Tag: friends

Dub Squad

Empty swings in the schoolyard. At least it's a sunny morning.

Zoe had been hoping that her orthodontist appointment would last longer. Or that it would start late. Or that the dentist office would catch fire. Anything to delay or, even better, avoid going to school. Mom wasn’t having any of it.

But Mom was being selfish. Said she had to get back to work. Zoe felt very strongly that it would be better if they had lunch together, then maybe go shopping. She made her case smartly and forcefully. Mom was having none of it. Stupid office.

Things didn’t go so well at the end of yesterday. Somehow the day got out of hand. It was that idiot project. She was working with Emily and Emma, like they almost always did. They were all in the gifted and talented program. They were all in the orchestra. She and Emily played flute. Emma played the violin. They were all on the same soccer team. Emily’s dad coached. They were called the Purple Reign because their uniforms were violet and they loved to sing “Let’s Go Crazy” on the sidelines. It psyched them up. They all had iPhones and sent each other the most hysterical emoji messages ever. Their moms couldn’t decipher their code.

They stopped singing the songs from Frozen this year. They switched over to binge watching The Hunger Games trilogy. Katniss was more relatable than the cartoon Elsa. The archer’s moodiness was more like they sometimes felt. Alone together. They were growing up.

Yesterday was ridiculous, though. They were close to being finished with their presentation. They worked in Justin Bieber’s Sorry from YouTube. The project was on language and the concept just worked. They agreed that the dancing would be a great way to finish off. Creativity points and maybe some cool points, too. Somehow, though, everything went south.

Emily started by saying that she didn’t think they should spend so much time with a dance video. It made them seem less serious. Zoe felt stung. She was working on their choreography. It was actually her major contribution. She made different signs for them to hold and swap as they were dancing. Using the classroom speakers and a YouTube video was uncharted for the students. She had to get Ms. Waldorf’s permission. Zoe explained how they were integrating a pop video into their research. She was pretty proud of her negotiating.

Before Zoe could respond, Emma piped in her agreement. She said it in a thoughtful way, like, “I hear what you’re saying, Emily. That makes sense.” But she said it as soon as Emily finished her sentence. As if they had discussed it before. Zoe felt a bitter taste in her mouth. She took a big breath through her nose. She blinked her eyes quickly to quell the rising salt water. She exhaled and then took another deep breath.

Emma’s left eye narrowed just a bit and the one side of her mouth turned down. She was thinking for real this time. “But maybe we can keep it and just only do it for half of the time.” It was Emily’s turn to stiffen a little.

“If you don’t want to do it, that’s fine,” Zoe said with a bit more force on the fine than she was intending.

“No, no, no. I’m okay with Emma’s idea. Let’s just cut the dancing short.”

There was a bit of shortness in Emily’s response. All three girls were feeling edgy. Zoe quickly packed her notebook and markers in her backpack. She put her half-eaten Lara Bar that fell out of it’s wrapper in there, too. She didn’t care that it would be gross. She was ready to go. She needed to go.

“Okay. I just remembered I needed to see Mr. Ripley. See you guys tomorrow.” She stood up and shook her stuff to the bottom of her bag, awkwardly zipping it as she walked away. She hoped that they didn’t see the back of her hand run across her eyes. Her last few steps out the door were a sprint.

She was quiet at dinner. She couldn’t stop replaying the conspiracy in her head. Why were they ganging up on her? They had been working on this plan for weeks and this was the first she heard about “too much music.” When she thought the words “too much music” she thought them in a sarcastic baby voice.

And this was after she cleared it with the teacher. After she made the signs. After she figured out how they would use them to “convey their educational messages in an authentic fashion to their peers.” Those words got her the approval. A flare of pride pushed away her gloom.

Were Emily and Emma mad at her? Did she do something to make them mad? Why were they rejecting her? She started to feel a tennis ball sized mass in the middle of her chest rise to the back of her throat. She swallowed it back down before it reached her eyes. Mom started to ask her something but her brother and his friend came home and the dog went off.

Zoe put her plate and silverware in the dishwasher and decided to call it a night. She walked upstairs. She stared at the foam from the toothpaste leaking from the edges of her mouth. Like a sad clown face. She felt a little sorry for the girl in the mirror. She downed a glass of water and watched a little water drip down her chin. It spotted her t-shirt. She pulled on her favorite nightshirt and curled in bed with an unopened book. She gazed absently at the ceiling, her hand resting on the cover of her book, her mind spinning through the end of the school day and cycling through emotions of confusion, anger, sadness and doubt.

Now she had to go back to school and she didn’t know if her friends were her friends. She made herself stop. Mom pulled in front of the school. If Zoe looked at her, she would have seen her mother’s head tilted to one side, studying her daughter with pronounced lines on her forehead. But Zoe had the car door slammed behind her–not slammed hard but with a little extra force–before her mother could finish her assessment.

Crap. It was lunchtime. Everyone would be in the cafeteria. She didn’t want to go in there, but after she checked in with the school secretary, she had no where else to go. She grabbed a tray and kept her head down as she approached the food kiosk.

She put her tray down on a table and felt someone sticking an earphone in her ear. She heard the tinny sound of a song. Emily was attached to the end of the white wire and held the other bud next to her own ear. She looked at Zoe all wild-eyed and crooned, “Is it too late now to say sorry?” Emma was horse stomping her right foot in rhythm to the song. She finished with her best Michael Jackson flourish, which meant she lost her balance. While she did stagger, she stayed standing. The three of them doubled over. Zoe’s snort was followed by another round of shrieks.

Those two Ems knew her well. And, they were exactly right about cutting some of the music at the end. In fact, all was right.

Posted on by docthink 3

Splice of Life

A almost collapsed cake with four lit birthday candles. The cake is greenish. With some chocolate cake poking through the frosting. What a mess. We didn't eat this. It's just a picture from the Internet.

Our neighbors moved a few months back. It’s only a few blocks from here, and they really needed more space. Their new house is terrific. The people who moved into their old house are very nice.

But it’s just not the same. It’s like there is a hunk of film spliced out of the reel. Something is missing.

My dog misses their dog. He’s gone up to their porch to check if his pupster uncle is there. He never is. He doesn’t live there anymore. Or maybe The Beast is just waiting for the door to open. One day they were having a party and he pushed into the house and beelined to the brie wheel on the table which he proceeded to eat in a single gulp. The kids were amazed by his audacity. It might have been their favorite story, ever. I know this because they have told it to me more than once. So maybe the dog’s standing on the porch because he wants more cheese.

I miss watching the kids running to the car in the morning on the their way to school. Sometimes they were in a big hurry and there would be backpacks flying and open jackets and someone carrying their coffee in their almost free hand. Sometimes it would be less frenetic and we would have a short visit. The kids would all ask to come across the street to pet the dog. Even though they had one of their own that they didn’t actively pet.  It was always a charming part of the morning. Sometimes I would bitch about The Spouse. Sometimes she would bitch about hers. Always in a loving way. That’s what neighbors do. Listen to each other bitch about loved ones.

I miss the extended family. Grandma’s and sisters and nephews and cousins. After a while, they all knew me. And I knew them, too. I’d get called over for a glass of wine at the tail of a family party. One day The Spouse brought over the leftover ginger ice cream I made. It was Christmas Day. Another day we were all snowed in and they saw that someone made me a fancy mojito. IN THE WINTER. You know how Facebook makes you jealous of your friends? So I sent the Big Guy over with a summer drink to make them feel less envious. The flow of goods and services frequently criss-crossed the street.

My friend and former neighbor had a birthday party. There was cake. There was dancing to favorite music–Hall and Oats and Skee-lo and some 80s music that I must have slept through but that everyone else knew.  And there was love. My neighbors are spliced out of the daily reel, but still have important scenes. I miss seeing them every day. But am glad I still see them.

Posted on by docthink 0

Postcards

A triangle, a pool cue and a few balls inside the triangle and a few balls outside the triangle. The table is green. The balls in the triange are 3, 5 and 9. Nine is striped.

There was this joint a few blocks away. It was tiny. There were two rooms, not including the johns. It was on the far corner of Colorado Avenue, and you had to walk a few steps down to reach the entrance. Not many. Maybe two. Max was three.

The door wasn’t the sturdiest, but the bar was solid. When you walked in you’d see a few dozen coffee mugs hanging from the wall. And, when you walked in, it was as a bell heralded your entrance. There wasn’t a bell, but you still felt a chime. As you crossed the threshold, Becky would come from behind the doorway to greet you.

She was a slight woman. She had thick bangs that topped big, thick plastic glasses. She wore her hair pulled back in a pony tail. It wasn’t long and luxurious. It was thinnish and a dull blonde. The rubber band was functional. This was her joint and she had work to do.

I don’t know that anyone else worked there. She must have changed her own kegs. She made the sandwiches–my favs were the turkey and the roast beef. I really really liked her ice cream scoop of potato salad. It was a big scoop. I don’t think she made it herself, but it was standout in freshness and flavor. The food wasn’t cooked. It was fixed–in the kitchen behind the bar. The only thing served hot was the coffee.

There was a great story about the robbery at Becky’s joint. A guy walked down the steps where he knew a small, fortyish woman tended bar, and he had a gun. He very nervously pointed it at the proprietor and demanded her money. She looked at him and said she would bring it from the back. As she stepped through the open doorway to the kitchen, the sweaty guy heard the click, click, click, click, click, click,  click, click, click, click of  ten guns being drawn. A heavily mustached man sitting at the far end of the bar spoke. His eyes were facing the shelves at the back of the bar. He didn’t move his head.

“Man. You done went ahead and fucked up. See all those coffee mugs on the wall. This is where we come to get a coffee. During our patrol shifts. Why don’t you put that gun down now, son. And I will have the police officers behind you lower their weapons.”

It was a cop bar. The would-be robber fell to the ground, was cuffed and taken away. Then Becky came out of the kitchen. She refilled the mug of the man with the mustache. Nothing else was said.

Just to the right of the bar was another open doorway, to the second room. That room was mostly for darts. There were leagues that played there some nights. Other nights people would pull their flights from their pockets and throw. It was fun.

There was also a misshapen pool table. You’d ask Becky for the balls if they weren’t on the table. If she didn’t know you, you might need to leave a driver’s license. But if she didn’t know you, why would you be playing pool there?

We were drinking Miller, the champagne of beers, from longnecks. We met up with some union brothers of The Spouse (when we were dating and not married, but let’s not confuse things by giving The Spouse a new identifier). Five of us were at the pool table playing a very unskilled game of eight ball. Slop counted. Someone brought another pair of handfuls of Miller.

She was a bit aloof, but not for any reason other than she didn’t know everyone. She was tall and had a quick smile and a throaty laugh. Her eyes were big and expressive, especially when she was making or parrying a point. Her layered dark blonde hair was heavy enough to stop it from flying all over the place. Still, her bangs danced just above her brows and cascaded along her cheeks and down her back.

I knew her husband, but she wasn’t with her husband. She was with a different union brother. I liked the one she was with better than the husband anyway. The crowd were mostly members of the local, except for me, her and her future her sister-in-law. Then there were four of us at playing pool.

In those next minutes, which were less than ninety, I became friends with my best friend that I ever had in Washington. The most regular person I knew here. She mostly grew up around D.C., versus the transplanted folks that were the majority of my colleagues, acquaintances and friends.

She had both a kindness and a take-no-prisoners air. I think that any prisoners would have been glad to spend time with her, though. Even if she upbraided them, she would relate to their experiences while demanding better. They would try harder.

She was an artist. She had huge feelings. She was the best mother I knew. She honestly and lovingly challenged my own failures in a way that pushed me to fail less. I want to be more like her.

Today would have been her birthday. Facebook told me. I found my head in my hands and cried again at losing her. Every year I cry a few times because I miss her.  I wish she was here to slap me upside the head and tell me the truths that I am too dumb to see. And I remain grateful, so very, very, very grateful, that she was my friend.

Dearest Kris, having a wonderful time and so wish you were here. xoxo

Posted on by docthink 0

Countrywoman

Two roosters. Polish folk art.

“Do you know kielbasa?” She bewitched me and then owned me with her intense blue eyes. Eyes that were light and deep blue at the same time. Like the beginning of a night sky, with the lightest brightest blue at the horizon almost immediately becoming a deeper darker murkier and much more complex blue until it became black-blue.

I couldn’t look away. She reeled me in by calling out more food of our people.

“The haloopschi?” I didn’t get that one, but I told her I made golabki.

She held up her little Polacki hands and cupped them together. “The stuffed cabbage?” And then to the common translation, “the pigs in the blanket!?!”

I nodded. She never made them herself but her galaxy eyes lifted to the heavens to savor her memory of those cabbage rolls braised in tomato. She bored through the simple green in my own eyes and planted herself into the ethnic part of of the tribal part of my brain.

In unision we said, “pierogi.”

We both blinked and took a step back. Not because we jinxed, but because we knew that we were both–each of us–slicing through a buttery stuffed dumpling using our thought forks. We synchronously met that most pure, delicate and delicious victual in our now collective concentration. We were conjoined on the holy grail of Polish-American cuisine. You know it’s just that good when six of the items on the Buzzfeed list of Polish foods are pierogi, nos. 18-23.

Our sentences overlapped and intertwined. “My My mother aunt made them made them. So good. Oh my god!” We licked our respective lips. Hers more wrinkled at the edges than mine. Mine well on the way there, though.

She asked where I was from in the same paragraph without sentences that simultaneously shared that she was from Western Pennsylvania. I braided her words with mine, “Detroit.” We nodded, again. In unison, again. She returned to kielbasa.

“That Hillshire Farms, like what is that? Not like what we got, what we ate.” I know that we  were both cutting into the taut skin of the red sausage, of watching the fatty juices running out and of filling our nostrils with garlic forward porkiness. If porkiness is a word. But it definitely, especially when combined with smokiness, says Polish sausage.

This is the prototypical exchange of all Polish Americans. It’s always about our food and our church and our families.

“You Catholic?” I nodded. No reason to parse it out right now.

“How come you were to Ireland and haven’t been to Poland? You gotta go.”

She was a very slight woman. She was actually tiny.  A septuagenarian with a little thinning of her bleached hair that was short but wavy, especially at the ends. She made no mistakes on her makeup, not an overly and oddly lined eye, not a big pink blotch on her uplifted cheeks. Her spring sweater was a cream with a ribbon of gold around the neckline.

A newlywed, she met her husband on Match.com and was unsure about what she had done. Her partner of forty-eight years had preceded her and before he left this world, told her to be happy. She didn’t want to be lonely. So she accepted an uneasy ease with her first spouse, after spending the prior half-century with a different man.

She didn’t know her husband’s ethnicity, but he had lived in Europe for a few years, but maybe he was French? She wasn’t sure, but in her eighth decade after seventy-four years with the same name, she was figuring out how to go by a new married name. Six months into matrimony, she still went by her own name. She said she was going to change it.

In the meantime, she told me how lovely the Poles were and how her Jewish partner make the pilgrimage to see the Black Madonna of Częstochowa on his hands and knees, but her tour walked through. This story of his devotion delighted her, and me.

She took my card and said that I’d hear from her. I hope so. I hugged my new friend, she joined her delightful new husband, and we parted as the bellman opened the door onto the street.

Posted on by docthink 0

#FreeLarryOrluskie

We all did paintball that day. Including Larry and Elizabeth.

Dear Larry,

What the fcuk? Why did you insist on being “healthy” and do that working out crap? You KNOW that generationally we don’t do that. We grew up on canned peas salted so long they were gray, space food sticks and Tang®. Seriously, you should have known better.

It’s not like this new age exercise and artisanal food–in which onions and kale and blueberries run free–makes us healthier. It just costs more money. You know that, too.

Frankly, it’s bad enough you rejected our childhood staple, bologna, when you became a friggin vegetarian. Your Babcie would so not approve that you eschewed kielbasa for rice cakes. No dobrze.

There’s other ways to remain relevant. Ones that are more passive and include hamburgers. For example, remember we worked on music. You were a decent student. I hooked you up with those Kings of Leon tickets and introduced you to Queens of the Stone Age. Although you held stubbornly against my attempts to get you into hip hop. But there was hope. I had hope, anyway.

At least you got it right on raising kids. You loved them for them. You let them be them. You knew it wasn’t about you. They never had to seek your approval. Your daughters had your love. Period.

But you went on that fcuking treadmill. And you dropped dead.

I can say that to you. Because that’s what you would say. You were never full of bullshit. Even though you worked in a job that was full of bullshittery.

You did as good as anyone could, you stupid man. Your family was with you. I hope you knew that.

I guess that fcuking Union won. #FreeLarryOrluskie

It’s done. Goodbye friend.

Peace and love,
DocThink

Apologies, Loyal Reader, if you find this tribute cryptic or unfathomable.
I could write nothing else after I heard. Today, I wrote for me, not you.

Posted on by docthink 0