Uncommon Glory

When I was in third grade, my brother, John, and I watched a movie from a graveyard. The graveyard was behind St. Charles Church in Drexel Hill, PA. We had both just served 40 hours devotion inside the church, a job that required us to kneel ramrod straight for an hour before the right side altar of St. Joseph. On the side altar was the Monstrance and in the Monstrance was a consecrated host. It was Holy Saturday, 1955. I was eight years old. My brother was ten. After our duty, he convinced me to sneak behind the church with our surplus and cassock tucked high so as not to rub against the dark tombstones. He wanted to try and glimpse the large screen at the Family Drive In tucked away in a hollow down below us. It was a Saturday night, and the drive in was packed.

We couldn't hear anything because each car had its own speaker mounted on its window frame. But it was a clear spring night, and I could see the entire screen from our vantage point. I have never forgotten what I saw. A man with a beard and a scar down his face was lashed onto a great white whale. Men in long boats were attacking the whale, stabbing it with harpoons. The man lashed to the whale appeared to be waving, his one arm raising and falling. That night, tucked within the silent landscape of a spooky graveyard, I watched Captain Ahab and Moby Dick in their dance of death.

I have never forgotten that image. Some years back, it became the opening scene of my coming of age novel, Uncommon Glory. Altar boys and drive in movies and the joy and angst of that time period flowed out of my fingers into this story. Conscience and caring, families and friendships found their way onto the pages. Rock and roll, slow dances and coon skin caps bubbled up from my memory. Quirky teenagers and adults, murder, revenge and redemption all came together into this sad and funny story.

Two literary agents tried to sell the manuscript. There were no takers. Editors didn't know what to make of it.  Faith and hope were backbeats to the pulsating rhythms that moved through the chapters. There was a talking statue, a psycho altar boy, and a singer appearing on Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour (the 50s version of American Idol). The book didn't fit into a publishing niche.

Oprah featured a book a couple of years back on her TV show. I read the book, liked it, and then contacted the writer's agent. The agent agreed to read Uncommon Glory but didn't respond for the longest time. I finally called her.

"I was putting off talking to you because I'm at a loss," she said.

"A loss?" I asked.

"A loss," she said. "I love your writing and I love the story, but, for the life of me, I can't think of a single editor that I can sell it to."

When James Cameron was interviewed after releasing his highly successful film, Avatar, he said," I came up with the script for this film in 1994, but it was not possible to make the film then. I had to wait for the technology to catch up before I could put it on the screen."

With the new technology of ebooks and digital publishing, I am now able to finally release Uncommon Glory. Patience and persistence have driven me not to despair in trying to bring this story to readers. Tonight, the book has been released through Kindle Books (http://www.amazon.com/Uncommon-Glory-ebook/dp/B006MINMJA/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1).  I hope to release the book soon through Barnes and Noble's Nook. My son, Jim, a professional illustrator, designed and illustrated the cover.

He has perfectly captured the mood of this American Graffiti meets A Prayer for Owen Meany story. His promo banner adds even more.

It has taken a long time for this novel to be born, but I couldn't be a prouder parent, both of my son's art work and of this uncommon story about loneliness and hope.

Seeking the Mind, Touching the Spirit

Twenty five years ago, I began a quest. I was 39, had been teaching for 17 years and writing off and on for the same time period. I had been watching high school kids struggling with school and parents and broken emotions. I had been watching adults around me tripping over divorce and alcohol and frustrated careers. I wondered if there was something that could help people find a path less crooked. I began to search for a natural, non-addictive aid that could help me, my family and others to become unstuck from bad habits and self-defeating thoughts. I sensed that the answer to positive change was not in a pill or a bottle. It was in the mind. But, how to reach it? How to get past years of negative thoughts that had carved ruts into our psyche? How to offer new choices for reflection and behavior to someone who was feeling hopeless and helpless?

My quest led me down several roads. One of these was hypnotherapy and NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). I began training with psychologists in PA and NJ to learn how to gently focus the mind on ways for achieving reasonable and desirable changes. Over three years I attended small seminars and international conferences where practitioners from Brazil to Italy to Canada shared their strategies. I became a registered hypnotherapist and a certified Master Practitioner of NLP. For four years, I offered consulting and counseling to several hundred clients and corporations. The needs ranged from improving communication skills for a thriving Philadelphia business to helping a woman deal with terminal cancer. If I hadn't taped the 60 minute trance sessions so that clients could listen in the future for reinforcement, few would have believed that more than several minutes had passed since I asked them to close their eyes. Buddha said: "The mind is everything. What you think, you become." I saw evidence of this over and over again, then and now.

Another road that I followed, and follow still, was seeking the internal spirit that lies in each of us. In Eastern cultures, this internal spirit or energy is called prana, chi and ki. I began to study Aikido, a Japanese martial art founded by Morihei Ueshiba. I attended a dojo in Philadehphia for a year until I broke my left collarbone one Sunday morning at class from a misplaced grand roll. Although I left Aikido, I embraced its powerful principles. I had not yet felt ki, the energy that the sensei (teachers) at the dojo spoke of often, but I believed that it existed. I saw tiny, third degree black belt women throw huge men across a mat with little effort. They touched spots on my arm to block my ki that made my legs buckle, and they threw themselves high through the air with complete abandon and never hurt themselves.

I began to study Tai Chi and Chi Gung with several sifu (teachers). Tai Chi is a form of moving meditation. Chi Gung is standing meditation. Both involve rhythmical, deep breathing. Breath is another translation for the word chi. Tai Chi, although beautiful and slow, is also a very powerful martial art. Lyrical names of movements like Snake Creeps Down and Playing the Guitar can translate into bone crunching strikes and joint pressures. After a decade of practice, I began to feel chi in my hands. It often felt like electric ants in my fingers and palms. After another five years of practice, I began to be aware of the skin temperature of people around me. Once, at a Chi Gung seminar, I was asked to place my hands near the body of a complete stranger in attendance. We were tasked with trying to feel any noticable differences of skin temperature. I felt nothing of significance until I placed my right hand over his right wrist. I quickly removed it because I felt a hot, almost burning sensation. When I asked him if he had any medical concerns that involved his right wrist, his eyes grew wide. "I have surgery scheduled for carpal tunnel syndrome on my right wrist tomorrow. How the heck did you know that?"

My quest continues. As health issues surface, as parents pass away, values change. There are new roads to explore and new wisdoms to discover. As Elisabeth Kubler-Ross explains: "People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beaurty is revealed if there is light from within."

Copyright (c) 2011 by James Hugh Comey

Until They're Not

In September 1969 I began my education career. I was 21 and looked 16. I was teaching English to 17 and 18 year old seniors at Kennett Junior/Senior High School in Kennett Square, PA.  A moratorium peace demonstration against the war in Vietnam drew massive numbers in Washington, DC and other cities. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Easy Rider were playing at the drive-in.  A little, four day festival in Woodstock, NY had drawn 350,000 people only the month before, and a new TV show called Sesame Street was on National Educational Television (later to become PBS).  Jimmy Hendrix and Led Zeppelin and Simon and Garfunkel were on the radio. Lloyd Alexander (who would later speak to one of my classes at Upper Darby High School and go on to endorse my writing) won the Newbery Award for The High King. A postage stamp was 6 cents, gas was 32.9 cents a gallon, and the median household income was $9,302.

It was a time of excitment and worry and change. Hair, including mine, was growing longer. Skirt lengths were growing shorter. I was spanking brand new and eager to try untried things.

One day, I presented this quote from Jules Verne in class: "Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real."

"Your assigment," I said, with all of the confidence I could muster, "is to think ahead 25 years and come up with a new invention or a radical change on a current one. It has to be feasible and doable in 1994. You'll think through how it will work, who might buy it, and what it might cost. You'll have graphics or a working model, and you have to present your invention orally to the class."

I had no idea how this assignment would fly. I met with each student in advance to approve their original concept, and helped them, as best as I could, with their research. There was no internet then, although that's not quite true. ARPANET, the precursor of the internet, came online in 1969 to connect UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Utah.

Forty two years later, it has been my fascination and delight to remember the incredible inventions that hundreds of students at Kennett Junior/Senior High School, Upper Darby High School and Strath Haven Middle School presented to me and their peers. Many were prophetic, insightful and remarkable in their scope. These came from honors students and struggling students. They worked solo with me or had help from parents, grandparents and neighbors. Their drawings were complex or simple. And, sometimes, their audiences hooted with laughter at the seemingly outrageous concepts that these student dreamers were proposing to them.

I don't know if any members of those classroom audiences will recall those speeches, but, if they do, they won't be laughing now. Here are some of those seemingly implausible ideas that I heard for the first time from middle school and high school kids decades before they came to pass:

* Build a larger version of a toy, remote controlled airplace and attach video capability for recon on military missions in remote area. When the student inventor suggested arming them for combat missions, the class suggested that he had some screws loose. UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) have played a major role in Iraq and Afghanistan for the last 10 years, as well as saving countless lives in wilderness rescues.

* Construct a rail on which a train would glide quickly and with little sound on magnetic levitation. There would be no conventional engines, no standard fuels, and no side rail or overhead wires. A number of students declared that this was impossible to pull off and would never happen. I wonder if any of them have ridden on the Maglev trains in Europe and Asia.

* Replace silicon chips in computers with light-driven sources and conduits of information. This was 18 years before I had heard of FIOS. And, the world's first photovoltain circuit was invented last year at the Univ of PA.

* Develop a steering system that would allow automobiles to assist in parking themselves in tight urban settings. Toyota introduced the IPAS (intelligent Parking Assist System) in 2004.

* Place wind collectors above signage on interstate highways so that tractor trailers, buses and other large vehicles would provide a constant source of wind energy to convert for lights on the road. Not yet invented, to my knowledge.

The list goes on and on, with many students over the last several years predicting holographic images projected from classroom walls, time travel to places of historical interest, and communication devices embedded inside our bodies. Electronic readers for E-Books, IPhones, and IPads are not revolutionary to them. They anticipate that their backpacks will completely disappear with DVDs and E-Books replacing their heavy textbooks. On-line college courses are standard fare, and cyber schools are commonplace.

For me, it is all revolutionary. The lastest issue of The Authors Guild Bulletin is devoted to apps. Before that, it was about the influence of digital publishing on conventional paper publishing. Borders bookstores are no more. Amazon and dozens of other sites offer free digital publishing with attractive royalities. The very length of writing is being influenced by the size of the screens of cell phones. Publishers and literary agents are scrambling to make sense of this reshaping of the delivery of text to readers. The fact that minutes after I type this, this blog can be read by anyone in the world with access to the web, is mind blowing to me.

And, I am delighted by it! In the very near future, I will be releasing my first digital book. My son, Jim, a MICA graduate and prize winning illustrator, is creating the cover. I hope to follow this first digital book with many more.

Had someone told me in 1969 that I would be communicating with people from Canada to China by electronic means through a digital format, I, like many of my former students, would have laughed at them. But, as Jean-Luc Picard, captain of the fabled USS Enterprise, said: "Things are only impossible until they're not."

Copyright (2011) by James Hugh Comey

More to Be Prized

There is a large maple tree in my front yard. It has been there since I moved to this house 35 years ago. Its bark has always reminded me of an elephant's wrinkled skin. Its leaves in the fall have held the colors of burnished gold and apple reds. It has drawn neighbors and morning walkers and strangers with fancy cameras to marvel at its height and strength and beauty.

But, over the last year, it has also had problems. June, a year ago, a violent wind shear that tore through Chester and Delaware Counties, snapped a mighty branch and hurled it atop one of my cars in the driveway. It only kissed the roof of the car, but it took powerful men with powerful chain saws to free the car from the embrace of the huge branch. Several months later, during a storm of lashing rain, another branch snapped off 40 foot or so above my other car, and fell like a javelin. Fortunately, nobody was beneath it or they could have been seriously hurt. Unfortunately, the branch struck the roof near the back with such force that it shattered the rear window. I had to quickly throw a tarp over the gaping empty space or the inside of the car would have been flooded.

Worried I could on longer trust the tree, I asked arborists to come and evaluate it. The first said, "Cut it down. It's old and worn out. More limbs will fall. It's now a nuisance and a danger. Cut it down." The second arborist came and said, "This is a beautiful maple, one of the finest I've seen. It's probably around 75 years old or so. It gives you shade and moist coolness in the summer. It has been the home of generations of wildlife. It does need some assistance now. You need to seriously thin and top the branches and have several cables strung from the trunk of the tree to the heavier outer limbs for support. You also need to have two iron rods driven through the base of the tree so that it will have better structural integrity. It's an older tree, but it's a tree worth saving." Ironically, the cost to cut down the tree was almost identical to the cost of rehabing the tree.

My wife and I had to make a decision. If we removed the tree, the problem was gone. No more worries during a storm. No further maintenance down the road. This was the most logical and rational cloice.

But, logic isn't everything. And reason doesn't account for the heart. My daughter, Jennifer, and son, Jim, grew up playing in the shade of the maple tree. My grandgirls, Wynnie and Maeve, run around and around the tree chasing each other when they visit from the concrete landscape of D.C. Sure no grass will grow beneath the summer shade, but delicate moss, not unlike the ground cover of the Irish countryside, has claimed my front lawn for its own. And, perhaps most importantly, I realized that I had a deep kinship with the tree. Both of us had weathered many storms over the years. And, it reminded me of my father, who, when he was 89, was brought by my brother, John, and I from Florida to PA so we could care for his aged body and mind. He died when he was 92.5, a once tall, 6'6" tree of a man with his three sons at his side.

The maple still has a lot of spunk to it. It took three tries and many hours for burly, seasoned workers to drill and drive iron rods through its trunk. Tiny, new branches are lifting up to the sky where thicker branches were shorn. Morning walkers are staring up at the marvel of the strung cables, like circus high wires. And the leaves, as they fall now onto the moss with the coming of Halloween, will grow again in the spring, shading the lives of my family.

The maple tree, with its wrinkled skin and proud stance, has been our companion and friend for the last 35 years. It has watched over us during happy times and times of grief. Although some may not understand, or may even scoff at my sentiment for something aboreal, I am in agreement with Thomas Aquinas: "There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship."

Copyright (c) 2011 by James Hugh Comey

An Intake of Breath



A circuit breaker changed my life. It was 1989, and I was sitting in the cafeteria at a local hospital. I was not a visitor or a patient. I was an actor. Weary of grading endless English papers and tests, I left teaching in 1986 after 17 years. It was time to try my hand at a variety of things: personal counseling through hypnotherapy and Neuro-Linguistic Programming, corporate communications consulting, and acting. All of my acting jobs were in industrial films. Not glamorous or flashy. Industrials are the meat and potatoes of the acting profession. The hours are often long, the payment low by feature film standards, and the audience limited to in-house training and product/service demonstrations within corporations. For a small cadre of Philadelphia-based actors, though, the work was rock steady and paid the bills between bigger gigs.

I was sitting with one of those actors, Vicki Giunta, that morning in the cafeteria. She was cast as a nurse; I was her patient. The client was a pharmaceutical company. The setting was an actual hospital room. It was cheaper to rent the room than all of the hospital equipment needed to make the scene realistic, as well as build the set. The only problem was that every time all of the production lights were turned on to cast the appropriate glow in the hospital room, a circuit breaker would blow. The director, my brother, Dave, who had left teaching high school theatre to start a successful production company, was having a hernia. Between him and the supervisor of maintenance for the hospital, they were stumped. The talent and production support staff were on site, the room was rented, a deadline was promised - the shoot had to be completed!

So, while Dave and the tech heads at the hospital pleaded with and cursed the electrial system, I sat across from Vicki and sipped juice.

I quickly discovered some fascinating things about Vicki. She was married to George Giunta, a prominent lawyer in Media, PA, who had grown up around the block from me. She had her M.A. in theatre from Villanova University, had taught high school English, like me, and had been acting on stage and in TV and films for years. Yet, with this incredible background, she was frustrated.

"I want to start a children's theatre company," she said. "I can produce the plays. My sister, Carmela Guiteras Mayo, who has danced Off Broadway, can direct the plays. But I can't find anyone to write the plays. Only, I don't want to present tired old fairy tales. I want to produce original plays that will completely engage kids. I want to address issues that are important to pre-school through elementary school kids. And I want to reach kids who have never felt the magic and power of live theatre."

I looked at her. Her passion was electric. The power that was missing from the hospital room was surging through her.

"I'm a writer," I said quietly.

She looked at me.

"I also know your sister, Carmela. She's choreographed a couple of musicals that my brother, Dave, directed at area high schools. She's fantastic."

Vicki smiled.

"This isn't accidental," she said. "The problem with the shoot today? That put us right here, in this cafeteria, together. Otherwise, we wouldn't have had the time to talk like this."

"What are you saying?" I asked.

"We're going to start a production company," she said. "Me and you and Carmela. We're going to present original musical theatre to lots and lots of kids. They're going to come on field trips during the day from their schools. And we're going to give them educational support materials so that they can discuss the plays when they go back to their classrooms."

"But, we don't have actors or a theater," I said. "And, we don't have any money. We'd need sets and costumes and props. I can't write music so we'd need someone to write lyrics and compose a score. And we'd need musicians or a tape of the score. That means a stage manager to cue the music for each show."

Vicki was smiling.

"I know," she said. "I've already thought of all of these things. It would also be smart to form a non-profit corporation, for tax breaks. Until today, I knew I could try to find all of these pieces but one. Now, here you are."

My brother, Dave, suddenly appeared to tell us that the electricity had finally decided to cooperate. The shoot was on.

Stages of Imagination was born that day. It took some months to decide upon a name and then incorporate, with George Giunta's help. It took several more months of knocking on doors to convince Neumann College and Saint Joseph's University to let us use their theaters. There was a lot of knocking on doors, asking for state and corporate grants and private donations. A board of directors had to found, and teachers needed to be convinced that they should bring their students to our shows. Throughout this uphill process, often with more rejection than acceptance, Vicki kept her electricity flowing. She knew Stages was meant to be. There was no stopping us.

A tad over 200,000 kids have now seen our shows in four states. Many of them are inner city kids from very poor neighborhoods and parishes. We now have a van to carry our actors and portable sets to those schools who can't afford the bus fare to Neumann or St. Joe's. We have performed in tiny gyms and minature all purpose rooms, with the audience inches from the actors. And the actors love it.

At the end of each show, the actors remove their wigs and face masks to remind the kids that the play is over, that it was all wonderful make believe. One little boy, who had been standing close to Vicki at the end of a show, looked like he wanted to say something. His teacher called his name and told him to hurry up and join his class as they left. He took a couple of steps, then spun around to her and said, "I'm going to think of you everyday for the rest of my life."

The magic and power of live theatre.

Some time back, I asked Carmela, "How can you really tell if a show is working, that the audience is with you?"

"It's like an intake of breath that they don't expel 'till the end of the show," she said.

I had not expected, when I reported to a shoot 22 years ago, that I was going to suddenly inhale when I met a dynamic ball of energy named Vicki Giunta. I did not know that I would be connected to an entertainment/educational organization that would go on to produce an award winning film and award winning CDs. I had no idea that Newberry Award winner Lloyd Alexander and Pulitzer Prize Winner Dr. Robert Coles of Harvard would endorse our work. And I could never imagine that the National Education Association and the Southern Poverty Law Center would cite our plays for their important issues.

Chris McGovern, our long time New York composer and lyricist, has now directed, arranged and composed shows Off Broadway and around the country, as well as produced, arranged and orchestrated solo CDs for Tony nominees' Alison Fraser, Rebecca Luker and Susan Egan. Vicki landed a principal role in M. Night Shyamalan's film, Wide Awake, along with Dana Delaney, Denis Leary, Robert Loggia, and Rosie O'Donnell. Carmela was named "Best Director" by critics for PA and NJ and has directed regional theatre in FL, VA, PA, DE and RI.

And me? I returned to education in 1990, teaching in the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District during the day and writing the plays and educational support materials for Stages at night and during the summer. My industrial films had converted to classrooms, rock steady work that paid toward my kids' college tuitions and my own tuition at the University of Pennsylvania.

Douglas Adams wrote: "I seldom end up where I wanted to go, but almost always end up where I need to be."

And I know that the show is still working, because I haven't exhaled yet.




Copyright (c) 2011 by James Hugh Comey

Information about Stages of Imagination can be found at http://www.stagesofimagination.org/

They Move in Silence

I was at the forefront of the Baby Boom. American GIs, returning from four years of war, made babies like crazy. I missed Kindergarten due to an affection for cowboy hats. A friend who lived down the street let me wear his cowbot hat just before school started. We shared everything. Secrets, tricycles, a cowboy hat, and a nasty ringworm that had taken up residence inside his hat. There were 70+ kids in the Kindergarten class at St. Charles School in 1952 in Drexel Hill, PA, and the good nuns were NOT about to have a plague of ringworm spread through the hoards of little people in their crowded school. I was sentenced to my home for a year of plucking hairs from the infected site with tweezers under a heat lamp. Since this was before Sesame Street and The Electric Company and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, I did not breath in my numbers and letters from TV. PBS was not in existence, there were only three channels, and kids' programming consisted of shows like Howdy Doody, Kukla, Fran and Ollie, and Bozo the Clown. I was behind when I entered first grade.

People were flocking to the suburbs from Philadelphia, and primary school age kids were now tumbling out the windows. The good nuns had to do something. We wouldn't fit anymore into a conventional classroom, no matter how hard they squeezed us. Their solution was brilliant. Let's put them in the auditorium. We can put LOTS of desks in there, and we can put up a non-permanent, accordian wall between the first and second grades so they won't see each other. Problem solved.

But not for me. My only memories of first and second grades in that auditorium are muted images and echoey noise. I didn't know how terrible my grades and comments were until I helped clean out my parents house 15 years ago after my Mother had died and my Dad was preparing to sell it. I garnered Ds and Fs both years. "He does not listen." "Poor attention." Disorganized and lack of focus." These were the comments of my first two years in school on the faded reports cards in the lowest drawer of my mother's dresser. She had hidden them. I don't know if she was embarrased by them or she just didn't want me to see them. I ripped them up.

One year before, I had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania. I was awarded a Doctor of Education degree with a 3.85 Summa Cum Laude average. My mother and father sat in the stands at Franklin Field and later at the International House where I was handed my diploma. My mother wept. I suspect that she was remembering those report cards tucked away in her drawer.

Fate being what it is, my wife and I were given the exact same comments in the early 1980s from the pre-school teachers of my son, Jim. "He pulls off his shoe and yells for us to be quiet," one said. "He doesn't pay attention and ignores me when I talk to him," another complained. "My classroom is very active," his Kindergarten teacher told us, "and he's unfocused and becomes very stressed. I suggest that you get him used to multiple sounds by turning on the radio and TV at the same time at home."

My wife, Trish, and I were concerned. Jim ignored us frequently when we spoke to him when he was watching TV. Trish had his hearing tested at the pediatrician's office. He passed with flying colors. Jim's Kindergarten experience was going downhill fast.

But Fate is a quirky thing. One day, Trish happened to hear a report on KYW News Radio. The report said that juvenile delinquents often report that they did very poorly in school because their immediate environment was too noisy. Their low grades over the years made them frustrated and angry. But a new hearing test had been developed that could now uncover a subtle hearing disability called APD, Auditory Processing Disability.

We immedeiately had Jim tested by an audiologist in private practice and an audiologist at St. Christopher's Hospital in Philadelphia. I will long remember sitting in the office at St. Christoper's with Trish next to me when the results were given to us.

"Your son has Central Auditory Processing Disability or APD," the audiologist said. "His normal hearing is fine. But, if there are loud competing sounds, he cannot distinguish between them. This makes it very hard for him to follow directions, remember information presented quickly, and be focused on only one speaker. Somebody sharpening a pencil near him will make him loose information from the teacher or  speaker somewhere else in the room. A loud room will make him very uncomfortable, and he may not be able to distinguish verbal commands or information at all."

My wife and I looked at each other.

"Is this hereditary?" I asked.

"It appears that it's often genetic," the audiologist said. "The good news? You've diagnosed Jimmy early. The bad news? There is no medication or surgery or hearing aid to help him. Your job from now until he completes his schooling is to inform his teachers of his hearing disability. Many won't believe you or they'll forget and some may not care. This is a hidden disabiltity and many people blow off hidden disabilities."

"What do we tell the teachers?"

"He needs to sit VERY close to the teacher. They should write important information and directions on the board or hand out printed information.  Jimmy needs to look at speakers in a loud room to really hear them. He should be away from the PA system and pencil sharpner."

The audiologist stopped and looked at me.

"I'm describing you, aren't I."

"Yes," I said. "I have to sit in the front of the room to hear a speaker. I teach and possibly have the quietest classroom in the world because distracting sounds make it impossible for me to hear my students."

"You were lucky that you survived going through school," she said.

I wasn't lucky. For some reason, my third grade teacher plucked me from the masses in our jammed classroom and had me sit directly in front of her. I was assigned to write the homework assignments on the blackboard every day. Kids stood when they spoke, and she always encouraged me to turn around and look at them. The grades on my third grade report card, tucked in with my Valentines and Mother's Day Cards, stacked with the rest of my family's memorbilia in the top drawer of the dining room china closet, were As and Bs.

My third grade teacher saved my life.

I understand now my need  for quiet. I had battles, at times, with some of Jim's middle school and high school teachers who refused to believe that he couldn't hear them because their classrooms were chaotic or their gym echoed their instructions. We both realize that we do a kind of lip reading in loud rooms or we simply back off to a quieter space.

For myself and all those others who share my way of hearing the world, Mother Theresa's quote rings true: "We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature - trees, flowers, grass - grow in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence....We need silence to touch souls."

Copyright (c) 2011 by James Hugh Comey

Straight on 'Til Morning

In February 1953, RKO Pictures released a film that would powerfully affect my sleeping and waking hours for years to come. The film was called Peter Pan. It was the largest grossing film of 1953, beating out the likes of: Shane, From Here to Eternity (Academy Award), War of the Worlds, Julius Ceasar (Marlon Brando), and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Walt Disney would go on that year to found Buena Vista Distribution to release all of the rest of his film and TV productions. (His studio was on Buena Vista Street in Burbank, CA.)

I went that winter into Philadelphia with my mother. I was six years old. The city movie theatres back then were wide-screened palaces of sleek marble and glass, grand murals and tapestries. Going into Philly was an exceptional treat. My mother bought me a book version of the movie right there at the theatre, and we stopped at the Automat at Horn and Hardart's for macroni and cheese and baked beans before we returned to Drexel Hill, in the suburbs.

The movie's lush images and music and adventures burned deeply into my six year old imagination. But, the notion that you could fly if you really wished hard enough, and had just a sprinkle of pixie dust, became imprinted on my psyche. For close to 25 years, my dreams were laced with intense concentrations of my will so that my dreaming body would lift slowly off the earth. If my mind stayed focused and strong, I would soar above the roof tops and trees. I could see and hear and feel sensations that were lost to the earthbound. My heart and soul were free.

As time passed, work and responsibilities pressed down on me. There were fewer instances of my trying to fly in my dreams, and, when I could, I would often begin to sink back to earth. Nightmares were often the norm.

But then, when I least expected it, I discovered that I could fly when I was wide awake. It was not drugs or alcohol that released me from the earth. It was a used 1969 305cc Suzuki motorcycle.

As a tiny guy on a tiny bicycle, I had learned balance on the long common driveway behind our twin house on Lasher Road in Drexel Hill. I remember the absolute joy of staying upright for the first time when I pushed off from a wall and peddled like hell to keep moving. I remember the concern the first time I released the clutch on the 305 Suzuki and lurched forward, to stall out. But, I had decades off practicing in my dreams, of focusing and willing myself to be free of the earth. So I tried again, and stalled again. And, again.

Finally, after much jerking and lurching, the Suzuki and I moved forward, with hesitation at first, but finally, after many hours of practice, with flow and grace and confidence.

I rode that 305 Suzuki and an R60/5 600cc BMW motorcycle for a decade or so, until, once again, responsibilities forced me back to earth. College tuitions, my own graduate work, coordinating a school-wide gifted and testing program, teaching at night in a graduate school, all leeched away at my need and ability to escape the earth.

Somewhere along the way, I picked up Peter Pan and Wendy and discovered the caution offered by J. M. Barrie: "...the moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease forever to do it."

Over the last 10 years, I have regained the freedom and lightness that a two wheeled machine can breathe into the soul. Moving down a shaded country road, the scent of Amish farm or hidden brook or newly mowed pasture thick in the air, there is an openness that is startling. There is no room (or time) for old worries because every second is new and different. Each bump and dent on the road must be seen and considered. Animals, small and large, may appear suddenly. Cars and trucks, with drivers hobbled by cell phone blindness, must be avoided. Your feet are working the gears and the rear brake. Your hands are working the throttle, clutch and front brake. And, all the while, at 65 mph, your balance is holding up a 500 lb marvel of rubber and steel, oil and paint, pistons and power.

I rarely have a destination when I ride with my buddy since 6th grade, Jimmy D. It isn't the arrival that we enjoy. It's the miles on the windy roads, heads in the wind, freedom in our hearts, as we steer a course "second star to the right and straight on 'til morning."

Copyright (c) 2011 by James Hugh Comey

Buster and Me

Last night, my wife and I watched the film, Marley and Me. I was a fan of John Grogan during the four years that he wrote a column for The Philadelphia Inquirer. His writing always touched a nerve in me, and, because I knew that at the end of his breakout book, Marley dies, I had purposely not read it. It was with some hesitation that I watched the film.

Most of my life there has been a four legged animal close by. Over the last 41 years, my wife and I have had dogs of various sizes. There was Strider, a 7 foot long Irish Wolfhound whose only fear was overhead airplanes and whose bristly muzzle served as the support for sticky-fingered toddlers. There was Kira, a rough coated collie who had a long nose that she tucked into your crotch as she stared up into your soul. Our last dog was Carling, a Bichon Frise who stole candy out of pocket books and never deemed to look, let alone bark at, another dog. She was fully convinced that she was human, a grand dame of some rank and privilege. She died in my wife's arms, her last heartbeats matching my wife's as she slipped away.

Treasa, our Maine Coon cat, missed Carling so much that she died 8 months later. We presently have Smudge, a black rescue cat, who has no idea that she is feline. She runs to you when you whistle and call her name. She greets strangers at the door. She finds small bits of things (crumbled paper, plastic caps, twisty ties) and deposits them at your feet. She looks at you and chirps until you throw the object. She then runs and retrives the object after much cavorting and pouncing. Smudge, from the first, initiated this game of fetch. We suspect that, through some odd twist, a dog lurks beneath her black coat.

But, in watching the 22 dogs that played the part of Marley in the film last night, I thought of only one animal from my past: Buster.

Buster was a dog my father adopted from the Delaware County SPCA in the fall of my 3rd grade. He was a short haired, big boned dog, maybe a mix between a boxer and a Lab. He responded to a leash, as though someone had trained him. He seemed gentle, which was good, because he looked like he could be scary if he growled or barked. He also had scars that ran down the side of his right rear leg. We had no idea what caused them.

My brothers and I fancied that we were accomplished animal trainers. So one day, as the weather was turning bitter, we took his leash off his collar, walked a couple of steps, and called, "Come." Only Buster didn't come. He looked at us, turned his head and looked down Garrett Road in Drexel Hill, and turned and ran like hell. Within 30 seconds, he was gone from sight. We ran and told our parents who weren't at all impressed with our training skills. We searched and searched, but we couldn't find him.

Snow came and then more snow. It was bone crunching cold. And then, a month later the phone rang one night. A stranger said that he had Buster and asked if he could bring him over. We were stunned. An hour later, a tall man in his mid 40s arrived with Buster in tow. Buster was much thinner, and his paws were in bad shape.

The man said that he was recently out of the military, that he had served in Korea. He said that he had contacted the SPCA to find who had adopted Buster so he could return him. He had come home that day and found Buster at the door to his apartment.

"But, how did Buster find you?" my Father asked, confused.

"Buster is an unusual dog," the man said.

We just stared at him.

"When I came home from Korea, my wife had given birth to our son," he said. "We had to find an apartment. None of them accept dogs. When I took Buster to the SPCA, we lived in Media. I've since found a nicer apartment in Swarthmore."

"Are you telling me that Buster made his way from Drexel Hill to Media and then to Swarthmore, in the freezing cold and snow, without knowing where he was going, and he found you?" my father asked.

"Yes,"said the man. "Buster is used to a harsh environment."

My mother nodded. The truth hit her first.

"Did Buster serve with you in Korea?" she asked.

"Yes," the man said. "I was in Recon. Buster was a courier dog, among other things. You may have noticed the scars on his rear leg. He was dropped by machine gun fire, but he kept going."

He looked down at Buster who had not moved from his side.

"I brought him back with me from overseas. He is a trusted soldier and my best friend.  But I can't keep him. I don't have the money for a house, and I'll get caught if I try to hide him in the apartment."

He looked at my tall, lanky father, my tiny mother, and my two brothers and I.

"You are a good family. I know that you'll care for him and love him."

He knelt down and took Buster's large head in his hands.

"Goodbye, my friend," he said.

He stood and walked to the front door.

"Buster," he said in a firm voice. "Down."

Buster immediately dropped to the floor.

"Stay," he said.

And walked out our front door.

Buster never ran away again.

There were many adventures where Buster was a key player for the next decade. We moved to a house in Springfield with acres and acres of woodland directly behind us. At the bottom of a very steep descent, Crum Creek cut lazily through pines and an old mill toward Smedley Park. With Buster in the lead, my brothers and friends and I explored trails and sniffed spoor and lay in the coolness of rotting leaves during the summers, and sled down the 9th hole of Springfield Golf Course during the winter. There was the time Buster blocked my Dad's path when he was carrying my younger brother to his bedroom. My brother's body was limp with sleep, and Buster, fearing that something was wrong, would NOT let my Dad pass until he shook David awake to show that all was right. There was the time that Buster fought a huge Husky that was nipping at our heels while sledding, and the many chains that he snapped when he saw someone wearing the color red.

But, these will keep for another time.

As much as Marley barked and damaged and disobeyed, Buster protected and embraced and loved us. Just as Owen Wilson struggled to find the courage to carry Marley to the Vet for his final visit, my father had to carry Buster who had been dropped by cancer and could no longer keep going. And just as the three children of the movie Grogan family struggled to find the words for their goodbye at Marley's gravesite, my two brothers and I have never forgotten the privilege of sharing our home with a good soldier and our best friend.

Copyright (c) 2011 by James Hugh Comey

Big John in a Box

Today is Memorial Day, 2011 and I am thinking of my father, John Joseph Comey Jr. People rarely called him by his given name. He was known to his friends, neighbors, grandkids, and great grandkids as "Big John." It was because of his height. He was 6 foot 6.5 inches tall and always ducked slightly when he went through doorways. He was string bean thin and Jimmy Stewart handsome when he was young. He grew up along 63rd Street in West Philadelphia, just down from the EL stop, in the same Irish and Jewish neighborhood that William Wharton used as the backdrop for his book, Birdy. Nicholas Cage and Matthew Modine starred in the movie.

My father spoke often of his neighborhood in West Philly. He used the name Sydney Schwartz when he played for the Jewish Basketball League, and his Jewish buddies acquired Irish names when they played for the CYO League. His father's parents emigrated from Ballyhaunis, County Mayo, in Ireland, but they refused to teach him Irish (Gallic). "We're in America now, " they told him. "We speak American."

So he learned some Yiddish instead and would curse up a storm in a language that we didn't understand when he bumped his head on a doorframe. His height also caused him trouble when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, now know as the Air Force. He wanted desperately to be a pilot and fly fighter planes, but his long, lanky frame wouldn't fit in the cockpit. So instead, he became a flight radio operator and spent his time during WWII at Lahoya Field, several miles up the coast from the mouth of the Amazon River in Brazil. There, he hunted down German submarines that were secretly refueling off the coast. He would go out as part of a crew on a PB-23 Mars Radar plane. Their mission was to take pictures for the Intelligence Boys back at the base. If anything suspicious was spotted, P-38 twin-boom Fighters were sent out to blow it up. A number of  U Boats never made it back to the Wolf Packs in the North Atlantic.

 He told us incredible stories about the natives that lived in mud and thatch huts just down from their base. He showed us a picture of his pet Spider Monkey that rode in his breast pocket. He amazed us with tales about a Tiger Shark that sank a jeep, and Flying Tigers pilots who underwent detox at Lahoya for drug habits they picked up while fighting Japanese Zeros in China. For the rest of his life, he had yellow freckles on his legs from a parasitic jungle fungus because he forget once to tuck his pants securely into his boots.

When the war was over, he somehow always ended up in jobs and places that would accommodate his frame. He drove a Greyhound bus. He took massive fuel oil rigs over the mountains in western PA. He oversaw the construction and maintenance of Exxon gas stations in three states, operating out of a large Suburban Chevrolet. While doing all of this, he managed to take courses at the Wharton School at Penn and Temple University, where he graduated with an Engineering degree.

On January 7, 2010, my father died. He was 92.5 years old. My brothers, John and Dave, and I were with him. My mother had left us in 1996. (She was only 4 foot 11 inches tall. Although tiny in stature, she was regal in bearing and determination. I will save her story for another blog.) The other person present in the hospital room was Father John, a missionary priest from Uganda. With so few priests now in the US, missionaries are coming here to serve. When Father John leaned over close to my father and said, "And do not fear, John, as you enter the dark valley, because you are safe and we are with you," my father took his last breath.

My father was fiercely proud of his Irish heritage. His grandfather had been blinded during the Easter Rebellion in Dublin in 1916. My father visited the Old Sod some years ago with my mother and was

completely enchanted. His roots in his old neighborhood were also incredibly deep. In his final days, when he was barely hanging on, he often told the nursing staff his name was Sidney Schwartz.

My brother, John, and I, with our wives, Barbara and Trish, took my father's ashes home to Ireland last September. We stayed on the River Shannon in a rented home between Ballina and Killaloe. My brother logged close to 650 km driving on the right side of a Volvo on the wrong side of the road (left) without getting us killed. We traveled through Galway, Limerick, Tipperary, Waterford, and Cork. We stood at the bay in Cobh (Cove) where my great grandparents departed for the promise of a new land. And we knelt in St Patrick's Church in Ballyhaunis, County Mayo, with Big John between us in a sanctioned, air-flight acceptable box.

There was not another soul in the church. It was very windy outside and thankfully not raining. The time had come to finally release my father from his cardboard coffin. We went outside, looking for a cemetery. There was none to be found. Aside from a deserted rectory at the rear of the grounds, we could only find four stone slabs bearing the names of deceased priests from the parish tucked next to the church.

"This will have to do," John declared, holding the box.

He stood next to the slabs and poked a hole in the bottom of the box. I held my breath. This was the moment we had all been waiting for. This was the solemn rite when a man returns to his roots.

Only, just as the ashes began to fall, the wind around us began to whip and spin and swirl. The ashes hardly touched the ground. They flew up into my brother's face and clothes and hair in a tumult of grey, then lifted above him in a frolicking play of shadow and light. They rose above the roof of the church into the blue Irish sky. I looked at my poor brother, and, God forgive me, I couldn't help myself. I burst out laughing. John was coated from head to toe with the remains of the man that he loved. John had nurtured and cared for my father the last four years of his life. It was their final embrace. It was also the way that my father decided for us to finally say goodbye. We wept at his last breath in a hospital room on January 7th. We were now laughing, all of us, at his liberation from the tall body that had served him for so long.

My father was finally flying.

Copyright (c) 2011 by James Hugh Comey

One-D and the Hippopotamus

The Thursday before Easter Week, Camp Nana commenced. My daughter, Jennifer, and her husband, Matt, were flying to Mexico to celebrate their dual 40th birthdays, and their dual daughters, Wynnie (7) and Maeve (5), were going to be staying with us for 10 days. We prayed for warm days and clear weather. It rained more than it didn't, and it was often blustery and cold. The grandgirls didn't care. They were at Camp Nana.

There are unique qualities at Camp Nana that you won't find at most run of the mill camps. The first is Nana. My wife, Trish, feeds, baths, reads, plays, and hugs the girls well beyond the daily recommended allowance. The second is art-related activities. Crayon, clay, origami, pencil, pen, water colors, fabric, stencils, ink pads, and food items all become grist for creative adventures for Nana and the girls. The third is movies. Most nights (OK, every night) a new film is watched and then discussed at some length the next day. These films often become the basis for clay figures, paper cutouts and elaborate settings involving cat toys and discarded cardboard. And the fourth is our yard.

Let me explain the hypnotic attraction the ladies have to our yard. They live in the Capitol Hill section of Washington, D.C. Their world is made up of row houses. Metro buses rumble down their street, and SWAT helicopters swarm overhead every time POTUS (President of the United States) goes out for a burger. A common rear driveway snakes the length of their block. They travel through congested streets with state and letter names to their charter school; they ride the Metrorail system with the sophistication of world travelers, and they often visit free museums and zoos and gardens that adorn our capital. What they can't do is run completely around the outside of their house.

Only gale force winds and nasty rains could keep the girls from running around and around our house. The novelty of sprinting, skipping and chasing each other safely around the whole length of our yard is a marvel to them. The only single house that they have visited and played on its lawn in DC is the White House. Last Fourth of July, Mr. Obama had a picnic for his staff, and the Secret Service and sharpshooters on the roof  frowned upon anyone running around the entire grounds.

So, it was no surprise to me that the girls explored and wondered aloud about everything that they saw around our house. This included the large white droppings on the hood and roof of our stationwagon. It was parked in our driveway, close to the house.

"Yuck, One-D," said Wynnie. "What is that on your car?"

The grandgirls call me One-D. I suppose it's my own fault. When Wynnie was born, Jennifer asked me what I wanted to be called. I called both my grandfathers "Pop," so that was taken. Grandfather sounds too formal. I thought of Granddad, but I figured nobody ever really says the first D, so I said, "Why don't you have Wynnie call me Gran'dad. But not with the two Ds together. Just use one D at the beginning of the name." I guess that I mentioned the explicit one D spelling once too often. The next thing I know, I've been tagged One-D by my wife, daughter and grandgirls. Go figure.

"Yeah, One-D," said Maeve, always eager to join with her sister. "It looks like yucky poop."

"It's hippopotamus poop,"I said matter-of-factly. "Or Pterodactyl poop. I'm not sure which." I pointed to a branch above us in the Magnolia tree and even higher in our massive Maple tree. "At night, a Pterodactyl or a hippopotamus sits up there in the branches during the spring and summer and poops on my car."

"Pterodactyls are extinct, One-D," scoffed Wynnie.

"Extinct," echoed Meave, nobody's fool.

I stared at both of them. At 7 and 5, I had no clue what the word extinct meant. But these are no ordinary little people. Jennifer is the product of Cornell and Johns Hopkins, Matt Boston College and Northwestern. Google, IPhones, Skype, and travel to far and distant places since birth had made these urban kids very savvy. I was going to have to tread carefully.

"You're right," I admitted. "It can't be a Pterodactyl because they are extinct. It must be a hippo."

Wynnie was now examining the branches above us.

"It can't be a hippo," she said. "The branches are too tall."

"Too tall," said Maeve, smiling at her sister, certain that they had me. "Hippos can't fly."

"I never said that hippos can fly," I said. "They use their powerful jaws to hold onto the branches, and then carefully pull themselves up."

Both girls were now searching the trees for signs of hippo bite marks.

"What do they eat?" asked Maeve. She was in kindergarten and, based on her speed in sizing up challenging spatial and logistical problems, she was going to be an engineer or architect, after skipping most of high school.

"Chalk," I said, without missing a beat. "That's why their poop is so white."

"Oh," they both said.

They knew that I was pulling their leg. But they also were awaiting Easter when an extraordinary rabbit was going to bring candy to Nana and One-D's house for them and all the other good little girls and boys who believed in the Easter Bunny. Wynnie has now read most of the Harry Potter books and Maeve is enchanted by the Disney Faerie series. Magic and mystery is mixed in their shared play and movies and reading. Logic and empirical evidence will slowly squeeze out their belief in the fantastical. Santa and the Great Pumpkin will be set aside for their own children as deadlines and bills demand their attention.

But, for now, One-D continues to tell them tales. Last Friday, strong winds caused a very large branch from the top of the Magnolia tree to crash onto our driveway. It miraculously missed crushing the hood of my Camry. I emailed a picture of the downed branch to Jennifer, asking her to show the girls how the weight of the hippo caused the branch to topple.

Albert Einstein wrote," The gift of fantasy has meant more to me than my talent for absorbing positive knowledge." Who am I to argue with Einstein?

Copyright (c) 2011 by James Hugh Comey

The Two Percent Man

A year ago I stood outside a cyclone fence that surrounded a school where I had worked for 19 years. I had taught in many of its classrooms, walked every one of its hallways, and overseen gifted and testing programs from its main office. The window to my old office was bare. All of the windows in the front of this 1920s structure were ripped out. It was being torn down. A spanking new, three level, geothermal-efficient structure had been erected next to it, and a wrecking machine had been tearing it apart. The destruction began from the rear of the building where a massive machine had been taking enormous bites out of its back. Bricks and plaster and blackboards had been dumped from the maw of the wrecking machine into dump trucks and hauled away. The only part of the building left was the stone front, with all of its windows gone. Nether Providence School, which became Strath Haven Middle School when I joined it in 1991, was now blinded.

I stood outside the protective demolition fence, with my fingers laced through its links, and stared up at the face of the 80 year old building. I shivered. It was spring and the weather was warm. And yet, I was chilled. The hairs on the back of my neck and my arms were standing straight up. There was no one else there with me. A short distance behind me was the main office of the new building, brimming with people and energy and life. But, what I was feeling was deep, dark sadness. It was not my own sadness; it was coming from the spaces where the windows had been. The life that had been clinging to the elder school was flowing out, and I could feel that ebbing loss as distinctly as I could feel the sun on my face.

It took some time for the goosebumps to leave my arms that day. Last week, I revisited the new school for the first time since I retired from the school district 10 months ago. There is now a blacktop parking lot where the old building sat. I felt nothing in the parking lot. The 80 year old building is dead.

I know that this sounds peculiar to you. A person can't feel things coming from a building. I can. And it isn't just buildings. After Kira, my rough coated collie, died, I felt her for five months by my back door. Kira used to stand by our back door when she wanted to go out into our fenced yard. She never scratched the door or whined. She simply stood there with her long nose touching the door until I felt her in some other part of the house. I used to yell, "I'm busy, Kira, you'll have to wait a minute till I get there." The family would then hear her bony elbows hit the kitchen floor when she would flop down in impatience.

In my first house, I saw a woman in the hallway when there was no one there, and twice felt a threatening presence in our bedroom. At one point, the presence hovered so close to my face that the muscles in my jaw froze up when I tried to call out. When I researched the house, I discovered that no one lived there longer than three years. I moved out, almost three years to the day, but I had nightmares for years about that house.

Not too many centuries ago, I might have been labeled a warlock and burned or stoned by the authorities. I never understood how or why I was able to feel and know the things that I could. And then  in the early 1980s, the counselors at Upper Darby High School, where I was teaching, thought it would be interesting for the 260 staff members to take the Myers Briggs Personality Test. After all the testing occurred, we would be grouped by our personality types, so that we could see who was like us and who experienced the world quite differently.

I was called to a counselor's office the day before the results were presented.

"Did I do something wrong?" I asked. I had never taken a test like this and figured I must have goofed up somehow.

"No," the counselor said. "I just wanted to give you a heads-up so that you're not surprised tomorrow when the groups are asked to come together."

 She paused and looked at me closely.

"Your personality results indicate INFJ. That stands for introverted, intuitive, feeling, and judging."

"OK, "I said. "Is that bad?"

"Not good or bad, " she said cautiously. "Just a bit.... different, is all."

"How different?"

"There are only two percent of the population who indicate this personality type," she said. "And here at the high school, there is only one other person. You will have a group of two tomorrow when the 260 staff are divided up."

I was not really surprised. I had always felt a sense of being apart from the general population. I was introverted all my life and managed to teach by clothing myself in the role of a teacher. Although I avoided loud crowds, I had strong empathy for individual people. My intuition was scary accurate, and I often knew when students and fellow staff members were sick before they realized it. I craved order and harmony around me, yet was always creating a rich inner world. Thinking and silence were (and are) my friends.

What I didn't know was that INFJs often have psychic sensitivity and that this can extend to people, things and events. Premonitions, foreknowledge, and uncanny communication skills are not uncommon. Real and fictional characters who have displayed an INFJ personality type are: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Martin Luther King, Jimmy Carter, Garry Trudeau, Nelson Mandela, Mahatema Gandhi, The Tin Man, Luke Skywalker, and Yoda.

It feels a tad lonely to only have two percent of all humans on the planet know the world as I do. I have learned, when I see and feel things, that it's best to keep them to myself. People will only smile or roll their eyes. And yet, it was Carl Jung who said, "Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes."

Copyright (c) 2011 by James Hugh Comey

St. James Place

From my earliest memories to my mid twenties, I was granted entry to a fantastical world. It was a magical place of unexpected smells and sounds and tastes. It was a city of majesty and poverty that never slept. People from all over the world, speaking dozens of tongues, flocked to its streets and hotels. It ran along the Atlantic Ocean on a sandbar island with three piers that jutted out into frothy, green waters. A boardwalk ran along its white beach for seven miles, where stores sold salt water taffy in little, silver boxes shaped like suitcases and mile long hot dogs from Coney Island. Men, down on their luck, pushed the wealthy in tall, wicker, rolling chairs along two smooth sections of the boardwalk, singing out, "Watch d' chair! Watch d' chair!" Undershirted men toting heavy white cases with worn, leather, shoulder straps tramped along the beach during the day, shouting, " I've got yer Eskimo Pies. I've got yer Fudgie Wudgies. Ice cream. Come and get yer ice cream!" Boys with blue change aprons and newspapers under their arms, called out, "Read all about Frank Sinatra. Read all about Frank Sinatra," regardless of the day's news. Burly life guards sat in tall white, wooden chairs or stood by long white row boats trimmed in red and black, scanning the thousands of bathers who jammed the surf. The ocean never stopped moving, and the tide of tourists who washed into Atlantic City, New Jersey, during those 20+ years never stopped, as well.

I was not a tourist. That was an important distinction to me. My grandfather, Pop Comey, emigrated to Atlantic City from West Philadelphia before I was born. He lived on St. James Place, between New York and S. Tennessee Avenues, in a cooperative apartment house. It was just a stone's throw from the ramp to the boardwalk. He and my grandmother owned their narrow, first floor apartment, with a porch that was only four steps up from the never-ending stream of people who passed from Pacific Avenue to the Boardwalk. Just down on the right was Feeley's, an Irish bar that enjoyed melancholy singing in the wee hours of the morning that my two brothers and I could hear when its door opened and closed. Down the other end of the street, and just up Pacific Avenue, was St. Nicholas Tolentine Church, where my grandfather was an usher. The church was built in 1855. The island became Atlantic City in 1854. There was history deeply embedded in the sand in Atlantic City, and I considered myself part of it.

Every night, throughout the summers, my two brothers and I explored every foot of the boardwalk. We knew the cheapest place to get a soda (the last store heading to Captain Starn's at the inlet - five cents and 40 varieties). We stalked the demonstration vendors where pitchmen hawked spring loaded choppers that every woman needed for her kitchen. They always had food items left over and gave them away. (Ed McMahon of Johnny Carson fame was the regular at the corner of St. James boardwalk.) We knew when the peanuts had just been roasted at Planters Peanuts, just across from Steel Pier, and when the Belgian Waffles were on sale at Woolworth's, at the corner of New York Avenue. We knew the best water games to play on Million Dollar Pier and who were the honest carnies. (Charles Burchinsky - later known as Charles Bronson - worked these same games in the 1950s.) And we haunted the Italian Village in the rear of Million Dollar Pier.

It was always a carnival in the Italian Village, a roof covered section at the rear of the pier that stood thirty feet above the ocean. Glassblowers spun liquid glass into fragile, tiny animals. Men with thick arms and hairy chests pounded their fists on white dough to make pizza pie. Huge sausages and cheeses with strong smells hung near posters of Rome and Milano. Small cafes served hoagies, pepper and egg sandwiches, Nepolitan ice cream, and shaved water ices with real chunks of lemon and orange. Espresso simmered in tall chrome percolators. Mario Lanza's voice echoed nonstop in Italian and English.

We couldn't afford to buy anything in the Italian Village. We often started the night with 25 cents each. My older brother would blow his money in the first half hour in the arcade on Garden Pier. He enjoyed pinball and was especially good in shooting a bear that would roar when you hit it with a shot of light and then change direction. My younger brother would eat his way quickly through his money. Me? I had two passions. Comic books (especially Classic Comic books) and the incredible parade of people every night. Conventions were popular and changed every week. One week it was men wearing fezzes decorated with black tassels and silver, crescent swords. The next week it was the Knights of Columbus with sashes and plumes. Masons and Elks and Kawainis clubs from every state in the union proudly strutted their finery among the mass of adults and children.

We usually walked up to Convention Hall where Miss America was crowned each September, and then all the way back to the cheapest soda place, and then, on weary legs, back to St. James Place. When I returned home, I usually had a new comic, a dime left over, and a tapestry of voices and faces in my head from the strangers I had been following for blocks, before they turned off into a store or a street. Often I could not understand a word they had been saying as I strolled only a foot or so behind them. I suspected what part of Canada or Europe or Asia they were from, but I could never know. I guessed their occupations and socio-economic ranges but I could never be sure. But I was always pretty certain if they were happy or not. If they were interested in the people that were by their side. If they loved their children and their partner. Years later, I would study Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) that taught me how humans mirror behavior and establish rapport and adjust their voice and tone with those they enjoy. It made me remember three little guys who were blessed to have a boardwalk and a street named St. James Place where they could discover a fantastical world each and every night.

Note: St. James Place is located between Pennsylvania Railroad and Community Chest in Monopoly, the Parker Brothers' board game based on Atlantic City properties and utilities.

Copyright (c) 2011 by James Hugh Comey

Becoming Invisible

In the winter of 1960 I had to make a major decision. I would be completing 8th grade in June and starting high school. The decision? Where to go. I had three choices. Monsignor Bonner High School was the option for continuing my Catholic education. It was several miles and a Red Arrow trolley ride away. There was no tuition cost then. Springfield High School was the public school. It had (and still has) a good reputation, and was a yellow school bus away. School taxes covered the tuition. The third choice was to attend a private high school. None were close to me. All charged steep tuition, book costs, and activity fees. Plus, public transportation to reach them wasn't cheap and took over a hour each way.

It should have been an easy choice. Bonner and Springfield were close, with free tuition, and a quick trip both ways. Devon Prep, Malvern Prep, Archmere Academy, and St. Joseph's Preparatory High School (known as the Prep) would put a financial strain on my parents, especially since my older brother was already a sophmore there. However, there was an historical connection to the Prep. Father Dennis Comey, a Jesuit priest and cousin, founded the Institute of Industrial Relations in 1943 at the Prep. Workers from every trade in the tri-state area came to the institute to discover and use rational and ethical practices in their businesses. In 1950, President Eisenhower asked Father Dennis to serve as the arbitrator of all disputes on the Philadelphia waterfront. He had unlimited authority and often stood between hard muscled dock workers and management on the freezing docks. There were zero strikes during his tenure. His name frequently appeared in the local and national papers, as well as the Catholic Standard and Times, where he wrote a column. People often asked me, when I first met them, if I was related to the famous Father Comey.

So, with this celebrity relative who had graduated from the Prep in 1914 (and earned his doctorate from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome) and a brother already there, I applied to and was accepted at the Prep. However, the morning after my 8th grade graduation, my father told me to put on old clothes and go with him. We drove to an Esso gas station several miles away. My father introduced me to the owner. They both congratulated me on officially becoming a gas jockey. I would work days and some nights for a dollar an hour throughout the summer. I would work weekends during the winter. I would turn my paychecks over to my mother who would use them to assist with the Prep costs.

I knew nothing about pumping gas (no self serve then), or changing oil and filters, or flushing antifreeze and studding tires. I quickly learned. The work was nasty in August from the scorching engines, and freezing in January when your hand stuck to the icy gas pumps. I saw my friends often go to dances and parties when I was working. But, it was my choice and I felt proud knowing that I was following in Father Dennis's footsteps.

As time passed, however, I began to realize that I was becoming invisible. It was very subtle at first. When I approached a car that pulled up to the gas pumps in my Esso shirt, with my rag in my back pocket, I always said, "Good morning/afternoon/evening. May I help you." The driver of the car, regardless of age or sex, generally did not look at me. She/he would tell me how much gas they wanted and frequently asked me to check their oil and radiator levels. While the gas was being pumped, I would wash their front window. The driver and the people in the car rarely looked at me, even though my face was just on the other side of the windshield. After all was done, and I had them sign a charge slip or gave them change from their purchase, they usually said thanks, but they rarely looked at me.

I was confused. Here I was, a hard working kid, earning his tuition to pay for a first class education, but people wouldn't make eye contact with me. My hair was groomed and my tone was helpful. I quickly performed all of the tasks that they requested, and then cheerfully asked them to come back again. I finally asked the owner of the station why I was becoming invisible.

"People are not ignoring you to be nasty or unkind, " he told me. "You're a grease monkey when you walk up to them, not a private school kid working his tail off. They see oil stains on your shirt and smell gas on your clothes. They assume that you'll be changing tires and dumping quarts of oil into their crankcase for the rest of your life. There's a pecking order, Jim, and when you walk out there onto the gas island, you are at the very bottom of it."

I worked at the gas station for 8 years to help pay my way through the Prep and college. Along the way, I also worked as a parking attendant at the Army and Navy Games, a paint store salesman for MAB in Chester and Brookhaven, and later, when I started teaching, as a major appliance salesman at Korvette's in Springfield. At each of these jobs, there were varying degrees of invisibility. Assumptions were made about what I did, not who I was.

Ralph Ellison wrote: "I am an invisible man...I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me." It is no accident that, over the last 41 years, in all phases of my educational employment, I have become friends with the secretaries, maintanance workers, bus drivers, technicians, cafeteria servers, electricians, teaching assistants, greeters, and photocopiers, as well as the professional educators. Each has had a story to tell, a dream to be chased, and a laugh to be heard. None has deserved to become invisible.

Copyright (c) 2011 by James Hugh Comey

The Box Step

When I was 10 years old, I was informed by my teacher, Sister Mary of the Holy Water Fountain (not her real name), that I had been selected to attend a very special program. It was going to be after school in a couple of days in the gym/cafe/theatre, a building separate from the old stone parish school. I quickly discovered that other guys had also been selected for this mysterious program.

We were a ragtag cohort of altar boys and hall monitors and candy collection kids. None of the axe murderers or psycho juvenile delinquents in our grade had been selected. A sense of wonder and apprehension grew among us. No one had a clue what was coming.

Our parents dropped us off that fateful afternoon and left, promising to return in an hour. We suspected that they had been told the purpose of the program and sworn to secrecy. Nobody with a lick of common sense ever wanted to cross swords with Sister Mary of the Holy Water Fountain.

We were stunned when we entered the gym/cafe/theatre and discovered that, in addition to our teacher, there were a dozen or so girls from our grade already there. There was also a distinguished older woman standing next to a record player. Sister Mary introduced her as Mrs. Foxtrot (not her real name), and told us to close our o-shaped mouths because it was impolite and we could swallow flies, and to have a seat opposite the girls on a straight line of chairs. We looked at each other and realized that we had been had. It was too late to bolt for the door. We each had earned responsibilities within the grade, and not cooperating now would mean loosing them. Plus Sister Mary was blocking the door.

No wonder the axe murderers weren't invited. Nuns knew a whole lot about compliance and crowd control. Sister Mary eyeballed each and every one of us until we had all taken a seat, and then glared at the girls, daring them to smirk. None did. Then she nodded to Mrs. Foxtrot.

Mrs. Foxtrot told us that she and her husband had been professional ballroom dancers. They had competed all over the country, won gold medals and tall statues, and loved every minute of it. But the Lord had need of someone with her husband's talent, and he was introducing the saints to the Tango and the ChaChaCha now. And that made her think of introducing the nice young girls and boys in her parish to the basics of ballroom dancing. She paused and looked at Sister Mary who blinked once to assure her that all was well.

"Today," Mrs. Foxtrot said with genuine pride and excitement, "I am going to teach you the Box Step."

Tony Scalzoni (not his real name) groaned. Tony preferred to box ears on the football field, not to learn the Box Step. Sister Mary scorched him with a fireball-sized glare that made him wince. "Sorry, Sis'tr," he mouthed.

Sister Mary extinguished the heat from her eyes and then blinked once again at Mrs. Foxtrot, whose smile had not diminished.

"The Box Step is the basis for many American ballroom dances, including the Waltz and the Rumba," Mrs. Foxtrot said. "It is easy to do. All you have to do is make the shape of a box with your feet with your partner."

Partner? We suddenly realized that the girls opposite us had tensed. Something had shifted in the room. There was a sense of mild electricity in the air, like you feel when you walk across a carpet in the winter. Only it wasn't winter and we weren't walking and there wasn't any carpet.

Mrs. Foxtrot showed us how the boy steps out with his left foot, bringing the right foot up with little weight, because it shifts to the right. She showed us how and when the shifts in weight happened to complete the square box. Then she showed the opposite moves to the girls. Most of the boys weren't listening. The word partner had confuzzled their thought processes. Some had lost feeling in their feet. Some had a strange ringing in their ears. Me? I had noticed that Mrs. Foxtrot had been scanning the row of guys while she was demonstrating, and her gaze had been lingering on me. Maybe it was because my eyes weren't watering as much as the guys around me. Or maybe it was the white starched shirt and creased pants that my mother had made me wear.

"I'll need a partner to demonstrate this easy and fun step," Mrs. Foxtrot said, and before I knew it, she had glided over to my chair, taken my hand, raised me out of my chair, and said, "And I accept this handsome young man's offer to dance with me."

A 45 rpm record began to play on the record player. I don't remember what the song was. I do remember standing with Mrs. Foxtrot in the center of the gym/cafe/theatre and suddenly everyone else on earth disappearing. I remember being aware of silk and sound, and of another human being joining with me in rhythm and movement. She was leading me gently through the steps for the first several seconds, and then I felt her let go, trusting me to navigate the floor and the space around us and between us. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced.

From that time forward, I sought every canteen, hop, high school mixer and dance I could find. I went for years to a Friday night dance where a young DJ hosted such South Philadelphia talent as Bobby Rydell and Frankie Avalon. I went to a roller skating rink in suburban Philly that was transformed into the coolest dance for 50 miles. And, in college, I met my wife one steamy Sunday night on a dance floor.

I am deeply indebted to Mrs. Foxtrot and Sister Mary of the Holy Water Fountain. They opened up a world of  music and shared emotion with human beings that has made my heart yearn, and soar just as often.

Copyright (c) 2011 by James Hugh Comey

Have Courage

When I was in 6th grade, my 3rd grade teacher took me out on my first date. I had moved to another area and had not seen her for three years. Out of the blue, she called and asked me if I wanted to go to dinner and then meet someone. I was more shy than I am now and didn't want to go. My mother told me to have courage, that my 3rd grade teacher was a terrific person, and that it would be a great experience. I figured that they were in cahoots about something.

We went to the Alpine Inn in Springfield, PA, and I tried to not sound like a fool as I blushed my way through crispy fried chicken and cold peas. Then she drove me to meet a man who would profoundly affect my life. His name was Father Robert Greene. He was a Maryknoll Missionary who had been stationed in Tungan, in the Kwangsi Province in China. For 15 years, Father Greene had been preaching and dispensing medicine. In 1950, Communists placed him under house arrest and issued an order that no foreigners or Chinese could speak to him. For 17 months he was only allowed 10 minutes of freedom every third day. Then he was taken before a firing squad where he was told that he was going to be executed for being a spy. But instead of shooting him, he was blindfolded, and angry mobs cursed him and made false accusations about him over eight days. Finally, he was marched through three cities and thrown over the border, where he finally found his way to Hong Kong.

Father Green's story was recounted in a 1952 issue of Life Magazine. He was then encouraged to write a book about his experience. He called it Calvary in China. Father Greene handed me a signed copy of his book that day. He told me about adversity and faith and not giving up, even when all looks lost.

I figured out later why my teacher and mother wanted me to eat crispy fried chicken and cold peas. It was so that I could meet a Maryknoll priest and decide to become a priest myself. It didn't work. I had discovered girls in 4th grade, so the priesthood was out of the question. What they hadn't counted on was how impressed I was to meet a person who had written a book. I had always planned on becoming a teacher. Now, I decided to add writer to my career goals.

As a teacher, I have met many students who have had their own Calvaries. I have watched 6th grade little kids and hulking seniors face hardships that seemed overwhelming. Dealing with sudden divorce or the death of a parent. Tragic accidents where a classmate was suddenly gone from a car crash. Multiple surgeries to fix legs and straighten spines and heal hearts. Each of these kids endured physical and emotional hurts that might have crippled an adult. Each had the courage to face their hardships, to not give up.

Six weeks ago I received a diagnosis of prostate cancer. In three days, I am going to have robotic surgery to have it removed. I remembered Father Greene when I woke up this morning. I remembered him looking me in the eye and telling me about the importance of faith and not giving up, no matter how scary the situation. Joseph Campbell wrote, "Opportunities to find deeper powers within ourselves come when life seems most challenging."

I am lucky to have met Father Greene and so many brave students as I prepare for this procedure and the healing that will follow. I will not be writing blogs for a while. I ask for your good thoughts and prayers as I face this Calvary, knowing that faith and the love of family and friends will give me the courage I need to conquer this.

Copyright (c) 2011 by James Hugh Comey

Rubbing Elbows

In the spring of 1990, I was invited to speak at a local elementary school. It was their Celebrate Writing Day, and a half dozen professional writers of different genres were going to share their insights with the students. My first play for Stages of Imagination, Inc., The Monster in the Woods, was currently running and had garnered some press, so I was the playwright guy. The kids were wide-eyed and wonderful, and the morning went quickly.

The thank you for our pro bono presentations was lunch in their library. A husband and wife team sat across from me. He was a fiction writer; she was a poet, as I remember. I introduced myself in between bites of my hoagie. He was visibly upset. He told me that his fourth book had recently been published, but it wasn't selling as he had hoped. He hated his regular job and wanted to quit to write full time, but his current royalities wouldn't allow it. His wife told him to hang on, that she believed in him, and that somehow they would make it through this difficult time. The students were going to present their writing to their classmates in the afternoon, so I took my leave. I wished the upset writer the very best of luck.

Six months later, I read where the upset writer, Jerry Spinelli, won the Newberry Award for his fourth novel, Maniac Magee.

Writing is a joy, especially when the words are flowing,  the characters are dictating their lines, and the scenes are rich with hurt and humor and hope. It is not a joy when the business of writing, the publishing and production potholes, whack you alongside the head.

Over the years, I have rubbed elbows with many professional writers who have walked up the same steep slope as me. Each one of their victories, whether small or large, is my victory. Empathy among writers is a powerful antidote for the feeling of isolation and rejection that we all experience. Persistance and determination are the driving forces that all creative people must have ingrained in their DNA.

Here are some of the more notable writers that I have met or communicated with via phone or correspondence. Each had or still have challenges with the publishing or production potholes, and each will be damned if they will ever quit.

Writers: Kurt Vonnegut, James Baldwin, Jerzy Kosinski, Andrew Greeley, Chaim Potok, Lloyd Alexander, Ray Bradbury, Donna Jo Napoli, Cyril Clemens, Jimmy Carter, Jon Cohen, and Judy Schachner.

Playwrights: Bruce Graham, Michael Hollinger, Ed Shockley, Walt Vail, Marcus Stevens, and Brian Lowdermilk.

In future blogs I will give more details about my meetings and conversations with some of the folks above. And, maybe I'll describe the night in a loft in Soho when Poets and Writers Inc. was throwing a benefit, and E. L. Doctorow, Allan Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, Erica Jong and a host of others, including me, stayed way too late on a school night to rub elbows.

Copyright (c) 2011 by James Hugh Comey

It Begins

I am a writer.

For 41 years I have paid the bills by teaching middle school, high school, community college, and graduate school. I have acted in industrial films and recorded voice-overs. I have consulted in corporations using Neuro-Linguistic Programming, and met with clients to assist them with hypnotherapy. I have run an evening alternative high school for troubled youth, and coordinated gifted and state assesment testing programs for an affluent suburban public school.

Throughout all of these diverse activities, I have been a writer. My novella, Death of the Poet King, was published in 1975 and sold for $4.95. Copies have found their way somehow to places like Yale and Oxford, and Amazon is hawking copies for up to $281.62. That makes me laugh.

In 1990, while on an industrial shoot, I met an actor, Vicki Giunta, who wanted to start a nonprofit, children's theatre company. She wanted to bring original, issues-based, musical plays to children, especially those who had never experienced live professional theatre. She could produce and her sister, Carmela Guiteras-Mayo, a New York choreographer, could direct. All they needed was a writer.

I am a writer, and Stages of Imagination, Inc. (http://www.stagesofimagination.org/), was born. Now, 20 years later, 250,000 pre-K through 6th grade kids have seen our plays, heard our CDs and watched our film, Wooden Heart. We have been fortunate to receive two Silver Telly Awards, a Parents' Choice Recommendation and Award, endorsements from Newberry Award winner, Lloyd Alexander, and Harvard psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Coles, and corporate and state grants. I based my dissertaion at the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education on one of my plays, and educational support materials follow each teacher who attends our plays back into her classroom.

I am blessed that throughout all of my work experiences, I have been able to sneak in time at night or during the summer, to write. This past June, I retired from public education. The stories that have been dancing through my head during cafe duty and grading papers and driving to schools before the sun came up, can now come spilling out.

Ray Bradbury wrote to me once: "Throw up every morning, clean up every noon. Do and then think. DO first. Get it down and done, with joy. Then think about it."

So, it begins.

Copyright (c) 2011 by James Hugh Comey