Missives from Wonderland

This is one of my entries for Week 17 of LJ Idol: The Wheel of Chaos. This is our Portfolio week, which involves a couple original entries plus some other things. Here's the link back to My Portfolio Page. This entry tackles the prompt, "Banner Year."
(If viewing this entry on your phone, turn it sideways for the best view of the photos.)

Like heavy-footed kangaroos, the members of my son's competition marching band bounce down the metal stands to the field. Usually at the end of a competition, only the drum majors and section leaders go down to represent the band for results. But today was the season-ending championship, and the announcer has invited all band members to the sidelines to support their leaders and watch results.

My husband and I remain in the stands, along with a handful of adults from the other bands. We've been the voluntary "stand parents" throughout the season: keeping the band company in the stands after their performance, just in case they needed any adult help or guidance.

This has been my son's first year in the competition marching band.* Watching him from the sidelines reminds me of my own days in high school marching band.

~~~

"I need to figure out how to make a C-3PO costume," he told me, one sweaty day after band camp. In response to my questioning look, he explained: "Each section will be dressing according to a theme on Thursday. The trumpets are dressing like Star Wars, and I'm going to be C-3PO."

We brainstormed for possible ways to pull off such a costume in the dog days of summer without sweating to the point of heat stroke. After consulting with a crafty friend, we settled on a yellow T-shirt and yellow shorts, with added-on cut felt to imitate the droid's physique.



KFP dressed as C-3PO, in yellow t-shirt and shorts, with felt affixed to resemble C-3PO's torso, and with one white and one gold sock to indicate his two-toned legs.


That Thursday, when I picked him up at the end of the day, he regaled me with stories about the different groups. The trumpet section's "Star War" costumes were a hit: complete with Princess Leia, Yoda, Darth Vader, and even BB-8.

In addition, he related, the practice field was full of color and whimsy, with characters from "Family Guy," "Peter Pan," "Scooby Doo," and "Clue," along with cowboys and a whole flute section of Tinkerbells.

Despite the exhausting heat, he related, that day transformed into one of playful camaraderie. They were no longer trudging through to their marks but gliding in character.

~~~

While it would have been far easier to dress as Alice in Wonderland, that connection was a little too much on-the-nose for me. Our director had encouraged us to wear costumes for our participation in the annual Halloween parade in a nearby town. I was going as the Mad Hatter.

For my costume, I'd studied the original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. I got myself an oversized top hat, affixing the label reading "In this style 10/6." In addition, I wore an oversized shirt to resemble his ill-fitting suit jacket, and tied a polka-dot tie around my neck. As I remember, my mom helped me make one out of painted cardboard and elastic.

Because I lived in a time before Instagram, I'm not entirely certain there were ever any photos of my fabulous costume. But I know that, of all the costumes I wore in high school, that one was my favorite.

I didn't care that people had no idea who I was, as I ran around insisting that 'We're all mad here" and asking people why a raven was like a writing desk.

My best friend, who was in the color guard and dressed as a black cat, followed me around, purring and mewing until even those who had no idea what was happening joined in on the fun, acting in character as Frankenstein's monster, or a witch, or a heavy metal star. We rocked that parade!

~~~

The announcer makes her way through the results for each division, and we shuffle our feet in the cold and clap for everyone. As the bands, in turn, receive their results, their contingents of band leaders salute and step forward, to cheers from their band mates.

Gradually, the announcer works through the smallest divisions to reach our school's division, Liberty A, for bands with 51 to 70 students. As far as I can remember, that's roughly the size that my marching band was, as well, although it felt larger at the time.

The announcer reads out the rankings, starting with 15th place. For each, she reads the scores, along with any special awards that group won. We know the competition is tight, as this comprises not only the bands my son's band has already competed against this season, but also some they've never met. While his band has always done well, today, they were competing in a much larger pool.

As the announcer makes it to 10th place, and creeping higher, the scores climb, as well. We know that the previous week, we'd been in the high 80s, and the scores soon overcome that mark. No matter where we land now, we've improved.

My husband and I cross our fingers and wait while the band, barely visible across the field, stomp their feet in anticipation.

~~~

Competition marching band today has changed in key ways since I was a high school student 40 years ago. Our shows resembled the kind of half-time shows that college bands still perform, with precision marching between set forms, playing traditional marching band instruments.

Even then, the practices and expectations were changing. One year, for example, we used an amplifier in order to allow a piccolo player (also our drum major) to play a solo during a John Philip Sousa piece. (Our band director was a huge Sousa fan). Other bands sometimes threw in fun moments, like a dancing drum line. But those were the exceptions, not the rule.

Now, all these years later, inspired by innovative techniques and driven by a new generation of directors, the field performances most closely resemble a theatrical performance. Nearly every band wheeled out set pieces that sometimes acted as mere backdrops and sometimes became a part of the action, such as a pirate ship that could be stood on by members of the color guard. Often, band members would dance while playing or move between their marks either at double-time or with dramatic movements, such as lunging like zombies for a show set in a world overcome with those monsters.

The use of traditional marching band instruments has also been augmented. Some bands used amplifiers to play sound effects, or recorded narration, or to allow them to field an electric guitarist and bassist, for example.

My son's band performed a show called "Desperado," with a cowboy theme that included wooden fences that could be wheeled around. They wore black cowboy hats and western-style shirts with their black uniform pants. The color guard wore pink hats and a fabulous pink and purple jumpsuit with dramatic white blousey sleeves.

At the beginning of the show, many of the band members danced without their instruments, modern style, with graceful reaching arms, telling a story with their entire bodies. My son was one of this group and was proud to have been picked. He and his partner in the color guard appear in a photograph that was published by the Cavalcade of Bands, who run the competitions.

As my son explained, the story was a day in the life of a Western town, with a welcoming open number, active midday -- including a trombone solo with color guard framing the soloist with pink fans -- and finally, an end to the day, where everyone falls down again, asleep.



My son leans on one of the wooden fences, while his dance partner stands on it from behind with one foot on the bottom rung, one knee resting on the middle rung, and her large pink fan poised in her right hand.

~~~

My son relates another fun memory from the year, where they were practicing their field show. One of the trumpets made her way towards a chair that marked where one of the fences would be and, in a moment of whimsy, tried to vault the chair but collapsed on the ground instead.

Hearing about this later, one of the freshman trumpet players scoffed that vaulting a chair was easy. He tried to do so and also failed spectacularly. Seeing this, one of the tallest trumpet players announced he would jump up onto the chair in a squat. He, too, failed.

My son, not to be deterred by the previous failures, took his own shot at jumping onto the chair in a squat. "It was easy," he told me. That, however, was when the drum major took notice of what the trumpet line had been doing and shouted at them to "Stop jumping on chairs."

Sheepishly, they returned to their line, finding it very hard to play with smiles stretching across their faces.

~~~

I know we worked very hard on our routines and took competition seriously, but I'll be honest that I have no clear memory of any scores or standings. Instead, I remember moments like the one my son shared with me: silly jokes, shared between band mates.

Buying "Happy Meals" at a McDonald's on the way to a competition and playing with the toys in the bus aisles.

My friend and I making our fingers dance like can-can dancers on the back of the bus seat.

Crushing on one of my fellow clarinet players, and then finding out a different clarinet player was crushing on me. (He was a nice guy, but was relegated to friend material by my adolescent brain.)

Some of the more entertaining moments on the field, such as the show where we got to pull little flags out of sleeves and wave them in a pattern. Or "Fanfare of the Common Man," where our trumpet soloist always blew the judges away.

Or stories people would relate of judges being so close to them on the field that they nearly had to run over them to make their marks. (These days, I've been told, judges stay more to the sidelines to avoid collisions, which happened more often than you'd think.)

Along with the camaraderie, marching band heralded my growing awareness that I could be myself, as silly or as different as I wanted to be, and be accepted. Along the way, I developed newfound independence and confidence. I think for many of us, band was our safe space.

~~~

The announcer gets closer to the top. Whatever they get now, they've well-surpassed their original scores this season. I think of that first show, when they all seemed green and uncertain, compared with tonight's performance, where they hit their marks with precision. Their dance routines seemed more heartfelt than ever before, and the music both powerful and sweet.

So as the numbers climbed higher, and as they surpassed some bands they'd lost to in earlier competitions, our excitement grew. Then, the announcer said, "Placing 4th in the Liberty A division, scoring a 93.563," and read the name of our son's high school. Even from the stands, we could see the explosion of cheers and bouncing brown-pink-and-black figures.

The band director and assistant band director, who'd joined us in the stands, told us it was the best the school had done in nearly 10 years!

After all the competition results were delivered, the announcer invited all the bands to run onto the field and celebrate with their band leaders. Which, of course, they did. And since we were no longer needed that evening, the band director dismissed my husband and me. We walked through the cold November air on our creaky middle-aged legs, full of joy for the young people running like gazelles across the white-lined green field, riding waves of friendship, self-confidence, and excitement.


At left is me in my sophomore year of high school, wearing my black and orange band uniform and holding my clarinet. At right is my son, KFP, who's currently a sophomore, wearing his red and black band uniform and holding his trumpet.


* Unlike many other schools, my son's high school has two distinct marching ensembles. The football marching band is mandatory for anyone who will perform in the concert band the rest of the year. There are also color guard, who take the course as an elective, I believe. The football marching band learns a traditional half-time show, marching in formation to music. They participate in a couple community activities, as well, including an annual parade and performing at the Memorial Day ceremonies.

The competition marching band is voluntary and treated as an extracurricular activity instead of a class. There are additional practices, including an additional week of summer band camp. They learn a separate marching show, which is more theatrical and uses props, set pieces, and special uniforms. Throughout the competition season, they compete against other bands of similar size, gaining points that dictate their start for later competitions. For each performance, they receive points for Music, Visual, and General Effect, with penalties subtracted.

This is my first entry for Week 16 of LJ Idol: Wheel of Chaos. This week we have to write two entries. The topic for this one is "kako no ashioto," a Japanese phrase which translates to "footsteps of the past" or "footsteps in the past."

This morning, my son, KFP, asked me what life was like before the Internet. My husband and I explained several differences: talking with friends on a landline; looking up information in a library or with an encyclopedia (often several years out of date); planning weekend activities by using the newspaper's movie ads; reading magazines like "Consumer Reports" for product reviews.

KFP wouldn't remember, but we vacationed in the 1980s for one week when he was a toddler.


The private cabin we rented near Raystown Lake, seen from the back yard. Some people are on the second-floor deck, leaning on the wooden railings. Surrounding the wooden structure is a large grassy back yard and many deciduous trees, aleaf with green.


At least, that's how my family jokingly referred to that vacation: staying for a week at a rented cabin on Raystown Lake in Central Pennsylvania, without WiFi or cable television. With its country kitsch decor, the cabin, indeed, seemed frozen in time in about 1985.

Ever since we've been adults, my siblings and I have often planned a summer vacation together, inviting our parents along. Though they were divorced, my parents remained friends and could cohabitate in a large rented house along with the rest of us.

My brother's kids were about 5 and 7 at the time, and my son, KFP, was just over a year old and still a wobbly walker. My brother arrived early and saw that the cabin had virtually no baby-proofing. The baby gate we'd told him we were bringing would never have bridged the opening at the top of the double stairway on the second floor.

So, my brother pushed the wide coffee table in front of the stairs to serve as a movable barrier, after counseling his kids that they were not allowed to stand or play on the coffee table. It was the sort of solution that we Gen Xers could remember from our own childhoods, and it worked surprisingly well. Looking back, it was a little fraught with possible danger, but we were all younger then, and the adults either moved the table aside or were able to climb over it (!!!).

Fortunately, we didn't have to use those stairs very often, because there was also a flight of steps to the second-floor deck, which was easy to close at the top with our baby gate. So, just in case you feared that this story would end with a precipitous fall down the stairs, rest assured that it does not.

The second floor was where we spent most of our time, as it housed the kitchen, living room, most of the bedrooms, and a bathroom. (In fact, I don't really remember the ground floor, because I think the bedrooms on that floor were occupied by my brother's family.) Hewn of wood, the walls reminded us of the wood paneling in our childhood living room.


My dad reads a book to KFP, who had hair curling around his ears before his first haircut. My dad was wearing his favorite light-blue polo shirt, which was his way of dressing casually. You can see a little of the wood paneling behind him.


This is perhaps a good time to remind people that, contrary to popular belief about the 1980s, most households didn't immediately update their homes to reflect a 1980s aesthetic of bold geometric shapes and bright colors. If, like my parents, they purchased and decorated their home in the 1970s and then had children, when the 1980s rolled around, and those kids were either pre-teens or teenagers, the 1970s decor still covered the walls. Or, in the case of wood paneling, it was built-in and not easy to change.

During our 1980s vacation, we soon realized that activity planning was more challenging. My sister had wisely printed out some options, but when we wanted to find out about hours or parking, we had to call the attractions using the landline. (Most of our cell phones didn't work when we were at the cabin.)

For the first time in at least a decade, we found ourselves looking through the phone book when we needed, for example, to find a local grocery store. We showed my brother's kids how it worked, but I'm not sure any of it made sense to them. KFP, of course, was too young for such considerations and was spending his time playing with toys on the floor.

We spent some sunny days on beaches along the shores of Raystown Lake, but we were sometimes more surprised by dicey weather than we would have been if our cell phones had given us access to the Minutecast rain predictor from our favorite weather app. Watching the clouds roll in and the sky darken, then gathering our stuff to go, felt more like old times. Look, kids. Weather prediction once you left the house meant relying on your eyes, your ears, and your gut.


KFP in his blue wet-suit style swimsuit and floppy blue beach hat, with a blue pail on the beach at Raystown Lake on a sunny day.


When we had a completely rainy day, we discovered the problem with satellite TV. Turns out that the very weather that brought us inside to the television was super-bad for satellite service. We gave up on broadcast television and perused the collection of VHS tapes on a nearby bookshelf. I forget what we chose, but it was a 1980s family movie that the adults had seen many times. Soon, all the kids lost interest, so we turned it off and played some board games.

Again, not too different from a rainy weekend in the 1980s where, if you had no other plans, and nothing good was on TV, you'd pull out Scrabble, or Trivial Pursuit, or my family's favorite, Parcheesi. I would often win Parcheesi, due to both luck and my intuitive form of strategizing. My Dad would usually win Trivial Pursuit, due to his mastery of Baby Boomer facts which, at the time, made up the bulk of the questions.

Both my husband and my sister's husband had to spend some time away from the rest of the family that week, because they had to do things for work. Because they couldn't connect at the cabin, they drove to a local cyber cafe to get their work done. And yes, it was 2011, and while most cyber cafes had shuttered by then, this town had such negligible Internet access that this one did good business. (It's like a time capsule within a time capsule.) Who knows if it would still exist today, in 2025?

Being cut off from the rest of the world didn't bother the kids back then the way it might today. None of them were old enough to have their own cell phones, especially not my sister's first-born, who was still growing inside her mother. None of them relied on electronic devices for entertainment yet. In fact, my brother's kids enjoyed reading to their little cousin. We took long walks together and found a toad in the backyard. My mom spent hours sitting at a picnic table in the grassy yard, drawing what she saw.


A greenish-brown toad perches on my nephew's thumb, who is otherwise not visible in this shot.


My mom, wearing a light blue bucket hat, with her paper taped to a portable board, lost in thought as she works with colored pencils.


My mom's pastel drawing, labeled "Farm Wagon," of one of the old decorative wagons that sat at the edges of the lawn.


We spent a very silly evening convincing my son that all of our noses made different sounds. He toddled between us, beeping our noses to see what sounds we'd make: from a high-pitched beep to a loud honk. When nighttime came, he didn't want to go to sleep while everyone was still hanging out, and he would writhe on the couch as he tried to keep his head up. But I would gently remove him from all the noise and fun and take him to the bedroom, where I'd coax him to sleep with mommy hugs and songs. (And, admittedly, watching his favorite "Caillou" DVD on a portable player I'd remembered to bring.)

While he doesn't remember it, for that week, my son experienced the good parts, and some of the bad parts, of the 1980s. You had to work harder to find reliable information and hope that things hadn't changed by the time you used that info. You were largely cut off from the larger world, but if you had supportive family and friends around you, you didn't mind as much. Consuming media wasn't always an option, unless you owned the media in question. When bad weather hit, you'd be even more isolated, but board games often came to the rescue.

Reflecting further, I'd add that you didn't have an easy way to connect with people outside of your immediate circle or area. So, for example, while I shared my love of "Monty Python" with my brother and a couple of friends in high school, it wasn't until I went to college that I realized how many other fans existed, not just at Penn State, but around the world.

For anyone who differed from the mainstream, it was harder to feel seen. I kept a lot of my opinions to myself back then, not realizing that some of my high school classmates were doing the same thing. Only when we connected later on Facebook did I realize that we'd all been just a little bit intimidated to let our freak flags fly.

I'd tell my son that, if he really wanted to experience the 1980s, we could try to book that cabin again. But I realize now that wouldn't quite be the same. It's different to go to a remote location when you're used to being connected than it was for us to live that way, back in the day, when we'd never known anything different. As we'd trodded at a snail's pace through the 1980s, we saw the bright shapes of the future expanding around us as a glorious promise.


My husband walks with KFP, who was just a little nugget back then. My husband had to lean down to grasp his hand. KFP turns back to look at the camera with a curious glance.

This is my entry for this week of therealljidol (LJ Idol Survivor). The topic this week is "You Shook Me."

As I punched in at the blue-plated metal time clock, Alistair* strode toward me with his long legs, intoning my name with a sing-song pitch that could turn anything into an insult. My skin crawled.

I slipped my time card back into its slot as quickly as I could, intent on slipping away to the dish room. But I wasn't quick enough. He stepped in front of me, asking me with a sneer what I'd done last night. It felt less like small talk than an accusation, and I didn't understand why. Something in his tone turned a simple question into an interrogation.

Alistair towered over me, his square jaw set in his long face, his limp brown hair falling in his eyes beneath the white dining hall cap. I wanted nothing more than to get away from him.

"Have fun in the dish room," he snarled after me as I scurried away. "I'll send some dirty trays your way." Alistair was a busser, which was a coveted position. Unlike the dish-room people, who were rooted to our spots and spent our shifts wearing plastic aprons that got splattered with other people's half-eaten food, he wore a clean white cloth apron and bustled about the dining hall, filling empty soda machines, and bringing clean racks of dishes and glasses from the dish room into the dining area as needed.

This evening, I was stationed in the dirty section, where we took trays from a conveyor belt, banged them over a trough, and placed them in racks to go through the automatic dish washer. Usually, I preferred the clean side, where you pulled the steamy-hot dishes off the automatic line and stacked them in rolling boxes to be delivered to the food line. Tonight, however, I was glad to be thumping dirty plates over a trough, because it meant I wouldn't have to deal with Alistair.

Whenever I was stacking clean plates, every time he passed through, he found a way to get in my face. He'd "accidentally" bump into me when my back was turned, so that I was in danger of dropping the heavy, stoneware plates and breaking them. While we didn't have to reimburse the dining hall for broken plates, we did have to immediately shut down the line and clean up the broken shards. Fortunately, I'd never dropped one, but that was no thanks to Alistair.

If he wasn't physically invading my space, he was staring me down with a predatorial gaze, throwing off a sneered comment, sometimes half-heard in the din. At least, when I was bullied in grade school, I'd had options. I could run away, or find a friend, or rush to class to sit in my safe assigned seat. But working here, I was locked into one location, designated by the manager to stay a sitting duck for the entire three-hour shift. And since the dish-stacking station was for a single worker, I didn't even have witnesses.

It had gotten to the point where I dreaded coming to work. Each time the weekly schedules came out, I frantically scanned them to see if Alistair was working with me. If he was, my stomach turned itself in knots for hours before I had to turn up. I thought about quitting.

One night, he was waiting for me outside the locker room, right after I changed for my shift. "Nice pants," he snarled, gesturing at my baggy red jersey pants, which I wore because I didn't care if they got covered with hamburger bits and salad dressing.

"Whatever," I threw back, walking briskly past him down the empty hall.

"Why are you walking so fast?" he asked. "Afraid of me?"

Yes, I realized. I felt a desperate need to put distance between myself and this man. My fellow co-workers had already gone upstairs to clock in. I'd been delayed because my locker wouldn't close right. Would anyone even hear me from down here in the basement, through the thick, brick walls and concrete slab floors?

As I picked up my pace, he did, too. My legs no match for his stride at walking pace, I began to run. He picked up the pace, too, and my heart sank into my stomach.

"Stop running!" he yelled. He was only a few steps behind me. In another few paces, he could have grabbed my arm.

As I turned a corner, I nearly bumped into Laurie from the Cook's Help station. We often worked together in Cook's Help at Saturday breakfast, where I got to work with food on the more appetizing side of the process. Even though Laurie and I didn't normally chat much, I cheerfully asked how she was doing. How was the Art History class that she loved to talk about? I steered her into conversation about the Renaissance period as we walked up the steps to the hallway behind the kitchen where the time clock resided. Frustrated, huffing loudly, Alistair ambled past us. He turned to throw me a glare as he passed.

I dallied with Laurie near the time clock, asking her if she'd be on shift Saturday, making chit-chat about the weather, until Alistair had no choice but to proceed to the Busser's closet to pick up his apron and check the clipboard for his tasks.

Dropping my card briskly into its slot, I called "See you later" to Laurie and walked with purpose down the hallway to the manager's office. Knocking on the light-wood frame of her open door, I asked, "Can I talk to you?"

Mrs. Hanlon++ had always intimidated me, with her no-nonsense attitude. Her ash-blonde, straight hair pulled into a long, shapeless ponytail, her large rounded glasses perched on her aquiline nose, always wearing a baggy suit in nondescript earth tones, Mrs. Hanlon clearly had no time for frivolity. Nothing so pointless as a smile ever crept across her thin lips, at least not in my months of being her employee.

"Yes?" she said, with the air of someone who had just been interrupted from something terribly important.

My hand trembling involuntarily, I took a deep breath and muttered quietly, "It's about Alistair."

Mrs. Hanlon's stern visage melted subtly, and I saw concern creep into her eyes. "What about Alistair?" she asked.

"He's -- he's been bothering me," I confessed.

Gracefully, she hopped to her feet, gesturing me to take a seat in the blocky wood upholstered chair in front of her desk, as she swept to the door and closed it with a quiet click.

Back in her seat, she said simply, "Tell me what happened."

The words tumbled out of my mouth: the threatening air he exuded, the way he hovered around me like a vengeful ghost. (In those days, I didn't know to call it stalking.) I ended the saga with, "I didn't know if I should say anything. He never threatened me, or made sexual jokes, or hurt me. I didn't know if it qualified as harassment."

She said simply, "It's harassment if it makes you feel uncomfortable." Reassuringly, she told me she'd take care of it. She promised me that he'd talk to him and that, if he ever did it again, she'd fire him on the spot.

I exhaled.

In the weeks after my talk with Mrs. Hanlon, our schedules changed. I rarely, if ever, got a shift that coincided with Alistair. When I did, he looked through me as if I didn't even exist, briskly walking past me, all business. I still got a sinking feeling in my stomach when I caught sight of him, but at least I knew I was no longer alone. Mrs. Hanlon had my back.

~~~

Though I rarely think of Alistair any more, I think of Mrs. Hanlon every time the issue of harassment surfaces. I've repeated her words to many people who may have needed to hear them: "If you feel uncomfortable, it's harassment." And while my memories of the exact details of what Alistair said and did to me have faded like a long-ago scraped knee, I can remember the exact quality of light in Mrs. Hanlon's office that afternoon. I can remember exactly what she was wearing and how her face softened, looking at young adult me, a little wavy-haired 19-year-old, trembling in the late afternoon golden sun through her many large windows.

Because of Mrs. Hanlon, the moment that shook me did not break me but only shored up my foundations.


*Not his real name

++ Not her real name

Me participating in the Penn State Monty Python Society's Mall Climb in the spring of 1990 with (left) Damon Buckwalter and (right) Pete Uoth. I don't have a lot of pictures handy from the time this story took place, so it's sort of ironic that the one I do have shows me loosely tied to Pete. I assure you, though, it was consensual, and he and I were just friends. You can see he carefully kept his hands in his pockets.

Findlay Commons at Penn State in 2012, before renovation. It looked like this when I worked there in the late 1980s to early 1990s.

If not for the kidnapping of Harold the rubber hand puppet, I might have gone a few more years before learning about casual racism.

Harold's abduction took place in the final legs of a legendarily abysmal family vacation. After contending with a car breakdown that scuttled our plans to stay in our camper, leading to us tent camping out of my mom's Ford Escort instead, we had also dealt with a gas leak in Old Orchard Beach, Maine, our final destination. Then, on our return home, we stopped in Boston, where my dad ignored the guidebooks and parked on the street instead of in a secure parking garage.

When he returned to our car to feed the meter, he discovered that someone had smashed the back window and stolen a few items, including an Apple laptop case that my brother used to store his favorite items, such as a well-worn deck of cards, a variety of cassette tapes, and Harold.

This meant that we got to see an unexpected tourist location, as my dad put it: the inside of a police station. The police officer was no-nonsense and, when he leveled with us that we probably wouldn't get our items back, he seemed surprised by my little brother's tears.

"But what about Harold???" my brother wailed.

My dad asked if they had any leads. The police officer told us that a young Hispanic man had been spotted in that area that morning, tossing items pilfered from cars into an accomplice's pick-up truck. There was reason to believe it was the same ring that had been operating in that area of late, stealing items from cars. This would also explain why, when we parked, there was already broken window glass on the sidewalk.

With resignation, we slouched back to our car to complete our journey, trying to make ourselves feel better about it all by telling each other jokes about the awful trip.

~~~

A few months later, I wrote a humorous column about the vacation for the high school newspaper, lampooning it so hard it could have starred Chevy Chase. Describing the Boston theft, I referred to a "Puerto Rican with fast running shoes" making off with the loot. The completed column was one of the first humor pieces I'd had published, and I was proud.

That was, until my Language Arts student teacher, Miss Diaz, pulled me aside a few days later. She had the article in front of her and asked me to sit down. Then, she pointed to the paragraph about the robbery. Gently, she explained that what I'd written could be considered a negative stereotype of people of Latin descent.

Flummoxed, I told her that I'd based it on an actual description from the Boston Police. Well, except for the fast running shoes.

Miss Diaz nodded quietly, then told me that wouldn't be clear to readers because of the over-the-top tone of the piece. Instead, she said, it would more likely confirm negative views that people might already have about people from Puerto Rico. People with Hispanic names. People, I suddenly realized, like Miss Diaz herself.

In an instant, I went from being proud of my piece to being deeply ashamed of it. And I was equally confident that Miss Diaz, whose bright smile and enthusiasm made our L.A. classes seem special, would never see me the same way.

What must it have been like for Miss Diaz, teaching in my nearly homogenously white school? I'd heard rumors about exchange students finding threats written on their lockers, but Elenio, the Brazilian exchange student who stayed with family friends, never had it happen to him. Then again, he was a football player who instantly fit in with the popular crowd. He looked so much like Elvis that it had become his nickname. But what about Carolina from Venezuela, the quiet girl with severe straight bangs and acne? What was my school like for her?

As a chubby geek with glasses, I'd been picked on for my own essential traits. Still, I could only imagine a fraction of what they must have faced. There was so much I didn't know. Did Carolina cry in Miss Diaz's classroom during lunch?

And what about the kids who'd lived their whole lives here, but didn't fit the prevailing ethnicity? What about Dee and Gladys, African-American girls in my class? I was on good terms with them, but had I ever said anything accidentally prejudiced? How had I lived 16 years of life without thinking about that?

All I could do, in that moment, was apologize to Miss Diaz and assure her I wouldn't make another mistake like that. And while I wish I could say that was true, that I never again unconsciously used a stereotype or accidentally offended, I can say I've kept listening and learning. That's all you can ever really promise to do.

Thank you, Miss Diaz. And thank you, too, Harold, wherever you are.