CHAPTER FIVE

School, Neighbors, Adventures on McGee Street

I begin this chapter on June 30, 2003 on a sunny day in Spokane, Washington. It’s Monday and my day off. It’ll be a short week, what with me only working four 8s and the owner of my company always having a 4th of July picnic at work to celebrate when he bought the company about 16 or 17 years ago. He’ll give us a tee shirt, and we’ll get to go home half a shift early this Thursday, and Friday’s the 4th, so I’ll only work 2 and 1/2 days this week, and that makes me happy as I begin to cut into the days of my fourth to last month working as a machinist.

Grandpa Nobody was a inveterate record keeper and card player. On reams of brown butcher paper, every night, he’d sit at the kitchen table and record in a very small print the box scores of every baseball game played that day, and he’d also record the weather. My guess is that he kept those records to aid him in betting on games. He may also have dropped a dollar or two on the horses besides gambling on card games like poker, cribbage and gin. One of my uncles, I believe, got hold of those records when grandpa died. I no longer know where they are or who might have them.

It’s strange I don’t recall much about grandfather during all my years there. After I left his and grandma’s house to rejoin my dad and stepmother, then I recall pinochle games being fought at grandpa’s mahogany kitchen table with uncles, my dad and him. I hear the windy chatter sound of cards being shuffled on a wooden table. They slam down cards with exclamations, grunts and sarcastic comments. They quietly lean back in their chairs to finger flip a card right smack into the piled trick. They don’t expect to win that trick; that’s why they’re leaned back in their chairs.

A favorite refrain of my dad’s was, “Winners sit around, joke and laugh while the losers groan, ‘Deal damn it, deal!’”

One uncle, the second born of my dad’s generation, the one with five sons, liked to snap his trump cards down, accompanied by a bang with the side of his hand. Some liked to slap the card down without the hand thump. You could hear it in the next room. Card games could sound pretty violent, like contact sports, and more than one night I fell asleep on the couch to the sound of a card game only to be picked up from that couch at dawn and carried home. The Nobodys were card playing fools. So were my stepmom’s family up in Connecticut, but my stepmom wasn’t. She disliked cards and only played when nobody else could be found. My dad played pinochle and gin rummy a lot. Then he learned bridge and there was no going back.

McGee Street was an international street. Right next door to grandma’s house lived Mrs. Feller with her deep-voiced German accent. In her back yard grew a pear tree and some of its branches extended into grandma’s yard over the rickety wire fence between the yards, so every fall I’d pick warm, sweet, juicy pears off the ground and eat to my heart’s content. Sticky fingers, wet chin, wow! How many tiny green worms I ate without knowing, I don’t know, and Mrs. Feller didn’t care if I came into her yard to gather more to eat. I was too young to even wonder if she was ever insulted by neighbors for her nationality during the war which was going on when I lived next door to her. I know grandma was friends with her, but I don’t know about grandpa.

Up the street a few houses on the other side of grandma’s lived the little old guy with the Italian accent. Arching over the sidewalk that led from his screened back door to his garage was a grape arbor, and, man, did it grow huge, dark, juicy grapes! Walking home from school down the alley, me and Bitty or me, myself and I would sneak in and grab a grape or two. Finally, one time, the Italian man came barreling out his screen door, yelling at me in a terrible loud voice. He scared the crap out of me! Terrified, I ran home to grandma’s house. Later, he came down and told grandma he’d been kidding with me (it was supposed to be a mock friendly growl) and hoped he hadn’t frightened me too much. Even though he supposedly wasn’t mad at me for eating his grapes, I don’t think I went into his yard anymore. He just didn’t know what a tender-feeling child I was, scared of my own shadow.

The accents I hear currently in the Pacific Northwest are Russian, Hindi and Vietnamese.

Vaguely, other houses come to mind with low porches surrounded by flowers, hanging baskets, shady interiors, almost all two storys tall, and they don’t look like homes in a plat. Grandma’s neighborhood was built before the day of the plat. It’s a poorer neighborhood, doomed to sink farther after my grandma moved away. Not too many fences between the yards. Many yards separated by flower beds. There was even a small church on the corner, across the street about three houses down.

The more I think about my childhood stomping grounds, the more I realize I’ve forgotten. No one is alive anymore who I can ask about McGee Street. The last time I drove down the street, it was showing lots of wear and tear. Vague images appear from the recesses of my memory. Houses I went into, but don’t know why, streets I walked down, vistas, sights which won’t quite materialize, fences I clattered with a stick, flower beds I bent to smell, people I can’t picture I know I played with, grownups who treated me well, gave me lemonade and iced tea, and knew about the poor little kid who had to live with his grandparents. I know I was inside the church on the corner more than once, but I don’t think we ever went to church there. Grandpa didn’t go to church anywhere, and grandma was a loyal Baptist. Why was I in there? It’s dark and cool in the basement, that’s all I remember. There’s a passageway with doors off it, and one big dark room.

A couple of blocks behind grandma’s was a tall brick and stone fire station, and the firemen sat out in the driveway in the sun during summer, and they gladly showed kids around the station and waved to see me or any kid walking past. For sure, we always knew when a fire broke out because we were so close and heard the sirens.

At grandma’s I lost the first of two dogs I’d lose to premature deaths. Someone got me the dog, dad or my grandparents. We didn’t have him too long, but as I write this, I can almost think we got him as a pup, and I did get to have him for a year or so, but I don’t even remember playing with him. All I remember is that he was brown and not very big, a mutt, a mongrel. I remember coming home from school and someone telling me he’d been killed up on Third Street, chasing a car. His head run over by a tire. All I know is that it hurt something awful to hear about it, in my gut and chest. Loss, loss, loss, people and dogs. A psychologist told me once, and it makes sense, that all of life is full of loss. We lose childhood, then youth, then teeth and people begin to die, then we die. All loss.

Sounds terrible, doesn’t it, but it isn’t. Not if we’re willing to face facts and live with life just as it is. Life isn’t nice at all, and it’s not happy, and anyone who expects life to be anything but one hell of a tough row to hoe is set up for a lifetime of disappointment and unnecessary pain. Take life at face value and then all the pleasant moments come as nice surprises and wonderful experiences. Sex, love, children, friends and a good laugh at the fools who try to make life into a moral straightjacket and try to deprive us of the few pleasures we can have, like a good lay and a laugh or two.

Another thing about grandma’s I want to get in here. She sewed a lot, sewed as a seamstress in later life, made money making clothing for rich women. She had friends and acquaintances in the best neighborhoods in Dayton. She never charged much, and when her sons and daughters-in-law asked her why she didn’t charge more, she said she made enough to keep body and soul together and that was sufficient for her needs. As a wedding present for my first wedding, she made my wife’s wedding dress from a picture in a book. My wife thumbed through pictures, found what she wanted, and, voila, grandmother made it up for her. The dress and my wife were lovely.

Grandmother’s sewing habit led to a happy state of being for her grandchildren. Empty spools! A huge cardboard box full of spools. I played with them, and I think most of her great-grandchildren played with them too. Armies of spools set up in rows to be mowed down or knocked over. Or they could become bricks in a wall of spools. And you could stack up a pretty tall pyramid of spools if you used the larger ones. The spool box also had a big wooden truck with three benches on the back. You could get three spools on a bench and drive them around, load and unload them. Just now I recall another toy I got a lot of pleasure from. They still have it today. It’s the pounding toy. A platform shaped like a bed, like a capital “I”, with pegs and a wooden mallet so you could endlessly pound the pegs through the holes, turn the bed over and send them back through to the other side. I know I pounded them so much that a couple were so loose they shot through with a single smack of the mallet. I also hit my fingers on occasion and cried.

Christmas was a big deal for me at grandma’s house. I recall slipping down the stairs so early in the morning that it was still dark. There the tree would be, lit, and a lot of toys for me under it. I’d stare at the magic sight, the tree of colored lights, shining on my face with almost, in my imagination the heat of fire warmth. Affection there and wonderment, I stare thunderstruck. My dad, probably out of guilt, sent me huge boxes of toys and games, and my grandparents got me things too. Remember? I was the first child of that generation and got lots of special attention. So Christmas was always a time of plenty for me.


Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana are all big basketball states. Someone put up a basketball net in the alley behind Bitty’s house. Bitty’s house was on the other side of the street and several houses down from me. I recall trying my hand at basketball then, but I was too small, and the bigger kids ran over and around me. I couldn’t get rebounds. They rarely passed to me so I seldom ever touched the ball. I just remember being frustrated and giving up pretty quickly. I truly had no idea what I was doing. Later on, I played a lot of basketball. A junior college basketball player who was an officer I met in the Navy told me he thought I ought be be able to play junior college ball after I got out of the Navy.

To this day, my only real viewing sports pleasure is March Madness. Walt Frazier played for Southern Illinois University when I was there, and Jerry Lucas played on the high school team, Middletown, that beat my high school team, Stivers, in the state tournament. My team was supposed to win the tournament that year. What a heart breaking night that was! One guy I rode to the game with and with whom I played a lot of pick up basketball said over and over, “Beware! Beware! This could be a bad night for Stivers.” Or something like that. We teased back and forth, but he was right.


(An aside. I’m currently listening to Bob Knight’s memoir full of excuse making for his tantramic nature. The ex-Indiana basketball coach is an angry guy, and he blithely makes excuses for incident after incident. He’s incapable of seeing outside his own little moral box to see what others experience of his anger. One thing he never does is ask himself why everyone seems to be picking on him. No other coach seems to get in so much trouble as he does. Isn’t that a clue? He’s like the guy with three drunk driving arrests who can’t see that most people don’t get that many and that, perhaps, he just might be an alcoholic, he might be seriously wrong. Knight just doesn’t get it, about his anger.

I don’t think he can get it. Bob Knight fits into that category of abusive types that I discussed in Chapter One. After he lost his job at Indiana, a friend told Bob that he should quit looking into the rear view mirror and start looking out the windshield. Knight readily agreed that the rear view mirror gives a limited view and the windshield is a full vista. That Knight was quick to agree with that consolation advice shows me that Coach Knight is not ready to do the painful emotional work that looking in the rear view mirror calls for. As I said, the abusive type is just as influenced by his past as the victim is. Both the angry abuser and his victim are stuck in past behavior, but neither can begin to get well until he first looks into the rear view mirror and sees that all his current behavior is based on the past when he was needlessly abused. Bob Knight will continue to be an angry, thus explosive, individual until he’s willing to stare into the rear view mirror and try to make out what’s chasing him.

July 6, 2003, Sunday. I’m nearing the end of the Knight audio tape, and he reveals another sad fact about himself. When he describes friends in this final chapter, he describes them as if he “earned” their friendship. A guy would probably have to earn his friendship too. Kind of like Hemingway in that way. I understand that Hemingway would drop you from his friendship list at the slightest step from the line he drew in the sand for you to toe. My experience of friendship is that its a gift, usually unearned, unsought and unexpected. Friends like us in spite of ourselves. There was this guy in the Navy from New York City who used to defend me at parties when I got drunk and mouthed off. He was 6’6’’ tall and strong. I was 5’8” and the only thing big about me was my mouth. I’d black out, mouth off, and he’d stop people from beating me up. To this day I don’t know why he chose to be my friend. It was a fine gift I never earned and which I recall with amazement to this day. Now off the soap box and back to life.)

One time, we kideroos were in the basketball alley and had got hold of a tire. We were rolling the tire down the slope at the end of the alley across the street to the other side. Great fun to watch it roll and bounce to a wobbly, rolling fall down. Suddenly, as the tire crosses the street, there’s a squeal of tires, and a cop car slides into view. Some of us ran, but I, obediently, terrified as usual, followed his beckoning finger to the side of his patrol car. He chewed me out royally, but didn’t arrest me, which I thought for sure he would do. When I tell this and think simultaneously of ghetto kids today, selling drugs and being arrested and everything that goes down these days with kids under traumatic conditions, my infraction and my fear of the cops seems like something from another world. And, of course, it is.

Two blocks down the street, one direction from grandma’s house, was the abandoned Bamberger’s meat packing building on a huge weed-filled lot which we played around and, rarely, in. Two stories tall and brick with holes through the concrete floors for conveyors (I think) you could fall through and kill yourself. Today, that building would have to be bricked and boarded up by law. Can you imagine this huge wonderful place for a seven year old to play in? Hide and seek, capture the flag, and a whole building to do it in?

Now the building’s gone and the lot’s a city playground with safety-proofed, rubber-seated swings. I do think all us kids were warned not to play in that building. I’m sure there were tales about kids getting hurt in there, but we were allowed to run the neighborhood in those days, unafraid and free roaming as a healthy chicken. Nobody could keep that close a watch on us. Personally, I must admit to being afraid in there, but my fear was part of my interest in it. It was eerie to peer down through the holes in the floor to the concrete floor far below in shadows. I was probably afraid because grandma told me not to go in and, second, because it was huge, gloomy, with shadowy high corners. It echoed too with our shouts, so I didn’t sneak in that often, but, come to think of it, I’ve always like big empty buildings that are half in shadow. I think it’s got something to do with their being the opposite of closets.

At the other end of McGee street ran brick-topped Third Street. Streetcars lunged down Third when I was a child. I rode them. Yes, I sat on the woven, yellow cane seats of streetcars and lifted the windows with the small side latches to let air onto my face when it was hot. I held onto their brass poles and lurched toward the back of the car when it started up with a clang. In New Orleans, years later, I sought out the Streetcar Named Desire just to experience the memory ride and to feel connected to that important Tennessee Williams play which excited me as a film with Marlon Brando when I was young.

I may have experienced my first sight of the dead while on a streetcar ride down Third Street unless, of course, it was after the incident at the funeral parlor while I was on that trip with my maternal grandparents to the southern Ohio farms. Of course the streetcar and death scene may have occurred even later in life, in St. Paul or Minneapolis, Minnesota when I was certainly old enough, though still a kid, to ride public transport without anyone going along with me. I would have been too young to be on a streetcar by myself if I am on Third Street when the following happens. But....

My memory says I was alone when my yellow streetcar clanged up behind another streetcar stopped dead in the street. Streetcars didn’t back up like that when I was a kid so it seemed a portentous moment. I stuck my head out the window and saw a sheet over something beside the streetcar in front of my car. It was a body, I was told, the body of a child. The child had raced into the street after a ball which rolled under the car which was stopped to pick up a passenger. No one saw the child. When the car started up, it supposedly, in the memory of what I was told, cut the child in half with its steel wheels. When we finally recommenced our trip into downtown Dayton and rolled by the sheet, I noticed a small pile of something beside the sheet, something strangely colored (red, black, gray?), lumpy, hairy(?) and unidentifiable. All my life, to this day, I imagine they are brains or guts that popped out of the child when it was cut in half, pushed out by the weight of the car.

During the first three decades of my life, Dayton passed through three phases of public transportation. From streetcars to rubber-tired trolleys to gasoline buses, I rode them all. For some reason, the trolleys seem more bouncy and rolling in my memory than the other two while the streetcar swayed and clanged and knocked when it started up and even seems to have had more pickup than the other two. Streetcars lurched at startup and, so, they seem to me to have had more pickup. Maybe not. Buses lumber and lean and jounce, roar at startup through the synaptical streets of my memory.


Third Street was a commercial street. Neighborhood grocery stores there, and the Cone Cavern for ice cream and a small, square two story, department store, taverns, dry cleaners, walkup apartments above the stores, lawyer and insurance offices, maybe even a restaurant. I saw my first fire on Third Street, flames and smoke pouring up out of second story windows. No one needed a car to be able to keep the household supplied in those days. I seldom adventured in the direction of Third Street except to go to school or my great grandparent’s house which were both several blocks on the other side of Third and the tracks.

On Third also was grandma’s symmetrical stone and brick Third Street Baptist Church in which I got drowned one day. Grandma was anxious to get me involved in Third Street Baptist. My parents never went to church. My dad walked out of Third Street Baptist one day when he was a youth and troubled greatly by some wrong thing in there; I don’t know what it was, but he never entered a church again for worship, although when he died, he was looking forward to seeing in heaven his mother and father and everyone who died before him. The church insult may have had something to do with his getting involved with my 15 or 16 year old mother and wanting to marry her when he was 18 and she 16. Anyhow....

Since my folks didn’t go to church, I hadn’t been baptized when I came to live with grandma. This knowledge scared the hell out of her. According to her church, I was damned to hell if I died without baptism, so she enrolled me in Sunday school right away. I vaguely remember the basement lessons and learning “Yes, Jesus Loves Me” and that’s about all before, one day, I’m led out onto the stage behind the pulpit, and I descend some steps into a blue painted, very small swimming pool, and the minister gets in there with me and before the entire congregation, attempts to drown me. I come up gagging, having swallowed a ton of water, it seems to me. But that was my first salvation, and my grandmother felt better after that.

Besides teaching me Jesus-loves-me songs, the Third Street Baptist people did me one more unforgettable favor while they had me in their Sunday school power. They took a concept out of the darkest history of human evolution and consciousness and made it live for me in such a way that it influenced my hidden life for years to come. They told me that there was a creature called Satan who ruled a dark underground world where little children would be tortured and tormented for any thing they did that Authority didn’t approve of. They put the Devil in my brain. They taught me to worship the Devil in their perverse sort of aversive way. They gave Him power in my life; they made Him live. These Baptists laid the ground work for the continual good cop/ bad cop routine that goes on in the Christian world today. Bad cop Satan threatens you with eternal damnation and good cop Jesus offers you succor. Caught between the two, it’s a wonder anyone can grow up out of the Christian fairy tale. Without their continual Resurrection of Him, Satan would remain dead to us. In passing, they terrified me of being myself, of being a human being with human desires and thoughts.

Part way through the adult service, the kids from Sunday school, basement hell arose from the stygian darkness into the light and marched down a side aisle to sit in the front pew, left side. The minister would then come stand before us and tell us a morality tale from the Bible. I liked the attention but remember none of the tales meant to enlighten us. Soon after, the collection plates zipped up and down the pews, and I think I always had a coin to put in the plate because of something from my grandmother’s past which is in a poem she wrote in her 90s while in a nursing home. What her poem lacks in form, it makes up in the brevity of a honest reflection.

UNTITLED

I went to a small church in a small town in Clinton, Ohio.
My father always gave me a coin to put into the offering plate.
I was always careful to keep it safe
In my hand until the collection plate was passed,
Then I was proud to have something to drop into it,
Making sure all the other children in the class saw me.

I began school shortly after arriving at grandma’s house. Because I turned five in October, they let me enter kindergarten when I was still only four. This didn’t turn out too well the next year when they wanted to skip me a grade, kindergarten to second grade. All I recall of that fiasco is sitting in the very back right corner of the seats, feeling lost and thinking that all the kids around me were really very big. I was lost. I was mentally ready for it, but, emotionally, I was a wreck. In fact, they couldn’t make me stop crying when they took me to kindergarten. Yes, I was one of those little tikes who cried and cried and whose aunts or grandmother, for weeks, had to sit in the classroom where I could see them or I’d run out after them and have a pass out, drop down, pee my pants crying fit. Of course I had a healthy fear of abandonment. Who wouldn’t? For all I knew, I’d only recently lost my mom and dad. You can’t fool me, I thought: if you go out of my sight, you won’t come back. Like my mother crossing the street in front of the apartment building in St. Louis and disappearing into the drugstore on the corner. Do I look like an idiot? Eventually, though, I learned everything would be all right, and they could leave me alone at school. Took some getting used to, but I did. And I remember the clay, the crayons, the finger paints that went with kindergarten, the cookies and milk and the naps.

Yes, I was pretty bright. I think I began to teach myself to read at grandma’s house. She had a set of encyclopedias which I loved to look through, and a book about the sinking of the Titanic and one about the First World War which had tons of pictures in it that fascinated me. The pictures were of dead, bloated horses and corpses and mud, shell holes, shattered trees and cannons. I’m pretty sure I began to put the printed word “horse” together with the picture of a horse long before I went to school. Books fascinated me.

In first grade, I recall specially the small thick cardboard squares with black letters on green background. I loved to play with them and make words. It was fun, like picture puzzles, moving the letters around and fitting them into the mental picture of a word!!!! I was good at it.

A very weird thing happened in that class where we practiced both handwriting and word making. One day the teacher came in with a huge pad of heavy brown art paper that she propped on a tripod. When she peeled back the cover, we saw she’d written a word on it for us to identify. She was very proud of her handiwork. I have the memory that she worked weeks on the project at home on her own time, but when she asked someone to raise their hand and say what the word on the first page was, no one lifted even a finger. We were all puzzled. She turned another page and asked again for a show of hands of those that knew the word. Then she came around in front of her handiwork to look at it and gasped. I could tell she was embarrassed. She had written all the words in cursive, and we were not ready for cursive yet.

Strangely, she forged ahead, like she didn’t want to give up on all her hard work, and tried to get us to tell her what the cursive words were. My memory is that I identified one of them in a sincere attempt to come to her aid. Good for me! But actually, it might have been that when I failed to identify a word, one of her brightest students, she did finally give up and closed her pad of art paper forever and took it home as fire starter. Again, I have to note how quick I was to pick up on her emotion of embarrassment. There’s a reason for such hypersensitivity, and it’s not all the time good or pleasant for the hypersensitive one.

Why is it that I remember so many negative emotional moments and not many comforting memories? Four more painful moments come to mind in regard to Washington Grade School.

The earliest, I believe, has to do with integration. Washington School was integrated by a few blacks who lived in a neighborhood not far away, but still separate from the white folk, and one winter day, at recess, kids were informally lined up to slide on a long sheet of ice that had formed on the macadam of the playground. No grass on that playground that I can think of, unless it was a narrow strip in front where the offices were. Other kids lined up beside the ice strip, watching the sliders. When it came my turn, I took off like a shot and worked up the momentum for a terrific slide. I had barely gotten started when an older black girl stuck her hand out, face high, and let me run into it. Wham! My feet flew up and I landed on the back of my head. I think the principle saw the episode, though, maybe, and the little black girl in pigtails was called up to the office. But my head still hurt and that’s the only sliding I recall on that school yard.

Speaking of using my head. Another day, warmer, we were playing tag on the school yard, and I was pretty fast, though not the fastest. Someone was chasing me, and I am running lickety-split while looking over my shoulder to taunt the chaser. I turn around just in time to run full tilt, face and forehead first into a stone wall. Knocked myself unconscious and came to in the nurse’s office. They were so worried about me they called grandma to come get me and have me checked for a concussion. My forehead was badly swollen and much skin was missing.

Now things get scarier and darker. Even so young as I was, I walked home from school by myself. It was only five or six blocks, but it seemed longer to a little kid like me. I had to cross Third Street too, but traffic was nothing in those days, even though Third Street ran from Dayton central out toward Wright-Patterson Air Base. During wartime too. I would think there might have been a lot of traffic in those days, under those conditions. The official USAF museum is there now. Anyhow....

... to return to my four tales of school terror, there was a bully who used to bother me when I walked home from school, just like the bully in “A Christmas Story”, he scared me pretty bad. I’d take different streets home to avoid him, but he’d prowl around, looking for me, and every once in awhile, he found me. I’d run away. I hated to fight because I was and am always afraid of physical violence and, of course, my memory tells me that he was older and bigger than me. (Later, you’ll see me in the role of bully too. Aren’t bullies always people who are afraid?) Then one day, as this nasty bully chased me down the sidewalk in the direction of grandmother’s house, I got an idea, right in the middle of fleeing. He always caught me so why was I running? It was hopeless. Then I thought that if I stopped quick and squatted down, he’d trip over me and fall down. So I let him get right behind me; I stopped, squatted, and, just as I imagined it, he sailed over my back. Better, he landed face down on the sidewalk and went home bloody, screaming bloody murder. He never bothered me again.

Last of the four painful school memories: I’m just a little older now, maybe in the third grade, my last half year at Washington School before I go to live with dad and stepmom. I’m walking by the school on the sidewalk, and, beside the school wall, two guys have got this kid between them. One kid says to the captive kid, “Tell me where your homeroom is or we’ll beat you up.” And the other kid says to their captive, “Yeah, and if you tell him where your homeroom is, we’ll beat you up!”

Imagine a childhood packed with moment to moment experience! Why would I remember that specific moment so clearly out of zillions of moments? Why do I forget so many others? Why did the victim’s situation threaten me? Why did I put myself in the victim’s shoes and take on his fear? I felt and still feel, though not so intensely, exactly just how crazy that situation was for him. No matter what he did, he’d lose. It was a classic lose, lose situation. I didn’t have those words at the time to explain to myself all that I just said (and if you don’t have the word for a thing you maybe can’t know it at all), but my current knowledge about situations like that and how memory works in the unconscious, tell me that the moment represented something very meaningful to me that I didn’t understand at the time and that I’m still living with and must continually keep in perspective. It was a marker for me about a psychic condition which only many years later would come clear.

I deeply believe that any recurrent memory from anyone’s youth, which hangs around and won’t go away, good or bad, is there because it means something special they need to understand if they’re going to achieve the enlightenment that Carl Jung suggests ought to be the goal of all humankind. It’s part of the process of getting to “know oneself” that a human history packed with wisdom tells us we ought to seek.

Before I leave Washington School, both at that time and in this writing about it, I want to brag on myself a little bit. In third grade, my home room was on the west side of the building. I can’t recall what the subject matter was of that last class of the day, but I was always bored with it. I wanted to go home and play. I used to study the marks on the desk, the cuts, gouges, curves and scribbles darkened with pencil and body grime, and I’d get to watching the shadows from the windows moving across the desk’s surface. My memory tells me that there was no clock in the room, or that it was at the back of the room, or that the teacher absolutely went ballistic if you were caught watching the clock. I think it was in this hellish room that I had my knuckles rapped for the first time with a ruler. Anyhow, suddenly, with great joy and surprise, I realized I could tell when the bell would ring by where the shadows were in relation to certain marks on the desk. I was no longer a prisoner of the clock or the teacher. I could stare at my desk top and know exactly when the bell would ring!

For a few days I felt powerful and secretive. Predictive power is a wonderful feeling! God like. I told no one, but I soon found out that I couldn’t exactly tell anymore because the damn shadows moved constantly in relation to the marks. My spirits fell. The shadow that I had used so effectively at first now fell in between marks, and I couldn’t predict to myself with the accuracy that made me feel so powerful. I can’t recall whether I figured out that if I made pencil marks on the desk from day to day, I’d almost have my predictive powers back. I don’t think I did. I think I just realized it as I write this Nobody’s autobiography. But, thinking back on my touch of scientific observation and its predictive power, I’m still excited. Here was this little 8 or 9 year old boy on his own, observing and using his own sundial, even though he knew nothing about the turning of the earth that gave him his predictive power. Like a god I was, if there were such a being.

To jump ahead and make a comment about the power of education to open and close minds, I want to leap from my chronology to junior high at Belmont Grade School where I had a crush on this teacher who wore tight, wool skirts that she wore about calf top high. Her legs were thick and her ankles were thick, but I didn’t care. She was maybe my first crush after Veronica Lake of the beautiful long blond hair, not counting my Texas auntie-in-law. (A long time ago, someone told me that Veronica fell on hard times and worked in a restaurant in NYC. She supposedly had an elevator accident, catching her hair in one and getting scalp damage.) Anyhow, to get back to the teacher with tight skirts and brown hair: she taught geography for one thing, and I’d watch her backside when she reached up to roll down one of those maps that used to hang above the blackboards, front and side of the rooms. I’d try to look up her skirt, too, when she sat atop of her desk, legs adangle, like a princess.

This room was full of sex ‘cause in that very room, I watched a guy, before class, reach around from behind and grab both of a girl’s breasts. She screamed but didn’t seem too mad and didn’t report him. This would be the late 40s, wouldn’t it, long before the sexual revolution? Holy cow, will I never get to the importance of education I began a few paragraphs back?

Anyhow, one day, like Wagoner in the 1920s, I was staring at a world map in a school book and happened to notice how the outline of Britain blended in with Europe and how the shape of the west coast of Africa seemed to match the shape of the east coast of the Americas. Wow, I thought, could these continents have been joined at one time!? They fit like a jigsaw puzzle. I went up to my favorite teacher after class and pointed out my finding. She poopooed the idea. I felt her disdain like a blow. Her response probably wasn’t all that bad, but when you have a crush on someone, their feelings for you and what you think are doubly intensified. So, there you go, folks! This little Nobody, just like a Wagoner, scorned by scientists, at an earlier time, was denied his discovery of continental drift because of the scorn of another little nobody of a teacher, and a female at that, which gave her nay saying a doubled force.

Right now, as I tell this tale, I think about my fascination with the spreading shape of the little girl next door’s pee puddle on the dusty concrete garage floor and of wondering what was beneath her dress in a sunny alley. I think about the fact that I was fascinated by picture puzzles and by the shapes of the little green letter tiles we made words out of in first grade. I had and liked lincoln logs too and I had an erector set at grandma’s, plus tinker toys, and I recall the shape of the marks on the desk that the shadow moved over, and something tells me that my interest in spaces and edges and such, and my curiosity in general, made possible my noticing the edges of continents that seemed, in my imagination, to be related to one another. Step by step, my mind built up those edgy relationships which budded eventually in an awareness of a scientific fact we now know as continental drift.

Kill curiosity in a kid, hit him over the head with the unscientific curiosity killer called “appeal to authority” or make him fear experience, and you kill his chance to know the truth about the world or himself. Needless to say, in the Bush-league world of today, appeals to authority are constant, and appeals to authority, Biblical or otherwise, teach us nothing about the scientific methods any brain must have to arrive at the “predictive truth” I experienced in the third grade at Washington Grade School and the telltale observation I made at Belmont Grade School.


It’s the Fourth of July, 2003, and the sun’s out in Spokane. I’m at Starbuck’s on Hamilton. I was looking at my newly planted section of flower bed this morning before I left to come here, my second year as a gardener. A breeze blew and the yellow orange Tickseed heads bobbed and the Oat grass leaves, the Blue Queen sage, the taller Purple cone flowers, Black-eyed Susans still without blooms, Sun drop Oenothera, the lemon yellow Evening Primroses peeking through the leaves of the taller plants, the whole bed of xeric plants alive and well, and I thought of them as friendly, happy living beings enjoying the sunlight. Then I thought of the new sick Panicle hydrangea with some sort of leaf rust it has caught from the neighbor’s plant on the east side of the house and of my Columbine up front which has failed to bloom for the second year and now is eaten alive with some leaf disease I can’t recognize. I imagined them, sadly, as sick living things, needing my care. A dark and new feeling about non-human living beings. I tell myself I must shake off this codependent sense of responsibility for things natural or all my fun in gardening will be spoiled. Back to McGee Street and a motley collection of final tales.

My first memory of the feeling of deep mortification comes from this time at grandma’s. I felt much worse about the kite incident than about what happened when my aunt caused my infantile coitus interruptus or the neighbor lady caught Bitty and me with her daughter. One fall, windy overcast day, I decided to make a kite. Squatting in the middle of grandma’s Persian carpet (she had a Persian carpet just as her parents had one), with newspaper, sticks and glue, I worked a long time with glue and string to build me a kite. Then proudly demanding that grandmother come watch me from the doorway, I go out on the sidewalk under the trees (kites under trees?), place my kite carefully on the concrete and, holding to the string, I take off like a bat from hell trailing my kite behind me. Within seconds, my kite disintegrated on the sidewalk, never lifting an inch from the earth.

Perhaps, if my “sticks” hadn’t been heavy 1” by 1” pieces of wood glued in a triangular shape with cross pieces to the newspaper, without any connection between them, I’d have had more success. But my shame was real even if my kite wasn’t. I felt so very very bad that I wanted to cry. My cheeks burned, my eyes screwed up to cry, and I probably did cry, but I don’t remember what happened after my kite tore apart, not even what my grandmother did. I just remember her standing in the front doorway behind the screen door, waiting and watching her grandson learn another painful lesson. Much later I wrote a poem about kites that is quite good and expresses the feelings associated with a kite that not only flies, it soars!

A MEMORY OF ALL THE RELIGION I’LL EVER NEED

Back to the wind, I held it
And tied to it a knotted tail.
Spring, and all that wind was with me.
Muddy feet that made me clearly dirty,
I was a thing of earth who sought the sky.
I ran and let it go and let it out,
And felt it lift to take the wind.
Whipping madly in a rush,
It sought a surface far above me,
Until I lost control of it and it flew itself.
What I held was something in the wind,
A line that curved to nothingness.

For one full windy afternoon, I watched it
Whip and twist at nothing I could see.
All control I had was in that knotted tail
I’d been sure to fasten to it
To hold it straight and true into the wind.
Then that wind was taken from me,
And it began to flutter down
Down to lay my line along the earth.

Grandma’s neighborhood was tough for a kid raised by a mother who probably wanted him to be like Gainsborough’s “Blue Boy”, but who may have cared for him more like a street urchin. Who knows? I kid you not. Though I can’t put my finger on why I imagine it as so, I’m sure she wanted royal purple velvet for me, beribboned hats and pedigree. She wanted these things for herself, I know, so why not for me? Someone I knew must have owned a print of the “Blue Boy” ‘cause it’s pretty strong in my mind, hanging somewhere on a wall in space, but I don’t know where in space that space is.

Bitty’s brother, Russell, was pretty mean, and he used to rough me and Bitty up pretty badly from time to time. We’d play in their dirt backyard a lot, high jumping over sticks, climbing and scampering. They didn’t have a lawn that I remember. I think they were pretty poor. One day, we got a ladder and climbed up on a garage roof, then they all got down and ran away. I think Bitty’s brother was the ring leader and took the ladder. When they returned, I begged and pleaded to get down. I was scared they’d leave me up there forever, and grandma’s house was too far away for her to hear me and come save me. It seemed too far to jump, but later, I learned to drop even farther, from roofs of houses, bending my legs and twisting to roll onto my back. I believe my paratrooper uncle taught me how to cushion long drops or I got it out of a WWII movie.

One day I hurt Bitty pretty good too. We fought about something, and he ran home to tattletale his mom on me. He crossed the street and began to climb the steps using hands and feet. I threw a stone and hit him on the run right in the middle of the back. I felt real satisfaction when he straightened up and his screams redoubled in intensity and echoed up and down the street. What a shot! I’ve never forgotten that moment of pride at my great throw.

Speaking of shots. I can remember very clearly that doctors made house calls. I had a bad fever and maybe a cough. It may have been strep throat, whopping cough, the flu, but in the middle of the night, it seemed, I was brought down from my bedroom in the small back room on the second floor. You had to pass through a larger bedroom to get to the hallway from my room. My room had steeply pitched, low peaked ceilings, like unfinished attics have. I believe it may have been meant for storage, but with four boys, my grandparents needed another bedroom and that became my room when I lived there.

The doctor arrived in shirt sleeves and a dark vest with sharp points at the bottom. He carried the insidious black bag that mawed open to reveal shelves like a fishing box. Out comes the needle and out come my screams. No! You aren’t going to prick me with that needle. No! No! I scream and kick, and it takes 25 men to hold me down my strength is so great from fear. But get me down, they do. And they kill me with the needle, and for the rest of my life I think of this doctor and his vest as a sort of Dracula, a bat man in a winged vest who comes in the night to hurt little boys.

One dentist, I nearly outsmarted. An aunt took me to the dentist one day. Which aunt I don’t remember. I think I had a bad cavity. My teeth are soft, and I had lots of cavities all my life. Now I’m mostly caps and crowns, like a movie star. This dentist worked from a small gray bungalow, a house not in a business district. Anyhow, with my aunt beside me, I sat in his chair while the dentist rooted around in my gums with his long probe thingy, and it hurt like hell. Something was really bad and painful in my mouth, and the dentist was making it worse, I can tell you. He turned away for a moment to root among his tools. My aunt was daydreaming, and I couldn’t imagine a better time to make my escape. Out of the chair I darted, through the office door, out through the waiting room, past seated startled clients, through the street door and down his walk. A left turn put me on the sidewalk, and caring not where I ran, I set out for anywhere but that dentist’s office. I think they caught me halfway down the street. I can’t remember anything else except my near escape. The rest is mercifully hidden in the darkness of unconsciousness.

Speaking of dentists and teeth extraction, I do recall the practice of tying one end of a string to a loose baby tooth and the other end to a doorknob and, then, someone opens the door to pull the tooth out. Whippoosh! At grandma’s house, we did that with one of my front baby teeth. Theory was that the tooth removal wouldn’t hurt if it was quick. That’s what they told me, but it did hurt, and I bled too which scared me even more. Never trust an adult if they tell you something won’t hurt.

This whole time at my grandparent’s was wartime. Grandmother had two stars in her window, to indicate two sons serving in the military. We had blackout curtains we pulled down to keep lights from shining into the dark. Air raid wardens patrolled the streets to enforce blackouts. Test air raid sirens frequently sounded. One night, our Philco console was leaking light through a crack in the curtain, and an air raid warden knocked on the door to warn us about it. He scared me. Many things scared me, as I said, the poor little orphan boy.

The Cold War began very early for me at grandpa’s house. I lay on the couch in the living room during a blackout. I may have been sick too, lying there feverish, where I could be cared for without their climbing the steep steps to the second floor. Either H. V. Kaltenborn or Walter Winchell was warning all Americans about waking up to be “stabbed in the back”. The image this conjured up for me, the vision of someone sneaking into my bedroom, scared hell out of me, and I’m sure the newsman was talking about our ally Russia and that it was an early warning, near the end of the war, to watch out for this enemy to come. Another fear that grew and grew as I grew.

Then came the night that FDR died and for the only time in my life, my grandpa is crying. The grief in the house is thick. I comprehended nothing about politics, but I do know my grandfather has never been sad like this in my view. The tears roll shining down his cheeks, reflecting the glow of the cat eye in the face of the Philco.


Consciousness was growing in me then and confusion and emotional sensitivity. All kids like to spin and get dizzy, and I was no different. I liked to spin and get dizzy, but that was easy to do in summer and harder to do in snow when traction failed, so, ever seeking the altered state, I learned that I could make my head spin by jumping off grandma’s couch onto my knees. The jolt of knee on floor made me dizzy immediately and with less tendency to nausea. So in my grandma’s parlor/sewing room where they put up the tree at Christmas, I jumped and jumped and jumped again, for days on end, making myself high, until one day, my knees began to ache. I thought they’d never stop aching. I don’t remember that I told anybody. I knew I’d done this to myself and they might be angry if they knew so I don’t think I told them. Eventually, my knees stopped aching and the crises passed.

Another thing I didn’t tell anyone about grandma’s house, as far I know, was the day someone smothered me near to death with a pillow. Years later, in counseling, when I am dredging up the past, deep in emotion, I remembered like a flash, the moment so real I knew it was an actual experience, my face coming away from the pillow and a huge gasp for air. I’m sure I’d come to the point of no longer fighting, giving in to death, relaxing, when the pillow was removed. The smotherer is standing behind me, and I’m bent over on the couch which I jump from to get high. To this day, at this moment of writing, I don’t know who tried to kill me or torture me or shut me up. All I remember, as clear as a bell, is that desperate moment of gasping for air, like exiting from a dark, 16 hour ordeal into light, as from a birth canal to gasp for life itself.