Reuniting and Reminiscing: A Weekend of Looking Back

This weekend brought something that I had been anticipating for 5 years, and looking forward to for about 6 weeks. Because just about everyone my age is in the midst of trying to raise 2.3 healthy children with their heads screwed on straight, or trying to secure as much capital to sustain them in their Golden Years when Social Security has been cashed out by the politicians, nobody in my high school graduating class was interested in taking on the daunting task of organizing our 25-year class reunion.

But then, sometime in the middle of September I received a notice in an e-mail that we were having an informal, unofficial, hastily assembled reunion on November 10. WOO HOO!

It was held at a sports bar down in the same Chicago south suburb where we all attended high school, a bar which, as it turns out, is co-owned by one of our classmates!

I can’t even begin to describe the joy of seeing so many familiar faces, as well as some faces not so familiar until I read the name tags! There were a couple of people there who had missed the 10- and the 20-year reunions, so it was doubly fun to see them for the first time in 25 years.

As I now live approximately 55 miles from the town where I grew up, and I was certain that I would leave the venue at a late hour, and there was likely to be more than a little alcohol on my breath, I decided to make a weekend of it. I booked a hotel room in the area and planned to spend the night there after the reunion, and then to spend Sunday visiting my father, who is living in a nursing home.

And that’s just how it worked out, except I didn’t exactly spend the night in the hotel room, but more like the morning, as I didn’t get back into my room until a little past 3:30 a.m!

The good thing was that check-out time was noon, and a mere 30 steps away (give or take) from the hotel is a honkin’ huge Cracker Barrel Restaurant! Another good thing was that in eight hours of partying, I drank a grand total of three beers, so the only thing threatening my drive back to the hotel was fatigue…and the freak November thunderstorm that struck while I drove, and there wasn’t even a hint of hangover.

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I slept in just a little this morning, arising around 9:40am. Breakfast at Cracker Barrel was quick and yummy, and soon I was checked out and on the road to visit Dad. Since I was in another suburb a few miles west of where the reunion was held, I followed a different route than I usually would follow to get to Dad’s.

I’ve driven down Illinois Route 50 certainly hundreds of times throughout my life. And if I go far enough south, through and past the town of Monee (pronounced moe-NEE), heading toward Peotone (pronounced PEE-uh-TONE), my mind fires to life with childhood memories. Mom had an aunt and uncle who owned a farm just off of Route 50, where they raised pigs and chicken (and probably more, but all I remember are the pigs and chickens) and, during the summer, especially, Dad and Mom, just about once every two weeks, would throw two or three of us kids in the back seat, and we’d ride through just a little bit of country until we got to the farm. I’m sure Mom got the family discount on eggs, as we always returned home with about three-dozen!

If my life depended on it, I couldn’t find that farm again today…if it even still exists. I don’t remember which road it’s on from Route 50, or even how far to go along that road.

But there’s another memory along Route 50, one that is more precious and more vivid than any of the rides to the “egg farm.”

With Dad off on Mondays, he would often lift the burden of watching me on summer days from one of my siblings – as Mom had gone back to work – and take me with him on his errands and visits to friends around town. Every couple of weeks it was to Joliet, where he would get his hair cut by the barber under whom he had apprenticed. Other times it was off to the junkyard to drop off brass and copper he had scavenged or had collected from handyman jobs he had done for friends around town. Once in a while we picked up barber supplies.

But one particular Monday morning – I was around age eight or nine, my best guess – he said to me, “Let’s go fishin’.” I climbed into his blue Ford F-150 pickup truck and watched our little world go by as he worked through the gears of the “three on a tree” to get the truck up to speed and out to Illinois Route 50.

We hummed along the Route for a few minutes and then he pulled to the side of the four-lane road, essentially in the middle of farmland. I looked around and asked, “What’s wrong?”

Dad just said, “We’re here.”

I climbed down out of the truck and looked around. There was no lake or pond to be seen in any direction.

“We’re where?”

“Just follow me,” said Dad, and I did.

He grabbed the poles and handed me the can of earthworms we had picked up at a bait shop, and he led me away from the pavement and into the tall grass beside the road, down the embankment and into a small gulley, actually a dry creek bed that bent and ducked under the road. He pointed in the direction away from the road and said, “Through there.”

I looked to where he was pointing and saw what, to me at that time, was one of the coolest sights ever: a concrete spillway underneath a concrete arch bridge supporting the Illinois Central Railroad over the creek – only I didn’t know those things then. It was just the coolest thing!

“I hope there’s water back there,” he said as he ambled over the loose river rocks.

In the moment, I took him to mean that he had never been there before, and that we were both discovering it together. But since then, I realize it’s possible that he wasn’t sure if it was as dry back there as the creek bed where we stood. I followed him through the tunnel formed by the archway, over the smooth concrete floor. Out the other side I saw that there was a small pond and, at my feet, a ledge where I could sit and dangle my legs over the water while our bobbers stood sentry over our worms dying below, savage hooks rammed through their bodies, and drowning to add the final insult to their injury. The water was clear enough to see minnows and the occasional larger small fish swimming around near the shallows and near our ledge, so Dad was encouraged and confident we’d catch something.

Dad had even packed a lunch – his favorite, and sometimes mine – hard salami on buttered Italian bread.

We did catch a few fish that day, but they were all tiny and not worth taking home. We left empty-handed though not unhappy, but I unwittingly brought with me a memory I would have, it turns out, for a lifetime.

On Sunday, as I passed through the other side of Monee, those memories along Illinois Route 50 fired up again. I drove past what I thought might be the turnoff to the “egg farm,” and, as the landscape rolled under me, my surroundings told me I was close to that special spot to where Dad had brought me that fine summer day so long ago.

I had tried to find it once before, one summer day; I think heavy foliage on the side of the road had obscured it from view and, at 55 miles per hour…or faster…I just missed it. But today, since November has stripped the trees of their camouflage, after doubting such an idyllic spot could remain after so many years, I was able to spot the tunnel with ease!

I drove on past it, but nostalgia nagged at me to turn back, to gaze upon the archway, to take photos with the camera I had brought with me to capture reunion shots! So I did. I returned, finally, to the spot that has decorated my memories like cherished photos in an oft-opened shoebox.

I stood on the bridge that carries the cars over the creek, and I gazed upon the hole beneath the train tracks.










I was in no hurry. Dad didn’t know I was on my way to see him. Nothing else was on my agenda. So down the embankment I went!

The creek bed was dry – the past summer’s drought had probably kept it dry for months. I ambled over perhaps the very same individual rocks Dad’s and my shoes had touched those 35 years ago!








I walked through the tunnel and came out the other side and… it’s exactly the same! My educated and experienced eye updated my memory and I now understand that the pond where we caught and tossed back a handful of fish is actually a sort of flood basin. The embankment beyond the pond shows evidence of some quite fierce water flow where man -- long before Dad and I were there -- has manipulated the earth to forcibly divert the creek through the tunnel, under the rail bed, under the roadway, and off through the farmland. In the spring, this is probably a very dangerous place to be!





I don’t remember the strangely constructed pipeworks, evidently drainage from somewhere, and the water appears now to be quite filthy. I saw no fish swimming about. It could be contaminated by pollution, or it could just be that the pond spent too much time unrefreshed by rains and creek flow, and its population went extinct in the stagnant water.





But it’s still there! That idyllic spot from my memory exists relatively intact! Autumn has taken away most of the foliage, and today’s gray November sky painted everything in drab, but physically, the spot is exactly as I remember it.

I drove on to visit Dad at the nursing home. He’s 84 now. His condition may not have worsened, but he certainly hasn’t improved. His mind is still pretty sharp, but he doesn’t recall the day he took me fishing in that secret, special spot so many years back, not even after I showed him the photos.

I’m neither surprised nor upset that he doesn’t remember it, or that it didn’t resonate with him as such a monumentally special, memorable moment with his youngest child. That day I think he just wanted to catch some fish!

The funny part of it all is that I can’t stand fishing. I’ve always hated it.

But I love my dad. And that day was a perfect, golden, special time for me, with him.

A Kick in the Can, The End

Washington Junior High School was the flagship of its school district. The only junior high in the district, it took in all of the students graduated from the elementary schools and prepared them for high school. What this meant for a lot of students – myself included – was first experiences with lots of kids of different ethnicities and races and skin colors. Most notable for me were the black kids.

A certain relative, who will remain nameless, had warned me in the final days of the summer before 7th grade to “watch out” the black kids at Washington Junior High…only this relative wasn’t so kind as to use the term “black.”

Innocent that I was, I took my relative’s advice and I “watched out” for all the black kids. And while I watched out for the black kids I had my back to all the white kids and Mexican kids and whatever other non-black kids there were back there, and they were kicking my ass! That was when I learned a life lesson: kids are kids. People are people. Take the time to learn which ones to trust, and which ones to avoid, and you find the two groups are not separated by color.

Unfortunately, not everyone learns that lesson.

As happened in a lot of schools, certainly during the time I was at Washington, the black kids and the white kids just didn’t hang out together. The black kids always occupied the northeastern half of the playground while the white kids and the Mexican kids stayed closer to the main building and the Kick the Can court. (In the photo above, there can be seen a fair amount of landscaping in the northeastern corner. Back then there was no landscaping, just a chain-link fence and gate enclosing the playground at the edge of the sidewalk.)

One day, in the middle of a game, one of the black kids showed up at the side of the court and asked one of us why we never let the black kids play. It was almost a chorus of voices as we told him that everyone was welcome to play. For some reason, the more kids playing, the more fun it was! We invited him to join us.

As there were few rules to teach him, and the game was learn-as-you-go, he was on a team and playing inside of two seconds. It was hindsight then just as it is sad hindsight now that we should have told him it was a brutal game, and that capturing the can the first time would be quite an eye-opening experience. But we failed to tell him that. We just figured he’d get it. Someone eventually passed him the can and he captured it, and was immediately pounced upon by five or six kids gripping his shoulders and kicking at his feet and shins.

A minor, angry scuffle ensued as the can was wrangled away from him, and he singled out one of his opponents and tried to strike back. But his opponent, seeing the can kicked away, chased after the can and left the fight behind.

The new player then just disappeared, and my friends and I laughed him off as a sissy.

The very next day the same kid showed up with a couple of his friends and asked if they could all play. Looking back at it now, it was the kind of formula action movie foreboding we all recognize when we see it. But we were just kids on a playground, not in a movie. And we just wanted everybody to play and have fun. So we said “Sure!”

Play resumed for a few minutes until one of the new players captured the can. I remember the absurd moment when he bent down and, in flagrant disregard for the rules, picked the can up in his fingers and ran. A bunch of us started screaming, “Foul!” or “No fair,” oblivious to the fact that he wasn’t running toward his opponent’s goal, but rather OFF the court and bearing northeast! Quicker-witted kids – like Lu, for instance – caught on to what was happening, and someone shouted, “Get the can!!” We took off after the kid, who ran between the friends he had brought along, who then turned and acted as though blockers on a football field. They stuffed the first couple of guys nearest the culprit, but Lu got past them as the can thief tried to disappear into the crowd of black kids.

Tenacious Lu chased him around until he snagged the kids shirt and started to reel him in. The rest of us caught up, and a few ran to help Lu, who was by that time grappling with the kid.

There had been, a few years earlier, what were termed “race riots” at the high school, where my older siblings had attended, which had started as a singular fight between a white teenager and a black teenager, and then escalated. On the playground I saw my friends converging on the mad scuffle to help Lu. And then I saw a couple of the black kids doing the same to help their friend. In essence, I saw our own race riot in the making, whether or not it was truly racially motivated.

I have the distinct image in my head of a pile of kids grappling, swinging fists and shouting, and Lu at the edge of the pile, head down and driving into it, his hands still gripping the kid who took our can. But I saw it turning ugly and, rather than jump in and exacerbate the situation, I thought it was time to get an adult’s attention before anybody got hurt. I wore a zip-front hooded sweatshirt that chilly fall day, and I had my hands in the shirt pockets, covering my belly. I turned to get the attention of one of the deans who, since it was so chilly outside, had chosen to monitor the children’s behavior from inside the doorway to the cafeteria.

I had made no more than one step toward the school building when another black kid, who had been standing behind me, quickly wound up and punched me in the stomach! My hands were already there and, in reflex, I had tensed my arms and hands inside my pockets, so all he hit were my fists. It was then that I realized this whole fracas had been highly organized by the culprits who took the can. They had the forward operating team, which had seized the treasure, then acted as first line defenders, and then baited the rest of us to pursue. They had a rear team to join the fight when we arrived, as they quickly piled on to Lu and the kid in possession of the can. And they had containment sentries to seal off anyone’s escape to the south to get help!

I was actually impressed! To this day I am still impressed with the seeming precision with which they pulled off the event! They were just 12 and 13 year-old kids! I don’t know what their motive was, if it was just simply to fuck with us and take our can, or if it was more sinister, and truly a ploy to lure us into a huge fight.

So I stood there, glaring at the kid who punched me, who must have at that moment regretted that he hadn’t hit me in the face instead, seeing as how his gut punch hadn’t hurt me. I didn’t strike back, so he didn’t continue.

The next thing I knew I heard someone shout “GET HIM!” and Lu went streaking past me – can in hand – and headed back to the Kick the Can court! Only one or two kids chased after him, and then there were the rest of the Kick the Can players in the mix. The race riot that was to be... wasn’t, so life was returning relatively back to normal. We just wanted our can back. The kid who had punched me drifted back down to the northeastern corner, and I trotted back toward the court, smug for having "blocked" that guy's punch. I was about 20 feet away from the game which had already resumed in earnest when a voice somewhere cried, “[FARRAGO]! LOOK OUT!” I turned just in time to see two sneakered feet filling my vision and connecting with my chest! I hit the asphalt hard, shoulders and chest first, the rest of me flopping down gracelessly. I didn’t swear as a general rule back then, but I do recall that when I hit the ground, I shouted, “FUCK!” Then I got up and learned what I was made of: anger spiked in me so fiercely that I faced the kid, one of the crowd from the northeastern corner of the playground, and suddenly… a lump formed in my throat… I was... in tears?! What the…?! And then I turned my back on the kid, determined to tell a dean. At first I walked, but then I felt a jolt in my legs, and they were suddenly very limber! In what I now know is the “fight or flight” reflex, the adrenaline pumped into my legs and I was inexplicably compelled to sprint, with much agility and more speed than I ever had before, to the door behind which stood the dean of 7th grade boys.

Flight.

I blubbered incoherently for a few moments until one kid, a black girl, shouted “David W. did it!” She used his full name. It was the first time I had ever heard it. When the dean waded out into the playground and called out David W., I recognized the kid as the one who had knocked me down. The dean dragged us both back to the cafeteria door and started yelling at both of us to the point that even David was crying. He forced David to apologize to me, which, even then, seemed macabre. We were forced to shake hands, and then we were sent back out to the playground.

I can remember moments of that day so clearly, and remember so clearly the helpless feeling after being slammed to the asphalt of the playground. As a boy, as a man, I wish I could have had the balls to immediately give back what I had gotten, but as a clear-headed adult, I am glad I didn’t react in that way. What I wound up doing, though embarrassing in the eyes of male culture in our society, was exactly what I should have done, and may have prevented me from turning a corner I’m better off not to have turned.

Perhaps the events of that day signaled the start of the end of Kick the Can at Washington Junior High School. Perhaps it was the advent of the soft-drink industry’s “progress” to an all-aluminum can the next year, which doesn’t flatten as well, nor does it fly as well or as far, and without the kind of control the original cans did. Whatever the reason, well before the end of my 8th grade year, Kick the Can was “outlawed” by the powers that were. My father may have invented it (or not), but I and my friends ended it.

Long Live Kick the Can!

A Kick in the Can

At Washington Junior High we played a playground game in which a group of us daily split up into two teams, flattened an empty pop can (soda can to those of you on the eastern seaboard and abroad, “Coke” can to those of you west of the Mississippi…even though it was usually a Pepsi can) and kicked it back and forth trying to get the can to hit the opposing team’s wall. The game was called, quite imaginatively, “Kick the Can.” It was a game I thought we kids had invented, but when I began to describe the game to my father, who had also attended Washington, he said he knew all about it, and that HE invented it. Yeah, right, Dad.

Someone would procure a can, usually from home, as the school then didn’t allow children access to vending machines, and would step on the middle of the can and then fold the ends over and flatten it further. It was necessary to do it right, as a properly flattened can, when kicked just right, would spin like a frisbee and become airborne and, potentially, score on a team’s wall above anybody’s reach to block it. My game was back in the waning days of the heavier cans made entirely of tin; they flew better and lasted longer. It was truly an art form, as some kids were much better at shaping and smoothing a can than others.

Of course, looking back on it, Kick the Can was a pretty dangerous game, not to mention brutal. Girls didn’t play. They were welcome to play – everyone was welcome to play – but after one or two minutes they realized that we boys were just stupid.

The game was very simple: the court lay east-west (see photo). Either team had to kick the flattened can to the other team’s wall for one point. It was forbidden for a player to pick up the can in his or her hands during play, except after scoring a point, when someone from either team could carry the can to the middle of the “court” to have the face-off and begin play to the next score.

To block the can with any part of the body was allowed, but to catch the can was forbidden.

Common techniques during play were:

-The Capture – a player would step on the can to control it and keep it away from opposing players. This technique was effective for finding teammates to pass the can to them. The drawback to the capture was the opponents surrounding the player, placing their hands on his shoulders and kicking at his foot, ankles and shins in an effort to dislodge the can from beneath his foot…or his foot from his leg.

-The Slide – a player, having captured the can, slides the can beneath his foot to perform a rearward pass. This technique was effective for faking out opponents and sending the can quickly across the court without having to lift the foot off of the can to kick it – which could afford opponents the opportunity to kick it away – and, if lucky, nailing the nearest opponent behind him in the berries.

-The Sail Kick – a player would kick the can, contacting the edge of the can nearest his body with his foot, which would lift the front edge of the can as it gained momentum, causing it to become airborne. An agile, experienced player could apply some English to the can and cause it to spin rapidly as it sailed, which greatly enhanced accuracy, as well as improving the odds for serious bodily injury to anyone attempting to block the shot.

-The Ground Kick – a player kicked the can, contacting the middle of the can with his foot, keeping the surface of the can flat to the ground, causing it to skitter across the court. This kick was the easiest to block and intercept.

There was only one recess period at Washington, and that was after lunch. The lunch period was 45 minutes, and the die-hards among us saw lunch as an obstacle between us and Kick the Can. The number one fastest eater of lunch, and I mean the whole lunch, was always my best friend, Lu, at an average time of five minutes. The second fastest was usually me, usually around five and a half minutes. I still remember chugging my chocolate milk from the little half-pint cardboard carton every day while speed-walking from the table to the garbage can to the dirty tray stack, and then dumping my emptied carton into the last garbage can before the door to the playground. How I never threw up on the Kick the Can court, I’ll never know.

As one might imagine, you had to be a pretty tough, hardy kid to play this game well. I could withstand only a moderate beating about the ankles before I coughed up the can, and I always managed to pass to the wrong players.

Lu was one of the best Kick the Can players. He was always a short, chubby kid with a bilateral lisp. To this day, he’s short and chubby, and he still talks funny. I wouldn’t have guessed it, but being a short, chubby Mexican kid with a sideways lisp must make one tough, because Lu was always a tenacious guard dog type of kid. If he was your friend and someone was threatening you, Lu had your back. Actually, he had your front, because he didn’t let anybody mess with his friends.

On the Kick the Can court he was The Intimidator. One of the top scorers, he was the most accurate passer and he was unflappable when he captured the can. I think Bigfoot himself, wearing steel-toed boots, could have been kicking at Lu’s feet and never gotten him to cough it up.

For such a rough and tumble game, one might think our matches often dissolved into fights, but that just wasn't the case. We all knew what the game entailed, and what to expect when playing. If someone didn’t like how the game was played, then he didn’t play.

And it was always that way with Kick the Can, but for one very notable exception….

(…To Be Continued)

Rhymes With Time

"Eenie meenie minie moe
Catch a tiger by the toe
If he hollers let him go
Eenie meenie minie moe..."

That is about the extent of my memory of playground rhymes employed to choose team members or first player or whatever, “randomly.”

Even as a grade-schooler I could never remember any of the other ones, and there were some I thought were really neat. Some of the other boys remembered some of them and we used them to pick who would be “it” first, but the more mathematically adept kids knew how to manipulate the rhyme and willfully affect the outcome to pick one of the slower runners (me) who would then be “it” for the entire recess period. And there were some girls I went to school with who could remember and recite vast libraries of them. And, for whatever others I could remember then, “Eenie meenie minie moe” is the only one left with me.

Well, there’s just part of another:

“One banana, two banana, three banana, four
Four bananas make a bunch and so do many more.”

Oops! Wrong playground! I meant:

“One potato, two potato, three potato, four…”
…and that’s it.

On this past Christmas morning Mrs. Farrago and I went out for breakfast at a local 24/7 place. Being The Holiday, we were delighted to be seated immediately in a calm, quiet, peaceful restaurant. As we ate (no, I did not conduct any research that morning), a family was seated in the booth across from ours. Well, it was portions of a family. It was a somewhat older couple with a small child – their granddaughter, I’m guessing. She was a cute, chatty little thing and her adult companions seemed to delight in her every word. Then the child spoke in a rhyme that brought back a flood of …not memories, necessarily, but the sense of being a vibrant child on the playground at school, with one foot jammed into a circle of feet, while one kid rhythmically tapped each toe consecutively to the beat of the rhyme, a rhyme I hadn’t heard since at least the sixth grade:

“Bubble gum, bubble gum in a dish
How many pieces do you wish?”

“Seven.”

“One, two, three…..”

I seem to recall there was more to it than just that, but it has all escaped me again. How enthralling that something so simple could spark so sharp a feeling in my gut!

I tried to remember to Mrs. Farrago any of the others I used to hear, but “Eenie meenie” was all that came to me.

I know I have a few of you who pop in from time to time. I couldn’t have reached 1500 hits just by posting and editing (…or could I?). Dig deep into your memories and share with me the rhymes you used to employ to build playground teams or who had to sit with the ugly kid (me again!)

I’ll follow up by letting you know which ones bring me back, and which ones I never heard – or don’t remember.