Vergil’s Coffee

Colin’s at his piano lesson and I’m noticing his outfit for today: Faded navy blue cotton pants and a cranberry-colored plaid shirt. It’s a nice outfit, except he has the pants and the shirt on backward. Apparently it’s Red Ribbon Week at his school and if I remember correctly, he and his school mates will dress up in different ways throughout this week. Today it might be backward day, tomorrow, I think, is crazy hair day. All of this, according to the take-home handout, is to show his spirit for this week: the Red Ribbon week.

I think the first time I realized that dressing up as something wasn’t the greatest way to express my support for some cause probably came in kindergarten when I was changing into my Planet of the Apes “Doctor Cornelius” Halloween costume. I won’t bore you with the details, but let’s just say it is the single reason why I didn’t dress up for Halloween during my childhood.

But I think the real shocker came in college when I was an resident assistant (RA) and the guys in my house wanted to dress me up as a woman. I resisted the idea, stating that I didn’t think was proper for a guy to dress up like a girl (which I knew would have some merit at the college I was attending. I even went to the Dean of Students would siding with my house guys and so I dress up in pink turtle neck, cardigan, plaid shirt, and boots. I was a fright to behold and got the desired affect effect for the ones who dreamt up the outfit in the first place.

We’re in a fairly serious class (I think it was Exegesis-English Bible) and Mr. Brew (our instructor) is lecturing about something equally serious (maybe the overall impact of Tyndale on our current translations) and he stops. Brew (a rather short man with glasses and wonderfully pressed shirts) looks at the class of 30 or so of us and steps toward the middle of the room.

He smiles.

“You know,” he says, “sometimes I wonder.”

He pauses and looks toward the window on his right.

“Sometimes I wonder what we are thinking and how that impacts what we do.”

We pause from our note-taking knowing that this would be another “Brewism”–a piece of thoughtful insight to the larger world beyond the campus on Franklin Avenue. This wasn’t the times that your teacher begins a digression for the sake of hearing one’s own voice. Brew was a smart, wise person who was unassuming with a zing of humor that earned our respect and usually our agreement of his perception.

“For instance,” he continued, “my daughter attends a ‘liberal’ college across town: Calvin. Now we may not agree with the doctrine over there or even how they would view our topic of translation and it’s impact on what we know about the bible.”

He looked at us, then walked to the window and then addressed us again.

“He are at Grand Rapids we have ‘Dress up your RA Day’ as a day of fun…and I’m not saying that’s a particularly bad thing.”

Brew then looked at the notes he’d scribbled on the board and then looked back at us.

“See, today we are having ‘Dress up your RA Day’ and at Calvin they are having a peaceable protest against world hunger.”

He let the words hang and then continued.

“We are so set on being right in our belief here and yet you have to wonder what is happening at Calvin to make them think about their impact on the world.”

Part of me wanted to explain to Brew that I didn’t even want to be dressed up this way and that I didn’t see the purpose of the whole dress up thing anyway. But I couldn’t because I was just feeling guilty for feeling guilty (something that religion does very well). Instead, I felt bad because he was right (something that he did not insist on).

Tomorrow’s crazy hair day and Colin has insisted on going with the green, wacky hair. Colin will be one of those students who will always participate on school or class dress up days. (Heck, he would have loved to be in my spot in kindergarten and then on those Spirit Weeks in high school and probably would have worn makeup with the turtleneck in my “Dress up your RA day”).

He likes to dress up because he likes putting the combinations on. And when the costume goes on so does the persona. Colin as the Joker, Colin as the Penguin, Colin as the Ninja Darth Vader.

And so, as he wears his clothes backward, he is happy to dress the part. And for dressing the part for Red Ribbon Week, he got a sticker.

It’s a round red sticker with an animal on it:

“Don’t monkey around with drugs.”

Piano lesson is over.

She’s reminded me to put the thing away, but for some reason, I simply have not until last night. The photo album had taken up residence under the family room table for about 2 months ago when I dug the thing out of the upstairs “yarn” room (it’s the place where Lori keeps…well, her yarn). And it’s this photo album that I’ve attached a few meanings to and it’s my portal to a time of a younger me—another time, another place, another person. And I took care, when I put my photos in it, to label each page and create a table of contents.

Seems that I did more looking at others and pretty mountains than living an exciting life.

At least, that’s what I get from thumbing through the album last night before Lori’s encouragement to put it away in the yarn room.

We were talking today in 5^th hour about LPs and how much music you could fit on the things (I think the point was about the limitations of time on music as restricted by the then current technology). To my best guess, I think we came up with approximately 30 minutes per side.

I’m thinking both of these ways of capturing moments are really old school: photos printed on paper and music engraved on vinyl 12 inch disks. Some people still prefer each of these medium for the archiving of memory and song and I’m thinking I’m happy to reduce the clutter, but there’s something about being subject to someone else’s editorial decisions.

For some reason, my photo album (more scrapbook/yearbook) lacks a chronological order and at times I question the arrangement of the photos. I used a lot of white space because, well, I wanted to fill up the entire book. But the book serves its purpose: to evoke memory of a more innocent time., or, possibly more accurately, a time when I think things were just easier. I take lots of pictures of nature stuff (especially the mountains of Yosemite which I can ot spell correctly). There are pictures of friends doing stuff and other shots of the same people posing. There are only two pictures of me: one of an out-of-focused blond-haired 12-year-old in front of some falls in Northern California on our sixth grade outdoor education trip wearing a navy blue sweatshirt. The hood is down and I have a Star Wars baseball cap on and I have my hands in the front pockets. Janet Burkhart took the picture and apparently couldn’t handle my Pentax K1000 slr. Focus is also an issue when we’re on a music tour during the summer of 1982. Christina is cutting my hair by the ocean and Russ or Ryan simply couldn’t manually keep things sharp.

I liked my Pentax K1000: you controlled the focus, you controlled the light, you controlled the picture and with that control, I messed up many a picture on many rolls of film that we not realized until a week or two after dropping the film to be processed.

With that camera, as seen in the photo album, I captured a 7^th grade soccer game and basketball game. Which is a bit odd because I was an active player in both those games. I guess it never crossed my mind if I were on the team and was to play that I probably shouldn’t be taking pictures of the game with my Pentax K1000 with my variety of lenses.

Also, I captured many people whom I’ve heard stories about since graduation. One person is apparently bi-polar, another is gay, someone else has been divorced twice and yet another a corporate lawyer for IBM. I can not verify any of these claims. All I have are the photos in this album and how I remember each of those folks in the context of my album. For me, I remember those people as still being 16 years old and laying down on the carpet on a church floor after a long drive to Middletown, California.

I did put the album in the yarn room, a day or two after the encouragements to do so earlier– I think I just placed it on the first non-cluttered horizontal surface—possible on the bookshelf to the left of the room. I like the yarn room, but realize that I don’t know yarn like Lori does. To me, yarn is color and texture in the chocolate brown room upstairs; to her, it is the stuff to create pragmatic things—usable color and texture within a sock or sweater or scarf. She is patient with her yarn and isn’t afraid to tear out an entire hour’s work if the pattern has strayed. I know that she doesn’t enjoy ripping out all of that work, but she deems it necessary to make the thing useful. ‘m not sure I could do that with the color and texture of my past as seen in my photo album.

I am incredibly happy to see that the RNC has used the medium of the Reagan era to convince me of…let me see…to question the other candidate’s lack of “caring about the country” because he pals around with terrorists Hollywood-types.

I’m not even told who to vote for in the mailer–which leads me to believe that the use of ambiguity is the newer strategy of the RNC. We’re going over the literary device of ambiguity in sophomore English and I’m happy that I can make another allusion of a terrific example of ambiguity for my students.

Now, being from an “almost” toss-up state, I haven’t received one of these mailing-types from the other guy (interesting that HRC sent me a mailer almost like this one a couple months ago). The other guy has real people call me and encourage me to vote early and ask if I will be voting for…wait for it…wait for the ambiguity…”Obama.” No robocalls, no mailers, mostly volunteers and the internets to get the clear message out.

And yet, the RNC is investing what little monies they have on Cold War time ways of advertising their ambiguous message.

Interpret this message as you may for I approved it.