I luv Ruby

My love smoldered in the margins of great books.

By Stephen J. Lyons

Apr 13, 2000 | Six dusty volumes of Junior Great Books (Discussion Series 4) lean and deteriorate at the end of my bookcase, next to a first-edition copy of the Hardy Boys' "Something Happened at Midnight." On the cover of each great book is an illustration of 10 empty chairs in a circle with a white dove in the middle.

At some point, a teacher at DeWitt Clinton Grade School in Chicago's West Rogers Park -- suffering from temporary loss of judgment brought on by excessive exposure to chalk dust -- must have noticed that I had just enough potential to attend a special class where I, along with others of the Chosen, would read and discuss Daniel Defoe, Robert Frost, Edgar Allan Poe, Jack London, Washington Irving and many other dead white writers of enduring status.

We gifted and talented arbiters of classic literature met in a poorly ventilated room with stained ceilings and sticky floors, where we offered up our seasoned critiques of the masters. Most of my colleagues took their special status in stride, but I was entirely out of my usual element of solitary angst. The very idea of sharing my ideas out loud was the equivalent of having last week's dirty underwear viewed by my peers under an electron microscope.

Fear rendered me speechless whenever I was called upon to deconstruct, for example, what Defoe meant in the following passage from "Robinson Crusoe": "My reason began now to master my despondency." But at home, alone, safe from mortification, I underlined that crucial sentence with an insecure wavy line, then wrote boldly in the margin, "He was sizing up the situation."

Thus I made my entrance into the land of marginalia.

On the next page I penned, "He has faith in God," for an interpretation of Defoe's "He that miraculously saved me from death can deliver me from this condition." A brilliant analysis if you consider that I read mostly Superman comics and the sports section of the Chicago Sun-Times.

This was eighth grade, a particularly edgy time for me, when pleasuring myself was a major passion, along with basketball, hockey, football and the two-boy street game called "pinners."

At the cost of a 19-cent rubber ball purchased or pilfered at the corner drugstore, my buddies and I consumed insane amounts of time flinging the ball against the concrete stairs of apartment stoops.

Pinners loosely resembled baseball. The goal was to hit line drives over your opponent's head for home runs while taunting him mercilessly with words like "pussy" and "retard." Extra base hits depended on arbitrary and fluid boundaries that could change instantly -- when, for example, a parked car drove off or a delivery truck appeared. Scoring was hotly contested, involving the use of more elegant slang acquired in the hallways and bathrooms of Chicago's public schools.

"That was a double, you pimple!"

"Was not, Pizza Face!"

"Screw you, Four Eyes!"

My vivid memory of the intricacies of pinners contrasts sharply with my dim recollection of the content of those great books. Certainly I remember the above-mentioned "Robinson Crusoe," and how could I ever forget the conclusion of London's "To Build a Fire"? "Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known. The dog sat facing him and waiting. The brief day drew to a close in a long, slow twilight ... Later, the dog whined loudly."

What a horrific, and appealing, way to die. And what city kid wouldn't want a dog?

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