Tank and theperfessah
I met Tank one spring afternoon while I was lying on the grass, reading a book. It was probably a how to manual of some sort. No doubt something to occupy my brain until school or hockey season restarted.Suddenly Tank burst through the fence that separated our back yard from the rich people next door. Without scanning left or right, she continued like a juggernaut directly to the stairs leading into our shared hallway. As if part of her programming, she froze at the top step and looked left and right.
I wasn't sure why she looked so scornfully at me but she turned around and walked straight to me, completely ignoring anything and everything in her path and said, "You better not tell anyone I was over there". She pointed to the fence and looked at me as my mother often looked at my troublesome brother.
Just as suddenly, she reversed direction and retraced her steps back to the house, hopefully to a parent or babysitter.
Yes, Tank was just like the war machine that went from point A to point B in a direct line and damned be anyone or anything in the way. Blue eyes, blond hair and as cute as a button but I made a note to stay out of her way. Not a bad entrance for a five year old.
A day or two later, I met her older sister. Both were coming down the path to the hallway and Tank escaped from her sister and ran straight at me. She was smiling and looking as though we were best friends. Then she asked, "Are you still reading"? Without waiting for an answer, she turned around and ran back to her sister.
Tank dragged them both to where I was sitting and said, "This is my sister. She reads a lot too. I think she wants to be theperfessah". Both her sister and I chuckled and properly introduced ourselves. She was only a year older than Tank but years apart intellectually. She rattled off a few of her favorite books and I realized she was above my reading level. And I was already eight years old and well ahead of my peers. Thankfully, I had also started reading about geometry and electronics. Dawn still struggled with the "thirteen times table".
Like many of the mongrel families in the area but mine, she bore little resemblence to her younger sister. She had light brown hair that wasn't closely cropped like Tank's, but below her shoulders. She was also taller than both of us. But the one similarity that I remember to this day is their eyes. The color escapes me, but I will never forget their effect. It was one of peace. It was as if looking into Tank or theperfessah's eyes somehow comforted me. I don't ever remember any ugliness between us unless you count my first meeting with Tank. Their eyes gave me a feeling of serenity.
Every day or so, when none of us were on adventures, Dawn and I would discuss literature, science and life in general. All the time, Debbie would run rampant in the yard, showing an inquistive nature only matched by Curious George. Tank was excellent at collecting the numerous crawling things to ask us what kind of bug it was. I really felt bad for the spider that made the unfortunate decision to bite her. Thankfully for the spider, it was a mercifully quick death. It took the longest time for Dawn and I to comfort Debbie after she realized what she had done and burst into tears.
A week or so before opening bell, their mother and mine talked to me about an opportunity. If I was willing to escort Tank and the perfessah to and from the grammar school we attended and entertain them until mother returned at 5:00 p.m. each night, I would get a new bike at the end of the school year. Not much of a decision for me to make. Everything I had owned up to then had been a hand me down. Ah the joys of childhood in the early nineteen fifties.
Of course Dawn properly protested that she didn't need a baby sitter and was quite capable of taking care of Tank. But you know mothers! Decisions had been made and agreements reached. They were now law.
It was a great year with fall and spring filled with Dawn and I trying to outsmart each other while we took turns reining in Tank. Or at least we tried to. When winter arrived, my singular talent was the ability to mostly shield both (if we walked single file) from the subzero winds and snow.
I rarely saw either during the day but at 3:00, I was outside waiting for my charges. I think back and wonder if perhaps Dawn wasn't my first love but at eight, I had no concept of that kind of bond, very little consiousness of gender other than knowing that girls wore dresses and were not fond of having their pigtails pulled. I knew that I looked forward to another spring/summer/fall of spending time with Tank and theperfessah. And then another year of carrying books for three while hoping that Tank would slow a bit so I could savor their company.
But at graduation, I got the sad news. Tank would of course be moving on to the second grade. I'm sure the tutoring she received from her sister and I helped but probably not as much as her teacher deciding one year with her was exhausting enough. As part of some Federal program, Dawn would be promoted directly from the third grade to the fifth. When my class were named as fifth to sixth graders, the principal proudly stated that one of us would be moved directly to the seventh grade.
I momentarily felt pride and confusion. William B. Jack Junior High school was much farther away than North School. Classes also started half an hour earlier. There were new teachers, rules, and hopefully, friends. A new library full of learning and you changed rooms with each class rather than opening your desk and grabbing another book. But what hit me like a ton of bricks was no more Dawn. No more Debbie.
As much of a handful as she was, Tank made me want to be alive, to continue that childish curiosity in the face of danger. I guiltily admit that on more than one occasion, Dawn had to corral the both of us when we chased some unknown creature or explored some scientific curiosity. And without Dawn, who would open my eyes to concepts I read but didn't understand? Who would be the red to my black, the positive to my negative?
When we arrived home from the festivities, there stood my brand new, twenty-six inch, fire engine red, J. C, Higgins bike. It was one of the saddest days in my short life. Ah the naive egocentricity of nine year old boys.
During the next three months, our visits together became less frequent as though Dawn and I somehow instinctively thought that slowly parting was less painful than waiting for the school bell. I don't know if we were right but I now believe it would have been equally painful either way.
A few months into the new school year, I learned that they were moving away. It was only to another part of the city but for me, it was the other side of the world even with my new found mobility. Since I had no phone, Dawn and I wrote for a while with the occasional addendum from Tank but not long after we were both in junior high school, we each found new things to consume our time and our interest. Tank's only letter to me asked if I was dead and said she was sad that Dawn and I didn't write to each other anymore. As with most fading relationships, it fell into birthday and Christmas cards until one of us forgot.
During my senior year in high school, I met Tank at a rally in the city square. I don't remember if it was an anti-war or women's lib rally but we were burning something in an illegal bonfire. Usually, it was a combination of draft cards, bras and photos of Richard Nixon. (^o^) My designation was 1-H.
Dawn was now identified as the professor and was still destroying the Bell Curve moreso than I. Even as a freshman, her college options were impressive. Tank still held that childish innocence I wish we didn't lose when we become adults. After we were updated, we hugged for the longest time and then just stared into each others eyes while men and women around us yelled and fought, fires burned and rocks rained down. The police arrived and chaos was chased away by batons and eventually, boredom. Thankfully, none of them seemed the least bit interested in either of us.
I am ashamed to say it was the last time I saw either of them.
There were many more protests and rallies for this or that during the sixties and seventies. By the time I settled down for college, another decade had passed and Tank and theperfessah slowly faded from my memory as old friends sometimes do. I imagine Dawn, now a tenured professor somewhere along the East Coast but probably below the snow belt, planning her retirement and working to write her final paper to Science or Popular Mechanics.
I see Tank still going on adventures in as straight a path as she can take, unintentionally touching and improving lives, encouraging what the French call joie d'vivre. Still open to the new and the unknown and trying to satisfy that five year old curiosity and sense of awe we too easily replace with the concrete and quantifiable.
Too often, my nightmares and visions are from memories of horrors I've seen, things I've read about and terrors my own mind has created. I was grateful for a bittersweet chance to see a warmer time in my life if only briefly.
And the event I can only contribute to spirits that brought this sequence to me was Mèimei putting away my photo albums after laughing at the time when I had hair down my back and wore clothes that would no doubt get me arrested or committed these days. She dropped one and a photo spilled out. She asked if it was a photo of me and my two sisters who long ago joined the spirits. No, it was a photo of a rather sad looking nine year old boy and two cute little girls standing next to that new, fiery, red bike.
As I write this and fawn over a couple of pixies sleeping peacefully a short distance away, I'm struck by the similarities between theperfessah/Tsiatsia and Tank/Mèimei. I suppose at some point, I'll delve into that conundrum. For now, it's not as important as relishing that feeling of innocence and naivete from a black and white moment dragged into the here and now by the color of love.