by Mark Falanga
The block-party committee—yes, there is a committee, because very little is spontaneous in your suburb and most things are planned and organized by planning committees—has asked Matt if he would play music this year. He said yes, and this is big stuff because Smashing Pumpkins is the hottest rock band in the world. Word of this has spread fast among your neighbors. You have plenty of lead time on this one to initiate many conversations with your non-block friends. You are confident that, no matter what caterers anyone hires, how many ponies they bring in, how large the tent is, or whatever the theme of the jump house may be, you will have something cooler going on at your block party this year. You are confident that you will win any block-party competitive discussion this year.
On this particular July Saturday, late in the afternoon, your block will have its annual summer block party. You get barricades from your suburb's department of public works in the morning. Your first task is to barricade the street from any cars. The kids will emerge and begin riding their bikes and start playing volleyball, boccie, Ping-Pong, Frisbee, and all the other games that come out for this big event. You help with the games, the tables, and anything that you can. Matt is out, too, and he is setting up the speakers, the amplifiers, and the instruments. There are wires and wires, going from his house to the sidewalk in front of his house. It takes a couple of hours to set up this music equipment. Why, you think, as he is setting up this equipment, does it always take bands so long to get set up? Can't anyone figure out a faster way to do it?
Anyway, there it is, right on the sidewalk, a complete setup for the band, and not just any band but Smashing Pumpkins, one of the few bands that have emerged in the past thirty years that you have heard of. You are very appreciative of your good friend Matt for doing this. Because, when you think about it, what will be a block party for everyone else will be an evening of work for Matt; Matt performing at your block party would be the equivalent of you being invited to next year's block party to entertain your neighbors by, say, describing a clever and complicated deal structure that you have created to buy a building, at a fair price, from a seller who was not contemplating a sale.
Anticipation builds all day. Usually, when the block party starts at 3 P.M., people start emerging from their houses at 3:30 or so. This year is different. It is 2:30 and the crowd is already bigger than it was last year. The talk at this event is almost all about Matt and his famous band. Matt is there and you hang out with him. You thank him for working when you will be partying and you try not to embarrass yourself by revealing to him how little you know about Smashing Pumpkins. You try to keep the conversation with Matt general, really general, so that it does not become obvious how ignorant you are about what it is that he does. Then you think that he probably knows less about what you do than you know about what he does, and that maybe it's not such a big deal after all. He may, in fact, be taking the same approach with you, now that you think of it.
The party is in full swing now and you are psyched. The games are rolling and the egg toss has just concluded. The food is coming out and it is nearing 8 P.M., the hour when Matt and his famous band will begin playing.
However, the thing that you have observed about bands is that they never start playing when they say they will. Eight P.M. in your world means 8 P.M. At about 8:35 P.M. or so, four guys emerge with Matt out of Matt's house, with their work clothes on. They all wear mostly tight black clothes and seem overdressed for this warm July evening. One, not deterred by the ninety-degree evening with 90 percent humidity, wears a checkered flannel shirt. No wholesale suits in this crowd.
They approach their instruments and you can feel the excitement build among your neighbors and all the other people you do not recognize as your neighbors. Just as they start playing their first number, “Today,” probably the only song that you will recognize on this night, one of your son's friends comes running over to you. “Blake and Ryan just ran into each other on their bicycles,” your kid's friend says. “I think that Blake is hurt,” he concludes. You run over to where the kids have gathered and, sure enough, your kid, with his bike on the ground and his front wheel twisted, is there, along with his friend Ryan and Ryan's damaged bike.
Your kid has really hurt his arm and his knee is scraped up badly. He needs to go home to get an ice pack on his arm and take care of his cut. And someone needs to take him. You look around for a volunteer and realize that you are the man for this job. Going for the quick turnaround, you carry him home, quickly clean the cut, and put ice on his arm. He starts to feel a little better, but he does not want to go back to the block party. In your effort to persuade your son to return to the party, you tell him that this world-famous band is playing. “Smashing Pumpkins,” you tell him. “Haven't you heard of them?” It takes you fifteen minutes, but you convince him to go back.
You start heading over and you see your wife coming toward you with your daughter. “It is an hour past Bianca's bedtime and she is a wreck,” your wife announces to you. Hearing this makes your son want to go back inside, because he does not want his sister getting any special mom-attention that he is not. Your wife asks you to come along to help put the kids to bed. The music gets fainter as you get closer to your house.
You all go home and you volunteer to put your son to bed. You figure it will take you ten, maybe fifteen minutes max, then you are back on the street jamming with the Pumpkins. You go through your evening ritual: read, lights out, story, and Catholic prayer. He wants you to lie down with him, because the music is keeping him up. You do, and you fall asleep.
You wake up after receiving one of his elbows in your face as he turns in his sleep and you notice it is 2:13 A.M. You slip into your bed, and as you are doing so you wake up your wife. You go to sleep; she cannot. You wake up the next morning and call your neighbors to hear how Matt and his famous band were. They cannot stop raving. “Wasn't that the most unbelievable night?” your friend says, not aware that you left one minute into the first set. “It sure was,” you respond.
One evening, a week later, you are at a non-block friend's house for a dinner party. You are asked about your block party, because he and his other guests are curious about this famous rocker playing with his band at your block party. This will be a question you will be asked frequently over the next year.
You tell them that it was one incredible night that you will never forget.
Learn About the High School Your Kids Will Attend
Because your social circle has been formed mostly around your elementary-school-aged kids' friends' parents, you know only a very few people who have kids in your local high school, and those people are ones who also have kids your kids' ages. Your wife is a little intimidated by the high school. It is big, with something like two thousand kids per graduating class. You have heard that it is intense. That the options and opportunities there are endless. You have heard that selecting classes is like selecting classes at a really good college. There are hundreds of clubs and the sports teams attract the best of the best. The culture, as you understand it, is that doing well is good (and all the kids want to do well), unlike where you went to high school, where if you wanted to do well you would conceal it.
This school is the reason that you and all your neighbors paid three times more for your homes than you would have if they were located in some other suburb, and also the reason that your taxes are the highest in the country and keep getting higher. You realize that the gene pool that this school draws from is one that would make Charles Darwin proud.
While there is something intimidating about this high school, ultimately you see mainly options and opportunities. And your job is to prepare your kids for this high school by exposing them to enough so that they begin to figure out what they want to do by the time they enter high school; you try to help them identify things at which they excel, because it is your sense that everyone excels at something at this high school.
You are at your block party and you meet a new neighbor. He has a son, whom you als
o meet for the first time at this block party, and who is in this high school that your kids will attend. He has just completed his sophomore year, and you talk to him and his dad to get some insight into the experience that you will have when your kids get to high school.
The sophomore tells you of the architecture classes that he is taking and the buildings that he has designed using a computer-aided design (CAD) program. He tells you that he has made a movie in one of his after-school clubs and that he is playing baseball, not on the regular team but on an intramural team, which he describes as fun. You presume that he is athletic and that in any other high school he might have been a starting shortstop, but at this high school, where the grooming for baseball begins with a second-grade Little League draft, he has no chance. He tells you that he has created his own website and that if you want to see his movie, his building, or some other cool stuff you can log on to www.bstauter.com. You do not have a website and you have not designed a building. You have not made a movie. You realize that this sophomore has outstripped you and you have two and a half decades on him. He has won this competition that only you know the two of you are having.
He talks about his course load and tells you that he does homework until at least eleven o'clock each evening. He tells you that all of his friends do, too.
Finally, you ask him about grading and how well, in general, other kids do. He says casually that everyone does well. He tells you that there are a lot of smart people and everyone tries very hard. “You have to,” he says, “just to keep up.” Then he tells you a story that you will repeat often to your other friends, who, like you, do not get much exposure to the high-school scene. He tells you that his cumulative average in his sophomore year was 97.5 out of 100. When you were in high school, that would mean that if you were given 100 things to know you knew 97.5 of them. That would be impressive and it would be something that you would hide from your friends, because you would not want them to get the impression that you were trying too hard.
This sophomore's dad, who is listening to this discussion with interest, then tells you that his son is in the seventy-fourth percentile with his 97.5 grade point average. To you, this means that his son, with his 97.5 grade point average, has a better average than only 74 percent of his two thousand fellow sophomores. It also means that 26 percent, or 520 of them, have a better average then he does, better than 97.5. You are astounded upon hearing this, and your expression shows it. How could you have that kind of grade point average and be in the seventy-fourth percentile? you think. In the high school you attended that GPA would have landed someone in the ninety-ninth percentile.
The kid's dad goes on to explain that there is a weighting system for the level of difficulty of each class; because there are many opportunities for taking college courses and other accelerated classes, many of your neighbor's kid's fellow students have ended up with grade point averages that exceed 100. “It is very competitive,” he says. You wonder where these kids get their competitive spirit.
First thing tomorrow morning, you reach up to your bookshelf for one of your old ninth-grade algebra textbooks and begin reviewing with your second-grade son how to solve for x.
Attend the Fortieth Birthday of Your Neighbor
You are invited to a neighbor's fortieth-birthday party. You are an acquaintance of this neighbor but you have not socialized with the couple, except at an occasional holiday party. They seem like very nice people.
Just about every party that you go to in your suburb is a party where people stand, drink, eat, and move around, or it's a dinner party where you talk mostly to the people at your table. Because your suburb is relatively small, you usually know most people at each party you go to. You arrive at this party, a summer, backyard party. You enter the backyard, and because you are showing up fashionably late a crowd has assembled. You look around and are surprised that you do not recognize one single person at this party of, say, 120 people. However, everyone else but you seems to know one another. In the five years that you have lived in your suburb, this has never, ever happened. You conclude that no one attending this party is from your suburb. Where they are from? You have no idea.
You go to grab a beer so that you can look purposeful at this party where you do not know anyone but your wife, and you soon realize that there is none. You find out that this is an alcohol-free fortieth-birthday party, your second indication within two minutes that this party will be different from all the others you have attended. You substitute an apple juice for the beer, because there is no purple grape juice, either; apple juice is such a great help to you in opening up to a yard full of strangers.
The guests are then asked to take a seat, any seat. There are about twelve or fifteen tables placed in the backyard, each having a capacity of ten people. You and your wife look around to see which group of strangers looks most inviting. You are equally unacquainted with everyone there, so you conclude that one table is like another. You choose the first two empty seats that you see at a table that is close to the back of the house.
You think that you are sitting down to eat dinner, but you are wrong. Larry, the guest of honor, walks up to a microphone that you have not noticed until now and invites his guests to come up and say “what they feel.” What appears to you to be an uncomfortable silence descends over the crowd and you are nervous for Larry that on his fortieth birthday nobody will come up to the mike and say anything, because you know that you will not and you assume that most people are like you. About this, however, you are wrong.
As soon as Larry is seated, a small line of people who have something to “share with you” about Larry begins to form. They say, “I have something that I would like to share with you about Larry.” You have heard people use the word “share” before in this context and it usually means that it will be serious, heartfelt, maybe even spiritual, and not funny.
The first woman, who introduces herself as Addie, describes how she met Larry at a self-help group that was first assembled ten years ago and still meets weekly. She is brought to tears as she describes how loving and caring Larry is, two adjectives that do not come to mind when you think of Larry and two adjectives that you would be surprised to hear from Larry's wife and daughter if they were to go up to the mike to speak, which they do not, or from his ninth-grade son, if he were home from his East Coast military boarding school, which he is not. She goes on to say how Larry was the glue that kept the group together, and that because of Larry they are all better off for it. “Larry is an amazing man,” she says. You look at your wife, who, like you, cannot believe what she is hearing at this fortieth birthday. You look around to the other guests who are seated at your table and you are compelled to look at someone and say, “Can you believe this shit?” But as you prepare to do so you see some of your table-mates drying their tears with their napkins and two others proceeding to line up behind the microphone to “share” their sentiments about Larry now that Addie has broken the ice. At that moment, you decide against asking anyone your question.
You and your wife do not talk. There is no need to. You know that this is one of those occasions where she is thinking the same exact thing that you are, which is, How do we get the hell out of here? In the meantime, you hear about Larry's “men's group,” which spent a week in Oregon. Each member of this particular men's group got up to tell the story of how whining everything they said for an entire week while they were in Oregon made them into better men than they were before. They hugged each other a lot. You are getting a little nervous about the line forming behind the microphone, because to you the stories are getting progressively stranger. You have already learned more about your neighbor than you care to know.
Next, a group of white suburban men (from some distant suburb, you are sure) approaches the microphone and starts playing conga drums. This would be OK, except the conga group has the rhythm of, well, white suburban men. They are members of another men's group that Larry belongs to, a white man's tribal group of some sort. Larry and his tr
ibal men's group start dancing, without any semblance of rhythm, to the beat of the equally rhythmless conga drums. One thing that you are certain of is that, if nothing else, all of Larry's participation in men's groups has given him the self-confidence to be himself in front of a crowd. Before long, most of the 120 guests join Larry and his men's group on the dance floor, each with his or her own interpretation of tribal dancing.
You and your wife take this as your cue to “get home for the babysitter, who has to go home early tonight,” if anyone asks. First, your wife goes unnoticed into the back of the house, then a minute later you follow suit and meet her on Larry's front porch.
It is not too late to catch a movie, your wife says. It is the second time that day that you both agree.
Take a Trip to a Foreign Country
You are of Italian descent and you have twenty-five Italian relatives who live in Italy. One is a cousin who your parents and your aunt and uncle have told you looks, talks, and gestures like you. You talk to your wife about going to Italy and she is excited. Because she is a planner, she goes to the library and gets every book about Italy, and each night when you come home she tells you of all the marvelous things that there are to see and do there.