Life on the Carousel

Slides 39,40,42,49 and 49

2011-01-13T15:49:00.018-06:00

Slide 39: My family outside my Grandparent's house.

The Date: October 1964

The Photographer: My Grandfather

The house was red brick that rubbed off on my hands, around the pockets of my pants and too often on my Sunday shirt and it wouldn’t wash off like regular dirt. The front porch spread the whole width of the house facing the street where tar bubbles snapped beneath my new bike tires. It contained a wicker rocking chair painted green and a matching sofa swing. The porch was a refuge on warm summer evenings where we’d husk corn, crack beans and shuck peas, my grandma collecting a pile in her sagging apron knees.

The back porch was a wonderful dusty place to explore. There were old gallon jars full of beans, meat scales, rotted out hip waders and lots more all of which I was forbidden to enjoy. Grandpa’d say, “That’s no place for a little boy.” Freshly painted grey wooden steps (I never recall them being faded) lead down to a cracked cement sidewalk bearing the stamp of the man that laid it.

The sidewalk lead to the barn out back where Grandpa toiled over raspberries and rhubarb with little strips of tinfoil that he heard would scare the birds away. Those were the same birds that came to play with the little strips of tinfoil each day. The barn had housed no animals for twenty years or more but there were still signs like feathers and white streaks and a kind of dusty floor that had a texture unlike that of ordinary dirt. Grandpa was afraid I’d either get sick or hurt if I played in there so most of the time I didn’t dare.

The front door had a built in ornate combination lock though no one came in who didn’t knock.

The rooms were connected by wall papered arches.

There were wooden floors with woven carpets.

The clock was wound with a key kept in the china closet.

Every sink had a green copper faucet.

On a corner desk stand sat the phone with a cloth-covered cord that didn’t coil.

Right around the corner in the kitchen the corn boiled and steam rose through a ceiling vent where my eyes looked down on Grandma bent over cooking a meal. I understood the deal. When I was at play, if that vent was open it was to stay that way. If I were to close it, dust would float down and ruin what Grandma’s been cookin all day.

My favorite spot in the house was in the closet by the itchy chair. Behind the coats and up on a shelf there were, I’d say, nearly a dozen instruments my grandpa taught himself to play… two guitars (Spanish and Hawaiian) a fiddle, banjo, clarinet, and accordion, a trumpet and several harmonicas and, most impressively, a musical saw. He’d bend it over his knee and with his violin bow play song after song for me.

I didn’t understand the nature of his illness but Grandpa had been sick for several years and I guess the house became too much for him. I remember when one day a stranger drove up in a noisy truck to look at the place. He was loud. Wore a dirty t-shirt. Had an uneasy smile on an unshaven face.

And he bought it.

He bought my grandparent’s wonderful home.

Got if for a song no doubt as he knew my grandparents really needed to move out.

I said indignantly, “What do you mean it’s sold? This can’t be true. This place is ours and if I want to play in the barn or sit on the porch then that’s just what I’ll do. You’ll see!”

Even as I spoke, I knew it was foolish as my mother so aptly pointed out. “Who are you thinking about Bobby? This has to be. Your poor grandpa can’t even get up the stairs.”

So for the next week or so we hauled out tables and chairs and the women cleaned closets and shelves. So many things I’d known and loved since birth were thrown out or just left behind. I swear, I’ve never known a sadder thing than saying goodbye to that red brick, that barn, that front porch and that old sofa swing.

The new house came in two pieces, lifted on a foundation with a big crane. For a kid like me the excitement of this lessened the pain a bit. Better yet, the lot was right next to our own. So close I could have carelessly thrown a stone through the bedroom window… and once did.

Dad and I spread grass seed and Grandma planted flowers and pretty soon that little place started to feel like ours.

And the old place started to feel like it belonged to someone else.

The noisy truck rusted behind the barn, tall weeds growing up around the wheels. The back steps rotted and the porch paint peeled. Grass went uncut. I still remembered the combination to the ornate lock. I would have never wanted to go in though and only once did I look in a window but it wasn’t the same… at least not much. You see the house no longer bore my grandparent’s name and certainly not my grandparent’s touch.

Slides 23,24,72,81 and 99

2010-06-14T12:19:00.018-05:00

Slide 72: Three girls on Main St.

The Date: Summer 1967

The Photographer: My older Sister

My older sister Sally was, I believe, the first person to ever represent our town as a Rotary Exchange Student. Following a memorable and impressive senior year she prepared for her adventure. Besides getting her passport and visa she was required to take pictures representing her life in America to share with her sponsoring Rotary Club in Sweden. The pictures she took are the best on my carousel, vividly capturing our town in 1967. They include shots of the back road to my grand parent’s farm, the pond behind our home and several more, including the elementary school and our church, featured in previous chapters. Sally had aspirations as an actress and a flare for the dramatic, which translates, well into her old slides.

I’m particularly happy with one though it is not one of the better. It shows three girls walking down Main St., smiling toward the camera. Slightly behind them a younger girl stands by some vintage bikes. To the left a row of cars angle toward the parking meters. To the right are storefronts with hanging signs and awnings and a big clock that says 9:15 but the shadows on the sidewalk indicate early afternoon.

I remember the three girls. They were a couple years younger than I and had just finished the seventh grade. After so many years I still remember the tone of their voices—the timbre of their laughter. I had a crush that whole summer on the little one to the right. I’ve not seen her or the others in forty years. It is odd for me to realize that I am not certain all three are still living. I hope they are. And I hope they are well. And I hope they’ve aged better than the town we lived in. One thing is certain. They have aged… a lot. All are now in their mid fifties. If they’ve changed as much as I, they too are now nearly unrecognizable. Sadly, the same might be said of our town.

My father told me that our town’s best years were in the thirties. The flood hurt us bad in ’42. My time there in the fifties and sixties was quite prosperous but everything was aging and much was maintained poorly. I mean no offense to those who remain there but the last times I visited things looked a bit broken.

A memory

When I was five, I lay with my family on a woolen blanket in the back yard, gazing wide-eyed, open mouthed, as one lonely little star made its way across the moonless sky. My father said softly, “Look closely kids. That’s the first satellite and it’s gonna change the world.” His words were prophetic. He badly blew his later prediction about the demise of the Beatles but he sure nailed that Sputnik one. Today there are over eight thousand man made objects orbiting the earth and on top of one a little camera transports me in ways my father could not have foreseen. From my home in Minnesota, staring at my computer screen, I orbit halfway across the country in seconds and descend to about a thousand feet above my hometown. It’s not a live picture. In fact, it was taken five years ago but it captures my town below looking much as it did in my boyhood. The streets are laid out as they were and the houses all where they belong and the Allegheny still flows through, yet I know that much has changed.

I fly over my high school where the track team gathers at one end of the football field. In white hoodies they look like a flock of gulls against the dark rubber track. I hover slowly over the community pool and toward Hillside Cemetery where many of my family are buried. Then I soar above the hill toward my house. This is the hill for generations and for descriptive purposes called Old Baldy. Now the late afternoon sun casts long shadows through Baldy’s stark April forest. Visually it becomes chaotic and briefly I lose my way before climbing higher to regain my bearing. My neighborhood and then the top of my house appear. My parent’s pickup truck still sits in the driveway though they moved to Connecticut three years ago. I ascend. The chaos of forests and shadows reappear and then I stop. There is something in the trees—an odd convergence of shadow. I drop down for a better view but losing too much photographic clarity I rise again. There it is. I know what I’m seeing. I’ve found The Rocks.

They are house-sized boulders, slid about by glaciers long ago and conveniently deposited

high on the hill behind our home. They’ve changed very little since. During the eighteen years I lived in that town and every time I visited thereafter, I climbed the steep trail to The Rocks. Season after season I returned. Many times each summer and several times each deep winter, I went there with friends or family or all by myself. As a little guy climbing fast I could get there in half an hour or so. I doubt I could do it faster now. The more impressive rocks have names. The two largest are Elephant and Bird. On top of Elephant is a large slab called Table Rock. Another is named Pyramid and everywhere are smaller boulders tossed about creating room sized caves and one tight-squeeze tunnel. The tunnel was a frightening rite of passage for every child who found it as was the thrill of first scaling the front of Bird.

A memory

My best buddy lived across a field and over the little creek behind my house. In the late winter of our sixth grade year his parents had to fly to California where his dad was interviewing for a new job. They asked my parents if Craig could stay with us for a week. He and I were thrilled, almost as much as my little sister who adored my best friend. On the way to and from school each day we tried to encourage our hopes that his parents would turn down the job and stay in our town.

One summer night a few months later, Craig and I and our neighbor buddy David camped all night at The Rocks. I was a bit surprised that our parents allowed us to do it by ourselves but we convinced them that it was important. It was, after all, Craig’s going away party. We hiked up there early in the evening carrying sleeping bags, canteens, hotdogs and buns. We collected a lot of fire wood, started a blaze beneath an over hang and waited for the darkness. We didn’t sleep much. I’d never spent a night out in the woods and was spooked by the eerie squeaking of trees in the breeze. Foolishly we’d decided to sleep on the rock rather than the ground but we weren’t planning on sleeping anyway. Instead we talked most the night about all the fun we’d had together and even dared to share that we would miss each other a lot after Craig moved away. We told each other that, no matter what, we’d always be friends. Pretty vulnerable stuff for little boys.

Two days later I stood quietly in the street in front of Craig’s house as he and his three younger siblings climbed into the sedan with his mom. The little ones were all crying and his mom was in a frazzle. His dad was waiting in California already busy at a new job. His mom would drive the family, by herself, across the entire country to Sacramento. Craig was quiet. We shook hands the way men do and I slapped him on the back as he turned to climb in the back seat with the baby. Then they pulled away. I knew they were going to say goodbye to some friends out on the east end of town so I rode my bike as fast as I could to the Tastee Freeze on Main St. I thought I might be able to wave goodbye when they drove back through. I sat at a picnic table for about twenty minutes and just when I thought I might have missed them, I saw the car approaching. Craig looking out the side window lifted his hand. I lifted mine. And then they were gone. It was terribly sad and perhaps the first time I realized that nothing remains the same. Everything changes… except maybe The Rocks.

Nearly fifty years later, staring at my computer screen I can see there has been activity in the woods. A number of new trails are cut for logging equipment and a few areas culled pretty thin so somebody’s making money. Even this economic change for the better makes me sad. I am, however, not concerned about The Rocks. Even in poor detail, the convergence of shadow is consistent with my memory. I can easily identify Elephant and Bird. The last time I climbed her I was surprised to find large trees growing on top of Elephant but she was, of course, still there. The same is true of the little town below nestled in the valley, shining on my screen and imprinted on my soul. It will change some for the better and some for the worse but it’s not going anywhere soon… and that makes me glad.

Three pretty girls walk toward my sister. They’re downtown. It’s a warm summer afternoon in '67. They all know Sally. This is. after all, a small town and well… she was the prom queen. “Smile girls,” she says. They do and Sally snaps the picture.

Slides 76 and 77

2010-03-08T10:19:00.014-06:00

The Slide: My family beginning our big vacation

The Date: Summer, 1966

The Photographer: Unknown

We are standing almost on the tarmac at the Mt. Alton Airport in a nearly forgotten time when, on summer days, we sometimes waited behind a wrought iron fence for planes to land. We would hear the twin engines roaring off in the distance and then see the Allegheny Airliner flying in from Pittsburgh, coming in low over the treetops and landing on one of the two runways. We covered our ears as it taxied within fifty feet. When the engines turned off and the props stopped spinning a man would open the iron gate and with a smile motion us through. We’d walk right out to the bottom of the planes’ descending stairway to wait for the passengers. By the time they stepped on the tarmac and everybody hugged, the man who opened the gate would have loaded the luggage on a handcart and pulled it over by the fence. We’d walk to the cart, grab a suitcase and head out to the parking lot.

In the slide I’m almost fourteen years old and had been through the routine plenty of times. People from our area occasionally flew off on vacations and when they returned we’d sometimes pick them up. But this day, as we pose for the camera—this day is different. Today, for the first time, my family and I are the ones flying. And flying as a family will not be my only new experience. In a couple hours, my father and I will play our first game of pool and then I will have my first brush with fame.

We were heading for San Francisco but couldn’t get there without a stop in Detroit. I was looking forward to the three-hour layover. I’d been in the Detroit airport the year before while traveling by myself—returning from my own vacation with relatives. At that time, unfortunately, the airlines deemed it necessary to escort me while outside the fuselage. I felt like a prisoner. To make it worse there was another minor on the plane with whom I shared the experience. She was a chatty, unattractive girl on her way home to Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, my route made a connection in Pittsburgh so we were required to stay together with an attendant for a couple hours while awaiting our flight. I sat uncomfortably as our female escort and the girl talked on and on about braces and dances and boyfriends. It was embarrassing. I stared from my seat in the terminal rotunda to an upper level where people played pool in a billiards parlor.

Now, a year later, I found my window seat toward the back of the plane. “Hey Dad,” I said, “When we get to Detroit can we shoot a little pool?” I’d always wanted to try the game. There was a pool hall in my town. It was just a couple buildings from my barbershop so I’d looked inside a few times. I didn’t actually go in the place but during the summer, when it was really hot, the door stood open and I could see dangerous looking people, mostly high school dropouts, hovering over the tables, vulture like, with a pool stick in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I noticed that they laughed and shouted the word "damn" quite a lot. You could hear it way down the street.

My father helped my little sister with her seat belt. “We’re only in Detroit for a couple hours,” he said, “I doubt we’ll have time to look for a pool hall.”

“Oh no Dad,” I said as if I traveled through Detroit regularly. “There’s one right in the airport. I can take you there.”

“Well then,” he said, “if we have time we’ll check it out.” Then he looked at my mother and they smiled. Apparently something struck them funny.

We arrived in Detroit ahead of schedule and had more than enough time for my father and me to play our first game of pool together. He was very good or very lucky. After a few games he paid the clerk and then said to me, “I’m going down below and check on the women. You can wander around the terminal a bit if you want. Probably a good idea to stay close though.”

Halfway down the stairs we saw my mother and sisters in a waiting area just up the hallway to the left. Straight ahead, sitting on the edge of the rotunda fountain were several college aged guys. I couldn’t see them clearly because a group of girls, who looked to be about my age, stood in front of them facing away from me prancing about excitedly. My father turned left at the bottom of the stairs and I walked toward the fountain. One of the girls let out a scream and thrust her hand in the air holding a piece of scrap paper. It was then I realized that the guys were signing autographs. When I was within ten feet the girls screamed a chorus of “Oh thank yous,” and gushed off down the hall to the left, their heads close together staring at each other’s papers.

I now stood directly in front of the boys—or maybe they were young men. I couldn’t tell. There was, at that moment, no one else in the terminal. I stood staring at them. They sat staring at me. I could tell they were waiting for me to say something—almost leaning forward in anticipation of my comment or request. But as I looked from face to face—left to right— though they looked vaguely familiar, I couldn’t identify them. Then the skinniest guy on the far right said, “I think we better go guys.” I hadn’t gotten down the line to his face yet but glanced directly at him when he spoke. He had on a little corded captain’s hat—the same kind Davey Jones of the Monkees wore. He held drumsticks and casually beat out a complex rhythm on his thigh. I knew immediately who he was. He was Gary Lewis.

Gary Lewis and the Playboys was a huge band that year having hit the Top Ten seven times with releases including "Count Me In", "Save Your Heart For Me", “Just My Style”, “ Everybody Loves a Clown” and "This Diamond Ring” that went all the way to number one. I knew every word to every song. Now I recognized all the guys. I’d seen the band five times on Ed Sullivan.

I turned toward our concourse and could just make out my older sister Sally sitting in a chair, reading her “Seventeen”. Surprisingly she glanced my way and I shot my hand up.

I heard Gary say again a little louder this time, “Let’s go guys. Now.”

I ran halfway to Sally frantically gesturing. She stood and walked casually my way. I sprinted the remaining distance grabbed her elbow and started speed walking her toward the band who appeared to be fleeing. I was surprised. I’d seen “A Hard Day's Night” three times. It was filled with scenes of screaming kids chasing the Beatles around London. Gary Lewis and the Playboys were huge stars but they sure weren’t The Beatles—they weren’t even British and it’s not like Sally and I were a mob. Why would they run from us? But as they turned down a concourse at the other end of the rotunda I realized we were chasing and they were getting away.

Sally was irritated. “What are you doing?” she snapped pulling her arm away.

“Those guys. Right there!” I said pointing, “Do you see them?’

“Yes,” she said. “So what?”

“That’s Gary Lewis and the Playboys.”

“No!”

“Yes! Come on!”

We sprinted across the rotunda and saw them ahead standing at a boarding gate down the hall. The two in the back glanced nervously toward us and motioned the others to hurry. Gary Lewis spoke to a desk agent who looked our way and then gestured the band to follow. They disappeared around the corner. We reached the spot only seconds later and saw the last guy going through the jet way door. The others were ahead laughing, jostling, heading toward the plane. We watched the agent close the door and walk behind her podium to begin boarding the other passengers.

My sister looked disgusted. “That wasn’t Gary Lewis and the Playboys,” she said.

I grabbed her arm again and walked to the attendant.

“Excuse me Mam,” I said. “We were just wondering if you could tell us. Was that...”

She cut me off midsentence. “Yes,” she said.”

We walked back excitedly to tell our parents never wondering what we would have done had we caught them. I guess maybe we would have stood there and stared a while. I might have said hello.

That was my first of many encounters with famous people—singers, television and movie stars, sports figures and politicians. My vocation has introduced me to many but most often the encounters have been in airports and on planes. That is, after all, how these people get to and from work.

The next encounter after Gary Lewis occurred nearly a decade later. It was a double—two stars in one day. I was, by this time, beginning a career in performing, mostly singing and telling stories. Judy and I lived in Chicago where I worked in a Children’s Theater during the week. On weekends I occasionally flew away with my guitar slung over my shoulder. I went wherever people would pay me. I went wherever people would pay me anything at all.

One Saturday morning I walked down a concourse at O’Hare and saw Jim Yester leaning against a wall carefully observing me walking toward him. Jim was part of the popular band The Association and was someone I had admired since jr. high. I looked at him and he smiled. “You’re Jim Yester,” I said informatively.

“I sure am,” he answered and reaching out his hand he asked, “What’s your name?”

“My name’s Bob,” I said.

He motioned toward my guitar “What do you play?”

“Oh it’s cheap.” I said almost apologetically. “ It’s Japanese.”

He waved off my response. “No, I mean what kind of music do you play.”

“Oh… I write songs. I’m singing for some kids in Buffalo tonight. Hey… I’m a huge fan,” I said. “Really nice to meet you.”

He took a step back toward his departure gate and motioned me to follow. “If you have a minute—come over here and I’ll introduce you to the guys.”

And that’s what he did. Behind him sat the rest of the band. “Hey gentlemen. This is my new buddy Bob. He plays guitar and writes his own songs—our kinda man.” All but one looked up and smiled. Terry Kirkman, who wrote “Cherish” and many other big hits, extended his hand and I shook it.

The guys were not as talkative as Jim so I stood awkwardly smiling for a moment and then glancing at my watch I said, “Gotta go. Nice to meet you.”

Jim shook my hand again. “Happy Life,” he said with a smile and waved goodbye.

I was impressed. I have often reflected upon the encounter because it was unlike most to follow. I don’t know why he was so kind. Perhaps he saw me as a young kid with no idea how tough it could be to make a living as a minstrel. Maybe I reminded him of himself a decade earlier. Maybe he’s just a really nice guy. I don’t know. But I know our encounter was not typical.

A couple hours later I landed in Buffalo where I walked down another concourse and decided to stop in a café for a quick cup of coffee. There sat Wilt Chamberlain. I didn’t have to wonder if it was him. LA played the Braves the night before. He sat, his knees rising above the top of the little table. He ate Corn Flakes. I thought of my little brother in law and the possibility of handing him Wilt’s autograph moved me toward the table. Wilt did not raise his gaze above his cereal bowl. I stood for a few seconds digging in my jacket for a pen and retrieving my airline ticket from my back pocket. Still he looked at his bowl. “Excuse me,” I said, “I wonder if you’d mind….”

“Yeah I would mind,” he snarled. “ I’m wondering if you’d mind letting me eat my Corn Flakes.” He did not lift his gaze. “Would that be too much to ask? Do you suppose it would be okay if a guy could just eat some Corn Flakes without being bothered?”

“No problem,” I said feeling my face flush in embarrassment. “Sorry.” I didn’t bother ordering coffee. I walked away and promised myself that I would never again ask anyone for an autograph. I never have.

I have a friend who loves the idea of spotting celebrities. She’s interested in popular culture. She enjoys movies, and her favorite TV shows. She hosts a fun Oscar party every year on the evening of The Academy Awards. Because of her interests, there are a lot of celebrities she would enjoy encountering. We once sat with our families in a San Diego restaurant and another friend reported spotting Elton John earlier that day. She lit up with excitement. Responding a bit dismissively I said, “I would not walk across the street to see Sir Elton.”

“That’s not true,” she teased. “If you knew he was in that store over there, you’d go.”

“To do what?” I scoffed. “To look at him? Why would I do that?”

“You’d go,” she said seriously.

I’ve thought about this a lot and I stand by what I said. I would not cross the street to see Elton John. I just can’t imagine being interested enough to take the steps. I could not, however, say the same of James Taylor. If James was across the street, I’d go over, but not so I could see him. I would go with the hope of thanking him for all the enjoyment he’s given me through the years. I know it’s an odd thing but I feel as though I have a relationship with James. And, if it’s odd for me, it must be really weird for him but I think he understands. Relationships are created through communication. One party speaks. The other listens and then responds back. James has been speaking to me for many years and I’ve been listening. I just haven’t had the opportunity to respond. So I’d enjoy walking across the street to say thanks.

I got the chance to do that very thing with Davy Jones. He sat in row 4B directly across the aisle from me. He spoke with a woman to his left and I recognized his voice before I looked at his face. “Well, how about that,” I thought. “It’s Davy Jones.” When we disembarked I stood and said, “Davy,” thanks for all the fun you gave me so many years ago. I appreciate it.”

He smiled, “Well… you are welcome,” He said.

I wouldn’t have that conversation with Elton John. I know many people would. I’m just not one. I don’t feel like I have a relationship with Elton. He may have been trying to speak to me through the years but I wasn’t listening so I have nothing to say. And that’s exactly how I feel about dozens of other celebrities who I’ve encountered in airports or on planes. I feel no excitement or fascination at all. I just see people going to work or flying back home —Dionne Warwick, Forest Whittaker, Martin Sheen, John Ratzenberger, Hal Linden (remember Barney Miller?), Brock Lesnar, Jesse Ventura, John Thompson, The entire Detroit Pistons basketball team, Teller of Penn and Teller, Richard Simmons (noisey flight) and of course Garrison Keillor.

I live in Garrison’s city and we fly out of the same airport so I’ve encountered him several times. Because he is arguably America’s favorite storyteller it is unsurprising that I would feel a kinship with him. But he is also, admittedly, America’s shyest storyteller. I’ve taken several opportunities to thank him for his work. Each time he muttered something.

Tiny Tim flew with me from Detroit. With his tall frame, large hooked nose, and stringy grey hair he was impossible to miss. There were less than thirty of us on the plane so most of the seats were empty. He sat across the aisle. I noticed that his grey hair was just about the color of his skin. The flight attendant announced that, due to the small number of passengers, we were free to choose a more comfortable seat. Tiny Tim shuffled way back to the last row where he sat alone looking out his window. Of course I can’t say he felt lonely but he sure looked that way. He died a week or two later. The memory saddens me.

As does my memory of Jerry Springer though not because he looked lonely. Unlike Tiny Tim, Jerry was surrounded on the plane with at least a half dozen noisy people though I couldn’t tell if they were friends or just fans who sucked on to him as he walked down the concourse. I sat in row five directly behind Jerry. I half expected a couple overweight trailer park women, sitting back by the lavatories, to parade up the aisle and claim that Jerry was responsible for their pregnancies. I imagined the plane cheering, “Jer Ree! Jer Ree! Jer Ree!” Listen… I don’t know Jerry Springer. I don’t know the man’s heart. But… I hate what he does for a living and it was sad to feel so little in common with another human being.

That was in contrast to my flight with Fred Rogers. I was living in Massachusetts and flying out of Bradley Airport serving the Springfield/Hartford area. Fred had been in Connecticut where he received and honorary doctorate at Yale. As I stood in line to board my flight I saw the familiar face of jazz pianist Johnny Costa who, being the musical director of Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, made frequent appearances on the show. I introduced myself and thanked him for his great work, telling him how much my own children loved Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood and what that meant to Judy and me.

“Oh thanks so much,” he said. “When we get on the plane I’d love to have you share that with Fred. He’ll appreciate it so much.”

I expected to see him in first class but we passed by and walked several rows into coach where Fred sat talking very quietly and patiently to a little girl. The girl seemed quite unsurprised to see him on her plane but her mother was beaming. Fred reached out his hand to greet the woman and introduced himself.

"Hello, I’m Fred Rogers,” he said. Then placing his hands on the little girl’s head almost as in a blessing he said, “You have a very sweet daughter.”

“Thank you so much,” she said. “Amanda, can you say thank you to Mr. Rogers?”

The little girl nodded and smiling followed her mom down the aisle.

“Fred,” Johnny Costa said, “I want you to meet Bob. He’s a musician and a storyteller.”

“Hi Fred,” I said, “Thanks so much for the joy you’ve brought to my two little boys and my wife and me. I was just telling Johnny that the kids can be bouncing off the walls but when he starts to play the theme music and you walk in that door they are mesmerized. And you hold them for half an hour. It’s amazing really.”

“Well that is so wonderful to hear Bob,” he said sounding remarkably like… well actually just like Mr. Rogers. “You know… here’s the thing.” He said, “I look into that camera and I imagine I’m speaking right to your boys. That’s the secret. But it’s not a trick. I’m talking right to them and you can tell them that.”

“I will,” I said. “Thanks again. So nice to meet you.”

He was not guarded. While we spoke he looked me right in the eye. It was as if he recognized the relationship I felt with him and was not threatened. Ninety minutes later, at the baggage carousel in Pittsburgh, I grabbed my suitcase and glanced toward Johnny and Fred. They were looking toward me. They waved and Fred shouted, “Nice to meet you Bob. Hope to see you again.” I actually believed him. I still do. That was my best celebrity encounter though not nearly as thrilling as the day my sister and I chased fame through the terminal in Detroit. I’ll not experience that excitement ever again.

Through the last couple years, as a result of some success in my work, I myself have a small degree of celebrity status. By this I mean that I get recognized very often—mostly at the airport. It’s always people who are happy to share how much they’ve enjoyed a performance—people who just want to say thank you. It’s nice to never feel the urge to run away like Gary did. I always try to have an encouraging smile and a ready handshake like Jim. Most of all, I try to be loving and real and patient like Fred. People deserve that much. After all, they didn’t initiate the relationship.

Our parents were not familiar with the band we’d chased through the terminal though my mother didn’t care much for their name. We made our way outside to await the plane that would carry us to San Francisco. My father lined us up on a bench. My little sister Ingrid was, of course, clueless. Sally tried to look composed the way she might imagine the girls in "Seventeen". I was still elated, reliving every moment of our breathtaking pursuit. He snapped our picture.

Slides 13 and 15

2010-01-24T17:09:00.025-06:00

The Slide: My grandfather, sister and mother

The Date: Christmas Eve, 1963

The Photographer: My father

Film is exposed at the speed of light but most of us don’t move that quickly. That’s why we’re so often caught unprepared in photographs. In this slide my mother is somewhere between facial expressions and my big sister who is tenderly cradling our little sister’s doll… well… who knows what going on there? But my grandfather, the subject of the photo, smiles in obvious delight at his Christmas gift. It is a King Size paint-by-number oil set from Craftint. My father raised the camera, focused carefully and snapped the picture.

“Sheesh Dad,” Sally complained. “Thanks for letting me know. That’s gonna look stupid.”

My grandfather turned the box around so I could see. The two panels shown on the front were shown on the back as well though one of them, the one of The Last Supper, was pictured in stunning color. I followed along as he read aloud.

“CRAFTINT KING SIZE DELUXE

PAINT-BY-NUMBER OIL PAINTING OUTFIT

The Ultimate In Paint-By-Number Sets

Each set contains, two huge 18 x 24 genuine artist's panels, 30 numbered jars of oil paint, 3 deluxe artist's brushes, a large bottle of brush cleaner, and complete directions.

It's exciting and challenging for you to paint the 2 beautiful panels in each King Size Set. Remember BOTH of the panels paint-up in FULL COLOR! One is shown in black-and-white merely to withhold the thrill of achieving the actual FULL COLOR results!”

“Wow,” I said. “Let’s do it!”

My grandfather laughed. “No Bobby. I think I’ll work on these myself. This project is going to take some very careful work. You see, this is what you call real art.” And with that he raised the age- old question. What is art?

My mother and father bought the gift knowing he would love it. He had retired from the bottle factory and needed something to keep himself busy. And, where some would suffer from the tedium of filling one paint number at a time for hours on end, my grandfather had just finished forty years on the line putting bottles in boxes one by one, hour after hour, day after day. Tedium would not be a problem. Furthermore he had an artistic bent—or at least a creative one. He loved to build things. He played nearly a dozen instruments including the musical saw. He sang, whistled, whittled and carved. And he’d been hinting about a paint-by-number set. For years he’d seen full-page Life magazine advertisements promising that anyone could be a Rembrandt. Of course it wasn’t quite true. What they meant was, anyone could put paint on a panel - or as Craftint called it a HUGE 18 X 24 genuine artist’s panel –and after a few days or maybe weeks they could have a painting that reminded one of Rembrandt. But, of course, Rembrandt never painted the way these paint-by-number painters did. I wonder though…what if he had? What if Rembrandt or Leonardo or Michelangelo or Picasso had decided to create this way? I’m guessing these guys could have still pulled off some real art?

Craftint did not start the odd revolution. In fact Michelangelo may be guilty of inspiring the whole thing by assigning pre-numbered pieces of his famous chapel ceiling to his students. But Palmer Paints, the first of many paint-by-number companies, launched Craft Master in 1951. In the first two years they sold nearly five million kits created by a staff of twenty-five full time artist/designers. Wide-eyed kittens, Scotty puppies, New England seascapes, Swiss Alps, tropical lagoons, Alaskan glaciers, oriental shrines, Venetian canals, snowy egrets and yes even nudes—all could be painted by anyone able to hold a brush and see. Stores were forced to set up entire paint-by-number departments to handle the rush of sales. In what became a huge publicity ploy, red-faced judges at The San Francisco Art Show awarded third prize to a Craft Master painting. Even President Eisenhower was a paint-by-number enthusiast giving kits to his entire White House Staff for Christmas. Television stars “Ozzie and Harriet” were seen on their show dipping a brush into tiny vials of premixed color and painting away at the kitchen table.

Paint-by-numbers were an American craze. Nearly every home had one hanging somewhere. Art critics were, of course, beside themselves—nearly apoplectic—but they held little sway over America. Certainly no one in my town paid them any attention. We lived in a fairly artless, culturally deprived part of the Appalachians. Did we think paint-by-numbers were tacky? Hey, we’d just spent four months gluing together a ten thousand-piece puzzle of the Taj Mahal. We hung it over the fireplace. We were probably the wrong people to ask that question.

“Okay,” the critics said, “but all this staying in the lines is defeating the artistic process and destroying the creative spirit.”

Well, I wasn’t so sure that was true. After all, staying in the lines was pretty much what we did in the 1950s. And who was to say we couldn’t get a little crazy once in a while--maybe use vial number 9 to paint all the 1s and 4s. I’m not saying I ever got so wild but hey—I could have.

My son Nate is a real painter—an artist and teacher. We often find ourselves grappling about the art world. Judy and I recently returned from a trip to Washington where we visited The National Gallery of Art. It was there, one floor down from a gorgeous exhibit of small French landscapes that we gazed upon a shower stall hanging on the wall. It was an old ceramic shower stall just hanging there—about three feet off the ground, placed at a twenty degree angle. I later told Nate, “I’m not sure how many of my tax dollars were used to create this grand masterpiece but whatever I paid was too much.”

“You have to understand Dad,” he said, “There are two camps. There are the fine art people and then there are the conceptual artists. Most of the time, they don’t have much in common.” He went on to explain that fine art is often quite beautiful… or if not beautiful at least displaying the effort of a skillful artist. Fine art is the kind most of us like to hang in the dining room. On the other hand, conceptual art is not concerned with skill. Conceptual art is all about the idea as in, “Hey I have an idea. I think I’ll write a grant to hang that old shower stall on a wall. I’ll put it about three feet above the ground at, let’s say, a twenty-degree angle. I was thinking ‘bout the National Gallery.”

I know that art appreciation is a matter of personal taste. I’ve seen television ads and heard the announcer screaming, “The Starving Artist Sale at The Holiday Inn! Three days only! Original paintings! All for under $14!” A thirty-second ad is long enough to know why these artists are starving and why some should probably die. But, I gotta say… forced to decide between these works and an askew shower stall hanging in my living room, I’m going with the crappy paintings every time.

Nate just earned his MFA. He spent two years creating paintings using old 50s snapshots as source material. I think he did a great job combining skill and concept. In his own words: “My paintings navigate and comment on the historical space of 1950s America as seen in discarded snapshots and slides. Paint and brush become the tools for possessing a photograph and the memories of people and places. The camera captures a moment of frozen time, but by slowly remaking the photographic image into a painting the viewer is compelled to reconsider what is depicted and to search for its inherent meaning.”

What a great concept. And the viewer is indeed compelled—which, I think, is a characteristic of real art. Real art compels one to ponder, consider, contemplate, feel, act, change and on and on.

So here’s what I’m thinking. Conceptual art is about the idea. That being so, can you think of a more exciting idea than the one Dan Robbins thought? In 1950, Dan was a twenty-six year old artist working as a package designer at Palmer Paints. He had an idea. I can’t say he thought of it as conceptual art. It was probably just a way to make money—but what an idea! He decided to make paintings and then deconstruct them into areas of pure unblended color, each color represented by a number. Then he would mail the numbered drawings to millions of people around the world. Many of these people would never have held a paintbrush in their lives but that was the idea. Dan would convince them that if they followed his simple instructions they could create a work of art. If they believed him, it would result in millions of paintings. What would happen in the art world… no…. what would happen in the world if he could pull this off? Well he did pull it off. And what difference did it make? I can only speak for one man.

During January and February of 1964, nearly everyday after school, I stopped by my grandparent’s to see my grandfather’s progress. Each day I got more excited. And so did he. As I walked in the front door I could see him seated at the dining room table covered with newspapers. He peered through the bottom of his bifocals carefully filling in the spaces.

“I finished all the 26s this afternoon,” he said proudly. “Now I’m thinking it’s time to stop before I go blind. Look it here.” Then he held up the panel so I could see and each day I was more amazed. If I stood far enough away, all the pure colors blended beautifully. “Yes sirree Bobby,” he said. “This is gonna be some real art.”

What did Dan Robbin’s dream mean to my grandfather? I can honestly say that I never saw him happier.

So I wonder...was it real art?

Slides 32,46,65,66 and 9

2010-01-03T12:10:00.027-06:00

The Top Slide: The Evangelical Covenant Church

The Photographer: My sister Sally

The Date: Summer 1967

My town had only a couple thousand residents but boasted a dozen churches, though actually I don’t recall a lot of boasting. The churches were all small. The Methodist and Presbyterian were probably the largest but even so I don’t think they could have squeezed more than a hundred-fifty in their pews. Our little building exceeded fire code at a hundred though seldom was that a threat.

Speaking of fire codes, the front doors were the only way in or out of our church—makes me shudder a bit. On the other side of these doors was a small entry area with coat racks and hat shelves. The sanctuary was straight ahead through glossy painted, creaking double- swinging doors. A carpet runner bisected the pews—ten rows on the left, eight on the right. There were fewer on the right due to the heating register in the floor. The upward blast through that metal grate would easily melt an old lady’s nylons were she forced to sit above it on a winter morning.

At the front were two elevated platforms. To the left stood an upright piano and to the right an electric organ. Between them a large wooden pulpit anchored the room. Behind the pulpit sat three chairs. The center one (the one with the arms) was largest and, oddly, never sat upon. When I was seven the pastor’s son told me that no one sat in that chair because that one was for God. This seemed plausible. Even at so young an age, I had a vague conceptual understanding of God’s attributes like omni-presence (meaning always there), omniscience (meaning that he is all knowing) and, of course, omni-powerful. I also understood, purely from personal experience, that God was omni-invisible. So he might very well sit in that chair. Who could tell?

From the beginning of my life I was around the church a lot. My father was the chairman for thirty some years as well as a Sunday school teacher. My mother served as treasurer for most of my life and both parents sang in the choir. From elementary age on, I helped my father mow grass, rake leaves, shovel walks, vacuum carpets, scrape and paint—really whatever needed doing. I was happy to be grown and gone the morning he pulled on hip waders and descended into the church basement to pump out two feet of raw storm sewage. The man was dedicated.

I remember being in the building one Saturday while my mother dusted the pews in preparation for the Sunday service. I wore my hair short in those days, much as I do now, and I liked it to stick up straight in the front. Like many boys, I used a nearly miraculous product called Butch Wax. It came in a blue plastic tube about four inches long. To get the product on your hair you twisted off the cap and then with one finger pushed the wax from the bottom until it oozed out the top. Then you placed the tube onto the front of your hair and slid it upward. Boy, that did it! If you left your hair alone it would not move all day or perhaps ever again.

On this particular Saturday, I horsed around in the sanctuary waiting for my mother to finish. I don’t recall how it happened but somehow my Butch Wax fell inside the top of the upright piano. On tiptoes, hanging by my armpits from the hinged lid, I gazed deep into the guts of the instrument. The tube was gone. My mother had not seen what happened, so I quietly closed the lid and innocently ran my finger up and down the keys to hear if anything sounded at all… well… waxy. Fortunately, everything seemed fine so I was off the hook. Of course, if God was sitting in his center chair, he could hardly have missed what happened but I wasn’t sure it qualified as a sin so I kept it to myself.

It was my secret until well into my twenties though by then I’d long abandoned any guilt. Honestly, I’d nearly forgotten. Judy and I visited my parents one Christmastime and went to the church with my father to help decorate the tree. This involved rolling the piano a few feet to one side. Normally it was a simple procedure but this year one of the piano casters would not roll. Stooping to investigate I was delighted to find my old tube of Butch Wax jammed between the metal wheel and housing. Judging from the wax’s smell and color, it had aged none at all.

In retrospect, I should not have worried that a little wax would harm the music in our church because, honestly, it could not have gotten worse. Like most churches, we sang the great old hymns of the faith. Unlike most churches, we sang them at half speed—maybe slower. Everyone needed three or four breaths just to make it through the first line. When we finally reached the chorus, I could not hold a whole note without growing dizzy and tilting toward my grandmother. Occasionally people just passed out. True, it happened most often in the summer so heat was certainly a factor but it always happened while singing. My mother warned my grandfather not to lock his knees. This was easier said than done. Many hymns had seven or eight verses—maybe more—with a chorus sung between each. That meant my old grandfather stood bent kneed for ten or twelve minutes. He never passed out but often, early in the week, found himself unable to walk.

Sometimes my father and I tried to push the tempo, singing extra loudly, hoping the organist might follow along but she would not do it. Or perhaps could not. Either way it was a tug of war we always lost. Most likely, it was a tug of war she didn’t know was happening. I don’t think she even heard us. Certainly she was unaware of her own hearing aid dueling with several others in the congregation causing the neighbor’s dog to howl mournfully. It was a sad sound coloring even our more joyful dirges. The first time I heard Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys, I remember thinking, “That weird space-aged instrument in the chorus sounds just like Sunday mornings.”

Music was not my only complaint. There were also the pews. It is clear to me now that the pews in my church were not designed to be sat upon. They were hard maple and slippery beyond a child’s control. The back and seat were set at ninety-degrees though, I swear, the back tilted in a bit in several rows. During the service my parents quietly (you know the look) encouraged me not to squirm and to sit up like a big boy—bottom in the corner, legs dangling over the edge. This I found impossible as sitting like a big boy with my bottom in the corner meant my little boy legs did not reach far enough to dangle over the edge. Consequently my calves rested painfully on the front of the pew cutting off my circulation within minutes and causing what I called “stinglies” to vibrate from my toes half way up my body. At that point I slid noisily onto the floor and then could not stand because my legs were no longer connected. One of my parents would put me back on the pew whereupon the cycle repeated and this brings me to my next complaint—the preaching.

The preaching was after all the only reason I endured the pews and honestly I never really understood much of it. My earliest recollection was feeling frightened by an angry man, Reverend Perry, who strutted and screamed. The style was not consistent with our denominational heritage and fortunately he was our pastor for only a couple years. Unfortunately those were the very years I became able to retain memories. After he left, it was a new pastor every year or so and not one prepared sermons for children. So a sermon was twenty-five minutes of stinglies and mind numbing incomprehension to be endured until we all mumbled the final fourteen-verse hymnslog during which time my grandmother could have killed, cleaned and cooked a Sunday chicken.

At the beginning of seventh grade, I was required to enter a two-year study called Confirmation. Two buddies and I met with our pastor for an hour or so every Saturday morning and I did perhaps another hour of homework each week. We were given an elementary overview of the Bible, Church History and Christian Belief but none of it felt elementary to me. It felt important, sometimes confusing and mostly difficult particularly the memorization—the books of the Bible, The Apostle’s Creed and much more that I’ve forgotten. At the end of two years, if we believed what we were taught and were willing to say so in front of the congregation, we were invited to join the church as official members. I believed it all and gladly joined but I can’t say I enjoyed the Confirmation experience very much. Actually, I can’t say I remember it much.

I have one slide taken on Confirmation Sunday. I stand at the front of the church. I am white robed like my friends Curt and Phil on each side. Behind us stands our pastor in a black suit. I don’t know whose fault it is but the picture is terribly out of focus. I don’t know whose fault it is—probably my own—but that’s the way I remember Confirmation too.

Fortunately my church experience was not all so difficult. In fact some of it was wonderful. Our congregation began in 1900 as The Swedish Mission Covenant Church. By the time I was born they’d dropped their Nordic moniker but held on to many of their best traditions. One of them was the annual Christmas Smorgasbord—probably the envy of every other Christian in town and most of the heathens too. Since we had nowhere to eat at the church, we rented the top floor of the Grange Hall. Parking on side streets, we walked the sidewalks between deep mounds of shoveled snow and climbed the crooked outside stairs to the banquet hall. Even before opening the door our nostrils flared with the spicy smell of a couple hundred thousand Swedish calories.

The windows dripped from heat rising off tables full of steaming food. In the kitchen, women in fine dresses beneath colorfully printed aprons looked as if they’d gained a few pounds from the sheer smell of it all. Meatballs, korv sausage, thuringer, smoked salmon, baked ham, pickled herring, deviled eggs, baked beans, rice pudding, lime Jell-O with pear halves and maraschino cherries, pickled beats, cucumbers, olives, limpa rye, hardtack, pepparkakor—have you had enough or should I go on? This was the kind of feast that historically made pillaging Vikings sleep for months.

As a special treat, at the end of the evening, each child was given a clear plastic gift bag containing a candy cane, a Hershey bar and a fresh Florida orange. This may not seem like a big deal today but it was then. In those days it was hard to find an orange in the wintertime and these oranges were the size of softballs. The candy canes were a foot long. I’m serious. And the Hershey Company hasn’t made a chocolate bar that big since Barney Fife left for Mt. Pilot—since Will Robinson got lost in space.

My church knew how to celebrate. Every summer, following the service on one particular Sunday we headed out to the Hooley property for a picnic. I never knew Mr. Hooley but he had a nice piece of woodland beside an open field and he offered it for our use. Picnic Sunday was the only time I went to church without a suit and tie. After the service we climbed in our cars and headed out of town. My father and some of the other men spent the previous afternoon scything grass for softball and putting up long tables in the grove. Ten minutes after we arrived, charcoal grills poured smoke from hot dogs and burgers. We shoved our hands into deep tubs of ice water searching for homemade root beer or Grape Nehi and then the eating began. Insert half of the Smorgasbord above and then add hotdogs, burgers, barbequed chicken, corn on the cob, apple, cherry and strawberry rhubarb pie topped off with rich vanilla ice cream made on site. What a great afternoon.

So here’s my point. I did not always love being at my church but I loved my church. Outside my home, it was the most important place in my life. Why is this so? Because of the story I heard there again and again. I could not escape the story then nor can I now. From my boyhood it wove itself seamlessly into my being. Here it is in a nutshell:

God who was omni-always (that’s my word for around from the beginning) made us all, made us perfectly and loved us completely. It couldn’t get any better than that. He also made us with free will, which was the best thing to do but unfortunately we used it to turn against him and that got us into terrible trouble because we became separated from our very source of life. This meant that we had to experience death. Death hadn’t even existed until then. So to help us out, God made us some rules. There weren’t even a dozen but we couldn’t follow them, which only made things worse. Some people were so miserable they just threw up their hands and quit trying. The only good thing about the rules is that they convinced us we couldn’t get back to God by being good. And that’s just what he wanted us to know.

Then he did an amazing thing. He came down to earth as a human baby. Talk about a great disguise! Only a few suspected who this baby might really be. Even his mother forgot from time to time. Anyway, the baby (who was named Jesus meaning “The Lord is Salvation”) grew into a boy. We don’t know very much about his early years. Only one story is told about him getting separated from his parents during a pilgrimage. He was twelve and they were scared nearly to death. One can imagine them thinking, “It’s one thing to look after a God-baby but quite another when he gets to Jr. High.”

The only other thing we’re told is that he never sinned. Then in his early thirties, after amazing many people with his teaching (not to mention his miracles) he got into trouble. He angered the religious authorities of his day until they figured out a way to get him sentenced to death. So Jesus, who was innocent and could have called down a few battalions of angels to defend himself (that’s a whole other story) instead allowed himself to be executed upon a cross. It was his idea to pay the price for all the sins that men and women would ever commit. I know. It’s crazy. Omni-crazy even. And there’s more. Jesus didn’t stay dead but instead rose back to life proving that he was God, more powerful than death and able to offer us a gift of life—full, free and forever.

This is the story I heard from my earliest boyhood. I didn’t often hear it all in one sitting, but week after week, month after month, year after year, in Bible stories and sermons and dragging hymns, through Advent and Christmas, Holy week and Easter, smorgasbords and picnics, in the lives of people sitting next to me in the pews, some who lived well and others not so much, the story came alive. It belonged to me. I could not be myself without it.

Of course, there is much more to tell. This is only a snapshot—little more than a thumbnail really. I know that some people haven’t given the story much thought. Others know it well and ridicule the whole thing. I stand with those who believe it is true.

At the end of the service, Rev. Perry would shout, “Let us pray.” I loved it when he said those words. It meant he was almost finished and then we could go home and eat.

Slides 20, 44, 45 and 64

2009-11-20T17:37:00.018-06:00

The Top Photo: Mickey Mouse and me

The Date: Early July, 1965

The Photographer: My cousin Peter

I went with my Californian cousins to Disneyland. I may have been the first in my town to go there—maybe the first in all of Northern Pennsylvania. People from our parts didn’t travel much. A trip to Disneyland was a big deal in 1965. I suppose it still is but back then Disneyworld was six years from opening and Disneyland, Walt’s original dream, was still one of a kind. Walt himself kept a little apartment on the second floor of the fire station, just inside the main gate, and it was not unusual to see him strolling down Main Street greeting his guests. Like most American kids, I watched Walt Disney Presents every Sunday night so I was familiar with many scenes around the park. What I’d not seen I imagined well.

I was twelve years old, only days from turning thirteen as evidenced by the slides in the carousel. In one I stand in my madress hat with Mickey Mouse, shaking his white glove, feeling a little silly knowing I might be too old for my level of excitement. In another, two mermaids lay sunning on the rocks of a serene lagoon, apparently unaware that I am photographing their alluring, scaly forms from The Sky Ride gondola floating high above. I remember viewing the processed slide for the first time and being disappointed that the mermaids appear so far away. I recalled capturing them in my viewfinder. I remembered focusing the lens so carefully. Believe me, I had 'em! They were right there! I rode The Sky Ride a lot that day. The ticket taker knew my name.

On one of my flights I was stunned to find the mermaids gone. I peered deep into the coral green. A fleet of grey submarines followed a rail around the lagoon. There! Right beside a sub, I saw one swimming porpoise like only more attractive than any porpoise I’d envisioned. Even from so high I could see she was beautiful. I had to get on that sub for a closer look. My cousin Peter rode the gondola in the seat across from me. He was a year younger. He stretched his chubby frame to look over the hand rail dangling spit from his lips. It was a game he’d nearly perfected. The idea was to let the spit stretch toward the ground a few inches—maybe as many as four or five—and then suck it back in before it fell on the tourists below. Unsuccessful in his last attempt he jerked his head back in the gondola and slunk down as far as the safety bar would allow.

“Oh Sheesh,” he said, howling in laughter, “I think I got that lady bad.”

“Hey, you wanna try that submarine ride?” I said casually.

“Naw. Look at the line. It’s clear over to the Matterhorn. Let’s do this some more.”

So we took another ride across. This time from a distance I could see the creatures were back, tail fins flapping playfully, bodies glistening in the late afternoon sun. When we were directly above them, the gondola stopped for about a minute swinging slowly back and forth. I did not know for certain that it was an answer to prayer. It may have been a coincidence. Either way, I took the opportunity to snap a picture. I looked at my cousin. He was about year away from sharing my interest.

“I think I’ll try that sub,” I suggested again. “I always wanted to ride one. You comin’ or not?"

We stood for a little over an hour and as we neared the front of the line I peered toward the outcropping of rock where the mermaids lived. They were gone. This either meant they’d punched their time cards and blended into the mostly human park populace or perhaps they were back in the water. At the front of the line, we squeezed through the turn style and descended the stairs into one of the eight subs circling the lagoon. Ours was called Nautilus. I grabbed the first tiny seat, flipped it down and peered out my porthole into a coral reef possessing beauty only Disney and God could create. Slowly the sub began to move. We heard loud sonar pings and the voice of our captain. ”Let me be the first to welcome you to the port of Rainbow Ridge, the gateway to the wonderland of the sea. Please keep your hands and arms inside the submarine. The fish get mighty hungry!”

My cousin looking through his own window said, “Oh cool, look at that big fish. It looks almost real.”

I hardly heard their words. I shoved my nose against the tiny window and tried to look right or left, my breath condensing on the cold glass. Crabs, spiny lobster, a large grouper, a giant squid and then more sonar pings.

“Now ahead of us, folks, is a seaweed forest. The submarine’s pressurized atmosphere sometimes get to you, and makes tangles of seaweed take on strange shapes like fish and maybe even mermaids.” I shoved my face against the glass. No mermaids.

The captain droned on, “Now we’re going deep into the ocean to view a dazzling maritime graveyard.” A mournful sound filled the submarine echoing my fading hopes. “There my friends is the saddest sound of the ocean,” the captain said. “That is the song of the hump-backed whale.”

He talked the entire time but peering deeply into the ocean depths, beneath polar caps and past Neptune’s sputtering paint pots, I heard little. After seven or eight minutes he said, “Well I can see we’re once again approaching Rainbow Ridge and we’ll now begin our ascent. You may need to pop your ears.” I’d seen the subs from the sky so I knew we’d not descended but now my heart sunk deeply. This was our last day. My cousin would never agree to wait in line again and we couldn’t stay on for another ride. We’d tried that twice at Pirates of the Caribbean and been told by a human pirate that we ought not try it again if we hoped to live another day. He let out a laugh and a loud arghhh. Then leaning near our faces with a distinctly southern Californian accent he whispered menacingly, “You - really - do - not - want - to - mess - with - me. You understand don’t you?” That seemed a bit harsh for one of Walt’s employees but yes… we understood.

I was about to pull away from my porthole when I saw a splash of bubbles and something swimming toward me. I cupped my hands goggle like around my eyes and tight against the glass. Yes! It was a mermaid! She swam to my window, reoriented her body vertically, smiled and blew me a kiss. Graceful bubbles escaped her lovely lips as I felt my face flush. She was an exquisite specimen. Her scales, glimmering rainbow colors in the refracted coral light, modestly covered her partially human form. She ascended slowly toward the surface and I took her in fully—thick flowing hair, tanned human skin, dark eyes, two large frustratingly effective clamshells and luminescent scales flashing tiny dots of light on the palms of my hands. She was only inches beyond my face. Then with one flip of her impossibly long fin she was gone.

My camera hung around my neck but I never thought to take a picture. Instead I experienced the moment. The sub stopped and the captain thanked us. “I hope you’ve enjoyed your trip into the wonderland of the sea. Please lift your seat as a courtesy to our next guests.”

My cousin said, “Cool.” I looked at him and realized he not seen her. The portholes were too small, the glass too thick and of course there was that oddity of refracted light. Only I’d seen her smile, felt her kiss and gazed upon her lithe sparkling form. She was mine alone.

Twenty years later and three thousand miles away, I sat around a New England meal with my wife Judy and our closest friends. I shared my siren tale. Laughing, my buddy said, “What a great picture of that peculiar passage from boyhood to being a man. And… it sure rings true. Our son turned thirteen last week. I opened his dresser drawer the other day. On one side were his Legos and on the other side his shaving cream and razor.”

Ah yes. I suspect it was something like that for us all. For me it was Mickey on one slide and mermaids on the other.

Slides 95, 96, 97, 98, 6 and 4

2009-10-05T12:15:00.014-05:00

The Slide: Judy and me in Sweden

The Date: June of '75

The Photographer: My father

My paternal grandfather grew up in the province of Smaland in southern Sweden. It is to this day a beautiful land of misty white birch, fields of buttercups and stonewalls everywhere. The walls are not decorative like those in New England. The walls in Smaland are big, five feet tall, six feet across the top, stretching field after field and longer every year.

Each spring the fields yield an abundance of new boulders. The farmers gather this crop they did not sow and pile it higher along the walls preparing for a more fruitful harvest. This hard land was my grandfather's home.

Barely more than a boy, he embraced his mom and dad for the last time and left those rocky fields of tiny potatoes, dreaming of deeper, darker, American soil. The fields he envisioned were probably in Minnesota, where I now live, but he had no idea how vast his new country was. By the time he reached western Pennsylvania, years had passed. He now knew the love of a wife who spoke his language. He knew the joy and worrisome responsibility of young children. He knew the hopeless monotony of American factories and the sweat of the oil fields. And he knew the ache in an immigrant's heart—an ache for which there was no remedy.

One day he saw something that filled him with joy. A "For Sale" sign stood in a field by a farm nestled on a hillside. The farmhouse didn't look like much and was far too small for his growing family, but it was every bit as good as what he'd known in Sweden, maybe better. There was plenty of lumber to build a barn. The few fields were dark soil, and most wonderfully, there were boulders everywhere. He was finally "home" in America.

My father grew up on that poor farm, sharing the tiny house with his mom, his dad and five siblings. It was a tough life but joy nestled on that rocky hillside. My father's mother, my grandmother, had not met her husband's family in Sweden but she wrote to his sisters faithfully, for sixty years, nearly every week.

In 1966, my grandfather died. My father felt terribly sad that Grandpa never made it back to Sweden. "I should have taken him for a visit," he said. "I could have made it happen." So for his mom, he did make it happen. In June of '75, my father, mother and younger sister Ingrid drove to the farm, picked up my grandmother and began a long journey back to the homeland. There she would meet her beloved sisters in law, Anna and Ruth, to whom she had written most of her life.

During the same weeks, Judy and I traveled back from Africa where we spent our first year of marriage. The chance to meet my family in Sweden was serendipitous. We had planned to spend another year in Zaire but due to Judy's continual struggle with tropical disease, we decided to come home early. She'd had a tough time. From the moment we stepped off the plane, she suffered from the heat and humidity, which by comparison made most American cities—Miami for example—seem brisk and invigorating. It's safe to say her first year of marriage was less romantic than she'd anticipated.

Within three weeks of our arrival I was flat on my back with malaria. It's a scary disease. As the missionaries say, "The first week you hurt so bad you're afraid you might die. But by the second week, you feel so much worse you're afraid you might not." Judy was just nineteen and spent the first month of marriage playing nurse to a delirious husband, crawling on all fours to and from the bathroom and eating through a straw. To make things worse, most of our new friends were missionaries who had long ago made the tough cultural adjustments and didn't seem to remember our novice fears. I believe missionaries are the most forgetful people I've ever known. Let me explain.

The first week we were there, the deacons at our church organized seven consecutive suppers in missionary homes. Each evening the stories began over salads and fresh garden vegetables and continued through chicken mwamba (a delicious combination of chicken, palm oil and peanut butter gravy over white rice). The dish is surprisingly tasty, though not recommended for seven consecutive evenings. At some point during the meal, our host would say, "So, are you starting to learn your way around?"

"Well, no," I'd reply. "Actually, we're still waiting for our drivers' licenses. Until they come, we're stuck at home."

"Well, praise God for that!" our hostess would say. Then with a little laugh, "Believe me, the longer you're stuck at home, the safer you are. Most of the drivers out there are little kids! Arthur, tell them what happened to Mary."

Each evening the names changed, but the stories remained much the same. Mary was back-ended by a ten-year-old cabby whose uncle, a government official, demanded a payoff or Mary's family would be kicked out of the country.

A guy named Jim stopped his car with the front bumper two inches over the crosswalk and was thrown in jail. Of course the phones didn't work, so no one in the church knew where he was. It took three days to find him. In Africa, prisoners are fed by their families, but Jim was single, so Jim "fasted".

The name Verner Pauls remained consistent through all seven evenings. Poor Verner's car was slammed from the side and shoved into a crowd of people. Verner wasn't hurt, but apparently someone in the crowd was. When he attempted to help them, a mob over turned his Fiat, set it on fire, and beat Verner within a breath of his life. He flew back to Goshen, Indiana, and no one expected him to return very soon. Usually, following a fairly detailed description of Verner's battered body, someone sensitively noticed Judy's tension. Trying to steer the conversation in a more pleasant direction they'd ask, "Seen any big snakes yet?"

This would lead us into Green Mamba territory.

"Oh, yeah, deadliest snake in the world," our host would warn. "Why, they can kill a horse in three minutes!" Since I'd seen no horses, I was surprised everybody seemed so fixated on that three-minute equestrian statistic. " 'Course, if it bit you, you'd be lucky to last thirty seconds. Did you hear 'bout that Bower girl who got bit last Christmas?"

Well… yes. We had heard but that didn't matter. They'd tell us anyway about little Lori, who would have been dead if she hadn't been bit in the fatty part of her bum and if her dad hadn't had serum right in the fridge and if the houseboy hadn't chopped the Mamba's long green head off in mid-flight just before it bit her again. The conversation usually ended with our hostess saying, "More dessert anyone?"

I don't know why this behavior surprised me. I suppose it did because one would expect loving Christian people to be more sensitive. On the other hand these were not just loving Christian people. These were missionaries and they are a different breed. I remember their type coming to our church when I was a kid. I endured many long slide shows. Most of the pictures were of church buildings, hospitals, maybe a baptismal service in some muddy river—fairly calm stuff. But always mixed in the middle was a shot of the smiling missionary standing with a painted tribal chief, mud red, holding a long spear, sporting a belt of monkey skulls and always… always someone's femur bone stuck through his nose.

"This is my dear friend Chief Bonsongungu," they'd say. "He comes Wednesdays for tea."

In truth, I believe missionaries are remarkable people. And, who knows, we might have joined their ranks had Judy not contracted malaria, typhoid fever, shigellosis, amoebic dysentery and a lovely orphaned family of tapeworms—all in the first six months. On our way home, stopping in Sweden to meet our family, Judy was down twenty ill affordable pounds and I didn't look too beefy myself.

We made our way to my parent's hotel having not seen them in a year. Needless to say they were shocked by our appearance. Their daughter in law was still beautiful but rail thin and their son looked like an indigent. I'd not touched my hair or beard since our wedding day.

For the next week we traveled with the family and my grandmother nearly wore us out. She was the first one up in the morning—ready to go. Stockholm, Goteborg, Malmo and then over to Copenhagen for a day or two at Tivoli Gardens and an evening with the Danish Circus—my grandmother's first circus. She loved it all. Finally the big day arrived, the reason for her journey, the day she would meet Ruth and Anna.

It was a sunny summer morning. We drove our van to the small village of Nybro and then headed out of town into the countryside. My grandmother translated aloud the directions she'd received from Anna while my mother compared each tiny farm to a black and white photo she held in her hand. "Okay, I think we may have found it," my mother said glancing back and forth between picture and landscape. "Bob," she said to my father, "turn here. This is it."

For a hundred yards, we followed a dirt drive—a high wall of boulders on the right, white birch and pine on the left and at the end a farmhouse the color of dandelions. As we approached, an old man rose from a porch swing yelling to those inside. We pulled up in front of the house. I slid the van door open. Two old women shuffled through the screen door. My grandmother saw them and uttered a soft sound. I helped her step from the van as the women made their way down from the porch. All three laughed aloud with outstretched arms before meeting in the middle of the dusty drive where they wrapped themselves together and wept.

Other distant cousins quietly appeared standing with us in a circle around the old women. No one spoke. It was a holy moment. Later formal introductions were made in a joyous blend of languages.

Over the next couple days more cousins arrived, many meals were prepared and eaten, hundreds of photo snapped and then sadly it was time to go. Of course there were more tears. For my grandmother, Anna and Ruth this was a final goodbye. "Okay ladies," my father said, "one more shot." They stood together—Anna, my little grandmother Gerda and Ruth. My father snapped their picture.

The reunion was the highlight of our trip but not the highlight of the eventual slide show. My father had taken most every picture. My mother made it clear that unless my father was in the shot, he would be taking it. Judy and I didn't help much because we used our own camera—a tiny Kodak 110 that we'd carried through Africa. I bought it because I loved its' compact size and because the salesman assured me that everything was going that way. "In the next ten years," he said, "the 110 will become the camera of choice. " Unfortunately, that meant I had no choice about buying the tiny 110 projector since the slides were half the size of my father's more common, supposedly soon to be obsolete 35mm.

Several weeks later, back in the States, all our relatives gathered at my parent's for an evening of slides. They were excited to hear all about Grandma's trip and vicariously meet their Swedish family. Judy and I were there too. Earlier in the day I had organized the slides, discarding the really bad ones and placing the others chronologically in the carousels. My father had returned to work that week so he appreciated my help never questioning my motive. But I had one. Though he did know, he had not taken all the slides. I took one.

We were in a Swedish village. My mother needed something in the drugstore so while my father ran into to get it, my mother stayed in the van with my grandmother. My sister and Judy and I got out to stretch our legs and it was then we saw the advertisement. It was on a large column right in the center of the street. It was unlike any ad I'd seen in modern 1970s America. For that matter, it was unlike any ad I'd seen anywhere. Ingrid commented first, "Sheesh! You won't see that back home."

"No kidding," Judy said. And then laughing, "In fact Bob, I don't think I want you even looking at it."

But I did look at it and I thought to myself, "This advertisement is quite beautiful. It is quintessentially Swedish and I think Dad needs to share it with the family back home."

"Mom," I said through her open window, "give me the camera." I removed the cover, set the shutter speed as quickly as I could and snapped the picture. My father exited the store. We climbed in the van and drove away.

Weeks later, our living room was filled with extended family and a few close church friends. About 9:30, we all agreed it was dark enough and I began the show. My grandmother commented throughout, particularly delighting in the shots of Tivoli and the Danish Circus. "I couldn't believe it," she said, "These crazy elephants sat on stools and this young lady drove her motorcycle on a tight wire right over my head. It was so loud. Oy yoy yoy!" Then she added,

"The lady wasn't wearing very much either." Everyone laughed.

Toward the end of the evening came the slides of the reunion, the moment the three "sisters" met and the litany of relatives—who was who and how we were all related. Finally the three old women appeared on the screen posing at their final goodbye.

The room fell quiet.

The projector fan hummed.

No one spoke.

"You know Dad, " I said, "these are beautiful slides."

"Well… thanks," he said softly.

I turned to my uncle. "Don't you agree Carl?"

"I sure do Bobby," he said, "I think they're really something. Makes me so sad I couldn't be there too. They're beautiful. Really great."

I turned back to my father. "I mean it Dad. You really did capture the experience through these images. We can see your heart.

More silent agreement…

Oh look," I said, pretending to fuss with the projector. "I think there's one more." I pushed "forward" on the remote and an image appeared. It was taken in the center of a tiny Swedish village. There was a moment of quiet and then laughter—loud and long laughter. When my father was able to breathe he offered his stammering disclaimer but no one accepted it.

My uncle Glenn, beautifully dead pan said, "I'm disgusted. Come on Martha we're going home."

More laughter.

I had anticipated this moment for over three weeks. It was worth the wait.

Slides 16 and 71

2009-09-21T17:04:00.018-05:00

Slide 71: Me on the couch

The Date: December 1971

The Photographer: Unknown

The photo shows me at age twenty, home from college for the Christmas holiday. It could be Easter but camouflaged in the lower right hand corner is one red Poinsettia. It's Christmas time.

I'm slouching comfortably in the corner of our old sofa having found my sweet spot. The soft fabric is printed with early Americana but the design screams 1970s, as does the orange wall behind. The wall wasn't always orange. The previous summer it was a lovely understated mossy green that my family enjoyed for years… so I painted it orange.

For several winters we had ice problems on our roof and the resultant leaking caused cracks in the living room ceiling. I had a couple free weeks between the end of my freshman year and my summer job so my father hired me to Spackle and repaint the ceiling. "And while you're at it," he said, "you might as well go ahead and repaint the walls."

"Yeah, I could do that," I said, "but you know Dad you might want to change it up a bit—maybe paint one of the walls in a complementary color."

"What exactly does that mean?" he asked.

I had just decided to major in art and was anxious to answer the question. "Complementary colors are colors that complement one another," I explained. "They are two parts that create a whole. One color makes the other appear more vibrant. Red with green. Blue with orange. Purple with yellow. With this particular green I say we go with a bright yet soothing reddish orange. What do you say?"

"Well," he said tentatively, "I don't know. I wouldn't want a big change. I've always liked how calm and peaceful this room feels."

"Calm and peaceful are good," I said, "but I've learned some things in my art classes that could really improve the design of this room. I think we could make it pop a bit." My father didn't respond which seemed oddly condescending and I felt an unfamiliar irritation rising in my chest—maybe because this was the first time that I thought I knew something he didn't. I shrugged defensively. "Hey, it's your room Dad. You want green, I'll paint it green. No big deal to me. I don't live here anymore."

He seemed uncertain. "I don't want to be closed to something more attractive," he said. "It's just… I wouldn't want to… I'm just a little concerned that… Explain to me again what you were envisioning."

"Well Dad," I said, "I know you love the autumn and that's all about complementary colors. If the leaves were all red or all orange it would be beautiful but when you mix in that touch of green pine and that blue sky it really pops. Doesn’t it? That's the power of complementary colors."

My father stared at his wall. He seemed to not be getting it. "And you're thinking that would work in our living room?" he asked.

"Yes I am," I said passionately. "Dad, if my college courses have taught me anything it's that complementary colors work. One color makes the other even more beautiful. That's why we say they complement each other."

"I don't know," he said. "I think we'll stay with the green."

"And I agree," I shot back. "I think you should stay with the green… on one wall. But why not complement it with another wall of subtle orange?"

"Because I don't know if I've ever seen a subtle orange," he said. "It seems to me that orange is sort of an unsubtle color."

I threw my arms upward gesturing in wild frustration. "Hey that's fine Dad! We should probably forget about it then. Jeesh!" My father, surprised by my reaction, stared at me saying nothing so I continued gaining speed and volume. "Your lack of confidence is irritating because I just studied this stuff for an entire ten week trimester and as you know I got an A plus for the first time in my life which is why Stu Carlson my Art professor told me I'm good at this so I think I know how complementary colors are suppose to work but if you want to stay with peaceful calm soothing subtle mossy green boredom I'm fine with that… really."

He was smiling—maybe on the edge of laughter though I couldn't be sure. "You okay?" he asked.

"Of course I'm okay," I said way too loudly.

He paused staring at the wall, then at me, then back at the wall.

I waited.

"Okay," he said. "You go buy the paint tomorrow and I'll see you after work."

The next morning I stood in the hardware store seconds after the clerk unlocked the front door. I was determined to prove to my father that I could deliver on my promise. I would create a calm yet vibrant living space. This was important to me because I was at the age when I needed to choose a potential career.

A year earlier, when I went off to college, I knew I wanted to be some kind of performer. I was writing music, playing guitar and singing songs. I was telling stories. I was trying to make people laugh whenever I had the chance and often when I didn't. None of it applied to my college curriculum. I could have chosen to study music but I'd never learned to read notes and it was a tough major. Coming off a less than exemplary high school career I was afraid to attempt that tract.

The next and most logical choice was theater. My freshman year, I auditioned and was chosen for a play. I enjoyed it and thought I did well. Unfortunately the director did not share my feelings and worse yet never thought to tell me his. So one day I stood excitedly outside his opened office door and rapped a knuckle on the glass. He glanced up wincing and waved me in. He sat behind his desk piled high with scripts and blue book essays. He slouched nearly horizontally in his chair with one hand flayed across his brow massaging his temples— headache. With his other hand, he pointed toward a stool and mumbled, "Mr. Stromberg what can I do for you?"

"My advisor told me I should stop by and tell you that I'd like to major in theater," I said.

"Oh she did huh? And why would she advice that?"

"Well, I told her I’d like to become some type of performer and we thought the theater program might be a good place to start." He leaned further back and turned slightly toward the wall. Both hands massaged his eyes now. He had a bad headache.

Then he said slowly, "You don't have it Bob."

"I beg your pardon."

"You don't… have… it."

I was confused. "I don't have what?"

"You don't have the temperament to make it in the arts. This is no place for fun and games. Honestly, I think you should go into nursing. Hospitals need happy guys like you but we don't need you here. And furthermore…”

I don't remember everything he said though he didn’t say much. He had a really bad headache. It was clear he didn’t know me well and the little he knew he didn’t like. I left his office confused, red faced—so embarrassed. I stood in the hallway for a long time staring at an audition board knowing my name was not welcome there. He could not technically keep me out of the program but he directed every play. My chances of getting on stage were not good.

Spring term I enrolled in Art 101 and met Professor Stu Carlson. He saw something in me. He appreciated my work and that changed my life. I knew someday I'd find a way on to a stage but until then I was an art major.

A few weeks later I stood at the counter in the hardware store back in my hometown. "What can I do for you?" the clerk asked.

"I need a gallon of orange paint," I said.

He reached beneath the counter retrieving a large book of tiny color samples. "What color orange are you lookin' for?" he said. "Do you have a name or a number?

I was unprepared for the question. Staring at two pages of orange squares, one barely discernable from the next I said, "I need an orange that will complement a wall and go with a couch."

"We can mix pretty much any shade you need," he said. "Maybe you could bring in something and we could match the color for you."

And that's what I did. I ran home and got a couch cushion. I figured that way I'd tie the couch color into the orange wall, which would then complement the green wall and carpet creating a well integrated, calm yet vibrant design.

I finished painting in the late afternoon and had just enough time to pick up the drop cloths, wash my hands and return the furniture before my parents pulled in the driveway. I was excited. I thought the room looked great though optically the color created a slight tickling sensation. I grabbed a magazine and sat casually on the couch. I heard my folks pull into the basement garage... then footsteps and conversation up the stairs. The door opened. They looked toward me and their jaws dropped. For a moment, speechless, they did not move. Then my mother said, "My glory!!! That's really… orange!!!" And then, "I hope it's not too bright. Do you think it might be a little bright? Maybe?"

"No, no, I don't think so," I said quickly, "These are complementary colors that's why they seem to kind of….."

My father completed my sentence. "They vibrate don't they? Is that an optical illusion or is the room bouncing around a bit? And Lucielle," he said to my mother, "Look at you. You almost look like you're tipping."

"I am tipping," she said sitting awkwardly on the ottoman. "I feel little queasy too. Do you guys feel that?"

"No," my father said, "doesn't really bother my stomach but I am a little short of breath."

I tried to remain calm, which was difficult with the room pulsing so. "Well," I said, "autumn can take your breath away too. Let's give it a few hours. It may dry a little calmer."

And it did…but not by much. It was a terrible color choice that really only looked somewhat natural from mid October through Halloween. The rest of the year, the orange was far too dominant to integrate with seasonal décor like red Poinsettias. Christmas time was an interior designer's nightmare.

I look now at the photo of myself sitting against the orange wall. I remember my clothes—the favorite brown buckle shoes that I bought for a high school dance and still wore two and a half years later. I loved those shoes. I loved them so much that I bought them a half size too big mistakenly thinking my feet were still growing. I wore two pairs of socks. I remember my favorite light grey denims with the dark pinstripe that I got at the Jeans Boutique on Lawrence Avenue in Chicago. I remember my favorite sweater, my hairstyle and my beard that was finally coming in fully. This was a good time in my life.

And there I sat at Christmas time, my skin reflecting that awful orange. The wall was a failure. But, and here's the point, I was not. I was not a failure or at least never felt like one because for a decade my parents delighted in that awful wall. I'm not suggesting they liked it but they delighted in it decorating it with my equally amateurish paintings. They delighted in the wall simply because it was mine.

Slide 16 on the carousel shows my folks around 1967. They're standing together by the kitchen sink in my grandparent's home. My mom washes. My father dries. At that time my grandparents lived next door and we shared all our evening meals—one day at our house, the next at theirs.

In the photo they are smiling.

This is what I saw most everyday of my life. Oh, I remember many other expressions but if I had to choose one that exemplified who they were and how they looked upon their children, this is the one. We were loved unconditionally which meant we could fail without being a failure.

I remember a conversation. My wife Judy and I had just returned from Africa. We spent our first year of marriage there on the Christian mission field. It was during this time that we decided I had to give performing a try and we formulated a plan. Back home again we sat around the kitchen table with my folks.

"Okay you two," my mother said excitedly, "we are dying to know. What are your plans?"

I was a little nervous to answer. It's not as if we'd been able to calculate our risks but clearly the stakes were high. We had no money and owned little more than our clothes. But… my mother asked so I answered. I said, "I have decided to become a mime."

My mother said, "What's a mime?"

"Well," I said, "It's a kind of actor that usually doesn't talk but that probably won't work so well for me. Still I want to learn how to move like they do. I want to understand the power of gesture. I want to add that to my stories and songs and comedy just to see what happens."

My father looked serious. "Where do you go for something like that?" he said. "And how do you make a living?"

I knew these questions were coming and answered with my rehearsed response. "I found a little theater school in the state of Maine," I said. "We thought we'd move to New England—somewhere near the middle. There are lots of people there and I figure where there are lots of people there are lots of schools. I was thinking I could go to those schools and ask them if they need an assembly program. If they do, they can pay me some money and then we'll pay our bills."

Even as I spoke I felt my confidence waning. "Why?" I thought. "Why had I not chosen graduate school like my friends? I considered seminary. Why didn't I stay with that? Would any schools hire me? Could I find enough work to pay our bills? Could we ever buy a car let alone a house? And we want to start a family! Am I out of my mind? " It was a crazy idea like the bright orange wall right behind me in the other room.

I looked at my hands. I played with my cup. My finger traced a pattern on the tablecloth. No one spoke. I looked at Judy for help. She sat to my left her expression mirroring my own. We looked across the table at my parents.

They were smiling.

They were both smiling that smile.

"Oh you two," my mother said, "it's perfect."

As it turns out, it was. It was perfect, or nearly so, and it began an adventure continuing to this day—an adventure I might have feared, perhaps fled, had I not known the freedom to fail. What a gift that is.

I am not my parent’s only child so I will not speak for my sisters—though I doubt they disagree. They can tell the stories of their lives and are more than welcome to a carousel or ten of their own. As for me…

My parents smiled on my orange wall.

They smiled on me.

They are smiling still.

Those smiles have, in a big way, empowered and sweetened every step of the journey.

Slide 43

2009-08-25T16:50:00.028-05:00

The Slide: My cousin and my great uncle and aunt. I’m in the background.

The Date: October 1964

The Photographer: Unknown

My relatives drove all the way from California to our little town in Pennsylvania. At the time, we were living in State College while my father finished his doctoral studies at Penn State but we drove back “home” on the weekend for a visit. I’d never before met my second cousin Tom and I was impressed. He was only eighteen but had chauffeured his grand parents, Ralph and Julia, across the entire country. The picture shows them standing in front of my grand parent’s home on a late October day. In the background I’m riding a bike. It has big tires, wide handlebars, and a broad seat with long springs. It might be mistaken for a classic vintage beach cruiser. By today’s standards (and at a distance) it almost looks cool. It’s not though.

A closer look reveals that only the front tire is a whitewall. I ran out of paint before I got to the back. The handlebars, spokes and sprocket are not chrome but silver painted. The bike is impossibly difficult to pedal and, most embarrassingly… it’s a girl’s. My mother and aunt rode it when they were kids and then it hung in my grandfather’s barn for twenty years. It is the very kind one would expect to see ridden by a witch in a tornado.

A few months before the slide was taken, I was staying with my grandparents for several weeks while my folks found a place for us to live in State College. It was during that time that I asked my grandfather if I could restore the bike. I wanted to create something different—unlike any other bike in town—and I might have succeeded had I money, skills or tools.

Bikes were important in my town. Nearly every school-aged kid had one. Between the months of May and October it was difficult to open your eyes without seeing a bike. They were parked in driveways, on front walks or porches, inside opened garage doors, lying in ditches, leaning against storefronts and strewn across front lawns. I knew most every bike in town or at least those belonging to kids near my age. On hot summer days there were perhaps a hundred in the racks by the community pool and not a chain or lock in sight. Flying into the parking lot, I’d swing my left leg over the back tire, stand on one pedal and glide up the sidewalk before slamming into the rack. Then I had only to scan the other bikes to know which of my friends were waiting for me in the deep end.

Like most kids my first real bike was a twenty inch. It was bright red—probably from Sears. The natural bicycle progression through childhood was as follows.

1. Ride a twenty inch between kindergarten and third grade. The seat and the handlebars were raised as the legs grew longer.

2. Begin riding a twenty-four inch around fourth grade. The seat was lowered back down on the cross bar to resume it’s slow ascent.

3. A few years later, if one’s genes were tallish, begin riding a twenty-six inch and enter puberty.

I skipped #2, which was preferable to skipping puberty. I kept my little twenty inch far longer than it fit my body. I managed to do so by adding an extra long stem for the seat and adjusting the handlebars straight up. I did it because bike styles were changing right about that time.

For several decades bike designers espoused a “more is more” philosophy. Every bike had fenders with big reflectors. Most had lights both front and rear. There were baskets for the front and wire saddlebags for the back. There were rack carriers with spring clips above each tire. There was a tank between the double cross bars serving no purpose other than looking pretty and adding weight to an already unwieldy design. I don’t know who did it first—don’t know who came up with the idea but about fourth grade we started stripping our bikes down to the essentials. Everything came off right down to the chain guards.

My parents were not thrilled with my modifications. My father said, “I think you’re gonna be unhappy without those fenders.”

“Nah,” I said, “It’ll be fine.”

He almost started to laugh but then held back. “Okay,” he said smiling and walked away.

A couple evenings later, during a Little League game, it started to rain hard—real hard. Our parents sprinted for their cars as we kids scrambled for our bikes and all headed for home. A deluge backed up the storm drains as mud and gravel washed onto the paved streets. My parents passed me on Arnold Ave and gave a greeting beep as they drove by. I would have waved had I been able to see. A shower of muddy water flew off my tires plastering a streak of brown from my butt to the base of my neck. A similar one shot into my face and up my nose. Ten minutes later I pulled my bike into our basement garage.

“Hey you,” my mother shouted down the stairs. “You take those clothes off and throw them by the washing machine. Do you hear?”

I did. I took off my uniform, climbed the stairs and walked naked, shivering through the living room to my bedroom. My father, delighting in the moment, smiled as I walked by but never said a word.

It didn’t matter. I loved that bike. It took me anywhere I needed to go in my little world and it took me there fast. My house was at the top of a steep curving road. It was my launch pad. If I didn’t slow down at the intersections—and I seldom did—I could shoot out my driveway and halfway through town before stepping on a pedal. I had a few close calls but unbelievably was never hurt. None of us were—almost seems like a miracle.

The summer following sixth grade, during those weeks I stayed with my grandparents, I finally outgrew the little bike and asked my grandfather about the old one hanging in the barn. It might seem like an odd request but there were some strange bikes coming on the scene. An older kid in town welded two bikes together, one on top of the other. The seat was six feet off the ground. It took him a month to figure out how to get on. Schwinn came out with The Stingray that same year. It was the coolest bike…ever. During the winter months we all looked at the pictures in the Sears and Roebuck catalogue and by spring a few Stingrays started to pop up around town. It had the distinctive banana seat and the high handlebars and it was the first bike I’d seen with multiple speeds.

I worked on the old bike for two weeks—mostly painting. I also took apart the sprocket and laid all the parts on a newspaper. Then I held my grandfather’s long stemmed oilcan and boink boinked some lubricant on the metal pieces. I put things back together but I think not very well. I didn’t really know what I was doing. Then one evening I rode my creation to the Tastee Freeze to show my friends. I was excited. They were unimpressed—thought it looked stupid. I acted like I agreed with them—like it was all just a joke—but I was disappointed. A couple months later, during my relatives visit, I took it out for a quick spin and realized that my friends were right. By that time I was okay with the truth though. By that time I had a new bike and it was beauty.

My father and I had talked it through. That road in front of our house was great for shooting down but very difficult to climb back up so I hoped to get a bike with three speeds. I wanted The Stingray. My dad had a better idea and he showed me the picture in a brochure. It was what we commonly called an English bike though a company called J.C. Higgins made this one in Austria. A twenty-six inch, it had fenders but it was sleek and clean, painted black with a little white trim and, best of all, it had three speeds. My parents bought it for me. It wasn’t my birthday or anything and I knew they had very little money but they bought it. When I sat on the seat for the first time, stretching my legs to reach the pedals, holding those gummy rubber handgrips, I knew it was perfect.

Like the little red twenty inch, the J.C. Higgins became part of me. For five months out of the year I was on it nearly everyday. Other big “three speeds” began to appear and some may have been better than mine but, for what it’s worth, mine was the only J.C. Higgins in town. I loved that bike.

I remember one August day—a week before tenth grade—my memory seared with detail. It was very hot and my bloodshot eyes stung badly from swimming all afternoon with my friends. Approaching dinnertime, someone’s smoky barbecue mixing with sun and chlorine called me home. I stepped into my flip-flops, threw my wet towel around my neck and headed toward the bike racks. Half a dozen transistor radios, tuned to the same station, blared The Grass Roots through tinny speakers.

Sha- la- la- la- la- la

Live for today

And don’t worry ‘bout tomorrow

Hey eeee ey eeee ey

By that time most of the kids had already pedaled home and the rack was nearly empty. Even from a distance I could see that my bike was gone. I was confused. There was no chance it was stolen. That kind of thing never happened in my town—couldn’t happen. You couldn’t steal my bike and ever hope to ride it. Everyone knew it belonged to me. I heard a friend shouting my name and turned to see him running toward me.

“Strom,” he shouted. “Your bike’s out behind the bleachers by the football field. It’s all smashed up. Somebody threw it from the top.”

“They what?”

“I’m just tellin’ you what I heard,” he said. “Someone threw your bike off the top of the bleachers.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Who?”

“I don’t know.”

“No, I mean who told you? “

“Hey, I’d rather not say. I don’t want to get in the middle of…”

I was in his face. “What do you mean you’d rather not say? Do you know who did this?”

He paused. His shoulders slumped. He took a deep breath. “Yeah, I think I know.”

As we walked together past the pool, around the gymnasium building and up toward the football field, he told me what he’d heard. By the time we found my bike, we were pretty sure who had destroyed it. Both wheels were pretzeled, fenders smashed, seat ripped, and hand brakes hung from their cables. The bike was ruined.

My buddy helped me carry it back to the rack. We walked past the pool’s chain linked fence where people stood gaping and some spoke soft condolences. My face burned with anger, hurt and deep embarrassment. Everyone stared and I didn’t know what to do. It made no sense. I didn’t have an enemy in the world. “Why?” I wondered. “Why would anyone do such a thing?”

We lay the crippled bike by the rack and I considered what I should do next. “I guess I’ll just leave it here for now and walk home.” I said.

My buddy climbed on his bike. “Yeah…sorry.” He pedaled off.

I stood staring at the bent frame. The J.C. Higgins emblem had sheered a rivet and hung upside down. I heard stifled laughter. Turning to see the backs of two older boys passing by I spoke loudly, “I can’t believe you did this.” The words were not aggressive but filled with hurt and confusion.

The bigger of the two turned and shot back. “Did what?”

“Did this!” I said pointing at my bike—anger rising in my voice. “I can’t believe you threw my bike off the bleachers.”

His smaller friend spoke to him. “Come on,” he said under his breath. “Let’s go.”

“Look me in the eye,” I said. “Tell me you didn’t do this.”

The big kid took one step toward me looking me in the eye—but only for a moment. Then quickly turning away and walking off he said, “We didn’t do it.”

At home I told my parents. They were angry and asked me who it was. I said I didn’t know which was mostly true. After all, I couldn’t know for sure. Only the vandals saw my bike flying through the air. I could have told my parents the whole truth but then phone calls would be made and other parents would get involved and I knew I couldn’t prove anything.

It took a long time to get parts to fix my bike but eventually I had it running almost like new. I saw those older guys every day at school. Surprisingly perhaps, I became a close teammate with the big kid—both football and basketball. I actually grew to like him and I admired him as an athlete. He moved away before my junior year. We never spoke about the bike.

Twenty years later I sat at a restaurant table in Orlando, Florida, preparing to entertain a few thousand pastors at their national convention. I heard someone speak my name. I looked from my notes and into the smiling face of my old teammate. Laughing in surprise I stood reaching out my hand but he ignored it and wrapped me in a bear hug.

‘Please join me, “ I said, gesturing toward a seat. “I can’t believe this. What are you doing at a pastor’s conference?” We laughed again.

Then he said, “I threw your bike off the bleachers. It was me.”

I was stunned—not because he’d done it but because the confession came so suddenly after so many years. We sat in silence and he did not look away. “I don’t know why we did it,” he said. “We were just lookin’ for trouble I guess—just lookin’ for something to do. It’s bothered me ever since.” His gaze did not leave mine. Then he said very slowly, “Please, will you forgive me?”

“Of course,” I said. “I think I probably forgave you long ago but yes… I forgive you.” Then he told me the miraculous story about how Life had thrown him off the bleachers but Love picked him up and with new parts put him back together. With that our real friendship began.

I think there is something so right about natural life progressions—you learn to crawl, then walk and eventually—Woah!—you are running! You mess up, then ask for forgiveness, then are restored and set free from regret. You learn to ride a twenty-inch, then a twenty-four and eventually you stretch your body out on a big twenty-six and it feels so good. At that moment, who can say where those two wheels will take you?

Slides 7 and 48

2009-08-08T20:45:00.021-05:00

The Top Slide: My sister Sally and me at a wedding.

The Date: August 22, 1959

The Photographer: My father

I am seven years old and I am sharp! “Sharp” is a word I’ve just learned in this context and never before used to describe myself. A couple hours ago, before the wedding, my mother pinned a flower on my jacket. Then licking her fingers and flattening down my eyebrows she said, “Young man you are dapper dandy.” I understand why she said it. After all, she’d never seen me in a tuxedo before—what my new uncle Ted calls a “Penguin Suit”. She was surprised and quite impressed with my appearance so she called me dapper dandy. It means that I am very handsome and indeed I am—particularly today as I am wearing white dress shoes… Unscuffed!

Though I appreciate my mother’s comment, my enthusiasm is tempered by the fact that she also made a terrible fuss over how beautiful my sister Sally looks in her flower girl dress. Please don’t misunderstand me. I too am impressed with the dress. It’s pretty big—much like Cinderella’s gown at the ball, and the outfit includes a stylish little crown with a table doily. It is an impressive ensemble though I must say I think Sally herself looks much like she always does. But hey… if Mom thinks that she is beautiful… well… fine.

I am not beautiful though and I’m not dapper dandy either. I am sharp. I know this because before the wedding my new uncle Ted (whose outfit is just like mine only much bigger) looked at me and said, “Whoa Bobby.” He grabbed me by the shoulders and squared me off for a good look. “I gotta say it. You my man are sharp.”

What was I suppose to say? “Oh no, I’m not sharp. I’m dapper dandy.” No… I’m happy to be sharp and proud to be a ring bearer.

I remember well when our Aunt Audrey and her boyfriend Ted asked Sally and me if we would be in their wedding party. By the way, don’t be fooled by the term wedding party. It might sound fun but that’s just so the two people getting married can get someone to come. It’s no party at all. For one thing it doesn’t just take a night. It takes practically a whole weekend. When you join a wedding party you are committing yourself to an evening without friends, sitting in a church and rehearsing for the actual party that happens the next day. And even that one is more like going to church than a party. The whole deal is pretty serious—not a lot of fun. Anyway, Audrey and Ted came to dinner and afterwards they hung out with our family in the front room.

Audrey is our favorite aunt. She is quite beautiful. She has eyeglasses with real gems glued in the corners. She used to be a majorette in high school and wore white cowboy boots with a short skirt while twirling a baton. I don’t think I could even do that. I could still show you the boots and baton because I know right where they are in her old bedroom closet at my grandparent’s house. I really liked her boy friend Ted a lot too. He has curly hair and is what is called a giant. I knew he’d make a great uncle.

Audrey asked if Sally would be her flower girl and then went on to explain what the job entailed. Sally went crazy with excitement, probably because all she had to do is walk in with a bunch of flowers, stand there for three or four hours and then walk back out again. As long as she didn’t have to pee or pass out she could hardly fail.

Then Ted asked me if I would be his ring bearer. My job description was a bit more ominous. I would be given the actual wedding ring in the ‘best of view” at the back of the church. The “best of view” is a small entry area that my grandpa called the “vestibule”. I think that’s the Swedish. I would need to carry the ring clear to the pulpit in the front of the church—a distance of nearly four hundred yards. To make matters worse, I would not be permitted to touch the ring with my hands but would balance it upon a tiny satin pillow. I am only seven. My knowledge of fabrics is limited but even I know that satin is slippery. I asked for a rationale concerning the pillow but was given none. I sat upon the couch in our living room. Ted sat in a chair on the other side of the coffee table and waited for my answer. “I’m wondering about the material on that pillow,” I said. “Why does it have to be satin?”

“I’m not really sure,” he said. “It’s just always satin.”

“Yeah, I understand that,” I said, “but I was wondering if we could maybe use a scratchy wool or burlap.”

“Nope,” he said laughing, “I’m pretty sure Audrey wants the pillow to be satin.”

“Rubber might be nice,” I countered.

“No,” he said, “I think we’ll stick with Satin. It’s already been ordered.”

“How big is the ring?” I asked.

From the other side of the room Audrey held up her hand flashing a band with a diamond setting. “Just a little bigger than this one,” she said.

I didn’t want to say it but I was concerned about the heating registers in the floor just inside the “best of view”. If I tripped, that ring could slide on that slippery satin and fall down in the register. If that happened it would be lost forever like one of my mother’s ear rings and several of my peppermint candies.

“How much did the ring cost?” I asked nervously.

The adults laughed and my mother said, “Bobby, it’s not polite to ask how much things cost.”

“How much do you think it cost?” Ted said.

“Well, I don’t know. Maybe a million dollars?” I said. More laughter from the adults.

My father spoke up, “I’ll tell you something. That ring is worth far more than a million. That ring is gonna cost Ted every bit of freedom he ever had.”

More laughter.

I never did find out for sure how much it cost but I’m guessing it was about a million and one hundred dollars.

Ted waited for an answer.

“Yes,” I said finally. “I will do it. I will bear your ring.”

Now I’m standing next to Sally on the steps of the church following the wedding. She is still holding her flowers. She did fine considering the little that was required. I on the other hand performed excellently. Before we walked out the door a lady said to me, “You did a great job young man.” Then reaching for a basket on the back pew she said, “Oh wait… I have something just for you.“ I was excited as I’d not been expecting payment for my services. The lady turned toward me and emptied a napkin full of rice into my hands. I have no idea why.

“Gee thanks,” I said. “You shouldn’t have.”

Sally looks a bit miffed.

We walk out the door. Our dad is standing on the sidewalk with his camera. “Wait you two. Hold it right there,” he shouts. So we do and a bunch of other people start snapping pictures too. I’m feeling a bit awkward, trying hard not to spill any rice. It’s okay though. I can handle it because I am sharp.

Fourteen years later I stood at the front of another church and, as always, I was sharp—this time in a polyester brown tuxedo with a yellow ruffled shirt. One could hardly look sharper in 1974. I stood beside the love of my life—a beautiful girl, only eighteen years old. She wore a wedding dress. Her little brother walked down the isle with a tiny satin pillow holding our gold rings. He was far less disciplined than I'd been years before. Had the rings not been attached he surely would have lost them. A pastor asked me a series of questions each one requiring a response. At the end I answered, "Yes. I will." What I meant was, "Yes. I will bear the ring."

It was a far riskier pledge this time around. This ring I would bear whether sick or healthy, rich or poor, whether things were good or bad. I know some who are unable to make such a commitment— afraid to even try. I know others who tried, some for a long while, and then gave up. I don't judge them. It is serious business bearing this ring.

I have done so for nearly four decades and will until the day I die. Years ago I worried that it would slip off my finger. There is no chance of that now. Whenever I remove it (which is seldom) I’m surprised to see how it has left a permanent mark in my skin—how my finger has changed its very shape to hold the ring safely. And here is the mysterious thing. Every year the ring takes on more weight and every year it is lighter and more joyous to bear.

Slides 89 and 92

2009-07-15T15:48:00.017-05:00

The Slide: Me wearing my basketball uniform in our living room

The Date: November, 1967

The Photographer: My mother

It’s a November afternoon. I’m two weeks into the basketball preseason. I’m a pretty good small town athlete and a starting forward on my Junior Varsity team. Following practice we received our new uniforms though to call them new would not be entirely accurate. The uniforms had been passed from the Varsity to the JV several years before and they were old even then. I got #44 and I’m happy about it. I know every player who ever wore that very jersey. Now the jersey is mine.

I’m sporting white canvas Chuck Taylor basketball shoes. Though they offer little support, “Chucks” have been the shoe of choice for at least a dozen years. I remember looking in old yearbooks where my father stood with his team wearing dark shoes—what he called “leather uppers”. They looked ugly to me and I wondered, “Who would wear leather shoes on a basketball court?” Answering my own question I thought, “No one. That’s who.” A couple years later some guys at adidas and Nike asked themselves the same question but came up with a different answer.

My socks are high and my shorts are…well… very much so. Both are the style of the day.

The previous year I’d been the high scorer on my team and was proud that the statistic was recorded in the yearbook next to a picture of me.

The caption read, “Bob Stromberg, high scorer on the Jr. High team tries for two in a game with Bradford.” I scored one hundred twelve points for the season. The yearbook failed to note that my teammate, Tom Huffman, scored one hundred and eleven. The omission didn’t surprise me. Why would it be mentioned? He was, after all, only second highest scorer. I’d clearly beat him and won the title for myself. That’s why the yearbook called me, “Bob Stromberg, high scorer…”

Following our last game (a game in which I’d scored two points and Huffman scored fourteen), he said to me, “I almost beat you Strom! I measly point! One little foul shot!”

To which I said, “No you didn’t Huff. You almost tied me. You would have needed two points to beat me.“ I felt bad for him but hey… the bragging rights were mine. It’s now nine months later and I’m hoping to once again excel.

I came home after practice and shouted, “Hey Mom. We got our new uniforms.”

“Oh good,” she said. “What’s your number?”

“Forty-four,” I said.

“Well put it on and we’ll get a picture.” Minutes later I stood in the corner in front of the TV. “Stand up straight,” she said. I did and the flashbulb lit up the room.

At first glance what appears odd is the picture’s context. One cannot imagine why I would be standing in the living room in a basketball uniform. If it were a little league baseball uniform, having just put it on, I might be ready to hop on my bike and peddle to the game. But there is no natural scenario in which I would wear a basketball uniform in the corner of the living room. The reason, of course, is because my mother said, “Well put it on. Let’s get a picture.” I didn’t argue with her because I’d been waiting eight or nine years to put it on.

Through my elementary years, my father taught at the high school and later became the principal. Very often, as a little boy, I tagged along with him to ball games. Even as a kindergartener I knew every player’s name, number and position. Sitting in the bleachers I watched pretty cheer leaders line up near the locker room doors. I rose with the crowd as the players burst out, dribbling single file past center court in their satin warm up suits. I dreamt of being one of them.

During football season on cold autumn nights, outside under the lights at “away” games, I huddled next to my father. The smell of hot dogs and cigars mingled in the cold air as the cheerleaders in stretch pants and varsity jackets lined up by the goalpost. I rose with the crowd as our players in orange and black roared on to the field. I wanted to be like one of them. Oddly, even then, I imagined how it would feel if others wanted to be like me.

Through elementary school and jr. high my greatest goal was to play football and basketball. It’s all I thought of. In the autumn we played back yard football every day rain or shine—particularly rain. All summer long we shot baskets on any hoop we could find.

I began to suspect, early on, that I would never be a great athlete. I didn’t allow myself to think about it much but the truth is, I wasn’t fast, quick, or strong. Nor did I possess a competitive drive. These were prized athletic qualities and three out of the four could not be faked. What I did possess was adequate size for a small town athlete and I had what coaches called “good hands”. “Good hands” meant I could catch a football if it was close enough to hit me in the head and I could make a basket if I was wide open. These attributes were good enough to gain a little notoriety. Following a successful freshman football season I was one of a handful picked to play varsity the next year. Of course I didn’t play much, but playing on varsity was not as important to me as being on varsity.

In basketball, following a good year on JVs, I was the only junior with important varsity minutes. It was during this junior season that I experienced for the first and last time what if felt like to a star. In the din of an important game, I sat on the bench with fourteen seconds remaining and heard my coach shout, “Strommy!” My knees went weak. We were down by four points with no time-outs and no three-point line. In the final seconds, thanks to my teammates defense and my opponent’s ineptitude, I scored six points. In slow motion from some inner world, deep in the corner with 0:01 left on the clock, I launched the last shot from my hip… nothing but net! The following year as a diminishing senior, I experienced what it felt like to know that others wanted to be like me.

I was picky about my shoes. I didn’t like high top sneakers. They felt clunky. Unfortunately, due to the threat of ankle injuries, our coaches would not allow us to wear low cuts. Improvising, I wore two pairs of socks and folded the outer pair down around the ankles giving the shoes the appearance of low cuts. I took a little razzing from my teammates but I liked the way they looked and felt. Halfway through the season I went to a freshman game. All our young players sported my sock styling. I was a basketball fashion trendsetter.

I competed in athletics from as young an age as possible. Early on I was one of the best in my grade but kids mature at different rates. Some of the big kids, who were dominant in jr. high, stopped growing and were left behind. One of my classmates barely made the teams year after year. Following our junior year, he finally grew into his awkward body and won the coveted “Athlete of the Year” award at graduation. Another basketball teammate—a year older than I—competed with me for a starting position his entire senior year. He went on to a big university, made the team as a “walk on” and had an outstanding college career.

I just got a little better each year and held my own. I wanted to be the star but the thing about athletics is… you can’t fake it. You either are or you’re not. And no one needs to wonder. You just look at the stats. Mine were just good enough to be lauded by the younger kids. I was, however, fortunate to play on a football team that won twenty-three games in a row. A number of my teammates and I received letters from interested college recruiters. The truth is I didn't have the desire or the talent to play college football. However several colleges couldn't tell that from my game films. I should have gotten out when I had the opportunity but I didn't even know how to quit when I had the chance.

I’d invested such a large part of my identity in athletics that I didn’t know who I would be without a ball in my hand. To make matters more difficult, in my family you just didn't quit. You didn’t quit anything! You didn't start a game of monopoly unless you planned to finish it. You didn't quit just because the game went six hours. Quitting wasn't fair to the other players. No, you toughed it out. In the first eighteen years of my life (all the years I lived at home), the only thing I remember quitting was Cub Scouts. Even then I'd stuck it out for a whole year.

I somehow grew up believing that quitters were bad, unambitious people who never amounted to anything, vagrants not worth the cardboard they slept beneath. Take Old Dicky, for example. Old Dicky our town drunk (who wasn’t all that old), slouched against the town square World War II monument, snoozing away hot summer afternoons. He was the quintessential quitter.

My grandpa said he remembered Dicky when he was younger. “Well, I’ll tell you, Bobby, he wasn’t the brightest kid I’d ever met, but he was a nice little boy till he started quittin’. Quit Little League. Quit Junior Firemen. Quit high school. He even quit work at the bottle plant. And for what? Just look at ‘im now. If that’s not the saddest excuse for a man I’ve ever seen. Just makes your heart ache.”

And of course I knew you didn’t have to look too far to find other examples. There was Al Capone and Oswald and that crazy guy who killed the nurses in Chicago. They probably all quit junior high choir or something. Quitting revealed a basic flaw in one's character. Quitters didn't have the stuff to stick it out when the going got tough.

I'd wanted to quit a bunch of things, as a kid, but I didn't. Now I think I should have. In high school I took geometry, trigonometry and calculus. I started to get lost about three weeks into my first freshman term and never found my way out of the confusion. This caused tremendous stress and made me feel intellectually inept. I've never completely recovered. In college I took Math 101 pass-fail, passed by a hair (I have no idea what that is in metrics), and have not opened a math book since.

And Spanish! Mi Gloria! Why did I have to take four years of Spanish? Why couldn't I have taken two years like some of the other kids? No one spoke Spanish within three hundred miles of my town except maybe my Spanish teacher, and I don't think he spoke it very well. I know I couldn't understand a word he said—which was, for him, a continual irritant.

“So Senor Stromberg. Apparently you do not think that the Spanish language is worthy of your time. Is this not so?”

I could have said, “No”. This would have been proper usage in either Spanish or English but I thought it best to remain silent and look straight ahead.

“Well Rrrrrrrroberto,” he said with a long rolling R—a sound I was unable to even approximate, “I want you to know that I do not care. Do you hear me? Look at me Roberto.”

I thought it best to follow his instruction.

“Mi amigo,” he said, his eyes red, anger seething just beneath the service of his otherwise calm demeanor, “if you would like to quit this class it is fine with me. And do you know why Roberto? Do you know why it is fine with me?”

I felt uncertain.

“Because,” he said.“ I… really… could… care… less.”

At this point I wanted very much to ask what the whole class was thinking. I wanted to ask, “Senor Mullins, do you mean that you could care less? Or do you mean that you couldn’t care less? You said that you really could care less. I’m concerned that you are perhaps not saying what you mean to say. If you mean that you really could care less then you still must really care. If that is the case I would like to ask… por que?” If I’d had any fighting, competitive spirit I’d have said it but intimidated and embarrassed I remained silent.

Looking back I realize I probably should have quit Spanish. I’m embarrassed to say that I sat in that class for four years and still can’t speak a complete sentence. It’s inexcusable. After graduation, I should have quit football too. And I would have, had my coach not said, “Hey we could send some game films out to your college. You never know.” I would have quit had my hometown paper not written a story about several of us who were seeking scholarships. I should have quit. But I didn’t know how to let go and move on with my life. It was too scary at the time. There were too many unanswered questions like; if I quit will I end up sleeping over a heating vent or killing a cop? Will I snooze away summer afternoons against the WWII monument? Will I have to marry someone in the eighth grade? Well, yes, probably. Those are the kinds of things that happen to quitters.

My college football experience turned out to be worse than I could have imagined. My first-year-coach, Coach Vader (no relation), was a maniac. You remember Woody Hayes when he went nuts on national TV and beat up one of his young players? Remember Bobby Knight and his folding chairs? Remember Jack Nicholson in The Shining? Remember Anthony Hopkins with his mask and fava beans? Then you get the idea. Coach Vader berated us in practice, screaming at us nonstop even during meals, his face only inches from the side of our heads. We awakened in the dark each morning to his voice taunting us over the dormitory intercom. Actually many of us were so nervous we’d never gotten to sleep.

It was so bad that two tri-captains, with distinguished college careers, quit on Friday, five days into the preseason. I only made it to Thursday. I didn't even have the guts to talk to the coach. At 5:30 in the morning, on the way to the field house for ankle taping, I turned around, hopped a Chicago cab, and rode off in the sunrise. The cabby said, "A donde vas?" Of course I didn't understand.

"Take me to my aunts in Brookfield," I said extra loudly presuming that the louder I spoke the better he might comprendo.

We drove for an hour and I began to wonder if my cabby was taking me to my aunt's or taking me for a ride. It seemed as though we passed the same Laundromat quite a few times, though perhaps there was a chain called Ronnie's One and Only Cleaners. Several hours later, he collected a good portion of my summer saving with a big smile and a "Muchas gracias, senor!"

I said the only Spanish that came to mind, "Que sera, sera." At least it was true. I stayed with my aunt for a couple of weeks until school began. I was a quitter.

In retrospect, I think I did the right thing. My mistake was to begin in the first place. One plays college football for the love of the game, or at least for the love of the scholarship money, but I played for neither. I played—if only for four days—because I didn't know how to stop. I didn’t know how to move on with my life. I didn't know that I could be me without a helmet in the autumn.

Surprisingly, when I quit what I was doing I discovered who I was. I saw that I could do lots of things and still be me. I joined the college choir. I played intramural ball. I studied hard—a new experience. I even began to understand what I might ultimately do with my life. Most importantly I figured out that what I am is less important than who.

I do not advocate frequent quitting. There are things we should stick with—hold on to and never let go. But sometimes the best thing is to quit what we’re doing, take who we are and move on.

I was a pretty good small town athlete. One day I put on my basketball uniform and stood in the corner in front of the TV while my mom snapped a picture. I did it because I thought the picture would represent who I was. I didn’t realize that basketball was just something I did.

Flash forward four decades. I haven’t held a football in twenty years—unless it said Nerf on the side. When we moved into a new home I didn’t even bother to put up a ball hoop. The boys were grown and gone by then and I didn’t feel like shooting around by myself. When I was a kid I could not have imagined behaving like this but… here I am—more myself than ever.

Slides 79, 91 and 50

2009-06-19T16:35:00.022-05:00

The Slide: My mother , Sally, Johnny, Ingrid and Me on Old Baldy

The Date: October, 1965

The Photographer: My Father

When people ask me where I come from I tell them I’m from a little place in north centrallish Pennsylvania. If they say, “Oh really, what’s it’s near?” I tell them it’s near south westernish, NY. I do so because, really, it’s not near anywhere. The nearest big city (Buffalo) is about a hundred miles away but I never knew anyone who had actually been there and I knew I never wanted to go. The only three TV stations we received in my little town were broadcast from Buffalo, so I had watched the local news enough to know I was better off staying right where I was. Every night I’d hear about the killer fires in suburban Cheektowaga or the four-alarm blazes in lower Lackawanna. When, as a junior in high school, I finally did drive with my family to the city for the Ice Capades, I was surprised there were any buildings left.

We were pretty isolated in my little town, but we liked it that way. On the radio dial all I could get during the day was WFRM (The Farm and Home Broadcasting Company). But on cold, clear nights, if I tuned my Sears Silvertone very carefully—I can still smell the hot tubes—I might pick up ABC in New York, CKLW in Detroit and my favorite WLS in Chicago.

“Radar weather, eye-eeeee-iiiii-eeeee-iiiii,” the weatherman’s choir sang in four-part harmony. “Radar weather, eye-eeeee-iiiii-eeeee-iiiii.”

“Hey Chicago, It’s cold out there,” the announcer would say. “Radar weather has forty-one in Des Plaines, thirty-nine on the North Shore and it’s a chilly thirty-seven in the loop.”

Tucked in my bed, I lay in the dark night after night and wondered what the heck a Loop was. I thought it was probably something like the circular drive at our high school though maybe even longer. We didn’t have the bright lights, subways, fancy restaurants, or a Loop, but what we had was beautiful. Nestled in the rolling Allegheny Mountains, everywhere you looked it was just so beautiful. All the little towns around were nice too but none more so than mine because we had Old Baldy.

Old Baldy was a big piece of hillside, stripped clean of trees, jutting out into the center of town. I asked my grandfather how it got so bald. He told me that it was originally clear cut by turn of the century lumber barons. The forest would have grown back like it did on the surrounding hills but, for several generations, it became a common pasture where town folks grazed their milk cows. The cows kept it bald.

From my house I could run out the back door, across the creek, and up through the pine grove at the base of the hill. Fifteen minutes later, I’d be standing at the most magnificent spot in my world. From here the town looked exactly like the postcards at the Five and Dime, but you didn’t have to pay even a nickel for the view. From here tiny cars drove slowly on rolling country roads. From here the Pennsylvania Railroad, like a Lionell model, snaked its’ path along the river to unload at the glass factory. From here on hot summer afternoons, barely discernible from so high, you could spot kids on their bikes weaving their way to the pool.

It was a magical place and from the age of five I climbed there often. On summer nights I’d go up there with a whole pack of buddies. We carried our sleeping bags and little blue boxes of Camp Fire Marshmallows. As the sun dropped over the far hill, we’d watch the street lamps blinking on below, only to be outdone an hour later by the blazing stars above.

In the winter we tobogganed down Old Baldy’s icy face, six little blue-lipped buddies, laced together holding on to one another’s frozen buckled boots, screaming at the top of our lungs. In the late summer lying on sleds of flattened cardboard boxes we careened down it’s grassy front.

Old Baldy was just a big piece of hillside in the center of my little town, but it played an important part in my growing up. I took my first solo hike there as a five year old. I had my first campout there at eight—pretty big deal. I met my first girlfriend up there once when we were thirteen. I’ll call her Denise because…well… that was her name. I recall it was exciting but a bit awkward. We sat up there, side by side, on a log and looked at the town for a few minutes.

I said, “Pretty huh?”

She said, “Yup”. And that was about it.

Then she stood up, smiled and kind of waved. She went down her side and I went down mine. Okay it wasn’t a hot date but it was better than having my dad drive us somewhere.

When I was twenty, I took another girl up there. She was very impressed. For years, every time we visited “home” we climbed there with our kids.

But the most special times on Old Baldy were the times I spent with my dad—many of them when I was very young. Dad always pulled on black artics over his shining dress shoes. Then he'd pull on a scratchy school letter jacket, and a wool hat. My mother would help me put on every imaginable piece of warm winter clothing that a child could legally be required to wear and off we'd go.

As hard as the climb was, stumbling over my own feet, sliding on the nearly frozen ground, sweating through several sweaters and a winter coat, I plodded upward, I wanted to get to the top. To me, the whole idea of climbing Old Baldy was to get to the top. But apparently my dad knew better. He’d stop and say, “Shhhh Listen,” We’d be by the creek or by a stand of pines or under a rusty old oak still clinging to its dry leaves. “Listen!” he’d whisper so softly I could hardly hear.

I was never sure what I was supposed to be listening for. Then, very faintly at first, I would hear it. The complaint of a maple gently moving in a breeze. The flourish of a black squirrel running a tightrope from tree to tree. Maybe the mournful chorus of a thousand geese flying far too high to be seen. And once, I remember, it was the plinking burble sound of trickling water flowing between layers of melting ice. To my dad it was all beautiful music. Eventually we would reach the top where we’d rest a while and enjoy the beauty. Then all too soon we’d have to head back down. My dad taught me to experience the climb and I grew to love it. As a young man though, it became increasingly difficult to be quiet—to be still. I still struggle with the urge to just get to the top. Then I hear my father’s voice, “Shhh. Listen!”

Old Baldy is gone now. The hill is still there but it’s no longer bald. Each year, the pine grove and the leafy seedlings crept higher and higher toward the top. Sadly, the last time I climbed Old Baldy I stood, surrounded by a deep forest, unable to see the town below.

It’s a beautiful Saturday afternoon in mid October. The leaves are just beyond peak. My cousin Johnny went with my father and me to the football game. We returned home, to find my mother packing a picnic basket. “Thought we might take a hike up Old Baldy,” she said. “It’s just so beautiful this evening.” My sister Sally helped little Ingrid into her sweater. “Don’t forget her hat,” my mother said,

Sally rolled her eyes. “Mom,” she said, “it’s hot out there.”

“But it might get breezy on top,” my mother said, “and who knows, maybe we’ll want to stay a little while.”

My father grabbed the camera.

An hour later, as the sun was setting, we gathered around a campfire and roasted our hot dogs. My father said, “Hey Johnny, do me a favor and snap a family picture for us. Will you?”

Johnny grabbed the camera, looked through the view finder and said, “Ingrid! Hey! Hey! Hey Ingrid! Look this way!” Ingrid, a perfectionist even then, was intently focusing on her hot dog and the job at hand. She never heard his voice. The rest of us looked toward the camera and Johnny snapped a picture forever preserving the memory of a beautiful place.