Daily Dose #69: The Bee Boy / A Lake Boy Tale

Back when I was a little shaver (around 4), we used to visit my Momma's best friend's camp on the western shores of Owasco Lake. Both friends had several kids around the same age, so it was always a lazy summer day hang. The rote routine: Swimming, playing in the woods, macaroni salad, hot dogs and lemonade for lunch, nappy time on the front porch, more swimming, and then packing up and getting home before Dad arrived from work.

I was the youngest in that combined gaggle of goslings, so I was always running around trying to play "catch up", and the older kids were always trying to ditch me. Such is the social dynamic of groups of children. The youngest is always the outcast, bringing up the rear.

One of the pastimes enjoyed was "Penny On The Rails". A real live train used to run on the west side of that lake back in the early 1960's, and right through that camp like clock work at high noon.

So all the kids would take pennies and put them on the tracks, go eat lunch, and after the train rumbled through, run and collect their squished copper coins.

The older kids would always get there first, so by the time I brought up the rear, all the flattened pennies would be scarfed up. It was always an exercise in futility for me, but I never stopped trying to be part of the action.

One time while chasing after them, I stepped right on a yellow jacket nest in my barefeet, wearing only my plaid swim trunks. As the angry little beasts swarmed all over me, up me, and in me, I really didn't know what to do. I knew to stay away from bees, but when you're covered from head to toe with them within seconds, including having a mouthful of them.... I kinda was at a loss, and in shock.

I called to my brother and sister, but they were way ahead of me on their penny retrieval mission... so I turned around and tried to get back to the camp, where my mother and her friend were laconically cleaning up from lunch, smoking cigarettes and sipping their afternoon decompression cocktail.

I must have been some sight. I was a half-pint, walking, talking festering, robot bee hive. As my mother tell the tale, she would recount "You couldn't see any SKIN!...just bees".

My mother has always been good in emergency crisis situations, and I never failed to provide them for her in my accident prone younger years. She ran down the hill, picked me up, ran down the dock, threw me in the water, jumped in, pulled off my bathing trunks, and held me under while squeegeeing bees off my little body with her bare hands.

Then she pulled me out of that baptism by bee and finger lake water, threw me in the car, and hustled my now ballooning and bloated body to the hospital, all without saying a word. She just dealt it down.

Up until yesterday, I have not been stung by a bee... a pretty good run of almost 50 years of a clean, sting free record.

But yesterday, while weeding the garden, I inadvertently stuck my hand in a nest of yellow jackets.

Hello my old striped friends! Within a nano second, I was about to revisit the torture I had once endured back in 1964. Fortunately this time, I was wearing a few more clothes.

I did a clumsy dance (I'm naming this dance "The Yellow Jacket", and I fully expect it to sweep the nation)  to the hose and escaped with minimal damage, except to my soggy ego. In my brief forays into naturalism, the lifetime score is Bees=2, Little Georgie=0.

But the first word I uttered when I stuck my hand in that nest and saw the swarm fly at my face was "MOMMA"... then the unending stream of expletives followed, like a little kid trying to catch up.

Daily Dose #54 (07/21/11)

LAKE BOY TALES

(Home as a "Reset" Button)

I had lunch with a very old friend of mine at the Cedar House Lanes in Skaneateles yesterday. I really love the Cedar House. It’s one of the last bastions of the town I remember growing up in. The rest of it, with the exception of the lake, has changed and mutated much over the past 50 years.

You can still go to a place called Riddler’s. but there’s no Ed Riddler to inject a personality to the experience. You can go to the Skaneateles Bakery, but you can't saddle up to the lunch counter to get a cup of cop coffee and chain smoke cigarettes, pretending to be a Bohemian in Paris as you ditched school for the day.

You can get a glazed donut, but it won’t even come close to the glazed donuts that used to be produced there. When it changed ownership, they got rid of the ancient machinery and secret alchemy that produced the best glazed donut in the entire free world. Those donuts (and the half moon cookies) were art, not just food. Every time I would land home after an extended ramble around the world, I could always count on the Bakery to snap my brain to grid with sensory memory back to Square One, Ground Zero.

Those donuts were like a giant reset button, re-booting me to my original "settings". It’s just evolution, and that reminds me of my own mortality I guess. I’ve certainly sailed into middle age collecting curmudgeonly barnacles along with my ever graying hair.

Originally, My friend Holly and I were headed to Cam’s (now The Willow Glen) up on the tangled intersectioning corners of Jordan St., Seneca Turnpike and Jewett Road, but we were greeted with a hand lettered sign written on a paper placemat that said, ‘Closed Tuesday in March.’ I don’t know if it was every Tuesday, but according to the sign this particular Tuesday we were to be denied.

So off to the Cedar House and The Hilltop diner.

I don’t have any axe to grind against all the other potential lunch spots in town; they all serve their purposes, and they put out fine food, in a great atmosphere. I sometimes pop into the Sherwood for a drink, but frankly I’ve been defaulting to the Cedar House for all my night time libations in public lately. There’s a little too much jockeying for position in the Sherwood for my tastes, and Dusty’s mother-in-law always makes me feel like a long lost son as she tends to her duties behind the bowling alley bar. I used to wash dishes in the Sherwood as a kid, so I do have a deep rooted connection to the place. The Blue Water’s been around for awhile (Their Portabello Mushroom Sammich is particularly yummy), but again, it still has new car smell to me, and I feel like an alien when I walk in there sometimes.

Morris’s Grill is now gone, to be replaced at some un-determined time with a ‘Bistro’ when the foreclosure on the Seitz Building finally gets untangled. And when I visit Skaneateles, I crave that "reset". As I age, the options for experiencing that are becoming limited.



To walk into the Cedar House, and to be enveloped in its yellow orange shellacked walls with an old and trusted friend, is like crawling back into the womb. After getting your ass kicked by life, sometimes you need that. Instinctually, when I do, I gravitate towards that reset experience.

Tear it down and build it up again.

Here’s how I start the process: a hamburger at the Cedar House, shooting the breeze with my buddy, Holly.

It’s not just the place, but the people in it. Here are all the ex-pats of the old town, that somehow survived the gentrification process that started in full force around 1980 or so. They tore down the trailer park and put up a spa. Some of us moved, some of us dug in our heels, and some of us just got plain left behind.

But those people, the descendants of Yankee pioneers with ancient bloodlines, as I remember them, are all here; like members of an exclusive club of wizened war veterans.

It’s just progress.

The "Old Skaneateles" of my memory wasn’t all that great. I mean we did have confirmed pedophiles running around at St. Mary’s Church and at the local movie house. It was down right creepy at times.

Sometimes, change is good.

I’m just grateful that the Cedar House is still there for me when I need it, even if a gas station now sits where Fabin’s used to be. I don’t know about the rest of you, but right now I feel like doing some keggling, and I thank God that I still can in a memory that I call "Home."

Sometimes, I need a little help in reminding myself who I am, and where I came from.




Fabin's demolition photo by Jorge Battle



"a parking lot in paradise"


FINIS

Author's Note:

Just a few little updates for the regular peep-a-roos that get their Dose, daily.

1. Page Views: "The Dose" just eclipsed the 17,000 page view benchmark in 53 consecutive days of publication (17,071 as of 5:30pm, EST 07/20/11).

2. Feedback and Metrics Count: The confirmed Peep-a-roo network has 40 feedburner subscribers, 14 google followers, and 10 networkedblogs subscribers. That means 64 peeps are actively sharing The Blog-O-Thon, and generating page views at a ratio of almost 4-5/1 per "share", to achieve an average viewership of around 250-300 page views per day.

Peeps... THANK YOU! This is how its supposed to work, and you have made yourself an integral part of this publication.

I know there may be more regular readers out there that are firing into the blog through facebook newsfeed posts. I'm very grateful for the time you spend reading them, but if you would please consider using the sign up options in the left collumn, I could get a much more accurate read on just how united The Peep-a-Roo front really is.

3.Comment Protocols: Commenting directly on the Blog-O-Thon site is supposed to help promote it, but for the life of me I don't know how... that said, I moderate all comments before they show up, in case you were wondering. If people want to say negative shit, I generally post it anyway.

But I'm instituting a new rule. No more "Anonymous" comments will be posted. If you have an opinion, attach your name to it. Other wise, your opinion really has no value. This blog is about standing up and being counted, not sniveling behind a cloak of anonymity.

4. The Master Index:A Peep-A-Roo (Denise, you know who you are) pointed out to me recently that the Blogger Platform makes it difficult to access archived blogs, along with the fact that its hard to find a previously published piece if all you have to go on is a consecutive string of numbered blogs.

I created a Master Index of all The Daily Dose injections, with a brief description of each one to make them a little easier to locate. This index will be updated weekly, and sent out every Saturday morning.

If you would like to receive The Master Index, please send me a traditional email address to: piannaplunker88@gmail.com You can always opt out at anytime.

Aside from receiving the index, this also gives us a chance to correspond one on one, probably the most rewarding part of the Dose experiment for me. Don't be shy!

Don't forget: "The Dose Is In The Discipline" and "Sharing" really does translate to a state of "Caring", no matter what you do, what you make, or who you are. If you participate in the Universal Recycling system while playing a game of catch with creation, great things will happen. They always do.

Love,

Geo

Daily Dose #53 (07/20/11)

THE LAKE BOY

(An Introduction)



A few million years ago, mighty glaciers migrated due south, gouging deep lake basins and creating what now look to be topographic claw marks on the face of Central New York. Or maybe it's backside, depending on your point of view.

The Iroquois also named them "The Finger Lakes". The original Native inhabitants envisioned this collection of gouges as the hand print of the Great Spirit on creation.

Whether interpreted as loving hand print or angry claw marks also depends on your point of view and disposition. There are thin lines between love, hate, and the viloent throes of passion. The Great Spirit probably was capable of a whole range of emotions.

One of those water filled geological scars is called "Skaneateles"; A slight Anglicized bastardization of the original Native American Iroquois word "Skeh-ne-a-iles" meaning "Long Lake".

The locals pronounce it "Skanny-AT-less". You can still suss out an interloper if they pronounced it "Skan-needles", or any other variation. They weren't true "lake people". If someone took the trouble to pronounce the extra syllable but got the rest of it right, they might be worthy of a little local slack being cut.

As spoils for soldiers participating in the Revolutionary War, nearly two million acres of land in Central New York were set aside as compensation. A clerk that worked in the Surveyor General's Office drew up the apportionment map; He had a predilection toward Roman history, Greek classical literature, and philosopher authors of the Enlightenment which is why to this day towns bear names like Marcellus, Pompey, Camillus, Ulysses, Syracuse, Cinncinataus, Milton and Locke.


Skaneateles (as a section of the town of Marcellus) was intitially settled by a hardy pioneer family around 1794; historically by Abraham Cuddeback with his wife and eight children in tow after a 43 day journey, depending on which historian you're talking to. It was rough terrain to clear for farming but the soil was rich, and because of the swift flowing outlet and its position on the Old Seneca Turnpike Road, it was perfectly suited for hydro powered industries such as saw and gristmills, and light industry.

The sons of the Revolution (or the folks that they sold their granted land to for a pittance) carved out a little Yankee town, and eventually a self contained economy and culture in one of the prettiest spots on God's Green Earth.

Many of the family names of those early settlers were still the surnames of kids I went to school with, proving that once you became a lake person, you stayed a lake person for life, and for generations.

There was one aberrant blip on the radar screen of the town's history that bears a little notice. J.A. Collins, a travelling speaker selling the concept of the Abolition of Slavery, became so enamoured of my little town that he was inspired to buy 300 acres just north of the village and start a Utopian commune that espoused the abolition of Religion, Civil Government, and the institution of marriage.

Collins formed his Utopian commune in a town called "Sodom", later to be renamed "Mottville". I kid you not.

Collins only lasted three years in the land of Puritan fundamentalism, but I mention the "Community" because a strand in the DNA of the collective gene pool of that social experiment is still in evidence today.

Just walk into The Sherwwod Inn on any given Saturday night, currently. You'll see what I'm referring to. The old guard conservative denizens of Skaneateles may be the descendants of Calvinists and Puritans, but they still know how to get their commie pinko free love freak on.

I was born in 1960, and by that time Skaneateles was a typical small Yankee town. You never had to leave, because everything you needed was there.

We had a movie theater, a bakery, a hardware store, a five and dime, lunch counters, pharmacies, toy stores, retail clothiers in which you could procure work and summer wear, and grocery stores; they were all locally owned and operated. We had doctor's that made house calls.

We had all kinds of houses of worship, except mosques and synagogues.

According to the US census, 99.16% of the total village population is white.

I guess that other .84% signifies some kind of progress. When I was growing up, being from one of the two EYE-Talian families in town tagged me as an exotic.

There was always old money in Skaneateles, but most of it was consigned to a rich persons ghetto, on West Lake Road from the village to the Country Club. The rest of Skaneateles had every layer of the socio-economic strata well represented, from the dirt poor to the upper middle class tax bracket.

We still had a trailer park in Skaneateles when I was growing up. After I left for good in 1978, at some point they tore it down and built a spa.

Skaneateles is a lot tonier now. Those balanced economic layers started to get pushed out during the boom-boom eighties. Now its basically a tourist economy and commuter community.

It has solidified its reputation for being the playground of the wealthy. There are alot more rich folk (Some of them EYE-talians!) and folks that are carrying three mortgages and are leveraged to the teeth to pretend that they are to take advantage of the excellent public school system.

Something got lost along the way though. There's no more movie theater. There still are two pharmacies, but they aren't on the main drag and are national chain stores.

There's no more Western Auto, or Talbot's Five and Dime. The retail shops service the hoi-polloi and tourist trade. The last vestige and holdout is Roland's clothing store and The Cedar House bowling lanes. Even Morris' Grill is gone, the victim of a botched condominium development project.

The impetus and inspiration of "The Lake Boy" daily dosages was to somehow record the era from 1960-1978, when a small Yankee town was still a small Yankee town, and trace my life's personal narrative arc within it, before it disappears from my memory.

The ingredients for the narrative gumbo in mind? Part Norman Rockwell, part Jean Sheppard, part Mark Twain, part Garrison Keillor, part Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery", part "Peyton Place", part John Irving, with liberal spices from Steven King's catalog of twisted horror.

The "Lake Boy" stories don't appear in chronological order, as this is how my brain actually works these days. The memories are randomly chaotic, like puzzle pieces that magically appear in the space between my ears.

The tales are but faintly flickering stars that I am pinning to a fantasized celestial sphere that surrounds me; I imagine that I am standing in the center of that sphere, estimating the proper location and distance of each memory as I attach it to the firmament.

Eventually, the picture that will materialize out of that chaos will take shape and form. One would hope that anyway, but you never know. As a regular reader of the Dose, you're taking that journey right along with me.

I will leave you with this memory:

I was a pretty angry young man by the time I hit sixteen, and left Skaneateles for awhile. I didn't leave with much of an appreciation for it, because I was a typical confused adolescent with his head firmly self-inserted in his own ass.

When I was about 18, I momentarily returned in the summer of '78. I hitched hiked from Bucks County, PA and got stranded on a country road in the bowels of Pennsylvania overnight. What was usually a 24 hour hitch turned into three miserable days.

When I got closer, getting dropped off in Auburn NY in the late afternoon of a glorious early summer day, I walked the seven miles due East to the place of my childhood; the staging area and backdrop of teen-aged, over-the-top angst.

But as I approached Clift park, I saw it, and felt it.

The sun was setting, the lake clear, clean and smooth as glass. It was ablaze with the reflection of the orange, pink and purple solar fireworks display.

I stood in that park with a duffel bag slung over my shoulder in an unexpected awe. What I had always taken for granted, became quite clear.

I was standing in a place where what the Iroqois called "The Great Spirit" had put its fingerprint on the whole of creation, and for one brief shining moment, that spirit completely filled me. I was home, in one of the most beautiful places on earth. A place of great spiritual power, energy and significance.

I let that energy flow freely through me, and reached a clarity, a state of peace and grace, and an understanding that I had never known. I was one, and connected with that place.

I turned toward home to walk along it's shores around its curve to the south on Route 41. Back down the steep downward incline, cut by a glacier, to 12 Gayle Road; to the lake and the little tribe that had been a constant in my life carrying this little thought:

No matter how hard I tried to fight it, ignore it, or deny its existence in my soul, I am, and always will be, a "Lake Boy".

FINIS

Kihm Winship's blog, "Skaneateles: The Character and Characters of a Lakeside Village", is a precious resource and inspiration; Kihm has been a great source of first encouragement for me to keep on grinding out The Daily Dose.

Check his blog out. It's really well researched and well written:

http://kihm6.wordpress.com/

Author's Note:

Just a few little updates for the regular peep-a-roos that get their Dose, daily.

1. Page Views: "The Dose" just eclipsed the 17,000 page view benchmark in 52 consecutive days of publication (17,071 as of 5:30pm, EST 07/20/11).

2. Feedback and Metrics Count: The confirmed Peep-a-roo network has 40 feedburner subscribers, 12 google followers, and 10 networkedblogs subscribers. That means 62 peeps are actively sharing The Blog-O-Thon, and generating page views at a ratio of almost 5/1 per "share", to achieve an average viewership of around 300 page views per day.

Peeps... THANK YOU! This is how its supposed to work, and you have made yourself an integral part of this publication.

I know there may be more regular readers out there that are firing into the blog through facebook newsfeed posts. I'm very grateful for the time you spend reading them, but if you would please consider using the sign up options in the left collumn, I could get a much more accurate read on just how united The Peep-a-Roo front really is.

After casually insulting the casually passive, non-sharing readers last week by basically calling them out for being lousy in bed, this would be very helpful data if you could sign on to the email or network options.

3.Comment Protocols: Commenting directly on the Blog-O-Thon site is supposed to help promote it, but for the life of me I don't know how... that said, I moderate all comments before they show up, in case you were wondering. If people want to say negative shit, I generally post it anyway.

But I'm instituting a new rule. No more "Anonymous" comments will be posted. If you have an opinion, attach your name to it. Other wise, your opinion really has no value. This blog is about standing up and being counted, not sniveling behind a cloak of anonymity.

4. The Master Index:A Peep-A-Roo (Denise, you know who you are) pointed out to me recently that the Blogger Platform makes it difficult to access archived blogs, along with the fact that its hard to find a previously published piece if all you have to go on is a consecutive string of numbered blogs.

I created a Master Index of all The Daily Dose injections, with a brief description of each one to make them a little easier to locate. This index will be updated weekly, and sent out every Saturday morning.

If you would like to receive The Master Index, please send me a traditional email address to: piannaplunker88@gmail.com You can always opt out at anytime.

Aside from receiving the index, this also gives us a chance to correspond one on one, probably the most rewarding part of the Dose experiment for me. Don't be shy!

I bite, but only when asked politely in the privacy of my own home.

I guess that's it for today. Don't forget: "The Dose Is In The Discipline" and "Sharing" really does translate to a state of "Caring", no matter what you do, what you make, or who you are. If you participate in the Universal Recycling system while playing a game of catch with creation, great things will happen. They always do.

Love,

Geo

Daily Dose #35 (07/02/11)

FLARE NIGHT


In our little neighborhood on Gayle Road, Fourth of July weekend was very special. It tapped into some real primordial DNA, at least when I was a little kid.

On the third of July we would have a neighborhood picnic at our shared beach that would go way beyond my normal bedtime and into the night. It was Flare Night.

Gayle road was its own little self contained community back then. It was a tribe, with tribal customs. The men cooked the meat, the women made the macaroni and potato salads, the kids would run around like feral woodland creatures and everybody broke bread, got drunk together, and collected around a huge bonfire. Toasted marshmallows washed down with Kool-Ade were the ritual hosts for the rugrats.

The first signal that July 3rd was just around the corner was the arrival of "Peanuts" in the Rossi family driveway. We only saw him once a year. He was a man of mystery, and to me the summer version of Santa Clause. Just as fat as Santa if not more, but clad in Raybans, a pencil thin William Powell moustache, and a half a tub of pomade in his hair. A white panama straw fedoroa floated atop this saintly creation, which not only looked like a halo in the sunset, but was also color and style coordinated with "Peanuts'" choice of summer sleigh.

He would back up the driveway of 12 Gayle Road in a huge ass white Caddy (He drove a new one every year). He never rang the doorbell or set foot in the house. My father was expecting him, and always subtly recused himself from the family dinner table on "Peanuts Appointment Night".

That didn't last long, however. I think I was about five when I snuck away from the table too, and followed my Pops down to the driveway to see what he was up to. You can't keep Santa Clause a myth forever, and "Peanuts" wasn't going to stay mythological around me for long.

Pops and "Peanuts" would have a brief conspiratorial discussion out of my earshot, and then "Peanuts" would hop out of the car, and pop the trunk lid of The Peanut Mobile.

That lid lifting was akin to cracking open the Lost Ark of The Covenant, or the Briefcase in "Pulp Fiction" along with the pre-requisite choir of angels "ahhing" in the background soundtrack of my imagination. "Peanuts" opened it in a tantalizingly slow manner for maximum dramatic effect. The only thing missing was a golden light emanating from within.

Lo and behold, there they were. A pirate's booty beyond a child's imagination.

Fireworks. Tons of fireworks. Illegal contraband of the highest order, all wrapped in a kaleidoscope of kiddie eye catching packaging.

Every imaginable incendiary device, from the most benign sparklers, fire crackers and bottle rockets to heaviest of Italian hand crafted heavy artillery, was loaded in that trunk creating a mighty strain on the Lincoln's rear suspension. "Peanuts" was the ATF's worst nightmare and wet dream rolled into one.

My father's contribution to the annual Gayle Road Pow Wow was the evening's entertainment for the kiddies, and the visual climax for the adults after a day of over-eating, kid wrangling, and copious collective booze consumption.

Pops did not approach this responsibility conservatively, and he always went big. Lots of crisp cash traded hands, and it took several trips to get all that booty stored in our basement closet along with our skis, poles and ski boots; all of which were in hibernation for the summer.

This was my first exposure to the "fell out of the back of a truck and into the trunk of a car" economic direct distribution system, and probably subconsciously in my adult life as I sold Shuffling Hungarians discs out of the back of MY trunk, I was channelling my inner "Peanuts" business model.

July 3rd was like Christmas as far as the little kid anticipation factor went. Although the tribal picnic started in the daylight hours, you couldn't wait for that sun to go down.

The tribal mass was based in night-time gun powdered sulphuric pyromania and the whistling, exploding bombast of rockets while sugar buzzed children danced around the blast furnace heat of the bonfire, waving sparklers with melted marshmallowed smeared faces.





It started with the lighting of the flares at sunset.

Like some ancient Druid ritual, all the inhabitants of Skaneateles that had beach access would line their shores with flares, and light them as the sun made its final descent over the western horizon line.

There is nothing quite like seeing the entire shore of the lake rimmed in a ring of red fire, before it dog legged to the South East and out of sight.

Nothing compares to witnessing that red fire ring. It will be forever etched in my memory.

The light fireworks of sparklers and bottle rockets were like foreplay to the big event, where the men folk would self-importantly make sure that the women and children were corralled at a safe distance. Then they would light the air borne bombs as you nestled in a beach chair with your mom, amid much "oohing" and "ahhing".

The flares would become nubs, the bonfire a massive pile of glowing embers. The Pagan ritual mass came to an end, and we all trudged up the hill in the black dark to our respective huts for the night.

The next day was spent clearing the debris painfully hungover, unless you had a kid old enough to send in your place.

That Gayle Road throwdown was the best night of the year.

One time my sister Becky was running around with a roman candle and aimed it at her best friend, Danielle Kane.

She nailed Danny's derrierre with a roman fireball from 20 feet. It stuck to Danny's cut-off jeans and lit her ass on fire. The men folk threw her in the lake, quickly averting crisis.

After that, the tribal fire mass was never quite the same, due to obvious liability issues. "Peanuts" would still make his annual visit to the driveway, but the fireworks displays were toned down to the point of utter boredom. You can only go so far with a sparkler.

Since moving back home a few years ago, I've spent flare nights with my family. Mom and Pop live in a condo in downtown Skaneateles, but their building still as lake access.

And although flares are still dutifully lit at the shores of Legg Hall, its not the same. Its an ancient custom and ritual that is dying out. There is no more "ring of red fire" that rims the lake, only a sporadic dot or two pathetically blinking along the shore.

They feel like desperate little signals of red light that the last of the Druids send to each other.

"Remember who and what we were? We are not that now."


"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!


THANK YOU KINDLY,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #32 (06/28/11)

THE BOAT LESSONS

In the summer of 1975 he was fifteen; lost in the weeds of adolescent rebellion, unbridled anger, and raging testosterone levels with few outlets other than his own manual dexterity.

Which clearly wasn't getting the job done enough to calm his roiling waters.

She was nineteen, back from her first year of college in Boston.

Neighbors for several years, both families were close, parents and children alike. Being four years younger, he was odd man out when it came to the mysteries of teen-age life.

He was always trying to grow up too fast, and always seemed to be banging his head against an immovable concept. He was just four years younger. Get lost kid.

But she was different. She actually enjoyed his company because in trying to grow up too fast, he was intellectually beyond his years.


In the evenings over that summer, as the sun set over the western valley ridge of the lake and the water still and smoothly surfaced, she sometimes would go out in his family boat to do a little skiing, smoke a little joint, or both.

She would always do this not because she had something better to do. Usually she had a date with a man much older than her, and would always hustle up the lake road as he attached the boat to the buoy to shower and get ready for her evening's adventure.

Summer evenings hit that rhythm in June, and lasted through July like ritual.

After a ski they would float freely in the middle of the lake. She would light up a doobie and lounge on the bench seat of the lemon yellow boat and the two of them would talk about the mysteries of music, love, and life. Although he wanted to share, her weed was always better than the skunkweed available to a kid in ninth grade. They always got the shake, over-priced.

On one such night with the sky bursting in orange and purple, slunk back into the bench seat and threw her wet hair back and turned her face toward the setting sun.

She fingered the strap of her brown bikini thoughtfully, and as if querying the sun, casually asked:

"Have you ever eaten pussy?"

That may seem like a forward question to some, but it wasn't to him. She was free, unencumbered by convention, and never seemed to give a rats ass about what people thought about her. She spoke her mind. That's why he was secretly in love with her.

He in fact had, on a beat up canvas seat of a catamaran stored in a boathouse the next lake lot to the south. There was a girl a year older that would allow him to get this far, and no further over the past year. They would sneak to the barren winter beach at separate intervals as to not be seen entering the shanty at the same time. They were careful not only of being found out, but being found out by her social contemporaries, as if it were to leak it would have resulted in a form of social suicide for her.

So there was a baseline of knowledge that he felt confidence in sharing. He wasn't totally wet behind the ears, even if in fact, those barely post puberty boathouse fumblings were much less of an education than he gave them, and himself credit for.

She stood up, small droplets of water making there way down her her tall but wide hipped frame. They had a long way to travel before they reached the deck.

She looked him in the eye.

"You know, if you really know how to give head, you can conquer the world"

He stared right back at her.This was a new concept worth contemplating. The extended silence was lightly punctuated with the sound of the lake shutting down for the night. A motor in the far distance. Water lapping up against the boat.

"O.K....teach me, then."

What came next was unexpected by him. He was just expecting a verbal walk through.

She slipped her bikini bottoms off, bent at the waist gracefully with her knees locked, and removed them from their strangle hold around her ankles.

She playfully twirled them around an extended index finger as she reclined back on the bench, and then let them fly seemingly carelessly past his left ear, but they were well targeted.

With the same finger, she pointed to the area of deck between her set apart feet.

"Kneel here".

He complied, his knees dug into the all-weather carpeting as he draped his forearms over her sun seasoned thighs.

"We're going to go through this step by step. I'll explain a few things, and then you do exactly what I tell you, when I tell you. Deal?"

"Deal"

"Whatever I teach you, you have to promise me to remember one thing after we're done"

"OK"

"This isn't a one-size-fits-all world. What works with me, isn't going to work for someone else necessarily. Every woman is different. There isn't any 'one way'.... if you really want to be good at this, that's the main thing you have to remember. You gotta be 'head's up' when you're going down. Understand?" She laughed at her own joke.

He nodded assent. She may be laughing but in his world this was quickly becoming... serious.


In very cold clinical fashion, she first pointed out the external working parts. An anatomy lesson. Labia majora, labia minora, clitoral hood, clitoris, perinium, anus and sphincter. She explained not only the clinical names, but functions of all these elements when attempting to bring her to climax.

But she also explained the art of it all. Erogenous zones around the working machinery. Patience. Respecting the clitoris by avoiding it at onset. The mechanics and timing of insertion, and how to use them to drive an orgasm. Rhythm, tempo, and meditative consistency. Building a narrative story.

She explained that there is an introduction, a beginning, a middle, an end, and a denouement. Patience, waiting and building urgency through anticipation. Letting somebody's body tell you what to do, instead of forcing the issue. Be invited instead of storming the battlements. Allowing the flowers to open and bloom organically, on their own timetable. How to compose, orchestrate and conduct the symphony.

And so they began.

"You have to be able to read the signs. Don't pay attention to noise at first. That's bullshit for show to benefit tiny male egos... you'll know when it's real."

"OK"

"Listen for respiration rate instead. Breath. And try to detect pulse rate with your finger tips when you start touching me. Those are first set of clues.... directions, and road signs. Got it?"

"Got it."

"No Improvising... Got it?"

"Yup"

In slow, step-wise fashion, she taught him how to tell an epic story without words.


For the first time, he felt the slow build up, the bear down and then the release; the repetitive rifle shots of muscles contracting around both of his hands, fingers buried deeply inside her, the explosions of all creation erupting around his buried head. He never felt that type of power, and the control of that power before. It was like driving a rocket as it approached escape velocity on it's way to commune with God.

"Now, wait...be still. There may be more. Wait for the signals and then make sure you're in position to take advantage of them"

The lesson continued as the sun hovered over the horizon line. "More" was an understatement. He was in awe that this could repeated and sustained. He was boggled that you could actually make someone feel this joyous, this continuously.

"Its getting late. Let's go in. I have a date tonight".

He drove back to shore, and dropped her off at the dock. No words were spoken.

He held the boat into position as he watched her scamper up the road, on her way to what seemed to him to be her other life. Her adult life of men with money and fast cars, bars, booze, and bands; dancing through the night to daybreak.

Maybe her rich boyfriend with the sports car was not particularly talented in this area of expertise. Maybe she just needed a seemingly benign beta test of personal control after a year of college boy ineptitude... or maybe she truly loved him enough to not allow him to stumble through blindly as she had through the adolescent minefield of sexual knowledge.

He thought of these things as he drove the boat to the distant buoy, attached it, and snapped the cover on the boat; tucking it in for the night.

None of it really mattered. She was right. For a brief moment, he did feel like he could conquer the world. He would carry that feeling like a Rosetta stone into his adventure that was about to begin.

He dove in piercing the cold water cleanly, and then swam to shore.










FINIS




"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!


THANK YOU KINDLY,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #28 (06/24/11)

Naming Rights

("A rose by any other name would smell as sweet")

My Moms, Linda Rockino, and my Pops, Nick Rossi. were married in 1955. Here's a little video of Nick explaining how he met Linda.



The future was bright for both of them. Linda was barely 21, and Nick was settling in to his responsibilities of overseeing the family business, a successful pasta manufacturing concern that distributed product throughout the Northeast and the Ohio Valley.

They didn't waste anytime screwing around starting a family. Or maybe they wasted all their time screwing around starting a family, depending on your perspective.

As Linda tells the tale, she had one menstrual cycle after getting hitched and got pregnant with my brother Alfie, and after he popped out she had one more menstrual cycle and then got pregnant with my sister Becky.

That was love, Italian Style, circa 1955-1957!

Nick and Linda wanted to follow the same procreation schedule and continue their "one-and-done" baby timetable, but I took a bit longer to conceive. I didn't become a bun in the oven until three years later. Even before I existed, I was already the problem child.

As my mother was carrying Alfie to term and was going through the "early-stages-of- pregnancy-naming-process-of-the-day-and-age" of "If it's a boy,? If it's a girl,?", little did she know that if it was a boy his name had already been pre-determined about two hundred years and fifty years ago.

Evidently in the Rossi branches of the family tree, every first born male child was named either Alfredo Nicola Rossi or Nicola Alfredo Rossi. The names alternated through each generation, and had been doing so since time immemorial. Since my Pops was Nicola Alfredo, my future older brother pulled Alfredo Nicola.

Although my mother may have internally bristled a bit at having no say in the naming of her first child, she knew better than to lock horns with her father-in-law Alfredo. He was the patriarch, the ruler of the entire roost, and the ultimate source of her personal ticket out of Palookaville by marriage. Immediately fighting hundreds of years of family tradition wasn't really a strategic option for her.

When she was pregnant with my sister Becky, no one seemed to have an opinion on what name should be chosen. She was constantly surrounded by little old spooky mustachioed Italian ladies dressed in constant black mourning attire, and when my Mom finally gathered up the courage to ask her mother-in-law why nobody had an opinion about what to name her gestating fetus, my Grandmother Pasqualina looked up at her while she was peeling garlic and perfunctorily said, "Eh...its a girl."...and then went back to her garlic peeling.

The Rossi matriarchs always knew the gender of a fetus, through observation of how the fetus was being carried, and some form of witchy dark arts Italian Catholic voodoo. Clearly, my mother was never going to be allowed into that club, or have the opportunity to learn those dark arts. She married into the clan, but she wasn't blood.

My parents were second generation Italian Americans starting a third. In America, it was very important to Americanize, and assimilate as quickly as possible into American "mayonnaise faced" culture. Italian was only spoken by the first generation, per example. So when my sister was born, my Mom named her "Rebecca Lynn". Nobody even batted an eye at the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant lilt of the moniker.

Perhaps because of the de-escalation of the superstitious Italian voodoo shit surrounding the birth of my sister, this gave my Moms a false sense of security when it came around to naming me. She hit a home run her first time at bat by having a masculine child, gave a drama free birth to a lovely little girl approaching the age of three, and both were popped out with due diligence. She had now been around for a few years. She had paid her Rossi Family dues to a significant degree at least in her mind and had at least earned the right to name her own children.

So much to her surprise, one day early on in her pregnancy with yours truly, my future Grandfather Rossi saddled up to her at the traditional Sunday family dinner, rubbed her belly lovingly, and asked, "Howza-Giorch-yo?"

"Who's Giorgio?"

"a-Giorch-yo!" My grandfather declared happily, still rubbing but now wildly gesticulating with his hands around my mother's barely bump of a belly, as Italians are wont to due when words fail. My grandfather would have been a PHD Magna Cum Laude graduate from the Vanna White School of Hand Modeling, had one actually existed in 1959.

Evidently, the witchy Italian ladies of the kitchen and Catholic Voodoo arts had broken the news to the King that mother was carrying another man-child.

"Oh Poppy... It might be a girl in here you know"

"No, eetzaleetle boy. A-Giorch-yo... a-Giorch-yo Ju-seppuh-Rossi!"

He was beaming.

"Well, Poppy, Nick and I have discussed this... if its a boy, we've already decided on a name."

Uh,oh.

"No, No, No. Dis eetza-Giorch-yo!", he declared, slightly more forcefully, but still with a frozen grin pasted on his face. The gears in his head were starting to grind.

"No, Poppy... if its a boy, we've decided to name him Andrew Steven Rossi"

Maybe my mother saw this as an opening to finally assert some type of independence in a Patriarchal system where she had absolutely none. But she was sadly mistaken.

The meltdown quickly ensued at the Rossi Sunday Dinner table, with all of the voodoo ladies and my Grandfather transitioning into the mile-a-minute dialect of Italian and hand sign theater that even my father couldn't decipher. War had been declared by the upstart neophyte of the family.



Ahh, La Guerra! The Procino and Rossi family past-time! Although my mother had probably been debriefed extensively by Nick just how "La Guerra" Rossi style could manifest itself, you are never prepared for it when it is declared.

Sunday dinners? Cancelled! All communications? Blacked out! You are immediately dis-owned, shunned, and isolated from the rest of the herd. Philistine!

For my entire gestation period, war intelligence was only delivered through intermediaries and most of it from The Patriarch's side was news of collective heads on fire, hair pulling, wall wailing, teeth gnashing, hand wringing, melodramatic hearts breaking... and steely resolve. It was going to be "Giorgio Giuseppe or total exile and banishment, FOREVER!". A real over-the-top Italian Opera.

And although my poor Father was caught in the middle of all of this very real nonsense, he still supported my Mother, and her need to assert her independence. It was going to be "Andrew Steven", and the whole rest of the family can go fuck themselves if they think they can name our kid.

That's Love... Nicolo Alfredo Style. And that's why they've been married for 57 years.

So positions hardened, boot heels got dug into deeper foxholes, and nobody talked to anybody for the entire term of the pregnancy. Until March 19th, 1960, the day I decided to leave the comfort of my nine month swim in amniotic fluid and see what the rest of the world was up to.

These weren't the days of natural childbirth. There was no new age Enya music, family witnessing and video documentation of birth, and comforting warm baths for the newly born.

They pumped mothers full of Demerol, Morphine, and God knows what else in the chemical cocktail, knocked them out, jammed a set of forceps up their crowning vaginae, put the plates around the heads of the babies, squeezed the handles together and then pulled the little suckers out like corks from nine month old vintage wine bottles. Then they slapped the baby's asses to get them to gasp their first breaths of air.

Welcome to the world, little Andrew Steven Rossi.

My parents held their ground. That's what went on the birth certificate. La Famiglia Guerra was officially over, and now it was time to negotiate the peace treaty.

In temporary truce, in honor of the blessed event of my birth the warring family factions collected around the glass partitioned viewing area to discuss the first visable evidence of my genetic mix of attributes before my mother even got a chance to see me, let alone hold me.

As she started to awaken from her dope induced haze in her recovery room, lo and behold she was greeted by the sight of my grandfather kneeling at her bedside, weeping openly.

"I justa saw a-Giorch-yo...heeza beeyoootifuls. Please, a-Linda-Loo...Pleaza forgivamee."

In my mother's narcotic haze, she may have recognized a seam in the Rossi family defense shields and systems. She won the war. I was "Andrew Steven" and she at least knew that for fact in her doped up delirium. But she was finally going to be allowed to ask the question that everyone had refused to answer while I floated around preparing for my first journey; a forceps aided dive bomb out of the birth canal.

"Why?", she asked. "Why 'Giorgio'"?

My grandfather, in his broken English translated the narrative of an epic and heroic poem in Italian, that had been passed through generations of Rossi's orally.

The story he wove centered on the only Giorgio Giuseppe Rossi in the entire history of the family. There was only one Giorgio branch, and it was barren. A real black sheep in the family history, but one that garnered much respect in certain family circles.

Through the excruciating period of the Italian Unification process, Giorgio was a follower of Mazzini and Garibaldi, a red-shirted revolutionary. As legend had it, one Sunday morning he waltzed into a Genoa Cathedral where The Dean of The College of Cardinals was giving a high mass to make the case, and with a cross-bow my namesake shot the Galero clean off the Papal emmissary's head from 150 feet away.

The point of the fabled arrow pierced the marble heart of a statue of The Christ on the Crucifix that rose above the altar, and stuck; the red tassled Galero dangling from the vibrating shaft of his instrument of protest.

He received a Papal death sentence, and was promptly boiled alive in a vat of oil via hook and pulley. At least that was how my Grandfather spun the tale. He was probably hanged, but the boiling detail was a little juicier.

My Mother's head was now reeling from more than the awakening of a drug induced sleep as she asked Alfredo why in the world would he want me named after the official family ne'er-do-well, black sheep revolutionary assassin and reprobate.

"Whatza today?"

My poor mother couldn't be expected to know what planet she was on, let alone the day of the month. She was doped up but good, but she still had enough control of her faculties to make an educated guess.

"March 19th."

"Thatza right. Marcha Nine-a Teen. Dis izza da day da firzta Giorch-eyo wazza bornt anna dis izza da day da secundo Giorch-eyo izza bornt. Giorno di San Giuseppe... Santa Joe-seffzza'sa Day!"

St. Joseph, the spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Patron Saint of Sicily.

Suddenly, the clouds started to part from my mother's delirious state.

Those family witches not only prognosticated the gender of her child, they had predicted the exact day of his birth well before she had completed her first tri-mester to the minute: 11:11 AM.

As they toiled and troubled stirring and sweating over the Sunday cauldrons of blood colored boiled and bubbled tomato brew, they not only knew the gender and date of birth.

They knew that the warrior soul of the first Giorgio Guiseppe Rossi, the family rebel revolutionary, and the chosen one that would fearlessly stand up and be counted to the point of death was being re-incarnated. The family lunatic was back in the fold. Back from the dead.

His soul was mysteriously stewing amid the DNA juices in the cauldron belly of the neophyte when they had broken THAT news to The King Of The Family on the ill fated day that family war was declared.

Those little mustachioed witches clad in hairnets and black dresses knew.

They saw it in the sauce.

Fifty one years in retrospect, they were dead-on right.

The lawyers were called and the birth certificate was changed immediately. "Andrew Steven" was consigned to historical irrelevancy, and Giorgio Guiseppe arrived; The product of war and a form of ancient Italian necromancy.




I was forged in utero boiling in the heat of La Famiglia Guerra, and emerged steeled and ready to assume the mantle and responsibility of my family's crazy namesake. It was predestined.

Like I said: Spooky, Dark Arts, Catholic Voodoo Shit.

THE END OF THE BEGINNING OF THE END


"You may shoot for the stars and end up in a back alley behind Pluto, beaten and bloodied, but at least I dare to dream, and that’s better than being Earthbound, mired in the muck of mediocrity.

I judge my forward progress and success by the crushingly epic nature of my failures.

The more epic the crash, the more I’m convinced I must be doing something right"

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!


THANK YOU KINDLY,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #19 (06/15/11)

THE BAD NEWS BEAR

(A Lake Boy Tale)

OPENING DAY

In the spring and summer of 1971, I joined a Little League Ball Club.

My baseball training was pretty non-existent. My dad Nick was a hard working man, and had been since I could remember. He was up and out of the house by 5:15 am every morning, six days a week. Sometimes he didn't come home until 7:30 or 8:00 from the factory, wiped out. He had the weight and responsibility of many families on his shoulders, let alone his own brood.

Every once in awhile, we would have a catch in the backyard as the evening's dinner meat had it's untimely heated intercourse with grill fire. But we never went to ballgames at MacArthur Stadium, or even watched games on TV... there just wasn't enough time.

I became aware that spring that a bunch of my friends had signed up for Little League, and had been involved in organized baseball for a while. These were the new friends of sixth grade, and curiously, my elementary school circle wasn't into baseball as much as they were into Scouting.

So when I asked Chris Kelly if I could join, he was enthusiastic. So I did. I wanted to hang with my band of brothers. I became a Red Sock.

My father was ecstatic. Finally, one of his boys showed an interest in athletics, rather than running around like Leonardo DaVinci with my brother, The Prince Of The D'Medicis (which was basically my Mother's upbringing agenda).

His boy was going to participate in "The National Pastime". Evening catches and batting practice became much more frequent, and I cherished the extra time that Dad eked out to spend with me, trying to get me up to speed.

Red Sox practices were a blast. My friends were the youngest on the team, but the older boys were really good. We had all the Cahill boys, and Keith and Kevin Sawyer, who were already making themselves known as the future of Skaneateles High School sports. We were loaded, and the prospects of a Championship Season for the Red Sox weren't even in question. The only competition looked to be The Yankees.

The team was coached by Mr. Sawyer, Keith and Kevin's dad. Very early on in practice, we all knew that the Red Sox were going to be the instrument to deliver his son's to Little League glory. Nepotism? Sure, but it made sense, because Keith and Kevin were very talented athletes.

I was anything but a talented athlete. I never played before. I couldn't hit, catch or throw. I didn't know the rules, or the culture of baseball.


But it didn't matter to me. Practicing on that little square patch of grass beneath the track that sat atop a hill overlooking Elizabeth Street was a blast. I loved running down fly balls from left field and diving in the dirt. Sometimes I actually caught the ball. Most times I just ended up with a mouthful of sod caught in my braces. I just loved being with the fellas, doing fella kind of stuff; sweating and getting down in the dirt in the sunshine.

But mostly, I loved baseball because my Dad loved baseball and I loved him. I will never forget the look on his face on the day that uniforms were issued to The Red Sox, with me trying on the crisp white cotton replicated professional Red Sox uniform that was several sizes too big, modeling it for him. He almost cried tears of joy, something I had never seen my father ever do.

And so the season commenced. I rode my bicycle down to Austin Park to play in my first real baseball game under the lights. I was breathing a rarefied kind of air, just being there and being a part of that scene.


Of course, I didn't start. If not for the Official National Rules of Little League, Mr. Sawyer wouldn't put me in the game at all. Who would blame him? I certainly wouldn't. I had a pretty accurate assessment of my own lack of skills on the diamond.

But the rules are the rules, and Wally Sawyer followed them. Every kid on the roster had to play at least 1.5 innings, and I debuted my talents or lack thereof, at the bottom of the fifth. The stands were filled with Little League fans and parents of the players, except my own. They couldn't make it for some reason.


Just as well they didn't show up. I struck out, had a fly ball hit me in the head in left field, and then eliminated myself from taking possession of first base with an infield pop fly cupcake ... after excruciatingly foul tipping twelve consecutive pitches.

But to sit on the pine and cheer my fellow Sox on as they systematically dismantled the opposition? It was great. Watching the heroic exploits and feats of baseball derring-do as performed by my friend Chris, the Cahill and the Sawyer boys was thrilling for me. I was part of something way bigger than myself, and it felt good.

I had all summer to improve. It was going to be a great season.

The coaching strategy that Mr.Sawyer would adopt was revealed that first game. Have the incredibly talented starters cream the competition for five and half innings, pad the score, put in the scrubs, and walk with a win.

After a few practices we approached the start of our second game, and like as before, I picked the pine splinters out of my coolie at the bottom of the fifth. As I approached the plate, suddenly I heard the loudly ringing bray of Trua Sawyer, the coach's wife, and mother of our golden boy star players.

"WAAAAALLLY! Yer not gonna put HIM in are ya? He sucks!"

I whiffed the first pitch amid the faint twittering of laughter from the bleachers.

"See? That little greaseball can't hit the broadside of a barn!!!"

The laughter increased in decibel level.

DIGGING IN

Throughout that summer, Mrs. Sawyer never let an opportunity go by to hurl invective at me while I tried to play baseball. The more outrageous she was, the more positive feedback she got from the stands, which just amplified her level of outrageous.

I became the object of her floorshow, and she never failed to pull out all the stops.

"Greaseball". "Dago". "Guinea". "Wop". "Guido". "Goombah". "Brown Skin". "Nigger". I was swarthy, and spent most of my time in the sun.

These were the nouns she used to point out every one of my baseball shortcomings. Every time I went to bat, or aligned myself under a fly ball from way out in left field, I was so filled with anxiety that it took all my concentration not to cry, or vomit out of nervous tension. The entire season, I never got a hit.

It took me a while to figure out that the cooler that Trua brought to every game was filled with beer, and that by the bottom of the fifth inning of every game she was three-sheets-to-the-wind-on-her-way-to-four drunk. What did an eleven year old kid know about drinking?

The outcome of every game was determined by the time I entered it. And when I did, that was the time for Trua's comedic and verbal skills to be rolled out as I became the object of public humiliation and ridicule. It was regulary scheduled comic relief like clockwork, as the mighty Red Sox went on to an undefeated season and into the playoffs.

It was a public stoning, every game. My teamates were embarassed, but that embarassment manifested itself in them distancing themselves from me instead of rallying around me. I became a leper.

Just as consistently as Trua's racist harangues were going to reduce me to a human ash heap at every game, I could absolutely count on one more component.

Mr. Wally Sawyer, my coach, her husband, and the father of the golden blue-eyed child Gods, would do absolutely nothing to stop his wife's abject cruelty and abuse.

After riding my bike home after every game, I would look at myself in the wall sized mirror of our pink tiled bathroom. The clear tracks of my tears lined ans streaked my dirty face horizontally, due to the velocity generated by furious pedalling with cleated feet.

And I would ask myself "Why am I putting up with this?"

My mother would never go to a kid's baseball game. Especially her own, as it was against her every agenda point in molding a future Leonardo DaVinci. My father, never could make a game, either due to his schedule, or the fact that he was dog tired after six consecutive fourteen hour work days per week.

He was so proud of me. I was playing on a team headed for a championship, and when we got the opportunity to discuss the season, I'd recall each game, and the super human exploits of my team members, and the not so super human exploits of my own.

He just met that news with an arm around the shoulder, words of encouragement, and the wisdom to point out that "Rome wasn't built in a day: and you won't be either: Just keep plugging, son".

If I quit, then evening catches with Dad would quickly become a thing of the past.

I couldn't tell them about the fifth inning floorshows of Mrs.Sawyer's. I just had to ride it out until the end of the season.

I couldn't, and I wouldn't, break my father's heart.

THE HAND OF FATE

A curious thing happened as The Red Sox advanced through the playoffs in August.

Many families of our star players had scheduled their respective vacations during the same week, and even fielding a team of nine for the semi- final playoff game before the championship was in question. The roster had been obliterated; the starting nine full of ringers were going to be in Cape Cod, or some other east coast vaction destination spot.

What was once a guaranteed shot at the trophy might have to end up in a forfiet.

At practice, there were only nine of us. There were no Kelly's or Cahills. Just seven scrubs and the incredibly talented Sawyer boys.

All of us were going to have to play the entire game, and we were going to have to win it to meet the hated Yankees for the championship cup.

I'd like to tell you that amazingly I had a bottom of the sixth, walk off homer run to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat heroic moment, but that was not the case.

It might make for a better sports story with a happy ending, but real life always intrudes.

I was just as lousy as I ever was, and seeing how this might be the last time that Trua could take a drunken whack at me, she now had six full innings in which to do so, never hesitating to exploit every opportunity to spew her drunken bile directly at me to the delight of the crowd attending the event.

I kept my batting average a perfect zero. I never knew what it felt like to get a hit in a baseball game.

The game was incredibly tight, but the Sawyer Boys pulled through putting the seven uncoordinated bunglers on their respective backs, and The Red Sox preserved their undefeated season. Next on the horizon was the championship game.

As the sun set in the West over St. Mary's Church, Mr. Sawyer took it upon himself to have a paternalistic chat with me. As we walked off the diamond, he put his arm gently around me over my shoulders.

"Ya know George, I know this season was rough for ya. But ya have heart. You never caved in, crumbled, or quit....and it's a good thing ya didn't. If ya hadn't been here today son, our season woulda been over. We couldn't have done it without ya. Yer just as an important member of this team as my two boys are... I'm really proud of ya, son"

And right there, I allowed myself to break down. I cried. I thought about all of the ratcheted abuse that this man's shrew of a wife heaped upon me for an entire summer, and the fact that this man had allowed it... and now he was giving me the "We couldn't have done it without ya speech"?

I knew when everybody was coming home from vacation. Fielding the "A" team next week was a forgone conclusion.

I squared my eleven year old shoulders at this hulk of a man,this... cretinous piece of shit, disengenuous oaf. I looked him dead in his watery blue eyes, handed him my cap and glove, and with all menace and clarity of force available to me, snarled:

"Go Fuck Yourself, Coach"

As he stared at me with his jaw agape, I turned and walked off the infield.

Liberated, the imaginary band at my adolescent dance with authority officially struck its first chord.

I went home to tell my parents I quit the team. The Sox went on to beat the Yankees the next weekend.


I enrolled in a Saturday art class at the Everson Museum shortly thereafter, and most of the students were inner city African American kids. I now knew where I belonged, and I no longer belonged to Skaneateles, and it no longer belonged to me.

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!


THANK YOU KINDLY,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"

Daily Dose #15 (06/11/11)

MY FRIEND STEVE: PART 3


Author's Note:

"Friendships are funny. You think they will last forever, but life intrudes. Trajectories that seem to coincide for a time, skew unexpectedly.

As I age, I've come to accept that phenomena a little more gracefully, but as a child, it's hard to understand what was seemingly set in stone... wasn't."

These three "Daily Dose" entries, #'s 13,14, and 15, concern a 40 year cycle of friendship with Steve Krause, my childhood best friend. If you haven't the first two, the rest of this won't make much sense. Just go to the subheading in the right column labeled "The Daily Dose". Number 13 will be easy to find.

PART 3

I left part 2 of this trilogy with this critical question running through my mind: "What if I wasn't brought here to fix me? What if The Universe brought me here to fix something, or someone else?"

I thought I was up here to start something new: to fix my life. But then this new opportunity popped up out of the blue. Maybe my path crossed Steve's for a reason. Maybe I was here to right a past wrong, or fix something that was broken. Maybe me being in Skaneateles in a railroad apartment working on developing a show was just window dressing: a smokescreen to perhaps accomplish something of much greater value than prancing around on a stage as the Monkey Boy screaming, "Look At Me!"

Once you really start to notice what I call "The unseen connective tissue between two points", you start to see more evidence that you may have uncovered a hidden cosmic agenda.

While I was up here preparing for the show, I started dating a local Skaneateles woman who I had gone to highschool with. In highschool, she was a very close friend of Steve's wife Dorothy, and that friendship had been preserved for the past thirty years. I somehow had also been given a more insider's view of the struggle that Steve was going through concerning his injury, and the effects of those struggles.

Also, a mutual friend of all of ours in highschool was getting remarried at the Skaneateles Country Club. With a little push on my part, there would be plenty of opportunities to talk with Steve. I insisted that we all get together at the Sherwood Inn for an "old home week" reunion dinner.

So the Universe, or whatever you want to call it, was serving up meatballs for me to take a swing at basically. All the puzzle parts were fitting.

So I got to hang with Steve in several social situations, none that could be perceived as an ambush on my part. I didn't want to knock him out of his comfort zone again.

So at a cocktail party, at a wedding, and at my engineered "dinner" I got to hang out with my dear old friend, and we got to re-connect. If he was suffering from sort of diminution of cognitive or comprehension abilities, he hid it well.

During that dinner, we got to talk about my car accident. I got to finally tell him, after forty years, that I never blamed him. And that I understood how scary it must have been for him. That I loved him dearly, and that love was never turned off as if it was on a switch. It was just shelved because of an apparent lack of interest, one that I had a much better understanding of now.

We both decided that maybe my being here in Skaneateles might provide us with the opportunity to resume a friendship long gone, and that having that opportunity was an unexpected blessing, and we both expressed regret for letting a friendship become dormant for forty years. What a colossal waste of time.

We promised to stay in touch, and to make sure we didn't let life intrude on us rekindling a new, adult friendship.

EPILOGUE

I'd like to tell you there is a happy ending to this story. After two years of Steve and I periodically calling each other to try to set something up, we never did. Life did intrude, and scheduling was insurmountable for both of us. We both sort of gave up.

I ran into him at a fundraising dinner in the spring of 2010 at the Skaneateles Country Club, and we got to hang a bit. Hanging with him was like putting on a pair of very old comfortable shoes. We both reminded each other that we were blowing it by not making more of an effort to get together. We made a pact to not let this opportunity to pass.

A battery of phone calls were exchanged again, and again, we never seemed to get to the point where we would drop what was going on in our respective lives to actually make it happen.

On October 16th, 2010, Steve Krause died. He was fifty years old, leaving behind his wife, four beautiful children, his mom and dad, his siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews... and his friends, of which he had volumes.

That little red Audi that I witnessed Steve and his Dad pouring themselves out of just less than two years previously, became the instrument of his untimely demise. He was travelling toward Skaneateles on Route 41, from the family camp in Spafford. He lost control of the car, and he hit a tree.

The car was discovered at approximately 4:45 in the afternoon. He died the next day at Upstate Medical Hospital in Syracuse, NY.

State Police statements included information that lead to the conclusion that he was travelling too fast for rainy driving conditions.

I went to the chapel that Steve had designed for Lemoyne college, where his memorial service was held. You couldn't get in the joint. The service was SRO with a line around the block.

I also attended a "celebration of his life" function at the lodge on the Welch Allyn Corporate compound. He was very much loved by the entire community.

Steve's death filled me with regret. I had been given an opportunity, but ultimately, I blew it. Maybe I did enough just by clearing the air on a childhood event that occurred forty years ago. Maybe that was enough, but I could have done so much more for him in his time of trouble. He was struggling. I knew it, and I didn't do enough to ease some of that for him.

So at the risk of repeating myself (I suspect that I will do that a lot over the course of 365 consecutive blogs, and frankly I'm not too worried about it),although many may question my motives for writing these things, I'm pretty clear on my own motivation.

You have to share what you know. You cannot be proprietary about what you know like its some sort of trade secret. Its time for me to give it away, and stop guarding it. I'm not competing in a rat race anymore. I've walked off the track.

There is no guarantee that I will wake up tomorrow morning.

Lets face it. I've lived hard, and have lived a hard life. I've been rode hard, albeit by my own design and choice, but I've still been put in the barn wet. This moment, right now, may be my last opportunity to pass something on that I value, to people I love. I try to write like its the last time I'll get the chance to do so. These blogs are about the simple truths that I have learned in my time spent on planet earth.

So this is what I know:

You have to read the signs Peep-A-Roos.

It's not enough to be able to develop the ability and sensitivity to read the signs to see the unseen connective tissue between points and events on the time continuum.

You must act upon them, and in accordance with them.

Most importantly, you have to give. Give, and give, and give some more without the feeble expectation of reciprocation. Reciprocation will always come, but it won't always manifest itself in an obvious way. It usually manifests itself in the form of relationships, not stuff.

You have to diligently throw creation into all of creation. Share with an open, loving, and trusting heart. Creation takes care of itself, and takes care of its own.

There are assholes out there that will take advantage of people who give. That doesn't matter, and it ain't your problem. If you are giving to wear a crown of thorns to broadcast your own victimization, you're giving for the wrong reasons.

Assholery takes care of itself, and takes care of its own.

So...once again, with feeling:

Don't "Try": "Do". Don't parasitically "Take":"Give". Don't thoughtlessly destroy, following some scorched earth policy to serve your own needs at the expense of the needs of others: "make" instead. Don't "Hate": "Love". Don't harbor resentment: "Forgive". Don't point the crooked finger of blame: find your own personal responsibility in any adverse situation, because that's the place where future usable wisdom resides. Embrace failure and the lessons learned from it, instead of being paralyzed be the fear of failure.

And tell the people you love, that you love them. Every chance you get. You may never get another.

AS ALWAYS: PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE, AND SHARE THIS BLOG ADDRESS VIA COPY AND PASTE IN AN EMAIL, THROUGH THE TWITTER OR FACEBOOK "SHARE" BUTTONS,WORD OF MOUTH, FILTHY WHISPERED GOSSIP, FALSE NARRATIVE, TIN CAN AND STRING CONFIGURATIONS, PONY EXPRESS, OR CARRIER PIGEON. WITHOUT FEEDBACK OR ACTIVE "SHARING", WHAT YOU JUST READ.... DOESN'T EXIST!


THANK YOU KINDLY,

COLONEL BEAUREGARD "IRON THIGHS" JEFFERSON, A.K.A. "THE MANAGEMENT"