After school Valerie was still in Uncle Rance’s Freshmen English Classroom, not because she was re-taking his Freshmen English Class, but because he had asked her to stay and not ride the bus. He was her Uncle. Married to her father’s only sister. And he was one of those adults she had to listen to no matter what.
“Your grades are going down again, Val. You used to make A’s, especially in Science.”
“I know. I just don’t get Mr. Walther’s Physics Class.”
“He’s the same teacher you had for Chemistry last year, and you aced that. You were his best student.”
“Yeah. But Danny was in that class too. He flunked it as a Junior. And he’s the only one that can explain some of Mr. Walther’s jokes to me.”
“You don’t need to understand jokes to get the science. It is precise and mathematical, provable by experiment.”
“I know that. But somehow Mr. Walther’s teaching style works better when I understand his jokes.”
Uncle Rance walked over to his desk and sat down behind a huge pile of Freshman writing folders.
“Your Uncle Dash is coming to take you home this evening.”
“What? Why?”
“You have to ask after the fiasco at the dance?”
“Oh, please. He doesn’t need to get mad at me over that. The same thing would’ve happened to me if you had gone with me instead of Uncle Dash. It wasn’t about him.”
“I think he knows that. But we’re worried about you.”
“That’s it exactly,” Uncle Dash said from the classroom doorway.
“Hi, I could’ve gone home on the bus.”
“No, you couldn’t. I needed to talk to you.”
“Come in and take a seat, Dash,” Uncle Rance said. “Or do you need to talk to her in private.”
“No, you can help with this too. Valerie needs to know that she can rely on the men in this family when it comes to things her father can’t do for her anymore.”
“So, you do understand why I couldn’t handle being at that dance, huh?”
“Of course. You told me flat out. It was a father/daughter dance. And I’m not Kyle.”
A sharp sob escaped Valerie’s lips, and then she was back to her usual composure. “It’s so much more than that. More than I could ever talk about with either of you.”
“The school guidance counselor? He’s overworked with college-readiness seminars and whatnot. But he’s willing to do what he can.”
“No.”
“What can we do to help, then?” Uncle Rance asked.
“I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. My head is wrapped in darkness. And I have to find my own way out.”
“But you know you can talk to either of us,” said Uncle Rance.
“Or your Aunt Jen. Or Aunt Patty,” said Uncle Dash, naming his sister and his wife.
“No.”
“What do you mean, no, Val?” Uncle Dash’s eyes betrayed the stinging in his heart. Val’s words at the dance had hurt him deeply. And he was the kind of man who always had to have the solution to every problem.
“Just no. I mean, I appreciate that you want to help. But it won’t work. I have to find my own way out.”
“Stacy had to find her own way out too, and she ran away. Promise me you won’t run away too!” Dash’s face was grim and stiff, betraying what he feared she really would do. And Valerie understood why. Her cousin had run away to be with the man she loved. But Uncle Dash could never approve of the restless and reckless Toad. He still didn’t after all the intervening years. The men in her life were too tightly wound, too strictly self-disciplined to know when to admit they were wrong and try to go down another pathway.
“Maybe we just need to have confidence in Valerie, Dash,” Uncle Rance said. “Sometimes the right thing to do is trust that the other person will choose to do the right thing.”
“I still need to hear you say you won’t run away, Val. Not like Stacy did.”
“I promise. There are things ahead you’re probably not gonna like. But running away is not on my list.”
Her two Uncles accepted that then. And what followed was a long, quiet pickup-ride home courtesy of Dash Clarke.
#3. To know about Filipino culture, you have to understand what Jollibee is all about. Jollibee is the Filipino MacDonald’s. Of course, it is cheaper… and better tasting. There are a few of them around the country here. California has more than Texas. They are like a giant Filipino magnet. You go there to find the Filipino community in any American city. But other people love the food too. You have to sort the Filipinos from the Hispanics and white folks that are not too proud to eat cheap and delicious.
Catch a Falling Star 
Strawberry Fields
This foolish essay about berries that mean love to me is only partly inspired by the Beatles song, “Strawberry Fields Forever.” That’s because, of course, their song was only about meditating. In the lyrics they take you to the “Strawberry Fields where nothing is real… but it’s nothing to get hung up about…” They are talking about a blissful place of no worries where we all need to go. And then staying there forever.
This, of course, I could never do. Worrying about the future is tattooed on my behavioral imperatives in the dark part of my stupid old brain. And while I often found that place of no worries, and lingered there for a bit, I found you could never really get anything done if you stayed in that state of strawberry fields forever.
But don’t get me wrong, strawberries are a critical part of every healthy mental diet.
You see, my meditations on strawberries when I was a child of eight, nine, and ten centered on the strawberry patch at Great Grandma Hinckley’s place.
She was, as I incorrectly recall, slightly older than Jesus when I was that age. By that I mean, though she seemed museum-quality ancient to me, I had derived wisdom about life, love, and laughter from her before Sunday School taught me any of those things said in Jesus’s words.
And I was given the task of mowing her lawn in the little plot of land surrounding her little, tiny house in the Northern part of Rowan where I also lived and grew and celebrated Christmas and Halloween and Easter and the 4th of July. And though I was doing it because she was so old, I never even once thought she was too old and frail to do it herself. Grandma Hinckley’s willpower was a force of nature that could even quell tornados… well, I thought so anyway when I was eight. And she gave me a dollar every time I did the lawnmowing.
But there were other things she wanted done, and other things she wanted to teach me. There was the garden out back with the strawberry patch next to it. She wanted me to help with keeping the weeds and the saw grass and the creeping Charlie from overrunning the strawberries and choking them to death. (Creeping Charlie wasn’t an evil neighbor, by the way. He was a little round-leafed weed that grew so profusely that it prevented other plants from getting any sunlight on their own leaves, causing a withering, yellowing death by sunlight deprivation. I took my trowel to them and treated them like murderers. I showed them no mercy.)
And Grandma always reminded me not to be selfish and eat the very berries I was tending in the garden. She taught me that eating green strawberries (which are actually more yellow than green, but you know what I mean) was bad because they could give you a belly ache, a fact that that I proved to myself more than once (because eight-year-olds are stupid and learn slowly.) She also taught me that it is better to wait until you have enough strawberries to make a pie, or better yet, strawberry shortcake with whipped cream. She taught me that delayed gratification was more rewarding in the long run than being greedy in the short run and spoiling everything for everybody.
She always gave me a few of the ripe strawberries every time I helped her with them, even if I had eaten a few in the garden without permission. Strawberries were the fruit of true love. I know this because it says so in the strawberry picture. Even though I probably never figured out what true love really means.
My Great Grandma Nellie Hinckley was the foundation stone that my mother’s side of the family was built on. She was the rock that held us steadily in place during the thunderstorms, and the matriarch of the entire clan of Hinckleys and Aldriches and Beyers and other cousins by the dozens and grandchildren and great grandchildren and even great great grandchildren. I painted the picture of her in 1980 when she passed away. I gave it to my Grandma Aldrich, her second-eldest daughter. It spent three decades in Grandma’s upstairs closet because looking at it made Grandma too sad to be so long without her. The great grandchild in the picture with her is now a grandmother herself (though no one who has seen this picture knows who it is supposed to be because I painted her solely from memory and got it all wrong.) But Grandma Hinckley taught me what true love means. And true love has everything to do with how you go about taking care of the strawberry patch.
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