Double Tears
Chapter 115
“I may not have believed in lady luck, but I believed in her fucking sister, irony. That bitch was out to nail me to wall.”
—Pippa DaCosta, Trapped
WHEN I GOT HOME Sunday afternoon, Beca’d been in the kitchen making a casserole for dinner. Mom was standing beside her giving her instructions. I just stood there for a while watching them. It was sweet. Pey came to take my hand and whisper, “Mom’s teaching my other big sister how to cook.”
“I’ve been learning from everyone this summer,” Beca said. “One of the things I learned is that when the man of the house enters the kitchen, he’s supposed to encourage the woman by giving her a little kiss.” Mom’s shoulders were shaking with laughter. I quickly went to the stove where Beca was browning hamburger and she turned her face up to me for a little kiss.
“Honey, I’m home. What’s for dinner?” I asked in the best rendition of a fifties sitcom I could remember.
“I don’t know what this is called,” Beca said. “Mom just keeps calling it ‘Almost Dinner.’ I guess when we serve it, it is dinner.”
V1 had a jolt. One of Uncle Dave’s wives worked for a food packager in Chicago back in the fifties. That was a tumultuous time for labor relations at Studebaker where Dad worked. Seemed like they were always on strike or laid off. We ate a lot of government surplus food and Aunt… The name escapes me… Anyway, she was determined to help. It seemed that sometimes cans came off the packaging line without labels. Employees could gather up a case of random cans of food and take it home. Talk about potluck! Every month, she gave us two or three cases of unlabeled food to help supplement the government surplus.
Mom, never the most creative cook in the world, would simply fry up a pound of hamburger and onions, boil some noodles, and toss it together with three to five cans of random food. She called it ‘Almost Dinner.’ Sometimes we had casseroles that had three cans of green beans in them. Sometime, creamy soup. A couple of times, Mom had the good sense to serve the cans of fruit cocktail in a separate bowl.
Whatever was served, we sat and ate.
I found tears running down my cheeks. It was stupid how a memory could blindside me like that. I could see there was a list of ingredients in a recipe book Mom was using. Even if it reminded me of the old family tradition, someone sometime had formalized it and put it in a church cookbook.
Like I did whenever I was overwhelmed like this, I took my guitar into my room and started to play.
“You’re sad, J,” Pey said. She plopped onto the beanbag next to me and cuddled against me while I continued to mindlessly let my fingers find chords and notes. “Whatever it is that makes you sad, I’m here to share it with you.”
“Do you ever get sad for no reason at all, Pey?” I asked softly. She was such a sweetie and I don’t think she’d taken the talisman I bought her for her birthday off since I gave it to her. It was just a little bronze medallion a guy at the fair was making. It was a stylized symbol of a howling wolf and was supposed to be a protection talisman.
“Sometimes. Mostly I get sad when I’m lonely.”
“Do I help you not feel lonely?”
“Silly. That’s why I come to listen to you play. I don’t feel lonely when I can hear your guitar.”
“I don’t feel as sad when I hear your voice,” I chuckled. “Maybe we should send a music message to Em so she doesn’t feel lonely. What do you think?”
We quickly agreed and I recorded five minutes of lively tunes while Pey danced around. We sent it off to Em with a message that said ‘Cheer up! We love you!’
“I’m going to go see Joan,” Beca said to me. Much to my surprise, after dinner and family games and a movie, she’d simply joined me in brushing her teeth and came to bed with me. I wrapped her in my arms and held her as we settled for sleep.
“Can you do that? Don’t they, like, lock them in during training?” I asked.
“Only during basic. We talked a lot the weekend she was here before going to NSO training. You were in San Diego. She was very disappointed she missed you.”
“I’m sorry I missed her, too. She’s in Chicago now, right?”
“Yes. I think NSO screwed up, not realizing her father lives there. She’s actually living at home with him and her stepmom, almost like any summer. Her training is about the same as having a full-time job. She reports for work at eight and goes home at five. Most of it is in a classroom or an office.”
“That’s really different from Em’s training.”
“Different specialties. Who knew the government needed so many people to create graphics and websites? They’ve already started her on advanced animation training,” Beca said.
“Cool. Just make sure she doesn’t sign that stupid service extension in order to get into management.”
“They’ve already tried,” Beca said. “It’s part of a professional career path. Mostly, though, they’re trying to get programmers into it. They didn’t put much pressure on Joan.”
“So how are you getting to Chicago?” I asked. Beca rolled to face me, pressing her soft breasts into my chest and my perpetually hard cock into her stomach.
“You’re taking me, silly,” she said. She kissed me deeply and squirmed against me. “Maybe we should relieve some of the pressure down here so you can get some sleep,” she whispered as she began stroking my cock. It didn’t take long to relieve the pressure against her stomach and chest. She kissed me again and produced a washcloth. Ever prepared.
I had to show up at school early Monday morning, so my run with Nanette and Livy was truncated. Beca rode with me to school and I went directly to Mr. Gieseke’s office with the form he’d emailed me over the weekend. He’d sent me a listing of classes available during the period I wouldn’t be taking Calculus. I really wanted in the Constitutional Government class but I wasn’t willing to fight for it and get a reputation for being even more difficult than I was.
His top suggestion was that I rearrange my schedule and move Chemistry to fourth period and take Finite Mathematics during seventh period. The dude just wasn’t giving up on me taking higher-level math. His list of choices for just filling fourth period were lame. He suggested Technical Theater or Applied Guitar. They were both veiled insults as one was considered a class for techies who were uninterested in academics and the Applied Guitar was an introductory class where students learned chords. Down at the bottom of the list, though, beneath two or three that would require me to leave school and go over to Ivy Tech for a dual credit class, was a class that struck a chord with me: Photography: Filmmaking.
I got online for a complete course description and discovered this was the first of a series and the advanced course could be repeated for credit. What got me was that we’d produce a public service announcement, a music video, and short live action subjects. And we’d learn Adobe Premiere Pro. I’d been using a shareware video editing program to make the simple cuts I used in my morning concerts and add titles. But learning a professional tool would be great. And I was sure Cindy and I would be doing more music videos. This class could really be helpful.
Gieseke signed the transfer slip and handed it to me without a comment. It looked like he was too disgusted with me to even acknowledge my choice. I checked the transfer slip to make sure it was for the class I wanted.
Latin was Latin. We were working on translating passages of Cicero’s Paradoxa Stoicorum as an exercise. Miss Lustig—yes, the same old librarian who had been my proctor when I first got back to school—taught Latin. There were fewer of us in the second-year class than there had been in first year. I’d heard a rumor that there was no first-year class this year because Miss Lustig planned to retire after my class had completed its third year. The school didn’t consider Latin to be important enough to bring in a new teacher to overlap with her. That was too bad.
Most of the texts we were working on were pretty boring, though the last section we’d been challenged with last year was a segment of Julius Caesar’s The Conquest of Gaul. It wasn’t a long segment but you could hear the general’s voice in his writing.
Anyway. We were just starting our work on Cicero. It involved a lot of reading the Latin aloud and then selecting a student to translate it. At the end of class, Miss Lustig handed out a simple sheet and told the class that she would award bonus credit for anyone who could translate it by the end of the semester.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
Several in the class recognized the placeholder text and just scoffed at it. I grinned. V1 had encountered the text in a computer training manual thirty years ago. Of course, it was nonsense text used as placeholder copy. It had come to my attention because a training manual for the new CAD program we were using had a section that was filled with the text. Someone in the publishing department had apparently missed replacing this segment and let the manual go out with it still intact.
We all had a good laugh about it, but the instructor for the class suggested the words actually had an origin in a Latin text by Cicero, but had been chopped up for use as placeholder text. I was pretty sure I could find the passage if I thought about it long enough.
I was still puzzling over it and trying to remember the passage reference when I walked into the Photography classroom with my admission slip.
“Jacob?” I looked up at the instructor as I approached his desk. Right into the eyes of John Carson, the videographer and former fiancé of Donna Levy.
“John? Um… I mean, Mr. Carson. I didn’t know you taught this class. There was a mess-up in my class schedule and I just got transferred into this. Here’s the admission slip. I hope that’s okay,” I stumbled.
John Carson had shown incredible talent and creativity in videoing our music production in Kentucky. We hadn’t seen the final yet but I was confident it would be good. We planned to release it the weekend before Labor Day and then promote it more when we went back to Kentucky for the holiday closing weekend of the festival. For all that, though, I didn’t like him. It was an irrational dislike, I know. He’d been Donna’s fiancé. He’d slept with her. He was still interested. My hackles rose at the thought of him.
“It’s fine, Jacob. Perhaps we’ll get to use some of your music for our class projects,” he said. “Come and have a seat. We’re looking at some film clips to analyze specific techniques today. I’ll give you material to catch up on when you come in tomorrow.”
At least that part was easy. I needed to get my visceral reaction to him under control. I’d had managers I didn’t like years ago. I still managed to get my work done. This would just be one more instance.
“The role of the conductor, for those of you who have forgotten or are new to orchestra, is to interpret the composer’s music and bring it to life by blending the sounds of the instruments he has,” Mr. LeBlanc said in front of the class. “Now, Rita has just completed her trial. Let’s discuss it and see if we can help her improve.”
I was pretty amazed that most of the first two weeks of orchestra, were jurying who got what seat. Some instruments, like mine, weren’t an issue because there was only one and no way to work up for position. Others, like Cindy, were part of a large section but she held the first chair by virtue of her position last year. She could only be unseated by challenge. The same was true of the violins. The first chair was a senior who occupied it last year as well. The other fifteen violins were competing for order of priority. And then there were sections like the woodwinds who had six clarinetists (like Rita) and no order established. Each played a solo section under LeBlanc’s baton and then the class discussed it. It could be brutal as several of the freshmen were truly novices at their instruments. But everyone had passed an audition in order to be admitted, so we all knew LeBlanc saw something in each of us.
“I think Rita had a good tone and control of her instrument,” a horn player volunteered.
“I agree, but her timing was off,” said a violinist. “She can remedy that by paying more attention to the conductor.”
“And more practice,” said a cellist. “Part of the problem is her speed in reading the music. That’s good news, Rita. All you need is practice.”
“Very good feedback. Let’s take a moment for something new,” LeBlanc said. “The guitar is not a staple of the standard orchestra. It is normally deemed a solo instrument with orchestral backup. As we do not have a harp, but we do have a classical guitarist, I have rewritten several parts of our repertoire and transcribed them for guitar instead of harp. It’s a different sound but those of you who thought Jacob was going to be sitting back there, strumming chords need to hear what his instrument can do. Jacob, you’ve had a chance to look over the Mozart Concerto, have you not?” he asked. He’d given it to me Thursday and I’d played it a few times. It had some tricky fingering I was still working on but I nodded.
“From measure forty-four at your entrance,” he said. I watched him count down the timing and cue me in. I did my best but it was pretty ragged. I’d have to practice this quite a lot. Nonetheless, I’m not sure most of the orchestra had heard a classical guitar other than the concert Cindy and I did last spring. There was polite tapping of bows on music stands and one hand on thigh. “Very good for our first time working this together. I will say that since last spring, your attention to the conductor has improved immensely.” There were several polite chuckles. “Like everyone in this room, Jacob needs practice. Don’t get me wrong. Each of you has talent. You have good ears and facile fingers. But without practice, talent is nothing. NOTHING! Do you understand? Whatever you have been told about how talented you are, if you do not commit to practice you do not belong in this room.”
He glared at all of us and I nodded. My practice typically took place late at night after I had everything else done. If I was serious about this, I needed to move the priority up a bit.
I was beat by the time the final bell dismissed us from Chemistry. I’d been thinking about prioritizing all afternoon. I was still thinking about it when Jock yelled at me to mark the pace for five six-minute miles. The whole team lined up behind me and I set the rhythm.
It occurred to me that one of the reasons I liked the even pace of running was that it was rhythmic in the same way music was. As the footfalls counted out the rhythm, I could hear the music in my head. This was a good timing for that first movement of the Mozart. I could feel the movement in my fingers as I pumped my arms. I no longer paid attention to what Jock was calling out to flag runners off the track and start them working on sprints, stretches, and weights. My feet were the conductor’s baton and I kept the rhythm even and steady. It was blissful. I was jolted out of my musical trance as I passed one of the runners. That was unusual. Jock always flagged slower runners off the track, specifically so they wouldn’t have either the humiliation or the confusion of being lapped. By the time I’d completed another lap, I’d passed three more runners and was closing in on the first again. There were only the five of us on the track and I sailed past all four of the others on the next lap.
“Hopkins! That’s enough! Bring it in!” Jock yelled at me as I went past again. I slowed to a jog and walked a full lap as I suddenly felt exhausted and weak. One of the trainers ran out to me and gave me a bottle of water. I didn’t usually have this much trouble catching my breath after a run. I was really dragging and the other runners jogged past me, apparently not finished with their runs yet. I dragged myself in and found Livy supporting me. All the cross country runners on all four teams were gathered around. Jock was still flagging in the remaining runners and having them walk it off. Teammates ran out to each one to offer water and support as they walked a lap around the track.
“What happened?” I asked. “Why are they so slow? Those guys always keep up with me.”
“Usually, you quit after five miles. That last mile is a killer.”
“Last mile?”
“Gather in, runners,” Jock said. “This is how we’re going to make a mark on the State cross country records. We have five runners who turned in 10k times under forty-five minutes. I challenge any other school in the state to produce that!” There were cheers.
“I ran 10k?”
“Close enough. Six miles. He pulled you in before the last lap. You ran a perfect thirty-six,” Livy said. “You’re an inspiration, Jacob.”
“Wow.”
“Our first five-mile race is Saturday at Huntington. All sixteen schools at the invitational will enter teams in the 5k for boys’ and girls’ varsity and JV. We’re limited to seven competitors per team so some of you won’t be running. I’m told only eight of the schools will enter five or more runners in the boys’ five-mile and one school will have only one competitor. We’ll enter seven. How are you runners going to win that race?” Jock shouted.
“Pace Jacob!” my teammates called out.
“I’m telling you that five runners under thirty-five minutes in a five-mile or under forty-five in a 10k will beat every team in the state,” Jock said. “And it’s only the second meet of the season. Hit the showers and get some rest. Stretch often tonight. Get a bath. Drink some electrolytes. Tomorrow we do intervals and upper body weights. Go!”
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