The Disappearances

22

We, well most of us, as children get things as gifts, typically twice a year at birthdays and Christmas. As the years pass, these things accumulate in our rooms until they are bursting by the time we graduate High School. Or do they? For some, I'm sure the answer is yes, but for many others the answer is no.

One family faced the horror first hand with an annual purge dictated by their mother. When that day of the year came, the children had to run and grab everything they could, for that which they couldn't hold onto ended up in the yard sale, no matter how loud the protests or how genuine the crying. Some might at first pile all their toys and dolls into a corner of the room and sit on them to keep them safe, but it was to no avail as they were easily pulled from the pile and then those kids were literally left empty handed.

For my family, things just disappeared.

Uncle Ronny gave me a leather billfold that he'd gotten during one of his transatlantic trips. I was thrilled and quickly put all the money I had into it. After he and Aunt Harriet left, I went up to my room and played for a bit then left the billfold behind on the bedside table. I went for a long winding walk in the woods and got home with eager anticipation to look over and hold the billfold again. It wasn't there. While the loss of thirty-four cents wasn't heart breaking, the loss of the billfold was. What had happened to it? Had I actually had it in my pocket when I went for my walk? I quickly checked my pocket, then the other ones just to make sure. Nope, it wasn't there. Had it fallen out as I had walked?

I then redid my long winding walk, carefully watching the ground and checking behind trees. Nothing. I returned home and told my mother of the lost billfold. ''Where did you put it, last?'' she'd ask while not looking up from whatever it was she was doing. I'd tell her and she'd tell me to go check there. When I'd tell her I did and it wasn't there, she'd say, ''Then it must be somewhere else.''

When things disappear as a child, you can take it for granted, believe someone stole it or, as you get older, assume you're going crazy. When a broken toy disappears, you take it for granted as, let's face it, it was broken.

In fourth grade there was this girl whose desk was moved next to mine when the classroom got rearranged. She befriended me and as Christmas time approached I got a small toy of a plastic Santa face that, when you pulled the tassel of his hat, his red nose lit up. I took it to school and showed it to her, she thought it was fun. Later, when we went out to recess, I put it in my desk for safekeeping. When I returned it was gone. I told the teacher about it, this lead to a quick round of asking other students if they'd seen it. Nope, it was gone. At the end of the school day, when class was dismissed, we gathered our things to go home and I saw the girl take the Santa head out of her desk and begin to slip it into her bag. I grabbed her arm and called the teacher. Under the teacher's questioning, she admitted she took it from my desk while the rest of the class was at recess as she assumed I hadn't wanted it any more... Say what? This sort of thing happened again with her and I had to make sure not to bring any more personal items to school and leave them in my desk.

But when things disappeared from my bedroom at home, it was clear I must be going crazy. After all, my siblings were much older than me so why would they want a toy for a young kid? My parents were above reproach, again why would they steal from their own kid? They're parents after all. And as my childhood progressed, I began to take it for granted that things at home would just disappear.

As I got older, I noticed a pattern of those things that disappeared. Any gift from Uncle Ronny or Aunt Harriet disappeared within a few days. Smaller items were more likely to vanish than larger items. The rare gift from my father, which Mom hadn't gotten and put Dad's name on, disappeared within a month or two. Gifts from my siblings typically stayed around for a year, and gifts from my mother never disappeared.

Then one day I caught her red handed leaving my room with a handful of small things. When I startled her and asked what she was doing, she said she assumed I hadn't wanted these any more, even though some of them had been in my keepsake drawer. When I told her I did, she explained that she hadn't known that and handed them to me, telling me I should let her know these things.

This was when I realized I had to keep things safe from my mother. But how? It now made sense why the big things were rarest to go, as it would be obvious to the other family members if she took them and walked through the house holding them. So it became a question of where to keep those small things I most valued. The first solution was to not keep things in my keepsake drawer, but then that practice would be too obvious with it empty, so I pondered what small things I wouldn't mind losing and kept them there along with a couple of coins. Then I tried to squirrel away things at the back of my clothes drawers, but this only worked for a few weeks before they had apparently been found. Then I tried the simplest method of just spending more time in my room, thus giving my mother less opportunity to rifle through it. But ultimately that was futile as it would mean turning down all future play dates and never taking a shower or bath again.

Finally, it occurred to me to use the hidden spaces in the closets. The roof of my house had three foot wide strips that tapered down more quickly at the edges than did the rest of the roof over the bedrooms. The closets were in the first part of these tapers and started out with a flat ceiling square that then turned into an angled surface coming down. Once it reached halfway to the floor, there was a wall with a cabinet-like door which hid the interior tail-end of the taper. The little door was there for additional storage and to allow pipe and wiring access. Those spots were most often used for storing empty luggage or discarded shoes that had been outgrown. Here was a place to hide my most prized keepsakes and toys, and to be extra safe, I used the closet of my old childhood bedroom which was once again empty after my eldest brother left.

And it worked... for a few years.

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Got Me Some Beans

21

The previous Summer, when Paul was still around, we had fallen into a new Saturday routine. We'd get together late morning for fun at his place, have lunch, then walk to another kid's house just a bit down the street. Also named 'Paul', we'd then visit while we killed some time until the ''Creature Double Feature'' afternoon broadcast hit the air. The advantage was, other Paul had his own T.V. in his upstairs bedroom where we could watch the two movies back to back without parental interruption. It didn't matter that his T.V. was black & white as the movies themselves were black & white classics from the nineteen forties and fifties. Along with the typical monster movies were the occasional freaky ones with giant ants or rocks that would spring from the ground and fall on people or buildings to crush them flat. We would usually only watch the first movie, then spend sometime outside with other Paul before we had to go back to our respective homes for dinner. Once in a while, when it rained, we'd stay in and start the second movie...

But in the Summer of Nineteen Seventy-Four, soon after we got back from Wyoming, I had Pete over to tell him about my trip and show him the jumping beans. He was impressed by the trip news, but more so by the jumping beans as he hadn't thought they were real either. Though only about half of them were jumping at the time.

Sure enough, the hayfield was short from haying but I checked with Marcus Giacomo to see if they needed any help on the deliveries. They didn't but they were going to be doing a follow-up harvest by mid August, so I planned on that.

I made sure to get in a visit to see Jonathan and fill him in on my trip news, though I forgot to bring the jumping beans to his house and show him. When his mother returned me home, he rode along so I could quickly bring him into my house and show him the beans. Only about a third of them were jumping, and I had to hold them under the light for a bit before they did.

By the middle of August, my father had decided to clean-up around the yard a bit. In the previous years my sister had done this as part of getting ready for her annual Fall bonfire, but as she'd now been gone for a few years, first disowned, then out west, the yard had declined a bit. This caught my interest and I was helping him. Then to my surprise, the other Paul from the previous Summer came walking up my driveway. It turned out, with Paul having moved away, in my usual out of sight out of mind fashion, it hadn't occurred to me to return to the previous summer's routine of visiting with the other Paul and catching the monster movies with him. Thus with both Paul moved and me forgetting about him, other Paul had felt abandoned. As we had always met at his house, he didn't know my phone number and even though he hadn't been to my house either, he knew generally where it was and had walked the half mile until he found the driveway into the woods.

I apologized to him and we visited and played for the rest of the afternoon. I don't remember if I showed him the jumping beans, I'm sure I must have. And then my mother gave him a ride home and I made a commitment to keep in touch with him going forward and visit the following week...

I didn't. Pete's father was taking his family to a small plot of coastline land he'd bought on the Northeast edge of Maine. Somehow it had been arranged between my mother and Pete's parents that I would join them on a week long camping trip to there. This was news to me as I hadn't been in the loop at all and found myself having to get together a bag of clothes and sleeping bag for the trip the night before.

Pete's parents took the front seat of their sage green Dodge Dart and Pete and his sister took the back seat. My mother brought me over early in the morning and we packed my stuff in and I squoze into the back seat. The trip from home to the plot of coastline took a full day's drive. We chatted for a bit in the back seat, Pete's father would toss in the occasional travelogue point of interest. We stopped a couple of times to visit one of these, a memorial to someone involved in a witch trial or the such that had taken place in Maine's early history. We took another driving break so we could eat our bagged lunches. This was a bit of a novelty for me as I had only associated bagged lunches with school and work routines, not trips. We finally got to the plot of coastline in the evening with the twilight glow even darker as the land was woods that directly touched the coast.

The place had a picnic table, a small cooking area made of some cinder blocks, I think, and a hole in the ground a few yards away where we were to 'do our business.' Given the lateness, we pretty much unpacked and grilled some hotdogs for dinner. Pete's parents had the largest tent, his sister had a tent of her own and I got to share Pete's tent, the smallest of them all. Described as a 'Pup' tent, it gave each of us about two feet wide for our sleeping bags, meaning we pretty much got to sleep only on our sides. We would chat for a bit before falling to sleep.

In the morning I found that there wasn't much more to this plot of land than what I had seen that previous night, except for the actual coast. We walked through the woods until they broke at the ocean side. About three feet down from the edge of the woods was a thin ribbon of water rounded rocks, of various sizes, though mostly pebbles. Activities included digging through the rocks for clams at low tide, and hiking through the surrounding woods at other times. Unlike the woods around my family home which had rolling hills in them and patches of small clearings where you could glimpse the sun for a bit, these woods were flat and uniform. We had brought along a couple of games to play which we did at the picnic table, often with Pete's sister joining in. By the middle of the second full day there, Pete and I needed periods of apart time and I would roam the surrounding woods on my own or take a lie down in the pup tent and count how many days were left until the trip back home.

As I had a long history of not eating fish, for clam bake dinners they would ration out a couple more hotdogs for me. Lunches would include various canned items, including beans. By the end of the trip, there was a spare hotdog that evening and Pete got a surprise treat. The drive back home was quieter, as we had long since been talked out, though this time it included a stop at a restaurant for lunch. Everyone seemed to revel in that moment of variety and choice.

Unlike the day driving out where I had been delivered to his home, I was dropped off at my home the evening back. Dinner had already passed at my house, but I didn't mind as I just wanted to take a long, hot shower and crawl into a comfortable bed with a pillow. By morning I discovered that the second haying cycle had taken place while I was gone. I consoled myself that there was always next summer, but I think even then I had my doubts.

School was the next week and I took my Mexican jumping beans with me to show all the kids. But even with some time by a hot lamp, they just sat there in the little plastic case. Pete vouched for me that they had actually jumped when he first saw them. I concluded that I would plant them the next Spring and hopefully grow some more.

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Distance

20 

It started soon after my mother had moved into my sister's bedroom. I would get invited in for talks and these talks would be the first of the how she was wronged stories and how Dad was a terrible person tales. Now here's the thing, as mother had spent years with me over-hearing her tell similar derogatory stories about me to other people, I already took these new stories with a grain of salt.

I need to back up a bit. While my sister effectively raised me during my earliest years, my mother would demonize me to her friends and perhaps one of my brothers. As I was too young at first to understand what she was saying, she would get comfortable doing these poison sessions while I was in the very next room playing. These put downs of me and tales of how burdened she was by having to deal with my existence was just the background noise I grew-up in. I was about four years old when I realized these tales of want were about me, but I was too young at the time to have a clue what I should do about it and so it just remained the background noise in the house. And I became quite use to not reacting when people were putting me down or belittling me in earshot.

But my mother had now found a new role for me in life, and that was to be her confidante. Not only that, but I was going to be something she could use against dad, by first trying to poison me against him, or more simply by taking me away from him.

As I had worked my way up in the haying business to help out with driving the tractor during bail pick ups and helping to deliver, I was eager to find out what I could graduate to as the Summer of Nineteen Seventy-Four came around. Instead my mother had a surprise for me, she and I were going out to Wyoming to visit my sister, for a month. This left me torn. I would love to see my sister, but it would mean I'd miss out on part of haying season and seeing my friends. My only solace was that the haying season had recently become split with the field being used for two cycles, one in June and one in August. So my hope was I could at least participate in the August harvest.

The trip from New England to Wyoming was the second time I'd ever flown, and this time there was a change of planes in Denver, Colorado. While we never saw much of Logan airport where we would leave from and come back to, at Stapleton we had a couple hours to kill until we took the flight through Wyoming. This meant sauntering down the airport hallways, visiting the various shops and even grabbing a snack. This was before I had even been to a mall for the first time in my life so a building with all these different shops under one roof, and that roof also served as an airport, was mind blowing to me.

One of the shops that particularly grabbed my interest was one which featured Mexican jumping beans. They came in a little flat plastic box, about an inch and a half per side, the bottom half was colored plastic and the top half the clear plastic lid allowing you see them jumping. While I had heard of Mexican jumping beans, I think through cartoons, I had assumed it was a joke and didn't realize they actually existed. I asked mom if I could have a box and she said, ''Maybe, on the way back.''

The flight through Wyoming was also a new experience as, unlike all other flights I had been on that were direct to their destination, this plane landed at various towns before getting to the one we wanted. So the plane would land, some people would get off, some would get on, then take off again, then land again, let some people off, etc. The good news was, unlike today's typical flights, our plane didn't have to wait in line once it landed or before taking off as it was pretty much the only plane at these little airports.

Finally, we were there. My sister and her husband picked us up and first took us to the apartment. As we were staying a whole month, my mother thought it'd save money if we just rented a furnished apartment. At the time I thought that was okay, though the apartment didn't have any bedrooms, so my mother slept on the couch in the living room section and I got to use a sleeping bag on the kitchen floor. Once our luggage was dropped off, we then went to their house. A rental itself, it was next to a sugar beet field and by the middle of the month a traveling carnival set-up on the far side of the field.

Yet so much of my time became sitting to one side and listening while mom and sis talked, occasionally her husband would add a few words. As the days moved on, my role developed into tagging along as we saw the sights. One on one time with my sister, I think, ended up being one game of cards when her husband took our mother out somewhere for more sights. To make our time at the apartment more interesting my sister offered us the use of her portable record player, though the choice of albums to borrow had to include records that my mother wouldn't mind listening to, so that left me with The Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album and the Cast Album of Hair as the only two records for me.

When not visiting my sister, our time at the apartment largely became my mother going through the classified ads in the local paper and circling some while I would just roam the apartment building and its surrounding yard. The building was an old family home which had been subdivided into apartments. Two on the bottom floor, two in the second floor, though one of those was the landlord's apartment. Was there a fifth apartment in some attic level? I don't remember. This was the time I came to know of Cracker Jacks as mother would supply me with a box for lunch and I would often sit on the front porch of the building and watch the squirrels do their work. I would sometimes provide a few popcorn kernels for them if they wanted to come up. The landlord showed me that I could hold it out and the squirrels would sometimes come up and take it out of my hand.

After circling some ads from the paper, mother would go out for a while to ''run errands'' while I stayed behind. The first time I did what I usually did and roamed the grounds or the hallway. The landlord invited me into his apartment and we visited for about an hour and a half until my mother knocked at his door trying to find me. Once retrieved and back in our apartment, mom was horrified that I had gone into a strange man's apartment and from then on I was supposed to hide in our apartment when she would run on her ''errands'' and be very quiet so the landlord didn't know I had been left alone. Hiding meant I couldn't look out the windows, there was no television, so when my mother was gone at these times I listened to one of the two record albums on the portable player at a very, very low volume so it couldn't be heard across the hall. As my brother already had Sgt. Peppers back in New England, I had heard that album quite often. So I consoled myself with listening to the Cast Album of Hair, over and over again. I had probably memorized all the words by the time the month was over, though have long since forgotten them as I've never heard the album again during the rest of my life.

Don't get me wrong, there were many highlights of the trip. We would drive by the coal pits where my sister's husband worked as a strip miner, and we visited his parents' home a few times. It was a new custom built house for them and included his father's gun making shop. As it turned out I was more interested in the gun making shop, and his father more interested in gun and bullet making than visiting with my mother, so I hung-out with him and watched as he worked. He pretty much made rifles, but also showed me his prized hand guns.

One of the first things I got to watch him make were the little cannon balls for the little cannon that would be fired for the Fourth of July. The lead would heat-up to a shimmery liquid in a little metal bowl with a handle and a little open top spout to one side. Once melted, he'd lift the bowl and tip it so the molten lead would run down the spout and into a hole at the top of a closed block. He'd stop pouring once the lead over-flowed a bit and one time a drop sputtered to the table top where it spun and sizzled for a quick moment. The drop had a small stain on one side as it had first touched the table, I watched that stain as it split in two and each half moved away from the other to opposite sides before the drop hardened and stopped moving. I was tickled by this as it made me think of how the continents of Earth had been formed by a single dry area splitting and flowing to opposite sides as well.

There were the obligatory battlefields to visit, but they were just stretches of field like any other except for the plaques posted here and there. More interesting was down town as it was an actual, true western town with cowboy themed bars, shops and clothing stores. We looked in one and I was awarded with my very own pair of cowboy boots. My sister's father-in-law had horses at his spread and we got to ride them a few times; it was my first time riding a horse. And also my first time seeing a full sized train, in person that is, as the town was ringed by train tracks that would often close down roads as open top box cars heaping with coal would then take five to ten minutes to roll past. Even the father-in-law's driveway had a train track across it so I got see a train roll on by from just a few feet away.

Fourth of July at my sister's father-in-law's house was essentially him, his wife, my sister, my mother and my brother-in-law. He had taken it upon himself to buy all kinds of fireworks. In New England, we would usually see fireworks from a distance fired over a nearby lake, with the only hands on touch being long cattail like sparklers or little paper drops that popped when you threw them at the ground. But for this Fourth of July everything was hands on as we lit fuses and then ran away before the firework went off, or tossed it into the air to burst. Mother was mortified and insisted that I only watch, but my sister's husband was more sure of my skill and forced a compromise where I would light the small fire crackers and such, and he would light the cherry bombs and rockets. It was the most up close and personal Fourth of July I ever had, all fingers survived, and it was topped-off by the firing of the miniature cannon. I first got to watch as it was packed with gun powder and wadding, then one of the little cannon balls I had seen being made a few nights earlier was rolled in and all was packed with a little rod. We then all stood behind the canon as it was lit. Pow! and it rolled back a little bit from the recoil. I asked if we could do that again and my wish was granted. Pow!

Once, while my sister and mother stayed at the in-laws' ranch with them, my brother-in-law took me out for something special. It was a surprisingly long drive. I say surprisingly long drive as, even in rural New England all houses and buildings were well within a mile or two of each other, where as out west the nearest neighbor or business was sometimes many miles away. So I had gotten used to a drive between houses to be several minutes, but this drive was more like an hour. We arrived next to a small hill and parked there just as twilight was beginning. We quietly crawled up a small hill and peeked over the top to see a small valley, at the far side of which were some wild rabbits. A few of the wild rabbits had horns and were facing in our direction. He explained that these were jackalope: The ones moving around without the horns were the female ones, the ones with horns facing our direction were the male jackalope. He said we must have made too much noise crawling up the hill as the horned rabbits were very still, listening in our direction, but if we were very still and quiet they might start to move. He had a pair of binoculars and we spent a little time watching as the sun set. But the horned rabbits never moved, as we were apparently still too noisy. Then we had to leave before it got too dark.

The month ended with a birthday dinner for my mother at a local fancy restaurant a fair drive away from the main town. There we had a full rack of lamb served for all of us. The place itself was an old family wooden cabin that had been converted to a restaurant. Various sepia pictures of unknown people adorned the walls along with old tools and other kitsch. While this would become a common restaurant decoration style by the end of the Twentieth Century, this was still a novel experience for me at that time.

Then in the last days before we boarded the plane to leave, we went out for a prairie dog hunt. Again at the in-laws' property, my sister, brother-in-law, my mother and I all went out to a nearby prairie dog 'village' in a field and hid on our bellies behind a small rise. Brother-in-law took the first few shots, then offered mother a chance, she passed and so he offered me a chance. Mother wasn't thrilled but had become used to her son-in-law getting his way and he showed me how to hold the rifle and look through the scoped sight. The goal was to aim for the back of a prairie dog's neck and shoot to sever the spinal cord and thus kill the dog instantly. I took careful aim and looked through the cross hairs... and pulled the trigger. ''Good,'' he said, ''Now that one.'' I took aim at the next one, waited for it to turn sideways, and fired again. As we stood up, he went out to collect the shot dogs. A couple of his were still squirming and he had to hit them in the head a few times until they stopped. Then he got to mine that were limp and floppy as he picked them up. He joined us as we walked back toward the in-laws' house, he tersely told me that he was very surprised by my skill.

He never let me near a gun again.

For my last evening out west, brother-in-law and a friend of his had to round up and move the cattle for his father and I was invited along and we saddled a third horse for me to ride. I watched from behind as the two of them rode into the heard and yelled and slapped some cows with their ropes to get them moving and then, once they were, we followed from behind to either side. One small calf made a break for it and I was ordered to get it back to the heard. I at first chased it but it seemed a futile effort as all the calf did was simply continue to run in front of me and the horse, leaving it even further away from the retreating heard. My brother-in-law shouted at me to ''Get to the outside'' of the calf which took me a moment to figure out what he meant, then I realized. I urged the horse to run to the side of the calf away from the heard giving the calf the choice of running into the horse or turning away back toward the herd. It did the trick and the calf turned and kept running, this time to catch-up and rejoin the heard as we reached the next pasture.

My mother seemed disappointed by the end of the trip as she never got what it was she had been looking for during her many errand runs. I realized many years later that she must have been job hunting and, had she found a job, I wouldn't have been going back to New England. But at that time I was oblivious to this near dramatic change in my life and just looked forward to visiting the Denver airport's row of shops and picking up a box of jumping beans!

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Rash

19

Toward the last half of fourth grade, my elbows and underside of my forearms started to itch. I did what came naturally and scratched but that seemed to only make it worse. After about a week of this, these areas were now scratched raw and the teacher took notice of this and sent me to the nurse's office. The nurse didn't know what to make of it and called in my mother to have me taken to the doctor.

He concluded that the rash was directly from my scratching and for my original itching, perhaps my skin had been touching something I was sensitive to. He ordered a steroidal cream to heal the rash and had mom schedule a follow-up. Picking up the cream at the pharmacy, I was to apply it twice a day to the affected areas and would soon see an improvement...

At the follow-up appointment there was no improvement and the doctor asked why I hadn't been using the cream. I told him I had been and he pointed out that he knew it wasn't true because if I had used the cream, the rash would be gone by now. The problem is I had used the cream and it hadn't helped, but what do you say when the doctor implies you're lying?

Mother's solution for the problem was to dress me in long sleeved sweat shirts. These hid the raw rash areas from the teacher and thus the problem was resolved in her eyes. And oddly, too, the rash itself improved over time with the long sleeves on. Was that because I could no longer easily scratch it? As I don't remember it itching once the long sleeves were on, I now wonder if the teacher had coated the top of the desk with something that I was having a reaction to when I rested my arms on the desk. From time to time she would rearrange the desks and we would come in and see that they also looked shiny and new. Was she coating them with something?

About this time I was also having problems at the dentists' office where they would clean my teeth and then my gums would swell up. The first time this happened, the dental assistant got nervous and called the dentist in early to have him see it. He was stunned and the two left the room for about ten minutes as they discussed what it meant and what to do about it; meanwhile I was stuck in the chair with my mouth swollen and in pain. After a while they came back in and simply continued to work ignoring the puffiness. By the next morning most of the swelling and pain had subsided.

But this now became a routine experience with every dentist visit, swollen gums, pain, and they just ignored it and continued working. One time during lunch a friend of mine was talking about the horror of having a tooth drilled when he had gone in for a dental visit. The other kids oohed and aahed and I brought up that my least favorite part of the dentist visit was the swelling gums. I just got curious looks back and I didn't bring it up again.

Also around this time, my scalp started itching and the scratching brought flakes and I was given my own medicated shampoo to use from then on.

When I had my first allergist appointment in my twenties, they used glycerin as a control to compare against the reactions to known allergens I would next be tested with. But the 'control' turned red and swelled up and the assistant got the doctor and the doctor came in and marveled that I was one of the very rare people who was allergic to glycerin! And so I was placed on the watch to find and avoid products using glycerin. It turned out most all shampoos and dental creams used it and once I found the very few that didn't, my itchy scalp problems went away and at dental office visits, now using a glycerin-free polish for my tooth cleaning, my gums no longer swelled-up and hurt.

But this knowledge in my twenties didn't help me at the end of fourth grade. Was the teacher periodically cleaning the desks in the class with something that had glycerin in it? I will never know as I can't go back in time and see.

But there is one thing I am sure of, by June of Nineteen Seventy-Four I had a newer and much more extensive rash covering my arms, legs and torso and I was back to the doctor's. He diagnosed it as heat rash, this time, due to mother keeping me in the long sleeved sweat shirts into the beginning of Summer. Now I was cursed with the opposite cure of having to wear nothing but shorts for the next week to allow my heat rash covered body the chance to 'breathe' and heal on its own. With the obvious rash and wearing nothing to cover it, I ended up trapped at home and not seeing any friends for the week.

I felt like a total freak, fortunately it was only for that week and I was then able to go back to jeans and a tee for the rest of the Summer!

I found out by the early nineteen nineties why the steroidal cream hadn't worked, but that's a long story for another day.

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I Go Fourth!

18

Fourth grade was an odd bag. Unlike the previous years where the teacher introduced herself and added the usual behavioral expectations for the students during the year, my fourth grade teacher told us a story of a student from the year before who had been lacking throughout. But when the end of the school year came, he went up to her and told her that he felt he hadn't done a good enough job that year and asked to be retained, rather than advance to the next grade level. And because of that, she was very proud of that student and she wanted to be equally proud of us this year.

Did this mean she wanted all of us to come to her at the end of the year and ask to be retained? I wondered.

The first thing that caught my attention when instruction started was when she used a hand-held frame which clasped about five pieces of chalk separated by about four inches each, this allowed her to draw five straight lines across the board instead of the typical one at a time. Looking into it now, I find they are called a 'Music Staff Line'. Back then, I thought this was rather clever as it sped things up. I subsequently saw why she liked it as she was the first and only teacher in my experience who did the classic routine of holding an unruly child after class to write one sentence repeatedly as featured with 'Bart' in the beginning of the Simpsons television show credits. She could quickly put up twenty-five to thirty lines in five or six strokes taking her a minute, and in return the unfortunate student would get to spend a half, to a full, hour filling-out the words that she dictated. While effective, the chalk array device was not perfect as sometimes a piece of chalk would wear differently than the others and thus leave a gap or two, but she quickly filled those in with a couple of quick strokes with a single piece of chalk.

During the school year, the classroom layout would change. Starting with the traditional desks evenly spaced out and facing the front, then side by side pairs, or evenly spaced but facing a different wall, one time it was organized with the desks lined up side by side to make a large squarish 'U'. Each time these changes would be made by the teacher when we weren't there, and thus we'd have to start out these mornings by trying to figure out where our desk was, now. In reflection, the nice thing about this surprise rearrangements was that, rather than always sitting next to your friends from the beginning of the school year until the end, you got to spend a few weeks by kids you didn't know so well and have a chance to get to know them better.

And sometimes a student would find their desk placed right next to the teacher's desk, facing the rest of the students. I believe this was to make that student feel self-conscious about themselves and somehow improve their behavior so they could be moved back within the rest of the students as soon as possible. Yet on the couple of occasions this happened to me, it didn't make me feel any more self-conscious beyond what I already did given my stuttering, and in fact it made me feel special as if I had a personal audience of the rest of the class. So the corrective goal of these times was lost on me.

My favorite project of the year was where we read a book, then made a shoe-box diorama of a scene from the book. By fourth grade trips to the school library had become common and, as I was a budding astronaut to be, I always skipped the fiction books and went straight to the books on space flight and the stars. I particularly liked the ones with proposed space craft for landings on Mars and other solar system investigations. For the diorama I picked a book on the planets and was wowed by the theory that the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars was from a planet that used to be between them, but was broken-up when it got too close to the massive gravity well surrounding Jupiter. With this in mind I made the back of my shoe box with a small red planet Mars to the left and the large rim of Jupiter to the right, then on a separate piece of cardboard, drew a circle planet on one side and a broken-up planet on the other. Using a piece of string through two holes on the back of the shoe box and tape to hold that string to a square of cardboard, I rigged it just so that as you pulled the string to move the whole planet from Mars toward Jupiter, it would flip over at the end to show the back side of a broken planet. As mine was the only interactive diorama, that I humbly recall, it gained a lot of interest by the students and even the teacher seemed unusually smitten by my work.

Another unusual aspect of fourth grade was that the teacher had us vote for one of our classmates to be our monitor each week. Their job was to make sure we lined-up in the classroom and proceed down the hallways in an orderly fashion to and from recess, lunch, library, gym, etc. The first thing the teacher would do is ask for nominations, at first she would take the first three, but by the end of the year she would prompt for more and more nominations until she seemed to get a name she wanted. We were to then place our heads down and raise our hands to vote when the student's name we wanted was called from the list. Toward the last few months of fourth grade, after I had been voted in one week, I couldn't believe it as there had been many more popular kids nominated before I had been. To confirm my suspicion, for the following week's vote I turned my head and watched the number of hands raised per student name called, and the teacher's tally once voting was over didn't match what I had seen at all. By the end of the year, after each one of us had gotten to be the monitor for a week, I had concluded that the vote was a formality as the teacher had already decided who it was going to be from the names nominated. And as the voting was secret, we'd never know it was rigged...!

At some point early in the school year, people outside of class became interested in me. It started out with a bunch of us from many different grades being sent to the old gymnasium to fill in bubbles for a test. While bubble tests would become a routine if not an overburdening portion of school life by the turn of the Twenty-First Century, the Fall of Nineteen Seventy-Three was the first time I'd ever seen one, let alone taken one. It was an odd test in that there was no time limit. We were deemed done once we reached the end and we could take as much time as we wanted to think over our answers. At first I enjoyed the novelty of being pulled out of class first thing in the morning for this, but after a few hours, once many of the other students had finished and left, I realized I had missed recess. Oh well, I thought, and soldiered. Eventually lunch time started and the bagged lunch kids started to filter in, the remaining few kids taking the test -- actually I think it was just me -- were moved to a far table. I realized that if I didn't finish soon, I would miss my chance to eat lunch and quickly ran through the last couple of questions to make sure I was done in time.

After the pull-out for that test, I was pulled-out a couple more times. Both of these times to the nurse's office. The first time to look at some cards with multicolored bubbles inside of circles where I was asked what I could see, such as did some of the bubbles inside the circles look like a number and if so what was that number? I was told to stand at one end of the room and look at ever smaller rows of symbols and have to state which way the middle line was pointing for each symbol, and there were a couple of other such tests. A week or so later, I was back at the nurse's office, but this time instead of just the nurse being there to greet me, there were about four other people crowded in the little room to observe. I was to sit at a little fold-up table and read aloud the first page or two of a book. It was about Disney World and Walt's inspiration and creation of it. Once I was done reading, those assembled seemed happy and I was sent back to class.

The following month I was routinely taken out of class along with another kid, and two kids from the other fourth grade classroom, twice to three times a week. We were to go to the art building, which was the original one room school building with the one big room on the bottom level serving as the art class space. But for these visits we were taken to the upper floor which was an attic like space divided into a couple of smaller rooms. The bigger 'L' shaped room was used for storage, one room was the building's one person bathroom, and two other smaller rooms. We were taken to one of them with a table and five chairs, two to either side and a better chair for the 'teacher' to sit at the end of the table. And we would play Scrabble for forty-five minutes.

But this wasn't the regular game of Scrabble, with the solid letter pieces, which I had played with my sister in earlier years. This game was a version with a two sided board and cardboard letter pieces, one side of the board was like the regular game, but the other side had words pre-printed on it in the spaces. We would only do the pre-printed side where the words were already spelled-out. Each week, every week. While the novelty of this was okay at first, it was soon quite boring as the only challenge was being the first to randomly pull up the letters that would spell the next available pre-printed word. After a month I asked the 'teacher' if we could play on the other side of the board, but I was told we couldn't. And the calendar year came to a close.

Once school resumed early the next year, there was a day the 'teacher' had to be away doing something else while we were to have our Scrabble session. Once she left, I offered the idea to the other three kids that we could play on the other side of the board and pick our own words as long as there were empty spaces enough for the words to cross and fit. This idea seemed like a surprise to them, but agreeable, and with a quick rummage of the room I found a dictionary that we could use when we weren't sure how a word was spelled, that was how my sister had played it with me. And so we did. And we got to aim for double word and triple word scores with our word choices as part of playing the game and scoring. And we got to flip through the dictionary to make sure we had the right spellings. And we had fun. And I think we actually learned something to boot.

When the 'teacher' arrived at the end of the forty-five minute interval, we showed her how we'd used the other side as well as a dictionary. She was horrified and told us that we could never do that again. From the next time onward, we were back to filling in the pre-printed words on the original side of the playing board once again and through to the end of the school year. I subsequently learned that the Scrabble game we were playing was the children's version and the pre-printed word side was to be used for the first couple of times until one got the hang of how to play the game, then advanced to the regular side of the board. I guess in the eyes of the pull-out 'teacher' we were never going to advance.

Finally, the dreaded day came in fourth grade. I had done something which had annoyed the teacher too much and it was my turn to be held after school and write a repeated sentence over and over again on the chalk board. Some kids she knew lived too far away to walk home, so they got to do theirs during recess or lunch. But she knew I lived within a mile of the school so I got to miss the bus ride home, do my chore, then walk home as an added punishment. I dreaded this day as I was increasingly having problems writing as my fingers and back of my hand would start to hurt and seize-up as the elementary grades had progressed. But as I would only be called lazy when I would complain about this to teachers or my parents, I just did the best I could through the pain. But the pain and frequent seizing of my fingers would mean I'd have to take many little breaks to stretch my hand and wriggle my fingers before I'd go on to write the next word or sentence.

As she used the chalk array device to draw the lines on the board for me, I could easily see this being an hour and a half or a two hour task of pain and tedium until I would then get the chance to walk home. I tried to apologize for whatever I had done to annoy her, but it was to no avail and I began writing the first line, then the second line while she worked on grading papers and organizing her desk. I looked to the chalk array device and it occurred to me how much faster it'd go if I used it, but I knew what she would say if I asked. Fourth copied line, fifth copied line, by the sixth copied line she said she had to go to the office and I was to stay put and keep copying the sentence. Once she was gone and I finished the sixth line and my hand was hurting like hell, I looked back to the chalk array.

When she returned about ten to fifteen minutes later I had just finished filling in the little gaps the chalk array device had left in some of the copied letters. She was very impressed with how quickly I had finished and told me how I must have accepted the truth of the sentence I was to learn as I had been driven to finish it so quickly.

I realized by the end of the week that I'd completely forgotten what that sentence was...

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Rumblings

17

Once kicked out of the house toward the end of my second grade year, my sister had little choice but to temporarily move in with her boyfriend. That soon turned into a permanent situation by the end of the Summer of Nineteen Seventy-Two. During the summer break my sister had made the occasional furtive visit to the family home to see me and take me for some fun when she knew dad would be working at the ski area. By fall she and her boyfriend moved to 'their' own place, an upper floor of an old family home turned into a studio style apartment. In this larger, more comfortable space, my mother would then make visits allowing me to tag along. We just weren't supposed to tell dad.

As my sister started her second year teaching third grade, the administration soon found out about her living arrangements and informed her that she wouldn't be able to continue teaching for moral reasons, common place in that day and age, unless the situation was soon rectified. So a marriage was hastily set up, and the next time my father saw sis was at the reception in the basement of the local bar. It was my first time being in a bar and we pretty much had the basement to ourselves with the moving colored lights and music for dancing. Not a big turn-out. And this was the first time I perched myself in a corner and watched. For the rest of my life, with groups of people, I've more enjoyed finding a corner and observing people interact, more than participating myself. But that's a different story.

Secret visits to my sister continued with my mother and things had calmed down enough that my sister and her husband joined us for either Thanksgiving or Christmas of Nineteen Seventy-Two. I don't think it was both. The funny thing was her husband worked on the ski patrol at the park so when skiing season came I tended to see him more than my sister.

By Spring, I heard they were leaving to move out west. This came as a shock to me as the farthest anyone I had ever know had moved away was one state. I learned many years later that it was a shock to my sister as well. Her husband's family had moved from Wyoming to New England some years earlier and he had finished his high school years in our state. For whatever reason his parents had moved back while he had stayed in New England for several years afterwards, but he now had the itch to move back to Wyoming himself. Now married, my sister didn't feel she had any choice in the matter but to go with him and by the end of third grade they packed everything they had, including their small Japanese sedan, into the back of a U-Haul truck and drove away.

My not as older brother, mother and I were there for this last packing flurry and to watch the truck leave. My sister remembers dad showing up unexpectedly at the last moment to see her off as well as if he had never disowned her. I would later find that my father would routinely do this, disown his kids, then in later years act as if that had never happened and expect to be friends.

While my sister was now out of my life, by the start of fourth grade, my eldest brother was back. Apparently with a gap between jobs, he couldn't afford a place to live and moved back to the state where mother had him move into my original bedroom in the family home. Once again it was a situation we were not to talk about, it just was as it was. This was an odd situation as my not as older brother had my eldest brother's room and furniture, and I had my not as older brother's room, though spruced-up. It seemed to me that we should return to our original bedrooms and I asked about this. But once again we weren't supposed to talk about it.

My eldest brother personalized my old room by painting it flat white. As he couldn't use my child sized bed, it was gone and he pretty much had a mattress on the floor for his bed. Where my not as older brother would spend a lot of time with my eldest brother in his room during my early childhood, they now spent that time in my old bedroom. My eldest brother spent the Fall through Winter season using one of the painted walls of the room to draw a charcoal nude based on a picture in a magazine. By Spring his prospects had picked up and he moved into his own apartment leaving behind the white room with the completed charcoal drawing. While our mother thought it was a bit scandalous, the woman's pose really didn't show anything.

As it wasn't his idea to have my eldest brother back during that time, my father expressed his displeasure by accusing my eldest brother of silly stuff. The most memorable was him commenting to me one morning, before I left to catch the school bus, that my eldest brother had been taking dinner knives from the drawer and using them to cut up an apple for lunch later in the day, then he would lose or throw-out the knives rather than bring them back. Now maybe this had happened once, but we seemed to pretty much have the same number of knives at the beginning of the time when he moved in, versus the time he left. Though I had never seen my father as an authority figure, I hadn't seen him as a silly person either. But after that comment and his other string of grumblings during that time, I started to see him as a bit of a comic figure.

Then one weekend day during the ski season, I joined my father on his morning ride to the park. In earlier years, this had been a family routine where all the siblings would pile in and come with him to work so we could ski all day. Now it was just me and my father in the car. While there was the novelty of now having the front seat, I could also feel the absence of my siblings as well. Once we reached the park, my father went straight into the building while I unstrapped my skies and poles and followed after. I used the employee time clock/break room to change from my shoes to my ski boots. It was right next to the back door leading to the ticket girl windows and my father caught my attention before my boots were on. There was someone he wanted me to meet: An older, though new ticket girl at the end of the row. He lead me down the narrow room just to see her, which was vary strange as he had never before introduced me to the other ticket girls, I would just come to know them as the ski season progressed. This new lady looked me up and down, then ran the fingers of her left hand through my hair. ''Oh, you have your father's hair,'' she remarked and then I was given my free ticket to ski with for the day.

As I skied up to the lift for my first run, I reflected on the meaning of her comparison: So she's been running her fingers through my father's hair...?

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When Is A [redacted] Not A [redacted]?

16

It was late Nineteen Eighty-Seven and I was in a waiting room at 'Premier Medical Center' in Denver. So early in the morning, it was just me, an elderly gentlemen and another patient in a small alcove that might hold ten patients at the most. By the age of twenty-three I had been wasting away for several years by a then undiagnosed intestinal infection. After seeking help from local doctors it had turned into a nightmare, my hope was that going to the vaunted hospital in Denver would produce some positive results...

“I know what you are,” was whispered at me.

Once the third patient had been called and left the waiting area, the elderly gentlemen had leaned forward and said this, breaking my train of thought. “I'm sorry?” I prompted.

Even though it was just him and me in the room, he felt the need to continue with a whisper, which betrayed a touch of a southern accent. “I know what you are... You're part <n-word>,” he said, then sat back with a small smile on his face.

There didn't seem to be any need for a response, so I just sat there and pondered this for a bit. Should he get no credit as there was no African blood in my background, or should he get half credit because I was, in fact, mix raced? Given his accent, it occurred to me that while he might have fingered me as mixed race in his mind, he didn't have any experience beyond Africa Americans with which to draw his conclusions.

It started simply enough in first grade when Paul had asked me how I kept my tan during winter. When there was bad weather, we would have recess in the classroom and, without playground equipment to keep us busy, these in-door recesses would become meet & greet sessions between the students. Paul, at one of these indoor recesses, had his head wrapped in a bandage and I had gone up to him and asked why that was. Turned out he had hit his head at home and was to keep the bandages on his head for a few days. It was his turn and he asked me how I kept my tan during winter. I looked at my arm and looked to his and sure enough mine was a few shades darker than his. “I don't know,” I answered as we went on to other kids to greet.

Later in the first grade year, we were doing a project where we took twigs from outside and made some mud in the classroom and created little model “lodges” of the type the north eastern Native Americans had done when they had the land. Much like a log cabin, I was tickled by the project and told my mother about it when I got home. She told me that was where her father's side had come from, though I didn't understand the reply at the time.

By second grade a few kids occasionally made fun of the look of my face and, in the rare constructive experience with my mother when I told her about it, she explained to me that her father's side of the family was from an Indian tribe and they had taken her father's family away from their parents and sent them to school to learn to be white. Then her father and herself and her brother spent their life pretending they were white even though they weren't. But Martin Luther King had died for people's rights to be respected for the race that they were so we no longer had to be ashamed of our background. And so it was this time forward, that when people asked how I kept my tan during winter, or why my face looked funny, I would tell them of my Indian background.

In retrospect, this was the first step toward the confidante stage in the relationship with my mother as it was the first thing that brought us together at some level. Since my birth, my mother had kept her distance from me except for the unavoidable times when she had to lug me around from place to place or have me tag along during her errands. But this was the first time in my life where she actually just talked to me. Not that there was a lot to tell.

Primarily it was the size and build that gave her side of the family away. My mother, at six feet, was about the same height as her brother, but both were a couple inches shorter than my maternal grandfather, Bumpa, and his siblings, a brother and sister of his own. All of whom were a few inches over six feet. When my mother was young, she was beaten by her white mother, so I was told, because her appearance favored the Indian side of the family. Though her brother also had the same build and features, they apparently worked well for a boy, making them look stouter.

In her adult years, my mother had better luck passing as white by dying her hair, first red during the Lucille Ball era, then blonde during the California blonde television craze and onward. During her childhood she ended up living with her aunt, Bumpa's sister, to keep her safe from her mother's beatings. There she felt accepted and loved and much as my sister had been my mother figure, mom's aunt had been her mother figure as she grew up.

The only times, that she told me of, during her childhood where her racial background would be made fun of was when they were shoe shopping for her and the salesman would make fun of her feet and say that she should just wear the shoe boxes themselves rather than stuff her big feet into the shoes. Perhaps this was why my childhood memories of family shoe shopping was of driving a long way to get to a Five and Dime store near the Vermont/New Hampshire border where the entire top level was a 'serve yourself' shoe room. There one could browse the shoes on the shelves and try them on without having to share your shoe size with a clerk. It's a style of shoe store which has since become the norm for America, but at the time seemed rare.

In fact, mother would tell me how her father and his two siblings all had toe problems from them being bent and twisted around in order for their feet to fit into the limited shoe sizes available during their lives. In some cases, toes ended-up being amputated later in life, or metal pins surgically implanted to straighten them back-out once larger shoes had become available by the nineteen seventies. My mother's own toes had become upside down letter 'U' shaped from a lifetime of having size twelve feet in size eleven and a half shoes.

When I was thirteen I met a boy and went to his home to visit where he forewarned me his sister was 'big boned' in place of saying she was fat. When I got home I told my mother of this and she snickered telling me they didn't know what 'big boned' meant. She said once the 'Americanized' kids from Indian boarding schools came back after being taught how to be white, White people weren't supposed to acknowledge that they were of Native American ancestry and so referred to them as 'big boned' or the 'big boned people' due to their larger skeletal frame. A hundred years later the term had devolved into meaning anyone of a surprising size.

Except for those kids in second grade who made fun of my looks, for the most part the other children in my class didn't make fun of my race, at least that I knew of. The handful of exceptions was my fifth grade teacher, which I'll get to later, and an upperclassman when I was in seventh grade.

For the first six years of school, not counting kindergarten or nursery school, I was the closest thing to a minority kid in an all white school district. Then in Nineteen Seventy-Six, the 'black' family moved into the region. They had a son joining sixth grade and a daughter joining fifth grade. Of course, the same few kids that made fun of me during my elementary school years were now the ones who made fun of the new black kids at school. To prove they weren't racists, they became my 'new best friends,' to show that it wasn't the color of the new kids that bothered them, it was 'just something else.'

One of these self appointed 'new best friends' asked me what my mixed background was again, I told him Indian and he responded, “Oh, well then. I guess that does make you a Woods <n-word>,” with a laugh.

Needless to say I never bought into their being friends of mine...

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