On Writing

      I just started a brand new journal.  It is a little intimidating because it is filled with blank pages and I have no idea of how I am going to fill those pages.  What will I write about?  Why do I bother to write at all?  I started journaling when I was first married and wrote so poorly that I threw the first volume in the garbage.  For over thirty years I have filled many journals with my thoughts but I know that, eventually, these volumes will probably be thrown away, just like my first one.  Still, I enjoy the process and I reward myself by putting my best work on my blog so that friends and family can read it.  Once I have found a theme, like triathlon or traveling, I’ll combine several entries and turn them into a book; over the course of the past six years I have written three books and have self published them on Amazon.  The hard fact is that very few people have read my blog and even fewer have read my books but my thought is that is alright.  As long as I enjoy writing I will continue to journal, even if no one else ever opens the covers.

   I only write first thing in the morning because that is when I am fresh and can concentrate.  Over the course of the years I have collected a series of hard backed paper journals, to add an air of permanency, and have used the same fountain pen for all of my writing.  This pen makes me write slowly and deliberately as I commit my thoughts to paper.  I own an iPad but I only use it to type up my entries so that I can upload them onto my blog.  It is too easy to delete files or edit entries using a computer; my true feelings would be edited or deleted. Using an old school paper journal keeps me honest because readers could tell if I ripped out pages or scribbled out some thoughts.

   Another reason as to why I keep a journal is because I need a place to write down my favorite quotes that I have read in a book or heard in a movie.  For example, I stole this quote from “Moneyball” and later adapted it into a paragraph in the journal as an introduction as to why I don’t participate in triathlon any more.  “We are all told at a certain time that we can no longer play the children’s game.  Some of are told at eighteen and some of us are told at forty, but we are all told.”  Another great quote which expressed my fears about how I was going to handle retirement comes from the movie “Inception.”  “Do you want to become an old man, filled with regret, waiting to die alone?”  This one sentence contains almost all of my fears about aging so it deserved a paragraph.  Finally, Mark Twain once said, “I am all for progress.  It is change that I don’t like!”  This quote doesn’t deserve an entry, or even a paragraph, so I jotted it down in the back of my journal for future reference.  Who knows if I would ever be able to use it.

   The last reason as to why I write is because I like to pick up my old journals, some of which are thirty four years old, and thumb through the pages.  The good, and bad, memories come flooding back and I can relive the emotions that I felt at the time.  And because I invested in quality, hard back journals, these volumes look like they were written yesterday and not thirty years ago.  My hope is that my children, once I have passed, will thumb through my journals and read about how I felt when they were born or how we celebrated their graduation and wedding days.  If nothing else comes from all of the time that I put into my writing then the labor was worth the effort.

The Blind Woman and the Ironman

        The Blind Woman and the Ironman         

   I have had some wins and losses as I have made my way through life the game of life but the one accomplishment that I will always be proud of is my 34 year marriage to Tracey.  We have weathered the storm together and have taken a lot of hits over the years.  For example, we lost all four of our parents before we turned 60.  Now that all of the hard years are over, and we are transitioning to an easeful retirement, we get the best versions of each other.  No longer are we career driven or overachieving but instead are relaxed and at peace with the way our lives have turned out.  When Tracey was a lawyer and I was a teacher we both had a strong sense of purpose but I think that we are happier now than at any other time in our lives.

   I was initially attracted to Tracey because she is so smart, having learned how to navigate her world in spite of being blind, and because she was so much sophisticated than I was.  For example, she taught me words like ‘trousseau’ and opened up new worlds for me by making me look differently at things.  Her parents kept a Lincoln bed in their guest room and Tracey had to explain to me that the old saying of ‘sleep tight’ meant that a bed like that was held together with ropes and a special key was need to tighten those ropes every once in awhile.  These are small things but when put in the aggregate they made me realize that I was marrying up.  

   Part of my attraction to Tracey is that she is so vulnerable but maintains a positive mental attitude to get her across all of the obstacles that life has thrown at her.  Before we had even met I had heard about the blind girl who had joined the Louisville Jaycees, a community and service group who had organized a haunted house, and the first time that I saw her she was painting the walls of the house black.  It was her positive mental attitude that was so attractive to me.  What she could do, she did, when she could have spent her life on the sofa and watching television.  No one would have blamed her for becoming a shut in because of her handicap.  Instead, she was helping to raise money for a local charity and she was attending college.  

   The first time that I talked to Tracey was when we were taking a break from fixing up the Haunted House.  It was still summer so we were all hot and sweaty.  Tracey was paint splattered and covered in dust from her job.  When I saw her walk through the door and towards the group who had gathered in the courtyard, she had a cigarette in one hand and a beer in the other and I thought to myself, ‘that’s the girl for me.’  

   While we were still dating, Tracey was finishing up her undergraduate degree from Bellarmine while I was at the University of Louisville and working towards my certification to become a teacher.  When were were first married I was doing my student teaching and Tracey went to Spalding University to get her masters.  These were the hard years.  As I started my first real teaching job, we decided to buy a house and then had three children in quick succession.  Tracey had always wanted to be an attorney and decided to go to law school while the children were still young.  I supported her all of the was and one of my proudest moments was listening to my wife as she gave the commencement speech for her graduating class.  In return, Tracey supported me with the crazy hours that I put in to training for eleven Ironman competitions.

   Now the hard years are over and we can travel like we always wanted to do.  Our trips overseas are our reward for finishing our careers on a good note.  Some couples may find it daunting to spend so much time together but that really hasn’t been an issue for us because we know each other so well.  We both can be touchy and we both know when to give the other some space.  And because we travel so well together we have been to places and done things that others can only dream of.  We have climbed the pyramids in Egypt, fed elephants in South Africa, driven a Yugo through the streets of Belgrade, and floated through the Panama Canal.  Our future plans include visiting places that we never would have tried to tackle individually; Greece, Ireland, England, and South East Asia are on our list.  I am not saying that we deserve our storybook retirement but because we have a strong marriage and a desire to live life to its fullest, we are going to appreciate everything that we have.

Paris, France

    The thing about travel is that you never know what you are going to to see or what hardships you are going to have to endure to experience the new memories of our daily lives.  For example, we took an Uber from our condo and arrived at the airport at 4:30 on Saturday for our 6:30 flight to Paris.  Travel is an ordeal, in spite of the fact that we flew throughout the night without incident, and we met the SS Joie de Vivre, our hotel on a ship, at 2:00 pm on Sunday.  It made me feel good that Carmine Esposito was truly glad to see us and hugged us as we arrived on the ship.  Tracey and I were completely overwhelmed after 18 hours of a travel day.  What we wanted, more than anything else, was to meet up with the University of Louisville Travel Group, as we prepared ourselves for the trip of a lifetime as we navigated through the cauldrons of history that is France.

   Our first real day of travel began on Monday, March 24, as we travelled to the medieval castle of La Roche Guyon.  Our tour was good for what it was and we spent a lot of time listening to Patricia, our guide for the day.  She liked to “gab, gab, gab” while describing the intricacies of the castle, but her narrative was less than inspiring.  Stephanie was our guide in the afternoon and she led us through the Chateau Gaillard, or the old castle that was situated above the Seine River.  It was beautiful but I couldn’t escape the feeling that we were stalling; waiting for the opportunity to visit the sights of Paris, France.  Carmine wanted to save the best for last.
   Most of the travel group drove to Mont Saint Michael on Tuesday, March 25, but Tracey and I made the hard decision to skip this excursion because the bus trip was too long.  Instead, we took a walking tour of the medieval city of Rouen.  Pascalla was our guide.  The highlights of the tour included the Cathedral of Notre Dame, the Joan of Arc Church, and the Market Square.  The main topic of conversation was how the French government had decided to move the retirement age from 62 to 64.  As we were leaving Rouen, thousands of protesters were entering the old city to dispute the new retirement age, and we later learned that they broke out some windows in the Market Square and they set fires in front of the church and the cathedral.  Tracey and I decided to stay on the ship for the whole afternoon to avoid the protestors and their vandalism.
   Honfleur is the old port city that sits on the Seine estuary to the English Channel.  It was a beautiful day as Barbara, our guide, showed us the historic parts of the city that are so interesting to the tourists.  We have done a lot of trips and I don’t ask a lot from these excursions; all that I want is a good guide who will show us interesting places that are new to me.  Honfluer fit the bill as the place and Barbara was the perfect guide as she blended facts with a lot of humor to make the tour more interesting.  I took a lot of pictures which I immediately posted on Facebook because that is immensely satisfying to me.
   I have been reading about D Day and the Normandy invasion since I was in middle school so I knew all about the Utah and Omaha beach landings but I never dreamed that I would actually be there.  Utah Beach was well preserved and looked exactly like it did when when our heroes landed there in 1944.  When we took our tour we saw the statues and other memorials that had been placed just off of the beach.  The people who had built a memorial even included a Higgins’ boat that the tourists could walk in to.  A museum has been built off site and it included restored Jeeps, a glider, and a C-47 plane.  Life-like mannequins were dressed up in full uniforms and it was a little eerie to take their picture.  At Pointe du Hoc, where the Rangers climbed steep cliffs to take the German command posts and artillery pill boxes, so that our infantry could land on the beaches more easily.  We visited the American Cemetery at Omaha Beach which contains rows of 2,000 white crosses, a beautiful chapel, and a huge statue that is entitled “The Spirit of American Youth Rising from the Waves.”  Our first stop on our D Day Tour was to see the “Les Braves on Omaha Beach” steel statue which has been cemented in the sand.  Barbara led us through a prayer service, through which she had hired a trumpeter to play “Taps” while we were given a rose to place at the foot of the statue or to place in the waves on the beach.  All five of our stops on Thursday showed that the Americans can build memorials with class and reverence; that we can rise to the occasion when it is important to do so.  
   I taught world history at Sacred Heart for twenty six years and in those years I always taught a unit on the French Revolution.  This chapter of history is important to me as I took a whole class on the revolution at the University of Louisville.  It was 1989, or the two hundredth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, and Dr. Weisbach was my teacher and all of the memories of the lessons that I have learned from that class, and that I have used in my lesson plans for 26 years of teaching history, came alive to me as we toured the Palace of Versailles, the cost of which spurred on the revolution.  Tracey and I signed up for the apartment tour which gave us some alone time with the more intimate artifacts of the French monarchy.  Afterwards our guide, Aurilie, had us join the masses in the main section of the building, where we saw the famous “Hall of Mirrors,” the exact place where, after the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck founded the nation of Germany.  The portraits of Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette were on display and this was quite a treat for me because I had been using those pictures as examples of French power and wealth for years.  One of the reasons why we take these trips is because it is impossible to describe the opulence and majesty of Versailles; you simply have to visit the place in order to appreciate it’s grandeur.  
   For our last day in Paris we decided to burn the candle at both ends by doing a tour of the city in the morning, the Louvre in the afternoon, and the Moulen Rouge in the evening.  Our city tour acted as a good primer for the history and architecture of Paris.  This overview was helpful because we intend to revisit the city to tour the highlights of what we have missed.  Paris is overwhelming but our appetite has been whetted for another trip to the City of Lights.  The Louvre was also overwhelming that we could not see all of the artifacts in one day so our guide, Joshua, narrowed our experience to seeing the the “three ladies,” which are the “Mona Lisa,” the “Venus di Milo,” and the “Winged Victory.”  I was distracted by the beauty of these works and, as we were leaving, Tracey said to me, “it is not crying if the tears don’t come out.  Right?”  What my blind wife meant was that she was close to having a nervous breakdown because the huge crowds at the Louvre were depriving her of room to maneuver, so she had to cling to me.  All of her skills in mobility were useless to her as we were packed into the rooms much like sardines in a tin can.  Also, the staircases and the constant escalators are difficult for blind people to navigate and the Louvre had a series of both of these things.  Tracey always makes mobility look so easy that I sometimes forget how difficult it is to be handicapped in these public buildings.  
   I didn’t have any expectations for the Moulen Rouge because I didn’t know anything about it aside from the 2001 Nicole Kidman movie, which I hated.  I could tell that this was going to be a premiere event even before entering the theater because the tickets were so expensive and the patrons were so well dressed; it was a high society crowd.  When we first walked in I was reminded of the dinner theaters from the 1950s, highlighted in The Godfather II movie, and I expected Frankie, Dino, and Sammy, to make an entrance at any minute.  The dinner menu was impressive and I am sure that it earned a five star Michelin rating.  It would be reductive to describe the show as merely a display of “tits and ass,” although that was a big part of what we saw, but we also witnessed the dancers in beautiful costumes who were fully engaged with the crowd.  Aside from the burlesque, we also saw a woman who swam in a huge water tank filled with snakes, a roller skating duet, acrobats, and two male power lifters whose specialty was strength and balance.  The show was better than anything that the Cirque du Soleil could offer in Las Vegas and our excursion to the Moulen Rouge offered a strong finish to our memorable trip to Paris.  

   

NCL Panama Canal

 Acapulco is famous for its cliff divers and we witnessed several men hurling themselves off of a 100 foot cliff to land in a pool of water that was fifteen feet deep at high tide.  One of our special memories of our cruise was having Tracey take her picture with a group of these divers and, when she had her picture taken with four mostly naked men, one of them allowed her to hug him.  We left Mexico to sail to Guatemala where we took a tour of a coffee plantation.  Our third port of call was Panama City where we visited the locks and then saw an IMAX movie about how the Panama Canal was built.  Finally, our last excursion was when we visited the old city in Cartagena, Colombia, where we experienced the Inquisition Museum.  The trip was a success because we remembered one golden nugget of an experience at each of the four places that we toured.

My wife lost her vision when she was a teenager and the question that I was constantly asked was why would a blind woman want to go to the Panama Canal since it was mostly a visual experience.  The short answer is that Tracey’s father always wanted to visit the canal but he was too set in his ways to take two weeks off from his home life to get on a ship and go.  People also asked why we were taking another major trip after we just returned from the Caribbean.  Norwegian Cruise Line only offers a trip from L.A. to Miami, via the Panama Canal, once a year.  So we sailed to honor Tracey’s father and so that she could soak up the sun during the dreary winter month of February.  As for me, I was happy to tag along with my wife and enjoy some quality time on a two week cruise.

We enjoyed all of the services that a huge cruise ship had to offer and we lived like royalty for two weeks but the lasting memories came from the people that we met.  For example, our tour guide in Cartagena was Al, who was seventy seven years old, and a pugilist who threatened to take on a group of teenagers because he though that they were bothering us.  On our tour of Acapulco, which we both wanted to see because we remembered the cliff divers being featured on “The Wide World of Sports,” we drove by a beach where our guide said that “this is where the senioritas go to swim a little and show a lot.”  A staff member was from Budapest and I said that we had been to that city and our outstanding memory was to visit “The House of Horrors.”  She replied, “you went to a house of whores?”  “No,” I replied.  Maybe it was the “House of Terror” where the communists used to torture the locals o gain information.  We all laughed at the misinterpretation.  Finally, a lady sitting next to me said that she was afraid of flying.  I replied that “there is nothing to be afraid of.  If lightning does strike the plane, and it goes down, it will be the worst 15 seconds of your life.  That’s all!  And you will probably be unconscious for most of those fifteen seconds.”  I was trying to add a little levity to our conversation but the lady looked at me as if I were crazy.

Our cruise was filled with old people because it was expensive, school was in session so families couldn’t sail with us, and it was a long cruise, lasting over two weeks.  I was raised to respect my elders but after two weeks on the ship I began to detest these people.  Here are some of the things that filled me with resentment.  When Tracey and I sat up front in the bus traveling to Cartagena we sat in the seats reserved for the handicapped.  One old lady said, “I don’t see why she needs extra help.  She seems to be fine on her own.”  Tracey tried to explain that if she couldn’t hear the guide then there was no reason for her to be on the tour.  Upon learning that the restaurant wouldn’t open until 5:30, a full half hour away, an old woman loudly declared, “but I am hungry now!”  The Norwegian “Joy” was good enough to set up a tent with thirty chairs under it for our convenience so that we could take a break in the forward section as we sailed through the Panama Canal.  However, the old people had put their purses and backpacks in the seats, while standing at the rails, rendering the thirty chairs occupied and utterly useless.  It made me sick.  In another incident, one old man stomped angrily away from the restaurant, flailing his arms and loudly exclaiming expletives after being told that, yes, he had a reservation for 5:30, but that didn’t mean that he could cut to the front of the line at 5:15.  The reservation simply guaranteed that he would have a seat in the restaurant at 5:30.  Really, these people acted as children.  One old man opened up, and sniffed, all of the creamers for the coffee, insisting that the server throw them all away since the creamer had obviously gone bad.  The server tried to explain that the creamer was non-dairy and that it didn’t go bad but the old man would not listen.  One old woman opened up the menu, glanced over the options, and loudly declared that “I am not impressed with the meal options.”  She sniffed at the delicacies that were being offered and then ordered spaghetti from the menu.  Really, she shoul have gone to the buffet on the upper deck where they serve fast food to the tourists like throwing food to pigs through a trough.  And finally, as we were waiting to get on the ship from a turnstile in L.A., one old lady, while waiting in the cold and the rain, loudly said that this was “the worst cruise that I have ever been on!”  The thing is that we hadn’t even boarded the ship and she was ready to condemn the whole experience.  It must drive the good people at the cruise line mad.

I think that the cruise went so well was because Tracey and I are experienced travelers and know what to expect.  The cruise was 15 days long, for example, and I have learned to pace myself by lifting weights every morning.  These were not light and easy workouts but true hardcore lifts.  Also, we kept our expectations low for our excursions and only asked for one good memory for each of the ports that we visited.  This strategy worked in our favor since it would have been easy to to become discouraged by the long lines and even longer bus rides to our destinations.  In order to share the joy, we gave out drink coasters from U. of L. to our favorite staff members from our cruise ship like Aileen, who gave us exceptional service and whom remembered our name from the first day of the cruise.  In fact, everything went so well that we signed up to do another Norwegian cruise and this time we will travel to Asia and visit Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, and Bali in Indonesia.  I cannot wait to make some new memories through the Norwegian Cruise Line “Jewel.”









Sent from my iPad

Epic Aruba

Tracey and I returned from our latest cruise on Sunday.  Our vacation was almost flawless in that it was the little things that went right for us, but we paid a price.  For example, we lined up to get off of our ship at about 8:30 on Sunday morning and yet our flight didn’t land in Louisville until midnight.  After sixteen hours of traveling, I didn’t want to do anything when we returned except for sleep.  It wasn’t just the fatigue; the changes in the barometric pressure made my nose bleed constantly and with all of the stress of travel, I had no energy at all.  Still, there were so many highlights to our cruise that the trip was worth it, which is good news since we intend on making a similar trip to Panama in February.

The quality of our excursions really depends on our guides, especially with Tracey’s handicap.  Ben Hoeck was our guide in Aruba and, since it was January 1st, our vehicle turned into a party bus.  The Puerto Ricans who shared the tour with us quickly tired of Ben’s narrative and began drinking beer and singing songs in Spanish.  Tracey sat up front with our guide and, in effect, had her own private tour because Ben gave up on trying to talk to our fellow passengers.  In Grenada, Philip was our guide, and we took a walking tour of the old fortress and the cathedral.  In 1983 a group of rebels were lined up and shot for fighting against the newly established dictatorship.  The highlight of our tour was when Philip showed us where the rebels were shot.  Finally, Kenville was our guide to St. Kitts.  We had a two and a half hour tour of the island and, once again, Tracey sat up front.  Kenville gave my wife a personal tour which was good because I didn’t see anything remarkable about the island and was glad that Tracey received a lot of interesting facts.

The only bad tour that we had was the one that didn’t happen.  We were in Bonaire and the lady who sold us our tickets told us to wait at her stand and she would eventually come back to pick us up.  This guide had such a great personality, and made the promise that Tracey could sit up front with her, that we paid cash up front and waited under her tent because it was a guaranteed good time.  We waited under her stand for a total of two hours before giving up on her.  The lady at the adjacent booth called the responsible company and we learned that our guide never returned because she had forgotten about us.  I don’t think that she did.  I think that we had become an inconvenience to the tour company and that she left us because we were easily disposed of.  My only solace is that this lady has to live with herself for leaving a helpless blind woman and her husband behind on a major tour.

We didn’t even get off of the ship at Barbados because we had been there before and had two remarkable excursions.  At St Marten and St Lucia, we did get off of the ship, but we decided that we would make our own tour rather than rely on the excursions sponsored by the ship.  When we walked around St Lucia my constant thought was “where are all of the white people at?” because none of our fellow 3,500 passengers chose to walk the streets with the locals.  On the other hand, it is difficult to walk in the Caribbean because, if there are sidewalks, then they are broken and uneven.  Usually there are drainage ditches off to the side and they can be up to two feet deep.  Add in the erratic traffic and a blind person has a hard time navigating the streets of the islands.  

On New Year’s Eve, as we were getting ready to go out to dinner, Tracey unexpectantly gave me a big hug to thank me for taking her on this trip.  The cruises are really for her because they give her complete freedom while we are on the ship.  For example, all of the floors are handicap accessible and every room had a Braille sign outside of its door.  A huge benefit offered to us by the Norwegian Cruise Line is that we were offered a ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) room which is about twice the size of a regular cabin.  There are designated smoking areas where Tracey can easily find a place to take a cigarette break.  Finally, we both enjoy eating out and, while the meals at the standard restaurants were good, the specialty restaurants that serve Italian, French, and Japanese cuisine were spectacular.  We both had a great time and look forward to our next cruise on the NCL Joy which sails through Panama in February.

• We met Wilma, an 85 year old woman who has travelled to over 200 countries, on the ship.  Her former travel companion died at the age of 103 after traveling with Wilma for 20 years, so now she has a much younger woman helping her on her journeys.  Wilma had a lot of energy and a zest for life that I truly admired.
• A beautiful young woman dressed cute for her big day on St Martens when, while walking on a sidewalk, a passing car splashed her from a puddle that it had driven through.  That cute little mouth let loose a string of obscenities as she was drenched from her hip down to her ankle.  We heard her curse in Japanese but it didn’t take a Rhodes scholar to get her meaning.
• I like to show off my knowledge of geography so when one of our servers said that she was from the Philippines, I rattled off the three main islands from that island-nation.  When the server asked me if I was in the military, because who else would have that knowledge, I replied with, “No, because I am a coward!”  The more that I thought about it the funnier that reply became. 

Papillon

 Like Dorothy, who followed the yellow brick road to find Oz, my brother and younger sister and I followed the railroad tracks to the mall.  Tommy, Laura, and I figured out that the tracks paralleled a major road and we remained relatively safe as long as we walked the tracks.  Once we used the pedestrian crosswalk to get across the five lanes of busy traffic, we arrived at the mall, where trouble waited for us.  We had a lot of time on our hands, especially during the summer months when school was out, so we went to the gallery section of the mall where there was a huge reflecting pool.  Each of us took off our shoes and socks, waded into the water, and scooped up all of the coins that people had thrown in to wish for good luck.  With our new found wealth, we three children immediately bought candy and ice cream from one of the retail shops.  The mall was a huge playground for us and we abused the privilege of being unsupervised by doing stupid things like racing up and down the escalators.  

There wasn’t just one trip to the mall but many and, over the course of the years, we got into so much trouble that security had to detain us.  The officer kept us in his office, called my mother, and we had to wait for her to come and pick us up.  We had become a public nuisance.  I wasn’t done with the mall, however.  After this episode I decided to fly under the radar by walking the three miles up to Oxmoor Mall by myself because it had a movie theater.  There was no better way of killing a day in the balmy summer in Louisville than by sneaking into the movies.  It was so easy to do.  I just waited in the foyer and, when the attendant was distracted, I would dart in.  The problem was that I was ten years old in 1972 and I had no discretion as to which movie I saw and ended up seeing movies that were wildly inappropriate for my age.  As one critic recently wrote about seeing “Chinatown” when he was too young; “Nothing was explained to me.  I was left to grapple with the horrors and mysteries of the adult world alone.  The trying and failing to understand.  The not getting it.”  No one will ever  be thanked, years after the fact, for showing a movie to a child who is not ready for the adult content.

This may sounded overly dramatic but I promise you that it is not, in that the damage of seeing R rated movies at the age of ten and eleven can never be undone.  For example, I saw the Jack Lemmon film entitled “The War Between Men and Women”  with its adult themes of alcoholism and divorce.  The scene that I remember the most is when Lemmon’s character gets drunk and starts drawing on the walls of his home.  He draws a cartoon battle, which comes to life, and he single handedly takes out a tank.  The whole scene plays out in his intoxicated imagination and closes only when Lemmon wakes up with a hangover.  No one was there to explain adultery, alcoholism, and the damage done to the entire family because of Lemmon’s drinking.  In that same year of 1972 “The Poseidon Adventure,” was released and I saw it several times because of the action sequences.  One of the major characters was a former prostitute.  Ernest Borgnine played a cop who kept arresting her for selling her body until she cleaned herself up and agreed to marry him.  Of course, I was too young to understand what sex was, let alone a prostitute, and a lot of the adult themes went right over my head.

These two movies pale in comparison to the 1973 version of “Papillon,” which I snuck into see more than once.  There was a homosexual scene in it and I had no idea of what was happening.  The first time that I saw “Papillon” my brother, who was all of thirteen at the time, tried to explain homosexuality to me and he did a poor job of it.  In another graphic scene, a man was sliced open and disemboweled so that thieves could get to the cash that the man had shoved up his rectum for safe keeping.  There was violence and nudity scattered throughout the movie and it was too much for my eleven year old brain to process.  To top it all off, Steve McQueen, who played Papillon, and part of the nuance of the role was that he was a bad man who protected Dustin Hoffman’s character for money.  And yet the audience cheered him as if he was a hero.  It was a lot to take in.  

I suppose that at this point in my entry that you are looking for someone to blame for my loss of innocence but the trauma was self inflicted.  We were three kids who were bored but it was reckless of us to walk to the mall.  Further, I should not have snuck into see “Papillon” and “The Poseidon Adventure” for a second and third time having already learned that the movies were inappropriate for my age and maturity level.  There were no new lessons to be learned through repeated viewings.  Also, I didn’t get any bragging rights to my friends, nor could I claim to be sophisticated and explain the movies to others, because I didn’t understand what I saw.  The empty vessel that was my ten year old brain was being filled with sewage and, since there were no impediments to stop me, I returned to the movie theater over and over again to get more helpings.

Music

    Out of the blue, my daughter, Virginia, sent me the following text.  “Every time that I hear ‘Renegade’ by Styx, I think of the four of us in the car and, wherever we were going, just singing the song at the top of our lunges.  I don’t know if you remember that but it is one of the strongest memories I have of our car rides during the summer or going to and from school.”  Music is the soundtrack of our lives and when I hear certain songs, they act as a trigger and send me back years, if not decades, into my past. 

   My mother spent a lot of time in the kitchen when I was a kid and she listened to a lot of am radio from a monitor installed on the wall.  “Georgie Girl,” “Downtown,” and “The Happening” are examples of songs that I remember bellowing from the radio.  The happiest that I ever remember my father was when he sang “King of the Road,” prompted by the car radio, as we took road trips to Minnesota or Vermont.  Late in his career, my father bought a really nice stereo system for our living room so that he could calm his nerves by listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

   My sister, Cherylanne, was the one who taught me how important music could be in my life.  She had a record player in her bedroom and had quite a collection of 45s.  “Billy, Don’t be a Hero,” “I’ve got a Brand New Pair of Roller Skates,” and “Run, Joey, Run,” were among the hits that she collected.  I remember that she had a pink carrying case for her 45s and she treated them like a treasure.  My brother, Thomas, influenced my taste in music in that he learned a lot of songs from his week out at Camp Tall Trees.  He was so happy when he sang these songs, like “Titanic” and “The Bismarck,” that I couldn’t wait until I was old enough to go to camp so that I could learn them as well.  

   In 1978 I was hired on at Camp Tall Trees to be a Blackfoot, which is another name for the kitchen help.  It was in that year that the movie “Grease” was released.  It was so popular that you couldn’t escape the soundtrack because the radio was continuously playing its songs.  The commute to Camp Tall Trees took about an hour and, to this day, when I hear a song from the soundtrack I am immediately transported back to that drive out to camp.  Similarly, Chris Wagoner, David Greenwell, and I, who spent our Blackfoot year together, spent hours cleaning the pots and pans and dishes after the campers and counselors had left the mess hall.  Chris liked to listen to classic rock and, since it was his radio, we heard “Joker” and “Money” over and over again as we scraped the plates and mopped the floors.  

   I’ll have to admit that I was moody kid throughout middle and high school because I was trying to figure myself out.  I listened to a lot of depressing music like “Cats in the Cradle” and “Seasons in the Sun” and I must have worn out my cassette tape of “Jesus Christ Superstar.”  By the time that I reached my senior year, I switched over to Disco because it had uplifting music.  “Celebrate Good Times,” for example, send me back to my cheerleading days at Xavier University.  After I graduated from Bellarmine, when I reached the depths of despair while working at a dead end job at Metal Sales, I listened to a lot of Van Halen, which helped to buck me up.

   In 1986, when Tracey and I started to date, we decided that our song should be “The Lady in Red.”  My wife taught me that not all Christmas music is bad; that you have to pick and choose which songs are uplifting, so we listened to a lot of Amy Grant.  Then, after we married and we started a family, Jimmy Buffett was constantly on our CD player.  “Jolly Man” was my favorite Buffett song because it told a good short story and I could sing it in about the same amount of time that it took to change the diapers of my children.

   Today, I still depend of music to distract me.  When I jog in the morning I like to listen to the local pop stations just so that I can keep in touch with the modern music culture.  I’ll plug in my MP3 player when I am on long bike rides and listen to Broadway musicals.  It is happy music with a narrative and I never tire of the songs.  If I need to block out distractions while I read something dense then I will YouTube classical or jazz music.  Movie soundtracks are a favorite for classical and you just cannot go wrong with the jazz greats like Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk.

   Forgive me from becoming too personal but, often, from the deep recesses of my mind, comes my “Citizen Kane” moment.  Only for me, it is not a sled that is so important to my childhood, that keeps reappearing.  No, my “Rosebud” is a song and it goes something like this.  “Chip, chip, my little horse.  Chip, chip, again sir.  How many miles to London Town?  Four score and ten, sir!”  This song comes from the 1948 movie, “The Boy with the Green Hair.”  My brother and sisters and I would race home from Holy Trinity School to watch television and one of the local stations played old movies in the afternoon.  For some reason, this movie, and this song, is a happy memory for me and my brother.  I clearly remember laying on the floor, watching this movie, and from the deep recesses of my mind, this song reappears, like a haunt wandering through my consciousness, searching for meaning.  Thomas and I shared a bonding moment s we sung this song together.