Racing in Place: Collages, Fragments, Postcards, Ruins

My Father Has Been Turned into a Monstrous Vermin

My Father Turned into a Monstrous Vermin

I was in Fort Wayne for the millennium's New Year's celebration. My mother was on the municipal committee that had planned the year's events that culminated with the fireworks launched from the top of the Summit Bank Building downtown. Freezing, the crowd below watched the display from the new park built with the proceeds derived from another recent celebration, the bicentennial of the city's founding in 1774. The park was a wonderful legacy. It had been built on an often-flooded floodplain with a design that recognized that fact. The flowerbeds were planted with ornamental grasses, yellow flag iris, and bull rushes and reeds that thrived in swampy conditions. The fountains produced a fine primordial mist, subtly lit, that floated over the marshy fields. In the cold of that night, the misting fountains created a crystalline landscape both old and new as the citizens of Fort Wayne greeted the turning of the age.

My mother had been on the bicentennial committee as well, and, in both cases, she had been instrumental in the development of the mascots. The bicentennial wasn't hard to figure out. Someone dressed up as General Anthony Wayne and made the appearances at the parades, beer tents, plaque dedications, and battle reenactments. Johnny Appleseed was a close second-he's buried in Fort Wayne-but the general looked better in uniform and lacked the cooking pot on the head. And besides, General Wayne came equipped with a horse. The millennium required more brainstorming. My mother, always the poet, finally rested on the notion the millennium would best be represented by a millipede, a millipede she named, for no other reason than the alliterative, Millie.

A costume was commissioned. The millipede would be incredibly long. Most of it would be dragging along the ground. The segmented body suit in greenish velour and black velveteen piping had oversized antennae, bugged-out eyes, and a butterfly's coiled proboscis. The multiple pairs of legs, only two pairs of which would be operable, were connected together in order for all of them to simultaneously move, marionette fashion, as the operator walked along.

My mother volunteered my father to be the bug. I teased her when I called home about the symbolism of the committee's mascot being a verminous scavenger.

"They're herbivorous," she replied.

"But hard to make cuddly, I bet," I said.

And what about having my father, her husband, appear for a year as this creepy crawly thing.

"No one will know," she said.

I had recently moved south, below the bug line as we like to say, the climatic zone where the winter wasn't cold enough to kill off insects. Infesting our new house, we discovered moving in, was a hatch of millions of millipedes or what we found out were millipedes once the county extension agent duly identified them. I have grown somewhat familiar to the flying roaches and the grasshoppers as large as small cats.

"You'd be surprised," my mother said, "about how cuddly your father is, millipede or not."

"You might have at least called him Milton or Mick the Millipede."

My father was good-natured about it all, suited up and crossed genders. My mother sent pictures of Millie in the parades, at the ribbon cuttings, in front of the huge numbers counting down on the official digital clock. I received a video of the ceremony in the park, the burial of the time capsule. I saw my father as the giant creature wave his many hands at the camera, inch his way through the festive crowd with the gold-plated shovel. He looked like a bad special effect, a monster from a Japanese Godzilla film, his dragging tail cutting a swath of destruction through a twig and tissue paper city.

By the time I actually saw him in costume in person on New Year's Eve, my father's tail had worn dramatically thin from the continuous friction of his various civic duties. They had taken to wrapping the nether region up over one shoulder of the upright upper half. The result was a commingling of legs or, now more accurately, arms that seemed to emanate from the lime body at every angle. That night the committee had sponsored a carnival for children at the Fine Arts Center to help them stay awake for the fireworks at midnight. The building was lousy with screaming kids doing spin art, singing karaoke, and having their faces painted. My father, as Millie, moved through the crowds. The children were strangely calmed by the hulking figure, magnetically drawn to hold one of its many hands as it slithered along. It led a little parade over to the park, the children still attached. Millie seemed to undulate through the ground-hugging fogs the fountains produced, lugging its cargo of limpid limpets. It stopped and turned dramatically to face the sound of the first exploding bombs going off above the city.

We Didn't Speak of Reddy Kilowatt

My grandfather worked as a meter reader for the municipal electric utility, City Light and Power, until it was sold to the regional for-profit company, Indiana and Michigan, or I&M, in a deal he regarded as shady.

I&M had always had a presence in Fort Wayne. That company owned the electric interurbans that ran all over Indiana early in the century. I&M maintained the high-tension transmission lines that brought much of the electricity into the city to be sold by City Light. There was a billboard near I&M's building, shielding the lot where it kept the hulks of transformers, gen erators, and cable spools. The billboard was by the corner of Spy Run and State, and my grandfather had to read its meter. The sign, of course, was lit all the time, and sometimes parts of it moved. The billboard, advertising the advantages of electric power, utilized a character named Reddy Kilowatt-a stick figure made up of a skeleton of lightning with a light bulb head and a light bulb nose and socket outlets for ears.

My grandfather despised Reddy Kilowatt, and we weren't to speak of him. Not that we would have even noticed its existence without the focus of my grandfather's rage. Reddy Kilowatt would have been just another cartoon on the landscape of cartoons I wandered through as a child. Still, we knew the days Grandfather read the meter on the sign. He would come home restless and unsettled, drink an extra Pepsi on the back porch to facilitate his belching.

After City Light was bought out and he retired, my grandfather took elaborate routes through the city to avoid passing the sign. This was a difficult thing to do since State was the main east-to-west thoroughfare on the north side of town. There were times that passing the sign was unavoidable and the traffic light at the corner of Spy Run and State always stopped you. Grandfather seethed in the car as Reddy Kilowatt, his crimped kinetic arm waving back and forth, loomed before him.

Stopped at the same light on our journey across town to visit my grandparents, my family contemplated Reddy Kilowatt, who might then be wearing earmuffs for winter or sunglasses during the summer, promoting electric heat or air conditioning. My mother always mentioned, her father not being present to hear, how Daddy was looking more and more like that Reddy Kilowatt-the wiry frame, the round mostly bald head with the tiny white shock of hair at his crown. "Don't tell him I said so, please!" she said as the light changed.

Hoosier Defines Itself

My uncle went to graduate school at Tennessee to study health. He got a government grant to run a study in the hope of demonstrating the validity of his thesis: To know the deleterious effects of obesity would aid in weight reduction. He had two groups of dieters. The control group simply followed the menus and exercise suggestions provided by a national weight reduction company. The subjects in the experiment also had to follow the diet and in addition complete a rigorous course detailing graphically and statistically the dangers of fat. To his surprise, my uncle proved that while the control group modestly lost pounds, the educated group effortlessly gained a ton. Traumatized by the detailed information they were receiving, they nervously ate in order not to think about what was happening to their bodies as they ate.

While in Knoxville, my uncle sent me a poster I hung on the wall of my bedroom. The drawing depicted a team portrait of the mascots of the Southeastern Conference, their eponymous heads bobbing above the various team football uniforms. There were two Bulldogs, a Hog, and several military combatantsMississippi's Rebel, Vanderbilt's Commodore, and Tennessee's own Volunteer. Alabama's Tide was, strangely, an Elephant that would make no sense until, years later, I moved to Tuscaloosa and learned it derived from the historical confluence of a Rose Bowl game and a local luggage company. Right after my uncle's gift, my father gave me the complementary poster representing the Big Ten, and I taped it next to the first one. I liked to think of the two portraits as my uncle's two groups of dieters.

The head of the Hoosier was rendered as that of a bumpkin, the dictionary definition after all, the same definition that Dan Quayle once on the floor of the United States Senate argued to legally change. The Hoosier on the poster showed up as a yokel, a rural rube with a fraying straw hat atop his rusty head of hair. He had vacant blue eyes and freckles, big lips and buckteeth that gnawed on a bent straw of a wheat stalk or weed stem. This Hoosier, even wearing a big-shouldered football uniform, not the requisite blue denim bib overalls, didn't look very competitive surrounded by the vicious menagerie of Wildcat, Badger, and Wolverine.

There is a whole class of mascots that suffer in this modern era of corporate corporeal identity. Look at the Buckeye looking like an eyeball with eyes. Adjectives get attached. Hurryin' was wed to Hoosier. Or weapons are issued, a pitchfork, say, that arms the Hoosier as an animated American Gothic. For a while there, the Indiana mascot metamorphed into a bison. I believe it derived from the state's seal, in which a pioneer with an axe fells a tree while the silhouette of a bison lights out for the territories. In the end Hoosier is just what it is. It is the word itself, its own mascot. One year, perhaps the same year native son Quayle rose in the Senate, the state tried to change the motto on the license tags from Hoosier State to Heritage State and was met with near insurrection. No one really knows what a Hoosier is, but not knowing, as my uncle proved, has its own logic. A Hoosier is a Hoosier is a Hoosier.

The State Drink of Wisconsin

The state bird of Wisconsin is the robin. The state flower of Wisconsin is the wood violet. The state tree of Wisconsin is the sugar maple. The state animal of Wisconsin is the badger. The state wild animal of Wisconsin is the white-tailed deer. The state domesticated animal of Wisconsin is the dairy cow and the various breeds-Holstein, Brown Swiss, Guernsey, Jersey, etc.-take yearly turns. The state fish of Wisconsin is the muskellunge. The state insect of Wisconsin is the honeybee. The state mineral of Wisconsin is galena. The state rock of Wisconsin is red granite. The state soil of Wisconsin is antigo silt loam. The state symbol of peace of Wisconsin is the mourning dove. The state of Wisconsin is undecided on the state of Wisconsin's drink. The legislature continues to argue the issue. Beer could be the state drink of Wisconsin. Milk could be the state drink of Wisconsin. Or both beer and milk.

Touchdown Jesus

My father liked to take me to football games at Notre Dame. He liked to point out how gold the gold on the helmets of The Fighting Irish was, how they were as gold as the gold on the dome of the big building on the campus we could see from the stadium. Navy's helmets were gold and Pitt's helmets were gold but not as gold as Notre Dame's gold helmets. I saw O. J. Simpson play in South Bend. We always sat in the end zone, and I remember watching him hauling in the kickoff ball and starting his sprint up the field right before us. I saw Roger Staubach and Navy in a snowstorm. Crushed tight together in the stands, everyone wore heavy wool coats before the coming of down parkas and Gore-Tex. I was there when Dan Devine's team changed its uniform to the green jerseys from the blue. The entire stadium went crazy seeing this brand new team emerge from the tunnel. And I remember when Notre Dame built the library beyond the other end of the stadium and finished off the nine-story facade with a mosaic of a beatific Christ, His arms raised above His head, in the jubilant gesture of the referee signaling a score. He hovered, it seemed, above the goal posts, above the thronging crowd, above the teeming stadium, the Goodyear blimp drifting above His head, exhorting us all. Touchdown! Touchdown! Touchdown!

We always got there early. Sometimes we stayed by the car and tailgated in the parking lot, eating our lunch from a cooler in the trunk. But more often, especially when we were with some of my father's old high-school teammates, we would all drift over to the field house to look at the names of the lettermen on sacred plaques, admire the immaculate cases of memorabilia, trophies, and photographs of the old great and holy teams. My father had gone to Central Catholic in Fort Wayne. They had been the Fighting Irish too, and in his senior year, his team had won the mythical state football championship. My father, who had been quarterback, and his old backfield would recite the names on the plaques, remind each other of games they'd played in or seen.

Most of all I liked it when we went to the far end of the stadium before the game, to the locker room door. A crowd had always gathered to wait and watch for the Notre Dame players to emerge alone or in small groups, threes or fours, from their campus dorms and drift toward the stadium, wading through the crowd into the locker room. The players were huge. None of them had necks. They were stuffed into the insignia-dripping letter jackets of dark blue wool with glossy blue-black leather sleeves.

Touchdown Jesus looked down on us all gathered in the plaza before the locker room door. Look, there were some more coming our way! Often, just by the door, there was a boy-it was never the same boy-about my age, waiting in his wheelchair or leaning on his crutches, his body mangled into a cast or contorted or quaking with palsy. The players had been tipped to his presence. The crowd parted as they approached. The players tolerated the back-pats and the praise as we moved to make room. We just wanted to touch them, to get a word in. They said "excuse me" politely, didn't stop for us as they made their irresistible journey toward the door. But when they spotted the kid by the door they were drawn to him and to the football that miraculously appeared in the folds of his hospital blankets, in the crook of his traction-set arm. We all watched as each player took the ball to sign it, signed it, and handed it back to the bandaged kid, saying a few inaudible-to us-words and then tousling his hair with their beefy hands before disappearing into the changing rooms to be transformed for the game.

My Mother Invents a Tradition

At our dining room table in the house on Clover Lane in Fort Wayne, my mother made it all up. She was the dean of girls at Central High School. The city school system had announced Central's closing and the busing of its students to the six other high schools in the system, two of them, Northrup and Wayne, just being built. Mom would be going to Northrup, and her job now was to manufacture the particulars of the new school's identity. There was a committee, a group of students and teachers drawn from the constituencies of Central and the two northside schools siphoned off by the expansion.

I remember the group listening to records of marching bands playing fight songs and alma maters, the words absent, in our living room. They rated the melodies on graph paper with scales from 1 to 10. "This is `On Wisconsin!"' my mother would say. And one evening the band uniforms and cheerleading costumes were modeled and judged there too, but that was much later. My mother had to do the heavy lifting of the task force, actually writing the words to the songs the band members would play in the future. She would also narrow down all the choices of styles and colors in the catalogues she gathered from the wholesalers of academic garb, the purveyors of embroidery and emblems, the flag-makers, the jewelers, trophy stores, yearbook printers, decal suppliers, and fund-raising companies. Then she would guide the committee to her favorites.

At the dining room table she had to get herself in the mood for her creations. For this new school she was constructing a nostalgic past out of nothing. It was named for a former superintendent, no help there. So she relied on the stored memories of her own high school, the images of high school created in movies she saw while she was in high school. There had been ivy on the red brick walls and a senior door only seniors could walk through. Every year the graduating class planted a climbing rose bush along the fences of the stadium, and the trowel used for the job was handed down to the next class at a ceremony in the spring as the roses budded and began to bloom. Northrup had none of these rituals as of yet, it was being built in a scrapedflat cornfield on the northern edge of town. The excavation left a few trees from a woodlot nearby, and mother mused to me that perhaps that could become a lover's lane. She imagined the moon over the copse of trees. "The students," she wrote for the students in the new handbook, "call this spot Lover's Lane."

I was in high school then, at North Side, my mother's high school, the one she waxed with nostalgia as she worked at the dining room table. At North Side now no one remembered why the seniors gave a garden trowel to the junior class. The rose bushes had been torn out during a renovation before I started there.

She went with orange and brown for Northrup's colors, presented them to the committee as a fait accompli. It was the early '70s, and those colors were hot. Our sofa was orange and brown striped. The other new high school, Fort Wayne Wayne-I know, it is very funny name-was forced into red, white, and blue since its mascot, the General, followed from the name. Mom had more leeway and went with the palette of the moment. She trusted that her words for the school songs, the cheers, the student codes, and the orientation materials would give the colors a patina, age them in a tea of her own emotional past.

The mascot would be a Bruin. This seemed more sophisticated than the simple Bear, and perhaps it fit the same logic of euphemism left over from Central, the school that was closing, where the team mascot, Tiger, had also been known as the Bengals in the sports pages. Bruin went nicely with the earthy tonic expressed in the newly selected colors, rhymed with ruin, and suggested the whole conceit for student publications. The newspaper, she decided, would be called What's Bruin and the yearbook known for years to come as Bear Tracks.

At the dining room table she wrote the poems that became the fight song and the alma mater. I have no notion of the words themselves. They survive to this day, sung at assemblies and home games. I went to a different school and never had to learn them. I can remember her singing, though, trying to fit her words into the scansion of the appropriated songs. As I watched her sing a few bars then stop and erase then sing a few notes more, I was making this memory of my mother creating memories and the myths of memory. A few scraps of cloth. A totem or two. Some new arrangement of the same old words hooked to a persistent jingle.

A Cyclone of Cardinals

Midwesterners like to think a tornado is the region's official natural phenomenon. It's their pet weather, their special storm. The twister in the black and white Kansas of the movie is more powerful and magical than anything in glitzy Oz. The citizens of Xenia, Ohio, where all the tornado alleys empty, speak nervously but with a kind of pride about their repeated visits of destructions. With its precision and its paradoxes, a tornado fits organically into the landscape of open plains and cleared spaces where its victims can see the funnels dancing on the horizon, chase them across the checkerboard of the farm fields and feedlots.

I lived for a while in Ames, Iowa, where Iowa State University adopted the Cyclone as its mascot, the V of the vortex twirling on the sides of football helmets, stationery letterhead, sweatshirts, and baseball caps. But in Ames, for some reason, those graphic depictions were eclipsed by an icon of an angry cardinal. The designers had worked hard to make the bird look angry. Its beak curved into a permanent snarl. Its black eyebrow crooked above its glaring, staring eye. They had named the cardinal Cy, the name the umbilical back to the official atmospheric logo, I guess. It was, when I arrived, a mystery to me. Cartoon cardinals were everywhere, adorning outdoor advertisements, adhering to side panels of cars and trucks, decorating the facades of buildings where the more placid and real pigeons roosted in the flexed fiery combs on the heads of the giant representations. I gathered that any animal species made more sense to those people who orchestrate motivation. A bird, any bird, was more inspiring to rally around than a mere organized wind. Maybe. Maybe it was only symmetry that propelled the choice-the cardinal a kind of mirror image, an avian match for the cross-state rival Iowa's golden hawk schematic that stood for the Hawkeyes, whatever a Hawkeye was.

I discovered that Ames was an outlet for Collegiate Pacific, a company that manufactures licensed trademark apparel. I discovered this when I was taken to one of the factory's open houses where we locals were invited semiannually to come in and take the mistakes and misprinted items off their hands for a significantly reduced price. And that had been another thing I noticed about my new town. While the official cardinal had been the predominant mascot fauna, I couldn't help but notice the eclec tic nature exhibited by the populace on their casual wear. Lions, tigers, bears. All manner of birds. Spartans, gladiators, Trojans. Fighting thises and thats. Pirates, cowboys, devils-blue, red, and green. Indians, chiefs, redskins, warriors, braves. Tarheels, Yankees, Rebels, Hoosiers, Buckeyes, Hawkeyes. Bulls, Browns, Bees. You name it. It was a kind of United Nations of proprietary images teaming with team identity.

On closer inspection you noticed the flaws at the sales and on the street-the ghost images of the double exposure, the smear of a misaligned silk-screen registration, the misspelled words, the missing letters. I loved the mad juxtapositions of multiple printings that created hybrids of logos and language-"University of University" or "ate State." Here on someone's back was, what? Here were the Jabberwocks-a swirling cloud composite of swords, lightning, and horses' hooves. Someone else displayed the Chimeras-a bestiary of eyes and beaks and the 4-H cloverleaf.

At the outlet sales the whole town rummaged through the mountains of rejects. Short- and long-sleeved T-shirts, sweatshirts with hoods and without, pullover sweatshirts, sweatshirts that zipped and those printed fleece-lined inside facing out, ponchos, sweaters, cardigans, windbreakers, blankets, towels, hats, caps, scarves, even the old felt pennants on a stick. I liked the rubbery feel of the paint on the cloth and all the Latin of the upside-down printed school seals. The open books, the oil lamps, the olive branches, the oak leaves and acorns, the palm fronds, the bells, the crosses, the earth, the moon, the planets, the stars.

It turned out that Collegiate Pacific also made a line of outfits for mascots, the kind with the foam rubber body suits and giant heads. I was told they had had a surplus cardinal suit lying around. Maybe the school that ordered it failed to take delivery, or they came up short with the payments and the company repossessed the bird, donating it to the hometown team. Besides, the architecture of a comparable Cyclone suit seemed impossible to construct with the available technology. Where would you put the eyes? Should a Cyclone even have eyes? It would keep coming out as an odd-looking cloud-dirty gray, nebulous, amorphous, simply wrong.

Then You Hit the Archer Over the Head with Your Ukulele

I wouldn't do it. I wouldn't take part in the rally's skit my mother had written and choreographed. I was five and in the habit of accompanying my mother downtown where she taught freshman English at Central High School. I had my own desk at the back of her classroom where I drew pictures of the Trojan War and Odysseus sailing home, the books she was teaching. She was also the faculty advisor for the booster club and I helped her sell candy, popcorn, and pop in the concession stands during the games. She spray-painted the spirit posters too, the message emerging in the burst of paint as she pulled away the masking letters. It also fell to her to run the weekly pep sessions. During basketball season they were in the tiny gym. I sat up by the drummers in the band, who taught me Central's signature rhythm, a backbeat syncopation that made the marchers skip on every fourth step. I liked to watch the Tiger on the floor, acting in my mother's morality plays. The Tiger suit consisted of the furry orange-and-black-striped footed pajama that zipped up the belly and a papier-mache head I had helped my mother repair and paint. The head was very large. I could fit completely inside it curled up. It was hard to breathe wearing it, so the student inside would lift the head like a knight's visor to gulp in some air between cheers.

South Side, Central's archrivals, were the Archers, represented by a green leotarded Robin Hood. The Archer, in elf shoes, patrolled the sidelines with a long bow and a quiver of arrows. My mother had written me into her latest creation vanquishing the Archer. In it there were vignettes representing the history of the rivalry. I was supposed to be in the scene from the '20s. Dressed in kneesocks and knickers, raccoon-skin coat, and felt pork pie hat, I was to hit the Archer, who had tied up the Tiger with his own tail, over the head with my ukulele, freeing Central's mas cot. Later in the sketch, all the historic characters did the Twist, then wildly popular, around the supine green body of the defeated foe.

For some reason I can't begin to remember I didn't want to do it. I do remember my mother and her students pleading with me during the rehearsal, telling me how cute I was and would be. It was hot in that coat. The Tiger had his Tiger head off completely. It wasn't that I was shy or I didn't know how to do the Twist. I understood the concept of the piece. I didn't have any lines to memorize. Perhaps I felt too responsible. What if I performed and the magic charm of that performance failed to work, the strings of my enchanted ukulele no match for the strung taut bow of the green archrival?

It had been just that fall my parents had taken me to Ball State, where my uncle was a student, to see the grand homecoming parade. Suddenly one of the Roman slaves, a fraternity pledge drafted to haul his house's float, broke free of his chains and ran right to me in the crowd. "You must save me," he cried, "Save me, please!" until his brothers, dressed as Legionnaires, dragged him back to the float. I must have been thinking of that incident months later in the Central gym. All these costumed people begging me to help, urged me to save the Tiger who stood there patiently, headless, happy to have this moment to catch his breath.

The War Dances of Redskins

I was a Redskin. I was a Redskin for three years when I attended North Side High School in Fort Wayne. Before that, in junior high, I had been a Chief. This was in Indiana, of course, a state named to honor, with the inaccurate name of Indian, the people killed, expelled, or assimilated in order to create a state named Indiana. The Miami mainly. Little Turtle's grave is just down the river from where my high school sits. The excavation there uncovered the remains of the sword presented to the chief by George Washington, etc. It was another excavation, however, the one on the sandy riverbank to lay the foundation for North Side in 1926, that suggested the future name of its mascot. That dig uncovered an ancient midden, relics of teeth and bone, worked stone, a few beads, remnants of fire, maybe even a grave or two, and led to the honorific of "Redskin" attaching to the athletic teams of the new high school built on top of the site. The evidence of that excavation, its meager catalogue of artifacts, a residue of an indigenous pre-Columbian, perhaps, inhabitation, is today used as justification by those who want to retain "Redskin" as the mascot in the face of the occasional efforts to change it. See, the supporters say, there is a reason, a history, a tradition for the appellation. They miss the point, of course, of using this particular epithet, its particular nuance of that history and tradition. But never mind.

The name came with a character, a student in costume who danced before the start of football and basketball games. The costume was buckskin chaps and shirt with the leather fringe on the sleeves, a beaded breastplate and full-feathered headdress, more a plains get-up than the more accurate woodland outfit. But then what did we know. And the dance and the music that accompanied the costumed character were all Hollywood too. It was supposed to be a war dance, we imagined, with a lot of rhythmic bowing, hands outstretched, moving with a step that was both shuffle and skip in the inscribed outline of the tip-off circle. There might have been a hatchet or a lance.

A kid named Kevin was the best of the three students (there was a yearly competition) who held the position during the time I went to school. All arms and legs, Kevin added a twirling dervish turn to the movements, took his shirt off even during the late football season, danced around the lance (yes, there was a lance) he ceremoniously thrust into the ground. There was war paint too, on his face, red and white, the school colors, greasebased makeup streaked under each eye. The war paint had been applied over an initial coat of copper color he sponged onto all his exposed very white and freckly skin. Often the finish was splotchy, dappled.

Kevin didn't have enough time to get into makeup during the big riot. This was my junior year, the year the school system closed Central High School downtown, where my mother had taught English and been the dean of girls for nearly twenty years, and bussed its mostly black students out to the six white high schools around the city's edge. This was in the early '70s. The integration hadn't gone well, with every high school experiencing protests, beatings, fights, vandalism, and bomb threats. This was even true at the two new high schools, Wayne and Northrup.

At North Side the alienated black students staged a boycott of classes, and a schoolwide assembly was called by the fretting principal hoping to talk things out. We met in the gym. The football team and the cheerleaders were there, already clustered on the court with the frazzled administrators and coaches. The teachers patrolled the stands. Those squads on the floor had a semblance of harmony and order, having had to work together through practices in the summer. Kevin burst in, running halfdressed in his outfit, feathers flying, to his spot in the center of the floor. He was very white, I remember, without his makeup. He seemed to glow, reflecting the bright light of the new mercury vapor lamps just then reaching the peak of their illumination, having been turned on in haste as the crowds of students poured into the gym from all around the building. They shoved a microphone into his hands urging him to speak, and I remember thinking this breaks some unspoken code to which mascots adhere. The mute mascots were to remain silent on the sidelines as if they had appeared in our midst from some preverbal land where only pantomime, pep, and pumping fists were allowed. They are to always be illustrative in their stoic silence. Indians even more so.

But our Indian said something. Did he say to the throng of angry and frightened students packed into the bleachers that we were all Redskins? Did he say it? "We are all Redskins!" I hope he said it. And then he did the dance. Yes, he did the dance. A skeletal band had been mustered, the drums beating the tomtom and a trumpet blaring that warning staccato. We watched Kevin dance the dance.

I don't remember what happened then, but we all ended up dancing on the gym floor. Marvin Gaye was on the speakers. The Stones. Carole King. We were studying Tapestry in Mrs. Neuhaus's English class.

The cheerleaders reminded us to take off our shoes before we ventured out on the gym floor. We filled that floor. We were on the edge of a riot, on the verge of a party. The administrators began to look relieved. We didn't talk. What could we say? Dancing seemed like the thing to do at the time. We were so many, nearly two thousand, we couldn't do much more than mill in time to the music that didn't stop, it seemed, for hours. We danced that way, in a kind of trance, until the buses came.

The Mother's March

I went with my mother when she went door-to-door in the neighborhood, collecting for the March of Dimes. She let me push the doorbells. I liked the illuminated ones that blinked out when I depressed them. Mother and I would visit with many of the neighbors who invited us in for a chat and for something to warm us up. This was after the polio vaccines. We had all just taken the sugar cube the summer before. The charity had altered the focus of its appeal to birth defects, but most often my mother and our neighbors shared memories of polio-the closing of the river beach, the braces and the iron lungs, Roosevelt. I drank hot chocolate and sometimes got to play at playing someone's piano. At home, my mother would let me separate the big pile of coins we collected into smaller piles of pennies, dimes, nickels, and quarters.

"The first thing I did when I saw you for the first time was count your fingers and toes." She had been knocked out completely for my birth. I had been delivered with forceps. I picture her groggily counting my fingers and toes. They're all there.

Years later, I came to realize that during those treks through the neighborhood my mother regarded me as a kind of mascot. I was an emblem of her luck as a mother, both the charm that embodied the wish and the body itself charmed into existence. I was illustrative of the charity's objectives. See, all his fingers tickling the keys of your piano, depressing the buttons of your doorbells. I was no cartoon, no stylized rendering of the talisman, not even a poster child. I was just her son, but that was enough for metaphor.