Senior Skip Day

Senior Skip Day was my favorite day of high school.

On the face, this may seem to be no surprise. For many, this would be a statement about how much they did not like high school, or maybe how much they liked to party—or a combination of the two with an inconclusive understanding of causality. On my senior skip day, I missed the party.

I missed all of the parties in high school. I heard about the parties—or overheard about the, on Monday mornings in the open period before home room in the cafeteria or at lunch later that day. I never knew where any of the parties were. I was not included. I could count the number of reasons why, all true and none easy to verify. But being left out opened the door to a great day late one May my last year of high school.

I arrived at school that morning, seeing a street filled with cars, trucks, a boat--vehicles all loaded with beach fun and provisions to aid the festivities. It seems that the only thing I had in common with most of them was that I was armed with a note from my parents excusing me from attendance for most of the school day.

I don't know what most parents thought about writing this excused absence note for their kid. What is it that they thought they were providing their kids? I am sure that some kids knew their parents would not write such a note: no such note to miss school for no good reason, much less for the opportunity to party with lots of alcohol and youngsters of the “opposite” sex, unsupervised by any adults and at a location disclosed only to those who would be driving there via a quickly mimeographed, last-minute map.

I don't remember what mine said. It was respectfully crafted. I don't remember which parent signed it, and actually, was likely dictated by me, crafted so that I would have an excused absence and be eligible to attend baseball practice the next day.

All the seniors attended home room. Not many were dressed in anything that was appropriate for a day of school. Not that it was necessary, either for the day or in a useless attempt to fool teachers or the administration.

Home room let out. There was a mad dash to the waiting cars and vehicles that soon would be pointed to someone's lakeside property, somewhere in Stearns or Benton County in central Minnesota. I walked slowly and empty-handed to the old Buick Estate Wagon that I used to drop mom off at work less than an hour earlier. I got in and made my way to one of the other high schools in town, one of the public schools where my girlfriend Lisa attended.

Missing senior skip was no matter. I did not feel that feeling of being left out-- again. Rather, I did not notice I was being left out. I was also in love.

Calling me smitten would have been an understatement as would any literal description of the heart break that visited both Lisa and me in our youthful helplessness delivered by the hands of highly cultivated, culturally aged intolerance.

I spend Lisa's free period with her in the student commons, having a tender conversation, holding hands and staring into the eyes of the cutest and smartest girl that, to that point in life, ventured onto my radar.

Lisa and I talked and then I walked her to her French class. There, we met her best friend, anther smart girl, and waited for “Madame.”

Madame was Mrs. Anderson. She taught me for two failed years of French as a freshman and sophomore. I was a silly little boy who was a bad student and didn't have enough of a clue about the parts of English speech to apply them to the French version in class.

When I had Madame, she spent a lot of time talking to the girls in the small class. There where four boys and almost a dozen girls. The boys talked amongst ourselves as the beginning of each class was filled with cool, grown-up girl talk.

This day, with Lisa, was different. I had not become one of the girls, but I had become something—someone worth talking to.

Instead of the first part of this class being taken up with the girl talk (and Lisa's class was even more strongly represented by girls than mine had a couple of years before), it was filled with me talking to Madame.

Okay, is there a better way to impress you girlfriend than by taking over a huge chunk of one of her favorite teacher's class time with a conversation that gave me more attention than any silly-boy, ninth grader could ever get? If your girlfriend is one of the smart kids, there really isn't anything better.

I said good-bye to Madame and the cutest, smartest girl in the world and left to meet my dad at his work, which was not far from Lisa's high school.

Dad took off the afternoon from work and we played a round of golf. It was a habit that had lasted, to that point, about a decade during the springs and summers, but rarely on a school or work day. Golf was followed by a late lunch trip to....Burger King.

Burger King was good. It was not a feast of food, but a feast of conversation. Or a feast of having a dad who would take off from the middle of a work day to spend some earnest time with one of his sons.

I remember little of what was said. I remember that we lingered. I am sure dad asked me about my thoughts about the future. I am sure that I evaded some of his questions, ones that were hard enough to think about much less answer. We got our food fast but the conversation was not.

Even though I do not remember many specifics of what was said, I remember one other thing he said, more clearly than anything. He delivered a simple message: I could go out with whomever I wanted.

Seems kind of simple—and kind of odd, but the backdrop of the statement held many more words than the brief sentences he spoke near the end of our talk. Growing up as a black kid in an almost completely white town, it meant that if I was going to have any kind of social life, I was going to date someone who was white— with all the treacheries that come with transgressing the often unspoken and sometimes overtly stated apartheid of that time in history and the cultivated segregation of that subculture. Except to most people who had gotten to know our family, we were at least marginally unwelcome, and the idea that I might date was an offense many degrees to the bad.

I did not know what sense dad had about the unease I was living with—and the fear I felt and the sometimes tacit, sometimes overt hostility that I faced. I did not know if he sensed that it was a current issue in my relationship with Lisa. I did not know if Lisa's father, who worked at the same place as my dad, had said something to my dad about Lisa and me.

I didn't say much in response. He wanted be be sure that I understood what he said. I mumbled an okay, dad. We finished our late lunch and I drove dad back to work so he could clean up his desk before the end of the day.

I was buoyed by two grand conversations. I felt thoroughly adored and respected. I was lovable, smart, attractive and worth more than anything in the world.

That Skip Day was glorious. The next school day, everyone was back at school, talking about the party just as they did every other weekend. There was a discussion among the senior baseball players who held a mock accountability session for what they might, hypothetically, have done that might, hypothetically, transgress Minnesota State High School League Rules.

Even though I did make it to a couple of parties before summer really got underway, I realized that I did not like drinking or teenage drinkers enough to make me come to the conclusion that I had missed something by being excluded.

Not long after, the luster on the mutual infatuation between Lisa and me dulled under the social pressures of the realities of the day. It was not Lisa's father who really objected. It was her mom, who stood in the way, telling me, one evening, “I thought I told you to never call here again.”

Neither this, nor anything else dulled my memory of the best day of high school I ever had. I didn't miss anything.

Ducks on the Pond

I look out over the pond. It is an odd occurrence of open water in our Minnesota January. I am curious as to why there was open water. Everything else I see is frozen: everything from my landscape to the personalities I meet, hot stove crabbies desperately waiting for the spring thaw. The pond is filled with ducks.

The phrase “ducks on the pond” has a special meaning to baseball fans, to my son and me. It means that there is a runner in scoring position, either on second or third base where there is a reasonable expectation that a runner can score on most base hits. 

Something exciting might just happen.  I look at the flock, bobbing on the water. There is a hint of expectation; what might happen? They seem excited, anxious that maybe the next duck to land on the pond will be the hit.

But my mind is elsewhere. The ducks all look the same from the office window from which I view them. Their anxiety produces no opportunities, no epiphanies, and no Emmanuel-like swans. They are all gray-looking. I look again. They are all the same. In my anxiety, I suddenly realize I am hungry.

One of Many Thoughts on a MLK Holiday

It has been more than once that someone asked me whether I prefer to be called Black or African American. What is distressing is being asked which one is “correct”: Negro, African American or Black. “You're asking me?”

I remember being asked by a woman who came to me, like I was the authority on cultural correctness—or because she felt superior enough to me to confront me as if her confusion was the fault of someone who at least looked like me and that I did not have the power to deliver a scorn that she felt from some source that had criticized her for being “incorrect.” I'm not sure why she cared what was “correct.” I can guess and I am sure there are several reasons why, but I'm not sure which.

When Martin Luther King was killed, we were often called Negros. It was something more essential than pride or self esteem that brought us to call ourselves Black and that created the evolution to the term African American. Pride or not, regardless of the label, the reality is that being characterized as any of these things is a function of being “raced,” that some aspect of culture determined that they would be dominant and would give names to others, assigning them names like they were the Adam (and sometimes the Eve) naming the animals of their little world as far as their myopia could see.

It seems that some of us have taken up the challenge of seeing further—seeing farther. Years ago, Bruce shared one of his frustrations in a conversation. “You know what the problem with my son is?” he said. “He thinks he's white.” He's not, I thought? “He can pass as white if he wants to, just like a lot of us,” Bruce continued, “but me—I'm Irish” (and the millennium of history that goes with it).

If we want to know what term to use, we have to realize that Negro, Black and African American all mean something different. And each term has its important history. If you are an arbitrarily supremacist, anthropological categorist, Negro probably works. If you heed someone who says, “Well, they like to be called African American, now, maybe you should listen if you know who “they” is. Black: who's black? The term puzzled me as a preschooler. Whose skin is black? But Black is something that I share with people all over the globe, not just in the Americas or just in the United States, which is what is usually meant by the term African-American.

It is something I share with Desmond Tutu, as surely as I share it with Bob Marley, Barbara Jordan, Barack Obama and everyone else in the Sub-Saharan diaspora. So, what should you call me? Call me Clarence. If you don't know my name and who need to know who I am, meeting me would be a good time to ask. I won't mind. I will try not to criticize, even if you don't want to know my name.

Crying at the Cathedrals

For the first time in a while, I made it to church. My church, that is.

My son Sid had mentioned that it had been a while since we went there. Do eleven-year-olds do this? It is heartening to hear him remind dad, instead of the battle it had been when he was younger to get up so we could make our way to the service.

Sunday morning we sat in our frequent place—maybe a little unfamiliar with the lapse of time and the fact that we attended the later service, and we have been, generally, early service attendees, where we chatted with familiar faces instead of the later service habit of stacking chairs for custodial staff.

We sat in our place, scouted out by Sid, with our friends Barbara and her son Zander. I sat with my arm around the back of Sid's chair, about as much public affection a preteen would allow, and my hand in Barbara's, about as much as it took to make me feel the wonder of how good it felt that day.

And I cried. I don't know why. I cried the first time Sid and I went to church together. I also cried the first time Sid and I attended our first baseball game, just the two of us. The church and the ball park: two of America's greatest Cathedrals. Two places where we run the risk of misplacing worship—something we can afford at neither place.

Sunday morning, I started to cry with the first song. I don't know why, but I was happy. Over what, I can't be sure—something more sentimental than salvation, and less practical. I don't know. Part of the mood was seeing my son sing—some songs that at some times are favorites; some that he may play on his guitar soon—if he practices. Maybe it was sharing that piece of love with Barbara for the first time, at a time when we really needed it. Maybe it was a joy of taking our sons to a very important place, maybe—just maybe more important than the ball park.

At the ball park, we watch and dream of heroes on the field and in our memories. There are great and beautiful stories behind those diamonds. There are pages full of heroes in the primary text of worship and as many heroes who have been created since the consecration of those texts. There were a few of them, sitting next to me, two thirds of the way back on the right side of the gym where the services are held: one hero who could hardly sit still through such a grown-up service whose restlessness was interrupted by some songs (Sid promised Zander, “It gets better soon,” with more music.) and the recognition of a Bible story he knows from reading with his mom almost nightly; one hero who gave me a bit of joy and security in the palm of her hand against the palm of mine, an intermittent gaze and a shared pleasure in where we had taken our sons—taken ourselves; one hero who let dad know that he was ready to go back to church and who turned to me half way through the service saying, “We have to come back next week.”  This is a blessing.

I don't think any of my heroes saw me crying. It was a very faint tear and in the middle of one or two songs; they were reading lyrics. Doesn't matter.

What does matter? Something: Whatever it is we get from being there. Whatever is important. Something in a message. Something in the spirit. Maybe even something in the lefty pose that doesn't always seem necessary but marks our congregation for good or ill. Something about being there with people for whom I care.

The first time I set foot in one of the services, it was with a Love from a previous stage in life. It was not I who cried that Sunday, but she. Maybe because that Sunday, her children were not there. It is hard to trace the paths of those griefs, sorrows and joys. They intertwine and no one can tell the difference. Another neatly concealed secret.

Next week, I will not cry. I promise. I will listen, enjoy the space with reverent gratitude (the topic of Sunday's message) and wait for a cookie after the service. Maybe a moment to dream about baseball. But today, I will pray for more of my heroes.

Arizona: God is my Shield from the Crossfire

On Saturday, a gunman killed six people and wounded others including Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was gravely injured. The new Congress has been swift to act, finding ways to improve security around the Capitol and Congressional offices.

Fortunately for them, the Supreme Court has rendered a decision that has made it next to impossible for them to take action that would protect the rest of us, including those of us like the citizens who actually died. Fortunately for them, they have the resources to direct toward the fortification of their venue and the political will to arm the rest of the population and watch them get caught in the crossfire trying to “protect” themselves.

I will pray through my anger, hoping the ire will not infect the plea. I will pray, but it seems that God has already hardened Pharaoh's heart. Hopefully, mine is not so hard.

Finding America's Team

If you ask me who the biggest football fan is in our family, I will tell you it is my sister Jennifer. Not my dad, who went to college on a football scholarship. It is neither my brother nor myself: my brother, who, as a child and youth, was very physically capable, but never got into sports that much. I played football through high school. I played for my dad, who coached at a local parochial school for 29 years, but I didn't really enjoy it in the four years after playing under his coaching. I don't enjoy it much, now.

After I left for college, Jennifer became dad's primary football watching buddy. Jennifer knows the game as well as any fan, having learned how to watch from our father, who has spent much of his life as a student of the game as well as the social and political aspects of it. Jennifer watches every Sunday. She watches the Minnesota Vikings, the home team of her childhood, with more dedication than teams of Chicago, her current home, or Washington, her most previous home. She watches with more dedication than she does the New Orleans Saints, the team of our parents' home, the home of many loved ones, and the somewhat darlings of American football.

As important as our roots there are, she does not like the Saints, she said to me over a recent holiday phone call. They play dirty, she told me. She doesn't like that. Dirty.

But among all the character(s), virtues and charms, that is what New Orleans is: a mix of wonder and dirt.

For a long time, people who vacationed there, even vacation there frequently, talk about how much they love the town. I love the town, too, but the New Orleans they talk about is almost unrecognizable to me.

Most summers as a child, our family would make a trip down to New Orleans from our Minnesota home. It was three weeks with grandma and grandpa. Three weeks of getting spoiled. Three weeks of seeing and meeting relatives, my father's old friends, amazing food and more getting spoiled by grandma and grandpa.

It was also three weeks of culture shock. Three weeks of seeing fist (and stick/rock/bat) fights break out. It was a lesson of seeing how poor people could be in America. It was a lesson on how the city's “fathers” were content to allow some streets to experience a cumulative decay and filth, mitigated only by the rare man or woman with the time and initiative to literally take their broom into the streets.

New Orleans is the place of the French Quarters, an amazing spectacle of culture and architecture. Most of this was built with slave labor. Not a labor of love. Not compensated. Hardly recognized. It is the place of some of the greatest music on earth, created by it's unique cultural mix: a history of slave life; emotive of long and deep suffering and the pockets of joy infused to keep the spirit alive long enough to produce the next generation who, hopefully, will be freed from the despair.

New Orleans is the home of a levy design that conveniently selected a level of tolerance for disaster that certain strata of the cultural echelon could survive. It is the place where the fault of that levy eventually brought that disaster. That disaster, hurricane Katrina, brought a military action against the victims of the storm. The lack of investment in infrastructure and the penchant for treating the city's residents with disdain were two of the the many secrets that dominant culture worked to keep from tourists and anyone else from whom it is important to impress with the idea that things are okay.

It is also the home of the New Orleans Saints. They won the Super Bowl last year. This year, are they okay?

It is easy to get lost in the sea of success and popularity when searching for fairness and justice. In moments of despair, long bouts of despair, and cultures of despair, it is easy to accept the facade of “okay.” Who knows what America's Team will blow in on the winds of the winds of our next Katrina. Who knows what secrets will blow in with it—and what secrets will get swept away?

Conveniently, Jennifer's favorite team is the Vikings. The team that no longer has the narcissistic quarterback whose secrets have had their covers blown away. She will watch next season a team with a new coach who is described as one of the good guys. Jennifer is far enough away, in Chicago, for it to remain a secret to her, as it will effectively for many of the people here, to hear the legislators who started their session today in Minnesota talk about putting a chunk of our money into helping billionaires respond to the tattered roof of their current playing home.

Come fall, Jennifer will call dad on Sundays. They will make informed comments about what they see. They will know that I, nearly 35 years removed from my last touchdown catch, will not be watching—and they won't call. They don't need to call. It is enough to know that they get to share that joy. Their phone chatter is a slightly kept secret with few compromises. It is a place to escape the dirty.