Jack meet’s Jill

Since it is nearing the end of summer, I think it is important to start talking about someone who is affected greatly by it’s pressures and pleasures: Jack Palsey. Now Jack was a boy of seventeen, some would call him a man, but for our purposes he is still an adolescent. In between his Junior and Senior year at North Meadowviewville High School, Jack has taken it upon himself to discover his passion in life. All the movies he’s seen, and the books he’s read have left him with the impression that in order to be great and live a good life, one must find a purpose, and find it early. Personally I believe that only 50 percent of that statement is half true. Regardless, Jack took an interest survey at the end of his Junior year, kind of a test that he thought could tell him what path to go down in life. The results came back this Tuesday, around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and Jack would soon be able to read their findings.

He sat in his kitchen, and stared at the envelope. Jack’s father, Jack Palsey Sr., poured a drink, and sighed, as he looked at him from across the room. His son stressed over these results, and it made him concerned. A boy shouldn’t worry about life so early.

“What does it say bud?” Jack’s father asked?

“It says. ‘Dear Jack Palsey Jr. You have been matched with the following career choices that best reflect the answers you gave on our survey. Career choices with a high percentage reflect a greater likelihood that you will succeed in those areas.’”

“And…?” Mr. Palsey inquired further “What are the choices?”

“Oh, right. Duh.” Jack responded, “Culinary Arts 80%. Vocational School 75%. Transportation Services 70%. Liberal Arts 50%”

Now Jack Jr. did not know what most of those things meant. But he assumed that since he hadn’t heard about them before, that they were either very prestigious fields of work and study, or the exact opposite. He hoped for prestigious.

“What does it mean?” He asked

“It means the test is messed up.” Jack Sr. responded. “Those are all over the place.”

With that, Mr. Palsey took the paper out of Jack Jr.’s hands and walked outside to sit on the front porch while he waited for Mrs. Palsey to come home from work.

Culinary Arts, Vocational School, Transportation Services and Liberal Arts, he thought. What the hell are those?

Like any strong-minded high school student, Jack decided that he would research these. He strolled over to his laptop after stopping by the refrigerator to get a soda, cracked it open and settled into the desk. He sat down and opened the computer up, and went straight to Google.

Search: What is Culinary Arts?

Response: Culinary Arts is the art of cooking. A culinarian is a person working in the Culinary Arts. If you have desire, discipline, and a passion for food and creating food for others, then culinary training is the place for you.

He was pretty sure culinarian wasn’t a real word, but didn’t bother to look it up.

Culinary Arts? That’s like a cook! He thought. Black boys don’t become cooks. They do cool things like become sports stars, civil rights politicians, or… He stopped thinking. You see, his father was a descendant of those freed slaves that first started to integrate Meadowviewville, and his mother was a part of the wave of Italians that came later. Well, my Mom is Italian, maybe that part of me is supposed to be the cook.

Jack had never cooked anything in his life other than a Hot Pocket. One of his friends from school, a beady-eyed red head named Lewis, gave him a recipe for some special brownies but he never made them. It said he had to go into his mother’s garden and get some weeds. He decided that putting garden waste in brownies wasn’t a good idea and that they probably weren’t going to taste very good.

Search: What is Vocational School?

Response: A vocational school is a school providing vocational education with students taught the skills needed to perform a particular job or trade. Traditionally, vocational schools have not existed to further education in the area of liberal arts, but rather teach only job specific skills, and as such have been better considered to be institutions devoted to skilled labor training.

That did not seem to be very helpful to him. He had always thought that vocations were what the ministers had. But this was telling him that Vocational Schools were different. That it meant you would learn a trade, like plumbing or carpentry.

My uncle is a plumber, that’s kinda cool I guess.

All this researching was tiring, yet he pressed on.

Search: What is Transportation Services?

That search yielded a plethora of bus routes and taxis services in Meadowviewville.

Taxi driver? He thought, Bus driver? I barely have my license, that’d be tough.

He gave up searching after that. All that research was annoying, and something told him that searching for Liberal Arts would be difficult. So he leaned back in his chair and pulled out his phone to text some friends. If he wasn’t going to figure out his life plan, then he was going to do what he did best: play video games with friends.

The screen door opened and he heard his mom’s shoes come clicking down the tile hallway. As mentioned earlier she was of Italian decent, and carried all the vivacity that is stereotypical with that culture. She smiled as she got close to Jack and reached out to hug him, kissing him on his forehead lovingly.

“Hey there,” she said, “Dad says you got your results from the interest survey back. That’s great! Are you going to be a doctor? What did it say?”

“Um. It said that I should be a cook, a handyman, a bus driver, or a liberal.”

“Oh…” Mrs. Palsey paused. “A liberal? I didn’t think it was that kind of a test. Well a cook is nice. You know your great-grandfather Buccelli was a cook. He made the best pasta. Not the out of the box stuff your father gets, but I mean the real stuff, homemade. Oh, and the sauce! You should’ve had his sauce. Not too sweet or spicy, but just right. I bet you’d make a great cook like him. I can teach you. We can get started tonight!”

He’d heard about great-grandpa Vito Buccelli before, about how he served in World War II in France after Normandy. Apparently when a company of Germans overran his camp during the Battle of the Bulge, he defended the kitchen with nothing but spatula and a four-foot long sausage link. They gave him a medal for that, and he was a real hero when he came home. He wasn’t ready to hear that story again.

Jack didn’t think he had what it took to be a cook or any of those other things. He thought his parents should be laying things out for him, like they always had. He wanted to get out of there before he got lectured and asked a million questions he didn’t have the answers too.

“Yeah, well, I don’t know.” He said, “I’m going to go to John’s to play X-box. Text me when dinner’s ready. Bye!”

“But –“

Before she could get the words out he was out the back door, headed across the lawn. He jumped the chain-link fence that separated his house from Old Mr. Larsen’s and sprinted into the woods. I say it was a wood, but really it was about the size of three or four empty housing lots that the housing developers never ended up getting around to. After a few years of inattention it grew over with brush and was spotted with trees. Jack and his friends had traversed it many times and cut a few paths, imagining themselves as explorers on some dangerous expedition.

Jack found the path that he knew would cut straight through the lot so that he could cross Poultry Avenue and be on his way to John’s. John lived a few blocks away, and had just bought a new game for the summer. Jack’s family didn’t believe in computer games, so he used every opportunity he could get out and play on his friends’ consoles.

Walking through the woods, he felt the summer heat pressing down. He’d spent all day inside, and hadn’t realized how hot it was. As he reached an old apple tree, he paused. He thought he had heard something behind him.

Larsen’s dogs must be out again, he thought Stupid dogs, never leave me alone.

Mr. Larsen, was an old man who had been friends with Jack’s grandfather. In fact, his family had bought the land for their house on a parcel that Mr. Larsen had up for sale. He had two massive Irish Wolfhounds. They were formidable and looked intimidating beasts if you’d never seen them before. But Jack’s mother had forced him to go over with her every week to say hello, and talk about this and that. He never really liked dogs, but he knew that they wouldn’t bother him if they knew he would feed them. So every week, in order to appease the two stately beasts, he brought them some treats, until they were used to the routine.

However no Wolfhounds appeared, so Jack strolled on until he passed the apple tree. When he heard another sound. The sound of a click and then something moving fast through the air, faster than any animal or bird, towards him.

Whack

A stinging sensation tore through Jack’s left leg, just above the calf. He screamed out in torment and fell to his knees. He reached down and pulled his hand back. It was red.

Blood!? He thought. Oh no! I’m going to die! If only I had a spatula and sausage links like great-grampa Buccelli, I could defend myself!

Whack! Whack!

Two more wet stings erupted on his back as he kneeled there in agony. It all was playing out like in some sort of movie. In fact, in his head, he could seem himself in a sort of out of body experience. He watched as he looked towards the sky with both arms outstretched.

“Ahhhhhhhh!” he shouted out. Still watching himself in his mind’s eye, he saw the agony on his face. With that he crumpled and laid down, face in the dirt, and accepted his fate.

“I got you! I got you!” A girl’s voice shouted from the underbrush, “Trespasser! You will feel the full force of the law! Are there more of you out here? I should get back to cover just in case.”

Jack opened his eyes, and his mental out of body experience was done. He wasn’t dead. He reached back to where the stinging was on his shoulder. When he brought his hand around he saw green goo. The other place it stung was yellow.

Paint? Did I just get hit with a paintball?

“What are you doing?” He cried, “I was just walking through! Who the hell are you?”

“Quiet!” She growled, “I want to catch the rest of your friends. You’re all in a lot of trouble.”

Jack was mad and confused, but really just mad. His mind was filled with ways to avenge this ambush, and he was so frustrated that this had happened to him for no reason. He stood up and stomped towards her and waved his arms.

“What… What… I don’t…” He stuttered, “There’s no one else.”

Whack. A ball nicked his left shoulder, forcing him to turn a little and take a few steps back.

“Ahhhhhh! What? Why!”

“You got too close to me,” she said. “My dad says that I shouldn’t let boys get too close to me. Something about a belt… You don’t have a belt, do you?”

“What? No!”

Exasperated he looked around to see if anyone could help him make sense of this weird girl. Who was she? Where did she come from? What could possibly be going on? He was determined to get these answers and give her a piece of his mind too.

She looked about his age, but then girls did mature faster, so he couldn’t be sure. He was sure that he knew everyone in the neighborhood, and there were no paintball gun toting lunatic girls that lived here. As a matter of fact, he knew most of the people in North and East Meadowviewville, and was certain she wasn’t from around here.

“No, I don’t have a belt. I’m wearing a bathing suit. It’s summer.” He said, not trying to get too close to who, he could only assume, was the spawn of some rouge CIA agent. “What are you doing out here. I was just walking through and you attacked me.”

“My daddy is building a house here.” She said innocently, “I’m supposed to scout it out and make sure it’s safe. What are you doing on our property? Is this how people in this town behave? Just traipsing around through people’s backyard like they own it?”

“Well kinda. I mean no. I mean… I didn’t know anyone had bought this. And besides, that doesn’t give you the right to go pegging me without warning.”

He finally had a chance to look at her. She was his height, with dark red hair. Her skin was sunburnt and tanned, and then sunburnt again, with smudges of dirt all over her arms, legs and forehead. She wore a green jacket, with black shorts and a brown bandana tied around her hair. Jack decided that he would calm down, because, even though this girl had just nailed him with a bunch of paintballs, he started to think she was kind of cute, and maybe he should play it cool.

“Your dad told you to come out here and shoot random people with a paintball gun?”

“Well, no” she confessed, “I just thought that since this was ours now, that I had the right to make sure there were no squatters or anything. You know, like Stand Your Ground, or something.”

“You’re weird.” Jack said as he turned and shook his head.

Wooosh – He ducked as he heard a ball nearly miss him and immediately put his hands above his head.

“Woooah. Ok! Ok! You’re not…weird.”

“Thanks.” she replied. They stood there looking at each other awkwardly, both not knowing how to move forward. “My name’s Tasha. Tasha Townes. What’s yours?”

“Ummm. Jack Palsey.”

“Well hello Jack Palsey.” She said.

More awkward silence.

“I’m sorry for shooting at you. I guess that wasn’t the best idea I’ve ever had.” She admitted, “I’m new here, like I said. We just moved up from Pennsylvania, and we’re staying with my grandmother downtown. I bet you know quite a bit about this neighborhood. Could you show me around?”

Jack paused. Not five minutes ago, this girl had waylaid him as he walked unsuspectingly through the woods. Now she wanted the grand tour? Were women always this crazy? He did appreciate the apology though. That made him think she might have some sanity. Jack might have been young, and he might’ve been terrified, but he knew that when a pretty girl asked you to help her with something, it was in your interest to do so. Even if that girl had been shooting paintballs at you moments earlier. And he had started to think that underneath that dirty exterior and random-acts-of-violence attitude, he might like her once his wounds started to heal.

“Well… Ummm. I guess I can show you what we’ve got around here.”

Such is the logic of seventeen-year-old boys, and his mind soon drifted. You see, Jack had never had what one might call, a personality. That was a major inhibitor in his ability to connect with the opposite sex. He was a very nervous boy, and while he was athletic and intelligent, he had not grown into himself. He will in time find a way to do so, however, but for now he struggled in the field of interpersonal relations.

“Hello?” She said agitatedly, “Well. Let’s go. Show me what’s good around here.”

He snapped out of his daze.

“Oh, right. Yeah, lets go.”

And off they went, past the apple tree and out of the woods on the other side, to explore North Meadowviewville, with Jack looking over his shoulder out of both fear and attraction in equal measure.

Walking out of the wood that bordered Poultry Avenue, yhey took the sidewalk east until they arrived at the intersection of Poultry and North Meadowviewville Blvd. There they stood, looking at the stop sign, with Jack thinking of the best way to both impress this girl with his knowledge of the area, and to also have an avenue of escape should the girl decide to open fire on him again.

“Well this is Poultry and North Meadowviewville.” He looked around to find the first thing that came to his eye. “That’s the gas station…”

“Oh wow,” she mused, “a gas station…”

“Yeah, I know.” He acknowledged, “but across the street there is the pizza shop and a laundromat, on the other side of that is the Presbyterian Church of the Chosen Few, and right next to that are a few shops.”

“Shops?” She said inquisitively. “What kind?”

“Well…” he stared at the three boutiques that were packed side by side on the corner, “there’s a thrift store, next to that is Ali Ann’s, some sort of a book shop, and then next to that is kind of an old time pharmacy. Down the way there’s a little café too.”

“A pharmacy?” Tasha had seen pharmacies where she used to live, but they were big, with bright lights and were owned by all the big chains. This one was different, smaller, and homier. There was a sign for milkshakes in the window, and she lit up with excitement. She also really liked thrift shops, and figured she might find some discarded gems. “Alright, lets go in and poke around.”

Jack was stunned; his day had been a whirlwind of activities. From trying to figure out his life’s journey, to being pegged in the back with a paintball, and now taking the this girl on an impromptu shopping trip. He was flustered. Things like this didn’t happen, and it was getting a little weird for him. He also didn’t know how to interact with girls, and thought that it all might be a little too much effort.

“You know, I’m really not in the mood for shopping right now,” he said, “I think I’m going to go get a slice of pizza and head back.”

She looked at him with a quizzical stare, obviously not understanding his thoughts.

“Oh, ok.” She sighed, “Well, um, maybe I’ll join you when I’m done.”

“Sure.”

He walked across the street over to Jill’s Pizza. Jill’s is an older building, pretty simple. It used to be a deli for many years until the owner passed and his kids put it up for sale. The front of the shop was small, with a large kitchen in the back, separated by a counter with a register. The smell of fresh pizza poured out as Jack opened the screen door and headed to the back to order something small. The woman behind the register looked up from a book she was reading and smiled as he approached. She was older, with light lines on her cheeks that were covered with flour.

“Hi there young man, what can I do you for?” She inquired.

“Uh… I’ll take a slice of pepperoni and a medium Coke.” Jack responded.

“Man, knows what he wants. Sounds good to me.”

“I guess…”

He sat down on the stool and stared at the T.V. screen. The news was on, and he found it depressing. So he soon was lost in his thoughts. He heard the man in the back pounding dough hard through his hands, and then slap it down on the baking sheet.

“You alright?” She asked earnestly, startling him.

“Yeah, I guess. It’s been a weird day.”

“Honey, I’ve lived 63 years and if there’s one thing I’ve learned its that most of the good days seem weird at the time.”

“Sure.” He was sullen now. He had started thinking again about his life’s journey and realized that he’d spent the whole day goofing around instead of being serious about it. This frustrated him, so he crumpled on the stool and put his head in his arms.

“What’s going on in there?” She said as she handed him his pizza and Coke. She tapped him on the forehead for added emphasis. “I believe I’ve seen you around a few times. You’re Maria Palsey’s son aren’t you? You’ve always been pretty care free. What’s the problem?”

Well that was enough of an invitation for him. He needed someone to talk to anyways; it might as well be the pizza lady. So he started off with the results of his test, then his parents. She seemed fascinated by the new girl he found in the woods. Finally when he was done recounting the day he explained how he was just sure he wasn’t going to make anything of himself because he didn’t understand how life worked.

She sat in silence for a second and picked up his drink. Then walked over to the soda fountain and refilled his coke. When she came back she placed the cup in front of him, looked at him and smiled.

“There you go sweetie.”

Great, I just poured out my frustrations and this lady is going to blow me off, he thought. Whatever.

She smiled at him and then backed up against the register, understanding his frustration. She stood there a minute, and then looked past him, through the screen door and out into the empty street. He could tell she was deep in thought, some unknown memory had settled into her. A warm summer breeze push up his spine and then crossed the space between them and fluttered her greying hair.

“It’s alright,” he said, “I just needed to let it out. Thanks for listening.”

She said nothing, just looked out the door for a few minutes. The man in the back rang a bell and passed up a slice of pizza. She turned to take it, then placed it in front of Jack and knocked on the counter.

“You see this ring here?” She said, the knock breaking the silence that had held them.

Oh boy. He thought, with the cynicism only teenage boys can hold.

He looked at the small diamond on her left hand, covered in flour with a little bit of marinara sauce crusted on. It was small, he decided, obviously purchased when the owner had little means for luxuries. But still she looked at it with a loving gaze and it sparkled for a minute in the light.

“Oh I know, it might not be the prettiest thing, but my husband gave it to me when we were dating. It is our engagement ring. He proposed to me right across the street there in front of that cherry tree. Then he left and went off to Vietnam. Leaving me like that. But he made it back all right. We got married a year later in the Presbyterian Church on the other side, even though I’m Catholic. He worked for Kodak for a while till they offered him early retirement or a lay off. He took the retirement. In the mean time we had three lovely children, two girls and a boy. They come by and help me out with the shop from time to time.”

“Ok…” he wasn’t sure where this was going.

“Listen,” she insisted, “there’s a point I’m making. Things were good right? I had found a purpose: my family. If I had taken a test and worried about it, I might have missed meeting my husband and starting our family.”

He fidgeted in his chair uncomfortably as she moved across the back to turn off the fan.

“Well,” she said mistily, “about six years ago he died in a car accident. He was driving home from an American Legion meeting he was killed by a drunk driver. I was heartbroken, grief stricken, to say the least. I couldn’t move, couldn’t eat, and couldn’t talk to anyone. I thought my life was over. My purpose had been broken, I thought. Talk about needing a plan, everything seemed to fall apart.”

He’d stopped eating at this point and was listening. Jack wasn’t good at offering solace but he knew she was saying this for a reason, so he listened.

“And then one day, about a year after, I was looking at the ring he gave me. I thought about how it was made, and the millions of years it took to form just so. The thousands of pounds of pressure that had to be placed on the bones of an old dinosaur so that I could wear it around and look pretty. And I sat there thinking about all the stresses in my life: his departure, my financial troubles, and my own grief. I figured that maybe one day my bones would end up compressed into a diamond. Maybe I’d be on some nice lady’s hand. That’s when I had a thought. I realized that pressure in our lives could transform us while we’re alive too. That my husband would want me to be a diamond in this life, and not fall apart like a bag of bones. So I took all those worries and used them to do something, anything that would make me happy.”

“What was that?” he was engaged now.

“I had no idea.” She admitted “It’s tough getting started in life, you can see that because you’re going through it now. It’s even tougher to move on and start over. I wasn’t sure anything would really make me happy. But one night, my kids came over and helped me make dinner, and we talked, and laughed. For the first time in a long time I was happy. I decided that I was going to open up a restaurant because food always brought my family together. So I went out the next day and asked the bank for a small loan to start a pizza shop, and I’ve been doing this ever since.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.” She said, “I realized I couldn’t wait around for someone to tell me what to do. My husband wasn’t coming back and I needed to be happy, like I knew he wanted me to.”

“Are you?”

“Grief hits you like a wave, and then it recedes. As you get farther away, the tide has less of an affect, but you’re always going to get wet sometimes. But with this shop it gave me something to do. People to talk to. I didn’t need to go out and start a campaign against drunk driving. Or to seek revenge on the poor soul who killed my husband. Other people will do that, that’s their calling. Other people will be the advocates and the lawyers, and all the other things that I could have done. I just needed to do something that made me happy and this shop is it. It reminds me of him and brings my family together. That’s all I need.”

He sat there for a moment thinking about what she said, about the pressure of figuring his life out so early. How he had let it consume him, and blamed his parents for not telling him what to do. He was grateful for this conversation, and a little honored in a way. This woman had opened up to him about all her troubles, without any judgment of his own small frustrations.

A weight was lifted off his shoulders, and he was relieved. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but after that conversation with the old lady, he didn’t seem to be bothered by it as much. He blushed a little bit, and smiled, the boyness in him came back and pushed away the frustrations.

“Thank you Mrs. – ”

“Jill,” she said, “just call me Jill. No formalities here.”

Just then the screen door opened and a young girl with black shorts and a green top came in, holding a paintball gun and a bag of clothes.

“I found something.” Tasha said.

“So did I.” Jack responded. He smiled, as the evening grew darker. A vibration from his cell phone went off. “It’s time to go though, I think.”

“See you tomorrow?” Tasha asked.

“Sure.” He said as he walked to the door, “Just don’t shoot me.”

 

The screen door closed behind him, and the sun set through the trees. Just another day in Meadowviewville.