Apropos of Nothing Friday

Maybe the fifteenth time the dogs went berserk yesterday I trudged out the front door to see if it was an actual threat, or one of the goddamn cats next door, or just the mailman (who has the temerity to put mail in the box within eyeshot of the guardian hellhounds--seriously, man, what are you thinking?), but found just a little flyer rolled up and tucked under the hose bib. Usually these are handyman ads or menus for restaurants that invariably close within two weeks of their menus showing up at my front door, but this day it was someone's anonymous statement of gratitude. I just skimmed the front material--the upshot was that someone had challenged this person to list 25 things he was grateful for, and he wound up with something like 340 before running out of space. The first one listed was an early memory from the age of 4, of initially being grateful that a neighbor had bought him a double-scoop ice cream cone, and then immediately after that being grateful to his cousin for sharing one of her scoops when he accidentally dumped his own cone on the sidewalk. And so on for most of a double-sided xerox.

I'm not sure how to pick the items that would go on my own list, since obviously any middle-class American's list should be completely filled with stuff like housing, employment, access to medical care, and that whole Constitution thing before even getting around to the juicy bits that make better flyer copy than "7.25% fixed mortgage rate." Fail to list the basic stuff you should be weepingly grateful for and karma snatches it away! Did I mention my family and my dogs? Very grateful for them, capricious universe! Very much so! No takey! Hands off!!!

That said, after this shit week I am grateful for the database guy fixing some major problems that were giving me fits. I am grateful that my company's proposal for a major excavation from an early time period that interests me greatly won the county contract. I am grateful for prehistoric people using rocks for tools in consistent ways that left identifiable signatures in the archaeological record, ensuring my continued employment.

I am grateful for the best teacher I ever had, and was remiss in not making the big TomDay birthday post I'd planned for March 1. I'm grateful that he touched so many students' lives that we sought each other out after his passing, and that as a result a couple of people I hadn't talked to in 20 years are back in my life as e-mail buddies.

Also grateful for Big Head Todd, the Santa Catalina mountains, snow in the desert, Merrell footwear, Frankie's Philadelphia Cheesesteaks and Hoagies, cool shade, streaming internet radio, cushy soccer balls, sunflowers, and geckos. Not grateful for static electricity, constant desert springtime dry winds, feral cats, olives, being pinched--fucking pinch me on St. Pat's day and you'll be picking yourself up off the floor--Will Ferrell except in Elf, cartilage tears, or John McCain, who is a douchebag.

I could go on and on.

Memorial

It's been a year since he left us, almost to the moment. Tonight I'll trawl Bookman's and pick up a few more volumes of the classics he taught for my library, put the Beatles on, and light a candle to his memory. Not that he needs any help from me, should there actually be an afterlife that requires letters of recommendation for admittance.

Tom Gerencher, 1946-2006.

Hug your English teacher today.

All Souls, Again

First, a confession. I did not put up my altar in the library plaza on Saturday, mainly because when I got down there it looked like it would be one of maybe three or four altars. That and what I was afraid looked like childish exuberance in my design cracked my personal embarrassment threshold, so like a woo I strolled around the plaza a few times among the myriad urban hunter-gatherers and then fled.

I wasn't going to leave Tom hanging, though, so I went ahead and constructed the altar in my back yard under a rising full moon.

Tom Gerencher, English Department, St. Joseph's High School, South Bend, Indiana

I decided it looked pretty okay after all. The original ban pay toilets sign hung on his classroom wall over the left side of the chalkboard. I stared at it every day. The tiny blackboards in the foreground contain Five Qualities of Great Literature and Seven Support Techniques for Essay Writing, all burned into my brain. Later that night I went to the Icecats game, where the usual pregame bangin' eighties metal music was replaced, briefly, with Beatles tunes. I took it as a sign that he liked my altar and was happy to be honored in a cozy backyard spot under the silver moon.

Maybe next year I will recruit a contingent of friends to build a flotilla of altars so no one's is left conspicuously alone. Um, I think I'll save the stack of faux wood books for next year, if anyone would like to join me. Anyway.

The Boy and I stopped at Grill for a pre-procession dinner (spinach ravioli in herbed pink sauce for me) and then wandered over in front of Hotel Congress to wait. Surreal sight #1 of the night was watching three otherwise prim 60-ish ladies sway and groove to the fuckfuckMOTHERFUCKERFUCKTHATFUCKFUCK rap music blasting out of a Club Congress soundcheck.

Then came the procession itself, which is a half-mile long exercise in surreality. The beginning is always almost overwhelming to me, with the first giant puppets followed by a crush of black-clad people in skeleton makeup surging curb to curb, drums and incense and bells, people dancing, people waving skulls, coming and coming.

This person had a little mini-me skeleton marionette with skull maracas.

There were many wonderful giant puppets. This one spun round and round.

Plenty of political statements as well, including coffins labeled "Bill of Rights" and "Constitution." These nice people handed out leaflets reminding us to vote.

This is rapidly becoming my favorite community event. It's amazing being in a space with so many people simply letting go and putting themselves so totally into it.

Navel-Gazing Music

I love Mogwai. Mogwai works particularly well when it's a rainy day and you're feeling introspective. Go here and click away.

This is why, still.

I'll get back to the political yowling in a day or so. For now I'm contemplating the impact one man had on hundreds of people, evidenced by the numbers who showed up at the first memorial service. A lot of people have come to this blog by way of googling his name (hi, Tish!). He was the kind of teacher they make movies about, and I'd venture that the sheer numbers of us who count ourselves lucky to have been his students make it a happy ending.

How We Grieve

Terse e-mails from former classmates. Entries in the funeral home's electronic guestbook. I didn't really cry until I read his obituary today. I suppose if I were still the good little Catholic girl who sat in his classroom 22 years ago, I would have spent last night at a church, lighting candles and saying a couple decades of the rosary for the repose of his eternal soul. But I figure if a merit-based heaven does exist, he doesn't need my help to sail to the front of the line.

I wandered around a few bookstores instead, remembering how he introduced me to the amazing world of used books, how he gave everyone in his class a card from The Haunted Bookshop with his signature on the back guaranteeing the bearer a 10% discount. I still have the card, someplace, and I still have all the books I bought there in my junior year, the big Collected Works of Emerson, the Thoreau, the Hawthorne. So last night I stood in Bookman's feeling stupid to have tears in my eyes when I reached out to touch the titles--some of them the same editions--I'd written papers from back then.

I housesat for him and his wife for a week the summer after I graduated. One of the rooms downstairs in their little house was his library, all its walls covered with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with great literature. I made it a point to write down every author on those shelves so that someday I could have the same library. Last night I bought a few more volumes toward that end, Cooper, Chekhov, Stein. It seemed the most fitting tribute I could make, at least of the quiet, personal variety.

Tom Gerencher, Rest...

E-mail came in at 2:11 this afternoon to say that Tom had died this morning. The finest teacher I ever had, the fabled high school mentor who made all the difference. He was... for a while there he was everything in my life. Taught me how to write, how to think. Books, books, books.

He was walking around the track at the school and had a heart attack. It's fitting, I suppose, that he died there. He graduated from the school himself and came back after college to teach literature and media (which essentially boiled down to all Beatles, all the time). This would have been his 34th year there, if memory serves. He commanded respect and not a little fear, but allowed students to call him by his first name. My early papers were handed back with so much red ink on them they looked like they'd been used to mop up a car wreck. My later papers were college level writing and clean.

We kept in touch over the years, primarily through Christmas cards. My consolation is that I did make sure to tell him exactly how much he meant to me and how important his touch on my life has been. Hardly a day goes by that I don't think of him or some lesson he taught me. He's in my head always.

Godspeed, Tom, and God help St. Peter if he stammers and says "um..." at the pearly gates, or tries to pass off an uninformed bias as a well-supported argument.