The Cadre

13

By the end of second grade, my circle of friends had pretty much formed up. Gone were some early nursery school and kindergarten friends whose families had since moved, or had simply been placed in the other classroom when our group was split-up for the beginning of second grade. In was a new kid or two who had moved into the region...

I might need to explain: While some cities have multiple school districts for a single city, rural school districts encompass a large land area and draw in the students from tens, twenties, or thirties of miles away to have enough to fill a classroom per grade. In the case of my second grade, while the first grade class had been a bit large, by Nineteen Seventy-One a school about fifteen miles away just didn't have enough students anymore to justify the expense of having a building of its own, thus those kids were merged in with our kids and our second grade class became half again larger. That's why it had been split between two teachers. I was lucky in that most of my friends from first grade ended up in my second grade class.

But a couple did not and that's when I discovered I was an out of sight out of mind friend. During the first month of second grade I tried to keep in touch with the couple of friends who had been merged with the other classroom. But by October, with my other friends right in front of me, it was always easier to go out to recess with an activity involving them in mind, or to set-up play dates, or in the case of one new kid, mistake my coat for his and not realizing it until I got home and we had to sort it out that evening between our parents.

This kid was 'Jonathan' and he was of a wing of a wealthy family that had moved into the area before second grade started. After the coat mix-up, we would spend time at each others' houses. While mine was pretty big compared to some of my other friends, his house was about thrice the size and on the shore of a nearby lake. And by thrice the size I mean the rooms were three times the size of the rooms of my home, all large and cavernous with plenty of windows looking out over the lake. The smallest room of the house was the kitchen and a row of rooms adjoining the second story garage where the ground opposite the lake was higher. While the house had an official front door and entryway, we never used it, instead going through the garage for play outside away from the lake, or taking the glass doors of the living or dining room for play on the yard in front of the lake. During Summer this would include play in the lake or the occasional motor boat ride.

Jonathan was always even tempered, at least with me, though he did like to play a prank on days when I was at his house toward the late afternoon. Having once mentioned that I had watched Sesame Street as a youngster, Jonathan and his siblings would use that as an excuse to watch it with me, which was odd as I had long outgrown it and hadn't watched it in years. But as it turned out they had never been allowed to watch it, they used me as a reason to see what it was all about under the guise of being a good host to me. The fun thing was, after the first couple of times, they didn't get the urge to watch it again until they noticed their father was coming home, either his car spotted approaching through the woods, or the sound of the garage door opener whirring. Then Jonathan or his sister would say, ''Hey, you like Sesame Street, its on now!'' And they would rush to the television in the living area and tune it in and Jonathan and his sister would then, when lucky, be able to sing along with the show as their father walked in. In retrospect, I realize it was just to get his goat and horrify him with the thought that his 'upper level' kids had been exposed to that 'lower level' stuff all afternoon long.

Then there was Peter, the longest-time friend who I met in nursery school, we had become best buds by kindergarten. In the early years, he was about eighty percent friend, twenty percent frenemy. An example was when he was over to my house. I showed him Bumpa's watch which had been given to me once he had been sent off to the nursing home after his stroke. It was kept in the top drawer of my dresser and after some other play, we later returned to my room to play with some clay. I excused myself for a bit to use the bathroom and when I came back and settled down I found him mashing the watch into the clay. When I noticed this I asked for the watch back and he wouldn't give it to me, he just kept on mashing it in, completely covering it. Stunned, I called my mother and got the watch back. We asked why he had done that and he said he didn't know. We did another thing or two and it was time to take him home. From that day onward, while we remained friends, I never pointed out anything I particularly cared for to him just so it would remain safe.

While I had remembered watching Star Trek during the original run, he discovered it when it hit afternoon reruns; this spawned us spending much of our playtime parroting Star Trek as the Kirk & Spock pair. Despite my having the classic Spock hair cut as a child, he insisted on being Spock, even one time showing how he could tape the tips of his ears into points. As Elementary School went on and other science fiction television shows came briefly to the prime time line up, we would play based on those as well, though nothing ever over shadowed the Star Trek inspired play for long. By Middle School, the balance had changed to more fifty/fifty on the friend/frenemy range and by High School it settled to thirty/seventy. We could never get the clay cleaned off the watch and it was soon discarded from ruin...

Paul's family moved into an abandoned dairy farm about half a mile away from my home. We had visited one another during an in-house recess in first grade and quickly became friends. He was that perfect mix of charm & mischief and we loved each others' home settings. He seemed to love the huge patch of woods surrounding my home, I loved the abandoned dairy farm that was his home. The most notable part of his home was the vast barn, designed to house all the cows during milking, it was now a large empty space with some forgotten items stored in the lower level with the upper level comprised as two long lofts where the hay had once been stored. Ropes had been tied to the center pitched roof beam and we could use the ropes to swing from one hayloft to the opposite, sometimes setting up the ropes ahead of time so we could swing from one side, grab the rope there to swing right back again without stopping. To the side of the hayloft level was a hallway with an old office room having a window in the door and a window looking out to his driveway. With a hook lock on the outside of the door, Paul showed me how it could be used to lock others in, specifically me; this was when I learned I wouldn't get hurt by breaking glass with the palm of my hand as I had been pounding on the glass in the door window in protest only to have the ancient glass break, allowing me to reach through and unhook the door myself.

Further down the hall, made up of old bare wood planking, were alcoves for tool storage, mostly now empty, and in one of them was a small hatch like door that Paul had one day figured out how to open. This lead us to the second wing of the barn, the upper level was a large, empty, storage space over the lower level which had been the bottling area. The bottling area had become the place where all the disused milk bottles had been tossed and abandoned when the place had shut down. It became a fun challenge to scamper over all the broken bottles without falling. Sometimes when I would get home, I'd have to pull some bits of glass from the bottom of my sneakers so they wouldn't tear at my home's wood floor. The final part of the dairy farm was the silo. There was an opening from the top level of the milk bottling wing that lead into middle of the silo, then a wood board ladder leading to the top level. From there we could open part of the metal dome of the silo and see a great view of the surrounding land and the grass feeding field below, long since gone to hay.

On one of Paul's birthdays, many of us joined him for a party, then played in the barn wings, and one of the unsupervised activities was the silo jump. The ground at the base of the silo had become thoroughly soaked by rain creating a small mud pit, the game was to jump from the opening of the silo dome and land in the mud... Effectively a three story drop. Having had two collar bone breaks in the past, I think I was the only kid Paul couldn't tempt into taking the leap. Most the rest of the kids he did get them to try it, even one time pushing a hesitant boy. Very few of them would do it a second time, whereas Paul, with much practice no doubt during his free time, did the jump several times that day. As most of us where then all muddy, we had to stay outside and entertain ourselves by building forts out of a stack of hay bales and then having a mud ball fight until the various parents came by to pick us up one by one and get scolded by our chauffeuring parent. Paul was great fun, but by fourth grade his family moved away leaving a hole in all of our hearts.

While there were many other girls and boys I would occasionally visit and play with, Jonathan, Pete and Paul were the most common playmates I had during my elementary school years.

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I Was An Only Child (eventually)

12

The Fall of Nineteen Seventy-One had started out like it was going to be a great year as my sister had graduated from College and was going to be a teacher at a nearby town. This meant she would once again be living in her bedroom and keeping hours that synced with mine and thus my original mother figure would be back in my life full-time along with the rest of my siblings. But in reality, having graduated from High School the same time as my sister graduated College, my eldest brother was given a set of luggage from dad as part of his surprise disowning. This was postponed as mother intervened, but by the turn of the year my eldest brother was gone.

Surprisingly enough, his room wasn't. His furniture and stereo remained, just some of his personal belongings were gone. My not as older brother had grown up idolizing him and in his absence decided to move into his room. This lead to my not as older brother's room being available and our mother encouraged me to move to it in kind. My own bedroom had been next to the master bedroom so perhaps she wanted more privacy or something. Unlike my not as older brother, I did personalize his old room to make it mine with some moon landing related large photos and painting the window trim.

I wasn't suppose to ask why my eldest brother had gone.

Before the end of second grade, my sister was gone.

I wasn't suppose to ask why my sister had gone.

A month or so later, mother moved into my sister's vacant room. And this was my family by third grade. On the holidays I wasn't supposed to notice that two siblings were missing. Once in a while alone with mother she might mention that my eldest brother was living in a different state and my sister had moved in with her boy friend after she had been thrown out of the house...

A couple years earlier, after Pappy had built his apartment and moved into the house from Spring to Fall, my mother had been assigned to help take care of him on top of watching out for her own dad, Bumpa, and everything else. The daily visits to Bumpa became less frequent as she tried to make new time in her week to run the necessary household errands. Soon after this, I was with mother on one of these fewer trips to see Bumpa after she had not been able to reach him by phone. When we arrived, he didn't answer the door and my mother used her own key to let us in. She had grown very quiet and ordered me to wait in the living room portion of the house with the dining room between me and Bumpa's closed bedroom door. She knocked and heard moaning, and she let herself in. After a bit, me looking to the open bedroom door through the vertical slates of a dining room chair like bars reminding me that I was to stay away, my mother came out crying and went to the phone.

I honestly don't remember what happened next. I was later told that Bumpa had a stroke in bed and it had left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak, or get out of bed, or go to the one phone in the house. In a bit of a whirl Bumpa was soon in a nursing home and we were helping mom clean-out his house and ready it for sale.

As my mother had already become distant with my father from the living arrangements with Pappy, she went to the store owner, Joe, for comfort. That soon turned into an affair and they would sometimes meet with their cars at a location near some woods, then take one of their cars to a place where they could have some privacy. During one of these trysts, in early Winter Nineteen Seventy One, my eldest brother had spotted her car while driving by and assumed it had broken down and been left there. When he got home he asked Dad about it. Dad had my brother take him there and they waited until Joe returned with our mother. That's how they found out about the affair.

While I had started second grade joining the grocery store owner's son for the morning bus stop, mother stopped working at the store and started taking me straight to school and dropping me off. She found a new job as a motel cleaning lady, a type of job she had during her teenage years. I was no longer joining Joe's son in the morning because if my mother stopped there, it might be thought she was doing so to see Joe. While I had enjoyed a few play dates with the owner's son at the start of second grade, I was no longer allowed to go to his home or him to visit mine.

My eldest brother had been told by our father to keep the news of the affair from the rest of us. Despite this shared secret, or perhaps because of it, my eldest brother was soon gone and living on his own. Or perhaps his unintentionally outing my mother's affair had ended her support for his not being tossed out of the house.

Suddenly, mom and dad were joined at the hip and would do things together that I had never remembered them doing. Going out to eat while the rest of the siblings stayed home. Going to a movie, this time with me in tow. Going on a vacation trip to Florida, with me in tow again. It was my first time flying, and our first chance to see the completed Disney World and take some of its many rides. In part, this trip was so my father could meet-up with my snow birding paternal grandfather, Pappy, and the two would drive back to New England while mother and I returned by plane. It was soon after this trip that my sister was disowned and told to move out of the house.

Originally, dad had told her that she was to move out of the house if she didn't go to College but this soft peddling had back fired as she did, then, go to College and graduate. He made sure not to make that mistake when it came to my eldest brother thus providing him luggage to move out with upon graduation of High School, and rectified his mistake with my sister once he was back from the Florida trip. My sister, incensed as she had done College as he had said, retaliated by pointing out that mother was still having an affair with the grocery store owner, just now with the convenience of her working at a motel. With this news, the brief period of mom and dad being tied at the hip ended with them now living in separate bedrooms. My mother resumed her original job at the grocery store and dad invited Pappy to stay at the house year round and no longer snow bird. This stalemate remained for the next three years.

It was a little Cold War at home that I was blissfully unaware of, at first.

The odd thing about my father disowning my siblings, as I learned many years later in life, was that Pappy had disowned my father in his own teenaged years. It was an emotional confrontation and, as my mother told me, it ended with my father pushing Pappy through the plate glass window of their then Massachusetts home. I don't know how or when they reconciled later in life, but as for the emotional trauma of being disowned, my father had decided to pay it forward...

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Unsupervised Free Time!

11

In the Fall of Nineteen Seventy-One, when I was seven, my not as older brother was taking a different bus home from the High School while I took the earlier bus from the elementary/middle school building. As a result, I'd be dropped off at the grocery store, check in with my mother who was working there until after four in the afternoon, then walk across the hayfield to the family home. Officially, I was then looked over by my not as older brother, but in reality, he didn't get home until just before four, assuming he wasn't staying late for a high school activity. This gave me about an hour to get into trouble by myself at home... I mean enjoy my own company.

At first I'd get home and take out a large bowl and pour in a few handfuls of potato chips, then go the porch where I would sit down and admire the September sunset while spoiling my dinner. As October rolled around, I had grown bored of this and decided to use my time exploring the house. Much of it I already knew, but the basement could always be better known.

The house's basement was actually built into the bedrock, some of it had been chipped away, but a third of the bedrock still remained and sloped down from the 'back side' of the basement to the floor, though it was the front side of the house. This left two thirds of the space remaining with one half being for the freezer case, work sink, and power panels. The other side was the workshop.

Within the workshop half was all my family's tools, including the drill press and table saw, two large work benches (which were typically covered in abandoned half-done projects), and a selection of various old cabinets which held the hand tools and a small selection of hand held power tools. I had tagged along and watched as my father or eldest brother had worked down here on stuff and now I had my chance for an up close and personal look. To stay out of trouble each day, my cue was hearing the door of the house close above, meaning someone was home and I'd pop-up from the basement. No one ever asked why I was down there and no excuse needed to be given.

Opening up the cabinets revealed a great array of tools: Screw drivers, hammers, push drills, wood planes, etc. The other cabinet, though, held something unexpected, a nude picture of what could have been a younger version of my mother. Posted on the inside of the cabinet door itself, it looked like it was from a glossy magazine and was in color. Was this actually a picture of my mother in her pre-marriage days? Did my father keep it secreted away here to remind himself of how she originally looked, from time to time? Or had he seen this picture during his World War II service days, clipped it out, then found my mother years later and pursued her as she looked similar to the pin-up girl's picture he'd kept during the years after the war? I never knew for sure, but I've always wondered.

Then there was all the scrap material in the shop area, mostly wood, but some metal. With the wood scraps, I'd practice with the tools, drilling holes, either with a hand held push drill, or occasionally with the drill press. The drill press I remembered from Bumpa's house where it had been in his own basement before his stroke. Essentially just a metal frame which grasped a hand held power drill, it had knobs and handles to allow strictly measured drill depths for anything a hand held power drill could bore. It was fun using the little circular, toothed, tool-key to tighten and untighten drill bits from the drill's 'chuck'. Then see how the various sized drill bits and depths made various sized holes. I found I actually liked the push drills better as they let you drill holes in different directions than just down.

The table saw was more exciting, though, given its powerful motor and reputation for danger. Before the age of saw blade guards, its metal toothed circular blade peeked out from a slit in the center of the table and you could use one of two cranks to raise the blade to almost a full half circle, or lower it completely out of sight. The other crank tilted the blade one way or the other for angled cuts. And I just had to try out all the combinations of height and angles with the pieces of scrap wood available! Keeping the memory of Bumpa's unnaturally shortened fingers in mind, I was very careful as I cut some boards in half and made groves in others. Yet, with using all of these wood tools in the basement, it never occurred to me to start a project of my own at this time...

With wood, that is.

Of the various scraps in the shop was electrical wiring, some switches, and light bulb sockets. Knowing that electricity went through light switches to turn lights on and off, I decided to figure out how this worked for myself. As metal was involved with electricity, I found an old red Radio Flyer bed that had long since lost its wheels and pull handle. Upside down with the rim against the table saw surface and the underside of the flatbed surface facing up, I used the push drill to make some mounting holes for the switch and the socket, then used the scrap wire to hook up between them, cutting off the rubbery insulation to expose the metal before I screwed the ends down. For the stretch from the power outlet to the switch, I found the end of a power cord, with the two prongs on one end and the two bare wires on the other, and mounted that to the power switch as well. Plugging it in, the light lit up immediately regardless of the switch position and I realized that only one side of the wiring had to go through the switch for it to work. So I took the screw driver to loosen the wires, and got a burst of sparks and the screw driver flew out of my hand. Oh, yes, I thought, I should unplug it first! Unplugged, I tried again, this time putting the switch between one path of the wiring from the plug to the light bulb socket, and the other path I just twisted the ends of the two wires together. Plugged back in, this time the switch worked perfectly to turn the light on and off.

With this project completed, I decided to try out the tin snips on the metal Radio Flyer bed just to see if it would really cut through it. It did, but was hard going so my original thought of cutting all the way across was soon abandoned. As was my time in the basement.

Having tried out all the tools and explored all the corners of the shop area of the basement over the weeks, it was time to find something new to get into trouble with. I considered exploring my father's electronics work table and teach myself how to use the soldering iron but I discovered Star Trek reruns on the Boston UHF channel, instead...!

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Here Cometh Second Grade

10

All seemed right with the world as my sister had finished College and was back living in the house full-time. She was a new teacher and found a job in a nearby town teaching third grade. Alas I was only in second grade, though, so I returned to the same school building as before. But this year, due to the ever growing size of our class, we had been split-up between two teachers. Two of my friends ended up in the other classroom and two were in mine. Also of note, twin sisters had moved to the area and it was decided to place one of each in a classroom. My second grade teacher was the woman I had remembered from first grade who had looked in on us while the first grade teacher had been detained at the office the previous year. No big single experience defined this year, just a few smaller ones.

Unlike first grade where our desks were spread apart or at most in pairs, our desks were now in two columns. Each column made up of two rows of desks facing each other and placed tightly together side by side making a large, if uneven grand table-like surface. In this set-up, the teacher would use three walls to teach from with the back of the room reserved for the true tables which had high tech things called 'headphones' where some individualized lesson materials were played from tape. With our desks so tightly together, the teacher had a pile of cut cardboard boxes. They were cut into three sided partitions which would be arranged on every other desk for tests, providing us privacy as we filled out our answers.

Though we were always told not to look over the cardboard divider and cheat off our neighbors' answers, one day the boy next to me was doing just that. For every question he would hang his head over and wait for me to answer, then tuck his head back for a moment, presumably to write the answer onto his page, then hang his head over the divider again to await my next answer. After a few questions I was surprised that the teacher hadn't noticed this and whispered to the boy, ''Stop that!'' This brought the teacher over to us where she took my test and tore it in two for the rest of the class to see. Stunned for a moment as she'd took the wrong student's test, I tried to speak up, but was shushed. And I was left sitting there as the boy next to me made do by looking at the student's test on the other side of him.

Recess was immediately after the test. As the rest of the students collected their coats to go out this winter day, I went to the teacher to ask about the test and why mine had been torn-up. She said it was because I had been cheating and I would get a zero. When I tried to protest she told me that she would hear none of it, and that was that. I slunk over to the coat hooks and took my coat and followed the last of my class outside.

The play equipment was across the side driveway at the end door. The driveway lead to the combination soccer/baseball field which was not in use this time of year. As we had gotten quite a bit of snow this winter, the excess had been plowed to the parking spaces in front of the game field creating a tall snow-piled wall. The teachers would gather near the end door of the school and chat amongst themselves as recess progressed. Slinking outside, still stunned by the teacher's actions, I noticed the boy who had been cheating was eying me and had gathered two friends of his from the other second grade class. They then started moving toward me.

So I drifted away from them.

But they continued coming my way, putting on a show of just meandering, but that meandering always got closer to me and I continued to drift away, further from the playground area and toward the game field. Soon I realized my mistake as I found myself trapped at the snow-piled wall as the three kids were now openly striding toward me as we were now out of sight of the teachers. I kept one eye on the approaching group and the other on the pile of snow behind me. I could easily image a desperate escape attempt trying to climb up and over the snow wall, but I also realized that they would either grab me by the legs as I tried, or worse we would all make it over the snow wall and then the teachers wouldn't even hear my plaintive screams as I received a good beating.

So I stood my ground and waited for the boys to reach me. Fending off any coming unpleasantness, I promptly said, ''I can do a Mickey Mouse impression!'' This surprised the boys as the cheating boy asked me to repeat what I had said. I repeated I could do a Mickey Mouse impression and, bemused, he told me to go ahead. ''Hi, I'm Mickey Mouse,'' I chirped. He said it sounded more like Minnie Mouse; that got a laugh from his friends. I agreed it might be the case. Then he wanted to make sure I wasn't going to tell the teacher that he had been the one cheating. I told him that the teacher had already told me she wasn't interested and so I didn't see any point saying anything else about it. Was I sure? Yes, I wasn't going to say anything else about it.

With that behind us he looked to his two friends and me and asked if we wanted to play 'King Of The Hill' given the large snow bank we were standing next to, but the bell rang and recess was over and we needed to get ready for lunch...

One time the second grade teacher called in sick. The mother of one of our classmates was assigned to fill in as the substitute teacher for our class. Rather than teach the class, though, she took this time to warn us all of how the school system was stripping us of our culture and homogenizing us. This, most importantly, included taking away our birthright New England accent and she was going to teach us how to properly say words which had consonant pairs. Over the previous year and a half we had been taught to 'blend' consonant pairs into a single sound as we read aloud. That had been wrong, we were told, and we were to pronounce the hidden vowels that were between each consonant pair. It wasn't 'barn' it was 'barin', it wasn't 'truck' it was 'turuck', and so on. We spent the morning going over these words and repeatedly said them 'correctly' and other words as she wanted them pronounced. Then we had morning recess and lunch and returned to spend the afternoon repeating more words 'correctly'. By the end of the day she left us with the instructions that no matter what our teachers told us, we were to always pronounce the hidden vowels!

In retrospect, I realize she never told us about the hidden vowel for 'th' pairs, nor for that matter tell us what to do with three letter consonant combinations; should it be pronounced 'tehoree'? And did 'rr' count as a consonant pair in 'correct', if so should it be pronounced 'cororect'? Given how interesting the day had gone, I eagerly anticipated the next time the second grade teacher would be sick and we'd have our classmate's mother back with more warnings about the school system and how we were being taught wrong. But on the handful of other times the second grade teacher was out, the classmate's mother never returned...

The final reflection on second grade was getting to school. While my brother had been my bus ride guardian for first grade, he had moved on to High School the next year and took an earlier bus that went to a different building. Rather than have me walk the two hundred or so feet away from school to wait at the speed limit sign on my own, my mother had talked the owner of the grocery store into insisting that the school bus stop in front of the store to get his son, 'William'. Being an important person in town, the school did so and my mother would bring me to the grocery store when she went to work each morning. There I would wait with the grocery store owner's son and sometimes visit with his mother, Dorcus, as she waited with us. When it came time for the return trip, the bus would drop us off at the grocery store and I would then touch base with my mother at the store before I walked across the hayfield and hung-out at the house alone until my not as older brother arrived from High School about an hour later.

By about December everything changed and my mother would drive me to the school and drop me off by the end door of the building where I and a handful of other students would wait until the school doors opened. This drive took us from our home past the front of the grocery store where I would see William still waiting for the bus with his mother and I would ask why I no longer waited with him for the bus. I wasn't told. And I now joined the group of a few students where our mothers picked us up at the end of school.

It was during this period where one morning my mother took me to the end school door and dropped me off. It was still wintertime with snow banks surrounding the school and for some reason my legs started to itch. And I would scratch and my undies started to itch, and my shirt, and it was getting progressively worse. As the school doors were locked closed, there wasn't any adult I could talk to for advice and it occurred to me that the cold of the snow bank might numb my skin and make the itching get better. So I sat on the snow nearest the end door and it helped my seat, making that itching go away, but my legs and the rest of me still suffered. So I decided I needed a place were I could lie on the snow and let the cool numbness sooth the rest of my body. Going around the corner of the building, I found a good spot by a classroom window and lay down, arms and legs spread and it did the trick. All the itching went away.

The bell sounded meaning the end door of the school had been unlocked and I should go to class, but staying in the snow with its coolness had been so good, I didn't want to leave. So I stayed for a few minutes more, after all I wouldn't get into trouble being only a few minutes late to class. And I waited a little longer and then realized that I would be so late getting to class that I would get into trouble... Thus becoming a second reason not to leave the snow and go to class.

And so I stayed in the snow, feeling nice & chill and entertained myself by looking into the classroom window. This third grade classroom was the only one divided into the main room with the students, then there was an arch like entry to a back portion that had its own door to the hallway. This portion was mainly used for storage of rarely used items and it was this area that I was by the window. As the third grade class begun I watched the backs of the students as they took their seats and paid attention and sometimes did classwork. Then apparently because it was deemed to be too cold out, they broke into an in-class recess after a couple of hours. As part of this, some of the students drifted into the back portion of the room to get toys to play with or visit with each other. Eventually one of them noticed me in the snow looking at them. She pointed me out to her friends and then they gathered at the window looking at me and I looking back at them.

Their interest and chatter gained the attention of the third grade teacher who came to the back portion and looked out the window and saw me, then she left. A bit later an adult came out the end door and around the corner of the building and asked what I was doing there. I told of my problem with the itching and had found the cold snow was helping, but he or she felt that I should come in out of the cold and see the school nurse. This was my first time seeing the school nurse and she would become a familiar figure for my next several years of Elementary School and Middle School. She had me take off my clothes to find my body covered by a red rash save for my hands and face, and she called my parents and this lead to my mother picking me up and taking me to the doctor.

It turned out my mother had changed the laundry detergent that we used and I was allergic to the new stuff. Mother had to buy some of the old detergent and rewash all of my clothes while I was consigned to spend the rest of the day lying in the bathtub in water filled with a special soothing soap to help heal my skin. By dinnertime the first batch of my recleaned clothes was done and much of the redness of my skin had shrunk down to just a few scaly patches.

This was my first diagnosed allergic reaction, though I never learned the name of what it actually was I was allergic to. As I would later find out, I had been suffering from allergy problems for some time and would be plagued by them for the rest of my life.

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Parked

9

As it had always been during my life, we had a ski area. Actually, it was just a loaner as we didn't actually own it, but my father was the manager of it during my childhood and into my mid-twenties. As such, family members and the very rare friend would have all the free skiing they could want. Before I was born, my family had a home within a stone's throw of the ski area. A year after I was born, we moved to the home by the hayfield. While I had grown up with the Giacomo hayfield and surrounding woods as my backyard, my siblings had the ski area and its surrounding territory as their childhood backyard. I never remembered being taught to ski by my family, I just did, mostly tagging along the slopes with my sister, occasionally with one or both of my brothers.

While limitless skiing had its charm, I also loved the off season. You could hike the grounds in Spring, Summer and Fall. In fact, summertime had lift rides to the summit for tourists, sometimes with an art fair as an added draw. The lower slopes would be used for hang glider training. Other times, the buildings would be leased out for Gem Fairs, occasional Weddings, and other private functions. But the thing I loved most was the off season days when nothing was happening.

As my siblings grew-up and moved away there came the question of what to do with me on the days with no school, but when both parents were working. The answer was to have me either tag along to the grocery store where my mother worked, or to the ski area where my father would work. On those off season days with my father, he would first walk the premisses to inspect for vandalism, I guess. Mid-morning he would make the run to the combination post office and general store to pick up the park's mail, and for the rest of the time he would sit in the office and do paperwork. This was when I'd be left to my own entertainment.

The ski area buildings, when empty, were a ghostly place that would call to me. There was that combination thrill and chill of large empty spaces where people had once been but were now missing. Just me, alone. The vast outdoor area to walk and hike around with stilled ski lifts, occasionally swaying and creaking in breeze. Echoey interiors with locked doors, forgotten corners, some lit by lights, though most bathed only in limited light from windows. That limited light would approach a twilight during rainy days adding to the spooky atmosphere. I ate it up. In fact all my life I've been drawn to empty buildings just to again soak-up that vibe it gave me during childhood.

And then, of course, there was the ski season. Buildings packed with skiers, seasonal workers filling the previously empty back rooms.

In the early years, ticket girls would stand at various places around the park with a work apron which included many pockets for various types of ski tickets, each with the day stamped on them, limitless twisty ties to secure them to skier zipper tabs and a pocket for cash and a coin changer made up of metal tubes, each with a single denomination of coin in them that would be spat out by a little lever as needed to make change. While this method worked for the mythic Norman Rockwell era of America where everyone was polite and friendly, by the more jaded nineteen seventies, a ticket selling wall was made with little windows behind which sat the ticket girls with cash registers. The register receipts were the lift tickets, each day printed on a different color striped paper that would then be folded around a metal hook through the zipper tab and stapled in place. While the new ticket selling technique safeguarded against girls in the open being harassed or robbed, it also meant that all skiers now had to come to a common part of the ski area, regardless of where they found parking, and wait in lines as the girls worked through the confining windows. Soon after, the ticket girl aprons got a partial reprieve on busy days as it would allow the tickets to be purchased through the window, then stapled by cashless girls standing outside the ticket windows to save time.

The ski lifts were diesel engines with electric starting motors, sometimes in partial basements of the lift buildings, often with submerged metal housings next to the lifts. They typically had to be warmed up for a time before they could be operated to run the chairs. The Summit Lift was started earlier than the rest to first ferry-up the people that worked in the Summit Building, and the Ski Patrol who would check out the slopes and settle into smaller buildings around the ski area to be on the ready should they be needed. Once in a while my father would reach the park early in the morning to get a phone call that a lift operator would be in late and my father would do the duty of starting a lift engine or two himself. Sometimes, a little bored with skiing or a bit too cold, I would lie on the partially submerged engine housings to soak-up the radiating heat of the motors and let the vibration from the engine soften and sooth my back, and legs.

Grooming machines would run up and down the slopes during the morning hours to break-up any icy spots into little bits of ice that would be safer to ski upon, or pack down fresh snow into smoother surfaces so skis wouldn't sink down and be caught by the fluffier flakes. By late morning they were all back to the maintenance shop that served as their garage and also housed the tools and provided work spaces for the other mechanical items at the ski area that needed repair or routine review. All of these lift operators, ticket girls, ski patrolmen and slope groomsmen served as an extended family for me and my siblings.

Then there was the food staff. My father had first started out working at the ski area as the food stand manager, but as more slopes were added and more buildings built, father had become the park manager and the cafeteria had become its own enterprise. When fully operating during the busiest times of year, there were two fully fledged cafeterias, one at the first floor of the main building and one at the summit building, two smaller sandwich and snack lines on the second floor of the main building and the smaller original main building, and once in a great while a snack stand at the mid mountain building built on its own lower peak of the ski area. In the earliest years of the park, there was just the one lift that went from the original main building to the mid mountain building, but once the whole ski area had been developed and opened up, the smaller peak building was often simply forgotten about and served only as a warm place for some of the ski patrol people to be stationed.

And this was my home away from home...

The problem is, after a childhood of limitless free skiing, I could never imaging paying for it as an adult and haven't been skiing since!

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Did I Mention I Stuttered?

8

So, here's the thing, I actually couldn't write this chapter until months after the rest, even though I had always intended for it to be here on this page of the unfolding of my life. I've spent my life accepting the fact that I stutter, even though not liking it, yet somehow the thought of writing a segment about it still freaked me out. Unlike everything else in the book, I guess writing about my stuttering was too personal for me. Something too personal, yet on display in public every day of my life. How about that?

At the start of second grade, my friend 'Paul' came over to my house after school for play. He was the kind of person that was comfortable asking the type of questions people shied away from. And so he asked me, ''Why do you talk like that?''

''Talk like what?'' I asked back as I hadn't a clue. So he said something with the common stereo-type of the repetitive first consonant, then the rest of the sentence. ''I talk like that?'' I asked.

He said, ''Yes, and your lips repeat what you just said afterwards.'' At my surprised expression, he said something, then mimed saying it again silently.

''I didn't know I did that,'' I returned. And while we continued to play-out our time together I began to think about it and pay more attention as I talked to my family members that evening and at school the next day. Sure enough, I started to hear myself stutter and even notice my lips moving again once I was done talking. In the case of the moving lips, that was easy to put a stop to and it was soon suppressed.

In the case of the stuttering, though, my noticing it just seemed to make it that much worse. In fact, while I apparently had been stuttering all along, I had still been getting through my sentences. But now it became debilitating in class and at home and I began to avoid talking all together. In the case of class, I'd just no longer raise my hand to give an answer. In the case of my friends, I'd just reduced myself to single word responses to what they were talking about: ''Yes,'' ''Uh-huh,'' ''Okay.''

As time went on, I realized I would be more likely to stutter on certain sounds, so I would start swapping my word choices around. I'd think, ''So, how's your mother doing?'' and say ''I hear your mom's better?'' As the years went on, I became very good at avoiding a stuttering moment with this rephrasing and word substitution on the fly. Though occasionally it'd trip me up as well. One time I said to a friend, ''I think you'll like this music group because they're –'' Silly, I was going to say, but felt I wouldn't be able to do it and quickly popped in ''– stupid.'' instead.

My friend was stunned by this and returned, ''So you think the music I like is stupid?'' I immediately realized the mistake of picking that word, but I also learned through hard experience that trying to explain why I had said a different word than I had wanted to say just made me look desperate and that much more guilty. It was something I just had to accept.

Talking became kind of like surfing, you catch the wave and start to say something and then with each word you're rejudging your balance and direction and by the time you reach the end of the sentence, the wave is done. But most of the time I'd wipeout somewhere along the way.

Then one discovers the trick of forcing the words out. I now know it's called a 'Conversion Disorder' but when you start, it seems a simple solution. As you reach a word you think you're going to stutter at the start of, you stomp your foot and that seems to get you through the moment without the stutter, or blink your eyes midway through a word to not get stuck in the middle, or clench your fist to force the end of the sentence clearly. The problem is, these tricks lose their power the more you use them, but since they once worked you keep on doing them more. Now you not only sound funny as you stutter throughout the day, but you also look funny as well stomping, blinking and clenching as you talk.

It eventually came that I was mortified to go to school, for I knew going to school came with a guaranteed moment or more of making a fool of myself from the stuttering and the additional behaviors I'd developed surrounding it. But at the same time I just couldn't stop going to school, no longer leave the house and just hide in my room, no matter how much I wanted to. And so I just had to get through it, each day. Accept the fact that I was going to be the silly kid in class, that no matter how much another kid might embarrass themselves, I would soon relieve them of the spotlight by having to say something... Or trying to say something.

This became the daily moment of courage for me, each morning for the rest of my school years. I'd crawl out of bed, clean up, get dressed, grab my lunch -- all just fine -- and then that pause between opening the front door, but before going through the storm door. There was that pause as I accepted that I was going to make a fool of myself today and I would get through it. And going through the storm door was my affirmation 'I was going to get through it.' And I would make a fool of myself. And I would get through it. And then the next morning I'd be back between the doors and take that pause.

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First Grade And Me

7

The last significant time I spent with the family's red Volkswagen bus was a day in the schools' parking lot after first grade had ended. Both of my parents had taken me there, dressed formally, then had me wait in the bus while they went into the school building. This was the last week of June, Nineteen Seventy-One, the sun started to bring-up the temperature and it was getting hot inside the bus and I didn't know what to do about it...

While Nursery School and Kindergarten had provided a place for me to be while my mother took a part-time job at the grocery store across the hayfield from our home, First Grade came with 'expectations.' While the first two had mixed some learning with play, this was going to be learning with brief periods of what was called 'recess.'

The first day our mother took my not as older brother and me to the combination elementary and middle school building, before the rest of the kids would normally arrive, so we could look at the list of names next to every door in the elementary section to find which room would be mine. Once found, my brother left for the middle school wing, my mother left for work at the store, and I got to stand there by the door, eventually settling to sit on the floor. After some time another mother brought her daughter to the door to review the list and then left her with me. A bit later, the teacher arrived and opened the room. And thus first grade started.

For the subsequent mornings, my not as older brother and I took the bus. But there was a problem with that: Our home was just barely within a mile of the school and district policy was that all kids within a mile, must walk. Our father worked out a solution to this problem by instead having us walk away from the school by a few hundred feet and wait at a nearby speed limit sign down the road. As we were now more than a mile from the school, the bus would pick us up there in the morning, but in the afternoon the driver wouldn't worry about the rules and drop us off at the foot of our driveway.

For much of my early childhood I was either a burden to my not as older brother, or the subject of ridicule. In my adult years I would realize that I had taken his place as the baby of the family and there were some resentment issues, which especially flared up if he was assigned to watch me when the adults were away. Thus were the mornings with him at the bus stop and the afternoons once we were dropped off until our mother came home from work. But to me this was just the way of life and I took it as it was without any reflection, until my later years.

Oh, yes, I was supposed to be talking about first grade. So it went well, I got to sit by my long time childhood friend, 'Peter Hatch', who I had first befriended in Nursery school, but more so in Kindergarten. The only point of complaint that I recalled from the teacher was that I didn't know my last name, thus there was a long evening at home where I got to write it again and again until bedtime.

First grade routine was a couple hours of teaching, recess, and hour and a half of teaching, lunch, second recess, nap time, then instruction until the end of the day. Bathroom breaks were whatever we could fit in walking to and from the room for lunch or recess.

One day, during nap time I got a burning sensation in my bladder and once nap break was done I asked if I could go to the bathroom. The teacher told me 'no' and scolded me, saying I should have gone before second recess. When I explained that I hadn't needed to at the time, I was told that was my own fault, and afternoon teaching commenced... And the burning got worse and the bladder got tighter.

Forty-five minutes later, I raised my hand and waited for the teacher to call on me. When she eventually did, I asked if I could go to the bathroom, please, as I really needed too. She told me to recount what she had previously told me on the matter, which I did, and she assured me that there would be no exceptions and I was not to bother her about it again. And so I sat, as the burning got worse and the pressure got stronger.

In my adult years I would find out that I had a number of allergies and intolerances and my body reacted differently to each one. Some resulted in my body sending the allergen straight to my bladder where it would burn until gotten rid of. In retrospect, I think this is what was happening to me on this day of first grade. I likely ate something at lunch which they didn't normally serve, it was in my tummy during recess, then reached the intestines during nap and was quickly sent to the bladder. But in first grade I didn't know any of this as the burning became far beyond bearable and I was desperate for relief.

Then it occurred to me that maybe I could pee a little. After all I was wearing undies and it would surely absorb a little pee. That would take the edge off the pressure, I could then wait until the end of the school day to use the bathroom on the way to the bus. Just if I peed... A little.

And so I did. Only to find that once the burning pee had started, the rest didn't want to stay in the bladder. But I tried, I tried so hard to stop. But once the undies were full, I could feel the dampness running down my leg. First the thigh, then the back of the calf to the sock and the sock lead to the shoe. And I started to shake, realizing how much trouble I was going to get into and tried so very hard to stop. But I couldn't until everything was out.

Pete raised his hand and was called on immediately and he told the teacher what was happening. Perhaps it was a good guess on his part, or perhaps he had watched my taut face and shaking and made a logical deduction. Or it was likely the pee smell. Either way there was yelling from the teacher, and the mother called-in to bring a change of clothes. In the meantime the teacher allowed me to now go to the bathroom, but there seemed little point as I was already finished. Still, it allowed me a refuge to hide-in until my mother arrived.

Then came the dreaded morning after and returning to school. I knew that I was going to be made fun of and belittled for the rest of first grade. In fact I knew that, in rural New England where everybody knew everybody else, I would spend the rest of my life known as the kid who'd peed in their pants in first grade. And I slunk into the classroom the next day with my head held down and silently took my seat.

And none of it happened. Instead there was a kerfuffle in class as the teacher was missing. When the bell rang and class should have been officially in session, the second grade teacher from across the hall came over to us and told us to settle down as our teacher was in the Principal's office. Pete then leaned over to me and told me that when he told his father what had happened when he got home last night, his father was very angry and called the Principal about it. So had a number of other parents.

When the teacher did finally arrive at the room, red faced and angry, we were told that her policy was that we were to use the bathroom between recess and class or lunch and class, but if we needed to use the bathroom at any other time... we could raise our hands and ask. No one ever made fun of me. None of my classmates ever brought it up again for the rest of my childhood. The only person who ever brought it up again was my mother, years later, when she told me of that day in the parking lot of the school a week after first grade had ended.

As the Volkswagen bus heated up in the sun and I was alone and had been told to stay in the bus, I wasn't sure what to do. It eventually occurred to me to open the windows and vents, first one, then the others. When that still wasn't enough, I noticed that the bus was parked next to a tree and that tree was between the side door of the bus and the front door of the school. I realized that I could open the side door of the bus, sneak outside, and hide behind the tree and wouldn't be seen. This worked and I was able to cool off. When I heard the voices of my parents in the distance, I slipped back into the bus and sat down as if I'd always been there.

As my mother told me some years later, it had been decided that the first grade teacher would not continue at the school, and in return she decided that I would not advance from first grade. My parents were called in for a meeting about this. As my grades hadn't been bad enough for me to be retained and, since the teacher couldn't use the peeing incident as a sign of immaturity, she staked her reasoning that I should be retained because I stuttered and should be held back until I no longer did. If this line of reasoning had been followed, I would still be in first grade today. Instead my mother told me how she valiantly fought against this until the school backed her up. In reality, I learned later in life that my father had been a childhood stutterer and most likely when the line of reasoning had been brought up, he was the one to have been insulted and most vehemently against retention.

But on that day, when my parents had reached the bus, they quietly got in and told me I'd be going on to second grade. This was the first and only time that my parents had stood up for me, that I know of.

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