The Page Comes to Life
As a youngster, I played and watched baseball everyday. I modeled myself after the professional baseball players I watched on ESPN. Every night before bed I sat there in front of the mirror, mimicking Ken Griffey Jr.’s jerky batting stance or Nolan Ryan’s burly windup. The bright lights, the cameras flashing, the roar of the crowd. It all seemed so magical. “Bases loaded. 3 balls, 2 strikes, 2 out. The pitchâÂ?¦crack!” Like every young boy, I dreamt wildly of hitting towering homeruns, making diving catches, and winning the World Series. But as I matured, the game began to lose the vibrancy that had once had me hooked. After eleven years of playing my favorite sport, I crossed over that chalk-white baseline one last time and hung up my flimsy, tattered mitt next to my dad’s from his days of playing little league baseball. There on the far wall of our shaded and disheveled garage, we each had our own little piece of childhood memorabilia side by side. Even though I never slipped my left hand back into that raggedy brown-leather glove, my pen soon recaptured the pure excitement of the game on a thin sheet of lined notebook paper.
I was nine years old and had just entered the fourth grade. It was, for what seemed to me at the time, another dreadful year of Hebrew school at Temple Beth El. Who wanted to wake up at 8 a.m. on Sunday mornings to spend three hours learning Hebrew? My older brother had completed Hebrew school three years ago, and now my parents expected me to follow along in his footsteps. I wasn’t about to fight my parent’s word; I knew better than to waste my time trying to convince them when their minds had already been made up.
That mid-September morning my mom dropped me off at the synagogue, my eyes still half-closed, my pants wrinkled, my shirt still soaked in cranberry juice stains. I slammed the car door, triggering the squeal of car tires and the smell of burnt rubber. I looked over my shoulder, but she was already halfway down Sixth Street making her way back home. I pushed open the front doors and inched up the stairs to the second floor, contemplating turning back with every step. Entering the vacant classroom, the door closed shut with a piercing clang as if I were entering a prison cell for the next three hours. I selected a seat from the myriad of chairs lined against the far wall and plopped myself onto its hard-plastic exterior. Within a few minutes the rest of my classmates had shown up followed by our teacher. There was no turning back now.
I detested every moment there, from practicing my Hebrew at mock synagogue services to discussing Jewish traditions and culture with our teacher. I concentrated on pronouncing each Hebrew letter with fluidity and grace, but my mind was already made up. Sports were my real religion. Thoughts of Sunday morning football cluttered my head. Who was winning the San Francisco 49er-Dallas Cowboys game? What time were the Oakland Raiders playing the Denver Broncos? Inside my head was a projector playing one extended sports highlight reel over and over again.
As part of the curriculum, the last hour of Hebrew school provided a chance for each of us to become more acquainted with Jewish culture and tradition. Looking at the list of choices, I struggled to pick an activity that would actually spark some interest. In what seemed to be a matter of seconds, I hastily convinced myself to join The Temple Times, the student newsletter at Temple Beth El. I walked down the hall to the assigned classroom, regretting my haphazard decision. I found a seat along the back wall and waited patiently for the teacher to arrive. Three minutes later she stood in front of the blackboard, welcoming us as new staff members. Explaining the guidelines of the newsletter, she told us that we could write articles on topics of our choice. Flashes of buzzer-beating jump shots, bone-crushing tackles, and game-saving double-plays rebounded off the sides of my head like a pinball machine. I lowered my head and stared at the desk, recalling the details of last night’s UCLA football game on television. I frantically ripped a sheet of lined paper from my spiral notebook and scribbled some notes down on the Bruins’ convincing 46-24 victory over Arizona State in Tempe. Grabbing a clean page, I carefully wrote my name at the top. Pausing for a moment, I exhaled deeply to recollect my thoughts. I made my plunge into sports writing when the pen hit the first line of the page and continued to move at a constant rate until it was time to go home.
I collected my stories week after week, showing my parents when they picked me up at noon every Sunday. They often smiled and acknowledged my work, yet never presented me with a clear sign of approval. For me though, that feeling of seeing my byline on the page loosened my nerves and left a tingling sensation throughout my body. Soon I looked forward to Sundays when I wrote about the latest football, baseball, and basketball games that I had watched the day before. The Temple Times had helped me forget about the horrors of Hebrew school that had haunted me for many previous years. My fascination with sports had instilled a passion for writing in me that I reclaimed after graduating Hebrew school two years later.
Little did I realize now that my involvement in The Temple Times was the beginning of a journey that would bring me 3,000 miles from home to Amherst College at the age of fifteen. As the plane approached all I awoke to see were the lush green tops of trees in the distance. Coming from smog-filled, overpopulated Los Angeles, I was enraptured by the color green. I thought we were descending into a rainforest of the United States. I stepped off the aircraft into a sheet of humidity. I was not going into the heart of Massachusetts just to be away from mom and dad for three weeks. Rather, I felt the need to dedicate a portion of that summer to enhancing my journalistic skills at Amherst College’s Excel Program-a chance for high school students from around the world to take seminar-style classes at the undergraduate level. I had neglected to join the student newspaper my first two years of high school and had gradually lost track of my love for writing and sports ever since graduating from Hebrew school at the age of twelve. Now I felt the need to rejuvenate my interest-there were more NBA titles and Stanley Cups to write about in my life. I was determined to become a better writer, and I was anxious to have the opportunity to learn more.
The seminar room chilled my bones. The light switch turned downed, the blinds drawn, the floor lined with cold, white tile. My journalism instructor, an Oxford man at a younger age, stood tall and poised in front of our class of thirteen aspiring journalists. He had high expectations of us. I had the same for myself. We read intensive, elaborate non-fiction books detailing the Clinton administration, the Gay Rights Parade in San Francisco, and the effect of media on American democracy. Class time was spent largely discussing issues and setbacks that reporters today routinely encounter in their field of work. We asked questions that generated plenty of voices from the entire class: what role does the journalist play in modern-day society? What public service do journalists demonstrate? How are journalists thought of today? We discussed the role of the journalist and gradually worked on how to generate a story. But Barry Bonds and Magic Johnson were no longer on the tip of my tongue. I wanted to learn more about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. I wanted to capture their spirit in my own work. I wanted to become a journalist. My instructor challenged me to make that jump one day after class.
The clouds had begun to tumble in that late afternoon, and another August thundershower was making its voice heard. Earlier in the day, our instructor told us to interview someone in town. From the interview, we were expected to develop an angle that would guide us in writing a human-interest story to be shared among the class. Most of my classmates had been familiar with the process. As writers for their student newspapers back home, they knew what was expected of them when presented with such an assignment. I, on the other hand, did not have that luxury. Not only was it my first time conducting an interview, but I also had to interview a complete stranger.
I walked into town with veins popping out of my skin. I gritted my teeth as I reached the stretch of quaint stores and cafes that furnished Main Street. As I paced up and down the sidewalk, I saw my fellow classmates finding interview subjects.
“Those thieves,” I muttered to myself.
I thought it would be better of me to be choosy in the process of completing an assignment of this nature. I was pursuing an interviewee with charisma and poise-one with a story to tell. I walked down to the end of the strip and stopped. An older couple walked past, noticing the confusion that coated my face. I forced myself to walk back up the street. The pressure was on when I walked into the local sandwich shop.
Empty. The lunch-time business had concluded for the day, and the smell of baked bread and sharp cheese had wistfully eased through my nostrils. I took my first step inside the door and stopped. My head panned the room in a sequence of erratic, multidirectional swings. I glanced around the room as if I had just entered the confines of an abandoned house. Approaching the counter, I inhaled several breathes of air. A waterfall of sweat tumbled down my forehead. The middle-aged man at the cash register grinned kindly at my boyish face. I looked away before I could see any more of him.
Say something. Don’t just stand there.
I turned my head back around, but my eyes were still directed at the tiled floor. Looking up, I managed to improvise my request.
“Oh, I’m a summer student at Amherst, and my teacher gave us an assignment to interview someone in town. Is there someone here that would be willing to answer a few questions?”
“Sure,” he replied. “She’s in the back. Let me grab her.”
He turned and headed to the back of the sandwich shop. I sat down at the nearest booth and stared pensively at the leftover crumbs on the table surface. In a few minutes, I pulled my head up to find a young woman coming at me. She stood tall with broad shoulders as she walked confidently in my direction.
“Um, hi, I’mâÂ?¦Josh,” I stuttered.
I extended my hand, and she eagerly shook it with a warm smile. My timid, bashful look promptly transformed into a grin of small measures.
“Hi, I’m Jennifer. Nice to meet you,” she said with a cool and calm deposition.
What now? My legs quivered. My back stiffened to a board. I needed to break the ice before we both became restless. Her green-tinged eyes stared back at mine. I opened my parched mouth and attempted to speak. Words dropped onto the table with a heavy thud.
“Um, IâÂ?¦IâÂ?¦.excuse me.”
Slow down. I redeemed some composure to explain the nature of my assignment, making sure to notify her that the interview would only be used for my class.
“So where are you from?” I interjected.
“Springvale. About two hours northeast of here,” she responded.
“And how long have you worked here?” I asked.
“Well, I started about a year ago when I enrolled at UMass-Amherst about ten minutes away for graduate school,” she said cordially. “Right now I’m working on getting my masters in education to become an elementary school teacher. I work here just to make a little extra money on the side.”
Her twenty-second response had already provided me the angle for my feature story. I began to focus my questions around her interest in education and her future career as a teacher. As she spoke, my hand raced across the page, catching every word she let out of her mouth. I felt awkward recording this stranger’s life in my notebook, but the ability to learn about someone’s life in just a matter of seconds had provoked me to ask more.
Starting as a timid novice, I soon became engaged in the interview. It no longer felt like something foreign. I felt comfortable with my client, and I talked with her as if I were speaking to a close friend back home. Questions fired off my tongue, replacing any potential gaps of silence with constant dialogue. The illustrations that she painted of her own life ran vividly through my streaming thoughts and impulses. I had unconsciously turned off the sports highlight reel spinning through my head and centered my attention on my subject.
But our conversation didn’t just stop at her life. Jennifer had become interested in my life back in Los Angeles and how I had ended up across the country in rural Massachusetts. What had started as a question-and-answer session morphed into something much more real and personal. I lost track of why I had been talking to this stranger in the first place, continuing to converse with her just for the sake of talking. After the initial shock of the encounter, the conversation was finished.
“Thanks so much for helping me out,” I said emphatically.
“Sure thing,” she answered. “It was very nice to meet you. Good luck to you.”
I watched her walk back behind the cash register and disappear forever. For twenty minutes my subject had become my best friend only to never see her again. I scratched my meditative head as her impression remained ingrained in my memory. Regaining a sense of perception, I pulled my head back down to my spiral notebook and scribbled down my last set of notes on Jennifer. I took a deep breathe, lifted myself up from the booth and left the sandwich shop carrying a slight smirk on my face. And at that moment I knew I would never forget.
My foot hit the sidewalk of town again, and I was instantly ambushed by thundershowers that by now were in full force. Large drops hit the concrete and pavement, and it was time to return home. One step in front of the other, I rushed back to my dorm room shading my notes from the rain. I fell into my desk chair, breathing in heavily the thick, hot air. And then, I hunched over my desk, placed my hands on the keyboard, and began to write my feature story on Jennifer. I crafted each sentence with care and dedication as if my subject was peering over my shoulder. Even if it was only my imagination cooking up such fantasies in my head, I left her memory on that page.
I’m still a sports nut, but now I don’t always write about miraculous touchdowns or towering homeruns. Like my early childhood memories, at times the thrills and chills of the game come back to find their way into my pen. I will never stop loving sports, but my pen has tried to illuminate new faces and issues in its travels; writing and editing for several newspapers and now learning the ropes of television production and programming, interviews have become my steady diet.
