CHAPTER FOUR

Wartime Great Grand and Grand Grand Parents:
A Memory of War

Only two, maybe three, females in my life have had my unconditional love, and one of them is my paternal grandmother. Unlike modern, corrupted-by-politics Christians, grandmother was an old fashioned, apolitical Baptist who “prayed in the closet and served others”. That was how she defined Christianity for me when I asked her. She was a peach of a gentle lady, but she wasn’t squeamish. I watched her chop a live chicken’s head off for Sunday dinner. That headless bird ran around in circles for a little while in the backyard before my amazed eyes, so I know first hand the source of the saying for scatterbrained behavior: “He ran around like a chicken with its head chopped off.”

That chicken execution is one of the many things that tell me how much modern America has changed from the days of my youth. While I knew city life, my grandmother, for her part, probably recalled a mostly rural America in which the farm population outnumbered us city livers. By my childhood, that population division was reversed, or nearly so, irrevocably, and we won’t return to those farm heavy days unless a worldwide catastrophe reduces our population to nearly nothing. Survivalists probably pray for such an occurrence.

I don’t have to push my knowledge of history and my imagination very hard to feel connected to the Civil War through living with my grandparents. And I spent a lot of daytime hours, during my stay at grandma’s house with her parents. There, I was certainly in the presence of the Great War of Emancipation, as we Welsh Nobodys call it.

My father’s mother’s parents were still alive and well until I went away to the navy. My great-grandmother and grandpa died while I was in the navy, both quickly, she in her sleep beside her husband in their cozy home of heart failure, he after living many years with his widowed daughter, my paternal grandmother, in his deaf silence, staring at black and white TV images, always in white shirt sleeves and a dark vest. Great grandmother used to make chop suey for me. I loved the dry, crunch of the brown noodles and sweet tang of soy. Great grandpa taught me to play card games like “Casino” and “Seven Up”, and laughed to see me cheat. Patiently he played these card games with me for what seem now hours and hours.

He also taught me to play cribbage. That was a tough game for a kid. I don’t think I was very good at it, I was better at Casino, but I do remember the thrill of 24 and 29 point hands. To hear the points counted up in the standard rhythm thrilled me: “fifteen two, fifteen four, a pair is six and a run of three makes nine”. Combinations of all sorts and colors! I still like the feel and look of three of a kind in cribbage. O, the wonders of the combinations, specially if I had three nines and a six in there. And think about three nines and two sixes: “Fifteen two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve; six’s 18 and a pair’s 20!” Wild! Or three jacks and a pair of fives?

Even today, as I write this, the memory of counting cribbage combinations excites me not a little bit, though I never play cribbage anymore. Cribbage made counting aloud fun. Do I think cribbage games helped me in school? I’m not sure because math was never my strong suit. In junior high, or “middle school” as it’s called in some places, I hated and struggled with my multiplication tables. And here, the card game, bridge, hops in to give me the metaphor, “strong suit”.

My great-grandparents were gentle people and kept a stereopticon in the parlor with pictures of the Seven Wonders of the World for my viewing pleasure. He had been a hostler for a brewery, driving huge dray (draught) horses to deliver kegs of draft to the taverns. He told me of the great 1911 flood in Dayton in which the water rose to the second story in downtown Dayton. True! I’ve seen the pictures, darkened with age. He had to dash down to the brewery and save the horses. They nearly drowned in the quick upsurge of water. Many horses did die. After the flood, the whole Great Miami and Mad River districts got together and collected money and built a series of levies that stopped those floods forever. It’s one of Dayton’s proudest memories of great historical moments when a whole city got together to accomplish an historical task.

My great grandparent’s home was half a block from Washington grade school where I went to school until halfway through third grade. After school I’d visit them. They lived in a long, one story, narrow house with a side door entrance, a step or two up from a patio into the kitchen. This ground level patio under a low roof was always shady and cool, and a free standing porch swing there too, and flowering vines climbed up a chicken wire trellis that closed off the long side of the patio.

Out back great grandpa’s dilapidated wooden shed burst with salvage and tools. Inside, not much room to turn around, shelves, cubbyholes, bins and racks, stuff stacked, piled and crammed, garden tools, lots of rust and bent nails he’d straighten for odd jobs. It’s dirt floor, damp coolness and rusty dusty everything smelled wonderful to me. A grassy alley ran behind the dark red shed on the other side of a black wrought iron fence which, actually, ran all around their yard bordered by flower beds.

Flowers and veggies grew everywhere, greenery, coolness, kindness, gentleness. I’m near tears remembering, suddenly, this feeling of them and their home. Strangely, I can’t remember winter there except sometime being cold in their house. That must have been wintertime and coal furnaces that you had to go down into the dank coal cellar to stoke. Then shoveling the clinkers into buckets to take out and dispose of.

Inside that house lived Victoriana. Flowered wallpaper. The severe rococo furniture, the gaudy picture lampshades with crystal tassels dangling and clinking, or lace-edged, the light purple and rich gold color scheme. Deep reds. Heavy Persian carpets that had to be taken out, draped over clothes line and beaten every spring as part of spring cleaning. Lace and frills and antimacassars on the arms of chairs and sofas. Doilies everywhere like flattened cream and white flowers. No room but the kitchen was spacious.

They weren’t the only great-grandparents still alive when I was born. I’m told I had four complete sets of great grandparents still living when I was entered the world. I don’t know how many fragments of great grand-couples there were. Most of these great grandparents were on my mother’s side of the family, I believe. I don’t remember any of them distinctly except that we had to drive south and east or west out of Dayton to get to their farms. Most were farmers and small town folk.

One distant relative on mom’s side of the family owned a funeral parlor in a country town and that led to an interesting jolt for me. We we’re visiting for a spell. I think we were driving through from a family gathering at a grange hall, and while the adults talked, I explored outside and inside. Poor me, I didn’t know I was exploring a funeral parlor. I didn’t know anything about death. Then I stumbled into this big room filled with flowers and a long box in it. On tiptoe I peer into the box, my little fingers grasping its edge on either side of my face, and, blam, I’m staring at the immobile profile, the ashen face of a corpse. I jolted back and ran from the room. I don’t think I told anybody about it. I thought I’d done something very wrong.

I do vaguely recall one of those farmsteads. The smelly grunting pigs, the tall wide barns, several sheds and barns and dirt roads between them, and the haymow to leap around and roll in, even a rope to swing out over and drop down into a haymow. I recall the trembling anticipation of edging out to the edge of the hayloft to stare down through the front loading door to the earth far below. The house had narrow tall windows and narrow long hallways. A central, gloomy hallway led straight through from front door to back. Dim and dusty this old house, smelling of age and pig shit. I never climbed the thin, steep stairs to the second floor.

A maiden aunt lived in that house, just like a maiden aunt lived in the house my stepmother grew up in. See Hamlin Garland’s short stories; read literature from the turn of the 19th into the 20th Centuries: maiden aunts lived all over America in those days in the homes of their sisters. They were bits of the extended family. Long dresses, slightly hysterical mannerisms, unappealing and, for all I knew, the most lonely people in the world. The one who lived in the farmstead was Gertie, probably short for Gertrude, and she had a thin face, thin nose and granny glasses low on her nose long before they were hippy fashionable. Thin and narrow like the house she lived in, she was. But her most salient feature was her cackly laugh, straight out of the “Wizard of Oz”. She didn’t wear green pancake makeup or fly a bike, but she did cackle heartily, almost like she enjoyed life.

A final memory of this time and farm is the icy water that you pumped with a long handle pump up out of the dark underground into the galvanized metal kitchen sink. I liked the sucking pull feel of the handle and liked to pump the handle almost more than I liked to drink the cold water which could hurt your teeth if they were sensitive enough.

Another big change from then to now that jumps into mind, this from my reading, is a memoir about living in Dayton, Ohio in the mid to late part of the 19th Century. It told about living with no screens on doors and windows, of flies swarming the food, and of putting cloths over the dishes while everyone got ready to sit down to eat. They still covered dishes when I lived with grandma. In grandma’s house, yellow flypaper strips dangled from light fixtures. The little buggers buzzed and stuck on them everywhere, slowly turning the stickum black with their carcasses. I also had fun dashing around, killing flies with a fly swatter. Fly swatters, of course, still exist for the poor who still don’t always have screens or air conditioning, and who live with wide open doors and windows in the summer time. My wife and I don’t have air conditioning. We can’t afford it. It’s good we live in a cooler climate. In the South, we’d be toast. There, also, they get cockroaches big as horses. Screens don’t stop cockroaches, do they?

Also I watched the last of the icemen coming to fill grandma’s icebox. He’d clump in, bent under the heavy, dripping block of ice, and put it in a top compartment so the heavier cold air could press down through the box. He was a friendly man, and with his long ice pick, he’d chip a piece of ice off the block for me on hot days, and I’d let that wonderful cold chip of ice melt in my mouth. Aaaahhhh! Just now, I think of how that moment must have felt for him and for my kindly grandmother, when she told him that grandpa had just bought a frigid air machine. Iceman—disappeared like the horse drawn combination ragman, knife sharpener and produce man’s cart. “Rags! Rags!” he shouted. “Sharpen knives! Strawberries!” Passing down the street before grandma’s house, a parade from the past before my mind’s eye.

Grandmother, of course, gardened and canned, so we had vegetables from the root cellar most of the time. Of course you could buy fresh vegetables and fruits in season from stores and little produce markets too. No frozen foods that I can recall when I was little so you had to wait for strawberries to be in season, etcetera. The ragman brought those too.

By grandfather’s wish, I think, grandma wore her hair long. One of my earliest memories living with them is of standing in their bedroom watching grandmother sit before a vanity table mirror to brush out her long hair which nearly touched the floor when she sat to do this daily task. During the day, she coiled her hair atop her head in a massive bun of braids which she let down every night. For as long as grandfather lived, she never cut her hair. Soon after he died, she chopped it short.

I suddenly recall, popping out from decades of looking at books, a Victorian picture of a woman in a long robe and nightgown with long hair that hangs nearly to the floor. Grandma at the mirror in her nightgown is a figure of the Victorian age, I realize. My emotional feel of her kindness connects me to that distant time and place, probably a connection many of my peers, who weren’t raised by grandparents and active great grandparents, don’t have.

Although the house they bought on McGee Street was modern enough to sport a detached garage that opened onto the alley out back, they never owned a car while grandpa lived. Soon after his death, grandma took driving lessons and owned a small coup for a time, but she never felt comfortable driving and soon gave it up. I remember a moment before automatic shifts when we were on a steep hill, waiting for a light. She was taking me home from spending time with her, and I was in the passenger seat. I was terrified we were going to roll backward. So was she, I think. In fact I believe my fear was her fear. I could pick up on things like that when I was younger. It happened to me more than once that I confused my emotions with my companion’s emotions.

Speaking of garages, wartime and sex. In the garage next door, I had a sexual experience, probably later than the sexual experience with my sexy auntie on the bed upstairs because now I’m pretty conscious of what’s happening in the world around me, even if it’s only curiosity and not truly sex. It was in that garage where we had a kind of show and tell with the neighbor girl. I don’t know whose idea it was, but Bitty (a friend from across the street), the girl next door (suddenly I think of that girl next door image from my teen years and later, Doris Day) and myself decided we would pee in front of one another. First Bitty, then me whipped ‘em out and peed and, then, the wonderful girl next door (imagine Doris Day) pulled down her panties, squatted and peed. I can still see her splash down that wonderful puddle of foamy pee while it spread out between her shoes on the concrete floor of that dusty and cobwebby garage. It was real exciting, and when I add a grownup Doris Day, squatting in my mind’s eye, doing the same thing, I can still get excited by the recollection.

Things went from bad to worse with the neighbor girl after that. Sometime soon after the pee orgy, me, she and Bitty are in the alley behind her garage, and Bitty and I are really curious now. I know she’s not cooperating because I’m holding her hands over her head against the garage door while Bitty has pulled her panties down and is about to do some exploratory surgery with a finger size, splintery and rough barked twig. The neighbor girl is screaming and fighting because just as Bitty is about to make the first probe, her mother comes around the side of the garage and catches us. She’s mad all right and grandma’s a bit upset too. Two weeks without leaving the backyard for me. I don’t recall what happened to Bitty.

There were other neighbor girls too, and I wasn’t monogamous. At a very young age, I learned that I liked to play with girls almost as much as I liked to play with the boys, if not more so. My dad taught me a variation on a theme when I was in school to counter the taunts of the school crowd. You’ve all heard it. It went like this:

Georgie Porgie pudden’ pie
kissed the girls and made them cry.
I’d add with a shout, “For more!”

When the boys came out to play,
Georgie Porgie ran away.
I’d shout again, “With all the girls!”

In another house, on a corner, about two blocks from grandma’s, lived a family of girls. I think I must be seven now or eight, and I ran over there every day for a time to play pirates and damsels in distress. Had to be the movies that were infecting my imagination, although it might have been “Let’s Pretend”, the Saturday morning radio show. “Plunk your magic twanger, Froggy!” would take us on a whistling wind of magic flight into fairy tale land every Saturday even when I was living on the house on Kenview again.

The girls’ mother was a seamstress, like my grandma after grandpa died, and she had all these brightly colored, ribbon snippets left over from her work that we kids could play with. I’d wear a bright ribbon around my waist to slip my wooden sword into and another ribbon around my forehead, and the girls would bedeck themselves with ribbons too, as I remember. I always played a swashbuckling pirate (whatever that means) and fought sword fights with imaginary enemies. Sometimes I’d be captured and tied up. Sometimes the girls would be tied up.

These girls had a detached garage on a alley too, and one time I was captured and tied up in there. They went away and left me for a very long time. They had truly tied me up in their gloomy garage, and I really couldn’t get loose. I believe I was getting nervous, then the oldest sister slipped into the garage. She didn’t often play with us. I don’t know how old she was, but she comes over and plants a real French kiss on me, with open mouth. I don’t remember whether tongue was offered with my French meal, but her lips were cool and moist, and my groin tingled and I wanted more, but that would be my last French kiss until I turned fifteen and met Sandy E., the friendship ring connoisseur which I always like to pronounce as “kind of sewer”, just like my dad liked to pronounce potatoes au gratin, “potatoes, hog rotten”.


Grandma raised me from age four till age eight or nine when my dad remarried and took me from McGee Street to live with him and my stepmom on Kenview Avenue. Kenview is where I lived with my real mom and my dad before the move to St. Louis. As I said earlier, my dad and stepmom were now paying rent to the trust which paid the mortgage on my house. Any extra went into trust to be mine some day. None of this did I realize for a long time.

For months after the night I awakened to my parents’ bitter argument everything is a blank to me. I don’t remember arriving at grandmother’s house or anything else for months afterwards until my consciousness reemerged out of the fog of forgetfulness that swallowed the pain of the breakup of my parents’ marriage.

Closets in a St. Louis apartment, visits to the St. Louis Zoo and my earliest months on McGee Street are things which I have forgotten, each associated with traumatic events in my life. You can never convince me that the human animal’s brain doesn’t have convenient forgetters which protect us from confronting the pain of life-changing events in our lives. These forgetters sound like a handy thing to have going for us, to get us through rough patches in our lives, but what if escaping from pain in our pasts also keeps us trapped in the prison of our pasts, locked on some childish behavior which is bad for us because we can’t escape the childish behavior which in a limited fashion originally protected us from the pain? Like the sex which comforts us or the booze which softens the pain until both turn into prisons too that perpetuate our self destructive victimhood? Further, a victim, trapped in behavior formed in childhood can become abusive without meaning to.

The adult driver who began drinking as a youth to suppress the pain of having been sexually abused as a child and who then kills someone in a drunk driving accident has moved from victim to abuser in the wink of an eye. At no time did he or she make a decision to become an alcoholic or a drunk driver or to kill someone while driving drunk. Yet, the criminal justice system treats this lifelong series of mental events and physical actions which lead from alcohol abuse to tragedy like a single moment of conscious decision.

The status of the victim in societal consciousness varies widely from person to person and from era to era. Currently, it’s not fashionable to use victimhood as an excuse for bad behavior. In the first place, except in the case of criminal physical or financial abuse, being a victim is a state of mind. Some people may perceive a hurt where another feels nothing. In a sense, we’re all victims of abuse in our lives. Anytime we hurt, we feel victimized. People hurt us all the time, severely or slightly, emotionally and physically, accidentally or on purpose. Historically, society fluctuates between abusive and nurturing attitudes toward the victims of abuse who act out in inappropriate ways which harm others. Gaols cycle between punishing and rehabilitating prisoners. One century and place stones criminals to death. In another place and time, criminals are sailed to the Georgia penal colony in America or to the penal colony in Australia. The message is that it’s okay to be a victim, but don’t act like one.

Personal growth is only possible for those of us willing to search within ourselves and look there for who we are and how we got to be who we are. Of course, eventually, the only way to health is to make one’s way from being a victim into being responsible for one’s own behavior, but that conversion takes time, and the way to health is through recognizing that one has been victimized and screaming loudly about it.

What if the only way to quit being a victim in sexual relationships and to alcohol is to first find out that you are a victim? Suppose you must point out that you are a victim before you can begin to work on the damage in your psyche? Often, you must confront your abuser before you are well on the path to recovery. Naturally, an abusive person doesn’t want to be exposed and confronted, so you can imagine that husbands and wives, politicians, priests, talk radio mouths, generals, police officers, teachers, all who might have power over us and who might also be abusive in nature would do all in their power to silence the public outcry of their victims.

What would the sexual predator do without the victims who surrender themselves to his control for the momentary comfort of sexual release? How could people bent on controlling an alcoholic personality control them if they didn’t keep making fools of themselves while in a drunken state? The abusive person is actually a victim who has not done any work on their own victimhood, so naturally, they want to silence all talk of “people being victims” and, abusively, they like to blame people for not taking responsibility for their actions.

In this particular time and place, Americans seem once again to be supporting the abuser, encouraging the silence which will allow the abusive ones among us to continue their abuse in homes, in prisons and on the job. The personal is always political. George Bush Jr. will always be seeking the approval of his pilot dad in the cheers of the military. The silenced victim is always a sure victim, and a surely silenced victim will become an abuser someday, in some capacity, even in the presidency.



(I’m lightheaded today, June 22, 2003, as I continue on an overcast day in Spokane, Washington with this autobiography of a Nobody. Also anxiety and IBS plague me as I feel a poop coming on. Having a spinach salad at Ripple’s makes me feel better.)

Once upon a time in counseling in my mid-50s, I related a story I came across in the monthly newsletter from our local Union Gospel Mission while sobbing uncontrollably. At the time I was a contributor to their charities and so received the monthly news from them with its tally of their conversions, how many meals served and children housed, drunks bedded, what supplies were needed. But when they honored our local politician, George Nethercutt, at a breakfast, I had to cut off my support for their work because they were honoring a man whose oligarchical votes in Congress make things worse for the poor. Not only that, Georgie Boy had run against Tom Foley on a pledge to limit his reign to three terms, then broke his promise once he got into power. I just can’t support Christian hypocrisy.

But back to the story I shared in counseling. It was a tale about a little girl who proudly took a cap her grandmother had knitted for her to school for show and tell whereas the other students brought pretty dolls, toy cars and electronic games. The other kids thought the girl’s show and tell knit cap was pretty lame, and they teased her about it. I cried very hard as I told my counselor how proud that little girl was because her grandma knitted the cap for her with love and caring. The cap was love and caring materialized. I felt my own lostness at that moment, the loss of that grandmother who’d raised me during a traumatic time of my life. As I had lost my mother, I had lost grandma too when my dad and stepmother took me away from her to live with them.

Until that moment in counseling, 46 years after the fact, I didn’t realize just how much I loved and missed my fraternal grandmother and, consequently, the impact of her support and love on me. My counselor thought her love had, maybe, “saved my ass” even though I wasn’t aware of it until that moment. Fortunately, I was able to visit her one more time back in Ohio where she was living in a nursing home, 99 years old. I sat across one of those narrow rolling trays from her while she sat on the edge of her bed, still very alert, but her voice had grown very tiny over the years, and I said, with feeling and sincerity that surprised me, “I love you, grandma.” I had never felt and meant something so certainly in my whole life as when I said those words to her. My whole body flushed. It was the first time I’d felt love so immediately and unconditionally. And she said to me, leaning forward, in her quiet, frail voice, “I love you too.” Tears filled my eyes at that moment, just as they had at the counseling session a year earlier. She died the next year after reaching 100.

Some people with immediate access to their feelings may wonder how I could not know about and feel the love that my grandmother had for me during troubled periods of my life. The inability to feel life as it happens to us is what happens when one’s life becomes so painful that he shuts down to feeling. If a human ducks any feeling, shutting down the feeler in himself, he shuts down all feeling. Then you don’t have anger to warn you of danger or love to guide your decisions or fear to keep you safe. Without clear awareness of feelings, one is like a ship without a rudder. She sails aimlessly around, crashing into shores and shoals, without safe harbor to go to or purpose to guide the way. One doesn’t even know if he’s on a pleasure cruise or carrying cargo to the Hebrides. Sometimes, in the middle of a cargo haul, the dude forgets and heads off on a pleasure cruise, wakes up in San Francisco in an alley. Another time, launched on a pleasure cruise, the crew gets drunk and ends up in jail, all pleasure blown to the four winds.

Another contribution to my well being that I loved her for was her validation of my troubled childhood at a time when I was struggling to understand the difficulties I created for myself. As I emerged from the confusion of my past, the craziness and alcoholism, I tried to talk to various people and to get information from them about my childhood. Most ducked, were not aware of or had not been observant enough to help much. The pederast uncle completely forgot his own abusive treatment at the hands of his father (or didn’t remember it and, if he did, made excuses for it in a letter to me) even though my dad told me that he’d been surprised to find out that his eldest brother had hated their father all his life. Even my own father denied the truth of some of what I had to say about my stepmother, telling my sons, “It’s all in his head.”

That Depression era bunch truly were in denial and so can’t be held to account as they might be. But they can’t be blamed. No one had yet come forth with the torch of truth about dysfunctional family systems. Then, while talking to my grandmother about these things, about how I was beginning to understand my emotional life, she said to me, “I knew you were a troubled little boy when you came to live with me.”

That’s all it took, someone trustworthy outside myself to authenticate my own sense of the troubled childhood I was dealing with. I was so grateful for her support. I was not at all certain of anything that I was feeling about my childhood and to have someone near to me at that time validate my sense of the troubles I felt as a child was wonderful and freeing. Everyone in trouble could use someone like that, someone who just says, “Yes, I see that you hurt.”

One time, a few years back, I was involved in a chat room, and a Nazi was giving everybody hell, and he was taking a lot of abuse in return. I’ve known a few American Nazis myself when they were having a good day. Many of them are victims of male abuse, their fathers or some other close male relative. They’ve got manhood issues. Some are even victims of sexual abuse at the hands of males. Anyhow, putting their ideas aside, I just typed in my regard for some of the Nazis I knew, and the chat man Nazi thanked me, softened, and forgot the rant. I sensed real gratitude. People are always at their worst when they’re in fear or pain and in battle with their fellow man. I’m no exception, though I’d sure as hell like to be.

Like I said, people don’t want to hear from victims in this culture. To hear from victims reminds people of their own pain which they constantly try to escape rather than face. Thus, perfectly normal people side with abusive types to keep victims in their victim roles, and, together, they keep culture the abusive place it is rather than a nurturing place where children really are safe in a sort of global village.

Some social critics and psychologists argue that it is perfectly normal for people to shy from the sick and to negate them. Shunning the downer is an animal thing, part of our evolutionary baggage. Richard Wright in The Moral Animal discusses that idea. In his book, Wright uses Darwin’s life to illustrate his points, a novel concept. What he shows is that even an intelligent and sensitive animal like Darwin changed his social contacts as he moved up the pecking order of fame and notoriety, leaving behind less successful acquaintances and gravitating to the more successful.

Living in a society in which abusive and unaware people at all levels of society try to blame you for emotional problems which you did not create for yourself is no help in recovering from them. Most of us, most of the time, are operating with behaviors we learned as a child. They’re survival tools and not always suited to adult situations. To realize that you are using the tools of a victim and that they keep you down as a victim is one of the first steps in changing those behaviors. But first you must understand that you were victimized. Then you start to treat yourself with some compassion, and from compassion for yourself, you can begin to make changes in the self destructive behaviors you learned in childhood, behaviors which worked in childhood but which don’t work for adults.

As I said those abusive types who want to dominate you and your culture are only too glad to keep you confused, demoralized and down. That way, you’ll be self-defeating, giving them the victory, never giving yourself a break by realizing that you were a victim and not the lowlife, most horrible person in the world, you’ve always thought you were, which is exactly how victims feel and exactly how abusive, controlling types want to make them feel. Don’t forget, abusive types are also victims who have never dealt with their own pain. They don’t want to be reminded of their pain. They alleviate their own pain by identifying with the abuser and by causing the same pain in others that they have suffered. Giving pain temporarily eases their own pain. Abusive behavior is as much an addiction to escape painful feelings as drinking alcohol.

Again, I want to emphasize that we all eventually must accept responsibility for our own behaviors. The only behavior we really have any control over are our own behaviors. Until we do feel responsible for what we do and say, we can’t change anything about our lives, but it’s a whole different ball game to approach these changes with compassion for ourselves as victims rather than with the blame and self-loathing most victims feel.

What victim hasn’t had his or her share of self-loathing? Self-loathing can be so frightening and painful that some of us animals can’t even feel it or recognize it anymore. Thus, I think, enters the sociopath and the serial killer and even the casual bar brawl murderer and the wife slayer. You almost aren’t aware how much you hate yourself till you kill someone else to alleviate your own self loathing. After the deed’s done and you’re caught, the cops have to put you on suicide watch because the self-loathing’s back, intensified by the murder guilt you’ve added to your self-hatred and multiplied by fear of punishment. So you want to kill yourself or have the state do it for you.

I think a lot of killers find peace (they attribute it to finding god, but I think they’ve finally found themselves) on death row because they can see their suffering is going to end at last and finally. No more pain, baby; I can remember when death seemed like a good solution to me, but I was too much of a coward to put the gun straight into my mouth. Yes, cowardice saved me from myself. It’s just my opinion. You don’t have to agree.

Only recently have I reinterpreted something between my grandmother and me that illustrates how accepting she was of the troubled four year old who tore like a cyclone into her house. I would tell this tale, along with a couple of others, in bars, for the laughs. I used to laugh at many kinds of abusive behavior during my blind time.

Grandmother owned one of those dustpans with long handles that allowed the sweeper to stand upright while sweeping dirt into the pan with a straw broom. Those dustpans may still exist for all I know; I just haven’t seen one myself, recently. Of course that may say more about my minimal involvement with house cleaning than with that dustpan’s presence or absence in the current housecleaning world. In my household, I’m the dishwasher, straightener upper, organizer, and I share cooking honors, and do the occasional load of laundry. My wife occasionally cuts the lawn, but I’m the flower man. I love gardening and can’t wait to retire and take it up almost full time. Anyhow....

The pan handle was made of a single piece of heavy gage wire, doubled, then twisted in the middle for strength and at the top to form a handle. The wire ends near the bottom arched to both sides of the pan and were bent the last half inch to fit into the pan through holes on either side of the pan. The back of the pan was a space enclosed on all sides but the front. When you lifted the pan after sweeping dust into it, the pan’s weight imbalance levered it backward, catching the dirt in the enclosed space. Perhaps the tech writing above is of far too much detail for the female reader and an interesting sidelight for the men. Is it? Anyhow. The attachment of the handle to the pan was pretty flimsy. Two short straight ends held by spring tension into holes in the side of the pan. No fasteners. It was this material flimsiness that gave me the memory I witness of today.

I was having a temper tantrum. I had quite a few in those days. As I said, I could easily cry hard enough to pass out and pee my pants, so to have a loss of control to the point of tantrum is also easy to understand. My rages were, I imagine, pretty frightening for all concerned. They were for me, for sure. Being out of control is always scary. This day, I raged beside the side door that opened onto grandma’s back porch. I was beating this dust pan I’ve just windily described against the house above my head. Crash. Crash! Crash!

I can remember the intense, flush-faced, breathless terror I was releasing through my angry outburst. You all know, I hope, that most anger is a symptom of a hurt or frightened animal. Even when bar brawl anger leads to killing, the killer is almost always acting from pain and fear. There’s no premeditation and no plan to murder. You’re just an animal with animal instincts, lashing out as hard as you can from the fear and hurt inside yourself. In self defense, you lose control and strike as hard as you can to save yourself. The murder happens as a side effect of the overwhelming pain and fear which cause an overwhelming and, for some reason, unquenchably spontaneous physiological reaction in some of us human animals. Who knows why some people can’t stop themselves from lethal self-defense and those who know some limits? I personally know more than one angry young man today who, if he got into a brawl at the wrong time and in the wrong place and with just a little too much booze in the tank, could easily strike hard enough to turn a fight into an unplanned killing.

Anyhow, to get back to me. The damn handles came out of the pan. I can still see, in slow motion always, the pan do a rising flip above my upturned face before dropping down, sharp edge first, to strike me across the bridge of my nose. A permanent scar, for many years vivid, now almost faded to nothing, recall my attention to that moment while my screams of rage turn into wails of pain and fear.

At this moment of fear turning into pain is when I become grateful for my grandmother’s awareness that I “was a troubled child.” She stood inside the screen door, I now recall, a shadowy figure within the house, watching me but taking no action. Some caretakers might have been driven to rush through the door and punish the little bastard having the temper tantrum. More physical or emotional pain than I was already giving myself might have come down on my head. Instead, my grandmother stood quietly inside the screen door watching me, letting me have my temper tantrum. She let me have my anger. She let me feel my pain. For that sort of thing, in retrospect, I’m so grateful to her.

Later, in another time and space, during all the hippy and long-haired days of the Sixties and Seventies, grandma never said a mean or critical word to her grandchildren, never mentioned the length of our hair or the color of our clothing. Many of us led some troubled and/or dangerous lives, still she did not interfere. Vicious arguments between parent and child, niece, nephew and uncle/aunt, fueled by holiday cheer and beer, could develop at the drop of a Nixon or Johnson or Vietnam. Her refusal to meddle may have had as much to do with her principle not to come between parent and child as with her loving and uncontrolling personality. I know she cried tears of joy many years later when she learned that I had stopped drinking and found a spiritual program also so there’s no doubt in my mind that she cared what was happening around her to her family.

Years later I asked her about her hands off approach. How did she do it? She told me that she just prayed a lot for all of us.