VOLUME 1, CHRONICLE 7, SOUVENIRS REDUX, let me tell you a story from the steps: Well, it’s really two intertwined stories, the first, a present day tale, the second published in March of 2022 though the scroll started on a channeling of Kerouac’s beatniks in September, 1971. While I believe too much looking in the rear view mirror causes a lot of missed scenery out of the front windscreen, the last six weeks, especially today, has contained more looks backward rather than out the front & I’ve been privileged to connect with two old friends. Please notice, there’s no prefix “re” in the connection because in spite of distance, whether it be 12 miles or 12 time zones, life’s peaks & troughs, its silences & screams, & our last seeing each other in 2019 before a near global shutdown, we never disconnected. Our friendships with each other & the others you’ll read about still have attaching adjectives like cherished & valued. An attached firmness like old firmly to money & cold firmly to ice. I came home a little while ago & cranked up my favorite music streamer & loaded my Junior High playlist because today, a small gym, a small cafeteria & two small 3 ½ year olds, one who was concerned I’d lost my “chef thing” (my apron) & was most relieved when he saw me wearing it later & the other who told me, straight & direct, that he had brought his lunch & then offered a sweet & heartfelt “I’m sorry”, took me back to the souvenir stand. A stand of gym, cafeteria & brotherhood (& yes, included sisters) that gave breath to Thomas Jefferson’s, “I’ve never considered a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy, as cause for withdrawing from a friend.” And now, to March ‘22 & that second story on the road of the cherished & the valued…

SOUVENIRS: On Labor Day evening 1971, with Monday Night Baseball the backing soundtrack, I sat in my dad’s lap in the house numbered 1432 & cried. Cried because the next day, I would enter 4th grade at a new school with a 6579 address. I left Elbert Long School, 6579 East Brainerd Road as a graduate in June 1977. I didn’t cry then because I was a 14 year old with the world to conquer. Yesterday, with some old friends, I entered & exited those seafoam green, flat & bull nose tiled hallways, hallways too talkative girls stood in & too talkative boys in Mr. Spencer’s class stood with noses against the hallway tiles, dismissed from class with the phrase “the hall called”, fairly certain it would be the final time. I didn’t enter with an eye for yesterday, a “we did it better” stance like old men leaning on a fence & seeing only the past on a fall Friday night, or intend to receive or stamp a letter from the past. I went to visit a gift shop. A place where invested time, scholarship, & friendship were shelved as momentos, souvenirs given by others on the way to their obituary, souvenirs collected by me on the way to mine. A tour that I ran into spots where I avoided the raindrops that puddled into “woulda’s, coulda’s, & shoulda’s”, & places where I danced in the rain with the intention of getting wet & I stomped in the puddles of “glad I did”. The auditorium on one end of the main floor, its wooden theater seats long gone. The place I entered & sat nervously at stage right waiting for the first 4th grade day. The place I entered in later years, proudly wearing my game day jersey or a wool letterman sweater when it was way too hot in September & way too cold in January, taking my seat at stage left. The place where I learned in orchestra that scales were the same foundation in music as footwork was to sports & I became attracted to jazz. The library where Mrs. Hoover encouraged my love of books, the words, the feel, the sound of a cracking spine & turning pages. The office where Mrs. Lawrence served Mr. Blanchard & Mr. Dryman as secretary. Next door the 4×8 room that served as a bookstore for needed erasers, pencils, notebooks, & P.E. uniforms. Up the steps to the top floor, & my 4th grade classroom. Where my rite of passage was being the new guy, ignoring my name being purposely mispronounced, ignoring the fact I was the last guy picked for football at recess, hanging in until on a spot where a soccer pitch now sits, I intercepted 2 passes during one recess & the next day wasn’t the last, mispronounced pick that day or any other. Across the hall to 5th grade where 2 boys picked up a shotgun rider in each other for the rest of our time at Elbert Long School & beyond*. I went back across the hall from where I came, shotgun rider in tow, for 6th grade. My friend & I joined our athletic lives here, youth league football & baseball in 6th grade & through open projecting windows that still protect from the weather, we heard cheerleaders clapping hands & bopping feet & the thump of a big bass drum as a pep rally roared for his brother & the Trojans. For the next 3 years as Trojans, the claps, the bopping, the drum beat was for us. Every class, every team, except 8th grade homeroom when the “M”s left the N-Zs & joined the A-Ls & 9th grade 1st period when he took art because he could draw & I didn’t because I couldn’t draw a blank. The room where Mrs. Farrow drove & demanded from an overhead projector, allowed a day of paper football before Christmas break, & wheeled in a big black & white TV so we could watch Aaron swat #714 before she dropped down the 3 floor central staircase & joined us for 7th & 8th grade math. At the landing at the central stairs, by the double swinging gym doors, at the spot where every K-9 student walked every day to recess or to lunch, sat Mrs. Pitts English class. It’s her fault for me clogging so many timelines, she told me I could write. The last time I saw her in 1988, she told me I could write, ’cause educators are gonna educate. On the left, back toward the library, sits what used to be Room 207, the room where football pregame took place, nervous blue shirted boys tapping orange helmets or fumbling with a chinstrap. Turning back on the main hallway, toward the big picture window which, like the hallway has grown smaller as the years have grown longer, Mr. Haskins Science room & Mrs. Hearn’s Civics class & in between the Typing room, where I spent 1st period in 9th grade with Miss Winston at 41 words per minute & nabbed my first byline courtesy of the “Trojan Trackdown”.  Across the hall, Coach Moser’s art room. The room I visited frequently for one who wasn’t an artist. Down the steps to the bottom floor, passing the picture window & looking over the baseball field & beyond, to the patch of green that used to be the gridiron. At the bottom of the steps, on the left, Mrs. Farrow’s math room, now without the obligatory overhead projector, a room that in later years proved, as I looked over blueprints or tried to balance an ailing checkbook, that one does use math as a grownup. On the right, Mrs. Welch’s Home Ec room, where for 9 weeks I learned to sew & to cook. Past the lockers, to the foot of the main stair by a library that used to be the woodshop sits the coaches office. I spent a lot of time there to not be a coach. It was the room from where I got my first big boy phone call from Coach Moser, a call informing me that our classmate & teammate Gary had drowned. He was with us during football season in the form of a black cross on the back left of our orange helmets. Under the steps, school janitor Mr. Chapman’s office. His green uniform & red mower gone but not the memory of well cut ball fields & slick gym floors nor the double duty magic sawdust, the sweeping compound that could suck up a poorly digested lunch or dry a rain soaked pitchers mound with equal effect. A quick turn back into the cafeteria. The half moon sink to wash hands became a relic the first time the school closed in 1989. Over to the location where 2 tables of boys shared meals. Boys with hair of brown, afro, & blonde & skin of light brown, white, & mahogany. Dino. Cedric. Bruce. Clay. Tommy C. Stefan. Tommy J. Todd. General. Mike. An empty chair for Gary. Boys Mrs. Farrow was proud of when we came back & beat Notre Dame. Boys that as men I still call friends. Boys that turned the abstract truth of “treat & love your neighbor as yourself” that I learned at the church in view of the school’s front steps into concrete truth. Then up the back staircase to the gym. My often private route to 5th period English class through the gym. At the top, by the girls locker room, the site where bleacher stairs descended to a landing & I received a pep talk from Mr. Chapman that I didn’t apply or fully appreciate until 2013. The double water fountain that refreshed during many basketball practices is now gone. Through the half door & on the end wall on the right, the location of a long gone chalkboard where I spent many Sunday afternoons with Coach Careathers working on the offense & finding out football, & from Coach Mo in basketball & baseball, that sports is a life metaphor. That it really isn’t about X’s & O’s but Jimmy’s & Joe’s. The Jimmy’s & Joe’s in my case bearing the same names as the boys in the lunchroom. In the shadows of the hoop at the gymnasium’s North end, Coach Careathers let me know that the last 2 quarterbacks he huddled with were Conredge Holloway & Ken Stabler & while I couldn’t come close to them in talent, I had better match them in commitment to words & numbers like Slide, I, Veer, 19, 34, or 70. The hoop at the North end was the one Coach Moser stood under & threw tennis balls in the summer to help refine my swing & then still expected me to hit 80 out of 100 free throws after the baseball experience. Then, the wall that fronted the bleachers that I walked in front of on my personal post lunch path. The wall where I nervously approached a cheerleader, a girl I had eyed not only on the sidelines, but in orchestra in the woodwinds over the bell of my trombone, Tracy, during the Homecoming Dance & asked to fill a line on her dance card. The wall where she said yes. Near the foot of the wall, being an observant Baptist, I knew to keep my hands at east & west above the hips & to leave enough room between us for Jesus. I was so nervous, more nervous than I ever was in room 207, that I’m sure I left enough room for Him & a couple of the cats that He strolled the shores of Galilee with. In spite of my awkward start, girls went instantly from mostly “yucky” to as Matthew McConaughey stated, “alright, alright, alright “.  Our basketball bench sat against that wall & I learned that team  

outranks me as I became a former starter turned 6th or 7th man because the team was better that way, because you never give up on your team on or off the floor & on the floor, you never give up the baseline. Out the other half door with a quick glance to where my dad sat every game. Every. Game. The glance became a journey into the bleachers & my seat plopping into his with much more gratitude than I possessed years ago. Back down the steps, a left turn & up an incline of 4 or 5 paces & on the left, the locker room. In its tight confines I learned that jersey color is more important than skin color. A last exit out the double doors & the deluge was forming in my eyes. A last walk of the 45 degree angle from gym to English class, a last view down the hall to the auditorium & picture window, & a final peek up & down the main staircase, a final handspin on the newel post & trip down the 5 treads to the back door & a concrete landing where Bruce & I waited on a post practice pickup by one of our parents. Down the steps where shoes were put on & tied before practice & untied & removed before climbing the steps after practice. Then onto the parking lot, hearing in my head the rhythmic click-clack of football cleats & the crunch that baseball spikes added as a coda to the click-clack as metal met asphalt. Around the drive that leads to the baseball field, a look toward the train tracks as a bush grows where an old wooden bleacher of 2×12s once sat as a sentinel for a football field where five touchdowns with my name on them lived long ago. With the diamond below me, off to the left, the most important triangle, save the Holy Trinity, in my life. The adjacent side formed by Coach Moser’s room on top & Mrs. Farrow’s on the bottom & the opposite side by the cafeteria under the gym, forming the points for the hypotenuse of my days. Down to the diamond & a promise to a friend now halfway around the world. A promise kept at a place where we were much closer, the 90 feet between first & second base. I also fielded an imaginary grounder & completed the 4-3 putout to honor our season as the right side of the All City infield, documented somewhere by an old photo with adhesive tape patina in a scrapbook. I was the pivot man on an imagined 5-4-3 twin killing as my main sidekick was in that yellowed photo as the year’s All City third baseman. I made my way to the batters box & took my stance in sight of a metal A-frame awning that has overlooked the field since 1977. An awning my dad & other boosters used as a concession stand to help pay for athletics. Back up the hill, by the side door & steps & around to the front steps to see classmates for the “it was good to see you”, & it was, before the goodbyes. And it was time to go, the once new, now old, always my school in my rear view mirror, the deluge releasing in my eyes, not because a time & place had vanished but because it had occurred, & my off key rendition of the alma mater in my lungs:

ELS Forever

Her men today

Are eager for battle 

Ready for the fray 

Every soul is loyal 

For her they’ll fight

So cheer for her colors true

The BLUE & WHITE!

*EPILOGUE: Less than a year after graduation, I found myself with Coaches Moser & Careathers even though we had left for other schools. I was in a hospital room with an exploded left leg in traction from a spring football injury. Coach Moser was laying the foundation for state title winning Lady Dynamo basketball & Coach Careathers was coaching a guy who would be enshrined in Canton, Ohio, Reggie White. I’m still moved by their appearance, one they made to encourage me, not one of their players any longer, on a comeback that ultimately failed. The failing meant that the previous November, I walked off a football field for the final time. My new school had traveled to meet my besties new school. After the game we found each other. Familiar faces in unfamiliar uniforms. He in his home white jersey & blue pants, me in a maroon top & gold bottoms, but Butch & Sundance walking off together again, me on the left, him on the right. Under the goal post & across the track & time to part. He, straight to his locker room, me taking a step back, patting the back of his jersey between the 4 & the 7, & heading to my team bus. Every athlete wants to leave the field a hero or be valiant in defeat or as Spartan mothers told their warrior sons on the way to battle, “…return with your shield or on it”. I left neither a conqueror or on my shield. I left with a third, unknown to a Spartan, rather pleasing option. I walked off the final time with my best friend, and that, along with coaches who forever consider you their player, are souvenirs too…