The Magic Dipper

My old friend Lou DeLuca visited me the other day. The fact that I live in Perth, Western Australia and Lou had been living in Norwell, Massachusetts made the visit pretty special. The fact that Lou has been dead for two and a half years made the visit really special.

Let me tell you about Lou. I met him in 1979 during my early high school years. The father of my buddy, Johnny DeLuca, Lou had a vending business and he'd often take us on his route to service the machines. Johnny and I would do the hoisting and Lou would reward us with a meal at an honest-to-goodness diner or hole-in-the-wall ethnic restaurant and then a cultural outing of some sort: a museum, historical landmark or a film like, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

A first-generation Italian, Lou could still speak the street's language and related well to Johnny and his friends. His beard, unkempt hair and... well, I was going to say "considerable girth," but that just sounds too antiseptic and polite. Look, Lou loved the beautiful food that he cooked so well, and he often spoke of his addiction here. Suffice it to say he looked like a working-class Pavaroti (interestingly enough, they were born and died during the same years) or an intelligent version of the late Captain Lou Albano of wrestling fame. His clear and powerful speaking voice coupled with his colorful language completed his formidable presence.

The teenager in me had him boiled down to this: funny fat guy who sells Cokes, candy bars and cigarettes, likes science fiction and still says "Fuck!" like he means it.

So, one day Johnny, who had a kind of nasally voice, tells me that he had to go to some talk with his parents that night and thus couldn't hang out with the rest of us behind the cemetery.

"What kind of talk?"

"Theosophy."

"You mean philosophy." Amongst the group of guys who hung out around Washington Park, I was the motormouthed kid who could've done pretty well academically if I wasn't such a clown in the classroom. John, like the rest of my buddies at the time, ended up in the region's vocational school. Maybe I suffered from a certain arrogance when it came to language.

"No, theosophy."

"John, it's pronounced phil-osophy." I guess I was trying to help Johnny, given that nasally sounding voice and all.

"Theosophy!"

"It's philosophy, trust me. Just drop it."

I ended up going to one of those talks, if not that night then during the next month or so. Johnny was right, of course: Lou, his wife Carole, Johnny, and daughter Jasmine would go to the monthly meetings of the Theosophical Society. They had a shop and meeting rooms on Bay State Road in Boston, on the BU campus. Nice real estate. Johhny and I would, at that age, get a bit antsy during the talks, but liked the fact that we could walk to Kenmore Square.

Well, not only did Lou and family attend those lectures, but Lou was the president of the Boston chapter and often led the talks.

Yeah... I seriously shortchanged the man in my teenage estimation of him.

If you're not familiar with the Theosophical Society and don't have the time to visit the link above, the short version is that they've been around since the late 1800s, are interested in comparative religion and the brotherhood of man and "investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man." There's also a heavy "search for truth" element at play.

Over the next few years Lou and I became very good friends. After I returned home from the Navy to study, I lived in my parents' house for a little while and my relations with my stepfather, Harry, were often strained. Lou and Carole were the friends who understood things, understood me and were straight shooting enough to tell me what I might have done to raise Harry's ire.

I last spoke with Lou in early 2007. Diabetes was doing its nasty job on him, but he still had that youthful voice that never sounded anywhere near 70+ years old. Most likely I was seeking his advice about a particularly bad relationship or something. At the end of our talk he said, "Always a pleasure, Greegor."

I could and will talk more about Lou in the future, but I need to get to the point here.

Every time I walked into their little house on High Street, Lou would greet me with the nickname that he bestowed, "Greeeeeeeee-gor!" More often than not, I'd head over to their kitchen sink and open up the tap. There was a window over it and hanging from the window's frame was an antique water dipper. You know, the kind with the enamel worn away in a couple of places. The DeLucas had well water, and it always tasted so good and cold from that dipper.

It was through the dipper that Lou visited me the other day. Carole had sent it to me, most likely following the phone call I made to her on Christmas Eve... as if hearing her warm Kentucky drawl wasn't enough of a gift. The dipper now hangs from a cabinet handle over my stove, an arm's length away from my sink. I don't have well water and the City of Perth's water isn't particularly cold—especially during the Australian summer.

But it's a magic dipper and the water tastes wonderful from it.

Always a pleasure, Lou.

I've Made All the Mistakes... Now It's Time to Get Things Right

A good chunk of my life is over. In fact, if I'm at the midpoint, then I'm going to have an enviable lifespan—and the guys in my family generally don't have enviable lifespans. Divorced, laid-off and living far from my New England homeland, I've reaped the fruits of my errors over the last half-decade. Several months ago I said to myself, "I better get serious in a hurry." So I decided to become a high school English teacher.

I'll be qualified to stand before a classroom in about five months. One semester to go. Although I make a bit of money by writing copy for a few Australian websites in the retail space, I'm burning through my savings. The local press says that there will be a great need for secondary-level teachers in a few years, but it'll be competitive for a while; finding a permanent teaching gig isn't going to happen quickly.

But I feel like I have a fighting chance in education. That's a new feeling for me.

Truth be told, I stumbled into my career in marketing. After high school I joined the Navy and became a military journalist; my dream at the time was to be a filmmaker, and my recruiter told me that journalists worked around cameras quite a bit. So I ended up reading the news for the Armed Forces Radio and Television Service. The military seemed like the adventurous thing to do and, besides, I was way too much of a cut-up in high school to go to college—and I had the grades to prove it. After my hitch, I went on to the University of Massachuetts to pursue a degree in English. I earned good grades there.

While at UMass I held all sorts of odd jobs: bouncer, barback, courier and emergency room clerk, to name just a few. After I received my degree I simply went on to a slightly better administrative posting at the hospital where I'd been working. Children's Hospital, Boston, to be less vague. Got married. Then went from that slightly better admin job to a start-up internet company that one of the hospital's physicians had founded. Amongst a dozen or so M.I.T. and similar computer hotshots I was woefully out of place and got laid off for the first time since I started working in high school almost 20 years earlier. Ouch.

Not long after that my ex-wife and I discovered that she was pregnant. Yes, it was pretty scary hearing that I was to become a father while there were no paychecks coming in... especially since my biological father, whom I had not seen in almost a quarter century—nor would I ever see again—had been a huge failure. A massive failure. Colossal. We'll talk about that later. Anyway, I got lucky and landed a job that actually made use of my degree about two months after I was shown the door at the internet company. I would be working as an editorial assistant in the marketing/communications department of a large consulting firm.

A few years later I quit that job when my ex-wife and I decided to move to her native Australia. It took me the better part of a year to find a job once I hit these shores. Blessings were counted when I successfully landed a marketing manager gig six weeks after my second son was born. Yes, it was good to be working again, but marketing in Australia, I soon discovered, seemed to have more of an accent on sales rather than communications. The marketing job I had before I left the U.S. was pretty rare in that it was primarily focussed on the written word, so I always felt like an imposter when asked to do anything business-development related in Australia.

Fast forward a year after getting that job and my marriage is over. Three years after that and I'm thoroughly burnt out. I get another marketing job. Nine months later the Global Financial Crisis is in full swing and I fall in its path. Add another 11 months and half a Graduate Diploma in Education (Secondary) and here we are.

There's ad copy that needs to be written right now, and a book that I've been trying to birth for a few years. My writings here definitely fall under the "Procrastination" banner.

It's time to get things right.