Odd that just the other day President Obama held a conference at the White House on bullying, because that was the very topic of my next post.
At the conference the president said, “If there’s one goal , it’s to dispel the myth that bullying is just a harmless rite of passage.”
The POTUS even confessed to his own tussles…
It’s been my experience that every good thing is immediately followed by the mundane.
And every great thing—by pain.
Drop the needle on the record: the opening bars of Jackson Browne’s “The Load-Out.” It’s Saturday, Aug. 5, 1978: “Pack it up and tear it down.” That was the bittersweet ending to Camp Shamineau, 1978. Then set it up back in town, at Tonka Toys, “workin’ for that minimum wage.”
That was the mundane.
But the pain was more drawn-out. With the long hot month of August stretching out ahead, I was aching to see Debbie again. We made plans for a date to Disco-Trek and a big excursion with camp friends to the State Fair at month’s end.
But once back in the clutches of work and home life, it was hard to get anything going. Sunday night, Aug. 6: “A funny thing happened, a minute ago, at around 12:30 a.m. Just once, but it did: The phone rang. I wonder who…” It could’ve been Debbie, or even Kim, sneaking a late call or, most likely, just a wrong number.
The following afternoon I was back on the factory floor, working Table 4 with twin brothers from Hopkins-Eisenhower high school named Brad and Tim Fischer. Kevin Gibson, a lanky, older musician guy I’d befriended, told me Dave had quit while I was away at camp. “Hey,” Kevin said to me somewhat laconically, “You bring me back a pine tree?” They were hiring new people, but the routine remained the same. “Worked Table 21 with Brad and another guy and Hippie,” the diary reads on Aug. 8. “What a crazy night. My hands hurt.”
The next day I joined Mom in the front yard, helping her shuck corn and strip green beans for dinner. I was fighting a midsummer head cold, and hoping for calls back from Deb. Then, at work that night, a breakthrough. Our floor supervisor, Cindy, moved me from Table 16 after dinner break to the tumbler-deburrer. It involved a wage hike just for working that station. And I’d be working alone.
A forklift would stop by with a bin full of parts that needed deburring, the driver would dump them into the tumbler and, like a huge drying machine, the parts rolled around for a set amount of time. I had to keep a log of which parts were going in and how long they were deburred. Equipped with a small desk and stool, lamp, pencils, logging sheets and timer, I was in the factory sweet spot!
After work, I had girls on my mind. I was missing Deb, but also thinking about Kim and Lisa. Lisa’s chats over Cokes at the Crystal Burger King were restorative. It’d been too long since we’d caught up, as she wasn’t even home the afternoon I left for camp. When Deb called back on Aug. 11, saying she was excited that we might go to the State Fair, I was happy again. “I’m beginning to feel,” I wrote in the diary, “more like a boyfriend to her.”
The excitement intensified Saturday, Aug. 12, when I headed to Lisa’s house just after 10 a.m. She was “a little tired/hung from the night before … we talked about everything—Camp, life, Debbie, love…” After an hour I left for Deb’s where I finally met her mom and dad, sister and brother, who I realized I’d met at camp years earlier. I didn’t stay long.
Sunday brought further respite from the mundanity. My brother, his neighborhood friend Joe, my buddy Steve and I packed into Mom’s car for a day spent tubing on the Apple River in Somerset, Wisconsin.
We left the car at Float Rite Park around 1 p.m., catching a bus with our inner tubes to the top of the river to drift back down to the park. It was a careless summer’s day—likely one of the last times I’d enjoy days like that after college had started. All down the river I thought of Debbie—except for the time we boys “attempted to meet these two real keepers … but they ran into friends and we (metaphorically) waved goodbye.”
Monday afternoon I was back on the factory floor—feeling the weight of the mundane again—and wondering what autumn had in store.
[Last of a two-part post]
“The laziest of days and I love it,” begins the Aug. 3, 1978, diary entry. “…I’ve been wandering around, watching volleyball games, playing piano, talking and listening to everyone.”
I’d gotten into the habit that week of chatting with Chip’s girlfriend Kristie, especially about Debbie, who was also staying in her cabin. The annual camp banquet dinner was that night. Deann was hoping I’d go with her, but instead I asked Debbie, who said yes. Her friend Jeanne sat with us, along with Dean and Joni, Kelvin and Karen, Tom and Cecilia. After the dinner there was an awards ceremony with comedy by some guy named Chester and music by John Priestley and The Scribes.
One of the staffers, Rhonda, had injured her foot and was on crutches. Her pain was so bad that night that everyone helped get her to a hospital. Later there was a chapel service where Debbie, Jeanne, Kristie, Chip and I sat together.
“It was a quiet, starry night,” I later wrote, “Walked with Deb.”
***
Thirty years later, on Aug. 4, 2008, I responded to Dad’s email: “Thanks Pop … you’re telling me stuff I already know, but that’s okay. She’s a very special person and all the things you say. Love, Mike.”
AJ was heading up north to her annual college summer reunion, and I’d be on my own. I was beginning to feel on the periphery of her life, and she, I suspect, of mine. But I was convinced Dad was right—that I had found that “golden-haired brunette of my dreams” and that I shouldn’t “let her get away.”
***
The last full day of Camp Shamineau 1978 was Friday, Aug. 4. It was such a memorable day that I taped a special two-sided addendum in the diary. “The day began clear and warm,” the entry begins, “and everyone knew but rarely said, ‘Well, this is the last full day.’”
Rhonda returned to camp still on crutches, but feeling much better. A few of us helped her down to the lakefront, where I took some photos (above right). I was still having heart-to-heart talks with Kristie about Deb (pictured at left in yellow top with Jeanne). Kristie also read some poetry I’d brought to camp.
After supper, chapel hour and canteen, there was a melodrama performed up at the playing field, where everyone brought blankets and stretched out in front of the stage. Deb and I sat with Chip and Kristie and Wade and Ann. “It was a very starry and beautiful night,” the diary states, “romantic […] during a scene change, Deb and I, close, kissed once.”
After a brief intermission, during which packs of peanuts were tossed out to us, the melodrama concluded and we all moved to a roaring campfire. It was “testimonial time,” something I was familiar with from the early evangelical days of The Family Project. I knew what was expected and—puffed up with puppy-love pride—stood to speak.
That’s where 1978 eerily collided with 2008:
“[I] got up and spoke about the unsaid love and kindness I saw during the week. Deb really believed in what I said, after I sat down. She grabbed my arm and really held me. I like her a lot.” [emphasis mine, 2013]
AJ and I stayed together for 9 more months, but grew distant as time went on. By fall, text messages went unreturned and, on Sept. 7, while she was with her family at her 40th birthday party, my father passed away. Eventually we broke off our relationship for good.
What haunts me is this lesson I can’t seem to learn: “If you’re talking about love, you’re probably talking about something else. But it becomes entirely different when it’s lived in practice and mutually held in witness. Between two people, love is ‘the third thing’—the thing bigger than just the two in the relationship.” In this case, the “something else” was ego. She admires me; I need that admiration, so I will find ways to fuel it.
But that’s not love. That’s manipulation. When you’re desperate to depend on external confirmation of inner-kept feelings, you’re leaning on the flimsiest of things—ego. From that position there’s no possible way to see the other person for who they really are, or allow them to see you for who you are. And there certainly are not three things here—not even two. Just one. One. Lonely. Thing.
Aug. 4, 2008: “They’re playing the Stones now at the Pig. So true; trite, but true…”
Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday. “Who could hang a name on you? When you change with every new day…
“Still, I’m gonna miss you.”
[First of a two-part post]
When you have a ticket to paradise, you’d damn well better make sure you catch your ride. Me? I blew it.
I didn’t get on the bus, so I had to get on the bus.
Sunday, July 30, 1978, I was up early to pack. Steve would give me a ride to Crystal Free Church where I’d catch a school bus up to Camp Shamineau in Motley. Well, that was the plan. He picked me up at 1 p.m., but we couldn’t remember where the church was, so we stopped by Lisa Tepley’s house to get directions. Lisa wasn’t home, but her sister Marna set us in the right direction.
By the time we’d gotten there, the bus had already left.
Crestfallen, I called home from Lisa’s again. Mom was adamant—she refused to drive the 250-mile round trip to Motley. So she suggested I come home for dinner and Brian would take me to the Greyhound station, where I’d take a later bus to camp.
My Greyhound rolled into Motley around 9 p.m., and I got off the bus with a camp staffer named Darrell, who called us a ride into camp. When I threw my bags down outside the canteen, Deann “came wandering up and hugged me (an embarrassing moment)” before I was assigned to the Ottawa cabin and rejoined old buddies there.
At least I’d made it—back at last among those happy campers.
***
Then there was the dream of that golden-haired brunette. And, possibly, a connection 30 years later.
Thing was, I knew she wasn’t Deann. The diary seems to indicate I tried to tell that to her right from the start: “…the biggest thing is Deann and I did a lot of talking; a lot of those pre-Now dreams came true in two days (with five more to go!).” You see, Deann and I had history: smashmouth time together the previous year at camp. She was cute but, to me she was no Lisa Tepley. I was flattered by her attention, so, truth be told, like any male, I exploited that.
Among the old faces in the cabin: counselor Jim Wannabow, Dean, Wade, Chip, Derrick, and the new guy, Bob Nelson, a tall, angular kid from Minnetonka, who I hung out with after camp. As for the girls, early in the week I got talking to Lana (pictured at right) and her friend Marie, as well as Cecilia, Jeanne and her friend Debbie.
Everyone’s colas were diluted at the canteen in Tuesday’s rains. It cleared up in time for goofiness mid-week. On Wednesday the girls were waiting down by the dining hall for the boys’ cabins to come down for breakfast. Everyone was surprised to see the guys marching “down the hill, backwards and single file, ‘left, right, left, right…’” I spent that day talking with Lana, Marie, Deann, Denise, Eileen, her sister Mary, Sonya and Trudi. While Ottawa, my cabin, played Mohian in football up at the playing field, I was down in the dining hall basement playing piano. A couple girls showed up, and it’s likely then that Debbie first caught my eye. She was cute, brunette—could she be the one I’d come all the way to meet?
***
“There’s no time to lose, I heard her say,
catch your dreams before they slip away.”
Fast-forward—almost 30 years to the day.
It’s Monday, Aug. 4, 2008. Mom had passed away two months before. The journal reads: “Dad sent me an email today after I sent him a pix of AJ [my girlfriend at the time] and I” off to attend a local arts fundraiser. His email read: “Hi Mike, got the picture and if I was your age I would be camping on [AJ’s] door step and Mike, I read in her eyes, she is at peace with sole,,,what a great looking lady,smart and donot let her get away!!!Love Dad.”
AJ and I had spent the previous weekend together. Then, in a telling statement recorded afterward in my journal: “We had a long talk after she started crying, worrying about her autumn and where she’s going in her life, but I attributed it to hormonal flow and was just there to listen. She’s never freaked me out, even when she’s emotional, which I consider beautiful and honest.”
Buried deep in the 1978 diary, there’s a statement that corresponds eerily to the 2008 journal.
On Aug. 4, 2008, I was having lunch at one of my St. Paul hangouts, the Muddy Pig, when the Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” came over the speakers. The intuitive pull of the golden-haired brunette popped into my head. AJ had similar features as the Mystery Girl.
Were the decades somehow compressing? And had I been lying to myself about things that just weren’t true for all those years?
[Photo credit: Glass Factory Worker Rob Kidd 1911—NARA—Wikimedia Commons]
Wednesday, July 19, 1978: I’d passed the interviews, physical and, along with fellow post-high school summer jobbers Randy Johnson and Pam Fox, hurried up to the “first day” at Tonka Toys, working 2nd shift in Department 02: Sub-Assembly. Although the conditions were hardly as squalid as the Victorian glass factory worker pictured at right, that’s still an accurate reflection of what it was like to go from summer sunshine into a dark, dingy, percussively loud and bustling factory in the late 1970s.
Mom gave me a lift, getting me there by 4:20 p.m. It was the only time I ever worked in a factory and the first time I recall ever having an employee number. Outside of women bosses like Jeanne at the Lafayette Club and Sabrina at Super Sam’s, it was also the first time I worked for The Man.
My shift supervisor, Dick, bespectacled, middle-aged, clad in tie and short sleeves, led us past roaring forklifts, banging riveters and—overhead—small metal toy pieces swinging by conveyor chains to the paint and finishing department yards away. Smudgy workers wearing earplugs grimly eyed us as we were shown to a workstation.
As a new employee, I was anxious to know if I could get the first week in August off to attend camp. Dick listened to my request, his jaw set, and said, “get in touch with me later and I’ll let you know.” That night I worked with a Karen and Dave deburring rough edges off Tonka bulldozers. Mom left her car in the parking lot after she’d left me the key so I could drive home. On the way I stopped off at the Gravel Pits to stare up at the full moon.
Thursday night I worked at the deburring table again with a guy named Brant. The following night another guy, Steve Walters, joined me with two guys named Kevin and Dave. I’d hoped to ask Dick again on Monday about the time off so I could send in my camp registration.
It was an odd tonal shift to the summer: Bright, peaceful, sunny days spent painting the lakefront deck stairs and swimming—followed by clanging loud, dreary nights in the factory. It was so noisy during shift that we all didn’t talk much—unless someone had to change stations or move materials bins around. At dinner break we sat outside at picnic tables, smoking and gazing at the dusky parking lot before the bell clanged and we shuffled back inside.
On the weekend I reconnected with friends, hitting Ridgedale in Steve’s car and stopping by the Minnetonka A&W—where we were surprised to discover Kim had started as a carhop. With Monday looming, and a full week at the factory, I kept my sights on Camp Shamineau, meeting old and making new friends. It kept my spirits up.
Monday I walked the railroad tracks to Tonka. Still no word from Dick about the time off, but I’d decided to risk it; I’d sent in my registration and deposit for camp earlier that day. “I hope no one gets mad—” I wrote in the diary, “because I’m going! It’s too strong for me to ignore the feeling I get.” That night I worked with Chuck Gemar and Dave from the previous Thursday, “riveting side panels to Tonka pickup trucks.” After shift, my brother picked me up at 1 a.m. in Mom’s car, where I learned Dad had just bought a new boat—a Starcraft—and we were itching to take it out for a spin.
But reality crept back in—final summer before college be damned. Tuesday, the diary reports, “No one called (besides an Army Recruit officer—I hung up—)” before I left for shift, working with again with Dave, Kevin and a couple girls “at Table 5 … piecing together and riveting those, ya know, car-carrier truck beds. For a while I riveted … then I spent a large amount of time piecing the bottom part on, which really grated up the sides of my hands and forefingers.”
It was the night for clock-watching.
In four days, maybe I’d be back once again among the smiling, sunny, young faces of Camp Shamineau—my last year ever—and the noise, monotony and grim surroundings would be a fast-fading memory.
At dinner break I screwed my courage to the sticking point and went to see Dick in his cluttered office.
“The 31st through the 5th?” he sighed. “O.K. I suppose you can have it.”
I had poison ivy.
Tuesday, July 11, 1978, the diary reports Mom took me to the doctor for a prescription to treat welts on my hand, which later spread to my face and lips. Itching all over, I was miserable.
Topping that, I didn’t have a summer job, fired from the janitorial gig because I was slow (too busy daydreaming), lazy and—well, to tell you the truth, I stole a letter opener. Yeah, I was a petty thief. With poison ivy. And the itching just wouldn’t stop.
The daydreams were of summer camp and the girls I’d met there before: Lynn, Lisa, Jill … and others I haven’t yet mentioned. After “Happy Campers I,” I’d befriended a blonde from Wayzata with the unusual name of Vizma Sturnicks, and a girl from Forest Lake named Deann Mork. They attended Camp Shamineau when high school friend Loren played Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” on the upright piano in the dining hall basement. Deann and I made out in the chapel the previous year at camp.
Vizma and I stayed in touch. She had an unrelenting sense of humor, which I instantly glommed on to. That Tuesday in July, Mom drove me to Wayzata where I window-shopped at Bay Center mall, then walked to Burger King where Vizma worked the front line. I always considered her a new friend rather than a potential romantic interest. “Called Vizma this eve,” the diary states. “Shamineau’s got a new melodrama stage. 55 kids going this year.” Seemed like a positive sign; things were looking up.
“The Clown with the Golden Voice,” the next day’s entry begins, “His heart may break, but the show goes on. … I wanna stand around the sundial again, Mr. Storyteller. … It’s so very much summer, but I feel trapped, or even better described as ‘waiting.’”
You see, I’d formed this myth (which later took the form of a poem) about a sundial I saw at Camp Koronis. In the story, a strange old storyteller conjured his readers to appear at a certain time and place. All the loose ends of his stories would neatly tie up. I needed Mr. Storyteller again. “It looks as if there’ll be a brightening cheery revival of a summer spirit, like a wondrous old man simply sleeping somewhere in a sweet breezy field.”
My sense of intuition was at full charge, albeit veering on the side of purple prose.
On Thursday, July 13, the diary turned pensive: “Sargasso Sea. The Horse Latitudes. Where is the Shamineau oasis and the girl with the golden brunette hair? Just a vision and/or recurring fancy just created from whims and outside symbols? I don’t believe it. I won’t believe it’s because that is something stronger now than a small, objective and sterile little doubt.”
Who was this mysterious girl with the golden brunette hair? I’d been on the phone with Vizma, Deann, Kim, Lisa, even hanging out with a sophomore friend from late in my senior year, Mary Geyen, at her parents’ place. But none of these girls fit the description of HER. I had to find out who she was. Feeling friendless and alone, I later confessed to the diary: “God, I feel that girl in my head.”
Saturday night Jim Borgheiinck picked me up in his car and we hit a party at sophomore Colleen “Cubby” Dunn’s house north of town. Cubby fit the bill as a smart, lovely brunette, and she and I often flirted in high school. At the party that night she showed me her Jackson Browne albums. But something seemed off. “Cubby was standoffish last night,” I later wrote, “but uncomfortably friendly.”
Uncomfortably friendly. Even after 30 years that statement strikes me as calculatingly vague. Maybe I bristled at her standoffishness, but was not entirely convinced of the attraction, given she’d be back in high school in the fall and I’d be off to college. I’m not sure.
On Monday, July 17, there was a break in the unemployment clouds. I’d walked the railroad tracks to Tonka Toys and scored an interview appointment for the following day, to work in the assembly department. Things were looking up—potential tiny dancers and poison ivy notwithstanding.
Maybe landing the job, and making my last summer at Camp Shamineau really count, would finally scratch that itch.
I’m not particularly superstitious, so I’ll just throw this out to y’all. You decide what to make of it, especially coming off a blog post from about a month ago.
This morning I sorted and recycled bills, receipts and mail from over six years ago. It’s a tedious process, but I’ve decided to do it by hand because I never know what I’m going to discover inside “The Paper Monster.”
Not a lot of personal stuff, but one manila envelope from Dad, postmarked March 12, 2007—18 months before he died. Inside was his church’s newsletter—and a photo that nearly floored me.
Taken on Mom and Dad’s first anniversary, Dec. 21, 1958, they’re all smiles and celebrating Christmas with best friends (and soon to be my godparents), the Morelands. A Post-It note from Dad reads: “Hi Mike, Picture from yesteryear and Church news letter Love Dad.”
What’s crazy about this is how it’s apropos of nothing. With a March 2007 postmark, there’s no anniversary, birth date or other reason for Dad to have sent the photo when he did. And for me to rediscover it a week after I’d written a blog post about that very period 1955–1959, prior to my birth—I mean, wacky, huh?
So, Scooby, Dooby Doo, where are you?
Now go get yourself a Scooby Snack. All-new post up before Saturday morning!
