Category: Audio

Includes an audio version.

Radical Acceptance

Tomorrow I will resume work on the thread I have been doing about “From Boom to Bust,” but on this day I feel I should take a moment to offer a few reflections on sobriety. No one asked me to give a speech, but it’s my blog and I have the prerogative to say a few words here if I want to.

Today happens to be Saint Patrick’s Day. It is also the thirty-ninth anniversary of the day I decided to try sobriety one last time. This morning began as all mornings do, fixing a cup of coffee for myself to have during my first chess session of the day. My wife, Sarah, gave me a little squeeze of appreciation as she congratulated me for making it through another year sober. I smiled. A few moments later my phone buzzed with a text message from my ex-wife, Laura, also offering a celebratory sentiment. This year we will have been divorced for thirteen years, having been married for twenty-two years before that. She is the mother of my biological children. I thought to myself that it’s nice that we still wish each other well. My mother sent me a “birthday” card every year for as long as she was able. Reflecting on all this made me think, “Wow, what does it say when there is a general consensus that the world is a better place just because I don’t drink anymore?” I guess my drinking must have been pretty bad.

I came-to that morning of March 17, 1985, which also happened to be a Sunday, after a crazy binge that began Thursday after work. There will be future posts with more details about how I had hardly drawn a sober breath for the previous eight months, but suffice it to say for now that what made this Sunday morning different from the previous ones was not the fact that I was contemplating quitting drinking. What made it different was that for some reason I realized that it was a loop: I had been having these thoughts every Sunday for weeks now. I would resolve to take a break, if only to clear my head and get a little perspective. But by Monday I would forget, and find myself drinking again as if my resolution had never happened. This had been going on for weeks, and only on this occasion did I have the mental clarity to realize I was stuck. Eight months earlier I had come to a point of radical acceptance of my fate. I was moving out of the apartment I shared with my then girlfriend because my new love interest wouldn’t have sex with me as long as I was living with someone else. Why? In her words, “because I’m decent.” That left me no choice but to get my own place. As I was leaving, my girlfriend tearfully asked me why I was being so cruel. I looked at her intensely and said, “I’m doing this to protect you. I’m dying, and there’s not a damn thing you or I can do about it. I’m getting out of your life to spare you.” In that moment I had every intention of dying drunk, and I knew it wouldn’t be more than a year before it happened.

My parents had also reached a point of radical acceptance. They hadn’t heard from me in months, but they had a sense of what was going on. Divorced for years, both of them were attending Al-Anon meetings in their respective towns. My dad had twenty-one years of sobriety at that point, but his biggest challenge had become what to do when your child is dying of the same disease. They prayed for me and had their friends praying for me also. Both braced themselves for the seemingly inevitable bad news that could arrive at any time, probably from a third party, that I had met my end. It was a dark time.

But that morning was different, somehow. The miracle arrived in the form of a question: what if I am wrong? I had acquiesced in the knowledge that it was my fate to die drunk. I had stopped fighting it. I was embracing it. I had burned all my bridges and was just trying to go for all the gusto I could on my way out. People I didn’t even know were stopping me and offering warnings and advice, it was so clear from my behavior that I was going to flame out. It must have been sad to know me then. But that morning, for some reason, it occurred to me that maybe I was wrong. Maybe I wasn’t meant to die drunk. What if I was supposed to recover? That was a terrifying thought, because every aspect of my life was a complete shambles. To try to turn things around now was going to be incredibly difficult. Even just my financial situation was astonishingly hopeless. I had just lost my latest girlfriend, I was about to lose my job, and it seemed like no one at all was buying my horseshit anymore. I had run out of cash and had only enough in my pocket to buy a pack of cigarettes or a six-pack, but not both. When I realized that I had been vainly trying to stop for several weeks and forgetting each time, I realized that this might be my very last chance.

As I sat there contemplating the question of which fate I might be destined for, another question hit me. What if it’s a lie? What if the one thing that has been making my life a little bit bearable, the one thing that gave me a moment or two of relief from the hatred I felt for life and for myself was actually causing all the problems? What if instead of being my one true friend, alcohol was actually what was killing me? If that were true, I owed it to myself to at least try to get sober one last time. Ugh. But if it were true, and I were to pick up that next drink and begin the slippery slide to oblivion knowing what I knew, it would be very embarrassing, to say the least. What a fool I would have been! So, that’s how it started. All these years later, I have still not picked up that next drink. It turns out that it was not my destiny to die drunk after all.

I brought my phone to my wife to show her the text from my ex-wife, and made a wry comment about how bad my drinking must have been for everyone to celebrate the fact of my sobriety. But neither my current wife nor my ex-wife has ever seen me drink! Sarah said, “Well, it’s always been clear that your sobriety is very important to you, so I’m happy for you.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Of course it’s very important to me. It is the foundation of every good thing in my life, everything valuable thing about me as a person. Yes, it’s very important to me. Sometimes I mention to someone that I have been sober for a long time and they respond with, “You must be very proud of yourself!” No. I went back to college in my fifties, thirty years after I dropped out, and busted my butt over the next three years to graduate with a double major, summa cum laude. I am very proud of myself for that! But sobriety? I only feel gratitude for it. Grateful that I escaped the whirlpool and I don’t have to do that shit anymore. And I am grateful every single day that none of my kids has ever seen me drink. Very grateful, indeed.

I wrote a post a few years back called The Wisdom Prayer in which I talk about how pointless it is to accept anything that is not an actual fact. For example, for thirty years I accepted the “fact” that I had missed my chance, that it was too late to go back to college! People in recovery sometimes seem to elevate the idea of Acceptance into some kind of general principle, as if it is the key to everything. But like trying to use a screwdriver when what you need is a wrench, practicing “acceptance” in the wrong situation can keep you stuck in a victim mentality. In such situations what is needed is Courage, and to know that, you need Wisdom. But I want to share something, a fact which I have accepted as such all the way to the core of my being. When I think about all the things that could possibly happen to me — illness, bankruptcy, tragedy, horror — I am unable to imagine a situation that I couldn’t make worse by taking a drink. Honestly. That particular form of radical acceptance keeps me sober.

This is the first year I can remember where I haven’t had a single drinking dream. You know, the nightmare in which I am at some sort of social gathering walking around talking to people with a half-finished drink in my hand. I suddenly realize that I am drinking and wonder, how long have I been doing this? And in the dream I think back and realize that it has been happening for a while now, and that somehow I have lost my sobriety without even noticing. I take these dreams as a warning. In my youth (I was twenty-three when I took my last drink), whenever I would resume drinking after a few weeks or months it would happen without fanfare. No drama. I would just “forget” somehow that I wasn’t drinking. I have no doubt that if I were ever to start drinking again it would happen like that. Terrifying! But I haven’t had any of those dreams this year, thankfully, not even during the Annual Dreary Rehash. The past year has had it’s share of challenges — a couple of colonoscopies, people around me having mental and physical health challenges, financial stress, a sense of impending doom for Western Civilization — but I have a good life. I believe that as long as I am grateful every day for the gift of release from the horrors of alcoholic drinking, I will be fine.

Posted on by Kirk 1

From Boom to Bust (Part 8)

The last installment ended with a teaser about the next two years, and there will be a lot more detail and analysis in future posts. For the purposes of this thread, going from barely being a baby-boomer to fully joining Generation-X, I will start with a snapshot of how the two years ended. One August day I was sitting at the playroom table playing with the chess set. I think I had just finished a game with one of my brothers (“almost fifty-years-ago” is a long time to remember tiny details). I heard some commotion as people moved through the house from room to room. This big old Victorian house had a lot of rooms and most of them (all but two) had doors connecting them to multiple other rooms. For example, the “girls bedroom” had four doors, one leading to the middle living room, another to the dining room, another to the adjacent bedroom, and the fourth leading to the master bathroom. The playroom opened to two different bedrooms, the dining room, the laundry room, and the back bathroom. There were any number of potential paths through the house! I heard voices and footsteps making their way on one such path, people talking, more footsteps. Something was off, but I was locked into the fascination of what I was doing and was suppressing my growing sense of unease. Walt emerged from the boys bedroom and stood over me, my mom, sister and brother trailing behind. I looked up, flinching a little in preparation for whatever might be coming, but was shocked to see tears staining his face. I had never seen him like this — he had become a completely different person yet again. He seemed smaller, cowed like a contrite child. And then he did the weirdest thing: he stuck out his hand for me to shake, which I did, and through his tears he said, “I’m sorry.” As he walked away, someone whispered to me, “He’s leaving.” Mom had finally stood up and told him it was over.

Content Warning: This post contains a graphic depiction of domestic violence.

Victor Frankl in his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” describes the reaction of the prisoners when the Allies unlocked the gates of the concentration camp in which he was interred. They wandered out the gate into the forest, looked around a bit, then went back to their barracks. They couldn’t yet process the reality of the liberation they thought would never come. I was similarly in shock. In fact, all of us kids were showing clear signs of trauma, which had led my dad to ask his lawyer about beginning a custody challenge. But my mom had already begun to take control of the situation. To give Walt time to leave and to allow us to decompress, we were sent to spend a week at my dad’s. My eldest sister, who had previously gone to live with him, was now eighteen and a militant lesbian. She came at my mom’s request to stay with her in the interim, lest Walt return to cause trouble. It was decades later when I learned from her that she had borrowed a gun from a friend, just in case. So the consensus seems to be that the situation had become pretty scary.

On a lighter note, I want to tell you how my infatuation for baseball ended the previous year. There were three levels of little league: majors, minors, and California league, in order of skill level. My first year I was in California league (my team’s name was “Bakersfield”), but in my second year I was good enough to be on a minor league team, the Padres. So I guess we can say I was an intermediate player. I usually played right field or second base, although I do remember subbing at third base on occasion. I was once shocked by the speed of a line drive that came right up the third-base line. I caught it, but boy did my palm burn from the impact! I decided I preferred second base. Anyway, we were a pretty good team that year. Our hitting and fielding were strong, but our pitcher…he was the head coach’s grandson and had a love for baseball that exceeded his talent. He was a real pitcher: he could throw fastballs, change-ups, curves, and sliders. The one thing he couldn’t do was throw the ball over the plate. Every single inning it seemed the bases were loaded with runners who had been “walked.” If only we could find a way to get our other players into the game! So one day at practice, in despair, the coach let each player on the team take a turn at pitching. I had no idea about fancy aerodynamic techniques that required putting spin on the ball, but I could throw hard, fast, and straight. All those hours throwing balls against the back steps finally paid off, I guess. So I became the new pitcher! I met someone later who remembered playing against me, and he said, “Oh, I remember you! I loved coming up to bat against you, because you would throw it straight over the plate. I could always hit it!” At least I wasn’t walking people. And when they did hit my pitches, which was often, it created a chance for the rest of the team to deploy their skills, which were very good — so good that we found ourselves in the championship game at the end of the season! Sadly, it all ended in a Charlie Brown moment when I had to be pulled out during the game because for some mysterious reason I just couldn’t throw straight and we ended up losing the game. It was weird. Only later did it occur to me that playing for hours the previous day in a neighbor’s swimming pool was the cause. It was something we all knew not to do the day before a game, but I had forgotten all about it! It’s so sad to think that I was on the verge of being a hero, and wound up being the goat. After that I aged out of little league and was not good enough to continue to the next level. But by that time I was discovering my musical talent, which changed everything.

During the two years of my mom’s marriage to Walt our world was sharply bifurcated into two irreconcilable realms. My dad had become a laid-back, west coast, “enlightened” male. (The pants-down spankings had ended when he moved up to Washington for grad school.) He and his wife didn’t have a television, but did have a nice stereo and a collection of classical, folk, and jazz albums that we could listen to around the fire. I remember him smiling through his beard as he put on his apron to cook his classic eggplant stew, a recipe he found in Sunset Magazine. During the summer we would walk through a redwood grove to get to the edge of the Russian River a quarter mile away from their house, hanging out on a patch of sand where the little creek fed into the river. Directly across from us was a famous nude beach where dozens of naked hipsters would peacefully relax to the sound of bongos or guitars, the smell of weed often wafting in the air. My dad, stepmom, and sister would routinely skinny dip too, and we younger kids who didn’t live there all the time were free to join in if we wished. Family nudity in that setting never seemed awkward or uncomfortable to me, but it would have been unthinkable in the context of the rest of the extended family. The tone at my mom’s house was utterly different. Walt was a bit of a country bumpkin. He had no taste or sophistication of any kind. Whereas my dad would play the ukulele and sing Woody Guthrie songs, Walt could perform only one song: “How Great Thou Art,” a plodding, cringey, hymn. Whereas my dad could entertain a large audience to thunderous applause, whenever Walt performed his song people winced, either from the forced baritone of his untrained voice, or from the forced emotional display of his performative Christian faith. Because let me tell you: in spite of being a minister, that man was a spiritual pygmy. (Oops, no offense to actual pygmies, who no doubt possess authentic indigenous spirituality.)

One of the many things I used to love about professional baseball was the singing of the National Anthem before the game, with all the pomp and ceremony. Back in those days the solo was not a performance, per se, but was for the purpose of leading the crowd in singing. That seems to have been long forgotten, as now-a-days pop stars often butcher it in a way that leaves the audience out. I loved singing along. The cultural divide between the two households can be seen in how my two father figures differed on their assessment of the suitability of The Star Spangled Banner as a national anthem. For Walt it was a sacred hymn, and to besmirch it would be equivalent to flag-burning or blasphemy. But my dad had a more nuanced view. He pointed out that the verses of the poem were damn-near unintelligible, and if one did do the work to parse them out, the meaning was mostly militaristic. Plus, it was set to the tune of an old drinking song that required a range of a full octave and a half, something only trained singers can handle well, and then only when it’s “in their key.” America the Beautiful, on the other hand, is a lovely yet sing-able melody with words that warm the heart with vivid images of the natural assets of our land. There was no comparison: the latter should really be the national anthem.

One day, when I was twelve, Walt was watching the beginning of a baseball game on TV and I stupidly decided to articulate my dad’s position on the question of the two songs right in the middle of the singing of the anthem. Bad timing, I guess, but it also poked at the heart of a war that had been quietly raging between them for influence over my soul. It seemed I might be choosing sides. Walt became very angry that I would have the audacity to question the unquestionable nobility of our sacred national song, and voices were raised as we argued back and forth. I finally blew up and shouted at the top of my lungs, “I HATE the national anthem!!!!” and ran from the front living room all the way through the middle living room, dining room, and girls bedroom to finally arrive at the boys room. I slammed the door behind me and threw myself on the bed, sobbing.

In fact I did not hate the National Anthem. I loved it dearly and I dreamed of being able to lead the crowd at a baseball game in the singing of it myself one day. (It so happens that I have, many times, as lead in a barbershop quartet, but I digress.) But that’s not really what any of this is about. This is about the war between “The United States” and “America,” between Pepsi and Coke, between Jazz and “Country” music, Blue and Red, my safe cool dad versus this toxic troglodyte in a tractor hat. Boom, boom, boom, boom, I heard heavy footsteps on the wood floors coming towards my room. The door burst open and he pounced, slapping and punching me about the head and shoulders. I tried to shield my head with my arms, so he pulled them down to my sides and straddled me to keep them pinned as he continued his assault. This was the most uncontrolled rage I had ever witnessed from him, and that is saying something. Of course, the whole family arrived right behind him. I remember my older sister, Karen, shouting, “get the hell off him, you asshole!” and my two brothers actually trying to pull him off. As usual, my mom stood there, helpless in the moment. But as I described at the beginning, she was ultimately able to get him out, and thus began our next chapter.

Me at eleven.

Posted on by Kirk 0

From Boom to Bust (Part 7)

From the ages of nine to twelve baseball played an increasingly important role in my life. I was certainly not great at it, but I spent many hours playing catch, three-flies-up, and throwing a tennis ball against the back steps to hustle for the rebound. I adored my mitt like a favorite pet. I would oil it carefully, massage it, and rub it against my face to revel in the leathery smell. I loved the sound of a baseball smacking into the pocket. The game of baseball is very structural: the time and space relationships, the way the various positions must coordinate to move the ball around the diamond, the partition of blocks of time into innings, the count of balls, strikes, and outs. I was fascinated by the relatively narrow space between pitcher and catcher, standing ready to intercept the ball with my bat if only I could read the speed and trajectory correctly. I loved the uniforms. I spent many hours attempting to draw pictures of myself in major league uniform. My art skills were limited, but I used pastel crayons to try to get the colors just right. I was obsessed with the Oakland A’s professional baseball team, who were heading towards three consecutive wins in the World Series.

My dad was not really into sports at that time and I only remember playing catch with him on a few occasions. But my mom’s new boyfriend and his son were very avid about baseball. Walt coached a little league team in the nearby town where they lived, and I think they won their league. Blaine, his nine-year-old son, was a gifted player. As we began to spend more time together, he and I (a year older) became inseparable. We played baseball, rode bikes, and got into the various kinds of trouble together to which boys that age are prone. We were buddies, and I ended up spending a lot more time with him than my two brothers. If I was ten, then my mom would have been forty, and Walt was in his fifties.

Here’s what I came to know about Walt’s biography. My mom met him in Al-Anon, as his second wife was an alcoholic. I’m not sure if she died or was just institutionalized, but it was unusual in 1971 for a man to be a single father. Actually, Walt had several children from his first marriage, which ended in divorce when he “took up with the town barfly,” according to my mom. He had been the pastor of a small Methodist church in a mountain town, and the scandal led to his “defrocking.” Everything I am telling you is what I heard from my mother, so I don’t know any other facts. Anyway, he was now teaching sixth grade P.E. at yet another small town to the west of us. Originally from rural Pennsylvania, Walt grew up on a farm in a large family, abandoned by his alcoholic father for the most part, except when he would swing by the farm and cause a ruckus. My mom said Walt’s dad was physically brutal, but Walt was very attached to him. Walt’s “glory days” were during the Second World War, where he served as a corporal in Patton’s Third Army. General Patton was his hero. And everything I am telling you is sprinkled with “red flags,” isn’t it?

Walt and Mom dated through my fifth-grade year, and things were actually really nice. He was teaching me baseball. One of the greatest things I ever experienced was piling into the car and going down to Oakland to see the A’s play in real life. We also took a trip to Disneyland! I was really looking forward to their wedding in the summer of 1972. But he and Blaine had their little quirks. Blaine seemed to have no conscience or empathy of any kind. Whenever he got in trouble he lied his way out of it with ease. Adults were like cartoon characters to him: if they got mad about something, he just laughed at them. He never seemed to feel guilty about anything! I was the opposite. One time we were visiting them at their small apartment and Walt was sitting at the table playing solitaire as Blaine and I watched. Walt smoked a pipe regularly and had chronic post-nasal drip that caused him to sniff frequently. He wore dentures, so he made frequent mouth noises whenever he was thinking, as if he were trying to get them into the right position. His balding head was glistening with sweat and he adjusted his horn-rimmed glasses repeatedly as he concentrated on the game, which Blaine and I were following closely. With nervous little flutters of his fingers, he would surreptitiously re-order the hidden cards whenever he ran out of moves. “You’re cheating!” Blaine chided. We both laughed as he did it again. “I’m not cheating!” he replied, bristling at the accusation. He did it again. Blaine and I were giggling, because his cheating was so obvious yet the way he went about it was so sneaky it seemed he actually thought he was getting away with something. He refused to cop to it and seemed to resent us trying to call him out.

So 1972 was a bit of a magical summer. As the wedding approached I felt euphoric at the prospect of being his step-son, and Blaine and I were going to be step-brothers! The wedding was held at the Protestant church we had been attending for the past year. A note about that: my little sister Jenny cried one Sunday morning, saying, “I don’t want to go the laughing church!” her voice trailing off into a whining sob. She cried and whined a lot in those days, and we teased her for it. But she had a point. We had grown up going to the Catholic Church for Mass every Sunday morning. To us it was The Church. Every non-Catholic church was a fake church. Real priests never married. At the Protestant church the minister had a wife and children. Fake priest! Fake Communion! Fake church! And whereas at the Catholic Church the congregation maintained the proper decorum of somber penitence, when the UCC minister would tell a funny story in his sermon, the people would laugh out loud like it was a comedy club. We kids were mortified by the sacrilege of it all. But we eventually got used to it, and even learned to enjoy the more relaxed and friendly atmosphere. The people there were really nice, actually. After the joyous nuptials, my mother and her fancy new hair-do headed off with Walt for a three-night honeymoon at a tacky motel a few miles away.

While they were gone my sister Karen, sixteen, was in charge. We did fine, although the house got a little untidy, as you might expect with six kids unsupervised for four days. What happened next is something none of us expected. The front door opened and my mom called out, “We’re home!” Footsteps were coming down the main hallway. Walt appeared, at least I thought it must be Walt, but he was unrecognizable. His eyes were rolling back in his head, his tongue was pressed against the backs of his teeth, curling to punctuate the snarl on his face. He began yelling obscenities and tossing things about, excoriating us for having trashed the house and shouting orders at us to clean up this and that. I was numb with terror as I attempted to comply. My mom stood there in shocked horror but said nothing. I guess the honeymoon was over.

There will be more threads detailing the next two years, but this is how it started. Many years later I asked my little sister Jenny what she recalled of those times, and she told me, “Nothing. I just remember feeling sick to my stomach for two years.” Unfortunately, I remember far too much.

My Mom, Walt, my brother Dan to the left and Blaine to the right. I am between them in age, but am not pictured.

Posted on by Kirk 0

From Boom to Bust (Part 6)

Before I continue my story I want to pause and check in. I thought it would only take about a half dozen posts but we are barely halfway there, so I apologize. It’s also taking more time for me to draft each post as we go, as my memories get very muddled in these middle years, and the topics are increasingly complex and painful. But if you are reading this I take it to mean that something here has grabbed your attention enough to get you this far, and I think if you stick with me you will be rewarded. I also want to say that, as dark and hideous as things are about to become, everything I write is from love, compassion, and gratitude. I have reached a place of healing and equanimity, and it is the hope that something I say will help someone somewhere that impels me to write. So, thank you.

My dad and his new bride relocated to the wine country along the Russian River, a couple hours away by car. We visited one weekend a month. He was a reliable ex-husband, always picked us up when scheduled and never missed a support payment. Unfortunately, it was not enough to survive on without my mom getting a job. She was a registered dietician and found work in institutional settings such as retirement homes and Meals-on-Wheels. We got by. She found friends in the Al-Anon groups she had been attending for years and spent many hours on the telephone “talking program.” She eventually started dating one of the men she met at a group.

Not long after my dad and step-mom established their cool hippie lifestyle in a rented cabin across from a Russian River resort, an incident occurred that shifted the configuration of our family significantly. My eldest sister, Stephanie (I have decided to start using first names), was a classic “problem child.” Famous for her outbursts of temper, anti-social antics, and frankly bizarre manners and beliefs, she could be forgiven for two reasons right off the bat. She was a genius, frankly. She told me once that beginning at the age of fourteen she read between one and four books a day. A. Day. And she remembered everything: author, publisher, year, table of contents. She could not only quote what they said, she could explain what was good and bad about it, and what others thought. Amazing. I remember one time not too many years ago discussing a rather thorny topic with her, one that not everyone even knows exists. She popped out with, “Well, have you read [such and such a book] by [three authors]? It’s from the early 1980s, so it’s a bit dated, but in the third chapter they talk about [such and so] and they say [this].” She was not showing off: it was truly helpful to my understanding of the subject. (She passed away in 2016 and I am tearing up writing this: I miss her so.) The other reason was that she was born with a congenital syndrome that required her to have dozens of surgeries over her lifetime. Developing cancer was a side-effect of the syndrome. She lived with post-metastatic cancer for twenty-five years before succumbing. So the second reason was that she had suffered a lot from this malady, and frankly just never really felt well.

In her early teens, Stephanie and my mother would get into arguments on a regular basis. It was like two cats fighting, because my mom was gifted as well. The volume would increase and the pitch would rise as their verbal kung-fu fights soared. On this particular occasion the crescendo was suddenly punctuated by a loud pop, a horrid gasp from my mom followed by a quiet “oh,” and then silence. We all gathered around to find my mom looking down at the floor, a hand held to her reddening cheek while Steph stood there panting, arms at her sides, staring as if she had just come out of a trance. Everyone was in disbelief. Had she slapped Mom across the face?!?! Inconceivable. Silently my mom made her way to the telephone a few steps away, sat down and dialed. “Ed?” she said. “You’re going to have to come pick up Stephanie. She’s going to have to live with you. I just can’t handle her anymore.” Stephanie never lived in our house again. My dad was good with her. It turns out his master’s degree was in working with at-risk youth, drop-outs who were working to finish their high school education. His libertine lifestyle and laid-back vibe turned out to be a good fit for her, since she was already hanging out with bikers and using drugs. He had only a few simple rules for her and she followed them.

So my middle sister, Karen, one year Stephanie’s junior, took on a lead role as Mom’s assistant as we continued muddling through as a single-parent household. In another year, my Mom would remarry, but that is for the next post.

Posted on by Kirk 0

From Boom to Bust (Part 5)

Now that I was back in my old public school things were better. It was a relief to be surrounded again by friends, and the teacher — who did run a tight ship — was nice and supportive. Yet I continued to have problems with school work. Over the next few years I found it difficult to complete assignments. Reading and writing were painful and slow. Math got progressively more confusing. By the time we got to estimating square roots in the sixth grade I gave up. It was becoming too vague and frustrating. Through the rest of elementary school my mom would return from every parent/teacher conference with the same refrain, “They said you could be getting the highest grades in the class if only you would apply yourself.” And yet, somehow, I did well on every test. What they didn’t know was that while I was often disrupting the class, talking to peers, and only rarely doing homework I was hearing and retaining everything that was said. I understood things well enough that when a test came, I would focus really hard on it and somehow came up with the right answers. My spelling was exceptional, even if my reading was slow.

Towards the end of third grade my mom signed me up for tee-ball. For my readers outside the USA, let’s say that tee-ball is just baseball, but instead of having a pitcher the kids hit the ball off a rubber tee. I had always been coordinated and athletic. I could throw, catch and hit a baseball. I was a fast runner and had quick reflexes. I should have been good. But I found myself stuck out in right field where they put the weaker players, and since there were no lights on the field where we played at sunset, I found it more and more difficult to follow what was happening in the fading light. One evening I was standing out in right field waiting for the kid to hit the ball. I saw him swing and — crack! — I saw the ball flying straight toward me. I began to run back to catch it, but suddenly it changed direction and flew off. It was a bird. The ball had actually gone to left field. My mom was watching me and realized she needed to get my eyes checked. Once I got glasses it hit me how nearsighted I had been for a while already. I was so excited to see that stars are actually pinpoints of light, not fluff balls! Perhaps this explains a little of my trouble in school: I couldn’t read the blackboard without glasses. No wonder I developed an auditory learning style. Even with glasses reading strained my eyes, and I had to get higher and higher prescriptions every year. I remember doing timed reading in sixth and seventh grades and my reading speed was half the class average. But my comprehension was near 100% and my vocabulary was at the college level. No one said it was dyslexia but…it was dyslexia.

My dad came home to visit over Easter break my fourth grade year and we had a big family meeting. Our parents explained to us that they weren’t going to be living together anymore, that when my dad finished school in a few months he would be getting an apartment in town and there would be two households. It actually sounded kind of fun, the way they told it, but my siblings were all crying. I didn’t understand why, so I said, “It sounds like it will be good to have two households, why are you all crying?” My middle sister, who always seemed to be plugged-in to whatever was going on (she is four years older than me) turned to me angrily and scolded, “Mom and Dad are getting a divorce!” Now I cried. I felt like a complete idiot. Of course that’s what it meant, why didn’t they just come out and say it? They were like that. They never fought in front of us. They thought it was “important to present a united front.” That left us all wondering though, why were they getting a divorce? It was decades before I received a clear answer from my dad, less than a year before his death.

That summer my dad got his own place, a small apartment on the north side of town. And there was someone living there with him: a lovely young woman some fifteen years his junior whom he had met in school up in Washington. She was starting a career teaching third through fifth graders, and she became my stepmother. Their wedding took place when I was eleven, at a small church in the countryside. Her parents shocked everyone by showing up to it. They were upper class folks and she was their only daughter. They had been appalled to find out that she was in a relationship with a married man who had six kids and was a recovering alcoholic no less. Scandalous! They had expected so much more from their daughter. But I am told that upon meeting us kids the first time they instantly fell in love, welcomed us into their lives and always treated us like princes and princesses. On our part, my dad and step mom gave us intensive training in etiquette and table manners so that when we went to visit them in Portland, Oregon we wouldn’t disappoint them. Today I am happy to have my stepmother as my last surviving parent and, as my mother assured me before her own passing, she is fulfilling the role of benign matriarch quite admirably.

Posted on by Kirk 0

From Boom to Bust (Part 4)

I have talked about my frequent sleep disturbances in the form of nightmares, but I should also mention that I often sleepwalked as well. We camped all the way up and down the west coast, as far as British Columbia in the north; as far as Carpinteria to the south. At the far end of one of these adventures we visited my dad’s extended family in Riverside. During that stay my mother remembered me sleepwalking into their room, urinating in the corner, then curling up to sleep in an open suitcase. I also wet the bed until I was seven. Exasperated, my parents decided one time to humiliate me by putting me in a cloth diaper with plastic pants. I vividly remember the embarrassment and discomfort of the tight elastic and the fear of getting poked by the safety pins as they struggled to secure the diaper while I squirmed in resistance. I think it actually worked though: I finally stopped peeing the bed.

A month before my seventh birthday I came home for lunch looking forward to a nice toasted-cheese sandwich and some Campbell’s tomato soup, only to find my mother seated at the big round dining table, sobbing with her tear-stained face in her hands. “What’s wrong, Mom?” I asked. I had never seen her like this. She looked up at me and said, despairing, “They shot Robert Kennedy! They’re assassinating all of our leaders.” Only two months earlier our family had reeled from the blow of Martin Luther King being killed. He was a hero to us. Now this. At six years old I had no words. I just tried to absorb the horror. It was bad enough seeing the Vietnam war and the civil rights struggles on the news every night. It did seem the world was coming apart. I also recall her saying on more than one occasion, “Heaven forbid Ronald Reagan ever be elected president: he will call up the National Guard and end democracy.” This was way back in the 1960s when Reagan was still Governor of California. She knew all about the rightwing conspiracies that were already afoot; the white panic over civil rights and the militarism that permeated our culture. It certainly shaped my worldview and created a fatalistic sense of anxiety about the future. And let’s not even talk about the overarching sense of dread the Cold War induced.

Later that summer we found out that my father had received a Rockefeller fellowship, which meant he would be going to Bellingham, Washington for two years to get his master’s degree. I felt his absence keenly. Long-distance phone calls were very expensive and thus few and far between, but he did mail us tape-recorded messages regularly. We would gather around the reel-to-reel tape recorder in his now empty study to listen, then we each had a turn to record a message of our own to be mailed to him in return. It was fun, but it was a poor substitute for actually hanging out with him.

My mother decided that with my father gone, I might benefit from being enrolled in the Catholic school that my older siblings had been attending. I had been thriving socially at the public elementary school half a block from our house. I was very popular with the kids and teachers alike. I liked it being so close. Now I had to ride my bike half a mile to the Catholic school where I didn’t know anyone. It did not go well. My teacher was the notorious Sister Anne Joachim (pronounced “Joke ’em”), a tiny old Irish nun with a thick accent who was known for brandishing a wooden rod. Everyone but me seemed to know she was no longer allowed to actually strike the kids with it. I’m sure I visibly flinched whenever she slapped a ruler on the corner of my desk. She would yell, “Gawk, you idiot!” whenever I failed to instantly name the capitol of a state. Flash cards were the worst. We were supposed to memorize our multiplication tables up to thirteen. I was trying to learn them, but my brain would freeze whenever I was confronted with a flash card, and whereas I was considered the smartest kid in class at the public school, I now felt like a complete moron and was treated as such. The bullying from the altar boy clique was unbearable. I felt like I had been sentenced to a gulag.

Even boys a year younger learned they could pick on me at recess and get away with it. My mom was a devout Catholic and had taught me to be Christlike, turning the other cheek and choosing non-violence. So I took it, trying to rise above it all. But one day on the playground I hit my limit. This one second-grader (I was in third) just kept after me, endlessly taunting. A switch flipped in my brain. I lost all restraint, deciding it was time to beat his brains in. I tried to grab his jacket, intending to hold him with my left hand and beat his face with my right fist until he was dead. But he slipped out of my grasp and ran away. I went after him. I was always among the three fastest boys at my old school and I was sure I could catch this twerp, but he kept getting away. Round and round the blacktop we went, other kids scurrying to avoid us. I summoned one last sprint to catch him on a curve, but I ended up facedown in a large puddle. Everyone was screaming and laughing at me, and the last thing I remember was looking up to see my eldest sister a few feet away looking at me, then turning away in disgust. I had hit bottom.

A day or two later my mom told me that she was pulling me out of that school and re-enrolling me in my beloved public school! I was confused but elated. After months of silently staring out the window of the classroom, watching the clouds move outside while daydreaming I was on an old wooden sailing vessel on the high seas, I was going to be back in my element with my old friends. (Years later I found out from my eldest sister, who had been thirteen at the time, that she had had a talk with my mom that night, advising her to get me out of there. Bless her!) I will never forget the moment the principal brought me into the third grade classroom. The teacher (who I didn’t know yet) stood before the class and said, “Kids, we have a new student joining our class today, his name is…” Before she could even finish three boys literally jumped over a table and ran towards me yelling, “Kirk!” The king had returned from exile!

Unfortunately, the damage was done. Years later, in psychotherapy at the age of thirteen, the two topics we centered on initially were the pants-down spankings and the Catholic school. But by then there was so much more going on.

Posted on by Kirk 0

From Boom to Bust (Part 3)

I mentioned at the end of the last post that everything changed when I hit third grade. It is the inflexion point in my journey from Baby Boomer to Gen-X (originally referred to in media as the “baby bust”). To be fair, I was born in 1961, which is demographically speaking the last year of the baby boom. So I was only barely a boomer to begin with. Unfortunately, the story of my third-grade year will have to wait until part 4, because I need to tell a few more dad memories to set it up.

When you are a middle child in a group of six, any time you get to spend one-on-one with a parent is special. I always craved attention (see “Monty Kangaroo” in part 1), and perhaps because Jupiter and Saturn are both in my seventh house, I have always thrived in one-on-one situations. That might also have something to do with me becoming a massage therapist late in life, a career I truly loved. But the few times I got to go somewhere with my dad alone really stand out in my memory.

In the summer I turned four my dad needed to run an errand. He probably was walking toward the front door flipping his keys into his palm making a rhythmic jingle sound that always signaled his imminent departure. He called out, “I need to run to the florist, anyone want to come?” I jumped up, and it was just me going, it turned out. The florist shop was in a white stucco stand-alone building near the west end of Main Street with beautiful shrubbery out front, blank gravestones on display in the rear, and bright white plaster sphinxes on either side of the front steps. The sphinxes were fairly new at the time, very beautiful, with perfectly formed bare breasts (something you probably wouldn’t see today). As we approached the steps my dad said, “Wait out here, I’ll be right out.” People don’t leave their four-year-old children alone out in front of a store these days, but 1965 was a very different time. Anyway, he took longer than I expected — OK, any length of time is an eternity to a preschooler, I guess. I got bored, and I kept looking at the sphinxes. Those perfect breasts! I had to try one. Just as my lips clamped onto the right nipple of one of them and the plaster of Paris began to melt onto my tongue my dad appeared on the top step. “Son!” he blurted. I pulled away, knowing I was going to get a pants-down spanking when we got home. “Get in the car,” he said, guiding me with a large, warm hand on my crew cut head. Oh, boy. I was in for it now. In the previous post I described one of the few times getting a spanking actually made sense to me, which is why it stands out in my memory. This incident stands out not only because I still remember the taste of cool plaster in my mouth on that bright summer day, but also because I did not, in fact, get a spanking! Perhaps it’s because he was quietly laughing the whole way home. He never mentioned it to my mother, and the incident was never spoken of again.

That fall our town went crazy with football fever. The team was having an undefeated season and was on track to make it to the state championship if they won their final game. For reasons I will never know, my dad took me to the game by myself. He was a teacher at the high school, and I think he was there in a chaperone capacity, which might explain why he didn’t bring the whole family. I had never been to a real football game before, and although it was a modest, small-town stadium, the lights were bright and all the stands were full of people. I was in awe. I vividly remember he bought me my own bag of peanuts sealed in paper that I got to tear open myself. It was heaven! We were sitting in the stands near the center of the field when all of a sudden I heard a loud series of booms from behind the opposite bleachers. I grabbed his hand and shouted, “Oh, no! A giant is coming!” He laughed and said, “No, son, that’s just the marching band.” I had never seen a marching band, or even heard of one. I was simply beside myself with excitement as they approached. My town had one of the best music programs in the state, and this was a very well put-together ensemble marching around the field in formation. When the trumpets blared my entire body tingled. Wow. At the end of the game, which we won, the team carried the coach around on their shoulders while the crowd went berserk. Undefeated! They did win the state championship, and the star quarterback went on to have a brief professional career.

On my seventh birthday for some reason my dad took me by myself to a college town about ten miles away. My birthday happens to be the Fourth of July, and I was accustomed to family gatherings that had nothing to do with me. I did always enjoy the fireworks, but having your birthday on a major holiday means your celebration is kind of an afterthought most of the time. This was special, just me and my dad going to a movie on campus (I’ll bet it was cheap: we were very poor). He even took me to Baskin Robbins to get an ice cream before the movie. I got a double scoop of chocolate mint chip, my favorite. This was a very special birthday indeed! We stepped outside and I went to take my first lick of the majestic cone. Plop! Both scoops fell off and splatted onto the hot pavement. “Don’t worry son, I’ll get you another one.” The guy inside had seen everything through the front window, and replaced the cone free of charge. I have always been really careful with ice cream cones since then! Walking across the parking lot towards campus, my dad’s lit cigarette accidently burned the middle knuckle of my left middle finger. I screamed like a girl. He was very apologetic. He quit smoking soon after that, and I wonder if this incident helped motivate him. He had been a compulsive smoker for many years. Anyway, we went to see “The Time Machine,” a very strong movie for a sensitive kid like me. It terrified me, but I loved it. It was my favorite birthday ever.

In those days the original Star Trek was creating a sensation in prime time. And the captain was named Kirk, like me! I thought he was handsome and amazing. No one else in the family was really interested, but my dad watched every episode. At seven, I didn’t really understand much of what was going on, but I loved cuddling up next to him in the big easy chair. I could ask questions and he would do his best to explain things to me. I do remember one time these scary aliens suddenly appeared on screen and I let out a high pitched scream. “Oh, I’m sorry son, I didn’t realize that would scare you,” he said, but he knew how sensitive I was, and prone to nightmares, too. I had a vivid imagination.

Which brings us, finally, to the Story of the Mummy Box, a week-long saga that became a permanent entry in the family lore. My older brother liked to build plastic models, the kind you buy in a box and put together with glue. Usually it was cars and airplanes, but this time he got a replica of Boris Karloff’s character in The Mummy, a 1932 film. I had never heard of the movie, but we had an old 1940s National Geographic magazine that featured ancient Egypt, and the picture of the face of an unwrapped mummy haunted my nightmares already. So my dad told the story, including how they had a sarcophagus replica out in front of Grumman’s Chinese Theater for the Hollywood premier. He then proceeded to do a spot-on impression of the mummy — arm out, feet dragging, groaning — which of course petrified me. And the picture on the box the model came in was really creepy, with bits of bloodstain on the tattered rags on the mummy’s arms. I couldn’t bear to look at it, frankly. Every night for a week I woke up screaming from nightmares of the mummy. My brothers teased me. My parents and older sisters tried to reason with me, to talk me down from my hysteria, but I just couldn’t get over the terror of imagining easily outrunning him, only to look over my shoulder to see that he’s always still coming. After about a week of this nonsense my dad, exhausted, came into the room I shared with my two brothers (who were fed up) and held up a rosary. He pointed at the cross part and said, “Son, this is a crucifix. I’m going to hang it right here on the wall. If the mummy comes into the room the crucifix will cause him to crumble instantly into dust.” He said it with all the seriousness he could muster while my brothers probably rolled their eyes. The mummy box sat on the dresser to the right in full view. I couldn’t bear to look over at it, but it’s presence burned a hole in me from across the room. I tried in vain to fall asleep. Everyone else fell asleep, but I was being tortured by the thought of the mummy box just a few feet away. Desperate, I decided to do something I had never been brave enough to do before: creep out of the bedroom while the whole house was asleep. Slowly, painstakingly, I tried not to make any of the floorboards creak as I carried my pillow through the family room and the dining room, arriving at the middle living room where I planned to sleep alone on the couch. I had never before slept alone in a room, but I was willing to go that far just to put some distance between me and the cursed thing. I arranged the pillow against one of the armrests and began to lie down. Just past my pillow on the end table sat the mummy box, as if it had been placed precisely where I couldn’t miss it even in the dimmest light. There it was. But how???? At that moment a switch flipped in my brain, like a circuit breaker snapping. It was just too much. “Forget it,” I muttered and fell fast asleep right next to it, never to be bothered by it again.

Whenever I reach the end of my rope with a phobia or a hang-up, when I am ironically and inescapably confronted by one of my worst fears (root canal, anyone?), something inside me snaps and I just accept it without any more fuss. I call that “having a mummy box moment.”

Posted on by Kirk

From Boom to Bust (Part 2)

My mother told me that when I was a preschooler I would hop out of bed as soon as it was light, throw on a pair of shorts and a shirt and head out into the back yard by myself to play. I could play for hours in the dirt. I loved my Tonka trucks. I loved the grass, the bugs, the leaves, the garden snails. I remember enjoying the taste and texture of dry mud chips dissolving in my mouth. I knew what everything tasted like: the metal railing on the steps, red bricks, sticks, dried snail trails. I played with the garden hose, being fascinated with water and its effects. I threw rocks, climbed trees, built roads with my Tonka bulldozer for my Matchbox cars. I remember stuffing dried weeds down the front of my shorts to see what that felt like. We had fruit trees: plum, orange, olive, pecan, walnut. If it had rained, there were earthworms and snails to play with. Reading over this I see that I have mentioned snails three times. Seems about right: they were fascinating friends. I just could never seem to get enough sensory input. It fed my mind.

My mind was the other source of fascination. What went on in my head was every bit as rich and colorful as what came in from the outside. In fact, everything had two forms. The physical form and qualities, associated processes and phases, the functional context of the thing: we’ll call that its physical reality. And within me, whether as a pattern of understanding in my mind, or in a spatial sense felt throughout my whole body, the multidimensional representation of the thing was every bit as real to me. And my imagination was so vivid I was prone to nightmares. The earliest memory I have of waking up screaming from a nightmare left a permanent imprint. I can still picture it perfectly. It was a still image, as if in a book. Imagine one of those pictures of a fetus, clearly viewed within its amniotic sack. Also, imagine a picture of the Virgin Mary, where she is framed in curved layers of color that bend around her shape. OK, but the fetus being viewed from the side has its head turned toward the viewer, staring at you with piercing eyes and a large-toothed sinister grin, as if to say, “I’ve got you now, haven’t I?” I am still horrified picturing it. But I also remember my mother coming into the room, holding me, saying, “It was only a nightmare.” In a future post I will tell the story of the Mummy Box, but it will have to wait.

When weather made the outdoors less hospitable, I would play with blocks, Legos, Barbie dolls, crayons, etc. I also spent hours browsing the encyclopedia volumes. I would get so absorbed in whatever I was doing I wouldn’t hear my name being called. I would be forcibly yanked out of my trance and hauled off to the back porch for a “pants-down spanking.” I’m sure all of my siblings experienced the ritual, but I couldn’t make it a week without getting one. My mom said that afterwards I would behave better for a while, but with each passing day I would drift more and more into my private world until they felt no choice but to give me another one. Of course sometimes it was for outright misbehavior. I remember being four years old sitting out on the front steps eating an orange. Suddenly the need to pee became urgent, and rather than going all the way into the house to the bathroom, I decided to drop my pants to my knees (there was no button or zipper) and relieve myself in the front hedge. Midway through I heard my dad’s car drive up. He must have been surprised to see my bare butt facing straight out at the street. I was just finishing as he walked up behind me. I turned to look at him as I reached for my pants but he said, “Leave ’em down.” I waddled like a penguin all the way around the side of the house to the back porch to get my spanking.

I am some kind of neuro-divergent. I found the spankings traumatic, especially for the way I never seemed to see them coming. I truly was absorbed in a private world that others couldn’t understand. For my part, I could never seem to grasp the social world that everyone else lived in, where they just seemed to know automatically what was going on, when dinner time was or what they were supposed to be doing. I was confused much of the time by all the goings on. I think I must have retreated to my own spaces as a way of coping. As I said in the previous post, it was a large and noisy family. I cherished my private time. I didn’t know until much later in life that my dad’s upbringing included regular beatings from his adoptive father. You know: slapping, punching, kicking, all that. In administering corporal punishments to me he was very methodical and self-controlled. Once my pants were down around my knees and the green switch was in his hand he would always say with sadness, “Now son, this is going to hurt me a lot more than it’s going to hurt you.” That never made any sense to me, given that I was the one screaming and crying, but I now understand it to mean that he was trying to do better than his own father, who simply lashed out in uncontrolled rage.

We lived a mere half a block from the elementary school, which had once been the high school before the town grew. It had an old wing, which was a classic multi-story brick building with white-framed windows like you see in all the movies. There was also a newer wing where all the classes were held, as the old wing was condemned and was eventually torn down after I had moved on to junior high school. But I do remember the summer I turned five my mother took me to the old wing for some kind of testing. My memory is not super-detailed, but I remember it was fun. They showed me shapes and had me solve some puzzles. Many years later my mom told me that some time after the tests she got a call from the school district office. They said something like, “We’re sorry, but we are a small town school system and therefore we don’t have any special programs to offer your son, but his IQ is unusually high, and you’re going to have to do the best you can to provide for his needs yourselves.” So my parents began buying educational games and resources. I remember going to hear the orchestra and watch ballet. There were lots of museums, day trips to San Francisco, art galleries. I think all of us kids really enjoyed it, but I was surprised to learn that it was a concerted effort on my behalf. It didn’t work. I struggled in school anyway. It turns out I was dyslexic, but I didn’t figure it out until I was nearly fifty.

I remember loving school from kindergarten through second grade. I was definitely the smartest kid in the class. I could be disruptive, because I had trouble staying with the program. My mind would be racing because, of course, my rich and colorful inner world went with me to class. Sometimes I would just keep talking when I was supposed to be reading or doing class work. I would disrupt the class by interrupting the teacher with a comment that would have the whole class bursting with laughter, including the teacher. My teachers loved me but I was also very frustrating to work with. Everything changed in third grade, but that story will have to wait until the next post.

Posted on by Kirk

From Boom to Bust (Part 1)

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.

I’m the boy in the center.
Posted on by Kirk

Five Years Old

I have heard quite a few people say they have very few early memories. Unfortunately for me, I have an enormous capacity for remembering things vividly. I say “unfortunately” because it means I end up replaying things on an infinite loop, which often interferes with meditation, and can feed feelings of depression if they are not happy memories. Part of my goal with this blog is to write some of them down. Perhaps I won’t feel the need to cling to the past once it’s recorded.

I have memories going back well into early single digits: I vividly remember my favorite pants from when I was four, my tricycle, my leather shoes. I even remember pulling the cuckoo clock down from the wall when I was two-and-a-half. My parents and grandparents were in the kitchen. The cuckoo clock hung on the wall just inside the dining room. It had pinecone shaped weights hanging from chains. I was looking up at the clock and pulling a little on one of the cool metal pinecones when, bam, the clock fell, a sharp corner hitting me in the bridge of the nose. I remember everyone crowding over me to see if I was all right, my mom pressing a rag on the cut. I still have a little scar!

But I have far too many recollections to be able to share them all. Today I would like to tell the story of the first time I fell in love. Or perhaps we should say it’s the story of my first girlfriend? I was five, so those labels are probably too strong. But I had feelings! Her name was Elizabeth and she was in my kindergarten class. This would have been the 1966-67 school year. She had thick long hair down to her waist. I was attracted to that, her quiet, gentle ways, and her meticulous manners, which were striking in a kindergartner. I would walk her home from school. The school was half a block from my house, straight up the street. She lived on the other side of the block from me, so walking her home meant going around a couple of corners. I would walk back to my house through the alleys that cut our city block into quarters. Before slipping through the opening in the old wooden fence (a slat was missing), I would steal one last glance at her house, which was directly opposite ours on the other side of the block.

I say “house”, but it was an apartment in an old Victorian boarding house that must have been a hundred years old. It was mostly empty, rundown, and starting to sag. It had a balcony all the way around the second floor. Kind of creepy, actually. I would accompany her to the front walk and watch her from the sidewalk as she made her way around the back to climb the stairs.

One day we didn’t go straight home from school. We decided to take a walk around the outside of the school yard. As we were walking up the street away from both our houses I felt like we were on an outward-bound adventure. Just then, across the street, an old lady opened her front door and her little dog, seeing us, slipped through the door and raced across the street towards us. It started nipping at our heels and we both screamed like little girls and tried to get away. I felt stupid for not being more brave, especially when I saw that it was more interested in her ankles than mine. I doubled back and tried to get between her and the dog. By that time, the lady had come out and rounded up her little yapper. My heart was racing, and it was the first time I became wary of dogs. I still feel shame when I think of being fearful in front of her, but I know it’s ridiculous because I was five!

After that I was determined to be brave. Had I not dressed in a Superman costume that Halloween? One Saturday I got permission from my mom to go pay her a visit. I remember walking through the alleys to get to the old boarding house. I paused at the front walk to get my courage up, then went around to the back. The paint was faded and flaking, the balconies seemed to tilt precariously overhead, and the old wooden stairs creaked as I climbed them. I think most of the units must have been empty: it was too quiet! As I reached the top of the stairs I could hear a television through the screen door facing the rear. As I approached the door I could see a man in his twenties wearing a “wife-beater” tee shirt, sipping a beer from the bottle and smoking a cigarette. I stuttered a little bit as I asked, “Is Elizab-?” “She can’t play,” he interrupted brusquely. I could see her sitting in the background, turned to the side with her hands clasped in her lap, pretending not to see me. Suddenly I had a sense of what life at home might be like for her, why she was so reserved and meticulous. I slowly pulled my gaze away from her, glanced briefly at the stern face of her dad, turned, and sheepishly retreated down the steps. My parents were always polite to anyone who came to the door. I realized that her situation was different. I think they moved away, because she was not at my school the next year. The memory of that old apartment building haunts my dreams to this day.

Posted on by Kirk