EXTEMPORANEOUS WRITING - "Untitled"

first comment: a life event - Star Chicaderis - Bar Mitzvah
second comment: a well-known book (hopefully which I know) - Casey Fogle - Green Eggs & Ham
third comment: a cartoon or cartoon character - Bill Duggan - Daffy Duck
fourth comment: a texture - Jim Thompson - stubbly
fifth comment: based on the above, the title of the piece should be: ___________ -(no response)

UNTITLED

-or-

First Train Out of Toyland

 

Dear Grandma,

Hi. How are you? I am fine. It would be much easier and much faster for me to write to you if you had email, but dad keeps saying, “that’s not going to happen,” so I guess I’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way. I hope you don’t mind if I type everything rather than writing it out in my own handwriting, but my hand always gets really cramped up if I have to write more than a couple of paragraphs, and besides, my penmanship is so lousy anyway that you probably wouldn’t be able to read a thing. Plus, I am using a really clear font and making it bigger than usual because I know that sometimes you have a hard time seeing things. Dad keeps saying that you‘re “blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other one!” , but I tell him that that’s not funny and besides you can see out of both eyes, just not very well. And I don’t think the glasses you wear look anything like “Coke bottles”, no matter what he says. Your glasses are nice because they make your eyes, which are really pretty, even prettier because they make them look much, much bigger.
Anyway, I wanted to write to you and tell you all about the exciting weekend I just had. I don’t know if you remember my friend Sam from grade school. He used to live at the end of our block on Pleasant Street. Anyway, Sam is Jewish, and it was his Bar Mitzvah last weekend, and I was invited to go. But there’s much more to it than just that, because I got to take the Amtrak down to Washington, DC and everything, all by myself, which was pretty cool.

Sam and I have been really good friends since kindergarten or first grade. His last name begins with “G”, just like ours, so our desks were always right near each other in class, and we were always next to one another in line and stuff like that. The fact that his family is Jewish and our family isn’t never really came up, except that his family celebrated different holidays than we did, and a couple of times Sam missed Cub Scouts if it was on a Friday. Sam always said that his family was “Reform” Jews, which I guess meant that they weren’t too strict about religion. I figured that it was pretty much the same as “fallen” was for Christians, since that’s what Dad always says we are.

Sam and his family moved away though, about a year and a half ago. His dad got some kind of job with the government, so they had to move down to DC. It seems like it’s not that big of a deal; Mom says that Washington is only 50 miles away from us here in Baltimore, but for some reason I haven’t even seen Sam once since they moved. So I was really excited when I got a really fancy invitation in the mail a couple of months ago when they requested the honour of my presence at Sam’s Bar Mitzvah. Mom made some phone calls, and as soon as she heard that I could stay overnight at Sam’s house, she said I could go, and that she was even going to let me make the trip all by myself. I was really excited, but instead of just picking up the phone and calling Sam, which is what I really wanted to do, Mom said I had to fill out the little reply card that was inside the invitation, and check off the part that said I was delighted to attend, and mail it back to “Master Samuel Goldman”. It took forever and it seemed like an awful lot of trouble, but Mom said that was how it was supposed to be done. So I was really happy when Sam finally called like a week later and he said he was glad that I was coming.

The first thing I had to do was find out exactly what a Bar Mitzvah is. I looked on the internet, and I found out that basically it is a ceremony in the Jewish religion that takes place when a boy or girl turns 13. If it is a girl, they call it a “Bat” Mitzvah. Anyway, according to that religion, this is the point when the young person is entering into adulthood. So, it seemed I was going to go and help my friend become a man. Sounded OK to me.

Anyway, Sam’s Bar Mitzvah was on a Saturday, so I got excused from class on Friday so I could take the train down to Washington. When I came home from school on Thursday, Mom told me that she had packed all my clothes for the trip.

“The suitcase is on your bed,” she said. “Go take a look and make sure you have everything you need.”

“OK,” I said, and I took the stairs two at a time because this is my first big trip and I was kind of excited to make sure everything was going to be right. I got to my bedroom and opened the door. There, in the center of my bed, sat my little sister’s Hannah Montana suitcase. My mother had stuck a piece of masking tape over the word “Hannah” and written “Joey G.” on it in magic marker, so at first glance the bag look like it belonged to a teenage girl named Joey G. Montana.

Oh my god, she didn’t really think I was going to get on a real Amtrak train dragging a Hannah Montana suitcase along behind me, did she?

I ran downstairs.

“Mom!” I yelled, “Where’s my suitcase?”
“You don’t have a suitcase, dear,” she said, as if there was absolutely nothing wrong here, “You’ve never been anywhere.”

“Well, neither has Becky!” I answered, as if that would actually make a difference.

“Yes she has,” said Mom, “she went to that Campfire Girl thing last fall. Anyway, it will be fine. Nobody cares what’s on your suitcase.”

“You’re kidding, right?” I said. “Of course they care! I care! There is no way I’m going anywhere with that suitcase.”
“Well, we’ll just have to ask your father when he gets home,” Mom said, in a way which I knew that any further discussion would be pointless. I went upstairs and took everything out of the suitcase anyway, because even if Dad didn’t care, I was not giving in on this one. I would put my clothes in trash bags if I had to.

Luckily, I didn’t have to do that, because here is what happened when Dad got home from work that day:

I was in the den watching TV and I heard Dad come in through the kitchen door. They started having one of their “discussions”. I couldn’t hear the words they were saying but I could hear the tone of their voices and they both sounded a little irritated. Then I heard Dad’s steps as he went up to take a look in my bedroom, so I turned the TV down really low and sat by the door to try to hear what would happen next.

I heard him open my bedroom door, and I heard the little ‘click’ when he turned on the light. Then all I heard was my dad saying something like, “Oh. My. God,” and then busting a gut laughing. As he came back down the stairs, he said something like, “You’ll just never get it, sweetheart,” and he went right out into the garage.

The next thing I knew, Dad was calling me. “Joey!” he said, “Come and get this bag packed!”
The suitcase he had brought in was the one he uses sometimes to go on business trips and stuff. It is humongous; Dad says it’s the biggest size the airlines will allow without being “screwed with baggage fees”, whatever that means. It’s almost as tall as I am, but I don’t really care. It’s got wheels, and anything is better than Hannah Montana.

Anyway, I basically ended up just re-packing everything that Mom had picked out for me. She’s much better at that sort of thing than I am, just not so good at picking out luggage, I guess. I put some comic books and my Ipod in there along with my headphones. I still carry an Ipod, because my cell phone is only an old-fashioned flip phone and Mom and Dad say I can’t get an actual Smart Phone until I’m sixteen and only if I keep my grades up. I packed my cell phone, too; but even with all that stuff I had only filled like a tenth of that gigantic suitcase.

So, the next afternoon, there I was, walking into Penn Station in Baltimore, rolling this huge suitcase along behind me. I didn’t really mind, though. I thought that in a way it made me look kind of important, like people would see me and think, “That young man must be a real go-getter, he’s heading off somewhere for a long time, with that big suitcase,” or something.

Anyway, Mom kept looking at me all weepy-eyed for some reason, and saying stuff like, “Our little man” and “Soon, soon…” Finally, when they announced my train, she made me stop and she took my picture with the giant luggage, and then she burst out crying.

Dad just rolled his eyes. He looked at me and mouthed the words, “Go, Son,” so I turned around and followed the crowd down to the train.

Penn Station is a pretty cool old train station. Dad said that it had been “recently renovated”, but it still looked pretty old to me. The benches were wood instead of plastic and the lights and the doors and fixtures and things all looked like they were from the olden days. I could almost picture people way back, like in the 1920s or 30s, rushing off to their trains in their long coats and their hats and all in black and white.

Once I got on the train, though, there was nothing old-timey about it. I hadn’t really thought about what the inside of a train would look like. I guess I thought it would be kind of old-fashioned like the train station, like trains look in the movies and old reruns of “Wild, Wild West”. But in reality, they are all modern and no-nonsense, just row after row of identical seats and stuff like that. Kind of like a school bus, but with no driver in sight and a lot more plush, like a school bus for an ultra high-tech school for millionaire kids in Japan.

Anyway, I found a seat for myself. I was lucky, because I found two seats together and I didn’t have to sit next to anyone. The gigantic suitcase was too big to fit in the overhead storage thingy, but I was able to leave it at the front of the car, and I could see it from my seat. Good luck to whoever wanted to steal that thing.

Before long, the conductor came along to take my ticket. He stood there and looked at it for a minute, and then he said, “Unaccompanied minor.”

“Umm, yeah, I suppose,” I said. I mean, I guess that was me.

He stood there and looked at me over his glasses for a minute. It looked like he was trying to memorize me, what I was wearing, what I looked like, everything. Then he handed me an Amtrak card with his name and a cell phone number on it.

“Something happens, find me,” he said.

He really didn’t look like a very nice person and I hoped I would never have to call him, but I tucked the card into my pocket. “Thanks,“ I said. It felt good to know that at least one person on this train had my back, because for the first time in my life Mom and Dad weren’t around, and not even a teacher or babysitter or anything. I was pretty much on my own. At least for the hour-long train ride to DC.

Dad had told me to just “stay in your seat and shut the hell up” for the whole train ride, but after a while I got bored and decided to walk from one end of the train to the other. My seat was pretty far to the back of the train, so I stuck my earphones in my ears, even though they weren’t attached to anything and there was no music or anything. If you have earphones in your ears, you can act like you don’t hear people if they try to talk to you, and then you don’t look rude if you ignore them and walk away.

I walked all the way to the front of the train, and then turned around and walked back. This is when it got interesting, because walking this way, I could actually see the faces of all the people on the train, and what they were wearing, or reading, and who they were talking to, and stuff like that. I took my time as I went. There were people who looked rich and people who looked like they had everything they owned right there with them. There were people who looked happy to be going wherever they were going, and people who looked like they had been crying the whole way. There were families with kids and old people; and people wearing strange and beautiful clothes from places like India and Africa.

As I walked backwards through the train, I began to realize how, well, kind of sheltered my life has been so far, with Mom and Dad and my family. I began to realize exactly how much there is about the world that I don’t know. And I began to think about how once this train stopped and we all got off, how everyone would scatter and go their separate ways and live their lives, but for the moment we were all doing the same thing: riding this train. Africans, Jewish people, Fallen Christians like me, all heading in the same direction and just trying not to bump into one another when the train shifts. I guess in some ways that’s what life in the real world is like, or at least it should be.

Anyway, I got back to my seat eventually and it was only a few more minutes before we were in DC.

I was really relieved to see Sam and his parents in the station, because Union Station in Washington is huge and I really didn’t want to have to call that conductor guy from the train. I spotted Mr. and Mrs. Goldman first. I almost didn’t recognize Sam, because he has actually grown like an inch and a half since the last time I saw him. In a way, though, it doesn’t look quite right, like his arms and legs are growing at a different rate than the rest of his body. I don’t know, maybe it’s just my imagination.

Anyway, we drove out to their house, which isn’t actually in Washington, DC, but in Maryland, in a place called Chevy Chase. I thought that was funny because there is a movie actor whose name is Chevy Chase. I put the giant suitcase away up in Sam’s room, and that night they invited me to join in a huge family dinner they were having with all the aunts and uncles and cousins and everyone who had come in to town for the Bar Mitzvah.

Dinner was really nice. We all sat at one big table, instead of being split into the “kids’ table” and everyone else. I wasn’t sure what to expect, because I had never been to a Jewish family dinner before. But the food was really good, even though I had trouble pronouncing some of the names of what they were. Everyone was laughing and talking really loud, and most of the women were trying to get everyone to eat more food and kept spooning extra helpings onto everyone’s plates. The grown-ups were all hollering at each other from one end of the table to the other one, and most of the kids were either stuffing their faces with food or couldn’t wait until dinner was over. Basically, it was exactly the same as our family dinners, and we’re Italian. I guess people aren’t really all that different from one another, after all.

At one point, Sam’s big sister, Rachel, said something like, “Sam, have you warned Joey about Daffy?”

Mrs. Goldman shot her a look and nobody said a word, but I looked at Sam and saw that he couldn’t suppress a big grin.

Then one of the Aunts or Grandmothers said something like, “Ever been to a Jewish family dinner before, Joe?”

“No, ma’am,” I said, “but it’s been really nice.”

“What religion is your family?” she asked.

“No religion, ma’am. My mom’s family is Unitarian, and Mom just says they believe in everything. Dad was brought up Catholic, but he says he hasn’t been in a church since he was 15.”

“Why is that?” someone asked.

“I’m not really sure,” I said. “I’ve heard Dad a few times, saying stuff like, he had ‘issues’ with a priest when he was a teenager, but he won’t say much about it, at least not to me.”

For some reason the room went really quiet at that moment. The adults were all looking at each other and one of the older teenagers started to chuckle under his breath. I hoped I hadn’t said anything I wasn’t supposed to. People can be very touchy about religion.

Fortunately, one of the babies started bawling or something at that point, and everyone was able to go back to laughing and spilling gravy and hollering at one another.

Later that night, after the dinner was over and everyone had left, Sam and I were up in his room, trying to fall asleep. He was in his bed, and I got to sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor, which was pretty cool. We weren’t all that tired, and we spent a long time just talking to one another. We caught up on what had been going on since the Goldmans moved away, about school and people we knew and stuff like that. Sam told me that he was really, really nervous about the Bar Mitzvah the next day. Turns out he had to go to a special school and everything to get his Bar Mitzvah; he had to practically learn an entire new language and memorize prayers and songs and all these rituals and everything. I tried to reassure him and tell him he was going to be great, but in the back of my mind I kept thinking that if it was me, I’d probably be scared out of my mind and would just want to run and hide and call the whole thing off.

“Especially some of the prayers,” he said. “Sometimes I just forget what I’m supposed to be saying, and when I look down the Hebrew letters just look like nonsense to me.” I could tell he was really nervous about the whole thing. “And then, Daffy-”
“Who is ‘Daffy’?” I jumped in.

Sam looked at me and grinned again. “Oh my god, you cannot react!”

“What do you mean?” I said. “React to what?”
“Our Rabbi looks, acts, and sounds exactly like Daffy Duck.” 
A Rabbi is what Jewish people call a priest.

“You can not laugh when you see him. But you might want an umbrella for when he starts talking.”
“What? What are you talking about?” I asked.

“Every time he says a word with an ‘S’ in it, he sprays.”
“Oh my god. No way.”
“Way,” said Sam. “And I am not saying another word.”

At least I had gotten him to forget how nervous he was.

We talked for a while longer, but we were starting to get a little sleepy. Just before we fell asleep, though, Sam told me that I had actually taught him how to read.

“Yeah,” he said, “we were in kindergarten, in Miss Conway’s class, and she used to have all these books along one wall. One day you grabbed a copy of “Green Eggs and Ham” and we sat down at one of those little tables and you started reading it to me.

I liked it because it had my name in it,” he said, “and every day we would sit down together and you would say the words while I looked at the letters on the page. One day I recognized my name, ‘Sam’, there on the page, and then I figured out what other words were.

So you see, Joey,” he said, “You taught me how to read.”

“That’s cool,” I said, because it is.

A few minutes later, I heard Sam, nearly asleep. “I do not like them Sam, you see.

Not in a house. Not in a box.

Not with a mouse. Not with a fox.

I will not eat them here or there.

I do not like them anywhere!”

“You do not like green eggs and ham?” I answered, smiling.

“I do not like them, Sam-I-am,” he said, and we both drifted off to sleep.

The next day was the actual Bar Mitzvah.

We were rushing through the morning, but at one point, while we were getting ready, Sam called me into the bathroom. He was staring at himself in the mirror, and one hand was rubbing his chin. “Come here,” he said. “Do I feel, I dunno, stubbly- to you?”

I walked over and touched his chin. I guess it felt stubbly. I mean, I’m not really sure what stubbly actually feels like. I’ve felt my dad’s face when he hasn’t shaved for a few days, and Sam’s face didn’t feel anything like that. It might have felt more like my mom’s legs after she hasn’t felt like shaving them for a while.

“I don’t know,” I said to him. “I guess so.”

“I’m going to shave today, Joey,” he told me. “Part of becoming a man.”

He held up a razor which he had found in the shower. It was bright pink and decorated with flowers.

“Umm, do you know how to shave?” I asked him.

“Technically, no,” he said, “ but I’ve seen tons of guys shaving on TV and in commercials and stuff.”

“OK,” I said.

“I do feel stubbly,” he said, turning back to the mirror.

When he came out of the bathroom, half an hour later, he was pale, and he had about fifteen little pieces of tissue stuck all over his face. He was smiling from ear to ear.

We had to go to the church, which they call a synagogue. The Goldmans were all really nervous and running around shaking hands and saying hi to everybody and stuff. So, Mrs. Goldman introduced me to this girl named Mary Margaret O’Shaugnessy, probably because neither one of us if Jewish, and I guess she just expected the two of us to entertain ourselves and figure everything out.

I never really understood what people meant when they said things like somebody “looks Jewish.” I mean, how do you look like a religion? But when I met Mary Margaret, I finally understood, because Mary Margaret looks about as un-Jewish as anyone can look. She is fair, with pale red hair and freckles everywhere, and she wore this dress and these little white gloves that made her look like she had just come from Sunday school or First Communion. She was pretty nice, at least, and the two of us ended up getting a seat in the very back of the synagogue, along with some younger kids and some grown-ups who didn’t really “look Jewish” either, but who did look a little awkward and out of place. I had to wear a yarmulke, which is a tiny little hat that Jewish men wear. They had a big box to pick from if you didn’t have your own, so Mary Margaret helped pick one out for me that she said matched my tie, and then she had to pin it onto my head with a bobby pin. I liked wearing the yarmulke in a way, because even though it was just a little piece of cloth bobby pinned to my hair, it reminded me that I was in the presence of God and that I needed to be respectful and reverent, even though I had no idea what was happening around me.

The ceremony began, and I found it harder to be respectful and reverent as I began to realize who “Daffy” was. Even underneath his fancy robes and everything, I could see it. He was really skinny, and dressed all in black. He had huge feet which stuck out from beneath his robes in bright, almost yellow shoes. He had three locks of black hair which stood up from the top of his head like feathers. He had heavy-lidded, shifty eyes; and a protruding upper lip and a smirk which made him look as if he were up to, well, something. And when he started to speak- well, let’s just say that I found out that there are just as many ‘S’ words in the Jewish language as there are in English, and every once in a while, Sam had to stop and try to wipe off his face with his prayer shawl.

“Oh my god,” Mary Margaret said to me. “It’s…”

“I know,” I said to her, elbowing her in her ribs. “We cannot react. If we do, he might not allow Sam to enter adultery.”

“Okay,” she said, but every once in a while one or the other of us would start giggling.

Sam was doing really well up there, I guess, and I was really proud of him. He had to carry this huge scroll around and had to read prayers in Hebrew and chant and everything. Mary Margaret and I weren’t paying too much attention because neither one of us really knew exactly what was going on. At one point, though, while Sam was reading something in Hebrew from one of the giant scrolls, everything had gone quiet. Sam, it seems, had forgotten exactly what he was supposed to be saying, and looking down at the Hebrew alphabet wasn’t helping at all. I saw him looking around the room, looking, I guess, for some kind of help. There was still one piece of blood-soaked toilet paper stuck on his chin. He saw me, and we looked each other in the eye for a split second. He shrugged at me, and all I could do was shrug back, and smile.

“So I will eat them in a house,” Sam said, so quietly that he could barely be heard.

“And I will eat them with a mouse.”

He looked up now, and his voice was getting a little louder. “And I will eat them here and there. Say! I will eat them anywhere!”

Now he was looking right at me and smiling, while Daffy Duck shifted and tried to figure out what was happening. “I do so like green eggs and ham!”

I jumped right up from my seat. “Thank you! Thank you, Sam-I-am!” I shouted.

I had forgotten to be respectful and reverent. Rabbi Daffy looked like he was going to have a fit and Mrs. Goldman kept hiding her face in her hands like people you see on the news on “perp walks”. I didn’t know what to expect. But you know what happened, Grandma? People laughed. They laughed, and some of them clapped, and everybody looked like a huge weight had just been lifted off of their shoulders and relaxed a little bit. The Rabbi got Sam back on track with his prayers, which were just about over anyway. People realized that it’s not always the words and the prayers that are important, it’s everybody being together and seeing each other through all the different stages in their lives, and laughing at the stuff that's actually funny, even if it is inside a church or a synagogue or whatever.

After the synagogue we all got together for a party. It reminded me a lot of Aunt Peggy’s wedding: everybody was laughing and dancing and catching up on old times, and all the old people kept saying things like “Look how tall you are!” and “The last time I saw you, you were only this big!”. Except instead of a bride and a groom, there was Sam. I watched him for a while, as people shook his hand and gave him presents and stuff, and as I did, I thought to myself that yes, I could see it. My friend Sam was becoming a man. I wondered if I was, too.

So, I took the train home to Baltimore the next day, but by then I had done that already and the novelty had sort of worn off. By then it was just a boring, hour-long train ride, and I was glad I had brought my Ipod along for real this time.

Mom and Dad met me at the train station and we went home and life pretty much went back to normal after that. But not completely normal. In some small way, I feel like I took a step myself that weekend. Maybe a step closer to “becoming a man”, whatever that means.

But for now, I think I’ll just work on being 13. That seems to be enough.

Love you Grandma.

Love,
Joey