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| Coming soon, the story of my Religious experience of '84!! |
Friday, April 27, 1984
Wednesday, September 5, 1979
File Under 1979
Flashback Friday: "The Great Moped Ride"
It was 1979.
The Cars were on the radio. it was the third day of school. I went to a Catholic "Parochial" school, which had a "strict disciplinarian" front to keep up..
I was starting my Senior year.
Every year, Sister Joan, the principal, gave an initiation speech to all the students. She broke the student body in half and gave the Juniors and Seniors one version of the same speech, and I guess the underclassmen their own variation of it. She may have relied more on scaring them.
Well, this was the day of that speech; and the day that I was going to try to sneak out of the building and ride my moped about 14 miles, round trip, to a Ticketron, where I was hoping to be early enough to get the best possible seats to see The Cars at the Boston Music Hall.
That concert would also be the day that Pope John Paul II would be literally right across the street from the music hall, saying a mass for 2 million people (I'll have to fact check that...)
We were "fortunate;" us St. Bernard's High kids. You wouldn't ever want to do anything that might get you expelled from a joint like that. Our parents were forking out good tuition money.
I would look around the classroom at all the other young gentlemen, and future Christian leaders; in their sports coats, shirts and ties and shiney shoes, and I could figure out that our parents wanted to make it so we would not have to change clothes our whole lives.
We would all go off to colleges that had the same kind of dress code; and after we graduated we would be seeking positions that entailed the same dress code.
To be expelled would be akin to falling in socio-economic status; and all the kings horses and all the king's men, couldn't get you into Harvard, again..
It was the third day of the school year at Saint Bernards Central Catholic High School, early September.
Sister Joan was up at the podium in the auditorium, in front of a boomy mcrophone.
She was telling a group of underclassmen exactly how to behave, if they didn't want to get expelled.
She mentioned specifics, all preceded by "There will be no..." (gum chewing, talking in the halls), or "You will..." ( wear your jackets in the hallways at all times; report to class before the bell rings, anyone caught in the hall after the bell for then next class has started will be, etc. etc)
Fear coursed through the auditorium like ripples in the veins of those underclassmen. She could expel you, and you would never, as long as you live, be able to list Saint Bernards Central Catholic High School on an application for college.
When Sister Joan got to the part about "No one is to leave the building for any reason whatsoever!!," and set down the penalty for doing so, she got very serious (i.e. talked to them like adults.)
She pointed out that, for reasons related to insurance coverage, for one thing, STB could really get screwed, should anything ever happen to a student who left the building without authorisation. Her tone of voice changed and she made it clear that this was the most egregious offence that could ever be committed. It was almost like we could "eat of any other fruit in the garden...."
I remember the words to this day because, as she was saying them, I had just tip toed past, behind the curtain which the podium stood a mere five feet in front of, and was pushing open the side auditorium door. I had stashed my sport coat in a janitor's closet, according to plan; and let the door close behind me while her words reverberated inside.
I would then hop on my moped, stashed under a staircase for this purpose, and ride the seven miles to Ticketron, in Searstown Mall, to purchase four tickets to see the band The Cars at the Boston Music Hall, October 8th, 1979.
The jacket, I left behind, so that I wouldn't look too much like a truant STB student, despite the tie flapping in my face, and I chose to fly down Airport Road, and not the more busy John Fitch Highway, to minimise complications.
Tickets were to go on sale at 10p.m. sharp, and I would be there 15 minutes early, depending upon the wind conditions on Airport Road.
Caisse Of Irony
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| Mowing Down Twins Along The Way... |
Almost two million people would show up.
I mention this because I bought four tickets, two of them were to be for the Caisse twins, Jeff and Joe (pronounced "cayse").
They were fraternal twins and I was friends with both of them (even though another good friend of mine, Ted Broughey's opinion of the boys was "It's seems that they each have half a brain.")
It came to pass that Jeff and Joe were not allowed to go to see The Cars, because of the presence of The Pope. Their mother wouldn't let them. She thought that they would be in danger of being trampled by two million devout Catholics.
I wound up enjoying the concert with one other friend who had a braver mother, we sold the two extra tickets without much problem, a girl rubbed her breasts on me on the way out; and a splendid time was missed out on by the Caisse twins, Jeff and Joe.
(We would have been closer than row 23, had I bought a block of two instead of four tickets, but, after 32 years, I am starting to forgive the Caisses. )
I also got to see the pope from about fifteen feet away (my reward for braving to tip toe past Sister Joan at the same distance?) when his motorcade cut the corner where I was standing rather close, necessitated by the length of his convertible limousine.
There were no reports of trampling.
But, back to the story of "The Great Moped Ride":
How did I manage to leave the building without my absence being discovered, you ask, dear reader?
Herein lies the genious behind The Great Moped Ride!
Zero Places At Once
My first period class was math with Sister Cecilia, who was probably in her 80's.
Being the third day of school, she probably hadn't memorised our faces, no matter.
I purposely did not go to Sister Cecilia's math class.
I waited in the janitor's closet where I stashed my sport coat.
A few minutes later, Donna Dower, another student of Sister Marcella's walked past, carrying the absentee list, one which had on it, at least, "Daniel McKenna."
She had to go through the gym, because the auditorium was filling up with underclassmen for the "beginning of the year," speach by the principal, touched upon already.
A few minutes after that, there was a crackle from the intercom and "Daniel McKenna" was called to the office, by the raging voice of Sister Lourdes O' Malley.
She was a diciplinarian and feared by many.
She had checked my name on the absentee list against the general list, compiled first thing in the morning in homeroom, and learned that I had been in the building at 7:45 a.m., but had not made it to Sister Cecilia's math class.
This meant that I was in the building somewhere (because no one is allowed to leave for any reason, under any circumstances -except a fire drill, but we will cover that in a minute..).
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| The Motorcade, Then The Cars... |
I then appeared in front of Sister Lourdes, repentant and giving her a story about having trouble with my locker.
She said that she hoped that I hadn't forgotten my combination, I had three days to memorise it, and if I couldn't do so, I wouldn't do well at Harvard...
I described a mechanical problem, wherupon she said "Well, you go directly to class, and don't let it happen again!"
Sister Cecilia thought that I was being detained (scolded) at the office, and Sister Lourdes thought that I was going directly to her class.
This allowed me to be neither place, and after having to sneak past the principal, at the high point of her speach, I was on The Great Moped Ride of '79
Thursday, January 1, 1970
The Target Ship
The Target Ship
It was our family, and the Curtis family.
We were on Cape Cod for a two week vacation in August.
It was 1969 and the "summer of love."
I didnt' know anything about any "summer of love," as I was 6 years old, my sister was 7, and our parents were keeping a shield between us and certain knowledge of things going on in the world at large, like hippies and the Vietnam war, for starters.
The Curtis's had three sons, Billy, Bobby and Stevie.
Stevie was my age. He was more worldly than I, and a little tougher, because he had older brothers.
I imagine that made it harder for Tina and Bill to shelter him in the same way from "the real world." Those were his parents.
Tina and Bill were friends of my parents. They went out together or played cards around ours or their kitchen tables. They also took their two week vacations at the same time in the summers, with Cape Cod being the destination for about 5 consequetive years, during the Johnson and Nixon administrations.
Bill had played football with my father in high school. Bill hurt his back playing football with my father, and still carried the symptoms of "a bad back" with him.
Bill had been "Billy" when growing up.
Tina was tiny, and had had the nickname "Teenie," before becoming Tina. 10 years later she would be found one morning in the Nashua River in our home town, after an apparent failed suicide attempt. It would be attributed to her going through menopause by the doctors, and the card games with my parents would stop around the same time (too much akwardness when Tina layed the "suicide" jack on the table.)
Billy was almost 17 and too old to enjoy a vacation on Cape Cod. He had become Bill by then, and had more interesting things to do. Cars and girls were amongst the list. He was going to Woodstock with some other teenagers in a Camaro, instead of coming to Cape Cod with his family.
Bobby was 14, hadn't become Bob Curtis, and was there with us. He would grow up to be a pharmisist.
Stevie was my age and a long way from graduating to "Steve." He would break into houses in our neighborhood as a teenager starting a couple years after the Nashua River incident, but not necessarily related to it.
We were all sitting on the grass outside an ice cream place in the town of Brewster, eating cones.
"Look at the hippies," said Bobby.
I turned and saw two men with long hair and beards, wearing colorful shirts; the first two hippies I had ever seen and at the age of six, no less.
My father whistled. It was a whistle that I would become very familiar with by the time I was a teenager. It was somewhere between the kind one would make while surveying the destruction left by a tornado and one made after having just carried a heavy object like a bag of cement a long way and placed it down.
He would often make this sound when confronted with anything preposterous.
"They're probably stoned!," said Bobby.
"What is stoned?," my sister and I said in unison.
Stevie was smiling as if he knew what stoned was and as if he was amused at my sister's and I's nievity.
"Never mind," said my mom.
"Quiet, Bobby. That's not a nice thing to say about someone. You don't know them, they might be nice people!" Vintage Tina.
The Curtis's had rented a cottage in Brewster, and we had stopped there for ice cream before driving to look at their cottage, and before my family continued on to Eastham, about 10 more miles up the cape.
We looked at the cottage, and then went to the end of the road to see the bay.
It was then that I caught my first glimpse of the target ship.
The target ship was an old barge, which had gotten stuck on a sandbar in the bay and then was sold to the military so that fighter jets could practice dive-bombing on it, using innoculous tracer rounds; usually at night.
The rounds emitted a loud report, though, and/or the sonic booms, which rattled the china in our cottage on those nights when the pilots were training to go rattle things near China.
From the angle of Brewster, the ship looked short. From the shores of Eastham, it looked long, as it was being viewed broadside from there.
It sat about 2 miles out, past where the tide ever receeded, and in my six year old imagination, it was in water way over my head and it's rusted, pock-marked hull was teeming with crabs as big as the water was deep.
In the five years that we vacationed at the Cape, I looked forward to seeing the target ship more than anything. It was the first thing I looked for. From Provencetown, on the tip of the Cape, you could only see the back of it.
Learning To Fight
One night, the parents all went out and left Bobby to babysit myself and my sister.
Bobby took this opportunity to teach me how to box.
If Tina was around, she would have told him something like: "Don't be teaching him how to punch people, that's not nice," but Tina wasn't around, nor were any parents. It was just us "men" (and my sister, but she was watching the snowy picture of a TV show; the Boston stations were a little weak out on the Cape).
Grabbing the little pillows off of a couch and handing me two of them, Bobby said "Come on, I'll teach you how to box"
We had to strip down to just our shorts. "You can be Mohammad Ali, I'll be Joe Frasier, he wears the red shorts."
He helped me with my stance and my crouch and how to hold the pillows in a defensive posture, and threw punches gentled-down to my six year old self.
I was hitting back and not wimping out, and I could tell that it made Bobby kind of proud of me. It was training that I just didn't get at home, with only a sister one year older around.
Then he said "You're just using your right, you need to switch them up to fake the guy out, here, try this!"
He showed me how to throw three lefts in a row and then (out of nowhere) a right, in order to fool the opponent.
"Now, you try"
I knew that Bobby already knew that I was going to throw three lefts and then a right (out of "nowhere") and I didn't like my prospects for success, but, for the purposes of instruction, Bobby played along.
My right pillow caught him "totally by surprise," whereupon he hit the cedarwood floor of our cottage hard, yelling "AAAAHHH" and rolled around in mock pain, saying "Frasier is down! Frasier is down"
And that was how I learned how to fight; in a cottage on Rolling Lane in Eastham, Mass which smelled like cedarwood, and where you had to put rice in the salt shaker, so the salt wouldn't cake up.
That night, I lay in my cot and listened to the sonic booms of the jets bombing the target ship, as boys much older than I learned to fight.
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| Huge Crabs And Water Over Your Head |
It was our family, and the Curtis family.
We were on Cape Cod for a two week vacation in August.
It was 1969 and the "summer of love."
I didnt' know anything about any "summer of love," as I was 6 years old, my sister was 7, and our parents were keeping a shield between us and certain knowledge of things going on in the world at large, like hippies and the Vietnam war, for starters.
The Curtis's had three sons, Billy, Bobby and Stevie.
Stevie was my age. He was more worldly than I, and a little tougher, because he had older brothers.
I imagine that made it harder for Tina and Bill to shelter him in the same way from "the real world." Those were his parents.
Tina and Bill were friends of my parents. They went out together or played cards around ours or their kitchen tables. They also took their two week vacations at the same time in the summers, with Cape Cod being the destination for about 5 consequetive years, during the Johnson and Nixon administrations.
Bill had played football with my father in high school. Bill hurt his back playing football with my father, and still carried the symptoms of "a bad back" with him.
Bill had been "Billy" when growing up.
Tina was tiny, and had had the nickname "Teenie," before becoming Tina. 10 years later she would be found one morning in the Nashua River in our home town, after an apparent failed suicide attempt. It would be attributed to her going through menopause by the doctors, and the card games with my parents would stop around the same time (too much akwardness when Tina layed the "suicide" jack on the table.)
Billy was almost 17 and too old to enjoy a vacation on Cape Cod. He had become Bill by then, and had more interesting things to do. Cars and girls were amongst the list. He was going to Woodstock with some other teenagers in a Camaro, instead of coming to Cape Cod with his family.
Bobby was 14, hadn't become Bob Curtis, and was there with us. He would grow up to be a pharmisist.
Stevie was my age and a long way from graduating to "Steve." He would break into houses in our neighborhood as a teenager starting a couple years after the Nashua River incident, but not necessarily related to it.
We were all sitting on the grass outside an ice cream place in the town of Brewster, eating cones.
"Look at the hippies," said Bobby.
I turned and saw two men with long hair and beards, wearing colorful shirts; the first two hippies I had ever seen and at the age of six, no less.
My father whistled. It was a whistle that I would become very familiar with by the time I was a teenager. It was somewhere between the kind one would make while surveying the destruction left by a tornado and one made after having just carried a heavy object like a bag of cement a long way and placed it down.
He would often make this sound when confronted with anything preposterous.
"They're probably stoned!," said Bobby.
"What is stoned?," my sister and I said in unison.
Stevie was smiling as if he knew what stoned was and as if he was amused at my sister's and I's nievity.
"Never mind," said my mom.
"Quiet, Bobby. That's not a nice thing to say about someone. You don't know them, they might be nice people!" Vintage Tina.
The Curtis's had rented a cottage in Brewster, and we had stopped there for ice cream before driving to look at their cottage, and before my family continued on to Eastham, about 10 more miles up the cape.
We looked at the cottage, and then went to the end of the road to see the bay.
It was then that I caught my first glimpse of the target ship.
The target ship was an old barge, which had gotten stuck on a sandbar in the bay and then was sold to the military so that fighter jets could practice dive-bombing on it, using innoculous tracer rounds; usually at night.
The rounds emitted a loud report, though, and/or the sonic booms, which rattled the china in our cottage on those nights when the pilots were training to go rattle things near China.
From the angle of Brewster, the ship looked short. From the shores of Eastham, it looked long, as it was being viewed broadside from there.
It sat about 2 miles out, past where the tide ever receeded, and in my six year old imagination, it was in water way over my head and it's rusted, pock-marked hull was teeming with crabs as big as the water was deep.
In the five years that we vacationed at the Cape, I looked forward to seeing the target ship more than anything. It was the first thing I looked for. From Provencetown, on the tip of the Cape, you could only see the back of it.
Learning To Fight
One night, the parents all went out and left Bobby to babysit myself and my sister.
Bobby took this opportunity to teach me how to box.
If Tina was around, she would have told him something like: "Don't be teaching him how to punch people, that's not nice," but Tina wasn't around, nor were any parents. It was just us "men" (and my sister, but she was watching the snowy picture of a TV show; the Boston stations were a little weak out on the Cape).
Grabbing the little pillows off of a couch and handing me two of them, Bobby said "Come on, I'll teach you how to box"
We had to strip down to just our shorts. "You can be Mohammad Ali, I'll be Joe Frasier, he wears the red shorts."
He helped me with my stance and my crouch and how to hold the pillows in a defensive posture, and threw punches gentled-down to my six year old self.
I was hitting back and not wimping out, and I could tell that it made Bobby kind of proud of me. It was training that I just didn't get at home, with only a sister one year older around.
Then he said "You're just using your right, you need to switch them up to fake the guy out, here, try this!"
He showed me how to throw three lefts in a row and then (out of nowhere) a right, in order to fool the opponent.
"Now, you try"
I knew that Bobby already knew that I was going to throw three lefts and then a right (out of "nowhere") and I didn't like my prospects for success, but, for the purposes of instruction, Bobby played along.
My right pillow caught him "totally by surprise," whereupon he hit the cedarwood floor of our cottage hard, yelling "AAAAHHH" and rolled around in mock pain, saying "Frasier is down! Frasier is down"
And that was how I learned how to fight; in a cottage on Rolling Lane in Eastham, Mass which smelled like cedarwood, and where you had to put rice in the salt shaker, so the salt wouldn't cake up.
That night, I lay in my cot and listened to the sonic booms of the jets bombing the target ship, as boys much older than I learned to fight.
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