The day Randy’s mother asked a key question

My friend Randy was a really nice kid and a natural leader–smart, focused, creative, bold, able, and he really knew how to present himself in a pleasing manner, whether to child or adult.  I was lucky to have known him, to be his neighbor, to be his friend.

As it turned out, he was a testament to the fact that sometimes the apple drops really, really far from the tree, and often it’s a good thing it does.  His parents were clueless, self-involved, mean-spirited, and, luckily for me, distant.  He was no more like them than he was like any random pair of adults you might pick out of a line-up.

Being his friend, I had occasion to go to his house from time to time.  I mean, he came to mine a couple of times a week.  When he’d come over, he’d be so ingratiating, so grateful for any little kindness shown to him.  My Mom thought he was the greatest kid ever.  And he was.

But sometimes he and I would have to go to his house.  He’d get an idea for something he wanted to do, remember something he needed at home to make it happen, and that was that; no matter what he had to deal with once he got there, he’d go.  It was real simple for him on that level.

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The day Randy Robinson’s dog was killed by a car

Mutts are just the best, aren’t they?  That has been my experience, anyway.  One of the better ones I’ve known used to follow my group of childhood friends on the fishing expeditions we took all around our homes on what was then the outskirts of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

He was a small dog, mostly white with three or four black spots covering maybe a third of his body.  He hardly ever barked, but he was always alert, always calmly watchful–well, except for that one day when his trusting obedience led to his death crossing a wide-open rural road.

We usually avoided the roads and took the overland route everywhere we went.  When we did walk along the roads, the noise and heat made it a big chore.  We had a much better time walking along creeks and fence lines that always seemed to lead somewhere interesting.

This particular day we did the unusual and made our way along a rural road, single file, wandering along.  We crossed the road at one point, the dog remaining on the far side, sniffing at something in the ditch.  My friend Randy called him just before he realized a car was heading toward us at high speed, something people did all the time on the straight, flat roads of Oklahoma.

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The day I looked up from baseball to find my teacher’s hospital room

This would have happened in the late 1950s, just after my fifth grade year at Andrew Carnegie Elementary School, in Tulsa, Oklahoma .  I loved it there–the school, my friends, the town, the ranches surrounding our suburban subdivision–it was just the ideal place for a boy to grow up.

Carnegie was a “pilot school,” one set up to try out new educational initiatives, and most of them really worked for the students there.  For example, from the second grade on, we changed classes.  The classes of children stayed together throughout the day, but we moved from room to room and from teacher to teacher.  The advantage to us was that when we were in, say, Science class, we had a Science teacher, not some nice lady who really wished she understood Science a little better.  The Art teacher, for example, was actually able to get me to produce some attractive works–something that never happened before or since–just by providing the materials and environment that put success within the students’ grasp.  It still is a great school, apparently–all these years later.

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The day I ice skated on my front yard

Oklahoma has freakish weather.  It is known for being in Tornado Alley, but you don’t have to live through a tornado to experience some weather-related excitement there.  I have seen a hole the size of a Volkswagen blown in a roof by lightning.  I have seen a summer storm fill the gutters in a minute, all the way to the top with warm, chocolatey water.  I have seen the extremes of the continental climate from a first-hand vantage, so I know how extreme it can get.  Weather like that adds interest to the life of a boy not yet old enough to lose his sense of wonder.

One three-day span stands out in my memory as perhaps the strangest.  It was early winter, a time of great variability anyway, but this particular period impressed me.  The first day brought about 6 inches of snow, falling steadily out of the steely skies all day and into the night.  The next day dawned cold, but the sun came out at mid-day, and the temperature climbed into the seventies.  The skies darkened in the late afternoon as huge, anvil-topped thunderheads built in the west.  Instead of rain, though, we got pea-sized hail which pelted into the top layer of snow cover.  Soon thereafter, as the sun descended, the clouds swept by, and the sky cleared as the temperature started to drop.  It went into the teens that night, and the next day dawned bright and clear.  Looking out the window, the hail embedded in the snow sparkled and glistened, fracturing the light into millions of tiny spectra, some complete, some partial.  Roy G. Biv would have been proud of most of them.

Walking outside, it became clear that this crust of ice and snow was very strong.  My sister and I didn’t break through it, even when we jumped up and down.  I think it must have been my mother who suggested we try to ice skate on the icy crust.  Whoever it was, the idea was genius.  We spent most of the morning gliding back and forth on our front yard until the sun softened the snow, and the ice skating was over.

I have told this story a few times in my life, but I stopped telling it because I became aware over time that almost no one ever believed it.  When my parents moved us from Oklahoma, they moved us away from the only audience that would understand and appreciate a story like that.

The day I made a bold move in the school cafeteria

Transferring schools is something I did quite frequently growing up.  I attended seven different elementary schools, in fact.  Transferring schools, especially at mid-year, can be disorienting under the best of circumstances.  They all have different rules and punishments, all have different things and people to be sought out and avoided.  It can take quite some time to learn the policies and personalities of each new place.

I attended Hammond Elementary School for just a few months before moving on, but I remember it as one of the most silent, orderly, and stultifying places I have ever been.  I felt totally unsupported there and conceived that every adult had chosen as his or her role to uncover my stupidity and iniquity.  I do not believe I am far wrong; this conception was founded upon repeated experience with the people there.  I don’t know how this school’s culture had evolved in this way, but it was a good thing I only had to stay there a little while.  I was in and out in a few months.

I remember only one event from my time there.  It occurred in the cafeteria, which, like the rest of the school, was utterly silent and orderly at all times.  The cafeteria had one of those milk dispensers that was popular back then before we discovered that everything could be individually packaged for our sanitary snacking pleasure.  With these machines, one strode up to it, got a glass from a rack, positioned the glass under a little rubber spout, and lifted a heavy chrome ball on a lever to start the milk into your glass.  This was early in my schooling, and I had never seen this sort of contraption before.

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The day I spilled my milk in kindergarten

Kindergarten was a catch-as-catch-can affair in mid 20th century Atlanta.  It had not become part of the public school offerings at that point, but there were many options, most of them offered by churches as a way to glean some income from their unused space during the week.  I’m told that I transitioned into kindergarten a bit reluctantly, but by the third day I was happy about the transition and taking part fully.

My kindergarten class was arranged in rows designated by birds.  It appeared to be a meritocracy of some sort since I got the vague impression that certain kids were better at certain things, and that was why they were seated in the bluebird row.  I would not be surprised to find that the row assignments were made on an altogether different basis, however, Atlanta, being as it was, rather a plutocratic, oligarchic sort of place.  I don’t remember being bothered by the situation at all, though, and if I was ambitious to become a bluebird, it can’t have been much of a passion for me.  I labored in mediocrity in the robin or cardinal row and was fine with it.  I saw little difference among the birds myself, even after the indoctrination we received on the relative merits of the species chosen to stratify us.

One task early in the year was to select a picture to designate our cubbies.  I looked through issues of Life magazine, with its great photographs, lying around our living room until I found a picture of an ocean liner.  The picture had been taken from the air, and it showed the huge ship steaming through rather rough seas.  This picture adorned the back of my cubby for the whole year, and I can see it still.

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The day we kids showed our racial sensitivity

While we were living in Ohio, my father arranged for workmen to come and do some kind of work in the yard near the front of the house.  I was about three, so I have no idea what they were going to be doing, but I do remember my mother sitting my sister and me down for one of those serious talks we had from time to time on any number of subjects.  She was concerned that we might say something wrong when the workmen showed up.  See, they were black, and you just didn’t encounter that many black people in rural Ohio, in the mid-1950s.  (Even today, the African American population of the area is only 0.14%.)

My mother had lived for a while in the south and had read a lot of southern fiction and fancied herself quite enlightened when it came to matters of race.  In actual fact, although her heart was in the right place and she really wanted to like black people, she hadn’t known any, and her ideas on what it meant to be black came from the white authors of all that southern fiction she had read.  She had seen and soaked up Gone with the Wind, but then what resident of Atlanta had not?  It ran in the theaters there continuously for years after its 1939 premiere.

Thus it was that her concept of blackness was nothing much more than a collection of black stereotypes, but to her credit, she acknowledged the ones she considered “positive” and rejected the rest, the overtly negative and threatening stereotypes that could make an unknown other so…what is the term?  Unlikeable?  It had been no great feat to hear these kinds of stereotypes spouted and expounded upon in the south.  She was accomplishing something, at least, by rejecting all that kind of talk.  The fact is, of course, that stereotypes, by their nature, tend to be negative, perhaps especially the ones my mother considered so “positive.”  They all diminish the humanity of the person being stereotyped.

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The day the lawnmower got away from Grandma

Until I was four years old, we lived next to my grandparents just south of Lake Erie in Ohio.  My grandparents, Clare and Hazel, were union workers who always had some acreage under cultivation, always had a ranch house with a basement, and always had their basement full of shelves groaning under the weight of my Grandfather’s produce and my Grandmother’s canned goods.

Whatever garden they had going was the envy of the neighborhood, and the house was always bedecked with ornamentals to go along with the food crops.  The saying among my relatives was, in the idiom of the region, that “Y’ daren’t allow Hazel to touch yer fence posts, ‘less you want ’em t’ sprout and ruin yer fence.”  My grandfather didn’t try to attract attention to anything he did, but he was just as talented, just as hard working.

This would have been the mid-1950s, and my grandparents were as forward-thinking as anyone in that progressive post-war period.  That went for their farm and garden machinery as well.  Their lawnmower, for example, was a model of post-war American efficiency.  It was a reel-type mower, with a big engine and power to the wheels.  It would mow the grass evenly, smoothly, and the way my grandfather kept the engine tuned, quickly.

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The day my sister hit me in the head with a hoe

I was born in Atlanta, Georgia, but we lived In Waterville near Toledo, Ohio, next door to my grandparents, until I was four.

[googleMap name=”Waterville, OH” description=”Lived in Waterville when I was little. Try satellite view to check out the terrain.
Google has been busy. Even this little town is on Street View now.” width=”550″ height=”300″ directions_to=”false”]waterville, oh[/googleMap]

I have mostly hazy memories of our time there, but a few experiences stand out, even after all these years.  One event leaves only vague impressions; instead of being a definite series of occurrences defining a narrative arc, it is more of a collage of images and sensations all related to the same time span on a particular afternoon.

My sister and I were playing in the sandbox behind our house.  She was a year younger than I, and for the most part we played together without any tension or problem between us.  At a certain point, however, I realized that she had raised a toy hoe, about three feet long, and was, without any apparent rancor, bringing it down on my head.  I remember quite clearly the grinding, scraping sound as the metal blade hit my skull.  Any wound to the scalp bleeds profusely, and I recall a lot of blood pouring down my face as I ran to the house to find my mother.
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Crystalline Moments

Quartz crystalsI finally have come to terms with my misgivings about the memoir form. Those objections are of long standing, but I guess changing perspectives go along with changing age. The fact is that I no longer have difficulty with the skewness of the typical memoir–as long as all that skewing is kept somewhat in check.

The younger me was rather jaundiced on the form. An occasional, “Oh sure…,” has been heard to fall from my lips when reading them. The self-serving way many memoirists embellish and ignore facts in their own behalf was grating, but I have come to overlook even things such as that. Truth comes in the arid, austere, rigorous variety–the truths upon which we all can agree–but it also comes flavored with varying degrees of human experience and bias–less universally agreed upon, but perhaps more easily applied to everyday life.

In keeping with my new acceptance of the form, I am launching a series of short memoirs upon the world. These are remembrances from my youth, mostly, with some kind of twist that I hope will broaden their appeal. I have found that these memories are distinguished by the fact that they are still so remarkably clear in my mind, even after half a century or more. I therefore consider them “crystalline moments.”

Although I am digging back into bygone days, I am trying to use some 21st century tools to do so.  For the places and things I mention, especially those that might prove unfamiliar or interesting in their own right, I have added digital images, Google Maps, and Wikipedia references for clarification. Fans of that kind of truth can have their merry fill of it. Go ahead and explore these external links, but see if you can make your way back to my little memories. You might find something there for which Wikipedia could find neither room nor license.