Lately Things They Don’t Seem the Same

In the early 70s, I spent my Catholic grade school days avoiding family conflict. Much of it hinged on polyester dress slacks. St. John the Evangelist Grade School required us to wear proper pants, sport jackets, ties, and lace-up shoes. I owned (or rather my parents did) neckwear with giant polka dots and wide rep stripes. My blazers ran solid-colored for the most part, but I had a garish tan one blaring red and green box plaid. Scotch plaid would have been much too much.

In time, my male schoolmates sported leisure suits with mock-silk shirts displaying motifs of upside-down trees and right-side-up gazelles. Leisure suit designers couldn’t have intended for their haute couture to include a tie, but the school dress code mandated a cravat. Even as a young kid, I felt the look flattered no one—tie or no tie. I could have also been envious since it felt as if I’d fallen behind the times a little kid feels compelled to keep pace with. 

Recess brought our class to a narrow alleyway bordered by the red-brick school and gymnasium on one side, and the local four-story YMCA and some backyards on the other. Young enough that small spaces still accommodated us, we played games on the pavement during lunchtime—touch football, kickball, and wiffle ball.

In winter, we sought out long flat patches of smooth ice in that alley and anywhere we went. Wearing the right shoes had us gliding across the frozen water like figure skaters without an ounce of control. My fourth-grade school picture even featured a horrific haircut that may have passed for Dorothy Hamill’s if her stylist had been seated at the pub all day. We sprinted on bare spots in the macadam and leapt onto the ice from the edge of those paved runways.

If only I could travel that way, gliding on glass through time, through Rome, through Athens, through Dublin…man, what a crazy trip it would be. If only I could conquer everything as effortlessly as floating heel and sole and toe across ice. Smooth, weightless, unburdened—the inverse of my ongoing life struggles. 

The imitation leather, slick-bottomed shoes could be a blessing or a curse. They propelled me across ice but provided no traction during school-day wiffle ball games. A fall on a stretch of ice spared my school pants from being damaged most of the time. On the blacktop, I faced terrible odds.

If I tumbled chasing a pop fly, my britches ripped at the knee half the time. I’d been through frightening episodes to that point in life. None of them compared to the gut punch delivered by trashed dress pants. But it cut both ways. No high matched the relief felt when I did eat the pavement, and my knickers came away unscathed.

Mud or dirt washed off. Holes in the knee did not. I tried to hide the pants under my bed or stuff them beneath the built-in shoe shelf in my closet. I used safety pins and chewing gum to fold and secure the ragged edges inside the pant leg in feeble attempts to conceal the damage. Who was I kidding. If I had learned to do laundry as a nine-year-old, it might have spared me from suffering for another day or two. But only my mother washed clothes in our house, and she checked every stitch of those slacks before laundering them.

I’d done some dumb things early on in life. Precedents must be set. I fell from trees. I split my head open throwing a football to myself because I tripped over my own two feet. Someone squealed on me for crossing William Street solo because newsy people had no problem meddling in a little kid’s precarious business. After launching rocks at a neighbor’s house, I got caught red-handed when my dad found evidence next to our home in an alley connecting Broad and William Streets. Maybe I should have left a cannoli and taken the slingshot.

None of these other situations set my mother’s eyes ablaze like welding torches. Something about shredding the knee of those school trousers sent her into orbit. It felt as though I’d sinned against everyone and everything. 

“I’ll tan your hide,” she’d say.

“I got pushed.”

“I’d like to push you out the window. And I don’t mean maybe.”

To not mean maybe was a common way for my parents to add an exclamation point to their frustrations. 

It was a few years later that I learned how my mom, in part, viewed me in comparison to my older brother.

In my early teens, I walked to Cork Lane to help my grandmother clean out the attic. Twice a year, the process remained the same. I’d move stuff from the dusty suffocatingly dry sauna of an attic to the detached garage. It was the same stuff I’d moved from the garage to the attic six months before.

It was then as it is today: Lunch marks the high point of my workday, and I avoid manual labor whenever possible. This cleaning event repeated itself for years with my grandma before I came home one 88-degree July afternoon, covered in dirt, cobwebs, and sweat.

I bowed my head and slumped on the living room chair, a big kelp-green round-seated velvet piece with curved wings at the top and thick braided tassels encircling the bottom. At times such as these I wanted to sink and hide beneath its cushion like a forlorn wheat penny.

“What’s wrong,” my mom asked. “Did my mother yell at you?”

“She doesn’t ever yell at me, but if she makes me go up that attic one more time, I’m gonna jump out the window.”

“Boy, oh boy,” my mother chuckled. “That’s the difference between you and Ned. When he came home from cleaning up there, he said he wanted to push your grandmother out the attic window.”

“I heard you say you wanted to push me out a window once.”

“I was joking, Thom-ass. I was only joking.”

There was a lot of joking around inside St. John the Evangelist School. It housed maybe four-hundred students enrolled in first through twelfth grade. Although my brother Ned and I spent five school years in the same building, I can’t say I ever saw him. I think, each morning outside the school’s arched stone entryway, a bus met him and wheeled him off to St. Michael’s— a school for incorrigible boys. 

I’d hear stories about Ned, however. One high school cheerleader—I knew her from my days as the varsity basketball team’s student waterboy— pulled me aside and said, “Did you hear what your brother did today?”

Ned loved Jimi Hendrix. Three of his bedroom walls in teenage days displayed the guitarist’s posters—aqua-blue velvet blouses and psychedelic scarves and headbands in play as Jimi closed his eyes and coaxed ethereal and dissonant notes from a left-handed white Fender Stratocaster he named Izabella. 

A kindly old nun, Sister Alma of the Congregation of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, taught Ned in high school. He told me he adored her. I think she felt the same about him. She spared him from the principal’s office when he arrived late for class almost every morning. He refrained from playing pranks on her that other teachers perhaps weren’t able to evade. But he couldn’t resist a little innocent fun with Sister Alma now and then. Ned’s female classmate related how my brother raised his hand in class that day and said, “Sister, ‘scuse me while I kiss the sky.” 

“Okay, Ned,” Sister Alma responded. “But don’t take too long.”

There were always more hijinks that extended beyond the school grounds. It seemed he was always in trouble. Ned and his ever-present sidekick from across Broad Street allegedly rolled a piano out of a third-story opening onto lower William Street one evening. The cops had their suspicions but looked in all the wrong places. After the incident, my brother and his friends drank beer (Genessee) and smoked cigs (Kools) and weed (parts unknown) in the basement of city hall, one floor beneath the Pittston police station.

“You’re full of shit,” I said after Ned told me about the hideout.

“Nope. It’s the last place they’d look for me.”

Well…he’s not really hard to find now. If you just know where to look.