Tag: Passages

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Natasha

UPDATE: Dammit.

Best wishes for a speedy and complete recovery to actress Natasha Richardson, who was critically injured in a skiing accident earlier today. She’s a beautiful and intelligent actress whose work I always enjoy.

Richardson is married to Liam Neeson, one of my favorite actors. They starred together in Nell, a movie I didn’t like, but not through any fault of the principal actors.

(Image courtesy natasha-richardson.org.)

UPDATE: As noted above, Natasha Richardson has died of her injuries. Awful, awful news.

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Grim Realizations

There was a shockingly brutal murder in my town little more than a week ago. An Arab-American woman named Aasiyah Hasani was stabbed and beheaded, police allege, by her husband, Muzzammil. They were the owners of a fledgling teevee channel that was, apparently, Aasiyah’s brainchild and dream. She wanted the channel to help change the common stereotype of Arabs as being terrorist-minded, violent people — but it turns out that her married life was a long tale of abuse, that ended horribly. There is speculation that Aasiyah’s murder was an honor killing.

When I first saw the above photo in the Buffalo News, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I knew Aasiyah from somewhere. True, we live in the same town, so we might have crossed paths at the library or wherever; the studios for their teevee channel, where the murder took place, are only a block away from my church. But when reading today’s News article (linked above) about Aasiyah’s difficult marriage, I realized where I “knew” her from: for a while she ran the local 7-11 franchise, where we used to go at least once a week, usually after our trip to the library, for Slurpees and Pepsis.

I remember seeing Aasiyah there, milling about behind the counter; I even remember her stepping up to work the register once or twice while her cashier was outside having a cigarette or changing the syrup on the pop dispenser or something. Her little son used to be there, playing in the aisles, usually running a dust butler back and forth over the little three-by-five throw rug that they had in front of the door during the damp winter months. She may have been there on Christmas day once, when we stopped in after our trip to the cemetery to visit Little Quinn. His cemetery is across the street from the 7-11; the 7-11 is four or five blocks up from the library; the library is directly across the street from our church; our church is one block from the teevee studio where she died. Small, small world.

Now, it’s not like Aasiyah Hasani and I were friends or anything; any conversation we ever had amounted to “$3.35 please,” “Here you go,” “Thank you, here’s your receipt.” But I do remember thinking that she was a strikingly lovely woman, that her little boy was a cute little tyke, and…well, that’s about it. And now she’s dead and her husband is the prime suspect, having already been arrested and charged.

A couple of years ago we stopped in at 7-11 and saw a sign on the door reading “New Management”. I assume that’s about when Aasiyah sold her franchise in order to launch the teevee venture. Since I didn’t figure this out until today, we haven’t been back to 7-11 since the murder. Lately we’ve been going to another convenience store, anyway, because The Daughter likes the selection of bottled pop there better. But we still go to 7-11 maybe once a month.

It’s all very sad.

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“Yea, beds for all who come.”

In summer of 2005 we traveled to the Coeur d’Alene, Idaho area for my sister-in-law’s wedding. This photo is Little Quinn on the wedding day, asleep on his grandmother’s — The Wife’s mother’s, my mother-in-law’s — shoulder. This was taken at a very pretty park where the wedding photos were taken.

Over the last year, my mother-in-law became ill. She endured many treatments, lost a lot of weight and a bit of hair, but still mostly kept her spirits up. The Wife talked to her mother just two days ago.

But the end came this morning, very shockingly and very suddenly. She was only sixty years old.

Obviously, we’re making arrangements to travel now, so blogging will be intermittent for a while. I’ll have the laptop with me, but other than that, who knows.

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Rick

A man I went to college with, Rick Tibbott, died the other day. He’d been battling cancer for some time, and the cancer finally won. Rick was older than me, by a year or two or three. That means that he was too damned young to go.

Rick and I were more than acquaintances, although we were never really friends either; we shared some good friends in common, but he and I were never particularly close. Sometimes I even got the feeling that he plain didn’t like me all that much, which frankly wouldn’t bother me, given what I know of the person I was in college. To this day I’m amazed to have reached graduation with a number of friends and a future wife.

Rick and I were in the band together, and we were both music majors for a time (before I switched to Philosophy). We shared the trumpet as our major instruments, although our band director had the odd habit of converting a trumpet player or two to the euphonium if that section was hurting for players, so as far as the band went, Rick was our lead euphonium player. I don’t much recall that I ever got to hear his trumpet playing, but I recall him being pretty decent on the euphonium.

(For those only familiar with symphony orchestras, you’ve likely never seen a euphonium before. It’s kind of an odd instrument, meant I suppose to add another voice to the brass choir in the typical concert band or wind ensemble. It is sometimes called the “baritone”, and that’s pretty much what it is: a valved instrument whose sound is a sort-of cross between a trombone and a French horn.)

I’m trying hard to come up with stuff to say about Rick. He’s a person I knew, and I well remember his face and his voice. He was the director of the college Pep Band for the time he was there, and he used to get freakishly angry with me when I would ignore his tempos and charge ahead on my own; the rest of the band would follow me because I was the loudest player there, and Rick would fume and fume and fume some more. (With good reason, obviously. Like I said above: in college I was, putting it mildly, a putz.)

Rick was also the utter stereotype of a small-town Iowa kid. He wore overalls a lot, and when I started wearing mine as well a few years later, more than a few people asked me if I was going for the “Rick Tibbott look”. He also was the small-town person who had never been to a large town of any sort until his college years. When I was a sophomore, our annual band tour’s itinerary was announced one day, in some detail. That year we were touring mainly in Colorado, with a couple of stops on the way in Nebraska, the first of those being Omaha. Our day in Omaha was to include a visit to the Omaha Zoo, and on the itinerary, the guy planning the tour, who was one of Rick’s best friends, had written: “Ricky has never been to a zoo before! Wheeeeee!” Upon reading that in the band rehearsal, Rick immediately raised his hand and insisted that he couldn’t possibly be the only member of the band (eighty or so members strong) to have never been to a zoo. Rick was not amused when the show of hands he demanded failed to materialize. He really was the only person in the band who had never seen a zoo before. I think he enjoyed it. It was more than eighteen years ago, but at that time at least, the Omaha Zoo was pretty impressive.

I don’t really know what became of Rick after he graduated, aside from that he became a music teacher somewhere in Iowa. I think I saw him last the next fall after his graduation, when he returned for Homecoming. Maybe once more too, but I don’t know. For some reason he always found it important to try and remember the name of my hometown (Allegany), and when I saw him that Homecoming, he greeted me: “Allegany, right? I found it on a map!” I was never sure why that interested him so, but it did. I think that Rick was genuinely surprised that the town I came from, in New York, wasn’t much bigger than the town he’d grown up in himself. My town was closer to more stuff, and that’s pretty much the entire difference.

Over the last week or so, I’ve received a number of forwarded e-mails from people in Rick’s circle that his health was deteriorating, that he’d entered hospice care at his home, and finally, on Sunday afternoon, that he had finally died, also at his home. He died too damned young, but he at least died surrounded by people who loved him. So, in the end, Rick Tibbott got about the only real consolation prize this life of ours offers.

So long, Rick. I’ll think of you next time I’m walking around a zoo.

(Since writing this I’ve filled myself in on details from Rick’s life from his obituary. I didn’t know he had three children. Sigh.)

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George

I’m going to forgo Sentential Links this week, in favor of a brief celebration of George Carlin. I loved his comedy dearly, even when it partially offended me, and even then, my offense was pretty mild anyway. Carlin was all about the language, and I loved him for that. So, here are some fine instances of Carlinia, taken from his book Napalm and Silly Putty. (I can’t find my copy of Brian Droppings at the moment. It was just here a minute ago….)

(UPDATE: It just occurred to me that I now live in a world that has two George Bushes and zero George Carlins. As a state of affairs, I find this deeply disappointing.)

On the human colonization of space: Can’t you just sense how eager the rest of the Universe is for us to show up?

So far, this is the oldest I’ve been.

I think someone could make a lot of money if they set up a little stand at the Grand Canyon and sold Yo-Yos with 500-foot strings.

Road rage, air rage. Why should I be forced to divide my rage into separate categories? To me, it’s just one big, all-around, everyday rage. I don’t have time for fine distinctions. I’m busy screaming at people.

Sometimes they say the winds are calm. Well if they’re calm, they’re not really winds, are they?

I think a good title for a travel book would be Doorway to Norway.

When Britain returned Hong Kong to China there was a long, formal ceremony. The whole thing looked well-rehearsed, and I wondered how everyone knew exactly where to stand and what to do. After all, the event had never taken place before; how could there be a set of procedures? Do the British have a manual on returning colonies? If so, they won’t be needing it much longer.

Sometimes people say, “Do you have the time?” And I say, “No, I don’t believe I do. I certainly didn’t have it this morning when I left the house. Could you possibly have left it somewhere? You know, now that you mention it, I believe the Navy has the time. In Washington. They keep it in an observatory or something, and they let a little of it out each day. Not too much, of course. Just enough. They wouldn’t want to give us too much time; we might not use it wisely.” Sometimes, in a playful mood, when asked if I have the time, I’ll say, “Yes,” and simply walk away.

On expressions he didn’t like: “Fine and Dandy”. That’s an old-fashioned one, isn’t it? You say to a guy, “How are ya?” He says, “Fine and dandy.” Not me. I never say that. You know why? Because I’m never both of those things at the same time. Sometimes I’m fine, but I’m not dandy. I might be close to dandy. I might be approaching dandy. I might even be in the general vicinity of dandyhood. But not quite fully dandy. Other times, though, I might indeed be highly dandy – but not fine. One time, 1978, August. For about an hour, I was both fine and dandy at the same time. But nobody asked me how I was!

And “In your own words”. You hear this in classrooms and courtrooms: “Tell us in your own words.” Do you have your own words? Personally, I’m using the same ones everybody else is using! Next time they tell you to say something in your own words, say “Nigflot blorny quando floon!”

By the way, next time you shop at a supermarket in a neighborhood that has a higher than average marijuana use, take a look at the cookie section. Combat zone. Half the packages have been opened, and all the really good cookies are gone.

“Where the hell are the Mallomars?”

“Oh, we can’t get Mallomars into the store. Folks line up at the back dock for Mallomars.”

There are always plenty of crappy cookies. You ever notice that? Shitty, low-priced cookies? Like “Jim’s Home-style Cookies. Twenty-six varieties.” I say, “Damn, Jim, if you can’t make cookies in twenty-five tries, leave me out.”

Who decides when the applause should die down? It seems like it’s a group decision; everyone begins to say to themselves at the same time, “Well, okay, that’s enough of that.”

Geologists claim that although the world is running out of oil, there is still a two-hundred year supply of brake fluid.

The Nobel Prize in mathematics was awarded yesterday to a California professor who has discovered a new number. The number is “bleen”, which he says belongs between six and seven.

According to astronomers, next week Wednesday will occur twice. They say such a thing happens only once every 60,000 years and although they don’t know why it occurs, they’re glad they have an extra day to figure it out.

I never take any personal precautions against germs. I don’t shy away from people who sneeze and cough, I don’t wipe off the telephone, I don’t cover the toilet seat, and if I drop food on the floor, I pick it up and eat it.

Even if I’m at a sidewalk cafe.

In Calcutta.

The poor section.

On New Year’s Eve during a soccer riot.

If a centipede wants to kick another centipede in the shins, does he do it one leg at a time? Or does he stand on fifty of his legs and kick with the other fifty?

Just for fun: call one of those How Am I Driving 800 numbers and complain about a particular driver. Tell them he was driving on the sidewalk, vomiting, giving the finger to old women, and dangling a baby out the window.

In restaurants where they serve frog’s legs, what do they do with the rest of the frog? Do they just throw it away? You never see “frog torsos” on the menu. Is there actually a garbage can full of frog bodies in the alley? I wouldn’t want to be the homeless guy looking for an unfinished cheeseburger and open the lid on that.

I never worry that all hell will break loose. My concern is that only part of hell will break loose and be much harder to detect.

Cats are very tactile; they love to rub against your leg. If you own a cat, and you have a leg, you’ve got a happy cat.

“Oh boy oh boy! I’m rubbing against his leg! How I love his leg!”

If you have two legs, you’ve got yourself a party.

“Oh boy oh boy, two legs! Now I can do the figure eight.”

They love to do the figure eight: around one leg, in between, and then around the other.

“Oh boy oh boy, I’m doing the figure eight.”

He’ll rub against your legs even if you’re not there yet. You might be twenty feet down the hall. As soon as he sees you coming he starts walking sideways. He doesn’t want to miss a shot at your legs.

“Oh boy oh boy! Here he comes! Soon I’ll be doing the figure eight!”

Why is it that when the two main characters in an action movie have their big climactic fight it always turns out that both of them are really good fighters? Just once, wouldn’t you like to see a fight between two leading male characters where one of them gets the shit completely beat out of him in about eight seconds? Especially the hero.

All music is the blues. All of it.

Do you realize that somewhere in the world there exists a person who qualifies as the worst doctor? If you took the time, by process of elimination you could actually determine the worst doctor in the world. And the funny part is knowing that someone has an appointment to see him tomorrow.

I don’t worry about the little things. Bees, threes, whales, snails: I don’t worry about them. I think we’re part of a much greater wisdom, greater than we will ever understand. A higher order. Call it what you like. I call it The Big Electron.

Whoaaaa….

The Big Electron.

It doesn’t punish, it doesn’t reward, and it doesn’t judge. It just is. And so are we, for a little while.

Thanks for the memories, George.

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Dustin

UPDATED below.

As long as I’m writing about high school reminiscences, I remembered a few days ago that a sad anniversary came and went this past April. I don’t remember the exact date, and I’m not even entirely sure it was in April and not May, but I’m fairly certain on that score. Anyway, it’s been twenty years since Dustin Jae Fleming died.

That name very likely means nothing at all to those reading this. Dustin would have graduated in the Allegany Central School Class of 1988, one year ahead of me. Instead he was killed in a car crash two months before he would have “entered the real world”. I don’t remember all of the particulars, but he was out with some friends at night, and the car was going a bit too fast on a two-lane road that runs along the Allegany River in Olean, NY. I seem to recall that the car hit one tree, “became airborne” in the horrible parlance of accident reports, and then came to rest against a second tree, upside down. I don’t remember if alcohol was involved, nor do I remember if Dustin was thrown from the car or crushed to death. Maybe I never knew those things at all.

Dustin was the musician of the class of ’88. His big thing was the guitar; he was our school’s “kid with his own rock band”, and from all reports, he was actually a pretty good guitar player. I only heard him play once, in a “concert” that took place in the parking lot behind the school during homecoming week. I remember thinking he was OK, although I found it hard to judge him because he did a string of songs I don’t particularly care for: “Twist and Shout”, “Talk Dirty to Me”. (Of all 80s hair bands, Poison was surely the worst.)

Dustin was extremely popular, virtually beloved by everybody. I genuinely don’t recall anyone else in high school, and possibly college either, who was as beloved as he was. I didn’t know him personally at all, but I will admit that I was rather in awe of his ability to be friends with anyone with a pulse. It was really pretty uncanny: Dustin Fleming was the kid to whom cliques not only didn’t matter, they didn’t even exist in his mind, from what I could see. In the space of sixty seconds walking down the hall, he’d joke with the school quarterback and the science brain in rapid succession, and flirt with three different girls while doing it. I was completely baffled by him. His girlfriend that year was a very beautiful exchange student from somewhere in Scandinavia.

On the last day he was alive, Dustin was present at a meeting I attended. The Social Studies department was making arrangements for the next year’s senior class – my class – to participate in some kind of Civics program that involved weekly treks to the county seat. (I think it was a mock legislature or something of that nature.) Dustin was there was one of that year’s participants. I doubt I’d remember this at all if he hadn’t died that night, but he casually sat on the radiator against the windows, leaning back against a cinderblock pillar. He was wearing a long-sleeve white t-shirt with some band logo on it. (Or maybe it wasn’t a band.) He didn’t say much during that meeting; he just nodded and laughed occasionally.

The next morning, I was getting ready for school myself. We had the living room teevee tuned to the Today Show; at that time the Today Show would break away for about six minutes at the bottom of each hour so local stations could do weather and run down any big local news stories. (Maybe they still do this; I haven’t watched the Today Show in years.) The guy on Channel 2 from Buffalo came on and said that the day would be warm and springlike, that someone in Buffalo had been arrested for something or other, that something else had happened someplace else, and that a fatal accident in the “town of Olean” had claimed a teenager. He gave a few details of the accident, and then the words: “Seventeen-year-old Dustin Fleming was killed.” I remember exclaiming “What?!”, just as my mother came out from her bedroom where she’d had the same station on and asked if I knew a Dustin Fleming.

That whole day was the most surreal day of my entire grade school career, and my grade school career spanned six schools. People everywhere were openly sobbing, or randomly breaking down at odd moments. I remember that they brought in grief counselors – or, I think they did. Basically the entire school shut down for the day; I don’t think a single lesson got taught in a single classroom in any grade. Our principal, who had only been in that position for less than a year after many years teaching biology, looked when I saw him like he was about to throw up. (It frankly wouldn’t surprise me if he did.) At every class I attended, every teacher basically said: Talk about him, or anything you want. If you need to go down to the auditorium (where the counselors were), go ahead. Do what you need to do. I was sitting in my history class reading when I glanced up to see my teacher go out into the hall, and when I shifted forward to see where he’d gone, I saw him tightly embracing a female student, who then turned around. It was Dustin’s younger sister. (I don’t remember her name.) How on Earth she came to school that day, I never understood until the day Little Quinn died and I went into The Store because I had to see the people I knew.

For me, the day after Dustin’s death was a quiet day that I spent more as an observer than as a participant. I hadn’t known him at all, as I noted to the one member of the senior class that I felt comfortable mentioning him to. That was a girl I quite liked at the time (the poor girl I’d inadvertently gotten in trouble a year before in trig class), although for some reason I never worked up the guts to ask her out. I asked her how she was doing, and she replied, “I’m awful.”

“I never knew him,” I replied.

“He was a great guy,” she said.

“He must have been,” I said. And then I walked away.

Dustin’s funeral was a few days after that, during the next week, if I remember rightly. I didn’t go, but at the time I did a lot of bike riding around town, and on more than a few occasions I rode to the St. Bonaventure cemetery to see his grave. It was covered with flowers and notes and prayer beads; the stone – graven with his name, his dates, and a picture of an electric guitar – arrived a month or so later. There was only one time when I was there that someone else came by. I didn’t even hear her coming until she started crying, and then I glanced over. It was his other younger sister. I think she was maybe ten or eleven at the time. I didn’t have the faintest idea what to say, and by that time I’d learned that when one has no idea what to say it’s best to say nothing at all, so that’s what I did. I quietly turned and left so Dustin’s little sister could pay respects in private. (I don’t remember if he had any siblings other than the two younger sisters.)

So why am I thinking about Dustin Jae Fleming now? Probably because of that number: twenty years. He’s been gone three more years than he lived. Twenty years is a weird stretch of time; Dustin’s death isn’t one of those events that feels like it was twenty years ago, and I have to actually work the sum in my head (2008 – 1988 = yup, twenty years) to realize that’s how long it’s been. I remember fewer and fewer names from high school as the time passes from those days to these, but Dustin Fleming’s is a name I’m not likely to forget. And I’m one who didn’t know him. I imagine those who did think of him often and wonder what might have been had he not perished in that car.

Anyway, I just figured that Dustin deserved a blog post.

UPDATE, 17 June 2010:

For those coming here via the link I put on the Facebook page remembering Dustin’s life, welcome. As I noted over there, and as can be seen by the date above, I wrote this back in 2008, before I joined Facebook and started reconnecting with a lot of folks from Allegany. While a lot of old high school friends stay connected after graduation, my own life took a different course, and since graduation in 1989, I’ve had very little contact with folks from ACS. The reconnections, “virtual” as they may be, have been wonderful and I’ve found myself thrilled and amazed to see what has become of so many people whose names I couldn’t remember when I wrote this post, but whose pictures I can now see again on Facebook and elsewhere.

I’ve never been one to engage in “regrets”; my view is that we make mistakes so we can grow and learn, and that every thing I’ve done wrong was an opportunity to get something right somewhere down the line. But dammit, I sure wish I’d have taken time to get to know Dustin.

-KS

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