Month: July 2016

Linda DeMers. From High School?

| Linda DeMers Hummel

People frown at you if you wear flip-flops to a funeral. This thought came to me as my plane touched down on Long Island, and I realized I was due at one in a few hours and had forgotten to pack shoes. Luckily I was in my hometown. Giving myself the requisite half hour to get lost in traffic on roads I used to know, I finally pulled into the shoe store I’d frequented as a teenager. I started looking.

“Do you need some help?”

I turned to the clerk in back of me to say, “Yes” but stopped.

It was Bobby Werner. From high school. Class of ’68. His hair was all gelled up, committed to a bad comb-over I wish someone had talked him out of. He’d lost those full cheeks he had as a kid. But it was him.

Before I even say my next words aloud, here’s where I’ve been in my head: Bobby Werner made Honor Society our junior year, which was the province of kids whose fathers were internists, so it was doubly impressive because his father worked at Grumman, like mine. He scored touchdowns against rival football teams. He lived on Forest Avenue. His house was green.

There’s more, and I retrieve that, too. He sat in front of me in English class junior year, where he turned around to pass me the SAT practice ditto every morning. So if my math is right, Bobby Werner was forced to look in my direction 180 times, give or take. I had such a thing for Bobby Werner, and I was wondering — now that we were face to face all these years later — if the feeling had been mutual.

“Wow,” I say as if we’re old friends who just haven’t gotten around to seeing each other in several decades. “How are you, Bobby?”

I see blank. Of course, it’s probably not Bobby anymore, I’m thinking. He’s probably ratcheted it down to Bob. Hence the void, I’m sure. So I hop right back in.

“Linda DeMers. From high school?”

Not a glimmer yet. But he’s squinting a bit, so I think he’s trying.

“Massapequa?” I add, just in case he secretly went to more than one high school.

“You went to Massapequa?” he asks. I nod. He stares, and the pause sashays over, right into awkward.

“Impossible,” he says. “I know I’d remember you.”

At first I think he’s flirting with me, but maybe he sees this conversation as an attack on his powers of memory. Whichever it is, I bet he never guessed he’d end up working in a shoe store in his hometown. Or come across a woman who knows the details of his illustrious past.

There’s another pause — even longer than the first one — signaling that we’re finished dancing down memory lane. So remembering why I’m here in the first place, I break the silence.

“Do you have this shoe in black?”

When he returns from the back, he has a shoe box in his hand. He doesn’t say he recognizes me after all, now that he’s had time to think. He doesn’t say he’ll look me up in the yearbook when he gets home.

I bet Bobby Werner remembers graduation day when we smiled for the camera with our proud parents. Our class motto was “We are good! We are great! We’re the Class of ’68!” When we screamed it at pep rallies, we emphasized the middle sentence, believing we were immune to the chips and scratches that would eventually find us.

“Anything else today?” he asks.

I hand him my credit card.

What Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Parents (and Mine) Knew

| Linda DeMers Hummel

I came to my obsession with Lin-Manuel Miranda much later than most people. I didn’t discover him until well after tickets to Hamilton had reached mortgage-payment levels. So I tried my best to catch up without actually ever seeing the play. I searched news stories and You Tube videos about him, and – if I do say so myself – I did pretty well at becoming a fan of the first order without, you know, being a complete stalker.

The pieces of his life that struck me most, though, weren’t the obvious. Not the trips to the White House, or the interviews where he told about his dismal days as a DJ at Bar Mitzvahs in Queens, or how his bus driver taught him old-school rap on his long rides to and from school in New York City. It was watching him on the videos his parents had saved of him — holding court — when he was a little boy.

My favorite is when he is about eight years old. He is doing a video book report on The Pushcart War. As narrator, he’s dressed in a little boy suit and tie, reading from copy. He changes into costume several times as the plot progresses. His father is behind the camera, his sister in charge of cue cards. In one extended scene, his mother, his abuela, and his great-grandmother play the parts of striking teachers, marching around the room, holding signs and chanting. Convincingly.

When I was eight, book reports were relegated to pencils and lined paper. But I recall with great clarity, the times I got it into my head that I could sing or dance (usually at the same time) with the likes of Doris Day or Peggy Lee. I would prance down the stairs into the living room, where my parents would already be seated on the couch, waiting for my rendition of a song I’d heard on the radio. Standing ovations every time. It never once occurred to me I was mediocre at best. Never once. That realization came to me much later, slowly, when I had moved on to my next potential occupation. I decided I’d be a writer instead. My parents changed course accordingly.

These days I spend lots of my time with a little boy who’s four. He is partial to acting out Fairy Tales in great detail, with voices and inflection we marvel at. He’s not shy about giving out (or abruptly rescinding) speaking parts to the adults in the room. We’re all thrown into the narrative, whatever it is at that moment. We have no idea if he will still be loving this so much in another year, or if we’ll be riding another train with him by then.

Broadway was a long way off on the day of Lin’s video book report. But everyone in the room knew their parts by heart and played them with relish anyway. They circled around him, holding their props and reciting their lines. And saying — without saying it directly — “This is the most terrific kid ever.”

I turned out to be a pretty pitiful singer and dancer. On the other end of the spectrum, Lin-Manuel Miranda is finding the world crazy in love with his talent. Isn’t it funny, then, that he and I have something in common.  Those moments when you remember their beaming faces, taking a bow, hearing the applause. We both came from a home of standing ovations.

Notes on a Shorter Life

| Linda DeMers Hummel

Twenty-five years ago, I saved an obituary written for someone I never met. Her name was Danielle. The paragraphs were written by a newspaper reporter, but really the story was written by Danielle’s mother, who is quoted for most of it: “She liked being in school and got good grades, her mother said. She loved dancing, running, climbing fences, and listening to music. Recently the nurses at Hopkins took Danielle to the ninth-floor playroom to enjoy Christmas caroling.” She was five.

In those days, my own kids were still small. I constantly found myself always looking ahead, toward things that hadn’t happened yet, unable to be grateful for the small stuff: When would he learn not to interrupt at the dinner table? Would she learn to swim before summer was here? Was he behind his classmates when it came to reading, or was it my imagination? They were silly, niggling worries, but I didn’t see that until I read what Danielle’s mother had written.

In a shorter life, there is no room for insignificant fears like mine. Danielle’s mother realized she needed to take stock every step of the way and be grateful for each tiny milestone. She knew she would never see her daughter in a prom dress, or what her smile would look like on graduation day. So she went as far as she could in the story of her life: “Danielle was not a finicky eater and liked seafood, steak, and all green vegetables. She even looked forward to taking her medicine. She dealt with it like a champion.”

I carefully clipped that newspaper story and put it in a file folder, where it would ultimately get old with me. That year I also took a part time job in a pediatric rehab center. I was the fill-in person on weekends, called a child life specialist, which sounded much more important than I was. My job was to play with the young patients who didn’t get to go home on weekends. My job was to make a long Sunday afternoon less long.

And that’s how I met Johnny, who had been in a horrific car accident several years before. As bodies went, there wasn’t much left of his. His facial muscles were intact, but sometimes there was a delay in his reaction, like a bad telephone connection. He could move his right arm. Brilliant smile. No speech. Many opinions, usually about what he would or wouldn’t eat for lunch.

His favorite thing to do on Sunday afternoons was to cruise the hospital’s parking lot with me and look at cars. My role was secondary — push his wheelchair and ask him questions, to which he’d give me hand signals that left no doubt about his feelings on the automobile industry. I was often the straight man, giving him chances to silently laugh at my ignorance. He always gave convertibles a thumbs up. Anything red got his attention. As we passed minivans, he would hold his nose and then look up to see if I was giggling behind him.

Without his ever saying a word, I knew his dream was that one day I’d scoop him up in my arms, strap him into a Corvette, and the two of us would speed up and down country roads for the afternoon.

That never happened. What happened instead was that one day a crash cart went sailing into his room, and in a matter of hours, everything about him had changed. But that’s when a funny thing happened.

“You were such a character, Johnny, you and those crazy sunglasses you used to wear,” his nurse said as she studied the monitors over his head. Someone else in the room laughed and said, “Remember this?” and in front of his closed eyes she duplicated the motion he’d make with his good hand whenever music played. We called it The Snake. She kissed that hand and sighed, “You sure were a dancin’ fool.”

That was the funny part. Were it not for the frail body of a child under the blanket, you might have thought we were at the deathbed of a very old man we had known and loved our whole lives. One memory triggered another, and there was enough material to fill a newspaper column, full of his unique history.

I searched the newspaper for a week after he died. Nothing was ever printed. I found myself foolishly wishing a newspaper reporter would call and ask, “Do you have anything you’d like to say about Johnny’s life?” or whatever it is they say when they have to make that horrible call. I had the words ready anyway. So I wrote them down, and put them in the file folder.

“Johnny P. loved to mold clay in his right hand but had no use for finger painting. His smile was legendary. Nerf basketball was his specialty. Johnny made a mess when he ate peas but never wasted a drop of applesauce. Without words and with facial muscles that had seen some hard times, he always let you know when you said something brilliant or when you had totally and woefully missed the point. He sparkled. He was eight years old.”