CHAPTER EIGHT

Geography

When I attended the University of Dayton, the “geographical” interpretation of history was in fashion just as “new criticism” reached the end of its popularity in English departments. It’s premise was that much of the history of a people or nation can be understood by looking at the geography the people and nation must deal with. Year round ice and snow, historians thought, ought to lead to certain political decisions and economic consequences and to create distinct national personality traits; rain and jungle to others. Landlocked peoples ought to be quite distinct from people who live on a wide river or lake.

Of course, all human animals are alike at root, but just think how different living in an Inuit village is from living in New York City. Certainly, geography does influence a nation’s intellectual history. Most American histories mention the impact of the frontier on our national character. Imagine how we might think of ourselves without a cowboy tradition and minus the zillion TV shows and movies with western themes. Further, as the frontier recedes from our national consciousness, we will interpret our history anew and our character will change, slowly, to be sure, but it will change. Obviously, a geographical interpretation of history is not, by itself, a complete interpretation, but geography does add another handy viewpoint by which to understand national history.

Geographical interpretation is as valid as saying that famous people make up the history of a nation. Famous people come along to fill moments in history that call for a certain kind of personality. Currently, in Bush-league America, which grows increasingly illiterate with each passing year, we should expect that an illiterate president like George W. Bush would be the boob who’d come along to mislead us. A people, by and large, gets the kind of leadership it deserves.

When I attended S.I.U. (1964-66), I first came across a psychological idea based on geography, current, at least, in the new self help movement which was beginning in America. (By the way, does anyone see the inconsistency in the mentality of those who tell the less fortunate to “get a life”, and in the same breath make fun of “self help” movements?) Anyhow... the psychological idea was that if one drew a map of one’s childhood stomping grounds, in that way, he might unlock memories and emotions which would help him (or her) understand himself better. I’ve been intrigued by the idea since I first came across it, but I’ve yet to perform the exercise. I’ve considered doing it over the years, and I even think I might draw a map which could be folded into this book when it’s published... but... perhaps, I’ll settle for the following word pictures.

In my larger geographical picture, to this day, when I glimpse a Big Ten football game on TV, just catch it out of the corner of my eye, I am moved to nostalgia by the memory of the rainy wet smell of hardwood forests and the autumn colors of “back East” leaves glimpsed over the rim of a stadium. Thoughts of Fanny and Zooey, of Salinger and suicide, Love Story, Harvard and F. Scott Fitzgerald pour into my consciousness out of that triggered geographical sense of place inside me. I don’t understand all the connection, and they vary from time to time. Nostalgia, welling from the natural world of Ohio imprinted in my sensual memories, comforts and diseases me simultaneously. It’s an animal reaction to my geographical, childhood stomping grounds. I’m okay out here in the West, and I love the barren scablands, its vistas (which are another thing to speak of), but the rainy yellow/scarlet/brown forests of the East move my balls. One is closed and dank and one is open and dry. One is closets and one is “wide open spaces” and fresh air.

My psychological childhood geography drawing ought to be fourfold: Kenview, McGee Street, the apartment in St. Louis and the motel in Iowa. It took four childhood stomping grounds to get me to my first teen year, thirteen. The psychological exercise suggests I draw the landscape most important to my childhood, but what would four landscapes do to a child’s core geographical relationship to the world? Wouldn’t any sense of place inside him be fractured? Is this why I have always had a sense of being misplaced wherever I lived until recently with my fourth marriage after 25 years plus in the Inland Northwest?

Then I ask myself, “Of the four, which would be my central geography?” You would think it would be Kenview where I spent most of my first twelve years, but McGee Street seems as strong to me, and when I consider the importance of the apartment in St. Louis, where my memory has misplaced the closets, I can’t decide which landscape the strongest impact emanates from. It’s all cities wall to wall inside my skull, but I do think I can discard the Iowa motel apartment....

(Suddenly, I have a picture of my paternal grandpa, sitting at his huge mahogany dining room table with reams of brown butcher’s paper around him, making his notes on the world at the center of my world.)

Isn’t that funny, that I should suddenly see the real center of my world as family, as a madly scribbling record keeper at a dining room table, a person I hardly knew, and that the place would be a manmade table rather than a landscape? An interesting moment of consciousness, yet, wouldn’t it make sense that a boy born and raised in cities would have manmade geography at his center? Actually, if my dad is partially a figment of my grandfather’s consciousness projected into the world, and I’m a figment of my dad’s consciousness living still in the world he left behind some seven years ago, then granddad’s table is one center of my world and a psychological center too which goes back and back through generations to Africa.

My genes, our genes, have traversed the world. They’ve been in the bodies of hunters and fishers, makers and doers, man and woman. They know a lot about surviving and duplicating themselves. They know absolutely nothing but are smarter than humankind. I know so damn much, but my genes rule me, tell me when to die and how to live and what to feel about living, tell me about the power of a rain-soaked hardwood forest back East and a mahogany table on a linoleum floor in a dining room back “there/then” to move me, even when to go bald no matter how I resist and protest. My environment, my geography/ as portentous as any insect’s in the wood. Cliché as it may be, take any man and break him down, and he’s a collection of chemicals; break him further down and he’s molecules; further and he’s atoms with lot’s of empty space between them; dissolve all that, disperse him into the earth, air and water and he’s nothing ever again anywhere. My reaction to my environment is as chemical as anything can be.

The total geographical import of my childhood is urban/suburban. I may have carried around the landscape of the cowboy westerns within me from the movies, yet, when I looked around me, I saw what? Cityscapes! Not one cow to herd and no vista to ride off into, just one bully after another. John Waynes ear to ear at the Metropolitan Opera. That’s why novelists Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road and John Updike’s Rabbit Run meant so much to me when I was a young man in college, why I felt so strongly the impact of Catcher In The Rye. From another perspective, the novel and movie, “The Last Picture Show” takes on the same landscape from the point of view of those who still have a degraded sense of country within them.

Those tales are about people who no longer have a frontier to go out into, people who live within the confines of the same cities and streets as I do, and it was driving them crazy. Things change when there’s no place to turn but inward. One comes up with the concept that the frontier’s inside, not outside. The wilderness to conquer is within, not without. And if we don’t accommodate the wilderness within, the human race remains in deep shit. See the movie, “Gummo” for the bully feel of what I left in southern Ohio when I grew older. It’s country with all the country kindness removed, leaving much ignorance, superstition and fear-driven violence. How can we leave this topic without mentioning, “Deliverance”?

I think something portentous for mankind has happened in the 20th Century and has been happening right along. People are divided between existentialists and between the still superstitious dogmatists (the materialistic religious, those who must have the paper and ink of their Bibles and Korans or their faith crumbles like old parchment). The world’s split between those who have accepted living in the modern world and those who have not. Even the religious are divided by this chasm. The existentialist spiritual person has accepted that faith is truly only a matter of belief and that her belief is based not on firm ground but on individual, relativistic consciousness. Let’s hope that earthpeople don’t have to suffer one more purge of the modern mind by the dogmatists and fundamentalists among us before the superstitious finally come to their senses and enter reality.

One piece of familiar geography is my own backyard on Kenview. First I played in it and then, grown older, I cut its grass with a heavy, old-fashioned push mower with steel wheels. It rolled heavily over the bumpy turf, making me sweat. At the back of the yard, under the clothes lines, the rough ground never grew a good patch of grass. This spotty patch revealed where our Victory Garden grew during the war. Almost everyone had one, a city garden where people grew their own vegetables to aid the war effort. We did our bit. In the corner, under a tall, huge-leafed tree I can’t identify, dad built me a sand box of immense dimensions. I think. In my memory, it’s huge, with dark, sticky sand inside. Some people fill sand boxes with white sand that won’t stick together very well. I never understood that. It was an early philosophical puzzle for my young mind: “Why do people put this useless white sand into a sandbox?” The tree too, is part of my geography for I loved to climb up in it. I got very high up, very high. Well, it seemed high to me when I was nine and ten years old, but I had some favorite forks and places where I could sit in comfort, and like from the Connecticut cliff, look down and feel superior and safe.

Dank and dirty basements are a part of my earliest geography too because of coal furnaces and coal cellars or hampers. Isn’t “hamper” a fine word? Just came to me how coal hamper and laundry hamper are related. I know it’s obvious, but it’s the kind of insight I sometime get energy from only because I hadn’t really thought about it before, and , then, wham!, suddenly there it is in my conscious mind. I think mostly of hamper as to mean “an impeding of progress”, don’t you? But when applied to coal and laundry, hamper means to confine within barriers, and then the tenuous connection goes off in my mind between the two meanings. Nostalgia connects with coal hampers too because I’m old enough to remember descending the cellar steps and “stoking” the furnace from the coal bin opposite the furnace door, shoveling in the big, irregularly shaped lumps and hauling out the clinkers. Then I think of the long-handled poker to loosen the coals up a bit before heaping in fresh coal. More nostalgia: cold winter mornings, I stood on the register in the dining room to change from jammies to school clothes. Those coal furnaces tended to cool down over a long winter’s night in Ohio. Then I watched the coal disappear to be replaced with a gas convection system which used the old body of the coal furnace and all its duct work. Like the ice man, the coal man disappeared from my life; that’s the cold and the hot of it.

Taking St. Louis and Dayton together, my mind’s eye in St. Louis looks mostly down from above, from the confines of our apartment, down on always cloudy downtown streets. Traffic and concrete, dirtiness and grim grime. The sunshine comes with the trips to the St. Louis Zoo. Of course! Who paces zoo paths in the rain but the animals themselves? So! Sunshine for the park and darkness in the apartment for me. In Dayton it’s also always streets but now at eye level. Unless cruising in on a Boeing 747 or from a tall office building growing taller by the decade, not counting the cityscape tamed within the folds of maps, we must use our imaginations to see the straight lines of streets, like geometrical problems (a2+b2=c2), like the edges of square or triangular blocks, the straight sticks and regular circles of Tinker Toys, the rectangles of books and encyclopedias, the squarenesses of rooms, the parallelisms of hallways and stairways, with right angle steps rising to nighty-night. It’s a wonder, with so much geometry about, that I managed to fail geometry my sophomore year and had to retake it my junior.


Out front of grandma’s on McGee Street, my kite broke up on the strict hardness of concrete parallelism. Between the sidewalk and the street, a rectangular strip of grass just like on Kenview except narrower. However Grandma’s curbstones are real “curb stones”, not the poured concrete of Kenview. Pieces of hewn stone laid down on edge for curbing.

Streets cut the city into rectangles, and buildings are rectangles of stone and concrete set on end or wood rectangles resting on their sides. Who hasn’t learned of this geographical hardness or thought of this geometry who’s literate and knows the literary work of our forefathers? Imagine Jane Austen (my wife’s favorite, after a good mystery) without her long country walks to the neighbor’s, and weekends there too. Minus her country walk, that’s us.

Also my childhood coincided with the end of front porch sitting. I left for the Navy from a neighborhood with front porches and returned to my dad and stepmom’s new home. They moved from a street with concrete front porches to a neighborhood without them, but their new neighborhood did have concrete porches at ground level, called patios, behind them. Enter with patios the backyard barbecue, still, for a time, inviting the neighbors over before that courtesy goes largely by the wayside, and family picnics on the patio. Joe’s dad on Kenview, sans patio, did build a marvelous brick barbecue in a back corner of his backyard, with side stones for implements and dishes, and a chimney too, but they never used it once that I recall. I think Joe’s dad did it for the mental/physical exercise of doing it, for the pride of craftsmanship.

The whole city environment, if I shut my eyes and imagine it, is a prison of walls for the eyes without an actual door. These eyes of mine which evolved bit by bit to sense danger, to peer through leaves and down from gentle heights, now can’t see around the corner. I must leave the city prison before I enter a landscape natural to the eye. It’s why we call going on vacation a “getaway”. That’s the connection between the robber’s “getaway” and the American vacation “getaway”. We are going away on vacation. An escape from the city prison.

Of course, if I squint a bit, I see more. There’s Bamberger’s abandoned meat packing plant at the end of McGee Street, broken and full of adventure, but still a huge, cavernous rectangle. Cavernous, yes, but a cavern not a bit like Mammoth Caves in Kentucky, a few hundred miles south of Dayton. And there’s Koontz’s pond which is like the country brought into the city, and Koontz’s pond always did seem oddly strange to go to, to walk out of a tree lined neighborhood into the shadow of trees and pond scum without a country drive on winding blues to get to it.

I must remember this is childhood geography. This is the geography of an identity in formation, not the geography of the youth who can freely get away or the young man who’s left home who can drive to nature. By the time human animals can drive away, they’re already well formed. They’ve got the nest bowl deep in their psyche, never to escape it except with the greatest effort. And some do, but not most. Most learn to accommodate the homeland cityscape, to make room for it beside the landscape of the dreamer, the escapist, or the domesticated animal who has accepted the cage he was born to and who only gets out now and then to a tether number in a state park.

Except for Alaska or some exotic adventure in foreign lands (but you can go on a guided tours to Lhasa and the Great Wall now), the frontier’s over, and for a young person that’s a binding pinch. I remember writhing in the grips of my city chains without any landscape contrast to tell me why I writhed, what it was that fretted me. In chains without knowing I was in chains, how many nights I paced the straight-line sidewalks (like tamed lions’ runways between house cages, work cages and bar cages) and sailed out on drunken adventures ‘cause that’s all I had to test myself against. But in the end, my test, walking 2 am streets alone, was how well I could stand the stress of isolation, no different than any mountain man except I could go home to meals or grab a diner bite. Honestly, I didn’t fare too well, but that’s a later story. No way can I imagine how a mountain man lives. Such a barren life is completely outside my experience, and so I had to learn to tame the inner wilderness rather than seek wilderness in the wild.

Still, after all’s said and done, my childhood feels like America’s ancient history inside me. Buildings were less tall, more stone and less glass, less the feel of steel and more of brick. And Dayton was still so small that almost in the heart of downtown Dayton sat the narrow two-story home of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, one of the earliest black poets with a national reputation. Yes, I read one of his books of poetry in college, and, yes, it rhymes, and yes, it’s overly dramatic, but he was black against my whiteness and a Daytonian like me and so a kindred spirit and poet too, and that interested me, and his small home, at that time, still rested in red shingled drabness behind a low, black wrought iron fence where anyone could walk to it from downtown Dayton. A small plaque stuck in the lawn announced it as the Dunbar home. Where his home is now, I do not know. Does anyone?

You could walk right out on the tarmac and climb steps into the side of the prop driven airplane in those days. You could still easy catch a lonesome whistle train from Des Moines to Dayton which I did with stepmom, and, vaguely, I recall my dad taking me to the steaming, dragon engine, waiting to eat coal and run on fire in the cavernous Des Moines station where the engineer lets me have a moment on the steel deck of his dingy cab. Diesel powered trains came in in my youth too. Now trains themselves face extinction. The strange part of this is that when airline subsidies are looked at, airlines have only made a five million dollar profit since they first began to fly. If it weren’t for government subsidies, they’d be too expensive to fly too.

In my childhood Kenview neighborhood, open fields still lie nearby under the humid Ohio sun of afternoons. Toward the North is Belmont School. Toward the east not too far is almost still farmland but that kind of farmland which is in transition from plow to plat. When I first started at Belmont, the street on which I walked to school was bordered on my left by one long, unbroken empty lot most of the quarter mile to the school and on my right with home-filled streets regularly spaced, Teeing into it. Unlike McGee, no alleys in this Kenview place. So, of course, my early Belmont adventures were walking the dirt paths through the long houseless lot west of the street that led straight into the back of Belmont school. Never took the sidewalk on the east side of the street unless the rain turned everything to mud. Stepmom didn’t like mud on her carpets. Made them hard to clean.

Eventually, they began to build homes on that long lot. Home by home my paths to the school disappeared and sidewalks confined my feet to straight paths while my psyche went crooked. One of my stepmom’s most abusive moments was connected to those newly arising homes.

I liked to play in half built homes, climb the dirt piles outside that basement evacuation piled up, go up and down wooden steps, climb into roofless, wallless attics or second storys and peer out at my neighborhood from a new perspective. The gloom of basement dirt also intrigued me, smelled strange down there. Then one day as I scrambled down a dirt pile outside a half finished home, I fell and gashed my knee on a small tree stump, an inch or two in diameter, that had been cut off at an angle. The sharp top of its ellipsis went in just below my kneecap. I went home bawling and limping. My stepmom poured peroxide into the cut and bandaged it. She wasn’t too happy. I was always a hypersensitive baby as a kid and far into adulthood too.

It was probably Friday or Saturday that I drove the stump into my knee. By Monday morning I couldn’t move my knee without terrible pain. Dad was at work and stepmom was trying to get me off to school. I couldn’t bend my knee to get a sock on. I was crying and she was raging at me to just do it. Finally, out of patience, she threw me face down on the bed, seized the ankle of my injured leg, and began violently and repeatedly to bend my knee.

“There. There,” she yelled, grunting. “See! See! It’ll bend!”

She forced my knee to bend three or four times, yelling all the while. Each time the pain ripped up my leg from the knee. I screamed. When she was done with her rage, my knee throbbed the rest of the day, and I couldn’t go to school. I believe to this day she realized that my pain might have caused teachers to ask questions too. Eventually, she also got me to promise not to tell my dad. This happened more than once. For some reason I kept not telling my dad about these moments. I don’t know how she did it or what there was between us that kept me protecting her.

To this day, I don’t understand why I never told my dad about these abusive moments, unless I was trying not to cause another divorce for my dad. I told about the sailors and it caused one divorce. If I told about the abuse, I might cause another divorce. See? When I eventually did tell my father about the abuse, long after she was dead and he’d remarried for the third time, he listened politely, but, later, told my children that it was all in my head. He died still not believing the truth. It’s called denial.

When my dad got home that night he took me to a doctor who removed tons of debris from the wound just below my kneecap. Twigs, bark, grass packed into the wound when I fell. The wound was very tender and the pain while he dug into it just added to the throbbing. The doctor’s ministrations hurt like blue blazes! Since it had been three days since the wound happened, the doctor said he could no longer stitch it, so he closed the wound with a butterfly bandage and dad and I went home.

My stepmom’s abuse of me flew on steady wings in my direction. It arrived with slaps, pulled ears, fists, forks and knives thrown at me, screams and frightening rages. More than once she trapped me in the back hall, and I remember rubbing my ears raw, fighting by her with my head forced against the rough plaster. Many a time I stood out on the driveway and pleaded with her to calm down, afraid to go in while she stood inside the door threatening me that it would go all the worse for me the longer I delayed my beating. This was no grandmother, patient with me, understanding that I “was a troubled child”.

Stepmom, who of course came to be for me the “wicked stepmom from ‘Hansel and Gretal’”, understood only that hitting was the way to change behavior. Punish, punish, punish. That was her single most relied upon mode of behavior modification. Discussion and talk were not her forte, although I do recall a few time-outs, sitting in the gloom of the attic stairway. My stepmom’s mode of behavior modification once drove a dog crazy.

For my brother, Dale, after I was out of the house, they once bought a pup. And like all pups, he crapped and peed on stepmom’s immaculate floors, the ones she kept so clean that “you could eat off them”. She took to hitting the damn dog with rolled up newspapers. She hit him hard and often. She hit him so often that he came to think that hitting was play, and, after a time, he was completely out of control. He’d race around the backyard in circles and fling himself at people until they had to beat him off. Getting hit was play to him. It’s all he understood. He was so crazy that no one could control him, and so they got rid of him. Whether or not, they put him down I don’t know. Whether anyone but myself understood what my stepmom had done to that pup, I don’t know either, but I knew and, in that dog, I later recognized myself.

My dad, on the other hand, because of his experience with grandpa and Willow switches (I think) only hit me once in my life. I’ve never forgotten that one hit (I was in high school and he gave me a short punch in the stomach), but my mother’s abuse was so constant that it all runs together, and I only remember a few stand out moments like the “incident of wounded knee” above.

One time, I’m halfway out the front door, one arm under the screen door, jamming it open, and she’s sitting on my back. I’m face down, trying to escape, and she’s slamming my face into the hardwood floor and fisting the back of my head and my ears. Another time, she chased me around and around the basement with a baseball bat, hitting me, fortunately, only on the back of my legs. For years, I got laughs in the bars by telling this story with the punch line. “Lucky for me she didn’t hit me in the head. It’d broke my bat.” Laugh, laugh. Finally, a counselor commented, “You’re laughing. That sounds pretty sad to me.” Instantly, came the tears.

One of the strange things about her continual punishments is that I don’t recall one thing, except forgetfulness, I was punished for. I only recall the steady abuse, as much and more verbal than physical. For all her angry attacks, I don’t know any bad behavior that was altered or any speech pattern that I changed. If anything, I cussed more, fought more, became more belligerent and resisted average middle-class mores even more fervently. Basically, all that I certainly did learn unconsciously was that I was a no good kid, untrustworthy, selfish and mean, worthless as a human being. Eventually, I came to expect punishment. I even got so I’d daydream my way to the store and frequently return with the wrong thing. If stepmom sent me for milk, I’d bring home bread. Asked for bread, dutifully, like the little bad guy I was, I brought home milk. They were so damn easy to mix up, those basics. Mix ups like that, were constant, almost as if, at some level, I planned them, wanted to earn or felt that I deserved them. I was a very malleable human animal, like everyone else, and if you teach me to hate myself, I’ll gladly oblige. Teach me to roll over, and I’ll roll over; teach me a trick and I’ll be a good dog. Many people don’t know that about themselves. Freedom begins, paradoxically, with knowing we aren’t free.

My geography’s laced with abuse. Why do I now say I’ve been abused when countless others think being hit by adults is not abusive? Over the years, I’ve listened to so many men with worst remembered experiences who claim they deserved what they got because they were such bad, little disobedient brats. They often don’t see that they were taught to be exactly as they now are. They believe that they deserved their abuse. Without compassion for self, they see themselves still as “bad boys”, tough guys in the present: bikers, hard drinkers, blues fans. It’s why they keep challenging authority, even just authority, so they can bring down from the wrath of authority the punishment they believe they deserve.

Years after my childhood and middle age were far behind, after much counseling, I watched a comedy routine by Richard Pryor in which he enacts a beating administered by his grandmother. Holding a hand above his head, he runs in a small circle with his large, round eyes upcast, his knees lifting and pumping to escape the blows aimed to the back of his legs. His short afro frames a stricken expression; he pleads with his grandmother to stop, promising to be good, that he won’t do it (what?) again. I laugh and laugh, hysterically (don’t you) and, then, realize I’m laughing at the sight of a terrorized child. Permanently sobered, I can no longer laugh at that particular routine.


Honestly, without a map (and that’d be research), I can’t certainly recall which is north, south, east and west in Dayton from my Kenview porch. I think when I step out on that small porch, bordered on my right by a wrought iron railing, on two sides by the house and before me by the four, concrete steps down, I’m facing in a general northerly direction. I’m not sure, but I think that’s so, and, now thinking more about sunrises and sunsets and the direction of the Aurora Borealis I’d watch from my front lawn from time to time, I’m even more certain my house faced north north east or, more likely, north north west.

Taking the larger map picture: I do know that if I stand in Dayton facing north on a huge U.S. map, Columbus is ahead of me and beyond that Cleveland, the Great Lakes, specifically Lake Erie where I learned to dog paddle. Behind me is Cincinnati where for one quarter I taught composition to Cincinnati Art Museum students and beyond that Kentucky and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. To my left is Richmond, Indiana and beyond that, Indianapolis, home of David Letterman. Beyond that, Iowa and the home of Johnny Carson and VJ day. Beyond Iowa and slighter more north (west-north-west) is my current place on a map of the World where I stand like a tiny upright stick except when I’m asleep and lying down. To my right 800 miles is the Atlantic Ocean. South-south-east lived most of her life my mother and died there in St. Petersburg fifteen plus years ago. To the northeast lived my stepmom’s Italian family in New England.

To the same northeast is New York City which was a mecca I never traveled to to live in though I dreamed long and hard to go there, to the bright lights and creative dynamo that seemed to hum there when I was young, to the miracle on 42 Street, to the publishers, eventually to Agent Ruth Cantor who handled a novel for me in the 80s but couldn’t find a market niche for my work. In those younger days, my imagination lifted its eyes to the Empire State Building, Yankee stadium, the subway; then arose the Twin Towers which I was hardly aware of, then terrorists made them famous over all the world when the Towers went poof, and all America went even more crazy paranoid than it was after Columbine. But Nobodys never make it to the Big Apple. Nobodys rest in coal mine country. Nobodys live in the past. My past, once filled with family pride, turned “hillbilly” in my imagination, like ashes in my mouth. Eventually, my inner Duke Wayne prayed to shed his horse flesh, but that’s the future still, and I’m innocent yet.

Compared to McGee Street, the Kenview landscape is a more suburban, more genteel. No Third Street in Belmont with clanging streetcars, no abandoned Bamberger’s meat packing plant, no peeling paint, ancient frame buildings to catch fire, no nearby fire station. In Belmont memory I see trees, mostly maples, lots of green well-watered lawns, bushes and flowers, neat, clean straight sidewalks, all shoveled in the winter and swept free of grass cuttings in the summer. Belmont stretches out more expansive than McGee which is tinier, where narrower frame houses are packed more closely together. By the time dad and stepmom move even further into suburbia, the houses being built are again lower, wider and farther apart. The square footage of houses still continues to get larger in America even as I write this, even though the strain on global resources is immense. No wonder the rest of the world thinks Americans are selfish, spoiled people. We can’t get our noses lifted far enough out of our belly buttons to see much beyond the steering wheels of our SUVs.

One of my earliest geographical, rambling freedoms was a bus trip to the National Cash Register auditorium every Saturday morning in the summer to see their free movie and stage show. Once I learned the route, I was allowed to go to the NCR show by myself on Saturday morning. I’d catch a bus down to NCR at nine and sometimes walk back. During the Depression, NCR began a free show for all the kids impoverished by that national tragedy. They had a huge limestone auditorium on plant grounds with tall pillars and many steps up to a portico. Kids flocked to the auditorium for a kid’s stage show, a movie and, then, a treat. When my dad was a kid, the treat was an ice cream cone. By the time I was a child, the treat was a candy bar. By the time my kids came along, the show had ended because it was too great an expense on a faltering NCR company which, as I have pointed out, pulled all its manufacturing out of Dayton during the decline of the rust belt in America. The stage show commenced with a song:


At nine a.m. from near and far,
We gather at the NCR
To have a happy time
As you will hear.
Wee brother and mother
And father and sis,
We’re sorry
This is one show
You’ll have to miss....

That’s all I remember of that song. After a few years I was too old to go there anymore, and, then, it was over.

Another part of my Belmont geography is a paper route I walked for one miserable year which I took over from Dick. Not too many streets, not a long route, but I had to collect and handle quarters and ride a fairly long bike ride to the paper branch. On my ride to the branch, I passed my fraternal grandparents’ expensive home with its tall flag pole and huge wrap around lawn my grandpa cut with a gas engine, power mower he designed and had built for himself. A heavy duty steel push mower, he put a gas engine atop it. It had a clutch and seemed dangerous to me, leaping forward like a bull and tugging me across the lawn when engaged. I only tried to cut with it once.

Sometimes my “real” mother lived there, and I would stop by to see her before delivering my route. One dark evening in midwinter I stopped by and found her there slightly tipsy with a man. Grandpa and grandma were gone. She wore a slip and skirt and seemed frightened. She introduced me to the man, but I don’t think he was very friendly or happy to see me. I didn’t stay long.

All these years later, I think I may have come between her and this man’s designs on her. I sensed she didn’t really want me to leave, but I had to go and deliver my papers. She was a woman, I believe, like so many abused women who have a hard time saying no and, so, find themselves in bad situations on occasions. On the other hand, I think of my poor divorced mother as a woman ahead of her time, trying to make a place for herself in the arts, trying to be a free spirit when that was not appreciated by American males. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to know her as well as I might have wished to, and most all my life I looked for a substitute mother in my wives and girlfriends.

The paper route also gives me the fondest memory I have of my dad of all the memories I have of him which are not many. One early, bitter cold Sunday morning, ice everywhere, I couldn’t ride my bike without falling over. You know how paper boys used to wrap the straps of their paper bags full of papers around the handlebars of their bikes? Several times my front tire went out from under me on the ice, spilling my papers all over he street.

Finally, one time I didn’t get my feet under me quickly enough as the bike tipped, and I fell hard on my shoulder, spilled my bag of papers yet again. The peddle sprocket may have hit my ankle too. Now I was hurt, frozen, my hands aching with cold, and I just left everything where they lay by the curb and went home. Dad sat at the kitchen table having a cup of coffee when I got there. I couldn’t have been more miserable and just broke down sobbing and told him my story. He got up, put on his coat and gloves and we went and got the bike and papers. He walked the route with me, carrying my bag. We dropped the bike off at home. Years later in counseling I remembered how much that meant to me at the time. A very important memory. It was so little and so much at the same time. I had no idea how much his help at that moment meant to me. I doubt he did either.

Counseling is powerful that way, bringing back memories of things long forgotten that help us to better understand the impact of the events of our lives. Why so many men don’t want to know themselves better I’ll never understand. To “know oneself” is a noble and enlightening endeavor. But, I had a friend once who I was sharing some of my knew insights with over lunch. At one point, rather grimly, he said, “I don’t think I want to know that much about myself.” The last time I saw him, I think he was busy trying to make a cocaine purchase.

For all my growing battle with my stepmom, I did try to please her. One time, my dad gave me a dollar or something to shop for my stepmom’s Christmas gift. My stepmom and I went downtown shopping, and she let me go into McCrory’s 5 and 10 to shop by myself. I loved their Spanish peanuts, scooped hot and popped greasy into red and white striped bags. Anyhow... I looked around and finally decided on some miniature animal figurines. A dog was one. I must say that she kept the little creatures for a long time on shelves around he house, at least until they moved into their new house while I was in the service, and I became the monster who haunted her tortured mind.