Independence Day On The 6’s

04 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, High Rise Buildings, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, My Father, New York City, Patriotism, Pittsburgh, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Work, Youth

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1976, 1996, 2006, 7 Train, Adulthood, Coming-of-Age, Dwight Gooden, Escapism, Growing Up, Independence Day, July 4th, Lee Iacocca, Manhood, Metro-North, Mets, New York Mets, Nolan Ryan, Peace, Shea Stadium, Siblings, Statue of Liberty, Subway, Technisort

Shea Stadium (taken from 7 Subway), Flushing Meadows, Queens, NY, September 10, 2008. (Gary Dunaier via http://farm4.static.flickr.com/). In public domain.

For me, the 6’s are ’76, ’86, ’96, and ’06. For 2016, all I’ve done today is make BBQ chicken legs and thigh (after an hour of so of marinating), corn on the cob, mac and cheese, and New York Style blondies with chocolate chips and walnuts. It’s a rainy 240th anniversary of America’s independence from the United Kingdom of Great Britain, England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. About as dreary the Mid-Atlantic and the nation, really, can be during an election cycle.

It wasn’t that way for most of my on-the-6 Independence Days. I’ve talked about my first one, the bicentennial of 1976, the summer of “baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.” That Saturday down in a ship and fireworks smoked filled New York Harbor, followed a train ride with my inebriated father to New Haven. I slept more peacefully on that train ride than I probably did at home. At least, until the conductor woke us up to let us know we were in Connecticut. We were lucky the trains in and out of New York were free that day.

Typical Pittsburgh fireworks show for Independence Day, Point State Park, Pittsburgh, PA, July 4, 2014. (http://davedicello.com/).

Independence Day/Week 1996 was pretty good, if not as meandering. Me and my future spouse Angelia went to Point State Park in Downtown Pittsburgh to watch the fireworks. For all of the issues that po-dunk Pittsburgh has, bad fireworks shows weren’t one of them. I needed the break, after a spring of turmoil with my advisor Joe Trotter and weeks revised my then 430-page dissertation (I would end up writing seventy-five pages [net] that month while doing a second set of revisions). It rained that afternoon and early evening, but it cleared up at 8 pm, just in time for some excellent fireworks. We perched ourselves where we could see sparkles and artwork over the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers.

Tuesday, July 4th of ’06 wasn’t memorable. It was my first summer working on Boy @ The Window, and I had already began planning my escape from AED and the daily grind of nonprofit work and raising money. I think we had my sister-in-law over. I made some ribs and chicken, bought dinner rolls and macaroni salad, and talked mostly about my then nearly three-year-old son and his potty training woes. Ah, the boring stability of a more typical middle-class American life!

Of all my Independence Days — on a “6” year or not — one stands out over all the rest. Friday, July 4, 1986. It was the grand re-opening of the Statue of Liberty, courtesy of one-time Chrysler head Lee Iacocca and The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, which had raised hundreds of millions to restore both symbols of American inclusion (via European immigrants, at least) and American freedom to museum-quality glory. My Mom, my idiot stepfather Maurice, and my younger siblings Sarai and Eri went down to Battery Park by Subway and Bee-Line bus to see the grand ships and fireworks for that celebration of the Statue of Liberty at 100 years old.

Dwight Gooden, aka, “Dr. K,” Shea Stadium, 1986. (Source/http://itsonbroadway.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/dwight-gooden-aka-dr-k/).

Not so for me and the rest of us. I took me, my older brother Darren, and my then near-seven year-old brother Maurice and nearly five year-old brother Yiscoc to Shea Stadium to watch the Mets play. It was either a 1:05 pm or 1:35 pm start, I don’t remember. What I do remember, though, is that was a beautiful eighty-five degree afternoon, beautiful because it wasn’t particularly humid, and there were no storm clouds to be found that Friday. Dwight Gooden was on the mound for the Mets, starting against the all-time great Nolan Ryan. It was built up to be a duel, and it was.

Keith Hernandez drove in a run in the first, and that was it until the top of the seventh inning, when Dr. K gave up a home run to Kevin Bass. Other than that, fly balls, walks, double-plays, and strikeouts were the order of the day. Lenny Dykstra drove in the game-winning run with a double to right-center field at the bottom of the seventh inning off of a reliever, as Ryan was out after beginning the bottom of the sixth giving up a walk and a hit. Despite giving up five walks and only striking out four, Gooden got a complete-game win, and 30,000 saw the Mets go to 54-21, well on their way toward their World Series title for 1986.

That was already a good day. But it so much better with three of my brothers there, away from 616 and Mount Vernon, hanging out, without an adult to supervise, or rather, abuse us in some way. It was one of the first times I actually felt like a responsible adult. I took the four of us down to the city on Metro-North at the Pelham stop, rode into grimy Grand Central, took the Shuttle train to Times Square, and then the 7 Subway to Shea. Maurice and Yiscoc were so enamored with the trains and the city that it seemed all they did was stare at skyscrapers and out of train windows when we weren’t at the game. Darren, though mostly quiet, at least wasn’t staring off into space plotting some revenge on me for my “5” on the AP US History Exam while doing the Wave.

Shea Stadium, second level, behind visitors dugout, Flushing Meadow, Queens, NY, 2008. (http://www.bloggingmets.com/)

It was so cheap to do what we did that day. The four upper-deck, left-of-home plate tickets we bought cost $4 each, but each hot dog was $3, and the sodas were $2. apiece Given my $3.40-per-hour job with Technisort, though, the $50 excursion wasn’t so cheap that I wasn’t thinking about sneaking a Sabrett hot dog from a street vendor in before we got to the stadium. To be sure, the hot dogs at Shea were better than my usual fare on the street or at Gray’s Papaya.

It was probably the best day I had during my Boy @ The Window years. I was with innocent family members, watching my favorite team and one of my favorite players. I was lost in the humongous human mob of New York on a double-whammy of an Independence Day weekend. I slept well that evening, knowing that I’d drawn a 10 am-2 pm shift that Saturday. I planned on buying a new Walkman at the Cross County Mall that Saturday afternoon. A normal weekend for many sixteen-year-olds was a small eye-wall in the chaotic hurricane that was my life back then.

Big Feet and Football Tryouts

20 Wednesday Aug 2014

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, Sports, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Adulthood, Coming-of-Age, Decision-Making, Foot Sizes, Football, Football Tryouts, Humanities, Humanities Program, Mother-Son Relationship, MVHS, Puberty, Puma, Self-Awareness

Aerial view of refurbished fields (for track and field, football, softball and tennis) across from MVHS (and the Cross County Parkway), Mount Vernon, NY, circa 2012. (Google Maps)

Three decades ago this week, I tried out for Mount Vernon High School’s junior varsity football team and made the team. Only to immediately quit. Mostly because I realized that there was too much going on at 616 for me to be a Humanities student, a blocking wide receiver (the coaches had an unimaginative view of offense) and a jack-of-all-adult-responsibilities at home.

What made the decision easier was something my Mom did that made my tryouts harder. As I wrote in Boy @ The Window:

I ended up making the team, but they wanted me to sit on the bench for a year while I bulked up to at least 175 pounds. The most I’ve ever weighed was 238 pounds at six-foot-three, and I weigh 228 now. It took me until ’10 before I wore my first pair of size-fifteen sneakers that actually fit (I wear size sixteens now). The idea of me as an offensive lineman simply because my sneakers were two sizes too big was and remains ridiculous. Thanks Mom, and thanks, coaches!

The one lesson I took with me from the process of trying out was that I couldn’t rely on my Mom to help me do the things I wanted to do with my life. Nor could I rely on her encouragement (or lack thereof) in that process. It wasn’t an assessment based on anger or disappointment. I’d only begun to figure out that my life was my life, and the decisions I needed to make needed to be my own.

On Hugs and Walks

01 Wednesday Aug 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Adulthood, Bronxville, Chester Heights, Child Abuse, College Plans, Crush #2, Dreams, Eastchester, Economic Inequality, Manhood, Maurice Eugene Washington, Maurice Washington, Pelham, Poverty, Puberty, Self-Discovery, Shuckin' an' Jivin', Tuckahoe, Walks

Commodus hugging Maximus as he plunges dagger into back (screenshot), Gladiator (2000), August 1, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws – low resolution of picture.

The beginning of August for me thirty years ago was the beginning of adulthood for me. I had little choice. After five weeks of emotional, psychological, physical and spiritual abuse, my choices were to either allow myself to be broken or to find something to hope for. Otherwise, my life would’ve been over before my thirteenth birthday.

I thought hard about how to end the summer of ’82’s abuse. I figured that I could pretended to be something I wasn’t — a loving, wayward stepson. I begged for my stepfather’s forgiveness and even called him “Dad” while he beat me for the sixth time in a month, on August 1, ’82. He stopped, finally, and gave me a hug. I cried tears of rage and hate, because I couldn’t even stand to touch or smell the man, much less being pressed against his overabundance of fat. I prayed for his death to be long and painful, as if I had a dagger in my right hand, ready to plunge into his back left ribs.

Dagger through back rib and heart (screenshot), Gladiator (2000), August 1, 2012. (Donald Earl Collins). Qualifies as fair use – low resolution of picture.

If masturbation were the only thing that I discovered that month, I might’ve begun aspiring for some other kind of life. Instead, I decided on a boring early August day to do something else novel. I didn’t want to go to Wilson Woods again. We didn’t have any money anyway. I decided to take my siblings on a walk on the wild side, to walk outside our immediate neighborhood. Darren and I took baby Maurice and Yiscoc in his new stroller out of 616. We walked and strollered down East Lincoln Avenue, across the stone bridge over the Hutchinson River Parkway into Pelham, and turned left on Fifth Avenue to go north. This was uncharted territory for all of us, especially me. North Pelham might as well have been Helena, Montana to me.

“We don’t know where we’re going,” Darren said.

“Yeah, and?,” I said in response.

“Okay, but it’s your fault if we get lost, Donald,” Darren said.

Sarah Lawrence College, Bronxville, NY, August 1, 2012. (http://slc.edu). In public domain.

We didn’t get lost. We walked until we hit Chester Heights, the beginning of the village of Eastchester, and then Bronxville. It was amazing in that it was much more suburban than Mount Vernon or the part of Pelham that I’d known up until that moment. The homes were luxurious by my standards. Everyone seemed to own a BMW, Volvo, Mercedes-Benz, or Peugeot. There weren’t many sidewalks around, only well-manicured lawns. We had walked into several ritzy communities without any warning.

I began to think that the world was a cruel place, having rich Whites living so close to us yet their lives were so far apart from ours. But instead of becoming depressed or angry, it made me introspective. “Look at these houses!,” I said to Darren as we walked by one Tudor-style home after another three-story mansion, broken up only by a few cul-de-sacs. Darren, having been around rich Whites through Clear View for nearly eight years, didn’t think too much of it.

That’s when it hit me. If I wanted to live a better life, to have a nice house and a car and a family, it seemed to me that I needed an education, a college education. I wasn’t going to get there just graduating from high school, especially in Humanities, where the expectations for college were so high that some kids already knew that they were going to law school. I just knew that I couldn’t go through another summer of abuse. So I said to myself, “I’ve got to get through the next five years. I’ve got to go to college.” Yet it seemed like an impossible task.

As we meandered our way back toward Mount Vernon, we ended up on North Columbus Avenue/Route 22. That’s when we passed by a ranch-style home with a stone facade. I looked and saw someone out in front I hadn’t seen since the end of the school year. It was “P,” my eventual Crush #2, outside in the front yard with her sister, apparently back from bike riding. She called us over, and the four of us talked. This was the first Black family I’d seen during our two-hour walk.

Of course I didn’t go into any detail about what we’d been up to. After all, the one thing that the past year had taught me was not to open up my mouth and say everything that was on my mind! So I let her and her older sister do most of the talking. They’d gone somewhere down South to visit family.

“Do you live around here?,” P asked.

“Oh, we’re on a long walk and just happened to be in the neighborhood,” I said.

“Okay,” she said in response.

The Denzel Washington Walk, American Gangster (2007), August 1, 2012. (http://variety.com)

“In the neighborhood.” Sure, if Bronxville, Eastchester, Pelham and 616, all part of our eight-mile trek, were all one gigantic neighborhood! After about ten minutes, we continued home. Darren was more excited about seeing my eventual Crush #2 and her sister than I was.

I wasn’t unexcited. P was far and away the nicest person to me in 7S all year. She stepped up when others made fun of me. I just took her being nice to me the same way Laura Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie probably took it when Mrs. Olsen was nice to her.

Still, I finally had a plan. I knew that there would be a lot of smaller steps that I’d have to take before even getting to college, though. But in looking at where P and her sister lived, I at least knew that someone in their family must’ve taken similar steps in the not-too-distant past.

The Last 616 Summer

15 Friday Jun 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Movies, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Work, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, Adulthood, Boomerang (Movie), Home, Mother-Son Relationship, Motherhood, Overprotective Mother, Role-Playing, Westchester County Department of Community Mental Health

Toni Collette and Nicholas Hoult, About A Boy (2002) screenshot, June 14, 2012. (http://www.movieactors.com).

Twenty summers ago was my last summer at home — 616 East Lincoln Avenue — for more than a visit. It was the long, hot summer of ’92, two months in which my master’s-degree-earnin’, twenty-two year-old-self reverted to my teenage years. At least, in terms of the responsibilities that I carried beyond taking care of myself, dating or clubbing, working or going to school. And it was a painful two months of submergence, revealing to me that I’d long since been on my own. Too long to be happy to play the role of big brother, young uncle, surrogate father, and my mother’s confidant all rolled into one.

I ended up in Mount Vernon that summer after an unsuccessful search for work in Pittsburgh in the six weeks between the end of the school year and the middle of June. At the last minute, I contacted the Director of Westchester County Government’s Department of Community Mental Health, hoping (and knowing) that he could toss me some work. From him, I found out that the work I’d done at the Mount Vernon clinic in ’89, though successful, hadn’t been followed up with improvements in the front office or in billing. Once again, I’d be working as a senior summer intern with Valerie Johnstone and a group of wacky psychiatrists.

I knew it would be a bumpy ride, as I’d only been home a total of thirty-five days in the previous two years. But I hadn’t counted on my mother acting like I was still a senior at Mount Vernon High School. Right from jump, I found myself constantly being nagged about how I trimmed my mustache, the “baggy” pants I wore, who my friends were, who I did and didn’t keep in touch with while I was back.

Boomerang (movie) poster, 1992, October 31, 2007. (Alessgrimal via Wikipedia). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because this image is a low resolution copy.

That wasn’t all though. One Saturday night that July, I decided to go check out Eddie Murphy’s latest movie, Boomerang. It had more good reviews than bad, and I just wanted a night to myself, to just be myself. I told my mother that I’d be home late.

I didn’t get in until about 2 am. To my surprise, my mother was awake, in the living room, waiting for me. “Where havey ou been?,” she asked, as if I had a curfew. “I went to see the movie down in the city, I hung out, I walked around, and then I took the last train back,” I said, with shock. “When you said late, I was thinkin’ 12 o’clock,” my mother said in response.

I was pissed. As many Friday and Saturday nights I spent during the ’80s tracking down my father Jimme for $50 or to pull him out of some dive in Mount Vernon, the Bronx or in Midtown Manhattan. I was a teenager then! I’m an adult, and now I’m supposed to be home by a certain time?

It got so that on another occasion, as I was pressing my clothes to go out — anywhere really — my mother tried to take the iron out of my hand to iron my clothes. “Mom, I got this,” I said, not about to let go. “You ain’t doin’ it right!,” my mother half-yelled as she yanked the iron away from me to press my jeans. Then, I realized that she was about to put creases in then, I yelled, “Mom, stop! No one wears creases in their jeans anymore.”

I took the iron away, and finished what I started, all with the b-word in my head. My mother knew what was in my head, too. “You can think it, but you better not say it!,” she yelled as she left the room.It was the first time I ever found myself thinking that way about my mother. Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be the last.

Of course, the word that was really in my head most of the last summer was weird. Everyone around me seemed weird that summer, especially my mother. She was overprotective, in my business, and talking to me about gettin’ filled with the Spirit more than usual.

Or was it me that had become weird? After all, I’d been in the role of the dutiful son for so long that it probably was weird for my mother to see me go out to see a movie, hang out with a friend, or go down to the city at night. Maybe, at least in my mother’s case, she simply wasn’t used to me carving out time for myself, to actually act like the adult male that I had become.

Milk-N-Things

21 Saturday Apr 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, race, Youth

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Adulthood, Black Males, Coming-of-Age, Discrimination, Fear of Black Males, Frank Sinatra, Hutchinson River Parkway, Milk-n-Things, Pelham New York, Persecution, Race, Racism, Shopping While Black

Major fire Sunday evening at F&Y Store (formerly Milk-n-Things), Grand Cleaners, Pelham, New York, March 9, 2008. (PelhamWeekly.com). Qualifies as fair use because of low resolution of picture and subject of this blog post.

As most folks who aren’t Black males have learned in the past couple of months, part of our collective coming-of-age story involves this sordid and cruel rite of passage to manhood. One in which people we’ve known since childhood suddenly start to treat us as if we’ve committed a crime or an unpardonable sin. No matter how smart, how tall or short, how athletic or waif-like, this ritual has continued unabated in American culture for as long as there have been free Black males living their lives.

My whole year between my seventeenth and eighteenth birthday in ’87 was like that. Between a crossing guard I’d know since third grade, some of my classmates, my idiot Mount Vernon High School principal, the late Richard Capozzola (see post “Capo, Mi Capo” from September ’09) and Tower Records (see my post “Why Black Men Carry A Public Anger” from March ’12). I was constantly shown through their eyes how my man-sized Black body was a threat to them.

One of the bigger kickers that year was an incident at the former Pelham, New York mini-mart Milk-n-Things. It was in a strip mall across the street from a Mobil gas station, off a Hutchinson River Parkway exit, just across the bridge on East Lincoln connecting Mount Vernon to Pelham. The store was two doors down from the laundromat in which we washed our clothes every week (or just about) between ’78 and ’87, and next to Hutchinson Elementary School and Pelham Library.

I’d been shopping there on my own since ’77, before I’d started third grade. Over the years, I’d gotten used to the smell of cheap cologne, the noise of broken Italian and Brooklyn-ese as spoken by the Hair Club for Couples, the people who owned Milk-n-Things. Not to mention their love of all things from the ’50s, especially with a gigantic picture of Frank Sinatra on the wall that greeted customers upon entrance. By the time I was fourteen, it dawned on me that these folks may have been mobbed up, but what did that matter to me?

Then one day in April ’87, the Italian folks who owned Milk-n-Things reacted to me as if they’d never seen me before. As usual, I went there to buy a few groceries late in the evening, somewhere around 9 pm, when C-Town had already closed. Milk, eggs and butter were among the things I planned to buy. When I got to the counter, the old Italian lady said, “I got you on camera.”

“On camera doing what?,” I asked without thinking.

“You know whatcha been up to. I got you stealing, thief,” she said as if she had another word in mind.

“There’s no way you could have me on camera. You might have someone else on camera, but I know I haven’t stolen a thing,” I said, as I felt both hurt and rage coming out of me.

“Get out of my store now before I call the cops!,” the woman yelled.

I left the groceries and took back my money, feeling persecuted. This was a store I’d been shopping at for ten years. Now this Frank Sinatra-worshiping bitch has the nerve to accuse me of stealing right out of the blue? “Fine,” I thought. “You’re not getting another dime of my money.” That was the last time I shopped there.

I actually didn’t step foot into the space again until ’06, during a Thanksgiving visit with family. By that time, it was no longer Milk-n-Things, and the Italians who owned the place had long since moved away. I went in, realized they had nothing I wanted, and left. No one walked up to me to check my pockets as I walked out. I was mildly surprised.

Taking the Long Road: Driver’s Delight

23 Monday Jan 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Mount Vernon New York, Youth

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Adulthood, Driver's License, Kauffman's Driving School, Late Bloomer, Learning How to Drive, Mount Vernon New York, Perseverance, Pittsburgh, Rite of Passage, University of Pittsburgh

Our 2004 Honda Element, Mount Vernon, NY, November 2006. (Donald Earl Collins)

How I was able to get my driver’s license twenty years ago tomorrow is a shining example of my late bloomer status. I started in the middle of May ’88, a couple of weeks after the end of my freshman year at the University of Pittsburgh. My main motivation was the fact that the only piece of picture identification I had was a choice between my Pitt ID and my old Mount Vernon High School ID. It also seemed to me that I couldn’t hope to travel or to get a good job without having a driver’s license.

1974 or 1975 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, cropped and colored green, January 23, 2012. (http://http://www.allcollectorcars.com). Qualifies as fair use under US Copyright laws because photo is of low resolution, cropped and altered for purposes of post.

I knew plenty of people with cars, but in my family and immediate circle, only my idiot stepfather Maurice had a license. In the eleven years he’d been in our lives, he had access to his Reliable cab for two years (’77-’79), and had owned a ’70s-era Coupe de Ville for about a year and a half. At least until he burned out his engine on the New Jersey Turnpike earlier in ’88.

Despite all of these disadvantages, I began my journey. At the end of my second week back, I grabbed a manual at the White Plains DMV, leafed through it, and took the exam. I passed with a 70, making the cut by two questions. I scheduled and took my first driving lesson two days later. I was quickly on my way to becoming a licensed driver.

But if I hoped to follow-up on that quick success with a job that could cover the cost of more driving lessons, I was sorely mistaken. I spent the rest of the summer of ’88 unemployed, like nearly seventy percent of Black males my age that summer. This began the off and on again cycle of my quest for one simple symbol of adulthood.

Even in the midst of my fall of homelessness and with $205 to work with between Labor Day and Thanksgiving ’88, I continued plugging away. I’d gone at the end of October to the Pittsburgh DMV center off Washington Boulevard, near the bridge across the Allegheny River into the northern suburbs. I ended up walking from Welsford through Oakland to Forbes, then Fifth Avenue, stayed on Fifth through Shadyside and Point Breeze and Homewood-Brushton until it turned into Washington Blvd, then kept going until I reached the center. It took me an hour to get there and another to get back. In between I scored a 95 on the Learner’s Permit exam, making me eligible to get a driver’s license in two states.

I even got my former CIS (Computer and Information Systems) co-worker Bill to give me a driving lesson in Highland Park Zoo’s parking lots before he left for Virginia that March for a job with AT&T. It was February ’89. I was behind the wheel of Bill’s car, his “babemobile,” his white ’88 Ford Thunderbird. It was an easy lesson until I screwed up. I was going too fast on a left-turn, cut the car too close to an embankment. We ended up going down a short grassy hill that cut off one side of the large parking lot from the other. Bill was terrified and a scary shade of purple for his car. I’d no sooner parked it then he had jumped out to make sure there wasn’t any damage. I knew that this lesson was over.

I continued taking driving lessons off and on in ’89 and ’90, between Kauffman’s Driving School (at $53 an hour), my Pitt friends, and a couple of 616 folks in Mount Vernon. By September ’90, with about twenty-five hours of driving lessons under my belt, I thought I was ready. After three driving test failures, I was obviously mistaken. Then my money ran out again, and then I started grad school the following year. I wondered, sometimes out loud, whether I’d finish my master’s degree before I’d earn my driver’s license.

It all came together at the beginning of January ’92. I decided to spend whatever it would take for me to pass the driver’s test on the Washington Blvd course in Pittsburgh. I took seven hours’ worth of lessons from Kauffman’s in ten days, mostly to practice parallel parking and three-point turns in a ’88 Chevy Cavalier. I

1991 Chevy Cavalier - similar to one I drove on day I got my driver's license, Gaithersburg, Maryland, July 5, 2008. (IFCAR via Wikipedia). In public domain.

practiced turns with my dinner plate in my apartment in between the lessons.

Finally, we scheduled my driver’s test for 9 am on Friday, January 24. That morning, it began to snow. By the time I drove to the test site, six inches of snow had fallen. I was the first person on the course. Between that and the falling snow, I was comfortable. Seven minutes later, I’d done it all, and had barely parked the car after hearing the words “You’ve passed” before literally jumping out of it and into the snow.

It took me three years, eight months and eleven days in all to pass my driver’s test in Pittsburgh. At the time, I was prouder of that than I was of any of my academic achievements or other personal triumphs. A month after my twenty-second birthday, I’d now earned the right to add to humanity’s carbon footprint. As well as a real badge of adulthood.

Hail To Pitt

27 Wednesday Apr 2011

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, eclectic music, Mount Vernon High School, music, New York City, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Work, Youth

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'91, 1991, Adulthood, Civic Arena, Class of 1991, Diversity, Fellowships, Financial Aid, Graduate School, Graduation, Job, Mount Vernon High School, Mount Vernon New York, NYU, Pitt, Student Loans, Uncertainty, Ungraduate Education, University of Maryland, University of Pittsburgh, Wesley Posvar, Western Psychiatric Institute & Clinic, Work

University of Pittsburgh Logo, April 27, 2011. http://www.pitt.edu

I can be hard on people, places and things, especially the ones I like and love. That’s as true of my undergraduate alma mater as anything else. Twenty years ago this date, I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh. I didn’t attend the cattle-call ceremony at the Civic Arena that Sunday in ’91. Almost none of my immediate circle of friends attended, either. My mother and my younger siblings, still in the midst of welfare, weren’t going to be there to see me anyway. The Penguins were on that day, in the middle of a dominant playoff run, with Lemieux scoring at will. And I had other things on my mind that day and weekend. Like, will I be able to go to grad school without taking out tens of thousands of dollars in student loans?

This was a time of major transition for me. Two years removed from the end of the reign of my ex-stepfather at 616, and four years after I graduated from Mount Vernon High School and my obsession

My B.A. degree, University of Pittsburgh, April 27, 2011. Note that this was Wesley Posvar's last graduation signature. The university president would retire the following month amid a $3 million golden parachute scandal.

with Crush #2. I was essentially the same person, and yet there was something inside me that had started clawing its way out over the previous year. It was a drive, a determination, a rage that I’d buried since my first year in Humanities and the summer of abuse that followed in ’82. I was going to graduate school, at least I hoped that I was. Or I was going to have to find a real job, something that made me feel like I had diarrhea.

I knew on my Pitt graduation date that the departments of history at NYU, University of Maryland and Pitt had accepted me into their masters programs. But NYU wanted me to make a signed commitment before they awarded me any financial aid. The University of Maryland conveniently lost my application packet during their graduate fellowship decision process. By the time my packet resurfaced, the department had awarded all of their fellowships, and decided to put me on provisional status. Not based on my grades, mind you, but based on how late they were in going through my application. Pitt had accepted me a couple of weeks before my graduation, but I was sixth on the alternate list for teaching fellowships that would cover my tuition and provide a stipend.

I felt a lot of anxiety about all of this uncertainty regarding my immediate future. It helped to have friends, even with my friends in the middle of their own uncertainty. My friend Marc was working at a Black newspaper, dreaming of law school but uncertain about his prospects. Three other friends, including someone I was sort of dating, were taking their last classes or unsure about grad school or law school. Even my summer job working for a project at the Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic was shaky. It only paid $5.20 an hour, and I could’ve easily gone back to Mount Vernon and New York making $8 an hour or more doing the same work.

But as uncertain as I felt about things, this much I was certain about. The four years I spent at Pitt were ones that cocooned me in a way that none of my time growing up in Mount Vernon, New York did. I began to heal while I was there, academically, socially, emotionally. I was far from done learning how to connect to people, but I wasn’t the twelve-year-old neophyte keeping only the most rudimentary connections to humans either. My education was a valuable part of that experience. The friendships and other bonds I forms, the lessons I learned about trust, the efforts — however limited — the university made toward creating a campus climate that embraced diversity were all appreciated.

Even at the time, I felt comfortable at Pitt because it was the first place I learned to be comfortable in my own skin. It was a place where my friends, my acquaintances and others around me didn’t look at me like I was a freak because I listened to U2, sang in high-falsetto or walked at Warp Factor 3 to get across campus.

Those are the feelings, those good feelings, that I have about my four years of undergrad and two years of grad school (more on that in May) at the University of Pittsburgh. So, “Hail to Pitt,” and to my Pitt friends and folks from the classes of ’90-’94, Happy Graduation Anniversary Day.