Category: Biographical

Part of my life story,

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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.
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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.

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Introduction

The day has finally arrived and I am a little bit terrified. I have known for decades that someday I would be old and retired, and there would be no more excuses. I always knew that someday I would have to begin to tell the story of my life. It’s not optional: it was locked into the contract. Not only was I bequeathed a rare gift at birth, but when I fucked it up so badly that death was going to be the inevitable consequence, the grace I was shown meant that I would owe something in return. And now that my life has entered its final phase, I feel I cannot evade the responsibility.

“Kirkwise” is the name of the blog, and it’s a double entendre. Yes, my name is Kirk. Some people think I am wise. Also, I would like my readers to get of sense of what it is to look at the world “Kirkwise,” that is, through my eyes. Some have asked, “Kirk, how did you become so wise? How can I too achieve such wisdom?” It’s simple. Fuck up in ways that leave you stuck in complex situations with a set of problems that are astonishingly difficult to solve — some that should inevitably lead to an early death, somehow miraculously disentangle yourself and survive, then spend the next few decades ruminating ad infinitum to extract every ounce of insight possible. Apply what you have learned. Repeat. Simple, really.

I am a very complicated person. Actually, I am too complicated to really be considered one person. Scientists say that our brains are mosaics, that layer upon layer was added starting from the primitive lizard brain, eventually resulting in the sophisticated primate brain we have now. Events transpired in my life that left my personality fractured. I lost the ability to tell you who I really was or to even understand within myself why I felt the way I did and why I did the things I did. It’s called “dissociative identity disorder,” and it occurs usually from severe trauma. So I have the tricky monkey brain by nature, and a squirrely mess of personalities from nurture, if you can call it “nurture.” Not to be too hard on my parents. They succeeded in being far less horrible than their own parents, and I am proud of them for that.

Before you read further, it seems fair to tell you more specific things about me, so you can decide if anything I have to say will be relevant to you. I was assigned male at birth but do not consider myself to be cis-gendered, since that requires one to be accepting of that gender assignment, which I have never felt. When I first encountered the term “gender dysphoria” I went, “Ah, so there is a name for it.” I never wanted to be male. I never wanted to be born, especially not born human. Dolphin would have been a better choice. In 2007 I did a pre-birth regression under hypnosis. I thought my therapist was a bit whack for suggesting it, and I didn’t really believe in it. But we had had two really amazing sessions prior to that, so I decided to give it a try. I can’t give all the details, but the gist of it was that I really didn’t want to come back this time. I thought I should be done. I was angry at the suggestion that I had more to learn from taking human form again, and I was resisting. By my side was a beloved and trusted companion who was urging me to do it. “It will be so good for you, I know you won’t regret it. And it’s important,” she said. I eventually agreed to go forward on one condition: that she accompany me. I don’t know what kind of karmic pull we had, but amazingly enough we were soon sharing a uterus, as fraternal twins. When we were just a few weeks along my mother miscarried. I remember being told the strange story growing up: how my mom miscarried eight or ten weeks into her pregnancy with me. She called the doctor, he confirmed it. A week or two later, she called him back and said, “I swear I am still pregnant.” Back she went. It was true: she was twelve weeks along. She said she always wondered how that could be, the signs had been so clear. (I was her fourth of six children: she knew the drill.) It was only after this hypnosis session that it occurred to me that it could mean that she had lost one of a pair of fraternal twins. I called her and asked her to tell me everything she remembered about it. I am convinced that I really did have a lost twin. I felt it my whole life.

Back to the session, where I am still a fetus: I was enraged. I felt abandoned and betrayed, and now I was stuck in this miserable human form without the one companion who would have made it ok. My earliest memories are of raging against life itself. My mother says I would cry and cry as an infant. She laughingly told me she finally got so frustrated that she started pushing the side of the crib to rock and roll my tiny body. She did it harder and harder until she was forcibly shaking the crib and I was bouncing and rolling all over the place while wailing at the top of my lungs. Then, boom, I was asleep. That became a routine. Possibly related note: when I was older, maybe five to seven, whenever I heard the washer going into a spin cycle I would run and sit with my back to it, letting it bang rhythmically against the back of my head. It was so soothing!

So I was a weird kid. My mom got a call from the elementary school when I was entering first grade. They said that my IQ test was unusual and that she and my dad were going to have to make extra efforts to provide me with stimulation and enrichment. We didn’t have “gifted” programs back then. I don’t know if it would have helped. I had attention problems in school, was often bored and disruptive. What I remember most about being sent out into the hallway for a timeout was the sound of the entire classroom laughing, often including the teacher. I did enjoy making people laugh.

OK, I will write a lot more about my childhood in future posts, but to finish this one I will give some factual background that will help you put me in perspective. I was born in the early 1960s, the fourth of six children. My parents were progressive Democrats of the Kennedy persuasion, including being very Catholic. I grew up in a small farm town in northern California. My parents were both college educated, my mom at Berkeley. My dad was a popular teacher at the local high school. I was a gifted musician. I sang, played the piano, and then every band instrument they would let me borrow, including string bass. I learned to write and arrange music, got decent at jazz improvisation, and really wanted to write movie scores when I grew up. My band director in high school sat me down one day to ask about my plans for the future. His suggestion was to head straight to LA after graduation and start doing studio session work. He said, “I don’t even think you need to go to college. You are already better than a lot of those guys. You know everything you need to know.” Oh how I wish I had taken that advice! But under the influence of my girlfriend’s very old fashioned family I enrolled in the University of California as a chemical engineering major. Much more to be told later.

I have been sober for over 38 years now. I had multiple careers, including computer programming, vocal studio accompaniment on the piano, IT management at a regional bank (reaching the VP level), and finally, fourteen years as a licensed massage therapist. I had dropped out of college due to my alcoholism in 1983. After a 30 year hiatus I returned to college in 2012, finishing a double major in Philosophy and Economics, summa cum laude. I have two biological children who are now in their early thirties, and a step-daughter who just started college. Whatever else I might have accomplished in life, it is my children of whom I am the most proud. They make the world a better place just by being in it.

So, future posts will include many stories about my life. Some are traumatic enough to come with a “content warning,” while others will be funny. All will be incredibly complicated, especially when you consider my tendency to digress. But I think there is a lot to be learned from my experiences, even while being entertained. My goal is to write daily, so we’ll see how it goes!

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My Dad and I Wrote to Each Other

I don’t even know if Grandpa Norris was literate, growing up in an orphanage and all. I do know that my grandma and her second husband were only educated through the sixth and eighth grades. They could definitely read and write: my grandma wrote folksy poetry and songs, and my grandpa taught himself calculus and got his ham radio operators license. It’s just that public schooling in the United States was still pretty sketchy in a lot of places a hundred years ago. So my dad’s parents were marginally educated, working class people. But my dad and his half brother were artistically inclined. My uncle made his living as an artist/painter, and my dad went to college and became a high school teacher. My dad had many talents, actually. He had a lovely singing voice, entertaining audiences with Woody Guthrie tunes, strumming away on his guitar or ukulele. He and a buddy had a nightclub act full of songs and jokes. And he was a radio DJ on weekends, had a column in the local newspaper, and started the theater program at our high school. He was always in demand as a public speaker, sweetening his insightful remarks with hilarious one-liners. But mostly, he wanted to write “The Great American Novel.” Never did, though. He planned to in retirement, but unfortunately he already had stage four lung cancer when he retired. He died at sixty-six. I am sixty-one now, so I think about that a lot. Maybe that’s why I retired early, to try to beat the clock.

My English teachers heaped praise upon my writing, beginning in seventh grade, when my teacher exclaimed I was a budding Will Rogers. I had no idea who that was, but she thought an essay I wrote was particularly funny. In high school my creative writing teacher tried to get me to submit a story to a national competition, saying I was one of the few students he’d had who might have a chance to make it as a writer. And so forth. I always figured I would spend my twilight years punching out some stories. And here we are.

All this to say that my dad and I didn’t fight with light sabers. We penned missives. We saw politics and economics through the same lens, so we didn’t fight about such things. But over the course of our lives I think we both cared a lot about what the other one thought of us. So when we wrote to each other there was an undercurrent of urgency, maybe even desperate hope. Because we both felt we were poorly understood by other people, we found in each other a certain fraternal affinity. Nevertheless, we often disagreed about each other’s priorities in life. Most notably, when I was on the verge of entering into a hasty marriage with my high school sweetheart just shy of my twentieth birthday, he wrote me a twelve-page handwritten letter begging me to reconsider. I thought he didn’t know what he was talking about. Yes, he made excellent points, and the similarities with his ill-advised marriage to my mother were numerous, but I was offended that he thought I was as stupid as he was. I knew what I was doing! Three years later I stumbled upon that letter. The marriage had only lasted a year and was a total disaster, as he predicted. As I reread his words, only for the second time, I realized he knew of which he spoke. So, another eight months down the line, when I hit alcoholic bottom, perhaps I was more open to reaching out to him than I would have been. It saved my life.

The roles reversed a little towards the end of his life. He was going through some deep therapy and seemed to be flailing about, while my life had really come together after a decade of sobriety. So we wrote to each other frequently. He was grateful for my helpful insights. My next post will touch on some of what was going on, and what I think about it all now.

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Grandpa Norris Had Two Last Names

According to my research into my ancestry my grandfather appears with different last names on the 1920 and 1930 census. In one case he uses his mother’s maiden name. I suspect he alternated between them as necessary. He and his brother appear in the 1910 census together listed in an orphanage in Bangor, Maine. I’m not even sure if they had the same father. Rumor has it that their mother was an alcoholic who placed her boys in the orphanage when she couldn’t take care of them herself. I have the impression that her marriage was also on and off again. Norris was handsome, slight of build, with a swarthy complexion. It is possible there was some Portuguese in his ancestry, but not officially. I guess I am implying that my great grandmother was a “woman of ill repute.” It would fit. My apologies: I could also be completely wrong about this. However you cut it, life was difficult for young Norris.

I am told that he was charismatic and charming, good with the ladies, and addicted to gambling. He also had a volatile temper, especially when drinking. As I described in an earlier post, my grandmother never forgave him for his abandonment of her and their baby son. Throughout her life she showed many signs of severe trauma. She received shock treatments in the 1950s for her depression. Given the way both my dad and I took after him, not just in appearance, but in personality as well, she seemed leery of both of us at times. She seemed much more comfortable with her second son, my father’s half-brother. When she remarried, her husband adopted my father and we all have his last name. My biological grandfather, my father, and I all seem to have been cut from the same cloth, including the reaction to alcohol and the temper, but also the charm. One story about Norris that stuck with me is how one time when he was hungover he threw his entire breakfast, plate and all, against the wall. I know that my temper was a problem for my family when I was growing up, and I am sure my dad was no different.

The last thing I will say about Norris is how he came to play a direct role in my recovery. In the final two years of my drinking I lived in San Francisco. As I got closer and closer to the edge my life began to fall apart. Eventually I stopped communicating with my parents entirely. My world was getting darker. Shame and guilt grappled with rage and confusion as I thrashed about pursuing momentary urges, continuing my deliberate slide towards death. I had decided during my first year there that I would not overtly commit suicide, but I was convinced that I would die drunk before I was twenty-five and I didn’t mind the thought. I found out later that both my father and my mother, long divorced, had each lifted me up in prayer: she in her church prayer circle, he in his Al-Anon group. He had started attending Al-Anon because of me. They both came to accept that they were going to lose me to the disease. But just a few weeks before my recovery began, unbeknownst to me of course, in a state of desperation he began to pray to the spirit of Norris, the father he never had the chance to meet. He said something like, “Hey, we both have suffered from the affliction of alcoholism. You died young, but I was lucky enough to recover. Now my son is fighting the same battle and it looks like he’s not going to make it. Wherever you are now, is there any way you could maybe put in a good word, pull some strings, help him?” He persisted in this prayer daily for several weeks until, out of the blue, I called him one evening, reaching out for help. Now, is any of this real? Ancestor worship is one of the oldest human expressions of religion. Who knows? What I do know is that during those final weeks of my drinking there was a series of weird coincidences, spooky experiences, and seemingly miraculous encounters the accumulated effect of which led directly to the breakthrough that reversed the course of my life. I guess I choose to believe that grandpa was indeed able to pull a few strings and call in a few favors. Why not?

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My Ongoing Relationship with My Father

I am old enough now (sixty-one) to have lived through the end of innumerable worlds. We all do. It’s common. The end of childhood, for example. Divorce. Losing one’s parents. Any major life transition, frankly, is experienced as the end of one world, the beginning of a new one. Optimistically speaking, I am entering the final one third of my life. (I am not so optimistic as to believe I will live past ninety, but it is theoretically possible.) Having just recently retired from a fourteen year career as a licensed massage therapist, I feel the end of that world acutely. The new world in which I find myself is less structured, less complicated, and, I suppose, lonelier. But it feels good to have the newly expanded energetic space filled with people I truly love: my life partner, Sarah, her teenage daughter, and my two grown children (both around thirty.) And I finally have the time and freedom to write, which was always the plan for my final stage.

I have been thinking a lot lately about my father, who passed away in 1998. At sixty-six he was only five years older than I am now. We shared a love for the game of chess. He taught me to play as a child. He had a few books and was a decent player. In my teens I remember playing quite a few times with my best friend, Chuck, who was an avid member of our high school chess club. He frequently urged me to attend, but I was too busy with musical activities to ever try it. It wasn’t until my father purchased a chess computer in 1979 that I became truly fascinated with the game. I vividly remember visiting him over Christmas break during my first year of college. My brothers and I watched my dad play against his new contraption, and we took turns ourselves. I managed to beat it on my second or third try. I explained to my older brother the mistake I believed the computer had made. Puzzled, he mused, “Wow, but I thought computers don’t make mistakes.” It was the earliest stage of computer chess and the machines of those days were rather weak. I explained to him about the billions of possible positions that exist even a few moves ahead, and how the computer must examine as many of them as it can with limited processing capacity and memory storage, in a finite time. There is no way it can think of everything, so it was possible to beat it. That began for me an exploration of what makes a good player better than a weak player, an obsession that has stuck with me for over forty years. It was a subject I always enjoyed discussing with my dad. Even today, when I am playing or studying, I often imagine him at my side as we discuss the marvelous ideas that emerge from even the simplest positions.

My relationship with my father was quite problematic, actually. Until I got sober in 1985 we never really got along. We got on each other’s nerves, probably because I took after him in so many ways. Friends and family have often commented that he and I were so much alike, and I remember cringing every time he described me as “almost like a clone.” Because it wasn’t really true. I have just as much in common with my mother, but it is different things. I think those parts were invisible to him. He was a bit narcissistic, for one. And also he didn’t like thinking about my mother (they divorced when I was nine), so he wouldn’t be disposed toward seeing her in me. When my siblings, all of whom had major issues with my dad, say that I take after him it never feels like a compliment. I end up feeling a bit sheepish about it, and make an effort to show them that I am different.

When I needed to get sober I reached out to my dad, who at the time had twenty-one years of sobriety. All of a sudden he had a role to play, and he and I went to meetings together and had long discussions about the program of recovery. My world at that time was a terrifying place, and I could visit him as a refuge. It was good to finally experience something like a healthy father-son relationship. I remain grateful for all of that. I was thirteen years sober when he died, and was the only one of his six children to have anything like a positive relationship with him at that point. In my next post I will give more details, because what I am experiencing now reminds me of what his final years were like, even while utterly different.

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