The Trumpeter

"...And the home of the brave!" Except there are no words... it's just the last bar of the national anthem being belted out by a trumpeter standing on our front lawn. Melvin meanders into our side of the 19th Ward several times weekly. His favorite approach is to dress in his full Empire Statesmen garb -- a bright red velvet and polyester marching band uniform trimmed with gold cord and tassels, tucked at the ankle with spats and topped with a sky-high scarlet hat shaped like brand new lipstick in a tube.

He plays his final note, lets it ring, and remains in stance before slowly lowering the brassy trumpet from his lips. This is how we know it's time to come outside and hang out.

Melvin has since left the 19th Ward and traded the marching band get up for Calvin Klein. I look at this picture and think... I grew up with this kid!

Kelly and the Keurig

For my 23rd birthday there's one present, and one present alone. That's fine because after a certain point, it's better to stop calling them birthdays and instead regard them as an anniversary of your 21st. This will be the first year I lie about my age to seem younger and other milestones such as buying "Adam", my new car, and finally seeing gains in my 401K after owing the Dow Jones money for several months. I don't need presents anymore, or big parties. I only need what's in the big, green papered box on the kitchen counter.

It's a Keurig.

At work, Keurigs are a sign of accomplishment, of power. They are issued to management like trophies. Having one screams "I'm better than the break room coffee" which is below many people, all things considered, as dunkin' donuts empties are the garbage can standard. And beyond the convenience of having a coffee maker prominently displayed at the entryway of my office, Keurigs are mechanical wonders as anything with a Swedish-sounding name should be. My fascination manifests in the daily consumption of probably 5 cups of single brewed Keurig goodness for the first two weeks of ownership. Incidentally, I didn't sleep for 12 days.

Red Wine

Under the table I check the glow of my phone to see if Gaga has called me back but I'm thinking she has a show tonight in New York and missed my voicemail. We've racked up a $550 dinner and my mouth is burning from a sip of something that's supposed to taste like apple, but with a 20 year stint in an oak barrel it finishes like nail polish remover. Per glass it's $1 for every year since its birth. It's not whiskey but something close. Hot as it filters down to my insides. Fantastic. We've traded the pickup for a limo, added a few familiar faces, and meandered down the hilly roads to Ithaca for a late dinner at a hybrid-Thai restaurant. Seeing the half-grand bill makes me wish the waitress had been nicer, a bitterness uncommon to me, undoubtedly made more poignant by the lingering alcohol.

My head is still spinning a little bit from the tastings earlier and my lengthy conversations about 2007 being the best year for Pinot in the region. Vintners love that, wine talk with wine people. It triggers some cathartic response that turns pithy tastings into heartfelt dialogues from artist to habitué. The result of their over-zealous pours hangs in my head for hours after, shadows of encounters from each vineyard. It's a much needed escape from the city.

My cohort for the day is a man who deals in fruit which his company juices, packages, ships, and sells to yuppy Whole Foods patrons in New York City and DC. Unassuming, he drives a ford pickup maybe half my age along the two lane stretches of country road and puffs a hand-rolled cigarette. He's less "six-figure", more salt of the earth in that capacity. This trip for him is both a business transaction among rural orchards and the somewhat rare opportunity to enjoy the local wine of the men and women sharing his craft. The industry involvement is somewhat of a free pass for us, but it's not treated frivolously. It's something to be earned through hard work and humility. We've all been the ones out in the muddy orchards and vineyards, the ones on ladders picking the fruit, the ones creating something out of nothing.

My bitterness towards the waitress fades. Someone ran their mouth and a tinge of hurt boils up inside me. You don't know people's battles. And there was a time when I was her. It's something I hold onto and force myself to remember even among this group of self-starters after a perfect day of camaraderie. We all came from nothing. Subtle hints of that fact emerge from time to time. It's what you do with your nothing and how you remember it that makes you special.

And Then There is Light

"Do you see it? Do you see that light!?" she cries from her seat in the car. She points outward into the distance, reaching, begging us to see what she sees. New York has succumbed to Autumn and the trees have turned to stark reds and yellows. It's rare that a day in the midst of this season would be so bright, but the sky is cloudless, the sun is high, and the air still carries the slightest tinge of warmth radiating up from the once hot summer ground. We're driving along the ridge of the Genesee Valley on what will be the last outing before the inevitable decline.

They say that when you die, you see light. As you take your final breaths, the world sinks into a deep tunnel and when all feeling fades, a light illuminates in the distance.

She points and cries again "That light! Don't you see it?" Her arm is outstretched towards a shaded pool of water ahead. We've stopped for a moment at an overlook to let the remnants of summer sink in through the windshield. A stiff breeze rustles up from beneath a grove of trees and they erupt into a flurry of red leaves. A pair of crows cackle in the distance and a cloud sweeps slowly over the valley below us. There is no light besides the sun that carries the south western sky over our shoulders. She points and demands we look but there is nothing to see. I cannot see the light, but she swears it is there.

Worst Case Scenario

For some reason I associate propeller planes with a certain degree of antiquity that makes flying in them an uncomfortable experience. Not all flight paths require a 300 seat Boeing 777 with its jet engines, especially a hop from New York to Burlington, Vermont. Thus I'm not surprised (though largely dismayed) to see a barely-commercial prop plane being taxied toward the terminal.

Early November isn't quite snow season, but there's a definite chill in the air. The remnants of fallen maple leaves are slicked to the ground with a light misty rain that's been falling all day. I already hate the idea of flying at night and the weather only heightens my sense of anxiety. The plane isn't even big enough for a direct connection to the terminal so passengers are ushered out onto the tarmac. Whether the plane is legitimately older than any jet engine Boeing or Airbus I've been on or not, it doesn't distract from the fact that I have a natural, guttural aversion to prop planes.

The rain has stopped beating the windows and the clouds have broken. Looking down, there's nothing but blackness below with the exception of a few faint sparkles of light. I imagine that this is what flying over North Korea looks like. We've entered into Adirondack air space and the steady, loud hum of the propellers has lulled me into a white noise induced half-sleep. The beverage cart is passing. There's maybe a half hour to go.

Either it's the sound of screaming or the powerful jolt that wakes me abruptly. My head ricochets off the window. The floor suddenly drops beneath us. The beverage cart makes a run for the front of the plane while the flight attendants struggle back to their feet to catch up with it. There's a collective gasp and children begin to cry. My head is spinning from the hit and in an attempt to grab onto something, anything, I find myself clutching hands with the stranger beside me. The plane jolts again and again. With every jolt, a fresh lung full of air is released in loud, random screams throughout the plane. Two of the flight attendants have wrestled the cart into its holster in the front of the plane. The third crawls on hands and knees down the aisle and into her seat where it takes her three tries to fasten herself down. She clinches her eyes closed, grabs the seat frame with one hand and shoves the other into her pocket. Her lips are moving rhythmically, reciting something over and over. If she's clutching a rosary, which I suspect, it's well concealed.

There's a moment where you think to yourself that this cannot be real. You begin to think you're peering in on someone else's peril--that even though it's your heart racing, your hands clutching a stranger, and your tears pouring down your face it's someone else's horrible fate you're witnessing. It cannot possibly be me. I'm not supposed to die this way.

The plane dips and rolls to the left, then jolts back to the right. The once steady whir of propellers begins to oscillate. Then, all noise fades and there is silence. Movement slows. Mouths are still moving, people are still clutching their seats, contorting their faces, eating air, but there is no sound. Dozens of soda cans still roll down the aisle, and the 'fasten seatbelt' sign blinks. The cabin lights flicker slowly. A woman in the row opposite mine has wrapped her arms around her sobbing child while tears draw lines of black mascara down her face. I take a breath in, there are no thoughts in my mind, I hear nothing and everything is at a standstill. Then the plane dips for one last time.

Prove It

I have been accused of plagiarism at least once a year since the first grade. It tapered off in college, thankfully, when expectations finally caught up at the 'Ivy' of NYS Schools. Up until that point, it was one paper after another with the word "yours?" scribbled in the margin followed by "see me after class" abruptly underlined in red.

The inherent problem with being a prolific reader, especially at a young age, is that one adopts a comprehensive vernacular at an astounding rate. This, and a penchant for thesaurus-ing due to an unnaturally early aversion to repetitive language sets off the 'bullshit detector" in teachers more often than not.

Year after year, in front of one teacher or another, I have to sit and explain that my inexplicably extensive vocabulary is not the result of thumbing through books (or the early google) and jotting down someone else's answer word-for-word to mundane questions about literary themes or economics or post-Mayan civilization...whatever subject of whatever teacher is sitting in front of me doing the questioning. I have to sit and explain that yes, I know what "verisimilitude" means well enough to use it in a sentence, I know how elasticity affects demand, and I understand that "irregardless" isn't a term... or whatever I'm defending this time.

Whatever it is, it's a far cry from what my peers are able to churn out on their MTV-induced vocabularies and world views. In reality, my grasp of language and vault of facts is directly proportional to my lack of friends. Without a social life, I immerse myself in newspapers, politics, literature, history, theater and sop up the juice of their fruit like a sponge. An embarrassing admission, but apparently not sincere enough to be believed since it's expected that all elementary/middle/high schoolers should still only be able to loosely string together sentences and that the pen lines they scrawl across unassuming, non-college ruled paper constitutes thought. The average achievers aren't frowned upon, it's the overachievers who get cornered in with your standard, under-medicated, trouble makers.

So when they ask for the final time in one interrogation session or another, "your words?":

I'm in 11th grade and this will be the last time I am questioned. Of all people, it's my English student teacher standing there with his arms crossed. I imagine teachers are trained to do this: He gives me that knowing look, slides my red ink-laden paper across his desk and lifts his eyebrows up into his hairline as if the higher the brow, the more potent the truth serum.

For every teacher that has done some variation of this dance with me the odds stack in my favor. The card I've got in my hand is the knowledge that they have no book, no article, no paper in front of them that reads verbatim (or even close for that matter) to what I'd handed in. I don't dare play that hand though. If they're bold enough to question my integrity I at least owe them an honest shot to make a problem student out me. I explain my love of reading and my stunted social stature (complete with graph), flash the thesaurus that I carry around every day of my life for them and rattle off definitions to the red-flagged words that set them off in the first place. It's no full house but often enough to elicit a sigh and a "fine, that'll do." The problem with accusing someone of plagiarism is that you have to substantiate your claim with more than suspicion. They're always bluffing. I know this.

At this point though, I'm fed up. These debates of intellectual property theft used to be a partially humorous process and most teachers have come to terms with the fact that my word smithing is my only legitimate claim to fame. But this guy is new and he's trying to be a hero and I've had to do this more times than I can count. My only response now:

Prove it.

Inside The Camera: Part 1

At the earliest onset of adolescence, my vision of heaven is cardboard boxes. Endless cardboard boxes of all sizes, mine for the taking. I want more cardboard boxes than I can count, to forge into the quintessence of urban summers: forts.

I yearn for those days when someone on the street buys a new refrigerator and casts aside its cardboard casing so that I might sweep down and dart home with the exact piece I need for my second story loft-library over our green plastic picnic table. My monolithic forts span our urban backyard from June until August--a testament to juvenile ingenuity and architecture that draws crowds of neighborhood kids so vast I give guided tours and rent out whole wings. I work in cardboard, patio furniture, and sheets the way Frank Lloyd Wright worked in steel and concrete. And then, when I get bored with my latest architectural masterpiece, I trash the whole thing and start over, Meliora, ever better.

After the Sears truck leaves I skittle down to the curb in front of the proud new owners of a 'Frigidair,' pop the box over my head and walk it home with no other visual guidance but the sidewalk running below my feet. It's a walking refrigerator box with pink Chucks that knows it's home when it reaches the stretch of sidewalk where "Kelly & Tristan" is etched into the concrete. The lifespan of these boxes is ever waning as soon as they come home. They inevitably succumb to rips, folds, punctures, pile drives, and the most heart-wrenching, rain. I'm lucky to pull in 1 or 2 boxes of grandeur per summer and squeeze maybe 1 week or 5 unique forts out of them before they enter into their rapid decline. It's not every day someone buys a new dishwasher or has all their belongs shipped over from Europe. But this summer, my parents decided to renovate our kitchen and in the restless heat of my transitionary time from elementary to middle school that means one thing and one thing only: boxes. There are dozens of boxes of all sizes. Cabinet boxes good for corridors and entryways, large appliance boxes for rooms (the pinnacle of which, a refrigerator box, will become my first ever ballroom), long flat window boxes for walls and roofs, and flooring boxes for, well, flooring. It was a gift from god so profound it seemed unimaginable, at the time, that my middle school social experiences would later make me question his existence.

I drag the scores of boxes into the center of our backyard, assemble all our lawn and patio furniture, inflate our rarely-used kiddie pool, collect all the sheets that my mom has deemed "fort sheets," and stand back. Visions of blue prints flurry my consciousness as I sink my chin into my hand in a most thoughtful pose. Where to begin? There was no summer I could recall for any frame of reference where I'd had so much to work with. I furrow my brow, examine all my piece while lapping the yard, think of everything I could ever imagine in the fort of my dreams. Then, I've got it.