Melsville

Getting on My Boots

Of all the young boys I know, Alex was the first to show  any interest in what he wore. When he was four,  Alex wore the same Bob the Builder shirt not often, but every day.  It grew grimy with dirt and sticky with paint and pasta sauce.  If his parents had been able to peel it off of him at night, they would have washed it, so I suspect that he also slept in that fading, shirt.

Five years later, Liam has a personal uniform.  My boy loves his sweatpants and long-or-short-sleeved tee-shirts.  If he’s forced to wear anything else, he does so sulkily.  He cares little for color or pattern,. He may clash three ways at once,  but if the pants feel fuzzy on the inside and the shirt has no collar, he’s satisfied.

The first garment that Emma chose for herself was her yellow rain boots.  As soon as she saw them, she squeal with delight and didn’t even let us take them from at the cash register.  She was two years old.  My girl loves boots.

Men may make jokes about women and shoes because most men own four pairs of shoes.  They own dress-shoes, black and brown, they wear sneakers.  And, most men own a pair of boots. They own boots because Winter happens.  Because it snows, because it gets mucky, most men will admit  that everyone needs boots.  One pair, brown or black with no buckles, spurs, stitching, hardware or heels.  Boots.

Some boots have jobs. Cowboys,-boots  motercycle-boots hiking-boots, engineer-boots, work-boots, combat-boots, each has a purpose.  They are men’s last vestige of dress-up,  Businessmen can wear their high-heeled two-toned cowboy-boots with their suits and feel like tycoons , Rock-stars can wear biker-boots to make themselves look tough and dangerous, and anyone can wear them and feel like rock-and-rollers.  Boots are a simple disguise,.

I own four pairs of boots.  I own one unimpressive pair of foul-weather boots that do nothing but keep water off my feet.   The battle-weary brown boots which I wear every day keep growing softer, more familiar.  When I pull up the zip and my feet settle in, they promise not to let me down, ever.  The girlie dress boots that I bought last year didn’t look girlie enough when they came out of the UPS box,, so I only rarely wear them.  Tight and thin, they are good for an hour or two  when I need them.

Can anyone have dream boot, boots that she wanted so much that she didn’t think they existed?  I do, because I finally own them.  Black leather, low heels, the perfect number of straps and buckles and on sale too. The desperate online shoe-vender  had sent me e-mail announcing a one-day-only sale on four selected pairs of boots, including these beauties.  That day, my house was filled with nine-year-old boys eating pizza and playing Magic and Heroscape., and I kept going back to the venders home page.  Shoulder-deep in roaring boyhood, I kept needed to remind myself about the lives adult women lead,  My friend, Sarah practically begged me to order them, and I could not bear to let her down.

Although I loved them the moment I removed them from the packing crate, it took me almost a month to surrender. The packing box sat by the dining-room armoire daring me to find a way to make the too-large boots fit.  I wanted them, I needed them and  I loved them with all my heart. The second time I tried them on, I stopped resisting.  Heel-grips, insoles, whatever it took, a relationship needs work.   Last week, I handed the shoebox to Liam to use for a school-project, love conquers all.

Giving Up, "I'm Sorry."

In the Ninth Grade, I was taught by two tough old European birds whom I did not appreciate at the time.  I don’t know if anyone appreciated Ms. Goldman, I only know that I didn’t.  She taught an introductory Algebra class to a roomful of students, all of whom were Fresh-people, and all of whom were wandering off anywhere else mentally while she was introducing us to Algebra.  She was Austrian, and she was older than anything. Tiny, but fat, she lumbered around the classroom wearing sleeveless tops, skirts and sandals, so a lot of pale wrinkles escaped.  When my father met her, he knew I dreaded laboring on through her classes four days a week, and the moment he met her, she became in his mind, a great teacher, the best I had.  “She only wants you to learn, and she’s so delightful, you can see it when she smiles.”

Maybe she did just want me to learn, and I couldn’t so I wouldn’t.  She stayed in her classroom ready to on-the-spot tutor any student who came looking for help with math homework.  She must have known, or learned the blocks  (students’ days were divided into blocks A-G ) that were empty, and she would quite literally pull me into the classroom when she saw me pass; she did that to a few of us.  She made me work even while she pulled me though that homework.  In class, I just dug in my heels and refused to go, apologizing the whole time, but still not budging.  Couldn’t do it, it was every bit my fault, so I apologized over and over every day.

Ms. Goldman may have had a delightful smile, but she rarely smiled.  Her accent thick as half-set concrete always hit the ear heavily and loudly.  I thought she must be German, until there came a Friday afternoon when she finally hit her limit.  “When I escaped from Austria,”  she yelled above the in of restless kids.  “I brought only my learning, and I am bringing it to you.”  We all shut up.

I repeated this to my brother, and he said, “so it’s true. That's what I’ve always heard, but nobody really knew. Is it true she has a concentration camp number tattooed on her ankle?”
She may have had a number, and that might have accounted for her exposed ankles.  Don’t know, never looked.

Another thing my brother told me was that he often saw Mme Brought, my French teacher pulling out her cigarettes and lighter while she was walking toward the small building on the teachers were allowed to smoke. I imagined that her cigarettes were unfiltered, even hand-rolled.  It was probably years of smoking that had done a number on her skin; she was, frankly, wizened.  Her voice seemed to have gone past “gravely” and straight to “rocky.”

In grade-school, I loved French class.  I loved learning new words, and speaking them. My teacher, Mme Fandel was friendly, warm and enjoyed teaching. I loved her, and looked forward to her class. 

Nobody ever told me why I was one of the students forced to stop attending French class after the Sixth grade.  It may have been that my spelling was so hopeless that someone decided that I’d never manage conjugating verbs, and it may have been that someone decided that a person doing so poorly in Math couldn’t handle advancing in another subject.  I’ll tell you things that someone else’s choice did for me, it took me out of one of the classes where I was really having fun, and it assured me that I just could not write in a foreign language.  This was what Mme Brough met in her class that year.

Mme spoke to us all in rapid, heavily accented French.  Sounded old and gruff, but she was funny, a riot and I think she expected a little enthusiasm from her students.  I did understand what she was saying even though such things as verb-tenses elludede me.   My last school has as good as told me that I’d never write in another language, so I quaked in my chair when this little woman told me that this was exactly what she expected me to do.  I fell right into apologizing, partly because I didn’t think I could excel in this subject, and partly because I missed enjoying as much as I once had.

That I failed both French and Math that year probably surprised no one , not even Peter Yeomans who may have been in both classes with me.  Peter Yoemans was a very sweet, rather cute boy who may have had a crush on me.  He bought me bags of jelly beans for no reason, balloons for my birthday and sent me a carnation (school custom) on Valentines Day.   After I broke my arm near the end of our first semester, he always offered to carry my books for me up the rickety stairs that lead to Mme’s classroom. Before class, when I was expecting to humiliate myself for a solid forty-five minutes or after class, when it was all over, Peter asked me why I kept apologizing.  It was the same thing our teacher kept asking me, but he was cuter, so he was less terrifying.  At the end of the year, he wrote something in my yearbook along the lines of, “It’s just like Madame Brough is always saying, ‘STOP APOLOGIZING’”

Both my aging teachers retired after that year, both had already died by the time I started college.  At least one had lung cancer, both smoked.

I’m telling you all of this because three weeks ago in Kung Fu class, I finally decided to take the advice of those two  crones and that one darling boy;  I’ve stopped apologizing when I’m not doing as well in class as I’d like to be doing. I’m not going to tell the classmates with whom I’m practicing that I’m probably never going to manage the fan kick - reverse fan kick combination or say, “I’m never any good at this bit,”  to my dear instructors.  Doing that just looks like  I think I can’t take care of myself,  and I can.  I’m  through with being sorry.

This doesn’t mean I’m giving on  being amused at myself.  I think I’ll always excuse a botched busting of a double-wrist grab by saying they never taught us that at Vassar. The laugh I try to surpress when the instructors tell me they will schedule my first Level Test for the Spring will someday escape. One day, I might not be so shocked that my instructor just told me that I did something right that I stop and thank her.  Part of not feeling like I’ve done something wrong means forgiving myself,  and part of that is self-forgiveness.

Tickets, the Old Way

IIn 1983, my brother offered to take me to see U2 in Boston (can't remember where). I said "no".  He practically pressed the ticket into my hand, and he basically told me I was a fool not to go.  A cool little band out of Ireland, he told me, you'll like them; come along.  Maybe I didn't want to go because my brother's best friend (whom I adored  with the passion that only unrequited love froths up) and his girlfriend (who was plain evil) would be going.  Maybe I was saving my first concert experience for David Bowie later that summer, I don't know.  All I know is that I declined his kind invitation and have spent the last twenty-five years kicking myself for it.

Jonathan probably stood in line at a box-office to get those tickets.  He did that, he waited in lines for his tickets because that is what teenage boys did.  In those days, music fans had two choices; to stand in the box-office line for hours or to call the ticket-vendor every two minutes until they got through.  This was in the days before the redial button or the cell phone, so the digits had to be punched in one at a time every time.  By the time the caller got though, she just had to take what she could get, so the box-office was the best way to go.   Cardboard ticket bought with paper money passed from one person to another. Try explaining that to a fifteen-year-old on typing on her laptop and texting her best friend.

Last week, it was announced that U2 would give an ultra-quick one hour concert in an antique movie theater half a mile from my front door.  They announced it on the radio, so I knew nothing until the tickets were almost all given out by radio-stations.  Since I don't drive, I only listen to the morning news on the radio, only when I'm half-asleep.  When I was younger, the radio got me out of bed in the morning.  I needed to drag myself out of bed just to push the ON button, and I half-danced around the room, pulling on  my miniskirt, tights and brightly-colored sweater or black turtleneck.  If WFNX was giving out U2 tickets, I would know.  Either that, or my best friend, Alex would tell me about it.   I never knew anyone who won tickets on the radio, but it alerted me to what was going on.

Do people my age still listen to the radio?  People old enough to have gone to Harvard Square and bought “The Unforgettable Fire” at Newbury Comics? They must, because all of the stations have given out all their tickets.  Funny, the stations giving out tickets were the same ones that started my days those many years past.

Tomorrow afternoon, you will see me around the theater in Davis Square just in case they start giving out tickets at the box-office.  I’ll be there while Liam is at his Kung Fu class; the part of me that’s still a sixteen-year-old girl all hopeful and excited.  If I get two tickets, I’ll have to choose between calling my friend Sarah and telling her to come on out with me  or offering it to Liam and taking him to his first concert.  Between a giddy little escape and a whole new experience.   

Davis Square will be crazy  on Wednesday night.   Holland Street will be mobbed with people buying and selling, the lucky few and the desperate,  The fast-fingered who had called from work and the rest of us.  Alone, I might pay for a single ticket, might.  If I stood by the doors just hoping to be let in for standing-room-only, I would not be the only one.