How did I come to be such a grumpy old curmudgeon? I have thought about this question endlessly since I retired a year or so ago because at one point I thought the point of this blog would be to explain it. But this morning I suddenly had the answer: it’s because the world of my childhood was so rich and wonderful. I am bitter because that world is long gone and can never be recovered. “OK, boomer,” you say! While I began life at the very tail end of the baby boom, I eventually threw in with the so-called X-ers. Call me an “X-Boomer,” I guess.

Over time I will be telling many dark stories about myself and my family, but I think to fully grasp the context, to help you eventually come to see the world Kirk-wise, I need to start with just how wonderful and amazing my family actually was. My parents were an unlikely pair: my mom from an upper middle-class, conservative Catholic family, my father from working-class, uneducated parents. They never would have met but for a fluke. My mother was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, pledging Delta Zeta like her mother before her. An awkward, left-handed product of Catholic schools, she was tightly wrapped and shy. She looked like Jackie Kennedy, fair-skinned, tall, slender, with a long straight nose and intense brown eyes that could bore through you.

This is the story my mom told me of how they met. My dad was a tough kid from the valley, six months younger, five foot six, with olive skin. He had a poor, brutal childhood but, being gifted, had become a BMOC at the state college, popular, and a bit of a party animal. He was a great story-teller, singer, and comedian. He and some of his friends decided one weekend to crash a sorority at Berkeley, a three-hour drive away, just for a laugh. They rolled up uninvited to find a group of elegant young ladies having tea. At first they were flummoxed to have a group of valley bad-boys at their doorstep, but against their better judgment they invited them in. What followed was three hours of hilarious conversation and flirting. My mom told me that she couldn’t stop laughing at everything my dad said. For her he was an explosion of newness, flipping the script on life as she had known it up to that moment. She knew immediately she had found what was missing, and wanted more of it.

Her parents had a hard time accepting him, and the family they started always stood somewhat outside the fold. For starters they were very liberal. My mom’s parents were uptight Republicans, defended Nixon until they day they died. My dad’s adoptive father was a card-carrying Communist. Literally: he once pulled out his wallet and showed me his membership card from the Communist Party of Detroit. He was involved in the labor movement there in the late twenties. Needless to say, there were only a couple of times the two families ever mingled, one of which was my parents’ wedding. I have no memories of the two sets of grandparents breathing the same air. I didn’t even think it was odd, growing up. Nevertheless, my parents were devout Catholics, which explains why I am one of six children (the fourth). Actually, after the third, my mother, who was having increasing complications with each pregnancy, was told not to have any more. But she tells me getting pregnant was impossible to avoid, and we are all separated in age by two years or less. After the sixth she told my father, Catholic Church be damned, he was either getting a vasectomy or they were done having sex. He chose the vasectomy, which he never regretted.

We were a big, noisy, happy family. My dad was a well-known figure about the small farm town in which we lived, as he was not only a teacher at the high school. He had a column in the local paper, was a radio DJ on weekends, and had a nightclub act with a fellow teacher in which they sang and told jokes. My mom told me more than once how crestfallen she was the first time she saw the Smothers Brothers, because she believed my dad and Joey were better, and had now missed their chance at fame. It was the same act, according to her. So wherever I wandered in my home town I was immediately recognized as one of his kids and treated like a celebrity. We would pile into the Volkswagen bus, seats removed to allow room for the camping gear on which we kids would lie, and drive to the coastal redwoods to bivouac. We had a large German expedition tent with multiple rooms. People would gather and watch in wonder as we set it up: you’ve never seen anything like it, it was like a small house. It even had small plastic windows with curtains, and a screened-in area large enough to fit a folding table to sit around. My dad would play the ukulele and we would all sing. A memorable sight, to be sure.

My dad taught speech and drama and American lit at the high school. I remember every week my parents would put on their coats and head out the door saying, “We’re going to the Shakespeare Club.” It never occurred to me that that was anything unusual for parents to do. They were always in a good mood when they returned. Often my dad would gather us kids about his feet and read to us for hours. He was a pro. And it would be Mark Twain, Damon Runyon, Eudora Welty. These names were household words to us. My favorite was when he took several sessions to read us The Hobbit. He and Joey started the drama program at the high school, staging several productions such as “The Drunkard,” “Our Hearts Were Young and Gay,” and a full-scale musical, “Oliver!” I still counted my age in mid single digits when we had many cast parties at our house. I delighted in capturing the attention of the teenage girls, and they would dote over me. I crafted my own comedy act where I was “Monty Kangaroo.” I would hop around and interact with the guests, never breaking character until I made my exit. Ridiculous to think of now, but I took it very seriously at the time!

To this day I am told by people who remember our family in the 1960s how magical it was, how much they loved my parents and, by extension, us too. Our childhood friends always wanted to come to our house to visit as there was always something interesting going on, much laughter. And when the holidays came and our cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents arrived from the San Francisco Bay Area, why, even our 3500 sq ft Victorian house and its quarter acre lot could barely hold everyone. I wish I had a time portal through which to view it all again.