recognition of God’s existence some forty years later.

Tags: cars, epiphany, high school, physics, physics demonstration, physics teacher, pressure and depth, Texas
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A Memorable, Otherwise Worthless, Evening

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Thinking of One Who Died on September 11, 2001

Show Me Where It Hurts: Memory Illuminates a Few Moments of My Baseball Career

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