All the Things You Thought Before

I still dream about Amy Cook. I couldn’t tell you how often it happens, because each time it’s as if she’s been there all along, lurking in a corner of my subconscious which, during those moments, looks an awful lot like the Gwinnett Place Mall.

I’m not a dream analyst or anything, but I imagine she’s there- at the mall, I mean- because during the brief period of time in which our lives overlapped, it happened to be the most convenient place for our parents to drop us off for our occasional meeting; it was equidistant from my parents’ house in Alpharetta and hers’ in Lilburn. So we would meet in that suburban no-man’s land for an hour or two, catching up over an Orange Julius and perusing the new releases at Camelot Music while our mothers scoured the Macy’s or Rich’s department stores for deals.

If they were so inclined, I’m sure the set designers of my sleep could offer us a more inspired setting- Amy and I first became acquainted, after all, along the meandering Etowah and Chestatee Rivers of North Georgia. There could be waterfalls and mountain laurels and rope swings swaying two feet above the surface and perfectly polished skipping stones lining the riverbed.

I wrote a short story once, in my 12th grade composition course, about a boy who found the perfect skipping stone and then kept it in his pocket, refusing to skip it across the water for fear that he would lose it forever- that he would flick his wrist too quickly and it would hit the water at the wrong angle and it wouldn’t make it across to the other bank. It was over-earnest and pathetic in its heavy-handed symbolism, but I wasn’t content to end it there: I named it “A Fable for Amy” before turning it in to my teacher, who commented that it didn’t technically meet the requirements of the assignment (the instructions had been to write a fable; my piece was more of an allegory or parable).

I must have been just as transparent in my direct dealings with Amy. I bought a cassette tape by the 70’s soft rock country outfit Pure Prairie League and learned to pound out their hit “Amie” on my dad’s classical guitar. When I played it for her one summer- the only song I could strum and sing simultaneously- I lied and said that I’d “just always really liked it.” In the weekly letters I sent her over the span of three years, I wrote about school and music and books I was reading and what passed, in grades ten through twelve, for philosophy; but it must have been obvious when I was writing those things that I was in love with her.

It didn’t seem to work the other way; she could send me ten-page letters detailing emotions she shared with no other human being, and it never occurred to me that they were any more than a way to occupy herself for an hour or two. Still, I treasured them. My heart soared when an envelope would arrive with her name on the corner (a simply flawless name, I thought- the seven letters hung in the air like a telephone number, the triangles of the A and the Y and the K achieving a precarious balance). One in particular I kept folded in my back pocket for weeks before it succumbed to the elements and was no longer legible. In that letter she had asked me, in jest, if I would marry her. My heart answered so loudly in the affirmative that I had to make certain I was alone whenever I reread it. And I reread it a thousand times before it disintegrated.

When I did meet the woman who would be my wife, I threw away a Swisher cigar box full of Amy’s letters- most from those days of occasional meetings at Gwinnett Place, before first kisses and telephone confessions and our disastrous attempt at a love affair. Our written correspondence dwindled once driver’s licenses and hand-me-down cars made seeing each other a reality. I could tell you about senior prom and graduation and all that happened during the summer of 1996, and it would likely make for a better story, but to me, my first love lived and died in that cigar box.

It occurred to me, as I carried the tiny casket down my parents’ driveway to the garbage bin, that the pages it contained numbered more than the pages of any diary I’d ever kept, any story I’d ever written- and then it occurred to me that, somewhere on the other side of the Gwinnett Place Mall, the complete narrative of my adolescence was in the possession of a person I no longer knew, entombed in a cigar box or wrapped in a flesh-colored rubber band. I wondered if it pained her as much to part with my letters.

And I wonder now if I haunt her from time to time in her dreams, if the tiled emptiness between Claire’s Boutique and Waldenbooks is simply neutral ground once again between my world and hers. It’s a good feeling when I see her again; we are silent for the most part, and now and again we accidentally brush each other’s sleeve as we reach toward the same item on a book shelf or shift the straw in our drink. It is a warm place, the mall. And then we’re gone.

Perhaps this is the way Amy remembers me. I hope so. I like to think so. Maybe, when she leaves, it is to return to her home and her bed on the other side of sleep, and maybe when she gets there, she rolls over and slides her arm around a kind and steadfast man who has done nothing to earn comparison to the awkward fifteen-year-old boy who lurks in her subconscious. It’s unfair, really. But this man, who I can’t help but imagine to be a fan of seventies soft rock country, has the game-changing advantage of being real.

Vic Racine's Magical Mismatched Socks

"I just respect him, you know? He's... He's smart. He's like... He's an adult I can look up to... finally."
-Angela Chase, explaining to her parents (both adults) the appeal of Vic Racine, substitute teacher.

"He did teach! He was the best teacher I ever had."
-Jordan Catalano, defending Vic Racine, substitute teacher, against Brian Krakow's slanderous remarks.

As promised, I'm going to attempt here and there this semester to offer up possible blog topics, should you feel lost and forsaken in the wide open internet. Here's today's: Write about a teacher or other adult in your life who you've felt you could look up to. Following Angela's lead, you may want to steer clear of parents or other relatives.

Correspondence

Happy Thanksgiving!

Several of you, who will be off influencing young minds this week, requested that I let you know what you'd be missing in the intervening days, so here goes. You will ostensibly have finished reading To Kill a Mockingbird, and enjoyed it, I hope. In class, we will be discussing some of the major themes of the book, and particularly focusing our conversation toward three potential persuasive essay topics.

Rather than clutter the minds of those of you who will be working with youngsters this week, I'll take the liberty of assigning you an essay topic, with the completed essay to be submitted upon your return to civilization. You won't, unfortunately, benefit from class discussion, but I know in my heart that you're all capable of giving me something grand on your own. So here it is:

Writing Situation: In April of 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King was arrested and jailed for his role in civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama. In a thinly-veiled reference to the "outsider" King's activities in the city, eight Christian and Jewish Alabama church leaders published A Call for Unity in a local newspaper, encouraging blacks to allow civil rights matters to be solved in court, rather than on the streets. In reply, King wrote his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, condemning Southern Whites who supported his cause in word, but not in deed. He suggested that such "moderate whites" would rather have peace than justice.

Some people have said that Atticus Finch is the type of person King was condemning. In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Atticus is shown to be a reluctant hero whose preference is to avoid conflict if at all possible. Instead of being an active agent working for good in his community, Atticus is a reserved and quiet man who wants peace, not justice.

Writing Directions: Write a multi-paragraph essay in which you disagree or agree with this statement. Use supporting evidence from To Kill a Mockingbird as well as the documents linked above.

A Veritable Who's Who

Remember how when you read Of Mice and Men last year you had all that trouble juggling a dozen or so characters over the course of a couple hundred pages?

Welcome to Maycomb County, and the first four chapters of To Kill a Mockingbird. You'll be expected to identify (and compile a list of) the following individuals: Scout (Jean Louise) Finch, Jem (Jeremy Atticus) Finch, Dill (Charles Baker) Harris, Boo (Arthur) Radley, Atticus Finch, Alexandra Finch, John Hale Finch, Calpurnia, Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose, Miss Rachel Haverford, Mr. Radley, Mr. Conner, Miss Stephanie Crawford, Mr. Nathan Radley, Miss Caroline Fisher, Miss Maudie Atkinson, Walter Cunningham, Mr. Walter Cunningham, Miss Blount, Little Chuck Little, and Burris Ewell. You'll also need to be aware of the Haverford, Cunningham, and Ewell families as a whole.

I love and miss you all, and wish I was there with you. Be nice to Julio.

Obviously, that person is a baby.

This week's episode of My So-Called Life, "Guns and Gossip," begins with Angela Chase, in history class, expressing envy toward people who can tell her exactly where they were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The adults around her have painted the 1960's, a decade she missed by a good nine or ten years, as "a better time, [when] people knew what they were supposed to do and how to make the world better." She is disappointed in her own existence and that of her classmates, who, "instead of changing the world [...], sit in class and write notes about other people."

It's one of a handful of MSCL moments that, for me, makes perfectly obvious the fact that there are adult writers behind every line of adolescent dialogue, because (in addition to shoehorning in a measure of Baby Boomer, "Weren't the sixties a magical time?" smugness) it undermines the central conceit of the show: that the notes people write about other people, the awkward first kisses, the fall-outs with best friends- those things are important. They are world changing. They are potentially devastating in the immediate world of the protagonist- much more so than the thought of guns or assassinations or... suitcase bombs. The episode regains its footing as it progresses, and as the "Gossip" half of the episode's title all but takes over, but that opening monologue almost shatters the illusion of a teenage narrator for me.

My fifth period class delayed watching the episode until today, because we had the opportunity on Monday to listen to Dr. Robert Fuller speak in the theatre, and while I think the experience was, overall, a valuable one, I've also got to say that there were moments when, despite the best of intentions, the good doctor pushed a few of my buttons.

Well, one button, mainly: I get wary of adults- and I've particularly seen it among those of the so-called "Woodstock Generation," though I'm sure my own peers are equally guilty- speaking to young people about the "task(s) of this generation," as if their age group, having fought the good fight for half a century, has earned the right to assign its "important issues" to the underage interns. As I recall, no revolution has ever been fought by interns, at the behest of the white-haired gentlemen in the corner- it's hard to really call it a revolution when you're holding up someone else's banner. If a generation is going to take up a cause (and I for one think it's slightly silly to speak of billions of people as if they'll all move with one mind), it must come to that decision independent of its predecessors. In fact, I'd put good money on the idea that a glowing endorsement from an elder statesman like Dr. Fuller may just be the kiss of death for a worthy cause. Social change, after all, implies that we are moving against what came before.

Which is not to say that I don't agree wholeheartedly with Dr. Fuller's theories or his admonition against holding ourselves above others- I do. It's just that I'd like to hear that- and more- from someone in the movement- in this movement, in this present- rather than someone on his way out, looking to pass a torch. I understand that, as they say, past is prologue, and vital to our understanding of the present, but I'm eager for the 00's to be presented as more than just the long-awaited sequel to the 60's. And yes, some incredible things happened in the sixties. Yes, significant attention was brought to societal ills which had been previously overlooked by much of the population. But I'd wager that most people had little to do with it. Most people weren't sure what they were supposed to do or how to make the world better. I'm still not sure what I'm supposed do- if there is such a thing- but I have a handful of ideas for how to make my little corner of the world better.

I'm sure you do too, and I'd like to hear them.

Oh, and by the by: here is the quote from "Guns and Gossip" I said I was going to write about:

“Don’t you remember? There’d be like this one person who had, like, perfect hair or perfect breasts, or they were just so funny... and you just wanted to eat them up- just live in their bed and just be them. It was like everybody else was in black and white and that person was in color.” (Amber Vallon, “Guns and Gossip”)

Here is the quote I actually wrote about:

"Grownups like to tell you where they were when President Kennedy was shot, which they all know to the exact second- which makes me almost jealous, like I should have something important enough to know where I was when it happened- but I don’t yet. And the fact that it was a better time then, and people knew what they were supposed to do and how to make the world better... now nobody knows anything. We know who’s popular, or that social studies is boring, or that Bryan always has stomach trouble, but nobody knows anything important. Instead of changing the world, people sit in class and write notes about other people." (Angela Chase, "Guns and Gossip")

And here, if you're interested, is the bibliographical information:

“Guns and Gossip.” My So-Called Life: The Complete Series. Writ. Justin Tanner. Dir. Marshall Herskovitz. ABC. 8 Sept. 1995. DVD. Shout! Factory. 2007.

I can always sleep standing up...

Liana's off at an American Studies conference in Albuquerque this weekend, which leaves me alone with the puppies, Linus and Mathilda. I slept in longer than I have in weeks this morning, and called her when I woke up. She didn't answer, so I pulled up the covers again and cuddled with Mathilda, who thinks the entire bed belongs to her. I thought of letting myself doze off, but I wanted to talk to Liana when she eventually called back, so I cradled Phoebus Apollo, my cell phone, in my hand as I lay there.

See, I keep Phoebus Apollo on vibrate because Linus is a very neurotic dog, and gets excessively anxious when it goes off- on any ring tone. But I hate having to lay with my hand wrapped around an electronic device, even if it is the only way I'll get to speak to my best friend today. A cell phone isn't like a teddy bear, or a puppy or a kitten- even when you go to the trouble of naming it, it's still cold and hard and impersonal, and the joy-buzzer vibration it emits to signal the receipt of a call is among the least pleasant ways of being awakened. Then I had an idea- and it wasn't like I was going to get to sleep again at this point, so I slid out of bed and pulled the sewing box out of the closet.

I've been sewing pillow covers for the new furniture in our living room- everyday ones and ridiculous patriotic ones for the election night party we're having two weeks from Tuesday- and I had a bevy of scraps left over from those and other projects. It took longer than I'd first envisioned in my moment of Edison-like inspiration, but I was able to stitch together enough patchwork for a small project, and I used a ukulele as the pattern for my piece (because it was the closest thing on hand). I built in a pocket just big enough for Phoebus Apollo, stitched the two uke sides together, and filled the form with polyester fiber (the trick is to stitch the bottom of the pocket last so it acts a sort of umbilical cord for filling the body of the pillow, and then the hem is hidden inside).

The result is a sort of "cell phone cozy"- I can comfortably wrap my arms around it while resting, and the vibration is sufficiently dampened so that an incoming call is reminiscent of a purring cat. The idea's probably been patented, and I could probably march over to Target and choose from a whole aisle full of cell phone cozies- some that look like teddy bears, or puppies, or presidential candidates, but for now I'll rest in the knowledge that I've managed, in a few hours' work, to solve one of life's minor problems. When I wake up, I'll move on to global warming.

Going the Distance

If I could figure out how to comment on Marissa's blog, I'd tell her she writes some of the most lovely run-on sentences I've ever encountered.