Butchblog

Part 2

Most days now I wake up feeling fairly content. That is, until I read the morning news; but that’s a different (sad) story, one that I can almost no longer bear dealing with. So instead I’m writing about forks in the road, you know, that old Robert Frost poem: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. It’s all about decisions, good and not so. I’ve got a wooden sign, a friend and former student gave me, that reads: “bad decisions make good stories.” It’s true, but sometimes good decisions can also provide material. It’s a mix, like all of life. Highs and lows. These days I try to stay happily in the middle. Living in a friendly community and having a supportive and loving life partner helps a hell of a lot. But I’m drifting, as I’ve a wont to do these days. I’ve earned my driftiness. I get to loll around in my dotage. I’ll be 82 this year, and frankly, I never imagined getting this old. So it’s a gift, I guess. I still feel (somewhat) young, the body is holding up for now. The guy I see in the mirror is not in his eighties—how can that be? But it is. So why not claim it, even celebrate it. Every day is a gift. Damn, that sounds treacly.

            Anyway, back to those forks in the road. The first big one for me was deciding where I would go to college—my initial bad decision. There was never any question that I would go to college, not in my upward striving Jewish family. As I’ve mentioned previously, my parents expected a lot of me—the oldest son. They didn’t have the same expectations for my sister, even though she was clearly the smartest one of us, and the most dedicated student. I wonder why they didn’t push her to become a doctor. Instead, she became a librarian.

            Mom and Dad were clear about the college I should attend—the University of Pennsylvania, where my father was an alumnus and my sister a current student. “It’s an Ivy League school,” Mom insisted. “That’s the very best.” Dad didn’t say anything; he never did. Mom spoke for both of them. But I didn’t want to go to Penn, even though I did, surprisingly, get accepted. “I wanta get out of town,” I tried to explain to my mother. “I’ve hardly ever been out of Philadelphia.” I didn’t tell her that what I truly wanted and needed was to get away from them.

            Mom and Dad were seriously disappointed when I told them I was going to Marietta College, a small, liberal arts school in Ohio that I knew nothing about, hadn’t even visited, picked almost randomly from a catalog I found in the high school counselor’s office. The college counselor didn’t know anything about it either, except that it was 500 miles away from Philly, which was qualification enough for me. Mom said, “I can’t believe you’re doing this. You’ll be sorry, Butch. I can feel it.”

            I shined her on, “We’ll see. It might be cool. I’ll meet a lot of new people.”

            Dad looked up at me over his copy of The Philadelphia Inquirer, and shook his head in disgust, then turned back to the sports pages.

            Turned out they were right. Marietta College sucked. But it did get me out of town. And that was the whole point. Oh yeah, and it would give me the opportunity to show my parents that pre-med was not going to work. I didn’t fit in well at Marietta. It was a typical, for the 60’s, white bread school, uninterested in most everything except fraternities and sororities and the drunken parties they were host to. I did enjoy living in the dorm and meeting lots of kids from different parts of the country. There were a lot of farm kids from Ohio and West Virginia, who had (to me) funny accents. I’m sure they thought the same of me. But mostly they were interested in sports and girls, though they weren’t very proficient at either. I for certain wasn’t. And I didn’t want to join a fraternity, so after that first year, I dropped out and went back to Philly with my tail between my legs. Thankfully my parents didn’t say much, didn’t rub it in. I should have thanked them for that. But, I didn’t. I was too depressed, even though I didn’t have the words for that affliction back then. I slept in a lot, until the parents made it clear I should go get a job or join the army, neither of which appealed, but I chose the lesser evil and reluctantly applied for a job in the shipping department of Strawbridge and Clothier, a big department store downtown.

I liked that job for the few months I was there, liked being a part of the everyday life of the city, taking the trolley to work, bringing my lunch in a brown paper bag, doing hard, physical labor, not thinking too much, laughing with my older co-workers, who called me college-boy. It was while I was working at Strawbridge’s that the news came down that JFK had been shot and killed. The workers all gathered in front of a television in the employee lunch room, many were crying. I felt like the world had shifted once again. Two nights later I watched with my parents as Jack Ruby pulled out a gun and shot Lee Harvey Oswald. It was all surreal. Even my father looked dumbfounded. This couldn’t be happening here, his expression seemed to say. I knew then, in an inchoate sort of way, that my life was about to round a corner.