Riding the big yellow school bus back in time

Published 8/30/05

The yellow buses are back, rummaging through my neighborhood for schoolboys and schoolgirls. You know, sometimes I’m tempted to get in line, enter that folding door and climb the stairs to my past.

Remember how the bus would always take off before you could sit down?

Even though I accidentally ended up in an unwelcome lap a time or two, I’ve not found it necessary to suppress all my school bus memories. I rode buses to an elementary school in Phoenix, Thaddeus Stevens Elementary in Pittsburgh, Mooresville Elementary just south of Indianapolis, and William Henry Burkhart Elementary, Perry East Junior High and Southport High School on the south side of that same city. The only school to which I didn’t ride the bus was Spring Hill Elementary, also in Pittsburgh. That’s because the steep hillside staircases, originally built to take steel workers from their hillside homes into the city’s steel mills, were part of Pittsburgh’s first transit system. In other words, the stairs were the bus.

But until a little red VW Beetle fell into my hands in high school, I was a daily rider of the bouncing yellow bus.

Some school bus memories are so embarrassing, I can still feel them 45 years later. Like the time I peed my pants in first grade and rode home in a pool of humiliation. When the bus stopped at my street, I more or less backed off the bus. That day in Arizona school bus history, I think I could have made a case for using the emergency hatch in the back.

Remember the decibel level on those elementary school buses? A whole district worth of kids trying to outshout each other in their shrillest playground voices. That’s why the bus drivers, at least in my era, were blaring their bus radios by the time we reached junior high and high school. Anything, I suppose, to block out that cacophony of kids.

The hipper bus drivers turned on FM stations, and we floated to school on the music of the Stones, Janis Joplin, the Doors and the Who. Oddly enough, the bus is where I first heard the song “Magic Bus,” which I don’t think was about a trip to school.

When we really wanted to drive the bus driver mad, we’d sing together those songs word for word, ooh, ooh, magic bus, and drown out the music that was meant to drown out us. Yep, we were a bus full of merry pranksters.

But on many days, I was an observer and, I suppose, on my way to becoming a reporter. I was moved by the way kids who with the cool and confidence factors treated those who carried the Napoleon Dynamite gene. I finally wrote an editorial about the high school bus experience and how it can be terrifying for some. I recently found that editorial. Oh well, it’s the thought that counts, right?

Of course, some school bus memories are so sublime, I can feel them 35 years later. For example, during my junior year, I would watch for Rhonda who always climbed the bus stairs with way too many books. I’d scoot in and we’d squeeze three in a row. On days she wouldn’t see me and would land in another row, not even Janis Joplin could brighten my day. Then a really weird thing happened. Rhonda started looking for me. And when I think about Rhonda, and her short black hair and pink lipstick, I remember us laughing and talking all the way to school over brooding songs such as “Solitary Man” by Neil Diamond. Hmm. This must have been the AM radio bus driver. When I started driving that red VW Beetle, I offered Rhonda an escape from the bus and started picking her up every morning at 7:15 a.m. sharp. Then one morning, she looked at me quite seriously and said, “Could we pick up my boyfriend?” Sure, Rhonda, why not.

“Don’t know that I will but until I can find her
A girl who’ll stay and won’t play games behind me
I’ll be what I am, a solitary man”

Yeah, this is that time of year when I find myself kind of missing the bus. If nothing else, the yellow bus is a vehicle for a lot of fond boyhood flashbacks.

Research says a funny flick is a healthy flick

Published 8/23/05

A cardiovascular study performed at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and unveiled at the American College of Cardiology in Orlando has revealed a need for more movies starring Bill Murray and fewer flicks celebrating the dead, the living dead and the dead dead.

Okay, I’m giving my own spin to the research but I think Roger Ebert would give me 10 stars on this one.

The study, which was reported in medical journals but should have appeared in “Entertainment Weekly,” sent 20 healthy volunteers to the movies—that is, to the two movies that were showing at U of M’s School of Medicine. Apparently the one film was a real howler while the other was a stress-inducing thriller. While the flicks produced the expected laughter and nail biting from the test subjects, the study was more concerned with how the movies affected the viewers at a deeper level—say, the blood vessel level.

At that level, the research indicated, a movie like “Caddyshack” and the laughter it produces tends to increase blood flow in the body of the moviegoer while films such as “Night of the Living Dead” or “City of the Living Dead” or “Day of the Dead,” due to some killer scenes, tend to restrict blood flow in the viewer.

While test subjects watched the movies, doctors watched the endothelium, or the lining of the blood vessels, of the test subjects. In 19 of the 20 moviegoers, the research showed, blood gushed freely through their vessels while viewing a comedy but blood flow slowed in 14 of 20 volunteers as they watched a slasher-thriller-horror movie. In fact, the average blood flow increased 22 percent during the flick with yuks and decreased 35 percent during the stress-inducer.

At the College of Cardiology convention, doctors told attendees that the endothelium is the first step in the development of atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries. (But nary a word about the consequences of popcorn with extra butter.)

The study wasn’t so much about rating movies as it was demonstrating the importance of laughter in reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease. However, the inference was there: People who prefer Woody Allen and Charlie Chaplin movies can potentially receive the same health benefits as those sweating through their aerobic routines. (Unfortunately, this is news that video-rewinding couch potatoes have been waiting to hear for some time.)

The cardiologists qualified their conclusions, however, recommending that moviegoers not avoid exercise but supplement it with 15 minutes of laughter each day.

Although I’m an experienced print man, I am definitely a cinematic doofus. So I’ve gone to the American Film Institute Web site, which lists the top movies in categories such as comedies and thrillers. I have not screened all of these movies so don’t blame me if you have a heart attack while you watch them. But according to the AFI, the following movies are good for a few laughs and, thus, good for your endothelium:
• Blazing Saddles
• This Is Spinal Tap
• Raising Arizona
• The Jerk
• Airplane!
• Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein
• Good Morning, Vietnam

On the other hand and if the American College of Cardiology study is believable, the following movies, according to the AFI, can harden your arteries. Watch them at your own peril:
• Psycho
• Jaws
• The Exorcist
• The Silence of the Lambs
• The Birds
• Halloween
• Fatal Attraction

Of course, everyone gets their laughs and their frights differently. What opens my vessels is watching “The Pink Panther,” the 1963 version, that is, and hearing Peter Sellers say, “Do you have a lay-sawnse for the men-kee?”

My endothelium feels better already.

When the wife’s away, cats, dogs and men will play

Published 8/16/05

While watching the news from London’s Heathrow Airport 24 hours before my wife was to return from a lengthy trip abroad, I had this sudden feeling of apprehension.

Oh, no, I wasn’t worried about the British Airways Strike that stranded the airline’s entire fleet and more than 100,000 passengers around the world, thus threatening my wife’s return flight from London. Type A that she is, I knew she could single handedly get catering workers, baggage handlers, bus drivers, ramp workers and check-in staff back on the job in a matter of minutes if she wanted to get home badly enough. It wasn’t her I was worried about.

What I suddenly realized was that the wife and son had now been gone nearly 14 days and, while I had engaged in other kinds of work and, okay, a little play, I hadn’t done 14 minutes of housework.

In Greek theatre, it’s known as an “anagnoresis,” (A-NAG’-NOR-E-SIS) the dramatic point in time where a character realizes a truth to which he or she has been previously and totally clueless.

The most startling part of my own personal anagnoresis was the realization that I had 24 hours to clean, more or less, 2400 squalid square feet.

Of course, as a man, and here I invoke a legitimate gender stereotype, the first thing I wanted to do after discovering the errors of my ways was to blame someone else. So I immediately called an emergency powwow of the housepets. Standing before Mr. Darcy, our new Yorkie, Abigail the Beagle and that cat thing that roams the house, I gaveled the meeting to order and announced that for the next 24 hours there would be no more eating, no more peeing, no more pooping, no more shedding and absolutely no more sleeping. On the furniture, that is.

Anyone who thought this was a zoo, I continued, was sorely mistaken. With any luck, I said, British Airways will go bankrupt and we’ll get the reprieve we need. Feeling that this was one of my better public addresses, I finished with a flourish: “Ask not what your master can do for you, you dogs, but what you can do for your master now that he needs a Merry Maid or two.”

Have you ever had three furry faces look at you like you were stupid when you were trying to make an important announcement? It’s annoying is what it is.

I then sped to my favorite wholesale outlet and told the clerk to give me the Works. Not only did I get the Works, I also got wholesale drums of Lysol, Windex, Spic & Span, Comet, Murphy’s Oil and anything that would remove a multitude of stains. I’d deal with a multitude of sins later. I also bought a tire pump. You know, to inflate the flowers that I had left wilting in two straight weeks of 90-degree heat. It was obviously too late for water.

It’s not that I was in a panic. But in one of my wife’s final international e-mails to me, she said she missed me and when she returned she hoped the house would be “emaculate.” Although she once received an administrative award of excellence from Governor O’Bannon, she’s not obsessive compulsive about spelling and her rendering of the word “immaculate” just looked too much like “emasculate” for me to take any chances.

Well, immaculate is probably overstating it but in the end I got the job done

One of the challenges of doing housework, of course, is living in that same house once it’s clean and then keeping it clean. The night before my family’s return, I had scrubbed the scum out of the bathrooms and had them on Lysol lockdown. I even put some of that blue stuff in the toilet bowls to keep them clean. But in the middle of the night when nature called for Abby and Mr. Darcy and I took them to their respective trees and then nature began to call for me, I kept thinking back to the bathrooms that I wanted to sparkle at any cost. Well, it was dark and everyone was asleep and if it was good enough for the animals…

The things we do just to avoid a Greek tragedy.

The glory of God is a base runner fully alive

Published 8/2/05

Around town this time of year, you can catch folks in full uniform heading to the sandlots with shiny bats, moth-eaten mitts and goofy grins.

Now what would possess grown guys and grown girls to spend a summer evening on a dusty diamond risking a muscle tear for the sake of softball?

One theory is the exercise thing. But if bulge is our battle, swimming, cycling or jogging probably prove more effective. (As someone has said, baseball—and that’s ditto for softball—is a game that squeezes six minutes of action into two and a half hours of play.)

For others, it may be the tribal attraction. That’s the experience of hooking up with like-minded locals on courts, fields, rinks and diamonds to participate in a common recreational passion only to find that what’s re-created is a team that rallies around its members like a family. What’s intriguing about the tribe is that it can be a dugout full of Democrats and Republicans, union bosses and chief officers, Pentecostals and Presbyterians, twentysomethings and sixtysomethings, all tightly bound by the thin string of a favorite game. Tribe members may only meet for a few hours on game day in a very brief season, but during those innings and evenings, no stronger strings are strung.

Maybe workers become players after hours because the business world puts us drudges behind the computers of sterile cubicles to stew in unfulfilled creative juices. When the 5 o’clock whistle blows, what we hear is the game whistle, the starting gun, an ump’s voice somewhere yelling, “Play ball!”

But if you’ll let me be so lofty, sniff, sniff, I’m wondering if we’re not drawn to the diamond because there, between the foul lines, we find what Calvin—or was it Berra?—called “theatrum gloria Dei.” That is, the theatre where we play for the glory of God.

In the “theatre,” grown women lean left to stop a dangerously hard hop and then dance off second to make the throw to first for the mere sake of a double play. In the theatre, out of shape outfielders gallop across green outfield acres and into the path of an oncoming teammate just to flag down a high fly and prevent a late inning rally. In the theatre, jocks run the bases with wild abandon and slide home in a pair of shorts even when it gives them six inches of open wounds but only one run. And in the theatre, folks like me bravely return to the batter’s box after going down swinging the previous inning on a pitch that would be a strike only in a bowling alley.

Yeah, we do it because at that point in the play of the after-hours athlete, vocation, money, education, race and politics count for zilch. And at that point in the action, we men and women of the game are fully alive. Several centuries before Calvin, St. Iraneus reportedly said, “The glory of God is man fully alive.” Surely, this second century father of the church coached an early church fastpitch softball team. Could it be that he saw poetry in the windmill windup or understood the mystery of that infernal infield fly rule?

But for all the glory of the game, there are evil forces at work. Just a few weeks ago the International Olympic Committee voted to drop softball from the Summer Games after 2008. It’s one of the first sports to be dropped in nearly 70 years. Among reasons cited were its association with the steroid-stained sport of baseball, which was also canned, and the sport’s total domination by American teams.

That makes sense since softball is the most popular participant sport in the United States today. An estimated 56 million will play at least one game of softball this summer. Because I couldn’t play just one, I played in 12 and coached a team that was always anxious take the field. In fact, speaking of goofy grins, one evening we almost collided with the other team as we tried to take the field at the beginning of the game. Oops, my bad. I forgot we were visitors.

I guess my mind was on the glory. Faded glory at times, but glory nonetheless.

World travel can be scary for those left behind

Published 8/9/05

I received an ominous e-mail message last Wednesday from the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. Under the subject line, “Public Announcement: Worldwide Caution,” the message read, “The U.S. Government continues to receive indications of terrorist threats in Kenya and elsewhere in eastern Africa aimed at U.S. and Western interests. Terrorist actions may include suicide operations, bombings, kidnappings or attacks on civil aviation.”

The unexpected warning made Thursday’s e-mail from my wife, who, ironically, happened to be traveling to Kenya, all the more welcome. “We arrived at 12 noon today at Tenwek,” Karen said. “We are all safe and sound but very tired.”

By “we” she meant our son, Jesse, and her mother, Betty. “Tenwek” would be the hospital that sits in the highlands of southwestern Kenya. And “tired” is what they got after spending two days in the air—Indianapolis to Chicago to Brussels to Nairobi—and several more hours on the ground, in search of Tenwek.

The reason for the inter-continental expedition, at least for Karen, was to arrange a missions experience for volunteers. For Jesse and his grandmother, it was a chance to see the world.

According to Tenwek’s Web site, the hospital, located 150 miles north of Nairobi, is accessible by paved roads. But the paved road Karen, Jesse and Betty traveled from Nairobi was a pot-holed dirt path winding through the mountains, if my wife’s memory served her correctly. But then again her memory might have been altered by their hired driver who reached speeds of 70 miles per hour, dodged oncoming cars from time to time, and occasionally had them hanging them off the side of a cliff. The trip left them a little queasy but fortunately their destination was a hospital.

Tenwek is one of the largest mission hospitals on the continent of Africa. With 308 beds, it serves 600,000 Kipsigis, the most dominant ethnic group in the Tenwek region. The hospital also operates a nursing school and a hospital chaplaincy training school.

Karen mentioned the dangers of this trip before she left but it wasn’t until the U.S. Embassy e-mailed me on Wednesday, which, ironically, was one day after my “delegation” left, that I fully realized the risks.

I think the paragraph that opened my sinus passages was the one that began, “Supporters of Al-Qaeda and other extremists are active in East Africa. American citizens in Kenya should remain vigilant, particularly in public places frequented by foreigners…”

My curiosity piqued, I went upstairs to the Web and clicked my way into the secret files of the State Department where I found a briefing, known as a “Consular Information Sheet,” on the stability of Kenya.

Okay, I can only wish the files were secret. The Info Sheet reminded readers of the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, which killed 213, an attempt to shoot down an Israeli charter plane in 2002, and recent car bomb attacks.

The Info Sheet also warned Americans of activities they should avoid, like the country’s frequent political demonstrations which apparently tend to turn violent quickly. I knew my wife and mother in law weren’t exactly agitators, but my son had been an outspoken political activist since kindergarten. Could he put a muzzle on it in the interest of life and limb?

The document also warned of highway travel at night in remote areas. Well, my wife knew that, which is precisely why our crew spent the first night in Nairobi and hired a driver to scare the wits out of them the next day.

Then there was the Bureau of Consular Affairs alert over the increase in “armed banditry” in national parks and game reserves and the danger of going on safaris. Which reminded me of Karen’s second e-mail, which read, “On Sunday we go to church and then we leave for the safari. They say the animals you see are incredible!”

Linger in the sanctuary, hon. We have animals at home. At least that’s what I would have said had our cell phones been connecting.

I suppose it’s only natural for a husband, father and son in law to wish his loved ones the security of a big civilized city. That’s what they’ll find later this week when, before heading home, they spend three days in the safety (gulp!) of London.

Be vigilant, dear. I’ll leave the light on.

A few words (okay 334 words) about my column

I launched my feature column in Anderson’s Herald Bulletin in August, 2000, imagining the Baby Boomer demographic as my main audience and with the intent of addressing topics about family situations, meaningful vocations, creative living, lifelong learning, mental wellness, pop culture commentary and the importance of being a good communitarian. And of course lots of columns about pudgy beagles.

Five years later, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find that readers from other generations have been reading over the shoulders of my target audience. I like to think that’s because I address everyday quandaries to which people can relate and then draw universal application. At least that’s what I like to think.

Seriously, whatever my subject, I hope that people leave my page of the paper laughing—or sometimes grieving, I suppose—about the human condition and determining to make it better. I see my column, if anything at all, as a hard slap in the face of despair.

COLUMNS PERFORMED LIVE

I have now written nearly 300 newspaper columns, some going back a decade, when I was the official running columnist for the Herald Bulletin and, not by coincidence, a runner. On occasion, I have had the opportunity to read one of my columns in a public setting. I thrive on this because it allows me to bring my writing to life, and the newspaper to life, which is particularly important for generations that no longer read the fish wrap.

Column reading as prose performance offers the opportunity for instantaneous feedback and, potentially, instantaneous embarrassment. But, hey, the world needs a touring columnist performing live for the cause of literacy.

If I can do this for your meeting or gathering or even “customize” a column for your special event, leave a message with Jack Williams, Ink.

Otherwise, meet me here every Tuesday a.m. for a cup of steaming hot copy and a couple of mangled metaphors on the side.

If you enjoy the column, post a comment. If you don’t, go for a jog.

Jack Williams