What I saw in the kindergarten picture

I recently read an excerpt from a memoir called The Night of the Gun by a writer named David Carr who works for the New York Times. Here's a guy who was a serious crack head and dope fiend, who slithered around in unsavory places with dark people, but ended up wearing a suit and writing for the Times. The hook in Carr's memoir is that he's a genuine newspaper reporter and he's managed to work his way through all this horrible shit - addiction and crime and paranoia - and now he wants to look back and figure out how he got to his current place in life from his past one.

So he uses his skill as a reporter to go back and find people who knew him and interviews them to find out what they saw in him back in the day, so maybe he can see some of it himself. Bottom line is that he wants to know not only how he made his grand personal shift, but what of his seedy past still remains in his shiny present.

When I first read that excerpt I was a little annoyed because I thought this dude had stolen my idea before I ever had a chance to develop it. I mean I was a reporter too and in trying to piece together my past I'd done a lot of Internet research and made some calls and sent some letters and at one point actually drive up to New York from Baltimore just to walk around my old neighborhood in the Bronx to see if, like a medium, I could pick-up a vibe of something, some spirit, some moment that I'd left there.

But in a moment of honesty and lucidity, I realized that old David Carr had not stolen a thing and I had no reason to resent him, though that rarely stops me from doing so.

In reality I was a reporter but a bush league reporter. No NY Times here. How about the Vandalia Drummer News and the Tipp City Herald near Dayton. Ohio? The other piece of the equation that lets Carr of my personal hook is that I don't really have to go on a heavy investigative journey to figure out what went wrong and to measure what pieces of my former self are still embedded in me. I think I already know.

I've poked around my past more in an effort to piece it together than to find clues. One gem I uncovered was a website called Bronx Board, an electronic message board for "misplaced, displaced and nostalgic ex-Bronxites." Amidst the nostalgic clutter are pages of old school pictures from parochial schools from the 1940s through the 1970s. I found myself there. St. Helena's grammar school kindergarten class of 1964, third row up, second from the right. Just the picture tells a story of who I am and where I came from. Thirty-four little five year-olds, all dressed immaculately in crisp white suits and lacy white dresses. The girls all wore white gloves and matching green and white bows and ribbons in their coiffed hair. The boys' hair was all slicked down with Vitalis. We wore white shirts, black bow ties and long ribbons pinned to our miniature chests that matched the girls' bows. Front and center sat Monsignor Scanlan, the then-patriarch of St. Helena's. He's an old italian priest resplendent in his monsignor dress uniform, black cassock and plum-colored accoutrement's.

I look at this and see not just myself, a cute little kid with reddish brown hair and an excited smile, but I see my parents and my neighborhood and my time. Back then there was a certain amount of order and respect. We were Catholics first and foremost, the highest-ranking priest even sat for kindergarten pictures with the kids (this was well before priests were sniffed out as potential creeps, and Monsignor Scanlan was no pedophile, I assure you). We were also aware of each other and respected the neighborhood and the school. At least parents did. There wasn't one kid in the picture with a hair out of place or a spot of dirt on their virginal whiteness. You can see behind the deep maroon curtain that served as a backdrop, mothers carefully combing and teasing hair, licking fingers to wipe smudges off freckled faces. The names were even within the small confines of the neighborhood. Irish and Italian period - Sullivan, Thornton, Camille Gargano and Frankie Starr. Greaseballs and Micks.

This is where I grew up, in a distant time where you followed the rules because they were there, no questions asked. And even if that very morning my mother had jammed bobby pins into my ears and made them bleed or screamed at me and pulled my arm nearly out of the socket as we left the apartment, I still showed up for school in dazzling white and still smiled for that camera and took my place behind the high ranking priest because this is how it worked. You did not air your laundry in public. No one was watching anyway, second or third generation immigrants living in brown apartment buildings and carrying their trash dutifully to the basement were not interested in your problems or your scars or your issues. You showed up for the class picture and took your place. You were clean and Catholic and quiet. That's all anyone would want to see.