My Father's Wallet

My Father’s Wallet

In the back of my desk drawer, behind the pieces
of broken watches, under unread instructions
for cameras long gone and mileage clubs
for airlines now defunct, I found forgotten
my father’s wallet. It is one of the tokens
I took to remember him, which I have
even without remembering the wallet,
which has been zippered closed probably
since he died in 1965. The embossed design
on both sides of the fold is flattened somewhat
by the years and the gold lettering inside says
“Genuine Leather.” Pinned to the change pocket
is a tiny silver police badge, a gift from one of
my father’s customers, a Brooklyn cop who gave
him it after a haircut as a tip. “To get you out
of trouble and speeding tickets,” he said.
My father never got in trouble. He didn’t speed.
He didn’t even drive, but he carried the badge.
The wallet’s yellowed cellophane compartments
contain my father’s life: his Social Security Card
signed as I remember from my homework assignments,
not one, but two First National City Bank cardboard
Preferred Credit Cards “issued as evidence of your
excellent record in the Personal Finance Department,”
the bank’s 1952 calendar with a three inch ruler printed
at the top, his K of C 4th Degree and District Deputy ID
from 1964, along with photos of the family as I have
forgotten we all used to be. And there, behind a
chubby crying me and Santa Claus, a folded paper day –
May 30, 1942 Saturday – lettered in my father’s hand
the words, “Joseph Edward Scalia II born 2:35 PM.
So very happy, my son.”

© 2012 J. E. Scalia from Poetry In Alphabetical Order

A Yellow Cashmere Scarf

“She always wanted a yellow cashmere scarf fringed all around that looked like melted butter.”


Nora saw the yellow scarf the day the seasons changed in New York City. Although it was still summer on the streets, with the weatherman’s promise of another week of temperatures in the nineties combined with insufferably high humidity, in a blink of an eye, as if by magic, it became fall in all the store windows on Fifth Avenue. The womannequins, only yesterday posed suggestively in two-piece bathing suits and clingy summer dresses, turned overnight into fall-draped figures in high boots and wrap-around woolen skirts bracing for the cold. In the morning they stared out through windows dripping air conditioned moisture at the rush hour traffic, the passers by in shorts and flip flops, oblivious to the mid-night wrinkle in the time, the disruption in the time/space continuum.

But it wasn’t lost on her sitting in the doorway across from Saks Fifth Avenue where she had spent the night. Unable to sleep because of the heat and the traffic, she had watched the designers move into the windows after midnight like a precision military team. And before the first light of dawn summer had been replaced by fall.

She gathered her things together, everything she owned, and packed it into the U.S. Post Office crate she had appropriated and partitioned into compartments to hold and crossed the street for a closer look. Cutting across traffic in the middle of the block, she exchanged words on the way with taxi drivers who cursed her in several unintelligible languages. “Your mother is a whore and your father is a goat,” she said to one. “Your sister eats pork during Ramadan,” she called to another, flashing a one-fingered New York peace sign. “And just in case you don’t speak English,” she added, she turned it into a backhand two-fingered victory salute.

She laid down the crate on the sidewalk in front of Saks, carefully selecting the place that would be her base of operations for the day, or at least until store security or the police moved her along. She shaded the window glass with her hands to block the reflection of the lightening sky and the traffic passing behind her and she pressed her face against the window like a child peering into Santa’s workshop. Within, the display shimmered with twinkle lights and stars and streamers that moved slowly in the air conditioned breeze and sparkled like the inside of a shaken snow globe. Outside it was heading toward another sweltering day, but inside it was a winter wonderland. Her eyes, jaded by the things they had seen during her time living on the streets, passed from one new fashion to the other to another – dresses, coats, boots. And when she saw the butter-yellow cashmere scarf draping the womannequin’s neck, she almost broke the glass to get a better look. She could see its elegant richness; she could feel the softness of the cashmere against her skin. She had always wanted a yellow cashmere scarf fringed all around that looked like melted butter. She sighed.

Back at her station she rummaged through the hand printed signs she carried in the crate. She considered the one that said: “I can work, I just prefer not to,” lettered in red magic marker with the “o” in the word “to” turned into a smiley face. It was good for a laugh and sometimes for a few extra dollars. But she passed over it and opted instead for something more serious. “Here but for the grace of God….” the unfinished statement said ominously. With the continuing downturn in the economy, the collapse of financial establishments once considered American institutions, the audible pop of the real estate bubble and rising unemployment, more and more people were realizing they just might be a paycheck or two away from taking residence there on the sidewalk next to her. As if to illustrate, two passers by dropped handfuls of change into the Dunkin’ Donuts cup from the night before that still contained something like coffee. She fished them out, counted the amount, eighty-seven cents, and tucked it into her pocket.

Nora drained the cup and winced just as a car, a black 7 series BMW with limo tinted windows rolled up silently to the curb and stopped. She watched as the driver, dressed in livery and wearing a cap, crossed around the front of the car and opened the back door, extending his other hand to a woman, tall and tan, young and slender, and clean, who emerged from the inside darkness into the bright morning late summer light. Her hair and make up, even that early in the day, were perfect. Well dressed to her shoes, she had to be a model, Nora thought, or should have been. The woman was closely followed by a man, every bit as elegant, engrossed in a cell phone conversation.

Nora followed the woman with her eyes as she approached. The scent of perfume, something expensive, floated behind her in the slipstream. The woman walked past without a glance; totally unaware that Nora existed until she heard her say, “Good morning, toots. Great outfit. Love your perfume.” The woman turned, glanced down through her Jimmy Choo sunglasses at Nora’s sign before she walked through the door held open by the driver into Saks.

“Not very friendly,” Nora said when the man paused in front of her.

He stopped talking on his cell. “The price of beauty,” he said as he fumbled for his wallet and looked inside for cash but changed his mind. Instead, holding the phone between his shoulder and his ear, he patted his pants pocket reached inside and pulled out several folded bills that he dropped into Nora’s cup. Then he resumed the call. “You still there?” As he attempted to replace his wallet, it caught in the material and slipped unnoticed from his back pocket into her Post Office carton. Only Nora saw it fall. The rags inside the carton muffled the sound. She threw one over the wallet to hide it, and the man, deep in conversation, continued obliviously into the store.

Nora waited until the driver was back behind the wheel of the car before she dug through the carton and located the wallet. Yves Saint Laurent. She traced her finger over the “Y” in the soft grain leather, weighing its heft in her hand. She opened the wallet and looked at the contents. Large denominations, fifties and hundreds in size order. She did a quick count. Apparently he kept the smaller bills in his pocket. American Express Black Card issued to Sharpe Ingersol. She wondered what kind of first name that was, if that was his name. Or was it the name of his multi-national company? And there was a refillable Starbuck’s gift card.

When the driver opened the car door, rushing out as he folded his cell phone, Nora knew she had been caught. Once Sharpe Ingersol was inside the store he was sharp enough to realize he had dropped his wallet outside and called the driver to retrieve it, she thought. She hid under her blouse, fully expecting the driver’s hands to wrest it from her. But the man hurried past and into the store without a look. Minutes later he was out again, weighed down under a pile of boxes, followed by the young woman who was talking on her cell.

“Early morning shopping,” Nora said. “Great idea to beat the crowd. The early bird catches the bargains. Pick up anything good?”

The woman briefly looked down on Nora, snorted and continued to the car.
“Have a nice day–” she called, adding breath just as the man walked past holding the boxes the driver couldn’t handle, “–bitch.”

In another minute they would be gone and she could have a closer look at the contents of the wallet. Then Nora saw the folded bills in her coffee cup. They weren’t singles as she thought, but two twenties and a five. She took a deep audible breath. ‘Hey, Sharpé,” she called, sounding the “e,” as the man was ducking into the back seat of the car.

“Excuse me?” he asked coming back out of the car and facing her. “Do you know me?”

“Intimately,” she said, “but not well. And not in the Biblical sense. I just wanted to say thanks.” She held up her cup with the money in it. “‘Here but for the grace of God,’ Sharpé,” she quoted her sign.

“How do you know my name?” He came closer. “And it’s Sharpe, not Sharpé.”
“You missing anything?” she asked. And when he was slow to respond she produced the wallet from under her blouse.

He patted his back pocket. “That’s my wallet! How did you get that?”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I didn’t take anything.” She handed him the wallet.

He looked inside and then at her.

“It’s all there. You can count it. Although I was tempted by that Starbuck’s card.”

He smiled. “It’s yours.” He handed her the card. “Thank you,” he said, and he went back to the car. In another minute he was back holding one of the Saks boxes. “This is for you,” he said and handed it over. “And this too.” He pressed two hundred dollar bills into her hand.

“No, no,” she protested mildly. But she took the money and the box, stashing the bills in her carton, slipping the ribbon on the box to look inside.

The car pulled away and Nora sat there. The September sun was warm on her face. Behind her she felt the security of Saks against her back. To those passing by, the ones who took the time to notice, she must have looked strange smiling in the late summer heat with a cashmere scarf, butter-yellow, fringed and soft, wrapped around her neck.

© 2011 J. E. Scalia

Daylight Wasting Time

A Short Reflection on Turning Back Time

I have come to regard the last Saturday in October as Daylight Wasting Time, a day that I have grown to hate and dread! On the other hand, I have always loved Daylight Savings Time, from when I was a kid. I eagerly looked forward with great expectations to that Saturday, which for me marked the real beginning of spring. During my weeks of anticipation leading up to the yearly event, I made plans and considered what I would do with more daylight and more day time. And long after the “Ritual of the Changing of the Clocks,” as I had come to refer the ceremony, I reveled in all of that glorious extra sunlight – except maybe when my mother sent me off to bed with the sun still up and most of my friends, whose mothers weren't such clock-watchers, still outside playing Hide and Seek or Manhunt late into the darkness of night.

I always loved helping my mother move ahead all the clocks in the house on that Saturday night before I was sent to bed, which was an hour earlier than usual to make up for the hour of sleep my mother told me I was going to lose. And years later, when the task of keeping track of time fell to only me, I took to moving all my clocks ahead with glee on Saturday afternoon, so I might acclimate myself to the new daylight several hours earlier than the rest of the Eastern Daylight Savings Time community.

Turning the clocks back in the fall has always been painful, despite knowing I will gain one more hour of sleeping time, and only partly because it means losing some of the daylight I had grown accustomed to during the spring and summer months. I hate it more because it marks for me the onset of winter, two full months before Mother Nature's actual date. And I hate it most of all because of the turmoil the yearly “Ritual of Daylight Wasting Time” night causes me in my personal life.

On that clock changing evening I always go to bed with great trepidation, knowing I have to set my alarm clock for 2 AM, and then, when it rings, I will drag myself up and out from under the warm covers in the middle of a chilly October night to turn back one hour every single clock in my house, including my three wristwatches! Even though I have grown pretty adept over the years, this whole time-revisionist thing usually takes me about twenty minutes from start to finish before I am able to flop back into bed. Then, to make bad matters worse, by the time I am on the brink of re-sleep and about to return to a blissful REM state, the alarm on the newly reset clock goes off again at 2 AM, and I have to do the whole thing again... and then again... and then yet again, until I am exhausted. On that night I am Bill Murray trapped in a Groundhog Day nightmare of my own, subtracting an hour each time I turn the clocks back, waking to the alarm and repeating the process ad infinitum!

On the positive side, if there is a positive side to all this, one year, by the time the whole clock resetting process was completed, I subtracted so many hours and gained so much extra time that I woke up on Friday morning! Of course, when I showed up at work bright and early, I was the only one there. For everyone else it was Sunday morning.


© 2012 J. E. Scalia

Defensive Driving Class

There is no question that a defensive driving class can be beneficial for several reasons. It serves as a refresher to help long time drivers remember how they used to drive before all those bad habits set in, and it provides an opportunity to review the new rules of the road that have been added since the days of crank starts and hand signals. Best of all, it can lower one’s liability auto insurance ten percent a year for three years – that’s not a bad return on a $35 investment and one six-and-a-half hour Saturday morning every thirty-six months spent in a stuffy church basement. With a little research an enterprising individual can save even more money by signing up for a reduced rate defensive driving course sponsored by special interest groups and organizations such as the Elks, the Red Hat Society or the Ku Klux Klan. I discovered my class in an ad in the back of the local newspaper for only $17. It was sponsored by the National Organization of Old Drivers and scheduled at the local library.

I knew that the cheap classes filled up quickly, so I showed up early to register in the falling snow. A line of seniors, like the walking wounded was already out the library door and around the entrance.

“Shit!”

I joined the throng behind a man with two hearing aids pushing a walker and we inched along toward the distant registration desk.

According to the literature, “The National Organization of Old Drivers – NOOD (pronounced nude) is not affiliated with other organizations of old and/or retired people. NOOD is not a nudist organization, nor does it espouse or condone the philosophy of nudism. Although some of NOOD’s older and more addled members have from time to time been stopped while driving nude by the police, nude driving by the elderly is not an activity that is encouraged or sanctioned by this organization.” The disclaimer ended with the warning, “A NOOD Defensive Driving course is not a guarantee, either stated or implied, against having an accident, and NOOD is not responsible for the accidents that my occur driving to, from or after taking the course.”

I signed up for the next Saturday morning class.

On the appointed date I arrived early in order to get a good seat, fifteen minutes before the 9:30 mandatory starting time stated in bold on the registration form. But my seating fears proved to be unnecessary because the library parking lot was grid-locked with my NOOD classmates all vying for the three handicapped parking spaces close to the entrance. I silently slipped my Miata around them and into a distant slot away from the crowd. I was comfortably ensconced in my uncomfortable metal folding chair well before the others drifted in to find seats. That took nearly an hour.

After everyone was finally situated, Bob the instructor, a beefy, red-faced retired NYC Police detective began the official opening ceremonies for the remaining five hours. “I’m a volunteer. NOOD don’t pay me for this, so I don’t take any crap from anybody either. Don’t talk when I talk. Turn off yer cell phones or yer out of here.” He was in the middle of his welcoming speech when the man with the two hearing aids I recognized from registration pushed the door in with a loud bang and wheeled his squeaking walker into the room. “And where do you think yer going? Yer late!”

But the man paid him no mind and continued squeaking across the tile floor.

“I said yer late.”

“What… Me… Huh?”

“Whatayer deaf too?”

“What… I can’t hear you… I'm deaf.” He pulled out both hearing aids and re-adjusted the volume controls until there was an audible squeal. Then he stuffed them back into his ears. “There was no place to park my Escalade…”

“Find a seat.”

“…and I gotta pee.”

The man’s proclamation set off a flurry of similar comments and before Bob could stop them, a substantial number of the men and a few of the women scurried for the door to beat the man pushing the walker toward the bathrooms down the hall.

“Ten minute pee break,” Bob announced. “But no more than that or yer gonna be here until seven o’clock tonight when it’s dark out and nobody will be able to drive home!”

A half hour after the ten-minute pee break, after they were able to find their seats again, we finally began filling out the necessary NOOD forms.

“Don’t write nothing,” Bob cautioned, “until I tell yer exactly what to write and how to write it.” He held up the one I had already completed and then delivered a brief lecture on block letter and non-block letter printing. To illustrate his point he printed “BOB” all in uppercase on the portable blackboard. Next to that he printed “Bob.” “Not this one.” He emphatically crossed out “Bob,” breaking the chalk. “This one.” He underlined “BOB” three times. “Now print yer name between the lines from top to bottom line in large block letters exactly as it is on the board on yer tent form.”
“I don’t have a tent form.”

Bob held up his with the printed “BOB” and folded it in half. “Now it’s a tent form! Do it. Then put yer completed tent form in front of yer so I know yer names.”

In unison twenty-nine people copied from the portable blackboard. The results were seventeen BOBs and twelve Bobs. The five people returning from the bathroom didn’t print anything. I printed CUBBY on my tent form and put it in front of me.

It took twenty-five minutes for all the errors to be corrected. Then the entire process was repeated filling out and correcting the carbon-copy official registration forms, which took longer because the mistakes had to be undone in triplicate.

“Because yer didn’t follow my instructions there ain’t enough registration forms to go around. That means some of yer won’t get credit for the course. And that means we have to eliminate some of yer from the class, unless yer want to sit there all day just because yer find me so charming!”

A heated debate started. Some wanted to expel one or two of the non-BOB/Bobs who caused the problem, others wanted a more democratic approach like a secret ballot or drawing straws to decide. In the end, when a consensus wasn’t reached, a woman with big eye magnifying glasses from her recent double cataract surgery volunteered, and we selected the deaf man with the two hearing aids who was still in the bathroom. The over-enrollment crisis was averted.

By then it was time for lunch and a prescription medication break, to be followed by a short power nap.

Safe driving videos were on the agenda for the afternoon session. However, setting up a VCR proved to be an even more daunting task than winning World War II for members of the “Greatest Generation” who grew up electronically impaired listening only to AM tube radio. There were several unsuccessful attempts to get the VHS tape to rewind. Then 87-year-old Cpl. Vincenzo Ragussa, a 19-year-old Pathfinder when he parachuted into France the day before D-Day on June 5, 1944, took charge and set out on a reconnaissance mission to the main floor of the library. In minutes he returned with an iPod-wearing teenager. The kid switched the TV to channel 3, pressed PLAY and the screen crackled to life, all without removing his iPod earbuds. The room filled with sounds of car crashes, people complaining that they couldn’t see the screen and the occasional snoring from the back of the room, where several people were extending nap time.

A brief question/answer period followed clips from “Cops” and “The World’s Greatest Car Chases.” Bob announced (a) why the “Three Second Following Rule” was the best way to calculate a safe distance between your car and the one in front of you. “Unless yer need yer calculator with the big numbers to count to three and crash because yer have to get it out of yer pocketbook, ladies!” and (b) how his extensive record of near-fatal car accidents and DUIs best qualified him to teach the class. “We had a saying on the job, ‘If yer want to stop a thief, yer don’t call a cop, yer get advice from another thief!’”

At 4 PM, when the shadows had grown longer across the parking lot and the group had reached meltdown stage, graduation commenced. Bob pulled from the desk drawer the official forms we had block printed a lifetime before and in exchange for our positive course evaluations and a blood oath that we would never admit, even under torture, that he had released us early, the ceremony began. Bob mispronounced each participant’s name and handed out the diplomas.

I clutched in my sweaty hand the hard-earned guarantee of lower insurance rates and rushed through the library door, hoping to be gone and home before the others even realized the class was over. Outside in the fading daylight I was surprised to see the man with the hearing aids expelled so many hours before still trying to steer his dented white Escalade out of the parking lot. I called to him and waved my diploma. “Class valedictorian!” I shouted, but he didn’t see me or hear me.

Then I steered my Miata around the small pile-up of Lexus, Infinity and Lincoln SUVs that had turned the library parking lot into… well, into a parking lot. And I sped off into the deepening darkness toward safety and home, knowing I had three years before the next time I’d have to take the class.

© 2012 Joseph E. Scalia

I Hove You

I love pizza. I love a good movie. I used to love swimming, but only in pools, not the ocean, especially after the movie Jaws, which really scared me, though in retrospect I loved the original version. But they were comical by the time they got to the IV and V sequels. I can say the same for Rocky and Rambo. I loved both the originals. I thought I loved the movie Chariots of Fire. While I was watching it in the theater I was mesmerized and resolved to turn my life around. I promised myself that I would take up jogging to the strains of that movie music in my headphones, that I would jog home from the theater. But as I walked up the aisle further from the screen the resolve faded with my opinion of the film. And by the time I got through the lobby and out into the daylight, I was shaking my head at how lame all that slow motion running really was.

I love vacations in big rental houses in exotic places with old friends cooking and drinking and laughing, though I definitely don’t love getting there. I used to love flying, but I don’t love it anymore. Maybe that’s because of 9/11, or maybe it’s because the airlines have squeezed all the love out of the experience.

I love spring. April is my favorite month. No matter poet T. S. Eliot called it the “cruelest month,” I love April because it is so filled with optimism that may never be realized in the chill of September. I love a cold beer on hot summer afternoons. “Would you care for another beer?” “I’d love one.” I love my kids of course, and I try to make it a practice of telling them “I love you” whenever we talk on the phone or video chat on the computer. Sometimes they say it first and I usually reply “Love you too,’ which I mean as an affirmation of how I feel about them and not an indication of my taste in music. That also goes for other family members from grandchildren to cousins, as well as close friends. I can even say it to some of the people I barely know. “I really love you, man” or “Dude, I love you.” It’s because that kind of “I love you” is very non-threatening, almost automatic, like saying “God bless you” when anyone, even an atheist, sneezes. But saying the words “I love you” to a person I might in reality actually love and/or make love to, someone who has seen me in unflattering positions in intimate detail in compromising states and not always at my best, is quite another matter.

It must be a guy thing, or maybe just my thing. I blame it on two divorces and a string of romantic entanglements that ended badly, but I think that just might be an excuse.

I can always manage the other “L” word, “Like,” with very little effort. It trips easily off the tongue without all that “Luh-luh-luh–” stuttering. “I like you. I like you a lot. I mean, I really like you a very lot. A lot more than those other people that I like a lot.”

I did get close to saying the words several times, once in particular, after my second divorce when I began seeing a younger woman where I worked. In the four years that we were “a couple,” she sent me no occasion greeting cards to tell me how much fun I was to be with. She always signed them “Love.” When I reciprocated I signed mine the same, but the “L,” because of my poor penmanship, looked more like an “h,” as in “I hove you.” It became our little private joke, and my little handwriting gaff made it easier for me to express my feelings for her. And that’s the way we went on, loving and hoving, until she fell out of hove and loved someone else.

It’s a lot of water under the bridge, and I am not looking back with regret. I just wanted you to know that I hove you very much. I hove you as much as I have ever hoved anybody. I hove you. There, I said it, even if I can’t find the right word to tell you.

© 2012 Joseph E. Scalia

Don't Call Me Hon!

My ship has sailed and I am standing on the pier waving as it pulls out of port. On second thought, it is more like I am inside the terminal looking through the grimy window at the backs of the people standing on the pier waving at the departing ship. On third thought, I am actually in the men’s room at the back of the terminal standing in front of a urinal trying to pee while all that waving and sailing is going on outside! It seems that I am no longer at the party and nobody is missing me.

I have never really been a player. In my professional life I took the first teaching job I was offered after graduation and I did it for thirty-three years. My social life wasn't much better. Because I went to parochial school for sixteen years, I was so riddled with Catholic guilt about sex I was a semi-virgin when I got married at twenty-two. By semi-virgin I mean that there were two glorious pre-marital occasions, both with a friend’s older sister, once when she was drunk and thought I was somebody else and once when she needed money for a pack of cigarettes. Both times I was so nervous I was hardly there, and both times it was over so fast I had to replay the scenes many times when I was home alone.

During those brief marriage years I must admit that I did a bit better, overcoming my guilt enough to have the occasional dalliance at work. It was the main factor contributing to the divorce. The affairs were mostly with disgruntled Home Ec teachers and unhappily married women who found me slightly less unpleasant than their husbands. After the divorce there were some other escapades with happy hour alcoholics, Parents Without Partners divorcees, desperate housewives and several graduated former students who returned because they remembered me from my long ago “glory days.” But like the postman who never rings twice, they generally never came back for seconds.

As I grew older and whiter and wider there were others, fewer of course, women of a different caliber, who had diminished expectations and lower standards. All had wear and tear, been banged up a bit in the race toward the bright light at the end of the tunnel, all had walked up to the edge, stared into the abyss and stepped back. I gravitated to the halt and the lame, the weak and the infirm, the addled and the marginally insane, woman with bigger scars than mine. They were women met not in singles bars, but in doctors' offices, CVS drug stores and Wal-Mart.

On these occasions the conversation went something like this:

SHE: “Looking through all these old pictures of you, you, um, seem to have put on more than just a few pounds over the years.”

ME: “Oh, yeah? Well, maybe so. But you only have one leg.”

My state of affairs worsened when I slipped and fell from that viable “25 to 50” demographic to become a full-fledged, card-carrying A-A-R-Per, and then hobbled into retirement, Medicare and golden-year senior status. Suddenly, or maybe it wasn't that sudden, as my systems started breaking down – seeing, hearing, hydraulic – I became invisible! Like the old soldier, I faded away into the wallpaper. Try as I might to re-invent myself, to change my image by darkening my hair and beard with Just For Men that made me look fifteen minutes younger, up-grading my disco wardrobe and daubing on more cologne, I was a wraith, a phantom, the ghost of many Christmases Past. No one saw me. No one heard me. No one cared. Whenever attractive young women came into a place where I was sitting trying to look “not so desperate and not quite dead yet,” the first thing they noticed was the furniture. “Isn't that a great maroon leather couch in the corner? The one with the patchouli-smelling old guy in the tie-dyed shirt sitting on the end of it.”

But I had seen the handwriting on the wall many years before, the first time my son offered to take me out to dinner at the Pasta House on Third Avenue in Brooklyn where he worked. The staff greeted him at the door, "Ian! Ian!" The young college girls serving our table constantly flirted with him while they over-filled his water glass. “This is my father,” he said as I looked over the top of my menu and smiled from the background at their polite, indifferent nods. My worst fear was that someone would bring me a booster chair!

It was just a matter of time until waitresses everywhere leaned in to inform me in a much too loud voice, “You are too late for the Early Bird Special, dear, but you can order from the salt-free Senior Menu,” inevitably steering me to the back page next to the Kiddy selections.

And when the simple task of filling out things like shipping labels, census forms, and Department of Motor Vehicles applications required assistance, annoyance was often balanced by compassion for my feebleness. I got, “You forgot to sign it here, dear, and you left something out here… and here… and here.”

The evening after my 50th high school reunion downtown Brooklyn, I stopped at Burger King to pee, a routine that has become a ritual, and get a drink to keep me awake and propel me to the next stop along the way to home and bed. A small coffee was a buck, a pretty good deal these days of $4.00 a gallon gasoline. But when I ordered the register rang up up 48¢.

“I thought it was a dollar,” I said to the pretty girl behind the counter, a high school junior, flashing my best smile. “Is this a promotional offer?”

“It’s the regular ‘Senior Coffee’ price,” she said not even looking at me.
“But I didn’t ask for that and you didn’t card me!”

She had just assumed that I was an empty antique, a seedy bump on a park bench, a harmless senior on Social Security, a pity candidate given one of the sops society bestows on those close to death.

That was when I decided to show this little pretty girl not to take me for granted. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders and announce: “DON’T DISMISS ME! I AM NOT AS HARMLESS AS YOU THINK! I AM HARMFUL! And to prove it, I am going to SPANK your shapely, even in that Burger King uniform, teenage bottom and then BOFF you! No, I will BOFF you first then SPANK you!" But I said nothing. I thanked her instead and took my bargain coffee to the car to be savored on the journey back to my not too distant rest.

Last week, along with my other scheduled doctors’ appointments, I visited my dermatologist, a man who seems to spend less and less time at further and further distance examining my sagging body during his regular yearly assessment of the multitude of things growing on it. His very attractive 30-something nurse smiled and ushered me into a small examining room, and for a few moments I thought that the old magic was back.

“Now take off all your clothes, hon,” she told me in a melodious voice and handed me a little packet still warm from her body heat.

“You know,” I flirted back, “it’s been a long time since a beautiful young woman told me to take off all my clothes.”

“Oh, you!” She put her hand up to her face as if to cover a blush. “Everything except your underwear, hon,” she said with a bigger smile. “And be sure to put on the robe with the opening to the front, hon. I’ll be back to check in a minute.” And then she patted my cheek. I could feel her smoldering warmth and smell her perfume.

When she was outside I pulled quickly off my pants and rolled them into a ball, my shirt, my socks, my sneakers, everything except my underwear. I pulled on the paper robe with the opening where she said.

I heard her soft knock. “Are you decent, hon?” she asked, popping her face around the door for a look.

My heart was pounding in my chest. I could feel the blood coursing through parts of me long dormant. “Decent enough,” I said, “although you should have seen me in my prime, or even just ten years ago,” I added. “I was more than decent then!” I used my best efforts to suck in my gut and hold closed my too-small paper robe.

“Oh, aren’t you just so cute,” she said. “You must have been something when you were young, hon.” She patted my old gray head like puppy or more like an old dog that can’t or won’t learn new tricks. “You can take a seat over there, hon. The doctor will be right in to see you. Okay?” She wagged her finger at me. “And one other thing, hon. You just might want to put your, um, little man back inside your underwear.”

That was when I knew my ship had definitely sailed.

© 2012 Joseph E. Scalia

Whatever Happened to Elaine Kashuba?

In that first hour of my first day of what I didn’t know at the time was to become my life-long career, on that opening Tuesday after Labor Day, which marked the unofficial end of summer, the day before the kids arrived to begin a new school year, I entered the 7th Grade classroom in what they called the “T-Wing.” The “T” stood for “temporary” and “Wing” meant that the sub-standard, U-shaped cluster of prefabricated wooden classrooms was an add-on attached to the real brick and mortar junior high school.

The twenty-four classrooms had been nailed together in those halcyon post-Korean War days, when the suburbs were exploding with people fleeing the City for a piece of Long Island dirt and a parking space. The T-Wing’s purpose was to house the thousand-strong classes of newly entering 7th graders in semi-isolation and prevent them from mingling with the general school population. Apparently economy and not the comfort of so many kids funneling in from the district’s eight elementary schools had been the major consideration when the uninsulated T-Wing with the bouncy floors and vibrating windows was erected. Of course I didn’t know then on my first T-Wing encounter the early fall and spring extreme heat or the bone-numbing winter cold that lay ahead. Ignorance and inexperience were bliss and probably why the 7th grade and most of the new teachers were relegated there. Each September when a new batch of frightened and confused 12 year olds entered the T-Wing for the first time they would invariably ask, “So why didn’t they call it the ‘U-Wing’?”

My classroom was T-3, three doors up on the left side, the odd side, in the corridor that made up the right side of the U. The base of the U was a long empty hall with a small office in the center for Mary Whiting, the new assistant principal. Within it was Mrs. Whiting’s very small private bathroom that made it unnecessary for her to leave her remote T-Wing outpost ever. On the other side of the U were rooms T-13 to T-24, interrupted by a faculty room and a storage area for old furniture and textbooks.

In June T-3 belonged to Miss Kashuba who had tended her resignation on the last day of school after she collected her final check and disappeared. But evidence of her was everywhere in the room, from her name hand printed on a 3x5 index card affixed with tape to the little glass panel in the door, to the ornately crayoned, multi-colored “Miss Kashuba” centered over the cracked slate blackboard directly above her desk, likely student created for extra credit. Posters stapled to the bulletin boards and authors’ names affixed to the wall covered the front of T-3 that was not blackboard including Ernest Hemingway spelled with two m’s. The classroom looked as though Miss Kashuba had fled for her life, taking only what she could carry when the last June bell rang.

At least, I thought, I wouldn’t have to decorate for a while.

Miss Kashuba’s ghost haunted the rest of the classroom as well. In her center desk drawer I found an assortment of teacher stuff – paperclips and rubber bands, safety pins, a math compass that had no place in an English classroom, three leaky ballpoint pens and a handful of pencils with broken points. There were crumbs of lunches past, a half eaten roll of Tums, travel size no-name aspirin and an almost empty bottle of congealed Pepto Bismol, coated on one side like dried out pink finger paint. I tossed it, missing the pail branded in black marker “Ms. K-S,” shorthand, I presumed, for the mysterious Miss Kashuba. I wondered why she would have gone to the trouble of hyphenating Kashuba. It was short enough. Unless the “S” following the hyphen was Miss Kashuba’s married name, “Smith” or “Smyth,” or “Silverman,” making her Miss Kashuba-Someothersomething. Or maybe she was getting married and that was the reason for her sudden departure from T-3. Of course if she were married before her June disappearance she wouldn’t be Miss Kashuba, and if she were planning a summer wedding there was no need for the hyphenation. Was the “Ms.” an indication of her independent spirit? It was a mystery that I pondered while I poured over the rest of her remains – a water pistol, a torn MAD Magazine and matches. Did Miss Kashuba smoke? Or were they taken from a student bent on burning down the wooden T-Wing when no one was watching?

The side drawers contained white ditto paper, lined composition paper yellowed with age and half a box of mimeograph masters to make dittos that made my fingers purple when I touched them. The middle drawer was empty except for a tube of Hazel Bishop Coral lipstick, a bottle of Midol and tampons. And when I fished into the bottom drawer under the jumble of absentee notes, I came up with a pair of lady’s panties – size 7, fringed with lace. Hers? They had to be. They were too grown up, unless I was mistaken about 7th grade girls. Were they a back up pair for the “Days of Midol” when the tampons were too late? I picked up the Pepto Bismol from where it lay on the floor. The hard pink inside had been knocked loose by the impact with the linoleum tile. Some had spilled onto the floor through the cracked plastic bottle and the rest sounded like a baby’s rattle when I shook it. From a hook on the side of the blackboard where they hung I took the small hand broom and metal dustpan, each monogrammed “Ms. K-S,” and swept up the mess. Then I carefully placed the broken bottle, the Midol and the tampons into the pail. I slipped the panties from the drawer and into a folder of my new leather attaché case, a graduation gift from my parents, for closer examination when I had the time. The prospect of getting to know Miss Kashuba more intimately was compelling. And I was twenty-two.

I inspected the rest of T-3 before the 10 o’clock building meeting in the auditorium, poking through the student lockers at the back, the front closet where books never returned to the Book Room lay in a tumbled heap, an old fuzzy sweater covered in cat hair hung from a broken hook and a peeling bumper sticker exhorted, “Go Comets!” in faded orange and black, the school colors. The rusty file cabinet with the broken lock was filled with stacks of unmarked projects and compositions from the previous years. Miss Kashuba was a bit of a slacker.

Then I heard her voice in my ear. “Just you wait, newbie, until those compositions and book reports and class projects start piling up because you have more important things to do with your time than sit around reading them and marking them up with red pencil. Wait until the little gnats are gnawing on your ankles clamoring for their grades. If you make it long enough as a teacher, kiddo, eventually you’ll get tired of marking all those crappy papers with the recurring errors, the alots, its/it’s, your/your and there/their/they’res never learned no matter how many times they are taught. And you’ll run out of excuses for not having their grades, so just to keep them quiet you’ll announce that you lost their papers after you graded them and make up marks. Just be sure to make them higher than they would actually get. That way everyone is happy. In a week you’ll know who’s smart and who’s not.”

I dumped the ungraded papers into the pail, to preserve Miss Kashuba’s reputation and to make room for my own papers.

During the following days I learned a more about Miss Kashuba from the veterans who populated the teacher’s lounge I discovered in the main building where they ate, smoked, napped and played cards. Her first name was Elaine and that teachers’ first name were closely guarded secrets to be kept from their kids at all costs, lest they run around the building calling their teachers Wayne or Fred or Hortense. And one of the many official memos included in the “First Day” envelope directed teachers to address one another as Mr., Mrs. or Miss Whatever.

Some of the things I learned about Miss Kashuba conflicted. She left because she “burned out” on teaching after only five years. She had a better offer for more money that she couldn’t refuse. She had to resign to avoid legal action for a “little indiscretion involving a high school junior,” a boy in her first year class who returned all grown up to thank her personally for everything she had done to and for him. She was single, a player. She didn’t leave to get married. She wasn’t pregnant and she didn’t leave to have an abortion, or to give birth to the young high school junior’s bastard in a distant convent or with relatives out of town, at least as far as the people who knew her knew. Though her “flighty nature and eccentric personality” didn’t preclude her possibility of maybe getting pregnant wherever she might have landed. I gleaned from these conversations that Miss Kashuba wasn’t much liked by most of the females on staff, though she was very popular with many of the male teachers, single and married. Her resignation was another example of her impetuous nature, So go she did, after the end of the school year party, without a good-bye to anyone. She drove off into the summer sunset in her new red Chevy Chevelle SS convertible and a young guy at her side. No one had heard anything from or about her since the day she disappeared.

In mid-November a postcard arrived from Venezuela with one sentence: “Glad I am here! Ms. K-S,” and an arrow drawn in ink pointing to a thatched hut in the center of other thatched huts in a clearing surrounded by of tall jungle vegitation. Some speculated that Miss Kashuba had joined the Peace Corps and was winning the hearts and minds of brown South American people one heart and mind at a time. Others thought she was there growing marijuana.

And still Miss Kashuba (I couldn’t imagine ever calling her Elaine) remained close by – in my class, my mind, my heart and my ear. She spoke to me during those harrowing first teaching days of filling out index cards (“Last name first, people. Last name then first name! And print.”), alphabetical seating charts and book distribution, where I had to invent unique student numbers for that would identify me as the teacher, the class period and year (“Scal-101-64”) and copy them correctly into each student’s book and on each student’s index card so that book collection or accountability for lost books would be easier the following June, or just trying to keep the little nits and gnats in their seats without popping up like Jacks in the box and rushing my desk with their problems and concerns: “Did I do this right?” “I don’t understand what you said to do.” “Can I go to the Boy’s Room?” “My nose is bleeding!” “Ted Fuchs stole my pen!”

“You better get tough with them,” she told me. “This isn’t ‘Camp School’ where everybody has fun and you are the social director. They don’t all have to like you. So if you think of it more like a medium security prison you’ll have a better chance of survival. Don’t smile until Thanksgiving, and don’t show weakness. They can smell weakness – and fear! And if they do, they will have you hanging out the window by the end of the week.”

She was there that first Parent’s Night when a father interrupted my nervous presentation to call everyone’s attention to Ernest (two m) Hemingway clinging to the wall. “His name is misspelled,” he said pointing at the error. “Isn’t that a bad example for students in an English class?”

I hemmed and hawed. I could have blamed it on the teacher who had previously occupied the room, but I didn’t. Instead my face grew hot and I began to perspire, soaking the collar of my white shirt. And then Miss Kashuba was standing behind me. “If you had tenure you could tell the old fart that you really don’t give a shit. And when you have a little more experience and are able to think on your feet, you’ll have explanations ready for such emergencies.”

“I will do that,” I heard myself saying, “not often, but from time to time. I’ll make intentional mistakes – just to see if anyone catches them – who’s paying attention. It’s a fun way to make the students part of the learning process, and–” I added, “– a way to get extra credit.”

Perfect! Some of the parents smiled and nodded their approval. The next morning I had an official memo from the principal in my mailbox instructing me to remove old Ernie from my wall. I did.

Gradually, as I grew more secure, traces of Miss Kashuba faded. Inside T-3 my bulletin boards replaced hers – free color photos of cute baby animals and book cover posters from the Scholastic Book Club. The writers on the wall gave way to “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” compositions, book reports recommending “this book to all my friends,” illustrated haiku, short stories where everything was only a dream and student created advertising projects like Sammy Luban’s “Hershey, Hershey, Hershey Brown Is Beautiful!” poster. He sent it to Hershey hoping they would use the idea and received a personal response signed by the vice-president of Hershey. The letter explained that Hershey was America’s number one candy bar and they didn’t need to advertise. For his efforts Sammy also got a 5 lb Hershey Bar and a $25 gift certificate.

Just before the spring break that first year, someone stole my “Ms. K-S” desk chair and replaced it with a straight back wooden one that didn’t tilt. All my investigative questioning was to no avail. My search failed to turn up the missing chair. It wasn’t in the T-Wing, which led me to suspect it had been spirited off to the main building where some strange ass was resting in the very place where Miss Kashuba’s ass had once resided. The following September I liberated a brand new desk chair with lumbar support from a new teacher’s classroom in T-16. I chalked it up as my “right of seniority.”

All the time the rusty file cabinet in the back of my room slowly filled with my own personal effects and ungraded papers.

Over the years rumors of Miss Kashuba continued to circulate though fewer and further in between as those who had known her personally moved to other schools, retired and died. Joanna Bender, a Home Ec teacher, reported seeing Miss Kashuba in Brooklyn wheeling a carriage with twins through a shopping mall while dragging a toddler by the arm. “And she was fat and unkempt.” Mr. Franks, a flamboyant-bordering-on-gay social studies teacher said she tended bar in The Pines on Fire Island during the summer. And Tony Palumbo, a math teacher and former boyfriend, said that she had moved to become a showgirl in Vegas.

In my head her voice grew fainter, but it never disappeared completely. My mind often wandered as I wondered what Miss Kashuba was doing that very minute I was teaching The Raft, a 213 page non-fiction book by Robert Trumbull about three World War II naval airmen adrift for thirty-four days on the Pacific in a leaky rubber raft. The book’s potential was overshadowed by the ho-hum manner the story was told. It put the kids to sleep and me on automatic pilot, especially after two or three years reading it with five classes. The whole thing might have been better condensed, reduced to a short story, a single page, one paragraph. “The plane crashed. The three guys got into a raft. The survived 34 days with almost no water and the very little food they caught. They were rescued. Period.” I thought about Miss Kashuba as I read about Old Yeller’s demise to the sobbing classes, and at the end of Daniel Keyes short story, “Flowers for Algernon,” when re-retarded Charlie Gordon says farewell to Miss Kinnian in a note asking her to put flowers on his dead mouse Algernon’s grave – “Good-by Miss Kinnian and Dr Strauss and evreybody. And P.S. please tell Dr Nemur not to be such a grouch when pepul laff at him and he would have more frends. Its easy to make frends if you let pepul laff at you. Im going to have lots of frends where I go. P.P.S. Please if you get a chanse put some flowrs on Algernons grave in the bak yard....”

Sometimes I thought of Miss Kashuba while I stared through the cracked glass of T-3, across the grass of the open space between the U arms of the T-Wing and I watched Mrs. Whiting’s rectangular bathroom window illuminate. The light projected her moving silhouette against the frosted glass and the unsuspecting assistant principal sat and stood, sat and stood all day, every day in the course of her administrative duties. My head filled with images of the lithe and supple Miss Kashuba in the Peace Corps peeing in the bushes, tantalizing all those South American men with her straight white American smile and her big American breasts. The conjured pictures of her traipsing through Europe on $5 a day armed only with her backpack, a bottle of Midol, some loose tampons, a supply of birth control pills and a back up pair of underwear excited me.
Passing through the various stages of my life – marriage, parenthood, divorce – I wondered where she was in hers. Had Miss Kashuba ever married? Did she have kids? Had she suffered the pangs of life and collected the scars of living it along the way? Did she find true love in the arms of Juan García Quesada, her Venezuelan coffee farmer? Was she – is she happy?

To this day Miss Kashuba is with me still, well beyond my teaching career and deep into retirement. We have grown old together, Miss Kashuba and I, grown wider and wiser, slower and whiter. I think of her at the oddest moments – during visits with my various doctors, before a routine colonoscopy, standing in line at CVS waiting to have my Lipitor refilled. Has she ever been seriously ill? I think of her while planning vacations. I wonder if Miss Kashuba has ever been to Australia? And I think of her on those long nights when I am alone and can’t sleep, wondering if she is alone and sleepless too. But mostly I think of Miss Kashuba, wherever she may be, whenever I see hanging on the hook in my basement that small hand broom and metal dust pan with the faded monogram, “Ms. K-S,” the very one I took with me on my last day.

© 2012 Joseph E. Scalia