Transitioning

49

As the sophomore school year rolled to a close, more and more of my friends reached sixteen. They got to take the High School's Drivers' Education class and then get their drivers licenses. With my birthday in August, I was out of luck and would have to wait until the next school year. But what really surprised me was how I felt when some of my friends, Pete and Van, picked-up jobs at the main grocery store: Annoyed. After all I was the one who had first started working at the chain, now featuring a third store, and yet my friends were the first ones to legally have a place there. Still, I stuffed the feelings down as I understood the reasons... That was until Van's year-younger brother got a job; his parents had filled-out some special paperwork to allow it.

That was that and as my bank account had been slowly dwindling over the past year and a half down to the low double digits, I went to the store owner, Joe, and asked what I would need to do to get a job at the main store once I returned from summer break. He said I could let them know once I was back. I thanked him and for the trip back to Colorado I pulled out the majority of my remaining bank funds from the money machine knowing I'd be replenishing it the following Fall.

I packed my one suitcase worth of clothes back into their one suitcase, left my winter jacket behind and flew out to Colorado. While my stuttering had faded a bit over my Sophomore year, it flared again when my mother picked me up at the airport and I had to struggle to say any words. As a result she did most of the talking. During the Spring, my not as older brother had joined the Air Force and left the state. She gave me an involved story as to why this happened, but my brother later told me it was a crock of bull. She, herself, had moved out of the one bedroom apartment and bought a mobile home to the extreme east side of town. It had a living area, combination dining room/kitchen space, two smaller bedrooms, a bathroom and the master bedroom at the back. I would have the second of the smaller bedrooms.

To my surprise, mother had actually kept some of my stuff while she lived at the single bedroom apartment as it was now set-up in my new room. This included the modular shelves, my chest of drawers from the first apartment, a couple of models I had made as a kid and the few record albums and record player I'd collected during the apartment years and our first Summer in Colorado. I guess these must have been in storage or something when she had told me she'd gotten rid of them. But gone was the custom mattress and box spring set that mother had ordered for me to entice me to stay in Colorado for my sophomore school year, it had been replaced by a standard sized twin bed. This bedroom also included the spare club chair from the living room set as it had at the first apartment, but in the eight foot by eight foot bedroom, it made everything feel a bit snug; yet unlike returning to the family home where my bedroom and its contents had been truly discarded, it was nice to come to a bedroom that looked somewhat familiar even if different.

Mother was tiffed that I had been wearing tattered clothes when I got off the plane and when I told her I was wearing the best clothes I had, she found that hard to believe and had me open up my suitcase. It was then she realized that I had lived the past year with just this one bag of clothes and she was pissed. She took me out to get some new clothes, but called up dad to inform him that, as the primary parent, it was his duty to supply me with clothes during the year, not hers. What she said did the trick as soon after I arrived back to New England at the end of Summer, dad took me straight out to fill up my closet with enough new clothes to last me the next few years...!

While I liked her new digs, there was a problem with its location for me, it was six miles away from the Radio Shack I went to. And as the mobile home was significantly further away from where my mother worked, she couldn't drive out and pick me up during her lunch hour to take me there. But I discovered that she had also saved the bicycle she had gotten me for my twelfth birthday so I came up with the plan where I would ride the bicycle to the Radio Shack around lunchtime, a mostly downhill trip, and then she would pick me up on her way home from work. She wasn't thrilled with the idea given her dislike of the traffic, but we found a series of side roads that would get me there and stopped at the nearby K Mart to buy a bicycle rack that could be temporarily mounted on the back of her car.

And thus I was once again doing my Monday-Wednesday-Friday visits to Ralph's Radio Shack to use the display computer. Though by this time, the second computer on display at a pillar was gone and the computer with the display desk at the window had been moved to the center of the store in its place. During my time away, this computer had been enhanced with the expansion interface, giving it an unimaginable thirty-two kilobytes of memory and two floppy drives. It still had the cassette player, which I needed for my stuff, and also had a printer, which I was discouraged from using as that cost money in ink and paper.

Ralph was happy to see me and let me continue using the store's computer and, given the slightly longer time I spent there on my days, I started to treat it like a job: I would work for a couple hours on my code and exploring the reaches of the upgraded machine, take a ten minute break by walking to the grocery store next door and buying a snack, then returning to the Radio Shack till the end of the day. He was impressed by the number of new games I'd come up with and coded while I was away and he even started using me as part of his sales pitches, noting that the computer was so simple given a kid could use it. Or sometimes customers would watch me for a bit without first talking to Ralph or his assistant, and ask me about the machine and then I'd do my own little sales job, pointing out the features the computer had and noting the various things it could be used for.

And of course, there was Jeff, who I once again got to visit, though this time it was more of a once every weekend affair given the longer distances mother would have to drive me. While Jeff was willing to occasionally pick me up for a visit, mother felt that was inappropriate for some reason and wanted to make sure I arrived at Jeff's house and was leaving Jeff's house with her own eyes. As the Radio Shack computer now had floppy drives and Jeff had floppy drives, it made sense for me to get my first pack of disks for the huge speed improvement it provided.

Jeff had continued to collect more games while I had been back in New England and two names stood out: Leo Christopherson and Big Five Software. Both of these had brought Trash-80 games to a whole new level by using 'machine code', the most elementary code level of the computer where the very bytes of a program directly controlled the computer, rather than having to be interactively translated from a text based code into actions by the computer. Big Five's games were pure machine code which made them this tantalizing mystery where I could see the results, but not how they were put together. Leo Christopherson's work was a hybrid of BASIC and machine code, where he hid the machine code bytes as strings of text embedded in the program, then fooled the program to execute the 'string of text' as if each was a small machine program. Using this method, he could code the guts of his games in easy BASIC, but then call the bits of machine code when something fast or flashy needed to be done.

Both of these coders also incorporated sound in the their games! They did this by tricking the computer's built in cassette interface from sending data to the recorder to instead send sound effects or beepy music. Radio Shack cassette recorders had this thing that if you pressed down the wrong combination of buttons, it would send any data sent to it out the built-in speaker. With other cassette recorders you would need to use an ear piece or external speaker plugged into the ear phone jack of the recorder to hear the sounds.

I knew I'd truly have to work my ass off to approach the level of these guys during the coming school year!

Oh, yes, what non-computer things did I do that Summer in Colorado...? I'm drawing a blank, but I'm sure my mother and I did something touristy once or twice and we probably made a trip up North to visit my sister. The complete absence of any non-computer memory of that Summer shows how consumed I had become with the burgeoning digital world.

When I arrived at Radio Shack for the start of August, I settled down to do my work. Ralph's assistant was there as well as some other older guy with a white beard, I assumed Ralph was away for the afternoon or just out for lunch. After most of the first hour, Ralph's assistant pulled me aside and quietly told me that Ralph had been transferred to a different store and the new guy in charge was incensed that I had come in and started using the computer as if I had always done that. While he and I knew I had been, the assistant couldn't tell that to the new manager without possibly getting Ralph into trouble, so I was to go and if asked I was supposed to say I hadn't known any better...

My days using the local Radio Shacks' computer was abruptly over. I grabbed my snack early and sat outside of the Radio Shack baking in the heat next to my bike as I expected I'd have to wait for the next three and a half hours until mother came to pick me up. Then about a half hour later I happened to notice Jeff's wife had come to get some stuff at the grocery store. I flagged her down and told her of the Radio Shack situation and asked if Jeff was home and I could join him? He wasn't but she said I could come over and use his computer for the rest of the afternoon. I thanked her and we figured out how to squeeze enough of my bicycle into the compact car's trunk so we could get to their place. Once there I called my mother to let her know of the change in plans and she agreed I could stay there and she'd pick me up once she was done with work.

Without being able to fill-up my weeks with Radio Shack visits, August became a bit of a boring month. So I decided to work on a problem that Pete had noted to me by the end of May and I had kept it in the back of my mind ever since: He noticed that my voice hadn't changed. As boys reached puberty, the first noticeable sign was often the cracking of their voice, and then some whiskers some months down the road once their new voice solidified. Yet, my voice hadn't changed at all and I realized this might be a problem.

As a kid I had automatically parroted voices that I had heard, such as from Sesame Street, cartoons, even music. I don't know why, but I just naturally did and my friends at school found it a fun trick. In the case of music, if I sang along, without thinking I would sing in my best approximation of the original vocalist's voice. As a result of years of exposure through my siblings records, I had gotten down a pretty good impression of each of the Beatles. I didn't realize this was a problem until we would have elementary school functions where we kids were to learn and perform some Christmas songs as a chorus. I assumed they would first play a recording of the song and then I'd try to mimic the voice but, no, they were common Christmas songs and we were to just sing them together using our own voices. Not having a clue how to sing sounding like myself, I decided to just move my lips during the first go through and listen to the combined sound of my classmates' voices. Then I had my anchor and for the rest of practice and the show itself, I sang in the best approximation of my combined classmates' voices as I could do.

So with free time on my hands during my last month of Summer, I thought I'd figure out what to do with my voice. Oddly enough, trying to come up with a voice on my own just sounded like a girl trying to sound like a guy. I thought this might actually be worse than staying with my own boyish voice. Then while watching a variety show, they had on the Oak Ridge boys and I noticed how, when doing the lowest notes, their bass singer would tuck his chin down to his chest. I played with doing this a few times and stumbled upon how it worked: Squeezing down like this constricted the throat and made the vocal chords looser, thus producing a deeper tone. While the sound worked, again, I'd look kinda suspicious if I spent all my time talking in school with my head tucked down. So I spent time with my head tucked and time with it not to feel how the throat felt different. With practice, I then learned how to tighten the muscles around my throat to loosen the chords rather than tucking in my chin. It worked! And I could now return to school with a deeper voice. I couldn't start doing it during my last days in Colorado as the change would be sudden and, again, suspicious. But I could start doing it once I got off the plane as people could imagine my voice had changed over the course of the summer months. Or so I thought.

For my other activity, I could only hand write so much code into notebooks before I'd get too back logged in trying it out. Jeff was nice enough to let me spend longer weekend days at his home trying out my code rather than him showing off other games he'd found. But I only ended up completing one final game before the month came to an end. When mother asked if there was anything special I'd like to do before I left back to New England, I told her I'd like to see Ralph again. We went to the original Radio Shack and I asked the assistant if he knew where Ralph had been transferred to? It was a store at the west side of town and mother was nice enough to drive me all the way there where I briefly said, ''Hello,'' to Ralph; I thanked him for the past years of letting me use the other Radio Shack's computer during my school breaks and then finished-up by showing off my latest creation, a cityscape game with buildings on fire and the helicopter you flew to drop water on it and stop the fire from spreading. With the necessary stops to fill-up with more water, eventually one could put it out if they were lucky. He was very impressed.

On the flight back, I sat next to a nice young woman who chatted with me during the flight to discover we were going to the same neck of New England, we talked of the places we knew in common and that I'd be working at the grocery store. As we approached Logan airport, we agreed to bump into each other in the coming weeks and visit. I never saw her again.

By the time the flight landed at Boston, I found I couldn't do it: The deeper voice that is. For some reason doing a voice for fun was okay, but the thought of intentionally trying to fool people into thinking I had a deeper voice weighed on my soul. Strapping down my breasts hadn't struck me in this way as, in truth, it was to retain my original appearance as much as possible when interacting with people. But using a 'put on' voice with the intent of misleading my friends that my voice had changed was just something I couldn't bring myself to do. So I got off the plane with the voice I had and I never regretted that decision.

No surprises greeted me when getting back to the house. I spent the traditional day-after at Jonathan's home showing off all the work I had done and other software I'd gotten, the only difference was he picked me up at my house, himself, which was the first time I'd ridden in a car with a friend driving. That weekend I went to the main grocery store to see Joe and let him know I was back. He asked how my mother was doing, and then said I could start the following Saturday, coming in a half hour before the store opened.

And thus began the, then, greatest year of my life.

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An Idiot Savant

48

Who was the Idiot Savant in our school? I finally figured it out...

At the start of Sophomore year, the school's computer remained in the teachers' lounge, but now with two new, important features: It had a cassette tape recorder/player, and it had been upgraded to a Level II BASIC machine with sixteen kilobytes of memory. Oh, baby! But as I soon found out, Level II BASIC was a significantly different language than the original Level I and a number of the earlier coding tricks no longer worked. I asked the math department head, Zack Hatch, if they had a manual for Level II, the answer was 'yes' and he showed me where it was kept in the shelves above his desk, but unlike the Level I manual which had a stick figure computer walking you through examples, the new manual just had command and function names with a brief description that was lacking any context or examples. At first, not knowing what to do, I was stumped. Then it finally occurred to me to use the computer itself and experiment.

Jonathan and Luke no longer shared a study period with me but this worked out well as I could spend a whole period fiddling with just one function until I learned it, without having to worry about wasting my friends' time. Once I got my money machine card, and could access my savings again, I pulled out a little money and bought a copy of the Level II BASIC manual for myself so I could review it outside of that one study period per school day. Still, that wasn't enough and on the nights when the late bus was running, I would stay after school to continue using the computer to finally crack the nut on the new language variation and begin converting my old programs to run in the new code.

By the end of October I had done it and was creating new games again as well as converting the old Level I games we had gotten from magazines. Once done, I would save an extra copy to tape to let Jonathan and Luke play them when they could. By November I'd gotten a reputation as the one to go to for help with the computer. Once a student found me between classes and asked me if I could give him a game to run on the computer, no not a tape, but write one down before classes resumed in three minutes. I compromised and said I could tell him the code if he wrote it down. He agreed and I rattled off the shortest, yet fun, game I had come up with from memory. After the next class was done I caught him in the halls and asked if it worked. He said it did and he enjoyed it. Another student asked me if I could teach him how to do graphics on the machine and I spent a period showing him how, only to find him using that new skill to create Swastikas... Was it a good thing that I had taught him how? I still debate that.

Of the various games I'd created, there was the original 'Master Mind' game clone. The simple but fun 'A,B,C' game had three letters dropping down from the top of the screen, your gun was centered on the left and you fired horizontally to hit them as they fell; 'A' was slow and easy, 'B' was fast and harder, and 'C' was fastest with a random variation. The game seemed deceptively simple with shooting at the 'A', but to get a good score you had to hit the 'B' and 'C'. The highest possible score was achieved by dodging the falling 'A' and 'B' all together and going for the 'C', yet given the time it took for your shot to make it across the screen, you had to anticipate its random factor in order to hit it.

'Fleet Of Foot', named by my eldest brother, had you as a dot running down an ever narrowing hallway. Being shot at from the narrow end, you had to dodge the timed, though randomly aimed shots, until you reached the tip of the hallway and captured the gun. I could never get my original Atari tank battle clone game to work fast enough to be playable, though I did get it to work finally, logic-wise. By the turn of the year I cranked out 'Depth Charge', another two player game where one player moved a submarine around while another had a fixed paced, right to left, P.T. Boat above that could drop one depth charge per repetitive pass. The trick with that game was to use the charges to scare the submarine into one side of the screen then aim for the tip of the submarine furthest from that edge forcing the player to slowly dive as well as move right or left away from the edge, often unsuccessfully.

Toward the end of the calendar year, I dubbed myself 'A Computer Programming Genius' in the tenor of 'An Idiot Savant', while I knew some people had a low opinion of me when it came to other subjects, in the case of computers I had no doubt that I was pretty sharp. My new found self esteem in this area was challenged when I went to Colorado for Christmas and Jeff had shown me games far surpassing anything I could come up with to date. When I returned home, I decided I needed to up my game.

But the school's computer also had some fun during the Christmas break. Given how expensive it had become with the recent upgrades, the administration felt nervous about it being in the open concept space; even though it was in the teacher's lounge, there were many ways in and out of it without going through a door or passing a teacher. Thus a small room had been built by the second entry hallway next to the gymnasium. This room served two purposes, one wall was a place for a teacher's work desk, as there was no longer enough room in the teacher's work area for a new teacher joining the school, and the other blank wall was a table for the computer. Being in this room meant it was locked, and rather than having a note to use the computer, students now had to get the key and return it once the period was done. This new room was a double edged sword, it gave us more privacy while we had fun playing games, but we could no longer entice passing students into trying out the computer for themselves. The new place for the computer came with a new guideline, games were discouraged. But, hey, they put the computer in a room with a locking door, what were they expecting?

Still, prompted by this new guideline I did broaden my interests by creating a program to conjugate Spanish verbs. Basically you type in the infinitive version of the verb, it would check it against a list of known irregular verbs and, if matching, pop out the answers for that irregular verb. Otherwise it would pass the word to the standardized conversion routine. This impressed the teachers as, being a text based program, it could easily be adjusted for French and Latin. I suppose I could have had it do English as well, but we already knew all those words! Then there was the run of making data storing and listing programs. One version was to place all the information into the program itself. While this was a good way of quickly testing what your program did with that data, it wasn't very practical when new data had to be entered or old data removed as it meant changing the program itself. The solution was the other approach to the program where you saved and loaded the data to tape... But god, it was slow loading and saving data to a cassette tape. Let's see if I can do the math right, sixteen kilobytes of RAM, with, say five kilobytes for the program itself you could have ten thousand kilobytes of data which would take about four minutes to load and save through the five hundred baud cassette interface! And you thought your device was slow.

Out of the blue, in early Nineteen Eighty, Zack Hatch came to me and asked if I'd like to join him that weekend on a trip to a computer fair. I did and he picked me up at my home and off we went. I assumed he'd bring his son Pete as well but, apparently while Pete liked to play the resulting games, he wasn't interested in the computers themselves and how to code them.

The fair was at another school building elsewhere in the state and I was there with about fifty other kids. Being Trash-80 focused, I toured the rooms but, as I'd been spoiled seeing many of the cutting edge programs at my new friend's, Jeff's, house in Colorado, I instead settled down at one of the unused machines and popped in my latest work in progress, a Trash-80 version of a popular coin operated video game at the time. Soon I had about ten kids surrounding me as I continued to refine the program. I'd run it for a bit, find a hiccup in it, show the kids what had caused the hiccup and brainstorm in front of them on how to resolve it, type in the updated code and rerun it and we learned together if that coding fix worked or not.

I did this for a couple hours, then once the game was working well enough, I excused myself from the group, allowing those kids to play the resulting game while I took another look around the rooms for anything new. When I returned, more kids had arrived at the computer to play and Zack and another adult had been drawn there as well. One of the kids pointed to me. Zack wanted to know where I had gotten the new game from, I opened the ruled lined notebook I had brought with me and showed him my hand scrawling of code. He and the other guy seemed very impressed. As the computer I had typed it into didn't have a cassette recorder, once the end of the fair approached three kids at the computer furiously started to list the code I had put in and copy it down into their own notebooks. I was positively beaming with pride on the way home.

Zack took me to another computer fair that Spring, though this one was in another state and had fewer attendees. But this turned out good for me as it had a variety of computers to play with rather than being Trash-80 focused. These included the Apple II and the Commodore PET. They had different games than the ones I'd been use to seeing on the Trash-80 and after playing with them for a bit, I broke open the source code and scrolled through it for their new patterns of code. It turned out, like with the upgrade from Level I to Level II on the computer I knew, the BASIC coding language on these computers also had their own variations of the syntax. After about two hours of looking over all this code, Zack decided he wanted to leave early as there wasn't as much to see or do. While the first fair had been a huge self esteem booster, the second one had actually been better for me as I realized there was a bigger world out there than just the Trash-80.

At the end of the school year I was revving to return to Colorado for the summer break and discover what new programs Jeff would have and also show him the new games I had completed in the past six months. I was also gearing up to show off my work to Ralph at the local Radio Shack, there, and return to visiting the store a few times a week to try out my code.

But there was a wrinkle to that last bit...

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A Wise Fool

47

Entering my second year of high school, how would I fare?

My Sophomore year of High School promised great things. All but two classes were mostly based on knowledge of subject matter, not pages of hand written endurance, and my computer programming ability sky-rocketed to surpass anything we had ever found in a magazine.

Oh, and those two classes? The same teacher taught both. They were English focused, one quarter long only classes. 'Horror and Fantasy' was taught by the original eighth grade teacher from Middle School, though I had the new English teacher that year so I actually hadn't met him previously, just knew of him. 'Horror and Fantasy' started out with a week of discussion about what horror was, versus fantasy. Horror was pretty straight forward, but Fantasy, he had to clarify, was not the Kings, Elves and Hobbits which had come to swamp the term, but any story set in an unrealistic location where the story is to take place. The brief example he gave us was: A guy walking across a desert, we don't know why or where he came from, comes to a giant featureless wall blocking his way. With no door, but not wanting to stray from his intended path, he doesn't know what to do.

With that as the example story, the grist left in the reader's lap was 'What do these images represent?' Perhaps the journey across the desert is the course of life and the impassible wall the barrier of death? Or perhaps the story intends for us to not get too fixed in our ways and except a change of course when there is no other choice? Etc.

Now with the twin genres defined, the class plan would have us read three books of our choosing from a list, then write a one page report of what we read. The Final would be a secret until the last weeks, but focus on what we'd learnt during the class. As I enjoyed reading, this class was great for me as it gave me a reason to stray from my normal focus on Science Fiction, and a single hand written page about every two weeks was perfect for me as well. When the Final came, we were told our grade for the class would be based purely on what we got as our score on the Final. And for it, we had to write a four page paper choosing either Horror or Fantasy and define and discuss the genre and its meaning. This seemed simple enough and even though it was four pages with only three days to do it, I had polished my one draft writing skills to an art and had no trouble completing it in time. I chose Horror.

We turned in our papers and had a day to ourselves and he would give the papers back with our grade the following day. When that day came he returned our papers with a surprise twist, he said one of us had written a paper saying that Horror and Fantasy were one and the same and he had found it so convincing that he had decided it was the only right answer and any one of us who didn't have that as the conclusion of our paper had it wrong. In this case, that girl got an 'A' for the class and the rest of us a lowly 'B'. The premise that he had set-up beforehand for the paper had been chucked-out and for those of us not psychic enough to know he would do this ahead of time, we were screwed. This shocked me as I had otherwise enjoyed the class up to this point, but I hoped this was just an aberration and things would go better in the English class I had with him next quarter.

'Basic Composition' was just that. He was going to teach us how to write well. He felt the best way to learn how to write was to have us write and then he would read our papers and mark everything wrong with them, and that's how we'd learn. This didn't sound promising, but my one draft writing style hadn't found detractors during the previous years. He wanted us to do a two page paper on any topic we chose and do an outline, rough draft, then a final draft for him that first week. I picked my topic and turned in my 'final draft' on Thursday. He rejected it because he required the outline and rough draft along with the final draft. oh. I said I hadn't realized that and I'd bring those in from home tomorrow. At home that night I did the trick as I had in eighth grade English where I made a shorter, poorer version of the paper in pencil and made the outline based on my pen draft. It was more than I normally could do in a night, but I pushed off all homework for other classes to get it done and turned everything in that Friday. I reflected that I could probably squeak by with this class given the format each week. The Monday when he returned our marked-up papers, he told us that he now wanted us to do this every two days. I assumed, given the quantity of paperwork involved, he would only be wanting the final draft. Nope, he wanted it all, once every two days and I knew I was screwed.

After two weeks of killing myself to get this amount done once every three days, he wouldn't even look at them as there had been too much time between the papers. An 'F' was guaranteed and so I went to the guidance counselor's office to withdraw from the class and, as it was a required class, reschedule it with another teacher in one of the last two quarters of the year. The counselor refused to let me do it on the basis that he was sure I wasn't going to do that badly in the class. I assured him I would, so he offered the compromise of waiting until after the quarter and he'd contact me then if it was going to be a problem. Fine, I agreed. The end of the quarter came as well as the 'F'. I didn't hear back from the counselor.

All other classes went well.

Math was again with Zack Hatch: 'Transformational Geometry'. The 'Advanced Algebra' students from the Freshman year of High School got to chose one of two geometry focused math classes, Zack had put in a recommendation for me so I could skip up from 'Intro To Algebra' and join the geometry level this year. Given how well I liked the previous year with Zack teaching, I chose the Sophomore year class that had him. And it went great; again I was at the top of the class, and this time when he sang my praises in front of the class it was with the kids who were already deemed to be pretty sharp.

The daring optional class I took this year was 'Spanish I'.

In eighth grade we had the chance to take a language class of 'French' or 'Latin' instead of having a study hall period. I took 'Latin' as I knew it was often used in science circles and I was still fantasizing that I'd be involved with the space program one day. But after the first quarter of 'Latin' class in eighth grade, I showed up on the first day of the second quarter and the teacher was surprised I was there. She told me I was no longer in 'Latin' class, hadn't my parents told me? No. Well, I was no longer taking 'Latin' class. I asked why, the teacher wouldn't tell me, she just asked me to leave so she could start teaching the class.

So now, two years later, I again signed-up for a language class. 'Spanish I' was a nice mix of learning & writing, listening & understanding, and thinking & talking. I did very well as I excelled at understanding the language and translating back and forth. In many ways I saw it as a computer language to learn, except you used it with people rather than type it in on a keyboard. Sure, I stuttered occasionally when speaking Spanish, but understanding the language was the teacher's focus. I was so thrilled by my first year of the language I signed right up for 'Spanish II' the following year.

In fact, my Sophomore year of High School had gone so well I enthusiastically signed up for all the courses I could for Junior year. I even found I could squeeze in the 'Civics' class intended for Seniors into my schedule. The administration intervened, saying I should take a different social studies class and hold off on that one until my final year. I pointed out I was already taking the other, shorter social studies classes but, as I had a free period all year and there was still room available for 'Civics' after all the Seniors had signed-up for it, I wanted to take it. And why couldn't I take it early?

They didn't address my question, instead pointing out that I could use the free period for study hall time. In the previous two years, I hadn't used study hall time for study but instead playing with the school's computer, so I hadn't seen any need for a study hall. But then, on reflection, I decided to relent and take study hall instead.

It would give me time to play more computer games at school.

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Landing A Catch

46

By December Nineteen Seventy-Nine, my father was spending time away from the home during some evenings. It turned out he'd found himself a girl friend, the first in several years. He excitedly confessed to me that 'Roberta' was the hot girl of his High School class and she was now available and he thought he had a chance whereas, back then, he didn't. Seeing her as a sort of Red Neck Princess, as part of his method of wooing her he suddenly bought and wore long sleeved red plaid flannel shirts. As he had never worn anything like it during my life time, I had to fight back the urge to laugh every time I saw him 'dressed-up' like that as it reminded me of the Monty Python 'Lumber Jack' song.

When Christmas came and it was time to see my mother, I put all of my clothes back into the one suitcase I had come to New England with and wore the old puffy jacket to the airport and carried it with me on the plane. Once set down in Colorado, my mother thought it was time I got a new coat.

In the intervening few months she had moved to a new, one bedroom, apartment and this meant my stuff was gone. She told me how she gave away all my games and toys since I hadn't wanted them anymore. Whatever made her sleep at night. I was gung-ho to sleep on the couch, but she had bought a roll away bed for me to use during the week and a half I'd be there. Also, she seemed to hope that my not as older brother would come down Christmas Eve and stay overnight on the couch himself. The roll away was more of a steel trap; both ends would fold-up making it a four foot high, two foot thick and three foot wide cage. With the ends folded down 'it was a bed', though with the steel hinge base smack in the middle, it was more of a torture device. I found the only way to sleep on it was on my side with my hips just beyond the steel bar and ribs just above it. It was like sleeping in the back of the car, except less comfortable.

Mother had found a new grocery store to work in since the one she'd started at just four months earlier. As she was working all but Christmas day, this meant I got to enjoy the apartment and its surroundings... Mainly just empty weed fields on the eastern outskirts of town. I somehow talked her into picking me up during her lunch hour and taking me to the Radio Shack of the previous Summer where Ralph worked and was happy to see me again and let me use the display Trash-80, still with the desk. I'd spend the afternoon there, then mother would pick me back up on the way home from work. For this small accommodation during my stay, I thank her. Not wanting to wear out my welcome, I was doing every other day there and on the second afternoon a large man stepped up behind me as I tried out a game I'd just coded. He said, ''Hey, if you think that's cool, you should come over to my place and see the games I have...''

Given his long hair and long beard, he could have been mistaken for a biker except that he wore jeans and a tee shirt. I told him I had to wait for my mother to pick me up at four thirty, but he assured me he'd have me back by then. So I gathered my things and hopped into his truck off to his house. Once there, he lead me up some steps to an older house in the downtown area, inside he brought me to a dark room in the middle of the base floor and had me go in first. He turned on the light which was pretty much a bulb hanging by a chain from the middle of the ceiling -- For some reason, when I tell this story nowadays, people start to get really nervous and cringe for fear of what happens next, but I need to explain that I was from rural New England and my parents had never expressed any concern about me talking with people I didn't know -- So anyhow, we get down on these really low seats, it might have actually been some cushions on the floor, and on this coffee table was a fully tricked-out Trash-80. By fully tricked-out I mean it had the Expansion Interface, this clucking box to the side called a floppy drive, whatever that was, and a printer.

Turned-out the floppy drive was a much faster cassette recorder for loading and saving games. And he loaded-up and showed me quite a few. Many of them were the text based games that I'd seen before, some called 'adventure games' where it gave you the description of a room and you got to either pick up or leave stuff there, then move to another room. But some were graphics oriented and more dynamic than anything I'd seen before on a computer. Behind the computer he had a few cassettes of a game called 'Interlude' and I asked him what that was, but he felt I was too young to see those games. When I noticed we'd passed three thirty, I mentioned I needed to get back to the Radio Shack before my mother got there.

So he got me back to the store a bit after four and stayed with me noting the many other games he had while I settled back down into the display desk. I expressed enthusiasm and he gave me his number and I wrote down his name at the top, 'Jeff'. He left soon after and not knowing how long I'd have to wait until mother arrived, I started to load the game I had been working on. When she came, I hopped in the car and, as we were driving to the apartment, I told her of my exciting day and she just about had a heart attack and told me I should never have left the store and gone with someone I didn't know. I told her I did know him, now, and had his name and phone number. Once back at the apartment, mother promptly snatched the phone number from me and gave him a call to give him a piece of her mind. When Jeff mentioned to her that he was married, mother asked to talk to his wife and soon calmed down. She said I could see him again the Saturday before I flew home that Sunday. But I was told in no uncertain terms: When at the Radio Shack I was to stay there until she picked me up!!!!

I did see Jeff that Saturday and picked some cassette based games to see. As we waited for them to load, we'd chat and he showed me his record collection of all these bands I hadn't heard of before; he would play a few songs off of one as he pointed out a few prized albums to me. A few hours later, it was time to go, have a final meal with my mother and pack for the flight home.

My father and Roberta picked me up at Logan airport and brought me back to the house. Once there I was surprised with the present my father had gotten me for Christmas. It was soft under the wrapping, not like a box with paper over it. I eagerly ripped the wrapping-off to find it was a set of long sleeve red plaid flannel shirts. My hands shook in revulsion as it dawned on me that this wasn't a present from my father, but a present for my father as he apparently thought he needed me to 'dress-up' as a lumber jack as well to finally land his catch.

I dropped the plastic wrapped shirts to the nearest side table and mumbled that I had to go and unpack my suitcase and fled the room. The shirts lay untouched on that side table for the next three to four months collecting dust until they finally, thankfully, disappeared.

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Time For A Wedding

45

Barely a month after I got back to New England, I found we had to scramble to get ready for a wedding. After living together for many years, my eldest brother and his long time girl friend had decided to tie the knot. And this was when I found out that his girl friend, 'Lucy', was from a more well to do family. I heard there had been some horror on the part of her father that his daughter was settling down with a 'ski bum', though by that time my brother was starting to work his way up into the leadership of a competing ski area. A compromise was struck where we would have to participate in a seemingly Kennedyesque wedding that had originally been envisioned for his daughter, in return he would give his blessing.

There was a panicked need to get me to a formal clothing store so when I was introduced to the father of the bride, it wouldn't be in my jeans and tee. The last thing I needed was more confining layers of clothing to make me hotter, but my protests were for nothing. Looking over the suits to be had in my size, they all looked pretty much the same, except for one. Growing up I had alternated between jeans and corduroy pants as a kid, and one of the suits available was a three piece beige corduroy suit, with vest. I figured the material was thick enough that I could wear it without the need of the ACE bandage and at least cool myself down a little bit. We were now ready for the great migration.

My not as older brother flew back from Colorado to participate and we car pooled our way to the Massachusetts coastline to prepare. Once established at the inn, a few steps above any motel I'd ever been to, we were whisked off to the suit rental shop for our fittings. Not quite a tuxedo as I had seen on television, it was more of a black tailcoat with shiny lapels and a grey vest with a black and grey striped tie secured with a pearl topped stick pin. Along with all the associated cufflinks for the shirt, there was also a black cummerbund but this never showed so I was sure its true purpose was to assure heat stoke. This would be the uniform for me, my not as older brother, and my eldest brother's friends as we would act as the ushers during the ceremony. I believe my eldest brother and father were similarly attired, but there might have been some variation as they were the groom and father of the groom. While my paternal grandfather Pappy also attended, I don't remember if he was similarly dressed up as we had been, or if given his Boston Banker background he already had appropriate clothing for such an upscale occasion.

Back to the hotel briefly to change into our less formal formal duds we were off to Lucy's parents' house to meet them and then we'd have dinner after the rehearsal. Arriving along with other guests, we were met at the door and introduced, then we stood aside in the foyer as more guests arrived and Lucy's father introduced us to them. As in Colorado, where people who didn't know me took me as they saw me, he got my name right but introduced as one of the bridesmaids, despite my beige corduroy suit. Perhaps he thought I was wearing it in support of the Equal Rights Amendment of the time? After my many experiences in Colorado that previous Summer, I had learned the best way to handle these moments was with a little humor so I raised my index finger and put on my best perplexed face and said, ''Ah, excuse me?'' Everyone burst out in laughter and the moment passed without recriminations or further awkwardness.

As more guests came, Lucy lead us through the large family home, rich with carved wood detailings, and told us a few anecdotes from her childhood. One that I remember was that, inspired by the communion ritual at their church, she and her sister one time got home to pull out some dinner rolls and squish them flat to make their own communion wafers for play. She also showed us the dining room and pointed out the smaller, lower down table in the corner and talked about her times at the children's dinner table and how she was thrilled when she was old enough to gain a chair at the adult table. This story was a gentle way of introducing me to where I would be seated. This out of the limelight placement suited me just fine though, but at age fifteen the small chairs themselves didn't. Once assembled, we went to a rented space for the wedding rehearsal, before returning for the dinner. When done, there was a little meet-and-greet amongst us as we trickled out over time to our various hotels and motels.

The wedding itself was at a church that we were told members of the Kennedy family had been to on occasion, classic medieval stone masonry with great oak pews. As ushers, we were directed to lead arriving guests to sit evenly on either side of the church for fear that the groom's side might otherwise be a little spare, but surprisingly there was a good turn-out for both sides of the family and the church filled up quite nicely. Despite the emotional distance between my father and my eldest brother, he had asked our father to be his best man. Our father had spent many years living on his own at the family home given that Pappy had his own apartment to spend most of his time in, so the role of best man was offered to him to give dad a participating place at the wedding, rather than being lost in the pews. The music started, my father and eldest brother waited at the alter with another groomsman, and Lucy came in: She made an elegant bride. Accompanied by flower girls dropping pedals along the way, Lucy processed down the the center nave aisle to reach the altar and join her three bridesmaids, her sister and two friends. Having been to a handful of other weddings with my mother over the years, this one seemed straight out of a movie as the vows were taken and the permission to kiss the bride given.

The wedding done, we were off to the family's Yacht Club for the reception. A huge oceanside stone building with a full flight of steps leading up to the entryway, it was decked out with the first room for the gift collection and to have the cake on display. A large adjoining side room was used for the hors d'oeuvres and dinner tables. While the main room did have a set of stairs leading to the upper floor, the reception was only on the main floor and included a smaller side room next to the entry. While not officially part of the event rooms, its glass doors were unlocked and served as a quiet place to decompress from the formality of the affair. Some of my brother's friends from rural New England had a little fun showing each other the 'proper way' of handling the food and addressing each other in the Yacht Club. I milled about the various rooms soaking up the atmosphere and observed the gathered people visiting each other and watching the married couple as the dinner commenced. I noticed that the flower girls had settled into the side room and joined them for a chat. They had been with me at the children's table during the rehearsal dinner, so this gave us a bit of familiarity and we chatted for a bit. Well, given my stuttering, I mostly listened.

We were summoned for the cutting of the cake and I got to have a slice. Afterwards, I noticed my not as older brother and one of the groomsmen friends sneaking outside. I followed. Along with another friend of my brothers, we went to a local pharmacy were they got 'various supplies' to help adorn the chauffeured car for the married couple. Returning to the club, we quietly made our way to the car, then they used shaving cream to add detailing and condoms to whatever external car fitting would hold them. We returned to the reception and stayed until it was time for the tossing of the bouquet; the women assembled at the foot of the flight of stairs leading into the Yacht Club and the bouquet tossed. Then it was time for the men to assemble at the base of the stairs for the tossing of the garter. While told to go down with them, I took to standing far back and to the side so I'd be well out of reach of anything tossed.

Once the married couple were off in their car, we made our way to our own cars and returned to the hotel. There, we could finally get out of our tuxedos and back into our regular clothing. We stayed the night, then car pooled back to our family home the next day.

And normality was restored.

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Release

44

Moving back to the family home, I guess I had expected, would be like returning to how things were fours years earlier before mother pulled me away to the apartment town. Here I was in the house I'd spent all but fours years of my life in, but my bedroom was gone. I was back in the same town that my friends had originally been in, yet the age of after-school-play-dates was over with. In fact my two closest friends at the time, Van and Luke didn't live within walking distance and, without public transportation existing or being old enough for a drivers license, the best I could do was call them on the phone and say ''Hi.''

My first day back from Colorado, after sleeping on the unmade bed, I searched the upstairs and found where the sheets were kept and some old blankets. I found a pillow as well, stuffed on the upper shelf of a closet. My father had gone off to work so I spent the morning learning how to use the washing machine. My eldest brother's bed, while made, hadn't been used for a long time and could use a stripping and washing, too.

With this under my belt, I called my friend Jonathan to let him know I was back in town. As the years had progressed, his father had curtailed his social time during the school year to a minimum to ensure his son would be fully devoted to his studies after school, so seeing Jonathan had become more of a summer time or school break opportunity. With my cassette of computer programs in hand and him having a Trash-80 computer of his own at home, I gave him a call to see if he was interested and available? He was and he and his mother were kind enough to pick me up. While we talked a bit of Colorado, we mostly focused on the games I brought and listening to the new music albums he'd gotten over the Summer. This would become an annual first day back from Colorado event for the next few years.

Getting home, I made the beds, mine and my eldest brother's. I found my old bedroom desk and chair had been moved to the white bedroom when my father had otherwise tossed everything else over the Summer, so I moved that into the new bedroom I was in. At first unsure where to put the desk, I came up with the idea of placing it in the closet. As I didn't need it for clothes, I had the suit case after all, I could use the closet as a study nook. The desk slipped nicely into the portion of the closet with the sloped ceiling and the closet had a window to the side allowing me to look out and ponder as need be. Over time, I found a spare plastic laundry basket in the basement. It was partially melted on one side, I assume from being left too closely to the baseboard heater at some point, but still it held clothes just fine so I replaced the suit case with the basket to hold my clothes.

That weekend I got a flash of memory and went to the closet of the white bedroom. At the foot of its closet was the door to the additional storage space. Opening it, I found the box I had squirreled away there as a kid. Inside were a number of childhood keepsakes from years earlier, such as a musket ball, which I had been keeping safe from my mother's hands. Now sorting through this box, much of it no longer held much meaning for me, but it was a connection to my past. So even though my bedroom and its contents were gone, I still had something which affirmed that this was my place and I belonged here.

Labor Day Monday, just before the start of school the next day, I noted to dad that mother had given me a dollar a day to pay for school lunch. While in reality she hadn't and I'd been using my own work money for that, I got the desired results of a five dollar bill each week. One of mother's oversights of the move to Colorado was that she didn't have me close-out my bank account as she had done with hers. As a result my saved money was still in New England except with one small wrinkle. The branch bank I had used was twenty miles away at the apartment town, and the main branch of the bank twenty-five miles away at the larger town nearby. My money was safe, but from me as well. One day in the Fall, I was walking along the shopping strip front toward the drug store and noticed a small room had been added just passed the hardware store windows, but before their outdoor garden lot. It had the logo of my bank, but just had a machine inside. It turned out it was an 'automated bank machine' and I called the main branch to find out about it, one of the early versions of the Automated Teller Machine we know today, they mailed me the paperwork to apply for a card to use it and then they sent me the bank machine card. I once again had access to my money.

So by Fall, I'd settled into my new life. My new bedroom was for sleeping, reading and school work, my eldest brother's room was for listening to music as it still had the original component stereo and some left behind albums, it also worked for reading as well. But unlike the years living with my mother at the apartment, my father neither spent hours each day telling me how terrible everyone else was, nor giving me the occasional hit, and Pappy kept mostly to himself as well. This allowed me time to emotionally decompress. Sometimes I'd sit at the desk in the closet and stare out the window, other times I'd just wander the woods and fields surrounding the house and soak in the peacefulness. As a stoke of luck, the ski area the previous year had added some cross country skiing trails and I had taken my skies and shoes to the park one weekend just before Spring to try them out. As a result, the skis and shoes were at the family home when my mother packed everything up for the move to Colorado, and so I had them with me and could use them in the surrounding woods and fields once the snows came.

Then one day in Fall, I'd gotten cocky while doing the laundry. During the two years of wearing the ACE bandage around my chest, it had never been washed. In fact, I doubt my mother had washed it after she had originally used it for her dislocated knee a decade earlier. I was unaware of hand washing at the time and I had only just figured out how to machine wash, so I thought I'd toss it in with the bedsheets one weekend. Once the machine was done, I found that the bandage had gotten caught up in the auger and stretched and pulled apart. Once the rest of the laundry was in the dryer, I struggled to get the ACE bandage debris out of the machine and finally did, but it was unsalvageable and I was panicked. I had become so used to using it to bind my beasts down and keep them from showing that I now had no clue how I could get another ACE bandage without being in public with my breasts bobbing through my shirt. It was a chicken and egg problem.

Then a solution occurred to me: In the room with the dryer was the family coat rack. As the years went on, once one coat was no longer being used by a family member it ended up forgotten on the coat rack with the new coat being added to the hanger next to it. As a result, over these many years, there was a selection of tattered coats just hanging there. In fact, as my mother hadn't packed-up my own winter coat for my return to New England, I'd have to pick one out of this rack once Winter came anyhow. I looked through what was there, most were torn or badly worn, but I found one light blue, down coat with its billowy surface that would fit me. Given its puffy shape, it hid what was underneath very well and, even though it was still Fall, I figured it was cold enough outside to get away with wearing it.

I walked to the drug store to pick up a new bandage and visit the money machine on the way there. Over the two years of using the ACE bandage around my breasts and not washing it, I'd developed quite the acne patch over my chest. I had become quite good at ignoring it in public as it itched, and it occurred to me that as I was picking up the bandage I could get some acne cream as well. When I got to the drug store counter, the clerk gave me an odd look. While some of it might have been due to me wearing the puffy winter jacket in Fall, I think it was mostly because of the handful of acne cream tubes I had brought to the counter along with the bandage. She looked at my face and didn't think I'd need so much; I froze as I didn't know what to say. As she was waiting for an answer, I stuttered out something about having some on hand for later.

At the time I was the only customer there and she left the cash register and had me follow her. I was sweating, not only from wearing the jacket as I followed her, but not knowing what this meant or what was going to happen. She brought me to a shelf and picked out a bottle of witch hazel and then snatched a pack of cotton balls on the way back. She explained that the witch hazel would work just as well and would cost pennies per bottle, rather than the dollars worth of acne cream tubes I had picked out. Transaction done, I returned home and coated my chest with the witch hazel and tried out the new clean ACE bandage. It also came with a little note of instructions talking about hand washing which I kept in mind for the future.

I also kept the puffy jacket in mind as well. During the first year of High School some students, rather than trying to stuff their winter coats into the little cubbyholes we had in place of lockers, would just wear the jackets all day in class, unzipped. When the snows came, I decided to be daring and do this too, but in reality this was so I could be out in public without the ACE bandage strapping me down. During the previous years with the bandage, I had kept to wearing tee shirts all year long to let the pent-up heat leave my body through my bare arms. Now with the jacket on, but no bandage, it really wasn't all that much hotter than what I'd been used to. I started to do this trick a couple times a week just for a change of pace.

Once December came, my father told me I'd be going back to see my mother for Christmas break. When I arrived in Colorado wearing the old puffy jacket, my mother was appalled and insisted I have a new one. I at first protested, but then agreed as long as I got to pick it out. I did and made sure it was another concealing jacket.

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Displacement

43

Discovering she was going to be living in Colorado indefinitely, how would my mother get me to stay with her?

By the middle of August, mother decided she should job hunt now that she was living in Colorado, it seemed Joe might need a few extra months to realize how much he missed her. She found a job at a downtown supermarket and began a regular work routine after having two months off.

Meanwhile, I reminded her that I would be going back to New England to continue High School. This was a great thing to note on my end as it wasn't like I had a plane ticket, or any means of getting to an airport. In fact I only realize now how tenuous my return was as all she had to do was not buy a plane ticket, or not let me know dad had sent her one for me, and I would be trapped.

With her working, I pretty much stayed to the same routine of writing code at home and trying it out three days a week at the local Radio Shack. By the end of the Summer I had five working computer programs under my belt and saved to tape. The reason my friend Jonathan had sought out the TRS-80 Computer in school was because his father had bought him one as part of preparing him for his eventual career as an Engineer. As a result I was eagerly anticipating my return to New England so I could show off the games I had created over the summer break.

With the end of August rapidly approaching, mother took her new found earnings and tried to woo me to stay in Colorado by giving me money to buy a number of record albums. She also bought me a customized bed; as I reached my early teens, I had neared my adult height of just under six feet tall. This left my feet and head bumping into the head and foot boards of the bunk beds and I had taken up sleeping crouched sideways to fit. The bed mother had built for me was longer than the typical twin bed. The good news was I could lie flat in it and my feet wouldn't be hanging over the end, the bad news was stores didn't have sheets that size for sale, so mother took the more worn sheets from my bunk bed days and cut them up into quarters. She then sewed them to the end of the better looking sheets, thus giving me sets long enough to fit the bed. She made sure all the sown-on pieces were at the foot of the bed so they'd be hidden by the blanket and comforter, but when lying on the bed I'd feel the sown ridges against my calves and I had to be careful sliding my legs in and out of the bed less my toe nails catch.

She further made sure she and I filled-in my bedroom by unpacking everything, getting it nicely in the closet, hung on the walls, on the shelves and generally make the new apartment's bedroom everything I'd want in a bedroom. She then started talking about where I'd go to school. I reminded her that I was returning to New England for school. She then started to openly lobby me to stay as she didn't want to be alone. I reminded her of my not as older brother living nearby in Denver but she said she had been disappointed that he hadn't visited more often. I think he had come at least once every other week which seemed more often than when we lived at the New England apartment, but in reality what she meant was she didn't want to be in a town where she knew no one and she wouldn't even have me anymore as her unwilling confidante.

I assured her that I was going back to New England to finish school. So she then tried the threatening path. If I went back to New England, I would lose everything! All my stuff, all my books, all my games, all my record albums, my stereo, etc. All I'd have to take back with me was one suitcase of clothes. I felt that was a fair deal in return for finishing High School with the friends I had known for all my years. Further, I already had my bedroom at dad's house with much of my stuff in it and, most importantly to me at the time, I had the cassette tape of my computer programs. For me, it was the true measure of what I had gained during that first Summer in Colorado. But I didn't share any of this with her, I just said: ''Okay.''

I don't know who bought the airplane ticket back to New England for me. And in fact, during all my summers visiting mother in Colorado I never knew who did, but I suspected there was a little trade-off between the parents. The Wednesday before Labor day I stopped by the Radio Shack one last time and said goodbye to Ralph and the new guy who'd recently joined the store. Mother actually made dinner for us that night and I packed my one allowed suit case, cassette tape hidden inside and I was taken to the airport. The flight back was, thankfully, non-stop so I didn't have to worry about changing planes, this being my first flight alone. Father met me at the gate in Logan airport, and drove me home.

It was a quiet drive back to the home town and I was so thankful to be getting back. As we arrived at the house and I got my suitcase out of the back of the car, this was when my father mentioned that I would need to stay in another bedroom, now. During the Summer, he had emptied out my family home bedroom to make it his library. He had mounted all the walls with board and bracket shelves and his science fiction book collection was now housed there. This stunned me as I hadn't expected to come home to find my bedroom was gone. All my belongings in it, he had gotten rid off. No trace remained. Despite the fact that the adjoining bedroom next to his was the empty white room where my eldest brother had sketched the nude on the wall six years earlier, my father didn't use that. My eldest brother's original bedroom, that even my not as older brother hadn't used for over the past two years, that remained untouched as well. The empty bedroom that had originally been my sister's, then my mother's and eventually my not as older brother's during his last year living at the house, my father hadn't used that room either even though all it had was the bed frame and bare mattress.

It was that last bedroom that my father pointed me to as the place where I could stay. My eldest brother's bedroom was right next door as a ready to use bedroom, but as I'd been pointed to the room with the bare bed, that's where I went to. As my father picked me up late at the airport given the two hour difference between Colorado time and New England time, it was after dinner and Pappy was already watching evening shows in his apartment, if not to bed, so there was little to do but go to bed, myself.

But as I was on Colorado time, I wasn't sleepy at all. I looked out the bedroom window for a bit, the same one I had first spied the haying machines from twelve years earlier, but the hayfield was too dark to make out anything. Instead my eyes were drawn to the main grocery store lights peaking through the trees beyond and the edge of the shopping strip that had been built next to the store during the intervening years. After a while, not knowing where any bedsheets or pillows might be kept and not wanting to disturb my father who had gone to bed, I just curled up on the bare mattress and tucked my elbow under my temple for a pillow.

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