Pat Boone and Joyce

Music...
It was about the only thing I could come up with.
Who would ever pay attention to a short, chubby boy with glasses, thick glasses...with absolutely no athletic ability...and very little brain.
I wasn't stupid, but nobody knew that...not even me.
What I was, at the time, was amazingly awkward and unconditionally sloppy, and I wanted someone to think that there was more. I wanted that badly.
Music seemed to offer hope.
In the musicals I watched and loved, there was a moment when everything would suddenly fall into place for a musician or singer....a person who had formerly been a hopeless nobody....and then all of a sudden......
BANG! Life would be suddenly good for a gifted nobody....
Hold on to something....ok? I wanted to be Pat Boone...."Love Letters in the Sand"..."April Love"....
Pat Boone!
The man was everything I wanted to be....cool, neat, suave, witty.... And it seemed that he had to fight the girls off with a stick.... The nice T-Bird he drove in one of his movies certainly didn't hurt.
In my pre-teen years there was a lot of distance between what I was and Pat Boone.
But to get the ball rolling, I began to practice his songs....over and over again. I even practiced whistling the bridge just like he did on "Love Letters in the Sand".
I was also drawn to Little Richard and Buddy Holly.... But Pat Boone was my main focus.
At the time, upper elementary, I stalked Joyce Stein.... Joyce was perfect....
I would watch her come into class on cold mornings...watch as she took off her coat...
It was like seeing a Christmas present opening itself up....the ribbons in her long, red hair....the wool scarf....and amazing dresses and jumpers....
On warmer days, she would wear a sweater over her shoulders, and it never slipped off. It magically stayed perfectly placed all day.
How did that happen? Did girls like Joyce take lessons in being perfect?
Somebody, probably her mother, put a lot of time into Joyce. There was a grace and elegance about this kid that I was not ready to deal with.
And she was smart! Joyce and my friend, Bubba, were always in competition with one another over grades.
I wasn't.... I was lucky if Mrs. Keith even handled my messy work.
At home, I would perform for my mother, and anyone else who would listen....seriously perform. And I would get my feelings hurt if I even got a hint that they were holding back a laugh. I wanted them to be as serious as I was about this thing.
Something big could come of this....like I might get on the Amateur Hour...or Lawrence Welk...
Who knew? Joyce Stein might notice me...smile at me...give some sign that she knew I was alive.
After school, I would walk down Boudreaux Street....casually following Joyce....singing....
"April love is for the very young. Every star's a wishing star that shines for you....".
Or...
"On a day like today, we passed the time away, writing love letters in the sand....".
Up to Magazine Street, doing my best Pat Boone....and she never turned around....not once....
I found out that she attended the Valance Street Baptist Church on Magazine, and I tried to imagine what she looked like on Sunday morning....
I did get to hold her hand once in fifth grade... They brought us down to the basement of the school to do square dancing.
Boys and girls alike made faces and gruesome sounds signaling how this was a fate worse than death.
Actually, I think we were very excited....
I remember Mrs. Keith trying to get us calmed down and civilized...and I remember Joyce in a wonderful green plaid dress.
As we began to dance,it shocked me how cold Joyce's hands were.
Joyce Stein was supposed to have warm hands...and she was supposed to smile warmly....and that didn't happen either....and her blue eyes were cold....
This would have never happened to Pat Boone.
The music never left me, but I think I realized that my music would never warm Joyce up.
And all I wanted was a smile....but that, I guess, was a lot to ask from a preteen girl who officially hated boys....especially boys who were a hopeless mess like me.
There was other music that would enter my life....but it came later and harder.
Perfection is not all it's cracked up to be.....

Detectives in Togas

The very first book I "owned" was DETECTIVES IN TOGAS.
Fourth grade had been a very hard time for me. My parents were in the middle of one of their on-again, off-again things, and that meant changes of address and schools.
It was also a time when I was coming to terms with how I felt about Eugene, my father.
From TV, I had put together a vision of what I wanted my life to look like....ponies, big fluffy dogs, and long-term, secure everything.
It was a vision that I didn't want to let go of...but it was all on a slippery slope.
Eugene kept increasing the angle of descent on the downhill run, and I began to realize that there weren't going to be any ponies.
I got my hands on DETECTIVES IN TOGAS at Thomas Jefferson Elementary. I had already been to two schools that year, and here I was in Mrs. Keith's combined class of fourth and fifth graders.
Mrs. Keith was a short, very thin woman, and her brown hair was as short as she was.
That teacher was one tough woman!. She may have been the toughest woman I had ever run across.... She had to be strict to teach two different classes at once and not have the whole thing be a zoo....
She pushed us hard.
I loved that woman...a lot, and I was sure she loved me. She loved all of us....I'm sure of that.
Our class was like one big extended family, and Mrs. Keith, her husband, and her older son were all part of it. Many of us needed that, and we needed her stories about her son and her husband....and what they did together.
What was Mrs. Keith's was ours for the taking...a life that we could be a part of.
Well, it was springtime and the school library was unloading a lot of books, and Mrs. Keith brought us to this storage room full of boxes. Everyone was allowed to take something that looked good.
Mine was DETECTIVES IN TOGAS, and I have absolutely no idea what drew me to it.
Rich kids in ancient Rome who attended a private school and were taught by a Greek slave...nothing like anything I had run across in the Irish Channel, for sure. Maybe the only thing I could identify with was this pack of boys ratted the streets of Rome the same as I ratted the streets in the Channel.
These little Romans were smart, curious, and brave...even solved a murder.
When school ended that year, I prayed that I would be back with Mrs. Keith for fifth grade. Over the summer I read DETECTIVES IN TOGAS over and over again....through my parent's screaming fights.... through the New Orleans heat....though a drawing back from Eugene....through a growing hate.
Over and over again... It was my connection to Mrs. Keith and the rest of my school family.
Miracles of miracles, my mother and I managed to stay near enough to Thomas Jefferson Elementary for me to be there with Mrs. Keith....again.
There were Bubba, Joyce, Johnny, Alice, Wayne, Peanut, Bruce, Alvin.... Long-term and secure.....
Mrs. Keith had taken a trip around the world with her son that summer, and on the first day of school, there were small presents for each of us....with our names on them.
One of the things I got was one of those Japanese ceramic spoons.
And there were stories and pictures of all that they had seen. (Seeing Mrs. Keith on a camel was a trip!) We were there, in each place, with her.
She was planning on us being back with her! She knew because we were her children....

Joseph, My Grandfather

I flashed on my mother bringing meat home from the Winn Dixie where she worked.
Mr. Harry would allow Mom to slip out with some fine cuts of beef that "weren't quite right"....or "on the verge".
She would open the packages in the sink and smell the darkened meat...sometimes smelling it more than once...and then out would come the salt.
Mom would put the meat under the tap to wet it, rub salt into the steaks or chops...sometimes repeating the process several times until it seemed cleansed and fit to eat.
Then would come the explanations of why the meat was ok...how rich people paid out good money for aged beef...how the general public didn't realize that the meat that was dark and old looking was really the best....how lucky we were.
Mom was like that.
I wondered how much of this she actually believed...or was it all a collection of the lies that the poor tell themselves to make it all ok...all acceptable...and palatable.
I don't know.
But I still have a styrofoam plaque of John 3:16 that we got from Top Value trading stamps. Mr. Harry also gave Mom rolls of these stamps. How all that went down, I don't know, but at least they didn't need to be rubbed down with salt.
The taste of glue is what I remember from filling book after book with the gold stamps....and the catalogue that spurred me on, all filled with dreams that could bought with those stamps. We never managed to get the really big stuff...just a lamp here, a set of Lilly glasses there....a coffee maker, a toaster.
The Top Value Redemption Center was the only place I heard the word redemption used outside of church. "Let the redeemed of the Lord say so....?
I was busy pasting stamps in our project apartment when we got the news that my grandfather, Joseph had died from his run-in with a big white Cadillac right off of North Broad. They had him hooked up for days on all sorts of machinery at Charity Hospital....but now that was over.
Joseph had paid for years for a burial policy that entitled him to a grand throw - down at the House of Boltman on Napoleon and St. Charles...complete with huge limos...a silver metal casket...and a plot at the Garden of Memories on Airline Highway.
Quite a show!
When I saw him in the casket, I thought about meat. It wasn't Joseph with the wad of Brown Mule in his mouth...the Joseph with the penetrating black eyes and jet black hair he dyed...the Joseph who sang crazy songs and cursed bitterly at all he hated...the Joseph who drew moustaches on the only portrait that my grandmother ever had made because he loved to piss her off.
Joseph lived to piss people off....which is why he praised Hitler and Stalin loudly.
He paid for that funeral bash the same way we would lay aside trading stamps.
And I suppose they preserved him for much the same reasons that my mother would rub down the
partially spoiled meat with salt.... He wasn't completely bad, but a lot of people were convinced, from all appearances, that he was too rotten to save.
His wife, my grandmother, thought so. When she was in the last stages of a hideous battle with intestinal and stomach cancer, she made the family promise not to bury her near him.
Like the meat from Winn Dixie, Mom explained away Joseph's life.... even the parts that had destroyed her childhood and her first marriage. He was ok....
Emma knew better.