There Will Be More

I spoke before on here about a teen I once knew who was treated like dirt. Today I flick on the CNN website and I see this black and white video of a girl peeling card after card away telling her miserable story. It reminds me of a sad version of Dylan's video, Subterranean Homesick Blues.

Amanda Todd, a thirteen year old from British Columbia, made the mistake of flashing her breasts to some guy via web cam. He was recorded it and then splattered the picture all over the BC area. Little time passed before her “friends” at the school got a hold of the picture and tormented her to no end about it. Once again, teen politics took over and her social status was wiped out between lunch and biology class. Welcome to Loserville was the next stop on the train in her social life.

It was a mistake to show off like she did. Do I blame her? Nope. She was a very young teen and they sure as shit don't have the best judgment on the whole, do they? I'm 48 and I still can't hit a 100% success rate on all my choices.

But here's what struck me. Amanda's mom, looking out for her daughter's best interests, felt moving away to a different school system where her daughter could start fresh would be a great idea. Move away? Run away? Guess who else had to run away when the community around them made it very plain they weren't welcome anymore. The Jews.

“Oh! Oh! Oh! You can't compare this even with the Holocaust! It's totally different!” some may say.

My answer to that? “Bullshit.”

People...we're dirt bags a lot of the times. If it wasn't Jews we were chasing down, it was gypsies, blacks, Indians, short, tall, fat,skinny...you name it. And, we chase down 15 year old girls who make the silly mistake of being goaded into flashing their breasts. Had she been in New Orleans during Mardi Gras and did that, she'd have beads and probably a coupon for a free beer.

Moving to another town was just a respite for Amanda, before her teen world ripped her apart again. As of today, she's dead.

I hear a lot of talk of choice and responsibility. It's usually aimed at the individual to BLAME them for their inability to rise above whatever personal demon they may be trying to conquer. Blame makes it very easy then to NOT help and walk way. One can feel quite smug because you managed to frame the situation as their personal, private failure. You on the other hand are the best thing that ever existed...right?

So, here's a challenge to every moral coward out there. CHOOSE, take RESPONSIBILITY to NOT grind down some poor sap who's having a hard time. Don't worry, I'm not asking you to save them...just have the moral guts not to make it worse, and we'll see just how strong and upright you really are.

Click Pic

Click This

We Boomers...

70's Parents lamenting: "They have no respect for their elders, they dress like bums, and their music...it's just noise!"

That post about the Blizzard of 1978 reminded me of my time in Goff Jr High. Nostalgia comes into play but I temper that with the fact it wasn't all fun. It's true that no matter what age you are, now or then, there were great days and some real ugly ones.

 

I called Goff Jr High the “Rat Trap.” Goff at the time was processing the tail end of the Boomers through and there was a good many of us. The administration of the building ran the place like a prison camp. It was an education on how to follow orders. We were guided through the maze to the next class, to the cafeteria and to wherever.

“uh-TEN-HUT! Eyes Foward...foward.....MARCH!”

I suppose there was no other way to manage that large a group of young teens but some of the teachers and administration took to it with the relish of a camp guard.

“You there! No talking! Get back in line!”

 

Teachers doubled as hall monitors as the classes changed. They would stand at strategic spots, looking for those known trouble makers and keeping an eye on them, while those looking more innocent would pull pranks behind their backs. There was a definite us and them mentality.

The bell would ring, and a flood of kids would spill into the hallway with a instant burst of talking that was quite loud. Then there was that “tramp, tramp, tramp” of 900 pairs off feet going down the hallways all at once. In about four minutes, the changeover was complete and most of the kids were in their next class. Occasionally we'd hear a burnt out teacher in an adjacent classroom scream at his class to “Sit down and shut up!” Those teachers needed to retire.

There was an old World War II ditty some kid reworked that made the rounds in the school about the most pissed off, run down teachers we knew. He swapped out Hitler and Mussolini’s names for the two most hated teachers.

 

Whistle While you Work!

Hecker is a Jerk!

Bertoncinni, Bit his Weenie

Now It Doesn't Squirt!

You have to love the level of maturity fourteen year olds have.

There were some teachers who could command respect from us without resorting to screeching and threats of detention.  The best one was a woman too. She had little problem in her classroom when it came keeping it manageable. She made friends of us and did it well too.

 

Miss Knight was a recent Providence College English major graduate who might have been 25 years old at the time. She was your perfect 70's chick too. She was thin and wore the latest clothing but nothing Disco. She sported Dorothy Hamil's haircut and drove a really beat to crap Alfa Romeo.

She looked cool to us.

Knight's english class was enjoyable and not drudge work as many of the others were. What made it enjoyable is that she blew about ¼ of the class time just talking to us about pretty much anything.

We kids would toss subjects at her that in no way you could even joke about in a classroom of today. She stood up in front of the class and told us that some of her friends were gay. That topic elicited a ton of questions from the girls in our class. The boys sat there and stared, as most of us had no clue to what gay really was, beyond the sexual aspects. She told us of her love life in college, but nothing graphic. One of the conversations we had ended up killing the entire class period. She spoke of getting high.

Now, how about this. She never got into any hot water at all for talking to us about it. Not only that, she very nearly was promoting pot smoking to us kids. That day's conversation made the gossip circuit in the school and there was no reaction from the teachers nor administration. Nothing.

I can see her still, leaning on her desk, explaining why pot made listening to music on headphones so much better. That and how a Snicker's Bar tasted far too heavy and sugary when stoned. She said pot would enhance all of our senses. We kids kept raising our hands to ask a zillion questions about it. I, however, sat there very quiet. I wasn't about to add to this conversation with any stories; or, betray myself with well-informed questions about being stoned, lest any suspicions about me were further enhanced. She had reason to suspect me, and I had my concrete evidence on her too. We both caught one another getting stoned once.

I've mentioned before that my first concert was Frank Zappa. I went with my older brother and his friends who were well supplied with pot and mescaline. I never got any of that mescaline but my brother and his friends kept lighting and passing joints up and down our little group. I became fried.

This being my first concert I had take everything in. I stared at the 13,000 people in there and thought of the Roman Colosseum. The trusses that held up the Providence Civic Center's roof and Zappa's PA system, which were suspended by these very thick cables, were interesting to me. I had never seen any of this before.

During the intermission when they brought up the main lights, I could see better and looked at all the people around me. Over my shoulder, to the left and up about three rows, sat a women who was sucking greedily on a joint. I stared...is that...no...yes! It was Miss Knight.

Of course, her head happened to turn around and spot me sitting the few rows below her. Our eyes met then and we both darted our heads away. I wasn't thrown by the fact she had a joint in her mouth. I was too busy asking myself, “Shit, did she see me passing joint after joint between my brother's friends and I? She must've of!”

She had guts I guess, talking like she did in that class that day, with me in there. Or, perhaps, she didn't care at all. We both knew about one another and sort of made an unspoken pact to shut the hell up.

You have to understand. The late 70's were a time when nearly all prohibitions, restrictions on behavior, were thrown OUT. What the adults did in the 60's, filtered down to us kids in the 70's. No one cared really. There was a phrase back then that I still remember, “Too Young to Know and Too Old to Care.”

What a time it was then. What a different culture. 1978 was when sex couldn't kill you and cocaine was regarded as safe before it's quality shot through the roof in the early 80's. These were the early stages when living like libertines hadn't the time to damage you much yet.

*****

I'll compare the young and hip Miss Knight to an older teacher we knew. One who now that I think about it, we treated unfairly.

Mr. Sable, aka: “The Hook!” was my homeroom teacher in 9^th grade. He won that nickname because his right hand was bent in the shape of Peter Pan's Captain James Hook's hand. He would use this malformed hand as a pointer and still could manage to jam a piece of chalk into it and write fairly well on the blackboard. I will admit, as a young teen, this was slightly disgusting. But, being young as we were, being unfair, immature and not knowing dick about life, we adjudged this man as less than what he was. We were fresh kids still. Healthy, full of life and pretty. Life hadn't chewed us up yet time and again to where we finally learned that scars, physical and emotional, aren't really ugly, when everyone now owned quite a few.

Mr Sable, at his age and being a World War II vet, had a lousy time connecting to us young upstarts in an age where parents shared their drugs with their kids. What brats we were then too. We had it all in a sense. Money, safety and the freedom to stay up till 3AM wandering the neighborhood without the cops giving a crap.

I am sure Mr Sable had his particular opinions on our upbringing, but unfortunately for him, the world evolved beyond his generation's values. So, he had to put up with our guff. I have to say this too, he did it expertly. He never flew off the handle when some kid made an off color comment about his hand or his old fashioned nature. A very even keeled man he was.

I found out, years later, why his hand was in the miserable shape it was. We were talking about old times when Mr Sable had come up. One of us, who happened to know his family somewhat, said his hand was ripped to shreds by a German MP-40 sub-machine gun in the Ardennes forest.

When I heard that, it stopped me.

“He was in the Ardennes offensive?” I said with some surprise

“Yep” I was told. “My neighbor, and old guy, was in the same unit as Sable.”

The battle in the Ardennes forest wasted hundreds upon hundreds of American lives. The Germans had a defensive structure that made such good use of the dense forest and very narrow roads, that the Americans trying to invade it, were tossed into a wood chipper.

Had we known about this, had we kids known that Mr Sable's hand was the way it was due to being wounded in that war, we might have acted differently. But the tough old bird never did mention why he was deformed.

Miss Knight and Mr Sable. One was young and cool and the other, not. One had the easier time dealing with the kids and the other, not. One made her kids her friends and the other didn't.

You see what maturity brings to you after all these years when you can look back on what you thought you knew?

Some of Us Were There

These grey, flat skies are reminding me of snow. I know it's not that cold yet but the evenness of the cloud layer we've had reminds me of what the sky looks like in December when a storm first sneaks in. When I remember that, I see the eastern sky in my mind and no other direction. I guess the memory is fixed due to my house being buffeted by those East winds when a storm arrives.

I enjoyed snow up until I was sixteen and then learned what it meant to drive in it. Snow was no longer fun because digging your car out after you've buried it into a four foot high snowbank became real work! I didn't mind snow past sixteen when it closed my highschool down though. Those free days to sleep in and make a little money shoveling other people out was a nice diversion.

The absolute best, A-1, Blue Ribbon storm was 1978. I was fourteen then and it gave me two weeks out of school. By the third day I was bored silly. You couldn't go anywhere as the snow depth was four feet and drifting to twenty. Even if I could manage to get off my street there was nowhere to go as everything was closed. So I was stuck at home with the TV. How many daytime TV soaps can you watch without pulling nose hairs out to distract you?

In January of 1978, we had two monster storms that I swore, everyone swore, would never happen again. We had one good 15 incher come though which was surprising as we hadn't had something like this in a long while. Then a nice ice storm came to cover that snow and everything around us in glass. The morning after the ice storm pulled out, the sun shone and you saw a trillion diamonds in the trees, on the houses...everywhere.

Sunday, February 5^th came with a forecast of a maybe, perhaps a large snowstorm for Monday morning. “Well, that can't be.” I thought. We just had the two largest storms I could ever remember. How can a third one show up? I wasn't alone in that thinking. Everyone blew it off. I didn't even hope for it and beg the Snow Gods to shut down school the next day. I knew school would be open.

The snow arrived that Monday but seven hours late. After our lunch period we were sitting in history class when the principal announced that he was closing the school due to getting reports that it was starting to snow one inch per hour. In my head I think, “Well, that's all well and good. We get a half a day when I thought we were getting nothing.” The let us out in under twenty minutes after the announcement.

I remember walking down Armistice Blvd., with Pat and Jimmy saying, “Ah, this is nothing. We'll get ten inches at best.”

The afternoon spent itself out and night came in, and the snow just kept falling harder and harder. I started to think I may get Tuesday out of school too. After dinner, I thought it odd that WJAR had kept interrupting my shows with John Ghiorse blaring warnings. I began to see he wasn't screwing around at all.

“I'll be smart!” I thought. “I'll get a jump on the shoveling now and there will be less to do tomorrow!” I was out there, till around 10pm at night shoveling our walkway and driveway. I'd turn around and see the top of the driveway already had another four inches in it.

“Sonuvabitch! I just shoved that!”

Randy, an older guy happened by and told me, “Hey, don't bother. I saw the forecast. They're calling for two feet by morning.”

“Ahhh...that can't happen.” I tell him.

By 11PM, my mom stuck her head out the front door and wanted me to come in as the temperatures were diving and the wind was starting to howl fairly high. I told her I'd be in in a minute and dragged the shovels to the backyard when I saw this, lightning flashes in the sky. A few seconds later, thunder.

That was enough to get me inside.

I stayed up till around midnight, watching it all,  before I went to bed. I can remember lying there hearing the house getting thumped a bit by the wind and our maple tree smacking the side of the house. What was weird, the house was getting colder too. All that wind helped to suck out that wonderful oil heat we had.

The next morning, we discovered a fifteen foot drift had covered the south side of our house.

 

 

Not my house, but it sure enough represents what was around here after that storm.

Poconos

Lehigh River Cutting It's Way Through the Poconos

I could tell some other great stories about the Channing Way Communes that sprung up around UC Berkeley during the Free Speech Movement, but I'm kicking a dying horse. A final word on them though. The communes died off as the kids got sick of starving all the time. Careers in hippy-dom don't create much wealth.

*****

I saw the Extreme Games up close in Providence years ago. It's not like what you see on TV. There is no loud, lead guitar music to egg on the competitors nor 400, one-second-long fast cut camera angles either. When you see it on the TV, it's a complete stage show.

I saw the street luge event. I watched as young 20 somethings lying flat on their backs as they passed me doing...a flaming 20mph. They rolled by me and...and...that was it.

“What's the big deal?” I thought to myself.

What was more interesting were the contenders and video crew milling about. I heard most were out of LA. They were more entertaining than the games themselves.

There were California dudes who did have that surfer look down pat. It's odd seeing a dude walking on brick sidewalks past old Colonial Houses on Benefit Street. The early New England architecture and surfer attire do not associate well. That beach look can be pulled off in San Diego only.

*****

My dalliance with Extreme Sports was a whitewater rafting trip on the Lehigh River in Pennsylvania. It was a package deal for a group of us that provided the bus ride, condo and a day trip down the Lehigh. It was a typical weekend getaway. I had never rafted and visiting the Pocono mountains seemed like a cool idea.

The rafting company should've been called. “Uh, We Just Slapped This Company Together as You Guys were Driving Out.” I can't say we didn't have accommodations but their training course was about six minutes long and all they kept repeating was, “If you fall into the water...point your feet downstream!”

We piled onto our rafts with our food, beer and paddles in a fairly quiet section of the river. What surprised us all was how cold we felt. We were deep into the Poconos and under a thick canopy of trees, so not much warm sun penetrated at all. The forest was full of that grayish fog that crept into the hollows and darkened the scene further. Adding to our chill, we had to step into cold mountain water to move the rafts out to center to catch the main stream.

The Lehigh river is not that wide. At it's widest in the Poconos it might have been 20 yards.  What the Lehigh lacks in width, it makes up by falling twenty-five feet down at times. The first rapids we approached none of us could see, but heard just fine. All of sudden the raft fell from under us and down we went. None of us had any idea of how to steer it.

Quickly we were shoved up against this monstrous pillar of rock that rose out of the churning water and as we inched further and further up it, the center of balance changed and one by one, we all were dumped into the water.

 

All I remember was being sucked under. We all had life vests on but they don't really work in rushing water too well. I can remember that the sun had come out as I was looking at it as I was being dragged along the bottom of the river. The surface of the water sparkles just as much from underneath as seeing it from the shore I can tell you.

The water rushed so fast that I don't recall all the cuts I received from banging into the rocks. The next thing I remember, I was hacking, coughing and bobbing like a cork in a quiet pool where the rapids had finally spilled into. I regained my bearings and dog paddled to the shoreline, grabbed an overhanging branch and pulled myself halfway onto the mud. I tried to stand up but I couldn't.

“Shit! My legs are broken!” I thought.

After looking at them and finding nothing wrong, I tried standing again. I managed it but they were shaking so much. Later the I found the reason. I was so frightened I couldn't stand.

I leaned against the tree and saw beer coolers, empty rafts and people thrashing about. The pool was turning into a traffic jam. My thought was, “Oh Christ, we have another 50 miles of this!”

Once it was over, we all collected our gear and set off anew but I was hopped up on fear for the next spill. I jokingly said to one of the leaders there if there was a way through the woods to get back to Wilkes-Barre. “Nope! This is the only way to get home!”

I can attest to this: You will become competent very quickly when you have fear and 20-40 foot drops in the river to deal with. I learned, we all learned hastily, how to spot the current as it goes over a cascade and how to position the raft to find that “slot.” We learned how to look down the river about 50 feet to see where the current twisted and turned so we could paddle like maniacs to the center of it.

It took me about three plunging rapids to become confident in one hell of a hurry. Once I got the hang of it I could calm down and focus on the mountains as they rose right out of valley bottom.

It's beautiful.

The further along we went downstream, the distance between rapids spaced out more so we just leaned back, sucked down beers and drifted along. I think I can understand why Pennsylvania is a huge deer hunting state. As we floated along, all you heard were the hooves of deer taking off. On occasion you'd see one bounding in 15 foot leaps through the woods to escape us. We think, think we saw one black bear a ways off too.

What's cool too, as you drift along, the land changes. It went from sloping forested banks to sheer rock cliffs that stood up on either side of the river. The guides estimated the height to be around 100 feet up. These cliff faces had tunnels dug into them that made them look worm eaten. “This is coal country!” The guides told us. The first miners would spot a coal seam exposed in the cliff wall and would mine both ways, towards the river and back into the mountain itself. These were cut before Lincoln was President we were told.

By the end of the trip, the Lehigh does widen out and the current slowed down markedly, which meant we were approaching Wilkes-Barre.

In the condo that afternoon, as I was taking a shower, there was a puddle of mud at the bottom of the stall. I had no idea I became that filthy. It was nice to wash off the smell of algae though. What was an unknown perk was that we found out the band Little Feat was performing at a 4-H thingy nearby and there was open admission. The locals there thought we were all from NYC due to our accents. We were told by some they had relatives that lived on Long Island, completely mishearing us say “Rhode Island.”

Shave and a Haircut..Two Bits!

Ken's Barber shop was the one of the many barber salons we had in this neighborhood growing up. Ken's was a “real” barbershop loaded with grizzled old guys who fought in WW2 and Korea. A friend of mine once said a barbershop isn't one unless there were pictures of WW2 battleships all over the walls. I'll add to that. Barbershops were barbershops if they were a “Men’s only” club on Saturdays. I swear, half the guys I saw in there while I was waiting to get my haircut were there just to hang out and shoot the shit.

Ken, whose last name I never did know, had a craggy face, accented with the reddest, bulbous nose you ever saw. He sported black rimmed 1950's eyeglasses that perched pretty high on that mountain of a nose. The guy had the forearms of a longshoreman. They were hairy as hell, covered in tattoos and muscular. This guy looked like he carried bricks his whole life. I found out later that he was a Marine who nearly died in some battle on a rainy Pacific island during the war. That would explain the tattoos.

Every Saturday, my Dad would take us kids there for the same military buzz cut. The haircut was tight and low on the sides, allowing the scalp to nearly show through. “Whitewalls” is what the military called that. The hair on the top of my head was cut but longer than the sides so I could swoop it across with a comb. I looked like any Waffen SS officer.

As we sat there, the place was full of cigarette and cigar smoke. Paced every two chairs was a floor standing ashtray that had a little mountain of crushed out butts. The guys in there just talked and talked and talked about subjects I knew nothing about. Hey, I was five years old then! I do remember Vietnam was a huge subject, sports and something about the then operational Narragansett horse race track that was just down the road.

Then it would be time for my turn. I hated the fact that Ken put a booster seat on the chair as it made me feel even more like a little kid. For once I'd like to sit in the chair like everyone else did. No go.

He was a friendly guy I’d have to say. I didn't give him a ton of trouble either as haircuts didn't spook me at all. I was “easy” he used to say. Barbers love to talk and I got the same questions each week.

“How is school?” “Good.” “Did you ride your bike this week?” “Yes.” And if it were close to Christmas, “Are you being good for Santa?” “Yesssssss” I'd say.

Since I was easy and a “good boy,” I always got the Bazooka Joe piece of gum. Ok, I guess sitting still for ten minutes was worth it.

What I couldn't stand about haircuts then, and the same gripe I have about them now, are those little hairs that fall down your back and stick into your skin like fiberglass to sting and itch. I'd come home from the shop and peel off whatever shirt I had on to replace it. That brought Mom out of the woodwork bitching that “it's STILL clean...put it back on!” Ugh...

I wore those military hair cuts till I'd say...1974. For some reason, my Mom took over the job of getting the boy's hair cut and she wasn't too keen on sitting in Ken's...it was a Men's Club after all. She then started to take us to a new place, a real salon called Calabros.

Calabros, had the cheeziest Spanish décor. Orange plush carpeting, paneled walls with pictures of Bull Fighters and Conquistadors on them. The business smelled funny too. The odor I found out later was incense burning. It also had a stereo system constantly playing disco and 70's mainstream rock music. This was cool at least!

The owner/operator was this look alike of Bjorn Borg the tennis player. This guy was as wiry and healthy as any tennis player could be, and yes he played tennis. He sported Barry Gibb's hairstyle. The longish hair that was piled and feathered. I eventually came to like him as he didn't smell like rubbing alcohol like Ken did. I guess I figured out why Ken's nose was as bright as a beet after all those years. Mr Calabro, who was probably in his late 20's then, wasn't an alcoholic, but a pot head. You couldn't really smell that and probably explained the incense he burned in there.

My brother got his first job from Calabros. Mr Calabro hired him to walk his Irish Setter three times a week for what was then, pretty good money. My brother came to find out that Mr Calabro, was gay. Apparently Mr Calabro was very open about his life and offhandedly told my brother. Now, at the age of 10, I had some worldly experiences, via TV and the news, and I heard about the gays but NEVER “knew”one.

I told my Mom about it and she took it in total stride. “He's the only one who can do my hair right.” Was her response.

So when I went back for my next haircut, I sat there and studied him. “So, this a gay man” I said to myself. The funny thing was that he was the same guy I knew before the news. He was the same Bjon Borg/Barry Gibb. And he didn't ask me the same damn questions every time I went either.

The last time I went to Ken's barbershop was due to Calabros being closed for nearly a month, with Bjorn taking a month long vacation in Greece I heard. I guess this guy had money as well. So, one day I had to get my hair cut and that would be at Ken's.

When I went in, I had nearly shoulder length hair at the age of twelve and I thought it pretty cool. Well, it was then. When Ken got me into the chair, I told him I wanted a “haircut” and he nearly beamed and said “Atta boy!” I remember to this day him saying that. I kind of surmised why he was happy about my choice later.

I got the same Waffen SS haircut he had given me at five. I think Ken, being from that old conservative bent, was more than happy to shave all that hippy hair off my head. “Yes!” he may have thought, “This boy has returned to our kind and is an 'American' again.”

You know after I saw what he had done, I hated it.

I paid him and went home and everyone I ran into was shocked by the transformation.

It took a good half a year to grow my hair back out.

Ken's business slowly faded I was told. I then heard he had medical problems that stemmed from his not-so-hidden drinking. One day, walking home from school, which always took us past Ken's, we found it closed. I had no idea where he ended up after that.

Calabros, still is in business to this day. Though I haven't been there in years as I'm not paying $40 for a damn haircut.

 

This, is the hair cut i had when i was five!

When Kids Played Outside.

My neighborhood has changed so much over the years. The racial makeup, economic status and no one really talks to anyone now. I think the last time we talked was when Hurricane Irene killed the power and out of boredom, people came outside to entertain themselves. As soon as the power came back, everyone retreated inside to their TV.

It wasn't all Walton's Mountain either back when I grew up. Then as now, people are people and you had your jerks and saints. Today, I couldn't tell you how many of the two live on this street, no one comes out now.

Then we had our recluses, braggarts, nosey meddlers, cranky retirees, up and coming young sophisticates and everything else in between that. I don't remember anyone not working, except the stay at home moms, which you never see today. The Moms who did work were either waitresses or secretaries then and that was part time. Our Moms ran from seemingly perfect Martha Stewarts to the haircurlered-housecoat-cigarette in the mouth while they talked ones.

The Dads you saw after 5pm or on the weekends. The ones in our neighborhood worked mostly blue-collar jobs and perhaps a few professionals. You could find the Dads, in their Lazy Boy loungers or you saw them pushing a lawn mower, the old kind with the curved blades, on the weekends.

The only ones left in the original crew from then are three very elderly women who have long since lost their husbands. They still gossip on the phone today as then with one another.

Did we all get along in happy concord? Hell no! Neighborhood politics were as hot then as it would be in today's neighborhood associations. There were a few times we witnessed the Moms screeching at one another like two cats late at night over territory. My Mom was one of them to be sure. What was great about that, the Moms would hang out their window and trade accusations about some small annoyance. The lawn not cut, the garbage cans left out one day longer than usual or mostly, about their kids. It would escalate into insults about the others families shortcomings to the point where one of the Moms would slam her window shut in a final “Hmmph!”

Then around 5pm, when all the Dads came home, they'd have to play peace negotiator with the other husbands and I saw this occur countless times. The Dads would brush off their own wives' bitchiness and concluded that women “were like that” and each promised to quell their own. The men never took up the gauntlet to start their wive's argument anew. Who cares if their little Suzy or Johnny were kicking pickets out of the fence, that was easy to fix.

I mentioned earlier about the kinds of families we had here. Some were “proper” and others were just gypsy camps. Pamela S, a girl I knew, came from the proper version. She always wore a dress (Girl don't wear “pants!”) and was impeccably clean. I wouldn't call her snooty but the appearance of a perfect house, perfect clothing and a perfect school record made some of us wonder.

None of us kids were allowed to be inside her home as we were unkempt and destructive according to her Mom. Her Mom was right. We boys then were dirty and at times hard to control. We would've tramped dust into the house and knocked something over eventually. If we played it was in her yard and it was “structured” play. No off the cuff games allowed in that yard with Pamela's mom.

Though, I can remember Pamela wanting to bust loose and just play like some of the boys, and certainly, like some of the tomboys like Gail. But inside her head, I'm sure, was Mom's restriction that it wasn't allowed for her. Pamela did find a way to rebel against Mom later when she reached her teens. She became the blow job Queen of the neighborhood. Take that Mom!

The Casey family was way more fun. The Casey's were a huge Irish family with kids ranging from 22 years of age to 2. They believed the Pope's admonition to “multiply” and they did so like bunnies.

The Casey household was a gypsy camp. The home had peeling paint, had no lawn of any kind save dirt and ruts. The vegetation was dying due to abuse and neglect. It was a pure, fun playground for kids! Here was a Mom who was in a housecoat shouting out her window for this or that, while a butt was hanging in her mouth.

What we couldn't get away with in Pamela's yard, due to her ever spying Mother, we could in Casey’s. Their Mom was way too busy doing laundry or managing the kids to pay attention to what trouble we were cooking up in her yard. If we were caught, it wasn't treated as a Class A felony.  The only reprimand was a simple,”Now cut that out!”

We did get more than a simple “cut that out” one day when we tried to get the Casey family dog, Dano, up the ladder to make him slip down the backyard slide. Dano was a happy go lucky mongrel who probably weighed 55lbs. So it was an effort for us 7 year old boys to heft him up, and carry him to the top of the slide and them push him down it. Dana started to get very upset being up so high, considering all the whining he did, but we managed to shove Dano down the slide with a “Wow, Let's do it AGAIN!”

Dano kept running away though.

We cornered him, brought him back and we boys again, struggled to get that dog up the ladder and this time, turn him around so he'd go down backwards. Dano kept protesting with many whines and yelps. Luckily for us, he was never a biter.

Then the Casey Mom appears in the window and sees her boys, me and a few others trying to turn Dano around so he'd go down the slide ass first.

“What the...BOYS! GET THAT POOR DOG DOWN NOW!”

To which, Mark, the older son there says, “Mom, Dano likes it...He's having fun!”

“OH BULL**** (Their Mom was pretty good about holding back her swearing, most times.) I CAN HEAR HIM WHINING FROM IN HERE! GET HIM DOWN NOW!”

Only in the Casey yard could we invent experiments to have fun with, as long as Mom was busy elsewhere.

I did like Mrs Casey to tell the truth, she was a kind but harried Mom.

Gardening

I'm going to bore you with another story that relates to my brother. You see...there are only so many people and experiences I have under my belt. This, is what's on the menu.

Beth and I were eating at her home, talking about my brother and life in general. She was a close friend of his for the past ten years or so and an acquaintance of mine. She invited me over to give me something of a respite from the hurricane that had been the last few months of his life. It was needed.

The conversation shifted around as they always do and I spoke of the fields I have worked in. I told her that of the two careers I've had, both dealt with damaged people in one form or another.

She had asked why I chose that and I surmised that I didn't consciously choose it; but I naturally gravitated towards it. There was no epiphany in my last year in high school where I said, “That's IT! I”ll work in social services!” I inclined to it because I understood it.

“Those careers are not happy ones.” she tells me. “Working with broken people all day long? All you can hope for is to stem the tide. You remind me of the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, trying to stem leaks.”

“You're right, in a lot of cases that's all you can hope for. Either the wreckage is too great, been ignored too long or the fixes can only solve some part of it. But, you try to salvage something of it.”

“Salvage...that's what you do then.”

“Yeah, I agree.” I end that without adding anything more to it.

So, I start with a new story, another theory of life I have, using my brother as an example, a perfect example.

I tell her, that people, are no different than any other living thing on Earth. We abide pretty much by the similar laws that control a lot of who we are, genetics and the experiences we pile on. I used my brother as an example and added corn seed to explain why I think life is the way it is.

My brother lacked one particular component healthy people have and that's the gene that makes mucous thin. You and I can cough up this goo as it is viscous enough to carry away all those cute bacteria down in our lung that would like to colonize and kill us. Those with cystic fibrosis cough up wood glue. Or try to at least, with little success. You do that for years and see what improvement you have with that.

“It wasn't his fault, being born with that. He had NO say and at the time in 1959 there was no cure and to this day, there is none.” “Impediments like this are a ball and chain and he had one hell of a weight to carry about. It also prevented him from being the best he could be. And what makes it worse, he was aware of that.”

I go on. You broadcast corn seed across a wide field. Some of the corn falls on plowed soil, some on sand and some by the roadside. It has no choice in where it falls at all. Which seeds will do well?

Take the seed by the roadside. It'll germinate and try to make a living there. But it has to compete with the weeds, hope for rain and not get any of the irrigation the fields get. Living like this will stunt your growth. Now the corn in the field, gets all the tender care in the world. Irrigation, fertilizer, weed killer, bug killers and it grows eight feet tall. It has reached and lived to it's potential.

And I didn’t take into account yet the seed that has lousy genetics. I say again, it's no fault of the seed either. The seed, wherever it falls, will try to do the best it can with what it has. And growing just a foot tall, all bent and scraggly and never producing ears of corn, may be the best effort it's allowed because it's genetics dictate this.

“That” I say, “was my brother's lot in life, and it was my mother's too, though her medical problems were different."

“It's also, the lot of tens of thousands of people now. Be it medical, mental...or what have you.”

“So Ron” she asks...”Who are you? Farmer Brown? You go around transplanting these miserable corn plants to decent fields?”

“By the time I got to them, it was too late really. The damage is done. All I could do was assuage some of that misery.”

She adds, “You do know, at your age, that all those experiences you've had, determine how you see the world. Most people can't stand to look at ugliness in the face without running away, yet you had to, you grew up with it.”

“Oh, I know, I know. It put me in a place many people can't relate to at all, not well at least. But I cannot ignore it, I can't avoid it. I know it full well. When someone you know, or even don't know, is crippled by life's shitty happenstance, they can stare at you...it's a condemnation of your good luck...or the stare is plea...either way, you are bound, must be bound, to help.”

I think for a bit...”Perhaps that's why I've always orbited the occupations I have had...I was schooled from an early age to do so. For me it's a kneejerk reaction, to lend a hand.”

“Then you will never stop.” she says. “You, are the corn seed who had the better genetics out of your whole family, although you grew up between the sand and road, you made it. You always have and always will be looking to replant others in better fields. You did it then and you do it now.”

“Beth..sometimes I wonder why don't I replant myself in a better field, say the Farmer MicroSoft's field, or Farmer Conoco Phillip's field. Give up playing EMT.”

“Because that's not who you are honey. That's not the way the world is. You have your experiences that tell you how you see the world. We all project our inner selves to the world at large. “Nothing is true outside of Ron's experiences, nothing is true outside of me, Beth's experiences, nothing is true outside my neighbor Alan's experiences...and that's how it is. If it falls outside of our own experience, it feels foreign and IS foreign and it is not 'true' to our view.”

“I can't see you in London, trading oil futures.” she says. “You could learn to do it, but it's not who you are.”

**

The moral of this story? There is only one and it applies only to one person, me. The moral is I am me, with all the glories and all of the scabs. I know what, not who, I am. You all have your particular pasts and they are what they are. You walk in your own shoes, live in your own skin and any answers adopted from someone else, probably won't work. You'll have your own.