Friends

30

New friends Brad and Mathew lived in the same town as the apartment. New friend Tim lived in my home town.

And then there was another new friend, a 'John'. He was a year older than me and lived a couple houses down from the apartment on the way to the back of the town hall where the school buses would meet. After the first couple of months making the morning walk to the bus waiting area, it was obvious seeing him take the same walk a bit before me or a bit after me. One day it was pretty much at the same time as me and so we walked together and chatted. He was a friendly boy also interested in a new friend near his home and that was that. He visited my apartment a few times, I visited his home a few times, but mostly we'd meet to roam the surrounding woods and chat.

Still, there were the old home town friends as well and I don't know if it was my mother or me that came up with the idea that, since I had the spare bed in my room and it was too far to drive for just an afternoon visit, how about an overnight visit much like I was doing overnight visits to dad's house during the week. It was thought best to do these for Friday/Saturday where there was no worry of homework that needed to be done and it provided most of the following day for visiting and play. Once this plan was settled on, the first person I invited was Pete. Despite the fact that he had become distant at school, I was hoping the overnighter would mend fences.

He accepted and rode the bus to the apartment town with me after school. The branch grocery store was open into the evening on Fridays and so my mother worked late and then had to spend sometime with Joe after closing hours for stuff, so we pretty much had unsupervised free time from the walk to the apartment after the bus reached town until around nine thirty when my mother would get home. Frozen pizzas and making popcorn kept us fed as we visited and maybe played a game or watched a little Friday night television.

Sure enough, Pete's and my friendship seemed to be back to where it was in the previous years as we spent the following day exploring the woods behind the apartment, seeing the tree house, chatting and playing some more games. Mother actually made lunch for his visit. Then we got to take him home around three in the afternoon so he'd be there in time for dinner. All and all the sort of reunion I had originally hoped for once school had started and I could see my old friends again... But then the following Monday at school, it was the same distant Pete as he had started out the school year, again I presumed to not jeopardize his new friendship with the upperclassman. And yet, he was back to being my old friend again the next time I invited him for an overnighter. I, myself, had to work hard to switch how I interacted with people when locations changed. I wondered if it was easy for Pete, it seemed to be.

Given the success of this, I invited Jonathan for an overnighter and it was equally successful, though he had remained friendly during school hours as well so I hadn't any doubts before hand. Things roughly worked out to three overnighters with Pete that school year and two with Jonathan. By the following years Jonathan would be less able to come as his father would progressively want him to spend more and more time on his studies at home, which included doing homework Friday evenings while Friday classes were still fresh in his mind. So with Jonathan down to once a year for an overnighter, I thought I'd invite new friend Tim. Also a success, he reciprocated by inviting me over to his home a few weekends later.

Unlike me having a spare bed in my room, Tim shared his bedroom with his younger brother, so he was displaced and I got his bed... Which included a plastic under sheet as his brother had problems wetting the bed. Oh, kinda icky, I thought but I toughed it out sleeping in the bed. The following morning his mother made a fried egg breakfast for us, though apparently his family liked the whites of their eggs runny. It kind of grossed me out and I just ate the edges around the eggs and avoided the less cooked centers. The toast was good and having juice for breakfast was a novelty for me. Then, unlike with my parents, or Pete's and Jonathan's parents even, Tim's parents didn't like us leaving the yard of his home, so roving the woods was out and this was especially disconcerting as my family home was just a quarter mile walk away and I would have loved the chance to have shown it to Tim. So we did a couple of things in his yard and played games in his home and visited, but by the time three o'clock came along I was ready to be back at the apartment and have more freedom. I wondered if this was how my other two friends had felt during their overnighters to my place, but I concluded 'not' as they came for return visits over the years. In the case of Tim, I was afraid of inviting him back for another overnighter for fear that I would get a return invite and wouldn't know how to turn it down without offending him or his parents. Tim and I would just remain school-time friends for the rest of Middle School and then just acquaintances by High School.

My routine during the school year, for those days I was at the apartment town, was to return on the bus and go to the store and work for two and a half hours until it closed at six and then get a ride home with my mother. She soon encouraged me to only work two hours and walk home as she and Joe had to 'count the money' after the store closed and she knew I'd be bored hanging around during that. So I would work at the store two hours, then grab myself a frozen pizza for dinner and walk to the apartment. On Fridays when I didn't have friends over, I would work three hours due to the store's extended hours, have Saturdays off as did my mother, then work Sunday mornings as, unlike the main store, the branch store was open then and made a fair deal of money as the town included quite a few working class single parents who couldn't shop the weekday hours.

For this work week, I'd get handed a five dollar bill and I was rich! This I cycled into school lunches so I could finally find out what my other school friends had been enjoying all these years, yet I still had plenty of money left over. There was a branch bank across the street from the branch grocery store and my mother would go there from time to time. So one day I took that week's five dollar bill and asked to open an account. I was eleven at the time and the bank personnel met this with some good humor. The answer was 'maybe,' but they'd have to check with my parents first. I told them that my mother worked across the street at the store and so they opened-up the phone book and called. Being just across the street, my mother came from the store and quickly signed some paperwork and left and I completed the rest and had my own bank account with passbook showing my account balance. This spent most of its time in my keepsake drawer until it was time to deposit more money or less often withdraw some money. This was my primary bank account until I left New England and moved to Colorado seven years later.

For my twelfth birthday, my mother wasn't able to assemble the family gathering as she had the previous year, so she recommended I think of some friends to invite, though they'd have to be local ones, not from the old home town given the driving time. Further, when my mother asked me what I wanted for my birthday, I just told her money. The previous Christmas had been a disappointment for me as my wish list of things to have got translated into generic knock-off versions of those things. By having cash in hand, I would be able to make sure I got exactly what I wanted. She gave me twenty dollars the next time we visited the capital city, and I pulled another ten of my own from the bank. While she spent her time visiting the various stores on main street, I studied the aisles of the toys-only store on the back side of the block. Seeing all the things I'd like to have, I did the math and figured-out the combination of games and toys that would perfectly use up my money. Mostly games as I knew I'd be able to have a group of friends over for my birthday the next Saturday. This was my most rewarding birthday haul and I insisted on cash from mother for all my future birthdays... It would just be two.

As an additional surprise, when my mother came to pick me up at the toy store, she wanted to go back to the department store on the corner as they had adult sized ten speed bicycles on sale and she was going to get me one! While I could only pick from the style on sale, I did get to pick the color and we then had the scarey time at the loading dock wondering if we could actually fit the box of the disassembled bike into her car or have to leave it behind. We finally got it in, though the trunk had to be tied partially closed. The next day I assembled the bike on my own and was riding it around the apartment parking lot that afternoon. Unlike last year's bike, this one fit me without having to raise the seat and handle bars high into the air. When my father picked me up for my midweek overnighter, my mother recommended I show him my new bike and enthusiastically I did, riding round the parking lot for him to see. My mother smirked as my father frowned, then he got to load the bike he had bought for me the year before into the back of his wagon so I could now have it at my old home.

For my birthday, I had settled on inviting over John from down the street and Brad and got them confirmed. I wanted to invite Beth over but, as I had friends of both sexes when I was younger, I had noticed an implied division of the sexes as I had reached my preteens. So instead I was thinking I'd invite Mathew... but when my father brought me back to the apartment the following day my mother said she'd seen two boys with their families at the store and invited them! Oh, ah... okay then. Mathew was now out as she said that would be too many kids. The good news, though, was I knew the other two boys from school and liked them so my brief fear, that one or both of the boys might be from the final quarter of Science class, was dispelled. When the day came and the boys arrived we pulled-out the pile of games I had gotten the weekend before only to find that they were for 'Up To Four Players.' We debated how to handle this as with the boys and me there were five. As we began to settle on the thought that one of us would sit out each game as we went through playing all of them, mother intervened and pointed out that, as a good host, I should let them play the games and I could be the banker: “After all, you'll have plenty of time to play the games later, yourself.” It turned out most of the games didn't need a banker and I got to spend from noon into early evening watching the four boys play through the various games I had gotten for my birthday. I discovered the games were not very fun when I later tried to play them alone...

The following year, when my mother asked if I wanted to have another group of boys over for my birthday, I said ''No.''

impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop

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.

impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop

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'.

impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop 

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?

impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop 

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...

impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop 

a note from the writer

ii

I've been seriously writing with the hopes of selling something for nearly the past thirty years. As that didn't work out very well and I'm reaching my Fiftieth birthday, I thought I'd do one last writing effort and put this story of my life together so I can have it as my ultimate and final unsold effort. Perhaps it'll simply be serialized in a blog after all the publishers have taken a pass.

In my twenties, I remembered many conversations word for word, so I didn't need to write them down. By my forties I realized I should have written them down. These recollections are largely based on my less vivid than they used to be memories. While I no longer remember the conversations word for word, I still remember a phrase or sentence of some of them and put those in quotes. The rest I just type as prose.

The next major source of information for this work are the stories my mother told me. But this is problematic as she would often recount her stories to make herself the victim and the hero at the same time. When something happened that she didn't like her role in, she would immediately start recounting to herself in a mumbling way how it should have been, over and over. The first time I realized this was when she pulled out of a parking lot and hit the side of a passing car. This all happened at low speed and the passing car ended up with a small dent by the driver's side rear wheel. After they had traded driver's license and insurance information, he drove off and my mother pulled the car back into the parking lot and stared out the window repeating ''He's the one that hit me. He's the one that hit me,'' over and over again. And then, for days later, that's how she'd tell the story to other people... Even though the only visible damage to her car were some scuffs on the passenger side of the front bumper.

And yet she told me many, many of her stories over and over again from my late single digit years of age until the end of the nineteen nineties when the shadow of Alzheimer's fell upon her. Given so much experience, I began to piece through these recountings and feel confident of some bits of them and immediately distrust other parts. Generally, any part that didn't paint her in the best possible light were most likely true. Those parts where she was the hero, were most likely not true. Those parts were she was the victim, probably had a kernel of truth to them.

When it comes to names used in this text, they are most often pseudonyms, I've used the trick of first presenting the 'name' in single quotes, then just using them as names. This is a story about my life and experiences. Explicitly naming others would only, eventually, bring the spotlight to them. This would be an annoyance to friends and family who just want to live their lives in peace, and would provide a platform for abusers to once again try to take a chunk out of me.

The final bits for putting all this together are snippets I've gotten from my siblings, friends and other adults over the decades mixed with my own historical check-pointing. An example is the story of my birth where I did the math over and over again to make sure it worked and my sister confirming that our mother had taken little role in my early up-bringing due to troubles with my birth. Completing this example, my mother told me the story of my birth as the 'How I had traumatized her at an early age' tale, with me sorting through the details she told me and tying it together into a cohesive whole that, hopefully, is more objective.

Of course my therapist will tell me that I've simply spun it into my own tale, making myself both a victim and a hero at the same time...

(if i had a therapist.)