Remembering Harold Meltzer

January 9, 2013

Harold Meltzer obituary (via Frank Pandolfo), January 9, 2003. (Westchester Journal News).

Harold Meltzer obituary (via Frank Pandolfo), January 9, 2003. (The Journal News).

Harold Meltzer, my favorite and best teacher of all, died on January 2, 2003 at the age of sixty-six, ten years ago last week. He was all too young and all too bitter about his years as a history teacher at Mount Vernon High School. But then, dealing with entitled parents and unrepentant administrators in Mount Vernon, New York for thirty-five years would do that to most people. Despite that, Meltzer was a rock, the first teacher since my elementary school years that I genuinely trusted with my family secrets and my inner self. He was the first and maybe only teacher I had in my six years of Humanities who actually seemed like he wanted to teach us (see my post “No Good Teaching Deed Goes Unpunished” from May ’11).

I met Meltzer on our last day of tenth grade, after three days of finals and Regents exams, on June 21, ’85. He had summoned fourteen of us to “Room 275 of Mount Vernon High School,” as the invitation read. We had all registered to take Meltzer’s AP American History class in eleventh grade, our first opportunity to earn college credit while in high school.

Meltzer started off talking to us about Morison and Commager — who I now know as the great consensus historians of the ’50s, until the social history revolution made their textbooks irrelevant by the ’80s — as we sat in this classroom of old history books and even older dust and chalk. Meltzer himself looked to be in his late-fifties (he was actually a day away from his forty-ninth birthday), tall and lanky except for the protruding pouch in the tummy section. His hair was a mutt-like mixture of silver, white and dull gray, and his beard was a long, tangled mess.

Met Logo and A full house, seen from rear of stage, at the Metropolitan Opera House (former bldg, 39th Street), for a concert by pianist Josef Hofmann, November 28, 1937. (National Archives via Wikimedia). In public domain.

Met Logo and A full house, seen from rear of stage, at the Metropolitan Opera House (former bldg, 39th Street), for a concert by pianist Josef Hofmann, November 28, 1937. (National Archives via Wikimedia). In public domain.

The way he spoke, and the way his eyes looked when he spoke made me see him as a yarmulke-wearing preteen on his way to temple. The force with which his words would leave his mouth hit me immediately. As much as I noticed how frequently spit would spew out of Meltzer’s mouth, the rhythm of his speech was slow and sing-song, like an elder or grandfather taking you on a long, winding, roller-coaster-ride of a story. Most of all, I knew that he cared — about history, about teaching, about us learning, about each of us as people. Maybe, just maybe, for some of us, he cared too much.

But for at least for me, Meltzer’s eccentric space in which he told Metropolitan Opera House stories and talked about egalitarianism extended beyond the historical. He was the first teacher I had since before Humanities who’d ask me if things at home were all right, and knew intuitively that things weren’t. He was the first to ask me about how poor my family was and about hunger. And he was the first teacher ever to ask if I had a girlfriend. Needless to say, these questions were unexpected. Yet through these questions, Meltzer had begun to crack my thin, hard wall of separation between school and family.

Because Meltzer cared deeply about reaching students — about reaching me — our student-teacher relationship because a friendship after high school and a mentoring one as well. I wasn’t looking for a mentor, and Meltzer was only being Meltzer. Still, his stories about his battles with MVHS administrators, Board of Education folk, and with upper-crust parents who believed their kids were entitled to A’s just for showing up, were filled with lessons of perseverance, patience, and looking beyond everyday headaches in order to reach people. While this wasn’t a factor in my going to graduate school and spending a significant part of my life as a history professor and educator, these stories have helped me over the years.

1972 Dodge Dart Dark Green (similar to '74 Dodge Dart Meltzer owned when I was at MVHS), December 25, 2009. (http://www.fotosdecarros.com).

1972 Dodge Dart Dark Green (similar to ’74 Dodge Dart Meltzer owned when I was at MVHS), December 25, 2009. (http://www.fotosdecarros.com).

But unfortunately, it was a factor in why Meltzer became embittered and took early retirement in June ’93. The end of the Humanities Program, the intolerance of some administrators toward Meltzer as a “confirmed bachelor,” the lack of decency — forget about gratitude — from many of his most successful students. Those changes, these things, all would take a toll on any teacher who’d stay after school day after day to run Mock Trial, to facilitate study groups, to work on letters of recommendation for students. But no, most of my former classmates who had Meltzer between ’85 and ’87, all they could say was that “Meltzer was weird” or that “I didn’t understand” his lessons.

I’m thankful that I did have Meltzer as a teacher, friend and mentor between ’85 and ’02. I’m thankful that I had a chance to interview him for what is now my Boy @ The Window manuscript in August and November ’02, just a couple of months before he passed (see my post “Mr. Meltzer” from June ’09). I’m glad that despite his physical and psychological pain, Meltzer welcomed me with open arms and answered my questions about his life and his career. I just wish that my former classmates and some of Meltzer’s more cut-throat colleagues had taken the time to really know the man.

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Posted by decollins1969

Cath The Great

November 5, 2012

Catherine A. Lugg, circa 2009, November 5, 2012. (Catherine A. Lugg via Facebook).

I define serendipity as the ability of hard work to create what others would consider good luck, fortuitous chances, random opportunities for success. I’ve managed to do just that over and over again over the course of my life, particularly as a student and occasionally as a writer. But as a human being in search of real, positive, life-changing connections and friendships, serendipity has been very hard to make happen. When it does occur, at least for me, it becomes one of those moments that I seal in my mind, like a note in a time capsule.

The beginning of November ’94 was one of those weeks filled with serendipity. It started with the chair of the History Department at Carnegie Mellon, Steven Schlossman. He had decided that he couldn’t make it to the 1994 History of Education Society annual meeting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. But because he had already booked a room and a flight, Schlossman apparently figured that he could simply transfer both the airline tickets and room to me instead (back in the pre-9/11 days when you could do such things without creating a potential terror alert). So Schlossman met with me a week before this conference and said that I should go “to represent the department” and because he thought it “a great opportunity” for me.

Carolina Inn at night (its better side), Chapel Hill, NC, 2007, November 5, 2012. (http://booked.com).

I wasn’t so sure, with the HES meeting being held in a mansion-turned-hotel, not quite on the University of North Carolina campus. Once I arrived from Pittsburgh on that first Wednesday in November, though, I felt at least free from the burdens of grad school at Carnegie Mellon. The weather was perfect, in the low eighties, and my World History sections for that Thursday and Friday were being covered by other teaching assistants. So I gave myself a tour of Chapel Hill, all the while wondering why didn’t I apply here for graduate school.

That was only the prelude to the four-day conference that began that Thursday. And since Schlossman had charged me to attend four sessions and to take notes on them on his behalf, I went to as many conference offerings as humanly possible. Back then, I had a much higher tolerance for boring academician-speak. So I was easily able to take detailed notes. I asked questions on topics in which I knew little. I even smiled and introduced myself to the mostly over-fifty White male crowd.

By Saturday, I had one mandatory session to attend. It was something about education in Japan and Germany post-World War II and how Japanese textbook makers left Japanese atrocities during World War II out of the nation’s history textbooks. During the Q & A, I asked what I thought was a pedestrian question, pedestrian because I forgot it five minutes after I asked it. Yet several people afterward told me that I’d asked a great question, as if I had some unique perspective or something. “It’s not even my subject matter,” I thought, adding in my mind that “Maybe some of these folks thought that the Black guy in the room didn’t really know anything.”

History of Education Society 1994 Annual Meeting program, November 3-6 1994, November 5, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins).

Or, as it turned out, my dedication to Schlossman’s charge made me seem 1,000 times as enthused about the HES meeting as anyone else attending. For two women did in fact notice me during that session. That Saturday evening, during beer, wine and spirits time in a cramped conference/ball room space, after pleasantries with a couple of older professors, I bumped into the two women again. They immediately engaged me in conversation, because they wanted to know how I managed to remain upbeat during such a boring ass conference.

Barbara and Catherine were both grad students in the School of Education at Penn State, as it turned out. Both were also PhD candidates in the midst of doctoral theses, and because of my being only twenty-four, couldn’t believe that I was a PhD candidate also. What I thought was going to be just another one of thirty conversations with older White male professors and kiss-ass grad students turned into a nearly ninety-minute discussion of research, pop culture, the HES conversation, and the ironies of life, and all with a snarkiness that only someone like me (or Rachel Maddow) could fully appreciate.

It might’ve ended there. Except that Barbara and Catherine’s research on federal education policy and achievement gap data for Latinos (especially Mexican immigrants) dovetailed pretty well with my work on multiculturalism and Black education in Washington, DC. Plus, the three of us saw an opportunity to use next year’s HES meeting as an opportunity to expose the hypocrisy of the old boys’ club and their petri-dish sense of educational issues for women, for communities of color, and for immigrants. We titled it, “Educational Historiography and Diverse Populations: Why Research Isn’t ‘Bringing a Pet to Class’.” Somehow the powers who ran HES accepted our proposal, giving us a chance to present at HES in Minneapolis in October ’95.

A skunk (something a teacher shouldn’t bring to class), November 5, 2012. (http://animal.discovery.com).

By that time, though, Barbara couldn’t make it, having recently married and having moved across the pond to the UK. Catherine ended up taking her place, and ended up doing two presentations in less than twenty-four hours. She’s been there for me as a genuine friend in academia and in my aspirations as a writer ever since.

The HES meetings  were the start of an eighteen-year friendship with Catherine, one that actually survived despite the tendency of the academic life to kill more friendships than one could ever start. I think we’re friends still because we share a same sense of the world, and both are willing to snark our way through the madness of it all.

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My Friend Matt

September 7, 2012

Beavis and Butt-head titlecard, May 21, 2012. (Nerd 101 via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws due to image’s low resolution.

Over the past couple of years, one of my son’s favorite bedtime stories has been about a character I named Matt (see my post “Crush #1 and Other Bedtime Stories” from July ’10). Having a friend with superhuman farts or a friend who belts out ’80s pop tunes while beating up some of the other characters isn’t exactly based on my growing up experience. In the case of Matt, his character was one that always over-explained things — like why 2+2=4 — and wanted to play Canasta in the middle of a basketball game.

Buried in all the ridiculousness and hyperbole around the character was a real-life friend named Matt, whom I met twenty years ago this month. Matt was in my African American History graduate seminar at Carnegie Mellon University in the fall of ’92. I took the course on the advice of my eventual advisor Joe Trotter, whom I had met that spring at my first academic conference at Lincoln University (see my “Meeting Joe Trotter” post from May ’12). I decided to take the course because my history grad program at Pitt didn’t have anything close to a course on Black historiography. In fact, I couldn’t find a course that would even approximate a graduate seminar in African American studies at the University of Pittsburgh in ’92.

I was one of seven students in the course, with two women (one of whom was Black and in her thirties) and three young White males, though not as young as twenty-two year-old me. And there was Matt, the first Black male I’d seen in either my own or Carnegie Mellon’s History PhD who wasn’t me. What I noticed immediately was the fact that in our Tuesday 9:30-12:30 course, Matt was the only one who spent the first two hours leafing through the one or two books and five articles we were to read every single week. Leafing, because as it turned out, Matt had already finished all of his coursework for the doctorate. He was auditing the course, and rarely read anything for the seminar in advance.

Carnegie Mellon University logo, June 27, 2012. (Abrio via Wikipedia). In public domain.

That’s what I learned when we had our first lunch together in the cafeteria of University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, where I could get a cheap lunch before or after shooting hoops. It was then that I also noticed something peculiar about Matt. He chewed his food with his mouth half-open, where if I looked too closely, I’d notice the mix of saliva, wild rice, green beans and chicken breast being crushed by his raptor-like teeth. I never knew anyone over twelve, much less someone approaching forty, who didn’t know how to chew with their mouth closed until I’d met Matt.

Despite my observation of some weird tendencies, I found my first conversations with Matt to be exhilarating. I simply hadn’t been around anyone in my graduate school experience aside from a professor or two who was as knowledgeable about American and African American history, politics and culture as Matt. That, and the fact that he had worked in the community development corporation world as a community organizer made him an atypical graduate student, even compared to the other older perpetual-student-graduates I’d known over the previous five years.

I learned from our eatery outings — especially after the first Boston Market in Pittsburgh opened in Squirrel Hill in mid-September — that Matt was the younger son of two prominent Black/Afro-Caribbean parents, both of whom were in the social work field, both of whom had doctorates, both of whom were prominent on Pitt’s campus. His father, of course, was also an ordained minister. I could only imagine the kind of pressure that would’ve put on Matt over the years to do something meaningful with his life.

Canasta, May 31, 2007. (Roland Scheicher via Wikipedia). Released to public domain by author.

The one political argument that Matt made during the fall presidential election cycle in ’92 was the need for serious campaign finance reform. Remember, this was a good four years before McCain-Feingold, which has since of course been shredded by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Aside from that, most of what we agreed on were issues of interpretation in African American historiography and the fact that two of our classmates, Mark and Mike, were the ultimate brown-nosers. They kissed butt at times like their lives depended on it, leading to heated arguments in our seminar every week. The fact that they thought Fogel and Engelmann’s Time on the Cross (1974) was a great work on slavery said it all on these future neo-cons.

Still, while I found Matt’s contrarian Beavis and Butt-head view of the world interesting at times, I also realized that Matt spent an amazing amount of time talking. At Hillman Library, in front of William Pitt Union, in the halls of Baker Hall, at Boston Market. And as I’d learn later on, there was a great distance between Matt’s interesting and sometimes great ideas and the hard work needed to put them on paper for a committee or to put them in action in his own life.

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Origins of the Obsession

June 13, 2012

Obsession Night For Men, Calvin Klein, June 12, 2012. (http://www.dealsdirect.com.au).

To think that it’s been a quarter-century since I went into obsession mode over a girl. Not love, not so much a crush, but a bonafide obsession. Well, it’s a confirmation of how pathetic I’d allowed myself to become in the summer between the end of high school and my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh in ’87.

The funny thing was, it was an obsession with Crush #2, and one that almost didn’t happen. After all, I’d given up on seeing Crush #2 again after our graduation ceremony. So the week after, I began working at the General Foods’ (now Kraft Foods) scientific testing facilities in Tarrytown, just down the road from the GM plant and the Tappan Zee Bridge over to Rockland County. I was hired as part of their Operation Opportunity program, a summer internship program for students of color.

It was my first office job, and it showed. I had to take two buses to get to and from work and walk the seven blocks from the bus stop at the corner of North Columbus and East Lincoln to 616. I took the 40 or 41 bus to downtown White Plains and transferred to either the 13 or the 1W to Tarrytown. I was consistently late to work in the first three weeks, not even knowing to call in to let folks know I was going to be late.

About a week into the job, I boarded the bus for White Plains on my way home from work and decided to vary my routine. I got off at the White Plains Galleria, a state-of-the-art mall back then. It was five stories of concrete and a glass ceiling, of shops, eateries and a movie theater.

Mechanically processed chicken, the key ingredient in McDonald’s Chicken McNuggets, pouring out into small tubs, October 5, 2010. (http://huffingtonpost.com).

The mall had a mom-and-pop cookie store that had the best chocolate chip-walnut cookies this side of Mrs. Fields. They also had a McDonald’s, a luxury for me for most of the decade. I stopped to buy my ultimate pre-dinner snack: a six-pack of McNuggets with that sweet-and-sour sauce, small fries, a vanilla “milk”shake and two gooey and warm chocolate chip-walnut cookies. It was heaven-on-earth food for me. When I went outside to wait for the 40 bus back home, there she was. Crush #2 was standing there, also waiting for the bus. We exchanged “Hi”s and started some small talk about college, music and movies. It turned out that Crush #2 had a summer job in White Plains just a couple blocks from the Galleria.

Even as pitiful as I was, I knew I had a window of opportunity to get beyond the idle chatter to the “Do you want to hang with me?” question. But I just didn’t and couldn’t ask. Not on that commute home, and not on any coincidental bus trips after that. In all, I probably had about a dozen opportunities to ask Crush #2 if she liked me or if she wanted to go out with me throughout July.

A standard non-conversation conversation went like

“Hey, [Crush #2].”

“Hi. How are you?,” she’d asked.

“All right,” I’d say.

“How was work?”

“Okay. How was your day?,” I’d ask in response.

“Fine,” Crush #2 would say.

Then, there would be the occasional “Did you see…?” some movie, or a “Did you buy…?” the latest album or tape. Otherwise, it was like two ex-spouses attempting small talk before switching the conversation to concerns about their kids.

These bump-ins weren’t deliberate and not even “by accident-on purpose.” When I did see her, I didn’t get the sense of euphoria that I had when I saw her in high school. My heart didn’t go pitter-patter, and my throat and mouth didn’t turn dry. At times, I felt a sense of dread when I’d come out of the Galleria with my comfort food in hand and Walkman on, only to have to talk to Crush #2 without the cover of school as a pretext.

I preferred to think of Crush #2 from afar. On meandering walks that often took me through Crush #2′s neck of the woods. Or when I listened to certain songs, particularly love duets and Whitney Houston. I never once dared to walk over to her house, and I refused to call even though her family’s number was in the phone book — I did look it up, though. I couldn’t even quench my libido’s growing thirst by thinking of her and how she looked.

In the back of my mind I began to realize that my attraction to Crush #2 didn’t have much to do with Crush #2. Yet when I did bump into her, I tried through our short conversations to see if there was any “there” there. Anybody with about two years’ more maturity than the twelve-year-old in a seventeen-year-old that was me knew that I was on the short road to rejection and embarrassment. And that rejection would lead to six months of obsession over Crush #2, and stalker-esque thoughts, if not stalker actions.

But I couldn’t get that smile of Crush #2′s out of my head. Even if it was more fake than any Chicken McNugget I’d ever eaten. In a year filled with rejection, scorn and externally imposed invisibility, the eventual rejection I suffered from Crush #2 was a bridge too far.

Mitt Romney (via http://news.yahoo.com), May 10, 2012. (Charles Krupa/AP).

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My First Vacation, Valedictorian Included

March 10, 2012

Ballston high-rise (on right), Arlington, VA, where I stayed with "V" and her roommate during first DC area visit, June 26, 2008. (http://therealestatedirt.com).

I’ve lived in the DC area now for nearly thirteen years, but it was this time two decades ago that I came to the DC area for the first time. This was my first vacation ever as an adult, and the first time I’d gone on a vacation of any kind since my mother took me and my older brother Darren on a day trip to Amish country in Pennsylvania at the end of third grade, in June ’78. The visit had as many layers to it as a Vidalia onion, as it involved my past, present and future, and all at once.

At the center of my visit was spending time with my Humanities classmate and friend “V,” the valedictorian of Mount Vernon High School’s Class of ’87. I crashed at her and her roommate’s place in the Ballston section of Arlington, Virginia for a week during my spring break in March ’92. As I said in a previous post (see my “A Friendship Changing Lanes” post from October ’11), I’m not sure how our acquaintanceship ever became a friendship. Somewhere between having circumstances in which our fathers weren’t around consistently, or at least being able to relate to Billy Joel, or both of us scoring “5″s on the AP US History exam.

Healey Hall (front gate perspective), Georgetown University, Washington, DC, September 19, 2010. (Daderot via Wikipedia). In public domain.

The fact that we went our respective ways, to Pitt and Johns Hopkins, helped. The fact that we wrote each other about some of our social triumphs and challenges helped more. Most importantly, it helped a lot that we both were more honest about our family troubles. Everything from my mother’s need to divorce my idiot ex-stepfather and the issues with my younger siblings to V’s mother’s health issues and her struggling with burnout trying to watch over her family while going to school. So, by the time I began my second semester of grad school, we’d become fairly close.

I hadn’t seen V since the day before New Years Eve ’88, the last Friday of that year. I hadn’t planned to visit V at the start of the year, but by the middle of February, I needed a break from Pitt and graduate school (see my “Paula Baker and The 4.0 Aftermath” post from January ’12). As I knew that I was two months away from finishing my master’s, I had begun to check out some alternatives to doing my history PhD at Pitt.

Key Bridge, connecting Georgetown area with Rosslyn section of Arlington, VA, at sunset (picture taken from west), September 18, 2008. (Jersey JJ via Flickr.com). In public domain.

Through Dr. Transatlantic Studies himself, Marcus Rediker — he was a Georgetown University history professor who somehow had been given an empty office in Pitt’s history department — I made arrangements to do some informational interviews at Georgetown during my early March spring break.

As soon as I told V of my opportunity to check out Georgetown, she offered me a place to stay for the week. I made arrangements through a couple of friends driving to Virginia to have them drop me at V’s that first Saturday in March.

The trip was a whole series of firsts and seconds for me. I rode Metrorail for the first time, went to Capitol Hill for the first time, and visited Howard University for the first time. I also spent one full day hanging out with V at Suitland High School in Prince George’s County, Maryland, where she was a first-year math teacher. Other than a couple of rowdy students, V was a very good teacher, and not just for a rookie.

My meeting at Georgetown went pretty well also. I managed to get a sweatshirt out of the deal, one that I still wear to this day. Aside from that, finding out from a then second-year grad student (and now and associate professor in African American history at Georgetown) that his annual stipend was only $7,500 a year in expensive DC made my decision for me. I decided that despite the name recognition, Georgetown wouldn’t be where I’d earn a PhD.

I also visited with V’s sister and mother toward the end of that week. V’s sister was in the process of transferring to Goucher, a far cry from the rising high school freshman I’d last seen a week before my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh. V’s mother seemed happier in Virginia than in New York, but medically speaking, she had gotten worse since ’87. Her speech was slower and more slurred, and her upper body motions were even more limited than I last remembered. It was a reminder that as much as things had gone well for V over the years, she also faced the intense pressure of trying to care for a slowing dying mother and her sister, and all at twenty-two years old.

What I came away with from that week as my friends picked me up the following Saturday afternoon were two things. One, that I really liked being in an area with great diversity, with Whites, Blacks, Latinos and Asians from all walks of life, but without the rude chaos and energy that was and remains New York. Two, that V and I had truly become friends, as adults in our twenties, mostly unattached from how we saw each other when we were in Humanities and high school.

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Regis and Donald Earl

January 12, 2012

Regis & Kathie Lee cover, cropped, People Magazine, September 30, 1991. (http://people.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because picture is cropped and of low resolution.

In a conversation I had with my mother about sixteen years ago, she said, “I always thought that all your friends were weird.” This after having broken up with a girlfriend a few weeks before, my first serious relationship in three years. Thanks, Mom! Of course, a month later, I began dating my wife of nearly twelve years (and yes, my mother thinks that Angelia’s weird, too!).

But she did have a point, albeit a small one. Some nerve, since I’m her son, after all! I had accepted this reality by my second semester at the University of Pittsburgh. This after a semester of attempting to be cool, then to not be cool, then to just close myself off out of picking my old Crush #2 scab.

I began my second semester in January ’88, attempting to meet people more like myself, which often meant meeting people a good five or ten years older than me, students comfortable in their own weirdness. The first friend I made this way was Regis. He was a working-class Western Pennsylvanian through and through, with that guttural Pittsburgh-ese accent. Regis said “jag-off” for “jack-off,” “ruff” for “roof,” “yinz” for “you all” or “y’all,” and “dahntahn” for “downtown.”

Regis had been unemployed for nearly a year, laid-off by Westinghouse, where for the previous five years he guarded a boiler room in one of their plants. He was about five-foot-six, constantly scruffy and disheveled, and sometimes looked like he was a step or two away from insanity. Kind of like a Pitt student’s version of Rasputin.

Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), screen shot -- closest approximation to Regis, circa 1988 -- January 12, 2012. (http://examiner.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright Laws due to low resolution and limited use for blog post.

But Regis was a quick study and absolutely enjoyed going to college, as he was a deeply critical thinker. Heck, he was the smartest person I knew during my Pitt and Carnegie Mellon years! As a result, we hit it off right away in our discussion sections on Friday mornings in Western Civilization II. Me and Regis would often gang up on the rest of the class in the discussion of all things Western European-related, from the French Revolution  to the connections between the European slave trade, the Industrial Revolution, and European imperialism. It was wonderful not being the only oddball in class for a change.

What made us friends, though, had more to do with the fact that Regis didn’t allow himself to be blinded by my attempts to hide the real truth behind my weirdness. He saw through my coping strategies to mask the battering I’d taken from poverty, abuse and Humanities in Mount Vernon. Regis was there for me my sophomore year at Pitt in a way that any true friend would be.

After my bout with homelessness — which I hadn’t told Regis about — I was broke from Labor Day to Thanksgiving. Despite my pride and my mother’s constant mantra of not asking for “handouts,” I first asked Regis for help in November ’88. This after he noticed that we weren’t even hanging out at the Roy Rogers in the Cathedral of Learning anymore.

“To be honest, I’ve only had $205 to my name since September,” I said.

“How’ve you been making it?,” Regis asked.

“Spaghetti one week, pork neck bones and rice the next, tuna fish after that. I’m now down to peanut butter sandwiches,” I said.

“What’s ‘pork neck bones’?” Regis asked, with this incredulous look on his face.

After explaining the intricacies of my diet and poor people’s cooking — especially since this was the first time I’d eaten any pork in seven and a half years — Regis finally said

“I don’t have much, but I can at least bring you some bread and a potata. We don’t want you out here starvin’,” having patted me on my right shoulder as our conversation ended.

Sure enough, later that week, Regis actually gave me some bread and a small sack of potatoes. It would’ve been enough to make me cry, but I was too hungry and tired to do much more than say a weak “Thank you.” That, and make the most of four days’ worth of Russet potatoes.

Regis was in my circle on other matters that semester. We talked, mostly about his Heidegger course, a scary existential philosophy course for anyone to take. I heard so much from Regis about Heidegger’s Being and Time that I felt like I was in the course. Whenever the subject came up, he was always like, “So you got a hot date tonight, right?” No excuse was good enough for him, whether it was lack of money or lack of confidence.

I stayed in touch with Regis for years after that semester and year. We took a Greek History course together in the fall of ’89. I began introducing him to my other weird and not-so-weird friends. He introduced me to working-class White Pittsburgh, for better and for worse. We stayed in touch during the summers I was back in Mount Vernon, through our master’s degrees and my doctorate at Carnegie Mellon.

The last time I saw Regis was in May ’96, just as my fight over my dissertation with Joe Trotter (see my “Running Interference” post from April ’11) was in high gear. Despite two degrees — both in Philosophy — and a professorial disposition, Regis hadn’t secured regular work and was still living at home in East Pittsburgh with his parents. I encouraged him to get a doctorate. But sensing how unhappy I was with my own process, Regis said, “How’s that workin’ out for ya?”

I wonder how Regis is doing today. Well, I should just look him up. After all, we’re both weird Pitt grads!

Comments Off | 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, Pop Culture, race, Work, Youth | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by decollins1969

A Friendship Changing Lanes

October 3, 2011

Changing Lanes (Movie, 2002) Screen Shot, March 2008. (Source/http://swedenborgiancommunity.org).

Part of the problem of being me is the fact that my close friends change as I change. Meaning that there have been transitional periods throughout my life that my old friends fall away. Oftentimes I make new ones, and sometimes, like during my six years in Humanities, my best friend was my imagination. Ironically, the best friendship I had from my Humanities days came with a classmate that I hadn’t become close to until my last couple of years at Mount Vernon High School. More ironically, that friendship didn’t truly become such until we both went away for college in ’87.

I’ve written about her before, the valedictorian of my class, whom I called “V” in a previous post (see Valedictorian Blues from July ’09). To be honest, I’m not sure how our acquaintanceship ever became a friendship. Somewhere between having circumstances in which our fathers weren’t around consistently, or at least being able to relate to Billy Joel, or both of us scoring “5″s on the AP US History exam.

But really, it might’ve just come down to both of us not belonging, or facing a small degree of ostracism from our Humanities and MVHS classmates overall. I wasn’t Black and cool enough, and V, well, she was a classic White nerd, a grinder who had the gall to finish ahead of our Black male salutatorian, at least from the perspective of some authority figures and the school’s popular crowd.

The fact that we went our respective ways, to Pitt and Johns Hopkins, helped. The fact that we wrote each other about some of our social triumphs and challenges helped more. Most importantly, it helped a lot that we both were more honest about our family troubles. Everything from my mother’s need to divorce my idiot stepfather and the issues with my younger siblings to V’s mother and her health issues and struggling with burnout trying to watch over her family while going to school.

So, by the time I began my second year of grad school, we’d become fairly close. I visited her and her family in the DC area eight times during the ’90s, and went to her mother’s funeral and wake in ’96. V came to my PhD graduation ceremony the following year. By ’97, me and V had been friends for ten years, and known each other more than fifteen. For more than six years, she’d really been the only person from my Humanities and high school days with whom I’d been in regular contact.

Changing lanes, Las Vegas Strip, December 12, 2010. (Source/Bjørn Giesenbauer - http://Flickr.com).

Who knew that within four years of marching for my doctorate that our friendship would become a distant one? I think that our approaches to life was so different that we couldn’t help but become distant friends. I am one who refuses to take life on its own terms. If I had taken V’s approach, I’d still be living in Mount Vernon, New York, only with a nine-dollar-an-hour job sorting mail or flipping carcinogenic burgers. V’s was based on some sort of realism that mixed with a sense of eugenic inevitability. That one’s slot in life should remain such, and if one does make it, one must do so without ruffling any feathers.

Besides that, it was obvious that things about who we had been since the early ’80s had evolved, and was changing even more rapidly as we reached our late twenties. I was no longer the blank-faced, closed-mouthed, socially-awkward kid I was in ’82. V was no longer responsible for watching over her mother and her younger sister. We agreed to disagree on so many things. Our politics diverged. Our views on race and racism were growing further apart, as if I was Michael Eric Dyson and she was Ann Coulter.

But even with all of that, I think the seeds of it began when I started dating my future wife at the end of ’95. Something about being in a serious relationship has changed the dynamics of every friendship I had then and have now. I never thought that my friendship with V would be affected. But of course it was. We live in a world where a man and a woman can’t be close friends without it being made into something more than friendship.

Like the seasons, people change, and even if they change for the better, our change will cause our friendships to change as well. It’s just too bad that V couldn’t adapt to all of the good changes in my life like I adapted to hers.

Comments Off | 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, race, Religion | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by decollins1969

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