the smedley log - suburban scrawl

Stowaway Ophelia

It was another Tuesday night open mic at the Point in Bryn Mawr, circa 2000-2001. A collegiate trio ambled up to the slightly elevated stage. Two guys and a girl with two guitars and a violin. The girl sang and played one of the six-strings for a Shakespeare-themed, brokenhearted love song. Her voice recalled the soothing tones of a mother in mid-lullabye.

I was so captivated by the sound I had to find them after they performed. They had a compact disc, which I paid for as I paid my compliments. The trio went by the name Ellipsis, which I thought was cute, especially when coupled with a CD titled And so on… .

The song they performed also piqued my interest because of a longtime fascination with Shakespeare and, more specifically, with the Hamlet scene from which some of the imagery in the song was lifted. The song, called “Stowaway Ophelia”, used the phrase “the more deceived” from a passage in Act 3, Scene 1 of Hamlet. Personally, I like to call it the “nunnery” scene. [Read more →]

Dirty old man

The pretty brown-haired girl across the way keeps looking at me and smiling. [Read more →]

Lessons from the seventh row

“I’m thinking of a word that has been knocked up and over-used.
You could say it’s lost all meaning from so much abuse.”
-Over the Rhine

First the girl.

She was eternally sunny, like the summer afternoon I made her acquaintance on a rural hillside. She was driven by passion, but still slightly guarded. She noticed things that other people didn’t, and she wrote them down – she said it was just to remember. As opposed to me. I wrote things down partly to remember, but also to exhaust the mental faucet that ran forever in my head (- if they were the demons, writing them down was a sort of exorcism).

She wove craft bracelets and necklaces, she wore pants referred to as “clam diggers” and she re-animated crinkled straw wrappers with a drop of soda while sitting in the seventh row of any given movie theater.

I thought she was a distraction, but she became a friend. One that would weave in and out of my life for the next half of it. [Read more →]

‘Til the world caves in

It was always like her to drop a bomb on me and run.

The first time it was the abortion she’d had before we met. Then a few months later, it was the ex who pushed her around. (She was ever careful not to say he hit her, because in her mind, there was a difference.) And the night we finally ended, she told me how she’d just figured out it all went back to when she was eight and her uncle used to babysit her, among other things he’d done that she hadn’t felt comfortable telling me until our world was crumbling around us.

[Read more →]

Old City Twin

(Warning—this is a repeat entry. If you are offended by such things please look away, but if you weren’t reading this blog in April, 2004, chances are it’ll be new to you. For more posts from my old story archive, please click here.)

We met in front of the north face of City Hall that day. It was late January, but not very cold. We decided to have lunch at the Reading Terminal Market. While we ate and talked, she combed over the movie listings for a decent matinee. There were several playing that I would have been okay with seeing, but she spotted the new Julia Roberts movie, Sleeping with the Enemy, playing in Old City.

Our preferred show time wasn’t for another hour, so we settled on a leisurely stroll of fifteen city blocks or so, east on Market to Second, then over a couple blocks south to the AMC just a stone’s throw from Penn’s Landing. We bought tickets, popcorn and soda, then meandered into the theater with about ten minutes to spare.

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Oh, you’re probably thinking of Greg

In my previous post referencing some of my stranger weekend experiences, I was intrigued by the fact that anyone actually responded to the “mistaken identity” idea. I’m almost over the weekend goings-on, now that it’s Tuesday, but some of it still lingers.

To continue on the mistaken identity theme, in a slightly different direction though, I have yet another story to tell. It’s from about eleven years ago. I got hired for a part time job in the circulation department at the local newspaper. It was extremely lower level management, the kind that doesn’t insulate you from having to wake up at four in the morning, or earlier.

On the day I was hired, my new boss gave me the orientation tour, and on the way around the office that morning she kept commenting back and forth with the others in the office about how much I resembled “Greg.” They seemed truly amazed by it, though I couldn’t believe it was as astounding as they were making it out to be. That was until about the second week on the job. It was early on Monday morning, and I was arriving at the office around 4:30 a.m.

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The frozen spoils

A work colleague of mine mentioned last night that she’s going to watch her son’s soccer game today; a tidbit that seemed to arise mostly because she was fretting that she hadn’t yet found him a pair of socks to hold up his shin guards.

Ah, youth soccer… the memories come flooding back to me. I was eight years old when I attended my first organized soccer practice. It was an in-house league; all the games were played out behind Walter Miller Elementary School, and I was #7 on a team sponsored by Gus’ 7-Eleven. Gus was our coach, and his 7-Eleven franchise was located less than a quarter mile up the road (it’s since been made into a commercial duplex of sorts, split right up the middle, hosting both a news dealer and a check cashing joint). After games, he’d often treat the whole team to Slurpee’s.

Those were the days.
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One strange cat

When I was younger (like childhood younger) I remember this cat we had at home. It was my sister’s cat, and her name was Misty (the cat, not my sister).

Misty had a tendency, especially on warm summer days, to seek shade under the right rear fender of my father’s ‘69 VW Beetle. I guess it made sense, except that as her age increased, her alertness seemed to decrease somewhat, so there were risks in taking naps on top of the rear wheel of the car. One of those risks, you might guess, was that the car would start moving and she would be rolled off the wheel and run over.

Now, this didn’t seem too likely, and there were all sorts of reasons why. One is that the rear wheel well of a 1969 VW Beetle resides adjacent to the engine compartment, which, even when one isn’t sleeping in the wheel well, is not a quiet place. Given the combination of a noisy horizontally-opposed engine and a cat’s, um, cat-like reflexes, it would seem unrealistic to expect a cat to sleep through the starting of the car’s engine, let alone to remain in her stupor long enough to be flung underneath the wheel of the car as it rolled backward.

Unlikely? Yes—but nonetheless, this is what happened. My father started the car, shifted into reverse and slowly started backing. And then we all felt that strange bump where we were reasonably sure no bump should’ve been.
[Read more →]

The legend of Smedley (revisited)

I had told the story of Smedley a few days ago in one of the posts that got accidentally deleted. It was a story I felt needed to be retold, if only to acknowledge the inspiration that was given to me by an old school chum.

His story begins in the September of my eighth grade year at an unnamed parochial (read that “Christian”) school. Smedley was different from other kids. Smedley wasn’t born in the sterility of a maternity ward. He wasn’t even born in a cab or ambulance on the way to the hospital. No, nothing that happened in his life was what I would call normal. You see, Smedley was born in the first few minutes of our eighth grade physical science class.

We had a physical science teacher who was a little like a substitute teacher. You know the way kids mess with a substitute? Well, this guy was like a sub, but better, because he was there everyday—almost begging us to screw with his head.

In the parochial school we attended, it was not uncommon for a teacher to begin a class period by saying a prayer. Some of the teachers would even ask the students if there were any special concerns that needed mention in the prayer. The poor permanent sub who taught physical science was one of these teachers. And one day, early in the school year, as he solicited prayer requests, one of my classmates (I’ll call him Pat) raised his hand.

Pat proceeded to tell us all about his friend from the neighborhood, Smedley, who had been involved in a freak accident and was now in the hospital, awaiting an emergency kidney transplant (or something to that effect). Were it not for the beginnings of a smile forming on Pat’s lips as the teacher sympathetically listened, some of us in the class might have believed the story also. But the teacher seemed to buy the whole thing.

As days went by, the science teacher would ask Pat for updates on Smedley, which Pat would willingly supply. As the stories got stranger, we in the class had more difficulty suppressing our laughter. At one point, the teacher scolded a few students for laughing at such a serious matter, but he never scolded Pat for the fantastic stories he was telling. To Pat’s credit, he got better at selling the stories as he told more of them. One of Smedley’s unfortunate incidents involved a transplant surgeon leaving a scalpel inside of him.

Thinking back, it was probably not that funny, at least the laughs were mostly in poor taste, but that’s what often happens with a roomful of thirteen-year-old’s. To our knowledge, the science teacher, who left the school after that one year, never caught on; but then, that may have just been the faulty perspective of our naïveté.

But Smedley isn’t just important for the myriad injuries and illnesses he suffered. He shares a common thread with my first public poetry display. For the very young man who had breathed life into Smedley’s myth was also instrumental in helping me “get published” for the first time, as a junior high”poet.”

This event sprang from a short verse I had scribbled in a study hall. The subject of my rhyme was a girl in our class who was quite unpopular, and the poem was fairly mean towards her. Of course, I never intended for anyone to read it; I was just bored at the time.

But my buddy Pat changed all that. He caught a glimpse of the derogatory little limerick, and instantly saw potential, so he confiscated it. I was mildly shocked to later find my poem posted on the bulletin board of our homeroom, from which it became a short-lived favorite of most of my classmates—until our teacher discovered it, and the handwriting was soon recognized as mine.

The funny thing is, I had gotten in trouble during my school years, but I didn’t really get into trouble for this particular escapade. But I remember it better than most others. The principal only gave me a lecture about how I was making poor use of my ability (he also made me apologize to the girl who was the subject of the poem). And I remember feeling bad about it for a while.

To this day, I think about that episode, and I wonder about that girl. I often wonder if she remembers that poem, or if it just blends into the countless assaults I know she suffered at the hands of her classmates. I know I saw her in the mall years ago, with a young child. I almost said something to her, but I didn’t.

I wondered if all the slings and arrows had faded into her subconscious, where she might prefer to leave them—unstirred by an impromptu greeting from someone who had once been part of the assault.

I hoped that her world had changed, that the child I saw by her side was part of a happier life than the one a bunch of junior high students had done their best to ruin. (-It was around this point in my life that I first studied Richard Wilbur’s poem “The Writer,” which may have had something to do with my philosophical thoughts at the time.)

This is more than I had intended to write, so I’m not too sure where this is headed now. Perhaps I meant to declare this set of memories as a sort of “rainbow” reminder—the promise that I will never again (attempt to) destroy someone with poetry.

But that just sounds silly…

What My Father Taught Me

“I talk and talk and talk, and I haven’t taught people in 50 years what my father taught by example in one week.”
-Mario Cuomo

Things are not always what they seem. Remember this as you travel life’s pathways, and even as you choose them. I will always remember one particular occurrence in reference to these words of wisdom. I was a teenager, sentenced to help my father, along with a crew of about a half-dozen men from our church, as we spent a Saturday afternoon fixing a few things around the church.

The men were mulling several topics of conversation, most of them too adult for me to care. On one particular discussion, my father, who tends not to talk as much as some people do, interjected a comment that the other men found enlightening. A few minutes later, as my father was off retrieving a tool from the car, one of the other men made a comment about my father to this effect: “You know, he’s pretty smart for a factory worker.”

My father spent the better part of his livelihood working in a union machine shop, and to most of these men, that must have seemed like working in a factory. After all, the other men besides my father were working in executive positions for some major companies like GM and Boeing; they drove brand new full-size, if not luxury, cars. My father and I showed up that Saturday in a beat-up Chevy Nova. I’m sure to the man who made this remark, it must have been something of a mild shock to hear intelligent commentary from someone with my father’s humble appearance.

My father, who had graduated 9th in a high school class of over 300; the same man who graduated almost as close to the top of his class in college, and then taught high school for a couple years before deciding he preferred to work with his hands. I don’t know exactly what some of these men thought of him, but what I had already learned about my father led me to believe he may have been the most intelligent person in the group that day.

Certainly, in my own experience since that day, I have come across many people who are much more cerebrally gifted than their job description might require or suggest. I have come across “factory” workers with MBA’s and law degrees, and the only reasons they chose work that was so “beneath” their academic credentials was that they enjoyed it more than working as executives or lawyers. And I’ve even met people of obvious intelligence in such working conditions, but with no impressive academic honors to speak of.

To flip the coin, I’ve also encountered corporate environments where people are hired or advanced based solely on academic credentials, without any serious thought as to whether the job candidate can think critically, or in some cases, even use simple reasoning skills.

Thinking back, I tend to believe my father would have been a fairly intelligent man even if he hadn’t honed his skills in the formal setting of a high school or four-year university. I can always seem to remember him reading or doing word or logic puzzles in his spare time, whatever spare time he didn’t spend on helping people around him. He didn’t concentrate on projecting a prestigious image to those around him. I remember him chafing as my mother practically had to drag him to the dealership where they ended up buying their first new car in almost 30 years. He simply never seemed to care about impressing people with outward appearances. It’s a trait of his that I’d like to emulate more effectively. As I become incrementally older, I see a quiet genius in the example he set. He didn’t concern himself with style, or self-promotion. As I’ve observed in his life, you’ll impress enough people by living right that you won’t have to worry about vindicating yourself in the eyes of fools.

…but back to that sweaty Saturday afternoon behind the church:

In the few brief moments between the ill-informed comment about my father being “pretty smart for a factory worker” and my father’s return from the car, another one of the men who had known my father for many years said, “Some of the smartest people in the world wouldn’t be caught dead going to work in a suit and tie.”—a comment that I thought was solely for my benefit at the time, which I later learned to be truer than most people probably think.

I guess that’s what comes to my mind when I think of the old axiom about judging a book by its cover. There’s a lot to be gleaned from sources that fewer and fewer people tend to notice. If we look closely enough, we sometimes find that the books with the plainest, most ragged covers are the ones most worth reading.