A Stream of Memory Where to begin, where to begin. Perhaps at the end, looking back. Well, not at the end, exactly. Hopefully, not there. Don't want to move things along too quickly. Time flies by swiftly enough. What I mean is that I suppose beginning here – right here, now, that is – is as good a place to begin as any. I'm 68 years old, a fact that comes as no surprise, since we're all in a similar predicament. As if any of us need to be reminded, especially on the eve of an event that'll do that in spades. But to move on compulsively, were I of the mind set that I harbored at the age enumerated by either one of the two digits that spell my age, I'd say that I'm sixty-eight-and-a-half years old, soon to be sixty-nine. Ya know – like the little kid who says, “I'm six-and-a-half, gonna be seven.” George Carlin thing. But, mercifully or not, the number is 68 – well into the 38th anniversary of my 30th birthday, which at the time was anticipated as an event of great moment. A friend's girlfriend, who was a nurse at the time, gave me an EKG as a joke gift. Can't even remember her name now. Hey! – I'm SIXTY-EIGHT, and that was more than 38 years ago. Jeeze! Don't want to depress anyone. It's just a fact. Honestly, I don't feel that . . . I was going to say, “that old,” but why self-flagellate (as I've been doing). Truth is, don't like “old.” Don't want to sound “old.” Most of all, don't want to feel “old.” Want to feel young. Where is she? Where was I? Where'd I put my keys? What was I going to say? I know I came into this room for something. Oh, sixty-nine, oops sixty-eight. No need to rush things along. Not interesting enough, huh? Well, let's put it this way. At about the age of 29, there abouts (looking back), I was not an astronaut. Didn't know that I wanted to be one until it was too late, until Neil Armstrong confused one small step with a giant leap. Ever since then, over these long years (actually short years, which grow shorter by the year), it has always bothered me that he left out the indefinite article a that should have been in front of the word “man” – That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind, damn it! Jeeze, weeks – months! – before the Eagle had landed, everyone – I mean every one and his brother – or is the expression, everyone and his uncle? – anyways, everyone – yes Sirree, Bob! – was asking the guy if he had thought about what he might say when he sets foot on the lunar surface – that is if he were lucky enough to survive the trip, the lunatic. So, then he fucks it up. Putz! Can you believe it! Harder to believe is the fact that now I'm 68, and it's been almost 37 years since a real man has been in the moon – as though the future went down the rabbit hole into the past, inducing us to wonder yet again if we'll ever go to the moon. The timeline seems even more remarkable when one reflects on the fact that it had hardly been more than a decade earlier when the last Civil War veteran died. And that happened a year or two after Sputnik spooked us. Even more to the point is the factoid that the last vet of the Indian Wars watched the lunar landing on TV, just like the rest of us. It's not just these juxtapositions that emphasize the warp speed of technological advance. As recently as 1954 – “recently” being our term, “long ago,” that of our kids – a lyricist equated a lover's kiss with this fantasy:
Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars. Somehow these little epiphanies make me reflect on the fact that when I was, oh, about five-and-a-half years-old-going-on-six, the Bowman Dairy Company (black-bordered, gold letters stenciled on the white side panels) was still delivering milk to our house by horse and wagon. The milkman would leave a steel-wire case holding six quart bottles at the back door. In the winter time, it would not be unusual to find several, sometimes all, of the bottles with their caps popped by a cylinder of the frozen milk sticking out of the neck of the bottles. During the summer, we would pull grass out of the front lawn and feed it by hand to Ole Gert. Can still remember the wet slobber of her tongue swiping my open palm. Strangely, this recalls an ancestral image that my father had transplanted into my mind with his description of Cossacks. They were wearing their bandoleers and tall fur hats and looking down at me (i.e., at my father) from their perches atop their steeds. I think I was in my twenties when it finally occurred to me that my father's characterization of the men and their horses as giants came from his own child's-eye view. But by then, in another leap – or compression – of time, that somewhat menacing, larger-than-life image had become my own. Still not enough? Well, how about Mrs. Stacey, our next-door neighbor? She had a genuine ice box. The cold was stored there every now and then when the ice man would cometh – huge glassy, sweating block hefted to one leather-draped shoulder and held there by large tongs gripped by strong hands at the end of even stronger arms, biceps squeezed by rolled up sleeves. Also echoing forth from that epoch of time, specifically, from the alley behind my childhood home, is the bluesy, sing-song cry-out of the rag man, who also had a pedal-driven, stone, grinder wheel for sharpening scissors and knives. You could hear his comings and goings by the crescendo and decrescendo of his song. So, you see, the alley – the same venue used for the delivery of the fuel that would keep Chicago's cruel winters from coming inside – was also a place of enchantment. Once, my brother Marshall (whom I hold so dear in memory) and I, grimy with the profligate mischief of childhood,
by sliding up and down the coal truck's elevated bay. We washed ourselves down in the fire hydrant spray and dried out in the summer heat that lingered in that autumn day.
because there was candy in the shop and string to wrap around the top. There was sand on the beach and a stone in the peach inside the brown, paper bag and care free was always within reach: hop-scotch squares drawn with chalk, flattened soda pop cans tossed on the walk, shooting marbles or six-shooters, watching our ever-soaring homemade kites and cartoons flickering on the white-washed, brick wall on those wonderful, warm summer nights. Sometimes I reflect on the idea that I might still be alive when the last WWII vet fades away. Always a witness. Come to think of it – measuring time, as we're doing right now – it's been, oh, about 64 years since, at the age of four-and-a- half-going-on-five, I wondered in awe at leaflets announcing the end of the war floating down from a bright, blue sky, wafting in the breeze, flexing back and forth between luminous white and black shadow, blinking that way, as they sailed to the ground, many right into our backyard. It must have been V-J Day. A short time later, as measured by these flash-by years, I remember the black-and-white Hollywood versions of how the war was fought in the air and at sea: Watch out, Joey, bandits at three o'clock, zooom, zooom, rat-a-tat-tat.... Run Silent, Run Deep. Clark Gable. Burt Lancaster. And beyond the war, popular culture gave us the Blackboard Jungle (trivialized by today's standards) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (comical only in memory). And who would have guessed that we'd also live to see the end of the Cold War, to say nothing of the election of a black man as President of the United States. We've witnessed much – have we not? Perhaps too much for a nutshell, but here's an attempt: McCarthyism (think Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Crucible); the Berlin Airlift and the building of the Wall to stop the Germans from “voting with their feet” (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold), Pork Chop Hill and the eponymous, Gregory Peck version; the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising by the Soviets, with whom we would be “eyeball to eyeball” when Cuba bristled with their missiles; JFK’s Ich bin ein Berliner speech; the killing of JFK; Dr. Strangelove's love affair with the Bomb; the head bashings in the Selma-to-Montgomery March; the killing of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; Viet Nam (in which our classmate Bill Currie, journaling for the Chicago Tribune, was an up-close witness); the killing of Bobby Kennedy; the melding of the civil-rights movement with the Days of Rage; the Soviet fisting of Czechoslovakia; Senator Howard Baker's persistent question, “What did the President know and when did he know it?” Ronald Reagan’s Star-Wars threat against the “Evil Empire,” as though it were cued from where else but Hollywood; glasnost and perestroika; the joyful destruction of The Wall and the Roger Water’s revival of the Pink Floyd classic to celebrate it. Then came September 11, 2001, and the pendulum-swung aftermath, which continues to inform us that there really might be “a vast right-wing conspiracy” after all. And then – suddenly, it seems – my bride Kathy and I (both of us having graduated from “white” high schools during an era of de facto segregation) find ourselves in Grant Park, elbow to elbow in a sea of humanity breathing a giant, collective sigh of relief at Obama's victory celebration – a place to which the pendulum had never swung before. Thinking about Pink Floyd. Occasionally, I did fly me to the moon. Loved the trips. Thinking about going again, as I had done not too long ago with a couple of high-school buddies extracted from our sacred youth. Sacred youth. There it is, like a crystal that shines even in dark weather. I can see us, now, playing touch football in the Midway Plaisance. I remember one game in particular – “the men of PALs” (as we and my fraternity brothers thought of ourselves) versus KOZ. Or was it TOMMIES? Was there a fraternity called SCHMEGLERS? Any way, here comes this monster of the Midway – I believe his name was Riowicz (sounds like rye o'witch) – sailing through the air (in slow motion, in my memory), one outstretched foot clad in football cleats and aimed at the back of our downed team mate, Billy Singer. Slight years earlier, in the same place, at a moment in time when it was a winter wonderland, we piled onto my Dad's back, in double- or triple-decker fashion, to sled down those slopes into the palm of the flooded, iced-over field. And, in a sequence of other moments in other places,
when my Mom gave us soapy baths in the Lake Michigan surf after dark and I can yet see her smile at family gatherings on blankets in the park. It was 1949 when my family moved from Hyde Park to South Shore. I was nine-and-a-half-years-old- going-on-10. I was also an emigre from Kozminksy grammar school, some graduates of which founded Kappa Omega Zeta, or Kay-Oh-Zee, aforementioned. I was enrolled in Mrs. Doney's fourth-grade class at Horace Mann. The Cold War years were well underway by then. The Korean War – ahem, “Conflict” – would begin the very next year. Don't know why at the age of 10-and-a-half-going-on-11 I would remember that – the “Conflict” thing, but I actually do. I have a vague memory, also, of Horace Mann “paper drives” that I think had something to do with that Conflict. As I recall, bails of old newspapers were deposited in the engine room – housed in a separate building connected by tunnel to the main school building. Even though World War II was in the history books, having ended maybe five years earlier at that point in memory, I recall that the air-raid sirens persisted as a regularly scheduled national defense test. If memory serves, the sirens were turned on every Tuesday morning at 10 o'clock during recess, whilst we cavorted in the huge expanse of the gravel playground that bordered the west and south sides of the school building. It seemed as though the loud, droning sound was emitted from a giant, voice-of-God loudspeaker located somewhere up in the middle of the sky. It would wail for about a minute or so. Afterwards, we’d continue our routine in class and in gym as though nothing had happened – as though nothing would ever happen. That's why I always figured that a Tuesday morning at – oh, let's say, around 10:00 AM – would have been the perfect time for the Soviets to launch their attack. It'd be another six or seven years before construction would begin on the Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways. In addition to more road kill, life on the Interstates would have its nostalgic casualties. No longer would we get our kicks on Route 66 nor enjoy the simple pleasure of giving sing-song voice to limericks like,
That's like a cactus Takes more nerve Than it does practice Burma-Shave There were hot rods and Jimmy Dean's Rebel Without a Cause and, less tangentially, there were Hula Hoops and pony tails hanging down. The image of Janie Goldenberg sticks until this day. Tight, form-revealing skirt, hemmed-at-mid-calf. Bobby socks. Can't remember whether she was in the class of '57 or '58. In any case, she was older, out of reach. I doubt that she was ever aware of me or the entranced state that I would fall into whenever I watched her walking down the hallway between classes – another image that plays out in slow motion: the swing of her pony tail, the sway of.... In 1958 – right around the time of my secret ardor – another lyricist, in describing (and memorializing) that pubescent perfection, took the words right out of my mouth:
And a pony tail hanging down That wiggle in the walk and giggle in the talk Makes the world go round. If there was any nervousness over these ocular displays of self-defense it was of the low-grade kind that was suspended way back within the cobwebs of weird thoughts, like what it might be like to be crushed to death under the stomping foot of a Brontosaurus or, worse, to be yelled at up close by our hard-of-hearing gym teacher Mr. Applegran, whose earsplitting squalls were equaled only by his giantism, so it seemed. I guess some were more nervous than others. Hell, lots of people built bomb shelters under their philodendrons. I never encountered people who actually had those – bomb shelters, that is, but I kept hearing about it. Of course, one can't talk about Clarence Applegran (does anyone know the etymology of that name?) without rounding out the men's phys-ed gallery: chin-stroker and basketball coach Roger Inman (a true Stoic) and the two Sidneys – serious Stein, our football coach, and smiling Kaz. I'll leave the female staff to the girls, although I do remember that Mrs. Feldman was the unlikely cheerleader coach. Mr. Inman designated me as the last man on the bench, a fact emphasized by this anecdote: Our uniforms for home games were white with blue-green trim. We'd wear the school colors – blue with green trim – when we were on the road. The home games were particularly embarrassing for me because of the fact that for a lack of just one pair of white shorts (perhaps the very same pair that had been decommissioned during a game on the home court when Terry Strom fell victim to a wardrobe malfunction that revealed his cheekiness, if you like), I was the only guy on the team that had to wear the blue shorts. In my still-developing, insulated, ego-centric, teenager brain, I was convinced that, rather than focusing on the game, everyone in the stands was concentrating on me, wondering if the bench warmer with the blue shorts would ever get onto the court. Other snippets of memory have preserved South Shore – the high school, the neighborhood, the actors on that stage. Will I ever forget the first time a girl – to whom I shall forever remain grateful – stuck her tongue in my mouth? Startled, I pulled back. Thanks to the sliver of light that came through the crack of the closed door, I was given an image that I carry until this day – the broad smile and the sparkle in the eye of Judy Krooth (Louise's older sister). It happened in the darkened kissing room, converted from our laundry room, which was adjacent to the finished, knotty-pine section of our basement in our house at 79th and Jeffery, which was just south of and across the alley from the Hi-Low Food Store, which, some might recall, was across the street from Our Lady of Peace, which was across the street from Shapiro's drug store, on the corner with the newspaper shack, which was operated by the man with orange hair, red face and a boozer's purple veins in his cheeks and nose and his sister?...mother?...wife? whose lips were stretched over her toothless gums, giving prominence to her rounded chin, and who, the whole year round, wore an army issue, olive drab, winter parka with the fur collar up. Neil Ostro swabbed the marble counter top of the soda fountain in the drug store. Mr. Shapiro looked and acted like Phil Silvers' TV character, sergeant Bilco. Across Jeffery Boulevard, a priest seemed to be floating as he emerged from the OLP rectory, his ankle-length, black cassock fluttering in the breeze. Anyway, it – the kiss – happened in the context of a wonderful game that we were playing at a party that must have been arranged by my twin sister Barbara, since planning such an event would have been utterly beyond my social skills at that point in time. We were 15-and-a-half-going-on-and-on-and-on. Equally unforgettable were the 16 millimeter, black and white, no-soundtrack, no-matter-we-provided-the-sound stag films that we surreptitiously watched in Bob Kayton's basement wreck room, where specific scenes, remembered until this day, were seared into my medulla oblongataaah. Don't mean to be drawing a theme here. These are but random memories. Petting Barbara Leeds, too timidly. Steaming up the car windows while parked in the dark of night in the parking lot of the La Rabida Children's Hospital, necking with Ava Belkin, whose legs, I would note when I was able to look at them from a distance great enough to get a full, vertical view, went from here to there and back again. Hey, c'mon, we were kids. It was all strangely, if intensely – perhaps, marginally – virginal, so much so that it made me
made me feel real loose like a long necked goose . . . oh, baby, that's what I like. The mind's eye continues to scan. There's Joel Zemans, broad smile revealing clumps of pasty brownies lodged in his braces. We're in the lunchroom. It's a warm, convivial space with various cliques huddled at their respective encampments. Janie Goldenberg just slinked past, again...again, sway to the left, then to the right, left.... I join Liana Simon and Carole Pritikin for a titillating repast. What a place that high school was. Not a single bad person in the house, except for Harry Balls, who would always manage to show up on the study hall roster whenever a substitute teacher was there to take attendance. Nevertheless, we were in a hurry to move on, to grow up, to follow dreams. So, that epoch of life came to its conclusion – too swiftly in retrospect. So much of it has faded from memory. There is an ocean of time between now and then and it is making seafarers – tars – of us all.
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