I Am (not) A Rock

Part of the life of most bipolar people is regretting not living the life they could have lived. In most respects this is caused by the illness – the inability to make a keep friends, jobs, other social contacts.

But environment plays a part too. If one has strong ties to neighborhoods, friends, parent’s friends and school mates, that can go a long way towards ameliorating the effects of bipolar behavior. In short – they already know you’re kinda weird and they accept the good with the bad.

I recently felt this little sting of regret when I saw a reunion of the eighth-grade class of one of the Catholic schools that fed into Lake Catholic where I went to high school.

They aren’t the only Catholic grade school to hold such reunions. There were a lot of Catholic grade schools in the 70s that had large classes (it was the height of the enrollment boom) that sent the majority of their students on to Lake. Now, many of them are struggling to hold on and some have had to close.

My elementary school I attended beginning in November of my kindergarten year, still exists. It grew a little and became more exclusive and expensive than it was. The nuns have pretty much disappeared, giving way to lay teachers. It is in many way, a shadow of its former self. Which is a good thing.

About six miles to the north is St. Mary’s Chardon where most of the people I rode the buses with went to school. It was a bus transfer point for Notre Dame’s students. It was also my family’s parish where we went to church.

But my mother (who was the sole decision maker here – the only time in our family she was allowed to make unilateral decisions, perhaps because she was a cradle Catholic and my dad was not) refused to send me there. Her story, passed down through the years, was that a teacher at St. Mary’s told her that if she wanted the better Catholic education available, to send me to Notre Dame.

But Notre Dame has the beginnings of what would become a long waiting list to get in, as the entire school from K-8 had room for less than 400 students. So, I went to a public school, Park Elementary (strangely enough with some kids that would transfer later to St. Mary’s) until November of my kindergarten year when I was unceremoniously yanked out of what I thought was a fun school and delivered to the tender mercies of the Sisters of Notre Dame.

To say this was a shock to my system was putting it mildly. I will skip details; I’ve discussed some of them earlier in this blog.

But the real mistake was probably made earlier when my parents decided to move from Mayfield Heights to Chardon. I was on the verge of kindergarten when they moved (August 1968) and was set to go to my neighborhood public school in the Mayfield system, one of the better and later, best in Ohio.

It was also the system where my mother taught second grade – not in the school I would have gone to, mind you. But there would have been some familial clout later when she because the teacher’s union president.

I often stare at the ceiling at 3 a.m. and wonder what my life would have been like to go to school with the kids I knew in my neighborhood, without ever having to be subjected to the ritualistic humiliation suffered at the hands of the nuns, largely for two reasons – my parents weren’t rich and I was a willful and smart kid who didn’t want to hide it.

Even though my mother would never admit, I was in the worst possible situation I could have been placed in. Even she would later admit that I learned almost nothing in school relative to what I taught myself by reading. Several years into my 8 ½ year sentence, even my father was making the case to my mother that perhaps I should transfer to St. Mary’s. If you knew my father, or have read about him here, you know that his objections were significant. Usually he didn’t care if I was suffering if it would ‘toughen me up.’ But he had seen enough of the nuns’ behavior and what went on in the halls that even he was disturbed.

I got off easy. We literally drove some kids right out of that school through bullying – kids that entered in the fourth and fifth grade. And yes, I participated lest they pick on me. And I was picked on enough being a fat kid with a funny last name, a geeky intelligence and a family nowhere near the economic level of the most popular kids. And there was nowhere to escape when you spend almost nine years with the same 26 kids (more or less) in the same room.

An aside: I often wonder if it ever occurred to her when she sent me to my first shrink between seventh and eighth grade, that my school environment would have had something to do with it?

But mom held fast. First, as I said, it was the only decision she had ever been allowed to make unilaterally in our family and second, she was one of these people who believed that once you committed to something, you should stick it out no matter what the damage or regret. After all, she didn’t have to be exposed to the nuns on a daily basis, she didn’t have to stand in a lonely outfield on a hot day waiting for the occasional fly ball that I would inevitably drop.

She also didn’t have to attend the Cub Scout pack comprised of people from the local elementary schools I didn’t go to when the majority of my Notre Dame classmates were part of the pack at. . .yep. . . St. Mary’s.

I KNOW this sounds like whining and I get that. But she couldn’t have devised a childhood to fuck me up more. I was surrounded by people I couldn’t bind with. And my insecurity as I got older just got worse as the mental issues took hold. Chicken or the egg? Causation or correlation? I’ll never know.

When I was paroled from Notre Dame and went to Lake Catholic I was very intimidated at first. But the people I met were not like the kids at Notre Dame. They seemed far more accepting. There were more people like me. And a lot less snootiness. After about a month, I was in smoothly and greatly relieved.

It wasn’t perfect but for me, no environment is ever perfect. But, although it isn’t the same most people, high school, looking back, was some of the best years of my life, especially after what I had gone through.

The years immediately after high school were full of effort on my part, to retain those friendships and connections. Eventually, slowly and sometime painfully, eventually, we all drifted apart.

I guess that’s why I was so jazzed about my class reunion last year – our 35^th. Of all the friends I had known, these were the people I had gotten closest to. I was very curious whether I could make friends again and possibly keep some.

The reunion went very well. I thoroughly enjoyed it and re-connected with some people. Unfortunately, for some of these folks, my own posting about religion and Trump have undone some of these connections. To their credit, most of my classmates are still nominally Catholic, many seriously so. Catholicism and I parted company some time ago. I do miss the feeling of belonging to a community, having something in common with people and the strangely comforting rituals of the Mass. But for many, many reasons, I simply can’t go back. They have their rules and I respect them but I don’t think it can ever be again.

As for politics, the heartbreaking thing is in another time, this would not have been an issue. Unfortunately, we only had a small grace period before the election would tear some of those bounds asunder.

If we can’t find a way to get beyond it, and we probably can’t, I probably won’t go to the 40^th reunion. I still have Facebook friends that I am trying not to lose or push away for various reasons. I hope they understand that I was always just a little – maladjusted. But I mean well.

When the elementary school classes of 77, whether they be St. Justin Martyr or St. Mary’s Mentor get together, I feel that tinge of what might have been. Although I recognize many of them who went on to Lake Catholic from the Facebook photos, I know that is not my tribe. I had four years with them – they had 12 and many grew up just streets away from each other, attended the same sports and social leagues and hung out at each other’s homes.

There were only four of us from Notre Dame that went to Lake, absorbed into a freshman class of 375 students – all boys, no girls.

And many of them still have friends and family in Northeastern Ohio. I’m two hours away in Pittsburgh so I can get up there if I want, but it’s not the same. I only really interact on Facebook.

Strangely, one of the guys I went to school with at both Notre Dame and Lake Catholic lives here in Pittsburgh. We used to be thick as thieves at Notre Dame. He won’t respond to my friend requests yet he is friends with some of our mutual friends at Lake Catholic. I would be lying if I said it didn’t hurt just a little.

I realize that a set of circumstances led me to where I am today – some I had control over, some I didn’t. I love Pittsburgh. I love my wife. But one should have friends outside of their spouse. My wife does – she’s tight with both her former classmates and all the friends she’s met in her knitting hobby.

My effort to do the same at work, at the Mustang club, at the local NAMI branch, at the improv school all have ended in either regret on my part or simply not being a good fit with others. But I have tried.

It’s difficult to talk about being lonely when part of the fault is mine. Most people who know me online don’t know how hard it is for me to go to work every day and when the day is over, I’m all out of spoons and find it difficult to leave the house for socialization. In fact, on my days off, I find I almost always have to work up the nerve to leave the house at all.

I try to be someone I’m not to make friends because I’m always worried that people won’t like the real me. And to those who always say, ‘be yourself’ I can go over my track record where that has lost me enough people in my life. And besides, this three-page whine has gone on far too long.

It just hurts.

Funeral for a friend

My best friend in high school died over the holiday. He was my age. 

I hadn’t spoken to him since May of 2005 and I distinctly remember the phone call.

Frank apparently died alone in his apartment in Florida and was found two days later as a result of a health and welfare check. I hate that he went that way.

I don’t know what took his life. 

I met Frank in late August of 1977 when he plunked down in front of me in homeroom our Freshman year in high school. We were arranged alphabetically and this is just the way it turned out. We struck up a friendship that lasted on and off for decades. 

To say Frank was something of a free spirit misses the mark – he was a total goof off with a heart of gold. He had a wonderful habit of getting into scrapes due to his adventurous spirit. I could tell many, many stories of the fun we had but I will just recount one for now.

Back in 1980, the airlines were having fare wars. Frank, always flush with cash from his father’s Air Force inheritance, decided we (around the six of us who were close to him) should have dinner some night in Washington DC.

Of course we lived in the Cleveland area. Frank put down the cash and bought the tickets.

Now, none of us really felt our parents would be up to what Frank had planned so he did something deliciously sneaky – he had us going to the airport from school, taking the 5 p.m. flight to Reagan National, landing at 545, taking a cab to Hogate’s (seafood) on the Potomac (my idea), having a two hour dinner, then taking a cab back to the airport to catch an 815 p.m. flight to Cleveland that would get us home by 9 p.m., our parents none the wiser for the cover story was we went to the movies.

I begged off as we grew closer to the date. I just couldn’t imagine the grief I would catch from my father if I got caught. Knowing my dad, well, I had enough of his volcanic temper growing up and didn’t want to poke the bear anymore. 

Alas, Frank being Frank, he could not keep his secret to himself. After all, he had scored some major savings on these tickets AND scheduled the whole thing to wrap up in less than six hours on a weekday. You had to hand it to him. 

As an aside, Frank also had another idea, based on two of his favorite movies ‘The Gumball Rally’ and ‘Smokey and the Bandit’ for a race from the Cleveland area to Kentucky and back. Calling it ‘The O-K Stogie Race,’ the gimmick was, once in Kentucky, you had to buy a pack of smokes with the state’s revenue sticker on them to prove you crossed the Ohio River. Then, the first person back to Mentor, Ohio with the sticker was the winner.

It was quintessential Frank.

So on the day of the flight, Frank shows up in school with the tickets sticking out of his shirt pocket, loudly telling everyone “we’re going tonight to DC for dinner,” Frank attracted the attention of a few teachers who didn’t believe he was really doing this and one sorta-priest who did. 

I will only refer to this ‘pastoral counselor’ as Mark for that was his first name. Anyway, Mark alerted the Dean of Discipline (the former football coach and a really nice guy) and Frank was called down to his office where he was relieved of his tickets because in loco parentis and all that.

I mean, there were a few things Frank hadn’t considered: what if the plane was delayed for some reason? We’d need another cover story. What if we were delayed overnight? What if, God forbid, the plane went down and our parents had to learn about our fate from the local TV news crews? 

Stuff like that.

Well Frank came back from the Dean’s office to a class we shared and looking at his face I knew right away what happened. 

“Father Mark and Mr. Ward took my tickets away,” Frank sulked.

Well even though I was no longer on the flying itinerary, I couldn’t stand to see Frank this way so I did so. . .so. . . um, I did something in retrospect I’m not proud of but at the time seemed like great fun.

I pumped Frank up with indignation. I reminded him that those tickets were his property and what he did outside of the school on his own time was his own business. I could see Frank getting worked up.

“They had NO legal right to do that,” I told Frank. “Do you want the card of my mom’s lawyer?”

Well by the time I was through with him, ‘Fighting Frank’ stormed back in the Dean’s office 

demanding the return of his property. All that resulted was a shouting match, Frank not getting his tickets, and a possible detention, I really don’t remember.

Lest you think this shattered Frank, it didn’t. He would proudly re-tell of the shouting match for years afterwards. All I did was put a little starch in his shorts. It wasn’t the first time and wouldn’t be the last because, well, if you can’t play asshole with your friends sometimes, what’s the point?

It wasn’t really the Dean that was this issue here. It was the smarminess of ‘Father Mark’ that galled us. 

Mark wasn’t quite through with us yet, but it wouldn’t go the way he wanted. First, Frank’s mom, after having her usual fuss and feathers explosion, quickly forgave her son with no apparent punishment. 

Then the next week at the football game, I played my card.

Before the game, I went up to Father Mark and remonstrated with him about what a low thing he did by ruining our fun and taking Frank’s plane tickets. Mark sneered.

“You know, you’re name was on one of those tickets,” Mark said. “What if I were to tell your father about this?”

“OK father, he’s right up there six rows from the top on the corner in the brown coat; can’t miss him,” I said. And walked away knowing a delicious feeling of triumph I would rarely experience in life.

See, when I finally told dad about the abortive dinner flight, he simply said “sounds like fun; I would have let you go.”

I remember feeling light-headed and wondering if this was some kind of Twilight Zone family. Seriously, you could have knocked me over with a feather (and I’m pretty fat). Had I known this, I would have been the one to take Frank’s tickets for safeguarding until the end of the day.

The whole idea was pure Frank and he had a million of them. We were young and full of ourselves and looking for adventure where we could find it. I remember those days and the things we dared to do that we wouldn’t now and I think we’re poorer for it. 

But Frank was the pied piper of the adventure and scheme. I know my high school experience would have been far, far duller without him as a friend.

In the end I lost him when he had to choose between his firefighter friends and me over some stupid shit having to do with hard feelings over a fantasy football club. Frank tried to make peace between me and them but couldn’t do it. After that last phone call, we never spoke again. 

A big part of the reason was my stubbornness and self-justification that I was right and had a right to be aggrieved. And then, 11 years later and thanks to Facebook, we had a chance to reconnect. 

We almost did, but we didn’t. I tried to friend him on Facebook but he never accepted and I didn’t really push it, thinking he was still between the rock and the hard place I had put him in a decade before. I had hoped he would come to the class reunion. He didn’t. I had no idea that my window for reconciliation was going to be so short.

So, of course, I feel like an asshole, as usual. 

Frank’s family is planning a memorial service up in Ohio in the coming days. Many if not all of the people involved in the fantasy football group that I used to so enjoy being a part of will be there. And I think they still despise me, so I don’t know what to do. I don’t do well in public gatherings and old animosities don’t help.

But I want to say goodbye to my friend somehow. We went through too much for me not to pay respects. I know it sounds hokey, but a part of my past and a part of me died too. In the weeks since Frank’s death I keep remembering all the shit we would get into and all the fun we would have.

He was the best man at my second wedding.

Wherever you are Frank, I hope you can forgive me. If it takes all the Ativan in my storehouse to make it through, I will be at your service. But I want to know where you’re buried because I want to make it more personal than a memorial service. Whether you’re remains are in Ohio or Florida, I need some time there to say a prayer for you, just the two of us. 

It’s the least I can do.

Sick Sick Sick

Sick, sick, sick.

Everyone has suddenly come down with some kind of illness. 

After having yesterday off, I find that several of my co-workers, who have been fighting various bugs, called in sick yesterday. My wife is hacking up a storm. I’m fighting it myself – AND we all had flu shots – where I work, it’s mandatory.

Our friends

I suspect a lot of upper respiratory illnesses are circulating. Right now I think (hope) I just have a head cold. One of my co-workers undergoing chemotherapy, is avoiding getting close to anyone and I don’t blame him.

This, of course, brings back my fond memories of being sick as a kid.

My mom was an elementary school teacher who had some basic training as a nurse. It was very difficult to get anything past her in the wake of faking an illness, but God knows, I tried. Especially in the third grade when things were . . .um, kind of tough for me socially. 

'Don't eat the pudding in the fridge'

If my mother had to stay home with us when we were little, she would have to call in and arrange for a substitute teacher for her second grade class. So we REALLY had to be sick in order to stay home. Dad never stayed home with us. He just wasn’t the type to bring up chicken soup and check our temperature. 

It got a little easier when we got older and mom would let me and my sister stay home by ourselves. This happened around the time I was in fifth grade. I know today that many will say that was too young but this was a different time (the 70s) and we were given more responsibility for taking care of ourselves. 

Wow, that sounded like something coming from a crotchety old man, eh? Well, it was true, dangumit! 

In fact, I remember having the house key around my neck in the first grade when the bus would let me off on the corner of the street and I would walk up the street and let myself in the house and wait for my mom to come home.

First grade – imaging that happening today. Child Protective Services would have a field day with that one. But nothing ever happened. Well, except that ONE day that I missed my stop which I wrote about earlier.

Um. . . .

So being sick usually started with a firm diagnosis made after a game of 20 questions about how I was feeling. I learned that if I really wanted a day off, careful planning the day before would make a more convincing case. If I started to hack and wheeze and complain the day before, it was easier to believe I was sick the next day. I could also make myself sneeze by picking my nose in a certain way. No I am not proud of this. No I will not tell you how to do it.

A co-worker of mine years later told me how he did it. He’d hide a glass of water in the bathroom, set his watch alarm to wake him at 4 a.m. and then to the bathroom making retching noise and throw the water into the toilet, all of this loud enough for his parents to hear. Then he’d flush the toilet before they got there. What could I say? Genius.

totally unnecessary. But I DID have to have syrup of ipecac. Ugh!

Of course, if I faked it and I was on my own, the day would be spent, first, watching CBS This Morning with Hughes Rudd (and Sally Quinn if you remember back that far) and Captain Kangaroo. Then it was a whole day reading and eating chicken soup. I had to eat the soup because my mom would check the garbage can when she came home to make sure I was eating right. 

But then there were those days when there was no question at all – I was sick and looked it. One such case I remember very well.

It was February 1974. I was getting sick at school the day before, hacking up all kinds of petri dish type gunk. I made a big tactical mistake – I went out for gym class in the snow which made everything worse. When I got back into class I was going downhill fast. I asked our fourth grade nun if I could do to the nurse and have my parents called.

Sister Mary St. Clair was a tough old penguin. She absolutely refused. “If you were well enough to go romp in the snow, you’re well enough to sit here the rest of the day,” she said.

By the time I got home, I could barely speak and shortly, I couldn’t speak. Mom came home and I was already in bed. I croaked out an explanation of what happened and she got mad at the nun which was not a good thing because whenever my mom had words with the nun, I was the one that suffered.

Mom’s anger turned to concern – my temperature was already past 101 so she knew this was not fakery. 

I would be home for the rest of the week and it was NOT that fun.

When I was dragged to the doctor after being sick for two days, he gave me a steroid shot and said I had bronchitis and laryngitis, not to mention a high fever. 

So let me tell you what the second night of my illness was like. 

I had been in bed all day hacking up. . . well, I’ll spare you the gore, but I was going thorough tissues and towels at a prodigious pace. I was also in woozy-woozy land. Much flat ginger ale was being drunk as my head lolled to one side, fixated on my little black and white TV which was on from morning to evening. 

Channel 61 (WKBF for old time Clevelanders) would run their evening movie promos all day. The first day it was for a movie called ‘Five Card Stud.’ They packaged the promo in such a way to build up all the suspense and foreboding of the movies. I assumed from the promos that all the cowboys playing poker were going to get shot. I could live with that since I knew I would not be awake for the movie.

But the second day of my illness, the worst day when my temperature hit 104 late in the evening, they were promoting the movie ‘In Cold Blood.’ 

OK, I kind of got the picture from the promo – nice family in Kansas, bad guys come in the middle of the night, noir shots of the guys coming up the stairs, and everyone dies.

I was 11-years-old and that put the hook into my fevered brain bigly. For a kid who lives in a house that makes strange noises in the middle of the night in winter (the heated water pipes ran through the wooden steps or near them), this was not something I wanted dancing across my dreams that night.

Having Truman Capote in my bedroom after my murder would be creepy enough

You can imaging the night I had. The hot water heater would send the water through the pipes with an evil sounding drip and whoosh. Then the wood would start expanding and contracting. At some point, I kid you not, even you would believe someone was WALKING UP THE STAIRS!

The other problem I was having with my high fever was auditory hallucinations. I was hearing things. The news anchor from CKLW radio (from Detroit but really Windsor, Ontario)  was talking to me “this is CKLW 20-20 News!” I could hear him in my head. Other voices from radio and TV were also speaking randomly to me. Regrettably none of those were Captain Kangaroo or MisterRogers calming me down. 

And all the while, I was waiting for Robert Blake to come up the stairs and kill me. I hoped that my dad would hear him first and, as a Marine, would kick the shit out of those two punks before they could do anything. 

But I didn’t know that. My radio and TV friends were in my head talking to me and they were not reassuring. I wrapped myself so tight in the blankets that I could feel the flop sweat drenching the sheets. 

Eventually, like all good horror movies, the sun came up and mom came in to take my temperature and get me more ginger ale. My fever was better but I still felt like warmed-over dog crap. I did not tell her of my psycho-horror night sleep because, well, that’s not the kind of thing a boy tells him mom. Besides, I survived. I spent most of that day sleeping and watching channels other than 61. There were always cartoons on Channel 43 and Prize Movie was sometimes pretty good. 

Clevelanders of a certain age will remember

Well eventually I returned to school after a four days absence and there was Sister Mary St. Clair, calling me to her desk first thing in the morning. She loomed over me and spoke quietly about the previous Monday. 

Of could she never apologized for not letting me go to the nurse. She justified her actions. I didn’t care and knew better to argue. In the back of my mind, I knew it really would not have made a difference when I got home: I was going to be very sick regardless.

But I learned something about human nature which, as I am wont to do, immediately forgot it.

Nowadays, as an adult, getting sick is not some kind of magical day off from school to watch TV all day and drink ginger all – it’s a genuine pain in the ass. I’m lucky in my job to have sick leave AND the option to use my annual leave in lieu of sick. Most people don’t have that option and have to come in regardless of how sick they are.

And you know what happens then – the sickness of one person spreads around the office like Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death.

But whenever I do get sick enough to call in, I’m always reminded of those days in front of the little black and white TV, with mom bringing fluids and soup and feeling like you were being cared for in the best way. 

Now, of course, we’re on our own. Make your own tea, pop Tylenol for severe cold, drink lots of water and hope you feel just good enough to come in the next day. 

The term that’s in vogue now is ‘self-care.’ It’s important for all of us. I wish people more people could stay home when they are sick – even if it’s the often derided ‘mental health day.’ Because with more and more demands placed upon us by work and family life, people are being stressed to death.

And not everyone has someone to bring them chicken soup.