Walking the (Clifton) Walk

This column originally appeared on Sunday, June 14, 2009

I don’t normally get involved with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. I tend to steer fairly clear of organizations in general – the words “organization” and “newspaperman” not wholly fitting together – and have also for several years given wide berth to any group whose formal name contains the word “disease.” So don’t go getting the idea that whatever issues the boys and girls down at CDC headquarters decide to promote go straight to my mass e-mail list. I know they’re doing good work, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to put down my iPod every time the CDC wants to talk about bio-terror emergency preparation or mold prevention strategies.

But I do want to thank them for coming up with their KidsWalk to School Program, which teaches parents and community leaders how to encourage the practice of kids, well, walking to school. The idea is that kids who walk to school are healthier, more energetic, friendlier and less inclined to grow obese or, worse yet, watch “reality TV” programs like “Viva La Bam” or “Kendra.” I think the goal of getting kids to walk to school is laudable for a variety of reasons, but they have more to do with collecting four leaf clovers than staying slim. I’ll explain why in a moment.

The walking to school issue rose to national prominence recently because, frankly, I began communicating with kids I went to elementary school with back in the days when nobody envisioned a black president, Hispanic Supreme Court justice, or $4 a gallon gasoline. They are, of course, not kids anymore, but apparently have reached the same conclusion as I about life in general, and that is that practically everything was better then than it is now. Including, you guessed it, walking to school.

We all lived in a neighborhood called Clifton in Cincinnati, Ohio, through which Clifton Avenue ran past two schools, “old” Clifton Elementary School and “new” Clifton Elementary School. (Curiously, the “old” building still stands, while the “new” building was torn down a few years ago for a new “new” building. Go figure.) The schools were adjacent to one another, and within an easy half to three-quarters mile from our homes. It took 15 minutes to half an hour to get to school, depending on how far away you lived and often and for how long you stopped to look for four-leaf clovers.

A friend named Paul Patterson, you see, had started this obsession with finding four leaf clovers in the front yards of the homes that lined Clifton Avenue. He developed such a knack for it that he claimed to have 20 or more of the good luck charms encased in plastic display boxes in his room. I did not doubt him for an instant, nor did any of the other kids in our class, who, I remember, when once asked on a test to use the words “four, leaf, and clover” in a sentence, all connected them with Paul Patterson, to a boy and girl.

So the race was on for those of use who felt slightly jealous of and intimidated by Paul Patterson and his collection of four-leaf clovers. Watching him, it seemed easy enough to accomplish the same thing, after all. He walked up to a yard, stood over the grass, stared for a while, then bent over and picked up a fresh four-leaf clover and went home to do his homework and practice the violin. (Paul Patterson now plays second violin with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and although I am not entirely certain that luck did not play a pivotal role in his selection, would nor debate the point that talent certainly cannot also be dismissed.)

There must have been some other factor in the hunt for four-leaf clovers that Paul Patterson either neglected to mention or kept to himself because to this day I have amassed the grand total of only zero four-leaf clovers, a number I fear is approximately the same as my childhood classmates Mary Hoffheimer, Helen Richards, and Caroline Siegfried, with whom I began this reconsideration of school walking earlier this month. But in looking for the lucky charms, I at least began to get to know on a more intimate level the community in which I lived, and connected on a friendly level with people who 40 years later I can still talk to without having to explain what I mean when I reference the “old” school.

So thanks, CDC, for the effort to get kids to walk to school so that they are healthier, more energetic, and less like to grow obese. But you might want to also mention the part about the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. It couldn’t hurt.

A Lesson in LIfe

This is a revised version of a column that originally appeared Sunday, June 7, 2009

I remember seeing him in the surf at Cape Henlopen in Delaware, on what I imagined was his first visit to the beach. He kept his t-shirt on when he went in the water, even though it was not particularly cold. It seemed clear that he was enjoying himself -- a big smile played on his face -- but he also struck me as timid and careful, never ducking under the waves, always turning away from them, afraid of their spray.

He was shy and said little, the way teenagers will when surrounded by adults they do not know well. The language barrier between us perhaps made him even more bashful. He was friendly, the other way from teenage surliness, but hard to get a handle on.

How could I have known that just months before, this quiet young man had made one of the bravest, most courageous decisions that a person could make; that he had willingly put his safety in jeopardy, his life in peril, so that he could attend school? That he knew every day that gunmen were looking for him, or someone like him, to shoot in order to make an example? To put it plainly, how could I know that he had risked death, simply to have a chance to learn?

This winter, he asked me to help him proofread the essay that he would be sending to colleges that he was applying to, here in his adopted country. (I do these freelance editing tasks willingly as favors, since it is almost all I am capable of doing. Please do not ask me to help change the oil in your car; I am still paying for the seized engine from the last go-round.) The essay came to me as an e-mail, and this is what I read first when I opened it:

“As I sit here in my room in my second home, in the United States, I can still see their faces, their dirty clothes, and their guns.”

In striking detail, he recalled the day in June 2007 when he sat in his classroom at the Gifted Students School in his native Baghdad and a teacher came in to announce simply that: “They are here. Al-Qaeda.”

For months before he had walked to school in his neighborhood and seen the dead bodies piling up. “People got shot for being Shia, like me, in a Sunni neighborhood,” he wrote. “I saw something like that almost every day; it was very dangerous every day.” Now, the gunmen from Al-Qaeda were in the school office, asking if there were any Shia students in class. The teachers and staff tried to convince them there was not, that this school was Sunni. One and all were aware what would happen: if the children were found out: Any Shia student would be taken away and shot. No questions, no doubt. And so he sat and felt his teenage heart beat in his chest and thought, I suppose, of the few years he had spent on Earth. And, remembering later that cold grip on his soul, he wrote this:

“At that time, I felt that I was few minutes away from death, getting closer every second. I was scared, but not because I thought that I was going to die. I was scared because I was thinking about what might happen to my family when they heard that I got killed. My dad always told me, ‘Don’t go to school, your life is more important than your education,” but I never listened and I always argued with him because I believe that my education was important enough to take the risky chance.”

The gunmen entered the room, looked around, and went away. They stole some cars, but left everyone alive. “Those seconds felt like years, they were the longest seconds in my life,” he wrote. “I felt that everything was happening in slow motion. I can still see them, right there by the classroom door, looking at us.”

And the next day, he went back to school. And the next, and the next, never telling his family what had happened, because if they knew it would mean the end of his schooling. What parent, after all, would put a child in a situation where the alternatives are hoping to complete exams or staying alive? But he said he earned an important lesson as he walked into his school the day after the men with their guns had left. In his essay, he wrote:

“Education is an important factor for success in everyone’s life. And just like many kids, I took it for granted. But now I know how important it is and how valuable it is. There are things in life where we don’t understand their value until we either lose them or get close to losing them, and education is one of them.”

He graduated from Westtown School on Saturday. That day, I saw a photo of him with his classmates taken at the beach this spring. He is bare-chested and bold, playing beach volleyball in the sun like a Californian, with a smile as big as ever.

Congratulations, Ammar Al-Rubaiay. You are my hero. Good luck in college.

An Old Fogey Remembers

This column originally appeared on Sunday, May 24, 2009

This is an apology alert.

I am going to apologize to a section of the Chester County demographic for the column I am about to compose, and I wanted to let you know about it. I am going to apologize to that demographic – i.e. the 18 to 35 age bracket -- because I know what it is like to have inflicted upon you, meaning me, what I am about to inflict on you, meaning them. I am going to apologize because I am going to write what we in the ink-stained wretch biz affectionately refer to as “the Old Fogey Column.”

You know the type, I am certain. You know the type because you have read them as long as you’ve been reading newspapers. You know the type, but you may have also referred to them as the “back in my day column.” You know the type, because you’ve read them and either nodded your head sagely about the perspecaciousness of the writer, or shook your head and wondered what they pay people for putting drivel such as this in print.

This is the column in which the author gets to harrumph about some change he or she just woke up from their afternoon zizz long enough to notice, whereupon he or she promptly made a mental note to pontificate on the subject of how “times have changed” and then go back to sleep. This is the column in which the author proclaims the benefits of the rotary telephone, or transistor radios, or non-bottled water that was so commonplace when he or she was coming of age.

The subject of this column occurred to me Monday when I heard that the folks in the Chester County republican Party were not, repeat not, going to be gathering at a spot on the west side of West Chester to go over the returns from the Tuesday’s primary election. Rather than live it up at the Elks, Skip Brion and his merry bunch of Grand Old Partiers were going to hunker down at the headquarters on South Church Street.

A similar theme was relayed to me about the plans of some major Democrats. The days of gathering at the local Knights of Columbus having gone the way of the nickel candy bar, they were going to get together at somebody’s house to check the returns as they came in.

Watching Out

This column originally appeared on Sunday, May 31, 2009

You are being watched.

Ahem. Perhaps “watched” is not quite the correct word, since it means that a person is looking at you, observing you, studying your moves. Let me say instead that you are being captured by a camera’s eye, recorded on video, your image filed away for future reference, whether you know it or not.

It’s not entirely a Big Brother sort of thing, the surveillance of average people by the government as envisioned by George Orwell in “1984,” the telescreens there in every apartment waiting to catch the citizens of Oceana acting without the interests of their all-knowing leader at heart. No, we Winston Smiths are in this case watched primarily by business interests, rather than political bureaucracies. And entertainment colossusses.

The thought of this ubiquitous video presence occurred to me some time ago, when I wrote of the case of several young men who were arrested and charged with a home invasion robbery at one of the apartment complexes in West Chester. Police were able to make a compelling case against the men in part by the use of videotapes taken from security cameras at both the apartment building where the robbery took place and a local Wawa, where the co-conspirators -- as we enjoy calling folks who decide that committing a crime is the best way to solidify a budding relationship -- gathered before and afterwards.

The men knew there were security cameras in the apartment hallway, and tried to disable them. But they did not realize that they were also being filmed as they stood outside the Wawa, their disguises in the apartment having discarded. Police were able to watch the Wawa video and match each man up to the images of the hooded and masked men who came to ransack and rob.

So, too, I believe, was the Buck County woman who faked her own kidnapping last week unaware that she would be spotted by a security video walking through the Philadelphia International Airport on her way to a luxury vacation at Disney -- a vacation albeit shorted somewhat by the delivery of an arrest warrant for false reports by the FBI. She apparently was not aware of the scope of the modern Big Brother’s presence.

And neither would I be. When I shop, I don’t consider that my movements, and inadvertent impulse purchases, are being filmed for general viewing purposes. When I walk down the street, I don’t imagine that a camera is going to catch me secretly scratching my nose. Or worse.

But I am perhaps among a select group who do not desire their lives to be filmed and broadcast, even though it may show those lives disintegrating into cheesy drama. I am referring of course, to the news that the Berks County couple who have become known far and wide as simply “Jon & Kate,” are now having marital and, possibly, legal problems.

According to the Associated Press, Jon, Kate and their eight children have attracted a huge TV audience, screaming tabloid headlines and, now, a state labor investigation.The Pennsylvania Department of Labor says it's looking into whether the hit reality show "Jon & Kate Plus 8" is complying with child labor laws.

The show drew nearly 10 million viewers for its fifth-season premiere Monday following reports of trouble in the Gosselins' marriage. Labor Department spokesman Justin Fleming tells The Associated Press that the department is looking into a complaint against the show. So now the poster family of fertility has the potential to find itself a symbol of child exploitation.

People must realize that the presence of cameras has unintended consequences, and rather than define reality, alters it. Recall the example of the All American Loud family in the early 1970s, whose idyllic family life ended in surprising divorce as the Public Broadcasting System cameras rolled. The impact of an ever present lens is why courtrooms in Pennsylvania don’t allow cameras, and why I am certain that the Chester County commissioners’ meetings are soon going to start featuring some classic “American Idol”-type moments, now that the meetings are being videoed. People, any good newspaperman will tell you, turn into different characters when the camera starts rolling

Perhaps the best consequence of this video presence is that eventually those potential criminals will realize that their every movement is on tape, and they’ll simply burst into a version of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Miz, ala British reality-show chanteuse Susan Boyle, instead of carrying through on that carjacking.

I’d watch.