Poison In The Brain

29

What happens when someone urinates in your mind?

The Summer of Nineteen Seventy-Three, once mother had moved into my sister's old bedroom at the family home, she would invite me in and then use me as her confidante to tell me everything wrong with my father, and sometimes how terrible Aunt Harriet or Dorcus Giacomo were. Once we had moved to the apartment in the Summer of Nineteen Seventy-Five, this was not something that just happened in the bedroom anymore but the whole apartment and expanded beyond just derogatory comments about a couple of people, but all the neighbors in the apartment complex, various regular customers at the branch grocery store, some of my siblings, and of course my father, as always.

Whereas before I could just leave her bedroom to get a break from these stories, with the apartment the only escape was to be at the tree house or in the woods. The woods were better as with the tree house she could check for me there and tell me to come back inside where she could once again use me as a captive audience. One time I told her I didn't want to hear any more and left the apartment to go into the woods, only to find on my return that she had locked me out. Despite being in the apartment she ignored my ringing of the doorbell and knocking on the back glass doors and I ended-up spending the next few hours stuck outside, unsure if I'd ever be let back in.

Lesson learned: I just fell into the pattern of trying to do other stuff, like playing with building blocks while my mother droned-on about how terrible everything and everyone else was and of course I was supposed to remember not to tell anyone what she was saying. Of course remembering what I wasn't supposed to say meant remembering everything she was telling me and keeping in mind not to tell anyone. This crap would circle 'round and 'round my head like a toxic whirlpool and I was slowly drowning.

Once skiing season had started it occurred to me I could avoid a weekend dose of poison by staying at the family home and joining my father to the ski area when he went to work and I could ski. Having grown-up skiing at the park, this would have been a typical thing to do during winter and my mother couldn't find a reason to say no. But the months and months of stories of other people's incapabilities and inadequacies had taken their toll and once I got to the top of one of the lower slopes I discovered as I looked down the slope that I was terrified to go down it. I had grown-up zipping down these slopes, but now at age eleven, I couldn't. Confused and panicked by this discovery, all I could do was take off my skies and walk down the side of the slope as I fought off a case of nervous shakes.

I spent about an hour at the base of the mountain trying to gather myself and come to grips with the whole silliness of my being afraid to ski. Eventually I steeled my nerves, put my skies back on, and decided to start with the gentlest slope of the lower mountain. At the top of the slope I decided, rather than facing down the slope and skiing to the bottom so far away, I would ski across the width of the slope thus just seeing the nearby side as I slowly slid across and came to a stop. Then there was the scary moment when I'd have to briefly face the length of the slope as I turned one hundred and eighty degrees around, then slowly slid to the other side of the slope. Fortunately, the easiest slopes weren't in demand by the majority of the skiers and if another skier was coming I'd just wait at the side of the slope until they passed, then slowly slide to the other side. Doing this slow zigzag I reached the bottom of the slope. I had survived it just fine and went for a second run, this time not coming to a complete stop as I turned at each side. By midday I had built-up enough confidence where I could ski with the direction of the slope at its flattest points. By the end of the day I had finally worked my way up to taking the easiest slope that went down the full mountain.

Rattled by this whole experience, I decided not to ski the following day, but as my father felt I was too young to be left alone at the house, oblivious of the fact that mother had been leaving home alone for years, he had my mother pick me up and I was back at the apartment. I down hill skied very rarely from that day onward.

Soon after my eleventh birthday, my not as older brother decided to move out of the family home before he got his official disowning from dad. He took his savings from his various part-time jobs over the years and left for an extended visit with my sister out west. His plan after the visit was to go to Jackson Hole Wyoming and find a job as part of the ski industry there. It turned out many people also went to Jackson Hole for this only to find that those who already lived in Jackson Hole got all the jobs. He ended-up returning to the family home by Christmas.

That Christmas, for some reason my eldest brother decided to make some two by four furniture and asked to do so at the house using the basement workshop. By this time my father's disowning of my eldest brother seemed to have softened to the point that he was willing to let him do it. Perhaps it was also partially the case that he had felt a little lonely in the otherwise empty house as Pappy was in his apartment during the daytime. The two by four furniture comprised three coffee tables, colored through wood burning then sealed with a glossy clear coat. Once completed they were placed in the empty space where the dining room table had been, the table itself now at my mother's apartment.

One of these days, visiting my father on his day off, my eldest brother was there and my not as older brother as well. He and I were admiring eldest brother's work when suddenly all of the likely disparagements mother might make about them bubbled up into my mind. Like mental vomit, I fought to keep it inside as my eldest brother and father were wondering what was going on from the living room. Suddenly, all the poisonous things mother had been telling me over the years wanted to escape, but I knew they couldn't. Out of desperation I let the mildest comment of hers that I could think of loose: That my not as older brother ''...wasn't mechanically inclined!'' It burst out and I fled from the room to my bedroom upstairs where I hid until I got it all tamped back down.

By the following Spring, I had come to let the comments my mother made pass right through me and not take them in, personally. It occurred to me that if I didn't hold onto them in the first place, then I couldn't betray them by bringing them up later. This was a useful skill to have learned as the following Fall was when my mother told me about the circumstances of my birth and from that point onward she would feel comfortable directly telling me stories about my own incapabilities and inadequacies and I just let it flow through me and not take it personally.

But like any channel with a constant flow of effluence going through it, the edges of my mind did become stained and moldy over time.

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Oh, Yes: Classes!

28

For me, sixth grade was an eye opener. Not for what was taught during the year, but for how it was taught. Gone were the box like desks and the separate chairs of Elementary School, instead to be replaced by chairs with built-in, right handed only, writing surfaces. But gone too was 'script' writing, we could now chose between longhand or print for our assignments and I never looked back. Homeroom was with the 'Social Studies' teacher, he remembered my not as older brother fondly and had high hopes for me. He would be disappointed.

I, too, was disappointed. Returning to school was going to be the first chance to see my friends since the end of fifth grade and, as luck would have it, none of them were in the same homeroom as I. Once classes started, I might see one or two in the same class, but that only left enough time to say 'Hi' before settling down as it started. It wasn't until lunch that we gathered for the first time to chat. It was cordial, but Pete seemed a bit distant. I would later find out that Pete had befriended an upperclassman and they had become the new best friends. If he was going to impress his new friend, letting him know he hung-out with a stuttering half-breed wasn't going to help. Jonathan, I had in math class, but as it had assigned seating I wasn't going to have much of a chance to visit with him.

So in the study hall time after lunch, in my homeroom, I decided I should try to make friends with some of the many new faces that had joined sixth grade... I would try to introduce myself but my stuttering would be the first impression I would give. This problem continued into my adult years at job interviews. Can you imagine how many call backs I got?

Still, I succeeded in befriending a kid named Mathew in 'Social Studies' class and since there wasn't assigned seating, we chose to sit next to each other at the back of the room. We spent the entire first quarter of the class visiting amongst ourselves and ignoring the class. This didn't make a good impression on the teacher and by the second quarter he had implemented assigned seating. Though no longer able to visit and thus my time undivided for class, the teacher still found me wanting and later in the year decided to assign my seat to sit before a kid with a known history of jabbing pencils into people's backs. Needless to say, that's what happened and the teacher wasn't interested in any complaints so I started to take up sitting sideways as I could keep my left hand ready to deflect any sudden pencil jabs. That, too, wasn't allowed by the teacher and I got to spend the next few days having to face forward while pencil tips were piercing my back. Then it occurred to me to try to befriend the kid with the pencils during non-class time and, sure enough, once we had a bit of a rapport going he was no longer driving pencils into my back.

The teacher noticed this within a couple weeks and promptly reassigned my seat despite the fact that we were in the middle of the quarter. Just my seat was changed with another unsuspecting student and I was now in the front row of the class. When it came to tests I always did well unless there was a question requiring a few paragraphs of discussion; then, with my hand writing problems, I'd keep those answers as brief as possible resulting in only partial credit for the answers. As my noggin seemed to soak-up class lectures and reading materials well, I didn't bother to take notes except for the occasional spelling of a historical name or the notation of a full date. Apparently that wasn't enough note taking for the social studies teacher.

One day, while he was pacing the front of the classroom as I watched him lecture, he walked up toward my desk and then suddenly lashed out his foot and kicked me and the desk to the side! Stunned, I just stayed there like that as the teacher continued lecturing as if nothing had happened. But now all the students were paying attention to me and not to him, so he ordered me to get up and right my desk. I did. From that point forward I paid less attention to his lecturing and more attention to his foot.

'Reading' class was simply a find a book to read and read it study hall followed by a one page hand written summary of the book to be turned into the teacher once you were done. The books you could read were based on those she had in the bookshelves of her classroom and only reading three books was required each quarter... I could read faster than that. By the end of the first quarter I realized that our class score was based on how many books we read in a quarter so from that point on I focused on the shorter books available and ended up with one of the highest grades for the class that school year.

For 'Science' class, I was sure I was doomed from the outset. The teacher explained her requirements and grading scheme quite clearly: We were to hand copy each chapter into our notebooks and that would comprise a third of our grade. Tests would comprise half our grade with lab work participation accounting for the rest.

Unlike previous science instruction in Elementary School, this science class was going to have 'hands on' experimentation and I was thrilled... But the copying of the chapters? Still, I gave it a try for the first two chapters. Effectively, she was going through one chapter each week and she would allow us twenty minutes classroom time to start coping the chapters, then we were to finish on our own time. I found that if I did no other homework but transcribing the chapters of the science book, I could do it using my two handed writing method in the privacy of my home; that was the method where I'd use the fingers of one hand to help steady the painful trembling fingers of the writing hand. But doing the science chapters only also meant doing no writing-based homework for any other class. I 'did the math' and realized that if I skipped transcribing the science chapters all together and focused on getting great test scores and correctly performing the lab work, I'd have a passing grade... Just barely.

And so it was a choice I made to insure I had a fighting chance to do the writing homework needed for all the other classes of sixth grade. The first week I turned in my notebook for her to confirm I'd copied the first chapter. The second week I turned in my notebook but forewarned her I'd only gotten two thirds done. For all other chapters, I flat out told her I didn't copy them and by the end of the first quarter she stopped asking. For the twenty minutes we had in class to start copying the chapters, I used that time for math homework, or finishing up reports for 'English' class or 'Social Studies'.

There was fall-out from this. Whereas the science mod I was assigned to the first quarter had my friend Jonathan in it as my lab partner, by the second quarter I found my science and reading mods had been swapped. As the same teachers taught the same subjects through the day at the same quarterly pace, we students could be swapped around which mod we were in and still have the same teacher, just different classmates. 'Reading', as it was solitary work, was the easiest to accommodate when other teachers wanted to swap a student between mods and thus I found myself with different 'Science' classmates for the second quarter. These were the science students that needed more attention, in reality the teacher just lectured in a louder voice. Though it made no difference as far as my boycott of copying chapters, it gave me a new lab partner who would become a new friend as well, 'Tim'.

Still, for the final quarter the science teacher again had me transferred to a different mod which was for her 'problem kids'. These were the behavior kids who just didn't give a rat's ass about science class. The class structure was slightly different too as she allowed more time for chapter copying in class, about thirty minutes instead of twenty and less lab work. I took advantage of the extra time to copy the chapters by doing more of my 'English' and 'Social Studies' work in 'Science' class. But with fewer of us in this mod, the teacher would rove our desks to make sure we at least had the science book open and were copying the first sentence. This was when she noticed I wasn't and I learned about detention. But as I was a student that lived in a town twenty miles away, I could only be assigned detention once a week when there was a late bus to take me home. Still I learned my lesson and from that point forward I had the science book open and the first sentence copied in my notebook so when the teacher glanced she couldn't assign me detention, but once the first sentence was done, I'd stare out the classroom window until the thirty minutes to copy the chapter was over.

But the new science mod also provided other challenges. Being filled with the problem kids, this was the first time I was openly mocked by classmates for my stuttering. While the teacher would tell them to knock it off, it was after the mocking had occurred; there was never any forewarning not to mock me. Further, when I would get back the science tests with 'A's, the other students would make fun of me, once they noticed. When belittling me for my high test scores didn't work, one of the students started to grab my tests from me once they were returned and tear them up. I assume he thought this was punishment for me as I wouldn't be able to show-off the good grade to my parents when I got home. In reality, my parents hadn't taken any interest in my class work since the first grade night I had to learn my last name by copying it all night long, so the torn-up tests just became a few less pieces of paper for me to take home and throw away there. Given the fewer number of students in the room, there was enough lab equipment for us not to need lab partners, which was fine by me as having one of these kids as a partner would mean not being able to do the experiment. Still, the kids tried to harass me from doing the experiments, but the teacher would intervene, presumably to keep the equipment from being damaged. While the 'Science' teacher had spent the school year disappointed and frustrated with me, I feel that by the end of the school year, hovering around me that last quarter as I diligently did the lab work, she just ended up confused about me and to why I was refusing to copy the chapters. She never thought to ask.

'English' class was with my previous year's fifth grade teacher. He was much the same, though he focused less on getting after me given that he had so many more students to keep track off. There were three memorable bits I took from his class, two of them positive, and one of those two was happenstance.

Alone at the apartment that preceding Summer, other than the time I'd work at the tree house, I started my first book. Writing that is, not reading. Having been pondering why I couldn't come up with original drawings on my own, it occurred to me that I could think of original tales of people interacting. And so I started writing ''The Infinite Voyage'' about three astronauts on a one way journey through space. Each chapter was like a television episode where they would reach a new place and find a different problem to face. My not as older brother actually liked one of the chapters so much he made a drawing of a scene of it into the pages of the manuscript itself. While it hurt just as much to write it by hand as classwork had, I at least enjoyed the creation of each chapter as a consolation. I had hoped that with the practice of writing it during the Summer I would somehow get beyond the pain writing by hand caused. It didn't help.

As the former fifth grade teacher had been so hot on us writing journals the previous year, I decided to bring in my manuscript for him to read if he wanted. He did and to my surprise actually wrote some positive comments in the margins! But once I needed to ration out my writing by hand for class work, the book was put aside and forgotten. Eight years later I got inspired and wrote a short story using the same three characters, but it didn't revive my interest in the book itself.

One of the segments the English teacher decided to do for class was a review and discussion of the lyrics of some Beatles songs from the White album. A record I knew well, I thought I was going to like the segment, but once again it became a session of his requesting others of what they thought the lyrics meant so that he could then explain to them why they were wrong and the only correct interpretation was his own. He assured us that if we thought it through, we would realize that he was right about his interpretations. In some of them he was flat out wrong as I learned in later years when I heard or read about what the Beatles themselves said they meant by the songs.

As far as classwork assignments went, I did well on the tests again, but had to strategically pick and chose the take home, hand written, work I'd do. I did all the shorter assignments and would typically choose not to do a long one or two during a quarter. As the long ones' grades counted as much as the shorter ones, once averaged out I was a 'B' to 'C' student each quarter.

The final good thing I got from 'English' class that year was another new best friend. 'Brad' had been randomly assigned as my partner on a project and as we had to work on it with after class time, this meant spending time at each others homes. This turned into my best new friendship and I saw Brad often throughout the rest of that school year.

'Math' class: Much like 'Science' class the teacher explained expectations right up front. A self study class like 'Reading', we were to read each chapter of the math book and do all of the homework problems at the end of the chapter. Once she had confirmed that it all had been completed and done correctly, she would let us take the test on the chapter. Our grades would be based on the number of chapters we got through combined with our test scores for those chapters. The answers for the homework questions were available in the back of the book, so the only challenge to the class was understanding the concepts and doing every page of homework. By the second chapter I tried to bargain with the teacher about doing every single page of the hand written homework, but I was told there was no flexibility, every page must be completed and turned in before the chapter test would be allowed. As a result, I only got two chapters done that quarter. That resulted in an overall 'D' grade. At the end of the quarter the teacher even felt the need to counsel me that, given that my tests were perfect, I just needed to apply myself more to getting the homework done. I didn't bother point-out to her that doing her work was the majority of my time for homework of any of my classes. Despite liking the material, my hopes for the whole class dimmed.

Second quarter started off with a surprise, we only had to do two thirds of the homework problems for each chapter, now, not all of them. As I'd already gotten much of the way through the third chapter, but just not finished it by the end of the first quarter, I was able to finish it and three more chapters by the end of the second quarter. This resulted in an overall 'C' grade. For the third quarter, she would only require we do one third of the homework problems, but she warned us that we should do more than that so we would be familiar enough with the material to get a good grade on the test. I just did one third, got through six chapters and received an overall 'B' grade for the quarter.

For the final quarter she wouldn't be checking any homework. We were to do as much as we felt we needed to do in order to pass the test, and nothing less. For me, this became one day to read the chapter, one day doing practice problems in class, no time needed at home, and one day to refresh myself just before taking the test that day. So I was clipping through about three chapters every two weeks. I finished the book a week and a half before the end of the school year with perfect grades on all my tests. The teacher felt the need to openly congratulate me in front of the class for not only being the most improved student of the year, but also being the rare student to finish the book before the end of the school term and the first for this year. My last week and a half I could use as quiet free time to do drawings if I wished, read a book, or work on things for other classes. I did. About a week later, a second student finished the book and by the end of the term a third student finished it.

At the end of the school year I spent some time pondering my score card as I reflected on just how much my problem writing by hand was directly defining my grades. And math class was the perfect representation of that fact for me with that string of 'D', 'C', 'B' and the final 'A'.

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Joining The Mod Squad

27

At the beginning of sixth grade year, my mother let me know that she had made sure to only move us to a town that went to the same school district as the one I had been in thus, while I might be away from the original home, I would still see all my friends at school. She told me she would never be the type of mother that would take her kids from their school and friends. But of course she had done this with my two older brothers when they moved to the bigger house next to the hayfield a year after I was born. In just a few years, her actions would point-out that lie to me, personally. I would conclude upon reflection that the only reason she picked this town was simply because it was where the branch grocery store was that she worked at.

The Middle School was just in another wing of the building I had been going to in the previous five years, but that building was now twenty miles away, this meant getting up at my not as older brother's high school time to take a bus all the way from the center of this new town to the school building. We would gather behind the town hall where there were two buses, one for the high school building and one for the Middle School. The branch grocery store was just a small walk and a street crossing away, so I either rode with my mother to the store when she went to work, or walk the third mile from the apartment on my own during better weather days. This was the first time I'd taken a bus without knowing anyone on it. In the previous years I'd always had the same bus driver so at the very least I'd have her as a familiar face, but this time I kind of had to guess which bus to take. It was pretty easy as the younger kids were boarding one and the older kids the other. The drive to the school was up the interstate highway, a ride I'd already become quite familiar with during the summer drives when my mother was temporarily working with the night crew at the main grocery store.

Though in the same building, the middle school wing had its own entrance by the new gymnasium where we would gather on the fold-out bleachers. In time I would become familiar with some of these new kids that I rode the bus with and we'd chat, tell jokes, and horse around as we waited until the first bell rang to signal the start of the school day. One time a kid was showing another how he couldn't catch a dollar that was right between his fingers. The kid would hold the dollar from the end with his thumb and index finger, while the kid taking the challenge would be allowed to hold his open thumb and index finger horizontally with the dollar hanging in between. The first kid would let go and the trick was to close one's thumb and finger fast enough to catch the bill. And they couldn't. The story was one's nerves from the eyes to the brain then to the arm were just too slow to register the bill was falling and then order the fingers to close in time. After watching other kids fail at this, I took the challenge... And I caught the bill. This stunned the couple of kids watching and I feigned keeping the bill for a moment just to tease, then handed it back and they wanted to see me catch it again. So I did. A couple more kids gathered to watch this and then the bell sounded. In the following mornings those kids would be trying to make their fingers close faster so they could catch the bill as I could. I didn't tell them my secret: Rather than watching for the bill to drop, I watched the holding kid's forearm. The skin over his muscles would start to move before you could see his fingers loosen so as I saw the skin of his arm shift, I would then close my fingers, grasping the bill a tiny moment after his fingers let go. I was pretty good at Rock/Paper/Scissors, too, which I learned at the same time using the same method. Needless to say, if the challenging kid wore a long sleeved shirt or jacket, I was out of luck.

Sixth grade presented multiple teachers instead of one, each with their own subject matter. To make things easy they called class periods 'mods,' short for modules, and decided to rotate daily when the classes met. So your first class on your first day became your second class on the second day and the last class of the day before was your first class that morning. This was supposedly setup because sixth period -- I'm sorry, mod six -- was an hour and fifteen minutes long, not the fifty minutes long as the other mods. Thus with rotating, each class would have the extended period to teach with on a regular basis. But I just suspected they were screwing with our minds for this first year of Middle School as, by seventh grade, time periods were once again called 'periods' and classes stayed at the same time each day.

Of the seven mods per day, five were for the core classes of 'Social Studies', 'Science', 'English', 'Reading' and 'Math'. The two time periods that didn't rotate were the 'Specials' mod and lunch time/study period mod. Specials were Gym most of the time and Home Economics or Wood Shop. Effectively, to even out the load of sixth graders, half the kids would have Gym Monday, Wednesday, Friday one week, then Tuesday and Thursday the next, while the other half of the kids had the other days for Gym. For 'Home Ec' and 'Shop', the half not going to Gym would be divided again with one quarter of the kids at 'Shop', while the others had 'Home Ec'.

As the school had gotten into trouble in past years by shuffling off the girls to 'Home Ec' and the boys to 'Shop', they now had mixed sex classes which swapped at the half year mark, so I had 'Home Ec' for the first two quarters, then Shop for the last two quarters. While 'Shop' was a natural for me as I had grown up using wood tools at home, 'Home Ec' turned out to be my favorite of the two as it was something new and I got to learn how to cook and sew. For our sewing final project, I decided to make a bean bag chair, but rather than a ball, I was going to make mine a cube to be different... And sewing a cube was a hell of a lot easier to plan out than cutting and sewing the pattern for a sphere. Cooking was a handy skill to learn because, as it turned out, without a family to cook for my mother no longer made dinner once we lived at the apartment, I had to come-up to speed on how to cook for myself.

'Gym' class was with a parent of a classmate, a girl I had known for years and had a play date or two during our Elementary School years. Elementary 'Gym' had been run by our regular teachers over the years, but with middle school gym class we had a professional teacher who would shape us up and expose us to various activities, not just those games played with a dodge ball. Also with this gym class came locker rooms and showers. As the school had gotten into trouble the year before, using the showers now needed the written permission of your parent. As it was biting nails to get my parents to sign anything, it was really easy not to get the written permission to use the showers and so I didn't. Besides, the whole showering with your friends concept seemed kind of weird. So our assigned gym lockers effectively ended-up being used for the pair of shorts we would wear during gym class, then put back once class was over.

Lunch time/study period was just that, a mod that was divided in half with the first half being lunch time and then we'd go to our homerooms for a study period until the next regular class started. Study period could also be used for library time, but we had to sign-out for that so they'd know where we were.

Of course, with Middle School, we got to have our first hallway lockers. While for sixth and seventh grade we had to share, by eighth grade we got to have one to ourselves. For a deposit, you could get a combination lock from the office as our 'lockers' didn't come with 'locks,' but as money was harder to get out of my parents than a permission slip, I just brought a spare lock from home.

Anything I've missed?

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Surroundings

26

After my entire life at one family home, how did I settle into my new surroundings?

To properly set the next four years, I should probably explain the townhouse and the surrounding area. The bottom floor was a concrete pad that had golden shag carpet over it, the stairs and upper floor were smooth hard wood floors. My mother was so fearful of slipping down those steps that she took the two foot wide strips of orange shag from the temporary living room at the house and sliced it up and glued it to each stair step using a vast quantity of white, all-purpose glue. While this insured no one would ever slip off a step, I doubt she got her security deposit back. The remaining strips of orange shag were used to carpet the attached storage shed where the clothes drier was located along with any yard items.

The upstairs was divided into two halves, the front half was the master bedroom which my mother let me have as I ''would have more room to play in,'' but with the bunk beds stacked in one corner with the chest of drawers directly next to it, it left the room very empty. The remaining half of the upstairs floor was cut in half again for the second bedroom which my mother took with the remaining portion sliced up for the bathroom, towel closet and hallway between it all. My mother bought a large round throw rug to put in the master bedroom to take up some of the vast floor space, but it looked rather lonely in the center of the floor, making the room seem that much larger.

Once I had finished the penicillin and regained my strength, I moved from the lower bunk to the excitement of the upper bunk. Before the age of safety rails, one night I rolled in bed only to fall off the edge. My head collided with the chest of drawers while the rest of my body hit the floor. I soon moved the chest of drawers against the wall at the foot of the bed and pulled up the throw rug to the base of the bed to cushion any future falls. By August, the thrill of sleeping on a high bunk had passed and I remembered the bunk bed came as two halves. I took them apart and I put the top half in the corner where the bunk bed had been and the lower half parallel to it halfway down the remaining wall. I slid the throw rug to the center of the smaller open floor space and this made the room look more naturally filled. I had chosen the top bunk half for the corner to use as my bed because its half had shorter legs and sleeping on such a low bed reminded me of the time my eldest brother slept on the mattress in my old childhood bedroom.

The townhouse complex was three buildings of four apartments each, set-up in an 'L' shape, with our apartment in the lower half of the long line. Inside the 'L' was a solid flat parking area with each apartment having enough room to park two cars in front. There were no lines. Between the buildings were large patches of lawn and behind them a smaller ribbon of lawn after which there was a forest. As I had enjoyed the tree houses my brothers had built at the house, my mother had Joe provide some assorted scrap wood so I could build my own tree house in the woods behind the apartments; she had gotten the permission of the landlord she told me. I then spent the next few days scouting the woods for an ideal spot.

The scraps of wood weren't much, so I talked my mother into going to a nearby town's hardware store so I could get a couple two by fours to support the base of the tree house, we also got some nails and a saw. My mother had kept my maternal grandfather's turn of the century hammer after clearing out his house, so she got herself a small toolbox to put it in and a set of screw drivers for use in the apartment. The tree house started out as a small platform between two tress with strips of the scrap wood nailed across to create the floor. With the remaining two by four wood, I created a ladder to get up to the platform, but found it was too short to reach from the ground to the platform. To accommodate this, I nailed one side to one of the trees about halfway between the ground and the tree house floor, the other side of the ladder hung in the open air. While not structurally sound, with my childhood weight it actually held up pretty good. From the platform I surveyed the woods and looked across a large rock touching the two trees I was at and it stretched to a third tree about six feet away. I fantasized about one day having the floor of the tree house reach that third tree, but I didn't have anywhere near enough scrap wood.

Then soon after, the remaining unused scrap wood I had in the backyard disappeared. My mother panicked as she saw the project of the tree house critical to keeping my interest in living at the apartment rather than deciding to move back with dad at the house. In reality I didn't realize I had a choice so she was safe. But still, she called around and found that the landlord's guy who came to mow the lawn assumed it was trash and took it and threw it out. As the landlord had given permission for the tree house to be built, he felt guilty about this and, as he was a house developer, had two four foot by eight foot sheets of half inch thick plywood brought over to replace the scrap wood. I was vastly better off with the deal and we ran to the hardware store to pick up five dollars more of two by fours and I was quickly across that rock and had a solid floor to the third tree and a roof to boot!

For birthdays, while my friends would have parties with lots of other friends, I pretty much just had one friend over, if that. But for my first birthday at the new apartment, my mother wanted to make it big and memorable and insisted that both my brothers attend and even had Uncle Ronny and Aunt Harriet come out. So everyone could come, we celebrated my birthday the Sunday before and we had lunch and cake, and I got to show-off my tree house and my mother took lots of pictures... In fact, that was one of my very few birthdays that pictures had been taken of and had ended-up in the photo album. For that birthday my father had one of my brothers bring a ten speed bicycle as my present. It was in a box and needed some assembly, which my brothers helped with, and it was child sized. While my mother had at first fumed that the bicycle was father's way of upstaging any present she had gotten me, those feelings were soon replaced with shy laughter. As I was just turning eleven, I was already no longer child sized, at least the size the bicycle had been intended for, thus my riding it was a little like the way clowns would ride tiny bicycles at the circus. By the next week I had found a longer handle bar brace pole and bicycle seat and installed them so I could ride with my legs fully extended. The side effect of this, though, was there was the bicycle down by my knees and feet, then about a foot of the extended poles to where my arms and seat were. Still, I was thrilled with it and the first time my father picked me up at the apartment the following month, my mother insisted I ride around the parking lot for him to see. I was more than happy to but, while I did, I noticed my mother smirking as my father frowned.

Once September came and I was going to go back to school, my mother returned to working the day shift at the local branch store and thus we discovered that the apartment complex had a block party every Friday night. The lights and loud music horrified my mother, but by the second Friday they drew me out of the apartment building to see what was going on and I got to meet my neighbors and one of them had a boy, 'Andrew', a few years younger than me whom I would later impress with the tree house and he would become my tag-along buddy whenever I was up to something on the nearby grounds as he wasn't allowed to leave the property without his parents. His parents didn't like the diminutive 'Andy,' but when we were out of their ear shot, I would call him Andy as he got a tickle out of being called by the forbidden name. With him in mind, I added middle height safety rails to the tree house and eventually filled the space between the safety rails and the floor base with slats of wood to make walls on either side. I eventually replaced the ladder that hung out into space with a structurally sound one at the back of the tree house.

Wandering the woods as Fall came, I found a girl, 'Beth', sitting on another large rock in the woods meditating. I introduced myself and while she was initially hesitant, we soon became good friends. She also lived at the apartment complex so it made it easy to visit. She was a year younger than me and had an even younger brother and a single mother about my sister's age. Having a mother so much younger than my own meant there was a whole different generations' worth of interests. Where my mother was into Herb Alpert and Dean Martin records, her mother was into rock and even Cheech & Chong albums. They had a bean bag chair which was all the modern rage at the time and her mother made Jello with a third of the water in a cookie sheet, then once solid, sliced it into squares which could be eaten as rubbery finger food.

With Fall came a shock. Once the ski area was closed for the Summer season this year, my father took Sundays off. It was the first, and I think the only time, he had either day of the weekends off on a regular basis. And he was taking them off just for me! Each Sunday he would pick me up early in the morning and take me places, typically touristy places but sometimes nature places. There was the Boston Museum of Science one time. Another Sunday he took me to visit an old timey railroad station and take a scenic steam train ride and he showed me how to squish a penny by placing it on the track for the train to run over. A trip to the capital city to bum around and see a re-release of Vincent Price's 3-D movie ''The House Of Wax'', this was one of the very first polarized light 3-D movies and I kept the special glasses in my keepsake drawer for the next few years. Once we visited the ski area where, at the base of one ski lift, there was a stream that a beaver had damned up making a pond; we got to watch with binoculars as the beaver worked, then later walked up to the damn and took a closer look. There was the time to visit the Boston Aquarium and the Bunker Hill multimedia experience nearby. There were a couple more of these and then they abruptly stopped and my father would just take me to the house and read the Sunday newspaper inside while I raked up the fallen leaves and pine needles for him. We never did anything like this again.

After another boring Sunday of just raking leaves or bumming around the house, as having friends over was not allowed, I asked my mother what I must have done wrong for him to have stopped taking me places? She laughed and told me they had finished the separation agreement two weeks earlier and ''He didn't have to put on a show anymore.''

Once the ski season started, my father was back to midweek days off and I would visit him and stay at the house on those days after school, and at the apartment the rest of the week. And so things remained for the next four years...

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A New Life

25

After my strep throat had ''developed into something worse'' and my mother refused to have me admitted to the hospital, the plan was to have me effectively drink bottles of penicillin. As past bottles of prescription syrup had come in small, flattish bottles with doses measured out in teaspoons, this came in round pint sized bottles and I was to have several table spoonfuls four times a day. After the first few times counting out all the spoonfuls, mother found it was easier just to fill the bottom of a juice glass. About every day and a half it was time to open up a new bottle and by the third day of this I was starting to feel very better. It was Friday and this was the first time that we followed the summer plan of me being taken to the family home to stay with my father at night while my mother worked the night shift at the grocery store.

On the drive up I was firmly counseled not to tell dad about seeing the doctor or of the medicine I was taking. Dropped-off, I got to join him and Pappy for dinner. During all the preceding years, mother had cooked the family dinner for us which ranged from a variety of different meals, though often with a common side dish of sliced cucumbers in brown vinegar; I always liked that one with pepper sprinkled on top though it gave me acidly burps afterwards. Left to his own skills, my father primarily fried stuff. His favorite was link sausages, typically accompanied by some canned veggie. Once in a while he would fry-up french fries by filling a fry pan full of Crisco, bringing it to a boil and pouring in frozen fries. They were far more interesting than the baked fries mom had occasionally cooked up. Once dinner was done and the remaining Crisco in the fry pan had cooled, he'd pour it back into the can to use for the next time. About once every month, when he'd have his usual day off from work to give him time to prepare, he'd make Hot Dog Lasagna: Sliced Hot Dogs between layers of lasagna, ketchup for sauce and a little bit of mustard for zing. I don't remember any cheese being involved, if there was I'm sure it would have been American.

Anyhow, on the very first night of this new routine we had dinner, after which I went to the living room to turn on the T.V. and watch some old repeats. Then I heard dad and Pappy talking and saying how terrible mother was and that she was a 'whore.' For some reason, while I had overheard mom saying bad things about me from the next room for years and hadn't reacted, I was terribly upset hearing this. I left the house and ran across the hayfield to the big glass windows of the main grocery store. Doors being locked at night, all I could do was knock on the window endlessly until one of the night crew came and saw me. After a while, my mother came to the window and Joe unlocked the front door and let me in and she asked me why I was there. I told her the things Pappy and dad had been saying about her after dinner and asked to stay with her for the rest of the evening. With a glance to Joe, she reluctantly agreed and went away to call my father to let him know.

This was my first time being in the main store after hours when the night crew worked. As I wandered around, each aisle had a worker with a shopping cart or two of boxes to unpack and put on the shelves. When I later joined the night crew myself at the age of eighteen, I found that pallets of food were delivered to the back loading dock and pulled into the back room. Then the workers would unload the pallets into shopping carts based on what aisle the boxes belonged to; each worker would take two carts worth with them to their assigned aisle, one shopping cart pushed by the handle, the second pulled from the front. Once my mother had finished the call, she hunted me down as I watched the others work and she brought me to the cereal section, which was apparently her shelves to fill. At this point I had been helping out at the branch store for two years on my own, but I was still shaken by the events of the night that I just watched her work for a while before starting to help out.

On the drive home she told me that I needed to stay with my father no matter what they were saying from now on as she and Joe were doing important business at night and couldn't be bothered. She also told me that during the phone call to let dad know I was staying at the store, she confronted him with the things they'd been saying about her and in return he claimed they hadn't said anything bad about her and I must have just made that up because that's how I felt about her. On the next Monday, during the drive up mother trash talked about dad and when she dropped me off at the house, I eventually told dad what she had said and when she came to pick me up, he confronted her about it and she said I must have just made that up because that's how I felt about him. I ended up being the ping-pong ball in this game between my parents daily and by the second week I concluded that the only way to make it stop was just to keep my mouth shout and not listen to what either of them had to say.

While I had understood not seeing any friends during the month out west the previous year, now being at home during the evenings I was in the same town as my friends but by the time I got to town it was too late to see them. Still I tried and called their houses but was told by their parents it was too late, even to talk on the phone. By the middle of August I was so lonely I broke down crying on the phone with Pete's mom as I begged for a chance to see him. To no avail.

So the routine was dinner with dad and Pappy, then I'd go out of the house for an hour or so just in case dad and Pappy were going to finish dinner with a good trashing of mom. Then I'd come in for the prime time shows. As I hadn't been able to pack anything the morning of the move day to take to the apartment, I would pick one thing from my home bedroom at the end of each night to take with me when mom picked me up and eventually got my toys and games evenly split between the two places.

The end of the night with Pappy and dad meant watching the local nightly news, then Pappy would go to his apartment for the night and I'd watch the first half hour of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson with dad until mom arrived. She'd drive us back to the apartment and, once we reached it, I'd take my next dose of penicillin and turn on the T.V. to watch the last half hour of the then ninety minute The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson while mom got ready for bed. Once the show was done it was bedtime, the next morning I'd be gotten up in time for my morning dose of penicillin and then I'd hang-out at the apartment until it was time for the mid day dose, then evening dose and join mom for the drive to work that evening. After a couple of weeks the penicillin was no longer needed. I actually missed that part of the routine as I had come to enjoy the artificial cherry flavor of the syrup.

And so the Summer went.

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Belly Aching

24

My original childhood bedroom which had become my eldest brother's room during fourth grade, now became my mother's living room during fifth grade. Same white walls and nude charcoal drawing, now the room had the old couch from the porch and a new color television. Some two foot wide strips of orange shag carpet that my mother had bought somewhere at a discount filled the center of the floor and a little fold-up table that we children had used for projects over the years became a permanent table with some light chairs to either side. The family's console color television had begun to give up the ghost by the Fall of Nineteen Seventy-Four, it had reached the point that all the replacement tubes in the world wouldn't give the fuzzy off-color picture the grandeur it once held. This and the fact that mother let me watch whatever I wanted on the new television upstairs, made the new living room a perfect lure for me.

My not as older brother, in his final year of High School, was finding reasons not to be home during the evening. So to keep the family dinner table full my mother encouraged me to have friends over, not just for the afternoon once school was out, but for dinner and through the evening. This I took advantage of, mostly with my friend Pete, sometimes with my friend Jonathan. During the early fall months this gave us time to play outside in the dwindling light, during the winter months a chance to play games in the rooms upstairs. In later years I heard how The Beatles had invited guest musicians to the studio to keep things civil as they felt too self conscious to squabble in front of them. I wonder if this was the same goal with my mother encouraging me to have friends over when dad was home.

By Spring, these opportunities became fewer as instead my mother had other things to keep us busy. She switched to working the night crew at the main grocery store across the hayfield instead of the daytime hours she had been working at the branch store twenty miles away. This meant she had daytime hours to go apartment hunting and by April had found a townhouse style apartment she liked less than a half a mile from the branch store. On weekends, she would take me and we would shop for some pieces for the apartment, such as a bunk bed set and chest of drawers for me, or curtains and side tables for her, and a fake leather recliner for Joe Giacomo to use during his anticipated visits. The rest of the furnishings for the apartment would come from the house later, she said. She had me mount the curtains and window sheers using a small ladder she had bought. I was surprised by this and asked why we didn't have my not as older brother do it as he was taller. She said he wasn't mechanically inclined. I guess this meant I was. The final purchase for the apartment was a new washing machine to fit under the stairs of the apartment, and a drier which fit into an attached storage room just outside the back glass doors.

These Saturday trips to run errands with my mother became a staple of our lives for the next four years, not only did it provide a second set of hands to carry bags for her, but she treated me to lunch at a restaurant as part of the trips. Before hand, eating out at a restaurant was a rare thing reserved for special occasions, thus eating out weekly like this made these trips seem extra special.

One time during fifth grade I had become sick and stayed at home. Often when this would happen I'd be left at home, alone, since fourth grade to get better. On this day, it happened to be my father's day off. Managing the park meant that my father had to work the weekends as they were the busiest times of the week, thus he had always had his two days off in the middle of the week, either Tuesday-Wednesday or Wednesday-Thursday. As I was sick on this Wednesday, I got to spend the day with him in the house. As his routine at the park during the off season was doing morning paperwork, then taking a mid-morning break to visit the combination general store & post office, on his days home he would spend the mornings reading the newspaper, then take a mid-morning break to visit the nearby drug store. While I was home sick, I guess he didn't feel I should be left alone that day and took me along with him for the trip to the drugstore. Apparently he hadn't been aware that I had been spending my other sick days alone at home during recent years.

By the start of Nineteen Seventy-Five, it occurred to me that 'if I were sick' on my father's day off this would not only get me a day away from the fifth grade teacher, but give me more time to be with my dad. Though, let's face it, it was little more than sleeping late in the morning, joining him for the trip to the drug store, then hanging out with him while he did other things at the home. He wasn't much for conversation so it was literally staying in the same room with him as he did something else. This became my Wednesday routine, 'I'd be sick' and then I'd spend the day with Dad. This was probably the most contact I had had with him to date.

Once the end of the school year came, I became sick, this time for real. It started with a sore throat and my mother's remedy for times like this was to buy a bottle of ginger ale and feed it to me over the next two days. Once the bottle was empty, I'd start to feel better. But this time it didn't work and all the bottles of ginger ale in the world didn't help. Given my fever, I'd be moved to my mother's bedroom during the day where there was a window fan that would blow on me and help cool me down while I laid on her bed. I missed the last week of school and also wasn't able to attend my not as older brother's high school graduation. I usually wasn't well enough to join the family at the dinner table and would just have crackers or ginger bread cookies brought to me.

After the last days of school was the move to the apartment and my mother concluded that all my being sick during the preceding week and into this one was my way of protesting against the move. Unable to help with that morning's preparations, my mother lead me to the back seat of her car as the moving van showed up and they loaded the furniture that she was taking from the home, the new living room set she'd bought a few years earlier, all of her bedroom, the dining room set she'd taken once Bumpa was in the nursing home, and the new color television and strips of orange shag carpet. I stayed lying in the back of the car once the moving truck was loaded and my mother lead them to the new apartment. Once there, I was taken to the lower bunk of the bunk bed to stay as they filled up the house. Once it was time for my mother to go to work on the night shift I had started vomiting and she took the night off to be with me, then a second night.

The weekend came and went with me lying in bed. Walking to the bathroom to pee had become a chore as my hips, knees and ankles hurt so much, so I waited until I really really had to go. A bedside pan was provided for the times I had to throw-up. By Monday, her next work day, mother scolded me for faking my illness and I just had to get used to the fact that I was now going to live in the apartment with her. The plan for summer had been that I would spend the days with her at the apartment, then the evenings at the family home with my father as she worked with the night crew, but with me vomiting, she couldn't let my father see that. As she couldn't take any more time off from work, she left me in bed for the evening while she went to work. By the second day of this I was throwing-up blood regularly and two days later, my mother thought maybe I should see the doctor.

Straight from bed to the back of her car, we took the twenty mile drive back to my home town to see my childhood doctor. He was told of the fever which I had for nearly two weeks, the vomiting which had recently turned to blood and he took one look at my throat. I was out of the examining room and, as I was having trouble standing, a chair was brought for me from the waiting room so I could sit in the hallway between examining rooms while my mother and the doctor had a heated exchange behind the examining room door. It seemed to last forever as I struggled to stay in a sitting position. Once the argument was over, we left and I was returned to the back seat of the car as we went to the drug store. I lay there for a while as my mother got a prescription for me and then we started the twenty mile drive back to the apartment.

My mother explained to me over the front seat of the car that she had thought my belly aching had all been about the move and I should have told her that I had Strep Throat all this time. Even though it had now ''developed into something worse'' and the doctor insisted I should be in the hospital, she couldn't have that as then my father would know and he could use it against her during the separation agreement negotiations...

To me, all this meant was I was going to die.

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I Take The Fifth

23

Fifth grade was different in many ways. First, we were deemed 'the other' classroom and were placed in the storage room area above the art building. All the boxes from the year before had been moved out of the space to reveal it to be in an 'L' shape. Given that the space hadn't been intended to be a classroom, our desks were lined up backing the walls, facing the center space of the 'L' which remained open. The short end of the 'L' had a chalk board like square, though it seems to me now it was more of a cork board than a writable space. One side of the outside corner of the 'L' held the true chalk board so students from either side of the 'L' could see it, though the students against the same wall as the board could only crane their necks to see the board from the edge. Often they would stand away from their desks a little to get a better view, then return to their desks for assignments.

Children's Scrabble pull-out was a thing of the past, at least for me, and unlike the previous year where the teacher had been strict but predictable, this time we got a guy teacher who was more haphazard and spur of the moment. Having a male teacher was novel and one who was more playful than authoritarian seemed a welcomed change. But after the first month it became clear that his lack of structure meant that one's success was more judged by his whim or mood, rather than classwork performance.

As writing by hand had become more difficult and painful for me as we transitioned from larger two line print of the early grades to the smaller one line print required for third and fourth grades, fifth grade introduced Script hand writing. Where my hand would get micro breaks between each letter with print, with scripted writing ''it was so much easier'' as you didn't have to lift your pencil until each word was done. But for me this meant rather than reaching writer's cramp by the end of the first paragraph I was now there by the end of the first sentence. This was compounded by the fact that scripted handwriting was naturally less clear than print, thus one was to be extra diligent to make each scripted letter perfectly.

To make matters worse, after the first month of class the teacher came-up with a new concept assignment. Each day after recess we were to return to class and write a journal of our lives, in script. We were to detail our home lives and we were to make them ''good'' entries. These sessions were about thirty-five minutes and he would then collect some of the students' journals to read through during afternoon assignments. At the end of the day, he would make named examples of our input by either saying they were not interesting enough or they were well detailed and engaging. In my case, given that I'd rarely make it beyond a few paragraphs each session, I was deemed to just not be trying hard enough. By the second month of this, a rumor started to make its way through the classroom that he had gotten in trouble once the news of this assignment had reached some of the parents.

Unlike a 'write what you did during Summer vacation' assignment, by insisting on a detailed recounting of each day of home life, the assignment had been deemed voyeuristic by some parents and this had been brought to the attention of the Principal. While never officially told this by the teacher, the assignment had become voluntary. The teacher could have had us write about something else each day during that time other than our daily lives but he wasn't interested in that, so those students who found out, such as myself, would instead use the time to get a head start on homework assignments. This resulted in a little blow back by the teacher where it was found that students still doing the journal entries received slightly higher grades on tests than students who were no longer participating. Thus a 'B' would become a 'B+' for the same number of correct answers for a still journaling student. When this variation was brought openly to the teacher's attention in class, he marked down the better student's score because 'she had allowed others to see her grade'. By the end of the calendar year, all but a couple of students were using the time for homework and he scrapped the journal concept when we returned from Christmas break.

Also with the new calendar year, I seemed to have a target on my back. He would play this trick where, after calling class done at the end of the day, he would ask me to stay for a moment just to chat. About what, he was not clear, and after he saw the school buses leaving the yard, he would lose interest and say I could go. Effectively, meaning I could walk home. On the second time he did this I kept my own eye on the buses and when it looked like they were ready to leave, I left despite his protests that I stay just a little longer even though, as before, he seemed to have nothing in particular he wanted to talk about. This time I caught the bus just as it was reaching the stop before it entered the street and I was able to board. He tried a few more times to insist I stay for a bit after class just to chat, but I figured once the class day was over he no longer had any authority.

My scripted handwriting samples were not good enough and so recess was no longer an option for me. Instead, I was to spend my future recesses in the classroom by myself redoing my scripted writing sample pages. As always it would start out fine for the first line, then my hand and fingers would start to seize-up and smoothness of the loops would be lacking. After the first week of this, without anyone else in the classroom to see, it occurred to me to use my other hand to steady the finger tips of my writing hand. This helped the quality of the letters quite a bit, though the pain was just as bad. With this, fewer script sample pages needed to be redone, but recess was still not an option, so I would spend the rest of my time alone in the classroom just to look around while my hand rested. Sometimes the art room in the bottom floor of the building would be empty and I would roam through it seeing what the students of other grades had been up to.

One of our course focuses was on the art of the ancient civilizations. We started out with Egyptian art then moved on to Greek art, part of these topics meant we were to mimic their artwork in drawing. Surprisingly, at least to me, I excelled at this as drawing with straight lines and large curves didn't hurt much at all. In fact my drawing output was deemed so good that a couple other students asked if I could do their drawing homework for them. I was happy to oblige as, surprisingly, it didn't hurt! Once I was all caught up with drawing assignments, I came up with drawing tasks of my own. I made many, many drawings of the Star Ship Enterprise and even copied some panels out of my comic books. Then one day I decided to draw something original... And was completely stumped. Copying other images? No problem. Coming up with images in my imagination to draw was more blank than the page in front of me. Still, this experience left me with a strange bug where I would marvel at artists coming up with new artwork in their mind and watching them create it. While I could copy, I just couldn't come up with anything on my own, so I would watch with giddy fascination as others did it. Bob Ross's public television show became a particular guilty pleasure of mine...

But Egyptian versus Greek art was more than just drawing assignments, it was also the teacher explaining to us how Egyptian art wasn't good because of its primitive style versus the good Greek art because it was so realistic. Some of us found this black and white comparison a bit too strict and one student spoke up saying that he preferred the Egyptian art over the Greek artwork because it did have some style to it, rather than being just perfect reproductions of life. The teacher explained to him that he was wrong, leading to a brief class discussion of how someone's preference for a style of art could be wrong, but it was put to an end by him assuring us that it was. At least he didn't label the Egyptian art as being degenerate. Oddly enough, he later lead us into a discussion of what selfishness was, he started out by asking for examples and one student offered someone liking vanilla ice cream so much that they would hoard it and not let other people have it. ''Wrong,'' he said, selfishness was liking chocolate ice cream so much that you demand everyone must have it. That was what selfishness truly was. I found this an interesting view on his part as he wanted everyone to agree that his opinion was always the right one and we must all have it.

Toward the end of the school year the teacher brought in a book explaining what peoples' first names meant. He had us all sit down on the floor in the open corner of the 'L' while he pulled up a chair in front of us and had us each ask what our name meant. By this point in the year, I'd gotten tired of dealing with him and would no longer participate beyond doing tests and assignments, but was otherwise just waiting out the final month. He had started out by having those interested raise their hands and ask what their name meant. He would then look through the book, find their name, and tell them. After the majority of the class had asked, he kept on prompting the rest of us to ask what our name meant. Eventually, one by one the remaining holdouts asked about their name. I didn't. But apparently he was keeping track and kept on asking if there was anyone one else, again and again. Finally one of the other students put two and two together and raised her hand and asked what my name meant.

For this, the teacher closed the book and explained that my name came from my Indian tribal background and it was the name of my tribe. And my people would run around the woods wearing only little loincloth skins and hung from the trees making repetitive grunting noises like apes because we didn't know how to talk properly.

I admired his skill at combining my mixed race background with my stuttering problem into a cohesive, unified, put down which made all the kids laugh. This is once again where I get to point out how great my elementary school classmates were as, while they laughed when he told the story, they never brought it up again or used it to make fun of me, just like they hadn't with the first grade incident, or my stuttering during those years in between. This would change by Middle School and High School as more kids from other towns came into the mix.

By the end of fifth grade, I was glad to be through with my one and only male elementary school teacher and I would never see him again. As it turned out, the administration didn't feel he was a good fit as an elementary school teacher either and reassigned him to be the English teacher for sixth grade.

Oh, well.

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