Vigilance Day

I have three questions, maybe four.

Whenever there was a holiday in the Frank Chavoor family one thing was certain. We'd spend the day at the beach? Never. We'd picnic at Griffith Park? A few times. Church picnic? On Memorial Day. But the one constant was that Dad, around 10 in the morning after he shaved and doused himself liberally with Old Spice, would go to the bookcase and pull out the appropriate encyclopedia and begin reading aloud about the holiday we were celebrating.

He'd stand in the middle of the den holding up the text like it was the Good Book and he was commencing to preach the word. He'd read the introductory paragraph and then stop and shout, "Come listen to this! Learn about the holiday you're celebrating!" And Mom would sent me from my bowl of Sugar Pops into the den where I would sit on the couch and be Dad's one boy audience.He'd read the entire article, read each word and paragraph as if each part of it were of equal importance and any part not properly read or not read at all would mean that I would have no chance of truly understanding and appreciating the given holiday. Sometimes he would read a phrase twice, adding my name at the end of the phrase in hopes of acquiring some buy-in. I suppose that's how I started bringing one page articles to class just before holidays for my classes over the years. Just last week I brought them an article about Labor Day, and I had them write a response in their journals.

One day they'll make 911 a holiday, I suppose. Labor Day being so close will be problematic but they'll do something to fix that, maybe like move Labor Day to the end of the month. Then there's the problem of what to call it. It could be called Freedom Day or Firefighters' Day or Vigilance Day. I don't suppose you could call it Freedom Day; 3,000 people dying is not readily associated with freedom. And the firefighters were surely heroic but naming the day after them may not encompass the broad sweep of what marked our collective souls that day. That leaves us with Vigilance Day which may not fly because it suggests that we may not have been as vigilant as we should have been and the point of the holiday would be to pledge to be more vigilant in the future which wouldn't be untrue. It was one of the biggest meltdowns of both preparedness and response in our history.

But we don't want to be painfully truthful about it; we want something about the day but vague enough to not think about it too deeply. Something solemn but not morbid and something with overarching patriotism to it. There will be flags, half mast, everywhere, and "Never Forget" signs in windows and on lawns.It won't be a picnic day. The day off will be on Monday, which means there will be Vigilance Day sermons on Sunday, just as there are Memorial Day and Independence Day sermons. Interestingly enough, not every American holiday merits a sermon on the day before. You won't hear for instance, a President's Day or Labor Day or King Day sermon, at least not in the churches I have attended in my life.But it will be a day to pray and reflect. What though-- after the memorial is built where the twin towers once stood-- will be prayed for and what will be reflected upon? The TV news will start at the memorial and the camera will show us people who gathered there to put flowers and light candles and hold signs and there will be 5 second clips of speeches by survivors and friends or relatives of victims and the mayor of New York. Then some shots of people in church in ornate New York City churches. And there will be public service announcements with the American flag waving in slow motion superimposed over the 911 memorial while taps plays and James Earl Jones does the voice over, something simple, short and moving.

Will people go on weekend getaways on Vigilance Day? Will they attend patriotic gatherings and listen to impassioned speeches? Will it evolve into something else? Will it become a celebration of the overthrow and death of Saddam Hussein? Will people burn effigies of him like they burn effigies of Guy Fawkes in England, even though Saddam is the wrong guy from the wrong country? Holidays have slowly departed from its original purpose. Mother's Day was originally meant to be a protest of Mothers against war. So Vigilance Day will morph into something other than what it should be; it's inevitable, I guess. The words "freedom," "courage," "sacrifice," "honor" and a host of others will tossed around like so many walnuts and raisins in a fancy salad.

We have not yet examined the hard questions, not collectively anyway, and anyone who does get dropped into the societal waste bin called "conspiracy nut." I don't consider myself a nut, not unless the word "music" is in front of that word, and even then it's not a word I'm entirely comfortable with. And I don't think there's a conspiracy behind every unanswered question but neither do I avoid pondering a question just because it might be one that might suggest a possible conspiracy. So here are my questions.

Why didn't NORAD scramble?

Do buildings really just completely collapse like that?

Why did the Bin Laden family members in the United States get a free pass, flown out of the country without even being interviewed on September 13?

And finally, President Bush. I'm not angry at him. I wonder about him though quite a lot. I think he was just a pawn, a rube. I think that he was the elitist that people thought they saw in his opponent for the office of president of the United States, although it sounds weird to think of him or anyone as both a rube and an elitist. Anyway, I didn't want to drag him into this because he might steal all the attention but my question is this:

How could he have ignored the briefings, Intel "chatter," reports, advisors on over 40 different occasions-- including several that were very specific-- about terrorist threats on our country?

Those are my four questions. And until they are answered or at least examined seriously, I don't see any point in getting sentimental or otherwise making 911 into some gaudy show or excuse for amping up God and patriotism which really aren't, shouldn't be, and can't be compatible in the first place.

Confronting Rocky

December 1999

The dog jumping the fence dream came from a memory before my official memory begins. Wait, that's not true either. I have always claimed that I remember my crib and a press board train that fit on the rail of the crib. This was later. This was pre-kindergarten and Mom had taken me on the bus to somewhere and we were walking together. Mom was dressed up and was wearing a hat. I was so happy and proud and excited to be with her. We had been on the bus and had lunch and we were headed back. We were on a residential street. There was shade and morning sun coming through the shade and it was peacefully quiet. I had a joy and contentedness that was just I don't know, hasn't been matched since. I was looking at the houses as we walked down the tree-lined street. I saw the dog-- it was a big black dog, maybe a short hair lab-- and got a little skittish but I saw that he was behind a chain link gate. The dog started to bark and Mom took my hand and said, "It's ok," using her dismissive, sing-song voice. The dog was jumping straight up and barking hysterically. I was trying to get to the next house. I didn't want to see the dog but I was already turning my head to watch him. That's the part that I believe is real. I say I believe because I dreamed the whole thing over and over for a long time after the incident. In the dream the dog clears the fence and charges us. All of it done in complete silence. Then Mom moves away. She doesn't walk or run and she doesn't speak but it's like she is suddenly repositioned and suddenly, inexplicably across the street and half way up the block. I would wake up just as the dog leaped at me.The dream went away after awhile but the memory of the dream never did. It made sense then that I grew up afraid of any dog that barked, jumped, ran and was larger than a loaf of bread.

At first I wouldn't tell anyone, not even when Jeff Ward down the street got a Weimaraner and the back yard smelled of dead grass, sun baked cinder blocks,dog piss and dog shit and the dog, I think his name was George, would jump up and put his paws on my shoulders. I wouldn't tell Jeff how scared I was. But by the time I got to high school I made it in to a running gag. That way it could serve dual purposes: it was humorously ironic that a "big" and "tough" football player was afraid of dogs, and I generally liked playing against the stereotypical jock anyway; and it could notify owners to keep their dog at bay.

One October night when I was 19 or so I was trying to find a house where there was a Halloween party going on. I can't remember if it was an official sanctioned church party or a party given by friends from church. I think the hosts were the Albarians, but I could be wrong.In either case it was a house I had never been to and neither had Robert, my good friend. We were somewhere west of Van Nuys Boulevard, maybe it was Canoga Park, and we were on the right street but we didn't have the address. There were a lot of cars--some of the were familiar looking-- and we had narrowed it down to two houses. They were both dark but we figured maybe that was for effect. There was music but it was hard to determine where it was coming from; it was muted and sounded as though it was hovering over our heads. The house directly in front of where we stood had a chain link fence around it; the house to our right had none.
"Would an Armenian put an ugly cyclone chain link fence around his front yard?" I asked incredulously.
"I think this is it though," Robert said.
"You sure?"
"No, but I got a 50-50 chance."

That's when the dog came blasting out of nowhere, a stupid looking, mangy tan and white little sheep dog with the comically short legs. He was barking manically, savagely like we were resident puppy killers. I jerked and jolted as if Old Scratch himself has crept up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder and singed the skin with the touch of his white hot sulfurous hand.
"Whoa! Easy there, Jack."
"I don't like dogs.
"No kidding."
"I used to have bad dreams when I was little about a big dog hopping a fence."
"This dog's no threat. No chance he's getting over the fence."
"Yeah? You don't know."
"Look, you want the dog to shut up you have be the alpha dog."
"The what?"
"Hey, dog! Quiet! Down boy!"
"Way to go, Robes. He's ten times crazier."
"Wait a minute now, if this is the Albarians, then the dog speaks Armenian."
" Ha-ha. Yeah, maybe."
"Seriously. Watch this. Shoon! Soos!"
"It's not working. Maybe you have to know his name."
"Everybody calls their dog shoon."
"We name our dogs Dog?"
"Of course! We're a very practical people."

But the dog was more hysterical than ever. He was trying to push his face through the bottom of the fence, all the while snarling, barking and making other guttural sounds.
"Come on Robes, let's get out of here. I don't like dogs. I told you, man."
"A tough guy like you?"
"Right now I'm all flight and no fight. I'm very practical."
"This is the place. Come on, tell that dog to shut up in Armenian. Confront your fears and prove that we're at the right place."
"Soos shoon, soos!"
We were barking out our commands when the owner of the dog came out, asking us in a manner rather rude if there was someway he could help us. Much to our ok make that much to my mortification, the man wasn't Armenian. He was highly annoyed though.
"Oh yeah," Robert said nonchalantly, "we're looking for the Albarian residence."
The man pointed to his left, then told his dog, Topper, to shut up and go inside, which the dog did immediately. I don't remember much about the party except that I was still rattled by Topper for a long time.

That's how it was. I hated people who said of their barking dog, "Just ignore him," or "He hasn't bitten anyone. Not yet, anyway!" When my oldest was five and began begging and bartering for a dog, I eventually gave in. I got the wrong dog though and he grew to be the size of Marmaduke. When he ran away for the fifth time, Grace and I said to each other, "Run Sherlock, run." But owning a dog was different than encountering one. We did better with a smaller dog and currently have two of them. Nevertheless, I still am nervous and jumpy around big, barking dogs behind fences. There is a huge German Shepherd around the corner from us; we haven't walked our dogs for years. Sometimes though one has to, as Robert said so many years ago, confront the object of fear, be the master of it. I was perfectly content at being better safe than sorry until the day I had to face down my worst fear.

We were delivering Christmas presents to kids whose mom or dad was in prison. The present was addressed from the imprisoned parent and was purchased by benefactors from churches that participated in the program. The parents described the gift so there would be no guess work or some vague, generalized, one size fits all gift.It was really a great idea and despite what happened, it still is. I thought that the delivery of the gifts would be a great activity for the youth group of the church; the ideal lesson having to do with the verse where Jesus says, "Whatever you do for the least of these, you have done it for me." It seems that if there is no outreach program the church is only a social outlet. But our church had several good things going on: we gave food out in November;we gave heavy jackets away in the winter;we participated in Cropwalk, which raised money for local foodbanks; we offered tutoring for the neighborhood elementary school kids. It was mostly planned and executed by the adults in the church;the kids typically played broom hockey and ate pizza. And so this time the kids were invited to participate. Grace and I had five or six presents to deliver. Our daughter, Kelsey, 10 at the time, was with us. We loaded up the Dodge Caravan and rolled through some pretty rough neighborhoods. For the most part we treated graciously. On a couple of occasions the participants were the parents or grandparents of some of my students. The look on the faces of the young children when we announced that their father was thinking of them at Christmas was the richest kind of blessing I have ever experienced. I was very happy that Kelsey was with us.

We were on our last or second to last stop, somewhere around Belmont and Maple. It was a small house on a block of small houses in varying degrees of disrepair. There was a cyclone chain link fence around the front and broken toys and car parts strewn about. The house had a front porch and the front door was ajar.

"Well, this must be the place," I said to Grace, "looks like they left the door open for us." I put my hand on the latch but Grace stopped me.

"Wait, there's a dog."

"Where?"

"Right over there."

The dog began growling as if on cue. It was a white pitbull, quite muscular, replete with studded collar.

"He's on the side yard isn't he?"

"Hello?" Grace called out, "We're here to deliver the presents? I called this morning?"

"Yes," an unseen man's voice replied from inside the house, "come on in."

"Could you please secure your dog?"

"He's on the side yard. He can't get to the front and the back door is closed."

So I opened the gate. We were about halfway to the front porch when the dog just materialized. and stood before us, ok, not exactly before us but a little to my left. We all slowed our pace but as I found out later, Kelsey never saw the dog. I immediately began thinking of strategies. I remembered from elementary school it was widely held that kicking a dog directly on his lower jaw would knock him out. But by way of twisted selected breeding a pitbull's face is mashed in and there wasn't much of a jaw to kick, and odds were I wouldn't hit the target even if it were the size of a hatbox and this wasn't the time to revert to or rely on schoolyard mythology. The dog was quicker, stronger and far more ferral than I could ever hope to be. There was only one strategy that I could think of: I would have to make sure the dog attacked me so at least my wife and child could escape. I had to assume that the owner had a shovel or a crowbar or a pistol to eventually separate me from the dog, but by God, I was going to protect my family. I locked eyes with the dog. I couldn't remember if it was something you were supposed to do or never do, like the moment of a car accident do you turn into it, out of it, brake, pump the brakes? Who knows? Anyway, I decided to stare the damn dog down. Let him know it was between me and him. And the dog watched me all the way to the front porch, slowly leaning his head forward. The dog was bracing himself when the owner, a shoeless man in sweatpants, a Raiders shirt, a goatee and Ray-bans,came to the door and called out, "Rocky, no," and Rocky suddenly relaxed and trotted off to the backyard.

We delivered the presents, more than a little annoyed that the man's inattentiveness created our brush with catastrophe. He insisted the side gate was closed but offered no explanation as to how Rocky might have made it to the front yard. I'm thinking that in dream like fashion, Rocky silently hopped it.

Marathon Boy

My face was beet red, sweat was trickling into places it had never been before, the smog was squeezing me like a python...

April 1966

I was fast. I mean one of the fastest kids in the school. Every morning before school started we who contended for the title of fastest kid at Lincoln Elementary would gather at one end of the playground and sprint the width—maybe 60 yards—crashing into the chain link fence, the order of the clanking sound designating the winner as well as the runners-up. I was almost always third, and that’s fast; there were a lot of us lining up for race after race, each of us trying to beat Donnie, the fastest, smallest kid I’ve ever seen. Didn’t matter if you raced him in the first race, figuring he wasn’t warmed up yet, or in the sixth race, when you figured he was tired. There just wasn’t any difference: the boy took off and left everyone in his tailwind.
But that was in the 2nd and 3rd grade. In the 4th grade though, a kid named Jay Johnson arrived and made Donnie turn invisible. Jay looked like he was 16, which to our 10-year-old eyes was a full-grown adult. He could hit a softball not just out of right field, but all the way to the fence that separated the school from a nursery school, which was two baseball fields away, and the ball would hit that chain link fence with force. He was strong, quick, very fast and dominated every game that was played in elementary school. I’m telling you Donnie just disappeared. Ok, he moved. But maybe it was because he was no longer idolized.
When we were in the 6th grade, Mrs. Jones proposed a marathon race. We had no idea what that was but we were up for it. It turned out that a marathon race started when a Greek guy 500 years before the birth of Christ ran from one city to another to say they had won a war. For us though, it was a long race around the perimeter of the school, then two jogs around the log cabin that housed the sport equipment and finally a hundred yards in a straight line to the finish line. By the 6th grade though I was no longer fast; my legs and arms suddenly began having a life of their own, flapping this way and that clumsily for every movement as if all four limbs were having a serious argument. That wasn’t going to stop me of course. It was irrefutable that Jay would win the race; the drama was in how the rest of us would do. I intuitively knew that I would not do well. Pain and I never got along well, and I was perfectly willing to cease any activity that was causing it. Not that the pain in your chest, lungs, and legs was the worst pain around but to me there wasn’t much point in putting up with it for a contest where there was no score to it. Still though I was going to do it and I looked forward to it.
“On your mark, get set, go!” Mrs. Jones had a smile in her voice and was wearing sunglasses. Jay Johnson broke out from the pack immediately, put a 15 yard lead on us and then set it to cruise control. I was quickly conceding to the slightest pain, but the race had pecking order implications, to which I was sensitive. One’s standing in the race was a direct correlation to one’s social standing. No way was I going to finish side by side with the outcasts of our tribe, Gene, who was a source of continual annoyance, and Mooney, a kid who was skittish and nervous but quiet who had a way of making the rest of us nervous. Behind them would be Billy Welsh, who would walk the whole thing. I had to be in the middle of the pack or face the consequence of falling down a peg.
I was somewhere in the back half of the middle when we hit our first turn. I stayed by the fence as Mrs. Jones had described it to us, but almost everyone else cut the corner. I was in mortal danger now of being caught by the laggers. I felt ashamed to do it but I cut the next corner with everyone else. We could hear Mrs. Jones calling out to us to knock it off. We were getting tired as we headed toward the log cabin. Asthmatic kids were wheezing and dropping out. Kids who assumed they would do well were barely jogging, then walking, then barely jogging again. Jay Johnson appeared to feel sorry for us as he took it down a notch. We were now close enough to hear his US Keds slapping the asphalt.
The idea of circling the log cabin twice after running such an unprecedented lengthy amount of time made me wonder if this was the cause of that smile in Mrs. Jones’ voice. I began to hate the Greek guy who got all this started. If Mrs. Jones wanted us to learn about it what could be better than reading it out of a book? My face was beet red, sweat was trickling into places it had never been before, the smog was squeezing me like a python, and I was still behind a dozen of my peers. This was basketball ball without the ball, hoop or any apparent reason. I was hoping for a twisted ankle so that I could have a reason to stop running, but ultimately I figured I was close enough to the end to finish the race.
As we completed the first lap around the cabin, something odd happened. Jay Johnson peeled off and headed down the stretch. He had either forgotten to go around twice or thought he had already done so or he was cheating, although he never had any need to cheat. And that’s when every other kid that came behind him did exactly the same thing. Now I’m not saying I’m a directions nerd but I was determined to run the race as instructed. This meant that every single kid got ahead of me. Well, except for Gene and Mooney, but even they nearly caught me. Billy Welsh had stopped walking some time ago and was pretending to mop the sweat off his brow while sitting with the girls.
After crossing the finish line we gathered around Mrs. Jones. We were gasping and bent over with our hand on our knees, except for Jay who stood grinning, with his arms akimbo, waiting to be praised.
“And the winner is,” she grinned, “no one! You are all disqualified!”
The uproar that followed was so intense and loud that she had to blow her yard whistle to restore order.
“I said twice around the log cabin, and none of you did it!” Jay Johnson took his hands off his hips and put his head down. We were all quiet. It took a while but a thought came to the surface and I spoke out before I could examine it thoroughly.
“Mrs. Jones, I went around it twice,” I said matter of factly.
“Yeah, sure. Very clever of you,” she remarked in an unteacherly voice.
“I did it.”
“Uh-huh,” she murmured, turning away from me. “All right! Let’s get back to class, come on.”
“I did. I went around twice, no one else did. They’re all disqualified, and I’m not, so I won the race.”
She stopped and turned to look at me, lowering her glasses for a moment, then turned away again walking off without comment. I felt that she knew I was telling the truth but she just wasn’t going to hand the title of marathon winner to anyone who won merely on a technicality. I wasn’t mad or sad. I wasn’t happy either. I just knew that I won it and I would always know it and believe it, even if no one acknowledged it.

The Kool-Aid Stand

“Two friends, two buddies, a couple of neighborhood kids, on a sunny day selling Kool-Aid; what could be more American than that?”

July 1965


I hadn’t seen all 47 years of Norman Rockwell’s Saturday Evening Post covers but I had a hunch the one scene of Americana I had in mind was one he must have done. Well, the Net is a wonderful thing; I just this moment discovered that it does indeed exist. A matter of fact, there are two that I was able to find. One is confusing though. It shows a boy selling lemonade to a girl but he is also selling apples. Apples? But the other one is classic: two boys selling lemonade. The hand drawn sign is there which must have served to convince a girl to part with her nickel. She drinks her lemonade while one boy hawks the product in search of the next customer and the other boy cleans the glass of what must have been a previous customer. The boys are wearing standard issue post-war, pre-Beatle attire --tee-shirts and jeans with rolled up cuffs.
That was Doug, my buddy and best friend who lived next door, and I. For a long time I couldn’t figure out why some people called him a “lonely child.” Later I found out the expression was “only child,” and so after that I start thinking of him as a brother.
There was certainly nothing lonely about him; he was like a ring leader for a circus, waving his arms and announcing events in our lives. I liked playing side-kick to him even though I was 2 ½ years older. I was 11, and Doug was not far from 9.
“You know what we haven’t done yet?”
“No.”
“We haven’t sold Kool-Aid from a stand for five cents!”
“Yeah, that’s sounds good.”
“Good? It’s great! Two friends, two buddies, couple of neighborhood kids, on a sunny day selling Kool-Aid; what could be more American than that?” He should have become a promoter.
“Yeah, that’s great. You mean like today?”
“Of course like today. Look at that sky, perfectly blue. Think about the temperature, hot but not too hot.”
“Ok. Shouldn’t we be selling lemonade though? You know, like the All-American kids?”
“Too complicated. Too messy.”
“Oh, yeah. We want something that’s easy to make.”
“You forget, we’re two guys. We’ll get our mom’s to make it.”
“You sure they’re gonna do that?”
“Oh course! They’ll think it’s so cute, they make it.”
We went to his mom first. She was in the living room with the ironing board set up to face the TV. She would attack a pile of wrinkled clothes, taking long drags on her Salems while “As the World Turns” played out before her.
“So, you want Mom to do all the work and you guys make all the money. That it?”
“Pretty much, yeah,” Doug offered bravely, smiling gamely.
“It’s Kool-Aid. It’s not hard or anything,” I chipped in.
“Thanks very much, Jackie. I think I could manage,” she took a drag and looked at me from the corner of her eye.
I felt embarrassed and found somewhere else to look. I stared at the painting of the flowers that hung on the wall. I remembered that Doug had once told me that without his glasses he could not see the petals of the flower clearly. No one was speaking. Had I annoyed her? I had never seen her cook anything, and Doug told me that she probably couldn’t boil water even if she wanted to. I envied that family; there were always going out to McDonald’s or Doug’s dad would make peanut butter and butter sandwiches.
“And what about Frances, Jackie? What’s she contributing to this business? She’s not leaving it all to one mom is she?”
“No.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say; an incorrect answer could quash the deal. Doug came to the rescue.
“Oh she’s letting us use their card table.”
Mom was likewise in the living room but she was reclined on the couch, eating an apple and reading a book. She nodded approval of our request, took another bite of the apple and resumed reading.
We wrestled the card table out of the crowded hall closet, set it up in front of Doug’s house, and Doug set about making a sign. I had to convince him that spelling the k backwards was not going to get us more customers.
We had the sign, the table, the Tupperware pitcher, the Dixie cups, but we had no customers.
“I told you we should have spelled the K backwards.”
“That’s not it.”
“Ya-huh”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Well what is it then?”
“The cars are going too fast. By the time they see us, they are already half way to Buena Vista.”
Doug thought about it, puzzled for a moment. Then he pointed his finger in the air like a mad professor.
“We gotta be like those guys.”
“What guys? What are you talking about?”
“Those carnival guys on the outside of the tent. They yell and stuff.”
“I’m not yelling.”
“We’ll go broke.”
“We can’t go broke, we didn’t spend anything.”
“Ok wise guy, we won’t make any money.”
“You yell then. It’s a family trait. On your mom’s side.”
“KOOL-AID! GET YOU ICE COLD KOOL-AID RIGHT HERE!”
“Yep. That’s loud all right. Don’t see anybody though.”
“FIVE CENTS!! YOU CAN’T GET ANYTHING FOR FIVE CENTS ANYMORE, FOLKS! KOOL-AID, RIGHT HERE!”
“Wow. That was louder than Mike Buckley.” Mike could do a perfect Tarzan yell so loud that anyone could hear it two blocks away.
We were arguing about why I wouldn’t yell and whether it would do any good when we hear brakes screeching across the street. It was a new Mustang, the color of the blue sky Doug had been talking about that morning. The Mustang certainly held our attention but then two girls got out and waved cheerily at us. Doug waved back with one hand while poking me in the ribs with his elbow of the other. We were prepubescent but we weren’t going to let that stop us from dancing the dance.
“Pay dirt, buddy boy!” Doug said in the voice of a conspirator.
“You said it, brother.”
Here were Betty and Veronica the blonde and brunette best friends, right out of the comic book, looking bubbly and happy crossing the street headed our way. The only comparable feeling I had at that time was waiting for your turn on the Slip n Slide.
“Hi guys!” they spoke in tandem, smiling like they were on the cover of Teen Magazine.
“Hello!” I chirped, grinning like Stan Laurel. Then Doug’s arm came across my chest and he shoved me back.
“I’m Doug; he’s Jack,” he said in a voice that suggested he was a diamond while I was a lump of coal, “What can we do for you ladies?”
“They want Kool-aid, Einstein.” They giggled lightly. Then the blonde turned her attention to Doug.
“I’m Valerie, this is Vee.” Doug shook hands with them both, tipping his head sideways like it was something they did in King Arthur’s court.
“Oh Vee, that’s my brother’s girlfriend’s name. It’s really Veronica, but everyone calls her Vee.” I figured finding common ground would be a good thing.
“Does your brother go to Burroughs?” Vee seemed interested in finding out if she had a namesake at her high school.
“No, he’s old, he’s in college.” They giggled again. I filled the Dixie cups and Doug handed them out, but when they started to fish in their pocketbooks, Doug raised his hand.
“On the house,” he said nobly.
“How sweet,” Valerie said in a coquettish tone.
They stayed and chatted for a while, Doug gave them a second free round, and then they crossed the street, got back in the Mustang and took off. When the car was out of view I turned to my business partner.
“What the heck are you doing? Our only customers and you give the drinks away?”
“They’ll be back,” Doug said confidently, “the blonde likes me.”
“Likes you? Are you blind or crazy?” I said incredulously, “I had them both laughing at everything I said.”
“And who held Valerie’s hand?”
“That was a handshake, that doesn’t count.”
“Ok, tell you what I’m gonna do: You can have brunette; I’ll take the blonde.” He raised his eyebrows like Groucho Marx, I rolled my eyes. We weren’t rivals, but we loved the idea of playing at being rivals.
“No way man, no way. They like me better. Sorry, that’s how it goes sometimes.”
“You’ll see tomorrow when they come back.”
They did come back the next day, and they paid for their Kool-Aid this time. The day after that they gave us a dollar each and bought the whole pitcher. By that time we were like old friends, somehow. Doug was smart enough to set out four folding chairs that day. We talked and joked and Doug and I razzed each other. The fourth day though they didn’t show. We knew they wouldn’t ever come back. We sat in our folding chairs with the legs sinking into the grass. The ice was melting in the pitcher. Flecks of unidentifiable stuff floated in the Kool-Aid. We had made two dollars and ten cents and two friends who didn’t stick. We sat watching cars fly down Verdugo Ave. We had our arms on the other’s shoulders as was our custom when we were younger. Just before we put the stuff away Doug spoke.
“Heck of a week, eh Jack-boy?”
“Heck of a week, Doug-Doug.”

Pizza

I would have to convince them that I liked it, too.

May 1965

Chris Day had Beatle boots. His hair was long enough to hang over his right eye, and he knew that flipping his head back every once in a while would not just get the hair out of his eye but would make him look terminally cool doing it. He wore rings on his pinkie fingers like Ringo. He slouched and shrugged regularly; he even made his stammer sound cool. He had athletic skills but was not necessarily interested in sports. This was baffling to me but it added a bit of mystique to his coolness. And even though we were in the 5th grade and were way past the girls are icky stage we were generally clueless about the female state of mind especially in regards to how they decided whether they liked one of us or not.
But for Chris, they would gather around him, comb his hair, straighten his already straightened collar, slip notes to him and offer up their place in line wherever we were required to line up. That kind of effortless attention from the opposite sex annoyed some of my peers but to me it one more reason to nominate Chris to the coolness hall of fame. There was something about him—a wounded hero quality—that impressed me; I even would give him back rubs.
“You’re the b-best,” he would say, “you s-should do this for a living.”
“Ha-ha. Yeah, maybe.”
“You’d make a lot of m-money.”
“Yeah.”
“What’d you s-said you are? Y-you know, your nationality?”
“Armenian.”
“Yeah. Armenians are g-good massagers.”
“We dyed rugs, actually.”
“Yeah, but this is b-better than dying rugs.”
“Guess so.”
The rumor of his birthday party started on a Tuesday morning. It was going to be big, at night and there would be massive quantities of food. There would be games the older kids play; we had no idea what that was but we all knew we would be very willing participants. Then Friday during lunch the invitations began appearing. The card featured a race car and a checkered flag, and the party was to be held that night.
I could see Chris all over the playground, talking to one or two kids at a time, nodding his head and flicking his hair back. After lunch during arithmetic, Chris made several trips to the pencil sharpener so he could distribute more invitations. He passed me by three times. By 3 o’clock it was clear that everyone else was getting a checkered flag but me.
It was a long, slow four block walk home. I couldn’t figure it out. I wondered if I had said something that offended him. I wondered if his parents had set a limit and I was the limit plus one. I wondered if I wasn’t cool enough, but how could I have been less cool than every single kid in Miss Moore’s class? Didn’t Dale, Ross and I get an A++ on our report on whales?
On the last block before home I tried to rethink the situation. I tried to block out the hurt by being logical. It was his party and if he didn’t want me there then, well, I mean, that’s what he wanted. It was his birthday, and maybe me not being there was part of his birthday wish. It wouldn’t make sense to be there if he didn’t want me there and so it followed that my wanting to be there didn’t make sense.
I was still troubled though when I walked through the front door. I headed for the kitchen, found some molasses cookies and poured myself a glass of milk. A few minutes later Mom came home and tooted the horn, usually indicating that she had groceries. I helped bring them in and then while we put them away I debated whether or not to tell her about the day’s events. At first I didn’t want to tell her, then I did, then I didn’t. Sometimes she had a tendency to overreact and somehow blame herself or ask too many questions, or get on the phone and discuss it with her best friend Pearl Laws or another friend’s mother, Mrs. Gullian. Other times she would underplay it to diminish its power to hurt. “Oh well,” she would she say and shrug and then bite into an apple as if I hadn’t said anything terribly important. But there were also times when her words were full of wisdom and insight. I decided to take a chance.
“Hey Mom,” I said while we put the last of the groceries away.
“Hah.”
“Something kinda funny happened today,” I said as lightheartedly as I could.
“What’s that?”
“Well Chris Day was inviting everyone to his birthday party today.”
“Yeah?”
“He was giving out cards.”
“Cards?”
“Uh, invitations. And well, everyone in Miss Moore’s class got invited.”
“Wow.”
“Except me. I didn’t get a card,” I said in a high voice like it was an amusing mystery.
“What?”
“I-I wasn’t invited!” I tried to laugh but no sound came out.
“You weren’t invited?”
“No.” She looked at me for a while, and then her upper lip curled up to the top of her nose—a sign of deep cogitation—while she looked at the telephone.
“I’m gonna make some phone calls,” she said with much gravitas.
I grabbed three more cookies and went to the living room to watch Felix the Cat. I didn’t know who she was going to call; I knew she didn’t know Chris’ mom. When I wiped out the last of the cookies and a commercial came on I went back into the kitchen. Mom was on the phone, nodding her head.
“I can see how that could happen,” she said twisting the cord of the receiver until it was wrapped around her fist. “I’m glad, too. Oh, fine. Dah. Thank you.” She liberated her hand and gently put the receiver down.
“What happened?” I asked impatiently.
“You’re going to the party,” she replied in a cheery but resolute voice.
“What did you….”
“Never mind. Just be ready to go at seven. And change that shirt. Did you go to school in that?”
“Yeah. What’s wrong with it?”
“Just change it.”
“What about a present and stuff?”
“I’ve got a card. I’ll put five dollars in it.”
The card had flowers on it but I didn’t care. I felt funny being not invited and then being invited after Mom called but I couldn’t undo that. I was in; I stayed focused on that.
I arrived late and the front room of the house was packed with peers. For a moment I was afraid that they knew I wasn’t invited but the feeling evaporated as soon as I was greeted by my friends and heard the Beach Boys decrying the unfaithfulness of Wendy. The front room had wood paneling and a painting of cowboys on pinto horses looking over the range and another branding a steer and another sitting around a campfire. The lights were dim but you could still see the deep shine of the wood floor. I wanted to go say hi to Chris but he was encircled by the prettiest girls in our class and I didn’t want to disrupt the revelry. There were chips and dips and M&M’s. We stood and ate and yammered and were relieved and thrilled to be together away from the tedium and rigors of school. It was as if someone had unlocked shackles that we didn’t even know we had. We were free to laugh, be loud, act silly, be funny and clever without the presence of well-meaning teachers looking to keep us out of trouble and on task, and when Chris’ brother shouted over the frenzy of “You Really Got Me Now” that there would be no adults at the party, that feeling of exhilaration intensified.
I was pouring myself a coke—a rare treat for me because Dad had a ban on sodas—when Chris came over.
“I’m g-glad you came.”
“Me too.”
“What happened was I r-ran out of invitations.”
“Oh, that’s ok.”
“And my m-mom said I couldn’t have anymore than the number of cards.”
“Uh-huh.” It was hard to imagine Chris negotiating something, anything, with his mother.
“But when I got home she said it was all right.” He was twisting one of his pinkie rings.
“Yeah, that’s good.”
“So like, sorry.” His eyes blinked in rapid succession.
“It’s all right.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say and he flicked his hair and walked off.
I was talking to Barbara Neese when Chris’ brother returned in a Cowboy hat brandishing a pistol.
“Hey, kids!” he shouted. No one paid him any mind. “Hey, ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention, please?” He raised the pistol over his head and the last thing I thought was he’s not gonna shoot that in here, and then BLAM! There was the collective shriek followed by dead silence. I was shaking and my ears were ringing.
“My b-brother’s a little crazy,” Chris said breaking the silence.
“All right, now that I have your attention, listen up.” It was so quiet I could hear the needle skipping at the end of a record. “We’re going to have a great time. Are you having a good time?” We quickly answered in the affirmative, not wanting to make him resort to shooting his pistol again.
“We were having a g-good time, until about t-two minutes ago,” Chris said, only half kidding.
“Do y’all like pizza?” his brother continued. Everyone cheered. “Well, the pizza is on the way, and there’s gonna be plenty for everybody. We got eight pizzas!” Everyone went bonkers, except me. I was mortified; I was 11 years old and had never even seen a real pizza.
Dad had a no restaurant policy and Mom had four basic meals: chicken and pilaf; roast beef and pilaf; dolma sarma and pilaf; and then there was mashed potatoes, which was fine and meatloaf, which was inedible even if you drowned it in ketchup. As a result the Chavoor children had a limited palate, to say the least. I knew nothing of pizza except that it smelled funny, and I gained that tidbit of knowledge because Doug, my best friend who lived next door had pizza at least once a week. My only other exposure to pizza was the school’s version of it and that was a disfigured mess that made their brick of spaghetti look great.
The doorbell rang and the kids cheered again. Chris and his brother brought the pizza to a banquet table that had been set up in the living room. The funny smell filled the room and was making my stomach curl up in retreat. I began considering different strategies to get out of eating the stuff. Just ate? No, why would I have done that? I have the flu? Why would I come to the party? Allergic? That might work, unless someone who actually had allergies shouted out YOU DON’T HAVE ALLERGIES! I didn’t like being devious. The pizza was being offered in good faith; how were they supposed to know I was raised in a weird family that ate only four meals? It wasn’t their fault. The only fair thing to do was eat the pizza. I would have to convince them that I liked it, too.
We lined up and I gazed at the row of pizzas while my peers oooed and ahhed. “Pepperoni!” they shouted with delight. But when I looked, it didn’t seem to have the same appeal. Then there was another with what looked like very thin ham slices and pineapple. It must have been someone’s idea of a joke. Hot pineapple? Ultimately I picked one unadorned slice and another with bell peppers on it. I decided to start with the plain cheese and if I survived that, I would advance to bell pepper. I sat down on the couch, placed the plate on the coffee table, moving the copy of Guns and Ammo out of the way, and situated my glass of Coke so that I could grab it quickly if necessary. I took a bite. It was delicious. I ate heartily then moved on to the one with bell peppers and found that it was even better.
I had an epiphany: there are things you know you don’t like and then there are things you think you know you don’t like, and it was true that without trying there would be no chance of knowing which is which. And trying would lead to lead to more and more discoveries. I was sipping my coke like I was a captain of a luxurious yacht, looking out across the ocean when Chris came over.
“You want some more p-pizza?”
“Yeah!” The Byrds’ rendition of “Mr. Tambourine Man” floated over us.
“Pizza’s the b-best, huh?”
“Yep, it sure is, Chris.” A minute later we got up and got seconds. I went for the linguini and then the Canadian bacon.

A Cigar for Everyone

“…we’re both trying to solve the same problem, that’s all. Just in different ways.”

September 1964

Eventually, Jack Darakji’s face and his saliva soaked cigar became one entity. He was never without it. It could be unlit, smoldering or extinguished, but it was ever present, any time of day, any occasion. He was an energetic man; animated in speech and gesture, as if everything he said and did came with an exclamation point. His face though looked tired. His jet black hair greased up and combed straight back, his little mustache, white short sleeve shirt over a white t-shirt, black pants, his short but strong looking frame combined with his energetic nature and his tired, bittersweet countenance, made him look like an exiled Mediterranean dictator. He wore the same combination of clothes, as if he had decided that if he couldn’t wear his uniform, then he would at least dress as uniformly as possible. His clothes hung loose on him. Clothes to him seemed to be something that didn’t merit his conscious attention, they were merely functional. They were never dirty but they appeared to be well lived in and the smell of his trademark cigar permeated his clothes as well as his very being. His cigar fixation made it quite ironic that Dad—who was against smoking long before anyone admitted that it was poisonous—called him his friend. That irony, coupled with the fact that when Dad yelled at him, he yelled right back with relish and impunity, made Jack Darakji a source of fascination for me and my sister.
He was nice to us; we never realized that when he called us young lady and young man, it was because he didn’t know our names. He was a funny, entertaining character, a little bit off kilter. One day Shamera couldn’t resist asking a question that led a kind of dissertation on life and cigars.
“Mr. Darakji, how come you always smoke those cigars?”
“Well young lady, I’ll tell you. I like cigars. I’ve liked cigars since I was a young man. If I didn’t like cigars, well, I wouldn’t smoke them. You see?”
“But they kind of smell.” She wagged her hand manically in front of her face.
“They might smell bad to you, but to me cigars are wonderful. I think everyone should have a cigar. Every man. And women, too. Everybody! Even you and your brother here. Little babies in a baby carriage, they should have a cigar.”
The image of cigar smoke curling up from a baby carriage was tickling my brain. I couldn’t believe an adult would be so honest and wacky to say such a thing.
“That’s funny,” my sister said, no doubt amused by the same image.
“Nothing funny intended. Everyone should have their own cigar. See?” “But they’re bad for you,” I put in.
“Well, sonny, you’re the son of your dad, all right. You don’t have to smoke a cigar if you don’t want to, but for me, I like cigars, so then, I smoke them, that’s all. It’s like me and your dad. Frank is a fine man. Very intelligent, your father. I’ve known him since before you were born. Since before your brother, even. How is your brother, anyway?”
“Fine,” I answered.
“That’s good. Glad to hear that. He’s a good boy, just like you. Yes, I’ve known your dad going all the way back to Fresno as a matter of fact. And you know, we don’t always agree on everything. I’m sure you’ve heard us arguing over various things.”
“Yeah, that’s for sure,” Shamera said emphatically.
“Now you should know this: I don’t dislike your father and he doesn’t dislike me. When you hear us shouting and the like, well, that’s just like a, like a disagreement. But we both are trying to solve the same problem, that’s all. Just in different ways. Do you see that?”
“I guess,” I said, uncertain.
“You’ll get it a little better when you, when you are a little older. Grown ups just argue sometimes, that’s all. But me and your dad, well, most of it is about the Assyrian Hall, the club, the organization, you know, what’s the future of it and all, and he sees it one way and I see it some other way. And then maybe there’s someone else, maybe your dad’s cousin Lily, or Maljan and they all see it yet again another way. But every one of us wants the same thing, which in this case is to keep club going and keep it strong. Ok? So that there is something there for you, something you can be proud of and you can say this is who I am and meet with people of your own kind. See what I mean? Thirty-eight years, I been a member.” I was studying the cigar carefully to make sure no ashes would fall off; he had been waving it like a baton. Shamera, in the meantime, had been sneaking glances at me because the “Thirty-eight years” line was his signature comment whenever he got wound up, so much so that Glenn, our cousin, included it whenever he did his spot-on Jack Darakji imitation.
“That’s a long time,” my sister said in mock reverence.
“How’s that again, Miss? Lost some hearing in the war. A bomb went off very close to where I was.”
“I said that’s a pretty long time, 38 years,” she nearly shouted.
“It sounds like it, young lady, and I guess it is. But those of us who are your father or your mother’s age, well, I don’t know how all those years got by or came and went or what have you. That’s why everyone should know what they like and want and they should do that because well, even though you aren’t thinking about it right at this moment, and you shouldn’t be thinking about it, we’re all going to be dead at some point or another, you see? So while you’re alive, you should do the things that you like, the things that make you happy or feel good or satisfied as often as you can because you don’t want to get to the end and say to yourself, goddamniit—oh, sorry, young lady—so, I mean you don’t want say to yourself I should have smoked some cigars while I had the chance. A cigar for everyone, that’s what I say. The whole world should have a cigar. Ok? You get it?”
“Yeah, I think so,” I said.
“Ok, good. Very good.”
“They still smell bad, though,” Shamera said.
But Jack Darakji puffed on his cigar, making it glow. He didn’t answer my sister; he was a man who had made his peace with a troubled world.

Goldie the Space Cat

Goldie looked down at the ground, shifting her massive head slightly as if it took too much energy to protest.

July 1963

The United States of America was the greatest country in the world for most of 1963. There were no wars that we knew about; neither was their any racism or sexism that we knew about. We didn’t even know those words. Everyone seemed to really like the president. No one was angry; the United States of America was like one gigantic suburb, and all you had to do was turn on the TV to see it. No one my age knew about the Korean War, but everyone knew someone whose dad fought in World War II. The Germans were the bad guys then but we were such a great country that we ended up being cool with them, the West Germans, anyway. I had seen the award winning picture of the East German soldier hopping over barbed wire to get to West Germany. The United States and West Germany were cool, but East Germany, China and Russia, well, they weren’t so lucky. As far as we knew Bart Starr, Jerry West and Sandy Koufax lived clean lives and loved their respective sport. The high school students in senior portraits in yearbooks looked like serious, goal-oriented young adults. None of them looked satirical or like boudoir shots. Women wore white gloves when they rode the Greyhound bus. The sky was blue. No one bought drinking water. No one was afraid to swim in the ocean. No one feared the contents of a can of tuna. The music never got crazier than the Beach Boys, Skeeter Davis, The Cascades, or Bobby Vinton. Five days a week you could watch Superman stand on top of the world with the American flag waving behind him, hear the words “…the never ending battle for truth, justice and the American way,” and not once feel it was ironic. There was nothing bad in soda, meat or French fries as far as we knew.
When middle age people say it was a different world, this is what we mean. It is true that our perspective was shaded by our youthful naiveté and simple ignorance, but nevertheless, we were true believers; our government merited our faith. We even explored space because it was there and we could.
My cousin Kirk and I were fans of the NASA space program. John Glenn was as big a hero to us as Don Drysdale, if not bigger. The flight of the Friendship 7 was the first major event in our lives. Kirk had framed pictures of the capsules and the astronauts. He knew Mercury from Apollo and Grissom from Cooper. He made models of the space ships. When I made model planes I would douse them with lighter fluid and tie firecrackers to the fuselage, but I did believe that space was the new frontier. I knew that was true because the Kingston Trio said it in a song, “Then on to the heavens and the stars for to see; this is the new frontier, this is the new frontier.”
It was no surprise then that Kirk was looking to launch a cat into space one summer day. Kirk and I were good boys; sending a cat into space was the riskiest thing we had ever done, well, except for finding a girlie magazine on a bulldozer at a worksite. At that age though pushing a button on the bulldozer that caused the blade to lift was much more exciting than any magazine.
Ever the perfectionist, Kirk spent the better part of the morning finding the right box and drawing an authentic looking control panel which he taped to the inside of the box, er, capsule. His best friend, Norman, came over but he didn’t share our enthusiasm.
“What the heck are you guys doing?” he asked.
“We’re sending Goldie into space,” Kirk answered scanning his father’s work space in the garage for potential feline space helmet materials.
“And how are you doing that?” Norman asked doubtfully.
“We’re putting her in a box!” I exclaimed.
“And what will propel this box into space?”
“Well, we can drop it off a roof.” I suggested. We hadn’t worked out the details just yet.
“That’s gravity, not propulsion,” Norman said, like a smart aleck professor.
“We’re throwing the box straight up into the air,” Kirk said, giving up on the space helmet idea.
“The cat won’t get more than five feet in the air; she won’t even need a parachute,” Norman laughed.
“They’ll be two of us,” Kirk said, laughing back.
“And if you help, that’ll be three,” I added.
“No thanks. I got other stuff to do. I just rigged my train transformer to an electric chair,” Norman said, rubbing his hands together.
“Electric chair?” I said, not accustomed to Norman’s eccentricities.
“Yeah, from an erector set.”
“So, you finally figured out how to do it, huh?” Kirk said.
“Yeah, I think so. Wanna come over and find out? I even got my first test subject.” He took a lizard from his front pocket.
“Nah.” Kirk said with a mild disdain.
“You’re gonna miss it when his eyes spin around then pop out!”
“But we’ve got a cat launch in like t-minus five minutes,” I said.
“Ok, you guys are gonna miss it, I’m tellin’ ya.” He got on his bike and rode off, waving the hapless lizard in one hand.
Kirk found Goldie lounging in the patio under the picnic table. Electrocuting small animals was too far gone for Kirk and me. We didn’t fight, steal, or cuss, and we didn’t torture animals. But a cat in space, well, that was a different matter. To launch the fat, lethargic, loveable Goldie into space as a tribute to the space program, well, that was patriotic. Goldie, also known as Tomasina, was about to become the next space hero. Kirk picked her up and held her aloft.
“And now, Goldie, the great astro-cat is heading toward the launch platform. What a brave cat! What an intelligent cat!” He shook her a little to see if he could get some response; she was as active as a bag of onions.
“T-minus ten seconds and counting,” I said as we moved toward the box in the middle of the lawn. Kirk may not have been the only boy in America who talked baby talk to his cat, but he was the only one I knew. His voice switched from impressed newscaster to hysterical mother.
“Will you be all right, precious baby? Will you blow up in a million bits? Precious baby, Goldie! Don’t die, Tomasina! Please, baby, please. PLEASE!” He dropped her in the box and she sat, motionless.
“Six, five, four…” I continued, as we lifted the box shoulder high. Goldie looked down at the ground, shifting her massive head slightly as if it took too much energy to protest. At three we lowered the box to our belt buckles and at zero we flung the box in the air.
She stayed in the box for a moment, but on its descent, she jumped out, looked at us with a crazed expression before she took off running. She went missing for the rest of the day, and the next day, too. We planned no further space shots after that; it was a great country and there were other things to discover, no doubt to the infinite relief of Goldie.

Dah Mickey Mouse

I jumped up at the commercial, retrieved a wash cloth from the linen closet in the hall and brought it to her.

May 1963

She didn’t speak much English. I tried once repeating an Armenian phrase I heard my dad say to me. I wasn’t sure what it was but when I moved up very close to her one afternoon just after she came out of the bathroom and said, “Gera suss,” she yelled out something in Armenian and I got in trouble with Mom. Turned out I was telling her, “Eat it and shut up,” something you probably shouldn’t say to your grandmother. She was undeniably better at English than I was at Armenian.
“You watch dah Mickey Mouse?”
“No.”
“Why you watch dah Mickey Mouse?”
“That’s Felix, Grandma, he’s a cat.” Sometimes I believed she called all cartoons Mickey Mouse; other times I believed we were playing a game where she pretended not to know the difference and I pretended that I didn’t know that she did know. I was never certain, though.
“I don’t like it, dah Mickey Mouse.”
“Me neither.”
“You turn it off, Mickey Mouse.”
“It’s not on. How can I turn it off?”
“I don’t like it, dah Mickey Mouse.”
“I know, I know!”
“Bring it me dah washcloth.” I jumped up at the commercial, retrieved a wash cloth from the linen closet in the hall and brought it to her. She took it and covered her face with it.
“Now I don’t watch dah Mickey Mouse.”
“OK, fine.” But I couldn’t help looking away from the screen to see if she was really going to keep the washcloth on her face. She was lifting one corner up to her eye to peek out.
“You eh-still watch dah Mickey Mouse?”
“Yeah.” I laughed. She was becoming more entertaining than Felix the Cat.
“I don’t like dah Mickey Mouse!” she cried out in a playful, melodramatic voice, and covered her face again. She played peek- a- boo with the screen until I finally turned off the TV.
“Good boy. Now bring it me soda. Diet-Rite.” I went to the kitchen, found a bottle of Diet-Rite, filled a glass with ice, and then brought the glass and the near empty bottle to her. I handed her the glass and set the bottle on Good Housekeeping on the coffee table. She took three long gulps, let out a sigh and set the glass down next to the bottle. I stood waiting.
“What you want?” As if she didn’t know.
“Nothing.”
“You want dah little soda left in dah bottle?”
“Yeah, uh-huh.”
“All right.” She pointed at the bottle with her chin. Cola nuts and cyclamates tingled my palate. I put the TV back on. None of Dad’s rules applied when Grandma came over. She drank soda and she had ice in the soda. I figured it was because she was his mother. All was good, for a few minutes anyway.
“Frances!” she yelled suddenly, “Tree o’clock!” There was no response.
I went in the kitchen to find Mom standing by the cupboards, her hands on her hips, frowning.
“I’ll get it,” I said taking out the ice cream scoop. “You want any?”
“No.” She retreated to the den and resumed reading Readers’ Digest. I prepared a bowl of vanilla ice cream, found the jar of orange marmalade and put everything on a serving tray.
Grandma nodded when I brought the tray to her. I took her empty glass and bottle of Diet Rite back to the kitchen. At a little after five Auntie Sadie came to take Grandma home. Grandma’s visits to our house were as regular as our routine. Playing the Mickey Mouse game was our way of communicating our love for each other. Her only other method was offering food, which she did every 15 minutes which I was over at Auntie Sadie’s place where she lived.
“You hungry?”
“No, I just ate.”
“What you want to eat?”
“Nothing.”
“You like choreg?”
“Yeah.”
“You like ‘em you eat ‘em.”
“But I’m not hungry.”
“All right. Shut up.”
I haven’t met anyone ever who made the words “shut up” feel like the words “I love you.” She would inevitably bring the choreg anyway, and then some fruit, and a glass of water. We would sit together at the kitchen table, enjoying each other’s company without the convenience of words. We had successfully hurdled the language barrier and found a language of our own.

Meathead

Paul suggested that we…fight for her honor, but we weren’t sure what honor was exactly…

April 1963

Paul and I liked the same girl, a lovely girl with long golden hair and green eyes, whose speech was garbled but soft and whispery. Both of us liking Barbara wasn’t a problem because we had the same goal: getting her attention and letting her know that we liked her. Of course we had seen mushy movies on TV; we knew that there was only one boyfriend to each girlfriend. At least that’s how we understood it to be in the third grade. So we hatched a plan by which Barbara would get the message and choose one of us. We thought this was entirely fair and logical. Paul suggested that we stage a fight for her honor, but we weren’t sure what honor was exactly, so we put it more plainly: we would fight because we had just discovered that I liked Paul’s girl and vice-versa. We would fight to a draw and Barbara—somehow or other—would be there and then she would pick one of us. So we picked a day and put the word out. Jack and Paul were going to fight one day soon after school on the grassy area where everyone waited in the morning for school to start.
Only Paul and I and our respective best friends knew that Paul and I rehearsed for a three days during recess. He would get me in a headlock, then I’d escape and get him in headlock. He would throw me on the ground and pin me and then I’d return the favor. Then one of us was to say, “You know what? This is a draw,” at which point Barbara who would surely be terribly impressed by then, who take one of us by the arm and would be that guy’s girlfriend, they would walk to Bradley’s Hardware store a block away and the guy would buy her a soda out of the soda machine. She would then be even more impressed, having spent a dime on her.
The day came—it was Friday, I believe—and our self-promotion was quite a success; quite a crowd gathered; even some fifth and sixth graders got curious and came to see what it was all about. Paul was an ill-tempered boy whose face would turn crimson at the slightest and silliest provocation, and the angrier he was the deeper the hue. It had happened so often that Lenny, my best friend and corner man for the fight, called him Meathead, for both the color and the dumbness of his behavior. But all week Paul was very calm, friendly even. I was sure that Lenny would have to give him a new, nice name or at least stop referring to him as Meathead.
The crowd formed a circle and we went over the usual rules: no belts; no hitting below the waist; no kicking in the nuts; and no hitting after the other guy says “I give.” We backed away and went to our corner guys. Lenny didn’t say anything since it was all staged. We faced each other and got ready to fight. I had forgotten to look but just before we got in a clinch, I saw Barbara out of the corner of my eye. The plan was working perfectly. Paul was the first to put a headlock on his opponent and he did it just as we planned, but from there, Paul went berserk. He clamped down hard with his headlock and with his free hand he began punching me in the face. The older kids started cheering wildly and I doubt anyone heard me say to Paul between punches, “What—are—you-- doing?” I thought maybe he suddenly got mad about something, but when I looked up at his face there was no red in it, just a very wicked grin.
Lenny was furious and started shouting out ways to get out it, “Stomp on his foot! Slug him in the stomach!” But I took the fastest path to stopping the proceedings. “I give, I give,” I said loud enough for all to hear. The older kids were booing my performance, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t believe Paul had so thoroughly conned me. He would surely have Barbara for a girlfriend now. He was beaming.
“Way to go, Meathead,” Lenny said sarcastically, then he turned to me, “Can’t win ‘em all. Come on let’s go.” I turned to leave when Barbara spoke for the first time.
“Are you all right?’
“Uh, yeah.” I was looking at the grass.
“That’s good. Fighting is so stupid.”
I looked at Meathead; his face was a fine mixture of confusion, anger and defeat.
“So Barbara, which is better, Tootsie Rolls or Tootsie Pops?”
“I like Tootsie Pops, the orange ones.”
“Me, too.” We headed north toward Verdugo. I never felt better.

Blup

She must have figured that at 13 cents each, the risk factor wasn’t that high.

November 1962

A water cooler was really a cool thing. Well, maybe not as cool as your own drinking fountain in the backyard like Doug, the kid next door had, but still pretty cool. It was out of character for Dad to spend money on water when it was in plentiful supply right out of a garden hose or a kitchen faucet, but of course that made it all the more cool to me. Dad set the water cooler in an awkward place—wedged between some unused tables and a stack of unopened boxes, right past the washer and dryer, and just before the ivy-- which I thought was poisonous because of the Coasters song —but I delighted in becoming a contortionist for the reward of getting a glass of water, and I loved that water cooler sound, blup. Sometimes it was a double, blup, blup.
That’s where I got the name. They say goldfish make lousy pets because they are silent and they don’t do tricks. But their trick is the best of them all; they can stare straight at anyone and anything and it appears that they don’t have a thing on their minds, but in fact who knows? They could very well be the greatest poker players ever. As for the sound, well, maybe they don’t have anything to say, or maybe they are making a sound the people can’t hear, and if we could hear that sound, I always thought it would be the water cooler, blup, every time their gills moved. So that’s what I named the first one, and since there really wasn’t a better name than that, I also gave the name to the second one. They were Blup and Blup. Everyone loved the name, even without the explanation. One would find my sister walking around in the house at given time saying, “Blup!”
I got the fish at Newbury’s in Burbank on Magnolia. I loved the humming of the aquarium pumps in the back corner of the store. That MMMMMMMMMMMM was a sound that could fix something inside. It counteracted the darkness, the smell and the worn out look of the store. I patrolled the rows again and again until Mom called me out of there. I’m not sure what happened the day Mom changed her mind and yes instead of no to my endless requests for a goldfish. She was never big on pets; it was one of the things that she and Dad were on the same page about: pets were a nuisance; an annoyance to be avoided, but they relented on several occasions and most of the time the results were good. We had several cats, Whiskers, Snowball, Sam and Sam II, and they were a source of fascination for Dad. He would dangle string in front of any of them until the cat was in a mad frenzy to catch it. Mom though wanted nothing to do with them other than that they leave her alone.
“Now you listen, you, Mr. Cat. You just go somewhere else.”
“Meow.”
“No, I don’t have any food for you. I’m not feeding you and I’m not playing with you, so just go on and go somewhere else.”
”Meow.”
“Go on, shoo!”
A goldfish for a pet, though, that was different. They make no noise, they don’t scratch or chew any of your belongings, and it is impossible for them to soil the carpet, and an 8 year old could feed the fish on shake of fish food a day. She must have figured at 13 cents each the risk factor wasn’t that high. Of course there was the bowl, the net, the ceramic deep sea diver decoration, the strand of grass and the fish food to add to the bill but it still made for a not so unreasonable investment. I knew I had to prove to Mom that she had not made a mistake. I would have to be a very conscientious pet owner, and I was.
After much consideration I chose the top of the kitchen counter for the location of the fish bowl. It afforded the fish a view of everything from the kitchen to the den, although I wasn’t sure how far or well fish could see. The two fish were nearly identical so I named them both Blup, My sister loved the name; she would often be seen walking around the house saying over and over.
I was a loving care taker; I greeted Blup and Blup every morning, then again after school and I bid them goodnight before I went to bed. I once had to rescue one of them when he somehow jumped out of the bowl. Mom called out for me from our back yard to Doug’s back yard next door. She did not care about the fish enough to actually pick it up and toss it back in the bowl, but she knew I would come running. I leaped over the gate and bolted across the yard, to the front door, through the living room like a comic book hero running fast enough to blur time and space. I grabbed Blup by the tail and tossed him back in the bowl in plenty of time.
I was a very responsible pet owner as well. I read the directions on the fish food box before and after each feeding, being certain not to over or under feed them. When the bowl acquired that pungent odor, I changed the water. I had heard stories of goldfish dying but I wasn’t going to let it happen on my watch. So when we had plans to go to Fresno to see Grandma Ruth, I asked who would care for Blup and Blup.
It was probably Veronica, my brother’s girlfriend and future bride, who took up the issue of pet care. Everyone who knew Blup and Blup loved their name and knew loved how I loved them. The Chavoor clan loved irony. The fish were 19 cents each, couldn’t do tricks, couldn’t jump in your lap so it was expected that we make a huge fuss over them. It was Veronica who thought of Mr. Auperle, a quiet elderly next door neighbor, to take care of the fish while we were gone. Veronica loved animals as much as she loved people. She did not see any irony in wondering how one’s goldfish would fare for two days. That made her a good candidate for selecting a caretaker.
I didn’t know much about Clarence. He was almost always silent, with the exception of a deep, raspy smoker’s cough. Clara, his wife, spoke often but was frequently annoyed about something and exactly what was annoying her was hard to determine because she had a scratchy “Oakie” accent. She was thin, as thin as her husband was overweight. I was embarrassed about it but whenever I saw them together I would begin reciting the schoolyard poem, “Fatty and Skinny Went to Bed,” although Clara was far from dead, in fact she was surprisingly strong. She grabbed my arm once and twisted it until I stopped, “jemping ‘round.” She was very strong, with a streak of mean in her. Her sister, “Aunt May” was her polar opposite. May was sweet and kind. I would sit in her lap and she would read Bible stories to me. Johnny, the son of Clara and Clarence may not have seen “Rebel without a Cause;” he was living it though. He kept his Camels rolled in the sleeve of his t-shirt. His skinny arms bore tattoos with images and words I was too young to understand. He once gave me a toy car that had a vague resemblance to the car James Dean’s character drove in the chickee-run scene.
“Here ya go,” he said his cigarette bouncing up and down as he spoke, “you’re not too old for toys are you?” He spoke from behind his Ray- bans, holding the car over the cyclone fence that divided us. I was too old for toy cars, but I lied.
“No. Thanks. I like it.” I waved the car up and down as if it were covering some rough terrain.
He nodded, took a long drag on his cigarette, and flicked it across his dad’s perfectly kept front lawn. He ambled over to his hot rod, revved the engine, burned rubber and zoomed off. It was the only conversation we ever had.
Strong odors often wafted from the Auperle house. I went over there once to sell tickets to the Scout Fair and the smell made my eyes water and my stomach do a back flip. I asked Mom about the smells.
“He likes liver and onions,” she answered.
“And gin,” my brother muttered. Mom made a look that suggested that she was in the practice of pretending she didn’t know anything about it and that my brother should do likewise.
The gin might explain his red face, laconic speech, and impossibly slow motor skills. When I knocked on the door to deliver the fish that Friday afternoon, I stood on the front porch clutching the bowl until the muscles in my arms were trembling. He opened the door about a quarter of an inch, then, when he saw who it was, he trusted me up to a full two inches more. All the phone calls had already been made. He was supposed to know what was going on. I held the bowl up to him. He finally relented and opened the door, took the bowl and stood staring. I picked up the paper bag that held the fish food.
“On the back of the box it says how much to feed them.” He looked at me as if I had somehow hypnotized him.
“Uh.” I waited to see if he would make any further response.
“Um, you just shake it once, once a day. That’s all.” He stood for nearly a minute before he spoke.
“Ok.” He took the bag and closed the door.
My brother’s favorite joke that year was about the oversensitive Marine recruit whose cat died.
The drill sergeant calls him front and center.
“Jones!” He barks out, “I have news from home: Your cat is dead!” Jones breaks down and cries.
“You could have been a little more thoughtful,” Jones says between sobs, “You should have said that the cat fell off the roof and broke his leg, that they took him to the vet and he performed surgery for 14 hours and that the cat battled courageously but finally passed on.”
Two weeks later the sergeant calls Jones front and center once again.
“Jones! Your mother fell off the roof!”
I was sitting in the kitchen with a glass of milk and some of Mom’s oatmeal raisin cookies. He was sitting in the kitchen with me trying to assemble the words that would not trouble his oversensitive brother too much. His girlfriend stood behind us near the sink. He cleared his throat.
“Uh, your fish are dead.” He didn’t look at me.
“That fat pig overfed them,” I bawled.
“Uh, well, maybe,” he murmured. He shifted his position where he sat. He put his head down and folded his hands like he was praying. But Veronica was having none of it. She strode over to where I was seated, and then bent down so we were face to face.
“Your fish are dead, so?”
“He killed them.”
“What else?”
“He’s a fat pig. He eats too much so he fed them too much.” I was aware that she was using some kind of strategy on me which bothered me but what bothered me even more was that it was working. I was losing momentum.
“Yes, and?” I had stopped crying but she was still face to face with me.
“Nothing.”
“What else?”
Instead of grieving for the fish or pouring out invective against Mr. Auperle, I had now become preoccupied with the skinny woman with the beehive hairdo and the pointy glasses who was still bearing down on me. I clutched my glass of milk, and considered dumping its contents on her, picturing her shocked look with her mouth agape and the dribbling milk making a mess of her hyped up self-assurance. That image made it possible to leave the table without a word. I laughed to myself thinking that she that she was giving herself credit for the wrong reason. I knew I was too old react this way and I did not blame her for putting an end to my response. I wasn’t mad at her; I wasn’t mad at anything. I felt relieved. By the next day the issue was as dead as the two fish.
Eventually, Dad canceled the water cooler service. The patio became filled with discarded or broken things. The washer and dryer broke. The poison ivy was torn out. I threw Johnny’s car away a week after he gave it to me. The Chavoor family called all fish blups for the next 10 years. Johnny Auperle cleaned up, sobered up, put his leather jacket away, sold his hot rod, got a job with PG&E, found Jesus, got married, and had children and grandchildren. Clarence and Clara died. Someone else moved into their house. The cyclone fence was replaced with a cinder block wall. Then this morning I woke up with the lyric, “Everything changes,” but I couldn’t remember the song, the melody or the artist.

Gang Fight

One morning at recess he came up with his best idea yet.

May 1962

The slide was a popular choice during recess in 2nd grade, but at some point, some adult decided we could no longer use wax paper to sit on to go down the slide. They were forever thinking up stuff like that, talking about how sitting on wax paper made the slide too fast, as if there were such a thing as too fast. Then there were the swings, and there they conspired against us when we discovered that the best thing to do was jump out of the seat while it was at the apex of its arc. We thought we were paying tribute to pilots who had to bail out of their planes; they thought we might twist an ankle. They were always getting in the way of important things, especially things that were fun. Later, when I got to junior high, an English teacher scolded me for saying they in an essay without properly identifying who the heck they were. Well, dear reader, now you know who they are, fun spoilers—just a side note. And then there was the jungle gym, which many people remember fondly. But admit it, the thing’s boring. There’s the climbing of it, taking less than a minute, and then there you are. That’s your jungle gym experience. Now there were some who would stand in the middle of it at the bottom and pretend it was a submarine, but come on, it doesn’t move, now does it? Eventually, I came to feel that a jungle gym was something they wanted us to use so we wouldn’t climb trees. By the 3rd grade I started climbing trees even though they cleverly didn’t have any on the schoolyard—I wouldn’t be deterred though; I climbed trees at home and at Verdugo Park.
Now, Dale Kranz and I were friends. I stuck by him because ideas were constantly pouring out of him—crazy, funny stuff that I hadn’t heard from anyone else. One morning at recess he came up with his best idea yet.
“We’ll get a bunch of people and we’ll all fight.”
“What??”
“Yeah, like you, me and Billy and maybe Ross.”
“We don’t want to fight those guys, they’re our friends.”
“No” he said calmly, although he was becoming impatient with my lack of vision, “they’ll be on our side. We’ll fight four other guys.”
We were quiet for a while, circling the yard like a couple of prisoners with a huge, improbable plan. We started eyeing potential opponents. Then Billy caught up with us and we filled him in on the plan. The three of us tracked down Ross and the four of us circled the yard one more time to work out the details. We would fight at the east end of the yard, in the sand by the slide and the jungle gym. The sand was important in case any of the combatants fell or was thrown down; better to fall in sand than on the blacktop. We wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt during the fight.
Dale, Billy and Ross picked out their opponents—who were very enthused about the idea—and I picked Timmy, a kid who wrote a three-sentence story that I didn’t like for some reason, but I had another reason for picking Timmy: he was the skinniest kid in the entire school. He looked like he was made out of pipe cleaner. If I was going to be in a fight, I certainly wasn’t fixing to lose.
We positioned ourselves in the sand between the slide and that jungle gym. One of us called out, “One, two, three go!” After that I had the sad realization that one could not fight and watch at the same time. I had no idea how anyone else fared; Timmy and I were locked on each other’s shoulders. Then I put my foot behind his ankle and pushed him back. Instead of tripping and falling, he went airborne, landed on his back hard enough to make clouds of dust from the sand. I pounced on him and pinned his poor little arms. The match, or the mismatch, was pretty much over. Timmy had no move to make and I didn’t know what else to do. I knew that this was the part where the good guy starting punching the bad guy on the ground. Punching him though required taking one hand off of him in which case he might escape. So I hit him in the mouth with my knee. He said, “Hey” as if I had gone off script, then his mouth started bleeding and Timmy began crying. Instead of feeling triumphant, I felt horrible; his tooth cut my knee, and I didn’t get any thrill from seeing Timmy bleeding and crying. It wasn’t like a cowboy movie at all.
I felt relieved when Miss Bennett grabbed me right under my armpit and lifted me off the ground. She didn’t say anything; she just hustled me off the playground and dropped me off in an empty room. We were all put in separate rooms, interviewed then all brought together and received a lecture. During my interview I had no sense of trouble; expect that I felt bad for Timmy. We had planned the whole thing and it had come off pretty much as we imagined it. It was the best use of recess we could think of, much better than any playground equipment available. I explained this to Miss Bennett but by the puzzled look on her face, which never changed, I wasn’t sure she understood. When we were brought together, Miss Bennett explained to us that this wasn’t a good way to play and that we would have to find another way to play. What made the moment so memorable was how calm and logical Miss Bennett was. We all agreed to find a different way to play. The next year we discovered the joys of basketball—as well as off-campus tree climbing--and neither Dale, Billy, Ross nor I got in a fight in the entire 3rd grade year. Sad to report though, I don’t remember anything about Timmy after that day.

A Time Before Cars

I can’t say we had a relationship because we didn’t speak the same language and we were 85 years apart in age.

June 1962

I don’t remember much about the house on Poplar Street, just fragments. I remember Dad trying to teach me the numbers on the clock in the kitchen. I remember the free standing tub with the claw feet. The front yard was shady and there were flowers but except for the hydrangeas I can’t picture the front of the house; when we arrived at Grandma’s house the driveway was behind the backdoor. It wasn’t paved and the dirt smelled sweet on warm summer mornings.
Just inside the back door was a chest of drawers and in the bottom drawer there were toys and books. I was delighted to know about the drawer because the house had only two grownups living in it, Grandma Ruth and her mother, Big Grandma, and although Grandma Ruth had five grandchildren, I believed that the drawer was meant for me, or at least my sister and me. I knew Charles, 10 years older than I had no interest in it, and our cousins, Debbie and Kirk had their own toys in their house which was a duplex adjacent from Grandma’s.
The most cherished item in the drawer was a story about a magic pot that would produce upon the command, “Little pot cook!” and would not stop until given the command, “Little pot stop!” The poor owner of the pot though forget the words to stop the pot and it overflowed and kept producing rice until the kitchen, the living room, the house and eventually the entire village had rice up to its eyeballs. The story was read to me so many times that I began reading it myself, improvising the words according to the illustrations as I went along.
In 1961 though, Grandma Ruth and Big Grandma moved into their triplex on Yale. There Big Grandma would sit in her upholstered rocking chair with a contemplative look on her face. Her life offered her much to reflect upon. Her husband, a shoemaker in Harpert, Turkey, had come to the United States alone to learn about sewing machines that might help him make more shoes in a shorter amount of time. When he heard that the Turks were causing trouble in Armenian villages, he wrote his wife and said, “Sell everything and come.” So, with her five year old daughter in tow, she made the 5,000 mile journey. I didn’t know any of that about her though; I only knew what I saw: a very old woman with veins showing on the top of her hands, sitting in her rocking chair.
I can’t say we had a relationship because we didn’t speak the same language and we were 85 years apart in age. I was a little afraid of her and I’m not sure she knew what to make of me. I would say that we merely existed in the same space and time and only for a brief time, but there were some moments we shared that demonstrated some kind of familial communication.
We were passing in the hall one afternoon at Grandma’s triplex. She was going to the bathroom while I was heading to the kitchen. She stopped me and spoke to me in Armenian. I didn’t even understand that there were languages other than English and so I assumed something was wrong with my ears. I decided to take my chances and nod my head yes. This pleased her and she said, “Goot boyee.” It was one of the few phrases that she knew or employed, along with, “Bat boyee.” I never knew for certain whether she would deem me good or bad because the litmus test was always in Armenian. If I shook my head when I should have nodded—or vice-versa—I got knocked on the head with her cane, not too hard, but hard enough to remember.
I also remember watching her one morning at breakfast eating a soft boiled egg. I had never seen a soft boiled egg or a soft boiled egg holder. The holder looked like some kind of unfinished toy, or something that might hold a very small spinning top. She would take her spoon and tap, tap, tap near the top of the egg as if she were gently knocking at someone’s door. With the top cleanly off and set aside she took the salt shaker and shook it steadily, pouring so much salt on the egg that I could barely see it anymore. Then the spoon, with its generous load of the gelatinous contents would waver on the journey to her open mouth, while her eyes—frighteningly huge from her coke bottle lenses—kept careful watch. Each spoonful was an adventure but in the end she did not spill, not even once.
The moment that I remember best came one day while I was watching TV at Grandma’s. I sat on the couch and Grandma Ruth turned the TV on to a western and then she went into the kitchen. Big Grandma emerged from her room, looked at the TV screen for a moment and then came to the couch-- instead of going to her rocking chair-- and sat down next to me. I didn’t like westerns and Big Grandma had a funny, sour smell. I was not miserable but something akin to it. She said something to me, in Armenian of course, but this time with a little more urgency than usual. I decided to nod yes. This agitated her but she didn’t reach for her cane; instead she pointed at the TV screen.
“You…eh-see…dat?”
“Yes,” I lied, not wanting to disappoint her.
“Look…der.”
“At what?”
“”Der.” She pointed at the screen again.
“Something on TV?”
“Dat.”
“You want me to change the channel?” I got up; I would be happy to do it, although Grandma Ruth had told me not to touch the TV. I reached for the channel knob though and she almost lost her mind.
“NO! NO!” she shouted. “Look you!”
“Um, I see a cowboy, a horse.” I was shaking.
“Yah. Look, you. “She apparently wanted me to name things.
“Uh, the cactus, the sky, a wagon?”
“HA!” One of the last three was the magic word, and she waved her hand manically.
“The cactus?”
“NO!” She burst into a tirade in Armenian, and I felt lucky to not be able to understand her.
The commotion drew Grandma into the living room from the kitchen. Mother and daughter then had a short conversation.
“She wants you to look at the wagon on the TV show,” she explained, a little puzzled.
“Ok, I see it.” They talked some more.
“She wants you to know that when she first came to the United States, she traveled in a wagon just like that.”
“Oh.” I looked at the wagon and then at her dark, oval face. She was smiling and nodding. She spoke again to Grandma.
“She wants you to know that she was there in a time before cars, and that you will live in a time after cars.” I was a little too young to see any kind of import in her words.
“Ok, but can I change the channel? I don’t like westerns so very much.”
Grandma Ruth looked at me for a long time and finally let out a small sigh. Then she spoke to her mother at length during which Big Grandma smiled and nodded. When she was done speaking, Big Grandma touched my face with her hand and murmured something in Armenian that her daughter either didn’t hear or chose not to translate.
“So can I?”
She gave me a solemn but understanding look. “No,” she said at last, “Password is coming on at 2.” She went back to the kitchen, Big Grandma went to her rocking chair and I continued watching the western, but something was different from the moment before, and when Big Grandma passed away two weeks later, everything was different again.

The Bus Boy

“Oh, it’s nothing to worry about.”
July 1992

We were fearless; we would venture into restaurants with three little kids: Kat, 8; Greg, 4; and Kelsey, 3. We ignored the glares of couples without kids who were looking for a quiet night out, walked right past them. We knew that trick of it was to keep the kids constantly occupied whenever there was any dead time, and there was plenty of that, from waiting for the our seat to waiting for the waitress and then the big one, waiting for the food. Most of the time we played it safe: going only to places where crayons and paper placemats to color were provided. Not that we were unsympathetic to couples without kids; we had after all, been in their shoes the decade before and we had no appreciation for caterwauling kids in restaurants. But I wasn’t going to let my kids ever get to that level so if you were getting ready for an Erma Bombeck type story, forget about it.
Before they even got out of diapers, I was taking one or another of them outside to explain the restaurant rules.

1) No being loud
2) No throwing or dropping stuff
3) No staring at or approaching other patrons

They were pretty good about it. As far as I can recall, there was no screeching, squealing, food chunking and no nose picking while watching other people eat.
Chain restaurants are interesting because in a way you can be in the same place wherever you are in the country. On the other hand, there is something a little spooky about having the exact same meal prepared in the exact same way in 700 or more different locations. I prefer local places like Javier’s in Sunnyside or Country Fair on Belmont or the utterly shabby, ramshackle New China Café downtown, or the Japanese place run by a very nice Korean family over on Butler Avenue.
I have a special appreciation for going out to eat because for the first 25 years of my life, I didn’t see the inside of a restaurant. Dad didn’t believe in eating out. His famous rhetorical question on the subject was, “What for?” He did stop for breakfast whenever we went to Fresno, but I suspect he was hungry or had to go to the bathroom or buy gas anyway. “Ok,” he’d say, “you can have anything you want for $1.” So there was that, and there was one other time where he had a tax client who owned an Italian restaurant in Hollywood who invited Dad and the rest of us to the place for dinner, but the food was less than spectacular and the Pepsi was room temperature. Dad just didn’t appreciate eating out, well, until Mom stopped cooking, anyway.
In any event we had been out house hunting on a hot day and we went into one of those chain restaurants late one afternoon, or very early one evening, take your pick. We were wiped out and glad to be in a nice cool quiet restaurant. It was so quiet you could have been walking into a library. The place was empty, or nearly empty; I believe there was one other party in there, a couple as a matter of fact. We seated ourselves in a corner booth with a view of Shaw Avenue. We were the only people making any sound at all. I relaxed the restaurant rules because the couple seemed oblivious to the rest of the world; holding hands and gazing into each others eyes and all that.
The waitress arrived with a basket of crayons and the paper place mats so the kids could connect the dots and color in the logo of the place. I asked for an extra place mat and began color it myself. The kids got a kick out of it. Then Grace and I distributed crackers, sipped our water and perused the menu. That’s when a bus boy approached our table.
“How you guys doing tonight?” he said, while tucking an imaginary errant strand of hair behind his ear.
“Pretty good, thanks,” I answered congenially.
“Pretty hungry!” Kat said.
“That’s great. Your waitress will be here in a minute,” he said absently. He nodded and smiled, looking somewhere just behind us. I thought he might have been looking at the cars zooming along Shaw.
He stood there for a moment. He was a heavy set man, maybe in his late 20’s. His skin had an orange tint to it and his large forehead was as shiny as his slicked back hair. His pencil thin mustache had a touch of grey. He had a mole just to the right of his mustache which came to my attention because he kept twitching his cheek as if he could throw it off if he tried hard enough.
“Well, uh, I need to get back there for a second,” he said, scratching a sideburn.
“All right.” I scooted over a bit, thinking he wanted to close the blinds. Instead he started spraying the window sills with insecticide.
“Excuse me,” Grace said, “Do you think you can do that another time? We’re going to eat very close to where you’re spraying.”
“Oh, there’s nothing to worry about.” He moved to the other side of the booth.
“I don’t want my children breathing the fumes,” she answered, smiling in a mildly menacing way.
“This?” the notion stopped him temporarily. “This wouldn’t harm a flea.” He hitched up his pants and chortled.
“Please,” I began, looking at the skull and cross bones crudely drawn with a permanent marker on the bottle.
“This stuff won’t hurt anyone. Look.” He turned the bottle on himself and squirted it into his open mouth, leaned over Grace and resumed spraying.
“You can spray yourself all you want, but spray it here after we leave,” Grace said, fully annoyed.
“All done,” he chirped merrily. He turned and walked away, moving as if he had blisters on both feet.
I’m not sure why but we went ahead and ordered, ate and I even absent-mindedly left a generous tip.
“What are you doing? The guy gassed the kids.” Grace asked incredulously.
“That wasn’t the waitress’ fault.”
“She shares the tip with him though.”
“Maybe she won’t this time.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Did you notice how good the kids did this time?” I asked as we loaded them into the car.
“Well, of course, their central nervous system was damaged.”
“Daddy,” Greg asked, ‘what’s a nervous system?”
“Nothing, Sonny Boy, Mom’s just making a joke.”
“A joke?” Kathleen said, “Was it a knock-knock joke?”
“No, it was, she was just being funny, you know.”
“Daddy’s funny,” Kelsey put in.
“Couldn’t believe the guy,” I said to Grace as I started up the engine. “He’s got the whole rest of the place.”
“Even after I asked him.”
“Not the brightest bulb that ever burned.”
“No tungsten to burn. Slow down.”
“L.A. Law is on tonight.”
We scooted down Cedar, bits of burger, fries, thousand island, root beer and pesticide rolling around in our stomachs. I thought about the bus boy-- too old to be one—trying to make his way on minimum wage and tips. “I’m too Sexy for my Shirt,” came on the radio and I wondered if he liked the song. I snapped it off, suddenly hoping that the L.A. Law re-run would be one I hadn’t seen or at least didn’t remember.