Midnight Drive from Nowhere

Sitting in the passenger seat of her blue Volvo 240 wagon, the wind animated her hair--hair that had lost all other life from the days of excessive heat and humidity. She was tired, wilted in the swelter. I clutched and shift into fifth gear, turned and see her happy and content.

The tassels of her deep brown locks swirled around her neck and face as disorganized as the rest of the world that had also wilted into a disarray.

We didn't mind. There comes a time in the heat wave when you just give up, realize that the starch in your shirt means nothing after a couple of minutes outside; that the potato salad might just be better left behind; that as hard as you try to protect yourself between the air conditioning of home and car or between car and work or wherever you are going.

Content with our state of disassemble, we sat wordless, headed to her home—or mine, from somewhere—I cannot remember. The destination was defined more by our momentary glances-- caught in between wafts of breeze and a passing car much more in a hurry than two lovers fine with each others' company.

Later, we would lie limp in bed, too hot to spoon, too hot to sleep, but not to hot to trace the space between us with a finger, a light touch through the heavy air.

What did we talk about? Religion, politics, the kids. The future. The past. The present.

The next morning, we wandered out the door, aimless, bearings confused by oppressive stew of weather. Maybe a shower before we found our first appointed stop, unable to tell, neither by how we felt or by memory, whether we had taken one the night before.

In this morning, I could not tell if we are happy, content, thrown back into the real world, unable to put off the facts in this start of the day. Unable to procrastinate those things that are so easy to forget in a cloud of a love. We would find that place of forgetting soon enough in each others' eyes, arms. And maybe a little bit of bravery to talk about those things, and religion, and politics, and love, and the kids, and work, and all those things that make all the questions that surround them so hard to answer.

Happy and content in our mortal, humble ignorance and relative wisdom. Happy to shift into neutral and let the rest of the world be in a hurry to solve the problems that have no answer.

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.

Celebrity Crush

Bookseller conventions have their perks.  Near the end of my career as a bookseller, I had the grand opportunity to sit next to historian and author Doris Kearns Goodwin, most famous for her biographies of Lyndon Johnson, the Kennedys and the Roosevelts, at the convention dinner where she was a keynote speaker.  This is especially significant—at least to me, because Doris Kearns Goodwin was once the object of the closest thing I ever had as an adult to a celebrity crush. 

The crush was a secret that I appropriately kept from her for the couple of hours we shared in the dinner hall.  I forewent much of the school boy gush: Traded such statements about loving her work and asking her about the challenges of working with her subjects—being polite (or timid) around the issue of Lyndon Johnson and his reputation for hands that roamed as much as most men’s fantasies.  Better that banter than exposing my fantasy that ignores the reality of Mr. Goodwin.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is smart. She is cute.  She knows how to turn our allure to  history's charismatic characters and to salt their personae so that we don’t recognize them as history, but, rather a compelling and even slightly sexy story.  She also loves baseball and knows the importance of the institution to American culture and the importance of baseball’s stories (history) to the American story. 

I saw her as the lone woman commentator for Ken Burns’ baseball documentary aired on PBS back in the mid 1990s.  Except for the fact that I was currently in love at the time, I would have fallen head over heals right then.
When she got up to give her talk, her small frame struck an imposing figure, in spite of her slight and petite size.  Her words were large as she read off her page, like the smart kid in class, grown-up school girl who was making good, once again, on her promise to go far.  She stood at the podium with her smart suit, smart ideas and a smart gaze at her notes, the ones that held her assignment for the night. 

But before her talk, we had the chance to share a mediocre meal, great conversation and, one or two great ideas.

This was big.  I had the best seat in the house, which is saying a lot given that the other keynote speaker was Suds Trukel.  I don’t remember much of the conversation.  I am sure any facility in conversing was compromised by my not wanting to appear too fawning or by the fear that I could not possibly hold my end of a conversation with her about any Roosevelt, Kennedy, or Lyndon Johnson.
But, of course, the conversation turned to politics. And even my reticent self knew that this was one subject on which I knew a little more than my opinions.
The next year would be a Presidential election year and somehow the conversation turned to who we wanted to see as the next President of the United States.  She said something that shocked me.  She said, You know who I think should be the next President of the United States?  Paul Wellstone.

I smiled to myself.  Two thoughts crossed my mind.  The first was that she was just saying this because she was in Minnesota amongst a crowd that almost certainly loved Paul—unconditionally.  This may have been true, but I did not quiz her on this. 

‑­The second thought was, Oh, here we go again.  A well-off, out-of-touch elite who is going to go on about how wonderful and liberal Paul is and “don’t you just love him?”  But what she said surprised me.  It was smarter than a knee jerk and was what I now see as a distinction that, today, is fading: that distinction between liberal and progressive.

She said something like this:  You know, Paul and Sheila (Wellstone) are just about the only people on Capitol Hill and maybe the only ones in the Senate, who, when they go out, have to pay attention to how much they spend.  She reminded/pointed out that the Senate was a club of the very wealthy.  As such, most of them had little perspective on what it meant for most Americans to live day to day, make their way through the mine field of common economic and social realities. 

It was an important articulation of the difference between liberal and progressive.  Today, the two seem to be used interchangeably, since so many people have become shy to use the world liberal and find “progressive” more trendy.  It seems the term liberal has gone out of favor, for some good reasons and some not so good ones, but seems to have as much to do with the waning of liberal glory that reached its apex with the charisma of Camelot and found its nadir in the series of political defeats, culminating in the disaster of Michael Dukakis’ campaign that will ever be marked by the press opportunity image of his egg-head bobbing out of the hatch of that blasted tank.  (I think it is more than an urban legend that said that the guy who had the idea for this photo-op was looking for work before the next news cycle.)

Paul was a progressive.  A profound and fundamental antidote to the criticism that says all non-right wing politics is about the elites.  He was also the response to a subculture that looks to segments of society with mock pity and finds itself sufficiently superior to the masses upon whom their empire was built. The class that hands out bread crumbs of mock generosity left from their lavish feast.  And Paul still stood in profound opposition to the supremacist cultures that chose to pick on an underclass that includes more of us than we care to admit.   We would still rather do for ourselves than have the crumbs handed to us.

And at the same time, looking closely to the public that surrounded Paul made us look at the liberal, conservative, progressive, tentative moderate, and supremacist in ourselves.  It is a place where we met the enemy if we looked in the mirror—if we looked.

But I didn't need to think about any such complex social diagrams.  I didn't need to remember Stud's stories.  I didn't need to think much about the dinner which was most likely chicken and something.  I didn't need to sound smarter than the school boy I never was in front of the smartest girl in the class.  No matter, because I got to sit with her, talk with her and at least seem smart in front of her.  (Or she made me feel smart.)

Could Dr. Doris Kearns Goodwin forgive the fact that I did not totally fall in love with her at the sight of her on the Burns baseball special (cute, smart and loves baseball for what it is: who could possibly resist?) given that, at the time the show aired, I was in love with  a woman who was dearly loved by Paul and Sheila? She would have at least been impressed.  I was and continue to be impressed—by all those people. 

So, I am humble enough to admit that I am not above succumbing to a celebrity crush.  It is a lesson that helps me (us) be humble enough to accept the reality when real-life crushes are not returned.  Maybe it is a lesson that prepares me (us) for the true humility that comes when a crush IS actually returned.

To end the drama, as you might have guessed, I did not succeed in wooing her away from her husband.  (Gosh, one would think, after sharing the “rubber chicken,” we would have been ready to elope.)  I did get to sit next to Doris Kearns Goodwin, hear a story about one of my heroes, and learn that some days, I am just smart enough to appreciate and participate in those glories. 

And if you run into her, please don't tell her my secret.  I'll be like SO embarrassed.