Respect

55

By the Spring, I was pining to my friends at school how much I wanted to take my computer to Colorado with me for that Summer's visit. While I could put the keyboard like computer back into its original packing box and take it as carry-on luggage, I couldn't very well do that with the cathode tube monitor. Jonathan perked up and said I could have a video converter box and use a regular television with the computer. I could? Yes, the Trash 80 Model I had been built with all the video logic in the keyboard/computer unit and sent the resulting picture to a monitor that was nothing more than a picture tube without a T.V. receiver. Radio Shack sold a kit box which could convert the computer's video output into a radio frequency signal that could then be hooked straight to the antenna inputs of a T.V.. While I wasn't sure about everything he had told me, the little black & white television from our apartment days was still in my mother's hands and about the same size as the Trash-80 monitor, so I asked Jonathan where I could buy that kit? He said not to worry about it, he enjoyed doing the kits and he would get it and put it together for me. Really? Great! The last week of school he brought in the completed box and I asked him how much I owed him? He said not to worry about it and I thanked him.

Given this act of kindness as well as all the help my friends had given me during the variety show, I realized I had truly earned their respect. It was a great feeling, but at the same time I wanted to look that gift horse in the mouth and try to figure out why they respected me...

Was it that I wasn't 'retarded'?

Let face it, that's the thought most people get when they meet a stutterer, never fairly, but it's there all the same. While people might have that first impression of me, most figured otherwise once they got to know me and realized that I was a person like them, just afflicted with a stutter. For those who didn't get to know me, they were swayed once my computer programming skills had become apparent to all my friends; they spread my self-mocking aside that I was 'A Computer Programming Genius' as a considered truth to the other students throughout the school, and those students who only knew of me from my stutter, came to think more of me as that.

Was it my ballsy stunt with the new Principal?

Between our Sophomore year and Junior year of High School, the original principal had left and our ninth grade English teacher, and father of the only twins in our school, had been promoted over the vice principal to become the new man in charge. While we felt a little bad for the vice principal, we felt better for the English teacher as he had been a stand-up guy that spoke to us students as people, rather than as burdens.

Soon after starting to officially work at the main grocery store, I walked down an aisle to find what looked like champagne bottles on the top shelf of the juice section. I was wondering why they would be here rather than with the wine section and took a closer look. They were actually 'sparkling grape juice' in wine-like bottles, one variety white and the other red. Curious, I wondered what it would taste like and picked up a bottle, and then I remembered something about the plastic cup area and hatched a plan.

Sneaking the bottle into school, I told Pete of the idea and he loved it and recommended that we do it during the study hall period we shared. We stopped by the office and asked the Principal if he'd have a spare moment then as a number of us wanted to get together and congratulate him on his new position. He was tickled and said he would. A few more friends found out about this and, when the time came, Pete went to get the Principal while the rest of us went to the cafeteria to set up a table of extra chairs and a place of honor. We opened up the bag of plastic 'wine glasses' which came in two halves and started putting them together as Pete and the Principal arrived.

He sat down a with the group of us, a smile on his face, and I pulled up the 'wine bottle' wrapped in a crumpled paper bag that I had kept hidden by my feet. His face went from a smile to horror as we pulled the bottle out of the bag and popped the plastic cork. He was likely thinking he'd have to perform his first mass suspension. We assured him it was okay as we filled up the 'wine glasses' and passed them around, then provided the bottle itself to him. As he read the label and found it was nonalcoholic, relief flooded his face and then the smile returned with a laugh.

We soaked up this moment of having pulled his leg, then we raised our glasses and congratulated him. He seemed truly honored.

Was it the bully incident?

Unlike large schools in urban areas where there were enough bully minded kids that they formed packs, our rural High School just had the one bully and we had to make do with sharing him as he was actually a grade ahead of us and he decided his territory was both his and our grades. You just had to make sure you weren't alone with him in a room or at the end of a hallway and you were pretty safe. In the light of day, the most he got out of his bullying was to give a furtive threat or name call as he walked by outside as we waited for the buses to arrive. The most common physical act of aggression he got to do was to try to trip kids as he walked past them in the hallway. In case any adults were watching, he'd stare straight ahead as he walked by, when the target was at the right place coming toward him, he would swing out his next step a little wide and get it on the inside of the coming kid's ankle, then pull his step in, capturing the ankle and planting his catch on the floor as he continued his walk down the hall as if nothing had happened.

While the best technique to avoid this was to move to the other side of the hall as he passed, this was not always possible when the hallway was full of other kids. He caught me once, after a couple of tries and I got my nose planted in the carpet. Thinking over why he had successfully tripped me that time, but not on his earlier tries, I realized that his technique didn't work if you twisted your foot to the outside. For all his next attempts, he'd capture my ankle with the toe of his shoe, as he'd pull it in, I'd twist my foot to the outside and his shoe slipped off and we both continued walking as if nothing had happened. I had gotten so smooth at this trick that I no longer worried about moving to the other side of the hall when I'd see him coming and instead we performed this dance. He'd try to trip me, I wouldn't be tripped, we both lived for another day. I started to suspect this was probably the most, non-violent, physical contact he had in his life with anyone, then it occurred to me the same was true on my side.

One day walking up to my group of friends in the hallway, bully-boy tried again and for no other reason than boredom of the dance, I wondered what would happen if I twisted my foot inward instead of outward? I got my answer as he went down hard and I followed his example of continuing to face straight ahead as I walked to my friends. I could see the delight from what had just happened light-up their faces, some getting off a couple of guffaws; their reaction matched my feelings while I held the straight face as I reached them. Expecting to greet them and chat about it, the smiles disappeared and they all abruptly stepped passed me. Confused, I turned to see what was up.

The bully had been stunned by his fall from grace. Somebody had tripped him? I'm sure he thought. After that moment laying on the floor in surprise he had gotten up and started charging for me while I was blissfully unaware, facing my friends. As the bully was about to reach me, my friends had stepped forward and made themselves a wall between me and the bully: Pete, Jonathan, Van, Luke, and Pete's upperclassman friend fearlessly stood between me and the bully wanting revenge. ''He tripped me!'' he yelled at them hoping to convince them to let him at me. But they stood their ground and explained to him that he had tripped each of them in the past and turn about was fair play. ''He tripped me?!?'' his second intonation, this time, was more of a vent of frustration. A teacher drifted over to ask if anything was wrong. ''Nothing,'' the bully bit out and stormed away. Apparently the teacher had gathered what had happened as he had a laugh with us once the moment of danger had gone.

I can never adequately explain the joy I felt at that moment of my life, not of having landed the bully, but that people had stood up for me and protected me. Something that I had so rarely experienced and so wished I could have happen again so I could revive and relive that moment of bliss.

This filly was a great horse with perfect teeth and I loved it!

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Making A Killing

54

The close of my Junior year of High School didn't disappoint. Each year, the school organized a student variety show one evening to cap off the term. Some kids got their garage bands together and played songs, others who had taken drama would put on a sketch or two, a few students from band would organize and play a piece, dancers would dance and elephants would march! Well, all right, there were no elephants. As some surprises, Jonathan and Luke had come up with the idea of programming two Trash-80's to do the dueling banjos song as beeps, one computer being the school's, the other being Jonathan's that he could bring from home for the night. And I thought: Why not me? I presented the idea of doing my 'Public Speaking' class final speech as a bit. The selection committee, I think it was just the music teacher, had me do the speech to him cold in his office and he thought I'd make a nice break between other bits. He was thrilled, he explained, that at least I wasn't another student garage band wanting to do a song as he had more of those than he could use.

My speech ended on a pun about my name and it occurred to me that, unlike giving the speech in front of my classmates who all knew my name, the variety show audience would include mostly parents who didn't know me at all and I needed to find a solution. Then it dawned on me that, as I was portraying a self-important political figure, I should have a seal of office made up which prominently featured my name. I looked up the other Paul who I had shared those Creature Double Feature movies with back in Elementary School. He had become a budding graphics artist and he agreed to draw up a seal for me which I could hang on the front of the podium.

The closeness between my childhood best friend Peter and myself had faded once he had found an upper classmate to befriend in band class. As that upperclassman had little respect for me given my stuttering and mix-raced background, Pete would discourage us from appearing as friends during the school day over the years in order not to offend his new buddy. But now things were different, his friend had seen me over the years and had started to like me. He and Pete came to me with an idea: They would dress up as my secret service agents and join me on stage. He'd play my traitorous assassin at the end on stage where the audience could see him in the lights rather than trying to plant my assassin in the unlit audience chairs. Pete would bring in his walkie-talkie and ear piece and have it make a static noise burst at a point in my speech and he'd mime listening to the ear piece to foreshadow the 'danger' I was in. I liked this too and once Jonathan and Luke found out, they offered to bring in their suits as well and be additional secret service personnel on stage as they'd be there anyhow to do their dueling banjos piece. This was only increasing my enthusiasm for the bit and I was raring to go.

Over the last few months of my school year, my father suddenly had to work late at the ski area, which was odd as it was the off season, but I was too wrapped up in my own stuff to worry about it. When the night of the variety show came, I asked him if he was going to attend and see me perform. He said he couldn't as he had to go back to the park and work late again after dinner. No surprise. I actually couldn't stay for dinner myself as I had to be at the school early for the show walk-through.

Once there, 'concerns' had been expressed by the staff in charge of the event that my 'speech' might be inappropriate given the recent assassination attempt of the President, my satire hadn't been based on that, had it? I lied and said it hadn't, even pointing out (falsely) that I had originally written and given the speech in class during the second quarter of school before Ronald Reagan had taken office. Oh, well then, that was okay they agreed and we were told of my skit's placement. It'd be in front of the curtain between two other items needing to vacate and set up on the stage. When Jonathan arrived he had brought two ear pieces for himself and Luke to wear as part of my 'detail', Pete's upperclassman friend felt a little put out not having one for himself, but soon realized how small they were, he could easily mime having one by touching the side of his ear from time to time. Given the fears of 'new technology', the organizing staff wanted to make sure the Trash 80 dueling banjos bit would work beforehand so Jonathan and Luke had to set-up on stage and perform it. They did and it sounded great and was loud enough so the show was going forward!

Once the audience arrived and settled, the show began and I went in back to change into my corduroy suit from the year before for my part of the show. Pete and his friend, it turned out, were part of one of the garage bands and I slipped into the back of the auditorium to watch them perform and I was there as well for the official performance of the dueling banjos bit. As my speech approached, we gathered in the cafeteria space next to the auditorium, all in our suits, to walk-through the action. I picked a pause in my speech where Pete could do his walkie-talkie bit, I told his friend the key line when he was to pull his gun and shoot me, it turned out he could use a cap gun for this as it was part of 'a performance on stage' and not during school hours. I affixed my large 'presidential seal' to the podium and the curtains closed on the preceeding act and my 'security detail' took the podium on stage and made sure the mike was hooked up and working. They then motioned to me that they were ready. I came out and checked the positioning of the podium as it had to be right in front of the split of the stage curtains so once shot, I could fall between the split and my dead body would disappear so we wouldn't have to worry about it being dragged off once the bit was done. Satisfied, it was time to give the speech.

I turned and faced the audience well. It looked completely black as the spot light was shining on me, the only evidence of people being out there in the darkness was that the light pouring on the stage glinted off and sparkled from people wearing glasses and jewelry. It was as if I were looking out into the blackness of space and those glints were the twinkling stars. And I began, with a more solemn and somber pacing than I had used for my 'speech class' performance, I made sure to turn my gaze to and fro, glancing at the various audience members I actually couldn't see to make that 'special connection' with them that the politicians liked to do. While I had brought the text with me, double spaced with notations of how to say each line, I didn't need to look at it once as I had practiced it so often before this moment. At an earlier pause in the speech, another group had decided to help my performance as a couple of girls screamed during that pause as if I were one of the Beatles on stage. I was proud of the fact that I didn't break character at this surprise, and I greatly loved the moment as it happened. Then the point came for the walkie-talkie squawk and then the punch line of my speech and the cap gun fired. I thrust myself back through the curtains and this time my head didn't hit the floor as it had for speech class.

It turned out the next act was a gymnastics floor routine and they had placed a mat right up behind the closed curtains in preparation. It cushioned my fall and I realized I was lucky something else hadn't been set up there instead, say a drum kit for a garage band. As I got up off the mat I heard the applause from the other side of the curtain. I hadn't stuttered once during my performance. As I walked off back stage, my friends came in from the side and handed me the 'seal' from the front of the podium. I kept it for several years as a souvenir hanging on the wall of my bedroom to remind me not only of this night, but of the great success of my whole Junior year of High School.

When I got home late that night, my father's second wife, Roberta, was washing dishes. She asked if I had seen my father at the show? I said I hadn't and he had told me that he needed to work late at the ski area. She told me he had told her and Pappy during dinner that he was going to see me at the show after all as he was thrilled I was going to be in it.

This left me wondering, was my father actually proud of me all this time, but felt he had to keep it a secret?

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B.M.O.C.

53

And thus came my Junior year of High School. All but one class was based on grasp of subject matter versus endurance trial of hand written pages. The one hold out was 'Chemistry' class. But as for the rest, all the classes went swimmingly and, in fact, I was so delighted with the first quarter I decided to review the open spots in my schedule and find little quarter long classes I could pop into the holes. One of those was 'Public Speaking' for third quarter, which I had stayed away from given my stuttering, but I was feeling confident and in the preceding weeks I had learned how to take a class for a while and if it wasn't working out one could drop it before the end of the quarter to keep the 'F' out of the record.

Chemistry was either the first or second class of the day. The teacher was about a decade past his prime and would pepper his lectures with stale humor that was based on the fact that one or two students in the classroom would find it funny and laugh, and thus the rest of the students would then laugh in reflex. But our class just had a handful of students, somewhere around ten, and so his jokes would just fall flat. As the advanced science studies students had Chemistry the previous year, he probably assumed we were the slow crowd and that was why we weren't laughing. The grade being based on half knowing the subject matter as reflected in tests, which I aced, and a quota of handwritten material, which I struggled with, it kept my quarterly score for this class out of the 'A' range for the whole year.

I really enjoyed the social studies classes I took, most all of them one quarter long courses with a single focus. While I don't remember most of them given their brevity, one was a Geography class which focused on maps and world features. This was the first time I had this particular teacher and he was very engaging. One bit he taught us that really struck a bell for me was how objects in orbit worked. He started out by noting how most used the analogy of the ball on a rubber band and spun the ball around as if it was in orbit and the rubber band the pull of gravity. Wrong, he explained, and drew a circle on the board to represent the Earth. Being in orbit was like being shot out of a gun fast enough that you miss landing on the Earth. He drew a tiny stick figure holding a gun at the top of the circle and showed how a normal gun shot would fire, then eventually fall to the ground. He then drew the faster shot, that still fell downward, but as it was fast enough, its downward fall matched the curve of the Earth and thus perpetually missed it, though not being fast enough to break free of Earth's orbit. That explained how people in orbit were in constant free-fall and not plastered to the outside edge of the ball on the rubber band analogy due to centrifical force. This account really worked for me and I greatly liked it, yet what it had to do with the 'Geography' subject matter itself, I don't recall. Anyhow I decided to find and sign-up for more classes with this teacher for Senior year.

I had 'Basic Composition' again this year and, thankfully, it was with a different teacher. A required class for Sophomore year, the then teacher I had it with wanted about twenty pages of hand written material each week, a level I hadn't been able to keep up with given my physical problems writing by hand. When I took the card for this replacement class, there had been no teacher specified on it because the school wasn't sure at that time if they could hire a new part-time English teacher or not. If not, then it would be with one of the existing staff and my fear was it would be the same guy I had the previous year. But it wasn't. 'Mrs. Shaw', though an experienced teacher, was still fresh enough to have an enthusiasm for her subject. Nicely balanced with lecture & discussion, test taking and some pages of hand written material, I was at the top of the class and she was very impressed by me... Though I probably did have an unfair advantage as I was a junior in a class of sophomores!

'Public Speaking', oddly enough, had many of my elementary school classmates in it, kind of giving it a reunion feel even though we had all been in the same building in the intervening years since Elementary School, I think having so many familiar faces may have helped. For you see: I greatly surprised the class. For some reason, when at the front of the class to give a speech, I didn't stutter much at all, it was the opposite of what I had expected to happen. Impromptu, Scripted, Informative, Persuasive, I just excelled at giving these speeches. The only time I significantly stuttered, oddly enough, was when I was talking about computers and computer programming while using the school's computer as a display prop. For our Final, we were to pick a historic speech or write one of our own, and give it from the stage of the auditorium. I decided to write my own speech prompted by the recent assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan. A satire, I was going to portray a figure from our community who was going to sacrifice their life with a staged assassination so that my political thoughts would reach such a level of notoriety that it would become indelible and compelling. The political figure I'd be portraying was a self-important version of me and my political goal: To increase tourism.

The speech was punctuated with the mock assassination itself. Jonathan was going to be the assassin with a cap gun, but we found out that was a suspendable offense. Brainstorming, Jonathan discovered that one of his clip boards made a loud snap when the clasp was held all the way open and let go. We tried it in the auditorium a few days before and sure enough it was loud and reverberated in the room. But as he would now have to manage the clipboard 'effect', we had to get someone else to stand up and 'hold the gun'. As these speeches were taking place in the auditorium, other students would be wandering in and out anyhow so our computer cohort Luke had a free period at that time and offered to come in. Other students gave their speeches, I did mine, Luke stood up at the end making a gun shape with his fingers and Jonathan let the clasp snap! I fell back to the hardwood floor of the stage and bumped my head. But it had been worth it, though a bit more of a dramatic piece than a true speech, the teacher still gave me top marks, and also for my whole time in the class. On a point of reflection, did I truly do better than the majority of my classmates during the course? Or was it that I had defied expectations given my stuttering and lack of it during the public speaking bits? I suspect I did a good effort in the class but the teacher elevated me a bit given where I was coming from.

'Intermediate Math' class was again with Zack Hatch and I was again at the top of my class. As Zack had provided me permission to jump a grade from 'Intro To Algebra' in my freshman year to 'Transformational Geometry' for my Sophomore year, he was going to give me permission as the math department head to take 'Calculus' for my senior year. Whereas in Eighth grade I had been held back from joining the majority of my classmates taking 'advanced studies' due to reasons out of my control, I would be ending my time at High School as one of the chosen few in the most advanced math class there was. I was proud of this coming achievement and I couldn't wait. The one caveat was, I'd still have to take 'Advanced Math' as well during my Senior year, but given my skills, Zack had no doubt I could handle both classes at the same time. It helped that Zack would be teaching 'Advanced Math' next year as well, though I'd have to get used to a different math teacher for 'Calculus'.

This had been the best year of my school life, both academically, but socially as well as it seemed to my other class mates that I had broken out of my quiet shell. Little did they know that I was drowning myself in my academics, work at the grocery store, software development for local businesses, and computer game playing at home on my own Trash-80 computer as a means of distracting myself from my physical 'Situation'. I scantly realized it myself.

By the last few weeks of my Junior year of High School, Zack seemed distracted by something, though I didn't know what. Then one day he asked me to stay behind after class for a private talk. As I had lunch next anyhow, I could easily be a little late for it and he waited until the last student had gone and I came up to him at the front of the classroom. He explained to me how the school district had been screwing me out of my education for years and I should talk to my father about this and hire a lawyer to sue the school district. I was stunned by this and also very confused as I felt things had been going well. But he explained that the district had been legally required to provide me with speech therapy since the mid-nineteen seventies and they hadn't. For the past three years, Zack had been referring me for it, but the school district had been ignoring his requests. He had finally gone to the district office and had been told that, officially, I didn't stutter. Not being able to imagine how that could be, he looked into my file to see when that had been determined. What he found was a time in fourth grade when I had been asked to read a portion of a book and as I hadn't stuttered during that, I was deemed not to suffer from a stutter. Not only that, but as teachers had repeatedly referred me for re-evaluations because of my stammer, rather than re-evaluate me the school district would play other tricks. Such as they placed me in 'special ed' pull-out in fourth grade to make the fourth grade teacher think I was getting 'extra help' and he saw in the records where they had taken me out of Latin class in eighth grade so the Latin teacher would no longer be able to fight to get me speech therapy as I would no longer be her student. Having seen my two hander writing technique, Zack suspected that I had occupational issues with my hands as well which had held back my performance over the years and the school had been required to accommodate for that, too. Instead he found they labeled me as 'lazy' in the records so they wouldn't have to address the issues. But more important than all this, there was evidence in my records that I was to have been provided extra educational opportunities above and beyond what the average student was offered which the school district had flat out not honored.

I had no clue what to say.

But at the same time, I knew I couldn't talk to my dad about it as he was not a supportive figure in my life and, given my age of sixteen, I doubt I could go to a lawyer on my own. And I had no clue how to find a lawyer anyhow...

I finally stammered out that, ''It's probably too late to do anything about it now,'' and left the classroom. I mean, after all, this had been the best year of school in my life, why would I want to screw that up and jeopardize my Senior year of school by suing the school district? Still, as I arrived for lunch and quickly grabbed a small bite to eat in the remaining time, I sat by myself and pondered this a bit more. Was this sort of thing the reason why I had been denied a spot in the advanced science studies curriculum at the end of eighth grade despite being on the honor roll? But again I pushed it aside reaffirming to myself that this was the best friggin' year of school and my Senior year would be the same.

Why screw it up?

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Of Work And Play

52

Two years after giving up my 'child labor' job at the branch grocery store, how would my first 'of age' job turn out?

My first official morning of work for the grocery store chain I arrived a half hour before the store opened, as requested. The elder cashier 'Hazel' was there and her job this morning was to teach me how to be a bagger. Even though I had been doing it for years, I didn't let on and listened as she explained opening the paper bag and sitting it up, using heavy square items to fill the corners, with lighter boxed or heavy bagged items to fill the center, then light or fragile stuff on top. I was cautioned to make sure the weight was evenly distributed between the bags and not have one that was too heavy and one that was too light. While it was a nice thing to do for the customers, it was a better thing to do for us as we baggers carried out most customers' groceries.

Once that lesson was done, I asked what other things I'd be doing. I got a blank look back for a moment until I realized bagging was the only thing I'd be doing, and then she came up with something: I could get her a cup of coffee from the Deli department. I did and I soon learned that employees could also get a free, freshly fried doughnut or two. Not being one for coffee, I picked the cinnamon sugar doughnuts, not the powered type but granules of sugar laced with sharp bits of cinnamon all held on by the remaining thin layer of frying grease. When fresh, as you bit into it the center wasn't yet solidified and just melted in your mouth; it was a great way to start one's morning... Though my doctor of today would strongly disagree with that.

And so Saturdays and four weekdays after school including the Friday evening hours, I bagged with my two friends, Pete and Van, along with some other baggers, some full-timers and some upperclassmen from my High School. Part social and part frenetic with a touch of hijinks, in a rural setting where you already knew everybody, bagging and taking out their groceries was a chance to visit and catch-up on the latest gossip with the locals. As the customers almost always came in waves, there were the quieter periods when us baggers would visit amongst ourselves or occasionally 'have fun'. During the high inflation early eighties we'd anticipate how much a customer's bill would be based on the groceries they bought. I actually found it worked best just to figure the average cost of what would fit in a bag and work out the total based on how many bags there were. A bag of groceries first averaged $12, then $15, $18, $22, and then $25 when I finally left three years later. One dead afternoon, I was bored with visiting amongst ourselves so I grabbed a shopping cart and went into the backroom to get some leftover stock and flush-out the shelves, as I would have at the branch store in earlier years. After about forty-five minutes the assistant manager of the store noticed me and asked me who told me to do this? I said no one, that since it'd been quiet I thought I'd keep busy. I was told I shouldn't do that and to stay put unless somebody told me otherwise. I said 'okay' and returned to the backroom with the remaining stock and left it there. So, the rule at the main store was not to show initiative.

At the start of the school year I discovered that Zack had bought the machine code manual for the Trash-80; as all the great games now included machine code I thought I'd buy my own copy only to discover it was hundreds of dollars, not twenty-ish as the Level II BASIC manual had been. So I asked Zack if I could borrow the manual overnight on my days off from bagging to study it, he said I could but I had in fact found our first store in town that offered self-serve photo copies for a per page price. As the machine code manual was loose leafed, three-ring bound, this made it easy and the store clerk let me copy the whole manual over a series of weeks as long as I let other customers who showed up go first or cut in. I agreed. When this rarely happened I looked around the rest of his store. A new store in a new two-story shopping strip that had opened in town, he wasn't sure what would sell best and keep him in business, so he sold some record albums, he had the copier and he also had a few selves filled with this new thing: Hollywood movies on video tape for rent. As I didn't know anyone with a video tape player, I couldn't see that becoming a profitable side of his business and would just browse the albums for myself.

As I soon found out, his store was the social center of the shopping strip and word got around that a kid who knew how to program computers was showing up there from time to time. As a result, once someone found me while I was copying, and another time the store clerk gave me the name and upstairs suite number of someone interested in my help. The first of these two people was a guy in the Land Use Office for our growing town. The town had gotten a Trash-80 computer as it was to 'help him' at his job, but he hadn't a clue what to do with it. So I found out what his job entailed: Keeping track of the parcels of land in town, Who owned them, Where they were located, And the estimated taxes per parcel. So I made a program to let him enter that data into the computer, list it from memory, search it and most importantly save it at the end of the day. As he had a Level II machine with sixteen kilobytes of memory and only a cassette recorder for storage, I recommended saving during his lunch break as well, given the time it would take and the annoyance if the power went out mid day and he'd lose any new stuff he had entered in the morning hours. For my help, I got treated to a couple of meals and in return gave him a tape of some of my best games to play with during his free time.

The second person needing help was a guy who made dentures for a living. He would be sent casts of a patient's gums and photos of them when they had teeth and he would individually select teeth to match those that showed from supplied family photos, while choosing from stock molars for the back as he made the plates. A solitary business for him, he needed his Trash-80 to keep track of patient names, dental offices, estimated & final costs and the arrival & estimated delivery dates. It was a simple variation of the program I'd made for the land use office on the same tape based computer set up. I did get to add some calculation functions to it so it could keep track of how much money he'd have coming in by the end of any given week as his income depended on intermittent flows of business. It also had a reminder function after he loaded up his tape at the start of the morning to list those clients still due to have their teeth done and by which dates. Unlike the land use office, his was a more of a pay and be paid business and he insisted on paying me for my work. I only asked for a hundred and in return gave him a tape of my best games... The next time he saw me he gave me the tape back saying he'd spent the first day with it playing games and not working. He realized it would be too tempting and put him out of business if he kept it. I wonder if this had happened to the land use office guy as, when I went to look him up the following year, I found he had lost his job and they were no longer using any computer in their office.

Still, word of mouth spread and I started to have people show up at the grocery store to talk with me about what they needed. One time a guy wanted his machine to translate messages into Morse code, which was easy, but he also wanted it to listen to a tape of code and translate it into English. That was much harder as, I first made it listen to its own output and got that to translate reading it back, but when listening to man made code, it failed as there was so much variation in by-hand coding rhythms. Rather than translate as it heard it, I finally came up with the computer storing measurements of the beeps it heard, then had it crunch the numbers afterwards and make its best guesses as to which beeps were 'dots' and which ones were 'dashes'. This solution worked pretty well, still the guy had wanted it to translate what it heard on the fly, but I just couldn't crack that nut given my skill at the time unless the man made code fit a consistent pattern.

Another guy had made a plug-in device that would allow the computer to light-up a set of L.E.D.s and while he could send it numbers to show a light pattern manually, he wanted a shell program to let him feed it a string of numbers and hold times and play light patterns on the L.E.D.s like music. This took a bit to get my head around, but I finally figured it out and gave him a variation of the database program I'd made for the land use office and the denture making guy. But instead of adding and sorting people, it allowed him to enter and arrange his numbers. I then added a secondary listing function where it sent the listing to the light device thus making it play his visual tunes. Once happy with each tune, he could save the number data to tape and load them up again to play or tweak at a later date.

In fact, most programs people found me to make for them could be resolved with a variation of my tape-based database program and while I liked the novelty of people from as far away as ten miles hunting me down at the grocery store for my help, I was starting to find this a bit boring when it came time to put the code together. So, fueled by the great games I'd seen that Summer and the photo copied machine coding manual, I devised my magnum opus. Let's call it 'Star Quest', a real time graphics based game, the player's job was to fly from star to star and assess their systems, looking for life on each planet encountered. Once in a while you'd find members of a bad alien race and blast them off the planet from orbit, other times they might be innocent natives so you had to be careful. No Trash-80 program approached this level of complexity in the game with such variation in play and it only took me two and a half years of experimentation and test versions to finally nail it down as a playable game. But the harder part was making it fun to play as well. I'll spill more on this work later as it laced through so many other twists and turns of my life.

I was saving money from my new job so I could buy myself my own Trash-80 computer to have at home. Doing the math, I found I wouldn't save up enough until the start of Spring. Having seen many television shows of people getting advances on their salaries, it occurred to me to go to the store owner and ask if I could do that. Joe said they didn't do such things, but then he came back to me with the money a day or two later. As he had known me for years, and known my mother even better, he had gotten a loan for me from the local bank under his name and all I had to do was pay it off by the end of the school year. I greatly thanked him and placed my order by phone with the out of town Radio Shack. When I got the phone call that it had arrived, I drove up to get it but the manager wouldn't sell it to me as I didn't look like he imagined I would from the sound of my voice on the phone. So I used logic on him and asked how likely it would be that I was a stranger who happened to show up at the store with twelve hundred dollars worth of cash and by chance know the name of someone else who had reserved a computer for that much money. He looked at the handful of cash and decided not to argue. I had my first computer and was the second kid in my class to have one!

Zack Hatch took me on three more computer fair trips, two in the Fall and one early the next year. By springtime he seemed distracted by something and he didn't invite me on any more trips.

Toward the end of the school year, the Principal came to me and asked if I could write a program for the school. Each year students would get to go into the class selection room and pick out cards for what classes they'd want to take for the following year. In years past, they would give priority to the high scoring students of previous years and then the staff would pick and choose among themselves which student would go first for those at the same level. Legal concerns had been expressed about the possibility of bias in this process and so they wanted to make the student selection totally random this time. My job was to produce a list of random numbers that they could then use to find which students went first. I clarified, ''You mean you want me to make a program to contain the student names and then give them out in a random order?'' No, for it wouldn't be right for me to see that resulting list and know ahead of time who went first. They had already assigned numbers to us students and just needed a randomized list of numbers to match us against.

I agreed, but at the same time I was curious if I could guess which numbers we had each been assigned and have that list of numbers favor my friends and give them an earlier slot along with myself in the listing. But what numbers were they using for the students? After thinking about it, I went to the office and asked to update 'my card'. Each student's contact information was kept on a four by six card in the office in case the staff needed it. Stored alphabetically in long drawers it was for office use only, but a student could request to update theirs from time to time when there was a new phone number or home address. As I placed the grocery store number down as my work number I noticed a three digit number written at the top right corner of the card. I remembered mine and guessed those were the numbers the school was going to associate with us for the random list. I chose seven friends and recommended that, if they wanted a better chance for an early selection of classes, to 'update' their cards and let me know what their number was. An eighth student heard about this and asked to be included, which I did in order to keep him quiet...!

Now it was simply a case of figuring out how to make a complete list of randomly ordered numbers. While most computers have a random number function that you can call, it would often produce duplicates and typically not get to a specific number for a long time after producing many duplicates of earlier numbers. This wouldn't work on a randomized list of all needed numbers. So my first idea was to keep track of which numbers had already been listed, and then ignore their duplicates when they happened. But this resulted in a program that made the listing ever slower and slower as the pile of numbers it had to check against grew and grew until finally the random number function was constantly running to guess that one last number that hadn't been listed yet. This would take hours.

Then I came up with the idea of: Instead of keeping track of the numbers already picked, I'd keep track of the numbers that hadn't been picked yet! How would that help, you ask? I had the computer think up a list of all the numbers from one until the total needed, placing each one of these numbers into a box referenced by its number. Thus ''1'' was in box 1, ''2'' was in box 2, etc. The program remembered the last box number, lets say 500 with ''500'' in it. Now the random number function was called to pick a number between 1 and 500. It picks 132, the computer looks into that box and lists ''132'', but then places the number from box 500 into the box for 132. I now knew I only had 499 numbers left to pick and thus had the random number function pick a number from 1 to 499. As it lists numbers, the number of boxes to keep track of shrinks and thus the program runs faster and faster as it goes, not slower and slower. It was like pulling a card randomly from a deck and, each time, the deck of cards got smaller. With some additional logic, the number boxes associated with my friends would be picked 'by chance' at specific points in the first third of the listing: Perhaps their number had already been randomly chosen, if so a lucky higher number was pulled out of their box instead. I humbly had my number come up just shy of halfway through the listing so as not to make anything obvious.

As the school computer didn't have a printer, I passed the program to my classmate Jonathan who had a printer attached to his computer at home. He brought in the list the next morning and we handed it to the Principal. He seemed very happy. But when the class selection queue was posted with the student names attached, it turned out the staff apparently hadn't been using the numbers listed at the top of the student cards. Still, my eight students had their names randomly elsewhere in the top half of the list and they gave me credit for it even though it had truly been by chance, and my name was just below the middle of the list. When one of the students asked me why I had myself listed so far down, I told him I hadn't wanted to raise suspicions...

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Learning To Drive

51

(Does it count that I was driving a tractor at age eight? No?)

So my very first quarter as a Junior in High School included the driver's education class. I made sure of that when selecting my classes at the end of the previous year. And the class was pretty much with a teacher whose job was focused on that topic so I thought this would be a pretty easy ride. Sitting down in class the first day he explained that the course was based on our parents teaching us how to drive during off school hours and his job was to fill in the gaps and check-point our progress. Have you heard me say 'I knew I was screwed' before?

Still, I approached the subject with dad at the family dinner that night. As I asked in front of his new wife, I guess that made the difference as he couldn't say 'no' in front of her and reveal how he normally would have handled the request. And so to my surprise, one evening after dinner my father drove me in his car to the parking lot of the grocery store and parked in a space near its center. The store was closed at this time so we had the whole parking lot to ourselves. We swapped seats, and he gave me some brief pointers. I pushed down the clutch and started the car, immediately dad was shouting at me that I had held the key in the start position too long and I should have taken it out of gear and held down the brake just to be extra safe. As this was a car which needed a foot touching the gas petal in order to start, I wasn't sure how I was to be pressing all three pedals when starting the car. Further more, in the preceding five years of watching him drive the car, I had never seen him place the car in neutral in order to start it before. It was all I could do to not lose my concentration on holding down the clutch while he was using his military bark just a few inches away from me. Without a pause, he was already demanding to know why I was still sitting there and not putting the car in gear as sitting still with the car idling wasted gas. Gas wasn't free and he wasn't made of money!

Putting the car into first gear with my feet on the clutch and brake, it was still surprisingly firm as I had to push past some resistance in the stick before I could feel it slip into place. Removing my foot from the brake and adding some gas, I withdrew my foot from the clutch. Again, like the stick shift itself, the car lurched forward as the clutch had a point were it was soft and easy, then wanted to push my foot out of the way as it engaged. Surprised by the lurch, the car stalled and my father's torrents of shouting started up all over again, this time including name calling. I tried my best not to react to his tirade as I put my left foot down on the clutch, right heel on the brake, and toes of my foot on the gas, put the car into neutral and restarted it. Then I thrust it into first gear, this time ready for the resistance of the stick, I pivoted my toes off the gas to straighten my foot, then moved it over to the gas pedal properly and pushed down a bit as I released the clutch this time prepared for that moment when it went from easy to pushing back against my left foot and the car was moving forward.

There had been a brief moment of silence, but then the shouting returned as I hadn't taken my foot off of the clutch fast enough, I wasn't following the lines of the parking lot: When driving I should always be following the direction lines of the parking lot! I turned the wheel to line up with the pattern of the empty parking lot but as the shouting was incessant, I instead just continued the turn into a semi-circle and pulled into the next parking space that was about twenty feet next to the parking space we had started in. I engaged the clutch, put my foot on the brake and stopped the car, turning it off. This surprised my father and he demanded to know what I was doing. I said I should probably watch him drive the car as the first step of learning. He got quiet for a moment and then in a more normal tone of voice said that was probably a good idea. We got out of the car to exchange places and he again started growling at me because the car wasn't perfectly within the parking space lines.

As I already had five years of watching him drive this car, the last thing I needed was more time to watch him do it. Still, the idea worked in that the shouting was gone and in his normal voice he started trying to narrate his actions while driving. This seemed to fluster him a bit as thinking of what to say while doing it made him forget to do the minor things; like coming to a stop and then turning left, he'd remember to tell me about using the brake during the stop, but not the clutch, and turning the wheel for the turn, but not the use of the blinker. While this kept him busy for the remaining fifteen minutes of my 'driving session' I was desperately trying to figure out how I was going to have time behind the wheel to practice with him in the passenger seat. Could I ask his new wife? No, then my father would know I didn't want him in the car and take offense.

Two days later the solution came to me. During that dinner I asked if I could drive the car around the driveway on my own, to practice. As it didn't require any effort on his part, nor a legal need to have an adult in the car with me, he agreed. With the house in the woods away from the main road, our driveway was pretty long, about four hundred feet straight from the road to the house, but it also had a loop around the front yard with a large tree in the center of it, I'll guess the loop was around fifty feet in diameter, with another straight stretch from the loop to the garage providing yet another fifty feet of driveway to the side. Add to this, two old tractor paths through the woods branching off from the driveway and I felt I'd have enough driving space to perform all the handling chores of driving a car and getting up to third gear very briefly.

And so for about three nights a week for the next two months, this is what I did. Going round the loop, pulling to and backing away from the garage, driving up and down the driveway, taking one tractor path through the woods until grass from the center hump started to brush against the bottom of the car, then backing the car all along that same stretch to get back to the proper driveway. Then I took that last tractor track stretch about a hundred feet until it piddled out into the side yard and doing three point, then two point turns to get the car around so I could drive back down that bit of path to again reach the driveway. And I did this over and over and over. Never once did my father offer to take me out on the main road or to a parking lot again, and I'd be caught dead before I'd ask him.

All my on the road time was with the driving instructor in the modified 'Driver's Ed' car. It had a second brake pedal built into the front passenger seat in case he needed to intervene when a student was driving. Given the size of the class and the time he had to 'check point' our progress, he took us out in pairs when he could, one would be behind the wheel for half the time, the other student taking the other half. Of the three times of twenty minutes I got to drive with him, the first time was getting use to the car in the emptier portions of the school's parking lot. With the few weeks of driving around my home's driveway and not hitting any of the cars parked in it under my belt, I did pretty well with this task.

On the second time, we drove out of the school parking lot and onto the road, then onto the nearest interstate on-ramp. While this might seem like a huge jump, in rural New England, the High School was deep in the woods and the nearby stretch of highway mostly empty during the middle of a weekday. I got the second half of this drive so the instructor had the other student pull off at an exit, we exchanged seats on the shoulder of the off-ramp, then I got to turn left twice to get onto the highway going back to school. As the instructor talked to me, I would look at him as was polite, but doing this I learned that looking one way or the other unconsciously made the hands on the steering wheel lean that way as well. No big deal as I had only drifted a little bit out of lane before he caught this and explained it to me. I got to practice glancing at him again while, this time, making sure I also paid attention to not letting my hands lean on the wheel as I turned my head. So far, so good.

Then we noticed a log in my lane up ahead. Going at fifty-five miles per hour I would have moved to the other lane, but upon seeing the log himself the teacher asked me, ''What avoidance maneuver should you use?'' Suddenly, like when my father tried to explain his driving actions in words while driving at the same time, my mind started to go blank. As we approached the log I scrambled to think of any of the official avoidance maneuver terms he had taught us in class a few weeks earlier, ''Straddle,'' was the first one that came to mind and, as there wasn't time to think of another word, that was what I did, centering the car to go over the log. It bounced against the undercarriage and the driving instructor said, ''That might not have been the best choice,'' and asked me to pull over on the shoulder and bring the car to a stop. We took a look at the underside of the car to make sure nothing was damaged, then got back in to complete returning to the school.

On the final check-point with him, he had me drive first. It had snowed during the night so he directed me to a stretch of empty parking lot covered with snow and suddenly slammed on his passenger side brake. The car abruptly stopped and stalled-out as I hadn't known to step on the clutch. He sheepishly explained that he had intended for the car to skid on the snow by his action and see if I handled the skid appropriately. But as the snow wasn't deep enough for that, this just turned into another drive away from the school, along the local roads, though not the highway this time.

'Driver's Ed' class was done and all I had to do was bring in the signed certificate from dad stating that he had spent twenty hours on the road with me teaching me how to drive. Of course he signed it without question as if he didn't he would have looked like a neglectful father who hadn't helped his kid learn how to drive. I was comfortable with this as well given that I knew I'd spent more than twenty hours going up and down and around the driveway and tractor paths. With this slip turned in to the teacher, I was given my certificate of completion and got to choose a school day to take off so I could go to the nearby small city where there was a drivers license bureau. I chose a day dad would have off.

But when that day came, it turned out he did have to go to the ski area that day to work as something had come up, even though it was the off season. Still, as the small city was closer to the ski area than home, he would take me to get my license during his lunch break. When the time came, he couldn't do it. Now it's not as if we had a certain appointment time that we had to keep, but somehow whatever meant he had to go to work on his day off meant he couldn't leave the park at any point in the day. He asked the park's secretary to accompany me. This surprised me, but at the same time it was a relief as well. I knew 'Joy' and she was nice to me and I had been friendly to her in the previous decade or more that I'd seen her at the ski area. Whereas I expected dad to drive me to the license bureau and then drive back, as this wasn't Joy's car, I got to drive from the parking lot all the way to the license bureau. The twenty mile drive there was the longest drive I'd had on the road and I made sure I was gentle yet concise with my use of the clutch, used the blinkers appropriately and anticipated my stops so they'd be soft, not sudden.

At the license bureau they took my birth certificate and used it for the information needed. Then they had me and Joy wait until their guy was available to take me for a test drive. When he was, Joy had to stay behind at the bureau, I guess for fear that she'd give me hints while my driving was evaluated. Rather than drive on any through roads for the test, he just had me drive through a small part of the adjoining neighborhood. There was one turn I missed, but he apologized for that as he hadn't pointed it out until we were already going through the intersection, and then we returned to the bureau and I was told to once again take a seat. Joy asked how it went and I said I thought it went okay, though I had missed a turn. After several minutes I was called to have my picture taken then wait another few minutes for it to develop and be laminated to the license card. It was handed to me. Yeah!

Unlike the largely silent drive to the bureau with Joy, on the way back we chatted a bit. Once at the park, she returned to the office, I let my dad know I was back and, as he'd have to be there until the end of the work day, I bummed around the park for the rest of the afternoon. When it was time to go home, my father waited in the office until Joy left first: He wanted to have a word with me in the empty office. He said that Joy had been very impressed by my driving skills and he wanted to let me know that.

This was the closest dad had ever come to complimenting me during my childhood and I've treasured that moment for the rest of my life.

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Red Neck Wife

50

Had I mentioned before? Roberta was the 'It Girl' in my father's High School years? He went to High School in the small city near the town where I mostly grew up. I had actually been born in that city before its hospital had been closed down. Can you still be called a city if you no longer have a hospital?

Anyhow, back to what I was saying, Roberta was the girl, according to my father, that all the boys pined for in school. Of course my father didn't have a chance with her as he was a stutterer himself, so he broken-heartedly watched the jocks woo her and take her. Now at the cusp of sixty, my father found out she was available. Having fallen on hard times, she had recently been getting by as a live-in companion and housekeeper for senior citizens nearing the end of their lives. Once they expired, they would leave their money to her in their Will, and she would find a new senior in need. One of those seniors happened to live at the retirement complex not far from the family home and dad had bumped into her at the grocery store across the hayfield one day.

He then started to look her up and visit, but she played hard to get. After all she was living with the senior she was supposed to be taking care of. Still she could get an hour or two, here and there, for them to secretly date. After my older brother's wedding, my father let the secret out and introduced me to Roberta and we'd once in a while go out to dinner with her, Pappy, dad and myself to her favorite greasy-spoon restaurant several miles away.

Now you might think I'm using these adjectives and calling her a 'Red Neck Wife' due to some resentment I had toward her, but actually, not. She was proud of having been the girl all the boys had wanted in rural New England at the time and she embraced the image of the back woods culture. She had a son and as part of gaining her acceptance, my father put a horse shoe pit into the back yard of our house, roping me into helping him track down a source of free clay at an abandoned quarry. As her single son lived at an apartment, he now had an excuse to come out to play horseshoes at our house and in return have his mother join him to visit my dad. When over, Pappy had to make time in his T.V. watching routine at night to including any Stock Car Racing or Demolition Derbies that might be on that Roberta would want to watch. But seeing his son perk up with a new love interest after the years since my mother had left him, I'm sure he didn't mind.

Soon after the start of Nineteen Eighty, Roberta's latest senior to help passed on and Roberta was available full-time for my father to dote on and find things to do with. She had become a fixture at the family home by Spring and they decided to marry over the Summer with her officially moving in. Unfortunately, I was in Colorado at the time and missed the wedding, though I did get an invitation.

Thus when I returned to New England to start my Junior year of High School, Roberta was there. While I knew she was 'my step mother' I assumed she would be a hands-offish parental figure like my parents had been. But this was not the case. While I had been away, she convinced my father that I was too young to be in the half of the basement where the tools were kept. So my father had a steel fence built dividing the shop portion of the basement from the storage side. It was locked with a door and a pad lock. This was particularly galling as I had spent some of my free time the previous year cleaning-up the basement after a decade of neglect. The door with the pad lock barring me I had hung myself, though obviously not with the lock in mind. Behind that door and the length of fencing were not only dad's power tools and hand tools, but my own tools as well. During the years at the apartment town building myself a tree house, my eldest brother had bought me a selection of tools to use on the project. Six years later, I was now deemed to be 'too young' to use those tools without adult supervision. Needless to say, if I had wanted to use them, my father would never have made the time to 'supervise' me anyhow.

And yet, this was a game by Roberta as the very first week I was home, she told me where the key was hidden so I could have access when she needed something. After telling me where the key was, she then told my father that I had found out where the key was, neglecting to tell him that she had told me, thus there was this quick row as my father accused me of having searched the house high and low for the key, even though I hadn't. Once dad moved the key elsewhere, Roberta wanted to tell me where that was as well but I told her I wasn't interested, putting that game to rest. With that trick no longer fun, Roberta convinced dad that Pappy had grown too old to pick up his own Sunday paper at the drug store anymore and that I should do it for him. She then told him she had let me know. But as she hadn't, I didn't pick up the paper even though I could have all day; Roberta spent the day brimming with a big smile on her face and she wouldn't tell me why. When father came home from work, Pappy caught him on the way in and asked where his Sunday paper was. This lead my father to have a shout fest at me while I stood there dumbfounded without a clue and Roberta smirking in the background. As the local pharmacy had closed by the time my father found out, he drove all the way to the small city to finally find a store that was still open and had a spare copy of the paper.

While this was perplexing, I had many more positive things going on in my life: A new official job at the grocery store, ever more notoriety in my computer programing prowess, and what was rapidly becoming the best year of school in my life, so I just disregarded these little games Roberta would try to play to pit me and dad against each other. So she instead decided to take an 'active role' in my life by letting me know which friends I should have and which friends I couldn't have anymore. This was so she could make sure I knew all the 'right people' while no longer having my reputation sullied by being around the 'wrong people'. As these were friends I had known for years versus knowing her for months, I took these suggestions with humor but otherwise didn't worry about it.

After having retained its original layout since my eldest brother first moved out, his original bedroom somehow felt exposed with Roberta living in the house. My not as older brother had lived in it for several years after my eldest brother's move. Then it had simply become his, and then my relaxation room where one could lie on the bed and listen to music on the left behind component stereo system, including some of the left behind records and tapes. I had also used it as a reading room from time to time as I poured through a recently purchased science fiction book. But now, it was just there and she was in the house and I was afraid that either, she might junk everything in it one day, or maybe even perhaps her own adult son might move into it and make it his own. While the last thought was far fetched, I still didn't like the room's contents being exposed and decided it was time to break up the room and merge its contents into my room. The stereo and block & board shelves were easily transferred, but the bed had a wooden base custom made by my eldest brother over a decade earlier. As his bed was a single bed and the one I was using in my bedroom a queen sized bed, I decided to split the frame in half and then recreate it as a queen sized base for my mattress. All other posters and light shades adopted into my own room, the old queen bed frame was left behind in the now empty bedroom. No one made any comment on my doing this once they noticed and the bedroom my father had assigned to me a year earlier was now more than just a bed, bureau and desk. It was mine.

By Winter, Roberta had to make do having her fun by prodding my father to belittle me and make fun of me at the dinner table. After a few weeks of this, as I was working again and had my own source of money for food, I just stopped attending family dinner time and would grab a bite at work at the close of the day, or occasionally go to the local pizza place with my friends.

The nice thing about having Roberta there, at the house, was it had been cleaned and was being actively maintained for the first time since my mother had left. It was also warm during the winter. In the previous year, my father had complained that I was using too much oil to heat the house, but in reality he had meant that I was heating the house when he wasn't there, so I had gotten use to having a cold house on the weekends and afternoons and even sometimes wore my coat indoors, but this year, as it was for Roberta, the house was now kept in the low seventies all day long.

By Christmas time, I found out I wouldn't be going to Colorado again as my mother couldn't afford it. So I prepared for a Christmas at the family home and went out into the woods surrounding the house until I found a good tree, cut it down and brought it back. I pulled the long disused decorations and lights out of the attic and dressed the tree up as well as the living room and got the usual gifts for my father, Pappy, and even some things Roberta had asked for.

Apparently, at some point during her life, the french doors at Roberta's parents house had been broken and thrown away rather than repaired. Roberta had felt guilty about that for all these years and, for Christmas, she had talked dad into taking down the french doors in our house, which divided the living room from the dining room, and install them into her parent's home as her Christmas present to them. My father agreed and soon the doors which had been in the house all my life were gone by Christmas week.

As were Roberta and my father on Christmas Day. As I woke up Christmas morning and came down the stairs, I found my father and Roberta getting ready to leave with the presents I'd gotten them tucked under their arms. Hadn't I known? They were going to spend the day at Roberta's parent's house. They were taking the presents for themselves to open there and, as 'they never knew what to get me', they had decided not to get me anything this year. Also including Pappy as part of their Christmas day plans, I was soon alone at the house to find the solitary remaining present under the tree. It was for me, from my eldest brother.

Pink Floyd's double album 'The Wall' was just what I wanted and I took it upstairs to my bedroom so I could listen to it on the stereo player that same brother had left at the house when he had abruptly gone all those years earlier. Putting on the headphones to get the best sound quality, I lay in bed and listened to the album again and again and again for the next eight hours...

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