By now if there's anything we don't need to be reminded of it's that economic times are tough. On top of that, whenever we begin to experience a little more confidence analysts' reports seem to somehow relish with bad tidings like “Don't expect gasoline pump prices to remain low for long,” or “The job outlook for new college grads is worse than dismal.”  Wow.  Should we all throw in the towel and give up. Is it me, or do most of these prognosticators live to see the glass half full?

It's a difficult thing to lose something important or dear to you.  Many of us have lost loved ones; we've lost opportunities; we've lost jobs.  Over the past several months I have heard echoes of the past, especially of the Great Depression, during which time both my parents were young children, and about which they could never forget how much they did without.  

They might learn something from my good friend, Jerry.  You see Jerry has seven kids.  He's done well.  After putting himself through college, then law school, he landed a terrific job at a local company as a legal advisor, the kind of job that allowed his wife to remain home and devote her days to being a hard-working mom.  All their kids attended or currently attend parochial schools.  Even with Jerry's income level, seven kids in private schools leaves little by way of disposable income at the end of the month.  Bottom line is Jerry and his wife have done their best to care and raise their family.

There's a short story by Ernest Hemingway called “In Another Country,”  where in it Hemingway writes of a harsh, enigmatic Major who toward the end stares, trancelike, out the window.  The reader later understands that the major had not long before lost his wife.  His pensiveness now becomes grounded and the backstory provides newfound depth and empathy to the scene, and humanizes the major.  In the end, though, we'll never really know what he is thinking, staring out that window.

Last month Jerry came over to my house for a cup of coffee.  He was quieter than normal.  Then he told me his company was letting him go.  He said the only excuse administrators could provide was that his job was part of a litany of positions targeted for elimination due to shrinking profits, rising costs, and too many “non-essential” employees that adversely affect the bottom line.  In the midst of my sympathy for Jerry's situation, and as much as I tried to muster something useful to say. I did not have a magic wand, or the cure-all phrase to offer Jerry.  But I think Jerry did not come to my house for that.  It may have been for just a cup of coffee with a friend that he was looking for, not conversation, but simply being with a friend ,and moments of comfortable silence.  From the corner of our table he stared out the window where in the distance my kids played in the leaves.  I didn't speak,  I let Jerry's eyes rest with his thoughts. 

Even though I could guess what he was thinking while he stared out that window, I will never really know. 

Reconnections

MySpace, Facebook, what's with it all?  I have a difficult time believing most of today's kids are actually able to climb a tree or make a snowman (snowperson) because of the influence of technology on their lives. Undeniably, Facebook is a convenient way to connect with old friends and family.  In many respects these kinds of sites have become the new playground for young people.  I have felt this way not because I am a technophobe, but more because I'm nostalgic. Circumstances, though, have a way of changing a guy.   Let me explain.

 

Recently my seventh graders completed a unit in poetry.  During that time we considered a variety of themes, one of them -- unfulfilled dreams -- connected strongly with students who were genuinely interested in sharing personal dreams, some that had actually come true, and many that had not. On the final day of our poetry unit students asked me if there were any dreams during my life that had not come.  I honestly believed at that moment I could answer no – that is until my sight landed on a photograph I had weeks earlier taped to a file cabinet.  

 

The photograph is of me and two childhood buddies from the days in the Detroit Public Schools; we had run into each other in the river of fans exiting the Comerica Park after the Tigers' opener.  By fate the three of us intersected. That chance encounter brought back a flood of memories, and for a brief period of time we laughed, remembered some of the old days, took the photograph that hangs in my classroom,  then hugged good-bye.

 

Thing is, that photograph is a reminder of a once hoped-for dream that was unfulfilled.  Those two buddies and several more of us had our own collective dream in eighth grade: to attend the same high school and have a championship football team.  

 

We believed we were the young Detroit Lions. We talked about our superstar futures every day and could not wait to be in high school together to make it happen; it was a dream deferred only by what time remained that year and the upcoming summer. Unfortunately for us it was 1975; Detroit was in the midst of enacting a court-ordered school district busing program designed to “mix things up” by taking inner-city kids and sending them to outlying schools and visa-versa, effectively breaking apart what we all thought would be a once-in-a-lifetime athletic opportunity, carelessly dividing us guys, sending us to several different schools, schools we had previously feared. Our dreams vanished before us in the name of a greater good called desegregation.  

 

While I am sure the intention of decision-makers to implement desegregation by way of inter-school student exchanges was done with positive intentions, I am not sure that they realized how many kids – minority or not – were in a very real way shortchanged, not because of politics or prejudice, or race, but because of proximity, of developmental continuity disconnected, because of friendships broken apart. We had been a band of brothers of all ethnicities and color and our dreams had changed because of one judge's decision in the name of social balance.  What the judge did not realize was, regardless of who we were, something bigger was lost:  kids' dreams to  stick together and play some ball. 

 

Detroit was our city.  It was our life.  My unrealized dream of playing football with my grade school buddies was made worse not only by distance,  it was bolstered by increasing levels of crime in a city on the brink of decay echoed by the screams of chainsaws and shredders eliminating the once numerous Dutch elms that had formed great tunnels over our streets.

 

And so I -- along with most of my friends of yesterday -- am estranged from our town, our dreams, estranged from what had once been a wonderful central city experience.  

 

I live in Toledo now.  It is a very nice city, possessing many of the same attributes of the Detroit of my youth, in many respects like a part of the Detroit never having been affected by change.  

 

I am a Teacher who believes in dreams that can be realized in part with family and friends that remain connected, not divided or separated by mandates or rulings the way a bunch of decent kids were, who thought they would one day wear the same letterman jackets.

 

“Mr. B.,  Mr. B,” a few students called, waking me from what had become a daydream of my own dream unfulfilled.  

“Were you daydreaming?” they asked.

“I was.”  I answered, shocked at my admission.

“What about?”

I pointed to the photograph.  “Those guys,” I said.  “And meeting them on Facebook.”

Profiles in Cool

Can anyone really define the word cool? Webster's Dictionary defines it as “fashionably attractive or impressive.” in this light the fancy car, the latest cell phone, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are cool. For some, making lots of money is cool. Kids learn young that a brand becomes cool (Old Navy, Aeropostale). Cool is the popular kid at school, it's having stuff. In recent years cool has been tattoos. But is cool only about things? James Dean was cool, but what made him cool? Was it defiance, was it his enigmatic personality, fame? Is cool edgy, dark, mysterious (Twilight)? Or is cool really about actions, good deeds, being helpful? Maybe it's time to give cool a new definition.

I remember reading a book written by John F. Kennedy called Profiles in Courage. In it he chronicles the lives of several notable Americans including Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, and Robert Taft (Ohio's). Kennedy displayed courage himself as a Navy Lieutenant in command of his famous patrol torpedo boat, the often celebrated PT 109. After a Japanese destroyer sunk the PT 109 Kennedy, seriously injured, saved several of his crew from drowning. About a decade later he wrote Profiles in Courage while recuperating from a back operation. Kennedy had done something courageous, then later in life wrote about others who had done something courageous.

My neighbor is a WWII vet. He's 86 years old and in better shape than most men in their 30s. He lives alone and remains very active including daily walks. He is humble, putting others before himself. On the birthday of each of my three kids, he leaves a genuine card with a twenty dollar bill tucked inside. If a tree branch should be downed by wind and fall in my yard, I will find it sawed and stacked neatly next to the fire pit. To me my neighbor is the definition of cool.

Last summer I remember seeing a guy stop his car on I-75 to save a turtle that had crossed the shoulder line and made its way into the lane. The driver had pulled over then redirected the turtle back toward the grass. Dangerous, risky, but kind. That's cool.

Cool can be making someone smile, helping somebody with homework; it's having courtesy in driving, empathy for the less fortunate and doing something to help.

The cool is out there, defined by actions not words. But do we, do our kids really see it that way? Perhaps if we begin to show them that by definition cool is none other than doing good, then maybe we'll see more of it. It's out there. In the city, in the suburbs, the small towns. All we have to do is look around. We don't have to change Webster's definition of cool, but can make it so you don't have to look it up.

Might be time for someone to write a book in the spirit of John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage, covering notable acts of kindness, selflessness -- maybe the title of this one could be Profiles in Cool. Wouldn't it be?

Good Look Back

It is easy to fall in love with autumn --
to fall for fall
When verdant trees morph into palettes
and it smells different
and your heart reacts to this.

Some of us fear what such thoughts can do
As if nostalgia was an illness to be avoided.

Not I.

For as soon as the first ribbon of leaf smoke enters my nose
I am happily transported back to Teppert street in 1966
where street lights flickered to start
and mothers and fathers tended leaf fires while some of us roasted marshmallows

and kids' voices were the ipod music of the moment.

The city in the fall of 1966 was different, 

marshmallows cooked
on an autumn night as it was, 

as it was,

leaf smoke on the streets
Bellowed nostalgia.

The Red Grape Lounge

Even though I’m in my thirties I still feel
Like I’m in high school. Except this isn’t school.
It’s a bar and the girls are women who can do what they want
and so can I because I am a kid in a thirty-year-old’s body

and mind.

I can sit on a stool straight like drafting class but
with my own eyes in the mirror over the bar while my cigarette, pencil-like reminds me of my self, of what I can do forever. This is my game, my life, something I have wanted since I can remember -- to be older and do older things like being here for as long as I want until the money runs out.

Just before the money disappears, before I scrounge a few bucks for the tip,
I grab hold of my glass for a final swig and beneath layers of my own fingerprints

I see images of my mother and father
dancing together in the reflections.

Memoir I

The summer of 1973 in Detroit was just like any other. It was summer. It was warm. Gigantic Dutch elms with great intertwining branches and millions of leaves formed tunnels over streets, streets made into playgrounds by millions of kids, the fallout from the baby-boom generation. There wasn't a neighborhood in Detroit's East side that wasn't filled with kids. If there was a theme to the streets of Detroit in the early 70's, it would be “kids.” In the mornings millions of kids would walk to school; millions would walk home from school. On the weekends kids would be playing football, baseball, hockey -- anywhere they thought would work, if not on the street, then on a business parking lot, or behind a bank after hours or a doctor's office. Some kids were so hot to play baseball that I remember seeing them mow their own diamond in an overgrown vacant field. That Detroit seemed like it was a kid's town. All I know is there was never a dull moment those days. And if, for some odd reason there weren't any kids around, the next best thing was hanging with family. And in our neighborhoods there were lots of those too.

Like all other summers before, the summer of 1973 was good. For my family it was the summer of corn. For some reason my dad got his kicks from driving out to the country and hitting up as many roadside fruit and vegetable stands as possible. It became his mission to find the best sweet corn around. So, once or twice a week he and my mother would leave us kids for the day and take our 1964 Chevy Nomad wagon on a corn mission. They'd return with a wagon load of sweet golden booty. Let me tell you, we had enough corn to feed all the kids in our neighborhood. And that's just what we did that day. My dad had all my brothers and sisters and I invite our friends over for a corn roast. First thing I did was hop on my Schwinn Stingray and ride to all my buddies' houses. First stop: Lips' house.