Sicily II - Sicily Runs Hot and Cold

Next, my advance reading about Sicily had prepared me to see some of the most complete Greek ruins still in existence – right there, not in Athens, but in Sicily. The Island had been a Greek possession during much of the classical Greek period. Plato had walked the streets of Syracuse where we toured, teaching in the forum there, possibly trudging across the very stones I was walking on. Dionysus I, a tyrant ruler of Syracuse, had prevailed upon Plato to come to Syracuse. Dionysus hoped Plato could teach his nephew and brother-in-law to be “philosopher-kings,” like the ones Plato had written about in The Republic. Plato was very doubtful that these young men could be taught wisdom. But he came to Syracuse and tried nonetheless. However, he soon had a falling out with Dionysus, was imprisoned, and was almost sold into slavery. Only his followers’ incessant pleadings on his behalf eventually won his release. He came back to Syracuse a second time to teach for Dionysus II – but fell out with this ruler in turn, over freedom-of-speech issues. This time he was only put under house arrest for a while. But all-in-all, Plato did spend a fair amount of time in what is now Italy, something that surprises even people who are familiar with Plato’s works.

The Greek amphitheaters were mostly carved right out of the Island’s substrate of rock. Sicily is one big, rocky, volcanic island. So it wasn’t necessary to haul big slaps into place to make the circular tiers of seating and the stage. The raw material was already there.

Some of the most notable Greek ruins are in Syracuse itself. But it was hard for members of our group to focus on the ancient ruins. The big draw in Syracuse is the wild pussycats. They are everywhere, poised on every vendor’s canopy, sunning on the forum steps, prowling where their larger relatives, the lions, were once led out to attack and do battle. The population’s willingness to communally feed and care for the wild cats may go back to the time of Plato himself. As I looked at the cats and their kittens reclining everywhere, it seemed as if they might have had more wisdom passed down to them than those numbskull human relatives of the Dionysus dynasty.

Then the Romans ousted the Greeks on Sicily and the “glory that was Greece” was replaced by the “grandeur that was Rome.” Our guide pointed out how, in Syracuse for example, a Roman arena would be built less than half a block away from a Greek amphitheater. The two kinds of structures looked essentially the same to me. Both were circular tiers of seating surrounding a performance ring. But our guide said if you looked more closely, you could see that the two structures reflected two entirely different worldviews and cultures.

The Greek amphitheater was built for the intellect and for enrichment. It was the site of plays and choruses and lectures. However the adjacent Roman arena was built “just for cruelty.” Our guide pointed to the runways that winged the Roman theater – where the lions would be prodded out from their pens in the excavated basement under the arena. It seems the lions had even less of a chance of survival than the gladiators or Christians. The lions were brought over from Africa and starved in wretched conditions until the moment they were released for the crowd’s entertainment. Hardly any survived more than one very short bout in the arena.

But the Romans were great builders. Their plumbing achievements are especially famous. Many of their water ducts remain in use to this day, although since the pipes were made of lead, it’s doubtful that one would want to drink too much of the water that passes through these pipes.

But one of our tours took us through the “Frigidarium” – the old Roman bath in Catania. A cathedral has been built on top of it, but the essential plumbing remains in the sub-basements of the church. The pipes down there were designed to carry cool water from local aquifers and feed a reservoir, which now serves to keep the cathedral cool through the hot summer months. It was a little eerie, going down the dim fire escape stairways to this old spa, inching along the catwalks overlooking the pool. I could almost see the Roman wealthy, languoring there, 2,000 years ago.

The city of Catania was itself an interesting contrast with the rest of Sicily. A lot of Sicily’s towns are similar mazes of ancient, stone-paved alleyways. But a lot of Catania is much more modern. That’s because Catania is right underneath Mt. Etna, the most active volcano in Europe. Our guide said the residents of Catania are kept busy sweeping ashes off of every surface, the spumings from Mt. Etna. However, I didn’t notice any particular residues about the place the day I was there. But several times in the 20th century, a large part of Catania was buried under ash and lava. And the residents had to rebuild their city. In Sicily, when you want to call someone “pigheaded, stubborn,” you call him “Catanian.” That’s because through the ages, the place has been destroyed so often – and yet the survivors always rebuild on the same spot.

Now big swathes of the city are glitteringly new. The main street is a broad boulevard lined with gleaming plate glass. But always looming behind is the outline of ancient Mt. Etna.

It’s not just one fumarole. Etna is actually a chain of several hundred craters. The volcano was especially active while we were there, more active than it has been in decades. A new crater was opening up, spilling lava down one of its steep sides. The molten lava pouring from this crater was added to the lava pouring from three adjacent craters. We would all angle to get good views of the Mountain at night. These four orange-glowing rivers would shift and re-channel, looking as if they were trying to form different letters of the alphabet there on the mountainside. For a minute, the lava streams looked as if they were forming a big letter “M.” Then the next moment, they converged to look like an enormous “R.” It was as if the mountain were trying to spell out a message for us. Everyone took photos of the spectacle, but I don’t think any of these night shots came out.

(By the way, when the tour was over, our group departed from the Catania airport. When I got home, I read that the very next day after our departure, that airport had been temporarily closed due to the heavy amounts of smoke and ash coming from Mt. Etna. It would have been too dangerous for the planes to attempt any take-off in the ceiling-zero conditions.)

But as I say, while I was there, I didn’t notice anything particularly noxious about Etna. (The only respiratory distress I suffered was when we were touring the ruin of a Greek temple in Agrigento. A man was cleaning the stones of the temple that day, using a scrub brush and buckets of benzene! Maybe he needed to scrub away spray paint graffiti?)

Our group was bused out to Etna one day, and invited to climb a little way up the mountain - on a facet away from where the molten lava was spilling. We were also told we could collect as many granite rocks as we wanted as souvenirs. The mountain just keeps tossing out more and more. Some of the ones we found were still warm, a sign of their recent escape from the nether regions. These were all spongy-looking, nondescript rocks though. It seems Mt. Etna doesn’t form any obsidian – the lovely black-glass rocks I was hoping to see.

“Obsidian my midnight gleams…”

Sicily I - Our Trip Starts

As for my big adventure of the year – my trip to Sicily – there were a lot of surprises there. I learned a lot. I didn’t prepare much for the trip. I decided to just make it a spontaneous junket without boning up a lot on Sicily in advance. I don’t know if that was wise. I sort of wish I had learned more before going, so I would have known what to look at, what questions to ask. And I certainly wish I had boned up on the language more. Every shred of Italian I ever knew totally escaped me when I was there on the ground. The one time I tried to communicate with a native in full Italian sentences was at the Post Office, and I ended up getting ten postcard stamps for twenty Euros – over twice what I should have paid. So something went wrong there. They saw me coming!

I did read a few books before launching off though, including one written by Lawrence Durrell (who also wrote the Alexandria Quartet and other become-PBS-Masterpiece-Theater-productions). In the 60’s-70’s he wrote this journal account of a bus tour he took around Sicily called Sicilian Circus. He made almost exactly the same circuit I was scheduled to make.

Durrell’s observations were generally out of my league, and well, to be frank, a little precious. He was very versed in classic mythology and found frequent likenesses between phenomena such as a lowering cloud formation and “the brow of Zeus as he was chastising Hera for her inconstancy.” Like that. Also, much of his book wasn’t about Sicily at all. It was a reminiscence of his bygone and again slightly too refined-for-my-tastes friendship/love affair with a beautiful, highly cultured woman – recently deceased when he wrote the book. She had lived in Sicily and frequently urged him to visit her there. But he never had, instead buying palazzos in Greece, and particularly on the Island of Corfu. Now, too late, he was heeding her call and visiting her beloved Sicily. As his little tour bus with its motley set of passengers made its way around the Island, Durrell recalled conversations he’d had with his friend.

He recalled how they had sipped wine under the stars of Corfu and exchanged anecdotes about Aristophanes. It all made me wonder – are there really people who converse like that? Could there really have been a man and woman, lovers, whose pillow talk consisted of reveries about what the ancient Gods meant to the Greeks? “Where the women come and go, speaking of Michelangelo.” That sort of relationship seems to exist on another planet, no - in another universe altogether from the one I’m inhabiting.

But getting back to Durrell’s Sicily – he did alert me to the long, multinational history of Sicily. The ancient Egyptians were there, although they didn’t leave any pyramids, as far as I know. But I did get to see some of their steles of hieroglyphics in the Palermo History Museum. And even at that, the ancient Egyptians weren’t the first to leave an imprint of their culture around Sicily. That Museum also had representations of some of the Paleolithic cave paintings to be found around the island – some almost as spectacular as the famous Lascaux paintings.

I hadn’t realized – Sicily is only 100 miles across the Mediterranean from Africa. I never really bothered to understand before why Patton and our other Generals were fighting in Tunisia during WWII. But Africa is only a rowboat away from Italy. So no wonder. This was brought home to me during what was perhaps my most memorable day in Sicily. Our group was touring Ortygia, an Island off an Island. It’s a southern projection off the Sicilian city of Syracuse. Some of us stopped there for lunch at an off-the-beaten-path restaurant. It was a hole-in-the-wall place with barely room for our party and the one other party there in an alcove. We glanced over at this other group, a panel of three distinguished-looking men who had little flags placed on their table. We didn’t think much of it at the time. We ordered, and gazed around the place, at the wine barrels and red-checkered tablecloths.

It was very homey. But there was near disaster waiting in the coziness. Two men on our tour were celebrating their 5th anniversary by making a present of this trip to themselves and to an accompanying pastor friend. One of this interesting couple was rather tall, and when he came back from the bathroom – he bashed his head into a low stone archway. He fell, briefly unconscious, bleeding. It was quite dramatic. Cold compresses were rushed to him and he was quickly revived. He was soon back in his seat, eating spaghetti. But he continued to seep blood onto his compress, and in his gusto over his food, he continued to drool a little rivulet of spaghetti sauce from his mouth. He was twin rivers run red.

The meal was delicious – prepared to order for each of us by the daughters of the restaurant’s Tunisian owner. After we finished, the daughter who had waited on us came up and shook hands and embraced each of us in turn. She had a mist of tears in her eyes as, in her halting English, she wished us all a good trip. We looked at each other sadly, realizing we’d probably never see each other again. This was the one moment when I experienced a really different way of being in the world from anything I typically find in the U.S. Here was someone putting human contact ahead of business. It was a truly touching moment.

When we got outside, our tour leader asked if we had recognized that other party behind us had been. What? No. She said the man in the middle of the group, the one who had nodded over at us and graciously said “B’giorno” – was none other than the Prime Minister of Tunisia – Mohammed Ghannouchi. It seems the restaurant owner was head of the Tunisian ethnic minority in Sicily, and so Tunisian potentates dined there often. But we’d really hit the jackpot of VIP’s that day.

We all shopped some more until night fell on Ortygia. It got a little chilly, at least chilly by the standards of long-time Sicilian residents. It was slightly comical, the way the tour leader would rush up to me worriedly and say, “Oh Rosalie, button your sweater. You’ll catch cold!” whenever the temperature dipped even a notch below 65 degrees.

Especially on such cool evenings, chestnut vendors came out in force along the lanes and in the town squares. Their metal cylinders sighed gusts of aromatic smoke up towards the starry skies. Our tour leader bought a big bag of chestnuts, and we all stood around munching, our sweaters buttoned, while we waited for our tour bus to pick us up and bring us back to our hotel in Syracuse.

While that may have been my favorite day in Sicily, there were many good days.
(To be continued...)

Stop Or I'll Shoot!

Packing for a trip is always a delicate balancing act between too much and too little. But even prior to all those weighty decisions for me – is the decision about whether or not to take a camera.

For most people, a camera is a foregone conclusion when they travel. But I come to that crossroads with the extra poundage of my parents’ prejudices in my backpack. My mother especially was given to issuing carefree, Auntie Mame waivers – about living in the moment. “Don’t record life. Live it! Don’t take pictures to look back on. Look at what’s around you now!” For her, taking pictures was like taking copious notes in class. You miss so much while you’re scribbling. You miss the fleeting grimace on the teacher’s face. You miss his joy in making a point. You miss the nuance in favor of the facts.

That all sounded so Bohemian and right. And other people’s pictures generally supported her argument. If anyone ever had the time to look back through them at all, they would generally find posed shots of “Say cheese” groups standing in front of – the Taj Mahal - the Eiffel Tower - the Leaning Tower of Pisa. And there were so many indiscriminate shots of these clumps of conscripted smilers.

Now technology has made it possible to be even more indiscriminate. Weddings aren’t usually about creating close, personal family ties anymore. They aren’t about the intimate hopefulness in the vows made between two people in love. Weddings are now usually mass staged events, like coronation ceremonies. The point is in the spectacle of the thing. The point is all in how the thing is visually arranged for the ubiquitous cameras. And a bride feels her life is ruined if the photographer somehow fails to get a shot of her throwing the bouquet.

In earlier decades, people usually only captured one or two choice pictures of themselves around the time of their weddings. My mother had one formal picture made in 1928. It is a sepia close-up of her husband-to-be smiling down wistfully, indulgently at her - and her looking up at him, a little tentatively, perhaps just a shade unconvinced that she wanted to launch on this adventure. She might have been prescient because that marriage did end in divorce about six years later. It ended amiably enough, amid, what was for the times, a relatively mild scuffle of Depression-era troubles. Yet at the moment the photographer snapped the picture, they were a strikingly handsome jazz-age couple - an early, untroubled F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda - except for just that slight shadow of doubt that might have revealed itself to someone pondering the picture closely enough. The photographer kept them on display in his window for years – a close-up example of his skill.

That picture is all my mother had or cared to have of the rites surrounding her first marriage. Then she didn’t even think to have any pictures at all taken when she married my father twenty years later in a civil ceremony. She was content to let all the unphotographed moments shed their skin and assume newer, livelier forms in the minds of the people who were there. Presumably she lived in the moment, and that was enough.

Now it seems necessary that everything about a wedding be captured on film. Now we must record every one of Uncle Johnny’s jarring elbow thrusts as he attempts to do the Macarena at the wedding reception. Now we must record Cousin Otis precariously threading his way across the dance floor, holding a sloppy, sliding piece of wedding cake on his little paper plate. These details can be of telling interest. But somehow, they usually end up being neither telling nor interesting. They just trap Cousin Otis in a podgy limbo somewhere between the self-conscious and the candid, whereas before he could have flown free into history. In the same way, our traveling companions of a previous era could have remained more truly themselves, rather than being cut to the constant Procrustean Bed of a picture frame.

Yes, my mother was right about all that. But then I got a digital camera. And I started taking pictures.

I still choose my shots carefully, although when I have the camera along, I feel pressure to take the obligatory shot of the landmark. But in general, I try to limit myself to things that have a personal, unpredictable interest.

And lo and behold! I see things on these pictures I would never have seen if I had just “lived in the moment.” For example, I recently took a series of photographs of the large Cooper’s Hawks that have miraculously been visiting my garden in a populous Chicago neighborhood. Looking over the pictures, I was amazed to find one that captured the instant when the hawk’s second eyelids, its nictitating membranes, were pulled down - eerie, iridescent shades over its eyes. Although the bird was indeed a hawk and not a raven, that captured slice reminded me of Poe’s final-stanza description of his harbinger bird – “And its eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming…”

That and a thousand other details are revealed in a photograph – details that would have been forever lost in the rush of impressions that constitute life in the moment. I suppose this value in taking pictures should have been obvious to me all along, if the enterprise hadn’t been clouded by my mother’s injunctions – and even more, by the generally rather dull and trivializing output of most shutterbugs.

But then, also perhaps obviously, I have discovered value not only in the picture, but in the process of taking pictures. Having a camera in my hand wakens me to my surroundings. I go forth with an artist’s eye, in the footsteps of Steichen and Stieglitz, more keenly aware - scouring the landscape for unique features, for odd juxtapositions that might be a commentary on the human condition, without necessarily involving any actual humans.

I still feel a reluctance to take pictures of people. That might in part be due to an instinct operating in me similar to the instinct operating among tribal peoples and people in closer-knit communities like the Amish. It’s a feeling that to take a picture of a person is to literally “capture” and encase the essence of that person in too-earthly a mold. And again going back to all the sorry and depreciatingly specific remembrances we have of the Uncle Johnnies of the world – that instinct has wisdom in it.

Then too, I feel that taking a picture of a person is just generally too intrusive an act. It seems it should certainly entail my approaching the person and asking their permission first. But if I do that, I will almost always destroy the spontaneity that made me want to take the picture in the first place. So how is that whole exchange supposed to be negotiated? I’m never sure. The classes I’ve taken in photography haven’t covered that topic. Any tips that teachers could give in this regard would probably have to boil down to legality and sensitivity – and after that, how to take pictures covertly.

I know I would certainly be made to feel ill at ease if I spotted someone photographing me, even if I was sure it wasn’t part of a lawyer’s investigation, but only because I was “picturesque.” Perhaps I’d be even more put-off by implications of picturesqueness, because that usually means being somehow typical of a place and time, being somehow representative. And above all, it usually means being old. And I assume other people feel the same aversion I do to being typecast that way.

But again, I might be wrong in many cases. On my recent trip to Sicily, I was rather taken aback to see a member of our tour group ask permission, then stand directly in front of a weathered native (an old-man-and-the-sea archetype) – ready to snap him head-on from only a foot away. I cringed at the audacity. But then something amazing! As our tour member lined up her shot, a huge grin radiated across the man’s face. Pride at being found picture-worthy boosted him, suddenly reversing the years’ inevitable sapping of youth and vigor. In the gaze of this media attention, he flowered into his prime, a second wind filling his sails. It was apparent our tour member had brought immense joy to someone by soliciting such bold exposure. And I felt a little ashamed of my global reticence. Because of it, I might have missed many opportunities to similarly bring joy to people.

Going back to the original dilemma that prompted all this reflection - I decided not to bring my camera along on the Sicily trip at all. It was practical reasons rather than philosophy that made the decision for me in the end. I had heard so much about drive-by camera-snatchings all over the world. And my camera had a big zoom lens. It couldn’t be tucked in a pocket. It would be an albatross around my neck, something that would brand me as a tourist from a mile away. Or more affectionately, it would be like traveling with an infant. I would have to be constantly conscious of it, protective of it – swaddling it away from harm.

I wasn’t even sure how to get such a thing on board an airplane in the first place. Not being much of a traveler, I didn’t know the post 9/11 protocol regarding cameras. You don’t really pack such an expensive, delicate item in your checked luggage, do you? But on the other hand, isn’t a camera a suspicious thing to carry dangling as you go through inspection? Wouldn’t the security guards want to disassemble it to make sure it wasn’t a bomb? Then even if I got it intact onto the plane, I’d be left with a big wattle weighing me for 3,000 miles across the Atlantic.

I am always so flummoxed by these little questions in life. While other people are grappling with wars and famine and family crises – I am left in the dust, immobilized by whether or not to tote a camera.

In the end I left the camera behind. In the end, I regretted it. Everyone else on the tour through Sicily routinely brought cameras along, seemingly without have spent a moment agonizing over what – how – who. So I will have to depend on the kindness of these strangers to share their pictures with me if I want to look back at where I’ve been.

But I probably won’t make a big point of asking to look back through their portfolios of pictures. I now see how my mother was partially wrong. But I still appreciate how she was partially right about the shallowness of taking pictures. A lot of things are better left to the imagination. Although I have developed a sort of keenness for taking the occasional photo, my primary medium always was, and probably will continue to be – the printed word. So I will still likely keep most of my memories of trips through life in the form of letters I write or in just random jottings like this.

Taking pictures is more like watching TV. Writing is more like listening to the radio. When I take pictures, I’m pretty much limited to capturing a scene as it is. Yes, I have choices – a choice of subject matter, of angle, of lighting, etc. But these are all choices among off-the-rack options already out there. Writing seems to leave me more room to insert myself into the scene. When I write up an experience, I can weave myself into the very fabric of the narrative.
So I will write my trip to Sicily. In some follow-up postings, I will tell what I saw in Sicily – or, more accurately, I will tell what a picture Sicily and I made together.

Attack of the Clones!

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila! You have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one thing, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don’t want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures.
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My Children are Clones! It’s a headline you’d expect to see only in a newspaper like The National Enquirer. But actually, most people speak as if cloning were taking place in their families on a routine basis. Listen to the average married couple.

I first became aware of what I was hearing years ago while a friend and I were watching a couple exchanging anecdotes about their children on The Tonight Show. This couple was famous not only for being a singing duo, but for their long-standing, presumably close and successful marriage. As they bantered that night though, they didn’t seem close. They seemed to be occupying opposite ends of a tennis court in a singles match. The wife started the story with, “My son…” The husband kept the tale in play by elaborating, “And then my son…”

The two went through the entire anecdote that way – volleying the child back and forth. “My son” – slam. “My son” – slam. My friend pointed out the oddity. The anecdote was finished, and not once had either partner used the pronoun “our.”

Yes! Something struck me as being not quite as idyllic about this couple’s marriage as the world would like to believe. And my friend zeroed in on the source of the taint. He pointed out how it was the persistent use of that singular possessive “my” – applied to a child who by rights should have been the height of the couple’s mutuality.

But then, once I’d been alerted to this usage – I found it everywhere. I found that Tonight Show couple wasn’t the exception. They were the rule. I hear most people employing that same exclusive “my” when talking about their children, as if every woman’s child had arrived by Immaculate Conception, a case of parthenogenesis – and every man’s child had been cloned from one of his cells.

The usage would be understandable, if somewhat ungenerous, in cases of blended marriages, or when one partner is dead or out of the picture. People have taken me to task for objecting to someone referring to “my” child when, for example, they are on air being interviewed by Larry King. A celebrity wouldn’t want to mention “our” child then, because this might imply the celebrity had had the child with Larry King.

That sounds like a good excuse. But in reality, it doesn’t wash. People who have biologically engendered a child together use “my” as often as couples with blended families. And like that Tonight Show couple, husbands and wives who are right there together, sometimes even holding hands, are still all respectively “My,” “My,” My.” When Oprah interviewed Jerry Seinfeld, she asked his wife, sitting front row center in the audience, what it was that she really liked about Jerry. Jessica Seinfeld thought for a moment, then said, “He makes my children laugh.”

Furthermore, the same celebrity who says “my child” will go on in the next breath to tell an amusing story about the sufferings endured in the course of remodeling “our house.” The house is no more shared with Larry King or Oprah than the child. But people seem more willing to acknowledge their spouses’ mutual investment in a house, while the children remain exclusive, each to each.

The switch in pronouns was dramatically illustrated recently in a statement issued by the mother of an abducted child. She stood before the cameras, issuing a plea to police to make a more concerted effort to find the perpetrator. “Someone took my child out of our house,” she anguished, with her husband standing in the background.

This may seem unconscionable of me – criticizing someone’s grammar when they are in the throes of one of the worst imaginable tragedies. But I’m not criticizing grammar. I’m regretting a more diffuse tragedy, one that seems to be afflicting most families. Each partner in the typical marriage is viewing the children of that marriage as the end – with the spouse as just the means. The man is acting like a sultan of old, before it was acknowledged, or even known, that women made any genetic contribution to children. The sovereign would look out over the numerous progeny his harem had produced, and he would see there HIS children, HIS heirs and successors.

For her part, the woman would allow the male his conceit. Meanwhile, she quietly maintained her sense of being the de facto power, the power behind the throne. The male was as incidental to her marriage ceremony, to her having achieved the status of wife, and to her subsequent nest-building - as the female was incidental to the man’s goal of perpetuating himself in a bloodline. The woman always knew the children were really HERS. And so it continues down to this day.

The perpetuation of this mindset seems more dangerous, more sinister to me than the actual techniques of cloning everyone is worrying over. That couple on the Tonight Show who started this whole rant are still around, still married, probably still as happy or as privately unhappy as they were those years ago. But in general, I think the use of “my” in connection with children spells trouble for a marriage. It dooms it to early dissolve, dullness, or dysfunction. This is the root that the Dr. Phils of the world so often fail to dig down to. Until people can truly, convivially think in terms of more inclusive pronouns – in marriage, and in the world at large – it will be OUR loss.

Gotcha!

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila! You have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one thing, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don’t want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures.

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It was such a good buy. I bought a wrapping tape dispenser at the Dollar Store. It was a big, elaborate tape dispenser. I got so much plastic for my money.

And I needed a tape dispenser. I mail a lot of boxes. In addition to being sealed, these boxes have to have all traces of their previous adventures taped over, concealed. So I was happy with my new acquisition. I even pictured myself starting a mailing service with this formidable piece of equipment.

But when I got it home and tried to load a roll of tape into it, I saw I had a problem. It hadn’t come with any instructions. How should the tape be threaded through the complexity of rollers and serrated edges? I tried one way and another and only ended up in an improbable Three Stooges dilemma for my trouble. I ended up with wads of tape affixed to my sweater, my jeans. I even had wads of tape plastered in my hair.

I brought in some consultants. But no one else could thread the tape through the dispenser either. So after several more accursed and cursing attempts, I put the dispenser aside. It languished on a shelf for months. Summer passed into autumn.

Then - a miracle. I saw an exact replica of my dispenser in a neat package in Walgreen’s. It cost ten times what I had paid at the Dollar Store – but I saw it had one vital thing my model lacked. It came with an instruction sheet.

I tried to read the instructions through the package cellophane. But it was useless. The sheet was folded and exhaustive. I didn’t want to buy yet a second dispenser just to get the instructions. That would have completely nullified my original bargain. So I regretfully walked on and shopped down other aisles. But I was drawn back to that dispenser. After unsuccessfully pretzeling myself around the package once more, trying to make out enough of its directions - I decided my only recourse was to steal that instruction pamphlet from the package.

I had never once before in my life shoplifted anything. Even as a child, a teenager, I had never taken so much as a candy bar from the shelves. It seemed an unlikely time of life for me to be launching on a criminal career. But I felt I had no alternative. (Don’t all criminals justify their deeds with some presumed necessity?)

I furtively scanned the walls for security cameras. I didn’t see anything pointed at me. But I couldn’t be sure there wasn’t a camera concealed in some unlikely object around the store. So I doubled over in nefariousness. I slipped a penknife out of my purse. Then, cloaking myself over my victim like Jack the Ripper, I sliced through the package cellophane with surgical skill and deftly drew its vital little packet of instructions out. I slithered it into my pocket, tucked back my knife, and continue to walk down the aisle, for all the world a nonchalant shopper browsing down the rows.

But I was hardly nonchalant inside. My heart was pounding. I felt almost dizzy with fear. What if camera surveillance had spotted me? They might assume I was trying to make off with something really valuable – something like one of those watches that had been stocked on a nearby rack. How could I convince them I had just lifted a sheet of instructions from a tape dispenser? Would I be hauled off to a police station?

Although I had brought the chill autumn air into the store with me, I realized I was now sweating - sweating bullets. And my heart was pounding harder, harder, harder…

Hoping my high anxiety wasn’t showing, I proceeded down the aisle as if walking the last mile. I was almost to the end. The checkout counter was in sight. And then – out of nowhere - a voice directly in my ear intoned in mocking malignant singsong – “I see you-u. GOTCHA!”

I dropped the cans of almonds I was legitimately going to buy. They clattered to the floor, in what seemed like slow-motion, endless reverberation.

I turned to face my accuser. I saw a skeletal face leaning into mine with an evil, triumphant grin. No, it wasn’t a skeletal face – it was an actual skull!

When my eyes finally focused and I started breathing again, I realized it was one of those motion-activated figures that stores display around Holidays. This was a sample of a Halloween haunting you could buy for your window. It would spook anyone who crossed its path. And yet – how eerily apt its “Gotcha!” Perhaps it really was inhabited by a stalking Halloween spirit, some all-perceiving vengeance from beyond the grave.

I scooped up my almond cans, and went to the cashier. I tried to keep my hands from trembling as I paid. But I don’t think I succeeded. The cashier was mercifully oblivious to the customers though, and just processed me mechanically. Still, I thought she might be feigning indifference. When I went outside, I took a few steps away from the building, then stopped and waited – for the long arm of the law to claim me. But no human enforcer came after me. So I walked a little farther, and then farther. And finally I was home.

After I had calmed myself a little with a hot cup of tea, I tackled those hard-won instructions. A few more hours of tape contortions demonstrated that, with or without instructions, the threading of the dispenser was hopeless. I ended up donating the dispenser to charity, actually compounding my felony I suppose by visiting this intractability on someone else.

So once again, the lesson had been conveyed – Crime Doesn’t Pay. But more than that, I’d learned to be wary of those animated Halloween displays. Perhaps they know more than we realize.

Lean Over and Look At My Stick Shift

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila! You have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one thing, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don’t want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures.

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I walked briskly out into the big, almost empty parking lot, but slowed a little as I approached my car. I saw there was a man loitering near it. It was too late. He’d seen me. I sighed. I was headed for a nuisance – or something worse.

“Is this your car?” the man beamed and waved me forward. It didn’t seem possible that he could be too dangerous. He was old and wizened. Yes “wizened” - not a word you hear much anymore. It recalls root cellars and your mother reading Hansel and Gretel to you.

He introduced himself cheerfully. “I’m Norm. Beautiful day, isn’t it? What’s your name? You live around here?”

It had been quite a while since anyone had hit on me. I didn’t know if I should be flattered or frightened. Even though he was small and “up there” in age, he was wiry. He could still do some damage. And it was always possible he had a knife or a gun. He might be counting on his harmless appearance to launch a surprise attack. Oh, all the TV shows have put serial killers on our brains. But I was polite and answered his small talk questions, as vaguely and evasively as possible without being rude. At the same time, I was conscious of the fact that that’s exactly how women get snared – through their compulsion to be polite, accommodating.

“That’s a beautiful Toyota you have,” he switched from strictly personal solicitations. “I love Toyotas. Always bought ‘em. They’re the best thing going. I have one myself – right now. See? It’s parked down there at the other end of the lot. Come and have a look.”

I’d already unlocked my car door, which made me doubly reluctant to follow the man. But again, that persistent female impulsion to be nice won out. And then there was also that ingrained reluctance to stanch the flow of any masculine attention, however unlikely the man. So I provisionally followed him, at a distance.

He continued extolling the virtues of Toyotas all along our course. Finally the fellow stopped short and pointed. “There’s my baby. She’s a ’94. Got 170,000 miles on her and she runs like a charm. I tell you, I’d never buy anything but a Toyota. They’re the best.”

The vehicle in front of me was an odd amalgam. I’m not familiar with makes and models, so I don’t know how to characterize the strange runt I had presented to me. It was a mini-mini-camper – a triple cross between a truncated camper, a scaled-down 2x4 flatbed truck, and a jeep. I didn’t know that Toyota had ever made such an odd fusion vehicle. I wondered if the man might have added that metallic shell on the back of his chassis as storage space himself. It was big enough to hold camping gear – or a couple of dead bodies.

The man continued his patter of praise. He opened his own driver’s door and waved his hand with a flourish, as if he were a model at a car show. “Lookee there. Clean as a whistle. And it’s a stick shift! I always did prefer the manuals myself. This one’s on the steering wheel. That’s how I like ‘em. Leaves your seat free clear across. Here, lean over and look at my stick shift!”

I laughed. I couldn’t help but laugh. Whether that was a racy pick-up line or an inept killer’s attempt to get me to bend down so he could bop me on the head and push me the rest of the way into his car – whatever it was, it was priceless.

The man seemed to take my merriment as sheer shared enthusiasm for his Toyota. He rattled off some more facts and figures about the car (camper, truck, whatever it was). He waxed nostalgic over trips he’d made in it. He got so caught up in his expostulations that he seemed to forget I’d never complied with his urging to stretch into his car.

Finally though I felt I really had to get back to my own Toyota, left vulnerably ajar back there. Like a TV talk show host running out of time, I mumbled some segue wrap-up phrases and started back. The man trotted along behind me, yapping more praise of Toyotas. When we arrived at my car, he insisted on jotting his name and phone number on a paper. He thrust it at me as I was getting in behind my wheel, ready to make my escape.

“Here, call me sometime. I live right back there. Call me. I mean it. Give me a call. I live alone. I get lonely. It’d be nice to have somebody to talk to. Never been married. Had a fiancé once. But she left me while I was away in the War. One of those ‘Dear John’ things, I guess. Soured me on marriage for good. But I sure would like to see you sometime. Give me a call. Promise?”

I briefly pondered what war he could possibly have been in. He looked too young for WWII or Korea – too old for Vietnam. What else was there? But I didn’t want to delay my departure with any more calculation than was absolutely necessary. I was just relieved this hadn’t turned out to be a deadly encounter after all. And indeed, I felt a little bolstered by this prospect of a date, even though I knew I would never call the man. Well, I probably wouldn’t. I politely took the scrap of paper he’d written his name and phone number on. But the triumph of romantic conquest has always been fleeting for me at best.

“Give me a call,” he repeated his urging. “I’ll take you out to lunch – my treat. Bring your Toyota. We can use your car to go to the restaurant. I’d like to ride in another Toyota. So be sure to bring it. Hey, you wouldn’t be interested in selling that car, would you? I wouldn’t mind having another one – as back-up. You can never have too many Toyotas.”

Well, this day had started out sort of flat. But it had ended up being more productive than I could ever have hoped. I had acquired not one, but two catch-phrases to chuckle over, to evoke as off-beat counsel when I didn’t know what to do. Now I could remember to “Lean over and look at my stick shift,” and I could remind myself that, “You can never have too many Toyotas.”

Not a Sparrow Falls

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila! You have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one thing, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don’t want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures.
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I went to Chicago’s North Park Nature Center the other day – to learn about sparrows.

Just going to the Nature Center itself always provokes flights of fancy in me. The Center’s conservators are currently devoted to turning the acreage back into native prairie and wetlands conditions. Walking along the trails lined with goldenrod and bluestem grass is interesting. But I remember when this land was devoted to another, equally interesting use. I remember when it was one of the last tuberculosis sanitaria in the U.S.

Right here, in the middle of Chicago’s busy urban north-side, there was this asylum for victims of “consumption” (the old word for tuberculosis). The last residents of the sanitarium were relocated (where were they sent?) in the 1960’s. After that, the land was hotly contested for several years, with competing interests vying for ownership. The conservationists eventually largely won out over the condo developers. A few senior citizen apartment complexes were nestled back in the parklands. But for the most part, the land has been handed over to the Park District as a place where citizens can come to study and commune with nature.

I often walked the ground when it was in transition though. It had a haunted, fading quality. The extended arbors on which the tuberculosis patients once grew grape vines as part of their fresh-air regimen were collapsing. The glass panels of the greenhouses were shattered and sharded. It was like a page out of a Southern gothic novel – beautifully bygone, but dangerous with bitter loss. The huge red brick building that used to be the “natatorium” where the patients could swim is still there. It was rehabbed and is a more generalized gymnasium now. However, there are nooks and crannies about the place that are still as they were in the days of the insidious TB bacterium, old hiding places where I would hate to poke a stick.

But the other day I went to my sparrow lecture in full sunshine. Most of the nature classes are held in a smaller, cozier red brick building. There is a fireplace in the main room where we gather. And the rafters of the room are usually decorated according to the season – twinkling white lights in the winter – papier mâché butterflies made by children in the summer.

A panel of expert birders was there to walk us through the fine points of sparrow identification. They handed out charts that labeled the different external anatomical parts of the bird, emphasizing the parts we could use as points of distinction. There is the superciliary (the eyebrow), the malar (the mustache area), the crown and whatever median line runs through it.

One of the best tips we got though was to observe the overall form of the bird. Look at its silhouette. If it is relatively small and has a long, narrow tail, it is likely to be a member of the Spizella genus. Around Chicago, that means there’s a good chance it is either a Field Sparrow or a Chipping Sparrow. If the bird has a stubbier tail, it may be of the Ammodramus genus. Maybe it’s a Grasshopper Sparrow, or if it has more lines on its face, it might be a Henslow’s Sparrow.

Another valuable tip to identifying sparrows – watch where they feed and watch where they flush to when they are frightened. Some species almost always forage in groups on the ground and flush further away into the grass when they are frightened. Some don’t like a background of trees at all. Other species may feed singly and flush into a shrub or a tree when they sense danger. I wouldn’t have thought to look at such behavior as a key to identification.

One instructor said that learning to distinguish the different kinds of local sparrows was like becoming a fine wine connoisseur – without the elitist connotations of that term “connoisseur.” But the point is – everyone can specify a preference for either “red” or “white” wine. Almost everyone can distinguish a cardinal from a bluejay. But if one would truly like to think of oneself as a nature lover – if one would truly like to travel down the path to becoming a naturalist – that means learning how to make finer distinctions. It means being willing to abide in nature long enough, lovingly enough to become aware of subtler distinctions.

I liked that analogy. And then another analogy involving sparrows came to mind. I remembered one noted feminist saying that women in this society could never be truly free and equal until people learn to love the sparrow.

She didn’t elaborate on this rather enigmatic remark. But I think I know what she meant. Unless a woman engages in time-consuming, straining measures – she won’t be noticed. In order to stand out, she must paint on a lot of flash. She must regularly prune herself into a strikingly artificial topiary form. Otherwise, she will be relegated to the status of sparrow – common, unremarkable. She won’t have the command of a typical man who is taller, more muscular. A man, with his bushier eyebrows and bolder, more prominent features, just naturally tends to be more vivid. And certainly a man, at least in many age categories, is a much rarer bird.

Older women are the sparrows of our society by virtue of numbers alone. Convalescent homes and senior citizen living facilities are notoriously female preserves. Almost everyone resident there is female. Women live longer. Surviving men perhaps are likelier to have younger, still healthy mates to take care of them in their own homes. So it’s women, women, women, you see out and about on tours and on retirement cruises, doing volunteer work, in gardening clubs.

It is easy to view them as an undifferentiated mass. It is easy to become dismissive and to look over their shoulders in the direction of that blaze of red cardinal. Even the nicest media stars take a dismissive tone when they refer to their matinee audiences. They say that they will be performing that afternoon for the usual “flock of little old blue-haired ladies.” They do their best to disassociate themselves from this demographic. They sigh and shrug, as if to underscore the fact that they play to these individuals not by choice, but simply as a matter of contractual obligation.

Well, perhaps it is true that they will be statistically less likely to find someone in those matinee audiences who will appreciate the edgy, avant-garde nature of a performance. Still, there “might be giants” out there. There might be genius that can appreciate the script better than even the performer himself does. And there almost certainly will be beauty. But the beauty will be the beauty of a sparrow, requiring more commitment and concentration before revealing itself.

Until people can learn to be interested in their fellow human beings selflessly – without the urgencies of sex or profit prodding them – then women are indeed doomed to being second-class citizens in society, to being the sparrows. When they are younger, they will be tied to the labor of bringing out their best features with mascara and lipstick and diet in order to be visible to the casual observer. When they are older, they will fall irremediably under the heading of “flock.”

Everyone’s attention will be turned to the soar of the masculine eagle, to the bright self-assertion of the woodpecker. And all those sparrows underneath, with their drabber, more difficult tones, will be invisible – except to the most discerning eye.

Spelling Bee - Part II

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila! You have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one thing, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don’t want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures.

_________________________________________________________

And finally the dread day of the Spelling Bee arrived.

My mother took me on the bus to Francis Parker High School, the old red brick building that hosted the annual District Bee. My classmates had been given the day off so they could attend the event. They’d been provided with directions on how to get here. Since they were all older, it was assumed they could manage the trip on public transportation on their own, without the need of any accompanying adult. Except for the boy I thought was going to be my partner up on stage - he had been brought by his housemother.

This boy lived a precarious, prejudiced life because of having been placed in the Uhlich Foster Home. The Uhlich Home wasn’t for orphans. It was for children whose parents were “temporarily” unable to care for them. But often that temporary status in fact stretched to official adulthood, when the youngsters were simply “aged out” of the system. Meanwhile, these children existed in limbo. They weren’t eligible for adoption since their parents were ostensibly waiting in the wings, just needing a breather before they would resume their parental obligations. But in fact, most of the parents never did recover their ability to care for their children – and so the children languished in their eternal waiting room.

Our grade school accepted all the kindergarten-eighth graders from that facility. And their presence brought out the Dickensian meanness in many of the teachers. “Those damned Uhlich kids” became the perennial scapegoats. They bore the brunt of the teachers’ pent-up hostilities and sadisms. Some of the teachers automatically started picking on any Uhlich student they had in their class from the moment the starting bell knelled the beginning of each school day. It was like watching the inexplicable pecking to death of one chicken by a gang of other chickens. It’s not always clear what causes one chick to be singled out this way. Sometimes it’s an obvious vulnerability; but sometimes the trigger is obscure, lying deep in some medullar instinct somewhere.

So a Uhlich student became the teacher’s automatic target. He would be sent to the dunce’s corner first thing in the morning, before he’d even had a chance to commit any transgression. There the teacher would fling humiliations at him throughout the day. The student’s only release was the day’s end. And I doubted that was any kind of release at all. I imagined he just shuffled from one locus of ritualistic abuse to another as he walked from the school back to his foster home for the evening. I didn’t know for sure what went on beyond the locked grillwork gate of that Home, behind those stone walls – but again, I pictured the most heartrending series of block print illustrations from a Dickens’ novel.

I had once almost gotten lumped in with these Uhlich students by a fourth-grade teacher, a woman with an especially sharp ax to grind. Along with the one actual Uhlich student in our class, I had also been taken as a handy coat hanger for this woman’s billowing frustration and rage. Whenever I mispronounced a word during reading period, the woman took the mistake as an occasion for a searing, humiliating condemnation of every aspect of my being. When I forgot to bring lunch money, the teacher declaimed the failure before the whole class as a clear indication of the total failure I was to become in life.

But then things changed suddenly. My mother wrote a particularly literate, slightly humorous, slightly flattering excuse note to the teacher explaining one of my many absences. And shortly after that, the teacher met my mother in person at a PTA meeting. During their conversation, my teacher learned that my mother was a graduate from an Ivy League University, and that my father owned a thriving neighborhood business. And from that day forward, the teacher’s persecution of me turned to fawning.

All the abuse that would have been heaped on me, now was heaped two-fold on the one actual Uhlich student in our class. That student had no parents in the picture to write literate notes to the teacher. That student had no college graduate mother, no businessman father standing prestigiously behind her. That student walked to school alone, without anyone to hold her hand – without anyone to object to whatever cruel treatment the world decided to mete out to her.

I felt wretched about this undeserved reprieve I’d been granted from the teacher’s abuse. But I did nothing to correct the injustice. I was just glad it wasn’t me under the teacher’s thumb any more. And that made me feel all the more wretched and cowardly. I realized I was one more person who had abandoned the Uhlich girl to her fate. But I guessed the Uhlich students were used to it.

I guessed that had been pretty much the same dismal grade-school experience my spelling bee partner had suffered through, although I had only landed here in the same class with him in eighth-grade. But I could see how he’d become inured. He walked down the school corridors mutely, as if in shell shock. However after he’d been chosen for this spelling bee, that had started to change. He began to blossom. He smiled; he talked occasionally. He became more and more eager and expansive as the day of the spelling bee drew close – just the opposite of me. Fred told me how his housemother was going to bring him to the event, and how he had even invited his real mother. She was going to take the day off of work to come see him.

He didn’t go into a lot of details, but I got the impression that this was to be the start of a whole new chapter between him and his mother. The fact that he was selected to represent the school in the bee was proof that he was a good student, a good boy, a worthy son. Maybe it would draw his mother back from her estrangement and they could be a family again. I saw in Fred’s eyes a reflection of the gleaming prospect that he wouldn’t be “one of those damn Uhlich kids” much longer.

And there he was sitting, near the front of the Francis Parker School Auditorium when my mother and I arrived. I hardly recognized him. His hair was brushed and Brilliantined back into daguerreotype formality. We made our way down the row toward him and sat. He was really happy. He whispered proudly to me, “There’s my mother – back there.” He waved his hand in a general over-the-shoulder direction. I couldn’t make out which of the many heads bobbing with pride he might be referring to. So I broadcast a general smile of acknowledgment.

Then everything happened so fast. My home room teacher leaned over to me and ordered, “Time to get up on stage. Get your placard!”

Fred and I both rose. But the teacher stopped him. “Not you, not you,” he said impatiently. “You’re just the alternate.”

Fred looked bewildered. I didn’t know what was going on either. But there was no time. The teacher was shooing me onstage. I jostled around with the other contestants for a bit, then found my seat up there, facing out the other way this time, into the dim maw of the Auditorium.

I didn’t have a chance to dwell on this mix-up. The spelling bee was starting. The moderator announced that there would be a warm-up round. She told us this first round would count, but she beamed that she was confident most of us would get through it without any trouble. And we started to tick off.

The contestant ahead of me got the word “laundry.” Not too bad. I would have known that – although it seemed a little tricky for a “warm-up round.” Then my turn. I lurched into the spotlight and looked out at the assemblage. I saw Fred in one of the front rows. His face had turned ashen. I still didn’t understand. Wasn’t he going to be up on the stage with me at all? And where was the rest of our class? I couldn’t see all the way to the back of the Auditorium or up into the balconies. Maybe they were out there, somewhere.

I couldn’t distract myself with these questions any longer though. My time had come. I had to stand and deliver. The spelling bee judge hurled the fateful word – “Myrrh.”

Myrrh? Myrrh? I was stunned. I had never heard so much as a whisper of this word. Myrrh!! I knew a million words – or so everyone said. But I’d never heard of myrrh!

I don’t remember if I had the presence of mind to ask for a definition and for the word origin. Since I’d had virtually no coaching for this event, I don’t think I’d been told that was my right, although somewhere along the way, I probably had gathered some sense I could ask for that information.

But whether I asked for definitions or not, I knew it was useless. To think – I had practiced, practiced – boning up on onomatopoeia and numismatist – only to meet my Waterloo on a one-syllable word. Myrrh. A practice word!

I took a stab at it. Against all reason, by some impossible intuition, I know I put an “h” in there somewhere. How I sensed that much, I’ll never know. I think I sputtered out a spelling like, “M-U-I-R-H.” With that, I’d shot my wad. I heard the dismissal bell. I was pronounced “wrong,” and made my way off the stage. Well, at least the pressure was off. I could enjoy the rest of the day as a spectator.

As I picked my way through the rows of contestants-still-in-the-running, I heard a girl sneer sotto voce to the student next to her, “She missed the easiest one. Everyone knows ‘myrrh.’” Well, I hadn’t known it. As I later learned, it is part of the famous Biblical pair of “frankincense and myrrh.” But I had never read the Bible. I had never been exposed to the slightest fragment of religious mythology. I guess the devout would say God came and punished me as an infidel that day. But really, myrrh! Could there be an odder word anywhere in the English language?

As I sheepishly took my place back next to my mother and homeroom teacher in the audience, I feared the teacher’s rebuke. He could be a harsh, sarcastic person. But surprisingly, he made light of my failure. “That’s OK,” he comforted. “That was a tough word.” I looked down the row at Fred. He was staring straight ahead, like a deer caught in headlights. I wondered if he would have known “myrrh.” Regretfully, I guessed he would have.

At that moment, the proceedings on stage were interrupted. There was a commotion in the balcony. We all turned and looked up. It was the rest of my class, boisterously traipsing in, displaying varying degrees of macho dishevelment. Marhsall’s face was streaked with mud in a war paint pattern. Leonard had one sleeve of his jacket rakishly torn away. Our home teacher grimaced and made swatting gestures at them. But they didn’t see us way down by the orchestra pit. They jovially stumbled over each other finding seating up there in the crow’s nest, and finally the spelling bee was able to resume.

I felt relieved that they hadn’t been there to witness my disgrace – me, the one they called “the brain,” the one whose homework they all copied. Maybe they’d never hear that I’d been eliminated on the warm-up round. Maybe they’d forget to ask why I wasn’t on stage when they got here. As the rounds of spelling wore on, I did hear a hoarse query from the balcony, “Where’s she at? I don’t see ‘er.” But it didn’t seem to be a pressing concern with them. And the spelling bee carried on to an uneventful conclusion without me.

Then we all scattered our separate ways home. Those late arriving members of my class roistered out as they had roistered in. My mother and I walked back to the bus stop. As we were walking, I caught a glimpse of Fred being ushered by his housemother toward a car. He looked as if he didn’t know or didn’t care where he was. I felt a knot in my stomach tighten.

The next day at school a few of those Fonz-like boys who’d clamored into the balcony did make reference to my early elimination from the bee. They’d heard. But they shrugged my failure off with good humor. You might even say they were mildly “supportive,” if that term had been in use then, and if you could ever characterize the demeanor of a gang of delinquent boys as “supportive.” At any rate, my spelling bee fiasco didn’t seem to have lowered me in their esteem. I assumed I would be as sought-after as dispenser of homework and quiz answers as ever.

However there was something wrong. There was a buzz in the air as we all flopped into our seats that morning and waited for the homeroom teacher, who was unusually late. I sat there, trying to piece together the snatches of excited conversation I heard bandied in back of me. As I was craning my neck around to be better included in this rush of rumor, I was brought back face-front by a terrifying crash.

Our teacher had arrived. He’d slammed a room-shaking load of books down on his desk. His usual cool remove was replaced with raw rage. “That’s the last time – the last time – you animals ever get out of your cages!” he screamed. “I’m going to see to it you never go across the street again, much less across town! Do you know – we’ve been getting calls all night, all morning – people reporting vandalism! You were always the worst class, but this does it! This is it!”

He stormed on, becoming more and more incoherent. But I gathered that our class had taken the occasion of their release from a day of classes to become pillaging Huns. They had cut a wide swathe of destruction across the city on their way to the spelling bee – ransacking, burning, looting. They toppled telephone poles and stop signs. They smashed windows. They spray-painted everything in their path. They started fires in apartment lobbies. They buffeted old ladies against garbage pails. They terrorized the driver of every bus they boarded.

It was true, our class had been branded as the worst in the School’s history even before this episode. The Uhlich students aside, we had that unusual concentration of older, demoted boys in the class and they had been chronically delinquent. They had made our class the original “Blackboard Jungle.” When people deplore the current epidemic of violence in classrooms and look back wistfully to “the good old days” – I can’t help but cast a dubious look their way. Their recollection of those days seems very selective. It’s true that students didn’t generally carry guns some decades ago – and weren’t generally high on crack or cocaine. But they had switchblades. Has everyone forgotten about switchblades?

Most of the students in my class carried a switchblade. One girl cut off the tip of her finger while we were only oh-so-mildly rehearsing three-part harmony during music period. She said she’d just been playing with her knife. One of the most unpopular teachers in the school was permanently blinded in one eye when a switchblade came hurtling at her down the corridor. The thrower of that switchblade (now one of the ringleaders of the mayhem en route to the spelling bee) had claimed he’d just been fooling around – trying to throw the blade to a friend of his down at the other end of the hall. The teacher had just haplessly stepped in the way of the projectile. So, another accident?

After all these accidents, plus vicious weekly switchblade fights on the school grounds, the school principle had been careful to assign only the toughest males available to teach our class. It didn’t help much though. Every day for these teachers was pretty much like Glenn Ford’s first day in The Blackboard Jungle. That’s why I smile knowingly to myself whenever I hear anyone lamenting “Today’s kids – all the shooting – drugs – violence - all because we took God out of the schools.”

Although it’s true - that particular group of students I found myself among in eighth-grade wasn’t exactly typical. We had the worst offenders among us, not because of Uhlich’s contribution to our population, but mostly because of that unusual concentration of demoted, older boys in the class. They were chaffing to get out from behind those pinching little desks and out into the wider world. And now they had thrown that proverbial straw on the camel’s back. After all the detentions they had racked up earlier that year – now this culminating vandalism. As our homeroom teacher continued his tirade, Fred and I could sit there, the only indisputably innocent bystanders. Nevertheless, our class as a whole was going to be punished.

Our teacher was reeling off the consequences of this flagrant cross-country pillage. Some of the boys would be sent to St. Charles, the distant reform school. Some would be held back again in the process. I imagined none of them would stick around to turn eighteen in grade-school. So that would probably be the end of their academic careers.

But there was more. As our homeroom teacher picked up a large book and slammed it gratuitously back down on the desk a second time for parting-shot emphasis – he yelled out at us that it had been decided our class trip would be canceled. No bus ride to the State Capital. “We don’t want you animals out in the streets any more – ever again!” The School would go ahead with the graduation ceremony (minus those youths who would be sitting it out in the reformatory, of course). The ballroom event at which the usual presentation of graduating class presents was made – would instead take place in private. We would each receive a paperback dictionary down in a basement storage room. All of us would be kept away from decent folk. “You are the worst class I’ve ever had or ever will have! You’re incorrigible - an embarrassment – a disgrace!!” the teacher spat out. And that was that.

I never saw those ringleaders of the spelling bee spree of vandalism again. I did see Fred every day for the remaining weeks until graduation. He had drawn back into pale numbness. He didn’t reproach me for not knowing “myrrh.” He never spoke to me at all after that. I never saw him speak to anyone unless he was spoken to. He just came and went, in a zombie trance. He stayed at Uhlich. No other home was opened to him.

The teachers, the counselors had decided to enter the School in the spelling bee just as a last-minute, off-hand sort of thing. No one had bothered to tell Fred or me what it was all about, which of us would be the real contestant. We were just sent. The teachers took a shot. No big deal.

It struck me that there had in fact been a crime committed that day – a crime worse than the crime of spray-painting walls or toppling street signs. And as usual, that really devastating crime had been the crime of casualness.

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I would like to hear from any of you who were ever contestants in a spelling bee and who have adventures to tell. Write a paragraph or two. What word did you win or lose on? I will try to post as many of your comments as I can.

Spelling Bee - Part I

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half turn (180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together. Voila! You have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a topological form with some amazing characteristics. For one things, you will find that simple twist has transformed your paper from a two-sided strip into a continuous band with only one side!

This is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don't want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side - but many different views, many different adventures.
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I recently watched the movie Akeelah and the Bee. It was heartwarming enough – about an inner-city youngster who might otherwise have slid down into conformist ghetto ways, but who finds her unique voice through her participation in the National Spelling Bee Contest. However the movie made me sad. It made me recall my own participation in that Contest. It made me recall the almost overwhelming drama and poignancy that swirled around my moment in the spotlight.

I was in eighth grade. Out of nowhere, I was called into the school counselor’s office. I cringed; I quaked. A summons from the counselor never bode well. I thought for sure I was in for another lecture on how I didn’t seem to fit in, on how I didn’t seem to have any friends. I thought I faced more unanswerable “What are we going to do with you?” shakes of the head. But no, this time, the counselor only had a specific assignment for me. She wanted me to represent the School in the upcoming Spelling Bee Contest.

The District Contest was scheduled for the following month. My grade school had never entered anyone in the contest before. But here at the last minute, they had decided they might as well take a shot. And my name had risen to the surface. I’d scored in the 99+ percentile on English Usage/Vocabulary in the last standardized test. And that autobiography I’d turned in as graduation requirement had shown I had quite a “good command of the language.” So I was it. They also incidentally selected another youth in my class who had done well on the standardized tests, a youth from the nearby foster home. But I gathered that I was to be their Great Bright Hope.

My participation was all so improvised though. I didn’t receive any coaching like Akeelah in the movie did. Oh, one of the classroom teachers did immediately take me aside for a half hour or so and drilled me on tricky words that came into his head. He discovered that I had a woeful inability to distinguish “ible” from “able” suffix words. I spelled “contemptible” with a disastrous “able” at the end. As soon as this vulnerability came to light, he concentrated on giving me those execrible (oops, -able) words as practice – and I almost always guessed wrong. I could see worry, and yes, regret, shadowing the teacher’s face. But it was too late for them to withdraw me as School Representative now. They were stuck with me.

So with deep dubiety furrowing the teacher’s brow, he sent me home to study on my own. “Concentrate on those able/ible words,” he commanded as I walked off down the hall in a state of shellshock. I had been double-promoted past several grades. So I was only eleven, whereas most of my classmates had been held back a year or two and were sixteen and even seventeen by this time. But in addition to being young, I was actually probably somewhat retarded. The world was an incomprehensible, primordial chaos to me (and still is). All I was good at was reading, at following the straight lines of printing across a page, grasping the individual words like pearls on a necklace. I felt their smooth roundness or slight imperfections. I sensed the layers of nuance and connotation that had built each word up to its present opalescence.

But I couldn’t function in the “real” world. I had no idea how to go to a school hangout and buy a soda. In fact, soda bottles frightened me, with their threat of uncapping into some fizzing geyser of preternatural liquid. And I didn’t know how to go places. I had no idea how to negotiate paying a bus fare and riding along a route I couldn’t actually pace or feel. So I walked almost everywhere I had to go. I was like a lab rat negotiating a maze, aware only of some vague scent drawing me on to some undefined destination. I had no access to a bird’s-eye view of anything.

With all these mental handicaps, you can imagine how the prospect of being in a spelling bee loomed for me. I’d have to go to a different school, in a different part of the city, and stand up on stage and PERFORM. So I walked away from that brief coaching like a death row inmate walking his last corridor.

But I tried. In the short weeks that followed, I drilled and drilled. I studied word lists. My classmates, aware of me for the first time, threw words at me. Well, mostly it was just one word they threw at me – antidisestablishmentarianism. That was the popular “hard” word of the day because it was cited as being the longest. Actually, it was as easy as railway tracks – straightforward, spelled just as it’s pronounced. But I cheerfully clicked along it each time a classmate proposed it to me, so we could all feel briefly united in the cause.

At home though, I trotted out the really hard words. I refreshed my familiarity with the likes of “oxymoron” and “amanuensis.” I remember lingering, somewhat amused, over the oddity of those two “n’s” in mayonnaise. I never could seem to get a handle on whether a word ended in “able” or “ible.” I just had to hope I’d get lucky on that score and wouldn’t be given any words with that fateful forking. I kept at it - up all night, pause for a dish of ice cream in the morning, then back to the list. (My parents were hippies-ahead-of-their-time who allowed everything, who in fact would never have thought of imposing any “rule” on me or on the world at large.) I assumed the full burden of self-discipline. The three weeks of this grind seemed simultaneously interminable and all too briefly inadequate a preparation time.

And finally the dread day arrived.

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I will tell the tragedy that followed in my next posting. But meanwhile, I would like to hear from any of you who were ever contestants in a spelling bee and who have adventures to tell. Write a paragraph or two. What word did you win or lose on? I will try to post as many of your comments as I can.

I Will Go Fly a Kite!

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn (180
degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together.
Voila - you have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is a
topological form with some amazing characteristics.
For one thing, you will find that simple twist has
transformed your paper from a two-sided strip
into a continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don't
want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side.
But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different
angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures.

__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________

I am perhaps the least athletic person on the planet. And the most sedentary. I am an adherent of the Oscar Levant School of physical exercise. That famous pianist/raconteur once quipped that for exercise, he would “get up out of bed, stagger, then fall into a coma.” And I may not be even quite that energetic.

School gym classes were always pure torture for me. I never could perform at even mediocre levels in any sport. So I spent those class periods trying desperately to get to the end of the line, trying desperately to avoid taking my turn at bat. My fondest hope was that I could remain a benchwarmer.

But recently I saw these kites for sale in the grocery store. They were in a rack in the “seasonal” aisle in springtime. There was such a large, appealing selection of them. There were giant owl eyes and eagles and colorful geometric designs. I considered. It probably would be good to heed some of the medical advice being poured our way every day about staying active. Besides, kite-flying struck me as the kind of “sport” I could really endorse. It is nonviolent, non-competitive, certainly more my speed than the basketball or baseball games I was called on to try, and try, and try again in high school gym. Flying a kite can be like becoming part of a ballet with the wind – graceful, sublime.

So after riffling through the store’s assortment for a while, I finally chose the owl kite. It’s big brown eyes, looking down, didn’t seem threatening. The owl had a sort of benign, protective expression. It would almost be like having a guardian angel up there, hovering in goofy raptness over me. I took it off the rack and went to the check-out counter, ready to join the ranks of the physically active.

A lot of people in Chicago go down to the lakefront to fly kites. But I was scheduled to meet my friends for one of our semi-annual get-togethers in Canada soon, at “our” place in Ontario. Different Country; different Lake.

Our place is on a bluff overlooking Lake Erie. It is wonderfully windy there, an ideal spot for flying kites. Shirts hung on our clothesline furl out into the friendliest, most welcoming of arms. They wave with ceaseless good cheer to the fishermen far out on the rolling waters of Erie. Those fishermen, in their picturesque trawlers, must enjoy spotting our landlubber greeting through their binoculars sometimes. Usually three boats at a time make their way in solemn procession out from the Harbor every day, across the horizon, so early, often just past midnight. They stay fishing until early morning, their running lights twinkling through the night. They look like such fragile representatives of life, out there on the rough waters. Then when the boats have met their quotas, they trail back to shore to unload their day’s catch at the various fisheries on the town wharf. Yes, I’m sure the fishermen must sometimes enjoy seeing our dancing shirts and pants, waving, kickin’ it. It’s an earnest chorus line, if not quite as perfectly synchronized a one as the Rockettes.

Sometimes the shirts have oil rig workers to wave at as well. I’m not sure about the mechanics of the drilling, but oil rigs will appear temporarily out in Lake Erie. At night, a rig looks like a gleaming tiara floating out on the water. It’s an enchanting sight, belying the dangerous, polluting work that is going on beneath that bejeweled topside.

But day or night, there is usually wind at our place – or at least a bracing breeze. Our area has been designated one of the windiest stretches in Canada. It’s a natural for windmills. Many municipalities in the Province have subsidized the building of wind farms, or even private installations of single windmills. However our particular municipality has gotten bogged down in red tape and bureaucratic argumentation over the matter. Our neighbors in Ontario have a ninety-foot windmill trestle ready to go up on their lawn. But they haven’t been able to get governmental permission to proceed with setting up this alternative energy source. There’s some fear that a ninety-foot tower might pose a threat to neighbors - such as myself.

I’m not sure why the windmill trestle has to be as tall as ninety feet. The man who sold our neighbors this tower, talked about “laminar flow” and the need to clear air turbulence currents from trees. But even a little decorative lawn windmill will keep spinning at a giddy pace in these parts. I get the feeling you could run a TV, maybe even a dishwasher, off of one of those pieces of lawn kitsch. So why the need for a full ninety-feet of scaffolding to take advantage of the wind? I don’t know. And our neighbors are getting frustrated, with the pieces of that so-far languishing trestle sitting bundled besides their porch.

Meanwhile, the wind keeps blowing, going to waste. But I was going to put it to use flying the kite I was bringing. We planned the coming Sunday for our venture back into childhood. The weatherman predicted a clear and breezy day. And we would all be together then to “go fly a kite.”

I had trouble sleeping the night before this big event though. I felt I might have been altogether too ambitious in this leap into physical activity. I had heard it could take quite some ingenuity to get a kite launched aloft. You have to snap your wrist just right in order to get the kite cast aloft. You have to orient yourself into the wind just right, and feed out the string at just the right rate. It was like fly fishing – only up into the air not down into a stream. There was an art to it. And I was afraid that here again, I would prove to be totally unequal to the task. I would never be able to get my kite up. I’d be as embarrassed as an old man at an orgy – caught short without his Viagra.

As I started to doze off into fitful sleep, other downsides to this precipitous venture loomed up out of the dark at me. Didn’t you have to run fairly fast in order to get the wind to catch the sail of the kite? I pictured myself tearing across the lawn. Watch out! A gopher hole! I pictured myself falling, breaking an ankle. They shoot wusses, don’t they? Or worse yet, I pictured myself hurtling pell-mell off the side of the bluff – rolling, falling, falling, hitting concussively on the rocks below. Oh, why had I chosen such a dangerous sport to inaugurate my more active lifestyle?

The next day after a late lunch, I blearily wished my friends might have forgotten about our venture. But woe betide – they hadn’t. “Kite time!” Ed proclaimed. He unwrapped the owl face from its plastic, pulled out the placard of twine at the ready, and handed the ensemble to me. “Here, it’s your kite. You do the honors. You start,” he knelled.

It plummeted me back into those bygone gym classes, desperately wanting to wedge myself away from the action to the end of the line again. I considered assuming a tone of generous deferral. I considered insisting that he should do the honors of launching the kite. But that would just be delaying the inevitable. It would be prolonging my anxiety. There was nothing for it but to brave this out. With my teeth clenched harder than anyone could possibly suspect, I held the kite to my bosom and stepped out of our French doors into the firing squad brightness of the arena of our back yard.

But an amazing thing happened. The moment I stepped out of those French doors, I felt a tugging at my chest - a gentle, but insistent beguiling. The breeze was taking the kite. It pulled it out of my hands and up and away. I quickly fed some twine – then some more twine. The kite was already over our chimney top, joyously released into the heavens. The owl was bobbing and weaving, ogling down at me. But its big, limpid eyes were getting smaller and smaller as the kite receded ever upward.

“Hurrah! You got it up!” my friends cheered from the back porch. I don’t think they realized how easy it had been.

I leisurely walked from one side of our half-acre to the other. The wind did all the work. I just had to be there beside. It was like walking an old dog on a leash, except my dog was up, not down. I strolled our property, master of all I surveyed. Then after fifteen or twenty minutes, I relinquished the twine to Ed. He did likewise. Then Sandy took her turn. We each walked the kite around our lawn. Since we hadn’t planted any trees yet, and since there were no wind mills allowed - there were no vertical structures we had to avoid. The kite could dance where it pleased.

After a while, Ed brought out some lawn chairs and we sat, passing the tag-end of string from one to the other. Then Sandy brought out a pitcher of sun tea. The one who had the kite at the moment would tie the twine around a finger, and proceed to sip iced tea from the glass in the other hand. Finally even that much involvement became a little too arduous. And we tied the end of the string around an arm of one of our lawn chairs.

And so we let the afternoon pass into dusk – sitting and sipping and flying a kite. Not much happened. Oh, a seagull swooped across the sky and seemed likely to collide with the kite. But at the last moment, it espied this UFO in its path and made a sharp right angle avoidance of it. We laughed. We had never seen a gull make a maneuver like that.

It was going to be a full moon that night. My friends and I often made a celebration of the rising of the moon when we were here. Since we had been out in the yard so long, we decided we might as well just sit on longer and let the day’s kite-flying blend into our night’s moon observation. And so we continued to sit and sip and chat – and the owl became a night owl, high up, watching over us. We couldn’t see it any longer in the dark, but we could feel its presence if we touched a finger to the string extended up from the lawn chair. We could feel the wind’s vibration along the lead. We knew it was still flying.

Then the moon rose up out of the water. It unfurled that breathtaking silver-gleaming carpet across the lapping waters, from moon to the base of our cliff. Oh, to walk that enchanted path!

And as the moon rose, I felt a corresponding beam of triumph rise secretly across my face. At last, I was succeeding at a sport! At last, I could feel that surge of self-confidence. “Yes,” I whispered to myself. “I can do this!”

Outside Graceland, Looking In

Take a strip of paper, twist one end of it a half-turn
(180 degrees), then tape the ends of the strip together.
Voila - you have a Mobius Strip. You will find it is
a topological form
with some amazing
characteristics.
For one thing, you will find that
simple twist has
transformed your paper from
a two-sided strip into a
continuous band with only one side!

That is what I hope the essays and reflections in this blog will be. I don't want to make or take sides. I want to assume a continuum with only one side. But each stop along my Mobius Strip will present life from a slightly different angle, at a slightly different tilt. One side, but many different views, many different adventures...

__________________________________________________________________

A documentary called Elvis, That’s the Way It Is just aired on Chicago TV. It was a collection of interviews and rehearsal scenes with Elvis at the peak of his comeback career in 1970. I watched the movie and was reminded of my one brush with anything personally pertaining to Elvis.

I went to Memphis in the late 80’s. I was traveling alone by bus, stopping at various cities, hitting them pretty much cold just to see what adventures would unfold. When I got to Memphis, I found it was ALL about Elvis. I had heard of Beale Street and the blues and W. C. Handy. But all those notable Memphis people and places were eclipsed by the legend of the beloved rock-and-roll singer. Memphis was essentially a one-industry town. And that industry was Elvis.

I remarked on this monopoly to a friendly cabdriver who seemed in the mood to chat. “Oh yes,” the young African-American smiled. “This is Elvis’ town. Well, he was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, but everything important after that – he did here. And I imagine, when the time comes, he will die here,” the cabby predicted.

I chuckled. I thought he was joking, making mocking reference to the clinging belief of some simpler souls that Elvis was still alive, to be seen frequenting the local Burger Kings. The cabby had seemed so levelheaded up to now. But I caught the severe look he bounced back at me from his rear-view mirror. And I realized - he was serious. He was one of those who believed.

He had seen me chuckle. “Oh, so you fell for those reports that he died,” the young driver spoke sharply to me. “Well, if you would do your homework, you’d see it couldn’t be so. Did you read the autopsy report on Elvis – I mean read it carefully?”

I sheepishly admitted I hadn’t read that document at all. It seems everyone has his own opinion about what you need to know before you can call yourself an educated person. One acquaintance of mine has been insisting for years that I read The Mind Game, a psychology book that analyses people’s motives. Another acquaintance has told me I MUST read Middlemarch, the George Eliot classic. And I intend to read both those works – really I do. I have had Middlemarch waiting on my bedside table for years, in a deluxe Everyman edition – waiting for that perfect night when I’m not too tired or not too wired to launch into it and do it justice. Now another item was being added to my “must read” list. It seemed I couldn’t lay claim to being an informed citizen until I had studied Elvis’ autopsy report.

“You read it,” the cabdriver was pressing his case. “You’ll see I’m right. Look at the top of the report. It says it is the autopsy for ‘Elvis Aron Presley.’ There’s only one ‘a’ in Aron. Only one ‘a!’ Now it’s true they spelled his middle name that way on his birth certificate. But that was a mistake. And he corrected the mistake as soon as he had a chance. He changed it to the correct spelling – to ‘Aaron’ with two ‘A’s.’ Everyone here knew it was two ‘A’s.’ So, when the autopsy report refers to an ‘Elvis Aron Presley’ with only one ‘A’ – you know that’s their way of telling you it’s not the real Elvis who was buried. You just have to see what’s right before your eyes. Somebody else was buried in his place. Probably Elvis just needed to take a break. But you mark my words – he’ll be back!”

Properly chastened for my foolishness at believing all the premature newspaper accounts of Elvis’ death, I thanked the driver, paid him, and got out to continue my explorations of Memphis on what I hoped would be a more even keel. I eventually signed up for a GreyLine tour of the City. I had a choice of several tours, ranging from a “full-package tour,” to a more abbreviated overview. Since I had already done considerable “Walkin’ in Memphis” on my own, I decided to save money and just go for the latter. All I needed was to touch on a few more highlights.

But the bus tour proved to be a further celebration of nothing but Elvis. We made short work of the likes of Beale Street and St. Jude’s Hospital. Then on to the real importance of Memphis, to its place in history as the cradle of Elvis’ singing career. We lingered in front of the Sun Studio, the small, squeezed storefront where Johnny Cash, and Carl Perkins – and Elvis – had made their first major recordings. Our tour guide next drove us to a large, gray block of a building. He pointed to a second-story balcony and informed us that that was the balcony of the public housing apartment where the Presleys had lived for several years after coming to Memphis. They had been receiving Public Aid. However, we were cautioned not to take the lawn chair that was out on the balcony as a real Elvis artifact. Our bus driver announced through the microphone that the chair had been brought there by the current residents of that apartment.

Then on to the Heartbreak Hotel, and the lot where Elvis had likely bought his first pick-up truck, and the place where the Presley family had probably done their laundry during those first lean years. I had always liked Elvis, but really, I thought this magnification of the minutia of his life was a bit much.

Finally though, we came to the pièce de résistance of the tour. We pulled up in front of Graceland. And this was one aspect of Elvis’ life I really was interested in touring. Pictures I’d seen of the interior had led me to believe it was a place of ostentatious kitsch throughout - not a décor I would have chosen for myself. But perhaps I was wrong. Maybe there were private wings in there that were more cozy and relaxed. I wanted to get a first-hand feel of the place.

We all eagerly disgorged from the bus and assembled in front of that famous wrought iron gate with its large black musical notes. Our driver contacted a groundskeeper on his walkie-talkie, and the gates were swung open. We started to file through. But wait! Something was wrong. A large beefy hand levered up in front of me, blocking my progress.

“Not you!” the driver forbade. “Your ticket is just for the short tour. You have to stay outside!”

What? I started to stammer some protest, but it was true – I had just bought the “short tour.”

There was a handsome Australian couple along for this round of sightseeing. I had already crossed paths with them several times. We’d become friendly. I’d asked if they were newlyweds. They were so friendly and alive to each other. They laughed and said, “No, we’ve been married twenty-five years.” The husband was a policeman assigned to patrol the outback around Adelaide, Australia. This was their first big vacation in years. They had been looking forward to Memphis because the wife idolized Elvis. She told me that as a teenager, she had taped a large poster of Elvis to the ceiling over her bed. I thought this was a bit of a racy revelation to make in front of her husband. But he took it in good part. He didn’t seem to mind that he hadn’t been his wife’s first choice as a bed partner.

Now this indulgent Crocodile Dundee went to bat for me. He tried to cajole the bus driver into letting me pass. “The brochure doesn’t make it clear. It sounds as if an inside tour of Graceland is included.”

But the driver was adamant. “She’s only paid for the short tour,” he played trump again. “You have to stay out here,” he turned his stern repulse on me. And that was that.

The others filed through to see Graceland, the Promised Land. I had come so far, past rickety lawn chairs and Laundromats – but I was not to be with my comrades for the final ascent to the top of the Elvis experience. I was the only one on the bus who had been too stingy to sign up for the extended tour. Each tourist in turn looked with commiseration, with pity on me as he/she was ushered on to the highpoint of this expedition. But for all their looks of regretful sympathy, I noticed that they gave me a wide berth as they trekked by. Most of them had not heard why I was being excluded. So they could only surmise that I was somehow one of the great unwashed, someone not anointed for admission to the inner sanctum. So they charily filed past me, and I was left, a leper, alone on the sidewalk. The gates clanged shut – me on one side; my bus mates on the other side of those musical notes.

I watched the tail of their procession move down the long driveway and disappear inside the mansion. How should I pass the time? We’d been told that a sweep had recently been made of the mansion’s gate and immediate surroundings. Groundskeepers had removed the accumulation of love notes and pictures that were daily attached and strewn nearby. But already some more avowals of undying devotion had been stuck in place. I occupied myself reading one cri de coeur after another. “Elvis - Love you Forever!” said one post-it note staked on the gate. “I (heart) Elvis” was chalked on the sidewalk by my feet.

I knew I would probably never get back to Memphis. I pressed close to the gate, looking wistfully through to the private Graceland – the Graceland that I would never see.

And I thought – back in the day, was it possible that Elvis sometimes looked wistfully out his window at this public sidewalk – the sidewalk where he could never stand?