Borderlands

“I’m sorry, Mommy,” the little dude says, his voice sounding someplace between pathetic pleading and true sorrow.

Just a moment ago, he was neither pleading or sorry. He was strutting in his shades, tank top, tasteful shorts and sandals. Parading back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the Sugar Shack on 26^thStreet. He was holding a waffle cone (sucked and licked dry and empty), arm up high, looking like some tiny 21^stCentury version of the Statue of Liberty, which is nowhere near Chicago, so please forget that I even brought it up.

The Sugar Shack is mobbed on summer nights despite the fact that it has no indoor seating, four small tables and eight chairs on the sidewalk, and uncommonly slow service. An ice cream aficionado at the end of the line might wait a good half hour to place an order and wait most of the rest of the hour to get the sweet treat for which she came. The front décor, menu signs, and miscellaneous designs are repetitive and about pink as they can be. There are two signs, posted on doorways on either side of the order and fulfillment windows that request patrons to respect the neighbors, park legally, hold down the noise level, and clean up their trash. These appeals are signed at the bottom in script. “Sugar Shack,” they say. These are the only places on the building where the business is actually identified by name.

The little dude is still wailing. He has also bruised a knee or two and it’s possible that pain has contributed to his anguish. Mom is not having any of it. “I told you to stop your running around,” she says, picking up the fallen but clearly undamaged cone with which he had been lighting his way, and tossing it. He moans. It is one more small trauma the little dude must process on his way to becoming a bigger dude.

A guy holding two small ice cream cones and accompanied by a child who no doubt will end up eating one of them, makes his way back to a minivan, where a woman stands with another child. “Looks good,” I say to him, or to the kid, or to the ether, as he walks by, and the guy smiles, making the barest minimum of eye contact.

A few minutes later, I’m at the pick-up window having assumed that a long enough portion of life has passed by to justify the expectation that my strawberry shake is ready. I’m wrong, of course and I can hear the voice of my irritatingly clever youngest son say, “Assumptions make an ass of you and me, Dad.”

But I’m standing there when minivan guy come back and edges up next to me. “I bet there’s a hundred dollars in that book bag,” he says.

I take a moment to process that statement. Is he talking to me, I wonder. What’d he say, I think. I look at him. He’s smiling, but it’s not the kind of smile that lights anything up. “No, I doubt it,” I respond. “There’s nothing in it, but stuff I’ve written. I think it’s worth way more than a hundred bucks, but I’ve never run into anybody else who thinks so.”

“Just joking,” he says.

“Ah. You got to give an old guy a little bit of extra time to get the joke. I’m not as quick on the uptake as I once was.”

He looks confused, but he keeps smiling that smile that doesn’t light up his eyes or anything else. Then he turns and walks away.

Shortly after, I get my milkshake. It feels like a reward. The chunks of strawberry in the shake clog my straw and slow down my rate of consumption. That’s a good thing.

I take a seat at a curbside table. The people in line seem content to wait and ready to chat with both friends and strangers. A woman carrying a cardboard tote with four sundaes of varying description balanced precariously walks back to a car parked right next to my table. She passes the good stuff inside to three passengers, all women, who are clearly thrilled to welcome her back. She walks around to the driver’s door and hops in. Someone passes her sundae back and they sit there, eating and talking.

A minute passes and here comes the guy with the fake smile. He makes eye contact with me and looks away. He has either never seen me before, a case of mistaken identity, maybe, or he simply sees no reason for further interaction. Whatever use value I once had, it’s gone.

He walks up to the driver and says something I can’t hear, but he points at the minivan and then points further down the street. The woman in the car is clearly reluctant to respond to him, but he keeps smiling and explaining and she shrugs and nods. The passenger in the back seat slides over and he gets in. They drive off, four women and a guy I’ve already decided is a psychopath. He probably does need the help, I’m guessing. Maybe a gallon of gas?

At any rate, the driver appears to have concluded that she can do whatever favor he’s asking for and that she and her friends are taking no real risk. But I can’t help thinking that the dude will keep playing people until playing them stops getting results. What happens after that is anybody’s guess.

I finish my strawberry shake and, satisfied, move on.

The question to ask

After a lifetime of weird and, even, epically stupid decisions, I have recently reached the conclusion that one should always ask oneself, “Am I stoned?” And, in the aftermath, give the answer some time to develop.

Think of all the situations when that question is/was/will be precisely the right one to be asking oneself before proceeding with whatever seems to be next on the agenda. As a for instance, consider what might be the reality when one is, say, considering a rather hard surface below and pondering the question, “Would falling from this height kill me?” Wouldn’t that be the moment to ask oneself, “Am I stoned?”

This question is more generic that it might seem. After all, it subsumes all the more particular types of questions that get asked by both interveners and bystanders. “Are/were you drunk?” comes to mind, but care should be taken to consider the terms of the question as broadly as possible.

Regardless, we are talking here about asking oneself the question, “Are you stoned?” with a great deal more frequency and in a much wider range of situations than those moments when the question might otherwise be asked. And, in that spirit, never mind the answer, which could cover an almost infinite range of possibilities, like, say, “Don’t know, but I can tell you that I. Am. Completely. Ripped;” to “Maybe I better call the dentist. I’m in a lot of pain;” to “Yeah, I’m stoned, but I still believe the more important question is, ‘Can I survive a fall from this height to the ground below?’”

To repeat, the important thing is the question, “Am I stoned?” which should be asked by oneself of oneself a great deal more often than it is in reality. The answer is almost always less relevant than the question except in regard to legal matters and insurance issues.

Related story, I think. A few short weeks ago, I was in the hospital with a concussion after falling—catapulting, really—off my bike and doing a helmetless face plant on the street. Concussed, I went to the hospital where I dimly remember being asked, “Were you drunk?” and in near-instant follow-up, “Were you stoned?”

These questions seemed focused on liability and criminality. In any case, I do remember thinking something along the lines of “Why do you care? I don’t.”

And, although I hesitate to add this last bit, my father was an insurance lawyer to whom such questions meant a lot in the narrowest possible way. Dad was also the tree from which this apple happened to fall, albeit not without the sort of bruising that accompanies falls. Inevitably the experience of falling away from old dad, and the injuries that accumulated in my subsequent lifetime of weird and, even, epically stupid decisions, also taught me that one ought to embrace one’s bruises.

I recognize that this is piling on so-called “lessons of life,” and we most certainly should return to the question, “Am I stoned?” Nevertheless, the tangential point bears repeating. Embrace your bruises. They are you, and you are your very own particular reward.

At any rate, the question I am proposing that one regularly ask oneself, “Am I stoned?” is intended to provide a fresh opportunity to consider the moment that will inevitably follow the asking. If you are stoned, in the broadest possible sense, and you are mindful that you are, you might possibly make the next moment more objectively memorable than you had anticipated.

As I write this, images of loved ones and friends, here and elsewhere, flicker across the memory screen inside my head, the screen that at this moment is showing, in something like an endless loop, a piece entitled The Life of Jeff. And so, I ask myself, “Am I stoned?” in the fervent hope that the answer is take the next moment and mold it.

This is the moment of your next step in a direction you were always headed. Doesn’t matter if the path you followed to get here was straight (more or less) or, if you were actually, and most of the time, aware of choices you were making, or, in the alternative, delusionally ignorant of the choices you made along the way. This is you, regardless. This is you arrived at this moment, however much you may have stumbled to get here, and the step you take next is yours to decide. Now, answer the question, “Will I survive the fall from this height?”

Dedicated with gratitude to Dr. Phil, and to my sister, Dale.

Life and memory, a continuing story

Today, Bernie lives

I will be 67 years old in a couple of months. I am not feeling particularly morbid at the moment, but it gets easier and easier to count the number of my days. It’s reasonable to assume that I could live another 20 years—unless something unexpected comes up—and also reasonable to assume that I will be in decent health most of those 20 years. Beyond that point, all bets are off, and both disability and death will loom much larger.

But it occurs to me, in this moment, that the true span of an individual life includes the years in which others will remember the otherwise departed. My father, Bernie Epton, died in 1987. But today he is alive in memory. Mine.

Today is not a special day. It’s not an anniversary of anything that happened to Dad. But I have been reflecting on my own life, and on my children, and how we have lived, separately and together. One thought triggered another, and Dad was suddenly present.

Today, Dad is a young boy in Chicago, living through the Depression and writing his father in Atlanta. Not to worry, Dad, he writes. Do what you have to do in Atlanta. I will take care of everything here.

Today, Dad will drop out of school at the University of Chicago and enlist in the Army Air Force. Today, Dad will leave for an Air Force base in England, where he will begin leading bombing runs over Germany and Eastern Europe.

Today, Dad will meet Audrey Issett, a private in the British army assigned as a plane spotter with an anti-aircraft unit on the coast of England. Today, Audrey is a combatant in the Battle of Britain. Today, Audrey and Bernie will fall in love.

Today, the war in Europe has come to an end and Dad will be rotated back to the states for the invasion of Japan, which will never happen. Today, Audrey, pregnant with Teri, will finally make it to the States and meet the maniac in-laws who will be her family for the next 65 years.

Today, Dad will pass the bar exam and become a lawyer. Today, Bernie Epton will lose his first race for Congress.

Today, Audrey and Bernie and their four children will stop at Rosenbloom’s after going to a movie together at the Hamilton on 71^st Street. We will order five hot fudge sundaes and one strawberry sundae to go. (“Teri, Jeffrey, Mark and Dale, they are simply full of schwale,” Dad will sing endlessly throughout our childhood, or at least until his oldest two become teenagers, and things stop being so much fun).

Today, Dad and I, divided by all the things that divide fathers and sons, will argue about the war in Vietnam. I will tell him that the war is evil and so are the war makers. I will not support the war or acquiesce to the domination of the war machine, I will tell him. And he will show me his multiple medals and insist that we owe service to our country.

Today, after being drafted, I will leave for Canada. Dad will be deeply grieved by my decision, but he will give me money to help me on my way. He will pretend the money was actually left to me by my grandfather, but I will know better.

Today, Dad and brother Mark will board a plane for Memphis, where they will join in solidarity with the Memphis sanitation workers marching in a memorial parade for Martin Luther King.

Today, on a visit home, I will knock on the door of my parent’s apartment. Home alone, Dad will shout “what’s the password?” the first phrase of a great Marx Brothers routine.

Today, Dad will pay for a naming ceremony at his synagogue for Nathan Nightrain Epton, my first child. Nate won’t be there. Neither will I. Nor will Nate’s mom be there. Dad will have Nate named Adam Nathan Epton because he doesn’t approve of the name I gave Nate, and Adam begins with A, the first letter of Dad’s father’s name. In the Jewish tradition, this is the way to name a child after an ancestor. Nate won’t care, at all. Over time, I will learn not to mind, either.

Today, Dad will retire from the Illinois State Legislature after 16 good years during which he only screamed in frustration at his legislative colleagues maybe a dozen times, okay, maybe a couple dozen. Today, Dad will stop saying he’s the smartest guy in the legislature. Today, Dad will stop saying he’s the richest guy in the legislature.

Today, Governor Thompson will call Dad and ask him to be the Republican candidate for mayor of Chicago, and run against whoever wins the Democratic primary, Jane Byrne, Richie Daley or Harold Washington, an old friend from the state legislature.

Today, Washington will win the Democratic primary and because racism will motivate many white Chicagoans to cross party lines in the general election, Dad will become the first truly competitive Republican candidate for mayor in decades. Today, Dad will try to explain to the media that his campaign slogan, “Epton, before it’s too late,” is not a coded racial message. Almost nobody will believe him, but he will insist that he’s right, they’re wrong and the slogan will remain in use.

Late tonight, after a long day of campaigning, Harold Washington will say to a campaign worker who has come to hate Bernie that the man they are campaigning against is “not the Bernie Epton I know.” She will be surprised by the depth of Harold’s compassion and his obvious affection for Bernie.

Today, finally, the race will end. Washington will win, becoming the first African American mayor in Chicago history. Dad will lose and begin lamenting the damage the campaign has done to his reputation.

Today, I will talk to Dad, who has woken up, as he does every day, feeling humiliated by his defeat and horrified by the belief that he is a pariah. I will try to tell him that the reality is not so awful as he imagines, but nothing I say will seem to help and the smiles seem few and far between.

Today, four and a half years after the 1983 election, and less than a month after Harold Washington died, Dad will die. Today, Dad will be buried in Oakwood Cemetery on the south side, where Washington is also buried, and where generations of Chicagoans, mostly African American and Jewish, are buried.

Today, more than 26 years after Dad died, I remember him. Today, Bernie Epton is alive.

Going Postal

Going Postal

I bought stamps the other day. Walked up to the bulletproof barrier and said, “I want 100 first class stamps, please.”

The postal worker held up strips of Liberty Bell stamps.

“No liberty bells, please,” I said and she asked if I wanted American Flag stamps.

“No flags please,” I said. “And no liberty bells.”

Her eyelids drooped and she nodded toward a sheet of Disney stamps lying on the counter.

“Disney?” I might have sounded a little irritated. “Don’t you have any people stamps?”

She shook her head and then, apparently reconsidering, she asked if I wanted Charles Chesnutt stamps. Widely regarded as the first true African-American novelist, Chesnutt would look good on my mail, I thought. I was enthusiastic.

“A person? You bet!”

My postal worker nodded and walked away. The worker at the counter next to her looked over at me and smiled. While I stood there waiting, another post office employee looked around the corner, almost peeking at me, it seemed. We made eye contact and he nodded. I nodded back, constituting at least the fourth nod between two people in that office on that morning that I was aware of.

Then my postal worker came back with 100 41-cent stamps. I had other stamp denominations I wanted to buy and I wished I’d mentioned them before she walked away the first time. I was afraid she would lose patience with me.

“Oh, yeah. I also wanted 20 post card stamps and 20 next-ounce stamps.”

She looked at me.

“Sorry,” I said and she said it was okay and walked away again. When she came back, I had more stamps, 20 26-cent stamps and 20 17-cent stamps, or 20 cougars and 20 mountain goats (a big-horned, big-headed fellow) to go with my 100 Charles Chesnutts.

I paid my bill and thanked her.

“That was fun,” I said. “I should write more letters.”

“Thank you,” she said with a big smile on her face, but I swear I thought she was going to go postal on me. Maybe leap through that bulletproof shield and grab me and throw all kinds of hugs and sloppy kisses my way.

That would have been okay with me. In fact, I’m planning to write more letters.