Jane Kelly's Blog, page 2

Keeping Secrets

Today I heard Elton John’s Crocodile Rock on the radio  and it brought back memories of a Friday night in 1973. I cannot recall the experience coming to mind for years, more likely decades.

I had gone out after work with a group of friends to a local bar that probably disappeared years ago in the redevelopment of the area. I have no recollection of the name of the place or the exact location. I don’t remember anything about the night except what happened in the parking lot as I was leaving.

For some reason, it fell to me to take a very drunk coworker home. I didn’t know him well, barely at all. He worked in a different section of my department. I thought of him as a kid. He might have been a couple years younger at a point in life where that a year or two felt like a big difference. I’ll call him Ted because I don’t think I ever knew a Ted and this is about keeping secrets. 

He had too much to drink that night. His inebriation made him quiet, almost comatose but left him capable of telling me where he had to go. I hoped. I never found out. As we approached my little VW bug, a big, seventies-style American car screeched to halt across from us. Not in a parking space, but straddling several spots. A woman jumped out of the passenger seat and ran across the parking lot yelling at Ted. 

I cannot describe what followed in any detail. I don’t think I ever fully grasped what was going on. It turned out the woman was his mother and she was hysterical. The man who followed her tried to exert a calming influence on his wife but failed. Miserably. I could say that Ted remained calm but I think he just withdrew. I had never witnessed any scene like that one outside of a movie theater. 

The last thing I remember was Ted’s mother screaming, running across the parking lot and throwing herself in the air. Like a pole vaulter she got her body into a position parallel to the macadam surface and dropped like a rock to the ground. 

I don’t recall leaving but I left. I am sure I was shaken then and months later when I heard Ted had died. I was no longer at that job or living in the area. I cannot remember who gave me the news. My memory says he died in a car crash. A one vehicle accident. Ted might have been drunk. It was at night, so I found it hard to believe he wasn’t. No one said it was suicide but I found it hard to believe it wasn’t.

His death was sad but that is not what breaks my heart when I think of Ted.

When I witnessed the domestic chaos that was his life, my mother had recently died and I was living in one of the largest counties in Pennsylvania, the fifth most populous state in the United States, with my father who had one of the most common surnames in the country. His first name began with R the 18th letter of the alphabet. 

What breaks my heart is remembering that when Ted reached me late on Saturday afternoon, he told me he had spent the day calling every Kelly in the Montgomery County phone book starting with the As. He begged me to keep what had happened to myself. He didn’t have to beg. I didn’t plan on telling anyone. And I didn’t. Not when it happened and not when he died.

Yes, I never told the story at work but keeping his secret was never a hard, or noble, effort. We never had mutual friends, only acquaintances. I am no longer in touch with anyone who knew Ted but I still wouldn’t use his real name.

I don’t recall talking about this incident but I worry that I ever said enough that someone could piece Ted’s identity together. Even now, fifty-one years after he died, I worry. 

I wonder if I did Ted’s memory a disservice by never explaining to those who probably saw him as a problematic kid just how hard his short life must have been. I couldn’t have witnessed the only chaos in his domestic situation. I knew of one close friend he had at work. He must have known what happened, what was going on. As for me, I didn’t volunteer the information and no one would have asked me. I was only part of his life for a few days.

I have not thought of him in years but today I can’t shake the sadness remembering and hoping that during the little time he had left, he trusted that his secret was safe with me.

© Jane Kelly 2024

Three Bag Flight

Valdosta Georgia was in the news today. The reason is politics-related but my Valdosta experience has nothing to do with politics. 

I used to do a lot of business travel - up to eight flights a week. The trips blended together in my mind and were immediately forgotten which is, I believe, the way it should be.

And then, there was a rainy night in Georgia. Atlanta to Valdosta. Probably on American Eagle. Definitely on a small plane. It was, in fact, a dark and stormy night.  I knew how dark it was. I didn’t know how stormy it was. At least, my brain didn’t know. My stomach caught on quickly but did its best to hold on through the short flight.

We were getting close to Valdosta when I turned to the man across the aisle and asked if he would talk to me, just to distract me. He smiled, leaned on his armrest and said something like, “Sure I fly this route a lot.”

I replied. “Never mind. Too late.”

At my meeting the next day when people asked how my fight was, I answered that it was a three-bag flight. Only one exchange was a little different.

“When did you get in?”

“Last night.”

“Did you throw up?”

Looking back, I should have asked why were there three air-sickness bags in my seat pocket.

© 2024 Jane Kelly

Favorite Sons

Anyone remember favorite sons at conventions?  

At the National Convention in 1960 in a speech that felt as if it mentioned his name dozens of times, Mississippi nominated its governor, and favorite son, Ross Barnett, to be the Democratic presidential candidate. For some reason, my family latched onto that idea, but not in a way flattering to the governor. (Barnett was a rabid segregationist.) His name became a household word to cover a variety of negative characteristics usually related to narcissism. Not a common occurrence in Pennsylvania homes.

In the early 1980s, I was in a taxi in Jackson, Mississippi when a car came careening up behind us, barely missed the cab, swerved onto a lawn, drove right across the grass and continued as if the sidewalk were an exit ramp.  

The cab driver did not seem shocked, “That’s Ross Barnett.”  I can’t imagine there would have been a lot of people from the Northeast who appreciated that.  

I could have said, “What a Ross Barnett!” I thought better of it. After all, he was their favorite son. 

Isolated Moments - Tonsils

I am fascinated by the isolated moments my memory can drudge up. Just flashes of a few seconds often with absolutely no context. What prompted my brain to store that moment? How weird that I barely noticed a moment not knowing I would recall it forever!

My tonsillectomy provides context for a few flashes. It is very rare for me to recall several moments from the same event but the time I had my tonsils out provides an exception. I remember three moments from the two day period when I was five years old.

I remember looking out the window of the elevated train as my mother pointed out the studio where they broadcast American Bandstand.  (3 seconds)

I recall a nurse asking me if I didn’t want to eat the ice cream on my dinner tray and saying no although I really wanted it very badly. (5 seconds)

I recall being told to count backward from 100 and can envision the spiral I saw as I slipped into sleep. (3 seconds)

That’s it.

Takeaways:  

My mother took me to the hospital on public transportation but not public transportation that ran anywhere near my house. I thought my mother said we had extra time so even though we wanted to go east, we rode to the west end of the line and then turned around. I never thought about how we got there but realize we probably rode with my father to his office and then got the train. We were on his time schedule. All my life whenever I thought of that moment, I thought we took the ride because my mother liked to go. Anywhere.

In those days a tonsillectomy required overnight hospitalization in the children’s ward. I don’t know what they served for dinner but I didn’t like it. At home there was a rule that if you didn’t eat your dinner, you couldn’t have dessert. I was so ridiculously obedient and honest, I didn’t eat the dessert even though the nurse encouraged me. I enforced the rule myself. I still say I am obedient to a fault. I got Bs in obedience in second and fourth grade, but As every other year. What happened to that rebellious little second grader? At least now I would eat the ice cream.

When administering ether, the doctors asked you to count back from 100. I got to 97. I am surprised a five year could do that but apparently we all could. That was the common practice. The memory of that spiral is enough to make this much-more-than-five-year-old nauseous (or nauseated - I’m not here to argue).

I think I am going to start a list of these flashes. Maybe there is more to them.

Theft protection

I am not often a jerk but I do have the ability to transform into one. I’ll give you an example. 

I used to travel a lot on business. I wasn’t extravagant. In fact, I was a bit cheap with my expenses. Even too cheap. I realized that when I suspected I was the only guest at a Holiday Inn near Dallas who was not a convicted felon. My point is, I didn’t ask for much. I simply did not want to sit in the center seat on any flight.

I had conveyed this request to our travel agent from a pay phone in the concourse at LAX after deplaning from a cross-country flight on which they had pre-booked me a center seat. In my own interpretation of Mark Ruffalo turning into the Hulk, I hissed in my jerkiest voice,  “do not ever book me a center seat again. If you can’t get me an aisle seat, get me another flight.” I slammed the phone into the cradle and said, “What a jerk.” I was referring to myself.

So, it was a very anxious travel agent who called a contact, Caroline, in New York (no cell phones yet) who reached me in Albany to let me know that she could not get me an aisle seat on my flight to LA that afternoon. I was, at best confused.

Are you sure it’s for me?

I don’t remember booking a flight to LA.

Did I say why I am going to LA? 

Caroline investigated and discovered that an assistant in the office had booked the ticket. I have no idea how in those pre-security days she could use it, but she had planned to take the flight to Los Angeles. I assume she had also planned to use the return trip. I don’t know if she had figured out how to process the expense report when she returned. 

Let me digress here to say that filing expense reports was not my strong point. As evidence, I offer an instance when the accountant at another job brought me a check for over $900 (which Google tells me is almost $3K in today’s money) that I had somehow cheated myself out of. The assistant didn’t know that story but she did know me. End of digression.

Meanwhile, back in New York, Caroline was investigating. She called back with two options for dealing with the thief. The choice was mine.

* Cancel the ticket and fire her.

* Let her pick up the ticket and have her arrested.

I thought it over but not for long. 

I told them to cancel the ticket. 

I don’t know what I would have said if she wasn’t in NYC. I didn’t exactly know the procedure but I did know there was a women’s jail on Riker’s Island. I am sure there are vicious criminals that I might not feel bad seeing in Rikers but most humans should not be subject to that jail.

My point? If you feel obligated to commit a crime, let me suggest that you not do it in New York City. Others might not be so reluctant to press charges.

Another, more problematic, point:  being a jerk really paid off.  Nonetheless, I don’t want that to be my standing operating procedure.

A NOTE ABOUT THE PERP:  I never saw her again. I forget her name. What I never forgot is that after she left we found thank you letters she never sent out to applicants for a job opening we had. For that, I can never forgive her.

The Clipboard Era

I once had a coworker who had a theory that worked back in what I’ve come to call the clipboard era. He felt that if you carried a clipboard and behaved professionally, you could pretty much go anywhere.

He proved his theory one day in Washington. We were at an online information meeting of some variety that was sharing the hotel with the annual NABOB conference. 

According to NAOB.ORG, which of course did not exist during the clipboard era, “NABOB is the first and only trade organization representing the interests of African-American owners of radio, television and digital media across the country.” 

We had no desire to intrude, simply to observe. So armed with our clipboards, we found an empty theater where it turned out Al Jarreau was rehearsing. We watched from the balcony. We were the only two people up there. No one questioned our presence. We were carrying clipboards. 

At our next stop, we had to deal with a larger crowd but people moved aside for the folks with the clipboard. We had no problem stepping into the room where all of the media outlets in Washington were waiting for a press conference to begin. As is often said, the excitement was palpable. The anticipation was visible. Everyone who was anyone in local news was gathered for the ground-breaking event.

Who was visiting? The Pope? Queen Elizabeth? Khrushchev arisen from the dead? No. Michael Jackson was in town. 

We were in the capital of one of the largest nations in the world, the alleged capital of the free world. Where else would the press be? It wasn’t as if anything else could be going on in that city.  

It was a long wait for a short appearance. What I remember about Michael is that when he climbed onto the platform at the front of the room, he appeared like a giant. Not because he was tall. The ceiling was oddly low. 

I might be misremembering what he said: not much and substance-free. I don’t recall if he took any questions. I do remember his high voice and satin outfit. I know it was a bright color. I think it might have had epaulets. Everyone loved him. 

We didn’t go to all the conference events. We never would have tried to go to the party that night mostly because we truly did not want to intrude. Also, clipboards were not appropriate and wouldn’t have fooled anyone. Invited attendees would have seen us as press which probably would have gotten us thrown out. 

We didn’t even pass by the door on purpose but as we did we couldn’t help but glance in and catch sight of a pretty high-profile guest. 

I later told a friend about the incident. I had a reputation for running into famous people, so I mentioned Michael Jackson was just about the most famous person in the world. 

My friend:  One person is more famous. 

Me: Who?

My friend: Muhammed Ali

Me: Oh, he was there.

Of course, I can’t attribute the Ali sighting to the clipboard. I count that as an accidental encounter, the kind I am prone to have. 

I am not a crasher of any type—gate, party, wedding. (I did once go to the wrong funeral but that was an accident. I swear.) Although I had fun that day, I wasn’t completely comfortable with the clipboard approach. I never tried it on my own and now it is a relic of the past.  I am glad I got to experience it before modern technology and heightened security moved us into a new era, but once was enough for me. Clipboard or no clipboard, a crasher is a crasher. And, that’s not really my thing.

© 2024 Jane Kelly

Mysterious Job Interview

As I approached college graduation with a history degree that I didn’t yet appreciate (I had not figured out what aspects I loved), I had no goals or expectations. It was a different time. I recall saying two weeks before graduation, “I guess I’ll have to get a job or something.” 

This was not related to the social norms of a time when the customs of the 1950s were still holding on - for women anyway. I had no expectation that I’d be marrying and raising a family. Let’s just say I was open to the possibilities. Any possibility. 

A friend suggested the civil service test. So, I took it and received in response a letter from the government asking me to come in for a “special” interview for those who had scored in the 95th percentile and above. No mention of a position or an agency. Just a job. 

There was a state office building on Broad Street in Philadelphia and my recollection is the interview was held in a conference room there. So, on a lovely spring day, I headed downtown to learn more about my new opportunity. I wasn’t thinking about career path. I was thinking about location. At the time I favored Puerto Rico and Hawaii. 

I arrived and was put in a waiting room worthy of any American institution of the 1940s. It was then 1970. The only other person waiting was a young woman much more of the flower-child type of the era than I was. She was very sweet and chatty and eagerly engaged me in conversation. About what? No idea. We did establish we were both waiting to be interviewed. For what? Again, no idea.

My next recollection is sitting around a conference room table with three other interviewees. At the head of the table was a very pleasant interviewer, male, Caucasian and possibly wearing a white shirt. And, a tie. Definitely a tie. Did he keep his jacket on? Possibly not. The atmosphere was very friendly and informal.

I couldn’t help noticing that those of us who were there to be interviewed could have come from central casting. The flower-child sat across from me. I called the fellow beside me the used-car salesman—not because he resembled any actual used-car salesman I had ever met but because he fit the Hollywood stereo type perfectly. I don’t remember the fourth person except he was a white male. I suspect we were all in our early twenties.

We were each asked the same questions I now realize were all about personal ethics. I only remember one. The son of a diplomat (from the Middle East? Hazy on that.) gets drunk and in a car with diplomatic plates runs down and kills an American citizen in DuPont Square. What do you do? (As to why they expected me to know about DuPont Square since I didn’t live in DC, I couldn’t say.) 

The flower-child focused on some half-truths that supported the victim’s and the diplomat’s families.

The used-car salesman came up with out-and-out lies to make it all go away including the diplomat’s kid who was on the next plane out of the country.

I have no idea what the fourth person said. He was a ghost. 

I laid out a plan to do the right thing. I specifically recall telling them—naively but wisely—not to try to hide the incident. Cover-ups always fail. Had they known what lie ahead, they should have hired me for the Nixon White House right there and then. But they didn’t.
I wasn’t offered any “special” job but I was eligible to be hired. I was  asked what locations I preferred. I got two choices. I put Puerto Rico and Hawaii. I never heard from them again. 
Possibly, they—whoever they were—figured out I wasn’t particularly series about a career in government service. Or any career, actually. I can imagine my evaluation. Unrealistic. Naïve. Possibly stupid but freakishly good at standardized tests. (I loved them.)
I’ve come to believe that the criteria for an invitation to this special interview had less to do with percentiles than with character traits. I suspect that there were questions peppered throughout the test to catch personality traits they found desirable and I might describe as pathological. 
I was telling a coworker—I’ll call him Rob—who had once held a top level security clearance about this interview. 
I told him about the flower-child, the used-car salesman and the ghost. “Ghost probably got the job. I can’t remember a thing about him.”
Rob appeared amused. His response?  "You were the only one being interviewed that day.”
It feels kind of exciting to think that might be true. 

Jane Kelly 2024

When the Upper West Side Was King

Sometime around 2015, I saw a movie called The Intern starring Robert DeNiro and Anne Hathaway. I don't know what genre of movie it was. It had the feel of a rom-com but the love between the two stars was not romantic. That has nothing to do with my point. 
My point is when the movie was over, I felt old and out-of-touch. Not because the film involved a man not much older than I was trying to fit it at a fashion start-up, but because the entire movie was set in Brooklyn. Every scene. Brooklyn. I knew nothing of Brooklyn beyond Brooklyn Heights and the River Cafe. To me, Brooklyn was somewhere you didn't want to live because it was hard to get a cab to take you there late at night.

When I lived in New York, I lived on Manhattan's Upper West Side. It was at the time very in. How did I know that? Because I could not step out of my apartment without running into a film crew. There were always production trucks parked somewhere in the neighborhood. Often they were from Law & Order. If as many dead bodies showed up in my neighborhood in real life as they did on Law & Order, rents would have plummeted. Well, probably not. Rents never plummet in New York. Let's just say it wouldn't have been good.

More often the filming was for movies about young professionals. Green Card. Baby Boom. You've Got Mail. When Harry Met Sally. Even the Ghostbusters were, in their own minds at least, professionals. Certainly, Sigourney Weaver's character was. All these successful fictional characters were my neighbors. Three Men and a Baby filmed a short walk down Central Park West from my apartment. I remember running into the twins who played the baby on the street and all the male stars in the park. A lot of the other movies were shot much closer. I was annoyed to find out while I was on an all-day conference call in my apartment Jack Nicolson had been filming Wolf on my corner. The Upper West Side was a cool place to be.

At the movies, I got used to recognizing not just streets but restaurants. All these shiny characters would sit at the same table where I sat. The Upper West Side may not have been the hippest place to live but it had a certain cachet, a certain style. I loved it.

I had not been living in New York for many years when I saw The Intern. I had heard about the move to Brooklyn. As a matter of fact, I made a business call to the only partially renovated building in Williamsburg in the early 1990s. The guy who lived on top of the mostly empty building where he ran his business told me to buy a building. What happened to Soho is about to happen to Williamsburg. I ignored his advice. I missed the boom, I have never actually been to the hip Williamsburg. For all I know, Williamsburg may have become somewhat passe. There might be a more hip Brooklyn neighborhood. I wouldn’t be the right person to ask.

So watching The Intern brought home to me that my time had passed. Sometimes, I like to revisit the restaurants I loved in the eighties and nineties when they were the hot spots in town, but my enjoyment is always tinged with a little sadness. My favorite restaurant and I are both a hold-over from the past. Ironically, it is owned by Robert DeNiro.

© 2024 Jane Kelly

Meeting Mr. Smith

Meeting Mr. Smith (Not his real name)

As I was approaching thirty, I had a boss who was very concerned that I was not married and, even worse in her eyes, didn’t seem at all concerned about my status. Because we worked in Human Resources, we knew a lot of basic information about every employee—enough for her to screen for suitable mates for me. 

“Mr. Jones seems nice,” she would say. Coyly. 

“He’s very nice, just not my type.”

“Mr. Williams is very polite and is going to medical school.”

“He is very pleasant but I think he’s interested in the head librarian.”

“Mr. Smith is single and always pleasant when I see him.”

“There’s something not right about that guy.”

She brought up Mr. Smith quite a few times and I always had the same response: “There’s something not right about that guy.”

I didn’t have any facts to support my claim. I didn’t actually know Mr. Smith although I saw him on almost a daily basis. He was a nice looking man about my age. From what I could tell, he and his coworker from their small department ate together at the same time and place every single day. Then, they sat for a few minutes in the lobby and watched. Everything and everybody. He even watched me. Not in a lascivious way. Not in an amused way. Not in threatening way. His face remained expressionless. I concluded he simply liked to watch. I found something about that creepy. My reaction was always the same even if I was only talking to myself. “There’s something not right about that guy.”

We never spoke until . . . 

One Friday afternoon, Mr. Smith stopped by HR on his way out the door. He needed to check something. I’ve long since forgotten what. He came into my office sporting a warm smile and exuding an appropriate level of charm that appeared genuine and not at all fake or creepy. His conversation was pleasant. He made me laugh. He stayed a little longer than necessary but not long enough to become a nuisance. When he walked out the door, he had won me over.

I told my boss: “You know, Mr. Smith? I was wrong about that guy. He’s perfectly nice.” And, then, I left for the weekend and I imagine she went home relieved at prospect of wedding bells.

So I guess you think you know how this story ends. You guess that just as in any romance novel, my bad feelings turned to love, we married and lived happily ever after. Guess again.

I never saw Mr. Smith after that Friday. I might have noticed that he wasn’t at lunch on Monday but my attention was focused on finding out what was going on that kept my boss, her boss, and his boss behind closed doors for most of the morning. 

Luckily, the secret did not remain a secret for long, Over the weekend, Mr. Smith had been arrested for rape and assault. 

A week before my reaction would have been “I told you so.” But I’d been charmed. And, now I was shocked. Had there been some sort of mistake? In my seventies mindset, I wondered if he had been too aggressive, misread some signal or if a girl had changed her mind. After all, the seventies bar scene was crazy. But then I learned about the breaking and entering charges. Note the plural.

It took years and the invention of the Internet before I learned the rest of the story. In the months before his arrest, Mr. Smith had committed a series of attacks in the western suburbs of Philadelphia each one escalating in terms of violence. There were at least a dozen victims. They had not met Mr. Smith at a bar. They had not invited him into their homes. They had never seen him before. He had broken into their houses or apartments and raped each of them inflicting more and more physical damage. One of his last victims after a required hospitalization testified that he was a monster. 

He claimed stress at work had caused his actions. He admitted he didn’t handle stress well. He offered alternative recommendations for sentencing to keep him out of jail. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. 

On the rare occasions I drove by the jail that was his home, I wondered how his life was going behind those walls. After twenty-five years I assumed he had been released. I was wrong. He had survived prison for only six years. I couldn’t discover whether he died from natural causes—unlikely in a man his age—or suicide or murder. 

My brain worried that I had bought into his charming act so easily. On an emotional level, I felt only sadness that my initial reaction had been so accurate. I’d been right. 

There was something not right about that guy. 

 

If I were a psychopath

Handy tip: if you are going to condescend to someone in the global community of social media, you might want to check if they live not in Sri Lanka or Paraguay but within ten miles of your house.

I used to check a daily post by author Terry O’Dell. I had a morning routine I loved which concluded with a visit to her Facebook page where she posted a word of the day and followers provided fake definitions. Light-hearted fun until . . . 

I decided to change a word in my comment. I backed my cursor up and in the eyes of any conscientious member of the grammar police committed a capital crime. I failed to convert the “a” before the new word that started with vowel to “an.” I hit the post button and went on with my day.

I don’t usually get comments on that page, so I was interested to see what someone had to say. What he had to say started this way: “Come on people. This page is run by an author. Let’s get our act together.” Then, he went on to explain the rule regarding the use of “a” vs. “an” to me. In detail.

Being condescended to is one of my hot buttons. So, ignoring the unwritten law that you never respond to negative comments, I shot off a snotty retort. What a jerk. Me. Him too, but also me. I referenced my two graduate degrees and the nine (at that time) books I had published and sarcastically asked: “How did I miss learning that?” I could have noted that I used the rule correctly on the next line of the post but I wanted to show some restraint.

He tried to make light of his remark in one or two comments. I was not appeased. I blocked him but before I did, I whiled away the afternoon—there was a pandemic going on—checking out this jerk. I mean gentleman. Let’s be honest, I mean jerk.

I felt elation when I saw his address. I could be on his doorstep in under half an hour. I knew what his house looked like. Thank you, Google Earth and Zillow.

I learned where he worked and in what department. He’d been there many years without a promotion. I discovered the hobbies he enjoyed and the church he joined. I do not know how often he attended but it was there in his sixties he married for the first time. I found the name of the widow he married. She had grown children and I learned a lot about them too.

I became fascinated not by the information I retrieved but by the amount of information I uncovered. And, how easy it  was. 

He and his wife had recently moved so I knew the price of both houses. I expected to find that info. What I did not expect to find was on the realtor’s website, the realtor who had neglected to remove the virtual tour of the couple’s new house. So I checked out the floor plan moving from room to room including the main bedroom where he would sleep never knowing the price he was paying for making that snide remark on Facebook. But, only if I were a psychopath. And, let me state for the record, I am not. (References available upon request.)

I didn’t need to shoot him in his sleep to get satisfaction. I got that when I checked his profile on Linked-In. There in the first paragraph, I spotted the error. Didn’t he know that the rule is use “a” before a consonant and “an” before a vowel? Come on people . . .