Short Story: October Surprise

It’s October 18th, my birthday. It should have been nicer than this.

I got up as usual to go to work, ate breakfast, got in the car and flipped on the radio. As I flipped channels there was nothing but chatter.

“More platter, less chatter”, I thought. It was a 30 minute drive to my job in Salem and I wanted something nice to listen to, not some inane thoughts about the upcoming election.

I was about to shut off the radio when I caught “…and tonight in Virginia all persons not officially authorized to be out and about should be off the streets by 9 pm. Travel to and from your place of employment is permitted, as well as travel for emergency medical purposes.”

“Wha…?” I began to the thin air in my car, and then continued to listen. “If you’re just joining us, President Obama has declared martial law throughout the entire nation, as well as in Puerto Rico and U.S. possessions in the Pacific.” Here is an excerpt from the president’s speech to the nation late last night:

“My fellow Americans, it is with deep regret that I have to announce the establishment of martial law throughout our great land.  However, I have determined this is necessary due to the ongoing violence in countless cities all over the nation. I understand this is an action of a kind which has not occurred since the Civil War. But the harming and even killing of innocents must stop, and businesses must be able to operate freely. I have instructed the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to move military personnel into the most affected areas in order to protect our people. I have also invoked the constitutional provision to suspend writs of habeas corpus for the safety of the public….”.

I stopped listening right there. Lincoln had suspended the writ of habeas corpus, which gives Americans the right to seek appearance in a court of law and avoid unlawful imprisonment, during the early days of the Civil War. He was worried that Maryland might secede from the Union. There had even been a riot in Baltimore provoked by the passing of Federal troops through the city on the way to defend Washington,.

“I knew things were bad”, I said to myself, “but I didn’t know they were that bad.” Since last summer American cities had erupted on a scale not seen since Vietnam Days.

Indeed, these imbroglios, sparked by the economic woes which spread to the U.S. after the complete collapse of the European economy, were far worse than those of the 1960s. And I could remember clearly watching parts of Baltimore burn as an adolescent when Martin Luther King was assassinated.

Whole sections of Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and other large urban areas were totally controlled by roving guerillas. These rebels were well-armed and in most cases outgunned the police.  Forget protecting yourself from them if you were a private citizen, even if you had a bazooka in your garage.

Lawlessness and anarchy were spreading. In my heart of hearts I couldn’t really blame these rebs. After all, the basic necessities of life had been taken away from them.

These people were literally starving. Government services such as transportation had ceased months ago. None of these cities had any money to operate busses and subways, or pay the people who drove or repaired them.

Hyperinflation had just about destroyed anyone’s chance of having a decent meal. Two or three bananas costs me $1,000 dollars the last time I went to Kroger over in the south side of Blacksburg.

In fact, the $40,000 dollars a day it cost me to drive to Salem from Blacksburg wouldn’t normally have been doable.  However, I had a job that paid me $4,000,000 a month.

Now I knew why I was teaching English to all these Spanish speaking folks wearing fatigues and why I was getting paid while others weren’t. The government was going to need these soldiers.

Like I did with most politicians I was now tuning out Mr. Obama’s taped remarks . I was in a semi state of shock, yet thrilled at being a part of history at the same time. 

“Given the current nature of events in our country at this time, I have decided to suspend the upcoming elections indefinitely until order is restored…”, I heard him say.

“YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING. YOU CAN’T DO THAT!”,I shouted at the dashboard. I began beeping my car horn in frustration. Funny. I was hearing other horns go off as I journed down Interstate 81.

The POTUS left the podium and the talking heads began to strut their stuff, although I couldn’t see their craniums through the radio. I changed the channel to get some more hard news.  News items were spouting like a flood from my car radio:

*Legislatures were meeting in several states today. Some were preparing secession documents.

* Some states were talking about forming confederations based on similar politics, cultures and ethnic makeups. Florida, Texas and Arizona were discussing forming a “Organization of North American States” together.

*Alaska was thinking of joining Canada.

*Hawaiian leaders publicly discussed asking Barack Obama to resign his position and become their king. They must figure there isn’t much hope for  a future United States of America.

“Governor Mitt Romney will be speaking in a minute or two from Salt Lake City” said the news announcer”.

“Now what’s he gonna say about all this?” was a question that poked at my brain.

I said to nobody and everybody,”We’re in big trouble. Now THAT is what I call an October Surprise.”

Eurovision 2012 Lacked Its Normal Camp

This weekend I was sitting at the harbor in my town here in Finland on a beautiful Saturday. I asked my friend as I sipped my coffee,”Whaddya gonna do this weekend?”. My buddy, a young Finnish guy, told me he was going to watch the Eurovision Song Contest.

Up until 2005 I had never heard of this show. However, when I arrived to work in Saudi Arabia and told people I was coming from Finland, they would inevitably respond,”Oh yeah-Lordi!”

If you are at least a young European adult, you probably know who they are. If you are not? Well, they are a Finnish band that won the Eurovision Song Context in 2005.

I returned to Finland in 2006 and the show was a big deal here. That’s because the country whose representative won the previous year gets to host the next contest.

When I got to a computer (I don’t have a TV), I managed to find the site streaming Eurovision 2012. It was being shown from Baku, Azerbaijan. Their singer won last year.

I hardly know anything about his country. What I do know is from a friend who recently spent some time there.

It didn’t matter, though, because between each of the 26 singers the organizers showed a touristy highlight of Azerbaijan. This contrasted with the snarly tweets next to the screen by those watching with me.

Azerbaijan is apparently a relatively cruel dictatorship. Interspersed with tweets about the performances were comments and sarcastic remarks about its human rights record.

What I did know about the European Song Context was its reputation for campy groups and performances. Lordi I think won because they were just that. (If you’re North American, think of a Kiss takeoff.)

In fact, Mr. Lordi produced my favorite moment of the whole 2012 event. He salvaged what to me was an interminably long results section of the show.

As the program began at 22:00 my time, I was happy to see how fast the performances went. Groups and singers quickly got up to perform and got off, and the next act began.

However, at around 12:15 the show began to plod. Sad interviews by bogus hosts. The reporting of results from a cohost located in each country. Zzzzzzz.

Then, Finland’s turn came around, with results from Mr. Lordi. He labeled each ”winner” from Suomi as “cute”, ”hot”, “babes”, etc., even six Russian babushkas and the male singer from Estonia.

He was hysterical when he announced the points for the latter. Mr. Lordi stuck his head up and twirled his tongue like a lizard (which fit his costume quite well).

Good looks and sex appeal didn’t seem to help the contestants as Mr. Lordi’s comments would suggest.  There were tweets about the hotness of the Justin Timberlake wannabe from Germany. The singer from Greece tried to pull of a “Jennifer Lopez”. Neither of these performers did well.

My biggest disappointment was with the overall lack of bizarreness in this year’s show. Most of the groups were just semi-talented, normal singers or bands, or worse.

However, there were exceptions. Romania, for example, had a group featuring a guy moonwalking with bagpipes.  There was also an Irish boy band with two fellows who were dressed up like some aliens in silver suits.

Flat out weirdness came from Moldavia. A tweet commented on their strangeness, noting that the country produced the same kind of “out-there” act the year before.

The tweets added to my enjoyment of the show. For example, one tweeter noted that the Turkish entry looked like an “Oliver” production.

Another commenter discussed the resemblance between the Albanian woman singer and Princess Leia from Star Wars. Frankly, all the lady from Albania did was bellow and scream.

My favorite, however, were the grannies from Russia. They smilingly pranced around stage singing some traditional tune. To me, they are what the Eurovison Song Context SHOULD be.

Alas, they finished second. First went to some space cadet from Sweden.

This woman sang a song called “Euphoria”and did what appeared to be some kind of interpretive dance. She indeed looked like she was on drugs.

During the results part of the show, she was interviewed halfway through. She cooed something about “friggin loving you”.

The host doing the interview wasn’t much help.  Her question concering what she she would do if she won actually produced a coherent response -”probably cry”.

However, the interviewer followed up with some question like “are you sure?” or something equally inane. The Swedish woman just looked at her like she had lice in her hair.

I think the selection of Sweden was political. The show seems to be very much like the Olympics in that regard.

However, unlike the Olympics, the judges are the populace from all the countries. They tend to vote for their political allies or neighbors. (I was however surprised that Finns voted for Sweden given the animosity between the two countries during hockey season).

I think Miss Sweden won partly because she met with anti-regime folks in Azerbaijan. (Plus, as tweeters noted, Sweden can afford to host the thing next year, unlike their fellow EU members Greece, Spain and Italy!).

Temper of the Times: Poor Leadership

A few years ago, a boss with an ulcer came to me a few months before he headed out the door and said,

“I want you to form a committee. Ask two questions: 1)What’s going on? 2)What’s going wrong?” I personally think these two questions are applicable today. All you have to do is pay attention to the news.

One of the definite problems today is poor leadership. No one seems to be able or is willing to lead.

Leaders lack competency today. They also lack integrity.

Furthermore, the followers are lazy. We put all decisionmaking on our leaders and go about our business and live with the horrible consequences.

In addition, we followers are also easily duped. In this world it’s all about image. If the public image is successfully portrayed, who cares about results? At least our pain is felt.

Kimberly D. Elsbach writes in an essay called “Looking Good vs. Being Good” that we expect three things from our leaders: 1) Control-they are in charge and have the final say 2) Competence and Consistency-leaders will make good decisions and maintain right thinking 3) Certainty-leaders have great confidence in the rightness of their decisions.

Unfortunately according to Elsbach, this attitude toward leadership leads to some messy problems when things go wrong. The truth is that leaders do not always fulfill the expectations of their followers.

Elsbach’s essay concerns the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic Church which came to light in the last decade. It is part of a larger work on the subject called “Church Ethics and Its Organizational Context”, edited by Bartunek, Hinsdale and Keenan.

She notes that part of the problem with the Church’s management of the issue was their attempt to meet the perceived expectations of their followers. This resulted in poor handling of the matter and even a coverup.

What would have been better according to Elsbach is for church leaders to have done three things to manage the crisis. They should have 1) admitted their incompetence and apologized 2) ceded control by changing the structure, for example, through bringing in new leadership  3) repaired the damage, for example , by focusing on the future though new evaluation policies and training programs.

Leaders must be properly trained. In the Catholic Church training in ethics was sorely lacking, at least according to James F. Keenan, whose essay appears in the same work as Elsbach’s.

Keenan believes that clergy should be trained in professional ethics. He indicates that while this kind of training abounds in medicine, the business and law, it is missing in the Church.  As a result, there is a lack of discourse and proper due process in relation to sexual matters which helped lead to the crisis.

The Church is not the only realm where trained leaders are needed. Jeffrey D. Sachs believes that economists need to be better trained in order to solve the world’s lingering extreme poverty.  

In his work “The End of Poverty”, he calls for economists to become more like doctors. What is needed to solve poverty is clinical economics. 

Sachs says that economists are not trained in clinical methods. As a result they have “focused on a very narrow range of issues, such as corruption, barriers to private enterprise, budget deficits and state ownership of production.”

He would like to see economists be able to engage in differential diagnosis and look at economies as more complex, just as a doctor does with the human body. Because of their simplistic views,economists currently have developed a cookie cutter approach whereby they prescribe what he calls “standardized advice to cut budgets, liberalize trade and privatize state-owned enterprises, almost without regard to the specific context.”

Organizations like the International Monetary Fund, Sachs notes,  overlook other valid causes to the poverty and thus come up with and insist upon the carrying out of a  wrong treatment plan:

 ”The current situation reminds me too much of the fable of the farmer whose chickens are dying. The local priest gives one remedy after another — prayers, potions, oaths — until all of the chickens are dead. ‘Too bad,” says the priest, ‘I had so many other good ideas.’

As Sachs says, it is difficult for a country to do belt tightening when it doesn’t have a belt.  Because of their lack of competence, economists miss this.

Elsbach indicates that if followers believe their leaders are competent and things are still going wrong, then they will perceive the problems as stemming from a lack of integrity. This can be seen all the time in the media.

Iyengar and Kinder in their book “News That Matters” note that television news managers engage in “agenda setting”.  The hypothesis they set out to prove (and did) was that “those problems that receive prominent attention on the national news become the problems the viewing public regards as the nation’s most important.”

Not only do TV news bosses engage in agenda setting, but they also are involved in another dubious exercise called ”priming”. This term refers to the effect television news has when it calls attention to some items and ignores others. What occurs with priming they say is that ”television news influences the standards by which governments, presidents, policies and candidates for public office are judged.”

There is not too much question that news people today are competent. However, I think their ethics are quite debateable.

What the world needs is leaders with character. Niall Ferguson claimed in Newsweek this month that the European debt crisis affecting millions of Europeans could be solved by the continent’s economic giant Germany.

However, things aren’t bad in Germany. As a result, Ferguson says, the country is complacent.  He writes:

“Life in Berlin is good. In Munich, the capital of the German manufacturing machine, it is even better. You should try explaining to the average Bavarian beer drinker at the Stammtisch why he needs to get ready to finance an annual transfer to the Mediterranean countries of up to 8 percent of German GDP. I never get very far.”

At least Ferguson is trying. Sometimes leaders need to be pushed.

Urban Meyer is a championship coach who just took over the reins at football factory Ohio State. Here is what he told Sports Illustrated (SI)  about one of his new quarterbacks.

“I hate to stereotype a kid as a typical high-school player,” Meyer said of Miller, “but I got the sense when I first got here that he was kind of a cool guy and, ‘I’m going to lift weights and take care of my business,’ as opposed to, no, you’re going to finish first in every drill, you’re going to be the first one in the office, you’re going to do extra work, you’re going to push yourself to be one of the best.”

For Urban Meyer of course, this is unacceptable. He will insist on his player being the best.

It doesn’t hurt to push leaders. Indeed, Colin Powell says that a little courage upon the part of his subordinates when he was Secretary of State may have kept him from having egg on his face in front of the United Nations.

Powell told Newsweek that he asks those he leads three questions: 1)What do you know 2)What is it you don’t know 3)What do you think? He says it is his job as the leader to analyze all this and come to decisions.

He says his followers failed him in that, although they knew certain truths, they lacked the bravery to tell him.  Powell says they are even out there writing books about him even though they are culpable.

Our leaders have to stop being children and grow up. When they do, it will look beautiful.

The results of a maturing leader are exemplified again from the sports world. In an article called “A Brand New Lane Kiffin”, SI tells of the growth of a football coach:

 He has reached a comfort level. He is driven, but not overwhelmed anymore. … Kiffin is smarter, more aware. He’s not accusing opposing coaches of breaking NCAA rules when they haven’t (Urban Meyer, February 2009). He isn’t popping off without an actual reason. “There has absolutely been a maturation of Lane Kiffin and that will continue,” says USC AD Pat Haden. “I expect him to be a different person five years from now as a coach than how he is now. He’s already come a long way as a head coach and I anticipate more growth going forward.”

This is the kind of growth in character we should demand from our own leaders. If we don’t get it, we ought to thank them for their service, send them home and bring in some fresh blood.

There’s an old saying that people get the leaders they deserve.  I think we deserve better. Surely the world can’t take much more from the current crop without getting an ulcer.

Birds on the Brain

Fowl(ers) are not nice on Mondays

I have birds on the brain. Beware of fowl(er) on Mondays.

Every day for the last 5 days I have been hearing cuckoo birds in my area here in Finland. You can hear the sound of these natural alarm clocks here.

It began last Wednesday at 4 am as I was sleeping. In Finland it is  also light out at this hour, so I didn’t get much sleep that morning.

It’s too bad I didn’t hear them again at this hour the next day. This was a holiday called “Helatorstai” (Ascension Day-see my post on this). It is said that if you have an “early cuckoo morning” on this day, hearing the bird from east or west, you will have good luck.

I have also been thinking a lot about the Oriole. This bird is the symbol of my hometown major league baseball team.

The Baltimore Orioles have been fighting for first place all season, which is amazing because they have been pitiful for about 15 or 16 years now. I think it might have something to do with the fact that the team switched back to their cartoon bird symbol, moving away from the ornithologically correct one they have used since the 1980s.

 Back in 1989 I happened to be visiting Finland for a few weeks and did not pay any attention to the baseball standings. I had no reason to since the Orioles had garnered one of the worst records in baseball history the year before.

A national magazine bemoaned the Orioles in 1988. By 1989 they were flying high.

Some time in midsummer, however, I was sitting on the Esplanade in Helsinki and opened up a copy of USA Today. Much to my shock the O’s were in first place.

They spent all season there and ended up tied with the Toronto Blue Jays (a nasty bird quite unlike my beloved Oriole). They lost a one-game playoff.

That year the theme for the Birds was “Orioles Magic, Let it Happen”. Peter Schmuck, the Baltimore Sun writer who covers the Orioles now, wrote recently that he senses the same spirit he witnessed in 1989 when he came to Baltimore from California to cover the Angels.

We can only hope! As the chart below shows, the O’s have been far more successful wearing the cartoon bird.

Source: cartoonbird.mlbblogs.com

Finally, the Angry Birds phenomenon has been front and center for me lately. I can’t help it as I made their cartoon bird my Facebook profile picture in the last couple of months.

If you have been living in a cave, you might not be familiar with the Angry Birds. This is a strategy video game developed here in Finland. Everyone around the world plays the game on their mobile phones or Facebook now.

Indeed, I wonder what my coworkers  do all day because I notice scores posted for them on FB. Of course, you could be asking me the same question, since I am on FB viewing them.

It was a big deal when the wife of the creator of Angry Birds came to the presidential palace last December for the annual Independence Day reception.  Knowing that the whole country would be jabbering about the fashions of the night, she wore a dress with the Angry Birds embedded into the pattern.  

Teija Vesterbacka sports her Angry Birds dress on Finnish Independence Day

I chose the Angry Bird cartoon for my FB profile pic because I bear a surname honoring our fine feathered friends. Furthermore, I’m angry a lot.

I was going to change my profile pic this week (maybe to the cuckoo). But I have figured out that my rage is actually justified.

There’s a lot of injustice out there and I want to do something about it. My self analysis showed me that my anger has more to do than injustice inflicted on me, though. What I want to do is get passionate about solving other people with their unjust treatment.

Thus, I had a career revelation this weekend. Hopefully my fancy won’t take flight like a bird.

What the heck is Helatorstai?

Somehow this week, on Thursday, there is a public holiday in Finland. We just had Vappu (May Day), so I was a little taken aback that there was another holiday so soon. I thought the next one would be Juhannus (Midsummer).

I don’t remember Helatorstai in my previous stays in Finland. So, I did a little research.

Helatorstai is actually Ascension Day, celebrating the return to heaven of Jesus.  Having left my Lutheran roots for more non denominational waters many years ago, I am not surprised I didn’t know this. It is a day on the church calendar of the more mainline denominations (Catholic, Anglican).

I also was not aware of the holiday because, unlike the “godless” Europeans, who universally celebrate it, we “Christian” Americans totally ignore it. Figures.

Indeed, my German colleague told me today that not only is tomorrow Ascension Day in his country, it his Father’s Day. He told some story of the men walking around pulling wagons of meat and beer.

It’s not that I didn’t believe him, but I checked it out. Indeed, the German guys go out into the woods with “party wagons”.  

Helatorstai is celebrated 40 days after Easter, when the book of Acts tells us Jesus ascended to His Father after His resurrection. Like Easter, the day changes every year. This year it is May 17. Last year Helatorstai fell on June 2. Next year it will be on May 9. In the 40 days between Easter and Ascension Day Jesus  appeared and talked with many, according to the Bible and Christian tradition.

Thus, the feast day is as old as the hills. It used to be quite important in Finland, even until the 19th century, especially among farmers.

It was a time to apparently walk through the fields and pray for a good harvest. Now it seems to be just a day off, a costly one for employers, according to the Helsinki daily newspaper, The Sanomat. 

There was an old folk saying in Finland, when translated, seems to say that the “the day is so holy the grass is not very strong”. I presume there are a lot of meanings for this proverb.

It could be an allusion to the Scriptures which note that all men wither like grass; thus, there is  a focus on eternity on this day. Or it could go back to the Rogation Days (rogere meaning “to ask” in Latin) which began in fifth century Europe. Here people fasted and prayed for their agriculture, eating only grass.

These became known as “Grass Days”. Perhaps the grass was weak because the people were eating it!

I don’t intend to fast on Helatorstai. In fact, I bought myself a special treat of meat since I intend to be holed up all in my home, as nothing will be open. 

So Hyvää helatorstaita!

My Heady Days Playing the French Horn

When we moved out to the suburbs from south Baltimore, I took up the French Horn. Mr. Hair was my teacher in the 8th grade.

Mr. Hair’s name fit. He was a slightly built, winsome man with a light head of curly hair.

With his glasses, he looked a bit like a Nordic nerd. However, he was far from it.

Mr. Hair would sit next to me and listen to my wild bellowings from the horn. Then he would look at his watch and ask,”Is it time for lunch yet?” His smiling sense of humor got me through the ordeal of trying to pick up the instrument.

French Horn is not the easiest thing to learn or play. Mike Pearce of Littleton Colorado says this in an introduction to advising band directors on recruiting students to play it.

“Do you have trouble finding and keeping French horn players in your elementary or middle school band? Do you have some trying to play horn but they drive you crazy? There may be practical things you can do to make life easier for both you and them.”

Mike’s advice includes giving some thought to the potential horn player’s abilities. Can he or she discern pitch? Are their lips small enough to deal with the small mouthpiece?

I can’t remember why I decided to go with French Horn.  I was a trumpet player to start, blowing away on my father’s high school instrument from the 1940s. Plus, being Lutheran was a handicap. 

Garrison Keillor says this in reference to the French Horn and Lutherans:

“Which one is the best one for a Lutheran to play? If our Lord played an instrument, which one would He have chosen? Probably not a French Horn. It takes too much of a person’s life. French Horn players hardly have time to marry and have children. The French Horn is practically a religion all by itself.”

It could be that being lefthanded had something to do with my choice. We lefthanders are natural arbitrarians. Not only that, as Pearce suggests, you’ve gotta have a large lefthand to grip the French Horn. Mine may not have been large, but it was powerful!

I carried on with both trumpet and French Horn in high school. There I was under the supervision of what I can only describe as the Vince Lombardie of band directors: Mr. Kerman.

Mr. Kerman had big dreams for our band. He wanted us in a national competition in Chicago.

However, to even think of getting there, we had to be good enough in our own state. Thus, it was off to the Maryland state competition.

Like a football player, I went back and forth between the first and second team (or what musicians call “chair”). Sometimes some overweight girl was moved ahead of me .

It was never good for my status in high school, playing the French Horn. I remember embarrassing moments as the hard-charging Mr. Kerman had us playing more and more difficult pieces.

Of course the music he chose had hard French Horn parts. As my partner and I tried to play them and come off sounding like screaming oxen, the rest of the band would break into hysterics.

However, when we went to States I happened to be the first chair French Horn player. Our piece of music was something by a Czech named Vaclav Nelhybel.

Unhappily for me, the piece began with the French Horn. The only positive was that the opening was only one, longly held note.

As Mr. Kerman took his position, I was off to his right, sitting in my chair hoping that my life would not come to an end. My director smiled and consoled us all.

Then, he raised his baton, turned is head in my direction, and developed a facial expression that said,”If you blow this, you are a dead man.”

As his baton moved, so the air in my lungs. I knew there had to be a God in heaven because I produced a clear note, put my instrument on my lap, and let the rest of the band take over.

When I got to the University of Maryland, I thought I would like to join the marching band, so I went out for it. However, there were no French Horn players.

French Horn players were given something called a peck horn. It’s a brass instrument that looks something like your large intestine.

Like the football team at whose halftimes we were to play, the band’s members were required to stand out in the hot sun for hours a day practicing formations. I even had to stand in place with my leg bent at the knee and hold this position for minutes on end.

All this for one academic credit. I quit and that was the end of my music career.

Today I don’t think I could even get a sound out of a French Horn. My embouchure is long gone.

I think if I ever took up another instrument, it would be something like the saxaphone. It’s cooler.

Culture shock

Maryland and Virginia are adjacent states on the map, and they are side by side in my soul. I grew up in both places, if I ever did.

Maryland and Virginia have some similarities. For example,  a good number of people in Maryland had secessionist sympathies during the Civil War (what Virginians would call The War Between the States) and Virginia of course was the main battleground in defending the Confederacy.

Some of that secessionist stuff still seemed to be around when I was a kid, but not quite as deeply felt in Maryland as in Virginia. The latter was full of “Hell no, we ain’t forgettin’” and “Save your Confederate money, the South will rise again” bumper stickers.

I think there was some sympathy for George Wallace in Maryland when he ran for president. He felt that the state was important enough to campaign there. It was in Laurel where he was gunned down by a lunatic named Arthur Bremer.

I was born in Baltimore, but was still in diapers I think when my parents up and moved the family to Roanoke.  It was known in those times as “The Star City of the South” because of its man-made astral structure on Mill Mountain.

I think Roanoke was a good place to grow up, although I think the men probably drank too much. Our Dads hung out at places like Shirley’s and Howell’s.

Those bars were like relígious sanctuaries, Holy of Holies, where I was rarely taken. Somehow, I must have been in them once or twice because I recall the shuffleboard.

Also sacrosanct in my early adolescent mind was the high schoolers cruising up and down Willamson Road on weekend nights.. One day, I thought, I’ll be one of them.

It was not to be. My parents up and moved us back to Baltimore when I was 13. I’ve lived a couple of places overseas and moved around the U.S., but that move was th biggest culture shock I have ever experienced.

I was in the 7th grade, just feeling my oats. In my mind, my budding football career had just gone up in the smoke of the exhaust coming from our car heading up I-81 to Maryland.

The truth is that I was played on the worst 6th grade team in the city’s sandlot league. And I was the worst player, derogatorily known as “Seabees” because of the T-shirt garnered from my uncle which I wore to practice. It’s a shame such a hallowed naval institution had to be associated with my gridiron skills. 

The biggest shock to my system was my the sudden issue of ethnicity which was flung at me once I began school across the street at Benjamin Franklin Junior High School. Baltimore schools had numbers and this one’s was 239.

I never could get up that old school spirit singing our fight song, even though it was to the tune of the one they use at the University of Michigan. I just couldn’t get sappy about “dear 239″.

What was dear to me there at first was my physical safety. Compared to Breckinridge in Roanoke, named after a local historical military figure, Franklin was a combat zone.

It had fence topped with barbed wire all around the school grounds, which were dominated by concrete and portables. It was more of a concentration camp than a school to me.

It wasn’t long after I got there that a group of boys jumped me in the playground. I have always been a terrible pugilist and mostly a pacifist, but somehow I managed to slug my way out of the melee.

I knew the school was tough when I noticed some older boys with D.A.’s and leather jackets walking around. And they were the school hallway monitors! What year was I in?, I thought.

As I said though, it was the variety of  people of racial, national, tribal, religious, linguistic, or cultural origin that gave me a concussion. I just had never been around so many different types of people before.

My Roanoke neighborhood was lily white. Our ‘hood was next to the black district, but never did the twain meet, accept for an occasional kamikaze biker who would whiz down Wayne Street just asking for hoots and howls from us kids.

I think Roanoke was a little slow about integrating. In the six weeks I spent at Breckinridge in the 7th grade, there were three black kids in the whole school. The truth is, I don’t recall them making any kind of impact whatsoever on feelings there.

One of my first mental disturbances was roll call, hearing the unusual names spout forth from the teacher. And sitting next to a Polish girl. Poland seemed like this mysterious land out of a book.

My classmates weren’t particularly endeared to this boy from the South. In addition to testing me in the playground, they mocked me in class.

One light-skinned black kid during a group session looked at me and asked,”Am I white or black?” Hmmm, was this gonna be on the exam?  I knew I had teacher blood in me when all I could think of is why this boy wasn’t staying on task.

Then came the day in gym class when I was truly baptized into racial harmony, immersion style. This particular day we were wrestling.

The gym teacher looked at me and said,”Timmy, you wrestle Tyrone.”  I looked over at this African American kid.

Now coming from segregated Roanoke, you can imagine the emotional deconstruct I had to go through. My life was changed forever.