Juniorbird.com

I woke up this morning with a start, completely convinced that it was Christmas morning and that I had overslept, missing the gifts. They say that you know when you’re an adult because you want to sleep in, instead of waking up at 5 am with excitement in your heart. My adulthood must be reluctant at best, because two days ago I woke up before 7 am after a fitful sleep, filled with anticipation for what would lie under the tree.
Or, I guess, the poinsettia, since my grandmother’s apartment is more potted plant-than towering conifer-sized.
There were a few Christmas trees along the way, it’s true, principally in the early days. My grandparents had this ranch in the country — a place in which we could fit a tree — a few hours out of Houston, to which they retired. Although my grandmother couldn’t keep the place after my grandfather died, scenes from some of my first six Christmases still click through my memory like View-Master slides.
Being a child I, of course, woke at a terribly early hour. I’d be up at five, but not allowed to disturb my parents until seven or eight. In the first year that I can remember, I slept in this little atrium, on a padded seat built into the wall — a nice, small, cozy bed for a kid who must’ve been three or four. There was some old, soft blanket for me to cuddle under, smelling the way that blankets owned by old people smell. There was also a sock-style stuffed plush thing that my father had cuddled as a child, and which I could cuddle now. With the lights out and my parents and grandparents in their rooms, the country air was quiet and dark and very very still. In the morning, I lifted the seat up to reveal a storage bin filled with my father’s old games, and I played “some game that involved jumping pegs”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peg_solitaire and, I think, Connect Four against myself. I couldn’t even look at the tree, it was too tempting, so I sat in the nook and played all morning.
Another year, I slept on a bed in the same room as the tree. I’ve always been scared of the dark and, at night, with the deep stillness of the country, the shadow of the tree was vaguely frightening at night.[1] I may have been young, but I could feel the contradiction there. In the morning I woke up early and spent a while contemplating the boxes under the tree, but I didn’t feel it would be right to look and see which were mine. For a while, I drew in my “Big Chief”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Chief_tablet Original drawing tablet; I didn’t know what the word “original” meant, but the cover was orange, so I thought that word must have something to do with that color.[2] Later that morning, I opened a miniature air-hockey table which I happily played with my father but of which I, oddly, have no other memories.
I must’ve been six when they let me sleep out on the porch before Christmas. My father always told me how, when he was growing up, he loved to sleep on his old screened-in porch, which was once swept away in a tornado.[3] The replacement porch, in which I slept, was glassed-in, but even with that I had to huddle under my blankets in the winter air.[4] After my parents and grandparents went to bed and I stopped seeing the Christmas tree in the window, I could see the trees outside, covered in their Spanish Moss, in the moonlight. In the morning, waiting for my parents, I played with my father’s tin soldiers. I liked to put the British redcoats in this little wooden boat he’d made — it had inward-sloping, gray-painted sides, each with three round holes for cannons, outlined in yellow. Somehow, I believe that was the year I got a cap gun for Christmas and accidentally left it in my carry-on bag[5], resulting in a little confiscation-related drama at the airport.
Later, I learned to sleep in before Christmas, but not before I left some of my best Legos in a drawer in a hotel room in McAllen, Texas. Maybe that trip, which began my love affair with “Feliz Navidad,” as sung by the great Jose Feliciano, will make a blog entry some day. You know, Jose Feliciano, ya got no complaints.
fn1. I think it’s the ghosts in my childhood home in Baltimore who make me fear the dark everywhere.
fn2. I believe I thought the word was “orangal”, meaning orange in some way that I hadn’t yet learned.
fn3. And deposite on the other side of the pond. Since I’m here, I bet we can all guess he wasn’t inside.
fn4. I think it was warmer than it was in Baltimore, but I was in my jammies, so there was a lot of huddling to do.
fn5. Which was a brown vinyl shoulder bag from “Globus Tours”:http://www.globusjourneys.com/ that I believe my maternal grandmother had gotten on a trip to the Holy Land. And this is the sort of useless information that keeps me from remembering the difference between Income Statement Cash and Balance Sheet Cash.

Dating California girls, I’ve really had the opportunity to appreciate how important car culture is in this state. It seems like all Califorians have a serious opinion of what their dream car is and a knack for spotting their favorite cars on the road. Myself, I grew up in what is “a somewhat less car-oriented town”:http://www.citypaper.com/news/story.asp?id=11464, and I’ve never had the relentless California drive to have the greatest, best-driving, best-looking car of all.
Part of this is just that the two cities draw from different cultures. For starters, most of the people who could afford cars moved out of Baltimore; those who are left are apt to prefer either American muscle cars with big turbo intakes on the hood, or big American trucks with raised suspensions and even bigger tires (perhaps the Chevy plant that used to be in town encouraged the preference for domestic automobiles). I have no memories whatsoever of people with lowered cars, although I may just be revealing my whiteness here. The expensive customizations, the whining turbos, the ubiquitous tricked-out Asian rides… I just didn’t see them back home.
So what car did I dream of? I only had a fantasy involving a (non-flying) car once, when I was in second grade, when my father got a new car. At first, I loved that car; I imagined that it was the perfect ride for a gritty private investigator, and, of course, I imagined myself as that gritty private investigator. Clad in a brown fedora and trenchcoat, I’d travel the city solving crimes. Fortunately, I wouldn’t need air conditioning, because my father’s car didn’t have that, or an FM radio, because it didn’t have that either. This car’s light-brown exterior would match perfectly with my bearded face, and I’d drive it purposefully and aggressively around town as I crouched in its vinyl seats. Yes, that car was the only car I ever imagined myself owning, the only one I ever pretended I’d drive when I sat alone. It was great, the car of my dreams, that…
1983 Ford Escort L Hatchback?
“!http://www.escortfocus.com/assets/images/82Escort.jpg!”:http://www.escortfocus.com/html/history.html
That’s right, the only car I’ve ever dreamed of was an entry-level econobox with a 69 horsepower engine and absolutely no added options of any kind. And it was tan. No, clearly I don’t share the same car culture as my Californian compatriots.
Although I did have a bit of geek lust for that “second-generation Prius”:http://www.hybridcars.com/prius.html. Cleverness just turns me on.

I did not — and this probably comes as very little of a surprise to most people who read this blog reguarly — spend much time in the Principal’s office in Elementary School. In all honesty, I simply wasn’t popular enough to have the chance to act out in a way that would gain the attention of the higher-ups.
And that was a good thing; the stern, strait-laced, British, Mr. Peerless, our Principal, rather scared me. I had been friends with his son Eric, and had taken French lessons from his wife, who was from Brittany (thus the circular white-with-red-center “Brest”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brest%2C_France sticker on her car’s rear window), and who taught me a grating Breton accent that, fortunately, faded away in time. A day or two a week I’d carpool with Eric and his mother, and, if I somehow missed my carpool, would travel with Mr. Peerless instead; a ride with Mr. Peerless was a guarantee of a silent, nerve-wracking trip.
So, for five years, I’d avoided the impeccably-named Mr. Peerless’s office, but I blew it one windy afternoon. After Recess the teachers would line our class up on benches under a tree next to the side entrance; when we were all well-seated we’d be led into the school in an orderly single file. But this afternoon the wind was strong enough to push a too-tall, too-skinny fifth-grader around as it swirled between the Elementary and Middle School buildings. Somehow, this wind picked up a white plastic half-gallon bottle and sent it spinning around the benches on which we sat. Someone kicked the bottle, sending it spinning towards someone else, and then that person kicked it, and then a few of the kids were laughing and running in the wind, kicking the bottle between them.
I sat still, figuring the teachers would disapprove of this levity and want us to head in; but the teachers were nowhere to be found, and I was boring quickly. So I got up and kicked the bottle too, laughing with the popular kids and having fun, until suddenly those absent teachers did appear and put an end to our frolicking. For adults who had been absent for at least ten minutes, they were remarkably put out. Those of us who’d played with the bottle were lined up against the wall while everyone else was led back into the classrooms; then we were taken to Mr. Peerless’s office.
That’s when I knew I was in trouble. Looking at the kids around me, I realized I was the only one who hadn’t made multiple trips to the principal — frankly, I had no idea what to expect in Mr. Peerless’s office and no idea what to do when I got there. So I hung to the back of the group and, then, sat in the corner.
The office was decorated in yellows and browns, with a textured-pile carpet and curved-edge furniture made from a yellowish wood; only a few red and green books in the bookcase, and the bright white sunlight coming through the leaded window, broke the monotone. First Mr. Peerless berated us for playing with the bottle instead of sitting there like good little children, and I was relieved, because I assumed that some sort of scolding would be involved. But what came next? Would our parents be called? Would we lose recess priveleges? How did these things go? Was there a negotiation? Would the other kids sell me out? I kept my mouth shut and nodded my head. Then Mr. Peerless asked us, with purpose, “so what were you doing with the bottle anyway?” One kid, I don’t remember who, immediately confessed to playing with it, which was clearly the wrong answer. I think someone else might have also confessed to playing, but then another of us malefactors came up with the right answer: “I just wanted to return the bottle to its owner.” This right outcome-oriented reply sat well with Mr. Peerless’s firmly Quaker beliefs and he shook his head in approval. “Who else just wanted to return the bottle to its owner?” he asked, scanning the room with his little round glasses looking over his beard, a skinny, balding, dark blond Freud. I could tell a good thing when I heard it and I, along with almost everyone else, raised my hand. We were allowed to return to class, while the two kids who had been unfortunate enough to cop to the truth before someone was smart enough to find the right lie got some kind of punishment.
Because it was a lie; we were kids, and we were just having fun. That’s what kids are supposed to do, except maybe not at Quaker schools.

One of my “favorite teachers”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/000610.php in “High School”:http://www.parkschool.net/ was my freshman year history teacher. This teacher was one of those portrayed-in-TV-movies-style teachers, intense, engaging, committed to learning and to his kids and, in return, loved by them. We all were thrilled to be in this teacher’s history class, and even after we left he knew our names and our faces for the rest of the four years and would engage us in meaningful conversation in the halls.
This teacher was my 9th grade History teacher, and, at that, he was a great upgrade over Middle School History teacher/gym teacher Lucky Malonee, who was quite knowledgeable but a little overaggressive for my tastes. This teacher was smart, editorialized in fascinating, rather left-of-center ways, and, best of all, appreciated how brilliant I was. Or something. Anyway, I loved his class, even though it was probably just a repeat of 7th grade or 5th grade or something like that, just with more information, as History is wont to be in K-12 education.
After 9th grade, I took AP History with “Mr. Lakin”:http://juniorbird.com/archive/001483.php, so I no longer had a chance to take a class with this teacher; but I still ran into him in the school hallways and the libarary, and he always knew my name and talked to me. And it wasn’t just hello — we actually had meaningful conversations. This teacher understood that I was a funny-looking, unpopular, low-social-skills kind of guy, and that I had a powerful and deep anger towards people who were popular, had interpersonal abilities or, god forbid, were non-hideous. I could vent to this teacher, he would say understanding things, deflect my anger and my not-yet-socially-unacceptable desires to wreak horrible, handgun-facilitated revenge on my social oppressors, and leave me feeling ok about my lot in life and as if my talents did matter.
But this teacher was badly broken. A Vietnam vet, he had what I would later recognize as “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PTSD. So, this teacher wasn’t all sunshine and smiles, but he was a good teacher, and my classmates all knew and very much appreciated him, and chose his class as an elective. For three years I was sad that he didn’t teach AP, because I liked him and because he could teach without traumatizing me nearly as much as Mr. Lakin. This teacher was one of the more popular and most respected teachers on campus.
Which is why I have no idea how to react to the allegations that he molested one of his students. Allegedly, during the late 1970s this teacher had a consensual (or, given the power relationship between a teacher and a student, not entirely consensual) relationship with a 14-year-old female student. This is sad news, and I don’t really know how I feel about it.
No, I guess I do know how to feel about it: I have an intellectual, disconnected sense of sadness for the alleged victim, because I’m sure that, if anything did happen between her and this teacher, it was likely not good for her; and I have a deep, personal sense of sadness for this teacher. He was truly a good guy to me and to other students, when I was at school. I don’t recall him behaving inappropriately around women, and I think I would have noticed because there were a few teachers about whom I specifically remember thinking that their behavior was borderline inappropriate. But, then, I was at school 18-20 years after the alleged acts took place, so I could quite literally have been seeing a different person.
It’s just sad all around. Some woman may have been harmed, and, now, towards the end of his life, this teacher may be remembered for the one student he hurt, instead of the thousands he helped. I hope it can be some other way.
_[Note: I received requests to remove this teacher's name from this entry about two weeks after it was published, and believe them reasonable under the circumstances. This entry was intended as a personal statement, and I never imagined it would become such a high search result for this teacher's name; had I thought it would be, I would never have written it. Both this teacher and his alleged victim deserve their privacy and the opportunity to opportunity to resolve this situation in a manner that they see fit, without it being played out on my blog.]_

I have a confession to make, a confession that will make you lose all sympathy for me. A confession that will draw away any residual extent to which you identify with me. A confession that will ensure that you label me, henceforth, as a freak. Aargh. I can barely admit it. OK, here I go.
I’ve only used the snooze button on an alarm clock twice in my life.
There, I’ve gone and said it. It’s a hard thing to confess, but it’s true. Every morning, that alarm goes off; and every morning, I get up and get going. It’s just that simple. I don’t even need coffee; as soon as that awful sound begins, I’m out of bed, turning off the alarm, sliding on my slippers, and, these days, checking my e-mail. (Nothing like a little pre-breakfast e-mailing.)
Once, during my Junior year of college, I experimented a little; I hit the snooze button, twice, on a mid-week morning. It was my junior year, I’d always wondered what it was like, so I just planned ahead the night before and did it. When that alarm went off, I pressed snooze, then I let my eyes close again; a moment later, my sleep was again molested by the buzzing and I again quieted the noise with snooze; then, another moment, and I was up on my feet and out the door of my dorm room. Just in time to make breakfast 15 minutes before the dining hall switched to lunch (no way was I missing my Apple Jacks).
But it was pretty unsatisfying. Apart from barely getting my mandatory morning Apple Jacks (later in my Junior year, I broke up with a ridiculously hot girlfriend because she was getting in the way of my Apple Jacks and comics), I was just as tired after two snoozes as I was before the two snoozes. Realistically, who can get rest in “nine-minute increments”:http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a991126.html? But it was alluring, and all the cool kids were doing it, so, a few tired mornings in a row, I became tremendously tempted to join the snooze crew.
So I moved my alarm clock across the room. And there it stayed, for years, and every morning I would get out of bed and walk to turn it off and, by the time I got to the clock, there was little to no point in hitting the snooze button (seven feet there and seven feet back is way too long to stay asleep for me). From that time forward, I was on the straight-out-of-bed-in-the-morning train. Even when I lived with the only girlfriend I’ve lived with, a woman who was dedicated to vegetarianism, and the maximum possible use of the snooze button, I leapt from under the covers and was in the bathroom and in the kitchen in minutes. Of course, with her it was harder because she insisted I sleep on the inside of our bed, against the wall, so I had to slide out of the covers and down the foot of the bed, to keep from bothering, or, worse, treading upon her.
Finally, when I moved to my most recent apartment, I actually put the alarm next to the bed, which was kind of radical; but I had a new, real job (no more working for myself) and I was excited to get up in time for breakfast and then work at 8:30 (granted I typically made it to work at 9:15; but that’s a story for another time). So, now, I get up at 6:30 to the sound of my apparently-immortal, 13-year-old, Korean-off-brand digital alarm clock, featuring what several well-meaning girlfriends have characterized as “the most annoying alarm ever.”
Maybe it’s that horrible, grating noise that gets me up every morning. Whatever, I don’t use that snooze, even though all of the cool kids tell me to.

There’s a Bank of America within walking distance; instead, I drive to Citibank. I hate Bank of America because they stole my money and were too incompetent to give me access to my bank account. Such thieves and incompetents should not be allowed to run a bank, but they are why Bank of America sucks.
I’m not good at holding a grudge, but a few companies have pissed me off enough that I would never buy from them again — Bank of America is one of these. Like most people my age, I signed on with BofA during college, because they were offering spiffy t-shirts and had ATMs everywhere. Unlike many people my age, I didn’t have a check-bouncing problem; I kept my account in the green for years and years. Meanwhile, of course, BofA was stealing from my friends by “processing transactions in the order that would allow them to charge the most fees possible”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_America#Excessive_Overdraft_Fees. They left the bank, but I was lured to stay by BofA’s ubiquitous ATMs and my lack of problems. That is, until one completely random day.
On that random day, I had run low on checks, so I called BofA to order more checks. I wanted a somewhat different address on the checks — I think I asked for a new phone number on them — and the phone rep set my checks up just so. I waited for my new checks, and waited some more. My last check went to rent one month, so I called up and was told my checks had shipped. Two weeks later, no checks, so I called and re-ordered, with rush delivery; the fee was debited to my account, but no delivery. Finally, with enough money in my account to pay rent but no checks with which to pay it, I bought a money order for rent and paid the fee to the post office. Then I went into a bank and tried to order checks there; I learned that BofA had a special, unique address field in its records to which it would mail checks only, and, in my record, that address was blank. Rather than generating an error, the checks were going out and being returned and I was not being informed. Another effort to get checks, another rent paid with money order, and I deposited my next paycheck at the CalFed across the street from my then employer.
I kept my BofA account open for a couple of months, since there was money in it, to make sure no checks out there would be returned unpaid; meanwhile, CalFed (since bought by Citibank) sent me new checks in a timely manner and I was soon paying my rent the normal way. Finally, I decided to close my BofA account. I switched all of my fees paid with my BofA debit card to other cards, waited a month to be sure, then closed my account.
But I’d made one mistake. I had one, forgotten online service that billed quarterly. Six weeks after I closed my account, they charged my BofA debit card, just $5.99. I got an overdraft fee, a closed account fee, then another overdraft fee since the bank took so long to inform me of the fee. The total charge was well over $30. I called BofA and, after pleading my case that they should simply have declined a charge on a closed account, finally talked one customer service rep into retracting all of the fees if I would just pay off the $5.99. Since there was no question I owed $5.99, I went to the bank to write them a (CalFed!) check. There, the teller told me to wait, please, then the manager came out and told me that I had to pay the whole sum, or the account would be sent to collections. I protested that the customer service rep had told me otherwise, but to no avail. This turned into a yelling match in the middle of the bank; I finally paid the check and left.
So that’s how Bank of America locked me out of my account through incompetence and then stole my money. I don’t even think I’d take a mortgage from them now. Bank of America sucks and I hate them and theyre incompetent thieves.

Right now the rain’s coming down, plinking against the exhaust vent of my gas heater. The temperature’s falling, air stinging our thin blood in the night. But the rain’s not snow; it leaves the streets damp and washes the smog out of the air but it doesn’t provide the soft, quieting, monochrome cushion of snow. I miss snow, I miss winter, I miss the flakes falling and bringing a heavy silence to the world, I miss the steam from my mouth as I exhale and I miss the sharp, dark nights that come in October and wrap around us in February.
And now I am jealous of my friends back East. They are near my home and they see the snow that I dream of even as the sound of planes on approach to LAX breaks through the wet noise of the rain. Their “pictures of the snow”:http://www.flickr.com/photos/harlykwin714/search/tags:snow/ break my heart with memories of the quiet mornings after a snowfall, when silence and a bright gray light greeted the morning, followed by deep hope for the magic words “snow day” on the morning radio.
It was 1983, about this time of the year, when I awoke to more than a “foot”:http://wintercenter.homestead.com/photo1983.html of “snow”:http://blogs.marylandweather.com/2005/01/february_arrive.html on the ground. Bitterly, I washed up and dressed for school, hoping that school would be cancelled and that I could play in the snow but preparing for another mundane day of class in a heavy, stone building with thick-framed windows that made the cold winter sky so far away. We had, unusually, the radio on through breakfast, listening for the school closing notice; the DJs cycled through the announcements of closed schools over and over again, each time making my stomach drop; I ate barely any cereal as I focused on the babble, waiting for my school name. Finally it came — I was free! Even before the normal morning post-breakfast fun of the Transformers could come on TV, I had my snow pants on and was choosing my mittens from the pile that sat in the closet by the door.
When I opened the door my cat lept out in front of me, as he did every day when I left for school, but soon he was surprised to find himself sinking into the snow up to his hips on every bound. Undaunted, he crossed between some bushes and disappeared into the yard next door. I made snowballs in the front yard, then helped my father shovel the walk. While my father tromped out, in heavy boots, walking to his work nearby, I piled the deep snow from the walk into feet-high walls that paralelled the narrow avenue I had cut from the door.
With the walk shoveled, I headed down the empty street to my friend Chris’s house. He was older — a third-grader! — and popular, and, when I got there, I learned he was industrious too. He’d piled the snow in his driveway high and dug tunnels under it, tunnels we crawled in and played in before walking to the bottom of the hill and building a snow fort. We waited in the fort, rolling piles of snowballs in preparation for battle, until we had to go back in for lunch. After lunch, there being no other children in the neighborhood with whom to do battle, we ran around the neighborhood and never returned to the fort. Through the whole day the bright gray sky sat in heavy silence above us, the street devoid of sound except for the crunch of our boots in the snow and our laughs as we ran up the hill and then down again.
Then the evening came, and the gray closed in, the quiet muffling even our calls to each other as we dodged between parked cars, playing our games. Soon we were called back in, our mittens soaked and icy and our noses red from the dry air, to be welcomed with dinners of hot soup and an evening in front of the TV, comfortable that no school would open with feet of snow on the ground, that the next day could include both Transformers and snow tunnels. Rain gives no such days, no such feels, as much as it cleans the air and moistens the plants on the ground. I miss snow days.