Cruelty Starts Young

I picked up one of those quick read magazines today, my interest piqued by the photograph of a young girl, who will never grow old. Phoebe Prince. She was bullied to death. Beautiful. Irish transplant. The glory of life before her. And now, nothing. Because other teenagers could not, would not curb that kernel of evil within all of us. After being taunted, publicly, over and over again and called words that teenagers should not even know (and didn't know in days gone by), she went to her mother's rented home and hung herself.

The idea of it is baleful. The authorities are prosecuting, this the new way to deal with behavior that should be within the purview of parent and social anathema before the destruction, not legalism after, too late.

Suddenly, a poem, I think by Edna St. Vincent Millay, suddenly and somewhat comes to mind. "I understand, I do not approve, and I am not resigned". But is it something to be understood, the drive by the still unformed human being to kill the soul of another, to isolate, to cast off?

Do you know what that young girl felt? I think you do, if ever you were bullied, as I suspect so many of you were. I was. And I remember as if it were yesterday the feeling.

I was also about 15, the same age as this late child. My best neigborhood friend, Fern, was going to go to a day summer camp. And she wanted me to come too. The only thing I did not count on was that, she being a year younger, we'd be placed into different groups. I hardly, if ever, saw Fern that summer.

What was it about me they did not like? I still don't know. I was in the full throes of pubescent transformation into something but not quite yet a woman. I was never one of the pretty ones. Not fat at that point, but definitely not skinny. Was that it? I did not smoke, and the girls smoked like chimneys. My not joining might have seemed rather uppity. I did have a tendency to disapprove of violations of rules. Given my line of work for the last 25 years, that apparently hasn't changed much. But then, I did not have the tools to deal with the infliction of utter abrogation. They excommunicated me. Literally. No one talked to me, even if I were in a group with them. Oh, there was one girl, who came after the season started. She liked me, at first. She was the relative of the art counselor. I thought, "No problem. One person. That's enough". But the word went down. "Don't talk to her." And she stopped. Some people's personal items were placed in my locker and then I was accused of stealing. I demurred. Nothing happened to me; I guess there wasn't enough actualy evidence, despite the plant. I was not fired as a camper, except that one counselor was convinced I was the culprit and sided with the girls.

I told my parents. They said I could leave there if I wanted. But something seemed so awful about what they were doing that I could not let them win by getting rid of me. I look back now and think what an idiot I was. I was going to make them see they were wrong. As if that were the issue, right or wrong. Well, I guess it was, but only to me.

I know what that girl felt. The girl who used to have bright eyes and a bright future. I do, although for me it was only eight weeks, not months as it was for Phoebe. I feel it now. An anger so deep, so raw, that was trapped inside her. She couldn't let them see it, because, if they did, it would only get worse. It would mean they were getting to her. As they were. She could beg them to stop, but that too was only fuel. The more pain they saw; the more they would seek to cause. Lies. Taunts. With laughter and smug smiles. I have often thought that such behavior is truly the incarnation of the devil.

There was no place for Phoebe to go. No one to understand. No one probably even to believe. Maybe she thought, "I deserve it." The impulse of escape was the impulse to kill, herself if she could not stop them.

God rest her soul. There but for the Grace of that same God go I. Go you. Remember her. If you pray, pray for her. And, if you have more virtue than I do, pray for those nine teenagers who killed her with unrelenting cruelty.

The Piano of Townsend Avenue

When I was about 4, someone gave me a pint sized baby grand. I mean, it looked like a baby grand, had a little stool to match, but it was for a child. I don't recall that I played it much. I do recall that at kindergarten about a year later, Mother Anna, already probably well past 80 years old, helped me learn "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on a real sized piano, although only an upright, in our one room school house. (The rest of the school was in the main building up the hill; suddenly I think of the crab apple trees that surrounded the kindergarten house, now long gone, probably both the classroom and the trees). Somewhere between the ages of 4 and 5 then, the idea of playing a piano, for real, took hold of me.

I told my parents. I even insisted. I don't know for certain, but I think they figured it was a passing fancy of their only child, but by the time I was 9, and still talking of lessons, apparently, they relented. For two dollars a week I could take classes in the music corridor (there were about four or five rooms) taught by another nun, was it Mother Regina, hmmmm, so long ago my memory is sadly fading, who herself was a prodigious talent, at least to my ears. I don't recall if I asked for an actual piano of my own, but, in order to practice regularly, I suppose, one was called for. And so, the piano, a mahogany Hardman and Peck, came to the one bedroom apartment on Townsend Avenue. It came to the bedroom. My bedroom, as my parents by then were sharing a Castro Convertible in the living room.

This was 1963. The piano was One Thousand Dollars, quite a sum for those days. I think Dad paid for it, "on time", one hundred dollars a month. It sat in front of the wall that was covered in full size mirrors. There are several photographs of me, ones in which I appear to be grimacing at the idea of being forced to pose on the piano stool, pretending to play in one dress up outfit or another. While that piano sat in my bedroom, I grew up into a teenager of 16. The piano moved with us to Giles Place, a far larger apartment, two bedrooms, and a living room that could easily house it as a kind of centerpiece amid similarly red and brown colored decor and, even more full sized mirrors. By this time, my enthusiam for music, but more particularly, practice, had diminished in direct proportion to the requests for public performances when I felt unready for them.

After an embarrassing last recital in which I forgot the piece I was playing requiring that the music be brought to me (I can still hear the click click of the heels of the classmate whose long walk to me enhanced the shame of my not having practiced enough to have fully memorized the music and the remonstration of the teacher, who had long before replaced Mother Regina, of the consequences of a lack of practice), the Piano of Townsend Aveneue and Giles Place was touched infrequently. I was 17.

After my mother died, while I was in college, the piano took on a nostalgic aspect. It came into my life when we were an intact family. She had no doubt been a key instigator in the original purchase as she wanted for me access to education and opportunity she had not been given. It resonated their hopes and wishes. I don't think I had any thought of any of that, but, when it came to my decision to move to Los Angeles some years later, I knew for certain that the piano had to come with me. My father could not quite understand it since I played so little, what need had I of it. But it was the one and only thing that moved cross country after me, courtesy of my father given my penurious state at the age of 27 taking a stab at living across the country.

Dad moved here shortly after I did, and when he'd stop by he'd play portions of a couple of dance like phrases on it. His instrument of choice was primarily the mandolin. We were so much the same he and I, both of us playing after a fashion, but neither really able to commit to the time and patience practice requires.

The piano was a repository for phones, lamps, photographs, papers over the years. It was overwaxed and scratched and dented. The dust gathered in various crevices. The music holder fell off. One of the connections to the bench broke.

About a year and a half after dad died, I looked around my cluttered apartment, which included the poster board of pictures used at his funeral I hadn't moved. It hadn't been a morbid thing, just maybe a kind of an unrealistic and illusory stopping of time. I knew that as time moved on, despite my feeble efforts, so must I. I decided to stay in this apartment but to purge all but the essential. It came to me that the piano of Townsend Avenue, now nearly fifty years old, was an essential. I treated it to renovation, outside and inside. It has been repaired and sanded and restained. And tuned to concert pitch. I know it is the same piano because I see just a soupcon of an old nail polish stain from one of my perfunctory ticklings of the ivory over the adult years.

And, I have begun to play it again. A circle closing.

The Object of Ridicule

Until last night, I had never seen the movie "MASH".

That deficit in my entertainment life has a small, digressive story attached to it. When I was 15, in Monticello, New York, spending the summer with my aunt, uncle and two cousins on Sackett Lake Road, each of us cousins had an age appropriate counterpart living up the hill in a large New England mansion. Stephanie was 5, like my cousin Carol, Tony was 12, like my cousin Barbara, and James, who played the loudest rock music to the fields and blueberry bushes surrounding their property, was 14 plus, just a little younger than me.

All the neighborhood kids preferred playing at my aunt's less expansive (but still about half or two thirds an acre big enough) house, and Stephi and Tony were always among them. But James the aloof eldest tended to come down less frequently. Until one day he seemed to be hanging about. It never occurred to me why since from my perspective, the awkward age was in full swing, and things were happening to my body that made me feel more like Quasimodo than the object of anyone's desire.

Then it happened, a breaking of the teen age silence, when James and I happened to be alone amid the other children playing. "Would you like to go to see MASH?" Instead of thinking hormonally, I thought more politically, a la, the disapproval of my conservative dad who thought MASH was a sign of the doom of our civilization, and said a too quick no. As I floated in the family pool on the hill a day or so later, all by myself (we were always invited), James' mother came out and made it clear that I had said no to my first ever date request. "James" she said, "likes older women."

My feeble efforts at dating, when I realized that was what was being requested of me, are a story for another entry, if ever there be one. But as to MASH, I find myself concurring with dad, having seen it last night at the AERO theatre, with Elliott Gould and Sally Kellerman there, live, forty years after the introduction of Trapper John, Hawkeye Pierce and Hot Lips Houlihan into the popular culture. The doom of our society, incipient i 1969, has come nearly to fruition. We are just beginning to experience the death rattle.

To me, although in a relativistic society of opinion, mine has no meaning, the easy ridicule of Christianity, in particular Catholicism, was particularly disturbing. I found myself surprised that it was so blatant in a main stream movie of a time that was only just becoming cavalier about everything, particularly God and authority in any form. I knew of course, from the television series, that the featured Catholic priest was a fully realized caricature.

But in the movie, when the dentist soldier, Painless, decides that he wants to kill himself because of his failed prowess with a lady (all the more problematic for him because of the prodigious size of his appendage), the good ole boys of progressiveness, Trapper and Hawkeye, stage a "last supper" for Painless. Painless would appear to be cast in the center role of well, you know. The buffonish Fr. Mulcahy, peers in, and only vaguely seems to recognize the scene and toddles off, presumably to his bible, already previously the source of amusement as read by another caricature character, Frank Burns, the religious hippocrite. (You see, he has been sleeping with the strict miltary Major Houlihan). Painless receives communion from one of the stars and goes off to take his suicide pill in an open coffin nearby the "supper" table. Of course, he is, in a somewhat compromised drugged state, rescued from his suicidal malaise by a visit from Lt. Dish, so no one actually dies. The audience laughed at the shot by the progressive and therefore more credible than thousands of years of theology and philosophy, Robert Altman taken at one of the most sacred moments in Christian history. It was forty years ago, and it remains today, an acceptible ridicule. It is perhaps fortunate that Christians believe in turning the other cheek rather than the Fatwahs, for example. For unto today, and with even more brazenness, the Church is one of the last remaining acceptable targets for vicious humor in the name of Freedom of Speech. No such speech is acceptable for other certain religions or New Age thinking, except maybe Judaism, as the ugly head of Anti-Semitism is raising itself again in the 21st century. Which puts me to mind of an ad for a cable show, "Nurse Jackie" that is splattered on virtually every City Bus I must be next to as I drive to work. The pill popping, philandering Nurse is pictured in what appears to be a halo, a la, for example, the Lord Himself, or His Mother. The halo turns out to be a series of pills, and hypodermics. Our healer has her hand in one of those iconic (I mean as in actual Icons) poses of thumb out and two fingers up in a kind of blessing. She is holding a bottle of pills and superimposed over this respectful picture is the phrase "Holy Shift". Oh, cool, got those Catholics (because Catholics favor holy pictures of that sort) again!

Now, I am told this is part of free speech. Ok. I buy that. Except I don't see free speech being applied to Christians or Jews as they express opposite opinions. "Getting in their face" is apparently only encouraged by certain high placed individuals of our social democracy if the face being gotten into to is religious or conservative. But free speech means the religious and conservative get to do the same, right? But, therein lies the rub, that isn't the deal. Free speech is only the acceptable progressive speech, which includes making fun of any people who believe strongly in that silly God thing. Or like keeping America with its founding emblems of Liberty, E Pluribus Unum and In God We Trust. (With acknowledgment to Dennis Prager).

We better start building catacombs cause we are going to need them again.