Wise Men and Other Stories

by Mike O'Mary

  I did not see Joey for a long time after our slap box fight, but the memory of that night stuck with me. Once again, with an opportunity to hurt or humiliate me, Joey Russo had let me off the hook.

  Not too long after that, I began to get into trouble myself. After the sixth grade, I left St. Elizabeth for Highland Junior High School. While at Highland, I got into progressively more trouble until by the ninth grade, I barely passed, getting six Ds and one F after skipping forty some-odd days of school that year. My problems at school, combined with an arrest for shoplifting and my parents’ divorce, meant I had enough troubles without worrying about Joey Russo any more. I ended up moving away to live with my father.

  The next time I saw Joey Russo was a few years later when I was back to visit my mother for the holidays. I saw Mark Schmid and a lot of the other guys I had always hung around with, but I was surprised to find that Joey Russo was now hanging out in our part of Germantown. Joey had always hung out with the tough guys, the older guys, even some of the black guys. He didn’t really fit in with my mischievous—but not necessarily tough—friends. Yet there he was, hanging around, trying to fit in.

  One night, a bunch of us were in front of my mother’s house with nothing to do when somebody suggested that we go ice-skating. Mark Schmid said he could get his parents’ car, so the rest of us went to tell our parents what we were planning to do. Everybody went their separate ways except Joey, who just kind of hung around in front of my house.

  Inside the house, my mother gave me five dollars—two for admission, three to spend—but rather than wait outside with Joey, I stayed in the house. I didn’t go out until everybody else was back. Then as we were getting into Mark’s car, Joey asked me if I would lend him the money to go ice-skating. This caught me off guard, but I knew right away that I did not want to lend him the money. I knew I would never get it back. I also knew that, although no one had said the words, none of us really wanted Joey to come with us.

  “No,” I said. “I only have enough for me.” I said this knowing that I could have given him two dollars for admission and still have had enough left to pay for myself. I said this also knowing that Joey might simply decide to take my money.

  We then waited for Joey to ask the other guys if any of them would lend him the money. But Joey didn’t ask. He just waited to see if anybody else would speak up. No one did. After a moment, we piled into the car without Joey. As we pulled away, I saw him head back toward his house on Shelby Street, walking right down the middle of the street.

  That was the last time I saw Joey Russo. He didn’t come to our neighborhood any more. Over the years, I heard he was constantly in trouble until finally he ended up in prison. I never heard why, but I assumed it was for stealing. A few years later, I heard he was out and that he had a girlfriend over on Mulberry Street. People said he was trying to straighten out his life.

  Then one day, his girlfriend’s ex-boyfriend showed up on Mulberry Street and found Joey there and shot Joey in the chest. Joey died on his girlfriend’s front porch, three blocks from where he grew up, two blocks from St. Elizabeth Elementary. He was twenty-three years old.

  * * *

  Sometimes we hear about somebody like Joey and we say, “Well, he was in and out of trouble... he had just gotten out of prison... he was always with the wrong crowd... what did you expect?” And we’re right. All those things were true.

  And yet, at the risk of sounding like his mother, I will say that Joey Russo was not a bad kid. He deserved better. He was no saint—he sometimes pushed people around—but maybe that was the only way he knew. And seeing how reluctant some people (including me) were to do something for him when he asked, it’s a wonder he wasn’t meaner and nastier and more spiteful than he was.

  In the end, living on the fringe must have worn on him. He wanted a nice girl like Kathy Johnson, or nice friends like some of the guys in my neighborhood, or just a nice place to visit like the ice rink or his girlfriend’s house on Mulberry Street. He wanted out of the tough-guy/bully role, out of our dreary, blue-collar neighborhood.

  But he didn’t fit in, so when he came around, we told him, “No.”

  On the night I heard about Joey Russo’s death, I went to the lagoon and skated. And now, when I’m out on clear, crisp nights, I look up at the loose fabric of our universe and think there must be some place in it for people like Joey Russo. Wherever it is, I hope Joey has found it and that it is a nice place.

  Meanwhile, back here on the creaky ice of the lagoon, I realize how lucky I am to have a nice place to visit... a nice life to live. And while I have difficulty remembering much about the skating rink I visited twenty-five years ago, I have no trouble at all bringing Joey Russo to mind, recalling that he was, in fact, not a bad person, and wishing things had been better for him in his short life, wishing I had lent him a few dollars to go ice skating when I had the chance to do so, and thinking if I had the opportunity today, I would bring little Joey Russo to this frozen lagoon and ask him to skate with me.

  And later this year, when the ice melts and the ducks come, I will feed them all.

  Heaven

  It was a spur-of-the-moment thing: “Put on your winter coat and get a warm blanket,” I told my daughter. “We’re going out to look at Christmas lights.”

  When I was a kid, one of the highlights of the holiday season was driving around town looking at everyone’s Christmas decorations. Our family—seven kids and two adults—would pile into the station wagon and off we’d go.

  Normally, my father and a car full of kids was a volatile mixture. But it was different at Christmas. When you put us in our pajamas, wrapped us in our blankets, and took us out for a late-night ride to look at Christmas decorations, it was actually peaceful in that station wagon.

  But that was then. My days of riding around in pajamas and blankets are pretty much over. However, one of the privileges of being a parent is that your children provide you with a legitimate excuse to do some of the things you haven’t done since you were a kid. And so, we set out in search of wonderful, awe-inspiring Christmas lights.

  Unfortunately, things seldom go according to plan when we try to recreate our childhood. Some little variable always changes the equation, sometimes for the better, sometimes for worse. Such was the case that evening when I took Kathleen, my little six-year-old variable, out for a Christmas drive.

  I had in mind a little subdivision in the neighboring town of Sycamore, Illinois, about five miles from our house. My wife and I had gone there earlier that week for a Christmas party, and we both thought it was nice that everybody in the neighborhood had decorated their homes. However, rather than drive through Sycamore to the subdivision as I had done with my wife, I decided to save time by taking the back roads. It turned out to be a bad choice.

  We saw a few decorations at farmsteads en route, and when we got a little north of Sycamore, I turned down a road that I thought would lead to the subdivision. I was wrong. We drove around for half an hour without seeing any lights at all, let alone Christmas lights. However, while we were lost, we had a very interesting conversation:

  “Daddy,” Kathleen asked, “Do you believe in Santa?”

  “Do you?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Then I do, too,” I said.

  My answer seemed to be acceptable. Score one for Daddy. Soon came another question.

  “Do you believe in God?” she asked.

  This one caught me off guard. I’m sorry to say despite attending St. Elizabeth Elementary School and serving as an altar boy, and despite a higher education that included exposure to Hinduism, Buddhism, existential philosophy, and the theological writings of Paul Tillich, I was not prepared to give my daughter a definitive answer at that moment. I had never been able to assimilate any of the things I had learned into a set of beliefs that made much sense to me, and it seemed that an appropriate answer would require a lengthy discussion of abstract and complex theological and philosophical thought. And
after all that, it still pretty much comes down to a leap of faith. The thought of trying to explain all of this to my daughter in a few simple words seemed overwhelming. However, in all my feeble reflections on the subject of religion and God, Being and Non-Being, I have come to one conclusion: I do not believe that there is nothing—which implies I must believe that there is something. And so, I took a leap that night and provided my daughter with a slightly boiled-down version of what would otherwise have been a very lengthy and probably confusing answer.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Her response: “I do, too.”

  There was a short pause, then: “Daddy, do you believe in Heaven?”

  I thought for a moment. “I believe we will always be together,” I said.

  “I think Pop is in Heaven,” said Kathleen.

  Pop was my mother-in-law’s father—Kathleen’s great grandfather. He had died earlier that year after a long illness.

  “It made Grandma sad when Pop died,” she continued.

  “Yes, it did,” I said.

  “I know what Grandma’s mom’s name was,” she said. “It was Gram.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “I liked Pop,” said Kathleen. Then she added, “It’s not nice to make fun of old people.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  There was another short pause.

  “Everybody dies, even if they don’t think they will,” said Kathleen.

  There was no skirting this comment. “That’s true,” I said.

  We drove along the blacktop highway, cutting across the countryside. I hadn’t noticed it until then, but at some point it had started to snow—big, heavy, wet flakes. Other than that, it was a very still, dark December night. My daughter was quiet for a long time, but she was alert, looking out the window, thinking hard. Finally, she spoke again.

  “I’m a little bit afraid of dying,” said Kathleen.

  Fear of dying... at last, a subject that I knew something about.

  “A lot of people are afraid of dying,” I said, “because we don’t know what it’s going to be like.”

  “Yeah, we don’t know what it’s going to be like in the ground or if we’ll go to Heaven,” she said.

  I did not want her to have nightmares about being in the ground. “You don’t actually go in the ground,” I told her. “Your body does, but by then you’ve left your body.”

  She thought about this, then said, “I don’t get you.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Wherever you go, I’ll be there.” This I truly believed. I could not imagine any circumstances, even death, that would cause me to drift very far from my daughter.

  “And Pop will be there,” said Kathleen. “And Gram.”

  “That’s right.”

  The conversation went on like that for a while longer. I was a little angry with myself for not being more prepared for such a conversation, but I was pleased to see that her mind was already at work on some of life’s biggest questions. I took comfort in the realization that my daughter would probably be able to figure out most things for herself—which means she’ll be a lot better off in the long run than she would be if she relied on someone like her father to figure things out for her.

  While all this was going on, I was still not finding the neighborhood. At some point I realized that Kathleen didn’t really know why we were driving around. When I said we were going “to look at Christmas lights,” she thought I meant that we were going to a store to buy more lights for the Christmas tree. By the time she figured out the real purpose of our trip, she was pretty tired. When I finally found the neighborhood, she was asleep.

  It was just as well. On second glance, the decorations in the neighborhood seemed ordinary and unimaginative. There was nothing particularly wonderful or awe-inspiring about them. I drove around for a little while, but by then I was tired, too, so I turned around and headed home.

  The whole excursion could have been pretty depressing. I had wanted to show my daughter some wonderful Christmas lights. Instead, I got lost. Then, when I finally found the neighborhood, the lights were nothing special. It was a far cry from the memories I had of driving around, looking at decorations when I was a kid. But that’s okay. We had discussed Santa and God and Heaven and death—a conversation I would not soon forget. And at the end of the evening, I was heading home while my daughter slept like an angel in the seat next to me. I would not trade that drive with my daughter for anything.

  Just then, Kathleen opened her eyes a little.

  “Daddy?” she asked.

  “Yes?” I answered. She didn’t answer right away. I looked over at her. She looked very warm and cozy—very peaceful—the way a child in warm pajamas and a blanket should look when out for a Christmas drive with her father.

  “Yes,” I repeated softly. “What is it?”

  “Maybe this is Heaven,” she said.

  I thought about that for a moment.

  “Yes,” I said. “Maybe it is.”

  About the Author

  Mike O’Mary is a writer of essays, fiction, drama and sketch comedy. He is author of The Note, a book about the power of appreciation, and Wise Men and Other Stories, Lessons from the Holidays on Santa, God, Heaven, Death & More Fun Stuff from Someone Who Still Has a Lot to Learn. He has published stories and essays in the Sunday magazines of the Chicago Tribune, Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, Baltimore Sun, Cleveland Plain Dealer and Detroit Free Press, and in Catholic Digest. He was also a regular commentator on WNIJ – Northern Illinois Public Radio, doing weekly commentaries as part of the local segment of National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” program.

  Mike is also founder of Dream of Things, an independent press focused on memoirs and anthologies of creative nonfiction. Mike serves as series editor for Dream of Things anthologies.

  Mike is a graduate of Knox College (BA in Economics and English-Writing), the University of Montana (MFA in Creative Writing, MA in English Literature), and the Second City Comedy Writing Program.

  For more information, visit www.dreamofthings.com.

  About Dream of Things

  Dream of Things is an independent press focused on publishing memoirs, anthologies of creative nonfiction, and other books that align with our mission to publish “distinctive voices, meaningful books.” For more information, visit dreamofthings.com.

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