The SOUTH ORANGE COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE DISTRICT —
"[The] blog he developed was something that made the district better." - Tim Jemal, SOCCCD BoT President, 7/24/23
We assemble the silver tree,
our translated lives,
its luminous branches,
numbered to fit into its body.
place its metallic roots
to decorate our first Christmas.
Mother finds herself
opening, closing the Red Cross box
she will carry into 1976
like an unwanted door prize,
a timepiece, a stubborn fact,
an emblem of exile measuring our days,
marked by the moment of our departure,
our lives no longer arranged.
Somewhere,
there is a photograph,
a Polaroid Mother cannot remember was ever taken:
I am sitting under Tia Tere’s Christmas tree,
her first apartment in this, our new world:
my sisters by my side,
I wear a white dress, black boots,
an eight-year-old’s resignation;
Mae and Mitzy, age four,
wear red and white snowflake sweaters and identical smiles,
on this, our first Christmas,
away from ourselves.
The future unreal, unmade,
Mother will cry into the new year
with Lidia and Emerito,
our elderly downstairs neighbors,
who realize what we are too young to understand:
Even a map cannot show you
the way back to a place
that no longer exists.
Been out there in soaked Orange County, but I finally got home and I took a break (of the laptop variety), looking for something that led me to something else that somehow landed me on a webpage for my goddam high school graduating class.
Nameless High, 1973. The Spartans.
Uh-oh.
Now, I’m not the kind to think about those ridiculous days of half-bakery, when we flailed and lunged about with gestures, not yet comprehending what it means to be a person. Remember high school? It’s like remembering the stages of one’s wretched bout with measles, after recovery. Why?
After maybe 1975, I had no contact with any of my high school crowd (though I didn’t have a crowd really; just a few friends and acquaintances unified only by my random wanderings).
My BF: from
Avalon to oblivion
I briefly kept in touch with my best friend—we had taken an ill-fated trip to Catalina Island literally the day after high school graduation, hiking for miles from the south end to the Isthmus. (The adventure was so dismal and ill-conceived that it likely destroyed our friendship.) He lived with his staunchly Republican family on a eucalyptus-lined street in the hills at the edge of the Santa Anas, and his next-door neighbor, a hundred yards up the road, was the pop singer Jose Feliciano. (His biggest hit was a cover of the Doors’ “Light My Fire.”)
My chum and I used to look over at his house and say, “It doesn’t make any difference where he lives, ‘cause he’s blind.”
“Yeah, he may as well live here.”
I’d occasionally drive by Jose’s house, glancing through his locked gate and up to his shuttered windows. But I never did see anything. There was a kind of symmetry in our relationship; he couldn’t see me and I never saw him.
R.I.P.
Anyway, I found that website for the Nameless High class of ’73, and, against my better judgment (I don’t actually have different grades), I looked at the page of “classmates,” organized by the first letter of our surnames.
I hit upon the letter “H.” I recognized a friend: Rusty Heaps. (That really was his name. He was a Mormon.) He was a bit of a galoot, but, as youngsters, we were Boy Scouts together, so I knew him whether I liked it or not.
Some classmates had provided information beyond their name and graduation photo. For instance, Rusty wrote:
“Hi all. I've been living in Arizona since 1987. I've been happily married since 1982, have two kids, one in high school, the other in grade school. I work as a news reporter for radio, for a company called XXXX. My memory of most of my classmates is shot to hell, but contact me if you remember me, maybe it'll bring it back. See Ya.”
The name, if not the
face, triggers something
akin to memories.
R.I.P.
Ah yes. Rusty fucking Heaps.
I saw something even more disturbing. One of my former classmates—I vaguely remembered her—had died. Next to her name, it said
“I am sorry to inform you, XX is no longer with us, [sic] she has passed away.”
I don’t know why, but this startled me. There was her picture: a cute little seventeen-year-old girl (the year of her death was not provided). Dead.
I looked further. I remembered lots of names, but few faces. When I did remember faces, I didn’t so much remember anything as feel a vague stirring. There is some subterranean patch of Roy Bauer’s mind that flinches (or otherwise emotes) at these images, even after thirty-seven years.
Articulate; dead
One kid—I recognized him immediately—was briefly a friend. I recall his peculiarly precise enunciation of words and his somewhat advanced vocabulary. (This capacity, in his case, didn’t seem to correspond to academic achievement.) He was a bit of a nerd, but he was also thoughtful and distinctly cheerful. I recall visiting him at his home, not far from my best friend’s house. We stood in his front yard and spoke of literature and philosophy. He made fun of my pronunciation of the word “absurd.” “Ubzzerd,” he said, mockingly. We laughed.
He died in 1998. Don’t know how or why.
Another former best friend (circa 7th grade), the temporarily popular Bob, had a girlfriend who was devastatingly beautiful. I was strictly on the periphery of their relationship, a nonentity to her (I was sure). But I never forgot her striking beauty and, as it happens, she lived along my way to school, and so I saw her now and again. The years passed, but I was too shy ever to speak to her. She was beyond reach. My heart breaks to think about it.
Beyond reach
By the time of high school, her beauty and elegance put her several classes beyond any of the rest of us. (Or so it seemed to me from afar.) I never knew what became of her. I forgot her.
But, today, there she was, frozen in time, as beautiful as ever. Like Rusty, she provided information about her subsequent adult life. She had become a professional ballerina. She started a dance school. She married some asshole and had two girls. With her girls now pursuing important dance careers, she’s thinking of getting into real estate.
I was devastated. (Don’t ask me how or why.)
But she wasn’t dead. I was relieved.
I came upon many former friends who are now dead. I was beginning to feel like a bad luck charm.
The website provided a “memorial” page with twenty-eight dead “kids.” (1998 was an especially bad year.)
Good Lord! I knew half of them!
The Roy of '73
At the bottom of the “memorial” page, it said
If you know of someone from our Class that you would like to add to this page, email me at….
That made me laugh.
A few of my former colleagues described midlife crises. They seemed embarrassed about them. It occurred to me that I have a midlife crisis every goddam morning. It’s been that way for decades, so it would never occur to me to mention the dang things.
* * *
It’s easy to feel gloomy about one’s life, especially as one reviews one’s dismal distant past, acutely aware of missed opportunities, failures of appreciation, youthful idiocy, and all the rest.
But, really, that’s foolish, for, if we are lucky, there will be a time, well into the future, when we will look back at this time, right now, with similar longings.
—But no. We can take the opportunities that we have now!
Take them. Take them.
Or die.
Again.
…On this morning 40 years ago, hippies from all over California and beyond were massing in caravans that lined for miles on Pacific Coast Highway in both directions. They were gathering for a rock concert that originally had been billed as a "birthday party for Jesus" but which quickly became known as either the "Christmas Happening" or "The Great Happening." The concert, which was held in a grassy bowl at the top of Laguna Canyon known as Sycamore Flats, began on Christmas Day and ended three days later when hundreds of police officers and sheriff's deputies, who had already blocked off the town with barricades, forced stragglers onto buses and used bulldozers to bury everything left behind….
Laguna on Acid:The Great Hippie Christmas Invasion of 1970(OC Weekly)
Thirty-three years into its voyage, the solar wind speed around Voyager 1 has dropped to zero as the space-hardened craft nears a milestone in its journey out of the solar system . . . Leaving the solar system, [chief scientist Edward Stone] says, will be "a milestone in human activity." Both Voyagers will likely outlive Earth, he notes. When, billions of years from now, the sun swells into a red giant, the Voyagers, albeit with their radioactive generators long exhausted and instruments frozen, will continue to wend their lonely ways through interstellar space and remain on course for the unknown, bearing a record disk and images of 20th-century Earth, music from many of its cultures, and greetings in dozens of its languages. They may be the only evidence the human race ever existed.
Maybe it’s just me, but among the good things in life are inexplicably cool gizmos.
Consider these gadgets:
Tiny brass brushes. Way cool. –I know: pipe cleaners. Whatever. I think of them as tiny brass brushes, so shuddup.
Check out the fabulous bear bottle opener. That’s right. You screw it on the wall and then you open bottles with it. On that bear’s teeth.
So cool.
OK, the creamer thingy doesn’t really belong, though it is classic. (There’s no free play in the hinge!) And the hands clip: OK, another misstep. Don't know where that came from.
I dunno where that little bar of fancy soap came from. It smells good. I like that I don’t know where it came from. Who gave it to me? Hmmmm....
The gizmo in back is a portable cooling fan, battery powered. I gave it to my niece, who promptly broke it and handed it back to me. I just stuck some floppy Scotch Tape there and it works. Really.
Now check out this set of doohickeys:
I got all these toy toolwinkels at the local Home Depot a few days ago. Miniature vice grips! A tiny tape measure! A “pocket caliper”! (Don't really know what that is, but it's cool.)
A "construction pencil" w/ sharpner!
What could be better! I'm giving these to my nephew Adam for Christmas. Plus an R/C helicopter.
One more:
I found this tiny VW Beetle w/ trailer at an R/C shop in Lake Forest (near City Hall, next to a thrift shop). It even has a tiny engine, slightly smaller than the real thing, but more powerful! Very cool. Adam will love it.
(If he's anything like me. And he is.)
My bear teeth bottle opener
One of my classic bottle openers
My old phone. Heavier than you'd think. People
used to commit homicide with these things
My old desk lamp. Nice, eh?
Don't agree?
Who can explain a difference in intuitions?
Who can explain the magic of an object?
The universe is full of brute facts,
some about us and what we perceive.
I see magic. You don't?
Oh well.
Brute
Fact
