Elena

by Tom Peters

12/28/2022

Writing at 2 or 3 am on Friday mornings is a pattern I’ve come to expect every other month or so, with droughts like I’ve recently had of almost a year.

In the dream, I enter a room and Jim Dimaggio, a high school classmate, is sitting on a bench near what looks like a small replica of the old Sears Plaza in Lincoln Park, MI, our hometown. It appears to be a classroom with a few small children around working on projects. As I enter, Jim is finishing giving a little one an assignment, he looks up at me and nods to the section that was once Arlan’s a discount department store, behind Sears & Roebuck, and motions for me to have a seat. I sit in the back, as I’m about to comment on how this scene looks like to me, Jim gets up and walks over to a counter to drop off some papers. I’m feeling a tiny-bit abandoned looking around the room noticing adults that look like the parents of the kids studying Jim’s every move. PTA ?. Jim finally comes back to sit down and I say I’m a long way from home and not sure how to get back and he says, “Tom, you’re not even on planet earth.”

Enough with the dream, I’m awake wondering ‘Where’s Jim now?’ I committ to calling our mutual friend Don Andreozzi in four hours after calculating the time change from LA to Detroit. Don will have his number.

But now is now so I want to unload on you, the reader, a little about my school days as a vulnerable teen. At least one aspect of that period of my life.

We all used to laugh a lot back then and when I got together with Jim and our circle of friends. A LOT! My wife, JoAn, laughs all the time. In her sleep, on the phone, and especially while watching her coveted Korean soap operas on NetFlix, she laughs out loud like we used to.

Jim married his high school sweetheart, Elena Martin.

Elena had a smile that made all of us want to marry her. But, she was Jim’s girl from the start. Elena laughing it something I said, looked right at me once and said, "You’re pretty funny Tom, but I’m not sure you know where you’re going and ……I worry for you." She was communicating with me, kind of soul to soul. At the time this was new to me, not knowing a life-long memory was being laid upon me from a loving person, 'not from planet earth'.

Jim, Elena, and almost all of the friends in our circle were headed to college after high school, and I…was not.

I was busy back then trying to figure out everyone around me in order to fit in. As our family grew to ten children, I, being the oldest, was accustom to trying to figure out what people around me were doing and how to adapt accordingly. (whatever that is)*

In my quest to ‘fit in’, I tried my best to make people like Jim, Elena, and others laugh. I didn’t take Jr. High or High school very serious because I was not going to college. A steel mill was waiting for me.

I married a couple of times back in Michigan but they were not Elena and eventually ended in divorces. I found my ‘Elena’ later in life.

In Los Angeles, her name is JoAn.

We most definitely will get our daughter, Ellie, off to college in just a few years. Jim & Elena and the three of us got together at a 50 year class reunion in 2017.
They were meeting JoAn and Ellie for the second or third time and the smile and laughter shared between us was as ‘real’ as it was when we were young.

Elena’s honest eyes & smile (like JoAn’s) reached back over 50 years to touch my heart and helped me truly realize my growth over the years.

Dedicated to Elena Martin, you'll be forever missed...

*Kikanza Nuri-Robbins, a friend wrote a book called “A Fish Out of Water”. Kikanza referenced our daughter, Ellie, in this book. My point here is my discovery that I was such a ‘fish’ like this in my school years, in my family, and most of my life.