Dr.
Paul Manuel—2017
I
also lacked any interest in using what attracted many of my peers: alcohol, tobacco,
or drugs. Having become a Christian some years earlier, I knew that God would
not want me to impair my physical health or mental faculties. Several of my friends
in high school were not so discriminating, a tendency not limited to youth. The band director was an alcoholic and
would host parties for students at which there was no limit to underage
drinking. Occasionally, he came to class visibly inebriated, behavior that
eventually got him fired. At that time, I was not personally familiar with the
effects of alcohol—neither of my parents drank; my father had taken the
Methodist abstinence pledge, probably because his father was an alcoholic—so
the signs of the director’s public intoxication, rarely to the extreme,
generally escaped my notice. Thankfully, my reticence to “follow
the crowd” kept me from such indiscretions.
Marty,
a drummer in the high school music department with me, was a regular user of
illegal pharmaceuticals (e.g., marijuana, barbiturates, LSD). He did not appear
to be addicted and seemed to function well. He would often offer me some of
whatever he had. It was both generous and sincere, yet I declined each time. To
my knowledge, his mother did not know about his drug use, but I noticed over
time a degradation in his ability to think clearly. That observation confirmed for
me my decision to eschew substance abuse of any kind.
In
August of 1969, Marty and I drove his 1963 Valiant (with its push-button
transmission) to a music festival in upstate NY at a place called Woodstock. We
had to park several miles from the concert site. The promoters were not
expecting so many people to come. They sold tickets for 50,000, assuming that
not all would actually attend. An estimated 400,000 came. Although we had
tickets for two days, there was no checking tickets at the gates, because the
initial onslaught of concert goers tore down the gates. The event lasted for
three days and was amazingly peaceful, but we only stayed for one day. There
was too much mud—it had been raining for several days—there were too few
Port-a-Potties, there were no public food options, and there were too many
people. The sound system was great, though, but there was barely enough room for
us to walk among the huddled masses, all seated on the ground in the mud. The
only space was at the foot of the elevated stage, yet by then a person was too close
to see anything.
Linda
and I had a much better time when we saw the documentary “Woodstock” the next
year. We were able to drive close to the showing, there was no mud in the
asphalt parking lot, the theatre seating was plentiful and comfortable, there
were food options (such as one finds at a mall theatre), the restrooms were
clean and line-free (unlike the too few over-taxed Port-a-Potties at the
concert). Marty and I were glad we went to Woodstock, even if only to say, “We
were there.” Nevertheless, the movie was a more pleasant experience and worth
the wait. Besides, I actually got to hear and see more of the concert.
My
earliest attempts at finding an academic path forward were neither focused nor fruitful.
After high school, I enrolled in a technical school for computer programming, which
began a series of student loans I was not able to retire fully until I moved to
PA years later. Following that brief scholastic venture, I enrolled at NYIT hoping
to complete its computer curriculum. That endeavor did not go well, especially when
the teacher of my first semester English course addressed the class with this inexplicable
piece of encouragement: “It’s good most of you are not computer majors [which I
was planning to be], because the computer field is closed.” I dropped out of
school soon after. I wonder how the direction of my life might have been
different but for that inspiring remark.
On
my way to class one day, I received my very first (and only) traffic citation,
for making an improper right turn. What impressed me most about the incident
was not this encounter with law enforcement, but the patrolman’s grammatically passive
statement: “A ticket will be issued.” While he doubtless intended his assertion
to sound official, perhaps forestalling any objection on my part, I later
learned it to be a weak construction. Why I remember what he said more than the
trauma of that meeting, I can only attribute to my eventual sensitivity to
effective grammar.
Linda
was a trendsetter in high school, although not always in a way she intended. For
example, one day she and a girlfriend (Janice) decided to dye their white jeans
red to wear in a variety show, which they did in Linda’s washing machine at
home. But they did not clear the machine of excess dye before her mother, a
nurse’s aide, washed her six white hospital uniforms in preparation for the
week. As a result, those uniforms all turned pink, which Linda’s mother had to
explain to her supervisor the next day…. To her mother’s surprise, her
supervisor liked the change, so much so that she ordered each department in the
hospital to adopt a different color uniform to distinguish it from the nursing
staff, which wore only white. The policy change did not, however, endear Linda’s
mother to her coworkers, as most of them now had to purchase new uniforms. Nevertheless,
it did show Linda’s keen fashion sense along with her ability to influence
people’s buying decisions, and it earned her mother the nickname, “Pink Lady.”
Linda and I were both students at Freeport High School (on the south shore of Long Island), but I had already graduated before she moved from Arizona to New York. At the time she was a senior (1971), driver education was a very popular course most students looked forward to taking, because passage meant that one could get a license at 17 versus 18. We both took the course, but Linda did not do well on the final road test, during which she hit a grocery truck. Fortunately, it was parked, so damage was minimal. Nevertheless, she failed the exam, which may actually have been for the best. With her poor depth perception, she could not gauge distance properly. (That incident ended her driving aspirations until, at age 47, having corrective lenses, she retook the exam and passed.) While her part of that road test was over, the outing was not. A girlfriend (Elizabeth) took her place behind the wheel and proceeded to follow the instructor’s direction—“Turn here”—too soon, driving the front end of the vehicle off a pier. She then climbed over the front seat and exited one of the back doors with Linda and the other students (two boys). The instructor, being a very heavyset man, could not move as quickly and remained trapped in the front seat as the car teetered over the water. The students watched from afar, listening to his exceedingly colorful commentary, until the fire department arrived and pulled the car back from the precipice, enabling the teacher to step out onto dry land to the applause of a growing crowd. Needless to say, Linda’s girlfriend did not pass her road test either.
