Show and Tell...

 

 

For show and tell today I brought a calling card case.

Doesn’t everybody carry one?

This silver case sat, tarnished and black, on a dark corner shelf in my Grandparents house. I remember just where it was back then, and I ignored it too,  like everyone did. Just another dust magnet.

Then it sat, ignored, in my parent’s house, and now, for the last 25 years, in mine.

This morning I decided to give it some love, polished for the first time in three generations.

I’m sure I’ve opened it, too long ago to remember.

The backstory is that my Great Grandfather worked for the Pullman Company in San Antonio, Texas. A railroad man with his own car, he helped Mexico grow their railroad system “from 416 miles in 1876 to 15,360 miles in 1910”, and became a friend of the Mexican President, Diaz.  

Grandma Maverick remembered sitting in the lap of President Diaz, and his wife giving her this silver case.

These notes from my mother were inside, her handwriting as immediately familiar to me, as her voice itself.

Wormhole Travels...

 

No bigger than a deck of cards, my transistor radio was a wormhole encased in white plastic.

After “lights out” when kids like me were supposed to be getting a “good nights sleep” to be ready to jump on the school bus in the morning, I didn’t. Instead, I stuffed my portal to the hustle of Broadway traffic and bright lights under my pillow, pressing one ear up tight. In that pillowed dark, surrounded by quiet, a full orchestra of life played surreptitiously, just for me.

My secret liaison.

Jean Shepherd was my guy. A radio personality and humorist, broadcasting nightly on WOR out of New York City. He told me stories, took me on adventures, showed me a party that was going on out there, right now, beyond that closed bedroom door.

If Mom had walked down the hallway, passing my bedroom at night, if she tiptoed on stocking feet and listened at my door very carefully, she may have heard a hushed laughter coming from inside. She would think I was lost in a happy dream, like the family dog had been an hour before, chasing squirrels from the TV couch, running upside down, straining to catch an elusive gray tail that flipped at her so maddingly in daylight hours.

I was in pursuit of bigger game, driven by a hunger for the world itself.  Everything beyond those four walls waved at me defiantly, like that squirrel’s tail, just out of reach.  

Fourteen years old, eager for all the tastes life had to offer, I had no time to waste in sleep.

Gene Shepherd and I had places to go.