9:00 p.m.

Claus began his 9:00 shift at 7-11 wearing the giant hot dog suit and standing on the corner of West Sixth Street and South Alexandria Avenue in Korea Town.  He was hot and miserable, able to smell Kendall’s foul body odor and unable to scratch places that itched.  

He hated wearing the costume, not only because of its shameful appearance, but also because it was a haven for germs and parasites.  While most hot dog suits were embarrassing enough: the bun wrapped around the wiener with a mustard squiggle down the middle; this one was even worse.  The hot dog portion had a hood with an opening for his face to stick out- it clung to his cheeks.  A twisted beanie top crowned the whole outfit, meant to mimic the end of a sausage casing.  Claus stood on the corner with a handful of fliers that advertised specials of Pepsi 12-packs with a coupon for dollar hot dogs. At 10:00 he could take it off and go inside- one more hour and he was free.

Since Claus was naturally stocky, the costume fit him snugly.  He was forced to share the dreadful thing with five other employees who the owner called “young and adventurous” trying to encourage them in the midst of humiliation. Claus was indeed young; he was even adventurous in most ways, but not with hygienic cleanliness.  The other 7-11 employees who shared the costume didn’t seem to be as fastidious, Claus noticed.  Kendall was the worst: a tall, thick-waisted girl with three moles above her left eyebrow and a terrible stench that stayed behind when she left.

Although Claus and Kendall had never really spoken, he considered her an unpleasant person that he did not want to know.  When he was forced to work alongside of her he did all of the physical jobs.  She sat behind the counter on her fat ass, chewing her gum noisily and staring out the window. 

Instead of mopping or cleaning up around the coffee area, which were the easy jobs, she would organize the hanging .  He hated working the shift after her, mainly because the bathroom cleanup was a terrible job after eight hours of neglect.  She didn’t even bother to read when it was slow; just chewed gum and looked out the window.  Claus had never seen her use a cell phone.

A car filled with teenagers stopped at the red light.  Claus smiled and waved at them, even though they were laughing and taking pictures of him with their cell phones. 

“Man, I would NEVER do that job!” one of them yelled at him.  The other passengers roared with laughter.  

Claus laughed and shouted back, “Never say NEVER!”   

The people in the car were silent for a moment, then laughed.  As they pulled away they honked and waved.  Claus sighed. 

“Yeah, everyone thinks the hot dog is a dork,” he whispered to himself.

Traffic was steady, but very few people were on foot.  Now and then the tin sound of a shopping cart could be heard in the distance; Claus looked around to see where it was coming from. 

He remembered when his father lost his job three years ago.  He was fifteen years old; Shelley was thirteen.  Mom left two months later, with no explanation.  Claus’ father was devastated and drank a lot; it wasn’t until Claus was forced to buy his dad’s whiskey that he realized how much he consumed.  Before long, Dad had drunk nearly all of the severance check and Claus didn’t know what to do.  He considered running away, but it would have meant abandoning his sister.  Desperate, he called his Chemistry teacher, Miss Gill, at home.  She came to their apartment right away, assessed the situation, and explained to Claus that he and his sister would have to go to “somewhere safe”.  It didn’t take long to realize that this meant foster care; this was how Claus learned that his father was in the throes of pretty advanced alcoholism. Dad was taken to a hospital; Claus and Shelley were placed in emergency housing with a foster family.  If it weren’t for Miss Gill, they would have been separated.   

Now Claus was determined to make a living that could sustain both of them; Shelley worked part time at Burger King as well, but she needed to graduate.  He was in community college, worked two jobs and was able to rent a small studio apartment for both of them.  All of it would get easier, he told himself, once he finished college.

“Hey, wiener!” He heard the voice of a bum, yelling at him from the sake house on the opposite corner.  Straining to see, Claus could make out the figure of a large-bellied man, leaning against his stolen cart.  The man looked familiar, was it Old Henry, the man that tried to steal the throw away dogs from the garbage?  It was hard to see in the half-light.

“Hello!” Claus waved a gloved hand.  The motion released the awful body odor smell.  He was repulsed, but quickly recovered – long enough to see the man shaking his head. 

“I said,” the man yelled louder.  “HEY WIENER!”

“Yeah, I heard you!” Claus knew the job was awful, but it paid well and it coordinated with his other job at the deli and school.  This way, he could rent the studio apartment for him and his sister. Pretty soon, he’d have to think about a scholarship application to UCLA. 

 “You know why I called you that?” The drunken man continued bellowing from across the street.  Where was a cop when you needed one?  More cars past, the whir of a city bus passed before him.  In one hour he could take off the costume and go inside to clean up the coffee stations.  That man was still yelling.  Why did his voice sound so familiar?

In a moment that stood still, Claus realized why the man looked and sounded familiar: it was his father.

There Claus stood, on the corner, in a hot dog suit – having this realization.  His father was pushing a shopping cart around Korea Town.  He was on the streets.  He was back to drinking, or he never got clean.  Shame filled him; it was worse than Kendall’s stench. 

He started to yell something at him, but his father suddenly stopped.  It was as if he recognized his son at the same time the son recognized the father.  Silence filled the tension between them.  West Sixth was quiet.  It wasn’t until the ground beneath his feet crested in a wave, that Claus snapped out of it. 

His father was a bum.  Was that an earthquake?  

2:00 a.m.

If you want to be happy for the rest of your life

Never make a pretty woman your wife

Those words stuck to Theo’s brain, a school-boy song he sang when he and his brothers were playing basketball in the neighborhood.  It was a catchy tune, one that made them dance and show off for the girls in the street.  He looked out the window now, the basketball courts were dark now and all but the junkies had gone home.  The street was lit by three lights; the lamp on the north-east corner of Zerega Avenue had been broken for weeks now.

Celia had been gone since four to visit her sister in Brooklyn; it was now close to two a.m.  Theo thought of going down to Lorraine’s to see if she was closing the bar again, but the kids were asleep in the next room and it was Friday night and this was, after all, Castle Hill.

Theo looked at his phone again: 2:00.

Pacing back and forth in the front room wasn’t working; the television was filled with junk.  Where was she?  She promised she was finished with alcohol, but Theo knew it was all lies.  He noticed the scarlet threads in her eyes when she actually made eye contact with him.  She accused him of being her parole officer, a reference to his own stint in prison.  There was no winning living with an addict; he was bound to fail, no matter what he did.

2:03.

She promised she’d changed the last time he caught her with Henry, their building super.  He had come home to find them on the couch, kissing and pawing each other like sixteen-year-olds.  A bottle of brandy was on the coffee table next to them.  They scattered like cockroaches when Theo overturned the table, sending the bottle, the ashtray and the TV remotes flying over their heads.

The incident was followed by weeks of tears; Celia begging to be forgiven and promising to go to AA meetings.  Theo stewed.  In a moment of weakness he let his guard down and she did it again. He knew better than to trust her.  Love her, yes.  Want her, yes.  Make love to her, yes.  Trust her?  Never again.

2:15.

He put his cell phone on the charger by the sink.  He noticed that he hadn’t done the dinner dishes.  He  filled the dishpan with warm water and suds and wiped them down carefully.  He glanced back at the wall clock.

 2:18.

There was a noise in the hallway.  He stopped what he was doing to listen.  It was Mrs. Craft and her son, returning from the Donner St. Church prayer meeting.  He heard them make themselves at home next door; the walls were paper thin.  They were trying to be quiet, but Theo almost told them not to bother.

After the dishes, Theo remembered the front room’s dirty ceiling fan he had been noticing all week.  He took a kitchen chair and put it underneath, returning to kitchen for the dishpan.  It still had plenty of sudsy water.  He dipped the dishrag in the suds, wrung it out and began wiping weeks of grime from the paddles.

Celia was never much of a housekeeper, but lately she hadn’t cleaned anything at all.  When he met her she was an effervescent church-going girl who could sing.  She was the prettiest girl he had ever seen, energetic and funny.  He fell in love with her and she knew it; she thought he was nice and stable.  Somewhere along the line, she decided that it would be good if they married.  He thought he was the luckiest man in the world.

The stairs creaked.  He stopped wiping the ceiling fan and listened closely.  The jingle of her keys.  He stepped off the chair and watched the doorknob turn slowly, the door creak open.  She looked in carefully and saw him, standing in the middle of the front room with a dishpan in one hand and a rag in the other.

“Why aren’t you answering your phone?” she half-shouted at him.  Her green dress clung to her tiny waist, the hem swayed merrily as she threw her purse down on the couch. 

Theo suppressed the urge to throw the dirty water at her.  He assessed her condition.  Was she drunk?

“What are you talking about?” he yelled. "I been waiting on you all night!"

“I been calling you!  I witnessed a robbery and I been at the police station!”

Confused and angry, Theo marched into the kitchen, threw the dishpan in to the sink, its greasy water splashing up and soaking the edge of the curtains. He picked up his phone, and saw a missed call from Celia. 

After unlocking it, it turned back to her.

“That’s right, I called you!”  Celia had followed him and was now standing, hands on her hips and raging mad.  “How am I supposed to get home?  Walk?”

Theo looked at the call details.  Celia had just called him ten minutes ago at 2:30.  He must have been cleaning the ceiling fan.

“You called ten minutes ago,” Theo stared blankly at her.  His anger had left him; he was now plotting.  How could he get her to move out of their apartment?  She would never agree to leave the children in his custody; it would be a big legal fight that neither of them could afford.

“Well?” She stood in front of him, expecting some kind of fight.  It was the way she did things; the way they had done things for ten years.  Fights were now their only intimate times.  Theo looked at her and realized it was over.

He looked at his phone.  2:41.

“I’m going to bed,” he said, sadly.  “When I get up, you should be packed and ready to leave.”

“Like hell!”

He was walking to his bedroom when he heard her, raging and swearing. He should have married an ugly girl; he knew the song was right.

pathways

The down staircase at the ARC Library

I heard from one of my best friends in South Africa this week, Lyn.  She emailed me an uplifting devotion; I emailed her back to thank her.  In our exchanges, we shared our hearts and what was going on in our lives.  Lyn is near the one year anniversary of losing her husband to cancer; she is having dinner with mutual friends of ours on Wednesday – it made me wish I could be there. 

Lyn remarked about my return to school, saying: “The very fact that you are at college shows that you are teachable … quite frankly, I could think of nothing worse, but then I never was great at studying …”

The irony of her statement made me laugh.  I was never great at studying either.  In fact, that’s one of the reasons I stopped going to college in the first place.  I enjoyed being smart enough; I didn’t want to put unnecessary hard work into being educated. 

These days, at fifty-two, I can see clearly where studying gets people.  It gets them pretty damn far.  I learned how to refinish furniture, plant roses, change my printer’s ink cartridge and home-school my children – all because I studied.  I decided to do something and then followed the directions.

Growing up, I was always told I had “attention problems” and I believed them; I loved daydreaming and writing poetry – not math and science. As an adult,  in an act of complete defiance,, I decided to read the biggest book I could find: Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.  I made it through (I actually loved the book) – it took me a whole year to do it, but I read the book in its entirety.  After I did, I thought : “If I could read War and Peace, I probably could run a marathon…”  The next year, just shy of my fortieth birthday, I did.

Running a marathon and reading Tolstoy’s epic novel were just two of the wake-up calls in my life.  They came late, but I realized that I might be able to really pursue things I wanted if I just focused.

There are pathways in our brain that wear grooves – they are called neuro-pathways. As you study, the neurons housed in the area of your brain that's thinking send electrical messengers to another targeted group of neurons that are processing the same information. At first, these neural pathways struggle to form a connection and store the information. These new pathways become stronger the more they are used, causing the likelihood of new long-term connections and memories.

Imagine yourself growing up in a wooded area, taking the paths through the woods to and from school everyday.  They are safe and clear and it doesn’t take much effort to stay on them.  You can think about other things while you’re walking, like what’s for dinner or who is going to be playing baseball that day.  One day, out of the blue, you decide to cut a new path closer to a nearby river where you want to fish; you purposefully take this path every day.  Eventually, this path becomes more worn and you have accomplished making a new trail.  The new path might  never become as worn as your original one, but it’s still a new pathway.   This is a lot like how neuroplasticity is worked into our brains when we learn a new skill. The more we repeat something and use that portion of the brain in a focused way, the more these neural pathways develop in our brain.

After spring break, I returned to school and got my midterms back.  I passed them all, but two of them were not A’s.  I felt discouraged, until I remembered that this is still all new to me.  I am trudging a new path and building neuroplasticity as I go along.  I'll study harder, I thought.  I made appointments to talk to my professors about improving my grades. 

I was never good at studying, but I will be.  With grace, I’ll be better at it than I ever was before.  Thursday, after I finished studying at the library, I decided to take the stairs down to my class instead of the elevator.  Maybe I’ll do that from now on…

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