The wooded roads of Dollar Bay, Michigan are about as upper as the Upper Peninsula gets, so Spring’s efforts at dispelling the frigid barrenness of winter go largely unnoticed until late in the season. On a cold afternoon, a solitary figure ambled home from school along the strip of dead, brown grass that separated the road from the tree line. Shuffling along, bent forward at the waist to ward off the piercing wind upon his face, the fifteen year-old boy gave off the appearance of a monk, his figure robed in a thick coat and heavy, dark jeans. The sun’s mocking glare belied a warmth that the chilly afternoon air did not afford.
Piercing blue eyes swept the path, inconsequentially marking each trudging step. His thoughts swept away from him, intermingling with the deadness of the air, and then plunged back again, skirting the depths of his moody, teenage ego. What did he find in there? The hazy innocence of a youth not long past? A burgeoning intelligence that was out of place in this backwater town? The harsh rebellion of a persecuted soul? It was too soon to tell; his thoughts strayed back outside, expelled like the steamy breath seeping out of his upturned jacket collar.
“A couple of kids jumped me,” Adam says to me plainly, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his chin nostalgically. “One of them broke my jaw with a baseball bat. My jaw still pops from it.” Seated comfortably in his barren office, I continue to listen to his story:
Across the road, he saw the wide expanse of russet grass that someday soon would become a baseball field once again. Dead tree branches crackled in the woods behind him. Startled out of his reverie, Adam instinctively turned to see what was causing the commotion.
There was no time for fear, no time for defense. The two boys scurrying out of the trees were bigger than him, and one wielded a long, thin-handled aluminum bat. Did the bully have time to say something clever? Adam would have. He was a smartass, and that was what made him a target: “Batter up!”
The bat swept through the air in an untrained arc, finding its target almost by accident. Adam’s jawbone snapped violently out of its place; inside his skull, the afternoon sun shattered into a mist of dazzling lights that blinded him from the pain. His knees buckled momentarily, before recovering his body to its full, if not significant, height. Darkness never descended, so Adam was able to see the stunned look on his attacker’s face.
“I think he couldn’t even believe what had happened. It was almost like it surprised him, so much so that he just dropped the bat. So I picked it up.”
He could taste the blood now. It poured into his mouth, seeping between his teeth, where the pain was beginning to localize. The two bigger boys stood dumbfounded, rooted to the dirty, dead grass as if they had forgotten why they had come. Lunging for the fallen weapon, Adam gripped its plastic-wrapped handle tightly. Fear had come and gone; the hatred of the hunter was now made insignificant in the face of the blind fury of the hunted’s revenge. Swinging the bat like a lumberjack hewing a tree, Adam crushed the side of the assailant’s chest, perhaps breaking the first ribs in that first hack. The squeals of pain did not deter him; again, and once more the bat came down as the once-bully crumpled to the ground. As if awakening from a daze, his companion lurched forward, throwing Adam back from his fallen comrade. Losing his balance, Adam finally toppled over, the bat rolling away into the underbrush. The previous moments’ rage and hostility spiraled down, down into a pinpoint of suddenly crystal-clear rationality: I have to get up. I have to get away.
“I was brought up on charges, but the judge dropped them, obviously because the kid broke my jaw first. He still ordered me to see a juvi officer, who recommended that I find a more constructive outlet for my aggression.”
When he managed to regain his feet, there was no sign of the two other boys except the muddy patch where the grass had been torn up by the sprawled body of Adam’s attacker. Turning to hurry homeward, his intention all along, the needling pains in his teeth exploded into a fire that consumed his entire skull. His eyes dulled, his ears closed off, and each step sent a wave of anguish through his loosely-hanging mandible. Behind the pain, though, Adam’s sharp intellect was reawakening, questioning: ‘What have I done?’
Thursday, April 30, 2009
Thursday, April 23, 2009
Small World
The familiar sound of Apt. 1’s deadbolt sliding back began the cordial conversation that I had with my neighbor Brandi. Her round face broke into an easy smile upon recognizing me, her eyes shining out from behind stylishly framed glasses with a look of bemused curiosity. Her five and a half foot frame was roundly filled out, though not to distressing proportions, and was clad in comfortable looking, though stylish, clothes. She was shorter than me, forced to look up to address me directly, yet there was no sense of inferiority in our engagement. Leaning in a bit, she listened politely as I stumbled through the particulars.
“So I have this assignment to do for my writing class,” I began, reeling off my pre-rehearsed spiel as she nodded sagaciously. Turns out she had taken a creative non-fiction writing class at St. Lawrence University, from which she graduated last year. Falling into easy conversation about her work, she struck me as exceedingly normal, the kind of person filling in the cracks in society between the weirdoes, degenerates, geniuses, and over-achievers. Her kindness did not seem to be rendered out of any sense of necessity or politeness, but came naturally as well.
“What is your last name?” I asked, feeling silly for having to ask my neighbor such a basic question. “Pestka,” she replied. Alarms of recognition sounded in my brain: “Are you related to Sherri and Don Pestka?” I inquired. “Yeah, they’re my parents.” Reddening, I couldn’t help but laugh. “They’re members at the gym where I work,” I explained, and she soon got to laughing herself. Despite the semi-dimness of her small nearly windowless apartment, I couldn’t help but feel that the entire room was filled with a warmth and comfort by this laugh, bouncing off the walls and filling the hallway where I leaned against the door frame. “What a small world,” she remarked. I couldn’t help but agree.
“So I have this assignment to do for my writing class,” I began, reeling off my pre-rehearsed spiel as she nodded sagaciously. Turns out she had taken a creative non-fiction writing class at St. Lawrence University, from which she graduated last year. Falling into easy conversation about her work, she struck me as exceedingly normal, the kind of person filling in the cracks in society between the weirdoes, degenerates, geniuses, and over-achievers. Her kindness did not seem to be rendered out of any sense of necessity or politeness, but came naturally as well.
“What is your last name?” I asked, feeling silly for having to ask my neighbor such a basic question. “Pestka,” she replied. Alarms of recognition sounded in my brain: “Are you related to Sherri and Don Pestka?” I inquired. “Yeah, they’re my parents.” Reddening, I couldn’t help but laugh. “They’re members at the gym where I work,” I explained, and she soon got to laughing herself. Despite the semi-dimness of her small nearly windowless apartment, I couldn’t help but feel that the entire room was filled with a warmth and comfort by this laugh, bouncing off the walls and filling the hallway where I leaned against the door frame. “What a small world,” she remarked. I couldn’t help but agree.
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
What They Don't... (Brevity)
This will be quick. I promise.
When I am given the assignment to write a paper, I don’t instantly seek out the minimum page requirement; instead, I check to see if there is a maximum. When assignments like “Analyze Aristotle’s use of the term ‘Substance’ in Categories and Metaphysics in a 4-5 page essay” or “In a 5-7 page essay, explain John Donne’s use of metaphor in three of his ‘Holy Sonnets’” are given out by a professor, my stomach instinctually knots itself as I question internally whether they are really serious about that upper limit or not. I can’t help myself. The pages inevitably stack up: A one page “reading response” written about a poem of no more than twelve lines suddenly becomes a three page mini-treatise on the metaphors for race in the closing stanza or the use of assonance in lines five through nine.
Now I could blame my propensity for prolixity on genetics (my father is notoriously long-winded, but that’s a story for another day), but what seems to be the root cause for my lack of brevity is in fact a fear of being misunderstood. Having never had a speech impediment, nor suffered under the weight of any learning disability, such a fear seems to have sprung from nowhere. My pattern of thought has only recently been complicated to the point of near absurdity by virtue of the higher education system, but this is neither here nor there, as I should, by the same token, still be able to say what needs to be said. But that’s not how it is: superfluous clarifications, the laying on of detail after detail, and a knee-jerk impulse to make every list of characteristics into a perfect set of three means that, where others nail their points in one shot, my words circle the rim timorously for pages and pages. The question of whether or not I am making any sense inspires an anxious verbosity, just as perching at the edge of a high-dive compels my knees to turn to Jell-O. My fear’s manifestations are evident even now: as I write these brief comments, I find myself squirming to avoid the short, simple statements of fact that would have rendered a succinct and concise essay upon my fear of being incomprehensible.
It seems to me that most fears people have are at base reasonably motivated: a fear of spiders brought on by the possibility of coming in contact with a Brown Recluse, a dread of high places incited by an understanding of gravity and density, or even a fear of crossing bridges brought on by a unseemly (though at least partially warranted) distrust in civil engineering. My own trepidation at being misunderstood seems just as rational as these in some sense; people who have speech impediments or have trouble putting words to their thoughts must suffer from such misgivings as well, but at least in their case they have good reason. The reality of their situation is completely lost on me; why my own fear is still manifested in spite of accolades from professors and peers for the high quality and clarity of my writing is a mystery worth investigating. The discontinuity of it certainly gives one food for thought…but that’s a story for another day.
When I am given the assignment to write a paper, I don’t instantly seek out the minimum page requirement; instead, I check to see if there is a maximum. When assignments like “Analyze Aristotle’s use of the term ‘Substance’ in Categories and Metaphysics in a 4-5 page essay” or “In a 5-7 page essay, explain John Donne’s use of metaphor in three of his ‘Holy Sonnets’” are given out by a professor, my stomach instinctually knots itself as I question internally whether they are really serious about that upper limit or not. I can’t help myself. The pages inevitably stack up: A one page “reading response” written about a poem of no more than twelve lines suddenly becomes a three page mini-treatise on the metaphors for race in the closing stanza or the use of assonance in lines five through nine.
Now I could blame my propensity for prolixity on genetics (my father is notoriously long-winded, but that’s a story for another day), but what seems to be the root cause for my lack of brevity is in fact a fear of being misunderstood. Having never had a speech impediment, nor suffered under the weight of any learning disability, such a fear seems to have sprung from nowhere. My pattern of thought has only recently been complicated to the point of near absurdity by virtue of the higher education system, but this is neither here nor there, as I should, by the same token, still be able to say what needs to be said. But that’s not how it is: superfluous clarifications, the laying on of detail after detail, and a knee-jerk impulse to make every list of characteristics into a perfect set of three means that, where others nail their points in one shot, my words circle the rim timorously for pages and pages. The question of whether or not I am making any sense inspires an anxious verbosity, just as perching at the edge of a high-dive compels my knees to turn to Jell-O. My fear’s manifestations are evident even now: as I write these brief comments, I find myself squirming to avoid the short, simple statements of fact that would have rendered a succinct and concise essay upon my fear of being incomprehensible.
It seems to me that most fears people have are at base reasonably motivated: a fear of spiders brought on by the possibility of coming in contact with a Brown Recluse, a dread of high places incited by an understanding of gravity and density, or even a fear of crossing bridges brought on by a unseemly (though at least partially warranted) distrust in civil engineering. My own trepidation at being misunderstood seems just as rational as these in some sense; people who have speech impediments or have trouble putting words to their thoughts must suffer from such misgivings as well, but at least in their case they have good reason. The reality of their situation is completely lost on me; why my own fear is still manifested in spite of accolades from professors and peers for the high quality and clarity of my writing is a mystery worth investigating. The discontinuity of it certainly gives one food for thought…but that’s a story for another day.
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Big
Shortly after I entered the world, my mother was wheeled on a gurney out into a hallway at St. Paul’s Midway Hospital in order to make way for another delivery. It wasn’t particularly distressing to her though; she was just glad to be in the air-conditioned hospital on a day my parents claim was the hottest they’d ever experienced. In reality, the entire drought summer of 1988 was sweltering, with temperatures peaking at 105 degrees in late July, not to mention the near-hundred percent humidity that saturated the air so much that you could have just as easily drank the air as breathed it. Eight blocks north of Midway, where the heat induced a massive spike in births, I came home to big two-story Victorian house that still had piping for gas lights sticking out of the walls. Needless to say there was no air-conditioning. There is no escaping such infernal weather without this modern life-saver; the nights are not cool enough to allow the house to bleed out some of the day’s fire. Instead, I was incubated for an extra three months, clothed only in diapers until the heat abated in late September.
Where does one escape such heat? Once, when I was about ten years old, my family visited my aunt and uncle in Milwaukee on a day when the temperature soared above one hundred. There house being about as old as ours and similarly lacking in the modern Midwestern necessity of air-conditioning, we were forced to retreat, to the great delight of my older brother and I, to a Holiday Inn, where we all gathered around the blasting industrial AC unit before taking a swim in the four foot deep hotel pool. That night we dined on Pizza Hut, delivered right to our room, and my brother and I stayed up late watching a movie on TNT while my parents shared a few rounds of Milwaukee’s most famous export with my relatives in the next room.
In middle school, long after moving to Oregon, where the dry heat of the summers was laughable by comparison, I passed long afternoons at the local YMCA with my friend Sven, whose name fit his brilliant blue eyes and cool Nordic temperament. We share memories from that summer that most of the kids I went to school with do: doing cannonballs into the deep end of the YMCA’s pool, carrying the ten pound rubber diving brick up from the bottom, testing to see how long we could sit beneath the ten feet of highly chlorinated water, all in the hour and a half each afternoon that that pool was deserted before an onslaught of young day-campers drove us out at 3:00. Our trips to the pool weren’t so much about getting out of the heat, as about not letting ourselves stew in the doldrums of an unstructured summer vacation. The years passed and our interests and circles of influence grew apart; Sven and I were never closer than in those many weeks in which we rode our bikes to the Y, stopping at a convenience store and buying up a few bucks’ worth of candy or ice cream on the way home.
I can’t deny the effect of the American movie industry upon my summer habits either. The “Summer Blockbuster” has been a staple in Hollywood for years, as the producers of these films reason that many people (especially those without air-conditioning in their homes) would seek refuge at their local cinema. The cool breeze billowing from the wall ducts is often more amenable to the fancy of movie-goers in the summertime than the films themselves.
The day I was born, June 3, 1988, the movie “Big” premiered to great critical acclaim and audience appeal. I would only come to know it from its presentation on TV, where “Big” has found its home on AMC in amongst the black and white Westerns and slap-stick comedies of the thirties and forties. The movie stars Tom Hanks, before his rise to superstardom with “Philadelphia Story” and “Forrest Gump,” and David Moscow, whose participation in the Disney musical “Newsies” had already made him familiar to me, as I had, by the age of seven or eight, seen that movie enough times to have every word in the script and every lyric in the songs memorized (by the accounts of others of my age, such an obsession was not uncommon). “Big” tells a story of a boy who wishes he could be big, grown-up, no longer subjected to the trials and tribulations of pre-teen adolescence. The next morning he wakes to find his outward appearance has been changed to that of thirty-year-old Tom Hanks, but he is still the same twelve-year-old boy on the inside. Hilarity ensues as he tries to navigate the adult world with the mentality of a kid, experiencing the pressures of work and his first romantic encounter with a woman. According to IMDB, the director first shot the entire movie with the young David Moscow performing Hanks’s entire role in order that the older actor could inhabit an accurate portrayal of his “younger self” in the real movie. What emerged from this was a great performance that really got to the heart of what it means to be a kid and what it means to be an adult.
Now, when I visit family, I don’t head into the next room to play with my cousins, or simply sit and watch TV while devouring Pizza Hut. I hardly ever go to the pool, except occasionally to swim laps when I’m feeling guilty about my eating habits. Summers are characterized by tedious work. As the unavoidable onrush of time has swept me up and carried me from that incubator of a house on Minnehaha Ave in St. Paul to the hallowed halls of Pacific University, I can’t help but feel that I, like Josh Baskin in “Big,” would choose to go back to being twelve if given the opportunity. While it would seem fair to sit back and marvel at my present condition, would it not be even more marvelous to go back and enjoy it once again?
Sources: IMDB, “GRAPHICAL CLIMATOLOGY OF MINNEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL AREA TEMPERATURES, PRECIPITATION, AND SNOWFALL (1820-PRESENT)” by Charles Fisk < http://home.att.net/~minn_climo/>
Where does one escape such heat? Once, when I was about ten years old, my family visited my aunt and uncle in Milwaukee on a day when the temperature soared above one hundred. There house being about as old as ours and similarly lacking in the modern Midwestern necessity of air-conditioning, we were forced to retreat, to the great delight of my older brother and I, to a Holiday Inn, where we all gathered around the blasting industrial AC unit before taking a swim in the four foot deep hotel pool. That night we dined on Pizza Hut, delivered right to our room, and my brother and I stayed up late watching a movie on TNT while my parents shared a few rounds of Milwaukee’s most famous export with my relatives in the next room.
In middle school, long after moving to Oregon, where the dry heat of the summers was laughable by comparison, I passed long afternoons at the local YMCA with my friend Sven, whose name fit his brilliant blue eyes and cool Nordic temperament. We share memories from that summer that most of the kids I went to school with do: doing cannonballs into the deep end of the YMCA’s pool, carrying the ten pound rubber diving brick up from the bottom, testing to see how long we could sit beneath the ten feet of highly chlorinated water, all in the hour and a half each afternoon that that pool was deserted before an onslaught of young day-campers drove us out at 3:00. Our trips to the pool weren’t so much about getting out of the heat, as about not letting ourselves stew in the doldrums of an unstructured summer vacation. The years passed and our interests and circles of influence grew apart; Sven and I were never closer than in those many weeks in which we rode our bikes to the Y, stopping at a convenience store and buying up a few bucks’ worth of candy or ice cream on the way home.
I can’t deny the effect of the American movie industry upon my summer habits either. The “Summer Blockbuster” has been a staple in Hollywood for years, as the producers of these films reason that many people (especially those without air-conditioning in their homes) would seek refuge at their local cinema. The cool breeze billowing from the wall ducts is often more amenable to the fancy of movie-goers in the summertime than the films themselves.
The day I was born, June 3, 1988, the movie “Big” premiered to great critical acclaim and audience appeal. I would only come to know it from its presentation on TV, where “Big” has found its home on AMC in amongst the black and white Westerns and slap-stick comedies of the thirties and forties. The movie stars Tom Hanks, before his rise to superstardom with “Philadelphia Story” and “Forrest Gump,” and David Moscow, whose participation in the Disney musical “Newsies” had already made him familiar to me, as I had, by the age of seven or eight, seen that movie enough times to have every word in the script and every lyric in the songs memorized (by the accounts of others of my age, such an obsession was not uncommon). “Big” tells a story of a boy who wishes he could be big, grown-up, no longer subjected to the trials and tribulations of pre-teen adolescence. The next morning he wakes to find his outward appearance has been changed to that of thirty-year-old Tom Hanks, but he is still the same twelve-year-old boy on the inside. Hilarity ensues as he tries to navigate the adult world with the mentality of a kid, experiencing the pressures of work and his first romantic encounter with a woman. According to IMDB, the director first shot the entire movie with the young David Moscow performing Hanks’s entire role in order that the older actor could inhabit an accurate portrayal of his “younger self” in the real movie. What emerged from this was a great performance that really got to the heart of what it means to be a kid and what it means to be an adult.
Now, when I visit family, I don’t head into the next room to play with my cousins, or simply sit and watch TV while devouring Pizza Hut. I hardly ever go to the pool, except occasionally to swim laps when I’m feeling guilty about my eating habits. Summers are characterized by tedious work. As the unavoidable onrush of time has swept me up and carried me from that incubator of a house on Minnehaha Ave in St. Paul to the hallowed halls of Pacific University, I can’t help but feel that I, like Josh Baskin in “Big,” would choose to go back to being twelve if given the opportunity. While it would seem fair to sit back and marvel at my present condition, would it not be even more marvelous to go back and enjoy it once again?
Sources: IMDB, “GRAPHICAL CLIMATOLOGY OF MINNEAPOLIS-ST. PAUL AREA TEMPERATURES, PRECIPITATION, AND SNOWFALL (1820-PRESENT)” by Charles Fisk < http://home.att.net/~minn_climo/>
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