Straight Pool

"The Hustler" was released in 1961, starring Paul Newman, Piper Laurie, George C. Scott, and The Great One, Jackie Gleason, playing Minnesota Fats. What ensued in this country, and possibly much of the world, was a rediscovered craze for pool, or more technically, "pocket billiards." Playing pool had become popular again, though the atmosphere of the pool hall and its connection with organized crime, unsavory types, and gambling, ranked it only one notch above the race track as a place you wouldn't want your child to be hanging out in.

By the mid-1960s I was hanging out in such a place, but the poolroom was on the premises of a bowling alley, and bowling was a more socially palatable sport and entertainment. A local crime family had a hand in the business (see "Unwitting Runners" M.H. February, 2011) and they usually allowed my friends and I to shoot pool when the tables weren't occupied even though we were under age. You had to be 18 to step inside the poolroom, and during business hours the management normally enforced the rule in one of two ways: Either you watched any games while standing behind a 4-foot cinder block wall that separated the poolroom from the bowling alley, or if you'd been paying you could continue to play until an 18 or older adult needed to use a table. Then you had to stop playing and cede your table to the grown-up.

If you were playing straight pool, the objective, as in "The Hustler" was to run out the rack, and the next rack, and so on until you missed a shot. I think that when playing alone, practicing, I'd gotten well into a second rack before missing (maybe 20 shots in a row). However, when playing an opponent, my high run was 13. 

On the rack end of the table there were notched plastic counters for keeping score. Bills of various denominations were stacked on some of the tables, and if management got wind of a pending, or "surprise" inspection, any money in sight had to be immediately removed. Nine ball was a money game and not easy to play. You had to play each ball 1-9 in sequence and bet on each ball, usually starting with a modest amount on the One ball and then doubling for each ball with winner taking all on the Nine.  

Not infrequently I watched the best young (though older than me) players run up to 100 or more shots in some of the games. Guys wearing Guinea-Ts, or wife beaters, with slicked down hair and goatees, and sharp creased pants from Robert Hall, and socks and sandals. Guys who carried their cues in long shellacked cases, and then carefully removed the cue from the case's velvet lining, and screwed the cue together and chalked it with an air of ritual to impress their opponent or challenger. The sounds were hypnotic: the swift pock of a corner shot, the graceful kiss of a side pocket shot, the crack of an exploding break shot or a defensive break of the pack to leave your opponent with no shots, the clack of the cue ball moving backwards in draw (hitting low), freezing in connect (hitting in the middle), following when hit high, which was all about table position for the next shot. There were mazze' shots, and bank shots, and geometrically precise double bank shots, and combination shots. And you needed strategy to leave your opponent with little or nothing if you thought you were going to miss. 

Although the younger late-teens/early twenties players were impressive, I was largely fascinated by two accomplished older players, in their 60s, whose close games against one another reminded me of billiards tournaments. The first gentleman was Italian-American, overweight, and mostly bald. He usually smoked a cigar during a game. His rival was a fastidiously dressed  Anglo-German, also balding, who wore wire-rimmed glasses and wing-tip shoes. It was fascinating to watch them play, not simply because they were incredibly good, but more so for the aura of infinite patience and respect they showed for the game and each other. These two hardly spoke while playing, maybe an occasional sentence or a few words. They were gentlemen to a fault but also possessed a Zen-like quality in their play. Sometimes, when one of them failed to show, the other would play alone or go up against one of the young hustlers. Sometimes they would lose to a younger player, but they never let the loss bother them. And though it hadn't made for great drama, like Newman versus Gleason, the younger players, win or lose, always treated the older men with deference and respect.

Later, in the 1970s, I mostly played pool in bars or taverns--- the game always 8-ball, never straight pool, because other people wanted to use your table (you couldn't play unless you put a quarter in). It didn't matter a great deal if I was good anymore: 8-ball was a game of luck as much as skill, except for the final 8-ball shot in which you needed to call your pocket. In this stage of my life, pool had become entertainment on your night or two, or three out, and there wasn't anything wrong with that---aided by a pitcher of beer, ones' shooting sometimes improved. But I missed the older pool room, frequented in my teens, and the dedication and gravitas of those inspired players, young and old. . . .

By the '80's I'd taken up darts. . . .

Mal-de-mer

When I was a boy nine or ten-years-old, I joined my father and uncles and grandfather in piloting their 21-foot boat, “The Nereid,” from Little Ferry, New Jersey to the Manasquan Inlet. We started down the Hackensack River, crossing Newark Bay, and then connected to the Hudson River which flowed to the Narrows separating the upper and lower bays between Staten Island and Brooklyn, and then sailed down the Atlantic Ocean until reaching the inlet. It was 1962, the boat launched annually from dry dock, and this nautical journey undertaken, in early to mid-April, depending on the weather.

For a boy a few weeks shy of his tenth birthday, it was an almost mystical experience watching smaller tributaries and currents merge with larger bodies of water and ultimately a very large body of water. I remember crossing the Verrazano Narrows into the lower bay, a great liquid expanse glittering in the April sunlight under a mottle of blue sky and clouds, so that the quicksilver flashes on its surface moved and shifted as the boat scudded through the emerging swells.

Water pollution was evident and rampant almost from the time we left the marina in Little Ferry but grew worse as we approached Newark Bay. I remember laughing at the yellow-white foam of Sulphur-based chemicals smelling like rotten eggs, or laughing at red dyes or blooms of plastic waste bobbing like strange jellyfish in the Nereid’s wake and sometimes clinging to the river banks. I was young, and my glee over pollution was somehow tied into the death wish, pretty normal for boys that age, like the drawings of skulls and monsters and ghouls in the margins of my school notebooks. But the polluters and despoilers of the planet still seem to have those 10-year-old boy brains, consumed by the death wish in their worship of Mammon and insatiable lust for power and world domination. Despite my young age, I now look back on those feelings with shame. My father and uncles also tossed beer cans and their lunch bags into the river. It would be eight years until the first Earth Day, everyone was littering and polluting, and there’d been little to no awareness or consciousness regarding ecology and the environment. I’m still stunned and amazed when I recall how different the waterways had been, the places you were no longer allowed to fish or swim in again until years later.
            My father and uncles were drinking beer, my father inhaling his Marlboros with cork-tipped filters, his older brother smoking a pipe, younger brother drinking but not smoking. Everyone looked a little rough and unshaven. I understood that part of my making the journey with them encompassed this vicarious initiation into “man stuff,” and I did want the beer and cigarette for the sheer sake of imitation. I had a few years to go before handling alcohol and tobacco, especially on a cabin-cruiser rocking back and forth. As soon as we reached the ocean I felt an incipient nausea and couldn’t understand the reason for it. My father stopped the boat for a while and everyone fished, and the rocking boat rocked more violently. My grandfather fished with a hand line and said it was a more natural way to fish. He was regarded as a bit eccentric, though he’d captained large merchant marine vessels in two world wars and the Korean conflict. I couldn’t stand the up-and-down rocking motion of the boat and headed into the cabin to lie down, but then the creeping illness grew worse in a confined space as I stared at the lures and tackle and life preservers and tarps rising and falling the same as me, and I soon raced from cabin, leaned over the starboard bow and threw up into the ocean, the ugly spatter of half-digested food, bile and peptic acid borne away quickly and easily on the salt tide. I felt that I was going to die, but the men didn’t seem all that concerned. They were long familiar with mal-de-mer and began to employ abundant vernacular language in characterizing my episode of regurgitation. My grandfather genteelly stated that I had “yipped my groceries,” which triggered a round of laughter, not at my expense necessarily but over the phrase that he’d used. “Throw up” also seemed a bit tame as well as the Latinate “regurgitate.”  “Puke” “Barf” “Upchuck” “Retch” “Vomit” better described the sensation of my insides erupting like Vesuvius through my nose and mouth. “Hurling chunks,” or “Ralphing,” favorites among millennials, had not yet come into fashion. Oh, what the hell, you’ll find more brilliant and hilarious examples here---339 of ‘em in fact. http://www.c4vct.com/kym/humor/puke.htm

My uncle told me that I would feel instantly better as soon as the boat docked, the moment my feet touched terra firma. I was incredulous, having never experienced the horror of seasickness before, but the prediction turned out to be true. The weirdest sensation, though, was the gentle rocking that occurred for hours after the boat had docked. The sensation was especially acute when sitting still in a chair, or worse, when lying in bed trying to fall asleep. I felt that I was back on the boat and believed I heard the sound of the bow planks creaking with this rocking motion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verrazano%E2%80%93Narrows_Bridge

Passing through the Verrazano Narrows I looked upwards to see the unfinished construction of the famous bridge. The work had started in 1959 and the upper level was finished in 1964, and the lower level would not be completed until 1969. I remember seeing a red crane and a truck on the bridge and from my vantage they were like Matchbox toys. The perspective gave you an idea of how long and high the Verrazano Narrows Bridge would be when big construction equipment looked dwarfed from our 21-foot cabin cruiser named “The Nereid” as it passed underneath the bridge.

James Braddock, the mid-1930s heavyweight boxing champ, had worked on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, and my father and uncles had known Braddock. When they were building their boat in a rented garage in North Bergen, they’d bought boat equipment from Braddock who owned and ran a marine junkyard in the neighborhood. They referred to him as a “junk man.” I hadn’t known there were wrecking yards for boats as there were for cars, but it made sense.

Although you will never quite control it, I’ve learned a few rules over the years about seasickness that definitely helped and either led to a good day of fishing or at least mitigated the symptoms and their severity.

1.    If possible, take a seasick pill the night before, or even better, 24 hours before going on a boat.

2.    Do not drink alcohol the night before.

3.    Get a good night’s sleep.

4.    Eat a light breakfast and don’t drink too much coffee.

5.    Keep moving when on the boat, do stuff and look at the horizon often.

Escape

At the beginning of November, 1995, I traveled with two friends to upstate New York with no specific destination. In our early 40s, two men and one woman, we planned on touring the Finger Lakes region. There was no sexual connection. We were friends and we hadn't been on a trip in a long time, mired as we were in middle-age, young kids, work, sick parents, marital problems and other life pressures---we planned on escaping from all that, if just for a few days. There was also a slight pretext in my going: though the Finger Lakes were more Central or Central-West, Western New York had a high concentration of Lockwoods. In fact it was the U.S. location with the most Lockwoods, and the second highest in the world, after Yorkshire, England (I believe Liverpool was third highest). So aside from the sheer need to get away, I was on a quest to find my roots, ancestral home, etc. I was even shown a place on a New York State map called "Lockwood Corners" a mere blip in minute-sized type.   

In the town of Homer, NY, we entered a library of the kind that were popular in the 1800s and early 1900s, like a gaunt historic house. I was standing upstairs on a creaky wooden floor in a narrow aisle of old hardcover books, and the place was completely silent, a profound silence that felt as if I were alone in the universe, in a private space where everything around me had cut out like turning off the sound in a movie. I held a small hardbound volume in my hand entitled, "The Queen's Garland," a collection of Elizabethan love verses more gelded and platonic than bawdy but a charming book nonetheless. A book sale was taking place downstairs so I would be able to buy "The Queen's Garland" and take it home with me.
I perused its pages and stopped at: 
                                             
                                       The blackbird and the thrush
                                       That made the woods to ring,
                                       With all the rest are now at hush,
                                       And not a note they sing. 

and while lost in the silence and the ancient book, I became aware of snow. Snow was falling outside the library window---flurries at first, but as the minutes passed and I paid only slight attention, the snow became more than a harmless flurry. Those earlier flakes, spinning in the November wind, had felt like a gift out of time in the silent library, but now the snow had evolved into a full-blown weather event. My friends and I quit the library and drove north to Lake Ontario where the sky was a vault of iron but dry, and dry ground, too, as if a switch had been thrown to stop the snow. But after about 10 minutes on the frigid shore of the lake, the snow returned accompanied by gale force winds that caused us to vacate and drive east on the East-West interstate towards Syracuse. Nature appeared confident in its malevolent display of wind and snow as though it had done this countless times, even sending us a friendly reminder now in early November. A white out. Traffic crawled in the flash storm, cars stalled, and others skidded off the road onto the highway shoulder sometimes denting the guardrail. We joked and tried to make light of a fairly scary phenomenon. We scanned the radio static for a weather report or snow emergency warning but only heard Johnny Mathis crooning:

                     "What a moment to share, it's wonderful, wonderful
                                  Oh, so wonderful, my love."

The entire sequence of events---from shadowed muffled library interior with a few snowflakes to a raging winter storm---had the flowing illogical logic of a dream.

We passed the night eating and drinking at a brewery in Syracuse, and the following Sunday, a lovely fall day, we drove along the lakes and stayed in Ithaca and Monday hiked some of the Gorges, another fine blue autumn day. And yet with everything we did that weekend, the threshold of terror in the silent library as I stood on the second floor with a hardcover book in my hand and the few snow flakes whirling outside the window is what I remember most.

Early Trauma

By the time I'd turned five years old, I hadn't lived through any significant trauma except for being born and also having a ring surgically removed from my stomach at the tender age of two-and-a-half of which I only possess a few dim memories.

And then, at age five, there was the ambulance.

The ambulance pulled along the curb in front of my house one morning or early afternoon (I seem to recall a noon hour, somewhere in that time of day). A red light flashed and revolved on the ambulance roof, a steady swirling blood pulse. My mother stood at the door with a worried look on her face, as if she'd been expecting the ambulance and not just idly watching out of curiosity like one of the neighbors. And because of her look and the time of day and the ambulance I knew something was wrong, an alteration in the normal everyday order of things. The rear door of the ambulance was yanked open and two men lifted out my father on a gurney, and then conveyed the gurney with the injured body of my father through the front door and into our living room. My mother asked me to move away as the men lowered my father's body onto the couch. He was in pain and seriously drugged (though I had no idea what it meant to "be drugged"), and his lower leg and most of the foot were bandaged except for the toes. There were a few random drops of iodine on the bandages---a color a little darker than the skin of an orange, maybe closer to a blood orange---which otherwise were clean and white.

From what I gathered---maybe not at the time but had it explained to me later---was that a rope from one of the pulleys on the wet rollers in the paper mill had snapped and coiled around father's shin and lower calf, and then the tension and speed of the snapped rope actually turned him upside down and jerked his upended body, like the tarot hanged man, toward the hot rollers and certain death. A co-worker had cut him down before he reached the searing roller stacks, but the burn had been severe and left him unable to walk, and that explained the ambulance ride, the hospital ER, and the ambulance ride home. Dad was out of commission for sure.



I had never been presented with a sight that scared me as much as this one did. His being injured and incapacitated were bad enough, but there was the added looming insecurity of seeing a parent vulnerable and unable to take care of you because they couldn't care for themselves. Luckily, my mother was present to take care of my father and brother and me, but mother was short (4-foot, 10-inches) and walked with a limp from post-polio. Would "she" be able to manage? I couldn't articulate my feelings in those terms. All I remember was confusion and fear.

My father used to tell me horror stories about the paper mill, stories of first-aid he'd administered for co-workers: A guy with his leg sliced down the middle so that you could see the femur bone from a machine appropriately named a slitter; pulling another guy out of the roller stacks after one hand and forearm had been crushed, requiring amputation and prosthetic limb; workers dropping dead of hard attacks or getting badly burned, scorched, or blinded, or writhing in seizure on the concrete floor. One story had circulated that in a different mill, a large one, a worker had met his death after falling into a paper beater.

In the days that followed his injury, I watched my father as he attempted to walk on crutches---a skip and a hobble, or a trip and a stumble, the choppy rhythm of forward motion. At first he stayed close to the walls, pressing a shoulder or an outstretched arm and hand for support. Because of his 6-foot, 4-inch height, the crutches were probably too short and may have been giving him trouble. What I do remember is that, as he began to recover, he discarded the crutches prematurely and hopped on the good leg and stayed close to walls and furniture to assist with his balance. I believe the slight added
pressure and increased mobility helped the bad leg to heal more quickly. He was only 23.

I cannot recall how much time elapsed until my father could walk normally again, but it seemed like a long time---days, weeks. And he wore the scar on his shin for the rest of his life---a Rorschach blot about the size of a daisy and the color of raw liver.

Born to be Wild in Sixth Grade

Sixth grade was a big year for me, the nascent blossoming of attraction and longing for girls. In that year I attended my first party where I kissed a girl, a few girls even. We played post office and the memory of kissing a pretty girl at age 11 was indelible.

It was a year to be cool, or as cool as an 11 or 12-year-old punk kid could be. Collarless suits were a big hit: iridescent, but especially sharkskin, because that’s what the Beatles wore when they came to America in January/February of 1964 and even young kids like me were trying to emulate them in dress or by starting bands with a musical knowledge of about three chords.

My parents had an above ground swimming pool enclosed by an eight-foot wooden fence. After Labor Day the pool would usually be drained and the fenced-in ground left unused until the following June. It seemed such a waste not to use it for something. The pool entrance behind the fence could be accessed by means of a small gate with a combination lock, but during the school year we left the gate open and I would often park my bicycle inside behind the fence because the space between the fence and the empty pool was two to three feet, certainly enough space to fit a thin 24-inch-tire kid’s bicycle.  

As mentioned in an earlier post about my ill-fated career in safety patrol (see "Resigned" April, 2013), the walk from my house to the school was two blocks up a hill and one crossing of a street, very close. Most kids lived several blocks away, or further, and their walks took forever. They barely had enough time to walk home for lunch and back again (the school did not have a cafeteria).

I don’t remember when or how the idea first occurred to me, but one day I realized I could help some of these outliers by allowing them to park their bicycles in my backyard, inside the pool fence (gate unlocked). By parking at my house it would be a shorter walk for them to the school and a bigger plus was that after school at 3:00, they could just hop on their bikes and get home sooner with more time to play. I believe my intention was not entirely altruistic---some of it certainly, because in sixth grade I was very gang or pack conscious, gregarious, everything became about “the gang.” But I believe I also charged my classmates to park in the backyard inside the pool fence and charged a nominal fee, maybe a quarter, candy money. My classmates and school chums appeared more than happy to part with a quarter for this convenience. My mother was home all day and often in the kitchen, and she may have seen what I’d been up to with the bicycles, but she hadn’t caught on or said anything. For one thing the fence obscured a good deal of what mother would be able to see, and after all there were only two or three bicycles in the beginning, which seemed pretty harmless, no big deal.

That soon changed….

At first the plan had been sound, working without a hitch. The two or three kids that I’d been helping for a small fee arrived at my house daily after I’d finished eating lunch and about 10-15 minutes remained of the lunch hour. Perfect. Plenty of time to walk back to school, maybe too much time. But word traveled and more kids wanted to get in on the cool offer of parking their bikes in my yard, and regrettably I let them, up to 12 or 15 bikes eventually, and that was not the worst of it. Many of the outlier newcomers were more aggressive than the first few. They would reach my house by 12:00 (not sure how, they must have inhaled their lunch), only halfway through the hour break, and being restless and aggressive, they chose not to park their bikes right away because they had so much time on their hands. Instead these miscreants rode their bikes around the school grounds en masse, showing off for girlfriends by executing “wheelies,” riding double or triple, and taunting the officious but legitimately concerned safeties who were only trying to enforce the rules, pointing out that even a lone rider on school grounds during school hours was illegal and subject to punishment. And the whole mess had happened so quickly! The new kids would not listen to my warnings about parking their bicycles only, nothing else. I had unleashed a tide of wild terrorizing pre-adolescent male cyclists on our beloved school all because of a good intention to make some kids lives a bit easier. They had never technically been my responsibility but the most aggressive of the lot were ignoring my warnings concerning the school.

 Everyone was clearly out of control by now. Some kids were arriving late after I’d already started walking back to school, and some of them arrived by the time the afternoon session had already started and in their haste threw their bicycles any old place in my yard or maybe leaned them against the outside of the fence. Not good. Of course the teachers noticed this rowdy, disruptive alteration in the smoothly-running routine of their day. So I fell afoul of the school authorities once again, and while I sensed that stunt riding bikes on school grounds was probably a “bad idea” and “wrong,” I still joined in and rode with the rest of ‘em, most likely to impress some girl I had a crush on.

            There came a phone call. There is always a phone call. It was time to cease and desist.

            My mother told me to stop immediately. I mostly felt relieved because I hadn’t known how to stop it, I’d been under the sway and influence of the gang, the pack, the wild angels, and that created a fairly big problem for a number or people. My mother mentioned something about “insurance” and I only had a vague idea of “insurance” at the time. She explained to me that because bicycle riding wasn’t permitted on school grounds during school hours (which seemed odd because we were always riding our bikes by the school when it was closed) if a child was seriously hurt---thrown from his bicycle, say, or maybe crashed into a wall or a parked car---the school, without insurance coverage for that type of serious injury, could be held liable and sued. To protect against that type of serious injury or, God forbid, accidental death (no one wore helmets in those days), the school would have no other recourse but to sue my mother. Anyway, I got the gist of it.

            From that day forward if a kid tried to unload a bike in our yard while I wasn’t there my mother politely reprimanded him and he took the bike away. That period of vigilance was short-lived as word spread quickly once again. The fun was over and the lock placed back on the pool fence gate until next summer.

Psalm 27

The morning of September 11, 2001 started off as a blue and sunny day, but that all changed when the news announcements commenced to erupt on the radio as I drove to work. We all know what happened. Two hijacked planes struck the towers of the World Trade Center, and a third had struck The Pentagon. A fourth plane had been hijacked too, but at that time the whereabouts, or whether or not the plane had crashed, was still unconfirmed. I felt terror and confusion. Wasn't that the intent of terrorist acts, along with destruction of American lives and the centers of our military and financial institutions? The news was understandably frenzied, chaotic. I had worked in the towers several times for a couple of clients and also had spent more time there when I passed through them on my way to do a job in one of the New York City government offices. I often would eat lunch out front and gaze up at the dizzying height. The last time I had been in the towers was March 2000. I thought of the people who worked there and wondered if they were okay, or even alive. By the time I arrived at the office the radio announced that all US flights had been grounded.

At first the mood at work appeared to be like most any other day---somber and a bit dull. The office had a printer and copier room and a woman, the administrator of this room, was the only person visibly shaken and emotional about the attacks. She had set up a TV in the room and as fellow employees (nearly all middle-aged males like me) came into pick up their printouts, some one would stop and watch the TV for a few minutes and discuss the horror, or ask the woman questions as if she were an interpreter or a chorus for the unfolding tragedy. Incredibly, the first tower had collapsed, had fallen. It didn't seem possible. As much as I wanted to follow the news, I had a conference call with a customer and project team that I was hosting so I returned to my cubicle.

The call was miserable and disheartening. I was shocked by the attitudes of the attendees---mid-Westerners, or northern mid-Westerners---who said, "It must be really hard for you guys out there," as if the attacks were somehow only about New York, or at worst the East Coast, and not an attack against the United States, as if these smug, bland, bourgeois inhabitants of the nation's interior felt themselves safely insulated from the unraveling nightmare . . .  and maybe they were. I think their intention may have been to sound polite and sympathetic, but I frankly felt ashamed of them as compatriots, fellow countrymen, in the context of what was happening. Then, from the printer room, I heard the administrator's voice, a scream "Oh, no! The other one is falling!" Her voice sounded closer to a protracted moan than a scream as if she'd been wounded. I wrapped up the call and entered the printer room where a small group had gathered around the TV to watch the collapsing towers (hushed words, heads shaking in disbelief), the screen filled with smoke and firefighters and medics and other emergency responders and people fleeing the scene on foot and others injured or dead. A scene of unremitting chaos, tragedy, horror, and a collective depression worse than anything I'd seen in years. I decided I was done working for the day and left the office.

I drove home to check on the kids but no one was there. They entered the house a few minutes later having been let out of school. They were trying to process what had happened. My oldest son, age 14, talked about the time a year or two ago when he'd taken a class trip to New York and he and his teacher and classmates rode the elevator to the top of the World Trade Center. We had the television turned on for further reports.

 My wife arrived home around noon. We ate lunch and afterwards I drove to the nearest Red Cross center to donate blood. I'd been pondering the best act I could undertake during this crisis and donating blood felt more important to me than it ever had before. But when I reached the donation center the line was already a block long, and almost as soon as I joined the end of the line a Red Cross official came out of the building and informed everyone in the queue that they would not be accepting any more donors for the rest of the day and possibly the next day. I was slightly crestfallen. I'd wanted to donate blood, to make some small difference, but I understood the American Red Cross had much to deal with and were vitally competent in times of disaster and emergency throughout much of the world. I had to be consoled by the thought that I had tried.

As I walked back to my car a woman approached me, holding a bible and a card. Normally I would have refused to engage with these people or grant them the slightest opening because their intention was to convert you, to make you "born again." And yet because of the day, the moment, I stopped to hear the woman out. Surprisingly she did not try to convert me at all, no hard-sell or browbeating me into accepting Jesus as my personal savior. Instead she handed me the card which turned out to have a calendar on the back of it for the year 2001. The front of the card displayed an air-brushed illustration, a very characteristic alpine scene meant to bring comfort, and in script the line: The Lord is the strength of my life. Psalm 27 1:b. The full text of verse 1 is: The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the strength of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?  Given the day, the situation, the moment, I was profoundly moved by her gesture and thanked her. She had no further business with me and continued moving down the line to hand her cards out to others in need of a pause, time out, in need of balm.

Later, in the evening, I was startled by the silence, the absence of airplanes, because I lived beneath a flight route and was accustomed to planes overhead all the time. There was no air traffic anywhere and very little automobile traffic. The world had grown still and grieving, the night quieter than Christmas. I checked a 911 website for the names of the people I had worked for in both towers. Luckily they had survived.

I still have that card the woman gave me, a bookmark on Psalm 27 in my King James Bible.

Scenes from Summers Past - Part 3 Camp, Barry, and Samuel Morse

In my late teens and early 20's I worked one month each summer, for two summers, at a camp in Upstate New York. The camp was located in a fairly remote and wooded place on a quiet road about one mile from Hunter Mountain in the Catskills. The clientele, or campers, were diverse in regards to disabilities---Cerebral Palsy, Muscular Dystrophy, Spina Bifida, post-Polio, Multiple Sclerosis and mental retardation often combined with one of the other disabilities. I made some close friends working there and I maintained contact with them once camping season was over. We had sleep over visits and parties because most everyone lived in New York City or North Jersey. In these parties staff and younger campers drank a good deal and smoked a lot of pot and everyone generally became wasted and had a fine time.

I worked as a dishwasher in my first summer job at the camp. Between meals in the rec. hall I had ample time to interact with campers and assist counselors by lifting campers, folding or unfolding wheelchairs, feeding and other helping tasks. My mother had post-polio and was partially paralyzed so I didn't feel like a stranger in this environment or nervous or uncomfortable around people who needed my help, though the majority were more severely handicapped than my mother who was ambulatory. It seemed logical then that when I returned to camp the second summer I was hired as a counselor (and occasionally helped in the kitchen when needed).

Some campers had difficulty speaking; others flailed their limbs in uncontrolled spasms; more needed to be lifted in and out of bed, helped with eating and having their asses wiped or flushing a toilet and having their bed pans emptied and cleaned. One of the most challenging campers had severe C.P. that twisted, racked  and contorted his body into excruciating positions to the extent that he needed to be strapped into his wheelchair to keep from falling out. We'll call him Barry. Barry could not speak---his oral muscles were dysfunctional to the point where he could not form words---and while another camper who also couldn't speak had devised a method of pointing to letters on a Ouija Board to communicate, spelling out each word, Barry was too spastic to effectively use that method. Instead he had a wooden board attached to his chair that was seasoned with the dots and dashes of Morse Code. Barry would jerk his head upwards to communicate a "dot" and jerk his sideways for a "dash." Except for a brief period of time in boy scouts I knew little-to-no Morse Code, but I decided that I would try and learn it again, only this time I committed those dots and dashes to memory. Only one other counselor in the entire camp was able to talk to Barry without having to lift up the board on the wheelchair and read each dot and dash (way more time consuming and frustrating) so I felt that I could fill a void here and be the second person to memorize the code and that way there would be two of us working with Barry.

But mastering Morse code did not result in easy communications by any means. I would spend long, sometimes exhausting stretches in hot cabins or outside but separate from everyone, attempting a simple conversation with Barry. Sometimes his head movements would not clearly translate into a dot or a dash, and he'd become livid with anger, not so much at you but at himself and his predicament. His spasms and facial tics would become very pronounced, but he valued me and we worked together because I was only one of two people in the camp who could talk to him effectively, and often someone would come and get me if there was an emergency and Barry had been struggling to convey the problem to a different counselor. His expressions were mercurial and vehement. When he didn't like something---a certain food, or song, or movie---he screwed up his features in a raspberry, tongue thrust out. When something made him laugh his entire face would light up and you heard a bass undertone that was his voice, but no higher range or scale, as if his voice was the bass pedal notes on a church organ with no notes above them. And you knew when he was angry and apoplectic. As with mimes and deaf mutes, Barry needed to draw more heavily on a repertoire of facial expressions and body language to communicate emotion. His violent spasms and facial tics regularly got in the way of parsing the code, words, or gestures of what he'd been trying to get across.

After camp ended I decided I would visit Barry because he lived in Fort Lee, which was about 15 minutes from my house. I met Barry's mother, a cultured and urbane woman. Apparently Barry had told his mother a great deal about me and the other counselor, Jim. When I'd been out to visit twice, Barry's mother praised me for continuing to see him after camp, and she expressed disappointment that Jim hadn't visited at all. I wasn't completely surprised. I lived closed and Jim was somewhere out in Brooklyn or Queens, or farther out in the Bronx and needed to rely on mass transit to get to Fort Lee.

The cause of Barry's C.P. had been scarlet fever. It appeared that his mother gave birth to him when she was fairly old. The father was no longer alive but he'd been president of the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation (I believe that was it), and Barry's mother showed me photographs of successful awards dinners and fund raisers in which Barry was a "poster boy," literally, not in a pejorative sense. The mother talked about how dedicated and active she and her husband had been in the handicap organizations. She seemed reasonably well off, educated, and somewhat gentrified. I noticed she tended to speak about Barry and sometimes for Barry, a kind of intimate proxy, which I guess was natural given Barry's handicap. However, he often tried to interject if his mother was getting something wrong or putting words in his mouth. Despite all her good works and "calling" I sensed the mother's loneliness without her husband, and Barry's too. I understood the importance of upstate camp in Barry's life, and during my few visits he and I would leave the apartment and I'd wheel him to a park bench or outdoor cafe'. Needless to say, people stared. People always stare.

It may have been on one of my last visits when Barry's mother confided that they read books together, or more specifically that she read to him. Barry liked best sellers, or mysteries, or maybe a little science fiction, and perhaps in an effort to elevate him to "literature," his mother had read him "The Fall" by Albert Camus. In the autumn dusk that settled over the apartment she asked me if I had read "The Fall" and I had read it.
"It's a grand novel," she said, "so moving and packed with philosophy and observations about life and the human condition. Such a marvelous writer, and sadly taken from us so early . . . Barry didn't care for 'The Fall'" his mother added with some degree of patient indulgence concerning his aesthetics. "He didn't like it," she said, smiling fondly at him. At that moment I looked at Barry and he grimaced and stuck out his tongue, but you could see the laughter in his eyes, the playful mirth. It was a great subjective critique (Camus is important but we're all entitled to our likes and dislikes) and didn't require any Morse Code to decipher. I've never forgotten that look on his face.