Rashomon

Commoner: Well, men are only men. That's why they lie. They can't tell the truth, even to themselves.

Priest: That may be true. Because men are weak, they lie to deceive themselves.

Commoner: Not another sermon! I don't mind a lie if it's interesting.

 



The Dragon Calls the Principal

The word Maryvale scares most of my Phoenix neighbors.  Hell.  A lot of them won't even send their children to the neighborhood public schools where my kids go.  Maybe being in the Navy me made less touchy about that.  When black and Mexican guys are part of the crew watching your butt when the bullets are flying around, you're a little less touchy about whose kid sits next to your little Mary in class. 

The world is full of a lot of basically good kids.  A few are self-starters, like my Mary.  Most, like my Jimmy (little guy in the middle), need some direction.  Some of the kids need a lot of direction. 







A few of them need a smack upside the head from the principal.  Towards the end of my son's middle school basketball season, we made the trip to Maryvale.  The game went well and the Maryvale players were good sports even though they lost the game.   The young ladies were another matter.  The Maryvale girls took exception to the Madison No. 1 girls cheering vigorously for the Madison boys.   The Maryvale girls, shouting profanities, followed the Madison boys and girls out to the bus.  There was no security anywhere in sight to stop this.   They kept up the profanities led by a tall black girl.  When the bus drove by them pulling out of the lot, the girls starting throwing rocks. 

I had promised my wife not to get involved with this stuff anymore, so I just stood and watched.   Finally I shouted at the girls and told them I'd be calling their principal in the morning.  At least I made it out of the parking lot without them throwing rocks at me.

In the morning I sent a strongly worded email to the principal, the president of the governing board, and their superintendent and our superintendent.   The leader of the pack was suspended from school.  The other girls were dropped from the cheer squad.   In the spring when we visited for baseball and softball, there was plenty of school security around.   The girls were still yapping at one another.  The boys played with respect.

The Dragon dials 911

Why didn't I send my kid to Camelback, the public high school down the street from us.  It would be so convenient.  Let's start with high school night at Madison No. 1 (my son's middle school),  the curriculum that CHS was offering left a lot to be desired for those who are college bound.   Then there's the wonderful neighborhood experience, eg, the gunfight out in front of the high school.   Old news?  Ok, how about the little league game last year where the game had to be stopped because two guys got into a fight over a girl.   It was a darn impressive fight.   One guy, a CHS student, he looks like superman.  The other one a wiry terrier guy who won't stop yapping at superman.   Not even when superman rips off his own shirt and starts pounding his own mighty chest with his fists.  Terrier-guy didn't stop yapping at all even while superman was shaking him like a rag doll and banging terrier guy against the walls and concrete deck.  Terrier-guy even managed to land a few punches while he was bouncing off the wall.

I'm done with breaking up fights.  I dialed 911 and yelled at superman and terrier-guy that the police were on the way.   Some other brave souls finally separated them.  Superman finally came to his senses and ran off.  He's had the crap nurtured out of him  and realized he didn't need to be there when the cops arrived.   Lucky for him it took the cops 30 minutes to show up.

I've lived in the Madison neighborhood for 20 years I love the kids -- I've been a soccer or baseball coach for a lot of them -- but a few of them scare the crap out of me.  And if they scare me, my kid isn't going to CHS.

The FBI meets the Dragon

The FBI showed up at our door one day years ago. 
Jim, Jim! wailed my poor old mother-in-law, a little old Italian lady.  The FBI are here! 
I walked over to the door. 
We'd like to speak with your wife. 
What about, says I. 
We need to speak with your wife. 
You can tell me. 
No, we can't.  We need to speak with her. 
At this point my little boy butted in: what do the ladies want, Daddy. 
I smiled and said, they're from the FBI, son, and they're here to arrest your mother. 
My mother-in-law nearly fainted. 
The FBI agents squealed NO, NO, it's nothing like that. 
Ok, what is it then.  
We can't tell you. 

I finally relented and told them my wife was at work and where that was.  It turns out she'd been taking a shortcut through the back parking lot behind the FBI building on the days she had to pick up our son at the babysitter. 

Do you have a camera, they asked?  
Were you taking pictures. 
We can't be too careful after Oklahoma City, sorry. 

Across town at about the same time a terrorist was training on an aircraft simulator for 9/11.

*   *   *   *   *

 

Since the FBI agents didn't tell me what they wanted.  I didn't bother to tell the FBI who my wife worked for.  I was sending them to Arizona's second largest Medicaid health plan run by the Catholic Sisters of Mercy and Carondelet.   My wife was the COO and a specialist in maternal child health care and had recently gone to Washington to accept an award from the Medicaid people for caring for AIDS patients.  

 

Receptionist:  Welcome to Mercy Care Plan.  How may I help you.

FBI:  we're here to see Julie...

Receptionist:  Do you have an appointment?

 

I'd guessed that the FBI wanted to ask some questions about the Native American tribes the health plan served.  That they took my wife for a potential terrorist never entered my mind.  But I've never let her forget it.

The Sprinkler Prayer

I confess that prayer hasn't been a big part of my life.   My son rats me out to his confessor that we miss Mass on Sunday.  It's not that I've lost faith in the One True Religion. I'm a just a pretty serious procrastinator unless I'm in the zone building a system.   My grandmother would say that every act is a prayer; most of my work was a prayer.  There were go-live days when I prayed a lot. 

I got sucked into Little League one day when a woman called up and asked if I'd coach my son's team.  I'd coached little league hockey while I was in graduate school and swore I'd never do it again.  The kids were great.  The parents made you miserable.  But what could I say to the lady who was suggesting no coach, no baseball for your kid.

It's a frightening and helpless feeling when you get caught in a rip tide.  You keep swimming and swimming but keep getting sucked in the wrong direction.  Everyone who's had a bad dream like that may understand, too. This was Little League.  Before long you're sucked helplessly in a direction you don't want to go... because you're doing it for the kids.  That's when I met Lyndon.

Before you can play ball you have to fix up the fields.  Ours were in really, seriously bad shape, especially by modern Phoenix area Little League standards where some of the leagues pay professional crews to manicure the fields.   We didn't have enough money to hire a crew.  When I heard how much the crew cost,  I volunteered for the do-it-yourself alternative and showed up at the playground at my son's school  (In the end it would have been less expensive and less painful to have personally forked over $10,000 for the crew in the beginning, but that's another story).

Even with the do-it-yourself option, some of the dad's got carried away.  I looked up from raking dirt and there are some guys with a backhoe digging a trench to put in a sprinkler system.  Later in the afternoon they're still working on the sprinklers.  Old fishing boat deckhands live by the dictum "don't watch while someone else works" so I sauntered over and offered to help.  We finished filling in the trench when the sun was low in the sky. 

While we waited for the water to be turned on, I chatted with Lyndon who was leading the effort.  He looked like a real worker, heavyset and muscular, sweating with his tool belt strapped to his waist.  Call me Mako.  I'm from Hawaii.  We're serious about Little League there.  What's the matter with you people (you aren't Japanese and don't know how to work).  We had nothing.  Compared to us you guys are rich, but you can't build a Little League field.  Mako played baseball at Baylor and although he was now a deacon at the Baptist church down the street,  he still hated Roger Clemens who played for Texas and taunted the Baylor players after he struck them out.

I didn't get to tell Mako about Uncle George playing poker with Babe Ruth.  The moment of truth came and we turned on the water.  Fabulous, wonderful we can now water the fields before games. Instead of weathering an Arizona dust storm, the kids could play baseball.  Then the bad news.  A puddle appears at third base.  It got bigger... and bigger.  Someone had driven a pickup near third and the weight of the truck had cracked the water pipe.  

We dug out the pipe, fixed the break and tried again.   More water.  We needed a new part.  Someone was dispatched to Home Depot to get it.  We waited and waited.   Night came and the lights went on.   More bad news.  The lights would only stay on until 9 pm.  It was Sunday night and the only way we can stop the water is by turning off all the water to school.   The principal is not going to be happy.   If we don't fix this, the playground will be a lake tomorrow or the school will not have water, and it's way too late to call a plumber.  The part comes and we try again.  This is time consuming because someone has to run to the school and turn on the water.   It doesn't work.  About this time the lights go out.   Mako has a vision.  Oops, he didn't glue it right.  Turn off the water.   Glue it right.  We hope.   We are working under the headlights of Mako's pickup truck now, in a trench that smells like Boston harbor at low tide.  His kid goes to a Christian school miles away.  I'm terrified because my kid goes to school here and I'll have to face the principal in the morning.  The principal was one of those wiry women who could humble you with a wag of a finger and wasn't shy about doing it.  She'd have made a good nun.

This is our last chance.  We wait a good while for the glue to seal the pipe.  We're ready to try again.  Mako stops everyone (which by now is just me and him).  Let us pray.  Standing over the trench, Mako bows his head and lifts his hands up in the darkness illuminated only by the lights from his pickup.  "Dear Lord, I pray for your strength and courage upon us.  Bless our work and give us a successful end.  In Jesus name, I pray."   I raised my hands, too, and prayed real hard along with Mako, even though he was Baptist.  And then whispered "Dear God, save me from principal Murphy."

Mako headed for the school.  He called me on his cellphone and told me to be ready.  Here comes the water.  I waited.  It sounded like there was water in the pipe...... it was holding.  We waited a decent interval, filled in the trench and went home.

Praise be to Jesus.

Revelation 1:12-18

A major downside to Holy Cross College prior to 1972 when the men's college became coeducational were weekends that became very quiet, especially after the football season ended.  Fraternizing with the gentler gender required trips to Boston: Emmanuel, Newton and Regis colleges for Catholic women.  My wife went to Simmons College across the street from Emmanuel, but I didn't meet her until much later in life.  She and her friends dated young men at Harvard and MIT.  This may have had something to do with snobbery on their part and lack of imagination on the part of Holy Cross boys.  Possibly a healthy dose of both.  I think it came as a major relief to my wife's parents when she finally settled down and married a good Catholic boy, a normal person with an honest appreciation for Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio ... and a war veteran to boot.

The Massachusetts Turnpike might have been the fastest route from Holy Cross to Boston, but we usually drove Route 9, no tolls.  In those days, that road had some very dark stretches and turns that could jar the passengers when the driver got a little sleepy.  One dark night on the road back from Emmanuel the passengers were sound asleep.  I was starting to nod off myself when we hit one of the those curves and I jerked the steering wheel to stay on the road.  Jerked from dreams about a beautiful Emmanuel girl with long black hair, my friend John who was sitting beside me screamed:

OH DEAR JESUS, I'M DEAD!

Above the curve, on a hill, illuminated in the darkness like a baroque Caravaggisti painting, was a huge statue of Jesus Christ, which of course was the first thing sleepy John saw when he opened his eyes. 

Revelation 1:12-18

"A revalation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him so that he could tell his servants what is now to take place very soon; he sent his angel to make it known to his servant John..."
"And when I saw him, I fell at his feet as dead.  But he laid his right hand on me, 'Do not be afraid; I am the First and the Last.  I am he who lives and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore.  Amen.'"

Beetlejuice and the Big Bang

Ask a Holy Cross student then or now what Betelgeuse is and 99 times out of 100 they'd tell you it's a movie directed by the renown Tim Burton, starring Michael Keaton, Alec Baldwin, Geena Davis, and Winona Ryder. 


The major exception would be all the Navy ROTC students who were required to study celestial navigation and knew how to locate the super red giant star that sits on the shoulder of the constellation that some of us playfully called O'Ryan, the Hunter.   Profoundly ironic that the NROTC students, who some vituperatively said didn't belong there, were among the few at Holy Cross with any academic connection to the great tradition of Jesuit astronomy:  Clavius, Secchi and Lemaitre, father of the Big Bang, and I'm not talking a TV show. 

Ok, it's an anachronism to conflate 1960s Holy Cross with Tim Burton, but what's the difference between a blank stare and a crossword puzzle education, although there may be some karma involved here since Winona Ryder is the goddaughter of Holy Cross alumnus and notorious LSD guru Timothy Leary.