Unsettled Chapter 29-C "There Was Magic in the Shoes"

Back in Chapter 9-A, I shared the following personal confession about this time in my life:

"It was that awkward age....I was what some adults euphemistically called a late bloomer with a "growth spurt" lost somewhere in my genes. Before graduating, I’d grow another seven inches, but for now, I was the third smallest guy in my grade level (which had about 400 students). I had never shaved and would not need to shave daily until my junior year--in college! There were sparse, struggling hairs under one arm but nothing under the other. I loved P.E. class but hated the required showers afterwards. Need I explain? Awkward age indeed! I was surviving sheepishly among a growing population of Neanderthals."

Make no mistake. Those feelings were real in the locker room of 9th grade P.E. class at Burton Junior High... and they were even more real at wrestling practice with Dave at the high school. So you can imagine how this "late bloomer" felt as he walked into the guest locker room of East Detroit High School and saw the team getting into their wrestling uniforms.

I had practiced with the team over Christmas Break. I'd seen them all in uniform at many wrestling meets, but until that moment it had not occurred to me that I have never put on a wrestling uniform in my life. Lockers are not assigned, of course, but there are many unspoken rituals and patterns that groups fall into without thinking. And for some reason, the team tended to pick lockers in the same order they sat along side the mat. So Dave found an empty locker for me in the first row where all the lighter weights were and then he moved on to the next row of lockers where the mid-weights were, leaving me to fend for myself. I opened the locker and just stared. There was no way I was getting out of my clothes until I could quickly pull on the uniform. No way was I going to nonchalantly walk around in a jock strap or less as most of the team did between "weigh in" and getting dressed. I was wrestling in the 98-lbs class but could weigh in fully dressed with a pound to spare. No problem there.

Perhaps more than other sports, wrestling generates "nick names" that can stick with a guy for many years. Stan Zelinsky was one of those guys. "Stan the Man" he called himself, but we all called him Stosh.

Stosh came by slapped me on the back.

"Hey, K'Spanky, you ready for the big match?" he laughed.

"I'm kind of nervous." I smiled

"Don't be. The other guy is the one who should be scared. You're gunna put the moves on him. Am I right?" ["Put the moves on him" was a general statement of wrestling domination at that time.] "K'Spanky's getting his first high school win tonight and he's only in junior high!" he announced, but no one was really listening.

It would be tempting to say that Stosh "high fived" me after such hype, but the high five as a form of athletic encouragement was not yet in common use. Strange as it may sound in retrospect, none of us had seen it done. The high five became popular a few years later and has become so common that it now seems impossible to remember a time when athletes did not naturally exchange them. No, Stosh did not high five me, he just laughed and moved on to the next man to begin a similar pep talk. That was Stosh's way of getting psyched up for meets. He was an average wrestler with more defeats than wins, but he was the kind of guy every team needs one of.

DomZom came up to me with a tangled handful of purple and white spandex. His real name was Dominick Zombo.

"Coach says to try these on." he smiled. Dom was a tall skinny senior just below Dave's weight class. He had known my sister Kathy and still knew both Paul and Dave, and so... by virtue of blood... DomZom looked out for me. Being the caboose of the family is sometimes hard, but following well-liked siblings through school is one of the highest honors of life.

I untangled the three pieces of the uniform, looked around to make sure no one was paying attention and quickly shucked my clothes to the floor and pulled on the white shorts.

"Tights and then whites," DomZom said from the far end of the bench.

"What?" I said, not knowing anyone had seen me.

"Tights then whites," he repeated. "You've gotta put on the purple tights first and then the white shorts over them."

"Oh... That makes sense." I laughed.

Laughing mid-mistakes even was a gift I'd picked up from my mother. We pretty much have three choices when we do something harmlessly dumb: get mad; get embarrassed; or laugh as you correct it and go on. Mom had lots of practice at the latter, and I'd picked up the mid-mistake laugh from her. It has served me well through the years.

I peeled off the white shorts, pulled on the tights, and then thought to ask...

"Is there a front and back to these things?"

"There is but it doesn't matter. Tag goes in the back, But they're kind of big on you so it won't matter once you put on the shorts," Dom said.

When he turned to his own locker, I pulled out the waistline and saw the tag in front, but there were not feet in the tights--just straps that went around the foot--so I pulled on the white shorts, and then began studying the third piece of the uniform.

It was more or less a tank top but it was also a "one-piece" that required stepping into like the swimsuits men wore in the Roaring Twenties. Great! I thought. Obviously, the white shorts had to go on after the top, too.

"Oops!," Dom said from the end of the bench. "I forgot. Tights, Tank, and then Whites. Just remember the shorts go last and you'll be all set."

For a kid who didn't want to get undressed, I was sure making things miserable for myself. I laughed slightly less as I pulled off the shorts for the third time. While I was at it, I switched the tights so the tag was in the back. By the time I was properly dressed and lacing up my patch-work shoes, the locker room was nearly empty. Dave stepped up behind me.

"Come on, Tom. You didn't weigh in. They're waiting."

"You didn't tell me when to weigh in," I said like a little brother, "and it took me a while to figure this uniform out."

Dave's eyes widened. Until that moment, he'd forgotten that this part of his wrestling experience was all new to me.

"Sorry about that," Dave said. (It was a line made popular by Don Adams as Maxwell Smart. Get Smart was one of our family’s favorite shows at the time.)

"That's alright," I said, tightening the laces on my raggedy shoes. I stood on the wooden bench, temporarily above my brother.

[This photo was taken the next day.]
A wrestling uniform is designed to look as if it can barely contain the muscular physique inside. Mine was only slightly more filled out than if it were hanging on a clothesline, but I was proud to have it on.

"Those shoes..." Dave sighed, shaking his head.

"Are cool," I finished for him. And still on the bench I did a little tap dance step. "Other than that, how do I look?"

"Fine. You look fine. But do me a favor: don't do that little tap-dance thing in front of anybody else. Put on your wrestling face and practice stancing like I showed you."

The term "stancing" refers to the various idiosyncratic moves and postures a wrestler assumes while stretching on the mat before the meet begins. He jumps in place, shakes off nerves, and then strikes a stance. It's usually the same posture he assumes while approaching his opponent after the ref says "Ready...wrestle." Stancing is a wrestler's trademark, a customized set of moves intended to reflect focus and the pent-up fury about to be unleashed. The little Sammy Davis Jr. tap dance I did for Dave in those patch-work shoes did not qualify as stancing. It was just the last twitch of the mid-mistake routine I'd learned from my mom. There was no way I would do such a thing in front of others and he knew it. I think he knew it....

Dave took in a deep breath, put his hand on my back, and we walked to the scales in the weigh-in room.
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To be continued: I hope to post the 4th and final installment of "There Was Magic in the Shoes" in a few days, but we're going to the beach today and I have some chores to do in the meantime.
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Chapter 28-B "There Was Magic in The Shoes"

Happy 4th of July! Thank you all for your patience. I have been away from the internet but have had time for writing. Hope you enjoy Part B.

Paul and Mom were not with us at the East Detroit wrestling meet, even though it was only a few miles from our house. Paul was not much interested in wrestling. His winter sport was basketball. All three of us boys played in the church league, but Paul played many more hours on his own time than Dave and I did. He was also dating a nice young lady from church who captured much of his attention. Basketball and the girl explain why Paul is not in many of these chapters.

As for Mom, she found it difficult to watch her boys wrestling. She did come to some events through Dave's three years of high school, but more often than not she stayed home with Jimmy who at this time was nearly three years old.

She did play one brief and unforgettable role in Dave and my wrestling experience. That previous Christmas Break when I was practicing with Dave’s team, Mom was our ride to and from wrestling practice five miles from our house. The ride to practice was never a problem because Dave and I were there to tell her it was time to go. She’d say, “I’m coming. I’m coming,” throw on a wig, pull her winter “furry hat” over it, step into her snap-over boots with the “furry” top, throw on her overcoat with the furry collar, and drive us to the high school.

The ride home was another matter. We were not there to remind her it was time to go get the boys. So each day after wrestling practice we sat on the slatted benches outside the cafeteria, waiting… and waiting…and waiting. It was a long-standing pattern of our lives to wait for Mom at nearly any event in life. This was long before “cell phones,” and we never seemed to have the change to use a pay phone. So we just waited and waited.

In fact, I think that if there were a special card that we could pull from our pocket that said “Bonus Hours for Waiting on Mom” and if we could use that card at our appointed times to die, we’d keep Mr. Death standing there several months tapping his foot and thinking no one in the history of dying was ever awarded so many bonus hours. And when we finally got done doing whatever we did with our granted time, we’d walk up to Mr. Death and say, “Now you know how we felt as kids.”

But waiting is a part of life…not death. At least it was a part of our life with Mom, and after the fourth all-morning Christmas Break wrestling practice, Dave and I sat there on the bench waiting for an hour.

Dave threatened to get up and walk home, but we had gotten nine inches of snow the night before, probably enough snow to cancel school if it had been in session, and he hoped Coach Nelson would have cancelled wrestling practice, but no such luck. Coach did say that if it kept snowing and we got a few inches more, the next day’s practice would be canceled. But what we saw out the window looked more like the wind stirring the snow up than more snow coming down. In spite of this, Dave finally stood to his feet up with disgust and said, “I’m walking home.”

Over his jeans and sweatshirt, he had on only a knit scull cap that did not cover his ears and a Navy pea coat which had been our Uncle Dick’s (Mom’s younger brother) nearly twenty years before. (He and later I wore that pea coat with pride.) I had on the “snorkel coat” Mom and I picked out at the Macomb Mall Sears.

It is possible that some readers have never heard of a “snorkel coat” so named because the hood zipped up and so far out from the head that the wearer breathed through the opening like a snorkel. The narrow-tunnel opening of the hood was encircled with fake “wolf” fur. These coats were all the rage at the time, but you don’t see them much anymore. I think it’s because the tunnel-vision we had when that hood was up made us turn our whole body just to look to the left or right. Snorkel hoods were downright dangerous…warm but dangerous.

Dave stuffed his gloveless hands in the stiff woolen pockets of the pea coat and marched outside without another word. Knowing the doors would lock behind us,. I stood for a moment in the threshold with the warm air of the school hall behind me and a snow-splintered gust in my face. And as I had done nearly all of my life, I decided to follow Dave. I zipped the furry snorkel around my head and trudged across the drifting parking lot to catch up to him. We walked down Common Road and then left down Utica Road.

About a mile-and-a-half from the school, we approached our church, and I noticed that no one had shoveled the sidewalks. This bothered me—not that we had to walk unshoveled sidewalks. We’d been doing that the whole way. It bothered me because I felt guilty that they were not yet shoveled and sensed it was my duty to do something about it.

It was a time in my life when I was constantly obsessed with James 4:17, which says “Therefore to him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin.” Most of my life, I thought that sin was when you did something bad--and it is, of course, but some time before I’d heard a sermon explaining that there were sins of “omission” as well as sins of “commission.”

Talk about a double whammy! It was hard enough trying to avoid bad things, but now I had to worry about not doing the good things I thought up, too. It makes a person hard to live with. I'd be walking home from school with friends and step over some litter on the sidewalk, then feel guilty that I should have picked it up. I'd sometimes run back a block to stuff a paper cup or something in my pocket. The inability to sort out what was and was not my problem to solve drove my friends and family crazy.

On this walk home with Dave, I was trying real hard not to think about what a good thing it would be to volunteer to shovel the church side walks. But it made sense. After all we were right there. The shovels were in the side entry of the church. I wrestled with these thoughts with each snowy step then finally spoke up to Dave.

“Hey, Dave, I got an idea. Let’s shovel the church sidewalks and then Mom will probably come by and see us and she’ll wait for us ‘til we get done. Isn’t that a good idea?”

“No. That’s a rotten idea. I’m cold. I’m hungry. I’m mad at Mom for not picking us up. If you want to stay here and shovel the sidewalk go ahead. I’m walking home.”

I stood for a moment at the corner with the snowy walks behind me. Dave pressed on with his collar and shoulders raised up to cover his red ears. I remember wishing I had Dave’s ability to avoid seeing opportunities to do good because, if I understood the verse correctly, it only held accountable the person who “kneweth to do good” so if I could avoid thinking of such good things, I’d be free not to do them. Dave hadn’t thought of shoveling the church sidewalks, and even when I told him about it, it didn’t seem like a good idea to him. He was guilt-free and kept walking without the slightest regret. I ran to catch up with him but my guilt felt deeper than the snow. By about the time we got to the Roseville Theater two blocks from the church (a theater we’d been in once to see Third Man on the Mountain, but that was before we’d joined the Baptist church), Mom pulled up behind us at the snowplow’s ridge over the curb and beeped the horn.

It had begun snowing lightly—new snow coming down mixed in with the blowing crystals in the air—and Dave just stood there staring through the flakes, glairing at Mom with frustration. I think he half intended to walk the rest of the way home just to make a point, but as I stomped over the bank of plowed snow and climbed into the family wagon, he let out a long breath of frosty air and stepped around to the far side of the car and got in behind Mom.

“I’ve been looking all over for you two.” Mom said attempting to sound prompt.

“We sat there forever,” Dave said with disgust.

“Time got away from me. I had no idea it was noon.”

“Ma, it was noon over an hour ago,” Dave said, “Just drive.”

There was something in his voice that should have made me know not to say what I was about to say. If this were a movie, and if I were watching it instead of being in it, I would be on Dave’s side, and I’d want to backhand the little brother. But at that age, I was not able to imagine how the “movie of life” played out one frame at a time. I was not able to know that we can sometimes actually control the next frame. A line can come to our lips, and we do not have to say it. The script is not set in stone. We can edit the film before it’s shot so to speak. I didn’t think of that at the time, and without that moment of thought, I stepped into a role and said that character’s line. I guess it’s who I was at the time.

Here is what that fourteen-year-old Tom said: “I wanted to stay and shovel the church sidewalks but Dave didn’t want to.”

I know what you're thinking: No, Tom! Tell me you didn’t say that! You self-righteous little snot! Here your brother was being cool enough to take you to high school wrestling practice with him even though you’re in junior high, and you get into the car and say that to your mother? You’re right, Tom, I’m on Dave’s side, too. But wait. It gets worse.

“Well, it won't take long to go back and do that." Mom said.

“Won’t take long! It’ll take an hour. Tom, is a slow shoveler. No, Mom. I’m hungry. If Tom wants to shovel the church walks, you can bring him back. I don’t care. Just take me home.”

Dave was right. He and Paul could shovel circles around me. But in fairness, we only had two good snow shovels at home and I was always stuck with the small scoop shovel which was only good for the small “detail” work around the porch steps and edges. He was also right that this was a bad time for my “good idea.” We’d been practicing hard for three hours.

We needed to eat, and though we passed a McDonalds on the way home [could not find a picture with snow], the thought of “eating out” was something we only did on vacation and only with Dad present. Hard to imagine that we “ate out” so seldom that McDonalds was considered “going to a restaurant,” but in fact, we could count on our hands the times we had eaten out including the handful of times Dad had pulled into the golden arches (at that time there was no indoor seating at the Roseville McDonalds. It was to home and a can of Campbell’s Vegetable Beef Soup that we wanted. Add a PB&J, and to me that was the perfect meal.

We traveled the three miles south on Gratiot Avenue and turned left at the Detroit Bank and Trust at the Eastgate Shopping Center. A few blocks east, and we turned right from Marquette onto Marlene. One block to go and we were home, and that’s when it happened….

Wham! A snowball splattered on Dave’s side of the car. It was not the first time we’d been hit by a snowball. In fact, the three of us boys used to throw snowballs over the Hill’s house behind ours and listen to them thud on the roofs of passing cars on Frazho Road, but we were never so brazen as to actually hit a passing car in plain view. The fact that the snow ball hit Dave’s window and made him jump, and the fact that the kid laughed when Dave turned to see him, made this a personal matter.

“Stop the car, Mom!” Dave shouted, jumping out before she did

And with all the pent up anger of the hour on the bench at school, the two miles of trudging in the snow, the church sidewalk debate, and the knowledge that there was no such thing as “bonus hours at death,” Dave bolted across the yard toward some kid about my age whose grin had turned to a look of terror. Dave was gaining on him, and oh what a face-washing this squirt was about to get when Mom stepped out from the car and yelled:

“I’ll bet you have fart stains in your underwear!”

She said it with passion. She said it in full support of her son’s noble defense of the family car. She said it very loudly.

And in that moment, everything froze like breath on a frosted window. Mom’s absurd remark came so unexpectedly it was as if we had been listening to the climax of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture on a phonograph, and just as those chords of adrenaline rose and the first cannon shots were about to fire, someone bumped the needle arm and sent it scratching across the vinyl to the center post leaving only a faint skipping sound in the cold air.

Dave stopped in his tracks and looked at his mother in disbelief. The running kid stopped and looked at the strange lady with the furry hat pulled over her wigged head. His puzzled eyes, to Mom’s way of thinking, begged her to say it again.

“I’ll bet you have fart stains in your underwear!” she repeated.

To Mom, this was the ultimate put-down and about as "vulgar" a cursing as she could imagine uttering. (It’s not as if she could never have said the same thing of her own boys, but that did not occur to her at the time.)

The moment the words hit the air, Dave’s countenance fell. His shoulders drooped as if some invisible referee had just raised the other kid’s hand at center mat. Clearly no true threat could follow such a remark from a blood relative of the vengeful aggressor. The chase was over. Dave waved the kid on as if to say, “Forget it, kid. Feel free to pummel our car any time you like.” He slunk back to the open door of the station wagon and plopped in the seat.

“What?” Mom questioned, pulling her door shut. “I’ll bet he does.

“Just go, Mom. Go home,” Dave said, sinking lower in his seat. “I never want to see that kid again for the rest of my life.”

“I was only trying to help. I didn’t want to see what you were going to do to him.”

“Just drive, Mom.”

The rest of the day was quiet. That night at supper, (which by the way was not in the kitchen but at Mom’s new and long-awaited dining room table that she had gotten for Christmas), things were still quiet until Mom brought up the church sidewalks. By then, my sympathies for Dave’s position had grown and I winced when the subject came up, but Dad said, “Tell you what, after supper the three of us will go see if they got done. If not, it won’t take any time at all.”

And so we drove to the church in the dark. When we got there the sidewalks had been shoveled by the part-time custodian. One might think this brought a smile to Dave’s face, but the day had done its damage. He just kept staring out the window.

I’m not sure when I learned that not all “good things” can in fact be done, and that sometimes countless "good things" can distract us from our equally good original goals (like walking safely home in a blizzard). I don't know when I learned that guilt is counterfeit form of "caring," but it's true. When we do "the right thing" merely to avoid guilt we are robbed of the joy that comes from serving others as Christ modeled. It's a variation on the "cheerful giving" principle. I don't know when I learned that "heart-felt" ideas cannot be imposed on third parties and remain "heart-felt," but one thing is for sure: I had not yet learned these things.

Whatever learning began that day was temporarily upstaged and made more indelible by Mom's improvised indignation. To this day, when we speak of Mom yelling her fart-stain remark at that kid, Dave just shakes his head and takes a slow, deep breath, but he can’t help but chuckle when he lets out the sigh.

Mom was not with us when we stepped into East Detroit High for my first match on Dave’s team.

To be continued and concluded in Chapter 28-C which I hope to post Wednesday.

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Chapter 28-A "There Was Magic in the Shoes"

[Three accidentally omitted paragraphs were discovered and added Sunday AM.]

The school year that followed the digging of the well--the year when Kathy was away at college--was the peak of my brother Dave's high school wrestling career, and by a wonderful twist of fate, with the help of some magic shoes, it became the peak of my career as well in a brief reversal of roles. But first... some background.

The term "middle school" has been in use for a few decades now. It refers to grades 6 through 8. But when I was a kid, they used the term "junior high," which was grades 7 through 9. There was only one school system that I knew of that had 9th grade as part of its high school and that was East Detroit.

(That city--at least that name--no longer exists. Back in 1992, the town fathers thought it would sound less like it was related to Detroit and more like it was a second cousin of Grosse Pointe if they changed the name of the city to Eastpointe, That's Pointe with an "e" on the end, which we all know makes it even ritzier. How cities and towns get their names is a fascinating study, but it's not the topic of this post. Suffice to say that more than a decade later, East Detroit/Eastpointe is still pretty much the same place. What's in a name?)
.
Anyway, East Detroit was the only school around that had a "freshman class" of 9th graders in their high school building. Had that been true of Brablec High School in Roseville, Dave and I would have gone to school together that fall of 1970. But as it was, Dave and Paul drove to the high school each day, and I walked a few blocks to Burton Junior High on 11 Mile Road.

[Back in the 90's, Burton was torn down to make room for a home-improvement store. It was a perfectly good school building, but the baby-boom was over and there were no longer enough students in Roseville to fill the two high schools and three junior highs it once needed. So it made sense to raze the school on the most marketable lot.]

The 70-71 school year would be my second at Burton without Dave, but he remained my "closest" brother in age and in common interests. One of those interests was the sport of wrestling--not TV wrestling--we'd grown up watching "Big Time Wrestling" with its collection of stars (Bo Bo Brazil and Leapin' Larry Shane were our favorite good guys while Dick the Bruiser and The Sheik were our hated bad guys.) That kind of TV wrestling was fake and we all knew it. (A peek at those links will remove any doubt that the old TV wrestling was staged and fell far short of the brutality of today's real cage fights.) No, the kind of wrestling Dave took up the winter of my 9th grade year gave new meaning to being his little brother.


The year before, when Dave went to the high school, George Ryder, one of his friends from church talked him into joining the wrestling team. Dave had been chopping wood and pulling stumps with Dad for a year by then. He was gangly and strong, and in excellent shape. Still it was not common to begin a career at the varsity level, but as luck would have it, the varsity senior in Dave's weight class had difficulty "making weight" (especially when slated to meet his toughest opponents). So right from the start Dave was varsity and faced some of the best wrestlers in the area, and while he did not win all of his matches, he gained experience in a hurry and chalked up enough "surprise" victories against unsuspecting more-experienced grapplers to earn himself a Varsity Letter his first year.

As always, Dad got involved in this process. His athletic background was league softball and Golden Gloves Boxing. Until wrestling came along, all of his training with us boys was on the ball fields of Huron Park or in the basement with the boxing gloves he'd given us for Christmas years before. (It was a time when most fathers considered it their duty to teach a son how to stick up for himself, not to pick a fight, but to know how to end one if it started. I'm not necessarily advocating this mind-set, just explaining how Dad had trained us when we were kids on the playground.) Those old boxing gloves were still in the toy-box downstairs, but our hands had outgrown them, and our ball gloves were tossed in the closet for the winter. But Dad took that same energy from teaching us those sports and began helping Dave with this one less familiar him.

On any given night of the week, if you looked through our living room window, you could see all the furniture pushed aside and Dad and Dave looking at wrestling books and practicing the moves. These sessions often turned into full-blown tussles that shook the floor and walls and prompted Mom to grab her knickknacks from the shelves. In time, I got involved, too. Though I was no match for Dave, I was not a bad "sparring dummy."

And so began my wrestling career. It was the winter of rug burns.

I adopted Dave's interest in this sport, and became the best "feather weight" in Roseville with the ribbons to prove it. I took first place in both of my wrestling annual tournaments at that included all three Junior Highs. Seeing my potential, Coach Nelson asked Dave to start bringing me along to the high school practices over the Christmas Break of that 70-71 school year. Wow! Me, a mere junior high kid weighing in at 96 pounds fully dressed, was invited to work out with the heroes I'd been watching on the mat for two years. I was both nervous and thrilled.

I had no proper warm-up gear to practice in. All the other guys were wearing sweats and layers of floppy cotton shirts, and I was wearing my official Burton Junior High P.E. uniform, This was back in the day when P.E. classes were very regimented. Show up on Monday without a freshly laundered uniform and a "strap" to pull out from under the right leg to "snap" when ordered by the teacher... and you got a swat with a wooden paddle right there in front of the whole class. The swat was bad enough, but the lingering proof in the shower room after class was the real punishment. We had never heard of "Red Square" in Russia. To us, the term referred to the big welt on the butts of kids who dared show up without their P.E. uniform or a jock strap on Monday.

I had never gotten a swat for no uniform and strap on Monday, and for all I knew high-school wrestling practice was the same way. Dave didn't give it a thought until I stepped from the locker room to the wide open gym where two huge mats lay side by side.

There I stood with white shirt emblazoned with a smiling bobcat head with white matching boxer shorts, white crew socks, and white tennis shoes. I looked like Mr. Clean Jr. on stage with the motley cast Dickens’s Oliver Twist. But the forty or so guys of all shapes and sizes were so busy rolling and sparring on the big rubber mats that they didn't seem to notice.

Dave came up and whispered, "I'll get you some warm up clothes for tomorrow, but don't worry about it. Nobody cares what we wear. Let me introduce you to the guys you'll be with today."

I spent the morning working out with other guys within ten or twenty pounds of me, and didn't do half bad.

After that first day of practice, I found a pair of old wrestling shoes in the trash. Did I say "old"? They looked like they had been accidentally drug for miles out a car door by the laces. These shoes were missing rubber and had holes from too much time on the matt, but they were only one size bigger than I wore so I took them home and sewed on denim patches with orange darning thread.

It was the 70's, and tie-died shirts and ripped jeans with patches were the latest craze. Sort of like they still are now--except now they no longer patch the rips... they just leave 'em gaping and kids pay fifty bucks extra for all the wear-and-tear. Back then, we had to wear-out our own clothes.

Anyway, I thought the shoes looked cool with their funky patches.

[If I had not found those old wrestling shoes in my mother's attic a few months ago while we were preparing for last weekend's estate sale, I would have forgotten all about them and this chapter would not have happened. If I had not found them and taken these pictures, readers may find it hard to imagine just what I began wearing with pride when I worked-out with Dave's team.]

Once Christmas Break was over and wrestling practice was after school, I had no way of getting to the high school from Burton, but working out with the team for two weeks gave me an unfair advantage in the Roseville Junior High Wrestling Tournament. I took home the blue ribbon for the second year straight.

It was a week later that Coach Nelson sent Dave home with some exciting news. They were going to face East Detroit the following week, and since that school began with freshmen, our school was allowed to invite 9th graders up from the "feeder" junior high schools.

"Me? Wrestling in a real meet against East Detroit? Of course, I'll do it." I smiled, but deep in my stomach, butterflies started clinging to branches.

I'll never forget the nervous feeling I had as Dave and I and Dad walked through the main entrance to East Detroit High. They were the shamrocks, and they had a big four-leaf clover emblem in the tile floor of their entryway. I accidentally stepped onto the shamrock, and a guy who was standing guard over the sacred spot told me step back not to cross over the shamrock. I did a little jig to side-step it, but it seemed like the floor of the front door was a pretty dumb place to put something so untouchable. I later learned it was only visiting teams that were not allowed to walk on the emblem. Still, my first step into the building only heightened my nerves.

To be continued...
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Chapter 28-B will be posted next week as time allows.

Iowa Coach Changed Lives

A year ago, I wrote about a small town near our Iowa home that had just been hit by a devastating tornado. (That last link is a video story about how my friend's home vanished while she hid in the basement crawlspace.)

Yesterday, that same town was hit by a far more devastating disaster. If you havent' heard about it. Here is the story.

Aplington-Parkersburg was a school district that, before the two small-town schools merged, was in an athletic conference of small farm-community schools in which our school participated. Our middle school math teacher and volleyball coach lived in this town. (It was she who lost her house last year.) This school's football coach, Ed Thomas, was a legend. He played a major role in rebuilding the town's morale as they were literally rebuilding their school after the tornado. They named the new stadium after him.

This little community and Coach Thomas's football team has produced four NFL players in recent years. One of them, had this to say about the tragic murder of his former coach yesterday.

"Coach Thomas was very special to me and many other young men from the Aplington-Parkersburg communities. His legacy for many will be identified with his tremendous success as a football coach. However, I believe his largest legacy comes not in how many football games he won or lost but in the fact that he was a committed follower of Jesus Christ. He lived his life trying to exemplify this faith and convey those values to those under his influence. His faith in Christ pervaded everything that he did and that is why in the midst of the heartache we all feel there is comfort in knowing he is with his Savior."
Aaron Kampman, linebacker for the Green Bay Packers.

My friends in Iowa tell me the entire state is grieving the loss of this fine man. Pray for this community as they pull together once again in the face of unimaginable loss.
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A Date to Remember...

One of the disadvantages of using a blog as a venue for unwritten chapters is that I rarely write about “current things” so as not to lose the thread of whatever storyline holds the chapters together. When I do write about current life, it’s usually by way of explanation for why I haven’t had time to write. In spite of this flaw in my current format, kind feedback prods me on in this pleasant pastime.

A few weeks ago, Quilly, our blogging friend in Hawaii, wrote this about Patterns of Ink:

"Those of you who haven’t been following this blog don’t know what you have missed! Tom is writing his family history, chapter-by-chapter and sharing it on the web. It is an enchanting and compelling story of a family of faith and their lives as they struggled together to build the family home that is now, sadly, for sale. Tom is not your typical blogger, nor is he your typical writer. His stories are definitely worth your time."

Thanks, Quilly, your endorsement read like one of those big-name quotes on the back cover of a book jacket.

I say all that to say that those "Unsettled" chapters will continue, but I simply cannot let a date I had with my wife last night go without mention here at POI.

In recent comment sections and posts, I’ve hinted that I have been busy with a big project in our back yard that has left me worn out by nightfall. I’ll spare you the details, but trust me it has been the kind of physical labor my brothers and I did on Saturday’s with Dad forty years ago, and the kind of back-breaking toil Dad still did at my age without the crippling side effects. Even now, my arms and hands are sore as I type. So it was very good that circumstances took me away from my “extreme home makeover” project.

Yesterday, Julie and I brought our youngest daughter to Chicago—directly to Midway Airport.—to catch a flight to Kansas where she will spend a week with her grandparents (Julie’s folks) in Kansas. It’s a highlight of her year to spend time with them and some of her cousins there. Anyway, since we had to go to Chicago, Julie and I decided to make a “date” of it. Here’s the exciting part….

Last night, we went to the Oriental Theater at the Ford Center and saw the stage production of Fiddler on the Roof. Wait… it gets even better…. Guess who’s playing the lead role of Tevye? Topol himself! Yes, Topol. If you’ve seen the film version of this wonderful story, you’ve seen the unbelievable Oscar-nominated performance of Topol as the talk-to-God-out-loud, cart pulling poor milk man from Anitevka. Well guess what, he is just as good on the live stage. (He is now 74, has performed this roll live now over 2,500 times in theaters around the world, but is now making his farewell tour.)

Julie and I were caught up in every scene and song of the nearly three-hour show, which we know by heart.

It seems like Fiddler on the Roof has been a recurring theme throughout our life. A few years after Julie and I were first married, her father bought a video record player. Not a VCR--this was just before VCRs hit the consumer market and long before DVDs were invented. A video record player was about the size of four stacked pizza boxes with records the size of phonograph albums. The users inserted the record into a slot in the front of the player. Julie’s Dad had only a handful of video records. The Black Stallion was one of them and Fiddler on the Roof was another. (Actually Fiddler on the Roof was a two-album set.). That is the way I saw this film for the first time—not at the theater—but in my in-laws living room.

[Most of that film, incidentally, was filmed in Croatia where our middle daughter Kim is on a TESL mission until August. It is Kim who is typically our reason for coming here to Chicago during the school year.]

Through the years, we watched that musical together many times at Julie's house. Her father could relate to Tevye. Not only is he a hard working pastor/farmer who more than once has had a lame horse, and pulled carts around their barnyard... he also had three daughters of marrying age, the first of which had recently married me. (In that sense, I guess I’m Motel, the poor tailor whose love for Tevye’s daughter saves her from an arranged marriage with Lazar Wolfe, the butcher.) [Years later, I too, had three daughters; and I too have one married recently. Now it is Keith who is the poor tailor.]

So fond were we of this story's plot line, that sixteen years ago, when Julie and I lived in Iowa, we took a trip up to Chanhassen, MN, (famous for its dinner theater) to see it performed live on stage. It was an excellent production, and it stirred a desire to direct the play myself the following year at our school. I was teaching high school English at the time, and had been directing annual stage productions for over ten years, but none so ambitious as Fiddler on the Roof.

I had a remarkable talent pool in the seventy or so students who each year tried out for our productions. And I had a perfect couple who I thought I could talk into the lead rolls of Tevye and Golde: Mr. and Mrs. Bruce Nelson. Bruce was our band director and his wife taught music in a neighboring district. I’d heard them sing together and knew they could pull it off. I had never used adults in a previous production, but in this case the other lead rolls were also huge and I needed their talent and experience to anchor this huge reach for our small school with only about 150 in the high school.

Bruce and Bev agreed to the performance months before I announced the title to the school, and they secretly began working on this daunting task. By the time rehearsals began, the two leads had their parts well in hand, and the entire cast knew they were a becoming part of something that would be really good. It was during these months of preparation that I grew the beard I have had ever since. You see, I was Bruce’s understudy. I knew the script by heart. I knew the character. I could sing (not as well as Bruce but so-so), and I stepped into the Tevye part whenever Bruce was not at rehearsal. The students rose to the occasion as well, performing far beyond the level of any high school production I have ever seen anywhere from schools many times our size. I know I was very close to this situation, but I believe that is an objective statement of fact. All three nights of this sold-out performance got standing ovations. It was the biggest show I ever directed. (I should add that Julie was always my assistant and another friend, Renee, always helped with music and choreography whenever we did musicals.)

Of course, “directing” a play in a small school means you also oversee every aspect of the production—costumes, lighting, ticket sales, and set design and construction. It is this last aspect that ties into our “Unsettled” chapters.

I was still finishing the construction of some set pieces when Dad and Mom arrived to our Iowa school from Michigan. They always made the trip west to see our school plays. I’ll never forget it. I was building the trees for the background silhouette scene of the song “Little Bird, Little Chavela.” [video clip at end of post] I looked up and there was Dad smiling down at me on the floor.

“Still makin’ sawdust just two days before opening?” He chuckled.

I got up and gave him a hug. They had arrived a few hours ahead of schedule and came directly to the school rather than to our house a few blocks away. It gave my father great pleasure to see me using the tools he had introduced me to in such creative ways. This was the first time he had arrived early enough to see me in the last phase of set construction, but each year he always helped us “strike the set” after closing night.

It will come as no surprise to those who read here that it gave me great personal satisfaction to have my mom and dad witness this part of my job each year. It’s true that we should all do our jobs well for many reasons. Teachers especially should strive for their personal best each day for the sake of their students, but I confess… knowing my parents would be there to see the productions my students and I put on each year was a huge motivation for making them the absolute best that they could be. Seeing my Dad work with kids he barely knew (he always knew some of them from the years before) as we took down the set was always a joy. And seeing my mom, always the talker who knew no strangers, interacting with the cast during that same process, always made my students feel like they knew the real me… the part of me that was once a kid, the part of me that had parents…. not just the "grown-up" teacher part of me.

I was 39 the year we did Fiddler on the Roof. Little did I know it was the last play of mine my father would ever see. One year later, with just a few weeks left of rehearsals before opening night 1995, I got the word that my father had died of a heart attack. We went home for the funeral, and a few weeks later my cast pulled off a wonderful performance of Charlotte’s Web. Needless to say, the scene where Charlotte dies was very hard for me to watch from the back of the auditorium.

It was because of this trip to Midway Airport in Chicago that we could not be at the last day of the estate sale at our homestead five hours the other way (near Detroit).

A few hours before curtain, I had called my siblings who did spend some time at the sale. They said it went well, and yes, there were mixed feeling as they watched things being carted off.

So on the evening of our estate sale of all evenings, you can imagine what a profound experience it was for Julie and I to sit in one of the most beautiful theaters in America to see Topol himself performing in this musical that seems forever entwined in our life... to be reminded of the importance of tradition and faith and change… and moving on… leaving home… leaving the “things” of life behind while holding tight to those around you. All this and more was going through my mind as I held my wife’s hand in that dark theater. It was truly a date to remember...

We’re staying in Chicago an extra day… so it may be a couple more days before the next chapter is posted. Thank you for your patience.

In the meantime, enjoy these two clips from the film version of this musical. Topol is just as good 38 years later.





If you want to watch other scenes, see “related videos” at this Youtube page.
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