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Michael Morrissey
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One of My Christmas Gifts, From Granny Suzie, a Wee Story

12/26/2012

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A princess came to my house on December 15, 2012. From felt stockings strewn upon the floor, before a fireplace she browses then names the best, when asked to choose. To make one immediately she agrees and we descend to a place where making-things reside.

A making-thing found that day… that time and in that place, was a bolt of canvas. She says…“I’ll trace the shape”… she did…and I cut.  She says…“It should be pink” and I squeeze the tube. The magenta paint, she says, …“is yucky”… I add white. She says…‘red and white make pink, my daddy says”… I added red and she agrees.

“Here’s a brush”...I say and she strokes the shape with heaps of glowing paint; she says, …”you do the back “…I did.

She says…“I’ll make some marker dots on a picture…I say…“make some on the stocking”…she prints her name.  “Do some more” I say…she prints the names of her family and her dog.  She says, …make me a heart”… I say, …“you make one”…she says…“I can’t…I cannot”. “But you can”, says I…‘“like this…a number 3 tipped over on it’s face…below the middle put a dot… connect the number to the dot”.  She did, then made some more on other things.

Puzzling over a join of front to back, needles fail…too dull…too thick.  I try the drill…usually works for making holes…I’m relieved.   She doesn’t like the holes, “the other doesn’t have holes… I do not like holes… I do not want holes”, she says.  “We need the holes to lace the parts”, I say.  She says, … you do not even have a Christmas tree” …I say, ...we have five”.  She says, … you don’t have any inside your house”…I say, “two are inside, remember”.

Exit the princess; she ascends the stairs to have a snack and visit Grampa, watching the game.  Below, I look for a lace to join the stocking parts; my lot of cords… gut…leather… twine…kite-string …none suitable, I need one of agreeable color, thin enough to thread the only just-rite needle I have.  

But wait…the loss of that single needle amid the substantial snarled mound of material now changes everything. An opportunity to think in another direction is one I’m familiar with. Envisioning what another person would be looking to use, it becomes obvious…yarn.

Yarn… again I’m lamenting our move to Fargo, soon to be two years ago; it required the slash of my stash to just above impoverishment level. I face the fact that yarn may have been one of the things I was willing to let go. 

I now too, need the relief of upstairs with the princess, the game, Grampa and whatever is transpiring. Upstairs, new exciting things are happening; the princess is engaged with an IPad scoop game and very adept at it. Not only can she score high with scoops and burgers, but is able to sort though all the applications picking suitable ones and suggesting new buys which require consent by password protected Grampa. Angry birds come up, she needs little time to precision lob those rocks or whatever it is she‘s hurling to crumble the structures. I think the missiles are more sinister than rock.

Snack offerings have not yet hit the mark; the princess likes small squares of chocolate wrapped in red foil but Grampa’s stash is gone. The dilemma becomes how to place my image of snack into the mind of the princess.  I peel a tangelo and set the segments on the island. The princess doesn’t bite; she delivers them in a bowl to Grampa, always most appreciative. She then peels one for herself and favors it with grapes and a frozen corn muffin she finds in the freezer section of fridge. She says I should put a frozen muffin in the microwave.  Usually the princess eats peanuts at our house but they too are gone; she settles in on some fried potatoes dressed with ketchup shortly before her daddy returns and says how hungry he is and the rest of the family will be by this time. The princess leaves with him.

I saw her last on December 16, 2012, line dancing in a recital at an urban high school; she was wearing a yellow gold costume, a trim of diamante’ with tutu and leggings.

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An Unexpected Benefit

12/22/2012

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While out and about yesterday, doing that which I like least of all human activities, shopping, I entered an antique store filled with remnants of people's lives, each of the thousands of items with its own tale of love, tragedy, financial desperation, betrayal or death, kept silently beneath its surface. Once inside an older fellow, about my age I guessed, hollered at me from where he was seated in a comfortable chair toward the back of the store. He was dressed casually in a jaunty Harris Tweed hat and a sweater. I guessed him to be there a bit reluctantly, maybe filling in for the wife.


As I nosed about the shop we started a dialogue common to old men who believe they are in the company of someone whom they do not immediately dislike. We chatted the "where ya froms, whadya do, ya a Bison? bits when I focused on a display case filled with intriguing shapes, forms and colors. The more we chatted, the more we seemed to be like a pair of divergent guided missiles homing in on the same moment in time. And eventually there came the explosion. He and I attended NDSU at the same moment in time, both English majors involved with the identical faculty. I thought I'd try a mutual good friend question. 


Didya know Bob Maier? I asked.


Bob Maier? Yeah, he was a really good friend. We worked together a bunch in theatre. He, John Winklemann and I.


He was my best man, I said. Our wedding singer too. He died a few years back, tragically young in my estimation. Pulled off a freeway ramp in the Seattle area and parked in an adjacent area and succumbed to a heart attack. God he was so young, I said, one old man to another, and ambled toward the front door.



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Guns and Schools

12/17/2012

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Full disclosure. I grew up quasi-rural. A fifteen-minute walk would take me to the hilly countryside west of Valley City. And I grew up a gun owner. My Uncle Bob purchased a .22 Marlin single shot for my third or fourth birthday. When I was about ten, Dad and I would walk into the hills where he began to teach me the fundamentals of gun safety. At the age of 17 I purchased a Ruger Mark I .22 caliber pistol with earnings from bagging groceries.

In other words I have been a gun owner all of my life, with a particular fascination with pistols, their mechanical workings, and the art of trying to hit a target (or a wily gopher) at fifty or sixty feet. Back in those days I never gave a thought to gun ownership as a means of protecting my life and the lives of loved ones. It was unthinkable.

What has changed between then and now? The capacity of guns to fire repeatedly until hundreds of rounds have been spent in a matter of seconds, radically changing the context of gun ownership. People who feel the need to own the civilian counterpart of a high efficiency military weapon could have only two things in mind: killing a lot of people or shooting a deer 103 times in a few seconds. Not sure that deer would be worth either eating or mounting for display. And the hunter is only allowed to take one deer, not an entire herd. Oh I know, the NRA would have you believe there is a big difference, that you have to pull the trigger for each and every shell that is fired. Wow! As if that makes a difference in a classroom of six-year-olds.

Fast-forward nearly half a century. I had the good fortune to serve as a superintendent of a high school district in suburban Chicago about 3/4s of a mile south of Midway Airport. We were tied to the Chicago Public Schools at the hip, on Cicero Avenue. The high school had about 1900 students at the time, divided between Hispanic, Arab, and southern European ethnicities.

On May 20, 1988, all Cook County school districts responded quickly to the Chicago North Shore school shooting, where a mentally deranged 30 year old baby sitter, Laurie Dann, walked into Hubbard Woods Elementary School in Winnetka with a loaded .357 magnum pistol and a .22 cal. Biretta and shot and killed one student and wounded another half dozen. On that day the lives of not only school children in Illinois changed, but also the agendas of superintendents and boards of education. From that day forward, communities demanded to know what schools were doing to keep their children safe. Clearly, the days of schools being open to anyone who chose to enter any of their many doors were over forever.

Concerned about copycat crime, we in our school district met to determine what means and methods could be engaged immediately to decrease the likelihood a tragedy could happen to us. All suggestions had practical consequences. Locking down in excess of 15 entrances to the building would cause students and staff to walk greater distances from games fields to locker rooms for changing before the next class. Parking lots suddenly became a quarter mile from an entrance. Additional staff would need to be hired to monitor access to the building. And then there was the matter of who would protect the students and faculty while they were in the building.

After considerable deliberation with the Board of Education we determined that we would employ a school liaison police officer who would be stationed in the school during the day. As a concession to some board members in order to gain consent for the plan, the officer would be in plain clothes. As a further concession, he would be unarmed, but would be in radio contact with his precinct, less than a half-mile from the school.

Following the implementation of the plan, the Chief of Police, a man I admired much, asked that we meet over lunch for further discussion. The chief’s main concern was that he would have an officer working in a potential crime situation where he would be unable to defend himself and others. He was having second thoughts about the arrangement. He wanted the liaison officer to be armed, if discretely.

I took the concerns to the board president, a very bright and level-headed person, and a graduate of the school himself. We determined that the officer would carry a concealed weapon and that three people would have that knowledge, the chief, the board president, and I.

As it turned out, there were many plusses to having the officer part of the school staff. As a fairly recent graduate of the school he knew a lot of the families whose children attended. As students got to know him through interaction in the lunchrooms and hallways, it became common for students to stop in his main hallway office from time to time to jaw a bit and drop a dime about things going on in the community. Those relationships with students led to the solution of crimes in the area that would otherwise have gone unsolved. Additionally, many students saw him as a positive role model dressed in shirt, tie, and khakis, most always in the hallways joshing the kids, a big smile on his face.

And having an armed officer in a public school? Well, in that day it seemed at least a token equalizer. But against the mayhem of assault weapons, it probably wouldn’t have made much difference, unless the officer was a superb marksman. Six to nine bullets against a clip of 50-75 is a big challenge. But in this day and age I’d be inclined to do it again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Dann

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A Piece From a Memoir in Progress

12/12/2012

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Chapter 1

A Sense Not Understood

What possible inner homing device can cause a person to be drawn to a former residence that predates one’s ability to compile and catalog data? Why do geese, or wild turkeys, or monarch butterflies for that matter have the capability of traveling thousands of miles to former reproductive grounds?  Perhaps humans have some of those same innate capacities but do not engage the evolution required to set them free....

If you are reading this you must be a relative. Or, you  have broken into our home and found your way to my study. Why you might pick up this manuscript and begin reading is beyond the best efforts of my imagination. I have rendered this tale to paper only to satisfy my own needs. Perhaps to take stock of my life in some way. Or, possibly, so my children, and perhaps theirs, could have some sense of the journey traveled by their ancestors. Anyway, whatever compels people to write a bit of their family history now compels me. I can hold it back no longer.

My earliest recollection is of being on my dad’s shoulders in the yard behind the back of the house. It is a white house, squarish, with a dark gray wood shingle roof. There are no rain gutters. At the back there is a garage with a basketball hoop on a pole nearby. I can visualize myself up near the hoop but unable to grasp or touch it. Perhaps I am on my father’s shoulders. The season is either early spring or late fall; it is cold and I am wearing a fleece-like powder blue jacket and a matching cap with flaps. I think it is fun to be up in the air! The gentle breeze slips in between the flaps and my ears. I think they are hot, like a match just struck. The year is 1942, and I am two years old give or take a few months.

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Slogging Through It

12/6/2012

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It's an annual thing for me. A lot like the annual physical, where one is weighed, measured, prodded, poked, and sometimes entered. I hate it. Always have. I've tried a variety of solutions, including giving away money, caroling, participating in concerts, going to care centers, serving meals, even tippling a bit. But I come up on empty. 

I've tried to analyze it. Could it be the uncertainty that Dad would get home from the daily railroad run on Christmas Eve given the winter storms in days gone by? Was it childhood worry that I'd bought the correct meager gifts for family members? Was it that all relationships with girls but the last one were dead or dying at Christmas and  purchasing the final Christmas gift felt like someone offering more mashed potatoes and gravy after you've already eaten the apple pie? Simply no taste for it. Period.



Maybe it's the noxious thought of going to the stores where teaming  throngs mill about like cattle searching for a tuft of green grass among the Canadian thistle. And then beller when another cow gets in the way.


Oh well, time to go out and join the cattle...ho, ho, ho. Be sure to avoid the thistle.
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    Morrissey is a retired school superintendent who is now content to scribble, swim laps, make wine, and do genealogy. His wife calls it chasing dead people...he can almost keep up with them.

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