Friday, February 21, 2014

I say Ma, you say Babcia




Yesterday I met up with L, an old, dear friend. We’ve been friends since seventh grade. 

Though we belonged to the same church, lived less than a mile apart, and had many frenemies in common, we never met up until the age of zits and Seabreeze mainly because up until then we’d gone to different schools. We’d probably never have become friends at all if our two Catholic schools hadn’t combined back in 1972.  

That was a thing back in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. Kids from different schools didn’t socialize with one another, even if they saw each other every week in communion line at Mass, crossed paths a thousand times a month at the corner store,  shared the bumpy slide at the park, played that same stupid bean-counting game in that stultifying summer program in that hellish-hot asphalt parking lot behind the same grimy public gym building.   

The first ten years of my life I lived spitting distance from two kids who went to St. Mary’s school, which was where all the Polish kids in the neighborhood went. I attended St. John’s-Ascension, the school for the Irish and Italian kids. I never played with Jake or Johnny. Not once.  During the entire time we shared the same small street, they kept to their turf at the bottom of the hill. The rest of us -- me, my sister, the other St. John’s kids nearby, kept to our play area twelve houses away at the sunny top, where Vernon met View Street.  

We never questioned why we had this great division, we baby-faced Sharks and Jets. We never thought it was odd;  never made any effort to change the status quo. That’s how our parents lived and that’s how we all lived too. We stayed with our own kind; rarely ventured outside our ethnic and school worlds.  

Though to be fair, I had good reasons to avoid those two particular boys. The fact that they were Polish was only part of why I stayed away. In truth, they were hooligans. 

Take Jake. “He’ll hurt you. He’ll teach you swear words. He’s going to get himself killed one of these days.” That’s what my mom probably said back then to keep me from playing with him. Later on, I learned that Jake had a juvenile record. For what crimes?  I have no idea.
   
I knew he was bad news though, because I remember this. One night during a snowstorm he piloted his Flexible Flyer right down the middle of View Street, lost control and ended up stuck under a car. It was many decades ago. I was about eight at the time. I remember seeing my parents standing in our darkened good room, poking their heads out from behind the gold drapes and whispering to one another, emergency lights turning their silhouettes and the gilt and plastic fruit-bedecked walls alternately scarlet and white.  I remember hearing rumors from the big kids up the street that his guts were ripped out by the jagged underbelly of the car, and remember clutching my own stomach as they talked. 

When I was much older and had kids of my own, I learned a couple of things that have since given me insight into what life must have been like for bad Jake. He was raised mainly by his elderly grandmother who was quite ill and who rarely left the house. His father was an abusive, hard-drinking son of a gun who had abandoned the family when Jake was just a toddler. His mom was never home because she was working herself to exhaustion at some factory in order to support Jake and her mother-in­-law.   

And here’s a tidbit I recently learned that absolutely fascinates me still. My ma and Jake’s babcia were good friends, even though his grandmother barely spoke English and went regularly to Mass at Our Lady of Czestochowa, and my own spoke with a thick brogue and was a communicant at Ascension.  Where did this juvenile prejudice against all Polish kids and all kids from different schools come from then? That’s what I wonder now. Granted, I didn’t exactly have great experiences with the only two Polish kids I knew when I was in the single digits. Maybe those experiences influenced me? 

I absolutely hated Johnny. He was in truth a huge bully, though I didn’t have the words or mental ability back then to truly understand that concept.  Once, he chased me down the street and stuffed oak leaves into my mouth and down my uniform button-down. I was maybe in third grade at the time. He was in fifth or so.  What a jerk. When I was in my thirties I admit I laughed out loud when I read he’d been arrested for exposing himself one night in the parking lot of our downtown library. 

Childhood was tough for him too. I know that now. He had an older brother Henry who was cognitively at about a pre­school level, but had a good eight years and a foot in height on me. Henry had Down Syndrome and his health was frail. He needed tons of heart and brain surgeries. His parents spent a lot of time driving to and from Boston hospitals at a time when driving those fifty miles was so out of the ordinary and so time-consuming most of us visited the big city once a year, if that. 

I imagine Johnny spent a lot of time on his own, and got passed around a lot from relative to relative, and maybe some of those relative weren’t all that nice. I remember peeking out the window sometimes and seeing Johnny yelling at Henry. I remember seeing family members yelling at Johnny. The fact I remember must mean it happened a lot. Over the years, I’ve grown some compassion for my childhood tormentor. I guess. Still, I was and am quite glad that karma took a big bite out of him back in the nineties. He totally had it coming. 

Even though I’d had some personal experiences with both Jake and Johnny that might influence a little kid to then hate anyone associated with them, other kids on my street had no reasons, and still chose to avoid the two boys and all the other Polish kids who went to St. Mary’s. 

But then there’s this. We all played with Henry, Johnny’s older brother. All us up the street kids did. Henry was Polish, but none of us cared. None of us cared about his Down Syndrome either. We didn’t see him as different from us in any way whatsoever. 
 
When I was ten, we moved to the north part of the city and switched churches though not schools. I kept in touch with all my old friends and I made many new ones, some were even public school kids. I’ve since learned that lots of folks my age did the whole prejudice thing way back when. 

Now I have a United Nations spectrum of friends. I have friends who go to cathedrals, temples, mosques, friends who pray to trees and flowers, even have a few I’m currently keeping at a distance who’ve turned to worshiping the all-mighty dollar. 

But, wow of wows, among my best and oldest friends of all, there’s one in particular who knows where all the bodies are buried, who helped me bury them, who still laughs with me cries with me, cheers me on and knew me back when I wore polyester culottes and was an idiot school girl crushing on Ronnie Perry and a hot high school jock whose name shall go with me to my grave.  

And this friend is not only blue-eyed and blonde-haired Polish, she went to St. Mary’s.  We met in ninth grade, at what lots of folks back then called the “French” high school.  Funny, eh?

Sunday, February 16, 2014

Boston 2014: It's not about the run



When you commit to running a marathon, your world shrinks. You plan your work, your menu, your free time -- if you ever have any, around your training. Your vocabulary changes. Words like hydration, proteins, carbs, foam roll, ice pack, trip off your tongue the way words like cabernet, brownies, frosting, cake, Nutella and sleeping in used to. 

When you run Boston for a charity, you add in all the nuts and bolts that endeavor requires and end up eating in front of the television a lot because there’s no way you’re going to find the top of your kitchen table until April is over, because in addition to the sleeping cats sprawled all over the tiny patches of visible wood,  it’s overloaded with piles of envelopes, letters, thank you cards, stamps, and lots of papers scrawled with phrases like “Go get ‘em champ,” or “Better you than me.” 

Fundraising, like marathoning, takes a huge leap of faith and much effort. But hey, if you’re a slow poke runner like me and you want to run Boston, you gotta suck it up and do what you gotta do, right? You’ve got to get that annoying fundraising thing out of the way if you want to shine on Patriot’s Day.  After all, it’s all about the run, right?

Wrong.

I admit that the first time I ran Boston for a charity I did it for myself.  A lot of us charity runners do start out that way. Maybe running Boston is our Mount Everest or Moby Dick. Maybe it’s our way of proving to ourselves that we’re more than others think we are.  Maybe we’re just checking off our bucket list. I know training for my first Boston was more about getting to that finish line than helping out others.  

But for many of us, me included, things change. As you train, you start meeting the folks affected by the illnesses your charity is trying to heal. You meet grandfathers who nearly died on the operating table, marathoners coping with Hepatitis C, living donor aunts and fathers, teary-eyed moms who nearly lost their children, sons who lost their moms. You meet brothers, sisters, cousins sprinting, jogging, limping along to Boylston Street so that someday no one ­­else will have to suffer the way their own family has.

Yesterday I did a training run on my marathon course. I started in Framingham, intending to meet up with my American Liver Foundation friends who were starting a few miles up the road in Natick.  My timing was off, so I missed most of my Run for Research buds by a good fifteen minutes or more. But I didn’t run alone. There were hundreds of other runners out there, many of them charity runners with Boston Children’s Hospital. 

The ALF and BCH had water stops set up for all us runners, manned in most cases by folks intimately involved with the life-saving work both charities support. What a glorious day. I chatted with lots of great folks out striving to make a difference, one step or one cup of water at a time. I got to chat for a bit with some dear RFR runner friends. Some were running and some were volunteering. 

I got to exchange shrieks and hugs and kisses with my friends Erin and Jeff and their son Jon, who were shivering in the cold but smiling and handing out water, Gatorade, tissues, candy hearts at a stop in Wellesley. 

When I’m not running Boston for Liver, I volunteer for the team at the mile 13 hydration stop on marathon Monday. Erin and Jeff always volunteer too.  Correction. Jeff couldn’t volunteer last year.  He couldn’t afford to take the time off from work. He was saving up his vacation and sick time because that July he was going to be giving half his liver to Jonathan and he needed at least six weeks at home to recover. Jonathan was diagnosed with biliary atresia, an illness of the bile ducts, when he was just a few weeks old. He’s spent his whole life waiting for a new liver.  

Both Jonathan and Jeff came through surgery like champs, though recovery was painful and long, especially for Jeff. Yesterday Erin said Jeff needed to run for Liver next year.  Jeff’s back at the gym, doing all kinds of crazy boot camp workouts. I said I’d help train Jeff if he wanted. We could start with some small races.  Jeff says he’ll think about it.

Their son Jonathan reaches my shoulders now.  He fit snugly on my hip when we first met years back. Erin told me he’d grown two more inches since the surgery.  I joked that she needed to stop feeding the kid. He shrugged at the both of us, a little embarrassed by his mother’s gushing. Typical teen. 

I took off soon after, headed with a smile for the first of Newton’s many hills. I exchanged thumbs ups and way to gos with lots of runners on the course, and I couldn’t help smiling as I remembered previous runs in earlier years. I stopped to say a prayer of thanks with the statues of Johnny Kelley elder and younger. I smiled at the bubbler for dogs and runners in front of the house near the Newton Town Hall and remembered that most people are good.  As I crested each up hill,  I reminded myself to thank my friend Wendy for making me do that mountainous Derry 16-miler a few weeks back. Those Newton hills were bumps compared to Derry. On the down hills I mentally thanked every trainer I ever had for making me work my quads, especially my dear friend Annie, who has a family member coping with liver disease. 

As I started up the last hill, just past Center Street, I thought of my parents because six of the seven times I ran Boston, they cheered me on from the median strip along that section.  I doubt they’ll be there this year. It will tire them out too much. They’ll be with me in spirit though, that’s for sure. 

My mind wandered back to Erin. I remembered talking to Erin on the phone a few days before the living donor surgery. She said something like this: “I’m just having trouble coping with the idea that in a few days, if things don’t go right, I’m going to lose my husband and my son. I can’t accept that. I just can’t deal with that.” Her voice trembled. I couldn’t even begin to imagine her suffering. 

As I began my downhill swoop past Boston College toward Cleveland Circle, I thought of the year before that phone conversation. It was early spring 2012. I was to meet up with Erin in Natick to volunteer at a training run for liver. Just a few days earlier, my mom had been diagnosed with two completely unrelated  types of cancer. On the drive in to Natick, my hands shook the steering wheel so badly I had to pull in to an empty parking lot on Route 30 for a good half hour, cry buckets, and take many deep breaths before I felt calm enough to get back on the road. 

Before I started running and volunteering with Liver, I knew no one with liver disease. The sad irony of it all, that my own mom was now grappling with cancer of the bile duct, and that I was going to support runners who were funding research to help her, and folks just like her?  I wasn’t coping well. 

I pulled into the parking lot at the training run water stop, at the VFW Post on Route 135  (runners know the sign -- Meat Shoot Every Saturday, 1:30 to 3:30),  about the mile nine mark. My eyes were stinging and my nose was raw. I was determined not to cry. Erin came running toward me with her arms opened wide. I ran into her arms and burst into heaving, hysterical tears.  And what did she do? This woman who’d been through hell and back since her precious baby boy was diagnosed with biliary atresia at two weeks old, way back in the previous century?  She gave me lots of hugs and calmed me down and told me it would all work out, one way or another.  And for her it did and for me it will. 

Yesterday, when I took that right onto Hereford and then that left onto Boylston, I paused long enough to take a photo and acknowledge the heavenly energy swirling around me.  All of the Boston Marathon route is hallowed ground. This I truly believe. And that last part. . .  well, I can’t even begin to put into words what that last part means to me now.  

And looking back at what I’ve written today about the rest of the run. . . that doesn’t do Boston justice either. But it’s a start.

Sunday, February 9, 2014

Get weird: Writing exercises to stumble upon

Other than these first few paragraphs, I can't take any credit for this blog post. It came to me in my email this morning via StumbleUpon. These are great writing ideas for teachers of students at all levels and for aspiring novelists like myself.

Granted, I've read tons of books on this subject over the last few decades, but for some reason this list stood out to me, maybe because it's so short and so concise, and therefore for me so doable. I've taken part in many of these exercises in workshops at Grub Street and at the Taos Summer Writers' Conference, but some are brandy new. I'm thinking I'll practice at my leisure and post my efforts with these in my blog.  This is, after all, my own stumbling journey, my record of was, am, becoming.     

To this list I'd like to add three other exercises that I've had much fun with. Both were takeaways from a Grub workshop. One was to write a short story using no adjectives (except for articles) or adverbs. This forces you to use precise vocabulary and is a great brain stretcher.

The second: start and end a short story with the first sentence from a book or story you admire. This can push you into a new creative world. Once, I used the first sentence from my most favorite short story ever, The Story of an Hour, by Kate Chopin, and finished with a last sentence from another great work, Hemingway's Hills Like White Elephants. I ended up with this bizarre story about a tragic circus accident involving clowns trying to put out fires with buckets of confetti. Who woulda thunk I had that weirdness in me?

The third: start a story by copying the first page or so of another author.  This is an opportunity to try on another author's style and in process possibly grow your own.

The site says this advice was last updated by Jim Manis in February 2000.  Thank you Jim Manis, wherever and whoever you are, for the fun suggestions.

Exercises for Story Writers
  1. Write the first 250 words of a short story, but write them in ONE SENTENCE. Make sure that the sentence is grammatically correct and punctuated correctly. This exercise is intended to increase your powers in sentence writing.
  2. Write a dramatic scene between two people in which each has a secret and neither of them reveals the secret to the other OR TO THE READER.
  3. Write a narrative descriptive passage in a vernacular other than your own. Listen to the way people speak in a bar, restaurant, barber shop, or some other public place where folks who speak differently ("He has an accent!") from you, and try to capture that linguistic flavor on the page.
  4. Play with sentences and paragraph structure: Find a descriptive passage you admire, a paragraph or two or three, from published material, and revise all the sentences. Write the passage using all simple sentences (no coordination, no subordination); write the passage using all complex-compound sentences; write the passage using varying sentence structure. The more ways you can think to play with sentence structure, the more you will become aware of how sentence structure helps to create pacing, alter rhythm, offer delight.
  5. Focus on verbs: Find a passage that you admire (about a page of prose) and examine all of the verbs in each sentence. Are the "active," "passive," "linking?" If they are active, are they transitive or intransitive? Are they metaphorical (Mary floated across the floor.)? What effects do verbs have on your reading of the passage?
  6. Take a passage of your own writing and revise all of the verbs in it. Do this once making all the verbs active, once making all the verbs passive. Then try it by making as many verbs as possible metaphorical (embedded metaphors).
Characters
  1. Create character sketches. This is a good exercise to perform on a regular basis in your journal. Sometimes you can just create characters as they occur to you, at other times it is good to create characters of people you see or meet. Some of the best sketches are inspired by people you don't really know but get a brief view of, like someone sitting in a restaurant or standing by a car that has been in an accident. Ask yourself who they are, what they are about. The fact that you don't really know the person will free you up to make some calculated guesses that ultimately have more to say about your own vision of the world than they do about the real person who inspired the description. That's okay, you are NOT a reporter, and ultimately the story you intend to tell is YOUR story.
  2. Write a character sketch strictly as narrative description, telling your reader who the character is without having the character do or say anything.
  3. Revise the above to deliver the character to the reader strictly through the character's actions.
  4. Revise the above to deliver the character strictly through the character's speech to another character.
  5. Revise the above to deliver the character strictly through the words/actions of another character (the conversation at the water fountain about the boss).
  6. Often when we call a character "flat" we mean that the author has failed in some way; however, many good stories require flat characters. Humor often relies on flat characters, but often minor characters in non-humorous pieces are also flat. These characters usually appear to help move the plot along in some way or to reveal something about the main character. A flat character is one who has only ONE characteristic. You can create whole lists of these and keep them in your journal so that you can call upon them when you need a character to fit into a scene.
  7. Young writers are prone to write autobiographical pieces. Instead of writing about people like yourself, try writing about someone who is drastically different in some way from you. Writing about someone who is a good deal older or younger than you will often free up your imagination. It helps to make sure you are delivering enough information to your reader so that the reader can clearly see the character and understand the character's motives.
  8. Write a scene of about five hundred words in which a character does something while alone in a setting that is extremely significant to that character. Have the character doing something (dishes, laundry, filing taxes, playing a computer game, building a bird house) and make sure that YOU are aware that the character has a problem or issue to work out, but do NOT tell your reader what that is.