Stopping by Roscoe

I posted yesterday’s blog, and it caused quite a nostalgic
stir on FBDC, with some twenty comments, and they’re still coming in. It’s gratifying when I touch on something – a
common memory that gets people talking as they themselves remember.

As I mentioned, I left a few things out – details not fit
for Internet posting and all the eyes that might fall on the sordid details of
a respected school administrator’s misspent youth. There was another, very specific item I omitted
– not because of fear of self-incrimination but because I didn’t know quite
where to fit it into the piece. The
Roscoe Diner was on my mind the entire time I was composing my post, but in the
end I’d left this detail out as well. Frankly, in the format I’ve been working with, I couldn’t figure out
where the eatery should enter into the narrative. As my college roommate, Greg King mentioned,
Roscoe, New York was the unofficial midpoint between home and school.

Perhaps I should have put it right in the middle.

When I think of Roscoe and the diner, the first image that
comes to mind is of a sign depicting a thick, meaty trout breeching almost
joyfully, someone’s skillfully tied fly imbedded in its cheek. “Welcome to Roscoe. Trout Town, USA.”

I suppose I could Google it, but back then you wouldn’t
have, and I remember being skeptical about that sign. Did they determine the moniker of Trout Town
based on poundage? Did the town keep records of all the lunkers that had been
pulled in within its limits over the years?

Or maybe Roscoe had simple decided one day they would
proclaim themselves the capital, based solely on how happy the fish on their
welcome sign seemed to be about being hooked.

Other images, in addition to that welcome sign, include a
wide parking lot, which was always packed with cars sporting license plates
from all over, from Montreal down to Florida. Because of the time of year my friends and I normally traveled home from
school and back, the diner was often full of men in loud plaid vests and coats –
hunters taking advantage of the abundant deer population in the area. Deer carcasses could be seen strung onto the
hood of many a vehicle in that large parking lot. Some were big bucks with elaborate antlers,
reaching up to slate-gray winter skies, while others were more delicate looking
does who seemed more peaceful in their repose. I can recall seeing one carcass that must
have been recently dressed, as I could swear I saw steam rising from the body
cavity there in the parking lot.

These were glimpses into another life, one I read about in
the books I loved at the time – by Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Jack London, and
others. The images I took in at the
Roscoe Diner made their way into my own work, as well. In one of my short stories a boy is cornered
in a diner men’s room by a drunk man who is showing him a school photo of his
dead son, who the man says would have been about the same age as my
protagonist.

The story had its strengths, most notably in the description
of the place, but was ultimately highly derivative of Raymond Carver’s work,
probably to an embarrassing degree. But
I did get praise for its emotional honesty. And its setting. And I have the
Roscoe Diner to thank for that – a place as iconic and as real as any other I’ve
been to.

I don’t remember much about the food, except that it was
plentiful. And for a 19 year old young
man on a long winter drive home, sometimes in automobiles with no heat and
questionable safety standards, the portions were perfect. My friends and I devoured the large helpings,
fueling up for the couple of hundred miles to go before we slept.

Dedicated to Greg
King, the best roommate of them all.

Perilous Crossings: Memories of Driving in Winter

It was this time of year back when I was young, some 30 years ago to be exact, that I would make the long winter journeys between Syracuse University where I studied and Westchester, New York, where I lived. I made some of those excursions by train, which I’ve discussed in an earlier post.

There were occasions too, however, when I made the trip between Purchase and Syracuse, New York driving. My mom and/or dad would drive me up, or I’d go with a friend or two. These trips were generally “uneventful,” as they say, in that no one was ever injured, killed or arrested in connection with any of them. Believe me when I say, with no hint of irony or hyperbole that any of these three eventualities could easily have come to pass during my five years of being a student up in the frozen tundra. It’s not something I say proudly, or even lightly; in fact I’m humbled and more than a little ashamed when I think back to my recklessness behind the wheel during my early driving days.

My friend Mignon Young (Hambrick back then) and I like to recall the time she, Pete Landau (pictured above in a photo by Mignon) and I drove home together in her aging Renault Fuego (as Mignon recently said, “I later determined that fuego was Italian for ‘biggest piece of shit on the road.’”). The car had no heat, and this was a five-hour trip in the snowy dead of winter. We
entertained ourselves in the freezing car by playing games like “Botticelli” and “the Movie Game.” The latter was of our own invention; one player names a movie title, the next has to name their own, starting with the final letter of the previous player’s movie title. It was a ridiculous, inane game, but one that made the minutes and hours pass more quickly somehow. Of course, the fact that we were young and had a joyous friendship helped too.

On that same stretch of road – Route 17 – I recall being stopped by troopers one year. There had
been a lot of snow and ice, so they were ushering cars over a particularly icy bridge one at a time. I was behind the wheel; my mother was in the passenger seat and my brother Mike was in back. The trooper looked at each of us and then, like the guy who straps you in to the roller coaster, he said, “Okay, man, just take it slow and keep those wheels straight and you should be fine.”
I nodded and, gripping the wheel, my forearms stiff as planks, tapped my toe lightly on the accelerator, then the brake, both of which felt suddenly unfamiliar, as if I were borrowing a friend’s car for the first time, instead of driving my mother’s LeBaron – the very automobile on which I’d learned to drive.

I’m not sure what happened next; I do recall the hundred yards or so of that bridge seeming much, much longer, and the moment when I silenced the unsolicited driving advice I was getting from my passengers, not by yelling but by evenly asking if either of them wanted to take over for
me. With the quiet I needed, I got us over that bridge and to our destination.

There are other stories I could tell on myself that involve that route, but I think I’ll wait until I’ve got less to lose. I like my job and my “place in my community” too much. Who knows? It might make for a good deathbed confession someday…….

Recollections of Springtime in the Frozen Tundra

I'm going to take the plunge and order Marcel Proust for my Kindle. It used to be that buying Remembrances of Things Past made you a weightlifter. Now, thanks to technology, no more lower back pain when reading the masters.


I don't know which came first -- this blog, or my tendency to travel around the different epochs of my life. This is what prompted my Proustian meanderings. (Who am I kidding? I've been reading The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo for what seems like an eternity. How am I ever going to get through Proust?) Today, as I made my way from the Technology and Training Center, where my office is located, over to the Administration Building for a meeting just next door, something hit me. I'm not sure if it was a breeze, a ray of sunshine, or a combination of both. Maybe it was the sound of that breeze as it worked its way through the canopy of trees that surrounds our complex, or the scent of a budding flower. I think it had something to do with being in a campus-like setting during the time of year when the weather starts to take a turn for the better.

Suddenly, I flashed on a patch of dirt and grass across Marshall Street from the Generic Bar in Syracuse. We called it something with the word "Beach" in the title. It was either just "The Beach," or "Generic Beach," or "M-Street Beach." Something. We would go into the Generic, buy our beers and cocktails, and then take our places on that patch on the other side of the street and watch the world go by on M. Street. We were peaceful, so the cops never gave us any trouble. I remember my friends Jem, Kenny and I once joking drunkenly at the expense of our number-one basketball star at the time, Dwayne "Pearl" Washington as he walked by with his entourage. We couldn't help noticing that he had a huge rear end, something we hadn't quite realized watching him work on the Carrier Dome floor. "Hey, Jane!" we slurred, just quietly enough so that he couldn't hear us, "get your books outta your butt. Why are you carrying your books in your butt?" No one else got the joke, but it killed me, Jem and Kenny.

It was such a joyous time, as that iceberg of a campus turned into one of the most beautiful places you'll ever visit in the warmer months. I'm no meteorologist, but I'm guessing that the same lakes and glacial formations that make for arctic freezes and record snowfalls also somehow account for the crystalline blue skies of summer up there in Central New York.

There were a few spots where we gathered during the thaw. The Beach was only one of them. Others included Fraternity Row on Walnut Park, where beer flowed and bands often played in the spring and summer. The quad is an obvious one; I picture sitting on the steps of Hendricks Chapel, or throwing frisbees, shirtless. There was Thornden Park, overlooked by some students, but to me one of the great treasures of that campus, and even Oakwood Cemetery, where I took many pleasurable walks during my time as an undergraduate up there.

College is such an important time in a young person's life; it leaves an indelible impression on the soul. I wonder if my friends who do college counselling -- Tara, Eva, Erik, and the rest -- think about this much, as they send their kids out there into the world. Knowing them as I do, and knowing they are all such good souls, I have no doubt that similar images of springtime on campus come up each time they shepherd another one off into the Great Unknown that will help determine the rest of their lives.

Bicycles and Me

I want to ride my bicycle;

I want to ride my bike.

I want to ride my bicycle;

I want to ride it where I like.

-- Freddie Mercury

In the beginning, there was the red Schwinn. Or at least that's how I remember it. There were, in fact, many bikes in our neighborhood. We had a bicycle culture when I was a boy in the 1970's. I haven't thought about it in years, but as I recall the accessories I bought for that bike -- the baskets and rear view mirrors, the generator lights that ran on pedal power, and the horns -- it makes me realize just how important my bikes were to me back then.

I suppose each bike was a kind of status symbol that said something about the kid who rode it. I don't pretend to have a memory that could call up all the different brand names each kid had, but I do remember one distinctly -- the Raleigh Chopper that Richie Mahoney owned. If I'm not mistaken it was a rust brown color and it was the coolest bike by far.

That is until Richie trashed it. That's what we did with our bikes back then. We were heavily influenced by the ABC hit TV series Happy Days, and there was a very popular storyline about the Fonz falling for Pinky Tuscadero, leader of the Pink Ladies. She was just as tough as Fonzie, and the two of them rode motorcycles together. To me, they were nothing short of the perfect couple, so I was devastated when Pinky was injured during a demolition derby by the evil Malachi Brothers. My friends and I regularly re-enacted the derby on the cul-de-sac at the end of our street, much to the chagrin of our parents, I would imagine, who must have wondered how we managed to smash up our bikes so completely on such a regular basis.

I would also imagine that I was the Fonz and Lorraine Mahoney was Pinky, and that we were the king and the queen of the demolition derby. No matter how things turned out in the cul de sac, in my mind, we always won, and lived happily ever after.

(I was a bit of a Walter Mitty, even back then.)

Bikes became less a part of my life as I got older; although that changed when we moved to Grosse Pointe, Michigan when I was going into the tenth grade, in the summer of 1978. One of the first things I noticed about Grosse Pointe Park, the town where we lived, was how flat it was. My brother and I were given bikes as a means of transportation; he rode to the middle school each day, and I rode over to Grosse Pointe South High School. It was an easy, bucolic, painfully suburban ride.

The first time I ever got intoxicated was in Grosse Pointe, at Wendy Maniere's house, about a block away from where I lived. At the end of the party, I rode my ten speed home, which was no easy feat. As I recall, there were no cars on the road, but I still managed to get tripped up at a stop sign and land on my ass.

I walked my bike the rest of the way home, collapsed into my bed and vomited shortly thereafter, in a manner so violent that I found myself promising the toilet bowl I would never drink again. (I lied.)

Bicycles didn't really play a part in my life again until I went to college and met Susan Barney. We bought ten speeds together and would take them for rides over to Oakwood Cemetery, where we would sit against trees and read. This was one of those simple, quiet pleasures of those years that I'll remember always.

When the two of us traveled one summer in Europe, we rented bikes in France, in Aix-en-Provence, I believe it was. The travel had wearied me, so that riding the French bicycle was difficult, and I ended up not only exhausted, but sick, as well. I remembered a cure for nausea I had found while traveling in California, when I got car-sick driving up Big Sur. I had my girlfriend's older sister pull the rental car over, and I sat on the side of the road, ready to be sick. Then I noticed a familiar smell -- eucalyptus. I was sitting right beside a bush of the stuff. As I sniffed in the aroma, I immediately felt better. There wasn't any eucalyptus in France, so I sat under a tree and breathed in the smells of the grass and earth until I felt better. (Susan was good enough to take a picture, capturing me in this condition.)

Bicycles were absent from my life during my time living in Manhattan, as that was an era of mind-numbing blurriness, for the most part. It wasn't until I re-emerged on the other side of the East River, in Brooklyn, that I decided to invest in another bike. I lived next to Prospect Park, a biking mecca, and I was wheeling into a new life, yet again.

Now, here in Manor, Texas, I ride my bike as often as I can. Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of those guys you see going up hills on the side of the highway, wearing brightly colored spandex, and I didn't need to take out a second mortgage to buy my bicycle. I like to ride a mile or two at a time, or just go for a spin with my kids every now and then. It's not much, but there's a feeling of freedom and renewal I get when I'm on my bike. And I'm not saying the red Schwinn will be my "Rosebud" or anything as heavy as that, but I do feel a connection to all those earlier, cycling selves each time I get on the bike and ride.

It's Official: I'm a Wimp

Newsflash, right? I know. I came to this realization this morning, after parking my car on the roof of the parking garage at the Education Service Center where I work, as I do every morning. This morning was different, because it was 21 degrees Fahrenheit, with a wind chill of about 8, according to Mark Murray, my morning weatherman on KGSR, "Radio Austin." I think it was the way I hugged myself against the cold, holding the collar of my coat with one hand. I felt like Jessica Tandy, or someone.

Oh, how the mighty Northeasterner has fallen!

When I was a boy, my brother and I couldn't wait until it snowed. We would beg our father to drive us over to Knollwood Country Club, where we would join our friends, Miki, Eddie, Richie and Guy for some good, old-fashioned reckless sledding. (The hill seems enormous in my memory, but of course when I visit it from time to time, I'm always shocked to see that it's more of an incline than a hill.) It didn't matter how cold, wet or icy it was; we were happy just to be outside in the air with each other. We threw snowballs, built ice forts -- all the stuff you'd expect from strong children used to the rigors of a New York winter.

One day Miki, my brother Mike and I were making our way up Whitewood Road, crossing from the Forberts' front yard to the Venuttis' (a favorite crossing point over to our street, Hartford Lane), passing a miniature football to each other. I passed the ball to Mike, and it was a beautiful spiral. It would have been a perfect lead pass, dropping just into the outstretched hands of my receiver -- would have been, had it not been for the sheet of ice that had formed on top of the snow. As he reached out for the ball, my brother's feet came out from under him, and his head went straight back and struck the ice with a resounding "crack." Because of the position of his arms out in front of him, reaching forward, he really had no opportunity to break the fall, so the back of his skull took the brunt of the force of the sudden drop.

When we asked him if he was all right, he replied that he was, which gave me and Miki permission to laugh about what had happened: "Oh man, you should have seen it! Your feet went straight up in the air!" My brother laughed, but then looked puzzled. "Wait, tell me again what happened." When he said this the third time, he began to cry. Miki and I exchanged a look and immediately stepped up the pace to my house. The pediatrician confirmed that he had sustained a concussion, and my parents spent that night waking my brother up every hour.

The point of the story? We were undeterred by the incident. We were back out on the ice in no time. Rain, sleet, snow, concussions -- none of it stopped us. We were not to be stopped.

Unlike some of my other friends -- Miki in particular -- I never took to skiing as I got older. I did do a lot of what I called "boot skiing," going from class to class at Syracuse University, in Central New York. Due to where the town is situated in relation to the Finger Lakes, it gets a ton of snow. It gets so much snow that when a reporter braved the elements earlier this winter, when the region got a particularly brutal pummeling of snowfalls, one after the other, he couldn't get a decent interview. Everyone he spoke to responded the same way: "This is Syracuse. It's just winter in Syracuse." The poor guy had no story. He and his producer had to pack up their shit and go home. (They actually ended up doing a pretty funny story about snow being a non-story, even nine feet in a week, or whatever it was.)

The worst cold I ever endured was the night I slept outside the Carrier Dome, waiting to buy tickets to see the Police on February 4, 1984. I was twenty years old and impervious to anything other than the awesome rocking power of "Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic" and "So Lonely." We ended up with incredible seats, on the floor, with an unobstructed view of the stage, thanks to a large area just in front of us where we danced the entire time. Worth freezing my ass off in a cheap sleeping bag? Oh, hell yes.

I'm not saying I've come to the point where I'm ready for the early-bird special and white loafers in Boca. Not quite there yet. But I've become spoiled living in Central Texas, with its (normally) moderate winters. 21 degrees and rolling, controlled blackouts, in order to prevent the Travis County grid from collapsing are things I could do without. I dug my winter coat out of the mothballs, and I'd just assume bury it back again. So 70-degree weather, I'm ready when you are. This freeze business is something I'm just getting too old for, frankly.

Now where's my toddy and slippers?

The Impulse to Write

Every year at this time, I have the urge to write. Usually what will happen in that regard is I'll begin a journal whose first entry is something like, "Every year at this time, I have the urge to write."

I then spend a few pages on general introspection before boring myself to the point of giving up on my journal until the next holiday season.

So here I am again. Only this time I'm blogging. It will be interesting to see whether or not having an immediate audience (presumably) will change the pattern. Will I write a few of these entries before petering out as I always do? Or will this become the kind of exciting interaction that I'm told blogs can be?

I guess we'll find out. Together.

I carry around some guilt about my writing. Years ago, teachers began identifying me as a "budding writer," first in high school, where I wrote a couple of articles for the school paper, and wowed the faculty with a modern version of Hamlet called "To Suffer the Slings and Arrows." Ittook place in Waco, Texas where I apparently believed the oil industry was located. (The Montagues and Capulets were now oil barons, in my retelling.) There was some talk of trying to mount a production of it, but mercifully that never came to pass. Still, though, it set something in motion in my mind, and I began to wonder what it would be like to be a "writer."

Aside from the teachers mentioned above, I'd be silly not to mention my parents, as well -- both writers in their own right. My father was a copywriter in advertising, and my mother wrote poems throughout her life.

Once I got to Syracuse, I discovered the writers who were teaching and studying there at the time: Raymond Carver, who would be my literary idol, Tess Gallagher, Douglas Unger, Jay McInerney, and Tobias Wolff, who became a mentor and friend. As a young writer, there really was no better place to be in the early to mid-1980's, and I do think now, as I look back, that I took full advantage. Thanks to my association with these people, I got to meet Edward Albee, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Richard Ford, among others.

I wrote a few short stories while at Syracuse, most of them awful, I'm sure. There were a couple that were well received by people whose opinion I valued, one of which was published in the university's literary magazine. I had enough "success" to continue writing as an expatriate living in Madrid, Spain, where I taught English classes, sat and journal-wrote in the beautiful cafes of that city, and met other self-proclaimed expatriate writers with whom I shared my work and whose work I read and carefully critiqued.

In the midst of all this excitement my mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. My heart was broken when my mother died, but I had no way of knowing (let alone expressing) that at age 25. In retrospect, the heartbreak came from all that we'd miss experiencing together. In November of 1988, however, all it was was the feeling of a carnival sledge hammer slamming into the center of my chest. Repeatedly.

It was the act of writing about the loss that eventually got me back on track and enthusiastic about life. I wrote a short story called "The Favorite Nurse" which told of the death of a woman from multiple points of view -- those of her husband, her two sons, and the nurse who watches over her as she dies. People told me they were moved by the story, but I remember being embarrassed by having turned something so personal into something so "literary." I also wrote my first longer piece about this time in my life, and I believe it was called "Family Matters," although this has faded into obscurity now.

And now here I am, a few lifetimes removed from 1988, finding I still have things to say. But I am aware of this new medium -- that this is a blog post, and, as such, is running on a bit long. I know I began with the mention of feeling guilty about my writing, and I promise to get to that. For now, though, I'll stop here, and continue on another day...