Tag Archives: childhood

Live and learn

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What a week it’s been for the old ego. Here I am a bit more ragged and a bit more paranoid and a bit more raw and sensitive and wounded and pathetic. And, here I am stronger and smarter and perfectly fine.

It all began on a day when I consented to not just listen to others but to go out of my way to solicit their opinions about me, myself and I. An idea born from the bowels of hell, doubtless, or at least from the sewers and muck and mire of man’s meager experiences.

They call it a 360 review. It’s the workplace, salt mine, hell zone, productivity, performance management equivalent of “Do I look fat in these jeans?” You line up a jury of your peers and your not peers and a professional, who voluntarily does that kind of thing for money, interviews them. The questions seem to range from, “Management doesn’t think she sucks, but what do you say?” to “”Seriously, tell me something you hate about her.”

Maybe there were some constructive things in there. I lost sight when the report turned personal.

Here’s what really got to me, though. I didn’t learn anything. Nada. Nothing. Zilch. But I did remember all of the emotions of being a kid, all of the stupid struggle almost anyone with any soul at all remembers.

The report said that the people surveyed thought I was smart, creative, quirky, funny, a good writer and interesting. Yeah, on some days, I manage OK. The report also revealed that some people don’t understand me, and I bug the shit out of some.

Wow. Revelatory. I find myself growing already.

The bitch is, at the suggestion of my manager, and in an open-minded moment of intellectual weakness when it sounded like a valuable experience, I asked exactly those people who I don’t really get along with to participate in my personal witch hunt.

Here’s a fucking bulletin: there are reasons we don’t get along and they ain’t all related to my being a flawed human being.

The same people who don’t like me at the age of 48, are the ones who in junior high told me I was weird. The girl who wanted to marry and stay in our town and have babies and just be normal, subtext unlike me, is now a woman in my office with the perfect nuclear family in a suburban home who works part time for the extra cash to ensure a model life. She doesn’t hesitate to point out to me today my flaws, just like her doppelgänger back then.

My whole life I’ve wondered why folks with the most boring lives are the ones who proselytize others to be like them the hardest.

Every conversation with her reminds me of my junior high crush crush on Greg Maharis. In addition to being cute and well-dressed, he smoked cigarettes and exuded cool. He also looked past my awkward, uncomfortable, unfeminine, uncoordinated, inelegant, ungainly teenage self, and we had some great conversations. Other, prettier girls in my class couldn’t comprehend why he talked to me at all.

Two of my junior high triumphs were via Greg. In another class, when some twat started making fun of me and doing what junior high girls do, he stood up for me and declared me “cool.” My friends who were there and had overheard the conversation in hushed silence assured me of the moment’s epic nature. Then, on a fateful spring evening he crossed the abyss of the gym floor separating guys from gals and asked me to dance.

My suburban colleague in my grownup world today is all of those girls who never understood why Greg would talk to weird me.

The other people who don’t get me today are the competitive ones who didn’t get me then. My whole dorky life, I had an easier time talking to the adults around me. Apart from my close friends, my peers weren’t thinking or reading or interested in the same shit as me. Other kids didn’t read the newspaper, for example, except to cut out items for a current events assignments.

I found myself in conversation with teachers and Blue Bird troop leaders and moms. I like hearing other viewpoints and stories. In adulthood, one of my good friends was almost slack jawed as her own mother told me the alternative, risqué version of her family’s journey from Hungary. A version she had never, ever heard.

Apparently, in today’s modern office I’m a self-promoting douche who curries favors with the higher ups by horrors of horrors, engaging in conversation.

Funny how none of the people deriding me for talking with our president gave a shit that I’m also friends with my buddy who runs the facility. Uppity I very well may be, but I’m equal opportunity in my talking with interesting people. It’s not self-promotion if people like talking with you and seeking you out.

I’m older by a week and wiser not at all. My journey of self discovery told me what I already know.

And for whichever narrow mind labeled me as “immature” and hopes that I grow out of my traits — Sorry, dude, it’s only going to get worse. I refuse to “act my age,” dress like you, stay quite, act appropriate or conform to what world order you deem correct. My job is to to fuck up your order. The older I get the louder I get.

Me, my friends and my tribe, we’re the crazy ones. The disrupters. Artists and dreamers. Our fun is to speak out of turn.

I will never be able to explain to you why a good friend insisted on wearing girls patterned socks with the uniform of a bailiff, a court officer of the Massachusetts State House, and face getting reprimanded. You can’t understand the friends who walked away from solid jobs for love and for travel and adventure. It’s beyond your understanding that what you label as a “normal” life leaves many of us cold or scared shitless.

We don’t want what you have. And you can’t have what we want.

And, here’s the part that I think you can’t stand. People like me. They like my friends and our kind just fine. They seek us out, promote us, thank us and befriend us. They also hate us, fire us and shun us in equal measure. Same as they do for the regular folks, like you, also in equal measure.

But, we have a lot more fun.

Holy, holy, holy

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I really don’t know how to feel, so I’m doing the only thing I ever learned to do. I’ll write. Badly, maybe. Thoughtfully, possibly. With futility, definitely.

Today the closest I ever had to a father figure left this mortal coil. A true mensch, a sensitive soul, my uncle Ron died today.

I thought about writing a euphemism for died, but for all the poets, madman and philosophers seeking the truth, I couldn’t do it. Ron was the first person I ever met who talked about the Beats, Ginsburg, Kerouac, Burroughs. For all of them, the word is death, and today it’s Ron’s word, too.

The first thing I remember about Ron is that he was the first grown up that spoke to me like an adult. I remember real conversations, or rather they were very real to me. Given that I was about 6 years old and he was in his 20s, his mileage no doubt varied on what he got from the dialogs.

I dogeared and wore thin the pages of a picture book he gave me way back when.

That mean man, who shared his chicken pox but never his jelly beans, deserved his score of mean children who made him live unhappily ever after.

It was its non-treacly story and non-kiddie flavor that made it long a favorite after I was past picture books. The book traveled to college and crisscrossed various moves and apartments. I regret not knowing where it landed.

When I came home tonight, I pulled open drawers and scanned shelves to find a tiny gift I never gave Ron over the couple of Christmases we didn’t return east. I meant to give him a small badge from the Beat Museum, an earnest little storefront in the heart of North Beach.

Long before I ever moved near the San Francisco Bay, walked down Grant Ave. to Columbus and by Jack Kerouac Alley, North Beach existed in my imagination. Ron’s love for books and the Beats taught me where City Lights Bookstore and the Condor club are, and I hoped that someday he’d come out here on a visit and see for himself.

As a placeholder for that visit, I picked up the pins from the museum. “Holy! Holy! Holy!” and “Starving Hysterical Naked.” Now they will hold a place of remembrance on the bookshelf by my desk.

I want to say so much more. Ron was the adult who extolled the virtues of “Exile on Main Street” above all other Stones albums. He was jazz records and quoting postmodern analysis of just about anything. He was the babysitter not knowing how to handle an unruly brood of five letting my brothers smoke a novelty cigar. He was nerdy passion for books, art and music in equal measure to a passion for sports, even though a natural athlete he was not.

Coincidentally, my aunt, his wife, told me a story about my father and his influence on her as a kid that I thought I could have said about Ron. My father to Nancy was someone who tried the new, bringing gadgets and food and whatever to her Dorchester, a neighborhood not known for exploration. Ron was that to me in my suburban world.

He listened to rock and jazz and read books that raised eyebrows. He spoke to me and my siblings and his high school students like a real person, including innuendo and jokes. He admitted to having inhaled way before it was asked of presidential candidates.

Ron and my aunt Nancy were Newbury Street in the 60s, urban life and walks in the Public Garden to feed the ducks after reading “Make Way for Ducklings.” I met my first hippies and interracial couples and a gay man through them. I tried new foods, like the exotic pita bread suddenly appearing on store shelves next to the Wonder Bread.

I got to take a sip of wine and beer, and instead of soda was allowed sophisticated drink mixers like Squirt from the corner store.

Every perception I had as a kid in the sixties and early seventies was influenced by what seemed at the time a Ron and Nancy’s counterculture lifestyle to my mom’s post-war mainstream self.

Ron was also after school adventures and schemes with Pat, my mother, as they both used their school teacher afternoons pretty well.

There is a part of the non-conformist me that I think I owe to both of them back in those afternoons. I learned about shy adults with passions bubbling under the surface. Early on I talked about writing with Ron, a closet writer who said his stuff wasn’t good enough to see the light of day. I am sure that he was wrong.

Perhaps most of all, Ron taunted a kind of affection and sensitivity in me, giving me the hugs that were not second nature in my family and speaking out loud about feelings. I modeled behavior that he showed and eventually I’ve gotten better. Ron and Nancy were the most couple-y couple in my world as a kid.

Now, I use his “take care” as a goodbye (which actually works pretty well in California.)

That’s all I have right now, and it’s not nearly enough. Maybe instead, I’ll just re-read Ginsberg. Ron and everything are Holy! Holy! Holy!

Remembering a dream I had

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Recently, I remembered a happiness I could never achieve despite my belief that some can attain it. For me, it will never be a reachable star.

Many moons and a couple of thousand of miles ago, I sat in a classroom. There, in the front, sat color-coded file boxes. They were the slick, good cardboard, shiny like magazine covers. Contained within were shiny cards, a bright color band on top, each with a different story or puzzle or game.

The product was called SRA. The acronym may be for Standardized Reading Aptitude. Or maybe Symbianese Reading Army, as it was the 1970s.

Each kid in the classroom was told what color they were, and they got to cluster around their colored box selecting an activity. As we moved through the weeks and months, we would development and be given access to a new color in the series.

Warren and I weren’t assigned a color. Within that classroom we were relegated to a strictly black and white world, no color codes for us. Black letters on white backgrounds, the text of books.

Together we walked to the front of the class and asked the teacher for our color. She was nice about it, but she clearly laughed at us. “Red, I guess. It’s the last color in e series.” We spent the rest of the afternoon amusing ourselves with a game or two that focused on vocabulary and comprehension skills we already had.

I loved being an early reader. Books brought me a sense of an entire universe that I couldn’t see from my window.

To this day, I remember the special vocabulary lists my second grade teacher wrote out just for me and tucked into new books I hadn’t tackled yet. Most definitely I learned the word “extraordinary” from Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

However, I also noticed something as I occasionally popped my nose above the pages and looked around the classroom. The other kids, the slow readers, always seemed to be having a raucously good time. They played loud and boisterous games, even when we were supposed to be quiet.

I was slower in learning how to make a triangular paper football and flick it over the goalposts of a friend’s two hands.

Worse, I got extra assignments. No matter how quickly I completed my work, the teacher always had a pile more waiting for me. Thin books moved to heavy tomes that tore away at the straps of my book bag.

In my childish brain it seemed so unjust. Purely because I could do my work, I was given more work to do.

My fantasy, therefore, was wishing that I never learned how to read. Or, maybe, more realistically, that I only ever could read at a minimally acceptable level. My whole life would have been different, as teacher after teacher passed me a long but never expected particularly much from me. I’d have more free time to master kickball and twisting a paperclip into the perfect missile to be launched from a rubber band.

Sometimes today, a fully grown adult, I still feel that way.

People expect more from me in some situations. I had a recent spate of meetings in which coming in or going out the door I got buttonholed for a couple more comments from the powers that be.

Meanwhile, I find myself shoulder to shoulder with the kids who never even made it to the red box, the last in the reading series. These kids, now adults, color-coded green or yellow or orange, get to leave meetings on time.

Happily, they go back to their desks. They work next to me, unaware, that I’ve just been handed an extra report to write and don’t understand why I like meetings even less than they do.