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Ethan is on the front porch, reading
I turn away, so my dyslexic son won't see my tears.
By Virginia Tubeck-Drozd
[04/12/00]

From household saint to social pariah
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Gift rage
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[04/11/00]

Image-conscious
We want your photos -- just the best ones, please -- for our new feature.

[04/10/00]

Are we not divas?
Guys -- at least straight guys -- can't be divas. They don't have the right shoes.
By Jori Finkel
[04/10/00]

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"If only I hadn't pushed his face into the water fountain!"

"Oh, why did I trip him down that flight of stairs?"

"Was he the one with those thick glasses and the buckteeth?"

I would hear the girls wailing because I would be an invisible ghost watching and listening from a comfortable seat in the funeral parlor (à la Huck Finn). Then, afterward, I would float back to their bedrooms to watch them slowly undress and shower.

Also Today Little girls on the big prairie Through these classics of childhood, a kid could suffer the privations of starvation in the flashlight-lit privacy of her own imagination -- and live to cherish the memory. By Melanie Rehak

But the other volumes remained neglected, perennial page turners like William Makepeace Thackeray's "The Rose and the Ring" and Padraic Colum's "The Children of Odin." I cannot recall one scrap of story from them, nor am I the least bit tempted to read them today, even if the CliffsNotes for them were available and online.

For this wasted life of unread classics I could fashionably blame my parents' divorce or all those forgettable hours watching such wonderful educational television programs as "Petticoat Junction" and "Love on a Rooftop," but, instead, I blame Ruby Levine, once the sole object of my intense longing and illegal stalking. Tall, frontal-budding, raven-haired Ruby, who spoke to me daily during the magical years I sang her praises.

"Watch where you're going, putz!"

In hindsight, her remark may seem a bit harsh, but you too would have been smitten if you could have witnessed the way "putz" rolled off her full lips while her braces gleamed in the fluorescent hallway and her chestnut eyes narrowed in ridicule.

But there was more to Ruby, much more. Whenever she got angry, an aura surrounded her and she practically levitated like a religious apparition as she lunged at me in mock rage.

"Do you ever wash your hair, Tinsel Teeth?" (She had many pet names for me.) "And stop sneaking around my house and looking in the windows, Schmuck Face!"

Still, she couldn't escape my ardor. For three hours a week we shared quality time in our intimate literary clique, proudly clutching our little brown books of polysyllabic prose.

Now, 30 years later, I have stumbled upon written proof of our relationship. In Volume 3, Page 19, of Rex Warner's "Ceyx and Halcyone," next to the sentence "Ceyx thought of Halcyone and only her name was upon his lips," I had scripted, in toxic green ink, my everlasting devotion, "I Love Ruby," in tall vertical letters for all the world to see. And again, on Page 73 of Friedrich von Schiller's "William Tell" (fisherman shouts, "O wretched man!"), using a phonetic spelling of "love," as in "I Luv Ruby."

In fact, Volume 3 of Series 4 is a Ruby Levine lovefest. Any evidence of an intellectually engaged student is absent: no highlighted paragraphs, perceptive margin notes, dog-eared pages or coffee rings. Instead, the book is peppered with the same three-word sentence repeated over and over like an out-of-control car alarm.

Choosing love and pinners over world-class prose is a familiar saga of wasted potential. Who knows where I'd be this very moment if I could quote you chapter and verse from "The Education of Cyrus" by Xenophon: "When they reached the flat bottom, Cyrus let fly his javelin, and the stag fell dead, a beautiful big creature."

(I paid a heavy price for my ignorance. Ruby became a physician, which meant that about the time she was doing her residency, I was a migrant worker picking daffodils in the rain on the north coast of California.)

After a few classes pretending to be absorbed in the discussions, my inadequacies were finally exposed during a pop quiz on Giovanni Boccaccio's "The Hospitality of Torello d'Istria." I had not read the story for a good reason: My favorite TV show -- "Combat!" -- was airing its final episode and after following Sarge and the boys for years, I needed to see who would ultimately survive the Germans. My answers to the quiz were entirely made up of what I thought was a clever rewording of the questions.

The teacher -- a reedy woman with nasal drip and a tight bun of red hair -- kept me after class to deliver the bad news: I was not Great Books material.

I returned happily to the regular English class, where I was greeted like young conquering Cyrus himself.

"Hey, Lyons, is that a banana in your pants, or are you just happy to see us?"

Now this was a sentence I could finally deconstruct with ease -- text without double meanings or elusive historical references.

They were right, of course, my fellow underachievers and partners in pinners. I was happy to see them.
salon.com | April 13, 2000

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