Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Happy Birthday To Tony Pavlick, My Favorite Teacher

Anthony Pavlick taught Agriculture to the boys in my seventh grade at Mentone School in Mentone, Indiana. He stayed in town just one year, never to be heard from again, until I found him on Facebook recently. Today is his 86th birthday. He ended up as an economics professor at the University of Wisconsin, has been retired for some time, but is still active and sharp.

One night back in the spring of 1952 he was hanging out at a Boy Scout meeting; these meetings were held in an upstairs room at the Methodist church on Main Street. When we had a break Mr. Pavlick -- as I called him then -- happened to be sitting next to me on a raised platform at the rear of the room. He was saying something to the effect that he recognized that I was bored with school and bored with Mentone and that I needed to realize that there was a great big world out there and that someday I would be free to explore it however I wanted to explore it. I was hearing him but I wasn't really listening, partly because my buddy Nick, a couple years older than me, had a pack of cigarettes, and he was over by the door waiting for me to join him for a sneaked smoke; and partly because Mr. Pavlick was trying to get me to think, to consider my future, and thinking wasn't something I was good at. I don't remember how I finally got myself away from my favorite teacher.

"We ain't got much time left," Nick said. "Let's just hide behind the altar downstairs."

The church downstairs was dark. What a good idea! We lit up, puffed away, and were chatting sotto voce. But not sotto voce enough. The Scout Master, Mr. Wayne Tombaugh, was suddenly glaring down at us from his adult height. Even in the dim light we could make out his anger-reddened face. He reached a pointing finger toward the door. "Out!" he ordered. "You should be ashamed of yourselves! Smoking! Smoking even in a church! On an altar! YOU ARE KICKED OUT OF SCOUTS!!!! RIGHT NOW!!! OUT!!!"

Our scout pack, obviously, was administered as a tyranny.

But I never forgot the gist of what Mr. Pavlick had said. I missed him when he left town and came to appreciate that this handsome man had tried to reach through to a kid who was, he could see, bored beyond bored.

I thanked him recently, on Facebook, fifty-seven years later.

(And in a subsequent post I'll relate the circumstances a few years later when Mr. Tombaugh practically begged me to re-join the Boy Scouts of America.)
(And this is my one hundredth post!)

Monday, April 27, 2009

A Long Road


It was 530 miles we needed to drive on Friday to get to near Washington DC to celebrate our friend's 94th birthday on Saturday, and then we'd driven 50 extra miles when I wandered off the New Jersey Turnpike onto I-80 West because I was quibbling with Rodney about some stupid TV show and not paying attention.  Then there was the 530 miles back on Sunday.

It was worth it.  Fun.  Warmth.  Great food.  Great friends.  New sights, including a "Prayer Stop" along a road which, sadly, I failed to get a picture of.

An extraordinarily beautiful young woman named Alicia, whom Mark used to work with, and her boyfriend, Mike, whom I've never met, came from Hartford to watch our pets.

Alicia and Mike were gone by the time we got home, but had left on a placemat the little sculpture, pictured above, of pebbles and sea glass they'd picked up on the beach.  It struck me as perfectly Zen, and it was balm for eyes that had made too many dismaying glances at the clock or the odometer, had seen too many miles of white line, too many green signs with white letters, too many other cars speeding or slowing along.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Cuban Relations & Other Communist Stuff

There was a cold war but it was a beautiful sunny November day in 1977 when I decided to go from West Berlin to East Berlin.

I start across, on foot, a huge graveled space. I come to a gigantic sign: WARNING - YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR. It is feeling like no-man's land. You feel very alone. You are aware that the uniformed man in the tower above the wall has a gun. The gun is pointed at you. There's still a ways to go. You eventually enter a maze of barricades. This way, that way. It's crazy. Finally, in small print, a sign says PASSPORT CONTROL.



I approach an iron gate. It is electronically buzzed open. I walk down short empty halls that run alongside each other -- another maze. I come to a grim looking young woman. Uniformed. She does not greet me. She does not smile. She takes my passport. She inspects it. She passes it through an opening to someone invisible in an adjacent room. Five minutes later my passport comes back through the opening. "Five Deutsch marks, 24-hour visa," she says. I hand her five Deutsch marks. She stamps my passport. Now I'm buzzed into another room where I'm required to empty my pockets and count my money. The amounts in the various currencies are recorded on a stamped slip which I must, I am instructed, turn in when I exit the eastern sector. Then more halls. In another room I am required to buy a minimum of 6.50 Deutsch Republic marks. More buzzed doors. Another inspection of my passport by yet another guard. Finally I'm walking freely in East Berlin.

I go to the TV Tower. It's 207 meters high. I wait wait wait to go up one level where, for 5 DR marks, I buy a ticket which allows me to wait wait wait to get on an elevator. The elevator takes me to the restaurant at the tower's top. The restaurant rotates 360-degrees in one hour. I wait wait wait until I'm seated. I order tea and a bowl of Ukranian Solyanka; it's sort of a highly spiced borscht. The views of the city and its rivers are fabulous.

While waiting to descend I notice three men. They are obviously foreign, their suits are cut differently from what a typical German man would wear, and they are speaking what I take to be Spanish. I ask, in German, if they are speaking Spanish. "Si! Si!" one exclaims. They smile and smile and smile. I ask where they are from. "Ku-bahn-o," one says. Smiles smiles smiles.

I make a couple of small-talk remarks in German about the tower. They can use a few words of German, perhaps just a few less than I can use. One asks my name. I don't want to say the Jorge of Spanish because I know that I can't add the appropriate exhalation that accompanies the "J" so I just say my name is Jurgen. And what is my last name? "Feetz-gay-rald," I say. Oh, it must sound so perfectly German to them, and it is not the first time in my life that a foreigner has thought my last name to be of German origin. One of the Cubans tells me that my country is very beautiful. He asks what city I am from. I'm sure he is wondering what German city I live in.

"Nuevo Yorka," I say. Obviously, I don't know how to say York in fractured Spanish. Maybe there is no way, except to throw some vowel on at the end.

They look puzzled. "Americano?" one asks.

"Si!"

At this they look at one another. Immediately, without another word, all three turn and walk away as if I am a disease.

I'm glad President Obama is fixing this so Cubans won't feel it necessary to snub me again.
*
I spend the rest of the afternoon and early evening walking walking walking. I walk up one side and down the other of the beautiful Unter den Linden. There's few people out and about which makes the gorgeous wide street seem drab. It's amazing ... there are beautiful buildings to look at but it seems too weird for there to be so few people looking at them on a weekday afternoon. But I am happy enough because I love the Christopher Isherwood novels that he set in in this city; thanks to him I can imagine that I am living in Berlin and it is the early thirties. I can be, in my imagination, headed for a cabaret.
*
Dusk arrives. I decide to head back to West Berlin. I have gotten a little lost. I wander in dark alley-like lanes that lead only to other dark places. There is a pitifully small amount of street-lighting. It begins to get eerie. I'm getting nowhere. Finally I can see the famous wall a few blocks to my right. I figure I can just walk along it, keeping just a block or two east of it -- aware that along parts of it there are probably land mines so I don't want to get too close. I keep meeting buildings and am forced to detour, until it seems like I'm coming upon one dead end after another. It is hopeless in a way that even Kafka doesn't apply.

Finally I see a few people across a way; they seem like factory workers out on a break. I can't make a single one of the five or six of them understand me, but one of them directs me to a soldier who has appeared nearby.

I'm afraid to ask where "Checkpoint Charlie" is -- the term the GIs used when I was stationed in Germany in the early sixties -- I'm afraid it might be considered disrespectful by an East Berliner. I ask in really clumsy slow German, "What is the street for the American to cross frontier to West Berlin?"

The soldier, his rifle strapped at his shoulder, doesn't quite get me. I ask again, slowly again. Finally he puts his hand on my shoulder and laughs and says, "Oh! Shakepoint Sharley!"

He kindly leads me through three blocks of construction area. I pass through Checkpoint Charlie carrying a manuscript book I'd bought as a souvenir. It's beautiful. The cover is made of inlaid bamboo reed. It is a Communist manuscript book; it was made in China.
*Photo top right of TV Tower courtesy Google Images.

Friday, April 17, 2009

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Bless me Father for I ...

... have become addicted to playing a game on Facebook.  I can't stop.  I can't help myself.  I am ashamed.  I've ignored my blog.  I've ignored the library; over-due fines of 10-cents a day are piling up on Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses and a volume of James Lees-Milne's journal called Deep Romantic Chasms.  I've ignored meals except what was quickest and easiest to fix.  I didn't change the kitty litter.  I didn't get notes written for two sympathy cards I bought.  I played this mind-numbing game for up to 3 to 4 hours each evening; 6, 7 & 8 hours on Saturdays and Sundays.  My mouse-moving hand would become almost paralyzed. 

When I had my annual check-up at the Veterans' Clinic in Hyannis my new doctor there, whom I really liked, did, after interviewing me, suggest that I should avail myself of one of the two psychologists or the one psychiatrist they have on staff there ... and I hadn't even told him about my obsession with a game.

Maybe posting "My name is George Fitzgerald and I am addicted ...." will help.


Sometimes my mood can become elevated by a little arraying of disarray and such, so I've ironed and folded that teal blue t-shirt I showed on my last post.


Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Teal Blue T-Shirts (Line for a poem)


After a long walk in the woods with the dog I sit staring at the Apple screen.  I'm wearing a teal blue t-shirt.  Over the course of half an hour six repeat six deer ticks (I believe them to be) crawl up the front of said shirt.  Is teal blue their favorite color?  And how many are crawling where I can't see 'em? 

How much Lyme disease can you buy for a buck? 

And my nephew's wife in Iowa talks on Facebook of red cake and shells stuffed with fresh basil and Thai noodles and I'm starving and wondering if they have ticks in Iowa?

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Great Collection of Plath Pictures & Info

I've added a Blog I follow to my list ... one I've gone to for years for the most complete collection of pictures for the Plath-obsessed ... thanks Peter Steinberg for a really great site and thanks for adding a good blog to it! 

And I've just discovered (and added to my list) another great one called Sylvia & Ted Collection done by a Laurie up in Juneau, Alaska!