Remembering Jerry Lucas

I was very excited in 1973 when Mom took 11-year old me to see Jerry Lucas speak at the Detroit Public Library.  Mom was new employee at the Library  – it was her first full-time job as a mother- and we drove the 40 miles into Detroit in her rattly Dodge Dart.  Jerry Lucas was an all-NBA power forward, renowned for his rebounding, his long-range shooting, and his odd mind.  He could immediately reorder the letters of any word in alphabetical order, from “basketball” to “aabbekllst,” for example, and he had a prodigious memory as well.  It was this latter skill that Lucas had come to talk about as, among other feats, he had recently memorized fifty pages of the Manhattan phone book in a single sitting.  Just think where I’ll be if I can do that, I thought to myself as we drove in.

Lucas was an odd, tall presence during the talk - scheduled on the New York Knicks’ off-day - which he shared with another memory prodigy with whom he had written a book. How did he do it, we asked?  The key, he said, was to link the information you were trying to remember – numbers, perhaps, but almost anything really – into a narrative.  It was best if you could create mental pictures, with the things you were trying to remember intertwined in inventive and memorable ways, sort of like a picture book. The really important thing was to make it all a story.  Lucas was a bit strange to be sure - “on the spectrum” we might say now - but he had great confidence that a better working memory would turn our lives around.  I was sold!

I took these methods back home and applied them to memorizing the Guinness Book of World Records – the most important book in my library at the time - but I could never get past the top dozen items on lists of “History’s Fattest Men” or the “World’s Largest Tumors.”  I would assemble narratives in which various cancers – lung, spleen, and liver, for example – would assemble for a picnic or rugby game, but it just never seemed to work for me. I’d try and try, prompting my best friend Jonathan to test me over and over again, but I could never successfully work colon cancer into the tale.  I still appreciated my mom’s effort, however, the fact that she had driven me all the way into Detroit on a weeknight, though I’m guessing that she also liked the idea of showing off her new employer’s elegant building.

While the talk failed to build my memory, it did inculcate in me a belief, one I still hold, that really cool things were happening at the library and that, too, my mom could help me find them.  That was a good thing, too, because my mom was starting to be around a lot less than she had been in the past.  She would join up with her carpool – just one other woman who also worked at the Detroit library – at about 7:30am and wouldn’t return home until 6:00 or 6:15, hours after my sisters and I had gotten home from school.  You still hear it claimed that there is no tension between being a parent and having a career, but that was poppycock then and it’s balderdash now, for both men and women.  There are only 24 hours in a day and if you do more of one thing you’ll have to do less of something else.  That’s not to deny that working parents – like me - can be effective at both things, but something has to give.

What gave in our household was that my mom was around a lot less. So my mom had hired my sister Mary – 16 years old and a junior in high school – to take over many of the tasks that she had previously fulfilled.  Mary fixed dinners, supervised the homework of myself and my little sister Emily, and took over mom’s role in carpools, all while being a high school junior herself.  The expanded roles of teenagers is familiar to families with one or no parents at home, but it was new to us.  Mary did an excellent job, but there were some ways in which the assignment was too big for any teenager.  I consistently failed to do any of my homework – whether it was for Mrs. Roeder’s Social Studies or Ms. Goodman’s Algebra class – and I lied about its completion to Mary and then to my Mom.  My subsequent grades outed my behavior, but I just trotted out a new set of lies, though it is hard to say whether that was out of laziness or a rebellion against my mom’s partial abandonment of me.

My mom’s plans for carpools – to little league, to band practice and the like – also did not work according to plan, as several mothers objected to their children being ferried about by a distractable teenager, both offering to drive our share of the carpool obligations themselves. This led to our exit from several carpool arrangements.  My sister was put out of course, as no teen appreciates critiques of their driving, and my mother sighed and said “they just didn’t want a working mom in the carpool.”  I very much sided with my mom at the time, but, now having been a parent of teenager drivers I am much more sympathetic to the views of the objecting mothers.

The early 1970s was a difficult time for many of the marriages that, like my parents’, were formed in the 1950s.  Those marriages had been formed under the expectation that, for the most part, the husband would go out and earn a living and the wife would stay home and take care of what would become two, three, or more children.  Husbands might dislike their work and housewives might feel addled or underutilized, but the expectation was that they would do their duty.  Things changed in the 1960s – my mom recalled to me later that her views were permanently changed when she read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique in 1963 – and the changes accelerated in the early 1970s.  Many marriages did not survive the stress, the need for major renegotiation on what the terms of the marriage would be.  This fact was brought home to me when we lived in New York City for the 1972-73 school year and where many of my classmates’ parents were divorced, and when I returned to Ann Arbor in the summer of 1973, when the marriages of several of my close friends were dissolving.  Even as an 11-year old, I could tell that my parents, like other parents I knew, were in the process of renegotiating their relationship.

I was really not privy to any of that renegotiation – and certainly none of the arguments, if there were any – but I saw some of the sequelae of those changes.  My father had been a dedicated parent in his way – reading books out loud and leading us in travel games when we drove on vacation – but he had never did much around the house – no cooking, no dishwashing, no laundering.  My father tried to make some changes in 1973, however, particularly around dishwashing, in ways that I now interpret as attempts to meet Mom somewhere in the middle.  “It’s never Mom’s turn to do the dishes,” he would say, and so he and us kids negotiated amongst ourselves as to who would clear the table, load the dishwasher, and wash the pots and pans.  He kept this posture up for decades, too, though, in what was probably a passive aggressive act, he was a terrible dishwasher, often requiring mom, not particularly neat herself, to come and clean up after his work.  And he never, not even once, cooked anything other than what came out of a microwave or a toaster.  But even his desultory attempt to do the dishes signaled to me that times were changing, and I think that Mom appreciated his effort.

Mom typically worked the late shift in Detroit on Wednesdays, meaning that we kids and Dad were on our own for dinner on those nights.  Dad would always take us out to dinner on those nights to The Athenian, a Greek diner in downtown Ann Arbor that catered to the airline crews staying at the hotel across the street.  I loved The Athenian for the gyros and the rice pudding, and my dad loved it because it was owned by his law school secretary Nikki and her husband Thanos. Thanos and Dad would always wrestle over the bill, but Dad would scurry us out after leaving enough cash to cover the bill and a generous tip. Nikki would often send Dad home from the law school with an extra serving of rice pudding for me.  I think that mom slightly resented that Dad took us out on the nights she worked – we did not eat out often otherwise – but she also viewed it as something that she should compromise on.  I still love rice pudding.

My maternal grandmother died that year.  Grammy lived in Austin, Texas, where my mom had grown up, and her doctor had warned her that a lifetime of drinking and smoking were catching up to her at the age of 73.  My mom got the call from her sister Marian, living in Texas at the time, and I remember the tears in her eyes as she sat at our dining room table looking through a childhood picture album.  Her father and her sister Blanche – “Tootsie” to my mom – had died in the early 1960s and so she had experienced loss, but she was still moved that night.  I wanted to ease her pain and so I tried to distract her – “I’m sorry about Grammy, Mom, but do you want to play a game of Monopoly?” I asked awkwardly.  She laughed a bit through her tears and gave me a hug, though she declined my offer, saying that she’d take me up on it in a few days.

I struggled badly through my three years – grades 7-9 – at what was then known as Tappan Junior High School in Ann Arbor.  I was smart and bookish – I had actually been promoted ahead a grade during elementary school – but I was anxious, socially awkward, and generally felt at sea.  Some of that unease came from being young for my grade, and some of it came from the discontinuities that my parents had imposed on our schooling – living in Colombia for three months when I was in 2nd grade; living in New York City during 6th grade; and then living in Los Angeles for half of 8th grade.  But I also think that some of my trouble, particularly academically, was a rebellion against my mother’s partial withdrawal from my life.  I do not begrudge her the choices she made, not least because she remained an excellent librarian for thirty years, helping many people with their dissertations and other research projects.  But all actions have costs and benefits, both hers and mine.

My mom took me to that Jerry Lucas talk to do something special for her basketball-loving son who was struggling with her reduced presence in his life.  There are many things I don’t remember about that night – the day of the week, what we talked about there and back, or whether I got Jerry Lucas’ autograph; and I certainly don’t remember anything about large tumors or the Manhattan phone book.  But I do remember the story of that night, about how my mom loved me, about how she was willing to drive 40 miles there and back when she was tired and had better things to do, and about the methods of Jerry Lucas himself - about how our most salient memories are more than mere lists or tables, and about how they are often a story about how someone who loved us did something special when they didn’t have to.