Assignment #9

Reiss duPlessis

The past refuses to die.
It floats on wafted odors
To awaken reveries
We thought long forgotten

The past from early childhood
Is rubbed into our consciousness
By pungent oil on oak banisters
As we climbed the stairs to the second floor
Behind Sister’s long black habit,
Her face hidden from view as she leads us to class.

The past uses its aromas best.
There is no reminiscence better than
The unmistakable flavor of brown sugar
As it melts to eventually enfold the pecans
And become the ultimate treat, a praline.

The past surprises us when a cough
Of exhaust from a passing motor bus
Revives long ago treasured minutes...
The ride to and from the store
With Aunt Ruth and the talks we shared.

The past sneaks up on us,
Unexpected and uninvited
When a woman walks by,
The aroma of her perfume...
No, it can’t be the same as Irena’s.
It is.

The past welcomes me into its arms
With the musty incense only libraries share,
Libraries that were so much a part of life
From the day I learned to read.

The past haunts our tranquility
When we inhale the fragrance
Of too many flowers
Gathered at too many funerals

The past lingers on a puff from stranger’s cigarette,
Escorted by the sound of Nat Cole...
“When I Fall in Love...”
Soft. Sweet. Sad. Tears
Memories.

Diane Marcus

A QUIET MORNING

Standing at the sink this Saturday morning
removing shells from the six
hard boiled eggs I didn’t burn
lucky that they didn'texplode because
I got involved with watering and feeding
vitamins to my Orchids, Palmyra, Impatiens
and other pretty plants I don’t know the names of
when it occurred to me how
I always look forward to this particular day
when I turn my radio to ninety-one point five FM
and listen to Duff Murphy’s morning opera show.

Standing at the sink noticing how easily
the shells come off the egg
a pinging sound swathed in soft velvet embraced my thoughts.
Something is different this morning
until it occurs to me that I
didn’t rush to the radio to turn it on,
the lawn mowers were not cutting the grass
and leaf blowers were no where to be heard.
Even the wind quietly rustled the leaves, exhausted
by it’s fierce howling of two days ago
when flower pots were overturned.

Standing at the sink rinsing
Small particles of remaining shell off the eggs
It occurs to me how much
I cherish the emptiness
of no one calling out my name
from across the house in the bedroom where
any minute I will hear Diane, Diane where are you.
I breath a sigh of gratitude for if this moment
will last only for another moment, I will revel in the
beauty of a quiet morning.

Miss Miller

Sometime during the transition from the relatively calm 1950’s to the more turbulent 1960’s, I, and two other graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh, rented an apartment at 4400 Centre Avenue, otherwise known as the Bellefield Dwellings. The building was located in Oakland, across the street from Schenley High School, not far from the University. It was a big, red-brick, structure, ten stories high, that at one time provided luxury apartments for people of means (steel barons?) who wanted to live in Oakland, but now the building, like a fading actress, had fallen on harder times. One could see traces of its former beauty, particularly on the upper floors where the halls were still covered with rugs, a bit thread bare now, and tables with small lamps stood in alcoves leading to some of the apartments.

The apartment building was owned by Miss Miller, a retired, spinster-school teacher from Baltimore. How she happened to wind up in Pittsburgh and own this property, none of us knew. She lived in a far from elegant apartment on the first floor, right near the main entrance, where she could see who came in and who left the building. She led a penurious existence, but it was not clear if this was a result of habit or of necessity. Her apartment like many in the building, particularly on the lower floors, consisted of a series of two or three rooms that had been carved out of a much larger unit. I think she had her own bathroom, but she apparently shared the cooking facilities (generally a gas stove stuck in an alcove) with some of the other tenants.

The first time I met Miss Miller (I do not know if she had a first name) was when I entered her apartment to pay the rent for the first month. She was seated at a table, piled with books, in what I think was her living room. “Oh, you just rented that lovely apartment on the eighth floor,” she sang out in a melodious voice that had an other- worldly quality. “The furniture and lamps in the hallway are antiques. You’ll really like it there.” (Miss Miller had not learned one of the basic tenets of saleswomanship: Don’t continue to sell the product once you’ve clinched the deal.) After I paid her she rummaged through all the items on her table, found a book that looked like a ledger, and wrote an official receipt. “I never had a receipt book until one of my tenants bought me one,” she explained.

Miss Miller was a perfect match for the apartment building, where the two elevators ran at erratic speeds and often got stuck between floors and nothing else seemed to work as designed. She was like a clock with beautiful sounding chimes that never quite gave the right time.

Friday and Saturday nights were raucous weekly events in our tavern often with fistfights and sometimes with knives. The rest of the week in the main was rather tame….. How did it happen that I was able to escape this environment?

At grade school I remember trying hard to please all the teachers. Then something happened there which I believe set the course of my life. I was told that I would be receiving academic honors at our grammar school graduation. I was selected to give the Salutatory address at graduation because of my superior grades. I was only trying to please the authority, the teachers. My parents seemed to be proud of my small achievement. The assignments that were given to me at school were all puzzles to be solved. And I loved solving puzzles… I knew nothing about academic awards. This surprise and all the attention that I received changed my way of thinking about grades as I entered high school.

During my high school sophomore to senior summers I worked on the local farms doing labor work—hoeing weeds in the tomato fields, pulling onions out of the soil and sorting them, and picking peaches and apricots. I was making twenty-five cents an hour for the ten-hour day.

As I rested in the shade during lunch on those hot summers, I wondered what the future had in store for me. Was I slated to work as a farm laborer all my life? Work as a tavern owner like my dad did not seem too inviting. Working for the Southern Pacific Railroad in the roundhouse in Tracy were the better jobs. But what did they actually do there? I thought I should set a monetary goal. Yes, I should work towards making $5000 a year. That sounded like a worthy goal. I really didn’t know what this would buy but it was beyond what anyone I knew made by a wide margin.

Everyone was telling me, “Jim, you’re smart. You should set your sights on going to college.” The University of California in Berkeley was the epitome of education. I must go there. I must study hard in order to be accepted. I could get a scholarship. How else will I afford to go to that expensive school? When I graduated, I would be in the first phase of achieving that $5,000 a year. The "valedictory" will get me there. I didn’t know what the criteria for this award was but I knew getting good grades was the major one.

As the school years progressed, I made a concerted effort to identify my competition and note what grades they were receiving. Every time grades were issued, the students in the college prep curriculum would surreptitiously compare grades to see how we all stood in the class. There would be at least a half a dozen students that would get all A’s. In my senior year, by my unofficial count, Georgia Peterson and I were neck-and-neck in the grade point average race with all A’s for 3 1/2 years.. Actually I hadn’t kept track of her grades in the freshman year because she had come to Tracy from another grammar school. But I noted that she was the smartest kid in our class. I thought Marian Rudkin, our grammar school Valedictorian, was out of it because I recall her getting several grades below an "A" over the years.

Around April of our senior year Marian and I were called into the principal’s office and were told that they we would be giving the Salutatory and Valedictory addresses respectively. I was in shock though elated and still disbelieving. About a week later, however, there seemed to be some objection to those choices and rumor had it that they were to be recalled. “Hey, Yamo, you’re probably not going to be Valedictorian,” was the rumor among the students. I again went into shock in the other direction. I should have gone directly to the principal’s office in confirm the rumor but felt that that would be too forward of me.
I learned later that grade point average was NOT the criteria for selection. Total grade points was to be used. Those that took more classes than standard received more grade points. Fifty years later I learned that I was the only student with a 4.0 GPA. Marian and Dorothy Reece had lesser averages but had taken extra classes with private tutors all thru high school in a musical instrument and were given school credits of 4.0 per class. Marian was the daughter of a local popular dentist and Dorothy was the daughter of the president of the bank. A few weeks of agony went by and then it was announced officially that a second Salutatorian would be added, Dorothy Reece, and the original selection of Jim Yamasaki, Valedictorian, and Marian Rudkin, Salutatorian, would stand. Georgia Peterson, who I thought was the smartest in the class, had some B’s in gym and did not have extra classes. At the end of the year she and I had been selected “the most intelligent” girl and boy by the graduating class.

While the details of the selection process and the hiccup that occurred was never explained to me, I figured out what must have happened. The selection of Marian and I were challenged by Dorothy Reece’s parents who produced the records of private tutoring from the same teacher as Marian’s. This must have resulted in an increase of her total grade points past Marian’s but not mine.
I knew that I had a 4.0 GPA for my 3 1/2 years. How was it that my grade point total was higher? While I was competing for grades, I realized that what I knew must be REAL in a competing world. I had figured out that I was deficient in a number of areas and decided to improve on it. I knew I would have to write technical reports in college so I tried to teach myself typing during the noon recess by sneaking into the typing classroom. Later when I was into basketball, track, and tennis team-play after school, I was excused from the gym class period. I talked the typing teacher to allow me into her typing class. In about six weeks I was at forty words per minute and felt that that was good enough. I received a semester’s worth of credit…. I then talked to the science teacher and asked what I needed to know in the Electrical Engineering major in college. Instead of telling me about it, he set up a special lab class for me alone where I constructed an elementary version of a radio plus other electrical devices. I received a full year’s credit for this class…. I had taken the normal two-year Spanish classes. When I heard that most college students at UC had four years of a foreign language, I asked the Spanish teacher about another year in Spanish. She was thrilled to set this up for the first time for just four students. When I produced double the amount of work as the others, I was told to write a term paper in Spanish. For this I was awarded two years of credit for one year of work thus getting my four years of a foreign language….In addition to all this, I took the extra 8:00 AM advance math class…. All this extra work allowed me to hold my own in grade points total.
This was the first step in escaping the wild and raucous class Z tavern environment.

A Side Comment: When I learned I was to be Valedictorian, I went up to Georgia and offered my condolences. She just said, “No big deal.” Sixty years later I found her happily married for fifty years to a WW II veteran. I told her I still thought she was the smartest in our class and should have gotten the Valedictory. She just said, “Yamo, let’s just say we were co-smartest in the class."..... Just in time...She passed away a year later.

Assignment 8

Reiss DuPlessis

“Trick or treat!”

“Hello honey, here you are. Help yourself to some pennies from the pumpkin.”

“This is a trick lady, not a treat, gimmie your purse and those rings and your watch!”

“You’ve gotta be kidding kid. Take the pennies and get off my porch!”

“I’m not kidding you old bitch, gimmie that watch! Gimme your rings and your purse!”

In concert with the snarled words, the mask is ripped off and a face older and uglier than the rubber mask is pointed at the elderly woman whose face is, now, whiter than the paper ghost hanging from the rafters of her porch.

“Wha... you’re not a kid, you’re .... What’s this?”

“It’s a hold-up and this is a gun! Now, shut up you old bag. I said gimmie your rings and your watch and I want your purse!”

“OK, here’s the watch. My purse is in the back of the house.”

“Go get it! I’ll wait!”

“OK. I’ll be right back.”

"Hey lady, what's takin' so long. Hurry up. I ain't got all night!!"

"Hold on, I can't find my purse! Hold on. It's here some place!"

The burglar alarm activated, the dogs released from the back yard, and baseball bat in hand, Mildred heads back toward the front door. Before she can get there, the dogs, all three of them, have come around the house, are behind the Halloween bandit and are snarling, growling and defying him to move.

Suddenly, much too suddenly, he turns to face the dogs, gun pointed at them. One set of teeth are, instantly, on his gun holding hand, another set firmly attached to his left ankle and the third set, waiting to attack. Mildred smiles as watches the, once, bold robber face his new enemies.

“Get dem damned dogs off me. Get ‘em off!!!”

“Why?”

“You’re crazy old bitch, call off dem dogs!”

“What did you say? Killer! Attack!”

The third dog, responds to the command with deep, guttural growls, and exposes shinny, white fangs as he lunges for the hapless man’s throat.

“Your trick, little man,” smiles Mildred, “my treat!”