The blog links may still come fast and furious, but I have to be honest and tell you that these days I am spending my writing time trying to put together a book. More for me than anyone else.
You say, ‘thank you’. I say fuck you ;)
It has been a good experience so far though – I would recommend it to anyone. It is cathartic and helpful in getting me to grind over the past and understand why I think the way I do or react to certain things the way I do or even why I liked steak bones and Incredible Hulk so much.
A little preview of the things I am writing about:
Like the songs from our youth that formed the soundtracks of our lives, memories of important people in my life come flooding back to me. I talk to them even now, I feel them around me still, hanging around and painting the shades of my memories lightly and delicately. There were people like Mr. Heumann and Mr. Grayson who taught much more than what was in their text books or novels.
There were people like Dolly who used to sing with her dog. It was embarrassing and thrilling all at the same time. Little Pierre the poodle just trying to keep tune and time with his mother Dolly – ah the memories are sweet and thick on my brain even now. Memories of Pierre and the kidnapping van that only ever held kids who were thrilled to be there… she made me feel like an adult and an equal and a person of worth like most no other person had ever done.
But the fun songs and the fun rides in the van, that she made feel like a home away from home, hid something that was going on with her for a decade plus. Her own true son, not the excited young kid next to her that wanted to be her son, was suffering from AIDS. He contracted the disease due to his hemophilia and his need for blood transfusions before they knew what AIDS was or that they needed to test for it. He suffered and thrived for years with the disease – one of the truly amazing survivors for that time, a time before you could beg or buy your way out of the disease like Magic Johnson.
Through it all though Dolly was strong and upbeat and an amazing influence on the people whose lives she touched. She could brighten a room or, if you were a garage, she could fill you with a ton of items that she bought off of television and simply never used or even opened.
Mr. Grayson didn’t have a full garage or a van, but he did have a mat near the door. It was on this mat that I often spent a good amount of time during class as this was his area where he taught discipline. It wasn’t a hard principle to understand: if you misbehaved or made a disturbance in class you were to quickly find yourself standing on the mat. Some of the teachers at the school might give you a form of detention where you needed to collect two bags of trash during lunch or do some more homework, but you wouldn’t find a much more disciplined or quiet class than Mr. Grayson’s and all due to the dreaded mat.
It wasn’t just discipline that he taught however. He also taught a new way to learn and involve others in your learning. For instance he would do activities such as having a group of students do a ‘radio show’ where they would be hidden from general view learning and teaching something all at the same time. It was a memorable class to be a part of.
Mr. Heumann, just down the hall from Mr. Grayson, was from of a different school of thought and different generation. The hall could have been two decades long if one didn’t know better.
Chris, as many students would call him, was a great man who is intensely driven in his own way. At the same time of being a student favorite and close friend to students he also was able to maintain a strict discipline in his classes. He didn’t have a mat for students to go to, but a way to make students want to perform and be disciplined for him.
He taught a math and science class so he was not able or it was not appropriate perhaps to do radio shows like his elder contemporary Mr. Grayson, but he compensated by taking students to do very cool trips during the summer and engaged in after school activities with students. Everywhere he went, and it seems to be becoming a theme, there would be students piling in and out of his van that had the makeshift convertible top.
During the summers it would be backpacking trips to places like Echo Lake or its nearby lake, Lake Tahoe. It was during one of these trips that I was able to try out my first jet ski. It was during the trips in general that I learned things about the way to act in groups of varying ages and things to say and not say. It was a summer educational experience such that you could never get in a classroom. These trips challenged me to revisit the ways that I had been taught to think about work and play and what words may or may not mean. It was one thing to boast that you were going to jump off a 40 foot high rock and it was an entirely another thing to stand at the edge and do it.
It was later in life, on another ledge 43 meters in the air that I would think back to these times, take a breath… and jump.
