By Scott Sullivan
Editor
Forms
Asked ethnicity, skin color, cultural/sexual identity … just check boxes the form provides. Conclude each one excludes others.
Am I:
• Irish, English, French, German … (God knows what my dad, with more research, might have dug up)?
• Caucasian (originally Armenian, Azerbaijani, Georgian or South Russian from the Caucasus Mountains region between the Caspian and Black seas)?
• White? (Moles, scars, sun exposure, wrinkles, rashes … blot out hopes of purity.) Therefore a person who has no color?
Teachers set up multiple-choice tests to see if students had paid attention. All, some or none of the above were often options.
Who are you?
a) None of the above.
b) Some.
c) All.
d) Nothing was above.
Who grifts data on forms we fill out? If you’re this, you’re not that. Simplify, segregate. Come-ons follow. There’s money to make on measurables. Never mind they don’t have a clue.
Born 3-6-55? Pisces, Baby Boomer … We can work this. Each human has nuances, variables, contradictions … but target them en masse data’s on your side.
Life is lonely; find a good sparring partner or you’re toast. I work out at the Grandville Y daily. Standing naked with other old men on tiles outside lockers we work out jokes about aches, pains, wrinkles, wife woes mounting while not going gentle into receding night.
“Three surgeries in five months because I did stupid things,” I grouse.
“See these scars?” says a guy near me. “Three double bypasses.”
“Hanging on long as I can. Cancer,” says another.
“Forever?”
Locker doors slam. Back out into snow. Steam rises from showered heads of those going inside out.
I get use of demographics like an ailment. So many bodies and souls blend sparks like sunset light diamonds dance on water.
Proteus — Poseidon’s son to the ancient Greeks, seal flock shepherd, Old Man of the Sea — could shift shapes to avoid sharing secrets. Held down and bound while taking his noonday nap, he would spill about past, present, future so he could merge again into water.
Some mistake him for Morpheus, god of dreams. German pharmacist Friedrich Setürner, who first found and isolated the natural opiate from poppies circa 1803-1805, named morphine for the deity. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses he is one of sleep’s 1,000 sons.
Functions
Don’t dither, choose. Buy a premise, the rest fits in place until at least one part doesn’t. Invest in conclusions still incomplete.
Whatever you do, do it. Examine vapor’s content, wave as waves go by.
Learning
Spring Term Grade 3 I was bused to the old school, Morton, near West Lafayette’s southside downtown blending with the Purdue campus. There, we could walk to the city library, being updated with more front glass, blonder bricks, back-lot depth, between student-shared rental homes, with no tether to free minds.
Morton, like my first Lansing school, had high ceilings, red bricks and worn-wood acoustics. Principal Carmen Fabian gathered us in the gym, held thumbs up and recited “Responsibility!”
Grade 4 on to Cumberland Elementary, the new northside school my brothers and I could walk to. “Hello Cumberland” we were taught to sing to the tune of then-popular musical “Hello, Dolly.” for our spring parents’ concert. West lay sports fields, playgrounds, tennis courts; east a mini-observatory. Walking to now my seventh school meant exploring earth changing daily as holes and homes pushed back butterfly- and grasshopper-catching wildflower meadows.
Mom bribed me with Raw Jello powder I could spoon from a plastic coffee cup if I’d sit through “As the World Turns,” her daily soap I made fun of. This meant with commercials 30 minutes. “Guiding Light” came after, but my tongue tingled Orange too much by then.
Alan Bobar got me into basketball. He was small and Jewish, I was bigger. While others played kickball. we shot baskets on netless west playground rims.
My three younger brothers and I put on shows in which we played dogs to parody or counter the cartoon “Top Cat.” I was made-up Frisky who scored all the points; Shawn was Cindy, our springer spaniel’s name, who got all the rebounds; Brother 3 Steve was puppy Wags; Stuart too little still.
In sixth grade another classmate and I conspired to drop an octave singing for our captive parents in folding chairs on gym tiles. The point was catch our music teacher by surprise.
Dad’s best bet was to disrupt Mom’s harmony. He learned banjo from George Stavis, a tall, bearded hippy from the campus region, she played guitar, me gut bucket: a stand-up bass-like contraption based on an upside-down steel wash tub with cut-off rake handle rising and string attached. Tambourines, pound-on ukuleles and maracas for Shawn, Steve and Stuart.
Grandpa’s Crystal Lake cottage was loosely built. Sometimes Dad’s younger brother, Uncle Mike, would come play accordion. They’d send us to bed upstairs but a crack between slats let us spy on their kidless music making below.