A Few Thoughts I’ve read and re-read the lyrical stream-of-consciousness pieces that Stu Patinkin and Barry Stern have given to us, among all the other wonderful articles in the website, and I was inspired to add a few thoughts of my own. But suddenly, out of nowhere, all of my teen angst revisited me. How can I write anything remotely as meaningful, as beautifully phrased, as completely Miss Annan-acceptable as those works of passion and erudition? Then it hit me…I’m not in school anymore. This is not a competition. I’m a grown-up. I won’t get a skull and crossbones! So I’ll just add a few thoughts of my own to the ones that have been so beautifully expressed. Some have to do with South Shore High School years, others are just from my memories of the South Shore area. I’m thinking this would have been a lot easier if I wrote this 10, maybe 20 years ago, when my detail memory was much more precise. But maybe that’s why, when we see a beautiful photograph or a movie, we describe it as painterly…the details aren’t really that essential to the final impression (a clever way of covering for my poor recall, no?) An actual screen memory: I was about 7 years old when my father brought home our first television…a round-screen, 9-inch black and white Philco, in a console the size of a refrigerator. My parents felt that the best place to put the TV set with its rabbit ear antenna was in the corner of the dining room, rather than a coveted site in the living room. My favorite place to watch television, by default, became the cozy space beneath the dining room table. I would lie on my stomach with my hands supporting my head, my legs outstretched around the central table legs. In this position I watched my favorite shows…Captain Video, Garfield Goose, Howdy Doody, and Kukla, Fran and Ollie. One day each year, my attention was riveted on a real-world event. On New Year’s Day, while frozen, dirty snow was piled up on the curbs of the streets and the frost on the windows was too thick to see through, The ROSE PARADE was broadcast from Pasadena directly into my heart. There was sunshine, mountains, flowers, beautiful blond girls, and convertibles. Even then, as a decidedly pre-pubescent kid, the lure of California was irresistible. Somehow I knew that when I grew up, I would move to California, buy a convertible and marry a blond. And I did just that, after a few twists and turns. When I was old enough to inquire what my father did for a living, he explained to me he was an engineer. He worked at Leaf Brands, Inc., a large manufacturer of candy and gum located at Cicero and Division…a long commute in those days. I didn’t know exactly what an engineer did. All I knew was that he would come home from work every day smelling of bubble gum, and how bad could that be? I knew that I too would be an engineer when I grew up. The owners of the company had the same last name as we did, and my father told me we were distant cousins. He never was able to explain to me exactly how we were related, saying that it all got muddled up by the fact that all of them had been born in Russia, and immigrated around 1914. My mother had a penchant for referring to them as the Rich Leafs. Even an 8 year old could figure what that meant for my side of the family. About 15 years ago a woman from Palm Springs came to see me for consultation. She asked if I was related to the Leafs of the candy company in Chicago. I said that I was, but explained that I never knew the exact connection. She said that Minnie Leaf, the aged widow of one of the founding Leafs, lived next door to her in Palm Springs and was her friend. She came back two weeks later with Minnie, age 96, in tow. Minnie was the one from the Rich Leafs’ side that I remembered fondly. She always had been gracious and sweet, and was genuinely interested in our family. And she said she knew the answer to the riddle of our relationship. We weren’t related at all, she said plainly. She explained that her long-deceased husband had emigrated on the same boat from Europe to New York with my grandfather and his young family, and that they all played pinochle, whatever that is, during the long crossing and became good friends. They had never met before embarking on the journey, had similar but not identical last names (Lifschutz and Lifschitz…I hope my side was the schutz and not the schitz), and all changed their names to Leaf upon arriving at Ellis Island. I had a sudden feeling of liberation. My family was no longer the poor Leafs…we were just different Leafs. I loved high school. It was a time of incredible optimism and patriotism in the country, and we all truly believed we could achieve anything we set our hearts on. Of all my memories, I recall most vividly the day Life Magazine came to South Shore High School and, for some inexplicable reason, chose me to exemplify the Typical American High School student. They were to compare me to a typical Russian student. Sputnik had just gone up, and the newspapers (remember them?) were crying out that we had lost the space race to the Soviets. The goal of the piece was to refute the notion that the American high schooler had a superior education. They figured that if we were losing the space race, it might mean that education in that Godless Russkie Communist Abyss might somehow be even better than ours. But somewhere along the way, it became evident that I was NOT your average American student, that I was a pretty smart feller, that my father had been born in Russia, and, perhaps most disconcerting to the Luce organization, I was Jewish. It would be much better from their point of view to show a more typical student. Nonetheless I had been picked, and for one glorious day, Stan Wayman and a group of Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalists followed me everywhere. I suddenly was the most popular guy in the school. Everyone wanted to sit with me in the lunchroom, and classmates who never talked to me were accompanying me down the hall to my classrooms, while the cameras clicked and whirred around us. Those unapproachable girls were suddenly shyly approaching me! Heady wine, indeed. In the end, they picked another school and another student, one straight out of Happy Days. The article was a huge success. As a consolation prize, they sent me some 11X14 photos, which I have in a box somewhere in my garage. The cruelty of fate: on that one day, my 15 minutes of fame, I was wearing my nerdy ROTC uniform. Did I say before I was a grown-up? It still embarrasses me. I’ve got so many more memories of South Shore and my life in and around it, but Stu, Barry, Ken and the others have really covered that hallowed ground eloquently enough. One more expression of joyously angst-filled pubertal transformations really won’t add much. It’s clear that awkward developmental growth steps are universal, no matter how cool those other classmates seemed at the time, and that they’re not unique to SSHS. The late John Hughes made a career of poignantly showing them to the world in the body of his film work. Some of you may know that my career path has included a 35-year practice of Plastic Surgery in Beverly Hills, of all places. This is not meant to be a boast (oh what the hell…it has been pretty cool!) But the reason I even bring this up is that so many of my patients over the years have come to me to be spruced up for their high school reunions. Most of them have been in preparation for younger iterations of that concept…30th, 40th, perhaps …I don’t recall any for the 50th, which I think must mean that no one cares that much anymore. I understood their desire to look good for their old classmates, to show that they’re still in great shape and as attractive as they were in their high school years. Delusional? Maybe a little, but that’s the flip side of aspirational, upon which most plastic surgeons base their work. Plus, if I didn’t deal with at least moderately neurotic patients, I wouldn’t have had a practice. And now it’s my turn…I suddenly can relate very closely what my patients were feeling. Those old insecurities do tend to creep back unwanted, even after 50 years, which at the moment seems like a blink. I suppose some of you might be feeling the same. But hey, don’t feel insecure…we’ve survived a lot to get back to South Shore so many years later. We are what we are, and we’re lucky to be alive. It’s not fraternities or sororities now; it’s AARP and Medicare. We Tars are all grown up! Aren’t we? See you in Chicago!! |