Two people who’ve had some influence in my life celebrate birthdays today. Well, maybe celebrate isn’t the best word. The once-great Dwight Gooden turns forty-five today. And a friend and former grad school classmate at Carnegie Mellon turns the big four-oh today. Two different stories, two different messages taken from two people born on the same day in November.

Gooden’s story is fairly well known, one of supreme promise and potential, but killed by the Mets leadership and by his own problems with cocaine and alcohol. It’s a sad story, only tempered by the fact that for a brief moment, Gooden was the best pitcher in major-league baseball. Period.

It’s a story all too common, of too much too soon with too many expectations from too many people. Gooden turned the perennially mediocre New York Mets into a yearly playoff contender. In ’85, Gooden’s streak of sixteen straight victories kept my Mets in a playoff run with the more talented St. Louis Cardinals. I should know. My ears were hooked to the radio, and when they weren’t, my eyes to the TV as he won game after game after game. All on the way to a 24-4 record, 1.53 ERA, with something like eight shutouts and sixteen complete games. Oh yeah, he also struck out 268 batters in 276 innings pitched. No one, except save Bob Gibson, had a year that was so dominant and so intimidating. And all at the age of twenty years old.

But between Davey Johnson and Mel Stottlemyre, the drugs and the alcohol, Gooden’s overworked arm and inebriated mind began to fail him well before he could enter his prime years. Gooden had won well over 100 games in his first six seasons, but would never have the chance to build on that amazing record. At forty-five, Gooden is an example of what could’ve been but wasn’t, a cautionary tale of needing balance and meaning in one’s life outside of the thing that makes one a prodigy. No balance or meaning — Dwight Gooden. Balance. meaning and support — Tiger Woods.

My friend from my Carnegie Mellon days was a different case. A professor now at a school in the Chicagoland area, he had learned from the excesses of others long before our paths ever crossed. There were few people I spent more time to during my last two years of grad school. Our conversations were all over the place, from sports to music, from studies to social issues. That was how I found out that he shared the same birthday as Gooden. He was really one of maybe three White students at Carnegie Mellon that I could have a conversation with without having my guard up for something bigoted or self-serving. Or even as part of some nerdy scheme to one-up me in a class or with a professor.

That changed on October 3 of ’95. The day of the O.J. Simpson verdict was already a bizarre one for me. I honestly didn’t understand why there was such a mix of emotions between the elated Blacks in DC and angry Whites in L.A. I figured that despite the verdict, I could just walk to Carnegie Mellon — the land of lily-White conservatism — and not expect the subject to come up.

Well it did, and with the one person I didn’t expect it to. My friend went on for ten minutes about jury nullification and racial bias and Simpson’s abuse of his ex-wife, as if I had anything to do with the verdict or the outpouring of emotions that day. I found the whole thing, including this conversation, pretty much like a soap opera. I assumed that the only reason that he talked to me this way was because I was Black, and somehow ecstatic over the “Not Guilty” verdict. I only pointed out how badly the trial was handled, making things worse. I ended the conversation thinking that if this was what my friend could be like when he was emotional, then I didn’t want to talk with him anymore.

And in my last years in Pittsburgh, our conversations grew fewer and farther apart. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy talking with him. I realized that even as friends, there were certain lines that couldn’t be crossed. We never invited each other over to watch a game or hang out. We certainly never read each other’s research or other writings. And we never had another conversation about what happened in the History grad student bullpen that cloudy day in October ’95. If I learned anything from him and that incident, it was that we were friends, but not on any deep level, and that race and other issues remained barriers to a meaningful friendship, especially for him. Still, I hope that despite their problems and inner turmoil, that today was a good birthday for the two of them.

When I was ten, I dreamed of becoming a chef and the owner of my own restaurant. Every time me and my older brother Darren went out with my father Jimme, I’d bring home some of the leftover garbage and used it to turn my part of our room into a miniature city with local bistros and other eateries. I took my Matchbox cars — fifty in all — and pretended that my city was populated with the adult version of characters from Schulz’s Peanuts series. Yes, even Charlie Brown had his own upscale restaurant, with steaks and shrimp that almost all could afford to eat. For the less affluent, Burger King and Mickey D’s were at the other end of this eatin’ and disco-in’ side of town.

My dream, of course, was hunger induced. It was ’80, the first year that my mother income-to-inflation ration had declined so much that we didn’t always have food in the house. Cereal had become a luxury we couldn’t afford, so I almost always went to school with only a glass of milk to keep me going. I ate on the free and reduced lunch program at Holmes Elementary, and dinner had become our main meal. After my mother and then idiot stepfather Maurice separated for the first time that October, we had even less food to eat. For Maurice had taken half of the frozen meats my mother had ordered — beef, chicken, ham, and a whole leg of lamb — with him when he left. All while my mother was at work.

I had few dreams about what I wanted to do in life prior to sixth grade. I think I went through the police office/firefighter phase all during kindergarten and first grade. Then, nothing. Divorce, shacking up, second marriage and baby brother Maurice was my home life. With the occasional sprinkles of Jimme about one Saturday every five weeks between April ’79 and April ’81. We didn’t take vacations. So between the school year, holidays, summer day vacations at Darren’s Clearview School for the mentally retarded, and Jimme outings, there wasn’t much to our drab lives.

Except for the rare time out on The Avenue (Fourth Avenue between West 1st and West 3rd Streets, a strip of shops, delis, a bodega or two and small eateries) or even rarer times in the city, that was my life. But when I did get out, the things I remembered the most were the sights, smells and sizzles of food. Eating at Papa Wong’s restaurant on Gramatan Avenue was a real treat for me even at seven or eight. They had great egg rolls, pork, shrimp and chicken fried rice. I loved the place. It smelled the way I thought a Chinese restaurant ought to smell. Ginger, sesame, soy, onions, scallions and garlic. It’s too bad the restaurant burned down suspiciously in ’82, with nothing to replace it with but a parking lot for nearly a decade afterward.

Or eating at Arthur Treatcher’s Fish & Chips on Prospect and Park before it closed down that corner for two years at the end of ’82. I loved their crispy chicken medallions with the chips — splendid! Carvel’s Ice Cream shop a block west on Prospect was also a good place to eat, even if the customer service sucked more times than not. I think I drove myself to lactose intolerance about five years early because of that place. Man, I miss those chocolate-on-vanilla ice cream sandwiches!

But nothing for my precious few dollars topped Clover Donuts. If you could take a Krispy Kreme glazed and genetically cross it with a Dunkin Donuts glazed, you’d end up with the best glazed donut ever! And that’s exactly what Clover Donuts sold. Not to mention those juicy, grilled and amazing Sabrett Hot Dogs. It was all a “kick in da head” for me growing up. On almost every visit I made after high school, I made a stop there for a glazed donut, their nuggety yet soft chocolate glazed donuts, and a hot dog. I might’ve not liked many things about Mount Vernon, but Clover Donuts was one thing I really enjoyed.

But by the time I hit my mid-teens, I realized that Mount Vernon’s food had changed, and not for the better. Papa Wong’s was long gone, and so was Arthur Treatcher’s. My home life at 616 meant that most of my shopping time was spent in Pelham at C-Town or in one of their inferior eateries. The pizzerias made slices that varied from sucky to pretty good, but were common and unimaginative enough that they blended together for me. At Mount Vernon High School, the deli in nearby Chester Heights easily surpassed anything I’d eaten sandwich-wise outside of the city.

Speaking of, going down to 241st in the Bronx, and then to Manhattan, changed my view of food for good. My years working with Jimme and Darren in Midtown, on the Upper East and Upper West Side, near Spanish Harlem on 90th and around Lincoln Center introduced me to great delis and bodegas. As well as a glimpse of what real upscale restaurants looked like. The best deli food I ever had from one at the crossroads between Broadway and Columbus between 65 and 66th Street, across from Lincoln Center. The smell of pastrami sizzling on the grill, the thick cuts of turkey and corned beef, the interracializing of cookies, my first taste of a blondie. It all happened there for me in ’84 and ’85, and sorry to say, I was spoiled by that food. Not to mention a place with a great Cuban pork sandwich, pizzerias with sauces that would make me want to bite the lower right corner of my lip, they were that good.

It’s safe to say that these experiences had have as much influence on what I eat and what I like to cook as growing up with a great cook in my mother at 616. From veal or lamb stew to matzo ball soup, from beef and broccoli to empanadas and Jamaican beef patties, and from fried chicken and corn bread to duck a l’orange to fettuccine alfredo with shrimp and chicken. I love it all, so it’s a good thing I work out and/or run three to four times a week.

Unfortunately, restaurants and eateries aren’t the same everywhere. It took me almost a decade to find the best deli, pizzeria and Chinese restaurant in Pittsburgh, and we moved two years later. It’s been ten years in the DC area, and Hollywood East Cafe — easily the best Chinese we’ve had down here — has been closed for almost six months. In this case, I can’t even go home again. But, I do have a skillet, a spatula and a mixing bowl!

I have written — quite extensively I might add — about the late Harold Isaac Meltzer over the past two and a half years. I still have plenty more to write about my favorite and probably best teacher between seventh grade and my doctorate. But I’ve neglected to mention that there have been others. Others whom did manage to reach me as a student and a person during my Boy @ The Window years. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a short list. In six years of Humanities, about six teachers in all would fit the mold of above-average or outstanding, while at least twice as many would be somewhere between mediocre and miserable.

Once again, I’ve digressed into the negative. I had one teacher, and only one teacher, that made my senior year at MVHS worthwhile. It was first-period AP English with a Rosemary Martino. She was someone whose aspirations beyond teaching were obvious, which both took my breath away and brought frightening chills to my bones. For she wanted to write, not just teach about writers, but actually write. Even in grad school, I only knew of one professor who loved to write beyond scholarly analysis, and his writing chops were atrocious. Oops, I went there again! Anyway, Martino could talk about the art and craft of writing for days if the course had been about more than reading the existential and the utilitarian for our eventual AP English exam.

But our AP English teacher wasn’t a favorite of mine at the beginning of the year. She was immediately disappointed with us because we weren’t particularly motivated to do the readings and the work. Almost none of us had touched a tomb during the summer of ’86, and we were exactly motivated to read at thirty-five or more pages per hour to start the school year off well. We started with Albert Camus’ The Fall, a bit of swirling existential thinking about the nature of inhumanity in human nature. Oui, oui — more like Oy vey! We moved on to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic Crime and Punishment, a seven-hundred-page marathon read of humanity at its worst that took us from mid-October through early December. Martino’s choices, though impressive in complexity, didn’t exactly inspire.

I knew I needed to read more, and read for arguments, plot, hidden plot, characters and character development, the tone and pitch of narration, the shifts in the narrative, and so on. That took time, and lots of it. Time I didn’t have between two other AP courses, college applications, SATs, not to mention my continuing saga at 616, as I’d become the go-to-child for every adult chore imaginable, short of working a full-time job. Of course, it didn’t help that I spent most of my spare moments in October ’86 watching or listening to every play the Mets made on their way to a World Series championship. I had a really wonderful teacher at the wrong time in my life. I should’ve found a way to have taken classes with her the year before.

So I spent about half of twelfth grade treading water in Martino’s class. My grades were barely adequate C+’s from mid-October to mid-February, sneaking in an occasional A or A- whenever I found two hours and a quiet place to write. I even managed an “Outstanding” A on my Dostoevsky essay in December, this despite only skimming the last third of his long and winding road. What helped was that I also had Martino for Philosophy from Socrates to Sartre. For whatever reason, I took to the half-year course better than I did AP English. Martino’s curriculum seemed more free-form and her lectures much more opinionated than in the full-year course. Her obsession with the existential and the dehumanizing made Dostoevsky easy to understand. Based on my 616, Humanities and MVHS years, I could certainly relate to existential philosophy on a personal level.

Martino shifted gears from the existential novel to poetry and plays for a while at the beginning of February, from Archibald Macleish’s “You, Andrew Marvell” and Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. She even threw in a creative writing assignment. The assignment was for us to write a short story. I wrote a short story titled “The Way It Is,” corny I realized even at the time. A better title would’ve been “On the Brink of Obsession” or “Role Reversal” or “A Pathetic Tale.” The story was about me and my crush # 2 and a take on some of our more coy conversations over the previous three years. Except that I had switched our names, feminizing my name and masculine-izing hers in this story. I handed the essay in, talked about it in class, and yet not a single person, including Martino and crush # 2, picked up on the not-so-subtle hint in the story.

We also read the late Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. This time around, the post-modern, post-structural, neo-Marxist perspectives on dehumanization and the end of the world as some of us knew it didn’t bother me. My grades went up again, even though my concentration and my time-to-task had dropped. I wrote my essay on Catch-22 the night before it was due, in my mother’s bedroom, in front of my stepfather’s portable TV, with the Rangers winning a close game. I started doing so well that Martino said to me one day before class, “you know, if you’d work harder, you could become a really good writer.”

I looked at her for a second. Martino was a very attractive teacher in her late-twenties, with that burning-the-candle-at-both-ends look around the eyes. She had short brown hair and was about five-three or five-four. Besides that, she was an aspiring writer in her own right. Martino had published a few short stories, was a big Anne Rice fan, and wanted to follow in her footsteps. So when she paid you a compliment, you tended to pay attention. Despite the backhanded nature of her praise, I thought very quickly of the image of the starving artist, the famous-after-death ones like Edgar Allan Poe, Vincent Van Gogh or Emily Dickinson. “I don’t want to become a starving artist,” I said in response. The idea of being a writer was still an attractive one to me, but I wanted to do and be something that would at least make it possible to have three squares a day. Martino didn’t push the issue. I thought I hit a sore spot with the “starving artist” image. She still talked with me first thing in the morning about the news and about her writing, but left my aspirations alone.

I only have a few regrets regarding all of the teachers I had between September 8 of ’74 and November 22 of ’96. One of them was that I didn’t attempt to get to know Rosemary Martino better. Meltzer may have inspired to me to write more. But it was Martino whom inspired me to write better, more literary, with some degree of passion and opinion, and not just facts. While the psychological and social dysfunctions of Humanities prepared me well for graduate school, my classes with Martino did help me with no less than five undergraduate courses at Pitt.

In the process, she managed to do something that even Meltzer couldn’t do. Martino awakened the writer in me, the writer that had been on hibernation since Memorial Day ’82. After her class, I couldn’t entirely say that I had no idea what to do with my life besides taking another classmate’s sardonic advice and appearing on Jeopardy. I will forever be in her debt because of it. So, Rosemary Martino, whatever your reading, writing or doing these days, many, many thanks!

Forgiveness, quiet as it’s kept, is for the forgiver, not for the forgiven. Forgiveness enables us to move on with and enjoy our lives in ways that we otherwise couldn’t. It keeps us sane, ready to receive love and forgiveness from others, even when we think that we don’t deserve it. Forgiveness allows us to appreciate the good in people, not to mention the good in ourselves. Still, it’s something that we have to do regularly, if not every day, than many a day. Especially when it comes to family.

My mother turns sixty-two on Wednesday. And I love her very much. But over the years, I’ve learned about my mother past, ticks and behaviors that have convinced me beyond a shadow of a doubt that she should’ve never given birth to any of us. Of all of the parents I’ve ever met or known, few have been more unhappy or miserable as my mother. That fact and two abysmal marriages have left her in some state of depression for the better part of the past three decades. She often said, “I like children when they’re [between] babies and two . . . it’s all downhill from there” while I was growing up, a sign that becoming the eventual mother of six children was perhaps not the best life choice.

For me, what made statements like that worse was when I learned that my mother grew up as the oldest of twelve — yes, twelve — siblings in the Red River valley area of southwest Arkansas, in a town called Bradley, just five miles from the Louisiana border. Growing up as the child of tenant farmers in the Jim Crow South in the ’50s was hardly easy. Especially with cotton on the decline as a commodity. The poverty that my mother grew up with was balanced by the reality that poverty was all around, especially if you were Black. After all of that, and then finding the opportunity to move to New York with one of her cousins in the summer of ’66, why would my mother fling herself into the heartache of marriage and kids that became her life in Mount Vernon starting at the end of ’67?

She must’ve asked herself the same question some sixteen years, a dead-end job and two abusive husbands later. With a fourteen-year-old kid in a school for the retarded (even though he wasn’t), a twelve-year-old getting beat up by the second husband, a three-year-old who all but refused to speak because of his abuse, a one-year-old and another one on its way, it was little wonder that she showed about as much affection as an NYPD police officer. The “I love you, Donald” faucet, which was an occasional drip prior to the summer of ’82, was pretty much turned off after that.

It would be awful enough if I could say with certainty that our hellish lives occurred because my mother made awful decisions. But the reality was, my mother often made no decisions at all. That allowed people in her life who had no interest in her interests to make decisions for her. Like when my two-sheets-to-the-wind father took my older brother Darren to Clearview in ’74 and forced him into the battery of tests that would determine that his severe shyness was really mental retardation, even though Darren had taught himself and me to read. She allowed him to go to school there for six years before she made any attempt to remove him, and by then, it was way too late.

Or when she took her spiritual confusion and channeled it into becoming a Hebrew-Israelite in order to hang on to her dead-beat, no-account second husband, dragging Darren and me into it in the process. Or when my mother just kept going to work at Mount Vernon Hospital in the summer of ’82, even when her friends and co-workers begged her to take part. Her non-decisions, as it turned out, were really decisions of the worst sort, the path-of-least-resistance type of decisions. Ones that didn’t require much forethought, self-reflection, assistance from others, or wisdom.

These things take their toll, and they did for my mother and for the rest of us. By the time I moved from Pittsburgh to the DC area in ’99, I had tired of listening to my mother’s weekly gripes about “the kids,” my four younger siblings from her second marriage. She’d been calling them “Judah babies” for nearly a decade by then. It referred to my ex-stepfather’s Hebrew-Israelite name, Judah ben Israel, and the fact that she saw them as burdens that God had given her, because “no one else would want them.”

I had been a mama’s boy for years, first by nature and because I’d been the younger brother for nearly a decade. Then by virtue of witnessing the full rage that my stepfather vented upon my mother on Memorial Day ’82. For years, I saw it as my duty to help her and my younger siblings survive those terrible, terrible days. But after ten years of higher education, academia, and finding myself, I no longer had the energy to provide the optimism and sense of success that my mother drew out of me time and time again.

Once I did my version of a family intervention in ’02, confronting my mother and younger siblings with this and much more than I could mention here, I knew that my relationship with my mother would stayed strained, maybe for good. The fact was, I was never so mad or resentful that I had stopped loving her. I decided long before ’02 to forgive, because I couldn’t have met anyone, much less gotten married or become a father, walking around with the kind of hatred a person could generate from learning so many horrible things about his family or mother. Yet I also understood that if my siblings were to ever leave 616, or Mount Vernon, or learn to see a world beyond their narrow version of it, I needed to perform a version of seppuku. I had to end my mixed friendship, boyfriend-girlfriend, husband/father-wife relationship with my mother. Just so that I could be her adult son, period.

That’s been tough, so tough, over the past eight years. Even now, I know that I can’t have a conversation with my mother about work, writing, teaching, finances or family without inviting stories about how “them Spanish people” took some job away from her or about how “fags are ruinin‘” this country. I stick to basic family stuff, nothing more, nothing less. I do love her, very, very much. I just hope that she can find her out of her own misery and enjoy life before there’s no more life left for her to enjoy.

Of all the songs I listened to back in ’89, few made me think more about my future than Mike + The Mechanics’ “The Living Years.” It’s not a great song, not one that I’d recommend everyone I know to listen to. But it’s a contemplative piece, one that I’ve thought about off and on over the past two decades as my relationship with my father has improved, while the one with my mother has declined and remains somewhat strained. Luckily, both have spent time with my son Noah over the past six years.