Most Likely to Be Gladys

This entry isn't going to be one of my picture-heavy, multimedia extravaganzas.  It's just a little story about a high school student named Karen Funk, on the night on one last high school humiliation.  I'll try to make the story uplifting.  Or something.

Fayetteville-Manlius Central High School in Manlius, NY has always been considered an academically superior public school, populated by privileged suburban kids. That's probably a fair assessment, but I was never all that fond of the place.  I was fat, shy, smart, a little awkward socially, and not at all fashionably dressed.  I wore a lot of polyester, partly because this was the 1970s, but mostly because that was the kind of clothing my mom liked.  She therefore bought for me, to the exclusion of all else.  The only shred of pride I had in my appearance came from the jeans that I bought for myself, and wore as often as possible.

It would not be true to say that I'd known the kids in my graduating class all my life, or even since kindergarten.  For one thing, there were many comings and goings of families, transferred in and out by GE, or moving around for other reasons.  Some of the kids I graduated with were certainly there by second grade or so, but not all that many.  But the main reason it would not be true to say that we'd known each other for many years was that they didn't really know me, and I didn't really know them.  I probably know Carly and Becky, neither of whom I've ever met in person, better than I ever knew Jack or Tom, Sharon, Cheryl or... well, to give any more appropriate examples, I'd have to dig out my high school yearbook again.

A quick anecdote will serve to illustrate the point, before I move on to tonight's main story.  I was in the high school choir, but I was never good enough to make the Swing Sixteen singing group, or do solos or anything like that.  I think I made the Choraliers, but I don't remember for sure.  But I did audition for All-County Chorus and make it, twice; and once I got into Area All State, auditioning with Sunrise, Sunset. 

That year, the Area All State concert was held in Fulton, NY, home of a Nestle factory.  It was only 37 miles from Manlius, Google tells me, but it seemed more like 75.  It was far enough that I stayed overnight at the home of a kid in the choir who lived in Fulton, as did all the other kids from F-M who made the trip.

My visit with the girl from Fulton and her family was pleasant enough, but the following evening before concert time, I had a problem.  My peers were washing their hair in the school bathrooms, putting on nice clothes, and doing their make-up.  I became acutely aware that my hair needed washing, but I had no shampoo, and didn't dare ask to borrow any.  I just brushed through it with water, and hoped it would help a little. 

But even that wasn't the main problem.  My parents always came to my concerts, and this was my most important concert ever.  Where were they?  I couldn't find them in the crowd. 

Concert time came.  I scanned the crowd as the rest of the choir and I sang selections from Godspell, conducted by the famous choir director Gregg Smith.  There was no sign of my parents.  The concert ended.  No parents.  Kids were leaving with their families.  Not me.  I would have taken the school bus back, but they'd deliberately not provided one, in order to make the parents come to the concert.

I called home on a pay phone.  My mom was there.  She explained that they'd been to all my concerts, but since this one was so far away, they'd decided to sit it out.  She was distraught to hear that I was both disappointed and stranded.

Enter a couple who were about the last parents from Manlius to leave the concert.  They gave me a ride home.  Their son was one of those obnoxious boys who liked to stand in the hall outside the cafeteria, and make rude remarks to passersby.  But in the car with his parents, he was a perfectly nice, intelligent guy, with college plans and everything.  I even kind of liked him.

At school on Monday, of course, he turned back into a jerk.  If anything, he was even more obnoxious.  But now I knew his secret: he was only human after all, more complex than his hallway behavior would indicate.

But high school society doesn't deal much in complexities.  The other kids knew how I looked, and how I reacted to teasing, that I was smart, and that I liked Star Trek.  Some of them probably remembered the skunk incident from second grade, and other social gaffes I'd made over the years.  That was all they needed to know about me.

Now, if I'd been more self-confident, more socially savvy, I could maybe have laughed off any teasing, taken more care with my appearance, worked to overcome my shyness, and made some friends.  A perusal of my yearbook shows a lot of kids that I barely remember, or remember only as being smart and nice.  But I never got to know them, any more than they got to know me.  In some ways, things haven't changed that much since then.  How many people at my company, or my church, know about my novels?  And how much do I know about their lives?  Not much, in most cases.

But I digress.

There was a nasty little tradition at F-M, in which the senior class put on a little awards ceremony, the F-Emmys.  I was nominated in two categories: Most Likely to Succeed and the Gladys Ormphby Award.

For those of you who may be too young to remember, or who didn't watch tv in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Gladys was Ruth Buzzi's most famous character on Laugh-In.  She wore a hairnet, a big brown sweater, a big brown skirt, oversized hose that gathered around her ankles, and oversized shoes. She was quintessentially frumpy, and had an amazing woeful frown.

The series of sketches she used to appear in had a simple premise. Arte Johnson's Dirty Old Man character, Tyrone F. Horneigh, would sit beside her on a park bench, forcing her to move over to avoid him. He would, of course, scoot closer.  Then he would try some strange, silly, relatively innocent pick-up line on her, something that sounded filthy but wasn't.  She would hit him with her purse.  He'd say something else.  She would hit him again.  This would continue until he fell off the bench.

Being named the class Gladys Ormphby was the most insulting award in the whole ceremony.

In a way, though, I'd invited the comparison.  Dan Cheney and I had done a sketch in 10th or 11th grade, in which he was Bobby Fischer and I was kind of a Gladys character.  I played chess with him in order to win a date with him - and I won using Fool's Mate.  The punchline was, "There won't be any cameras, will there?"

For this reason and others, I fully expected to win the Gladys Ormphby award.  I hoped to win Most Likely to Succeed as well.  I decided to make the best of the situation, and laugh along with the class, instead of letting myself be hurt by this.

That was the plan, anyway.

I dressed almost as I had dressed for the sketch.  I even carried a bunch of school books, so I could struggle and drop some as I came up for the award.  I chickened out of going all the way with it, though.  And as I came up the aisle, the auditorium was filled with catcalls and rude remarks. 

My prepared speech was this: "I can't imagine why you chose me for this award."  I don't think I ever delivered it.  I was too demoralized by the walk up the aisle.

Part two of the plan was to ditch the frumpy clothes after that, and collect the Most Likely to Succeed Award  with grace and confidence.

Somebody else won.  What can I say? It was a bad night for me.  And the faculty sponsor, one of my former French teachers, thought it was all in good fun.

But here's the thing.  If I'd learned how to take teasing and give it back without feeling crushed, if I'd made more friends within my graduating class, if I'd paid a bit more attention to the outward appearance stuff I disdained as being shallow and unimportant, that night would have been very different for me.  Too bad it took me 20 more years after graduation to learn this.

At my office now, there's a guy who teases me at least twice a week about the one part of my job that is excruciatingly tedious.  He's basically a good guy, and I mostly take his teases with minimal annoyance.  Only once have I been hurt by what he said, when he kind of crossed the line.  Even then, I didn't act like high schooler Karen Funk.  I handled it, and then griped to someone else later in order to vent.

Take that, Gladys.

Karen

Old Memories...and a New Mystery

Weekend Assignment #73: From your own AOL Journal or AIM Blog, pick your own favorite entry from the last year (from 8/21/04 onward). Link to it in the comment thread below, so we can all see what it was. You can alternately, of course, create a new entry where you link to your favorite entry, but that seems a bit overly complicated. Linking directly to your favorite entry will be fine. If you want to include any thoughts on the entry in your comment, well, that would be great, too.

This particular assignment is a bit of a stumper for me.  I've written over 365 entries this past year, and I don't know which one to pick.  Shall I point to one of my photo essay extravaganzas, 7-to-10 photos plus a thousand words or more about a Round Robin theme or Weekend Assignment topic or some aspect of life in Tucson?  I'm really proud of these, but most of the better ones are recent, and a lot of people have seen them already.  Shall I link to a "soapbox" type entry, one of my pseudo-sermons about being nice to people, or a rant about blog-related issues?  Some of these are well-written, but assignments like this tend to elicit lots of links to "uplifting" journal entries, the sort of stuff that used to be made into ABC Afterschool Specials.  Not that there's anything wrong with that (no, not at all!), but my gut instinct here is to shy away from linking to a "very special edition of Musings."

Then what shall I link to instead?  It may be better to link to an older entry, written when my readership was smaller.  These have fewer pictures, and slightly less ambitious writing, so they probably aren't my best work.  But here are some I remember fondly, that stand out as I review my AOL-J online archive.  The candidates are:

Postcards from Pleasant Street (Sunday, August 29, 2004).  This consists of several anecdotes from my days at Pleasant Street Elementary School in Manlius, NY.

(AOL has glitched up the next link three times so far with its disappearing space trick, but I'll try again.)
The Singing Skunk (Monday, August 30, 2004). This begins, "It was a serious tactical error on my part to trade roles with Jean Jeffrey in our second grade play."

A Remarkable Facility (Friday, August 27, 2004).  In this roundup of English teachers I remember from high school, five words on a returned paper are seared into my brain forever.

Blame It on Tiger Beat (Thursday, September 9, 2004).  In which Miss Skinner takes note of my Monkees-induced bout of temporary ungrammatical insanity.

The Lost Railroad and the Land of Salamanders (Wednesday, October 20, 2004).  My favorite place in Manlius was my own private semi-wilderness, just past Cherry Manor.  This is the closest thing to a photo essay on this list.

What the heck.  Let's go with the last one, about the salamanders and the old railroad bridge.

I seem to have chosen all Manlius reminiscences here. That's not all I write about, truly!  Last October, I wrote obsessively about Halloween and death for about two weeks straight, even though I'm not a morbid person.  This summer, it's been practically all Tucson weather, all the time.  There there are my Saturday night fiction entries (which only a few people read), the occasional poem, lots of photo essays, long-winded excuses about why I didn't write a long entry that night, news about what's going on in my life, and plenty of rants.  Oh, and I write about Disneyland, midcentury modern decor, and/or time travel rather often.  So if you're not interested in the Memoirs of Karen Funk, age 6 - 18, you may want to skip the entries linked above, and scroll through my July and August 2005 stuff instead.  Or not.

*******************************

I promised to tell you about this week's weird developments on the personal trainer front.  As you may recall, I was busylast week and the week before getting the house cleaned up, in preparation for the appraiser coming in.  (The results are in, by the way.  The house was valued at $2,000 less than the estimate, but almost double our purchase price.)  My only workouts last week consisted of hauling boxes of books and video to Bookman's, and lots of other stuff into storage.  I postponed my session with the trainer because a) I simply didn't have time, and b) I wasn't getting my workouts in anyway, or anywhere near enough sleep. 

So, okay, the first fault is entirely mine.

But my rescheduled session from a week ago Wednesday was supposed to take place this past Monday.  An hour before the appointed time, the kid assigned to be my trainer called to tell me that the computer showed I hadn't paid for any August sessions yet.  Say what?  I'm supposed to be charged automatically for that.  I've even talked to the service that handled the payments, and given them the expiration date on the new card.  There really shouldn't be a problem.  But somehow, there was.

My trainer, J., said he didn't have the number of the payment service handy, and would check with his manager about straightening out the account.  Apparently I couldn't have the training session in the meantime.  To make things easier on all of us, I postponed again, to Wednesday night at 8 PM.  Last night.  My usual time.

I never heard back from anyone about the status of the payments, so I called around 6 PM Wednesday and asked for J.  The person answering the phone hesitated a moment, and then said that J. wasn't there.  I explained about the payment thing, and asked whether I should show up for my session.  She said that I probably shouldn't.  This was not because of a problem with my account, but because my trainer had called in (sick or injured or something; the details were unclear) on Tuesday, and had neither called nor come to work on Wednesday.  She offered to let me talk to the district manager, who happened to be there last night.  I was then put on hold for a long time.  Since this was on my Sprint phone, I eventually hung up, waited a few minutes and called back. 

This time I got to talk to the district manager right away, with his sincere apologies.  Although the woman who answered the phone had spoken of problems with the payment service,the manager guy told me the system showed I had six sessions paid for that I hadn't used yet.  He also told me that in the event of aproblem, the policy was to let the client have the session anyway, and straighten things out afterward. He didn't say so outright, but the implication was that my account was probably fine on Monday, rather than fixed in the two days since. 

His main concern, though, was about my no-show trainer.  Had J. ever been late or missing when I showed up for my previous appointments?  "Never," I told him.  In fact, I'd been feeling guilty about the couple of times I'd called and postponed.  

It was clear, though, that the Body of Change folks were fed up with J., and anxious to make up for any inconvenience I'd suffered.  There was talk of a free session, reevaluating where I was in my training and assigning me to another trainer.  Sure!  Fine!  Great!  I resisted complaining too much about J., whom I'd liked.  But the truth was that I didn't think this kid half my age really understood the training needs of a 48-year-old woman.  I was ready for a change anyway, but hadn't made one because I didn't want to hurt J's feelings.

So tonight I showed up at 6 PM for a free session with Justin, the guy who signed me up in the first place.  It turned out that this arrangement was news to Justin, but he was gracious and helpful.  (Despite a few snafus tonight, Justin is very competent and personable, and a great guy.)  Next weirdness: Justin couldn't find my file at first.  It eventually turned up in a binder, possibly J's. 

Justin went over my training schedule with me, and set one up that's likely to work better for me than what J. was doing.  Then he took me through a long and difficult session of back and chest and abs exercises.  I learned a lot.  And next week, on Tuesday, I have a session with someone else, whose name I've forgotten already.

It turns out that Justin was out of town when all this stuff with J. took place.  He had no news or speculations to offer, except that J. was "on his way out the door." Yeah, I'd figured that.  So I still don't know what really happened.  Did J. make a mistake on Monday, or was my account genuinely screwed up, or was he making an excuse not to meet with me?  Did he really hurt himself on Tuesday, and honestly think his Tuesday phone call let him off the hook from work for Wednesday?  Why couldn't anyone reach him by phone yesterday?

I'll probably never know the answers.  But I've got a new trainer I haven't met yet, and incentive to get my workouts back on track.

Karen

Tags: Weekend Assignment, Best of, Manlius, Personal trainer

Manlius On My Mind

 I feel a bit better tonight, but today was a struggle.  My "digestive inconveniences" (my own term for IBS; like it?) woke me many times last night, and sent me down the hall from my cubicle to a rest room many times today at work.  I've had mostly fruit to eat today, which seems to have helped, but the lack of sleep really had me dragging most of the day.  So I fully intend to write a quick entry and go the heck to bed, three or four hours earlier than usual.  Of course, that's often the plan, but I seldom manage to carry it out.

Of all the journal entries I've written in the past 16 1/2 months, the one that's had a lasting impact, on me and on other people, is one called Seven Ancient Wonders of Manlius, NY.  Manlius, of course, is where I lived from 1961 to 1976.  The Seven Wonders were my half-mocking, half-appreciative list of local landmarks, circa 1970.  Most of the places on that half-forgotten list no longer exist. 

I posted that entry on May 6, 2004.  It never got any comments, but it's resulted in a number of emails, most recently last week from someone who lived in nearby Fayetteville in 1957.  A week ago, someone who still lives there sent me a bunch of digital photos of current Manlius landmarks.
Incidentally, when I Googled for my entry tonight, the first choice listed was Google Maps: 7 Wonders Of, Manlius NY.  The idiot-savant nature of search engines never ceases to amaze me.

Manlius was never my favorite place in the world, but I've been thinking about it a lot lately.  Part of this is because of the emails and the photos, and the phone call from Joel yesterday, but those aren't the only reasons.  As I was sorting the mail a week ago, I saw for the first time an invitation to the 30th reunion of the Fayetteville-Manlius High School Class of 1975.  The event was in June.  I finally read the flyer in August.  Doesn't matter.  I wouldn't have gone, although I've been tempted.  I've been telling myself I wouldn't go back there until I lost weight and got the novels published.  Silly, huh?

One thing I've deeply regretted as I ransacked boxes and envelopes and albums for photos to upload is that I have so few pictures of this town where I grew up.  Many of the ones I do have are damaged.  The best of the remaining photos were all taken by my best friend Joel, the one whose father died last week.

The picture to the left is one of my favorites.  It doesn't show the Village of Manlius or the Town of Manlius, but then, none of my photos do.  Most of the Manlius pictures are of my house, my yard, and a few rooms in my house, with a few pictures of Joel's house and yard thrown in.  I've also got pictures of Pratt's Falls (see below) and Snook's Pond, the ruined railroad bridge (see above) and a dog wandering loose in Cherry Manor.  None of those places are technically in the village at all.   

This particular picture, of course, was my bedroom as it looked in 1971.  I recognize everything in it. The cat picture is from a Fritz Hug calendar.  I don't remember why I had that American Indian picture, but it probably came from a garage sale. The print of the praying girl had been on my wall since I was four years old in Dewitt, and probably well before that.  The board with the word Love! painted on it was part of a hippie costume from Halloween.  I painted it in Sue Keeter's garage / art studio.  The game under Password was named after Jeanne Dixon, the famous alleged psychic.  The game was far less impressive than a Ouija board.

Okay, there have been several memory triggers lately to remind me of Manlius.  But my recent near-obsession with the place seems to be a bit more than that.

There are places I'll remember
All my life, though some have changed.
Some forever, not for better,
Some have gone, and some remain.
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living--
In my life, I've loved them all.
    --In My Life by Lennon & McCartney

Yes, I've been remembering Joel and his brother Michael, Dan Cheney, Gail S., Cindy R., Lori T., Sue and Pam, Brad and Cathy, and even Cindy K., friends, near-friends and a few enemies.  But I've also been thinking about Stone Machinery, a factory whose machinery turned out not to be made of stone after all, and whose noon whistle could be heard all the way to my house. I've been remembering Sno Top and Temple's, both of which still exist; and Weber's Department Store and Suburban Park, which don't.  I've been trying to remember whether L. Frank Baum lived in nearby Cazenovia or nearby Chittenango.  I want to drive once more up and down the long rolling hills near Pratt's Falls, and see autumn leaves that once meant nothing good to me, but are now a curiosity and a rarity for this transplanted Tucsonan. And I really must send off my money for Mr. Farrell's book about New York State place names.  He was my social studies teacher in ninth grade, and besides, I'm genuinely interested in the subject.

What's the meaning of all this?  Am I getting old and nostalgic?  Have I been away from my roots for too long?  Why am I reaching for a time and place that no longer exist, and which were mostly painful for me the first time around?  Is it simple curiosity, a desire to match old memories to new sights, before the memories degrade any further?

I'm not sure, but I do know this:  I really must get back there one of these years.

But only to visit.  I'm not nearly ready to go back to living with lake effect snow and 87 sunny days a year.

Karen
...

Snow, Rare and Otherwise

The first four photos here were taken at our old house on Grannen Rd around Christmas, 1987.  It was the second of only two White Christmases recorded in Tucson in the 20th Century.  The other one was in 1906, long before I got here.  ;) 

The odds are that John took these photos, but I may possibly have taken one or more of them.  It was a long time ago, too long to remember such details. 



From the driveway, looking north at the Catalina Mountains.



The palo verde tree in the back yard.



The back yard, looking west toward the Rincon Mountains.



The palo verde again.

Tucson, of course, is known for its warm winters.  That's the whole point of living here.  Who would put up with 110 in the summer, if the climate didn't make up for such discomfort in the winter?  It only snows here about once every two or three years.  A snow that actually "sticks" to the ground is almost unheard-of. 

If you want real winter photos from a real winter climate, then look at this rerun photo of Niagara Falls, taken in 1986.  This was definitely taken by John.




Okay, you want photos that were definitely taken by me?  Okay, but they're not as spectacular.  This one I took on December 7th, 2004.  The Catalinas are not as close as they look to this cheap resident hotel on 22nd Street.  This is as close as Tucson usually gets to snow in winter.



And,  because I can't resist, here's another rerun, also taken by me.  This is a crumbling, half-destroyed railroad bridge near Cherry Manor in Manlius, NY.  I took the photo in the winter of 1972.



Yeah, that was real winter.

Karen

Memorial Day, Then and Now

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Take a picture of something that shows what Memorial Day means to you. This can mean something directly related to remembering soldiers and others who have served their country -- but if Memorial Day also means fun, sun, cookouts or other things, you can use that as well.- JS

Y'know, when I was a kid, Memorial Day meant a parade down Fayette St. in Manlius, followed by badminton and a picnic.  That was thirty-five to forty years ago.  Although I have no pictures of the parades, I was astonished tonight to find that I actually have pictures of the badminton net and the picnic table, and even of me on some patriotic holiday in 1970 or 1971.  The one of me was definitely taken by Joel R.  The other black and white ones may be his, too.

I marched in that Memorial Day parade in Manlius a couple of times, first as a Girl Scout, and later carrying a white, non-working, ceremonial wooden rifle in front of the marching band.  The highlight for me as a marcher was at the corner of Seneca and Fayette, where I could usually see a cobblestone and a tiny bit of exposed trolley track from the early 20th Century.

Other years I'd be on the sidewalk with my family, holding a little flag or a newly-purchased pinwheel in one hand, a twist cone from Sno-Top in the other.  We'd cheer on the bands, marvel at the World War I vets in their old cars, and I'd wave at my seventh grade social studies teacher, Mr. Hennigan, as he marched with the volunteer fire department.

Maybe after the parade we'd stop for milk or something at Temple's Dairy Store.  Then we'd go home.  I'd insist on setting up the badminton net, or else (if it was hot enough) we'd grab our swimsuits and head over to Snook's Pond.  Dinner was steak or charred chicken or hot dogs or hamburgers cooked on a cheap grill outside, served at the faded redwood picnic table with Mom's potato salad (with egg, mustard, cucumber and chives) and Mom's fruit salad (mostly melon, with a can of fruit and a banana added at the last minute).

 

Fast forward to 2005.  I haven't been to Temple's Dairy Store in over a quarter century, nor seen a Memorial Day parade in thirty years. Dad is in Wilmington with Ruth, and I'm sure he didn't grill a steak or burgers.  Steve is in Cleveland, and he probably worked today.  And my mom, being dead, will never make another potato salad or fruit salad.  I'd make them myself, but they're too high in carbs.

For me in 2005, Memorial Day is mostly about having the day off, and spending it with John.  Today we signed up with L.A. Fitness, and then went shopping at Wal-Mart.  It doesn't get much more post-modern American than that.  We spent $100, ninety-four cents at a time.  Well, the gym bag and padlock and sweats cost a bit more, but nothing was over $15.  I also finally found a pair of my Athletic Works Silver Series shoes, under which (unlike my office shoes) I can wear an ankle brace.  (This ankle is NOT healing quickly,  probably because I've been walking on it so much, without any support or protection.)

As for the memorial part of Memorial Day, it should surprise no one that for me, that means thinking about my mom.  I've never known anyone who died in battle.  Heck, the only dead veteran I remember is my grandmother.  But Mom's only been dead since late 2002, and on holidays (and other times) I think of her often.

Memorial Day is a big day for cemeteries.  I discovered this two years ago, when I stopped by East Lawn in the early afternoon.  The staff had a tent set up near the entrance, and were handing out little flags for free.  Their rules say that such holiday decorations will be removed a couple of weeks after the holiday, but in the meantime there are flags.  On Mother's Day, they do the same thing with flowers.

Today I was there late in the day, almost at sunset.  The office was closed, and there was no tent set up. Large flags flew above the entrance drive, on poles that will probably be back in storage tomorrow.  There were a fair number of people around, but not as many, I suspect, as earlier in the day.

 

My problem with going to the cemetery is that I never know what to do when I get there.  I don't believe that my mom is hanging out at her grave, waiting to hear from me.  It doesn't seem like the right place to talk to her.  Really, no place does seem like the place to talk to her.  What do I say, anyway?  "Hi, Mom.  I graduated from college, and got a good job."  She knows that already.  I don't need to stand above her bones to tell her that.

So instead I make sure the marker is clean and the grass is healthy, and maybe take yet another picture with my ubiquitous digital camera.   Today I take extras, specifically to do this photo shoot thing.  Then John arrives with the car, back from Target, and we drive away.

Karen

Visiting the Stone

Time Traveler's Holiday Picnic, Part One

Time Traveler's Holiday Picnic, Part Two

Brought to You By the Letters F and M*

Okay, my brain is doing some interesting hopping around tonight.

First, let's get this out of the way:

Weekend Assignment #46: Make one new rule to apply to the Super Bowl. This new rule can apply to any aspect of the Super Bowl, from the game to the spectators, to the halftime show, to the commercials. If it's got something to do with the Super Bowl, you can make up a rule about it.

Extra Credit: Your pick for winner of the Super Bowl. Naturally, don't bother doing the extra credit if it's Sunday evening.

If I didn't know better, I would suspect that John Scalzi was trying harder and harder to find a Weekend Assignment I can't write about.  A football-related one comes darned close to that.  But okay, how about a rule that certain tv stations, restaurants and other sources of amusement declare a football-free zone for the day?  One could watch football-free movies on tv (with all the non-football ads that the Big Game's viewers are seeing), go to restaurants where no football is being shown in the bar and the staff has no update on the score, and maybe go see a movie that features witty conversation and no sports references. I'd like that very much.

Extra credit:  Who will win?  Why, the team with the most points at the end, silly!

*******

In trying to come up with something to say about a sporting event that generally means less than nothing to me, I remembered a poem I wrote in high school that nevertheless mentioned the game.  I was always fond of the poem (I even updated it for a college poetry course), so I went looking for a copy of it. 

I just spent an hour going through boxes in my closet. I ended up with lungs full of dust (or something; anyway I'm coughing again), and saw a bunch of fascinating things: drawings from when I was about 12 years old, letters from Dan and Joel, first pages of long-forgotten stories that never had a page two, a stack of flyers advertising Harlan Ellison at Syracuse University, a junior high newspaper with a lame thing I wrote about DDT and the bald eagle, for which I won a an honorable mention at a civics award ceremony, D&D character sheets, and the negatives from some photos I took circa 1972. I'm thrilled to still have all these things, but, as almost always happens when I go through old papers, the particular thing I was was looking for, and other important items I've been looking for during the past several searches, didn't turn up. 

I'm not thwarted that easily, though. Here, from memory, is the first stanza of 4967,  plus part of the bit that I don't quite remember, which is where the Super Bowl reference is. Darn it!

4967

It's never there the first time you look for it;
If you're not careful, you'll drive right by it.
But if you don't let the broken street sign turn you around,
There it is, three doors down,
(Past Berkshire),
Stop.
And stay a while.

It's near where the water main broke on Super Bowl Sunday,
[I can't remember the next bit]
A crabapple tree that broke in the Blizzard of '66
But grew back and is now in red bloom,
Name on the mailbox across the street,
Here we are,
Stop.
And stay a while.

Darn it.  I need to find that poem.  It was full of little things that nobody would know about that house in Manlius unless they lived there, stuff with meaning only for me. I think the college update may have been titled Packing to Leave.  I was a freshman (this was the first time I was in college) when the house at 4967 was sold.

*****

Speaking of college, my undergrad career is over.  I'll be graduating with honors. I was nervous all day, partly because of some friction with another member of my learning team, and partly because I had to do a presentation with the team. Everything went fine, with nary a cross word.  Yay.  When I got home, I called my dad.  He's coming here in March for the graduation ceremony.

*****

But back to my rummaging through the boxes.  (I told you my mind was jumping around tonight.) I found a manuscript for a course called Fiction (ENG 215), dated October '76.  Inside is a brief fictional introduction, followed by a monologue by Harry MacTavish (except that here he's MacDougall for some reason), explaining how he got to Mâvarin.  This was evidently before I bumped Harry from The Tengrim Sword, and replaced him with Fayubi. It's a neat thing, typed on yellow paper, and kind of entertaining.  Since Harry has now been revived as part of JW's story,and since the yellow manuscript is now sitting two inches from my left wrist, I'll probably scan it and post it a week after I finish the JW serial.

Yawn.  I'm tired and sore and nervous and happy, lost in thoughts of the distant past as I try not to worry about the immediate future. It's after midnight here.  My undergrad courses are over.  Today is quite literally the first day of the rest of my life.

I wonder if it will be friends with me.

Karen

*football, free, fiction, Fayubi, Four-Nine-Six-Seven, FM Road, MacTavish, MacDougall, manuscript, Manlius, Mâvarin.

The Lost Railroad and the Land of Salamanders

This was the view under the abandoned railroad bridge at the edge of Cherry Manor in Manlius, NY, probably in the winter of 1971-1972. I know it was when I was hanging out with Tracy M, around eighth grade.

Cherry Manor was more-or-less across the street from my house. Dan Cheney lived there when we were in elementary school together. It was the stone wall behind Dan's house in Cherry Manor that occasioned an explanation from him about the ice age which I didn't fully understand. I told my family at dinner that there had been monsters called glaciers in Cherry Manor, and they'd scratched the rocks.

Perhaps half a block from where that incident took place, this bridge was the unremarked gateway out of Cherry Manor into a bit of semi-wilderness that was my favorite place in Manlius for years and years. I first learned about it in Girl Scouts, on a scavenger hunt. I was afraid to climb the steep path up to the top of the bridge, but other girls did it with no problem. I later went back to the place alone, many times, and I did climb that path occasionally. It was kind of pointless, though, because there were easier ways up. That part of the railroad track, which still had some of the wooden ties but I think no metal track, didn't lead anywhere much. Half of the railroad bridge itself was long gone, as you can see in the picture below, taken in 1971.

If I walked under or next to the bridge, along this mostly-disused road, I would soon come to what I used to call Bathtub Pond. This was no more than twenty feet across, perhaps less, and no more than two or three feet deep. It had the following features:

1. A rusty, cylindrical tank, suitable for sitting on.
2. An old bathtub.
3. Those little black bugs that skittered along the surface of the water.
4. Frogs.

Over the years the frogs disappeared, and the pond dried up. But it was a neat place while it lasted.

Bathtub Pond was surrounded by fields of weeds, including lots of wild black raspberry vines. These were long and thorny and whip-like, and no fun to brush past. The berries were small compared to commercial blackberries, and quickly turned skin and tongues purple. But they were great. The area just beyond the disused railroad tracks was one of the best places to collect them.

Past the fields and the pond was a small forest of beeches and sugar maples, mostly the latter. If I remember correctly, the road forked and then dead-ended.  The left fork went  past a ravine I called Long Valley. I usually went right.

Maybe fifty feet from the edge of the woods to the right was a large, flat boulder.  Like the rusty tank, it was a good place to hang out, but being in the shade it was a bit cooler. It was mossy and variegated gray in color, probably granite or limestone.  Surrounding it were lots of lesser rocks, small, flat, broken ones like flagstones and rounder, smoother ones. Under many of these, when I was in sixth and seventh and eighth grade, I  could usually find and catch one or more red-backed salamanders. Each of these critters was about  two to five inches long. If you grabbed one by the tail and held it up, its tail would drop off, allowing the salamander to escape. That didn't stop me (sometimes with Tracy M.) from collecting a bunch of them as "pets." One day we caught 23 of them. I even wrote an essay for school, called "Stalking the Dreaded Red-Backed Salamander." Once or twice I also caught one of the big black salamaders with greenish-white spots, about six to eight inches long.

Is it any wonder that by the time I graduated from high school, salamanders were rare in those woods? By the time I got to high school I realized what I had done to that population, but it was already too late.

Going more than a few hundred feet into the woods was a disappointment. There was a house there, at the edge of some other street, not Cherry Manor but probably somewhere between there and Pleasant Street. I never wanted to trespass or explore enough to find out exactly where the access to that house was. As long as I didn't find the road, I could pretend that the house was all by itself in the woods, reasonably far from civilization. Heck, maybe it was.

But if I followed the railroad tracks south from the missing part of the railroad bridge, I would eventually come out  near Seneca Turnpike, not far from Pleasant Street.  A couple of times, I used that route as a shortcut back from my guitar lessons with Jackie, when my mom would get fed up waiting for me to come out, and leave without me. (I never seemed to finish my guitar lesson at the appointed time!)

Other days, though--on many, many other days--I would ride my bike up to the railroad bridge, calling out, "Bye, Mom! I'm going to the tracks!" on my way out the door. I'd ditch the bike in the trees just short of the bridge, out of sight. Sometimes I'd be up there with Sue or Tracy or Joel or Cindy. Most of the time, I was alone.

Afterwards, if I worked at it and there was no intervening traffic, I could ride my bike down the hill through Cherry Manor, across F-M Road and up my driveway without pedaling once.

It should be obvious by now that the railroad tracks near my old house in Manlius had not carried a locomotive on them in a very long time. I don't remember where the nearest viable tracks were, but they had to be several miles away at least.

But lying in bed, half a mile from the old, broken railroad bridge, I often heard a train whistle blow.

Karen

Photos by KFB.

The Earthquake That Wasn't

Over in Apple Bonker's Journal, Sarah K. took note the other day of the 15th anniversary of a 15-second quake that took place when she was 15. That's as good an excuse as any for me to tell you all a little story.

I was probably about 15 on the only occasion I ever felt the earth move. The year was about 1972. I was home in Manlius, NY, waiting for a friend to arrive by car from elsewhere in Manlius. When the house shook, I thought maybe it was because of a heavy truck going by. The friend arrived (I don't remember who), and she'd felt it too. My mom agreed with us that it was probably an earthquake. But in Manlius?! We were about 3000 miles away from California earthquake country.

So I called the news department of WSYR TV, or possibly WHEN. I think it was WSYR. (Both stations have since changed their call letters, I think.)  "Hi, I'd like to report a possible earthquake in Manlius," I said. I was as shocked as anyone at the words coming out of my mouth.  Whoever answered the phone got my name and number, asked a few questions, thanked me and hung up.

Perhaps forty-five minutes later, the phone rang. The tv station's news anchor was calling me back. "Hi, this is John Banks. I thought you might want to know that what you reported wasn't an earthquake." Or words to that effect.

He went on to tell me that a work crew had done some blasting over at Green Lakes State Park in Fayetteville, which was about five miles from my house. I never found out why they did this. Banks (if I'm remembering his name correctly) told me that the work crew had used too much explosive, making the ground shake for miles around. But it wasn't, technically, an earthquake.

I thanked the news anchor for the information. "I suppose it was stupid of me to think there could be an earthquake in Manlius," I said.


"Not at all," Banks said. He told me that Syracuse was on a fault line, not a major one like the San Andreas,but enough of one that there had been an earthquake in the area in the 1940s (1945 I think).

In the years since then, I've been to California many times. I've lived for 18 years in Arizona, where some people have felt at least one recent quake, originating I think near Yuma. But the only earthquake I've ever felt was the earthquake that wasn't, in a place where no one would expect an earthquake, but which occasionally has one.

I'm not saying I want death and destruction for my personal amusement. But someday, if there are going to be small, non-destructive eathquakes anyway from time to time, I'd like to feel one that wasn't manmade. Does that make me a bad person?

Karen

Photo credits: the house and the living room photos are by Joel Rubinstein, 1971. High Bridge Road from the Town of Manlius web site, photographer unknown.

A Gallery of French Teachers

 

This the last entry in my series about 1960s educational experiments in the Fayetteville-Manlius School District.

It is well known now that very young children have a greater capacity for learning languages than older children or adults.  In response to this, F-M instituted a pilot program to teach French to my fifth grade class. We were the first, last, and only fifth graders in the history of Pleasant Street Elementary to have a French teacher. They closed out the program behind us.  Perhaps by 1968 they had figured out that at age ten, we were already too old to benefit from the early exposure. Despite my taking French from fifth through tenth grades, I had no command of French vocabulary or idioms, and forgot most of it by the time I got out of high school. Ifreshman year at Syracuse University, I knew one too many tenses to qualify for a course at my vocabulary level, and was placed in a French literature course. I passed it only on the second try, and only because I sneakily read everything in translation. My professor told me, "If I didn't speak English, I wouldn't be able to tell what you're trying to say in French." So much for the efficacy of the "early" exposure to French!

So we had French in fifth grade, sixth grade, and seventh grade, and those three years added up to French I. Eighth and ninth grades were French II, and tenth grade was French III. French was the only foreign language available to us, not just in elementary school but in junior high as well. Of course it was French: we were a couple of hours from Canada on Route 81.  The closest province was Ontario, but Quebec was right next door to that. High school also offered Latin and Spanish, and possibly German and Italian, but by then I didn't want to start over with a new language.  Little did I know that someday I'd be living an hour away from Mexico, in a city where nearly all the streets have Spanish names, Calle this and Camino that.

I don't remember the name of my fifth grade French teacher, but she was from Quebec. I remember feeling a little cheated about this, on the grounds that Canadian French was probably to Parisian French as American English was to BBC English (not that I'd ever heard of the BBC, in those days).  Why couldn't we learn real French from a real French person? It was pointed out to me, however, that we were much more likely to interact with people from Quebec, anyway, so what was the harm?

As it turns out, I didn't have a single teacher from France in six years of French classes at F-M. I don't think any of them were even from Canada, after fifth grade. But they were an interesting and cosmopolitan bunch.

My seventh grade French teacher, Anthony (Tony) Procopio, used to be in plays with my mom.  I think he was in Mom's 1968 revue, They'd Rather Be Right. He may have had a brother who also was involved in amateur theater, but then again I could be confusing him with someone else on that point. In any case, Mr. Procopio was a good-natured guy who played the guitar and sang, albeit not usually in class! Based on my Googling, nowadays Mr. Procopio may or may not be a) a clerk of court in Syracuse b) a high school principal, or c) retired and still living in Central New York. I liked him a lot.

Dr. Bogoev (A. C. Dimov-Bogoev) my French teacher in eighth grade, was a serious, diffident man. He's the one who renamed me Geneviève for class, on the grounds that the name Karen didn't have a French equivalent. I later took Genevieve as my confirmation name. I didn't make much of a connection with Dr. Bogoev, despite being in his homeroom in eighth grade.

A Google search on Dr. Bogoev is far more revealing than one on Mr. Procopio. The name appears to be Bulgarian, which makes him the most exotic of my French teachers, even before you consider his literary offerings. He published a monograph, Bibliografia sobre las islas Malvinas, in Buenos Aires in 1952.  In the 1980s he co-wrote and co-edited a multilingual anthology with the intriguing title Eurasia Nostratica: Festschrift fur Karl Heinrich Menges.  The man got around!  On the whole, though, I'd rather order my ninth grade social studies teacher's book about New York State place names. (Hi, Mr. Farrell!)

My ninth grade French teacher was Mme. Karen Levine.  For years I'd been struggling to be called by the nickname Casey, but succeeded only in being called that by Joel and my seventh grade social studies teacher, Thomas Murphy Hennigan.  Mr. Hennigan pronouced it K. C., in keeping with my first and middle initials at the time. Two years later, however, I liked Mme. Levine so much that I decided the name Karen was okay after all. 

The most memorable of all my French teachers, though, was my Dutch French teacher. I had her for sixth grade French.

Her name was Mademoiselle Djykstra, or possibly Dyjkstra.  I don't know whether I ever knew her first name. I don't have a picture of her, and I've found no trace of her online. She was from Holland, obviously, and once mentioned hiding from the Nazis. She was young and blonde and pretty and nice. But what I remember best about her was an incident that happened outside of school in early 1969.

I don't remember which of the kids I was friends with that year came up with the idea of having a birthday party at an ice skating rink in Dewitt, near the members-only department store GEM. It may even have been my party, but I don't think so. Despite my clumsiness, I liked indoor ice skating a lot. After that, I got one of my parents to drop me off at the rink every couple of weeks until the novelty wore off.  What I liked best was that skaters were allowed to choose the music for the P.A. from the rink's small record collection.  I always put on the Beatles, either The Early Beatles or, if memory serves, Something New, possibly Beatles '65.

One Saturday afternoon at the rink, I saw someone that I knew - a teacher! This was something that almost never happened when I was in elementary school.  Except for Judy Finch, who starred in a local production of The Sound of Music, we never saw teachers outside of school. (Miss Finch wasn't my fifth grade teacher, but Paula Olsen's. Paula beat me out for the role of Gretel, and rightly so. My mom played one of the nuns.)

Anyway, back to the rink. I looked up, and there was Mlle. Djykstra! Skating! With a man!  She was out on a date!

I don't remember who said hello first, me or Mlle. Djykstra. She was very nice about it.  She even introduced me to the guy.  I don't remember the name, but he was big and handsome, either African or African American, long before that term came into vogue. He was very nice, too. He offered to teach me to skate better while Mlle. Djykstra took a break. I accepted.  I think the gist of his lesson was the idea that I should skate on one foot at a time, not both.

Remember, this was the late 1960s, and I was a naive, somewhat sheltered sixth grader from an all-white school. I was surprised to see my French teacher in a public place, surprised to see her on a date, and surprised that her date would take the time to be so gracious to me.  The fact that they were an interracial (and international!) couple was just one part of the whole surprising incident.  But it was a wonderful moment for me, simply because an adult, a stranger who happened to know one of my teachers, took fifteen minutes to teach me to skate.

Karen

Peace Corps Elementary

This is in continuation of the concept of educational experimentation during my elementary school years in the 1960s. For all I know, the Peace Corps may have placed volunteers in suburban classrooms all along, but my particular experience was a unique one.

When I was in second grade, my dad became assistant dean of Syracuse University's University College. That same year, U.C. landed a contract to help train Peace Corps nurses and teaching volunteers for deployment in certain countries, including Somalia.  (The Peace Corps had just started in 1961 under President Kennedy.) Dad told me last night that at the last minute, the program people from the Peace Corps country desk sent along more people for training than had been contracted, promising to square this with the contracts people.  They didn't, and the contracts people held U.C. to the amount of money in the contract, so that in at least one case the University lost money on the deal. Dad learned from this experience that "if it isn't in the contract, you're not going to get paid for it." With my current accounting / auditing orientation, I can see the conflict inherent in the program people versus the contract people.  The program people want to accomplish as much as possible. The contract people are responsible for accounting for every dollar, so they can't just let things slide.  I don't know what U.C. could have done, except refuse the extra people until the contract was modified.  According to Dad, there was no time for such maneuvers. They did the trusting, idealistic thing, and got burned a little bit.

Well, anyway.

As part of this Peace Corps training program, some of the volunteer teachers did some student teaching in Mrs. Nevin's second grade class. They were the first male teachers I'd ever seen, kind of young and kind of cute in their suits and ties. One day, they announced that on Wednesday (it may have been some other day of the week, but let's call it a Wednesday), they would be bringing a special guest into the classroom, another Peace Corps volunteer who was actually from Somalia.  I can't begin to spell the man's first name right, but it the name was something like Sheeda or Sheerda Jama. One question the American volunteers suggested we put to our guest was about his name.  They expained that Jama would be his father's name. A longer version of Sheeda's name would add his grandfather's name, making him Sheeda Jama Achmed, and even a great grandfather's name, possibily making him Sheeda Jama Achmed Sheeda.

Wednesday came, and I had the flu.  Normally, I would have been glad for the day off from school, but I was dying to meet Sheeda Jama.  I'd never met anyone from another country before, except possibly Canada, let alone someone from the distant country the Peace Corps guys kept talking about.  My mom wouldn't let me go to school, as sick as I was. I was quite upset about it.

Mom must have called Dad at work that day, because that night, my dad brought home a guest for dinner: Sheeda Jama.  In my excitement (and my shyness) I forgot to ask the name question, but it was a wonderful experience for me, and a wonderful thing for my dad to do.  I think Mr. Jama enjoyed the meal, too, not because of me so much as because of my parents' hospitality.

Nobody at school believed me when I told them about it, but that's all right. It was pretty unbelievable.

My dad still remembers the night he made me green eggs and ham, but he doesn't remember bringing home a guest from the Peace Corps.  But I do, even if I don't remember a word the man actually said that evening forty years ago.  (I wish I did, but I don't.)

Thanks, Dad.

Karen

P.S. I'd be remiss if I failed to mention that my stepsister, Dr. Amy Sisley, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Tonga in the late 1970s.  She's now a trauma surgeon in Baltimore.

Photographic Evidence of Childhood

I feel better now.  I found my missing photo album, the important one, the one I put together myself in 1970-1971. If you're over 40, you probably would recognize the type: black paper tied together with cord in a fake leather cardboard binder, with little corner things glued onto the pages, holding mostly Instamatic photos.  It's missing some pictures, but I'm hoping they'll turn up elsewhere. What matters to me at the moment is that it's turned up again, after much searching of shelves and boxes, the most important documentation I have of my childhood and early adolescence.

I'm adding the photo of Mrs. Nevin's class directly to one of the journal entries that mention her.  The ones here are of my mom on a raft in Snook's Pond in 1970 (that's her behind the tree), and me at the door of the old St. Ann's Church on the day of my First Communion in May, 1965. My wedding was exactly fourteen years and one day after that.

Sorry about the obsession.  I'll be done soon.

Karen

All Your Memory Are Mine

  Apparently, Manlius New York was born a little over two centuries ago, disappeared around the turn of the 20th century, reemerged just long enough to contribute some WW II war dead and to build and abandon some invisible school buildings, and disappeared again until the 21st century.  Currently, the town is invisible except for some real estate offerings, High Bridge Road (left), Snook's Pond (large lots available) and the village mayor, who wears an American flag in his pocket.

At least, that's the impression you get if you Google up Manlius, NY.  There are virtually no pictures to illustrate anything I've been writing about recently.  The only references to many of the places I grew up with are in a journal entry I wrote months ago, The Seven Ancient Wonders of Manlius.  There's a Manlius Historical Society, but it basically only has pictures of its own buildings.  Other than that there's an unillustrated narrative of the comings and goings of school buildings written by my former vice principal, Platt Wheeler, a listing that features lots of churches and cemeteries (but not St. Ann's), info about what family film is being shown at the library, and a huge number of real estate listings.  It seems that hardly anyone used a camera in Manlius after 1900.  Kind of makes it hard to find out what's been happening there in the past 30 years, from about 3,000 miles away.

Don't make me come over there!  Come on, people of Manlius!  If any of you stumble on this blog, please email me some pictures.  Give me visual proof that Arly's, Manlius Elementary, Temple's, Weber's, etc. really existed outside my mind!

I'll wait.

Karen

P.S. To all of you who don't know or care about Manlius, NY, have you looked up your home town on the web?  Was there much there that meant anything to you?

P.P.S. I just found evidence that Temple's Dairy Store still exists!  I'm so pleased! No picture, though.

M.E. School

Do they sell snow pants any more?

I'm talking about a second pair of pants worn over the regular ones in snowy weather, with straps on the feet and possibly suspenders at the waist.  In my memory, they were sometimes just an extra pair of stretch pants.  At Manlius Elementary, kids wearing snow pants were allowed to slide down the steep hill behind the school without skis or sled or flying saucer.  Without the extra layer, no dice.  I'm sure Mrs. Clayton, the principal, didn't want kids in school all afternoon with snowy pants!

Behind school was a small blacktop, and then the hill, and then a flat area with swingsets and monkey bars and open space.  I remember ten members of our class (which grade was that?) spreading out on the grass to demonstrate the sun and the nine planets that orbit it.  Beyond that was a  stream that fed Manlius' Swan Pond. And on the other size of the stream was a set of apartments. 

One day in winter when I was in second or third grade,  one of the two-story apartment buildings caught fire.  When the alarm at the school went off, we knew just what do do.  Duck and cover!  Okay, so it wasn't the correct response, but it was winter!  They didn't mean us to go outside on a fire drill in winter, did they? I think we probably did go outside briefly, but after that we lined up inside at the classroom windows, watching the fire.  One classmate, Nancy I think, lived in those apartments, but not, fortunately, in that particular building.

My second grade teacher was Mrs. Nevin.  She told us the first day of school that was strict, but that we would like her, and predicted we would say just that to members of the succeeding class who might ask about her.  I did, too.

My third grade teacher, Miss Olds, was flat-out wonderful.  She used to travel in the summer whenever she could, and bring back artifacts to show to students.  I remember she had a cricket bat from Australia, but I don't recall what she had from Alaska and Hawaii.  The last time I saw her was the same day as my last meeting with Mrs. Livingston: the day before high school graduation. The two teachers were hanging out together in the empty school at the end of a half-day due to teachers' meetings.  After a pleasant conversation with both of them, I went on to Carroll's (or was it Burger King bythen?). Miss Olds turned up next to me in line. "Synchronicity!" she said to me with a laugh.  I had to go look up the word.  After all those years, my third grade teacher was still capable of teaching me something.

Across the street from Manlius Elementary (which was later turned into village offices because of the baby boom going bust  - I think it's the police station now) was Temple Dairy Store,  better known as Temple's. It was halfway between an old general store and a 7-11, both in time and in substance.  People could get doughnuts there (headlights, taillights and bear claws), and milk, Twinkles and other cereals, comic books (a small selection), and, most important to Manlius Elementary students, candy for a penny or two cents or a nickel.  The wonderful crossing guard stationed in front of Manlius Elementary after school would help us get across the street.  Even kids who normally took the bus would sometimes walk home instead, just to get to the candy.

Next door to Temple's was Stone Machinery Co.  It took me years to figure out that the factory didn't make machines out of rock, Fred Flintstone style. The factory's noon whistle could be heard for a mile in each direction.  Depending on which noon hour we had, it served to send us to lunch or back from it, outside to slide in our snow pants, or back inside when we were done.

Karen

The Singing Skunk

It was a serious tactical error on my part to trade roles with Jean Jeffrey in our second grade play.  I started to suspect this the moment I did it, got the full impact of it both during rehearsals and right after the performance, and still felt the aftershocks for years afterward.  For the rest of my tenure in the Fayetteville-Manlius School District, I blamed an inordinate share of my peer troubles on that one bad decision:

Mrs. Nevin:  Karen, you and Jean may trade parts if you like.
Jean (quickly): I want to be Peter Rabbit!
Karen (reluctantly): I want to be the skunk.

Peter Rabbit and Sweetie Phew were the second and third leads, respectively, in a rather jumbled musical adaptation of Snow White.  I don't even remember whether there were any dwarfs in it.  Peter, despite the name, was basically a Thumper character, and Sweetie Phew was Flower with a persecution complex.

The skunk was a much more interesting and, to my way of thinking, likeable character than the rabbit.  And besides, Peter was a boy's name.  I didn't want to be teased for playing a boy rabbit. So, partly because I liked the role better and partly to curry favor with Jean, I agreed to the switch. I don't think Jean appreciated the favor.  As for myself, I was in trouble. Even as I said the words that sealed my fate, alarm bells were going off in my head.  A skunk?  Are you mad?  Everybody hates skunks!  Besides, it rhymes with Funk!

I did it anyway.  The last line of my introductory song was maudlin but meaningful to me:

"My story ends/I have no friends."

In the course of the play, Pete the rabbit and Bill (whatever he was) have enough of a character arc to ensure that Sweetie's social position is much improved by the reprise:

"I offer clothespins, but each shakes his head;
Bill holds his nose; Pete smiles instead.
Dear Snow White made all things right.
My story ends,
Now I have friends."

It shouldn't surprise you a bit that life didn't imitate art in this case.  I had just paved the way for a rather obvious taunt that continued for years afterwards:

"Funk the Skunk is a pile of junk!"

with variations.  "Flunk the Skunk" got some use, as did "Funk is a Skunk!"

I wish I could say that I successfully laughed this off, made lots of friends with my great self-confidence and adroit social skills, and ended up popular, happy and well-adjusted.  Um, no.

Was it because of that second grade role that I was still being teased by high school?  Of course not.  Being shy, smart and fat is a recipe for social disaster, which I didn't know how to overcome.  Sweetie Phew didn't help, but ultimately, it was my responsibility to learn to get along with the other kids, and take some teasing without being crushed by it. I've been looking at my high school yearbook recently, and to the extent that I even remember them, most of those kids were all right. I should have cultivated more friendships instead of shying away and nursing old wounds.

It wasn't until college that I came into my own.  Even now, married a quarter of a century, an A student, with a number of minor successes behind me to bolster my confidence, the oversensitivity that kept me from laughing off a school play is always lurking, ready to jump out at me.  "Nobody commented on the Skwok piece!  Nobody likes it!  Nobody likes me any more!" And similar nonsense.

Yeah, yeah, I know.  Get over it.  I'm trying!  This is the reason I include my maiden name in my byline instead of just calling myself Karen Blocher.  Having suffered for that name, I figure I've earned the right to use it.  It's part of who I am: a woman who, forty years ago in the Manlius Elementary cafetorium, chose to play a skunk in Snow White.

Karen Funk Blocher

The Experimental Class, Part One

 
This is the first part of a further delving into my elementary school years, inspired by John Scalzi's recent assignment and other people's great responses thereto.

The 1960s were a time of change and experimentation, even in education. When I started first grade in 1963 at Manlius Elementary, the school district decided to teach half the classes ITA, a phonetic alphabet. The other half were taught the normal English alphabet and beginning reading, with the help of Scott Foresman & Company's venerable Dick, Jane and Sally,  Spot, Puff and Tim. 

I was in what you might call the control group, one of the classes that stuck with normal English. After a year or two, the district compared the two groups, decided that ITA confused the kids more than it helped them, and phased out the experiment. The whole idea had always sounded crazy to me, anyway.  Let me get this straight: you're going to teach these classes the wrong alphabet, when the kids in them probably already know the right one. You're going to have them read using those w-shaped squiggles instead of oo, and then, when they get good at that, make 'em switch back to oo.  How can this possibly help anyone?

Our more traditional class started with a book called Getting Ready to Read.  We were supposed to match the letter M with a picture of a mouse.  I was already reading Dr. Seuss books by then, so I would fill in half the problems to show I knew the material, and stop.  Mrs. Livingston would mark the uncompleted problems wrong, and put "does not follow directions" and "Karen thinks the rules are for everyone except her" on my report card.  I think if she'd explained that part of the purpose of school was to teach me to follow directions, even if they seemed silly, I would have cooperated.  As it was, I didn't learn that lesson until much later.  Mrs. Livingston and I didn't get along very well.  My mom, who disliked my first grade teacher much more than I did, told me later that Mrs. Livingston once reported having nightmares about me.  Nightmares, plural. Yet when I was in second and third grade, Mrs. Livingston and I would wave to each other as she headed for the teacher's lounge while I waited in the lunch line nearby.  The last time I saw her, the day before I graduated high school, we got along great.

After Getting Ready to Read was a Dick and Jane pre-primer, which we finished reading the day of the JFK assassination. We were allowed to take it home overnight on that fateful day, when we got out of class early. I remember talking about it in the car with my mom, as she drove me to the Hall of Languages at Syracuse University, where my dad was a speech professor.  I sat in an empty classroom and drew gravestones. At the time, I was more concerned with the turning in of a permission slip (and money?) to see an extracurricular showing of a film at school (either Pollyanna, Pepi or The Miracle of the White Stallions - we saw them all) than I was about the dead president.  I was only six years old, and the president to me was the man on tv who was imitated in the comedy album The First Family. I remember going outside that weekend to escape the endless coverage of the assassination and the funeral. It was hopeless. Nobody else was away from their television sets that Sunday afternoon: no kids, no cars on Fayetteville-Manlius Road.

The pre-primer was followed by The New Fun with Dick and Jane.  I didn't see what was so new about it until years later, when a cousin of mine, Ed Oliveri,  tracked down an old Fun With Dick and Jane to use in a Freshman English book report.  The 1940 pictures were markedly different from the 1956 ones. I'm still very fond of the art in my late 1950s - early 1960s version, and the silly, safe, naive world it depicted.

Coming up:  Mrs. Nevin, Miss Olds, duck and cover, six gas stations, and Temple Dairy Store.  But first: The Singing Skunk!

Postcards from Pleasant Street

As long as we're on the subject of school, here's another old piece I found on my hard drive this week.  This one is about an incident at Pleasant Street Elementary School, many years ago.

Manlius High School, several decades before it became Pleasant Street Elementary School. I don't remember that cupola at all.

In the late 1960s, I was among the very last students to attend Pleasant Street School, an elderly building (formerly Manlius High School) that housed the fourth through six grades of Manlius, NY baby boomers.  Another school was under construction and the auditorium balcony had already been condemned, but we kids probably didn't quite realize that the school's days were numbered.

Pleasant Street itself was a quiet, tree-lined village street that led past the local Catholic church and on toward the road to Fayetteville-Manlius High School.  In the afternoons the school buses would pull up on another street by the school's side entrance.  Across that side street lived an elderly man who used to put up painted wooden signs on a tree in his yard for the kids' amusement: "Velcome backta school" in September, "Happy Halloween" in October.  Sometimes we would see him winking and making faces at us as we waited for our buses.  We didn't know his name, but he seemed harmless enough. I liked him.

One day when I was in fifth grade, the old man crossed the street while half (or was it a quarter?) of the school was at recess, and gave away at least a hundred picture postcards, one to each child.  There were landscapes, and religious scenes, works of art and pictures of famous people.  We eagerly took them, looked at them, and traded them among ourselves.  There was nothing written on them as I recall.  They were beautiful, the highlight of our week if not our semester.

After lunch, Miss Long, our principal, asked that everyone from my recess period come to the school office.  Like a fool I went, postcard in hand, and the postcard was confiscated.  The reason given was that it "wasn't fair to the other students" from the other recess periods.  I've always thought that on the contrary, it was unfair to us.  We had been given a small but wonderful present by an eccentric and kindly old man, and the school had taken it away. (My friend Joel Rubinstein didn't show up to turn in his postcard.)

We saw the old man a few times after that, but it wasn't the same. Our innocence had been spoiled, and doubt had entered our minds.  Was there something wrong about an old man giving a picture postcard to a child?  All these years later, I still wonder.  In this world of Megan's Law and children on milk bottles, the weirdness of Michael Jackson and a case in which child care workers were jailed on their charges' wild accusations about abducting them to the moon, are we too quick to see wickedness in any relationship between an adult and someone else's child?

August 2001.

A few more things about Pleasant Street, while I'm thinking about the place:

* Two school assemblies I remember: a memorial to President Eisenhower, and a visit from E. R. Braithwaite, the teacher who wrote To Sir, With Love, who was by then Guyana's United Nations ambassador.  I wish I could say I asked him an intelligent question during the Q&A, but no: I asked him a question about tropical fish, following up on an anecdote he'd told about reaching one student through his interest in his pet fish.

* The winter I was in fourth grade, it got down to 23 degrees below zero one day. That may have been with the wind-chill factor rather than raw degrees, but in my memory it was the actual temperature.  There was no school that day, but the next day we were back in class.  It wasn't all that much warmer, but Miss Long declared an "outside noon hour" anyway, probably for the convenience of the teachers.  Little girls were not allowed to wear pants to school in 1967, so we huddled together under trees, trying to hide from the biting wind, or participated in kickball games organized by Miss Ramsey, the same woman who once grinned when I told her of ten kids surrounding me to put ice down my back, and said, "makes you strong!"  (Don't ever try to tell me about the innocence of children.)  Later that day, I spent at least an hour drawing protest signs in case we were forced outside the next day.  We weren't.  I should add that I quite liked Miss Long despite these few lapses.  I was quite sorry when she died of cancer in 1974.

* Pleasant Street School was about half a block from St. Ann's Church, although technically St. Ann's was on nearby Academy Street.  In the mid-1960s, the parish tore down a hexagonal or octagonal building near the old, rather small church, and built a larger, more modern church building.  But before that, we Catholic kids got to walk to "church school" in that building once a week--on Mondays I think.  We actually got an hour of two off from public school to go to Religious Ed. It seems odd to me now that the school allowed that, with no legal challenges that I ever heard about.  Similarly, the new choir teacher at Fayetteville-Manlius High School my senior year, Bruce Campbell (no, not that Bruce Campbell) gave us nothing but sacred music to sing, on the grounds that that was the only serious (classical) music worth teaching.  I doubt that would wash now at a public school.  I could be wrong, though. I checked the F-M web site last night, and Mr. Campbell is still teaching choir there.  All my other teachers of thirty years ago are gone.

Karen

A Remarkable Facility

Weekend Assignment #21: Everyone had a subject in school they like better than all the rest. What was yours? And what's the most memorable thing you learned?

Alternate Assignment: If you can't think of a specific class or subject you liked the most, which grade of school has the best memories?

Extra Credit: Class pictures!

This is my chance to write something I've been thinking about for a while anyway.  My Compaq just hibernated my first draft of this into oblivion, but I'll do my best to reconstruct it.

It may surprise you to learn that this bookkeeper and accounting student struggled in math for most of high school.  I also dropped chemistry (I had a D in it at the time) and didn't take physics, which was probably a mistake.  What probably won't surprise you a bit is my choice of favorite subject: English. I took four years of English in three years of high school.

The enjoyability of each specific English course depended on what was taught, who taught it, and who was in the class with me.  My favorite course was creative writing, which aced all three criteria.  It was taught by our own rebel of a teacher, Tom Hayes.  His hair wasn't all that long, but he had sideburns and he drove a motorcycle. He sometimes arrived a few minutes late, which I found endearing. He had even written a hip musical called (I think) Simon Says. He knew about Vonnegut, and wrote about Kilgore Trout in my yearbook. He also helped me improve my fiction writing skills considerably.  I produced my first decent, complete short story, "The Disc Jockey," in his class.  I also got to sit next to my boyfriend, Dan Cheney.

My second favorite English course was on essay writing. I liked it largely because I got to sit next to Dan in that class, too. Ms. Hiestand let us write essays about Star Trek (her son Wil joined our Star Trek club that semester). She had a Who's On First poster in the back of her classroom, which Dan and I memorized.  It also didn't hurt that the course exposed us to a lot of different kinds of essays, not just the five paragraph literary kind.

The worst of the English courses, aside from having to read The Scarlet Letter for Ms. Firestine (later Dr. Firestine, who didn't like the book, either) were taught by Miss Conklin.  She was perhaps seventy years old, strict and no fun. She even made us sit in alphabetical order. This placed me next to Karen Florini, who had resented me for seven years over a fifth grade rivalry for the same best friend. (The weird part was that I admired her in return for her talents and dedication. I think she's a lawyer now.)

Miss Conklin kept praising my blue polyester pantsuit (this was the leisure suit era), which was my cue to buy myself some jeans. The only good thing about her literature class was that I got to write a research paper about Sherlock Holmes, called "The Case of the Appealing Detective."  The only good thing about her drama class was the dramatic reading I did from Camelot with a large, friendly male exchange student from Brazil.  His pronunciation of the words was painful, but he had real feeling for the material.

None of those courses were the setting for the most painful, life-changing moment of my entire high school career.  That came courtesy of Judith Gordon.

Ms. Gordon was the department head, but she was almost as cool as Mr. Hayes.  In one of the courses she taught, comedy, she showed us a bracelet with bawdy charms that she said would fit right in with ancient Greek culture. We were studying Aristophanes at the time. In deference to AOL's terms of service, let's just say that Freud would have found the charms very interesting, especially as worn by a woman.  Another time, Ms. Gordon showed up with one of those head-to-toe garments women from the strictest Islamic sects might wear to be completely hidden from men's eyes. Ms. Gordon offered no initial explanation for this, and we didn't dare to ask.  Halfway through the class she burst out laughing.  She told us how funny it was for her to see how much trouble were were having, trying to cope with a teacher whose face we couldn't see, not knowing where to look or what expression she wore under the garment.

In a different course, Ms. Gordon once assigned us to write a how-to essay.  Somehow I didn't quite get the concept.  Instead of a straightforward set of steps in present tense, second person imperative, I wrote what I thought was an amusingly self-deprecating, first person how-to essay.  I got a D + + on it.  I'm not sure whether it was on this paper or another one that Ms. Gordon wrote the words of praise and condemnation that were seared into my brain forever:

"...a remarkable facility with words...."

She made it sound like a bad thing.  Because of my "remarkable facility with words," she claimed, I believed that I could write anything I wanted, break any rules I wanted to break, and still get a good grade on a paper.  In her view, it was not enough that I had an excellent grasp of grammar, spelling and punctuation, and knew how to be original and amusing. I also had to write to the assignment, fit the essay to the format, relate the examples to the thesis, and write shorter sentences. If I did not do this, I would get a lower grade than a clumsy paper that followed the rules.

I guess you could say that's the most memorable thing I learned: talent wasn't enough. It was also necessary to do what my first grade teacher had always complained that I didn't do: follow directions. Not that I've always done so since then, but that was what was required of me.

The other point here is that writing is more than blurting out first thoughts on the topic at hand. An essay needs structure - not necessarily a thesis, three supporting paragraphs and a conclusion, if that's not the assignment, but some way to organize what is being said so that it is clear to the reader.  Fiction needs a beginning, a middle and an end, usually including a climax and a denouement. (My favorite description of plot structure is "Get your protagonist up a tree; throw rocks at him; get him out of the the tree.") A tv script must be the right length, with the act breaks in the right places. Bottom line: Ms. Gordon was mostly right in her criticism.

Effective use of structure isn't always easy to learn, though. Ms. Gordon's remarks at the top of that otherwise forgettable paper were the beginning of my long battle with the literary essay, broken only by that painless course with Ms. Hiestand. At Syracuse University at least three professors, including Dr. Firestine, tried to explain to me how I failed to relate the examples to the thesis. I could not understand what I was missing, beyond a feeling that it was a "tell 'em what you told 'em" sort of thing.  I finished my senior year with five incompletes, all due to literary essays not written.

Now, a quarter of a century later, I'm writing essays on accounting, management and related subjects at the University of Phoenix. I'm four courses away from my BSB/ACC (Bachelor of Science, Business, Accounting). Even now, even as recently as today, it's hard for me to make myself write a formal paper. That old relate-the-examples-to-the-theme bugaboo has magically resolved itself, but I still put off the papers as long as possible.  (For the record, my favorite subject at UoP to date has been business law, of all things. Reading through descriptions of cases and the legal issues resolved in them is fascinating stuff.)

So what have I written professionally?  Essays, mostly.  My first sale was an essay in tribute to John Lennon for Relix Magazine.  Since then I've written music reviews for Relix, celebrity profiles for Starlog, and teeny tiny essays about Doctor Who on the backs of trading cards. I've also written dozens of essays, perhaps hundreds, for Star Trek and Doctor Who and Quantum Leap  fanzines.

And what do I usually write in this journal?  Essays.  But see, here's the thing: these are freeform, fun Ms. Hiestand essays, not Ms. Gordon literary essays.  And even here, after all these years, I still coast on - and am haunted by - my alleged "remarkable facility with words."

Karen

Tags: Weekend Assignment, English, Essays, Writing

Who Are You and Why!

Back in 1977, I was an enumerator.

This means that I spent half a summer working for R. L. Polk & Co., going door to door in the Syracuse area with a list of names and addresses. My job was to verify who was living at each address so that the next edition of Polk's City Directory would be as accurate as possible.

It was an excruciating job in some ways.  I'm pretty shy, so ringing doorbells and attempting to take names was hard for me, especially when the person at the door refused to give a name. They didn't mind that their basic personal information was routinely published in the phone book, but being asked to tell the 20-year-old college student at the door the same data (plus the names and ages of other household members) seemed an invasion of privacy. I was also told by one person that he wouldn't give his name because he was hiding from the law.  Gulp! Okay, sir, I'll leave quietly now.

There were also productivity issues, partly because I didn't hustle quickly enough from door to door, but also because whoever set the quotas didn't have accurate data on the housing density of the different parts of town, and therefore set some quotas too high. Mr. Wigglesworth looked out for me, and I didn't get in much  trouble over this. Then the building we were in burned, and we had to go out again to the same houses as before.  Some of the people who gave the info the first time refused to do it again. 

I didn't have to put up with that for long, though, because right after that I left for the Clarion SF Writer's Workshop at Michigan State University for the rest of the summer. Clarion kind of scuttled my fiction writing for more than a decade, but I met John there so I've no complaints overall. Eventually, when I was ready to finish the stalled novel, the 1977 advice of Damon Knight and Robin Scott Wilson and Algis J Budrys and the rest were still in my head, waiting to help me.

There was one day on the enumeration job that I still remember after all these years. I was in Liverpool that day, a Syracuse suburb near polluted Onondaga Lake.  Years before, I'd taken karate lessons there. This day, I got lost briefly en route to my assigned district, but that was no trauma. I've never been a great map-reader, and I always learned an area best by exploring it while technically lost. 

I soon found the neighborhood, parked my dad's Duster, and resumed the door-to-door work.  One house had a decoration by the door that featured a wooden owl, and the words, "Who are you and why!" I couldn't figure that out.  Who am I and why what?  Why am I at the door?  Why am I who I am?  Who wants to know, anyway, and why?  And why did the question end with an exclamation point instead of a question mark?  Did that mean that the people in the house didn't want me to tell them the answer? Maybe the ! meant that I was supposed to think about the answer for myself.

The last house of the day was inhabited by an elderly lady whose son worked for my dad at University College.  She was lonely and wanted to talk. Since it was after 5 o'clock and I wasn't going to get any more work done anyway, I accomodated her.  That fifteen minute conversation was the most pleasant moment that came out of that summer job.

Oh, and during that job I lost 35 pounds with Atkins (mostly Steak-Umms and cottage cheese) and all that walking.

Why do I mention this, after all these years? That weird little sign, "Who are you and why!" has come to mind as I've thought about the school reunion topic that John Scalzi and R Yanagi and others have been talking about. High school reunions are all about who you are compared to who you were, as judged by the people who knew you way back when. Who am I? I'm theoretically a novelist, but I don't have printed books yet to prove it.  I'm theoretically about to be an accountant, but despite my high GPA I don't really feel anywhere near ready to sit the CPA exam, or to choose a specific area of the accounting field--maybe auditing, maybe not.  Is it too late to become a paralegal instead?  Maybe forensic accounting?

So who am I? I'm, umm, Karen.  Who do I have to be?

I registered on the Fayetteville-Manlius alumni site, but I have no plans to go to Manlius for my 30th high school reunion next year. Maybe if I was a CPA by then and had a printed copy of Heirs of Mâvarin in hand (from a major publisher, of course), I'd go. Maybe.  Without those things, I can't prove that my graduating class was wrong to deny me the Most Likely to Succeed award at the F-Emmys, and to give me the Gladys Ormphby Award instead. Even with the book and the CPA designation, I'm not at all certain sure my old classmates would be impressed. On the other hand, none of my classmates are U.S. Senators or Nobel laureates or Grammy winners or CEOs in the Fortune 500.  Probably. So why should I feel defensive or intimidated?

The thing is, I shouldn't feel the need to prove myself to all those strangers, who weren't particularly friends of mine when we were 17 and 18 years old together. My friends were a year behind me, or at other schools.  My boyfriend, Dan Cheney, had moved to Texas by then.  He's been dead for over a quarter of a century, but my other friends from 1975, from my old Star Trek club, are probably all still alive. My mentor and co-maid of honor, d l hobert, runs the Fulton library. Chris Dohery is in Skaneatales, the last I heard, and I think Gordon Hunter is a professor.  Now that would be a reunion worth going to. I wonder what Carl Norman, our token pro-military Trekker, thinks about the war in Iraq, and whether Karyne S. ever changed her name legally, or went back to Karen. Did Tim Reed become a cartoonist? How is Mark S. doing, and Will G., and Dick C., and Had C.? Who are all those people now, and why?

In my novels, I wrestle compulsively with the concept of who someone is, and what changes a person into someone else. All of my major characters are buffeted by profound changes in circumstance, in perception, in memory. They change their names, sometimes their bodies, and their roles in life. They become different people, and yet never so different that there's no trace remaining of the people they were. In the real world, people don't usually get amnesia, share consciousness with someone else in the same body, or turn into monsters, or suddenly learn they're displaced royalty.  Even so, there are echoes of such things in our mundane lives, and they change us. What victim of Alzheimer's or dementia is quite the same person as before? How does it change you when you find out you're adopted, fall in love, take on your spouse's name, get divorced, become a drug addict, get a prestigious new job in a new city, lose the job you have, or undergo chemo to fight the ravages of cancer?

I'm not adopted, addicted, demented, divorced or cancerous, but I know I've changed over the years. I kind of remember 17-year-old Karen in the halls of F-M High School, 20-year-old Karen going door-to-door, and 33-year-old Karen at her first Doctor Who pledge break at KUAT. I'm not quite any of those people any more. I've accreted years of experiences and ideas, accomplishments and failures.  I've learned things, but that hasn't taken me to success by anyone's standard.  I'm barren and in debt, fat and terribly sleep-deprived, and yet most of the time I'm reasonably happy.  Weird. All that stuff has changed me, and helped to make me who I am.

Whoever that is.

Karen

So.  Who are you?  And why! Take that anyway you like. It's kind of a verbal Rorschach test.