I am dating myself right here, right now, with my next sentence but I don't care -- here goes!
Do you remember Reader's Digest? I don't even know if it still exists because I haven't seen a copy of it since I moved to Seattle the first time in 1984. But growing up in the anti-intellectual but striving quarters of the Catholic, Euro-ethnic lower-middle-class, Midwestern U.S.A. division, I saw it every month for 25 years.
Articles abounded on God and positive thinking. There were also generally unfunny anecdotes called Laughter is the Best Medicine, word games my mother and my aunt Dot, both subscribers then, loved, and medical pieces I read as horror stories: "I am Joe's kidneys." Just reading about the problems our internal organs might develop as I aged kept me awake nights.
But there was one monthly feature in the old Reader's Digest I did enjoy. It was called, if memory serves, "The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met" or some such. In this monthly feature folks would hearken back -- now there's some Digestese -- to their experiences with an early teacher, or an Army sergeant who prepared them for World War II. I loved reading this feature. I remember thinking, 'I don't know anyone remarkable. It isn't fair. Why can't I meet Sgt. Jenkins or Mrs. Whacker, fourth grade teacher extraordinaire'?
There isn't all that much about passing 60 years of age and speeding up on the Highway to Heaven, Hell or Nowhere (take your pick, it's all opinion until we each go personally to what Shakespeare called "The Undiscovered Country") I enjoy, but I must admit I do get a kick out of filling a beer glass with cabernet or pinot noir. Depending on finances, it could be a juice glass of garden variety merlot, but you get the picture. There I am getting gently buzzed and walking down into the tangled garden of my past.
Because I was not, as one ad agency boss who hired me in 1985 explained, after hiring me despite my lack of ad copy-writing experience, "I could tell Wilken was not a cookie cutter kind of guy," I have met a squadron of unforgettable people including the guy who hired me at Metropolitan Advertising.
I stayed there a year; the man who hired me moved to Boise. But he returned here a few years later, in a stolen car he'd killed the 77-year-old owner to obtain, with a car full of ropes and some chloroform. Detectives claimed he planned to kidnap his estranged ex-wife and convince her to re-love him. The man who introduced me to copywriting is still in the Idaho Penitentiary, I think. At least that's where he was sent, given a life sentence, for his odd method of procuring an automobile for his romantic ride back into his ex-wife's life.
In a more Digesty vein, in 17 years of schooling I collected a few unforgettable teachers of my own. Miss Robb taught fourth grade in the Catholic grammar school where I sat for eight years disguised to myself as a child. Miss Robb was middle aged and doughy looking. She lived in a trailer near the school with her elderly mom. Miss Robb didn't stick to message very well and often segued into stories about her visitations from God. That's right, the Big Guy we were indoctrinated about daily at St. Anne's, He Who knew and saw all, visited Miss Robb and her mom. She had proof. She said His Holy Hand Print was burned into their kitchen table.
I understood I shouldn't tell my parents about the Robbs' visitation, but one of my less political classmates did tell. It wasn't long before the priests and nuns who ran our little concentration camp (my view, not this paper or the editors - my mom at 91 still attends Mass multiple times each week, so stuff it) were interviewing all of us. We all caved and before long we had a new, slightly more secular teacher. Belief and the Baltimore catechism were huge at St. Anne's, but hey, there were evidently limits. Me, I always wanted to see the table but I never did.
Sister Jean Clare taught seventh and eighth grade. She was a short fat woman who took no prisoners. She swung on junior miscreants with whatever was in her hands. And woe betide the child who ran home and said, "Sister hit me, Mommy." The parental response was universal in our neighborhood. "What did you do? Sister wouldn't hit you unless you deserved it." Then we would get hit again, or worse, told, "Wait until your father gets home."
We kids all understood that telling our first and second generation parents that a nun or priest did something wrong was tantamount to treason. So the rule, just like the pre-FBI-infiltrated mafia was simple: Say nothing. Omerta.
Sister Jean Clare remains remarkable in my failing memory for her approach to us. She truly believed we were all sinners and fledgling evil doers. She seemed to truly enjoy telling us what punishments awaited us in the next life -- adulthood -- and what came after, Hell if we didn't mend out ways. It's hysterical to me thinking back. We had no Internet porn, no drugs other than an occasional beer we stole from home and despite a lot of braggadocio we were all, boys and girls, virgins. None of it mattered. Jean Clare was on the march and we were the heathens in her path.
I like to think of what modern Seattle parents would make of her if they ever audited one of her classes. But it is not to be. She's 110 if she's still throwing erasers somewhere, which I find doubtful.
There's more unforgettable folk in my past, many more. Heck, we're not even out of grade school but my time here today is up.
Maybe another time I'll tell you about Father Roc, the Franciscan geometry teacher of my sophomore year in high school who featured the worst comb over I have ever seen. He hit me in the side of the head with a wooden geometric tool whose name escapes me, possibly because I am suffering from Catholic high school PTSD.
But I was not alone. Father Roc spread it around. But that's another story about those unforgettable folks who shaped me or at least bruised me up a little.[[In-content Ad]]
