Progenitors

Who better to teach the game of War to a four-year-old than a man who managed to avoid blistering agents in Europe? That man would be George.

George and the boy turned the cards week after week until the child recognized every number and every face in the deck. George explained that you play the cards dealt to you and that a card’s power depends on the one it goes up against. He taught the boy that loss can turn to victory, and vice versa, and that you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch. “We don’t have chickens” the boy replied.

George and his wife Mary Jane would have made wonderful parents but that wasn’t to be. They found prayers of fertility to be tricky. Across the street the prayers of a couple with more children than they planned were answered with even more babies, each more beautiful than the other.

Mary Jane and George began to borrow the boy next door. Saturday
mornings became a ritual. The boy would watch for Mary Jane to raise her kitchen blinds as a signal that he should come over for a second breakfast.

Mary Jane hailed from Kentucky where hams, sausages, eggs, biscuits, syrup and canned fruit grow on trees. The boy, a runt with the puffy eyes of the chronically malnourished (he wasn’t), would knock off everything Mary Jane could throw at him. She also introduced him to his coffee, mostly steaming milk and sugar.

Mary Jane would sit the boy next to her on the couch and they would “visit” over her candies (this was decades before Forest Gump, mind you). Each chocolate sat in a neat row in its own paper doily. Fussy tissues separated the layers. She taught the boy to identify the shape and color and squiggle on top of each one, then guess what was inside. She never reached for his favorites, he could only assume she had bad judgment in chocolates.

These were the first times the boy was allowed to venture out of his house on his own. It was only a few yards between back doors but it was as heady as stepping out of a spacecraft. Unlike the astronauts who came later, he wasn’t aware that his every step was being triangulated from those two kitchen windows.

The couple knew that time and maturation was working against them. They knew the boy would eventually cross the street and go off kindergarten. Families had begun buying television sets and the Funks would never be able to compete with Ramar of the Jungle and Sky King. They knew that Mighty Mouse was on the way.

It didn’t show up on the mobile apps or the weather channels, Doppler missed it completely. Only he and his wife and their daughter knew the storm was coming.

It showed no sign of changing course. Pressure was building with every conversation, text message and passing in the hallway.

Their daughter had her talking points down cold: I’m an adult! (She turned 18 days before.) I’ve pulled God knows how many all-nighters! I aced my APs! I earned this! A tradition! Once-in-a-lifetime!

There was a group of mothers who not only liked the idea but set it in motion. The plan was to rent a resort unit a hundred and some miles away and turn it over to a handful of recent high-school grads for a weekend. Enough kids had their own cars so getting there wouldn’t be a problem.

One mother in particular fielded calls from other parents. No, she wouldn’t actually be there in person. But, yes, she would be somewhere. She would definitely, you know, have her cell phone on. There might be alcohol but what else would you expect from our amazing “work-hard, play-hard” overachievers?

She danced around every question but on one she was perfectly clear. Even though she would sign for the rental, she would in no way be responsible if something happened. “They’re legal, you know?”

None of this surprised the new graduate’s parents. There were homes that were open for sleepovers every weekend. Tweens would curl up, catch a few hours sleep (or not) and wait for a ride in the morning. Their daughter often begged a sick day the following week until, mercifully, a groundable offense put an end to her sleepovers.

With the slash-and-burn adolescent years behind her, she was someone you could do business with. But on this question, she had filled sandbags and hunkered down.

It had been on a Saturday night forty-five years earlier, that her father woke his own mother to tell her what a fire hydrant had done to his friends.

They had been playing poker, the nine of them, townies and part-time students a year out of high school. They didn’t have an ounce of fat among them so “three-two” beer was enough to get them drunk. But it was the whisky that sealed the deal.

After poker they piled into cars and raced on a deserted suburban lane. The heavy, Detroit-made family sedan couldn’t hold curves as well as the Triumph or the Chevy coupe. Wayne lost his life. Dan lost the use of a leg. Johnny, the driver who slammed into the hydrant (and the sweetest kid in the group), would walk away tortured and inconsolable for years.

The graduate’s father can recall visiting the ICU several times a week — as long as Wayne was alive. He remembers sitting with Wayne’s family. He is fairly certain that he went to the graveyard with his mother, and that she drove.

What troubles him is that he doesn’t remember being properly devastated. He doesn’t know if he had suffered enough to be absolved for bringing the whisky that night. The right to cry wasn’t forbidden in his family — his factory-worker uncles openly wept when his grandfather died — but he couldn’t say if he had cried over the loss of his friend.

He told his daughter and her brother about The Accident many times. He didn’t condemn the evils of alcohol absolutely. After all Jesus turned water into wine to please his mother.

He and his daughter were close and they were anxious to settle their standoff. They walked to a wooded stretch of the Lake Michigan shoreline. He hoped he could convince her not to go away that weekend. He was reluctant to issue commands to a daughter he could no longer consider as just a child. (He had enlisted at 17.)

She allowed him to relive the details of the accident once again, looking out at the lake as he spoke. But this time she noticed something different in his delivery.

His breathing wasn’t right. His pattern of speech was off. There was a pause that had never been there before. That’s when she saw, rolling down her father’s cheek, a tear that had been held in reserve all these years, waiting for a time when it might make a difference.

 

Just Your Average 69-Year-Old College Freshman Studying Abroad.

 

ON THE DAY OF THE DEAD — Most Spanish-speaking students live at home when they’re in college, often until they marry.

Sadness flashes across the faces of professors when kids from the northern countries talk about moving out. The American ethic of rugged individualism — sallying forth to tame a continent and build gambling casinos — is foreign here.

“Telenovelas,” Spanish soap operas, feature in-laws, ex-spouses and all manner or relatives embroiled in tempestuous relationships. Since the Soaps are the truest of art forms, we know that Spanish families are not necessarily happier. The divorce rate here is about what it is in the U.S.

A 3-year-old, being dragged to day-care by her grandparents, threw a blood-curdling tantrum on the street the other day. Looking closely I saw these were actually great grandparents who won’t be available for a fifth generation of servitude. Adios means “Go to God.”

On the rocks protecting the western shoreline of Lake Michigan, students paint messages that last until someone paints over them. On one of the rocks is written “En memoria mi abuelo.” Maybe it will survive until the elements wash it away.

Just Your Average 68-Year-Old College Freshman.

Even a humble community college can make people nervous. There are books here and they have ideas on almost every page.

Politicians accuse each other of being from elite colleges, even if they went to Harvard or Yale themselves. They pander to the Swamp People and Alien Hunters in all of us. Today we learned about the Know Nothing Party of the 1850s. They named it themselves.

There are parents who worry the kids they send of to college won’t be the same when they come back home. They should be so lucky.