So there’s one main issue right off the bat:  It’s recommended not to use a child/teen we know, so how does one observe a strange child/teen in public for a time long enough to make notes for 350-385 word exercise, without having their parents call the police??!!

As fortune would dictate, my daughter asked if I could take her to her best friends’ indoor soccer game!  BINGO!

I’m posting both parts in the same blog, so it’s a bit long.  The names are changed to protect me from embarrassing my daughter!

5a: 

KAYLIE  (aged approx 17)

She enters the indoor arena jogging to the players’ side.  Her dark eyes are wide,  offset by her olive complexion. She has a classic Mediterranean beauty. Her tie-dyed green tee shirt, with  “#17 Nari” hand-written in black marker on the back, and her Kelly green, knee-length athletic shorts billow in the breeze brought by her swift gait.  She joins her teammates who’d arrived earlier. The coach approaches, speaks with her privately, a serious expression on his face, his hands on her shoulders.   She doesn’t fidget but seems to listen attentively. 

He smiles finally, pats her on the shoulder and she joins the rest of the team, who greet her excitedly.  She speaks animatedly, seeming to give a pep talk as they nod in apparent agreement.  

As she trots onto the floor for warm-ups, what’s hand-written on the front of her tee-shirt is clear: “CRANK dAT”.  Stretching, she ties her straight, light brown hair in a ponytail almost sub-consciously.  She kicks to her goalie equally strongly with either leg.  She shouts instructions to her teammates regarding positioning, advising them to stay focused.  Her tone doesn’t sound bossy.  She seems to be playing the role of Team Captain.

During the game she takes turns playing defense and offense.  When she’s on offense she looks to pass to an open teammate even more than she attempts a shot on goal. Her eyes never leave the ball as it travels up and down the floor.  On defense, the moment an opponent crosses the centerline heading for her goal, she runs to challenge.  She’s one of the tallest on her team and seemingly one of the oldest, but there are larger players on the other team.  More often than not she ends up with the ball, and uses her slim, muscular legs to kick it far down floor.  She seems to be able to place the ball at will.  One of her kicks flies the length of the floor, ricocheting off of a panel above the goal, landing in play right in front of a teammate who barely misses the goal.

After the victory, as she wipes the perspiration from her forehead with the bottom of her tee shirt, she’s the first to line up to congratulate the other team for a game well-played, slapping hands with her opponents.

A tad dry, no?  But it’s all preparation for

5b

Kaylie

“Late for the championship,” I thought.  “I’m so dead.”      

I saw Coach as I ran across the field.  His face had this weird expression:  a combination of fury and relief.  I almost laughed!

“Kaylie, you know these girls look up to you,” he said on the sideline, looking me straight in the eye.

“My bad, coach.  Won’t happen again.”  (I’m a senior!  LOL!)

“Just get out there,” he said, smiling.

Heather was practically in tears.

“Don’t ever do that to me again” she screamed, grabbing my face in her hands.  “You scared the crap out of me!” 

“Sorry,” I laughed.  “Yo, people, listen up.”   I reached into my bag pulling out the red roses I clipped from the garden before I left the house.

“You each get one,” I said.  “Watch the thorns.  You’re like these roses.  You’re all beautiful and strong, but if anyone tries to mess with you, they’re gonna get hurt.  Right?”

 “Right,” they screamed, and ran onto the field.

It was a tight game, evenly matched.  They were bigger but we were faster.  It was 1-1, less than a minute left.  Heather, a freshman, was tearing downfield on the left with the ball.  Their biggest striker stole the ball and left her eating wet grass.  No whistle!  (C’mon, Ref!!)  I was the only one back so there was nothing between our goalie and me.  She tried to fake right but I was onto her and toed the ball away from her cleanly with my right foot.  Then it got wicked weird.

Time, like, stopped.  I‘m not even kidding.  I could smell the grass.  I could hear dad screaming from the bleachers.  I locked eyes with Heather downfield just left of the goal.  I kicked with my left and the ball like, floated towards the goal.  Their goalie relaxed, thinking the shot was high, but Heather’s eyes locked on the ball.  It hit the crossbar and caromed right to her.  She headed it into the right corner.  The whistle blew.  Game over.  We were champs!!  Woo hoo!!

 “Awesome shot, rookie” I said to Heather, putting my arm around her.

“That pass was amazing,” she said.  I just shrugged.

“And how can you play a whole soccer game and still look hot enough to hit the mall?”

Practice,” I laughed.  “Lots of practice.”

So the question is, did I effectively use the profile I created with my objective observation, to paint a clear inner portrait of Kaylie, keeping in mind that I’m expected to use her language/vernacular/colloquialisms..etc?  Do you, Gentle Reader, get a sense of who she is, inside and out? 

The Metropolitan Hotel, Asbury Pk, NJ, circa 1948

The Metropolitan, just the other day.

RIP Metropolitan Hotel, Asbury Park, New Jersey

I heard a while ago that they were tearing down this old hotel but didn’t think much of it.  I’d heard it’d been empty for 20 years.

Then today, when I saw the picture at the top, I realized that I’d been there almost 30 years ago.  You see my grandfather, better known as Grandpa Harry, used to go there with his 2nd wife, Florence, on the holidays and they’d spend a long weekend ballroom dancing.  Grandpa Harry loved to dance.  Even at 80.  And Florence, who we mostly refered to as “Flo Bat” since she was a bit batty, you could tell she’d been a flapper in the 20′s.  I think Grandpa Harry also loved her big boobs.

(Actually it turned out she was a bit of a cleptomaniac too.  My Unlce Stu used to drop her off at the Mall with a couple of empty shopping bags, then pick her up in the afternoon, shopping bags full.  He’d ask “What’d you buy?”  “Nothing” she’d reply.  But my Grandpa Harry was never short of all kinds of little knick-knacks.  He gave me a mini-pen set once.  They were encrusted with colored rhinestones.  “Where’d you get this?” I asked.  “Florence.  She’s got bags of this stuff!” )

Anyway…Granpa Harry used to pay me $15 (In ’79 that was almost like $50!) to drive him and Flo down to the Metropolitan.  And if I brought my girlfriend he’d always give her $1.  “Here’s dollar” he’d say.  “Buy yourself a pack of cigarettes.”

It really meant a lot to him, that ride.  Looking back, it meant a lot to me as well, even if I treated it then as a bit of a laugh, and a way to make some easy cash.

Grandpa Harry was a jokester, an entertainer.  He could play the piano with his nose, and would at every chance.  He also taught me The Great Napkin Trick at my Bar Mitzvah.   Turn a cloth napkin into a bra, then Mickey Mouse ears.  He loved that.  He was so proud to teach me.  I’ve used it many times over the years, including my 5th anniversary dinner in a posh restaurant in Brooklyn.  The other diners were properly impressed I should say.  Sta got a kick out of it, too!

His favorite joke was

“Did you hear the supermarket took the Butterball Turkeys off the shelves?  Yeah, they forgot to butter the balls!”  He’d even stop the stockboys in the market when I’d take him shopping and tell them.  I thought it was great.

Grandpa Harry had 12 pairs of the same shoes in various colors, pale yellow, pale blue, white, etc, and he had pants and ties to match.

He used to tell me, as I was persuing an acting career, that the best jobs were government jobs.  You work 20 years and retire with a great pension.  As it turns out, he was right.  Those government workers have amazing benefits.  Which is one reason why our state is in such lousy financial shape!

Grandpa Harry died in ’89, 2 years after Sta and I were married.  I have a great picture of him at our wedding.  I’ll have to find it and take a digital photo of the pic and post it.

All he ever wanted was that he was my favorite Grandpa.  My dad’s father, Grandpa Ben, lived in Fla and I rarely saw him and Grandma Diane.  I did love him as well,

but Grandpa Harry, you always were my favorite Grandpa.

Love to all

At first, on Thursday morning I thought I’d simply forgotten it at home.  The conductors are usually cool about not having it if they recognize you, but as it happened neither conductor on the am or pm train was the regular guy and gave me kind of a hard time but did let me go without charging me.  But on Friday, when I’d realized I’d actually lost it, I had to buckle down and use my Emergency tickets I keep in my wallet just in case.

I also filed a lost and found report w NJ Transit, an Exercise in Futility if there ever was one..

So Friday afternoon I’m on my way home, waiting for the conductor to come and take my ticket, when over the train PA comes this announcement:

“Is there a Seth Newfeld (that’d be me) on this train?  If so would you please see one of the employees?”

I went to the conductor, who is the regular guy I know and who, if I’d seen him the previous nite would probably have had it then, and he had both the ID and the train pass.  He said he didn’t want to submit to the lost and found cuz then it would’ve taken weeks to retrieve.

So it was a great weekend after that!  
 

The sky was grey that afternoon in Lakewood.  It was 1967. I was seven, and the sky seemed so close to the water that I felt if I stood up in the rowboat I’d hit my head.  The only sound was the water dripping off the oars as they slowly dipped in and out of the lake.

I have very few memories of spending time with my father when I was a young boy, but this is a vivid one.  The two of us took a rowboat out into the middle of the lake near our house. 

He and I sat in the middle of the lake enjoying the stillness.  I’d never been so far out before.  Looking down at the dark green murky water, I imagined what it might be like to suddenly see a giant head on a long neck slowly rising from the surface.  The Loch Ness Monster!  I told my dad what I was thinking and we laughed at how cool that would be.

Out in the middle of the lake we could see parts of the shore we’d never seen before, and something caught my eye.  It was as if someone put a giant window on the edge of the lake.  I could see something beyond the shoreline.

“What the heck is that,” I asked my father, pointing.

“Let’s go find out,” he replied and started rowing in that direction.

As we got closer I realized we were looking through a tunnel under a bridge on the shore that led to some kind of inner courtyard.  When we reached the tunnel we became very quiet.  We held our breath as we drifted beneath the bridge.

“Whoa,” we said together.

The scene on the other side of the bridge opened up to us.  What we saw took my breath away.  It was a beautiful red brick and white marble courtyard built around a long lagoon that led back under the bridge and out to the lake.  In the lagoon were tall green grasses that stretched high over the boat.  Large green heart-shaped lily pads floated on the surface of the pond, and lotus flowers of purple, white and yellow rose above the pads, untouched by the still, green water. 

There was something very strange floating near the boat and we rowed closer to get a better look.  It was big and round, the size of a beach ball, but it was covered with bumps.  Dad tapped it with one of the oars and it made a hard hollow sound.

“Maybe it’s some kind of huge egg,” I offered.

Dad didn’t reply.  He was looking in another direction and when I turned to see what was there, I saw a beautiful white marble statue of a woman in a long hooded cape with her arms outstretched and her hands open to the sky.

“It’s the Virgin Mary”, he said.  “I think we’d better go.  I don’t think we’re supposed to be here.”

Now I was afraid.  Any moment I expected alarms to ring and voices to shout and police to come and arrest us. 

Dad just turned the boat around and rowed calmly back out to the lake.

Our trip was over, but the colors, smells, sights, and the memory of sharing them all with my father, never ended for me.

So am I jumping on a bandwagon, or clearing off a space on which to create, commune, contemplate….?

True I’d never heard of Weblog until my dear friend ga noted it on her myspace blog, but since I’ve never shunned the opportunity to express myself I figure what the heck.

I’ll start by wishing everyone and anyone a happy new year.  It’s said that the way one begins a year is an indication of how it will progress, and I am going to write more this year so I suppose my ”finding” weblog is a blessing.

Don’t you like the layout?  I love the pic.  It’s what I’d like my backyard to look like!   Or at least I’d love to be able to take a short walk to this bridge.

I’m currently taking a writing course designed to break into the market for Children’s Lit.  I may or may not post actual work here due to possible copywrite issues, not that I think anyone would steal my work..I dunno…anyway my current assignment is a non-fiction article of 500-1000 words on any subject of my choosing, but I have to specify to which market (ie 2-8 yr olds, 10-15, young adult etc) it’s targeted.  I’ve chosen Yoga for Teens, since both things are near and dear to my heart! : p  Not quite 1/2 through it yet but I like it so far.

Peace.