A New Hope

42

With the move to Colorado, the question was: What was my mother's ultimate goal?

My mother used a moving company for our belongings in part because there would be a week long gap between the time we left New England and the time we were in the apartment. With the moving company, she could have them place our stuff into holding for two weeks, then finish delivering it to us in July. The problem was, once in holding, there was a strike and we were just a pair of a vast group of people who suddenly discovered they would have to make do with what they'd taken with them. For us, it was a small black & white television, two sleeping bags and what we fit into our luggage to last two weeks.

It was kind of odd to have a bedroom all to oneself and you're to one side with your sleeping bag looking over the far reach of the carpet at floor level. Needless to say, our laundry went into a frequent washing rotation. Unlike the old complex, this apartment complex had roughly three times the number of buildings and each building had three times the number of apartments. For 'entertainment' I would roam the complex and get the lay of the land. It had a pool, but it was always busy so my using it was out of the question. Next to the pool, though, was a club house with a coin operated pool table and pinball machine. Having never played pinball, only hearing about it in one of my brother's 'The Who' albums, I asked mother for some quarters, she gave me two. When I returned, it was in use and I watched the teenager play it for a bit. When his friend arrived, they left and I gave it a try. The two quarters went fast and when I returned to mother for more, I was told there weren't going to be any more and to find something else to do with my time.

After a couple of days of sitting on the floor, my mother got sick of it and came up with a clever idea: Rather than buy indoor furniture as ours would eventually arrive, we would buy lawn furniture! It was cheap, and we could use it indoors for the next few weeks, then move it to the little balcony once our stuff arrived. During one of our exploring car trips around our neighborhood we found a drug store, but again with the change in scale, it was at least four times the size of the largest pharmacy I'd ever been to and had some grocery aisles, electronics room, and more importantly the lawn furniture set out for sale in the entry. We picked-out two pieces, a short upright chair and a lower lounging chair. Now we had the chance to watch the black & white while sitting in the otherwise empty living room area in lawn chairs. Everything seemed so novel to me at this time.

The antenna on the T.V. didn't pick up the stations very well, but the apartment came with free 'cable', whatever that was. In rural New England, I had never heard of cable and we all just had roof mounted antennas, so this idea of a 'cable' which held all the signals that would normally be out in the air was a new concept for me. The small T.V. didn't have a cable inlet in back so my mother found out there was a Radio Shack a little ways from the apartment. On the drive I realized it was within walking distance and once there the manager, 'Ralph', helped us find the necessary adapter to attach the cable to the television. As we checked out I noticed they had two TRS-80 display computers, the typical one on a mid-chest high pillar placing the screen and keyboard at standing level for customers milling in and out. But they also had one in the display model integrated desk, with chair, looking very lonely by the window. On the way out I asked Ralph if I could come back sometime and use the computer, he said I could.

This town had five malls at the time, mind boggling as in rural New England malls were few and far between and only near the capital cities. We visited three of the malls in this new town regularly, at first so we could buy some additional clothes, but to also give us a break from the heat. Air conditioning was something only the rich people had in their cars and houses when I grew up, so there was no surprise that our first apartment, nor our Colorado one, didn't have any. To console me over not being able to play the pinball machine given its thirst for quarters, mother found me an electronic 'Master Mind' game which worked for a single player. This kept me busy for a few hours.

The next time at the drug store, I asked mother to buy me a notebook and pencils and I started to write code. Except I didn't know what I wanted the code to do. Unlike the past year taking programs out of magazines, I was starting with a blank page. Then it occurred to me to write a program that worked the same way as the mastermind game. Given the slow pace of my hand writing, it gave me plenty of time to reconsider any change my code might need as I scribed. Once done, I took the fifteen minute walk to Radio Shack and confirmed with Ralph that I could still use the computer on the desk. I could and typed in the program. To my surprise, with only one quick to find and fix bug, it worked! As the computer had a cassette recorder attached, I bought the cheapest tape they had and saved the game. I then spent the majority of my time at the apartment writing code into the notebook and then visiting the store to try it out. After a couple days in a row, Ralph encouraged me to come less often and so I made it a Monday-Wednesday-Friday afternoon trip with code writing at the apartment to tide me over between visits.

At first, to fill our time waiting for the furniture to arrive, we went to all the tourist traps in the area. On the drive into town on the interstate highway our first time, the 'Chamber of Commerce' had a stand on either side of the highway in the dirt shoulder where people could pull off and look through the fliers. We had collected quite a few then and, now these weeks later, had been going through them one by one until we ran out.

There was also another problem which horrified mom. In rural New England, where we knew everyone and everyone knew us, as puberty dawned I was still me and everyone knew it. Sure, I was a little awkward given my 'situation', but we had all been told that puberty was an awkward time and none of my friends or classmates seemed to take any particular notice. But in Colorado, where everyone was a stranger, they took me as they saw me and occasionally referred to me as my mother's daughter. This was despite the fact that my breasts continued to be strapped down with the ACE bandage. After a couple times of this, mother's solution was to have my head shaved to a military cut. This horrified me as, in the nineteen seventies, guys didn't have short hair like that anymore. Still, the times people assumed I was mom's daughter decreased, so it made her happy.

There was a problem with the new apartment, the neighbor above us owned a dog and had him use the balcony above us to 'do his business'. Urine would come down to our balcony at random times of the day, and rain storms would break-up and wash down the feces. Complaints to the neighbor or landlord didn't help. Eventually, as we still didn't have any furniture, the complex offered to let us move into a different apartment at the start of August. Mother took up that offer and soon, before my birthday, the strike had ended and our stuff was finally delivered. Well most of it, they told us that the storage warehouse had been robbed during the strike and some of our belongings stolen, like my bunk beds and gaming console. As I had long since become bored with Pong, it was no great loss for me, but mother was very upset, I don't remember what stuff of hers had gone missing.

Once the phone was installed and activated, mother quickly called Joe to let him know of her number. This lead to the once a week Friday evening phone call where Joe would be working at one of the stores late and give mother a call. On these nights, mother would make sure to be at the apartment and pensively wait near the phone for the call that eventually came. Between the first few of these calls, she explained to me her plan: The whole move to Colorado was to let Joe realize how much he missed her and needed her in his life. He would thus finally divorce his wife Dorcus and come to Colorado and sweep mom off her feet and take us back to New England!

This would happen any day, now...

impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop 

Confined And Breathless

41

Fort Collins is a city north of the Colorado state capital of Denver. After hearing about the vast size and traffic congestion of Denver from my not as older brother, mother decided that she'd move to a smaller city like Fort Collins that would still be near to him, but have a slower pace of life comparable to the various larger towns of New England.

As mother had just been looking to buy a house in the apartment town that we had lived in for the past four years, I was stunned by the news that we were moving to Colorado. Not just that, but we'd move only days after my Freshman year of High School let out. Unlike the move to the apartment town where I didn't realize I had any choice in the matter, this time I told my mother that I'd stay behind and move in with dad so I could continue school with my friends. She was speechless by this, then told me I didn't have any choice. I told her I did and she decided we'd talk about it more later. The next time I was at the old family home with dad for his mid-week days off, I told him that mom was moving to Colorado and asked if I could move in with him. He seemed surprised that I'd be willing to leave mom, but at the same time saw it as a feather in his cap if I did move back to the house full-time, thus 'choosing him over her'. I didn't care about the politics of it, I just didn't want to get stranded in another new town with no friends as when we'd first moved to the apartment town, this time over a thousand miles away from any other place to stay.

Knowing that my earlier bluff of moving in with dad was now a true option, I affirmed with mom that it was what I'd be doing. She came up with a compromise. I would move to Colorado and help her settle in, then, if I still wanted, I could fly back and live with dad for the school year. I reluctantly agreed and, soon after, packing began. I have no idea what Joe had to say when he heard the news, but it turned-out mother had a plan...

We had one day between the end of school and the moving van to make sure everything was packed up. My mother had convinced my not as older brother to fly back to New England and trade off making the drive with her. In reality he did all the driving. Most all of our belongings went into the moving van except for the small black & white T.V. and two sleeping bags which ended up in the car with me, my brother, our mother, and the luggage crammed into the trunk and the floor of the back seat. I had the back seat, itself, though with no place to put my feet, I osculated between sitting sideways across the seat with my legs stretched out, or lying on my side on the seat with my legs tucked in... For the next four days.

While we didn't have time for sight seeing during the trip, we did stop briefly at a Great Lake's beach with its tall sand dunes. Then later in the trip, once mother was settled into the motel, my not as older brother took me to see a new movie. It was 'R' rated and it was science fiction! And it blew my mind: Alien. Having the chance to see the movie made the otherwise endless days on the road worth while.

Mother had my brother go apartment hunting for her the month before while she was still in New England and he was in Denver. From those he saw and recommended, my mother had picked a two bedroom apartment that wasn't available until the first of July. Thus with about a week to kill, we spent our first night in Colorado at Denver which allowed my brother a chance to check on his apartment and have a night to sleep in his own bed. We'd found a motel nearby and I stayed behind and had the room to myself while mother and brother went to see his apartment. When he lead her back, him now in his own car and mother following in her car, she was thankful that she had decided not to live in Denver itself after her brief experience driving in it.

The following day he lead us to the interstate highway and off to mom's new home town. With the apartment unavailable, we already had reservations at a motel where mom and I would stay for a few days. We took a drive to where the new apartment was located and a brief trip downtown before my brother returned to Denver and we stayed behind. This motel had a pool and, more importantly, there was no one interested in using it; so I spent much of my first two days using the pool for hours on end. Given my 'situation', I kept my shirt on in the pool and would grab a towel from the side of the pool to bunch up and hang on the back of my neck and over my chest whenever I got in or out of the water to keep things hidden. But, it wasn't a big problem, as I said, no one else was using the pool. This was my last time in a pool or doing any swimming for that matter. And the only reason I did this for just the first two days is because I was hit with a massive case of altitude sickness.

Crushing pain in my head and chest, I winced with every breath. Had I known I needed to get used to the altitude ahead of time, I wouldn't have spent the first two days holding my breath in the pool. Now it was time to pay the piper and I lay in bed for the whole following day and most of the next. By the fifth day my chest and head no longer hurt badly and I could walk around again without leaning on the walls and furniture. Mother went off to see if the apartment would be ready in time and left behind some money so I could walk to the local supermarket and get some food.

Up till then I had known two supermarkets during my lifetime, the branch and the much larger main store that Joe owned, but the store up the street from the motel was about half again the size of both of those stores combined. I roamed the endless aisles and ducked oversized shopping carts being pushed by the bustling people inside. I finally found the deli section and discovered that I had to take a number rather than wait in line, another first for me. With no menu, I had no idea what to ask for once my number was called and the girl had to lead me through how to order a sandwich: Bread, meat, cheese? Back at the motel I found I had enough sandwich to last me two meals. Even though not in Denver itself, there was a different scale to life in Colorado that I would have to get used to.

Finally, the new apartment was ready and we left the motel to move into the empty rooms. We had a black & white T.V., two sleeping bags, and our luggage as the Summer commenced.

impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop 

Living Arrangements

40

What's a mother to do when her plans don't pan out?

The apartment had always been temporary, but not in the way it turned out to be. By Spring of Nineteen Seventy-Six, I had settled into the big bedroom and I had even gotten a modular shelving system which you could choose how it fit together. I used one section for a bed table between the two beds and the rest made a blocky pyramid shape for the far wall of the room which finally left no more empty looking areas. By May, mother rewarded me with a small black & white television set for the room and it fit nicely on the top shelf of the unit. The following month, I discovered the trick of the 'selfless gift' of the T.V.: It would now be her room.

Her three pieces of furniture were moved into the area where the big round throw rug had been while mine was moved piece by piece into the now empty smaller bedroom. The bed had to once again be stacked into bunk beds with my pieces of furniture squirreled into the handful of available corners. She kept the shelving system and the T.V. though I needed to clear my stuff and put it into boxes as I didn't have shelves in the smaller room. After a year of slowly expanding my belongings to fit in the large room, my stuff now seemed cramped in the other room whereas mother's, which had just fit the smaller room, now looked lost in the large room.

Mother explained that we were doing this because Joe, the store owner, was separating from his wife and would soon be moving in with us and bring his son, William. William would be taking the lower bunk of my bed and the larger bedroom would soon be full because of Joe's stuff when he moved in. Mother also bought a large brown faux leather recliner for the living area of the first floor and the original third chair of the living room set was pinched into the smaller bedroom with me. It was nice having a club chair in my bedroom as I had never had one before, but it now meant a bit of careful maneuvering when crossing the room.

In July, mother arranged a play date for William and me which was the rare time I had seen him outside of school since second grade five years earlier. But this play date was nothing more than Joe arriving at the apartment with William; mom and I got into his car and we drove to an out of town burger stand for lunch. Once done, we returned to the apartment where mom and Joe talked downstairs while she had me show William around upstairs. About a half hour later Joe left with William and that was the last of it. She later told me that Joe's wife wouldn't let him leave without taking William and mother didn't want to deal with William. I suspect in reality Joe had never signed-up for the deal and mother set-up the lunch date saying it was at my request. Once we'd been sent upstairs, mother had lobbied Joe about how well the lunch went and how he should move in, and he declined. To me, that theory makes more sense. But it is just my theory.

For New Years Nineteen Seventy-Seven, mother decided it was silly having the large room mostly empty to herself and me stuffed into the smaller room and we swapped back to how it had been, only this time I had the chair in the large room along with the rest of my original two bed layout. I also got to keep the television.

While it was nice to have the black & white T.V. in my bedroom, mother was so rarely home during the early evenings or Sunday afternoons that I had plenty of time to watch the color set on the main floor, so it sat mostly unused in the large bedroom until my thirteenth birthday. For that year's twenty dollars and my additional ten, I discovered a video game console I could afford at a capital city department store and snatched it up. Featuring 'Pong' and the single player version called 'Squash', it also had a plastic gun and you could do target practice. The pong dot would wander around the dark screen and you'd aim and press the trigger button and if the light sensor in the gun saw white, you scored a point. When Luke would visit my house we'd play this and he marveled at how good I was at it as I most always scored. In reality, I had accidentally found out that aiming at the white wall behind the T.V. worked just as well as aiming at the dot, and the white wall didn't move around either. I'm so evil.

If Joe wasn't going to move in, mother decided to make the apartment his full service retreat away from home. Specifically, as the branch grocery store was open Friday evenings, mother would take the evenings off to prepare dinner for 'us'. Since moving into the apartment, I had been on my own for food preparation, the only exceptions being when other family members had visited during the holidays. But now mother was actually making dinner for 'us', meaning her & Joe... and I was welcome to join. The most common two meals were fondue, where we could stick various small bits of food into boiling oil or melted cheese, and 'True Italian Spaghetti'. For the latter, mother explained that Joe had told her that true Italian spaghetti sauce was very chunky with clumps of vegetables and chicken and so she made that for him. These dinners lasted for about six months, then Joe started to find excuses not to come anymore. Mother would prepare the meal and we'd sit and wait for Joe to come. Then she'd call to find out when he'd get there and then a couple hours later we'd eat without him. She stopped making Friday night dinners after three weeks of this and returned to 'work' on those evenings instead.

We settled back to the old practice of once a month for Fridays, Joe would take us to the burger stand out of town. Over the four years I'd see this stand expand, starting out as a box with two serving windows in front and a couple of picnic tables to the side. First they made a back room with tables and chairs protected from the weather where you could have something fancy like burger patties without the buns as if it were therefore a ground steak dinner on a paper plate. Then a true dining room was built in where the picnic tables had been. Half high walls and a roof, it was enclosed with windows all around making a rather nice space with full dinner tables and a really expanded menu featuring items other than burgers and fries. By the time the four years had come to an end a chain had bought them out and it was officially a full service restaurant. Once that happened, Joe no longer wanted to go there, perhaps because it was too public, and we instead went to a dank greasy spoon room attached to a small interstate highway side-motel. Obviously intended for truckers, I wondered if this was where mother and Joe had been coming too over the years when 'staying at the store late to count the money'. Given the atmosphere, I soon bowed out of joining these dinners and any pretense of being a 'family' disappeared.

Actually, as a side note, during those four years the kids in the apartment town took it as 'common sense' that I was Joe's illegitimate kid. This impression was enhanced when my Iroquois nose hump sprouted in my preteens and they took it to be an Italian nose. It turns out generations of Native American actors had made a living playing Italian mobsters in the movies and on the small screen.

By the Spring of Nineteen Seventy-Nine, mother had realized that this was all that her life with Joe would be and she started house hunting. There were a few I could see living in, but mother compared the color-painted or wall-papered walls of those houses to the bright white walls of the apartment and found them wanting. And in fact, she found her life of the past few years wanting and prospective future as well.

Suddenly, I was told we were moving to Colorado.

impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop 

Trashed

39

Three kids playing games on the school's computer: What could possibly go right?

Getting a note from my math teacher to use the school's computer was no problem given how much I had impressed him. Then I followed the example of Jonathan and Luke as they entered the Auditorium at the start of Directed Study and handed their notes to one of the monitoring teachers. I did the same and we turned around and left. The school's computer was in the 'teacher's lounge' on one of the tables, so we got to take the back entrance to the 'office area' of this open concept school and settle down. While Jonathan and Luke were a little wary of a third wheel joining them, I soon proved my worth.

This desktop unit, then referred to as a 'microcomputer', was the TRS-80 Model I with a built-in Level I BASIC programing language and four kilobytes of memory. TRS stood for Tandy Radio Shack, the corporation and chain of stores which sold it, but lovers and detractors of the computer line just called them Trash-80s. This unit was missing a very important item: A cassette recorder. The only means of persistent storage for the computer, without it meant we would spend the period typing in a game program out of a magazine and, with luck, have the last ten to twenty minutes of the period to actually play it. Often, though, the process of typing it in manually meant typos leaving the program to crash or worse play oddly leaving us to wonder if that was how the game had been intended to work or not. When on their own, Jonathan and Luke would trade off who read the computer code out of the magazine and who typed it in. With me there, we now had someone who could watch the screen and verify that what was told was what was typed in. This lead to a far better chance of having a game we could play once we were done.

And play we did.

Still most of our time was spent looking at the gibberish of the computer code and typing it. After several months of this I started to notice patterns in this gibberish that seemed to correspond to what happened once the game was running. With this in mind, I encouraged small variations as we typed in the code of a familiar program and sure enough they resulted in a desired change in the game appearance and flow. By the fourth quarter of our Freshmen school year, I felt I was now familiar enough with the patterns of gibberish to write my own game. One of the nights I was at my father's house, I pulled out the family's old manual typewriter and started typing away. A few pages later I had completed what I intended to be a tank battle game not unlike the Atari game of the time.

The next day, rather than type in a program from a magazine, I convinced Jonathan and Luke to let us use the program I'd typed up at home. After a little hesitation they agreed and we spent the next two thirds of the period typing it in and the last third trying to debug it as it didn't run at all. After this failure, I decided not to subject Jonathan and Luke to another lost period and sought out other times during the school day when I could squeeze in a little one on one time with the machine. But those opportunities were fleeting.

A few months after the start of the school year, my new friend Ed had disappeared. He was no longer on the bus or at High School and I went to his apartment to see what was up. His parents told me he was gone and they didn't know to where. About six months later I bumped into him at the combination drug store/diner in the apartment town and asked where he'd been. Turned out he'd been 'thrown out of house' by his family, but now had a job and was living with another family. He asked what I'd been up to and I told him about the school year, but more excitedly about using the school's computer. It turned out the family he lived with had one and they didn't know what to do with it. In short order I was invited over to their house to show them how to type in games out of magazines and discovered they had something I had never seen before: A manual. They also had the cassette recorder so once we got the games typed in and running, I figured out how to save them allowing the owner to load-up and play a game on it whenever he wanted. In return for this, I was allowed a couple hours each weekend to play with their computer on my own.

I used this time to read the manual and tryout the examples it had. The TRS-80 Level I computer manual was essentially a cartoon book with a stick figure that talked about the basics of computer programming and language structure. Soon the gibberish we'd been typing into the computers for the past many months started to have meaning and the structures of the code were the patterns I'd started to see. With this new information, I was ready to review my tank battle program and get it working, but looking at it I realized that I really had no clue what I was doing at the time I typed it up and tossed it aside.

My chance to use this family's computer also fizzed after a couple months when I showed-up at the house to find that Ed was gone. No news where he had gone to. As I'd been so helpful in the past few weeks, they let me have one more chance to use their computer for a few hours, though after that I should find another place to go to...

But where was another place? While I had money stuffed away in the bank, it was no where near enough to buy my own Trash-80. So, I'd have to find a place where the computers were sitting around and not being used. It occurred to me a Radio Shack store was the obvious place, but with one at the capital city twenty miles away, or the other one twenty miles west of my family's home town, there seemed little hope. And the end of the school year was here, so access to the school's computer would soon be gone, too.

As it turned out, I would be gone as well.

impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop 

To The Nines

38

And so we reach High School. Renown for many things, in my case it would take my life in a totally unexpected direction.

The teachers kept classes light for the first Freshman week as, I assume, they thought we might be experiencing a little shock. Gone were lockers, in were 'cubicles'. No, not the office kind, more like cubbyholes. The majority of the school was an 'open concept' floor space with these large boxes on casters. These five foot high boxes divided the 'hallways' from the 'classrooms', closed on three sides with the fourth side an open face; this side had the ten inch by ten inch by two foot deep cubbyholes and students got to pick whichever empty one they found when they first started. Pete, Jonathan, Van, Luke, and I found a group of free cubicles in the same box that we claimed as our own. It turned out that Pete's elusive upperclassman friend from the preceding three years had his cubicle in this location so he became a fixture in our lives for the next three years.

The entry hallway was lined with coat hooks, though no one ever used them, likely due to the fact that they were so far away from the cubicles, they seemed a little exposed to hanky-panky while students would be in class. Actually, these coat hooks had a long shelf above them and it left me wondering if perhaps these were the original replacements for the student lockers when the building first opened a decade earlier: A coat hook and a length of shelf above for all your needs! The entry hallway was lined by cinder block walls which divided the classroom open floor from the auditorium and cafeteria. The school office door lay halfway down the cinder block wall to the classroom space, it held the walled-off Principal and Vice Principal offices, two walled off meeting rooms to the other side, and the office staff in an open space between. This open area continued as, behind the office staff was the 'Teacher Lounge' area which held a couple tables, the school's walled off dark room, and circling around in a 'U' a line of teacher desks making a row to the back door of the office area which lead back to the entry hallway. This administration section was sandwiched between the two typing classrooms on one side and the two foreign language classrooms on the other.

The center of the open classroom floor was the 'Resource Center', essentially an open space library with two walls to either side for ceiling high book cases, additional book cases were like elbow high 'X's spread-out across the area with a sprinkle of tables between. Our group claimed one of these tables and it became our pseudo homeroom as the High School didn't actually use the homeroom concept before classes as Middle School had.

'Classrooms' were just a chunk of the floorspace with the cubicle wall behind, and thin, portable dividers to either side. At the far end was the chalkboard mounted on the exterior cinder block wall. Actually, that whole wall was a never-ending string of chalkboards between sliding glass doors. The glass doors were the only source of natural light and acted as the emergency exits, sometimes they would be open on fair weather days, though only very rarely. How much of a chalkboard versus glass-door mix each classroom got was based on how wide the space between the dividers, thus some 'classrooms' were wider and used for the more in-demand classes, and some were only ten feet apart for the smaller classes. These spaces had the same sort of right-handed desktop attached to chair as Middle School had featured. Some of the the dividers between classrooms included its own built in chalkboard allowing that 'room' to face a different direction.

At the far end of the open class area were the science classrooms boxed between one of the Resource Center's bookshelf walls and the secondary entry hallway's cinder block wall. Open area class rooms made up the Science Rooms on the far side of which was a built-in Science experimentation space with equipment cabinets and lab tables. On the other side of the secondary entry hallway was the gymnasium.

I actually knew this entire building very well already. As I had often taken Pete with me, during our elementary school years, on some of the days my father took me to the ski area during the vacant off season, Pete had once taken me to this building when his father went there to catch-up on paperwork when it was closed. We'd had the run of the place and explored all the nooks and crannies. Then the preceding Summer before my Freshman year, my mother found there were free community enrichment classes being held at the High School building during the evenings. My mother took the art class and brought me along. As the class was for adults, though, I used my time there to reacquaint myself with the building. The Art Room was behind the Auditorium with a Drafting Room next to it, then next to the Auditorium was the Metal shop and Wood shop sharing the same open space. The only walled classroom, the music room, filled the gap on the far side of the Auditorium before returning to the Cafeteria Space.

Once here as a student, I took my Freshmen classes. 'Social Studies' was very successful. 'English' was with the father of the twin girls of our grade, it went well on the whole. 'Science' suffered from there being too much hand written material versus tests, but I muddled through. For one period a day was 'Directed Study', essentially the students were to sit in the auditorium chairs and do classwork; without a flat surface attached to these seats, and the dim lighting of the space, it was neither good for writing or for reading, so I didn't see what the point was. I had this with Jonathan and Luke and the only challenging part of this period was finding out how much visiting we could get away with before a roving teacher noticed and scolded us.

'Wood Shop' I pretty much completely wasted. The first class of the morning, it turned out Mathew had signed up for 'Metal Shop'. Our projects for both Wood and Metal shop were self selected and the instructors would help and provide insight and guidance as requested, but otherwise left us alone. The metal lathes were next to the wood lathes and Mathew was doing a project requiring the lathe so I chose a project placing me at the wood lathe. As an echo to our original sixth grade Social Studies class, we spent much of the time visiting. Though we did end-up finishing some projects, in my case a pillar base for a wooden chessboard my eldest brother had made for me and, once that was done, to have an excuse to still be at the lathing area, I chose to do a bowl.

Unlike the pillar, which had been held by the lathe machine at both ends as it spun, the wood for the bowl had to be mounted to a screw-on plate, then that plate screwed onto the lathe head. I had apparently not screwed the plate tightly enough to the lathe on one day, it held on fine while spinning, but when I shut it off, the machine stopped but the bowl continued to spin, unscrewing itself as it did. Thoughts of the bowl completely unscrewing and either zipping across the shop floor and hitting someone, or just bouncing off the floor and breaking my work, lead me to stop it manually. As my hands were full with tools, I panicked and used the skin of my left wrist to brake the edge of the spinning bowl. It worked, but left a large wound on my arm and I was off to the nurse's office. Second degree friction burns now adorned my wrist, about two inches wide and three inches long, it made a glorious scar and provided me with a conversation piece for years to come!

Mathew was kind of cagey as to what his project was, though it was made up of many component parts that took two thirds of the course to finish. The teacher could grade him as the parts he had made were well milled & detailed, but he too was curious what it would be once all put together. It included a long metal rod with a grip pattern at one end and screw treads at the other, a sphere with one large screw hole and many other smaller screw holes in it, and then a series of conical pieces with sharp points at their ends and screw threads at their bases. It was done by third quarter and Mathew fully assembled it to reveal it was a Spiked Mace. Essentially, a Medieval hand weapon. Once the metal shop teacher saw it, he was afraid what the administration would say if they found out he'd let a student spend the course making a weapon and getting good grades for it. He had Mathew sneak it home and had him spend the rest of his time in shop class under a more directed course of work.

Oh, yes. 'Intro To Algebra', the forbidden class. Also with Mathew, it was taught by Pete's father, Zack Hatch. And it didn't have a dedicated classroom space and thus was in whatever empty space there was each quarter during the course of the school year. Once in the back of the auditorium where the semi balcony area also served as three classroom spaces with chairs featuring fold-up writing surfaces. One quarter it was in one of the open area class rooms and then two quarters in a science class room. Starting out in the Science classroom, Mathew and I sat side by side at the back of the room and the stage was set for visiting rather than paying attention. But as it turned out Zack was a very engaging teacher and thoughts of visiting were soon pushed aside by the interesting subject matter. Zack had been warned that he would need to 'guide me' to a different math class after I failed the first quarter. Grades were based purely on test results and in my case that meant I was at the top of the class after the first few weeks. I'm not bragging or inflating my ego here, it's just what Zack announced to the class after he noticed my steady stream of perfect scores on both expected tests and pop quizzes. Rather than consider moving me to an easier math class, he was wondering if I should be in the 'Advanced Algebra' class after the first quarter. We talked about it but, as it wouldn't be with him, for all I knew the teacher of the other class might be requiring vast quantities of hand written home work. I didn't tell Zack that was why I didn't want to change classes, but he accepted my decision and told me that students of 'Intro To Algebra' had the chance to skip a level and go straight to 'Geometry' the following year if the teacher gave a recommendation. He was certain I would earn that recommendation by the end of the year. And I did.

After the first quarter of Directed Study in the Auditorium, my two friends Jonathan and Luke stopped coming. I finally asked them what they were doing one day and they said they were getting notes from their math teacher in 'Advanced Algebra' to use the school's computer. Really? I asked, What do you do?

Oh, they played games on it.

I thought: I could do that!

impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop 

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

16

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

impatient? Paper, eBook
 help me break even: Shop