Tag: dad

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.

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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 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