The Weekly Meat

Joe's Gym

If you somehow missed the news, Smokin' Joe Frazier died earlier this month of liver cancer. Better writers than I have shared great words over his passing. But I'll try a few. Because he deserved the love. --BK

 

I met Joe Frazier 20 years ago at his gym, up in Olney. I was an assistant editor for a small local paper. We were doing a story on his daughter, Jackie Frazier-Lyde, and needed to take some photos to run with the piece. Jackie asked if I wanted to just meet her at Joe's gym.

Damn right I did.

I hit my stride as a boxing fan during the golden age of the mid-'70s, when Smokin' Joe (and the rest of the heavyweight division) were in their glory years. Muhammad Ali, Ken Norton, George Foreman, Joe Frazier.

Boxing — and especially boxing during that era — was everything I was not. It was big, tough as nails, skilled, black, and badass. The only thing Joe Frazier and I had in common was Philadelphia, and our relative shortness.

To this day, I love boxing. Given a few hours to myself, I'm happy as a pig in shit watching old bouts on ESPN Classic. (I have my favorites: the Ali-Fraziers, the Ali-Foremans, the Pryor-Arguellos, and on.) I have a speed bag in my art studio that I bang on — ticketa ticketa ticketa, ticketa ticketa ticketa — and I get the same sort of contact high from playing ice hockey as many do from boxing. From hitting and being hit.

But boxing also scares the crap out of me the way, say, prison scares the crap out of me. Outside of hockey scuffles, I've never really been in a fight. I have no training, and I like to think I might make a decent showing sparring with someone else my height and weight who is equally untrained. But I fear that wouldn't be the case, and the fact is I've never been tested against that fear. One on one. In the ring.

 

Joe Frazier's Gym was in a tough section of Olney, which at the time was one of the most grim sections of Philly. It was the sort of neighborhood (think The Wire) that no longer exists in many cities. On the subway ride up there, I removed the silver chain around my neck, cursed my oxford work shirt as I rolled up its sleeves, and untucked it. I put my glasses in my pocket, and loosened my walk. I was suburban, but streetwise, now living in the city, with empty crack vials at my bus stop in those days — but you simply did not fuck with Olney.

Even as a layman fan, I could see that Joe Frazier was difficult to fight. He was short, awkward, constantly bobbing, attacking from odd angles. He hooked quickly and hard. And he was relentless.

In person, outside the ring, he came off as a warm, personable guy. Jackie introduced me to Joe in his office, and to his son Marvis (who had the misfortune of meeting Mike Tyson at the peak of his powers), and he couldn't have been nicer or more welcoming to a wide-eyed suburban white kid with a Nikon in his bag.

 

Daughter Jackie asked where we should shoot. I was all of 22 years old, and not a professional photographer, but I wasn't stupid. We were at Joe's gym; I asked if we could hop in the ring.

Even with a stylish lady lawyer as my non-opponent (though she later cashed in on the women's boxing boom and went toe to toe with Laila Ali), it was a thrill simply to step through the ropes and into the ring.

It was the only time I've ever set foot in a ring — or even in a boxing gym — and I hold that memory, that feeling, dear. The ring — any ring — is sacred space, reserved for men (and women!) with the stones to enter. Because the risk of domination is terrifying, and boxing is as much a battle of mental acuity as it is one of physical acumen. Outside of war, the toughest thing anyone can do is to step into that square for the first time and put on the gloves — often against a bigger, stronger opponent. (And for that, I have great respect for Marvis Frazier as well.)

Behind Jackie in the picture at right is a framed print of Joe, touching gloves with Ali.

 

Joe was the first man to beat Muhammad Ali (in the "Fight of the Century" at Madison Square Garden). They fought twice more during their careers, and though I liked Ali during his day, Ali never gave Joe the respect he deserved. His taunting before their bout in Manila was downright vicious colorism. Their 41 rounds together left each forever broken in his own way, and their final bout was possibly the most brutal match ever, with arguably neither fighter physically able to continue into the 15th round.

Smokin' Joe effectively retired in 1976 with a record of 32-4, having never lost to anyone not named Ali or (the much bigger) Foreman. He came back five years later and logged a draw before hanging up his gloves for good, but for nearly a decade, he was the baddest man on the block.

But what a good bad man he was.

Godspeed, Joe. Rest in peace.

After 9/11

Less than an hour after the plane hit the south tower, it collapsed on live TV, as millions of us watched, helpless, and perhaps unbelieving. It seemed absurd to me, but Tom Brokaw (or was it Peter Jennings we were watching in the cafeteria at work?) was saying things along the lines of "We're not sure what we're seeing here. There's a lot of smoke, but something appears to have just happened."

 

A few mornings later, there were still no civilian flights in the entire US, and I just happened to be standing atop a monument on a hill overlooking Boston when I heard two F15s fly overhead, and looked up in time to catch the fly-by as they passed on patrol.

 

Three nights later, a group of friends got together to belatedly celebrate the birthday of the one of us who had actually been flying that morning. His birthday had been — and always will be — the 11th. Only now that fact suddenly seemed unfortunate and unlucky, and we were keen to show him the love. We had a pot luck dinner and lit candles and talked. The Gurgling Cod outdid himself with an au gratin potatoes baked in a skillet lined with bacon. It was the pinnacle of comfort food; a pound-for-pound champion of bad cholesterol and good healing.

 

And a night after that, AKL and I saw Sonny Rollins play one of the best live shows I have ever seen.

 

Ten days later, AKL and I flew from Boston to LA for a friend's wedding. BOS > LAX was the route of two planes used in the attacks that day. Security at Logan was extreme. Tons of police, national guard, Army. Guys in jackboots with grenade launchers. God bless them, but I have no idea what purpose they thought the grenade launchers might serve in an area of so many civilians.

But the world was a new and scary place then and no one knew quite how to deal with it.

On the plane, I had an aisle seat, and — aside from takeoff and landing — I left my seatbelt unbuckled. If, I supposed, I saw anyone moving toward the cockpit or acting strange, they were going to be checked hard into the next row of seats as they tried to walk past me.

At LAX, when we landed, things looked no different from what I imagine they did on September 10th. The difference between the two airports could not have been any more staggering.

When we went back to LAX that Sunday for our return flight to Logan, there was an orthodox Jew across from us in the gate area — the beard, the robe, the tefillin, the whole works — quietly saying prayers and davening. I too prayed — a less observant Jew, but observant nonetheless — that he would not be on our flight. My reasoning was simple: If I was an Arab terrorist, what disguise would be better than that of an orthodox Jew?

 

Three and a half weeks later, AKL and I got married. It was the happiest day of my life.

I had smiled so many fake smiles for pictures to that point that I literally never knew I had dimples. But this was a day of genuine and unadulterated joy and beauty, friendship and love and wonder. And the photographs bore it out.

When we took the microphone to say a few words and thank our guests for coming such a long way and under such circumstances, I said something to the effect that "We need to keep doing what we do; keep having fun. Because we are all the foot soldiers of this new war, and to not continue living our lives as we otherwise would is to allow the idiots the win."

 

A few months later, I painted for the first time since the attacks. It helped. It looked like this:

All those windows.

 

And now.

Ten years later, as most of us are, I am still so moved by the events of that single day and its aftermath. I am tired of the anniversary programs and editions and the "What did it all mean?" And yet I feel compelled to write about it. To scare it up again, explore my own feelings, and slowly piece together the memories.

I scored a C+ grade in the whole Kübler-Ross thing, skipping the first stage of grief entirely. I've tried denial for many things in my life, but in this instance, with the news anchors fumbling, as the first tower collapsed, the impact was immediate for me. I understood full well exactly what I was seeing.

And that I was watching thousands die. And that it was the single worst thing I have ever seen.

Thank god I have seen no worse since.

Deconstructed Menu

Shortly after food became not about nutrients but nutritionism, food became about chefs, and restaurants became about not the diners themselves, but the dining experience. Blame it on globalization, the excess of the '90s, cable TV and the Food Network, the advent of the chef as celebrity, but this food moment is here to stay awhile. Needless to say, a pox is upon us.

With all due feigned humility, the menu...

ABOUT THE CHEF

The chef is youngish, but old enough; good-looking, but not too good-looking — camera-ready in a working kitchen sort of way. The chef has a food Philosophy. The chef uses only fresh, seasonal ingredients, sown and reaped by hydroponically-grown local virgins. Relax. The chef and staff will take care of you for the next hour and forty-five minutes until our next reservation; enjoy our soul-free "housemade" delicacies, exquisitely-chosen modifiers, and gratis italics Française e Italiano. You, dear friend, are in the hands of a maestro.

 

Chef's Whim 12-Course Seasonal Tasting Experience

Available Monday through Tuesday, for groups of ten or more; please book two weeks in advance

 

SALADS AND SMALL PLATES

Deconstructed Caesar Salad
We supply the head of Romaine, croutons du hier soir, anchovies, raw egg, olive oil, mustard, Worcestershire sauce, and garlic; you do the rest

Simple Salad
Fresh market figs, macerated pomegranate seeds, applewood-smoked bacon, and spiced nuts in a champagne balsalmic mignonette with toasted elephant garlic chips and a three-cheese (cow, sheep, goat) foam served gently on a bassinet of microgreens

House Charcuterie Plate (Because these days, how can we not?)
With herb-infused-then-salt-cured olives stuffed with pickled smoked pimientos, candied mustard fruit, and house giardiniera

Poor Country Street Food
Cultural food-slumming po' boy du jour with house-pickled red herring

Bohemian Bacalao Sliders
Salted fish that has subsequently been soaked in water to de-salinate it (since preservation by salt is no longer necessary in this age of refrigeration) and served in ironic White Castle fashion

Rillettes des Vegetables
With toast points and artful shmears of jus de quelque choses

Deviled Eggs Flight
Tastes of the world meet American Midwest family picnic

Shrimp Mousseline
With crême fraiche on hand-carved spoons of Belgian endive

House Signature Confit of Thusandsuch
It is the chef's Philosophy to honor the farm-raised animals that give their lives for our pleasure by using as much of them as we can; with hand-cut liquid nitrogen potato chips

SLIGHTLY BIGGER PLATES

Locally-Raised Obscure Heritage Fowl (say, Happy Farms West African Pearl Guinea Hen)
Served with further unnecessary adjectives and young vegetables

Bore Boar Four Ways:
- Seared ethnic-seasoning–crusted loin
- Antiquated, tough cut braised till tender
- Unapologetically-fried belly
- Tender poached cheeks

Steak Frites
Grass-fed hanger steak with pink and green peppercorns, just-so demi-glace drizzle, and ubiquitous duck fat pommes de terre

Perfunctory Vegetarian Option
Terrine of roasted farm-fresh petites vegetables de saison with farro and adjective adjective local dairy producer cheese

Dayboat Fish of the Moment
This year's hip fish (Chilean Sea Bass, Bigeye Tuna, ad nauseum), crusted with toasted Central American whole grains and served rare with a splash of house-infused spirit of the moment

Hand-Rolled Pasta
Lightly pan-toasted vegetable spice tagliatelle with salt-cured meat and foraged mushrooms, topped with a gently poached organic egg, and shaved herb cheese

OVERPRICED SIDES

White asparagus with chlorophyll foam
Roasted root vegetables with house-candied nuts
Seared small leaves with smoked pork fat
Twice-buttered tubers (with crustacean, add Market Price)
Duck fat pommes de terre

DESSERT PLATES

Hyperbole by Chocolate
Seriously, you will "die" if you eat this

Market Tarte Tatin de Saison
Butter-fed fruits du chef du monde

Housemade Ice Cream
Two flavors, like blood orange and rosewater, or cumin seed and green tea, that are individually somewhat interesting but do not actually taste good together

Artisanal Farmhouse Fromagerie Plate
Surprisingly small amounts of perfect, hand-selected cheese, served with minute housemade crackers and fruit paste de España

 

Fishing

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. —Proverb

 

My dad taught me how to bait a hook, to cast, to take a fish off the line, but my Uncle Bob taught me how to fish. That is, the science — biology, ecology, meteorology, psychology — of catching fish that do not want to be caught. 

He had two kids of his own, but they were mostly grown and often justifiably tired of him when I came along. So, several times a year, I became known as "Rent-a-Kid," and the two of us went on an outing.

After a day of fishing, Uncle Bob smelled of cigarettes, aftershave, and acute alcohol sweat. I equated the smell with adulthood and didn't think much of him taking me in the local bar so he could have a sustaining beer for the ride home.

Drink or not, he showed fairly admirable patience by the time he taught this kid to fish. As I learned while taking 3-1/2 year old RK fishing recently, children are not generally suited to things like quietly waiting out hours for a single fish to strike, snagged line, tying intricate knots, etc. Even cutting up bait is a chore with an audience curious about when we're going to catch fish, why they're not biting, where they are, why the lake has weeds, and so forth.

But I digress. Suffice to say, time is scarce, and time away from work even more so, so when the questions start rolling in, it can seem a wonder that any of us survive family fishing expeditions at all.

My uncle and I did have fun though, and as my own kids do on these pages, my antics gave him plenty of fodder for storytelling.

Uncle Bob died a few years ago, after a several-years-long bout with prostate cancer. He didn't go out quite the way he'd have liked (I can't say for sure, but I'm pretty certain he'd have preferred a massive coronary while researching sexual mores with a brace of attractive Swedish nurses), but he had a good run.

Over the course of his life, he managed to reinvent himself several times. After an early start as an engineer (working on early microwaves, answering machines, and ATMs), he moved into banking and became City Treasurer in Philly under Frank Rizzo (yeah, that guy). Eight years and countless martinis later, he became an investment banker — a job in which he occasionally tolerated me as an assistant and editor of sorts.

Among other things, Uncle Bob wrote a weekly column for a local business journal. During college vacations, I became his de facto spellchecker and editor. His columns were ostensibly on finance, but they had far more to do with fishing, and life. He was, effectively, blogging before there was such a word or concept. He wrote to keep in touch with his client base in an age before the interwebs, and because he was a personality in a business in which those with personality, a mind for math, and good common sense could bring in deals.

He was both character and caricature. He wrote a certain way, dressed a certain way, ate at certain places, and conducted business a certain way. He created a personal brand before "branding" entered the corporate lexicon of our everyday lives.

He was a chain smoker — a guy who literally lit a new cigarette off the butt of the previous one, oblivious to the ashes dropping on his pant legs, the desk, the rug, his chair; a third cigarette still smoking in the overflowing ashtray. He smoked in such a way that at least three people quit smoking just from witnessing his addiction.

And yet when he himself finally gave up cigarettes, he did so cold turkey — in large part because he no longer had the stamina to land a Muskie while wading in the Schuylkill River. And in Uncle Bob's world, catching a Muskie was the equivalent of having a martini and a Swedish nurse at the same time.

He fished as often as 100 days a year — sometimes for as little as an hour or two. He fished anywhere he found himself and anywhere there were fish, and he did it as well as anyone. With him, I fished pristine streams and unswimmable city rivers alike. We waded through outlet tunnels; bushwacked through poison ivy and trash; and once, nearly lost a brand new fiberglass rowboat off the top of the car to violent updrafts on the Tacony-Palmyra bridge.

Through it all, a day fishing was a good day.

It still is.

When I fish, I commune not just with nature, but with Uncle Bob. I inherited pounds and pounds of the gear he bought compulsively over years and years — fly gear, spinning gear, surfcasting gear — yet not enough of his knowledge. And so when I find myself nearly skunked (as I was recently) on a weedy Wisconsin lake in which I can see huge northerns breaking the surface, or drifting flies into the perfect trout hole in Montana, or catching bass off a lakeside Vermont dock, or casting for stripers while four-foot-long sturgeon jump entirely out of the water in downeast Maine, I do so with the fishing spirit of Uncle Bob. And I am amazed and humbled that I am so much less able to catch fish that do not want to be caught than I feel I should be.

He did teach me that you have to make choices in life — not just in terms of work, but in terms of play as well — and that doing one thing often means giving up another. He made his leisure choice, and fishing was it. He did little else outside of work. (My aunt can certainly attest that he didn't cook, clean, or do yard work.) But fishing brought him peace — often in places where one could hear car traffic more than rapids.

I don't have the time in my life right now to fish nearly as regularly as I'd like. But I have made my choices, and I am present for my kids in ways that my uncle never was. There will be more time for leisure someday; I'll fish more then. And when I do, I hope to find in it as much peace as Uncle Bob did — and to become half the fisherman he was.

Truth and Courage

Back in elementary school, my friends and I all thought it tremendous fun to pick the winter sidewalks clear of ice for about a half a block, leaving the rest icy so we could dig out our old-school fixed-gear bikes and strap on our hockey helmets, then ride full bore down the clean sidewalks straight onto the end patches of blue ice — at which point we would jump on our brakes, recklessly sending our bodies wherever the bike happened to slide. And stopping wherever, and in whatever manner, they happened to stop.

Even then, I think we realized how slightly crazy and very stupid we were. Yet we were not the least bit frightened. Flecks of blood frozen into the ice only served to remind us how alive we were.

Blood was just part of the culture of youth. My younger brother once threw an instamatic camera at me, cutting open my forehead and ruining my white turtleneck. I took the blood-spattered shirt to school the next day for Show-and-Tell.

Back then, as ever, fear had more to do with the unknown than the known. Cemeteries were scary, haunted houses were not. Being stranded alone in the woods at night was scary, being stranded alone in the woods in the day was not. Losing teeth playing hockey was not scary, older girls were.

But then.

One summer during high school I traveled through the Rockies with my family. The day after we touched down in Denver, I went off hiking by myself near a family friend's place in Summit County. I climbed a mountain and came upon a series of waterfalls. I was able to maneuver behind one and take pictures out through the curtain of water. It was a beautiful place and a spiritual moment. And then in the time it took to blink, I took one bad step.

I fell and I slid. I turned on my side, dug hard into the wet rock, and still I slid, quickly approaching the next waterfall. The edge fell away sharply to more rock, and water. The fall was substantial and would take more than a second. I could feel the thud and crumple of such a landing. Time slowed down. I grabbed backward and looked forward, and my life did not flash before my eyes; rather, in that moment before certain crushing pain and possible death, I saw with supreme clarity the most probable outcome of the fall.

It was grim and filled with pain, traction, long hospital stays, and a wheelchair with a blow tube. It scared my 16-year-old brain possibly even more than death.

Instinctively, I dug sharply and continued to, until I found a hold the depth of a tack.

My legs dangled over the edge of the drop, and to this day I believe that God entered my fingertips for some fifteen seconds, until I had held and pulled myself to safety.

An hour or two later and altitudes lower, and when the blood was washed away, I sat and studied my fingertips. They were raw to the bone and the nails were completely gone. I cried for the first time in years, and for a full hour.

 

::::::::

 

I told this waterfall story in a college acting class during a "private moment" exercise designed to let us bear our souls — or, in a word, cry in front of our peers.

I learned that year that acting boils down to two things: truth and courage.

To be nakedly truthful; that is, to allow an audience to see the parts of your soul and yourself about which you are not proud. About which you are uncomfortable. When necessary, to give yourself over completely and allow yourself to dangle precipitously.

I got worked up, but I was not able to touch the memory closely enough, nor open up enough, to cry in that acting class. I was not that good of an actor. But the memory haunts me even now. And I write about it — as I have periodically — as a form of therapy, as a form of further discerning what happened and how it affects me still. I write as a form of truth-telling.

That day in Colorado, as I washed away the blood, and as I poured hydrogen peroxide over the left side of my body, I cried not because of the pain — which I understood — but because I knew for certain that no matter how I explained the incident to those I love, there would be no way they could understand precisely what I had gone through. They had not been there, and I did not have the capacity to make sense of what had happened nor allow myself to share it properly. And so no one could know exactly how close I had come.

Despite the solitary nature of this event, I also believe that had anyone been there, their screams would have broken my concentration for the slightest blink, and god would not have entered my fingertips, and I would have missed my hold and gone over the edge.

It mattered then, because high school was a difficult time for me, and I had felt a need for recklessness and rebellion as a way of dealing with teen angst and depression. And my near fall began a change in my thinking. It introduced reality and powerlessness into the life equation in a way far different from the fantastic teen glorification of suicide and the like. It made me realize too that there was much to the world that was much greater than I.

It matters now because I feel the need as a husband and a father to remember with unflagging precision how desperately I wanted to live at that moment — and how much more I still want to live.

Corporate Doublespeak

Note: This piece was originally published in The Boston Globe, in slightly different form.

 

There is a virus rampant in the business world that has slowly infected our lives outside of the office. It's not an e-mail worm this time. It's not a Microsoft bug. It's not spam. It's the babble we all use in our attempts to communicate with each other.

Or, to put it in a language we all think we understand: In our rush to ramp up our skill sets and partner with new media companies for value-added, win-win business solutions that leverage our knowledge base to maximize customer take-away, we've forgotten how to explain ourselves clearly and concisely.

In his great essay "Politics and the English Language," George Orwell argues convincingly that sloppy language allows us to have foolish thoughts. And we use sloppy language and have foolish thoughts now more than ever in the business world. Further, we propagate both.

The fact is, we have come to accept the obscure muddle of business-speak, and in doing so, we accept mediocrity itself. I'm not talking about poor spelling and grammar — though they're certainly not beside the point — I'm talking about our favorite adjective-turned-noun: content.

The folks in Marketing like to call it verbiage — that is, when they're not mispronouncing it "verbage." Ironically, verbiage is the perfect description of what too many of us are guilty of in the workplace. It doesn't simply mean "content," as most assume; it means "a profusion of words usually of little or obscure content." Yes, we do love our verbiage. We use pre-fab word bundles where one word will do. We say job function instead of "job," or top-line growth instead of "sales."

As George Carlin said, ''People add extra words when they want to sound more important than they really are.''

Words or phrases become clichéd through their use and misuse. But many of the buzzwords we use every day mean little to begin with. One well-respected new media company has since become more exacting, but in an earlier published incarnation of their mission statement,  billed themselves as a ''digital solutions provider that helps organizations generate competitive value by leveraging the power of technology.'' Sure, it sounds good, but what is it such a company does?

This corporate doublespeak turns adjectives into nouns, nouns into verbs, verbs into nouns, and humans into resources — all of which slowly converts our workplace into the cartoon world of Dilbert, and fills business meetings with the sweet nothings of executing on our strategy and bringing critical mass to our efforts. But the yes-men create value by yes-ing, and generally keep their jobs by simply regurgitating whatever text fills the latest PowerPoint slides, and the cycle repeats itself.

Much of our failure to communicate is the fault of consulting groups, who feed us their own rich sub-genre of euphemisms such as sub-optimal and developmental opportunities to downplay corporate inadequacies. Coworkers are never laid off; they are affected by a reduction in force, as a result of global sourcing (read: sending American jobs to India, China, etc.) or synergies (read: redundancies) due to acquisitions. Not to worry — layoffs help us become more agile in the marketplace.

My argument is bigger than semantic nitpicking. I taught college lit long enough to know that Orwell's 1984 illustrates the fact that for great ideas to exist, we need precise language with which to express those ideas. And too many know-nothing managers and VPs have yes-ed themselves into positions as the overmatched CEOs of today. Part of the reason many companies are tanking is that so many foolish thinkers hold positions of power. While high economic times allow poor management to hide behind the smokescreen of verbiage, difficult times do not.

Case in point: George W. Bush — our first MBA president. Face it, he had some of the best consultants and spin-meisters in the world working for him, and his well-spun jargon on the heels of the dot-com boom made him sound credible to nearly half of American voters back in the fall of 2000. Needless to say, those same folks eventually began to wonder when we were going to see any of the purported "compassion" in Bush's conservatism, and whether we would ever find enough palpable "evil" in Iraq to outweigh the continuing loss of American lives.

This is not to single out President Bush — though he deserves it — as there are plenty of politicos on both sides of the aisle who play fast and loose with the English language that we would all be well-advised to mind the flashy but nonsensical sound bites this election season. Unexamined, they will only serve to reward and further mediocrity — and what a waste, in a country founded on revolutionary thinking and the clarity of a few strongly worded documents.

We should not feel so threatened by such concise language, at work and at home, nor by novel ideas, by smart people. We need to hold accountable our managers, our VPs, our CEOs, when they start tossing around rhetorical cotton candy. I'm sure they have more to offer than they're currently able to express.

For that matter, we could all be a bit smarter and more creative, and certainly more intelligible, if we were not so apathetically liaising with our colleagues and having, as Mr. Bush the younger might say, important discussions about topics in regard to which we're speaking.

But not to worry: a consultant friend of mine assures me that though our situation may appear sub-optimal, ultimately, it presents us all with tremendous developmental opportunities.

So we've got that going for us....

Coed Hockey

"The hottie is wrecking my mojo."

That's what I'm thinking as I skate down the ice. And that is not a good thought to have. To my mind, nearly any thought is bad. I prefer to just be in the moment-to-moment pace of the game, reacting to whatever situation I'm in. If I think too much — either about what's going on, or about anything outside of the game — I tend to screw up. I'm a beer leaguer, but I love the sport, and I've been playing a long time. So though my ability to see the ice is still far better than what my hands and feet will actually do for me, I do alright when simply reacting as plays develop.

Hockey is one of the few things in my life that generally allows me this hyper-aware, almost meditative focus. I don't empty my mind per se while skating. Rather, I empty my mind of all things not happening right then and there on the ice — an act that frees me tremendously from the stress of adult life.

So, you can perhaps understand my red-blooded, heterosexual dismay when, say, a good-looking young Swedish lass skates with us — as one occasionally does.

Her mere presence antagonizes me, throws me off my game. Thought creeps in. At times, even, the sorts of thoughts for which Jimmy Carter was apt to apologize publicly.

And it's not just me. I've skated with the same Wednesday night group of guys for more than a half dozen years, and women sometimes skate with us. We're all of varying skill levels, from high school hacks to guys who played Canadian juniors. It's a good, competitive skate, with a nice pace to it. Without showing anyone else up, guys don't tend to give lesser-skilled players a break. But for the hotties.

This current one plays alright positionally, but she's not very quick on her feet, and for that, we tend to give her a bit more of a chance than we would show any of the less skilled guys who regularly skate. Is it sexist and slightly pandering? That's a discussion for another day. I just know it's different.

Doing anything athletic with women is fairly new to me. (That is, to say, in a group setting. Ahem.) And hockey doesn't generally lend itself to coed play, despite what those sophomoric '90s college t-shirts might have had you believe. Softball, sure, but that's a sport one can play recreationally while drinking a beer. Hockey's innate physicality makes coed play difficult, as even in non-checking games, there is plenty of incidental contact. Sure, there is bulky gear involved, so any male-female physicality is relative (as opposed to the closeness of a basketball court, where tight one-on-one defense is essentially groping). But still.

When I sit next to guys on the bench, we tend to smell, as I've noted before on these pages, like rotting pig stink. But even under all the same gear, women manage to smell like women. And that throws me.

I grew up playing team sports. After a 10-year lull during college and grad school, it was great, during my late twenties, to get back into the group dynamic of team sports while playing in an organized soccer league. The league was coed, and that was fine. I was single, and well, none of my teammates were exactly Keira Knightley.

But soccer led me back to hockey, and hockey has now put me, a handful of times, in a sweaty locker room with women. And that creates a strange dynamic, in a place that has been one of the few man-caves in which I regularly hang out. Not to get all drum-thumping about male bonding, but I do enjoy the camaraderie, and the moment women enter that world, sex enters into it — adding a certain stress into my sole stress-free activity.

Hockey has always been sacrosanct for me in that way. More so than anything I've done, it has always provided a break from all things sexual in life. Playing soccer as a teenager, I was always aware that the girls' teams were practicing on nearby fields, and always in part was hoping to somehow look cool even as I was playing. But in the early days of Title IX, aside from the occasional figure skater, women were only ever at ice rinks for actual games — and conveniently-scheduled prime-time games at that.

I don't know, maybe sports in this new millennium have entered a post-gender realm. Maybe I just need to look past attractive women and rise above what seems, at times like these, my biological handicap. Ach. Maybe I'm just a crotchety middle-aged married guy with too much to say about this.

Förlåt, Swedish girl. Jag förstår inte. So, go ahead, play on. Play with us, even. But skate with your head up. And dammit, if I can see your eyeliner, you're too close.

 

Thanks to Laura and to Katie for the pics.

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 1978, 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.

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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.

The Cold War on Ice

Back in my professing days, I once tried to explain the concept of the Cold War to a classroom full of college students, most born after 1980, who gleefully admitted, "Our idea of the Cold War is Rocky IV."

I could sympathize a bit, allowing that my own memories of Vietnam were those of hearing the morning news on the radio and asking my parents why we were off fighting "gorillas" in some jungle. What'd we have against them anyway?

But when I was eight, I witnessed an epic Cold War battle played out in my own hometown. It was January 11, 1976, and my dad gave up his ticket (I can still see it now, with crossed US and Soviet flags) so my mom and I could go down to the spiritual temple of my youth, the Philadelphia Spectrum, the day the Soviet Red Army hockey team came to town to take on the team for which I lived and breathed.

It was a politically turbulent time. There just had been two attempts on President Ford's life; Mitchell, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman had been sentenced for their involvement in Watergate; the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh; and Saigon fell (so much for that domino).

In the world of hockey, it was four years after the epic '72 Summit Series, but that was an entirely Canadian thing, and though the players themselves may have known better, most fans in the US were oblivious to our silver hockey medal in Sapporo. And we were still four years removed from the Miracle on Ice at Lake Placid, and all of the replayed sights and sounds associated with that game.

For me, life was pretty simple. I slept under a big National Geographic map of the US. Next to it was a map of the world, with each country's flag on it (so I knew the hammer and sickle well). I had a red, white, and blue bean bag chair on my floor. It was a bicentennial year and I lived in the city in which the Declaration of Independence had been signed. The Flyers had won the Stanley Cup the preceding two years, and were, we thought, on track to repeat a third time. Philly pride was at an all time high even before Rocky crystallized the feeling in celluloid later in the year.

Like all kids of the Cold War, I was taught fear at a young age. I knew there were good guys in the world (see States, the United), and there were bad (see Republics, Union of Soviet Socialist). I knew it was solely because of the bad guys that my school was a designated "fallout shelter" — and I knew what that meant and when I thought about it, it scared the crap out of me. I knew, too, that I was more free than my Russian counterparts, and I knew that (though my ancestors had a century earlier) I did not want to live in Russia.

On this day, the good guys wore orange and white, and the bad guys wore red. It's difficult in our now-global world to stress just how incredibly foreign the Soviets looked — so different from our guys: their facial features more severe; to a man, they were clean shaven, in contrast to our wild and woolly bunch; they did not smile; and they all wore matching Jofa helmets (odd, eastern bloc-y things in that era, and with the Cyrillic CCCP on them), at a time when few in the NHL wore helmets at all. They warmed up with different drills; they skated and played differently. As a kid, it was like going to the zoo for the first time, or witnessing aliens: new, fascinating, and a little frightening.

Their outstanding goalie, Vladislav Tretiak wore not a goalie mask, but a wire cage on a helmet — one of the first I'd really seen in action. It looked so ragged, after I'd become so accustomed to the smooth, clean contours of Bernie Parent's simple white logo mask. The difference seemed significant to me even then; the steel cage somehow speaking volumes about the lives of others in their country.

The Russians looked, and certainly played, like hockey automatons. They were extremely talented and machine-like, and at the height of their international dominance. This swing through North America was billed as a goodwill (though there wasn't any) tour, with two Soviet teams playing games against the best NHL teams, none of which had beaten the Soviets' vaunted Central Red Army team. The Flyers — "The Broad Street Bullies" whom nobody but Philly fans liked or respected — were to have the final chance at North American hockey salvation.

After Kate Smith's rendition of God Bless America, the Spectrum was as loud as I've ever heard it, and that place could get so loud it shook, and you felt the thunder in your gut. And somehow, we all understood — twenty-five years before the thought would be articulated in the trash-talking '90s —  what "not in our house" meant. Today was our day.

I can't remember who scored for us, but I remember Ed Van Impe's un-penalized bodycheck on one of the Russians (the talented and targeted Valeri Kharlamov) stopped the game cold, as the Russian players and coaches literally walked off the ice to protest the rough play and unfavorable officiating. A few Flyers players skated around the open ice and took shots at the empty nets, and I remember no one moved, though no one knew quite what was happening or if and when it would be resolved. And it seemed like forever, but finally, the Russians came back out onto the ice.

After that, we pretty much owned them. The Flyers had an unorthodox style — we came at you like Joe Frazier, from odd angles, willing to get hit, and taking dozens of awkward, if not plain off-target, shots — as foreign to the more fluid skating Soviets as the Soviets were to me. We were tenacious on offense, trapped in the neutral zone, and were smothering on defense. We scored immediately after play resumed, and by the middle of the second period, it was all over but the shouting.

Mostly, that afternoon I remember, when my mom and I finally stepped out onto Pattison Avenue, feeling the sudden joy and awe that David must have felt when his stone struck Goliath, and the mighty giant crumbled. And for that one day, everything I knew in the world was right. The US was better than Russia. And Philadelphia was the best in the US. Life was brilliant.

In Waiting

With the season upon us in which we tend to receive those folksy yearly recap letters from far-flung friends, I thought it might be an appropriate time to post this piece — which could very well have stood as a sobering, non-traditional holiday letter for AKL and me exactly three years ago. You need to know up front that ultimately, things turned out quite well for us, and we couldn't be happier (or more tired). But life reveals itself slowly, and as a time capsule, this seems no less worth putting out there. --BK

 

My wife AKL and I have been trying unsuccessfully to have children for the past two and a half years. Recently, we had our third miscarriage.

Three times we have been through the unbelievable loss and hurt — I never again want to hear a sound as sad as AKL’s open sobbing through the bathroom door when we lost the first — and then the shift into medical crisis mode, and then the aftermath: weeks or months of emotional fragility.

All the while, we lived in social awkwardness. As our pregnancies were not yet public knowledge, there was no public acknowledgment of our losses. So we kept going to the office, feeling distracted from the same work we hoped would distract us from our far more complex troubles. We wore no armbands, nor dressed in black — nothing outside the norm, but for a handful of hushed, coded conversations and emails. Coworkers and friends may have wondered, but they didn’t pry, and we didn’t offer, assuming most would not have been prepared for our honest answer when they asked us perfunctorily, “How’s it going?”

Our second loss was in July 2004, and we spent a horribly uncomfortable week cringing at every mention of the “DNC” (Democratic National Convention) — in our hometown of Boston, no less — while dealing with our impending “D&C.”

Full disclosure: we’re card-carrying pro-choice Democrats. But when you have a miscarriage, even early in the first trimester, rhetorical, clinical terms like embryo or fetus or viable go out the window, because in your gut what has just happened is that, quite simply, your baby has died.

Throughout, friends and family have tried to be helpful. Though it feels nice to be loved, their attempts at help are generally centered around stories of their friends or acquaintances who went through similar travails to eventually succeed. People who have three boys now and are happy, or some such. While I understand the hopeful message of these tales, because they’re about success, they don’t have much to do with our present situation. And with each loss, we pay a higher emotional price for our hope. Yes, we might wind up being those folks. But we might not. We might be the friends who tried and tried and then, because the trying was killing them, stopped trying on their own and either tried to adopt, or didn’t. We don’t know.

Sometimes I convince myself that one’s ability to have kids must be inversely proportional to one’s desire to have kids. Surely, if we were a couple of 15-year meth addicts, we’d have our own basketball team by now — but we’re not. AKL and I are 33 and 37, respectively (“you still have so much time,” you say); we have a home, steady jobs, a healthy relationship, love to give, and we have wanted children since we got engaged nearly five years ago. We waited two years: until we had gotten married, until we moved out of our little condo, until AKL finished grad school, and then we were ready. But nature doesn’t work according to human timetables. This difficult fact that none of us gets to decide when we might have a baby underscores our biggest struggle: the powerlessness of our situation. There are certain things we can do to help our prospects, but there is far more over which we have absolutely no control.

I thought about waiting to tell our story, to see how it all turns out. Maybe — hopefully — it will have a happy ending (yes, we understand, full of new challenges). But to wait would be to miss the real story, which is about our trying to cope with the agonizing uncertainty of right now.

Because the truth is, we’re having a really difficult time with it. The week or two after each miscarriage was emotionally — and in AKL’s case, physically as well — grueling, but together we muddled through, in crisis mode, on adrenaline, love, bad movies, and comfort food. The lingering psychological aftermath is tougher, as post-trauma, we find ourselves struggling to regain our bearings. And each time, we are forced to re-address the question of why we want children to begin with, and how we feel about ourselves without them.

AKL and I communicate well, but when we do nag or argue, miscarriage is the elephant in the room. When we talk about our cats, we’re really talking about our children. When we talk about our friends or our family or a possible vacation, we’re really talking about children.

It has been a long time since life felt normal. Before monthly planning and hormone spikes took over our sex life. Before the losses and the hospitals and the specialists. Before a nurse handed me a sterile cup and asked me to produce that certain sample (healthcare-subsidized porn at the ready). We’ll never regain the absolute joy of finding out we’re pregnant: the big ultrasound, talking excitedly about names, hearing a heartbeat….

That unfettered innocence is gone, and our story is rooted in the present. The ending is uncertain. We do what we can, but the rest is beyond us. So we sit and fidget with the not knowing. Today first, and then tomorrow, and then the next. Waiting to see where, eventually, it all leads.