Dov's Artist Blog

Without naming names, one of my children complained to me repeatedly about the mean bus driver she had to deal with on her daily trips to school.
My child was even then a person of great precision in her use of language and she gave me in great detail the arbitrary and grumpy nature of the bus driver who was making her mornings and afternoons unnecessarily unpleasant. Having grown up in a household that cherished civil disobedience, she was not particularly civil to the woman in question and she was undoubtedly disobedient. And so, in order to show her scorn for the bus driver, while the bus was in motion, my child would stand in the aisle of the bus, put her hands on the adjacent seats and do the gymnastic maneuver known as “skin the cat.”

And, of course, the driver called her on it.

I pointed out to my child that I could step up to the authorities and complain about the rude and arbitrary way the bus driver was treating her, but not until my child’s behavior had been absolutely exemplary for a considerable period of time and the driver was still maltreating her.

That day never came. Ironically the day that did come is that the driver’s husband became a lodge brother of mine and I got to know the driver myself on a personal level. And while I could see that she was tired, stern, and grumpy, much of the time, she wasn’t exactly Atilla. So, it became apparent to me that the disrespect between her and my child had been a self-feeding mechanism and my setting the standard necessary for me to lodge a complaint cut it off. In any case, I heard nothing further on the subject and when another lodge brother of mine became my child’s driver, they got along famously.

And that would have fallen off the edges of my working repertoire of recollections but for another incident with another child of mine recently. My middle son, Michael, as readers of this space are aware, had a difficult life before he and I met, not long after his 15th birthday, but he was fortunate to have a network of friends and friends’ parents who stepped into the breach and gave him safety and acceptance. One of these was a particularly handsome and incredibly intelligent young man of whom I was only dimly aware, but who was to Michael, very important. The first time I saw him, Gabriel by name, was when Michael took his best seating passes for his High School graduation and gave them to Tom and me, leaving his other supporters and adherents to sit on the wooden bleachers lining the side of the gym where Michael’s ceremonies were. Michael had been officially designated the class clown and his adherents in the bleachers, including Gabriel, having already graduated the institution and being safe from discipline, were really whooping it up at the ceremony, just barely inside the border that would have had security escort them from their seats.

So that was my introduction to Gabriel, one of a small group of Michael’s hyper-rowdy friends.

Well, Gabriel went off to college and after having ingested substantial quantities of illegal substances, managed to get himself a license as a Registered Nurse, enabling him, after considerable difficulty in a tough economy to land himself a job in a hospital in Elmira, New York, about an hour’s drive west of his native Binghamton. Since all of Gabriel’s friends are in Binghamton or nearly so, Gabriel thought it best to get himself an apartment in Binghamton and endure the commute to Elmira.

The day that Gabriel moved into his apartment, he had something of a move-in party with his friends, a party which was apparently noisy enough to disturb his neighbors considerably and the cops got called. Fortunately, the cops were only aware of noise and alcohol and they persuaded the partiers to tone it down a bit.

And that, seemingly, was the end of the deal. Except that shortly thereafter, Gabriel’s girlfriend was on break from school and spent a couple of weeks living with him, again an unremarkable event.

Gabriel was therefore shocked when a couple of months later he received an eviction notice from the landlord complaining of his noisy parties (plural, you will note) and his unauthorized roommate.

While the core of the accusations were based loosely on true events, the accusations themselves, were false and, so far as Michael and Gabriel could ascertain, based on nothing but Gabriel’s upstairs neighbor having taken a disliking to him.

Gabriel complained to Michael who, unsurprisingly, said to Gabriel, “Speak to my dad.”

It turned out that Gabriel was looking to move out and get a fresh start without the problems of having a grumpy neighbor, but he was concerned that if word got back to his employer in Elmira that he was thrown out of his apartment for being a rowdy tenant, that it would not sit well with his employer and his job could be in danger. He therefore wanted to fight the situation to clear his name.

However, I was aware that Gabriel had not completely given up on ingesting funky substances and it was of far greater concern to me that if we fought the eviction, word of that could get to his employer and have far worse consequences. So, under the circumstances, my advice to Gabriel was “Do go gentle into that good night.”

Just quietly move and put the incident behind you.

Because you can’t really complain about abuse of authority if the person
in authority knows or may know that you’re standing in the aisle of a moving bus and doing skin the cat.