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From this week’s essay by Gary Fincke: “Pledging loyalty to brotherhood,” he’d said, “isn’t always admirable.”
Weekly Featured Essay
Pledging: A Eulogy
by Gary Fincke
Woom! Ball
In early May 1964, during Hell Week, we played Woom! Ball at four a.m., just before the two-mile run, fifteen pledges in a circle slamming a football broadside into our neighbors’ guts. Woom! we said, then cupped our hands like running backs to keep ourselves from harm when our turn to receive arrived. Woom! The ball traveled clockwise because all of us except Cal Mroz were right-handed, and we were expected to take and deliver pain from the strongest side.
Woom! Early morning after early morning until we were five days into Hell Week, a half hour of sleep and six and a half hours of proving ourselves per night. We were nearly finished with Woom! Ball, one more night, but now there were more pledges who, after only three or four rotations, moaned and doubled up, clutching themselves in a way that signaled they were dropping out, and signaling as well they would accept the ridicule of the active brothers instead of shouting “Woom!” and silently wishing that half hour gone.
That night those pussies were given brooms or dust mops or bottles of window cleaner. They were told to do housewives’ work, to be something other than useless until there was only one man standing. Woom! I stayed upright, but near the end of the half hour older fraternity brothers joined, shouldering in among the tough guys like Jim Ulsh and Dave Mazur and Cal Mroz, the pledges who never showed fear or pain.
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Street Scene
by Anthony J. Mohr
Sam was happy, at least that’s what he said under oath. His employer had promoted him, he told the jury, and given him the rest of the day off. Heading home in his convertible, the radio blasting rock ’n’ roll, he balled his hands into fists, bounced them on the steering wheel and then into the air in long up and down sweeps, every stroke in tune with the pounding beat.
Sam cruised by a stretch of single-story California bungalows with gabled structures and front-pitched roofs overhanging the porches. He admired the Craftsman style of board and shingle. All along the street, palm trees reached for the sky. This was the best part of Sam’s commute, so he told the jury, a scene he enjoyed so much that he circled the block. The sun bathed him. The air felt like velvet. It was a perfect Southland day. Sam’s life and career had come together. He was riding the crest, his reward for good work, the future open before him, boundless and bright.
He said he never noticed the ten-year-old girl on the sidewalk, but she noticed him, and when he passed her again, she ran into her house.
“There’s a man in a car,” the girl told her parents.
The Fortunate Failure: A Triptych of the Senior Wordsmith
by Yuan Changming
I. The Fox in the Stone
In the humid, historical air of Jingzhou, our common native place, we lay spent. As Hua stirred, I felt the sudden, familiar urge to bridge the gap between our physical intimacy and the “biological stillness” of the page. In the dim light, she looked like a mum blooming on a foggy morning—an enchanting fox spirit from the folk legends of our youth, a sight for my sore eyes that snapped my soul into her hand.
“I want to take a picture of you like this,” I blurted out. “So you can see how you look when you’re most beautiful.”
She refused. A photo, she claimed, was “hard evidence” of an infidelity she was currently masking as a high school reunion. She waved her head, her long neck throwing shadows against the headboard of our hotel room.
“So, only I have the privilege to feast my eyes on your foxiest looks?”
“As long as you’re happy,” she whispered.
My First Birding Buddy
by Chandramika Nath
The first friend I ever made had feathers.
My father introduced us.
Every morning of my childhood began with the same sound—cheep-cheep-cheep. Before the village stirred awake, before smoke rose from kitchen fires, the house sparrows had already begun their day. Their nests were tucked beneath the roof of our Lakshmi Narayan temple, and their songs spilled into our courtyard like music.
Deuta never needed an alarm clock. The sparrows were enough.
With a cup of tea in one hand and a handful of grains in the other, he would step into the courtyard and scatter food across the ground. Within seconds, our little band of sparrows would arrive, fluttering down to share their morning meal. I would run after him, still rubbing sleep from my eyes, and together we would watch our little guests eat their breakfast.
One winter morning, I remember asking why the sparrows came to our house every day.
Deuta smiled and said, “Because they know they are welcome here.”
At the time, I thought he was talking only about birds.
Dead Heat: The Race Jim DeMoss Engineered
by Curtis C. Morgan
I didn’t know it yet, but in the spring of 1961 I was about to get a lesson in coaching strategy that would take me sixty years to fully digest. I was a college runner at Butler University in Indianapolis—in shape, I thought, real shape—and I had returned to my old high school, Northwood in the D.C. suburbs, where I had finished fourth in the state 880 yards the previous year. Coach Jim DeMoss was running his team through spring practice, and he spotted me standing at the edge of the track.
“Why don’t you run an 880 with Buzz and Tom?” he said.
Buzz Lawlor and Tom Rabenhorst were sophomores. I was a college runner on a track scholarship. I said sure.
Overconfidence was about to bite me on the hind parts. More precisely, I didn’t know what Jim DeMoss had already seen in those two boys—and what he was about to show them about themselves.
Parade Life
by Kate Farrell
For as long as I can remember, my father has assured me that the Fourth of July parade in our hometown is a celebration of my birthday, one day early. I am ten and stand breathless on the curb of our main street, watching our high school marching band play.
Dad puts a flag in my hand and says, “Don’t forget to thank them!” He’s swallowed into a circle of neighbors who slap him on the back and laugh about stories I can’t hear.
The majorette tosses her baton in the air, blows her whistle, then points right at me when she catches it. I wave my flag and am thrilled to have a summer birthday.
Dad can do anything. He leads the congregation in song every week at the ten o’clock Mass. He’s never off-key. He gets a perfect score when he and I do “How to Increase your Word Power” as soon as the Reader’s Digest arrives. I believe him when he tells me freckles are a sign of beauty and when he was disappointed in me when I took five puffs of a Virginia Slims 100 with my cousin.
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