In September of his 11th year he boarded the school bus and left the neighborhood and childhood behind. They closed the local school a year before he would have finished sixth grade, and now a busload of children from the sleepy neighborhoods along the West Mississippi were being shipped off to the inner city. The bus quickly passed what was familiar: the library, the diner, and Wong’s Chinese restaurant and used car lot. Crossing the tracks by the new shopping center, they entered the West end of Lake Street where the Native Americans, black families and Vietnamese refugees lived. He looked out the window and noticed the marquee of the adult theater and watched the people milling around talking loudly on the corner. They passed the old cemetery where some of the graves were so old that the trees had grown into the tombstones.
Over the summer he had entered puberty, somewhat prematurely, his voice changed, he was a head taller and his body was now covered in hair like a monkey. He was becoming a man like his father, who was strong and wise and left bad smells in the bathroom. On the bus they regarded him as a wonder and freak of nature—someone their same age who had passed from childhood and was now on the opposite side of a great chasm.
He exited the bus and parted from the group. His parents had placed him in a special program they thought fit his personality and interests better than the three ‘R’s of a conventional education. He was going to Open School, a post-hippie era experiment in education that consisted of boundless learning opportunities and the absence of rules. There were no classrooms or walls, only wide-open spaces and choices. Students could choose the courses they wanted, worked on projects independently, and were instructed to address teachers by their first names (like Joan, Susan or John). Joan, his homeroom teacher, showed them R-rated movies on Fridays, called them “little f*#%rs” when she got angry and chain-smoked incessantly. Most of the other students were from progressive wealthy or academic families who lived on the east side of the river by the university, except for a few gifted minority students from the immediate neighborhood. If his parents had listened to public radio or read the New York Times they would have known that many his classmates were the children of prominent city planners, politicians, celebrity authors and musicians. Aram Karapetian, who would become his best friend that year, loved to tell about the time his father, an orchestra conductor, got into a brawl with Pablo Picasso at a bull fight in Madrid.
All of this was a new world to him. Home-life was gentle, strict, oriented around religious piety and duty with a conspicuous lack of humor or irony. At school he found solace in the art studio, under the direction of a French Catholic bachelor who, recognizing his artistic inclinations, invited him to spend three hours a day working in the studio supplied with any materials he wanted. During that year he created three sculptures. The first was a terracotta bust of his father, the second, a terracotta bust of Jesus Christ and the third, a life sized plaster sculpture of a young man seated on a stool in contemplation.
The first sculpture of his father was admittedly crude, but showed promise and some familiarity with ancient and renaissance forms. In the fall of that year, his father was promoted from Lieutenant to Chief in the U.S. Amy. This change brought more money for the family, more responsibility for his father and meant more time that he was left home alone with his mother and three sisters. Making this sculpture was his way of identifying with manhood in the relative absence of his father that year. He was becoming a man, and as he carved into the clay day after day he saw something of himself and who he might become. During that time he and his father had the talks about wet dreams, the strength of testosterone, and a man’s natural curiosity about the shape of a woman’s body. Becoming a man was exciting, scary and complicated—and though he closely identified with his father, they were different. He was flamboyant, creative and risk-taking while his father was shy, cautious and duty-bound. He was becoming a man like his father, but also like himself. It was the beginning of his journey to discover how to combine the integrity, sensitivity, and devotion of his father with the courage to dream and act with courage and abandon.
The second sculpture of Jesus Christ was more technically developed, but when fired in the kiln the skull cracked, necessitating an impromptu addition of a crown of thorns. This piece was of special curiosity to his schoolmates from more “enlightened” secular families. “Who is this sculpture of?” They would ask, mockingly. With sincerity he replied, “It is suppose to be God.” He was never the good student in Sunday school or family devotions, but this environment brought out his nascent interest in the spiritual. It was the beginning of his journey to negotiate deep devotion beyond the sentimentality of provincial folk religion. The crown of thorns this path requires would be a continual surprise.
The third sculpture of himself was life-size and inspired by the haunting figures of George Segal, with and obvious awareness of Rodin’s “thinker” in bronze. What is the proper posture of a person, in reference to one’s humanity and the awareness of the divine? The figure sits leaning forward as in deep thought, with hands clasped to the face and eyes staring forward, equally conscious of the world within and the world without. When he visited the school fifteen years later, the sculpture was still on display in the window case. It was the beginning of his journey to identify as a mystic and a pilgrim—continually on a search for meaning and purpose—living into the questions—and inviting others to stare toward what is beyond and within.
