Author: patcamerino

No one throws old clothes into the trash can. Instead, they are donated to a social service agency for use by some, unknown “deserving person.” A half century ago, my donations were made to the St Vincent de Paul Society, a missionary group which, no doubt, made sure the items were sent to poor people in China. Now days, we buy new clothes made by low-paid people in China!

Along that line, the first suit I remember buying, when I was a senior in high school, came from a different source. Back then, teenagers usually bought clothing either from Sears or Montgomery-Wards. I did neither. The first suit I owned was made by a tailor in Youngstown, Ohio. My mother knew this was the only option, if you wanted an outfit that would last. I remember riding the bus from Niles into Youngstown for several fittings and the final pickup. The suit was a brown one; it was double breasted. A couple of years later, it was replaced by a suit I really liked, one designed for a young collegian: charcoal-gray and single breasted. The shade was not really black, although this was its most apparent color; it had a grayish cast, not unlike the coating on a briquette found around the edge of a backyard grill. I wore that suit for years, as both an undergraduate and a postgraduate student.

The style of men’s clothing has changed only slightly over the years, unlike women’s fashions which change for every season. My charcoal-gray uniform could have been replaced, ultimately, by either a Nehru, or a Mao, jacket – depending upon whether you liked the twin breast-pockets of the latter jacket. Although my young adult friends wore them, I waited for the later versions called “leisure suits.” I owned two: one was powder blue; the other had a brown-checked pattern. I never felt casual enough to wear a leisure suit with flowery prints or other, gaudier, designs.

I also avoided bell-bottomed pants, although several pairs I owned did have more material than usually found in classical versions. Living in the northeast, I had no need for blue jeans or Levi’s – items more common in the western states, at the time. There were also khaki pants, which almost all the guys wore daily, along with a white T-shirt with a rolled up short sleeve wrapped around a pack of cigarettes.

Bermuda shorts were not worn often, although, during my undergraduate days in the fifties, the boys in Delta Tau Delta did wear them, with long black stockings, to proms. My own fraternity brothers would not be caught dead in such a silly outfit. For formal occasions, we wore white dinner jackets and long, black pants.

I never owned my own tuxedo but relied on rentals, even for the weddings, much later, of our three children. If I had known that these events would occur annually, I would have bought one earlier. It was not until friends invited us to a Beverly Hills wedding, where tuxes were mandatory for the three-day event, that I finally purchased a black, velvet-collared suit and a fancy dress-shirt as well as a brightly colored cummerbund and matching bow tie. By then, I had joined the faculty of Baylor College of Medicine, which held multiple, fund-raising events where such attire was required. If Jerry Lewis, Al Hurt or Princess Lilian of Belgium were in attendance, it would not be appropriate to wear an ordinary suit to a party at the Petroleum Club of Houston.

I recall other male fashion statements I encountered over the years. There was the period for turtleneck sweaters, which were not really sweaters but long-sleeve jerseys. True sweaters were either cardigans with long sleeves or vests without them. Of course, real suits always came with their own matching vests.

Although other men might have worn brightly colored suits, I stayed with the basic blacks, grays and blues. My only colors came in shirts, especially paisleys which are almost impossible to find today. For making fashion statements, men wore ties. Every few years they changed not only in color preferences and designs, but also in width. There were years when it was difficult to distinguish a tie from a small bib. Other years they narrowed down to less than two inches across. These were usually rep ties with stripes of every conceivable color-combination.

The ultimate decision about ties, however, was not determining their width and length but rather what kind of knot to use. I learned how to obtain a perfect Windsor knot from a very unlikely source: Carl Oglesby, a college roommate who later became a leader within the Students for a Democratic Society, a radical, left-leaning, political-action group.

There also came a time, for some guys, that the concept of a “tie” was associated not with a piece of cloth around the neck, but with splashed colors resulting from the tie-dyed process for decorating T-shirts and other wearing apparel. I, myself, never wore a tie-died T-shirt. I grew up with ones that were always white. It was only in the last decades that I have turned to colored Tees.

The only fad I wore was a caftan, a blue and white paisley-patterned robe long enough to touch my feet. It was very comfortable leisure attire for a cold New England winter. Karen made it. She also created another outfit I made use of by our backyard pool. She sewed together two large Turkish towels, except for holes for my head and arms. It was great to wear while drying off and lounging near the pool on a cool day in September.

In the current decade, my wardrobe has grown more consolidated, although I should still give away seldom-used clothing. Over the years, the Goodwill Society replaced St Vincent de Paul as a donation repository. When we moved to Houston, it became NAM, the Northwest Assistance Ministry. It seems that the recipients of disposables have changed, over the last seventy years, from the “poor Chinese” to our own poor and then, to those with low-paying jobs in own neighborhoods. Now with increased unemployment and economic problems resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, donations remain closer to home. We continue to avoid tossing hand-me-downs into the trash can. Everything still has a useful life, even our clothing.

When I was young, my shopping experience centered on McKelvey’s Department Store in Youngstown, Ohio. Of course, there was also a department store in Niles. It may have been called Leopold’s, but I’m not sure. I do remember the network of money-carriers strung along its ceiling. When I made a purchase, the clerk would put my cash in a very small box attached to the wire network above my head. Suddenly, the box would zoom off to the central cashier’s office and, a few minutes later, would return with any change left over from the transaction I had made. When I was six years’ old, this was a magical experience. As a teenager, it was no longer impressive. By then, I had shifted my buying site from Leopold’s to McKelvey’s, which did not have the wire-box network. It did have pneumatic tubes! The only place this system might be found in today’s world is at a bank drive-through, but now the distance traveled within the whooshing tube is much shorter than it was at McKelvey’s.

Back in the late fifty’s, McKelvey’s was a major place for shopping. There were six floors, with different merchandise sold on each one. Leopold’s had only two floors. McKelvey’s even had an escalator between the first and second floors. For many years, an elevator, with its own operator, was needed to go to the higher levels.

It was a once-a-month adventure to shop at McKelvey’s in downtown Youngstown. When I was a teenager, a McKelvey’s branch store became the anchor for the newly erected Eastgate Mall between Niles and Youngstown. Bus travel to the McKinley Heights area, where Eastgate was located, was much faster than going all the way into Youngstown to shop. While I was away at college in Kent and later, in Ithaca, my mother worked in the cashier’s office at the Eastgate McKelvey’s. Her major daily complaint was how dirty her hands became because of handling all of that cash. Evidently, it’s true: money is dirty.

I do not recall any malls being located in either Kent or Ithaca. This memory may be due to my lack of funds for shopping at them, even if they did exist. There was also no need to use them for the other major reason for their existence: a place of social gathering. In the fifties and sixties, when shopping malls grew as fast as mushrooms, teenagers and young adults made them the primary sites for gathering every evening. The arcades within the covered malls provided places for them to window shop. The open courts made excellent locations to see others and, more important, to be seen by others. Teens gathered in groups to roam the malls and sit at tables to drink coffee and cokes. The equivalent place for me was, of course, The Hub at Kent State and The Ivy Room at Cornell, where students gathered between classes.

As the years passed, social gatherings changed, for Karen and me, from student union buildings to shopping malls, but this transition took a longer time than might be the case for other young couples. Being college towns, both Hanover, New Hampshire, and Corvallis, Oregon, had limited need for shopping malls for social gathering. I do not recall any for shopping, which was conducted at downtown stores in both cities.

Amherst, a quintessential college town, did not see the need for a shopping center and refused to allow one to be built within its corporate limits. However, the nearby town of Hadley had a different economic view and authorized the construction of one on the border between Hadley and Amherst. As a result, Hadley received the tax benefits and Amherst suffered the traffic snarls. For true shopping, Karen and I would make a significant journey to the Springfield Mall, an hour’s drive south of Amherst. The trek was usually associated with a visit to the orthodontist Deb saw once a month. She may not have enjoyed the outing as much as her brothers did, especially if an ice cream cone was part of the adventure.

The first major shopping center, the first true Mall, that I can recall is Westfield Mall in Wheaton Maryland. Karen and I went there almost every Saturday afternoon, to look and, sometimes, to shop. It was an inexpensive place to spend an hour or two with the kids. They could wander around, always in sight, of course, and do their own, if limited, investigations of seeing and being seen.

Our own time for significant mall-walking did not occur until we moved to Houston, more than forty years ago, when malls were in their heyday. Greenspoint Mall became the place for a weekly visit. The stores and food court were well attended for purchases of necessities and of snacks to eat while looking. We finally stopped going there when the socioeconomic environment started to slide in the Greenspoint area.

We then made Willowbrook Mall the site of our destinations for a weekend drive. The food court often became the place for a Saturday lunch. We finally learned in which arms of the sprawling complex our favorite shops were located and could browse through them without needing to expend extra effort finding them. By now, the kids seldom went with us; they had their own social needs and arrangements. Karen and I merely enjoyed each other’s company for a free hour of wandering.

We continued the endeavor even more so after we moved from the FM 1960 area to Cypress. The drive-time may have been about the same from Longwood as it had been from Ponderosa Forest. The destination was satisfactory for the effort.

Occasionally, we would visit a factory-outlet shopping center. A mall, usually, is a covered, air-conditioned place for casual walking and shopping in comfort, far removed from Houston’s humidity. However, some shoppers who desire bargains are willing to do so outside, although I prefer to attempt this only in early spring or late fall.

We have enjoyed an occasional visit to a shopping center in a foreign country. I was amused to see how international US commerce really is. A walk through a mall in Edinburgh did not differ from one in Germany. The accents and languages we heard may have been unlike ones we encountered in Houston, but the names of the stores and fast-food shops remained well-known. It was difficult to determine exactly where we might be in the world. It was, also, then that I realized covered shopping sites might not have been the invention of American commerce. A glass-covered Galleria in Florence, Milan or Moscow may be a prelude to the one found in west Houston.

Fifteen years ago, with our move to Eagle’s Trace and west Houston, our venues expanded to include First Colony, Memorial City, and Katy Mills, where we learned to look alternately into shops on both sides of the arcade rather than viewing each side independently as we made our way around the newer-designed circle of stores. We continued to enjoy the exercise of walking and its counterbalance of eating snack food as a reward.

Then came 2019. The coronavirus not only attacked people; it also devastated the world’s economy. It may be contributing to the demise of the shopping center, itself. Karen and I have not been in a mall since February 2019. The Christmas shopping displays for 2018 are the last ones I’ve seen in person. Amazon-dotcom has replaced every store which I formerly frequented. This may be equally true for a high majority of US shoppers.

Recent news articles have indicated that a third of the J.C. Penney and Macy stores have been closed in the last five years. Almost all of those owned by Sears or Lord & Taylor have gone out of business. About half of the remaining 1,600 mall-based locations are expected to shutter by 2025.

My comments about my own experience of wandering through malls for both window shopping and real shopping, as well as for pleasure and exercise, may ultimately become a personal history no longer directly relevant to any who read these recollections. It would, indeed, be ironic if the Mall of the Americas in Bloomington Minnesota becomes a site to be visited as tourists currently view the Colosseum in Rome.

Back in 1966, Nancy Sinatra was known for a ballad entitled: These Boots Were Made for Walkin’. I never owned boots made for walking, but my legs were. I had to walk everywhere I wanted to go. My father believed it was unnecessary to own a car. He walked everywhere he had to go and thought his family should, too. Fortunately, on weekends Uncle Bill Moransky or Uncle Frank Borecki would take their own families and us for a drive in the country or to visit other relatives. If my father wanted to gamble at cards, he would be driven to the game by his friend, Ed Shoebel. It wasn’t until I had planned to attend graduate school in another state that he agreed I needed a car. While living in Niles, my high school was only 0.9 mile from my home, and my grandmother’s home was the same distance in the opposite direction. It took only twenty to thirty minutes to make the journey on foot, depending upon weather conditions.

During the winter months I did wear boots, although not the kind Nancy sang about. Mine were rubber galoshes worn over regular shoes. It was a challenge to snap the metal toggles together so that my pant legs were securely wrapped for the journey through the sludge of winter in northern Ohio. With the spring mud, the galoshes were replaced by rubber overshoes that felt as if I were walking with lead-weights on my feet. During the limited months of early fall and late spring, walking was temporarily replaced by bike-riding. I preferred the more rapid journey afforded while sitting down to the pace of leg movement while standing up. Nevertheless, both biking and striding offered time for a wandering mind as well as a wandering body.

My continuing life in college towns of limited size allowed for more opportunities for walking. My home was usually located about a half-hour walk from where my classes occurred. However, proper scheduling was required to minimize cross-campus dashes. The crisscrossing paths were efficiently designed, in contrast to the slowly moving campus shuttle system with its over-packed minibuses. Cars were used only when they were needed for transporting packages, especially weekly groceries. This necessity, however, seemed to increase with the passing years and our move to Houston with its suburban sprawl. Now, walking was associated with the pleasures of sightseeing rather than with the necessities of life.

Neighborhood walks, especially in the cool of early evening, were pleasant ways to dissolve the stresses from my daily interactions with demanding faculty members. A community golf course, after the players had left for the day, could serve as a calm oasis for a quiet stroll.

Domestic and foreign travel destinations for vacations offered even better opportunities for my wandering body and soul. The grounds of an Ignatian Retreat Center provided the best location for my physical and spiritual renewal. Not far behind, were cemeteries in Prague or in towns in Italy and England. Narrow, cobbled streets with quaint shops and houses afforded quiet resources for contemplation as I passed along them. A wandering walk could be readily interrupted by a bench near a plaza, where people-watching would replace the desire to see delightful carvings hidden on the facades of the ancient buildings surrounding me. I enjoyed my attempts to compare the faces of the statues with those of the town’s current residents and see that only their garments had really changed, and not always for the better.

In between vacation times, with its opportunities for strolling through history, Karen and I would engage in mall-walking, a variation of that ancient custom of rambling through market squares in European villages. Air-conditioned sites are Houstonian replacements for the breezes found in plazas, especially if there is a food-court selling Cinnabons.

During our first forty years in Texas, we spent many pleasant hours wandering through Greenspoint, Willowbrook and Memorial City as well as among the crowded streets of Old Town Spring. For special times, we would travel to San Antonio and immerse ourselves in the events found along River Walk. Just as we avoided central London, or other major cities, during our foreign travels, we did not engage in the modern wonders of Bayou Place, Houston Center or Discovery Green, although the Museum District did become a beacon for special weekend stacations. We continued our wanderings until a multi-knobbed virus came to the United States and decided to remain for an undetermined period.

Yes, social distancing arrived as a modern way of life. It became the beginning of the end of my days of walking for any distance whatsoever. The epidemic began during the early years of my ninth decade, a time which may, by itself, have impacted on my ability to enjoy walking for pleasure.

When we first moved to Eagle’s Trace, I often walked around the new, undeveloped campus. Although the desire remains, the reality has changed dramatically. I once could readily engage in wandering outside for an hour; now I am challenged to move, in a reasonable time, to the garden near the lake. I prefer to sit where I am, for as long as I might, to the effort of moving from place to place. I have found there is an advantage in taking a “walker” with me; it allows me to sit where and when I want to rest and look.

I also recall how much I enjoyed mall-walking with Karen, even without stopping for coffee and a Cinnabon. We have not mall-walked during the last two years. I cannot remember when I last visited Old Town Spring or River Walk.

Last week our daughter and her husband returned from a ten-day vacation in Amherst and New England along with days in New York City and Washington, D.C. In one of her Facebook reports, she wrote that her Fit-Bit had recorded nine miles for a day in D.C. I found my envy was very high. A few weeks ago, one of our sons moved with his family from Houston to Gadsen, Alabama and a house on a lake. He has taken us on a cellphone tour of his new home, one which we will probably never see in person. His daughter, our granddaughter, has recently moved to San Francisco where she gave birth to a great-grandson, one we hope to meet when they visit Houston for one of the winter holidays.

I admit I am sad when I think about my desire to travel, to walk new and old paths once again, and then realize that such events are unlikely to occur. I remain very pleased to have the memories, both in my mind and in physical records, of those magnificent journeys we once made. We are fortunate to have had a wandering life that has taken us to live around the country and to visit around the world.

Indeed, my legs, once made for walkin’, no longer allow for that process. Those boots worn by Nancy Sinatra may have been given the boot. On the other hand … or foot, as the case may be … perhaps it’s time for my own life to be re-booted, to see what the next cycle holds.

Exercise is another name for a love-hate relationship. If you’re like me, you can love when it ends, and hate when it starts. I greatly prefer leaving the exercise room than approaching it. I find it’s really not a matter of loving the results and hating the process. For me, it’s a matter of time. I dislike setting aside the hour, three mornings a week, for moving while staying in place. It seems nothing is being accomplished. The process is a waste of time.

On the other hand, I do tell myself: I know there’s a long-term benefit. My leg muscles are surely being strengthened by the push-and-pull efforts on the machines I endure. Who knows, as the result of my exercising, the knee pain may vanish in the not-too-distant future. I tell myself things will be different; events will return to normal.

After all, my left knee doesn’t hurt when I stand or sit, but only when I walk – when the joint must be moved, ever so slightly. I also acknowledge the pain, itself, is not all-that-bad, perhaps a mere “two” or “three” on that mythical rating scale which goes to ten, a value reserved for ultimate torture by the Taliban. So why do it?

Why, a month-and-a-half ago, did I restart this discipline?

Discipline. That, too, is what exercise requires. A daily habit. A method for improvement which comes only from constant repetition. Like learning how to play a piano. Or how to live a righteous life. That’s really what being a disciple means: to live out the same life as the Master one follows. I know this theologically. Christ said to Andrew and James, as well as to his other friends, “Come, follow me. See where I live. Do what I do, if you are to be one of my disciples.” Yes, a discipleship is more than mere learning. It’s experiencing. It is doing. It is “changing” as a result of the experience and the action being undertaken. The Greeks called it metanoia – a change of mind, a change of heart. I call it exercise.

I’m not alone in that viewpoint. Ignatius of Loyola, after his own experience of encountering the Divine, designed his “spiritual exercises” to help his companions change and to become someone for the “greater glory of God.” I think I prefer his exercises to the ones I do in the first-floor exercise room at Eagle’s Trace.

Actually, I do his spiritual exercises more frequently than I do my physical ones. For almost forty years I’ve been following the Ignatian experience of prayerful meditation offered through my daily practice of reading the Liturgical Hours. Thus far, I’ve put in, endured, a mere total of forty hours for my physical knee bending in comparison with some four decades for spiritual genuflection.

I’ve done this physical knee bending before. This is not the first time I’ve engaged in the love-hate relationship of a workout in a gym. In my mid-forties, that time of mid-life crisis examined by Dante in his Divine Comedy, I stopped off at the local Nautilus on my way home from work, three evenings a week. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday (or almost every one of them) I spent an hour on a dozen torture racks designed by the Nautilus equipment company. They still manufacture workout equipment but the current locations for the communal use of their product appears to be dominated by LA Fitness. Back then it was Nautilus.

However, I admit my preference was not for the machines designed for leg-arm-chest-back improvement, but rather, the availability, afterwards, of the dry sauna and the bubbling hot tub. I could enjoy using them seven days a week, instead of merely three – the number of actual days I chose, in the belief that a “recovery” day was necessary between the ones required for the destruction of my muscles.

My physiology textbooks had once informed me that the building of new muscle fibers occurred during these rest-times between their breakdowns. I have firmly believed this observation and have refused to pursue a seven-day workout to rebuild my knees, even though there are some friends who maintain I should exercise seven days a week.

If exercise were not a love-hate relationship, I might be more open to a reconsideration of the recovery time needed for the reconstruction of the protein fibers in the muscles I use for voluntary movement. Fortunately, cardiac muscle fibers are different from those found in either voluntary or involuntary muscles; they don’t need a downtime. It is toward the build-up of the voluntary muscles in my legs that I volunteer the time needed for them to be improved.

I have no intention to be like one of my grandsons (Thomas) who is a bodybuilder and has, with training, curvature and definition to spare. I’m willing to devote only a limited time, some three hours a week, toward this activity.

To minimize the amount of time I might “waste” during this process, I have taken to reading from my Kindle while pedaling a cross-trainer. My current book is one written by N. T. Wright, an Episcopalian bishop and theologian, entitled: God and the Pandemic: A Christian Reflection on the Coronavirus and its Aftermath.

It seems it is, after all, possible to engage in physical and spiritual exercise at the same moment. Perhaps the basic question remains on many levels: when can I truly expect that a positive change will occur, that events will return to normal, that my pain (physical, spiritual and emotional) will pass away, that life will be as it was before? Or does life exist, as does exercise, in a love-hate relationship? A relationship which must be endured until metanoia has finally been accomplished.

The old adage says: “It’s like riding a bike.” The implication is that once you’ve learned to do something, it’s unlikely you will forget how to do it. Some might call this an example of muscle-memory. Others relate the behavior to “practice makes perfect.”

I disagree. Given sufficient time, it’s very possible to fall off a bike while attempting to ride it. I discovered this truth several times over the last decade. I have no desire to try it again.

There was a time when I really enjoyed riding a bike. I rode a lot when I was young. It began, as I’ve written elsewhere in these reflections, when I rode a bike to Washington Junior High School, which was much harder to do going up in the morning than coasting back down in the afternoon. This means of travel continued during my brief life in the country, when I peddled from my grandmother’s farm to Mineral Ridge High School. Without a family car, bike-riding was also the only means of locomotion between my house and Niles McKinley high school. The journey took longer during the snow months of winter and the rain of early spring. It was more pleasant to bum a ride from either George Davies or Paul Collins, friends who drove jalopies, which moved faster and were more weather-comfortable than any standard bicycle.

Many college kids seemed to own bicycles, but this was not true for Kent State, a commuter college. Students had cars for daily travel from Cleveland, Akron and Youngstown, or from the many small towns surrounding them. Students living on campus or in the city of Kent, itself, were content to walk, not only to their classes, but to all the other events they attended. Some may have had bicycles, but I fail to remember them. This was not the case for either Cornell, as a graduate student, or Dartmouth or Oregon State where I held postdoctoral appointments. When it did not snow in Hanover, or rain in Corvallis, I was able to peddle a vehicle that had three gears, having given up the balloon-tired machine of my youth. Both the Connecticut and the Willamette valleys had flat terrains. Cars were needed only for trips into New England’s rolling hills and Oregon’s pine-covered mountains – or for in-town shopping to purchase items that would not fit into the basket attached to a bike’s handlebars.

When we moved to Bethesda and Rockville Maryland, my bike went into storage. At least I think that is the case. However, I do have memories, which may be false ones, of riding a bike through Rock Creek Park and around Georgetown and the Mall. This phantom recollection is also true for Houston, Texas.

I have distinct memories of riding past new homes in Ponderosa Forest and Cypress Creek, suburbs where we lived. When we moved to Cypress, I seem to see myself covering the winding roads of Longwood and, after hours, the golf paths of the local country club, whose rules forbid such action. Nevertheless, I was not beyond trespassing after sunset, when the golf-carts had been parked for the night.

Those were the days when my body was still capable of muscle memory and balancing was not a significant problem. In fact, I continued to feel comfortable making my journeys without a helmet or other protective gear.

During my annual retreats to Grand Coteau, Louisiana, I used loaner-bikes maintained by the Jesuit House where I stayed. The vehicles were old, but I could usually find one with tires that would maintain an acceptable pressure for several hours after I had pumped more air into them. The handlebar basket was large enough to carry a bible, a notebook for journaling, and a small blanket for sitting on during my reflections.

The paved and unpaved roads around the grounds and throughout the village were peaceful and conducive for meditation while in transit to sites where I might stop to contemplate God and His surrounding nature. The sun’s warmth, the slight breeze from my movement, and the patterns of shade and sunlight resulting from the old pecan and live oak trees along the roads, gave a special wonder to my excursions. When needed, it was easy enough to walk a bike across the fields to get to the open-walled summer house above the banks which once enclosed the Mississippi River. As a result of such interludes, I have associated bike-riding with peace and a quiet time for personal reflections.

Then came retirement. I gave up my bike which I rode around Cypress and turned to walking the grounds at Eagle’s Trace. This may be the time when I forgot how to ride a bike. I made this discovery on several vacation trips to Europe, where the majority of its residents travel everywhere on two-wheeled vehicles, either Vespas or bicycles. I never tried the motorized two-wheeler, but hotels usually made the self-propelled ones available for hourly rentals to residents. I could not resist, especially when spending a few days in small towns in Italy. The only problem was that European bikes have only handbrakes. You could not stop by merely pressing backwards on the pedals.

I learned the hard way. With adroit steering I did manage to avoid hitting pedestrians strolling the town’s plazas. Upon attempting to stop, I fell over only a few times before learning how to use the brakes mounted on the handlebars. It was easier when visiting quiet cemeteries found in each town. Then I could aim toward the side of the path and slow down enough so I could use my feet to catch the bike before I fell off.

Although riding a bike may be a lifelong ability, stopping one is not.

It’s September and time for kids to return to school. It’s the beginning of a new year. In fact, for most of my life, the true year began on September 1, not January 1. My calendar-year finally reverted when I retired and no longer associated my life with academics.

On the other hand, the years of COVID-19 differed from those of the past. Even after the spread of this coronavirus became less serious, the question of a classroom versus electronic alternates continued as an ongoing academic concern. When September arrives, it has become difficult to define what is meant by “going back to school.”

The quandary comes, in part, from whether school is a place or an event. Like a circus. Must a circus occur in a tent or can the spectacle be encountered in any place where clowns, aerial-acrobats and elephants abound? Yet, a modern circus no longer can exhibit elephants on parade. Perhaps, desks and blackboards, or even whiteboards, are no longer required for “going back to school.” In fact, the three-ring circus tent of the past seldom can be found today. The circus tent which was a significant location for socialization has become obsolete. There are those who, believing a physical classroom is required for socialization, expect that real schools will not go the way of the circus tent.

Do you remember when desks were the essential symbols for a real schoolroom? When I was in school, the placement of student desks would not accommodate today’s requirement for social distancing. In both elementary and high school, desks for pupils were anchored to the floor in long rows separated by very narrow aisles. The seat in front of you was part of your own desk. Your own seat was only inches away from your desktop. Thank goodness that, back then, few students were “overweight.” Heaven help the ones who might be pudgy! Slipping into their seats could require some wriggling before any comfort could be obtained for the next hour.

The school desk back then had a unique shape, especially in the elementary years. The desktop was tilted and had a hole in the corner. The tilt might have been only a few degrees, perhaps ten or fifteen. It was, nevertheless, one that would make it easy for anything other than a heavy, immobile book to slide onto the floor.

I’m not sure why the top of each student’s own desk required being tilted. Perhaps, it was to keep the book you were reading at an appropriate angle, so you would not slouch until the teacher called on you for a response you really did not want to make. The incline, however, did make taking a nap, with your head on your desk, a bit more comfortable.

The desktop was hinged to allow for storage of your school supplies. All of the books you had to read were kept there, when they were not in use. In fact, this was a storage place for just about everything. There was no need for backpacks for lugging or storing items you might need during the day. There was even an adjoining, walk-in storage room for hanging wet coats and for drying boots that were worn on bad-weather days which, in Ohio, occurred almost daily from November through April. Individual lockers were not available until you entered junior high school.

An interesting feature of the student desks for the elementary years was the hole in the extremely narrow flat board on the upper edge of the lid. Most of the time it was merely a hole, an easy place to drop a hard, red rubber eraser or a hastily discarded wad of paper which could have been a secret note from the student across the aisle or the remains of a missile not yet tossed, because the teacher continued looking directly at you for the entire lesson.

Of course, the real purpose of the hole in your desktop was to serve as a repository for a small bottle of black ink. Although first graders possessed lead pencils a half-inch in diameter and, later, a yellow, number two pencil, there came a time, usually in the second grade, when pupils had to learn the mystery of ink and pens. The bottle of ink was quite small. It had a narrow top with a cork stopper. The size of the bottle and its opening were limited in order to avoid too great a mishap when the bottle was not in its hole. Of course, that rarely happened. Girls with pigtails had them dipped in inkwells only in Little Rascals movies seen on Saturday mornings and not during the real life encountered from eight to three, Monday through Friday.

On the other hand, students in classrooms several decades ago did need to be careful not to leak ink onto everything around them. Now, when students return to school, they seldom worry about leaky pens. Instead, their pockets bulge with electronic substitutes. Smart-phones don’t leak, but they do require the use of two opposable thumbs rather than one thumb and two, ink-stained fingers.

There was a time, decades ago, when students in elementary school had to be taught how to use a pen and ink, the latter of which came in a separate bottle. The pen, itself, had a nib, a metal point with a slit from its tip to a very small hole halfway up its rounded surface. The nib was attached to the staff of the pen, itself, which resembled a tapered pencil with a cork tip into which the nib was inserted. The trick was to dip the nib into the bottle of ink without getting any liquid on the cork surface and yet obtain enough to be held, by capillary action, in the nib’s hole and slit. This preliminary action began the final performance of transferring the ink to a sheet of paper, using the appropriate hand and finger movements.

In the beginning, there was a lot of practice making ovals and slash-marks on lined paper, which seemed to prefer spreading the ink within its fibers rather than on top of them where it belonged. In the process of nib-dipping, care had to be taken to touch the point to the side of the bottle to remove any excess fluid. A piece of soft flannel was often at hand to be used for any additional mop-up required when excess ink remained trapped on the nib or deposited in the wrong place, usually on index fingers or in the middle of the page you were working on.

The nascent writer had to learn to feel the correct pressure to use during the transfer. The touch should not too heavy, otherwise the pressure would spread apart the fluid-containing slit and damage the nib, itself. The flow had to be continuous. This may be the reason why the use of ink was deferred until the transition from printed, block letters to cursive writing had occurred. Once that skill of the proper pressure was developed, the student would be able to move from a quill-like writing instrument to a real fountain pen.

The fountain pen was the sign of literate maturity. You could be trusted not to ruin the point; this guaranteed the pen would last for many years. A new trick had to be learned as well: how to draw ink into the pen without getting the liquid over every surrounding surface.

There were pens with different designs for the required pumping to fill them. Many had levers on the side. Some had built-in pumps accessed by repeated twisting the upper end of the fountain pen. Others had screw-tops which allowed for the compression of metal strips that expelled air and permitted the ink to be drawn into the reservoir. It was always fun to watch the bubbles form in the ink bottle and see how many times you had to repeat the pumping before the pen was loaded with ink.

Of course, fountain pens had screwcaps which protected the nib and, hopefully, kept the ink from staining the pocket into which the instrument had been placed, awaiting its next usage. Frequently, this protective measure did not work. Male adults often had pocket-protectors for carrying their pens.

Later advances did not really help. An early attempt tried to replace the original fountain pen with ones containing disposable cartridges. When exchanging an empty ink cartridge for a new one, the attempt to puncture the end of the refill could be a daunting task. Then came the ballpoint pen with a semisolid form of ink. Much of the time, the ballpoint was equally messy when it was returned to a shirt pocket. On the other hand, those which seldom leaked, seldom deposited any distinguishable marks on paper when they were supposed to.

Originally individuals could choose bottles of either black or navy-blue ink. Few were satisfied with the sepia or brown ink which was the color found on ancient manuscripts. Occasionally, the adventurous writer might use red ink, but that was usually the choice for grading papers or bookkeeping. It was only with the advent of gel-filled ballpoint pens that a spectrum of colors became available. They might be part of the equipment for young teenagers. However, given the ubiquitous use of cellphones for texting, it’s unlikely that any of them use pen and ink any more for anything, even artwork. It’s also highly unlikely that any of them know how to write with cursive letters, let alone be able to read them. Practice making O’s and /’s is no longer a requirement for becoming literate. Being aware of which strokes go below the line is of little concern when forming block letters while “penning” a short note.

“Hi, Grandpa, how are you?” the young, male voice on the telephone asked. “I’m fine. Who’s this?” I replied. “It’s your grandson.” “Which one?” I inquired. “Your favorite one,” the young man responded, somewhere between a laugh and a sound of being misunderstood. “And I need your help,” he went on. “Oh, what is it?” I asked.

“Well, there’s been an auto-accident. I’m ok, but my throat hurts. That’s why I sound different.” “What happened?” I inquired, more neutrally than I might have sounded at another time. “I’m out-of-town,” he went on, “and I ran into a problem.”

“Oh, I thought you were back,” I said, remembering a recent Facebook report my grandson, Jordan, had posted about his going out-of-town to buy plumbing supplies. He’s a plumber in College Station and had reported that he and a friend had just returned from such a trip.

“Yeh,” he agreed, “but I had to leave again to attend a friend’s funeral. She died of cancer. And on the way, I had a car accident. That’s why I’m calling. I didn’t want Dad to know I was in trouble, but I do need some financial help to pay the fine and get the car repaired.”

“Who’s on the line?” Karen interjected, having heard my side of a puzzling conversation. “Oh I’m on the phone with some young guy who’s pretending to be my grandson and wants some money,” I responded to her in a normal voice.

The telephone line suddenly went dead. “Oh, I guess he hung up. Just when I was having some fun talking with him,” I said reluctantly. Yes, if I have the time and am not involved in a more important project, I do enjoy talking with someone who is trying so hard to get funds out of the “grandparent scam.”

I had known almost immediately the young caller was not one of my six grandsons. They all have the same father and, quite remarkably, sound exactly like him. Their voices have the same rhythms and vocal inflections. I find it almost impossible to determine who is the one calling. Sometimes the content helps, but I always need to confirm who it is, before I continue too far into a potentially “wrong” conversation.

This similarity is a weird phenomenon. In other ways, each of the boys differs from our son, Ken, but somehow, over the years, his speech pattern has become replicated by each one of his own sons. On the other hand, I don’t think that either Ken or his younger brother, Chris, sound anything like I do. Perhaps, over the years, Ken’s sons listened more closely to their dad than he did to me.

However, I am fortunate that the older grandsons do initiate telephone calls from time to time. And they are usually not about needing money, although we have sometimes discussed their need for an allotment from the educational trust fund I established for each one when they were born. I began setting aside these funds long before I realized I would have eleven grandchildren!

Their calls are their telephone greetings for Christmas or birthdays and, occasionally, for no reason at all. These communications differ greatly from the ones I never had with my own grandparents.

As I have written elsewhere, the telephone, introduced late in my teenage life, was not a regular means of communication in my family. A further complication arose from the fact that my father’s mother refused to speak English. She understood it quite well, but spoke only Italian to everyone, including me. Although my grandfather could speak English, and enjoyed browsing through the local newspaper, there was minimal communication between the two of us, even in person. At the same time, I do not recall his speaking very much in either English or Italian to my father, except when they argued while playing Pinochle.

My mother’s father died when I was very young, and I do not recall that we ever spoke with one another. As for her mother, our conversations were somewhat of a business nature during the time I lived on her farm in Mineral Ridge, when I was in the eighth and ninth grade.

She was the cook in a local factory, one of several steel mills in the Mahoning Valley of northeastern Ohio. Although her spoken English was very acceptable, she was, otherwise, illiterate in the language. Nevertheless, as a cook, she needed to be reminded what the ingredients and process would be for the daily menu. Every evening, I would read to her the recipes she would use for her work in the factory-kitchen the following day. I don’t recall we ever talked about anything at other times while we lived with her or visited the farm for holidays.

It would appear I had little “training” in being a “grandparent.” My interactions with my own were extremely limited, almost nonexistent. My own three children also had limited relationships with their grandparents. They never lived anywhere near one another. My parents and Karen’s remained in Ohio while we moved from New Hampshire to Oregon, to the Washington, D.C. area, to Massachusetts, and finally to Texas. We met only for major holidays and brief vacations in Ohio. Our parents were of the generation that seldom spent any time away from their homes.

These conditions were the major reasons why Karen and I have chosen to remain in Houston, where all but two of our extended family reside, at least for the moment. We wanted to be able to see our grandchildren more often than either we or our own kids were able to have done. Perhaps this lack in my own history is why I have found it difficult, at times, to be a “real grandparent” like those found in books, movies and television accounts making up modern fiction.

Time passed following my brief conversation with our unknown grandson. Following an early morning phone call a few months afterwards, I asked Karen who had called us so early in the day. She replied it was one of our grandsons, the one who did not sound anything like our own son. Her succinct response to him had been: “You’re not my grandson. Good-bye.” She finds no entertainment value in talking with scammers.

Now that we have been vaccinated regarding COVID-19, we can have the great pleasure of eating out with our grand kids and having direct communication with them. At a recent gathering, the youngest had a question, actually a series of them. He wanted to know: “When you were a kid, did you have to do chores?” I didn’t confirm, but I expect he had raised the question, because he has his own routine chores and wanted input on their “fairness.” I’m not sure he was pleased with my response: “No, I did not have any routine chores.” I suppose he could have used my answer either positively or negatively depending upon his own situation.

Upon returning home, I thought more fully about my response. I was technically accurate. I did not have jobs to do around the house on a daily basis – like setting the table, clearing it after dinner, or carrying out the trash. TV sitcoms seem to include these as the major, routine, around-the-house chores expected of preteens and teenagers. While I did not have these tasks to do in our three-member household, I do recall a recurring job I was expected to do, when asked. Mow the lawn!

Our houses on Cedar Street or Seneca Street, where I lived for most of my growing-up years, had postage-stamp-size yards. Together, the front and back yards probably measured an area of twenty-five-square feet. A side yard for Cedar Street may have added another twenty-five square-feet; there was no yard on either side of the Seneca Street house – only a driveway on one side and, on the other, a two-story apartment building, three feet away from our house. My father attended to this ten-minute job whenever he cut the grass for our landlady who lived across the drive from us. He claimed to enjoy doing it for her.

On the other hand, there was the summer between my residing on Cedar and Seneca, when we lived on my grandmother’s farm in Mineral Ridge. Her farm had a large field on the opposite side of the road, the side with the barn and the chicken coop. Since it was visible from the farmhouse, with its own surrounding yard, the entire half-acre had to be mowed. A remaining half-acre was left to yield hay for harvesting at the end of the summer. I did not enjoy pushing the reel mower for the two hours it took to cut the entire lot. It was easier when I did not need to attach the grass-bag and gather the clippings every ten minutes, although that part did provide a momentary respite from pushing the green monster with its helical blade.

Since I did not have a routine chore, for which I might be paid, my grandson raised a second question: “Did you get an allowance?” My response at the time: “No, I did not get an allowance, at least not on a weekly schedule.” Upon further reflection, that response was, again, technically true. I did not receive a predetermine amount of money on a recurring schedule. Whenever the mood struck my mother, I was given change from the cup-in-the-cupboard that held all of the funds needed for our day-to-day living, mainly for groceries. With it I would buy a comic book, for ten cents, or postage stamps for my collection. Back then, each stamp cost three cents. When it became necessary, my mother would take me shopping for new shoes. If she spotted an appropriate sale, she would buy new pants, shirts and underwear for me. Since I never had a choice in selecting new fashions, I did not require an allowance for buying anything I really needed.

Elsewhere, I’ve noted my memories about attending movies several times a week. The intended purpose was not entertainment, per se, but was to provide an opportunity to engage in bank-nite at the movie theater. My mother would give me money from the cup-in-the-cupboard for attendance; the cost was usually twenty-five cents.

Since I did not have routine chores to do and did not receive an allowance, in the usual sense of the term, my grandson had to raise his third question: “Grandpa, were you spoiled?” He elaborated on the question. Was I given whatever I wanted; could I do whatever I wanted to do?

My immediate reaction to his question was a laugh. I certainly believed I was not spoiled. I did not get whatever I asked for. Actually, I knew better than to ask for anything.

As a child of the Great Depression, I knew I would have what I needed, but not what I wanted. If there was money-in-the-cup, I might be able to buy an ice-cream cone at Isaly’s, a comic book from the drugstore on the corner, or new stamps at the post-office.

I’ve commented, previously, that, from time-to-time, my father would explode at my mother (or me), if he thought money-in-the-cup was missing; that the amount was less than what he thought it should be. So, my response to my grandson about not being given whatever I wanted was very true. It deserved a laugh.

Then there is the second part of “being spoiled.” Could I do whatever I wanted to do? The answer is, “yes,” I was allowed to do anything I wanted to do, providing it did not cost money. At the same time, I never chose to do anything I thought was “wrong.” Unlike today, drugs and street-gangs were nonexistent for almost every kid growing up in a small town in Ohio. I did not drink beer nor smoke cigarettes. None of my relatives did; except my uncles would drink beer while playing pinochle on a weekend. I’m not sure whether any of them smoked cigarettes; occasionally, there may have been a cigar. My own evenings and weekends were devoted to listening to the radio and doing homework. It was a rather boring life, both by standards of that day and certainly of today.

It seems my parents trusted I would not do anything I should not do. Whenever it came time for me to choose to do something, to make a decision about what course of action I should take, my mother’s routine response was: “That’s your department.”

So, in reply to the question: “Was I spoiled as a child?” I have to consider the role of “free will” in my life. If I could do whatever I wanted to do, is that being spoiled? If I were given a choice on “what should I do,” or “what should I have,” and if I used my free will to remain on the conservative side, can it be said I was spoiled? My grandson needs to decide that Q&A on his own – for me and for him. After all, that’s his department!

A recent Facebook entry shows a photo and a note that our youngest grandson, Gabriel, has his first summer job, sweeping up the leftovers at Sandy’s Barber Shop. This ground-breaking event immediately stimulated my memories about the early summer employment of his father, Ken, and of his aunt Deb and uncle Chris. They, as I recall, weren’t forced to look for summer jobs to get funds for personal stuff, although this was a well-accepted benefit. Since I, myself, had never held a summer job as a teenager – given the fact that most of what might have been available was quickly filled by college kids and others who were not already full-time workers in one of the local steel mills of the Mahoning Valley – I could not impose this condition on my own kids. They chose to work, I believe, because it’s what all of their friends were doing and they, themselves, needed a reason to get out of the house during the summer months.

Deb’s first summer job was an agricultural one associated with the Connecticut Valley. First of all, she harvested cucumbers from an airplane-wing. Actually, the wing was attached to a truck passing through fields of cucumbers. Teens, lying on their stomachs on the wings, reached down, plucked the passing produce from below, and tossed them into baskets fixed to the wing. I don’t remember if she made it for an entire season. An alternative summer job for many other young adults in the area was harvesting tobacco. Surprisingly, the Connecticut Valley was great for growing leaf-tobacco dedicated to the production of cigars. The fields were covered with gauze tents, increasing the humidity for the leaves and protecting them from insect infestations. A few hours in these enclosures gave many young workers a nicotine high.

Deb’s summer occupation in Houston was certainly one Karen and I did not promote. In fact, we probably tried to dissuade her from taking it, a pointless attempt with any young adult. The summer between her freshman and sophomore years at Syracuse University required that she have an excuse for getting out of the house. Apparently, any excuse would be acceptable. She found a job selling Cutco kitchen knives! I’m not at all sure how she found, nor chose, this position as a door-to-door salesperson. Maybe she hoped this would hone her skills as a budding actress, since she was majoring in theater studies at SU. However, her audience was limited, primarily to friends-of-the-family. She may have sold one set to one of them. Karen and I bought a set of eight knives and two (large!) forks. Four of the daily knives can still be found in our kitchen drawer some forty years later. The serrated bread knife is the most frequently used of the lot. We enjoy a daily bagel.

Deb’s first real job was as a worker at Tracey Laughman’s Deli at the entrance to Ponderosa Forest, our housing development. She waited tables, a preparation for the post-college roles she later held. She also did some food prep, mainly salad dressings. Another specialty was preparing banana-pudding, a major offering of this neighborhood deli.

Her brother, Ken, followed her into the dining job-market. His first summer job was with Denny’s Restaurant, located at another entrance to Ponderosa Forest. He was able to ride his bike to-and-from work at hours which were, at the time, considered to be safe, but which would now cause many parents some concern. For a time, he was even less than a busboy. The task he complained about most was the nightly clean-out of the oil-fat-drain. I don’t know what he did with the product. He did advance to busboy and junior waiter. However, he left Denny’s for another food service: working at a popcorn specialty shop. Here he had to sign a non-disclosure agreement relating to the unique mixes added to flavor different styles of popcorn. The family enjoyed the leftover products from this occupation.

Ken seemed to prefer his next job, working at the Houston AstroWorld Amusement Park. At the time, he was enrolled at TA&M and was eligible to work in the financial office where the park’s daily funds were gathered and counted. Like his grandmother, who had worked in a similar position at Kresge’s Department Store in Niles, he may have complained, from time-to-time, about the dirty money he handled every day.

One advantage of Ken’s daily commute to AstroWorld was his ability to drive his brother, Chris, to work as well. Chris had a position as a “starter” for one of the rides at AstroWorld; I don’t recall which one. This job may have come after an earlier one working at a local video-game-shop near Ponderosa Forest. At an early age, he became an expert at arcade video games. He did well enough to win a bicycle offered as a prize to the highest scorer. Evidently, if he were good enough to win a prize, he would be qualified to lead others into this original form of electronic addictive behavior.

The major use to which the three of them put their summer funds may have been automotive. At an early age, Ken had possession of the “brown bomber,” which, I believe, I may have owned and, finally, dedicated to his use. I also remember he spent many hours attaching a TA&M blanket as the interior roof in his personal-use vehicle. Deb’s first car was an AMC Gremlin, which lived up to its namesake. I may have helped pay for this one, as well as a rapidly obtained replacement. At the time, they were responsible for the gasoline and maintenance of the vehicles they drove. (Chris was granted primary use of a former red-and-white Buick family car while he was at college.) I continued to pay for the automobile insurance for each of them, since I would have had to do that even if they had, somehow, continued to be one of the drivers of the family-car.

On the other hand, what may have prompted me to encourage each of them to purchase their own personal items from their own individual earnings was an event in which I participated with Deb. Buying shoes. I had agreed, one day, to take her shopping for a pair of new shoes she liked. My own shoes seldom cost more than $20.00 a pair. Needless to say, I was dismayed with the ones she chose for more than $50.00 a pair! And they weren’t for everyday use, either!

At that point, summer jobs became useful for reasons other than as an excuse to get-out-of-the-house-for-a-few-months. Now they were part of leaving home for twelve months a year and the beginning of new, independent lives.