Cyrano and Mr. Casper

When I was in high school I was privileged to learn from a teacher named Bill Casper, who was affectionately known by his students as “the ghost,” because his name invoked the memory of a friendly cartoon character and because he had a habit of sneaking up on you when you were thinking of doing something wrong. Unfortunately he had a congenital defect that left his limbs short and all his joints painful. He had responsibility for speech and drama programs at the high school and he dedicated long hours to preparing students for their best presentations. I participated in both speech and drama, therefore I spent some long hours with Mr. Casper. One memory of our long association stands out for me.

I had stayed after school to work on a speech and we were the last ones left in the classroom. I was sitting on the floor and Mr. Casper was sitting on the chair of one of those student chair/desk combos. I had encountered a speech from the play called Cyrano de Bergerac, by Edmond Rostand. Mr. Casper volunteered to tell me the story of the play so I settled on the floor at his feet. For the better part of an hour I listened with rapt attention to the story of the fabulous swordsman with the extremely large nose. I heard how he fell in love with Roxanne and had no hope of capturing her attention because of his common looks, and how he then helps his handsome young friend, Christian, woo Roxanne by ghost writing his love letters. Finally when Cyrano returns wounded from the wars, he sets the record straight with Roxanne and dies in her arms as the plume from his hat flutters to the ground.

Mr. Casper was a superior storyteller. As we sat in the fading light of late afternoon I was completely transported by the tragedy of a man, beautiful on the inside, not so perfect on the outside. Cyrano and Mr. Casper, my hat’s off to you both.

The barbershop

I get my hair cut at an old-fashioned barbershop downtown. The two barbers there have been on the job for many, many years. They have Playboy magazines on the table, a shoeshine stand in the corner and a striped barber pole outside the door. It is the quintessential barbershop of Norman Rockwell’s youth. In a nod to modernity, a television set sits in the corner and plays Fox News all the time. The other customers are an interesting mix of retirees, downtown professionals, and curmudgeons.

During a recent haircut I was seated next to a customer in his mid-60s who spoke to his barber in a loud clear voice. He was reciting the typical tea party political line about how the proposed health insurance revision in Congress would sink our country. I sat and listened politely for as long as I could take it. Then I spoke up saying something like, “it’s not health insurance that will sink our country; but another ill-fated Bush war in the Middle East.” He exploded into a diatribe about socialism, taxation without representation, and how the hard-working people of America are being crushed by socialists in the White House. His barber quickly finished him up and ushered him out the door. My barber began apologizing to me and explained how the fellow just likes to hear himself talk.

When I left the barbershop and crossed the street I encountered a man with a handheld sign that said: “Obamacare will ruin this country”! I rolled up to him and asked what that meant. He said something about the hard-working people of America being crushed by Socialists in the White House. We talked for a few minutes more and I explained the benefits of universal health coverage. He didn’t seem particularly interested in dialogue, but was rather wed to a half dozen catchy one-liners. “The cost of this program is way too high, we can’t afford to insure every illegal immigrant, the debt will weigh down our children and grandchildren.” I thanked him for the conversation and rolled along the sidewalk, grateful that I live in a country where we could all have our say.

Moms

Moms

When Tom was about 12 years old, his mom went to the rectory to help prepare a special Lenten dinner. It was to be enjoyed by the Bishop and some visiting priests and clergy dignitaries from the diocese. Since the dinner was being prepared on a Friday night during Lent, she was surprised to see roast beef and ham on the menu. She had always been brought up to believe that a good Catholic did not eat meat on Friday, much less a Friday in Lent. She watched carefully as the Bishop spread his hands in the air over the meal and announced a special dispensation allowing the eating of meat on this occasion. So when her husband and her children got home for dinner that night, they were more than a little surprised to find a pot roast on the table. She passed her hands over the pot roast a couple of times, and announced a special dispensation. From then on they ate meat whenever they pleased.

I was eight years old before I realized what the roadside market was. On frequent occasions we would have some fresh corn on the cob or some succulent squash and when my father would comment on how good it was, my mom would respond by saying, “It’s just something I picked up at the roadside market”. I finally came to realize that in our agricultural community lots of fresh vegetables fell off the trucks that were transporting them from the field to the market. These serendipitous culinary discoveries were referred to by my mother as “shopping at the roadside market”. One Saturday afternoon as we drove along the freeway returning from an orthodontist appointment, Mom pulled the car over onto the shoulder of the road. She woke my sister and me, asleep in the back seat. Pointing toward the railroad tracks she said, “Go pick up that box”. We roused ourselves from our slumber and scurried across the empty desert space to a forlorn looking cardboard box near the railroad track. One corner of the box was bent where it looked like it might have hit the ground when it fell off a railway car. Imagine our delight when we got home and discovered inside the box was a television set. The hard plastic exterior of the set was broken a little bit on one corner where the box had apparently hit the ground. But it worked beautifully and it doubled the number of TVs in our house from one to two. We never made fun of Mom’s roadside market again.