Coming of Age and Current Events

“So, where’s your brother?”, demanded several of my little playmates all shouting at once.

Proudly I responded, “My brother DeDe is in Korea.” 

I was about 4 years of age when American armed forces were leading a United Nations coalition in a “police action” on the Korean peninsula.  I, then as now, was an only child.  But, I wanted to have an older brother.  So I made him up.  And I explained his obvious absense to anyone by saying he was “in Korea”. 

Now, one would think I was quite sensitive to current events at such a tender age. However, rest assured I had no idea about “Korea” other than it seemed something far enough away that inquiring minds were well satisfied and pestered me no more about where he was.  A maturity of mind makes a difference to an ability to perceive what is happening in space way outside one’s immediate experiences.  And, at the age, I was not yet mature enough to have grasped the real meaning of “Korea.”

I bring this up on the occasion of a conversation with a colleague which brought together the subjects of mourning and of Chris Mathew’s book, Jack Kennedy:  Elusive Hero.

To my scholarly associate I had voiced in our conversation a wrong-headed assessment of JFK’s political and governing policy and a hard-hearted feeling toward the first Irish-American Catholic elected President of the United States. 

He said I was out-right wrong and unsympathetic in saying I thought this President someone who was a man with great skill and insight, but captured by a time, a cold warrior well satisfied with exploiting the fear of Communism still pretty raw then for personal political gain and with further Americanizing the counter-insurgency in Viet Nam, with fully understanding the history of discrimination of groups in the US, especially Irish and Catholic, yet, fully understanding the need to appease those forces in the American South so he could get his legislative agenda enacted.

He said I had a stone for a heart when I asserted:  There seems to me, for those who then needed the hope of JFK, a continued deep need to believe in the promise he was thought to embody. Indeed, the sad events in Dallas, I continued, cut down the prospect of being disillusioned, as it appears always is the case when the real politique of American governing hits the image.

Well, we can argue policy another time, for I am willing to accept that I might be wrong, although I sense not.  What was striking to me was my scholarly associates umbrage over what he construed as my feelings toward this President, as he assumed I, as an American Catholic of Irish decent, which I proudly say I am, brought up through the ethnic-religious piety of the 1950’s, which I surely was, should be as identity bound with our beloved JFK as Irish Catholics were then and remain today.  But truth be told, for me, I had as much associative correspondence between this man and me as I've had with other presidential figures of the days of my young youth, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, that is, none at all.  As the word “Korea” had only a vague meaning of a place far away, so too these names held a vagueness:  They were this thing called “President”, whatever that meant.  Neither the title President nor the identities holding the individual human names did I feel correspond to who I felt, or thought, I was or wanted to be when I was the ages they were running for or actually holding the office of President.

As I explained, between 1960 and 1963 my world was a kid's world, a sheltered existence in late grammar school and very early high school. My Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, neighborhood had its occasional violence, but it was far removed from my experience. The folks on my block-I was third generation on that particular block-were blue collar, but were all working and emotionally, and financially, stable. I got into the usual school yard scraps, you know, the name calling, the pushing-shoving and the rare fist to stomach or mouth. I was an average student: I had the smarts to overachieve, but not the interest in so doing, nor did I have the cause to rebel either.  During that time my world was occupied with attracting girls, trying to be serious about my homework, which more often I wasn’t, and engaging in sports with friends-those whose fists usually found my mouth and stomach.  I had yet to discover drugs, but rock’n’roll was key-I had the beginnings of one heck of a 45 rpm collection.  Oh, and I loved to dance.  In fact,  my partner and I came close to wining the Twist contest in our eighth grade graduation dance.

Yes, I know exactly where I was when I heard the dreadful news:  coming from my Manhattan high school walking from the

69^th St.

subway station to my home on

72^nd St.

As I came along Fourth Avenue walking closer to Ovington Avenue, I kept hearing hushed voices in small crowds talking about the death of the President, some crying, most just standing in shocked silence.  Cars continued to move along the avenue and the side-streets, but I was one of the only ones moving on the sidewalks.  But the meaning of it all truly escaped me as I had no personal connection to either the political office called President or to the person everyone so affectionately called "JFK".  I vaguely understood it as a piece of "History" but, again a history removed from personal experience as almost all of history in books are so removed.

As I had only a vague notion of History with his death, I was even more clueless over the events in his Presidential life.  So, the Bay of Pigs didn't register and in the same way didn't it register when the world first learned about the Soviet missiles in Cuba, about the embargo, about when it come toe to toe and the Soviet’s blinked taking the missiles away.  I was a sheltered kid and oblivious to all these things.

Since coming of age, emotionally, intellectually and politically, I haven't studied JFK as there was, is, no affinity either drawing me to the man or to his role in the civic events of his time. It may be interesting to note that when I began to look at the role of the Irish in American politics during my “Irish period”-from Bloody Sunday through the second Hunger Strike to the Good Friday Peace Accords-I felt a kinship to the images of James Michael Curley of Boston and Al Smith of my home state of New York and not to the remembrance of JFK.

To be honest, my American presidential education began in earnest with LBJ as I came to maturity after he committed the country to Viet Nam  as JFK had not.  I was coming up to draft age under LBJ’s direction of the War; so, I learned much from necessity at that point. Ten years after the Paris Peace Accords were signed, I undertook a study of Viet Nam concentrating from the period of 1965 onward, only noting JFK's contribution to how we got so much involved, as I did not have a strong attraction to a time before my personal concern.
 
I also was coming of age when Martin Luther King, Jr., was stirring crowds. But, it was only when he was killed did I hear and read his "I have a Dream" Speech and it was only at that time was I aware enough of what was going down to understand its meaning within the broader social context of slavery, Jim Crow and institutional discrimination.
 
No, it isn't that I am hard-hearted, I said to my friend, it is just that coming of age brings with it affinities for those things which register, which resonate with an awareness of the world outside of self.  And, for me such sensitivity was not present until I was two years a collegian.

My Mother, Me and Depression

(Author's Note:  My mother died in the late afternoon on May 9, 2011, after years of decline and a short illness.  The absence from this blog since the last entries in June, 2011, is entirely due to my reaction to her passing.  I am slowing gaining an emotional balance sufficient for me to move forward.  Still, the closeness of our relationship and of my intimate care-giving in her last months placed burdens in me I had not anticipated.  I knew the greiving process would be difficult, but I had no idea how hard had turned out to be for me.  With this new post I am starting anew and I am hopeful I can regularly report my thinking to all who wish to read it.  Thank you.)

“Hey, we’ve moving to North Texas”, my wife, Karen, exclaimed. 

“Well,” I replied, “I can be depressed anywhere, and North Texas is as good as any to be depressed.”

And it was true:  I was as depressed in our little city of Denton as I was when we lived in Brooklyn and in the lovely hamlet of Ashley Falls, MA, from which we were removed to Denton.

But you know, these places have nothing on being in the house, being in the bedroom, where my mother died, where I, with help, rolled her over from side to side to clean and to dress her, to make and remake her bed and to try to comfort her to her last breaths.

My father died in a hospital and my mother got a call from there letting us know of the event.  That is bad, but I still had my mother.  And yes, I still have my wife and our son, but that’s different.

I’ve wondered over the years if my mother went before my father if the father-son bond would be as tight and as deeply seated as  mother-son, after all while I am definitely a product of my father, but it is from the mother we humans are born, are borne.

Anyway, I’ve stuffed down the loss, repressing most conscious thinking, but at times the hurt hits releasing sad remembrances.  Of late I am becoming ever-more teary-eyed as I lay in her room, on my bed, on the same side of the bed as she, staring up in the same visual aspect of the ceiling as she, trying to fall asleep quickly, but failing.  And in failing I am remembering her last days, her last moments:

I see her lying in the bed in the hospital, we knowing her health is weakening, and she still self-aware, not yet engulfed in dementia, full of hope she will be going home the next day to recover and to live to see beyond her 95^th birthday.  The hospital care team understands she is in her last days and makes arrangements for Hospice services.  The physician Director of the in-patient Hospice sees my mother letting her know who he is, his responsibilities in the hospital and the plans being arranged for my mother.  My mother, a nurse of long standing, understands the meaning of all this and it puts her into a deep, deep depression from which, I believe, she did not recover, and which, while she fought it, it hasten the end.  She was not yet ready to die!  We were not ready to let her go!

I see our pastor praying over my mother.  Karen had called the rectory early in the morning as see could see my mother could not last much longer.  By now her dementia was full.  She had stopped eating for nearly three weeks, stopped taking water for a week.  The Monsignor read from his book, he and I prayed together.  Then he said, “Lord, I commend the soul of our Frances to your care”.  As soon as he finished “care”, my mother began her dying breaths.  Hospice lets folks know the stages of dying and the very last is what they describe as breathing like a fish out of water.  I’d seen this before several times and I knew what it looked like and what it meant.  The breathing slowly shallowed, retaining the fish out of water rhythm…a wispy inhale, a wispy exhale…a nearly invisible inhale, an equally invisible exhale, then nothing, her face whitened, her partially opened eyes starring but not seeing…

I was alone with my mother when she died, although Karen had just parked the car arriving from work and my son had gone out to meet to let her know what was happening. 

It seems to me the Western way of dying is with others:  Dying should never be undertaken by oneself.  I suspect that is one of the reasons suicide is such a trouble to our society as the act by its very nature is alone.  The “ideal” death is with family and friends.  So, at least with my mother she had me.  But, you know, witnessing her last moments by myself has placed a psychic burden in me I had not anticipated.  My Karen can empathize and comfort which she does, but the second to second moments of the experience of the death can never be shared in the same way when others are not present to see them.  And here, I think, is the genius of the Western Ideal, in that the living, who must move on with their individual lives, can deeply share a comfort from feeling the presence of others at the moments of death, something of which a lonely son cannot partake.

Pitted, Cored and Shucked: School’s Dead! Part 2 of 3

The Twice-Exceptional, also known as Gifted and Talented Learning Disabled, are characterized by a wide discrepancy between gift/talent and deficit.  These children develop quickly in some areas of cognition and social-emotional dispositions and struggle in others.  They are highly self-directed, very curious and questioning, extremely creative in their approach to tasks, uninhibited and articulate in expressing their independently developed advanced ideas and opinions, very inventive as a technique to compensate for their disability, divergent thinkers and artistic; they have a wide range of interests, high levels of problem-solving and reasoning skills and penetrating insights. But they also have a specific learning disability, such as Disgraphia, Dyslexia, Dyscalculia, or Attention Deficient Hyperactivity Disorder, or are diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome or auditory and/or visual processing problems.  For sure they are highly empathetic and at the same time highly sensitive to criticism.  

-   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -

Our son and his mother grew close over her reading to him just before he went to sleep each night.  This started when he was just over a year old.  He had two favorite pieces of reading material during his fifth year of life:  Ranger Rick and Zoo Books.  And of the Zoo Books he most loved the one on sharks.  He had his mother re-read that over and over and over again.  In the late summer of his sixth year one of his good friends went fishing with his father.  Among the catch they brought back was a sand shark.  Seeing the prize, our overjoyed son asked if he could have it and the father agreed.  He brought the little shark over to the house and he petitioned me to instantly dissect it.  I looked for my college biology dissecting kit, but couldn’t find it.  So, I selected an old, but still shape kitchen knife with which his mother agreed to part and in back of the house on the concrete of the driveway I gently opened the shark to reveal its organs.  Our son not only named each one but told me their functions and how each related to the other, especially the connective tissue we saw between the shark's nose and brain, all the time being amazed at the discoveries right in front of his eyes.

And then he started kindergarten where he was instructed in the alphabet, numbers, colors and shapes.

-   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   -   - 

Our son should have been found to be Twice-Exceptional and was not.  When a single exceptionality is unacknowledged and ignored the result is emotional disturbance.  When Twice-Exceptionality is unacknowledged and ignored the results are devastating.

Again from the 2009 writing:

While our son was going through his very early grades in the parochial school I was attempting to establish myself in the Communication Arts professorate.  I was working as an Adjunct throughout the 1980's in most of the colleges in and around New York City having a Communication program.  Now, pre-service college teachers are taught to do research not taught how to teach, taught about logic in words and in numbers, not about the affective realms of children.  But, I knew something was wrong when I saw how unhappy our son was most of the time.  He dutifully went to school, but both his mother and I saw the build up of stress and concomitant disturbance.  We kept on talking with his teachers and the school's administrators but got no where.

Our son should have been found Twice Exceptional, gifted with a learning disability-Disgraphia.  I mean, he would drive teachers crazy because they saw his brightness but couldn't understand the reasons for his gigantic emotional upsets.  I had no idea of such things as learning disabilities or that giftedness required very different means of schooling than that provided by this parochial school, but those who should have known didn't either.  More, we were told over and over again in many different ways including out right:  Very bright children do not have problems, therefore he must be lazy!  He was told in many different ways including out right that he was dumb, stupid and lazy!  And for the very sensitive Twice-Exceptional child, to be thus told in so many ways is life threatening, life destroying.

 To demonstrate:

He was puzzled over addition and subtraction at the start of the first grade.  So, since the class was dealing with numbers 1 to 9, I showed him how to get the right answer using his fingers.  He caught on right away and was near giddy time after time getting the right answers.  Then one evening I saw him just stare at his arithmetic work book.  I inquired after his emotional disposition but he said nothing.  However, each night for months he would open his arithmetic work book, stare at the homework page, reluctantly begin, all the while being very sad.  He would complete one or two problems, close the book and go on to something else.  It was only much later, when he was a late teen when he told me that each time he went to use his fingers to do a problem in class his teacher would yell at him for “being such a baby”.   He eventually “got back” at the teacher as each time he did a problem he would give an answer either a plus one above the correct answer or a minus one below the correct answer.  And then if the teacher requested he redo the problem he would provide the opposite in effect bracketing the correct answer.  Yet, the teacher, it appeared from his telling never caught on.

A second example:  He had this gigantic trouble hand-writing.  He would take five or six hours to do his homework, although the amount of work assigned even for one who was not disgraphic would have taken at least three hours.  Anyway, his verbal skills showed he spoke grammatically correct most of the time; so, his composition skills were way beyond his peers.  But, his mind moved too fast for his hand movements.  At home from the early first through the entire third grade he would dictate to his mother and she would write what he said, but at school, his teachers saw no reason for them to allow a scribe for him.  He was just lazy they said and discounted everything done at home while favoring the dismally hand-written in-class work which confirmed to these folks that he was lazy, for how could such a bright boy perform so poorly.  If anyone would have bothered to ask him to verbally recall what he was learning they would have had a great demonstration of his brilliance even in the subjects in which he was not interested, but to this lot only hand written work demonstrated learning.
 
Another example: His sensitivity to criticism developed shyness in reading out loud.  Our son's silent reading comprehension was way beyond grade level once he unlocked the reading code, which he did on his own in the beginning of first grade.  But, because he wanted to avoid being yelled at, since he was constantly being scolded for being who he was by school folks who just couldn't see beyond their mid-19th century training, he fumbled over his words when reading out loud.  Well, the order came down to us from both the first grade teacher and the Principal, our son was to be placed in a remedial reading program where he would be assisted in reading by...a parent (not a trained reading specialist, but a parent)!  Our son would start reading out loud, fumble over a word which would be correctly pronounced by the parent who would have our son sound the word just as the parent had pronounced it and our son would re-read the part where he stumbled, this time speaking the word correctly.  In this lesson our son continued to learn how useless a human he was.

A further example:  He would get bored very easily and often.  Instead of getting up and roaming, talking or otherwise distracting the class, he would find some school work to do.  This incident took place in the first grade, about mid-year.  The teacher had assigned some spelling work which he finished to his satisfaction.  He then took out his math workbook, which was about half done.  He worked on it in pencil until the workbook was complete.  When the teacher discovered what he had done she scolded him in front of the class for doing something that the teacher did not authorize, for going beyond where he was suppose to in the workbook, and for not doing the spelling, which he already had completed.  For his punishment he had to erase each and every completed problem he had solved until he was at the place where the rest of the class had left off.  The many ways school folks can destroy a child is amazing!
 
To say he was mistreated is to say not enough.  I would go so far as to say he was emotionally abused especially by his third grade teacher who “made an example” out of our son at least once, twice sometimes a dozen times a day.  But, our son was silent about all of this, not telling us until he was an adult.  Besides, at the time I was such a good Catholic I just couldn't admit to myself that these good folks were capable of such behavior, until I found our precious boy pounding his head against his bedroom wall one day late in his third grade year.  If that wasn't a wake-up call nothing could be.  We took him out of that school the next day, but that was near four years too late, the damage was done and could never be reversed.

Shortly after starting the local public school for fifth grade a teacher overheard our son saying he was going to kill himself.  By law if a teacher so hears such a remark, action must be taken.  Counseling with the school psychologist followed which morphed into counseling with a private psychologist.  The counseling, in my opinion, saved his life, but it did not, it could not, repair the emotional damage done from the abuse suffered from kindergarten through almost all of third grade.

Among the characteristics of the deeply hurt Twice-Exceptional is low self-esteem.  Some children feeling worthless withdraw into daydreaming and fantasy, become apathetic or adopt disruptive or clowning behaviors.  They, indeed, become angry and more often then not turn that anger inward in massive self-destruction.  Our son to cope with his life filled with a sense of total worthlessness didn't withdraw or be disruptive or clowning.  He become very angry and turned it in on himself.  He began at age 9 self-medicating with copious amounts of food.  At age 10 he added copious amounts of nicotine and caffeine.  Now, pre-adolescents will as a rule wish to play adult with smoking cigarettes and drinking an occasional cup of coffee.  Our son's consumption of both went way beyond what would be expected.  He continued self-medicating at 13 with copious amounts of alcohol, at 14 he added copious amounts of marijuana and at 20 he added cocaine.  He was psychotic by 25.  He has a diagnosis of Paranoid Schizophrenia due to this substance abuse.  He is in treatment and has come a very long way, but to have a life of his own he needs to go a very long way yet. 

Over the years of traversing schools in many districts I have come to see our son’s experience as way too normal.  And thus, to prevent like children, those who are Twice-Exceptional, from going the way of our son, I dedicated myself to developing a school for them.  And now it isn’t going to happen.

In the next and final part of School’s Dead! I will briefly tell the story of the school’s conceptualization.

Pitted, Cored and Shucked: My School’s Dead!

The newly sworn Colonial President demanded to know why the captain of Battlestar Galactica lied to the gathered shocked human survivors of the Cylon attack.  Earlier, Commander Adama had told everyone he knew the location of the legendary home called Earth.  He replied to the President that at a time of such deep despair both individual and collective existence required hope and by providing a commonly known destination he had given an objective for the long and arduous journey ahead, he had give a reason for hope, and hope, as the characters and the audience knew, is the fuel propelling human existence forward.

Two recent events have ripped away my purpose in getting up and moving through the day crashing me back into the pit of depression.  One is the fact that my school isn’t going to happen.  It’s dead!  I am in great need of a destination.  Where is my Adama?

Okay, Bob sighed.  This thing isn’t going to get off the ground:  There is no money!  Philanthropy has dried up, both individual and foundation.  So, taking your school non-profit isn’t going to work.  And taking it for-profit isn’t going to work either.  Venture capitalists want their investment back within five years with at least a twenty-five percent return. 

Non-profit fund raising taps private, individual philanthropy first then foundation, but with both in a deep drought, I was exploring the notion of going for-profit.  I had explained to my good friend with the business acumen I lack I needed five million dollars over four years and a steady enrollment increase in that time to one-hundred-four all paying thirty-thousand per year.  This is an early childhood program through early college meant for the Twice-Exceptional, disabled gifted and talented, as well as those gifted and talented who do not fit into the conventional acceleration and enrichment regime.  As a special private school here in New York City I thought the tuition price point while excluding some would include enough so it could start and expand according to plan.  The initial start-up would be the early childhood program then the elementary, then the secondary education piece and finishing with the early college.  But, I had said, this unique project needs its start-up funding until the tuition takes over, which I figured would be the end of the fourth year when the early childhood and elementary programs were established.  Still, I had continued, the needed expansion to secondary and through early college while able to be sustained by tuition, assuming continued enrollment, would return nothing to investors as every tuition penny would have to be put back into the school until it topped out at just over four hundred, projected to be at the end of year nine.  And after that, with maintenance and replacement as well as other costs I thought there would be very little money left to carry-over which would be “pure-profit”. 

Well then, Bob said, I cannot see anyway by which the needed capital can be gotten from the Venture folks and individual as well as foundation philanthropy is out of the question now.  So, he concluded, the school’s dead. 

Game’s over…but the deep guilt I feel remains.  Our son is the passion for this school, and the guilt I feel over my full culpability in his personal destruction the fuel of the passion.  I thought if only I could help other children like my son, I could purge the dark feeling.  But, now I can’t.  I have to find the means of living with it.  Where is my Adama?  Where is my hope?

I wrote what appears below and in the next blog post in late 2009 and so far they exist as the best explanation as to what happened.

We parents, when we make decisions so much affecting our children’s lives, do not understand what we are doing.   I made some rather bad choices for our son which resulted in his personal destruction.  There were many signs of who are son was but I just could not read them.  And because I was so ignorant, our son’s life so much full of promise is now one full of struggle with mental illness self-induced through substance abuse.

My wife and I were married near seven years before our son’s birth, but we hadn't really a clue about who we were both as separate persons and as a married couple, no less about the big wide world of children.  We certainly did not understand how child behavior spoke to the needs of that child.  In other words we were your regular young married couple excited about our newborn and the glorious prospects for his future. 

As we saw our son as an infant we noticed he would try many things well before his body was yet developed to be successful at them with the concomitant frustration and anger.  For instance, he was no more than maybe, five or six months when we saw him a few times a day over weeks and months place hand over hand on the vertical bars of his crib moving his body upward to a standing position.  Then he would let go and boom, back onto his bottom.  The first three or four times he went boom were fun, but the sixth or seventh were anything but.  He wanted to stand up right then, but his body wasn’t yet physically ready.  There were many other things he wanted to do as he looked at us and wanted to do the same things as we did.  He tried and some attempts were successfully, like holding a small glass to drink from, some not so much, like cutting food with a knife.  And the not so much would not dissuade him from trying again, but with each unsuccessful attempt would come frustration and with recurring frustration anger.

As he grew through his first three years we supported his efforts in growing in his own way and in discharging the resultant frustration as much as we could.  But we really didn’t understand what was going on inside him at all.  Further, we didn’t recognize how this would later manifest in making his way through the world. 

My wife went back to work not too long after our son’s birth and I was working as well, so we needed to place our son with baby-sitters.  Rather than see that the placements would support his explorations and give him an opportunity to cope well with his frustrations, we just placed him with local folks we knew through the parish.  We noted his tell-tale behaviors of upset over his day, when we picked him up, but felt we couldn't do anymore than hug him and give him attention and send him back to the babysitter the next morning.  What he was really saying went well over our heads.

Our son was very energetic, a real “American Boy”, running and jumping into, onto and around everything inside and outside the house, being curious about everything and especially in exploring how the world felt inside him as it he ran quickly through it, jumped onto it and played with it.  I didn’t catch-on to the deeper meaning of it all.  So, when it came time for pre-school, I said:  our son needs to be able to cope with "structure" for him to do well in school; so, we should be looking for a pre-school with structure.  Of course when parents talk about structure they all the time are talking about a heavy dose of external discipline, strict obedience to authority and a high degree of quietude, just the opposite of who are son was and opposite of the kind of pre-school environment he needed. Long story short: the mis-match showed in many little ways but we did not pay it attention as we were, as said, quite ignorant of all this kind of stuff and didn't have it in us to translate his behaviors into statements of need until they became quite obvious cries for help.  Oh, we were attentive, as loving parents usually are, but his little unhappinesses we could not see as his way of saying that this pre-school thing was definitely not working for him at all.

And as to his parochial school which he entered as a kindergartener, as I will relate next, well, I was such a good and dutiful person of faith I just couldn't believe what was happening was happening, believed I could with constant talking with these good people mitigate the troubles and believed all would turn out okay in the end.  As one should have anticipated, it didn't turn out well at all and it took nearly four years of our complicity with that school system before it became crystal clear that we had to act to remove him from it.  But, by that time the awful damage was already done.

All along he was telling us very clearly of who he was, but we just couldn't translate his kid behavior to statements of need and from statements of need to doing well by our most cherished life we so intentionally worked to bring into this world. 

Too Shy To Ask? Take 1

Becoming adult can be defined, in a way, as the loss of childhood shyness in asking.  Well, it seems although I am in my seventieth decade, I haven’t completely lost my childhood shyness in asking which is creating all sorts of havoc since I now need to approach the high and the mighty in business and the law asking them for help in grounding my school in good business practice and sound legal foundation. But then since I was an early teen I’ve had this push-pull about asking, that is, a push to ask and a pull away from asking, which can be well illustrated with what happened in eighth grade, for starters. 

Eighth grade held two very powerful attractions:  football and dancing.

Pete, slender, athletic and fast, teased me unmercifully on as many occasions as he could but one, on the football field, whether the field was the concrete of our public schoolyard hang-out or the grass of the near-by Leif Erickson Park.  He always outran me when he was carrying the ball, that is, when and if he could get around me.  But, way too frequently for his liking I would hit him hard with my bulk taking him to the hard concrete or the slightly softer grass. Yep, hitting hard and taking opponents to the ground was my talent.  A tempo moved my body, 1-2-3-Hike, hit, wrap, drive, down. 

There was this one time in Leif Erickson, where Pete was running with the ball and somehow I caught him, taking him down, where upon everyone piled on top of us.  As we slowly unpacked our tied-up arms, shoulders, legs and torsos, I began laughing.  I was laughing so hard I was having that much fun.  But Pete was all sorts of upset.  He got up yelling and screaming at me, the words I couldn’t hear from my laughter.  He took his helmet off, grabbed it by the face mask with two hands, brought it sharply over his head and smashed it down on my helmeted head as hard as he could.  I laughed even deeper when his hard hat broke in two and mine was hardly scratched!

Pete while being the same age and in the same grade went to a different elementary school than most of us in the group of boys I called neighborhood friends.  We went to the local parish school, Our Lady of Angels, which at grade six separated boys and girls.  The boys were taught by the Franciscan Brothers, an order of religious men.  The order ran a sleep-away summer camp, Camp Alvernia, in Centerport on Long Island, which I had been attending for a while prior to my coming to the parish school.  My parents had transferred me from St. Angela Hall after I completed fifth grade into Our Lady of Angels for the start of sixth.  When I arrived in the school yard of my new school on the first day of sixth grade, I was surprised to find several Brothers I knew from the camp, including the man who would turn out to be our eighth grade teacher.  Knowing religious men well did not mean there was a lessening of severe deference.  Indeed, one remained in awe of their piety whether they were dressed in their habit or in their tee-shirt and shorts.  And I held my eighth grade teacher in as great awe as the other religious men I knew.

The Franciscan Brothers also had one of the football powerhouses of New York City Catholic High School sports, St. Francis Prep, a school and a football program in which I wanted to be in the worst way.   On a rather bright spring eighth grade afternoon, my teacher was making the daily announcements.  I paid little attention to these messages as they almost always had nothing to do with me.  But, then my ears opened, my eyes widened, but my wit, unfortunately, left me:  I was hearing that St. Francis Prep was having football try-outs for prospective incoming freshmen, but I missed hearing the crucial day, time and place of the event!  All I needed to do to make my dreams come true was to ask this man who knew me as well as I knew him to repeat the day, the time and the place!  But, I remained silent, SILENT!!!  The day and the opportunity past into history without me!

Eighth grade was, also, the time at Gregory’s Dance Studio.  I was introduced to social dancing in the first grade at St. Angela Hall.  At the time I had no idea that dancing was a great way to be in very close contact with girls. Instead, I felt dancing was just a great way of moving the body to the rhythm of music.  For quite a while I gave no thought to there being an opposite gender, until I woke up one morning and discovered Judy O’Hare, A GIRL, and a girl with whom I’d been sharing the same class for over three years!   And then I really understood the meaning of moving the body in time.  But, by then, for whatever the school’s reason, social dancing was not part of our studies.   

I would very occasionally complain to my parents over not having opportunities to dance. These were not subtle ways of asking, just statements of complaint.   However, I suspect my constant mimicking of what I saw on American Bandstand, along with the history of complaints, propelled my mother to sign me up for lessons in social dancing at Gregory’s.   It took a long time, but I finally got to move the body in time with girls. 

At Gregory’s we were as much being taught to be socially graceful as to be technically precise.  The boys would line up shoulder to shoulder with sufficient spacing between so we didn’t crash into each other when we were moving.  The girls likewise lined up.  Each line faced the other separated by about ten feet or so. The instructor in the middle between the two lines would model a step for the boys which we would then follow for a few rounds.  Then, the instructor would model a step for the girls which they would follow for a few rounds.  Next, on cue the line of boys moved to the girls and, under instruction, the boy and the girl opposite would take the proper social dance position and again on cue execute the movements we just individually practiced with the instructor going around to each couple correcting the performance. We would be dancing for a few rounds without music, just the words of the instructor in our ears.  Then, he, and it was always a he, would put on a record and we would dance for the duration of the record, again with the instructor’s corrective words in our ears.

However, there were times during the lessons for all of us to dance without instruction or direction.  In the beginning of the dance course just prior to these free dance moments we had been instructed on how a gentleman is to request a lady’s participation.  So, when the instructor would put on a record and stand back, if a boy was interested in dancing, he would go to a girl of his choosing and ask the young lady for a dance.  Here, the girl could refuse, and some actually did.  For me, a chubby kind of a guy, unfortunately, too often the girl I asked refused, which hurt, more than I ever wanted to admit.  But then those who accepted were surprised when they saw I really knew what I was doing and led them around the floor as born to the art. 

Which brings me to our eighth grade graduation dance. Our parish along with the two neighboring ones, St. Anselm’s and St. Patrick’s, held teen dances each Friday or Saturday evenings.  So, they had the music, the sound systems, the lights and all the security.  And what they also had was the custom of the boys standing by themselves looking intently at the girls who were dancing with each other having given up waiting for the boys to come over to ask anyone of them to dance.  Well, our graduation dance had all the teen dance music, the sound system, the lights and some security-we were not at all prone to fighting the way the older boys were so there was much less need for security.  And, we boys did what the older boys did:  we stood in groups looking at the girls dancing with each other.  Finally, I got tired of standing around and boldly went to a girl I knew and asked her for a dance.  She agreed and we rocked the house.  As it turned out, and unknown to me at the time, my act of defiance of “manly custom” was credited with breaking the ice as more and more boys then began asking more and more of the girls to dance.  And the topper of the evening for me and my partner was that we came in second in the dance’s Twist contest.

But, then, there was that summer and Camp Alvernia.  I was assigned to a cabin called the Dugout which rested at the bottom of a small hill along the path to the baseball field.  In the Dugout were kids I had been with other summers, some I discovered were new freshmen at St. Frances and, to my surprise, some of them had been already placed on the junior varsity squad.  In fact, all new JV players in Camp were in my cabin. 

The head varsity football coach became a regular there.  He was getting a head-start on his JV season by holding drills in available times, usually before lunch and before dinner.  He chose his center, his quarterback, offensive line and running backs.  They learned the techniques of their positions, the play calls and what each was suppose to do when a specific play was called.  I sat at the cabin’s picnic table looking on quite envious of my bunk mates. 

The coach was with us most days of the week, and for the entire summer.  But, I never talked with him, not a syllable.  I never asked if I could join in.  I never asked for a try-out…I never asked…

Prelude 1: Homework, Sleep and Being a Little too Curious

(Author’s Note:  While this blog is for thoughts on various subjects of interest, its main purpose is to tell the story about turning my dream school concept into real brick and mortar.  This school project is deeply motivated by the continued absence in our City of New York, in our home boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, in our family neighborhoods of Bay Ridge and Rockaway, any institutions of learning which would have worked well for our son, and would work well for those like him.   Our son was forever severely mentally hurt by his first four years of schooling, by being caught between compulsory attendance law and no school in New York understanding and working with his unique synthesis of gifts and disabilities.  And still today, there is no school which would do well by him.  I want to start a school in which those like him will thrive.  These Preludes are vignettes on the history of how I’ve gotten to this point in my dream.)

At the time, my parents could afford only a small three room ground floor apartment in that part of Brooklyn where Bay Ridge becomes Bensonhurst.  They gave me the bedroom while they used the living room for a bedroom and for its original purpose.  Like good parents of the day, the mid-1950’s, they furnished my room with the proper accoutrements for being a solid young scholar, including a rather large wooden student desk.  And there I would sit night after school night plying the student trade in arithmetic, sight reading, spelling and, yes, penmanship.

The elementary school in which I was placed was Downtown Brooklyn.  Among the reasons for placing me in St. Angela Hall Academy (which, by the way, closed many years ago) was that it was the only Catholic school they could find with bus service.  Bus service was a necessity as both were working, both had a commute which enabled neither to drive me to school, and they thought I was too young to walk to any of the parish schools in the area.  So, I, too, had a commute, of more than an hour each way. 

As it turned out my mother, the nurse, had the shortest commute, but the longest hours; so, she arrived well after my father and I.  My father, the high school English teacher, got out of school when I did, but arrived home later than I since his commute was longer.  That meant I got home first.  And having that privilege allowed me to have a quick snack and to get out of the house to meet friends before either parent was able to rope me into my desk chair to do my homework.  However, I did have to eventually come in for supper, and that’s when I got caught!  Right after supper it was homework time.  Supper was usually about six and I started homework about six-thirty or so.  By close to ten, I was sleeping on my books.  My first grade teacher loved homework and so she indulged her love with a passion.  Finally, with not everything completed either my mother or my father would wake me up, close the books for me and tell me to get ready for bed, which I dutifully did, climbing into bed as quickly as possible.  But then…

The soft, white bed sheet and dark blue blanket rested comfortably on me, as I stared at the off-white ceiling of my room.  I was concentrating on hearing whatever my mother and father had on the television; incredibly there was no sleep in my eyes or desire to be asleep in my mind, although I lay easy in bed.   

As much as I strained to hear, I couldn’t make any sense of any sound visiting my wide-awake ears since the kitchen lay between my bedroom and the living room where the family television sat as the focal point.  Years later living in the second floor apartment of my grandmother’s house, my bedroom immediately next to the living room, I would know everything about what was gong on on the television.  But, then, at six years old, the apartment floor plan put me out of range.

I ‘d be focusing on the television sounds when I would hear the hard shoe, even cadence of my father’s steps growing louder until he was in the room looking down at me.  His face had an annoyed appearance.  He explained to me something about needing to go to sleep so I could easily get up for school the next day.  Frankly I hadn’t an idea of what all this fuss was about.  Still, he said he had to do something to “get me tired”.  

He requested I sit up and on the side of the bed, which I did.  He handed me a book to read with pages pre-selected.  He said that sometimes reading that late at night makes people sleepy, so he said I should try it out, which I did.  On completing the selection, I was returned to my bed covers. 

He left, but there still was no sleep in my eyes or desire to be asleep in my mind, although I remained easy in bed.  Eventually sleep would catch me.  I suspect it must have been somewhere after eleven-thirty since I would discover much later that my folks had the habit of shutting the television off just after the local eleven o’clock news and I remember there being silence from the television as I slipped off to slumber.

My father was a stubborn person, at times, given to repeating an activity even if the objectives weren’t being met.  And so, night after school night he would have me read a chosen selection.  But, night after school night I would finish and remain awake.

But, also, morning after school morning, I would hear through a drowsy mist my mother’s voice calling my name over and over and saying many, many times that it was time to get up for school.  Eventually, the mist would clear enough for me to nearly fall out of bed.  Like a cat, somehow, I always landed on my feet.  But, I must admit, the bus ride most mornings was spent asleep.

What to Read to a Dying Mother?

My mother lies quietly in the hospital bed in her room at home.  Her intentional muscle control is now limited to her right arm and hand.  At times, she reaches comfortably into the air moving as if to grasp and to arrange or to rearrange what she has grasped.  Her eyes stare at the space where her arm moves.  She is silent.

In the next minute remaining at ease she lowers her arm and begins talking out loud to someone she sees in her mind, her eyes moving in the manner you would expect when in conversation.  From moment to moment she is inside dream-like scenarios, playing them out loud until she completes the scene.  Sometimes whatever is happening in her mind is very disturbing.  One time a Jane was at the door and she needed to answer the door to let Jane in, but she bumped into something which toppled an object onto the floor; she became very upset because her mother-my grandmother-an orderly and insistent person when my mother was a child, just couldn’t stand anything bumped or dropped on the floor, especially if the object broke.  So, my mother was frightened of being chastised for her clumsiness and for not answering the door in a timely fashion. 

There are many such disturbances.  I was at a loss to know how to comfort when they were upon her.  Then I decided to use what is called “guided imaging”.  I’ve used it as a relaxation exercise many times for myself and for students, especially in acting classes.  So, I conjured a number of images I thought would calm, bright sunny skies, our lovely beach on a summer’s day, sweeping placid meadows.  And what do you know, it works, but only when I am talking.  Once I stop, if there was a disturbance coming, it erupts and I can’t prevent it.

From this I wondered if it is solely my voice which calms or if, indeed, it is both my voice and the pleasant images.  I like to think it is the latter, which brings to mind a rather unsettling question:  Do I in my choice of readings contribute to her disturbing scenarios?

My wife and I decided to entertain my mother as she is at times consciously aware of being confined to bed without any real ability to help herself.  Being nearly blind and hearing poorly presents problems with most forms of entertainment with the exception of radio and being read to.  We have played the radio occasionally, but she seems bothered by it more often than not.  So, we decided to read to her.  But, what to read?  We thought since she loved detective and spy novels to start with one of our family’s favorite authors, David Baldacci.  Before becoming ill she had started Hell’s Corner and I thought she might like for me to continue it.  Like all of Baldacci’s Camel Club books, this one starts with a big bang; in fact a bomb blows up a few folks in Lafayette Park, the one just across the street from the White House.  The hero, John Carr, aka Oliver Stone, and his Club colleagues must plow through a whole mess of bullet ridden bodies and attempts on their own lives to uncover who was doing what.  Toward the end of the book I was getting a little nervous relating all the death and mayhem to someone who herself was dying.  Still, I finished the book.

Next on the list was an author my wife and I like, Jasper Fforde.  Shades of Grey was the story I thought might amuse my mother.  Fforde writes a genre-bending kind of thing.  This one is a fantasy, sci-fi romance cum socio-political commentary.  To give a flavor of the world he creates as the backdrop of his action I quote from the dust cover:  “It’s summer, it’s hot, it’s our world, but not as we know it.  Entire cities lie buried beneath overgrown fields and forests.  Technology from another time litters the landscape, and there is evidence of a great upheaval.  Welcome to Chromatacia, where for as long as anyone can remember society has been ruled by a Colortocracy.  From the underground feedpipes that keep the municipal park green, to the healing hues viewed to cure illness, to the social hierarchy based on one’s color perception, society is dominated by color.  In this world, you are what you can see.”  Well, the first real action centers on the narrator helping his father try to heal a person who is dying.  Unfortunately, they fail.  Again, as I read paragraph after paragraph on the way to this the poor man's death I feel none too queasy myself!  Well, I put that book down just after the pronouncement.

Still, I thought it was the genre-bending which was more inappropriate so I went to an author I knew my mother loved, Dick Francis, and a book I felt would do well, Silks.  However, it didn’t take long before the hero, barrister Geoffrey Mason, gets very nicely beaten-up by a former client he couldn’t get off, and a jockey the barrister knew murdered possibly by the trainer of the barrister’s racing horse.  I fine pickle and a great start to a mystery.  But, again I felt unsettled as I was reading the mayhem and murder.  So, I stopped and moved on.

Next I turned to poetry, taking in hand and in voice one of my father’s old books, 1000 Years of Irish Poetry:  The Gaelic and Anglo-Irish Poets from Pagan Times to the Present, which to the editor, Kathleen Hoagland, were the years between WWI and WWII.  Now, there is an old saying about the Irish, which I think horrid, “With the Irish all the wars a merry and all the songs are sad.”  War is never merry, but that is beside the point for now.  But, poem after poem were singing the blues, about lost loves, lost innocence, lost lives, lost nationhood, loss in general and in particular, to the point that I found the latter half of that statement quite accurate:  Indeed, all the songs are sad!  For a fourth time as I read I got the feeling what I was reading is not good for a person dying to hear!

A search of other material available uncovered what I thought would be just perfect, Celtic Meditations by Edward J. Farrell.  Well, after flowery discourses on the pleasures of the God given sun and of the God given earth, air, wind, spirit, I came to breath, that one source of God given life my mother at some moment, at any moment, will not be able to draw.  As I read, I saw distress in her, and frankly I was getting a little upset myself.  That booklet went back on the shelf forthwith.

With many tries, I’ve come to wonder, what can I read to a dying mother?  On Sundays, my wife reads the weekly church bulletin and the funnies from the New York Daily News.  And they seem to be okay.  But beyond that I am at a loss.  So, what does one read to a dying mother?

Living My Father's Regret, Part 2

At the time in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, a U.S. Navy recruiting station occupied the second floor of a building which held our second favorite pool hall; our most favorite, The Ovington Cue Lounge, was just around the corner from the house.  When the mood struck, my friends and I ventured to the building at the intersection of

86^th St.

and

5^th Avenue

to match our skills with the locals.  My skills always not so good put me on one of the long legged chairs lining the walls more often than not. 

On a sunny day, late in May, having said farewell to SUNY Maritime, I took myself to our second favorite pool hall and stopped by the recruiting station, bringing back to the house a few pamphlets.  Well, my father had a fit when he saw the glossy material, in effect ordering me back to college, any college.  He even went so far as to gather a few uncles who talked to me about the necessity of staying in school and getting the degree.  More, he chose the college which I would attend, Long Island University, in Brooklyn, a campus he knew well as many a student of his attended, a few colleagues taught there and he occasionally traversed the grounds after picking up a cheesecake from Juniors, the celebrated restaurant being directly across the street from the school; besides LIU was, still is, in the same downtown neighborhood as the high school where he had been teaching for well over a decade.

Being thrown off tack by this cork-screw of a turn, I was flummoxed in knowing what I wanted “to study” at LIU.  My father asked me what sorts of things I liked doing as a way of coming up with some suggestions.  I was way too intimidated to say scuba diving or working underwater or going to sea; so I said I liked playing sports, which was true enough, but definitely not any passion.  He said that the school had an excellent Physical Education program.  Thus, I was enrolled as a Physical Education major. 

To repeat: When one is uninterested enough in a thing, one should not have to wonder too long or too deeply about the reasons for a rebellion against what one is feeling forced to do.  While I decidedly enjoyed, and was somewhat successful, in the sporting aspects of the LIU experience, the academics of Biology, Math, Sociology, Philosophy, Western Civilization, and especially the strict memorization of Kinesiology, remained too much for me.  I rebelled by trying no harder than what it took to get “gentleman C’s”. 

A custom of this program, and I was told most if not all other programs, was that each Phys Ed major was to take up a competitive sport.  While I was built for football, and loved the game, LIU, Brooklyn, did not field a football squad.  I had to settle for the next best rockem-sockem which was wrestling.  I loved the physicality of it and the training did wonders for my dating life, but it was not the passion success needs.  In other words I was mediocre.  But, I was coming along rather well, in spite of that.  So, in my first, and only, match, I actually won! 

I spent two years on the team, and on an early December Saturday of the second year, the U.S. Naval Academy lost to the U.S. Military Academy for the fifth straight year in their annual Army-Navy football match, resulting the following January in a New York Times story about the Naval Academy opening slots for student athletes.  My father presenting me with the story put on the pressure for me to apply.  By that time I had submerged my passion for the sea and for scuba so I did not look upon going to the Naval Academy as a path to what I wanted to do in life.  Besides, I had been rebelling against academics since I entered college life.  I knew if I were accepted I would do poorly, probably failing out the first semester, which would absolutely ruin my father, and probably not do too well for me, either.  However, against every argument I threw, my father pushed back that much harder.  I applied on the strength of my one win and a good recommendation from my coach.  Incredibly, I got the nomination, but my eye sight, which was 20-20 in one eye but 20-30 in the other, got me disqualified. 

(Here I should mention that a U.S. Marine officer recruiter contacted me about a month after being rejected to the Academy.  He said that if I scored a cumulative point average of 2.3 at LIU for the semester I was completing I would be accepted into the Corp’s officer candidate program.  To be honest, although it was the middle of the Vietnam War, and second lieutenants were dropping like mosquitoes hitting a zapper, I was indifferent to the offer:  If I scored at the entrance level I would have signed-up, but, if not, there would be no tears.  As it happened, I continued to get my gentleman’s C’s, that was that and I had absolutely no regrets.)

I dropped out the next semester and revisited the Naval recruiting station. This time I didn’t tell my father and kept all glossy material away from the house.  Richard Nixon had won the Presidency for the first time.  His play to win the War, Vietnamization, was beginning to bite.  The in-country Navy was being scaled back with Vietnamese manning American equipment.  The blue water Navy in the South China Sea was holding station with the assets already deployed.  In other words, there was far less need for Navy recruits as in times before, meaning that they could be very picky.  And they were:  The final doctor doing foot inspections for recruitment physicals found a problem with my feet!  Rejected, I was because of my feet!  And thus I was rewarded for disobeying my father!

I tried one more time to get on the water.  As it turned out, the brother of a girlhood friend of my mother was at the time the head of the union working tugs in New York Harbor.  I petitioned my mother for an introduction.  But for her reasons, which she did not share with me, she declined.  I meekly accepted having already gotten used to repressing my own wishes for my parents’ insistences. 

Eventually, in my middle age, I got underwater as a scuba instructor, but this was as the entertainment my father envisioned it to be, rather than as a livelihood.  And, unfortunately, it was short-lived, as the lumbar spinal stenosis paralyzing my legs forced me to hang up my fins with only four years of underwater service.

By the time I finished unfolding the narrative to myself the tanker steaming outbound had passed from view as, too, the smaller cargo freighter coming in, the tanker in Gravesend Bay remained at anchor near the channel and for the moment the water calmed of any traffic. 

Reflecting on the story, I’ve wondered how many of us adults have gone through the same experience, sublimating our own wishes, our own personalities, for the sake of what our parents, or others, demanded we do and be.  And then I think of my current education project, putting together an alternative to the conventional way of schooling, and I answer the query myself:  millions upon millions of children over generations have lovingly, obediently, dutifully acquiesced to parents and to other adults in place of their parents as they comply with orders to do as told in school, and at home, most trusting without questioning adult wisdom.  And today, millions and millions more continue to do the same, trusting the wisdom of parents, teachers and school governors.  However, it is a sad fact that the wisdom so demonstrated is mortally flawed:  If my experience tells me anything, it is that parents, and school officers, do not know who their children really are.  They have in mind ideals, perhaps projections of what they hope their, or all, children should be or what they, the parents, and education governors, are not.  

Parents tend to act with the best of intentions; I even credit my father with so doing.  But the best of intentions are almost completely informed by the doubts, qualms, misgivings and failures of parents and they find in their children, in their intentions, a second chance to “get it right”. 

 In this case, my life was shaped, and lived, through my father’s regret, to my own deep and long lasting sorrow.   

Living My Father’s Regret, Part 1

The nurse asked me to step out of the thirteenth floor hospital room so my mother could get some intimate care which family was not suppose to see.   I complied locating a lounge on the same floor in the Brooklyn Veterans Affairs Hospital.  Directly across from the lounge door was a wall full of wide windows opening onto the expanse of Gravesend Bay, New York Harbor channel and New Jersey.  I saw a tanker ship in the Bay at anchor near the channel, another tanker steaming in the channel outbound and a smaller cargo freighter coming in.  As I followed the moving ships feelings of regret for many water borne paths not taken rose with as much awe as the vista itself. 

Over many of my older adult years I’ve wondered what it was that prevented me as a young man from following the strong urge to go to sea.  There were opportunities, or at least the prospect of possibilities, but they were never realized.  Certainly my father, a New York City high school English teacher, had a lot to do with it.  But, still I was an individual, not an appendage to the man’s body, although there were times I felt more that way then being my own person.  So, what was it that prevented me from going down to the sea?

Certainly, I was born to the water.  My earliest memories are ones where I am in the bath tub staying underwater so long that my mother would have to be sure I was alright, which at the tender age I was then was not an embarrassment to me.  I had a fleet of boats I would sail all about the bath water surface until my skin wrinkled.   In the nursery school’s kiddy pool my best friend and I would play tug boat and ship where we would take turns being the tug and being the ship and where one being the tug would guide with his head the other being the ship to his proper docking space.  We played tug and ship for as long as we were allowed in the pool for as many times as we were in the pool.  Where we lived during this time my father and I were able to frequently go bike riding along a wide promenade curving the ark of Gravesend Bay seeing tugs, barges, boats and ships of all sizes and types as we road and stopped to rest. 

Even when we moved to a different part of Brooklyn, we were not far from the water.  We lived in comfortable walking distance to

Shore Road

, the stretch of street, parks and ball fields along and below a ridge of the Brooklyn side of the Narrows, the Narrows being the New York Harbor passage between Brooklyn and Staten Island.  When my friends and I went to

Shore Road

to play ball with our little league or amongst ourselves or against friends from other blocks we were playing just feet from the water.   I must admit, I was far more interested in what was going on in the water, with all the ship traffic, than I was in anticipating my turn at bat or the play in the field.

At age thirteen at summer camp I discovered scuba diving!  And that was duck to water!  Indeed, it was the fulfillment of the play in the bath tub; this time I could stay underwater breathing for as long as the scuba tank allowed and not have to worry that my mother would stop me from this pleasure.  And since we didn’t go any deeper than about twenty feet, we could stay down a long, long time which we did.  I knew then what I wanted to do for all my life:  to work underwater either as a U.S. Navy diver or as a commercial diver.  But, my father having other ideas while allowing me to take scuba training, slammed the door on either career saying that scuba was only something for recreation and working underwater was not a suitable career for me, period.  I was a dutiful son and complied.  In fact once I finished being a camper at age sixteen, I gave up scuba until my own son became interested in it when he was a teen-ager and then I went on to become an instructor.

Actually, my father wanted me to be a scholar-officer in the U.S. military, something which he regretted not being himself although he had the opportunity.  He was in the Army during W.W. II, had taken and passed an entrance test to the U.S. Military Academy but ultimately rejected the opportunity.  Now, he wanted me to do what he forswore.  Which branch of the Armed Forces didn’t matter, so, being that I was water-borne I thought to go Navy, which, if all worked out the way I wanted it to, I could be a Navy diver after all.  But, his insistence on my going in as an officer required me to go directly to college, especially one of the fedeal service academies, from high school, which I really didn’t want to do.  I definitely had the brains for college work, even the tough service schools, but the interest for things academic just wasn’t there having spent four years being academic and being frustrated in being unable to stretch my mind-there is a big difference between being intellectual exercising one’s cognitive abilities pondering the questions aroused by ones reading and by one’s teachers and being academic having to memorize for ready recall in those specific ways schooling imposes the factoids of subject content.  I loved the learned conversation and hated the memorization. But I acquiesced and translated all this angst into an application to the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, which would have definitely put me on the water, if not under it.  I received the Congressional nomination, but not the appointment.  I had alternately applied to the State University of New York Maritime College where I was accepted and started with a program for incoming freshmen-fourth classman as the military school called them-in July, 1966.

Well, when one is uninterested enough in a thing, one should not have to wonder too long or too deeply about the reasons for a rebellion against what one is feeling forced to do.  While I decidedly enjoyed, and was successful in, the military aspects of the Maritime College experience and even more the seamanship I was learning, the academic nature of the exercise was just way too much at the time.  I rebelled by doing so little academic work that I had to leave by the end of the first year.  And here I begin to understand a part of the answer to my question:  I was living my father’s life, not my own.  I was putting my love of the sea into a framework constructed by my father’s regrets.  Being a dutiful and loving son I could do no less than to do as requested by him, but in the end it built a barrier too high for me to scale on the way down to the sea.