The Weekly Meat

The Five Best Things About Spring

I don't get quite as worked up about April as, say, T.S. Eliot. But here in the northeast, when the snow melts, the mud gurgles, and the college kids go home to wherever college kids live, I do start to feel rejuvenated, and with good reason. Here, specifically, are my top five reasons why.

Playoff Hockey

If ice hockey was a question in the bygone SAT analogies section, then the
playoffs : regular season :: Angelina Jolie : _______

A. Your mom
B. Your sister
C. Your cousin
D. Your Aunt Edna

Rivalries, overtime, guts, goals, grizzle and thread; the playoffs have it all, and every game matters. I don't even care who's playing — I can sit down on any given night, and watch whatever game is on, and be happier than a pig in shit.

Baseball on the Radio

I had the distinct pleasure twice this week of listening to the Red Sox game on the way to work in the morning. The occasion was an oddity — their season-opening series in Japan — but it reminded me that my baseball soul is putty in the hands of seasoned announcers like the Sox' Joe Castiglione or the Phillies' Harry Kalas. Hearing those guys on the radio is what the season is all about. There's something so simple, so analog and genteel about experiencing a ballgame that way. I hope it never goes away.

Green Becoming the New Brown

Spring is when you look out the window and the dominant color of vegetation switches from brown to green. You throw on some shorts, get out into the air again, dig around the thawing ground, and sow what you later want to reap.

I was never much of a flower guy until we bought our house. But now it's our yard I have to look at, day in and day out, and I get to jonesing for those early crocuses to start opening (we've got two out at the moment), the daffodils to shoot up, and the lilacs to bloom. It's nice to have all that color in our lives again. And hey — I can admit it — the lilacs smell good out the front door.

Beer in a Can

I like good beer. A fresh pint of Bellhaven, or Murphy's, or Old Speckled Hen at a place with clean tap-lines, or a nice bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale with dinner is just transcendent.

But after a day of working outside in the yard, or on the house — when you're tired and sweaty and needing a shower, there are few sounds more satisfying than the expectant release of a carbonated pop-top. And if you've got a respectable old school brewery nearby, you can even do a far sight better than delving into Anheuser-Busch or kitschy PBR territory. During the warmer months, no matter what bottles I've got in the fridge, I tend to also keep cold some canned 'Gansett or Yuengling (America's oldest brewery).

Ah hell, in a pinch, even the High Life will do.

The First Saturday in May

The first Saturday in May puts us firmly in the wheelhouse of spring: it's officially time to plant the vegetables, to drink bourbon, and to turn on the TV for the most exciting two minutes in sports.

In horse racing — and in the Kentucky Derby especially, in a field so crowded that it's pretty much impossible to run away with the race before the final stretch — no matter whom I've bet on and where they're running, I get chills when those nags come around that clubhouse turn and the track announcer bellows, "And DOWN THE STRETCH THEY COME!"

Joe Strummer

I first came to The Clash with the their London Calling double LP. I bought it on cassette, and once I listened to it, I was hooked. I was a disaffected suburban youth with unclear ideas as to what I was fed up with and how to channel that anger. The Clash gave me a voice. I was fuzzy on the politics — I didn't know Andalucia from my arse — but I would drive around in my beater Honda Civic, shifting from third gear to fourth without the clutch, and playing songs like "Spanish Bombs," "Death or Glory," and "Koka Kola" over and over again, singing the lyrics loud, with a sneer and a trace of accent.

Every gimmick hungry yob digging gold from rock 'n' roll
Grabs the mic to tell us he'll die before he's sold
But I believe in this, and it's been tested by research
That he who fucks nuns will later join the church

A few years later, playing and singing in college bands, it was Joe Strummer's cool I tried (in vain) to channel.

We all have our musical heroes, and Joe is one of my very few who has stood the test of time. I appreciate and like what he did at every stage of his career. I can't say that about many. He neither grew old and fat, nor burned out, nor faded away. He and his music simply matured and changed — and did so in ways that I suppose I wanted to emulate in my non-musical life. And he was making damn good music straight up until the day he died December 22, 2002 at age 50 from a congenital heart defect.

The Clash was mostly reggae meets punk, but that's only the tip of Joe's musical influences, which in turn — and even now — opened my ears to new beats, new sounds, new attitudes. From rockabilly to electronica, hip hop, and world beat, the guy just plain had good taste in music. The songs he covered make a hell of a lineup: from Junior Murvin ("Police and Thieves"), Toots & the Maytals ("Pressure Drop"), and The Rulers ("Wrong 'em Boyo") to The Equals ("Police on My Back") to Professor Longhair ("Junco Partner"), The Bobby Fuller Four ("I Fought the Law"), the list goes on.

And he in turn influenced countless worlds of musicians, whether they realized it or not, some of my favorites among them. From The Specials and Operation Ivy to Stiff Little Fingers and The Alarm, Rancid and Green Day to (arguably) Chuck D and KRS-1. Again, the list goes on and is impressive.

Joe, You challenged us — musically, politically, emotionally. Thank god you visited; your music and its legacy rocks on.

 

The 101'ers — Keys to Your Heart (1975)
The Clash — Jail Guitar Doors (1978)
Joe Strummer — Love Kills (1986)
Joe Strummer & The Latino Rockabilly War — Jewellers & Bums (1989)
The Pogues — Whiskey in the Jar (1993; Joe as producer)
Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros — X-Ray Style (1999)
Joe guest DJ'ing on Hova's WFMU show (2001)
Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros — Coma Girl (2003)

Cowboy Mouth — Joe Strummer
Billy Childish — Joe Strummer's Grave
Stiff Little Fingers — Strummerville

Stink Palm

As we wind down to the final third of the hockey season, it's important for us all to take stock of crucial issues and discuss the deadly phenomenon silently stalking our sport: gear rot.

Because the dirty little secret about playing hockey is this: It stinks. The equipment just flat-out reeks.

Now, for the uninitiated, let's be real clear about this. I've been skating for a long time, and I don't mean any of this in a prissy, sweat-is-smelly sort of way, I mean that, by any objective standards, old hockey gear smells like dead goddamn pig funk.

It's a smell all its own, yet shockingly the same from player to player: stale, fetid, animalistic. Not quite body odor, not quite fungus, not quite feet, not quite aging cheese, not quite ass — but a combination of all. It defies categorization, is strong beyond its years, and cannot be cured by simple measures. It laughs in the face of Febreze, washing machines, and even more rigorous chemical and non-chemical bacteria-killing treatments. Like puke, or "new car smell" (or can we just call that what it is?), it is so inherently linked to the thing itself, that it's hard to imagine even brand new gear not being a bit rank.

To put things in context for those of you who don't play or have never lived with someone who did, I skate with a goalie whose gear is so ripe that his (perfectly healthy) cat once mistook it for the litterbox and peed in his bag.

Once in high school, I borrowed a friend's ancient leather blocker to play goalie for a street hockey session. My right hand smelled for nearly a week. I washed it all the time. It was pink and shiny. But it smelled like a dead goddamn pig.

I used to have the experience where I'd be sitting next to a guy on the bench — or worse yet, skate by a guy on the ice — and get slammed by a sudden and thunderous wall of stink, the sort of which burns your nostrils and can be described only with words like putrid. Simply put, that doesn't really happen to me anymore. Which can mean only one thing: I've become that guy.

This is the sort of evolution that happens "two ways" — as Hemingway wrote in The Sun Also Rises: "gradually and then suddenly."

As a teenager, it wasn't too bad (despite my mom's protestations to the contrary). My equipment was newer, I didn't sweat as much, and, well, kid sweat is no match for the briny sweat of a grown-ass man. Now, I'm hairier, more out of shape, sweatier, and — though I've swapped out bits and pieces over the years — most of my gear is still old enough to drink legally (and live enough to walk itself to the pub).

Still, I think it wasn't too bad off until I started playing year-round. Sure, rinks are cool enough to keep the ice properly frozen, but a rink on a hot, humid, summer day in the northeast U.S. is significantly warmer (warm enough to fog up) than the same rink in the dead of winter. When I finish a summer skate, I and everything I'm wearing, am soaked to the gills in such a way that takes more than 24 hours for my pads to properly dry.

And suddenly, I'm that guy.

I should mention here that I'm a pretty clean, non-slob. I don't leave my wet gear in the car — or even in my hockey bag — overnight. I air it out — until my wife can't take it anymore, and my two-year-old daughter points to it and says "Stinky pee-ew. Daddy, hockey game."

Does it embarrass me? Hell no. I draw from that stench a perverse source of veteran's pride. It is maybe the only tangible rec-league career milestone I'll ever see, and I've worked hard to earn it. I don't dislike the stink and I don't begrudge it. So you clean-freak ninnies can take your fancy anti-bacterial countermeasures and walk on, eh. You'll get my hockey bag from me when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

...And I will smell no worse than that bag.

My Old School

Recently, my wife AKL and I have been watching the British documentary "Up Series" of films (gotta love Netflix), which posits the conceit, "Give me a child at age seven, and I will give you the man." Beginning with a dozen or so seven-year-olds in 1964, it then revisits them every seven years to find out how they have changed. Filmed interview-style, without the now-clichéd "Reality TV" filters, it allows a fascinating look at long-term personal growth.

And so, lately, there has been that question in the back of my mind, about whether or not the truest, most unadulterated portrait of me might have come at age seven. I was a nice, happy kid then, if a bit shy. I was creative and smart; maybe I didn't yet have a keen sense of humor, but I had not yet begun to edit myself in the affected way that, eventually, we all do.

Throughout my teens and twenties, I ran away from that seven-year-old a bit, but in the past ten years, I've come to admire the kid I was. And now, with children of my own, I find myself chasing down leads on that seven-year-old, looking for answers on parenting, and a return to that simple honesty.

So, after 20 years, though I didn't much like high school — I never quite found my niche there; I was never quite comfortable in my own skin; and, well, I don't suffer fools gladly — I figured it might finally be enlightening, and even fun, to go to a class reunion. And indeed it was.

I was remembered there by some folks whose names I had long forgotten, maybe even slightly more fondly than I'd have thought. But the real kick I got was not from seeing friends and classmates I hadn't spoken to in 20 years, but specifically from seeing those few with whom I had gone to elementary school. Yes, we had all continued along the same track to high school, but our elementary school was a special place — not only to me, but to them as well — and so we share a peculiar bond.

Though it was a suburban school, in the heart of Philadelphia's Main Line, it was not served by buses. All of the students walked there, and none lived more than 10–15 minutes away. That said, it had as diverse a population as could have been found in most suburban schools in the early '70s — an Ellis Island mix of whites, blacks, Chinese, Greeks, Italians, Irish, Jews, Catholics, Protestants. No one was egregiously poor or rich, but we ran the gamut from lower to upper middle class.

We all played together, as kids do — because the world hadn't yet taught us not to. And it was a blessing, to grow up in a small community in which not everyone looked alike and we were comfortable with that fact; in which some of my first kisses were interracial.

Because there was no bus service (and no technology for parents to nag us on cellphones), and more open field space than is possible for most schools today, there was daily loitering after classes. Good, clean loitering, mostly, the sort of which forces kids to bond. A few fights, sure, but mainly just hanging out, alternately chasing girls and being chased by girls; sliding on winter ice; playing four-square, or wall-ball, or "kill the cow."

We were pretty good kids, occasionally stupid and prone to splitting a lip, but it was loosely a neighborhood rule that when the church bells rang that evening, we all had to troop back to our respective homes. And we did.

Some days we'd head to the large park around the corner, or to a friend's house, or to catch crayfish in the creek of an open field behind an old age home. We walked or rode bikes; nearly all we wanted in life was only ever a few blocks away.

My own street dead-ended into the school, and at least once, my dog followed me right through the doors, into morning classes.

Stories of the school are legendary. Everyone of my era knows whose dad punched out the principal, which teachers had warts, which presumably unlucky students moved away, and what grade we were all in when the school closed. (Sadly, some budgetary truths are inevitable, and in 1977, Wynnewood Road Elementary School shut its doors as part of the Lower Merion School District, and the giant lot was sold off and subdivided for new housing.)

When we found out it was closing, it really stung, and even in fourth grade, as I was, we knew it had been our Camelot, and that nowhere else could provide quite as singular an experience.

And sure enough it did not. I remember the next year as being fun, and I made some new friends, but when we got to the new school (by bus), we, the outsiders, didn't quite pity the natives, but we thought them less fortunate. They hadn't been shaped by such a unique place as we had.

:::::::::::

It's tough in retrospect, of course, to know how rosy the lenses are through which I remember my days in elementary school. I think of that era in many ways as the best of my life. But there are levels to reality, and my wistfulness makes it tough to separate the actual from the burnished, from the imagined. (Or as Tim O'Brien puts it in his brilliant book on Vietnam, The Things They Carried, the "happening-truth" from the "story-truth.")

Clearly, it was a simpler time for me personally, but it was a simpler time for us all, an era in which kids could stay and play on school grounds after classes (without any administrators worrying about liability), or go a couple blocks over to the park and do the stuff of elementary school kids without being hassled.

I live now in an incredibly diverse area of Boston, among Brazilians, Indians, Caribbeans, Asians — and I am thankful my daughters will grow up in such an environment. And when I listen to the patchwork patois of our playgrounds, I think about my old school — and hope to do justice to the sons and daughters of it.