Pieces of the Puzzle

I spent my summers during my early school years mostly home alone. There were times when my mom wasn't working and was there especially when I was really young. And my grandparents were ever present next door if I ever needed an adult. But for the most part I spent my days alone. My closest friend in temperament and distance, Bruce, lived about a mile away and I did see him pretty often but there were lots of days all by myself. Our school was miles and miles away and it was even a long distance expensive phone call from my home to connect to any of my school friends that way. Because of that I never learned to have a phone attached to my ear 24 hours a day like a lot of teens of that era. There was certainly no need for a Brady Bunch pay phone in the den...like I even had a den. I didn't really connect with my peers beyond the classroom before I was 14 and had my own transportation.

I was comfortable in my semi-isolation. I never really had a sibling to play with or to connect with because my sister was so much older than me. I had Legos and comic books and toy cars and an Evel Knievel Stunt Cycle and a bicycle and miles of open land to keep me occupied. It's funny how there are no real boundaries when you are a kid. Trespassing just meant don't climb the tree in your front yard and don't mess with my livestock but the other 35 acres behind your house was fair game. I crossed from field to field and owner to owner without concern of any kind. There were times when you may get yelled at but it never meant much. Open land was free land.

I am not a herd animal. I'm not comfortable hanging out with the crowd. I never was. I don't know if the chicken or the egg came first but it is the way I am regardless. As an adult I require my alone time and open space around me from time to time to reset my batteries. Everyone in my family and most all my friends understand this need so nobody gets offended if and when I disappear from time to time, sometimes for days at a time. I will run off and spend hours on my boat or drive in my truck somewhere or go to Vegas and just hold up in a hotel room till I am cleansed. When the world overwhelms me I begin to shut down. It's like there is a room with a hundred levers that go straight to my battery and somebody just starts clicking all the levers to the off position one by one. I can tell when it begins, and it has a bunch of different triggers although I don't always recognize what the trigger is at the time. But I do have outward signs. One of the most obvious is that I pace like the sad old Tigers you used to see in cages in old zoos. I get that 100 mile stare and just start moving from room to room. I try to let everyone in my life know about this up front before I ever begin a relationship. I don't want to scare anyone. Sometime my wife sees me begin the pacing process and she escorts me to my pillow and my overnight bag and kisses me on the cheek and says go have fun. LOL. She is outstanding and she knows I will come back all bright and cheery and renewed and ready to take on the world again.

Despite my comfort with being alone there is still an overriding desire when you are a kid to seek out other kids. I'm guessing it's in our DNA. It almost never failed if I was out riding my bike and I happened upon other kids I would cheerfully engage them and try to be included in whatever adventures were happening at the time. If you look back on my previous posts GOD NEVER CAME TO DINNER and THE McGILLS you will see a lot of this behavior in action. Unfortunately, except for my friend Bruce, all of my attempts at fraternization or socialization were disasters. It always seemed to me that every one of the other young people who lived within ten miles of me were all bullies, the sons of wannabe preachers and backwoods farmers.

This story has never been told........One fine summer Oklahoma day with the south wind blowing the 100 degree and 100 percent humidity air through the sunsoaked trees I was out riding my bike on our little country road looking for adventure. I'm guessing third grade. A ways down our road I was passing a driveway to one of the preacher families when I spotted one of the sons and another boy who lived farther away playing in the driveway near the entrance to the house. The boys were older than me by a couple of years. They had a big cardboard box and were in the process of constructing some sort of structure. I had become wary of the neighborhood kids but a cardboard box is nearly irresistible to me. I pedaled just inside the driveway and stopped. The boys yelled for me to come play with them and seemed genuinely friendly and glad to have me join their reindeer games. My little brain jumped at the opportunity. I pedaled down the gravel driveway to the concrete paved section where they were setting up their clubhouse or fort or store or whatever it was going to be. They were busy cutting holes for windows and they wanted me to help them so I jumped right in and did whatever they wanted, happy to have a little social time. There was idle chitchat and I wasn't exactly included in the conversation but I wasn't excluded either. We got the windows all cut out of the box. It was pretty hot sweaty work on the exposed concrete as there were no trees next to the house. Then when I was getting most excited to begin our make believer whatever-it-was-going-to-be one of the boys produced a pellet gun. Pellet guns are much more powerful than BB guns and have the ability to take down small game like any small hunting rifle. The gun was pointed at my head. I was told I was their prisoner and this was their fort. I tried to run away but they were bigger and faster and they tackled me and tied my hands and feet and dragged me back to their cardboard fort. I was instructed to sit and stare directly at the sun or I would be killed. And there I sat. For hours. With a gun pointed at my head. I panicked but I didn't cry out. In my mind I had assumed that there weren't any parents to rescue me and if I yelled out and the boys parents came out they would do the same to me only much much worse. 100 degrees. Probably from about noon to 5pm. When I was just as abruptly untied and told to go away. I got on my bike and rode home as fast as I could. And sat there trying to make sense of what had happened. There was no retaliation to this event. I internalized it and made it all my fault because I was probably just a weird creepy kid that nobody liked. I was probably 9 or 10 years old. I'm going on 46 now.

So now I sit and wonder where that fits in my puzzle of a life. Was it a defining moment? Did something go click inside my head? Was this the beginning or a middle point in my long long road of social inadequacy and ineptitude? It certainly wasn't my only experience of that genre. I had run ins with many bullies and generally I fought back. But somewhere in that supercritical kid age between about 8 and 10 my paradigm shifted in the background noise of my brain somehow and someway. At that place in time and space I felt very alone and very vulnerable and very controlled. I spent 20 years of my life trying to control everything and I mean absolutely everything and everyone. I had some revelations in my thirties that changed that somewhat but I still struggle daily with the overwhelming need to control my environment. Now I can moderate it but for a long long time it prevented me from ever being able to be part of the crowd. It made me a jerk in high school. I made me a real dick in my twenties. I have difficulty making real friends. It feels like people are firecrackers with short fuses and I am constantly flinching and running away so I won't get hurt. There are a handful of people who made it behind my wall with me and they describe me as the greatest person they know, the pit bull that tears open asses but will lay all night with the newborn. I only wish I could have shared that greatest person with the rest of the world for all those years instead of being so focused on control that it made me inaccessible. I am ashamed and saddened by my history.

I have four wonderful children, by marriage, to whom I present the worlds greatest person in all it's naked vulnerable glory. They are rare individuals who didn't have to live with the huge wall of control from my early years. And they all love me incredibly, by their own choice and admission, and I feel like I may have been able to do something so worthwhile by them that maybe it makes up for all the ugliness that I presented to the world for all those years before.

Thank you. Thank you to all who are with me today and believe in me and look past my wall to the real person inside.

Taking a dump

This memory goes in the "I would die if I found my kids doing this" file.

Growing up in rural Oklahoma affords a curious kid many an opportunity. There are any number of natural wonders from trees and hills to climb to rivers and streams to ford to caves and holes to explore. But one of the worst blights in any community is also an absolute treasure to the right boy.

A sad part of rural living is that almost any country road or out of the way spot on a highway has a place where people decide to dump their garbage. Old tires and swing sets and couches and cans and bottles and roof shingles and washing machines and cars and televisions. And the list goes on and on. I spent many hours pilfering old dump sites for interesting treasures. There was a really old one not far from my friend Bruce's house that we frequented. There were all sorts of rusty metal cans and broken glass and boards with nails and I'm sure we got our fair share of injuries wading thru other people's garbage. When a nail goes thru your PF Flyers you learn to look down to where you step. When a can slices open your arm you learn to be more careful. When that copperhead jumps at your from under the old tire you learn to poke it with a stick first. These activities seem so foreign now and I wonder if there are still curious youngsters in the country who still get the chance to rummage thru the waste of others, or if they even would want to.

To me, I didn't see a pile of garbage. I could only see possibilities and the price of those possibilities was exactly zero. I was an original recycler. A turner of old things into, well, still old things but they were repurposed. There was old wood that made some perfectly good tree houses. There were discarded tires that were hung from trees or just rolled down big hills for entertainment. There were pieces of old chairs and furniture that could be used to make a perfectly usable outdoor living room for a few adventurous kiddos. I remember Bruce's dad had some old water ski blanks that we used to "snowboard" down hills in the winter before snowboarding was even a word in our world. We made make believe swords and fantasy worlds. We just plain threw a bunch of it further down hills just to hear it crash. Any unbroken bottle or light bulb was a treat beyond compare. Give a boy a bucket full of rocks and a bucket full of glass bottles and the day is set. Add in a glass of koolaid and a baloney (bologna) sandwich and you were king of the world. Store bought toys and games were grand but they were no match for something you made yourself out of some old scrap metal and a good imagination and a bunch of bailing wire. I'm a professional engineer now. I still make stuff from old scrap metal and a good imagination and some bigger better bailing wire. But, the song remains the same and close to my heart.

There was always a treasure that had no equal. One that always seemed better than all the others. Books. More specifically comic books. Most specifically...Playboy. Yessir, I found many a grown man's stash of comics that had been held since childhood and the porn that was treasured after the onset of puberty. Interestingly enough, comics and Playboys seemed to show up together. Two male vices. A childhood memory that needs to be discarded so maturity may ensue and pornography that has been collected and scoured till the pages are worn thru. Both tossed away, most likely due to a flash of guilt or embarrassment or because they were told to get rid of them or else they would be sleeping on the couch till they were OUT OF THIS HOUSE. And it's funny how they aren't thrown in the garbage can because that may cause embarrassment like you were committing the worst sin in the world and your sins may somehow be discovered by the garbage man or your neighbor or your mom when she comes over to visit. No, they are covertly and indiscriminately tossed into the woods when the world is looking the other way. Better to break the law than be judged by others. It's a silly game we play. One man's trash. Another young man's treasure.

You'll shoot your eye out kid

I had a BB gun at an early age. Not sure how young I was when I got one but it was definitely in elementary school. The standard Daisy model. I don't know if it was a Red Rider model and it definitely didn't have a compass in the stock. When BB guns are new they work well, not lethal to anything but small birds when they are new, but they quickly wear out to a point when the firepower becomes a joke and a boy begins to get creative.

When I first got it, had to be a christmas present, I read in the instructions that you could make a suitable target for practice out of a cardboard box that was filled with crumpled newspaper. It was a great idea and I had soon built my very own super duper target practice box to shoot at. The bonus part of it was that the box would capture the BB's and I could retrieve them and use them over and over again. The instruction expressly forbade this practice but I figured it was just a marketing ploy to make me buy new BB's all the time. Now it gets weird for the first time. It was the middle of winter and there was nowhere to shoot. So I set the target in the hallway between the kitchen and my room. And I shot at it. Over and over and over and over till it was shredded. Pump. Click. Whooomp. Whap. Repeat. My parents were home. They allowed it. They had to listen to it long into the night. What an amazing display of poor parental decision making and loving tolerance. Maybe listening to the BB gun go off over and over again was better than listening to my mouth going off over and over again. That's probably the real answer.

I shot my first little bird the next day. I cried and buried my first little bird the same day. Lesson learned.

I would gather large acorns from around the yard and would line them up on a raised concrete walkway that went around the front of our house. I would stand at one end and shoot the acorns off the walkway on the other end. I would do this for hours inspecting each and every acorn for accuracy and inspecting the damage I had caused. I would save up my money and would get my granddad to take me to OTASCO where I would buy big boxes of BB's to use.

After a while I moved my way up to shooting at little plastic cowboys and indians. They were like the little green army men but were bright red and blue and yellow, not green like the army men. In the woods, little green army men would all be lost in a day. I would create elaborate gun battles between the cowboys and the indians with me playing fulltime quarterback for both sides. I would take a shot from the cowboys side then would switch and shoot from the indians side. I would set them up all over the woods and would run and shoot and entertain myself for hours and days and weeks on end.

Eventually the BB gun would lose it's power to where you would have to aim at a fortyfive degree angle to get a BB to travel ten feet. So I made up my own game of chicken. I would go into a clear area where there were no trees overhead and I would pile up crunchy dead leave all over the place. I would put on a cowboy hat and I would aim straight up in the air and shoot. Immediately I would drop my head forward so the brim of my hat protected my head and shoulders and would put my hands at my side and I would wait and listen to where the BB would land, of course trying to hit myself on the head. I would listen intently and the BB would land in the leaves near me and I would hear it and then I would recalculated my aiming angles and the wind and would try again over and over. It was like playing solitaire. Chicken solitaire.

My weirdest and darkest moment with my BB gun was right before it died completely. A BB would barely even come out of the gun so I got the idea to see what else would shoot out of it. And wouldn't you know it, dry spaghetti worked perfect. I would put a stick of spaghetti down the barrel of the gun, cock it and shoot and the spaghetti would come rocketing out the end. It was a load of fun to play with but spaghetti has awful aerodynamic qualities. I was limited to very short range shooting. So I went off in to the woods armed with a bag of spaghetti looking for a target. Oddly enough I happened upon a small clearing that was absolutely full of tree frogs. They jumped every which way when I walked thru them and then the idea hit me. I loaded. Aimed. Shot. The spaghetti went right thru the frog and into the soft ground. Meanwhile the poor frog would still be alive jumping up and down on this stick of spaghetti till the insides of the frog got the spaghetti moist and then it would fall over. I don't think I ever shot any other living things with the BB gun but frogs held my attention at least for a couple of days.

My world was always about being outdoors and about searching for answers and about experimenting and testing boundaries. But spaghetti in a BB gun? That was out there, even for me.

More first grade adventures

We had a music class that all students had to attend. It was really a singing class and in that it was probably just another recess for the kids, a chance to blow off more energy before heading back to class once again. In my school you had one teacher and one class for the entire day except for music class and trips to the library and things like that. So you spent you entire classroom time with the same kids every day. In music class we would sit in our little chairs in a small room and scream out songs chosen by our teacher, Mrs Sewell. It seems like we sang the same basic songs every time in class unless there was a special event on the horizon like a PTA meeting or a holiday. But mostly we sang hymns. Battle hymns. (I don't think I ever used the word hymn in a written sentence before, it looks really strange and wrong. Hymn. Hymn. Hymn.) As I have written previously, I didn't have any awareness that there was a war going on in Vietnam so there wasn't any real connection to the songs we were singing. I think most of the songs were from WW2. I didn't really listen to the words and they had no meaning to me. I just sang along phonetically, pronouncing the words but not relating them to anything or in any order. I still sing songs like that today. The lyrics were just another musical instrument in my head...AND THE CAISSONS GO ROLLING ALONG, KEEP EM ROLLING, AND THE CAISSONS GO ROLLING ALONG. LALALALALA. I do recall being chosen to participate in a program that was to be given at an assembly for parents to see. It may have been a PTA meeting. I think there were a lot of those. Anyway, Mrs Sewell had discussed the event and how it was to take place. Certain exceptional children would be chosen to learn a verse to a song and would get to sing it in front of everyone at the assembly. I was elated. Just like everything else I knew I was the greatest singer in my class and probably in the whole entire school. I was the most confident neurotic kid you ever seen. When it was time for the teacher to choose kids for the various parts (these were real singing parts, not just to stand wearing a tree costume) I was absolutely sure she would begin choosing from the top of the talent pool, the cream off the old milk jug, the frothy head on the Dad's Rootbeer...and that would of course be me. But when the time came, another was chosen before me. And another. And another. And I remember sitting there aghast and ashamed and terrified and broken completely in two inside. I might have cried a little. I watched as all the parts were given away one at a time right before my eyes. My world was ruined. What had happened? But just when the world was on the verge of collapse, the shining beacon of stardom shown my way as I was indeed chosen. I'm pretty sure I was chosen last. OOOOOHHHHH! I get it. Saving the best for last so all my bathe in the glory. It all made sense now. I had no way to know the relevance of my part. Was I the Lead? Surely this is the case! And I tried hard and practiced long hours so I may not only perform well for my community but prove once again who was THE MAN! I will perform my part for you now for your enjoyment. Please forgive the spelling as there are some lyrical terms included that are not part of the spoken language. Here I go....ahem...ahem...

John Smith, there was a man!

Hi Ho Diddle Aye Oh!

From Kentucky he began

To make our country grow-ow-ow-ow-owwww!

Simply brilliant! I had a costume. Probably even a cool hat. Maybe a sword. I was so excited the day of the assembly. It was an evening event that required us to go home from school as usual and then to return to the school to perform. I remember going home. I remember putting on my costume. I remember getting a fever. I remember throwing up. I cannot believe I actually got sick. So sick that I could not attend the event. All that time and energy wasted. What a load of blah this turned out to be. Hi Ho Diddle Aye Crap!

The boys bathroom near the principals office had a sink for washing your hands that I was unfamiliar with. It was a large circular waist level basin. There was a circular lever below the sink that, when stepped upon, produced a gentle stream of water from a bunch of little holes like a long circular shower head where all the streams of water lined up. It was sort of like a fountain for dirty hands. I guess the design was to make it easier for little ones to not have to deal with faucets and all that. Plus it was much like a long trough urinal in that a lot of kids could use it at once. There was no one kid per sink rule to be followed. It was a soapy free-for-all. This bathroom was located in the fourth grade area of the school, very much foreign to me as a first grader. One day at school I got sick as kids tend to do. Flu, cold, herpes, whatever. I was escorted to the principals office by my teacher and left there while my mother was contacted via telephone. Dial up BR549. One ringy dingy. Two ringy dingy. Mrs Scott, young master Jeffery is with me and he appears to have become ill. Whatever shall we do with the young master? Mom was on her way. I don't know where she worked but she was coming to get me. It was my first time in the principals office. The place where the bad kids go. I felt bad just sitting in there. Delinquency by osmosis. Eventually my illness got he better of me and I got light headed, and then the cold clammy face, and then the sweat on the forehead and then...Hey! I gotta go throw up! Use the bathroom young squire, most haste! So into the bathroom I ran. And when I got there I was faced with this monstrosity of a sink. It confused me. It looked all hospitally and stuff. The long urinal thingy I knew about and wasn't gonna barf there. There was a couple of toilet stalls in the back of the bathroom but I wasn't sure that was the ticket either. But this big round doctor office thingy looked to be here for just such emergencies. So over the rail I went and BLEEEEHHHHHHUUUUUUUKKKKKKK. Much better. I got a drink of water from the fountain outside and took my place in the chair next to the secretary, feeling much better. Not long after that the principal came in the office, having just finished using the same restroom, and asked me if I had thrown up in the bathroom. Huh? Of course. Roll eyes. In the throwup thingy. That's a sink for washing hands not a place to throw up, he said. Why didn't you throw up in the toilet? That's where poop goes, not barf. I used the throwup thingy. LOL. The principal shook his head and went into his office and called the janitorial staff to come do a cleanup pronto. Apparently there isn't enough water flow in the sink to wash away barf and it was just gonna sit there all day greeting every dirty handed munchkin that happened by. HA! That couldn't have worked out any better if I had actually planned it. Awesome. Kids and barf. An eternal love affair.

That same bathroom sported one of those long white urinal tubs where several boys can line up shoulder to shoulder and let loose the worries of the day. It sat in a corner so one end of the urinal was against a wall. There is nothing remarkable about that. However...on the closed off end of the urinal...on the wall...was a small, mounted piece of sculpture, some kind of shell or something...or as a young boy would call it...TARGET PRACTICE!!!!!! Yessirree we would line up on the open end and encourage each other to see who had the firepower to get their pee stream up and into the target. I cannot begin to imagine how many gallons of urine flowed down that wall to, well, wherever it went. I'm sure the smell was wonderful and the janitors had to dread entering that bathroom every single day. Elementary school. Simply magic.

Our playground had slides. Several of them in fact. In particular there were three line up in a row on the far edge of the playground area adjacent to the open field. One was normal, like five steps to the top. One was short but had a big hump in the middle of it which made for great wheelies. And one was taller than the rest and I'm pretty sure it was the middle one. I am guessing it may have had 8 steps to the top. Now, as a kid, I harbored almost no fear of objects or nature. If it could be climbed I was in it. If I could jump off or over it, consider it done. But I had a bit of an issue with heights. I still do. I get a gut anxiety reaction to all heights and even when I just perceive height in a movie. I really hate it. It feels broken. A flaw. As an adult I can overcome the anxiety just by talking myself thru it but as a kid I only knew it as a weirdness that it seemed like only I had. You can probably see where this is going. I loved the short slide with the hump in it. It was like a jump. Today it would be labeled extreme and you would need little kiddie tattoos just to get a chance to ride it. But then it was just fun for me. The medium slide was straight and normal and posed no problems for me. Wheee! Slide! Butt first in the dirt and back up it again one more time. But the tall one. The tall one. It caused me trouble. I would watch kids go up and slide down but I simply could not make myself do it...but I ached to so very much. Every single cell in my body wanted to prove I was the man like always but the towering, infinitely lofty slide kept me at bay. I became transfixed by it. Haunted by it at other times of the day. Embarrassed to even be near it. But I couldn't let it go. I was determined to show this slide who was boss. So one fine day after probably months of trepidation I got up enough courage to go to the top. I had been in line before. I think I had even gotten to the second step before I would jump off and run away humiliated. It was awful and shameful and it made me feel completely alone in the world. But there I was, in line once again determined to make the top. To make it worse I had to watch little Cindy Brady's in their tiny dresses just run up the freaking thing and launch themselves over the top without a whim in the world. How defeating it was. I was next in line and I started up the steps. Probably three kids could stand on the steps waiting to work their way to the top so the process involved several individual triumphs. I made it up the next to the top step and had a firm grip on the rails...and froze. Petrified. Stuck. Wasn't going anywhere anytime soon. The kids yelled and eventually ridiculed me and called me names. A teacher had to rescue me. The bell had rang and all the kids had left the playground and I was still up there like a statue gripping the rails white knuckled. After a time of trying to talk me down, the teacher had to come up the steps and hug me and hold me and bring me down one step at a time. I was so terrified from falling from a stupid slide when I had easily jumped off the roof of my house at home many times before. I had launched myself out of trees twice as high. But this stupid slide had my number. Eventually I managed my fear one day when the playground was empty. I didn't even slide down the stupid slide. I walked all the way up the steps to the top and jumped off backward and landed on the ground and dusted myself off and went up and put my feet over the edge and managed to slide down the awful demon that had haunted my dreams for so so long. The story makes me wonder how many kids stand around just like me triggered by some unknown demon while nobody notices.

Being a kid is just plain hard.

A heapin' helpin' of first grade

First grade. My parents were married. My sister would have just started high school. I lived next door to my mother's parents. I visited my dad's parents just about every Sunday. First grade was chock full of events that have stuck with me all these years. What follows is what I can glean from the innocent fields of early childhood in small town America.

I was a bully. Actually to be more correct I was a superhero. Superheroes are just bullies to other bullies and that was me. I was the protector of the weak. I stood tall where others could not muster the strength. On more than one occasion I put a successful beatdown on a bully wannabe. I would play like normal but whenever I seen a bigger kid picking on a smaller kid I jumped to the rescue ready to throw down. I was a protector. Maybe it was the first time I ever really had other people who needed protecting besides myself. Didn't matter. I was a hero on the playground. And I'm pretty sure I got my share of corporal punishment from it. Yes, it was the norm to get out the old wooden paddle and teach lessons to kids who couldn't quite learn the lesson by just listening. I didn't listen all that well but I learned about a million lessons. OUCH.

I discovered girls in first grade. Better yet I discovered girls were for kissing in the first grade. What the hell! I don't know where it came from but I thought girls were, well, girls. Not icky. No cooties. Not good to play with but good to play near. I think the first girl I ever kissed cried. I think her name was Debbie. I also kissed Sherrie and Nancy a lot. Strange how when you play cowboys and indians with girls there is always a magical cure to bring you back to life if you just happen to stray in front of a lethal make-believe bullet. All it takes is a peck on the lips. Amazingly enough I died a LOT. And I always managed to pull thru with a little help from my friends. Lucky me.

Our playground was vast, if you were a first grader. We had all the room we could ever need to run and jump and do whatever came natural. What came natural in the early 70's was to play army. There was surely a Vietnam component to our role playing but I wasn't aware of it in any way. In fact I learned about the Vietnam war from books so I was too young to comprehend any of it that I happened to see on tv or in the newspaper. All the army boys would split up into two groups and war would commence every day. I didn't care whose side I was on because I was in it for the drama. My acting skills were keen and sharp and I had one of the greatest shot-to-death moves in the entire first grade. I would always charge the most elite fighting force at a full run and just before I could pounce upon the enemy I would be riddled with machine gun fire. At a full run I would grab my stomach and somersault and cartwheel end over end till I laid to rest a fallen hero. Then of course I'd get up and go do it again. Isn't life grand.

I loathed mornings. I still do. My world doesn't begin till after 10am. I used to wake up and whine like a stuck pig all morning about having to get up. Going to school wasn't bad it was the pregame rituals that I couldn't stand. We had a heater vent that came out of the wall from under the kitchen cabinet just under the sink. In the mornings I would get up and cry and go lay next to the vent with the warm air blowing on me till I was threatened. I would acquiesce, find whatever I had on the day before in the floor and toddle my way to the school bus. There was always a half hour or twenty minutes from time the bus let you off at school before the first bell rang. This was always basketball time. I played every morning with Kenny Harris. There were other players but Kenny was always there with a ball ready to go. He graduated high school exactly the same way. Our courts were made up of dirt or fine pea gravel that had been beaten into submission years ago forming a firm crust on which to perform our advanced ball handling skills. One of the best skills was avoiding the big thorny stickers that grew in the grass adjacent to the courts. On occasion the rubber ball would get on embedded in it and when it finally turned face up to your hand when you were dribbling it would jam deep into your palm or finger. Always keep you eye on the ball was a real mantra and a practical way to not be in pain all day. We played in the coldest weather completely bundled up in our winter coats and hats and gloves. Amazing what kids will do.

Jackie "Hooter" Gray would become one of my BFF in first grade till we went off to college in separate directions. He was shorter than me but athletic and energetic just as I was. He did have one thing in first grade that I never had even when I graduated high school. A mustache. Yessir he had a bonafide mustache in first grade. The offspring of a lot of indian blood he had black hair and lots of it and the crowning achievement was a mustache that he was probably born with. Ain't that a hoot.

Besides lunch time we had an actual recess in the afternoon also. Every day we would all line up in the hallway and launch out the door at a full run toward a set of tennis courts that served as our recess area where a teacher would lead us thru jumping jacks and stuff like that. The courts were a ways from the door of the school...maybe 50 yards? I would hang out toward the back of the group when the door opened and I would run like the wind. I made it my goal to always be there first and much of the time I was. So much so that it became more fun to start in the back and pass everyone than it was just to get there first easily. Growing up in the woods climbing trees and throwing rocks and jumping creeks does wonders to a young boy's coordination and strength and speed.

I was always athletic and loved any kind of game that involved running or jumping or throwing. Tee ball was a natural for me. I have memories of several moments in games. Tee ball was the start of a long love affair with baseball that eventually ended somewhat sadly but the ride along the way was epic and full of learning and respect and discipline that was handed out by one significant figure. Our coach Wayne Gable. He was our coach all the way thru little league. He played ball at a high level, perhaps professionally, and was the dad of one of the kids on the team. He didn't treat us as little kids, he treated us as young baseball players. He would throw the ball twice as fast as any other coaches and hit the ball twice as high as any other coach and hit the ball twice as hard at us as any other coach. By the time we played other kids it was like playing in super slow motion. We almost never lost a game. It was a great time in my life.

In first grade we learned how to write our ABC's using little guides about a half sheet of paper in size. They were a greenish hue. They were treacherous. They had three or four lines on them for writing. On the top would be some print of the letters we were to form and we would trace those before setting off on the rest of the paper on our own. I remember the class bemoaning the teacher every time we got one because our hands would cramp from sooooooo much writing. Too much work for such delicate souls. How could they do this to us! Oh the humanity! We had a regular reading session where three or four kids would sit in a circle with the teacher and we would take turns reading from a book out loud. Near the circle there was a poster board with all the kids names on it and it was broken up into columns. If you read superbly you would get a GOLD star, a SILVER star if you were good and I think a COPPER star if you participated. I was one hundred percent absolutely positively no doubt in my mind the very best reader in the whole state of Oklahoma, much less a puny small town first grade class. However I soon learned that there is such a thing as perceived equality. I noticed that even horrible readers would get gold stars sometimes and that the best kids, ME, would sometimes not get a freaking gold star. It was an absolute travesty and a serious blow to my ego even if I did understand the teacher was only doing it to make the other kids not feel so inferior to me. (Yes, my granddad taught me to read very early. I would do the Jumble puzzle and the Word Search puzzle at the bottom of the comics page of the newspaper almost every night. Well, ok, I helped with the Jumble. But I was a Word Search master. I don't know if I read better or worse than any of the other kids but I certainly thought I was superior and that is all that matters.) This bastardization of the gold star standard caused me to take desperate measures. I took to calling my fellow classmates the D word. Yes, they were all dumbbells. OMG! So controversial! I remember the scolding I got for calling other kids dumbbells from the teacher and from my dad. I never uttered the word again that I know of. I had learned my lesson. You don't mess with the Establishment or they will TAKE YOU DOWN! I spent most of the rest of my school years messing with the establishment and receiving the state approved corporal punishment each and every time. (No I don't want your 2011 opinion on spankings. It was an art form then that was mastered by the elite educators over many years of careful experience. Nothing today can even remotely compare.) In fact I remember getting stood up in a christmas assembly and marched directly to the hallway for a swat on the butt. All the kids were in the gym being led by the music teacher in tumultuous renditions of the classic kid christmas favorites. Rudolph was always a favorite song for kids and I sang loud and clear for all to hear. Only I was singing RANDOLPH THE BOWLEGGED COWBOY at the top of my lungs after being told repeatedly to stop. Establishment 1, Kid 0.

I tried Cub Scouts in the first grade. I went to a meeting. I got my uniform. Actually the uniform was pretty cool especially that little bandana thing you had to wear and the sweet hat. It took a couple of meetings before we got our merit badge books, We got like little gold arrows or something like that to sew on our shirts for each goal that was reached in the official book. I was excited to get the book and the day I got home after a meeting I opened it and started to look thru the list of goals to accomplish. I.E. climb a tree over ten feet tall. Check. Done that. Skip a rock on the water. Check Done that. And it went on and on until I had checked every one of the Cub Scout guide goals. Growing up in the woods I had already accomplished every single thing in the book. What a disappointment. I think I may have went to one more meeting and then I quit. Paper mache held no interest. Neither did scrapbooking. I determined right then and there that the cub scouts was a secret organization for sissies. I'm sure it is a fine organization but the way it was presented to me just didn't work out. I didn't need an after school activity. I lived in the woods.

Around first grade my mom took me to an apartment where she was meeting someone. I do not know the reason we were there. I did not know the people who lived there. But they were the first black people I had ever been around. Ever. My mom had purchased me one of those jumbo sized bags of jelly beans earlier in the day and I remember taking them with me inside when we visited. At some point I remember moving off by myself away from the adults, maybe on a patio. Some other kids came over and I tried to make friends. They bullied me and stole my jelly beans. I sat there dumbstruck. That was my first experience with racial tolerance. It was not a good one. I didn't have to form my own opinion of black people because that was given to us at a young age. Our town was white. There were indians (native americans) and a smattering of hispanics but no black people. We were taught that black people were inferior. Period. It was college before I could shake off those old belief systems and form my own informed opinions concerning race. But for then, at that point, black people stole my jellybeans and no white people had ever done that. I'm sure it left a mark.

Preschool hijinks

I went to a sort of combination preschool and daycare for kids under kindergarten age. My mom had a job at the time and she would drop me off. I don't remember how long I was there but it was long enough to set some memories into stone.

First and foremost there was a little playground with a canopy from an airplane and sort of figure 8 concrete sidewalk with lots of tricycles. I used to play under the canopy because it just seemed so cool and different. But my favorite by far was the tricycle track. My family were friend with a famous racing family from Tulsa. They are three generations further along now and the racing skills just keep getting handed down. We used to frequent the dirt track races at the Tulsa Fairgrounds speedway on Saturday nights to watch our friends race their cars. I loved the racing and the cars and the rumble and it has stuck with me to this day. The tricycle track was my chance to show my skills to the world. When all the other kids were leisurely pedaling around the concrete I was always in race mode. Even in preschool, rubbin is racin, and I made sure that everyone on the playground understood who was the boss when it came to three wheel speed. Unfortunately the grownups did not see that the same way and I was eventually banished from the tricycle track. I am sure I screamed and maybe that's even what caused my preschool days to come to an end but I do know that without the tricycle speedway I didn't have any reason to be there. Lame.

Nap time absolutely sucked. I always felt totally dominated. It did not sit well with a five year old alpha male. I remember just laying there staring at the ceiling or causing trouble because I wouldn't shut up...a trait that many people now would still recognize. LOL

There was a kid in a wheelchair named Phillip. I was five years old and I have this kid's image seared in my brain. I remember being curious about him and his wheelchair. Not scared or weirded out but it didn't compute well as to why he was stuck in the chair all the time. I remember him as bright and communicative but he obviously couldn't walk for some sad reason.

I hated Simon Sez. Nobody ever told me the rules. Even into my teens I don't think I knew how to play. In preschool we would go outside on a concrete patio and everyone would spread out and we would play simon sez. To me, the rules were easy...you just do everything the leader does exactly like they do it. Period. And I was brilliant at it. And I was always the first one OUT and I never knew why because I know I was doing better than everyone else. There was lots of frustration and I may have even went all tantrum on em more than once because of it. Ha. Even at a very young age I had to know why things worked like they did or I wans't happy.

Somewhere about this age I remember asking my granddad what made the wind blow. Now my granddad was a smart man and probably knew 95% of the scientific answer but you can't just blurt out scientific data to a 5 year old so he told me the clouds made the wind blow. I immediately knew this was complete bullshit. Even I had worked out that the wind moved the clouds. I remember being angry about being lied to even though I never said anything. I do know that this one simple conversation changed how I approached learning. It was better to research and experiment myself before asking anyone. This one event shaped a lot of how I managed my daughters when they asked real LIFE questions. I would often make a joke but when they were serious I would give them the full unrestricted scientific explanation right down to jargon and nomenclature. If they didn't understand then we slowly worked backward simplifying the explanation till it was digestible to them.

Doesn't everyone have a second grade teacher?

My father was around thirty years old when I was born. My mother in her late twenties. My only sister is eight years older than me.

We all had Mrs. Helen Paul as our second grade teacher.

I believe there is a building at the elementary school dedicated to her now.

Truly amazing.

Small town. Small world.