Elena

by Tom Peters

12/28/2022

Every election year I receive too many emails from James DiMaggio. I delete them as fast as I delete the multitude of other politically motivated emails trying in vain to detract me the whole fall season with annoying, repetitive pleading messages.

But with just four days left until Election Day, where I’ve actually got some skin in the game, I wake up at 2:14am and have to write after having a dream about the ‘real’ Jim DiMaggio in my life.

Writing in the middle of the night on Friday mornings is a pattern I’ve come to expect every three or four months, with droughts like I’ve recently had of almost a year.

In the dream, I enter a room and Jim is sitting on what looks like a small replica for the old (now abandon) 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 as assignment, looks up at me and nods to the section that was once Arlan’s a discount department store, behind Sear & Roebuck, and motions for me to have a seat. I sit and 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 and my every move. PTA obviously. 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 now wondering ‘Where’s Jim now?’ I could call our mutual friend Don Andreozzi in four hours, get his phone number and find out. But now is now so I want to unload on you, the reader, as much about my school days as a vulnerable teen as I can due to the memories that float to the surface of my 73 years old brain at this moment.

We all used to laugh a lot back then and when I got together with Jim and our circle of friends we laughed, to my memory, 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, JoAn 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 and he quite wisely married her. Elena would laugh in my presence and look at me like, ‘you’re pretty funny Tom but I’m not sure you know where you’re going and ……I worry for you.’ Of course, she was correct. 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)[1]

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 as most of them were.

I married a couple of times back in Michigan but they were NOT Elena and ended in divorces. I found my ‘Elena’ later in life, in Los Angeles, her name is JoAn.

We most definitely will get Ellie off to college in just a few years. I could tell the last time Jim & Elena and the three of us got together at a 50 year class reunion in 2017. Jim & Elena were meeting JoAn and Ellie for the second or third time and the smile and laughter shared between us 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.

[1] 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.