letmetellyouastoryadventures

“Let Me Tell You a Story”

A Collection of Ninety-Six Stories and Some Poems

Cliff Williams

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Adventures, 67–88

One of the nice things about being a college professor is that if you want to get up a group to do something off campus, you have people who are eager to join you. That is what got a number of these adventures going.

Bubbling

On the first Sunday afternoon in August, 1990, I went to Lamb’s Farm in Libertyville, Illinois, to listen to an outdoor bluegrass concert. I parked my car several hundred yards from the concert site. As I walked toward the site, a small man approached me. When he got close, he extended his hand, smiled broadly, and exclaimed, “Mr. Bojangles, at your service.” We shook hands, but I was too astonished to say anything more than a friendly hello. Later, during the concert, the short man appeared on stage, playing the mandolin and singing.

Six years later, during the second week of August, I was in Iowa at the national hobo convention, sitting around the nightly campfire and listening to musicians. A short man was introduced as “Mr. Bojangles.” He sang several traveling songs, strumming the mandolin as he did.

The faded memory of meeting a Mr. Bojangles six years earlier came to life. “Hmmm,” I thought. “I wonder if he is the same person.”

The next day I approached him. “Were you at a bluegrass concert at Lamb’s Farm in Libertyville, Illinois, on the first Sunday afternoon in August, 1990?” I asked. He replied, “Yes, I was there.”

“Ooooh!” I exclaimed. “Do you know what you did? As I was walking to the concert area, you came up to me, extended your hand and said, ‘Mr. Bojangles, at your service.’”

Mr. Bojangles smiled. “Yes, that was me,” he said. And then he repeated, “At your service.”

He told me that though he had a home in Indiana, he was a traveler. He would throw some stuff into an old car, set off for little towns, and sing on their sidewalks. He put a hat at his feet for traveling money. “A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do,” he explained.

Sometimes the local police chased him away from his favorite singing spots, he said. He didn’t understand that. When the police asked him what he was doing, he replied, “I’m giving out smiles.” To me he said, “God has blessed me with a pocketful of smiles.”

One of his favorite spots was outside Hand Made Music, a store in Nashville, Indiana. On separate occasions, two former Trinity College students of mine have come across him there singing his traveling songs. Knowing that I have an interest in such songs, they have asked him whether he knew me. He did.

Two weeks after encountering Mr. Bojangles in Iowa, Ellen, a former student, sent me a bottle of bubbles. I had never owned one before, but I instantly knew what to do with it. I got out the wand and blew bubbles. Then I visited Ellen in Chicago, and blew bubbles as we walked along Broadway Street. A tourist bus passed us as we walked, and one of its passengers leaned out the window and blew bubbles back at me.

A week after this, the thought sparked into my mind—“Hey! A bunch of us could blow bubbles at a busy intersection in Chicago, giving out smiles.” That night, I saw Stephanie and Phil at a college event. “Maybe they will want to go,” I thought. I voicemailed them the next day on the college’s phone system.

Three days passed. I thought they would think I was weird. Then Stephanie voicemailed me back. Yes, she said, she would like to go, and she could get several others to go as well. I would supply the bubbles and the transportation, and we would blow bubbles for a couple of hours. That is what we did, on a Friday night in September of 1996 at Clark and Belmont Streets in Chicago, an intersection with lots of foot and car traffic.

The next week other students started asking me about going. So I went again. And again. Three or four times every fall semester for more than twenty years. I bought bubble liquid by the gallon and refilled the small plastic bottles we used to blow thousands of bubbles into the air over the heads of passing pedestrians and moving cars.

Some Bubbling Stories

I found quickly enough during the first few bubbling expeditions that unusual things happen when four or five us stood on a busy Chicago street corner blowing bubbles. Here are a few of them.

In a Bar

We five—me and four students—had been bubbling for nearly two hours and had to get back to the car before the parking meter expired. We walked north on Clark Street from the intersection of Clark and Belmont blowing bubbles as we went. We hadn’t gotten far when a man who was standing in a doorway said to us, “Come in.” He motioned toward a door behind him.

I saw that he was standing at the entrance to a bar. “Blowing bubbles in a bar??” I thought. I was apprehensive—would the customers be annoyed? Would anything untoward happen? I needed to keep the students safe, a legal requirement for professors who take students off campus.

I indicated yes, and we went in.

The bar was rather small, about thirty by forty feet. There were tables set around in that space, about half of them occupied by customers. The place was dimly lit.

The four students knew what to do. They spread out while I stood near the entrance, all of us blowing bubbles.

We did that for a full minute—a long minute, it seemed to me. I began to worry that we had overstayed our welcome and that some customers might have been hit by a bubble. I raised my arm and said, not too loudly, but loud enough for everyone to hear, “We have to go now.” The students stopped, and when they did, everyone in the bar clapped.

We left with smiles on our faces.

A Swinging Hug

We were on the southeast corner of Clark and Belmont Street when a relatively short, somewhat stout, woman in her mid to late twenties came along.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Blowing bubbles,” I said. “Want to join us?” She did.

It turned out that she had just had an unpleasant encounter with her boyfriend. She unloaded on me, as we both continued blowing bubbles. I listened, occasionally looking at her and nodding my head.

This went on for forty-five minutes until I and the two students had to leave. The woman shook my hand energetically, thanking me warmly for listening to her.

She turned to Andrew and said, “Do you accept hugs?” He said he did, and the woman gave him an expressive bear hug.

She asked Melissa the same question, and when she said she did as well, the woman gave her also an expressive bear hug.

I was feeling left out, so I said, “I accept hugs too.” The woman wrapped her arms around me, lifted me off my feet, and swung me around in still another expressive bear hug.

She left, and we three walked back to the car.

In Someone’s Unusual Picture

Four of us were walking back to the car. We were crossing an intersection when suddenly a car stopped beside us and a man stepped out of the passenger side and asked, “Can I take a picture?” I said yes, and we four promptly stood in a line in the middle of the intersection blowing bubbles.

But that was not what the person wanted. He took out a life-sized, thick cardboard cut out of someone from the back seat of the car and placed it upright on the street. He indicated for us to stand beside it, which we did, two on each side.

The person took a picture, put the cardboard cut out back into the car, and the driver took off. No explanation. No idea of who they were. No idea of who the person was on the cardboard cut out.

We walked off, continuing to blow bubbles.

Bubbles, Not Bombs

Candace popped into my office one fine afternoon in the early 2000s, plopped herself onto one of the easy chairs, and proclaimed that she wanted to protest something.

I asked her what she wanted to protest.

She didn’t know.

I suggested something. She shook her head. I suggested something else. She shook her head again.

Then my face lit up. The Afghanistan War was going on. So I said, “How about making posters that say, ‘Bubbles, Not Bombs,’ and we go to the federal plaza in Chicago and blow bubbles?”

Her face lit up too. “Yes!!!!” she exclaimed.

We arranged to do that on an upcoming Sunday afternoon. She was to make the posters and get one or two others to come with us, and I was to bring the bubbling equipment and drive.

I had chosen the federal plaza because I had been there several times for protests. The plaza had been full of people, and there was lots of car and foot traffic going past it.

Alas! On that Sunday afternoon, the plaza was totally empty except for us, and there was no foot traffic past it and little car traffic. It probably was that way most every Sunday afternoon, I realized, too late.

We blew bubbles and displayed the posters anyway.

After a time, I suggested we go over to State and Madison, which is zero North, South, East, and West, that is, the very center of Chicago’s street system, as it was only four or five blocks away. So we did.

Cars passed the intersection at the rate of hundreds every few minutes, and the sidewalk in both directions was so full of people that we could scarcely find a place to blow bubbles.

Alas, again. No one paid us any attention. Nearly everyone walked by without giving us even a glance.

Candace was happy, though. I drove the others back to the college campus with smiles on our faces.

Coffee Shop Expeditions

The very first time I took a carload of students to a restaurant for ice cream on a Friday evening was in 1985 at the end of the spring semester. Colleen, Ellen, Monte, and I had met for lunch in the college’s dining hall to discuss questions I had posed.

I decided to take them out for ice cream on the last Friday evening of the semester. We went to a nearby Denny’s Restaurant. Afterward, we came back to a central lounge on campus, where there was a piano, and Ellen played the Winnie-the-Pooh song, the music for which she had brought along, while all three of us sang it. Colleen knew it by heart, and she had a large smile on her face as we sang. (See “A Little Stuffed Bear” on page 62.)

Next year I started taking groups of three or four students to Denny’s on Friday evenings and Sunday afternoons.

One time at Denny’s, someone gave me a little something, or maybe I brought it along for show and tell. It disappeared. I said, “Where is it?” I looked on the floor beneath the table we were sitting at. “Ah!” I said. “There it is.” Instantly all five of us dived below the table to get it. After we got back up, I said, “Do you realize what we all just did?!”

After some years of going to Denny’s, I discovered coffee shops. And later I discovered coloring.

I had come to possess half a dozen coloring books, mostly given to me and mostly of Pooh, plus a couple of boxes of crayons. I dumped them all into a grocery store bag and put the bag into the trunk of my car. When we got to a coffee shop, I took the bag into it and set it on the floor next to my chair. No one ever asked why I took the bag into the coffee shop with me.

After getting coffee, tea, or apple cider, and after talking for half an hour, I lifted the bag onto my lap, took out the crayons and coloring books, and lay them onto the table, saying nothing as I did. The very first time, I worried that the students would ignore them. I also thought that the male students might be less inclined to take to them than the female students.

I needn’t have worried. Instantly, every one of the three or four students at the table took to the coloring. My only request was that they sign their names so that I would know who had colored each page. I now have those coloring books full of mementos of those students.

Since then, I have been to coffee shops between one and two hundred times, first with current students and then with former students and others. It is always a fresh experience each time.

Sandwiching

I had read someplace that someone went to places in Chicago where the homeless congregated and gave them sandwiches. I thought, “I can do that with students.”

I had been to Chicago enough to know that one place the homeless collected was near Broadway and Wilson Streets on the north side. It was about a mile from Lake Michigan. There were SROs (single room occupancy hotels with seven-by-nine foot rooms with chicken wire for ceilings), drop-in centers (open only during the day), overnight shelters, and places that served meals. Homeless people hung out on the surrounding streets. They could easily be found simply by walking up and down the streets.

One fall semester in the early 1990s, I rounded up four students who wanted to go. I got five paper grocery bags, one for each of us, bought five loaves of bread, two big jars each of peanut butter and jelly, plus a box of plastic sandwich bags. We met Sunday afternoon at 1:00 p.m. at a table in the student center to make the sandwiches. I brought along knives to make the sandwiches and plates on which to make them. We put an equal number of sandwiches into our grocery bags.

I drove us to Chicago, and we walked around. Part of the aim in going was to talk to the homeless, because they needed friendly connections with other people in addition to food. When we ran into people who looked as though they were homeless, we split up, gave them sandwiches, and talked to them. After a while, I waved us on to another street. Occasionally, we mistook someone who was not homeless for someone who was. We apologized when that happened.

Each time we went, I took the group to Murder Alley, officially Clifton Street, the one short street in all of Chicago that had the most murders. I showed them the little corridor off it where there was drug paraphernalia and other debris lying around, including urine and feces. It stank.

Cornerstone Community Outreach, a resident facility for families in need, moved to Clifton Street at one point and had the city install bright lights up and down the street. They said that that had reduced the number of murders there. When I mentioned that to a homeless person in the adjacent SRO, he said that no, it had not. “Now you can see who you kill,” he declared.

At one end of Murder Alley near Wilson Avenue, there was a silver truck parked from two to four on Sunday afternoons. It was giving out free condoms and clean needles. The slogan on the truck was, “Any Positive Difference.”

On the way home, the students debated whether doing something that resulted in more illicit sex or drug addiction was worse than preventing the recipients of those condoms and needles from being afflicted with possibly fatal diseases.

I always took the students into the lobby of the SRO with chicken wire for ceilings, and to Sarah’s Circle, a drop in center for women. One time, on the way up the stairs to Sarah’s Circle, we met a couple of women coming down, who promptly exclaimed when they saw us, “No mens! No mens!” We went back down, and the two women in our group went up to see what the drop in center was like.

Some drop in centers simply have chairs lined up in front of a television, and it can be depressing to sit there all day. Sarah’s Circle has tables, counselors, and programs for the women who go there. All drop in centers are warm during cold months.

When the area around Broadway and Wilson began becoming gentrified, the homeless moved. I asked a homeless person I met where they had moved to. He said, “Everywhere.”

I discovered some hanging out on lower Wacker and lower Michigan in central Chicago. There were also a few encampments there. At one of them, sleeping bags had been laid out parallel to each other, with cardboard boxes beside the head of each bag that contained the owner’s belongings. I also discovered homeless along North Michigan Avenue south of the Chicago River but only one or two in each block.

When I took students to these places, we spent more time talking to the homeless, as there were fewer of them there than near Broadway and Wilson.

Caving

Sometime in the mid 2000s, Lauren and Emily were getting up a group to go caving during spring break. Could I go? I asked. Yes, they said. Then later it was no, because their cars had become full. A year later it was yes again.

Ten of us drove to Illinois Caverns near Waterloo, Illinois, southeast of St. Louis, stayed overnight in a motel, then went to the cave the next morning. We had hardhats, headlamps on the hardhats, warm clothing, food for lunch, and extra batteries and flashlights. Some of us had put on knee pads.

To get into the cave you simply go down about a hundred steps, the last two or three dozen of which are very steep. When you get to the bottom, you find yourself on wet dirt, and you hear a stream trickling along. Everyone is able to stand upright. That is also the case when you walk through the cave, most of the time. Sometimes you have to duck walk and sometimes you have to squeeze around stalactites. A lot of the time you have to wade through the stream that flows through the cave. Your feet get cold when you do, but they warm up quickly after you get out of the stream. At no point do you have to crawl, unless you go into one of the side passages.

On this first trip, we crawled into one of the side passages that had a little room at the end. At points the passage was so low that we had to scoot. When we got to the room, we sat down, turned off our lights, and closed our mouths. Absolute darkness. But there was dripping. We listened to that for a bit, then turned our lights back on. Lauren and Emily said we had to crawl back with our lights off. So one by one we crawled back in the blackness. It wasn’t a long crawl, but it was rather unnerving to do it in total darkness.

I found the cave so captivating that I had to return. I bought hardhats and headlamps, then invited carloads of students to go. A couple of times I went with other faculty members. One time three of us had gone into a side passage and as we returned to the main passage we had to wiggle feet first. That meant that we had to shrink then expand a few inches at a time. I was the last one to do this, and I thought for a minute that I wouldn’t be able to make it out, because the passage was so narrow.

Another time we stopped about noon to eat at a fairly open spot that had nearly a foot of stream flowing past. There were eight of us, and someone, maybe me, suggested we square dance. So we formed a square, I called, and we all sloshed around in the water. Fortunately, no one fell into the water.

In the dozen times I went through the cave, I have never been able to find the narrow side passage I had gone into the first time. The headlamps do not illuminate the whole cave, so each time one explores the cave it feels as though everything is new.

Taped to a Wall

It was the beginning of class in the first week of October, 2002. The class was the honors section of Introduction to Philosophy, consisting of fourteen students. We sat in a circle. I sat down in one of the desks and listened to the conversation, which happened to be about a recent weekend activity on campus.

One of the students in the class, Anna, had been duct-taped to a wall while standing on a crate. The idea was to pull the crate away and see how long she would hang. I don’t remember how long they said she hung on the wall after the crate was pulled away, but I do remember that someone suggested that I be taped to a wall at The Alley, a store on North Clark Street in Chicago just north of Belmont Avenue. I said okay. Four persons shot their hands up. We headed to Chicago two days later on a Friday evening, armed with three rolls of duct tape, one crate, and two or three cameras.

There was no wall next to The Alley wide enough to accommodate me. We walked around the corner onto Belmont Avenue and found a brick wall next to a nails store (fingernails, not steel nails). Someone placed the crate on the sidewalk, I stepped onto it, spread my arms out, and the taping began. It took over an hour.

The intersection of Belmont Avenue and Clark Street is a hot spot in Chicago. This means that there is a lot of foot and car traffic until the early hours of the morning. People walking by gawked at me. Twice cars stopped, and the drivers got out and took my picture. Someone asked, “Is this some kind of protest?” A drifter stopped to help with the taping. A police officer came by and asked whether it was okay for the drifter to do that. We said it was. I asked that the front pocket where I had my money and ID be taped shut. The four students stretched the tape across my shoulders, chest, waist, and legs, plus over my arms. One of the long pieces of tape across my shoulders lay just under my chin.

The time came to pull out the crate. I immediately sank an inch or two. The tape just under my chin began to pull into my throat. Twenty seconds later, I dropped to the sidewalk. We all laughed.

The students decided not to take the tape off me until we all got back to the car. That meant that I had to hop along the sidewalk, because my legs were taped together. Fortunately, the car was less than a block away, so I didn’t have to hop very far.

The group made me promise never to be taped to a wall again with anyone else so that they could be the only ones who had ever done it. I promised. And I never have.

Train Party

Titus loves poetry. After I hosted a poetry reading in the woods on Trinity’s campus, he mentioned that he wanted to have a poetry reading on a train. So some weeks later I asked my honors Introduction to Philosophy class whether they would be interested in going on a train party. A bunch of hands shot up.

Fourteen of us gathered on a Friday night in December, the last day of classes—twelve from the class, someone’s little sister, and me. We drove to the Evanston el, paid our fares, and got on the next train, which was headed to central Chicago. Some of us sat but most of us stood, swaying now and then as the train jerked. Several students handed around cookies and mini candy bars. Some minutes later we saw a small sign that said, “No radio playing, no smoking, no eating. $300 fine.” We stopped eating.

Titus got out his poetry and read a few daring love poems. At the other end of the car a man was dancing. A couple of us went to him with a harmonica and a kazoo to see if he wanted some live music for his dancing. He took off his earphones and let us hear his dancing music. He shook our hands with a big smile, but talked incoherently. There was alcohol on his breath, but he was not drunk. Later he came and joined us for a minute before we got off.

When we got to downtown Chicago, we walked to Millennium Park just north of the Art Institute on South Michigan Avenue. We watched the large faces that were projected onto a tall vertical wall for a bit. On our way to the Bean, I suggested that someone could stand on the large, concrete, square fence corner that was at the bottom of the stairs to the plaza where the Bean was located and pretend to be a statue. Tim and David did that until a security officer told them to get down.

We stood under the Bean for a few minutes, watched the ice skaters for a while, then headed to the brightly lit columns. There Christina taught some of us a line dance, and after that we snaked, with our hands on the shoulders of the person in front of us, to the sidewalk along Michigan Avenue.

At Michigan Avenue we sang Christmas carols. I directed. Some of the people who were walking by stopped to listen. Someone joined us and sang along. At the end of the song, she asked if we could sing happy birthday to her friend, who was standing behind her. We did, and when we were done, the birthday person threw us a kiss.

After spending some time in a nearby Starbucks drinking warm coffee, we headed back to the el. When we piled into a car, the dancing man we had met earlier was sitting there. He got a big smile on his face when he saw us.

There wasn’t much sitting room in that car, so at the next stop we ran out of the car and got into another one, where we were all able to sit at the end of the car. We played the Round Robin story game and the What Am I Thinking Of? game before we got to Evanston. We exited, walked to our cars, and headed back to campus.

Dancing

The Junior–Senior Ball at Trinity College, where I was teaching in 2004, cost $45. Linda and I decided that we would not go. $90 plus a $20 parking fee and the hassle of contending with Friday evening traffic into Chicago was not our idea of a good time.

The day of the ball was warm and sunny, so I took my lunch to a picnic table near the cafeteria. After a bit Ann and Meghan, two seniors, came along. Could they have lunch with me? “Sure,” I said. They walked back to their rooms in Madsen Hall to make lunch.

Prof. Bill Moulder walked by, saw me, and sat down. We talked for a while before Ann and Meghan came back with their homemade lunches. The subject of the ball came up. Bill said, “Why don’t you go?” Ann said, “Yes, you should go.” “Can’t now,” I replied. “The deadline was three weeks ago.” “I can go tell Justine in Student Development that you want to go,” Bill replied. I wavered. “Would you dance with me if I went?” I asked Bill. “Yes,” he said. “And I can drive.”

Bill got up and went to the student development office. When he came back he said, “You’re on. You can pay on Monday.” Ann and Meghan got big smiles on their faces.

Bill drove while I read poetry to him from the recent issue of The Trillium, the campus arts journal. We parked a mile away from The Drake, for free, and walked to the hotel.

Dancing started after dinner, a slide show, a talk, and a short dancing lesson by Prof. Carmen Mendoza. The lesson didn’t stick in me too well, except for the foxtrot. So that is what I did all evening, modified in various ways. About half of the people I danced with were male, and the other half were female. The females usually asked me to dance, but I had to ask the males. Once when I was dancing with Bill Moulder someone cut in on me and I had to step aside. That rather annoyed me. My look of consternation must have been evident to one of the onlookers, as she was staring at me with a large grin. I didn’t know who she was, but I waved her out onto the floor, and we danced away.

Ann danced with me the most and Bill the second most. At midnight the last dance was announced. Nathan was nearby, so I said, “Would you like to do the last dance with me?” He did. We had the floor mostly to ourselves as we danced, hand to hand, sometimes smoothly and sometimes awkwardly. Afterwards, Bill and I walked back to the car amidst the downtown Chicago street life. The drive back was uneventful.

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