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.

A Lever Long Enough Can Move The Globe But It Takes a Different Kind To Work Through Depression

Chomping down the entire one pound bag of pretzel nuggets took most of the day, Wednesday, as I snacked my way from early morning until late afternoon.  I was trying, and failing, to “catch the bear”, so I could go on-line to locate information for my alternative school project. The immediate project chore on which I am to be working might best be described as a Bullet Point Need Statement.  It is to consist of a targeted population of children, in hard numbers, from which the school is to draw, reasons present schooling of the population is not meeting the needs of the population and reasons my school design would meet those needs.  Now, the targeted population for my project is Special Needs; thus the Need Statement is to have the hard numbers representing the entire Special Needs population of the New York City, a break down of those being served by present public and private placements throughout the City and those who are not being served in any way at all and of disability, disorder and disturbance so it can be argued more specifically on how each disability, disorder and disturbance is being mis-educated and then for me to be able to argue the reverse for my school.  Unfortunately, these numbers are not easily come by as at the moment I am unaware of any group which collects them and the City’s Department of Education guards very jealously such information.  Besides, the total number of Special Needs children in NYC may be a number which does not exist anywhere.  Yet, it is possible that with some time on-line I might generate leads on where I could get such information or, jump for joy, the information itself.  But, I am required to take the step of going on-line for this purpose, and I am balking, big time, at doing this. 

About seventeen years ago there was this colleague, a professor of far greater import than I, who had been fighting all sorts of demons for almost as long as I was at the time.  He told me of a “lever” which moved his emotional predisposition to action from paralysis to action, and as one should understand, a positive emotional predisposition is the key motivator to all self-actualization.  He said, paraphrasing, I feed the bear, order him to leave me alone and then I can get on with what I want to get done.  Now, we’re not talking copious amounts of comfort food:  he was talking a handful of grapes, a single Navel orange, a big Delicious apple.  However, I have taken to things like pretzels, ice cream or cookies.  While it certainly would be healthier eating fruit, it is the self-actualizing step, the voluntary act of eating, feeling the pleasure and fulfillment of the action, and of the food itself, which re-sets the emotional predisposition, which releases the paralysis. And, naturally, it is eating in proper proportions, such as a small handful of pretzels, four ounces of ice cream or four to six cookies which makes the difference between a lever and an act of self-sabotage.

I explain how the lever works though my sideways understanding of Freud’s psychology of Superego, Ego and Id where I substitute the concept of Parent for Superego, of Adult for Ego and of Kid for Id-where the Kid is divided into the Playful Kid, well adjusted, reacting appropriately, etc., and the Bent Kid, maladjusted, vengeful, over-reacting, etc.  The Parent is filled with all the pre-and proscriptions of authority.  The Adult is largely goal oriented, logical, deliberative, interpreting the world in proper perspective.  The Kid is full of impulses, instincts, intuitions, positive and negative-of course, the positive belong to the Playful Kid and the negative belong to the Bent Kid.  

Behavioral paralysis, the inability to do those actions one wishes to do, is a consequence of the interaction of Adult, Parent and Bent Kid.  The Adult proposes an action which the Parent assigns as a pre-or proscribed behavior, a should or should not, a must or must not.  Once the Parent defines an Adult action, the Bent Kid opposes it as the Bent Kid opposes all Parental authority.  In the conflict between the Parent and the Bent Kid, the Kid triumphs, causing no action, or, worse, a self-sabotaging behavior, either way making the Parent impotent voiding the intended action.

The idea behind the eating lever is to generate the Playful Kid feeling of self-actualized pleasure from a range of food associated with pleasure to replace the Bent Kid feeling of vengeance stirred by the opposition to the Parent.  Once the Playful Kid feeling takes over, the combined food pleasure and satisfaction of the self-actualized step, the Adult is enabled to put into proper perspective the Parental pre-or proscription, that is, weighing pros and cons in light of the action’s goals, which has the effect of breaking the paralysis and precipitating action.  So, with a handful of pretzels purposely taken as a lever I can tell the bear to leave me alone, and get on with my school project chore.

However, in the presence of Depression, the lever works but less often.  As was said to me by another friend, “Sometimes you get the bear; but sometimes the bear gets you.”  Unfortunately, in Depression, the bear gets me far more frequently than I get it.  Yet, I try whatever lever I can which might catch the bear.  And I thought Wednesday, that with a handful of pretzels, I could tell the bear, the Bent Kid, to leave me alone and I could get on to what I wanted to do.  Well, that day, the bear, the Bent Kid, got me, and instead of generating pleasure and self-actualizing satisfaction, the Playful Kid feelings, the Depression kept on feeding me more of the Bent Kid’s vengeance which I expressed by continuously going back to the bag of pretzels and just as continuously balking at going on-line for the required information.  So, I never did go on-line for the information.

However, today I am not entirely paralyzed in that there are some activities my psychodynamic and Depression will allow me to do. Within the spectrum of what I want to do there are many actions including writing this post.  What I call the trade-off lever gives me permission to do what I can, which if done with some frequency elevates a sense of personal power, the recognition I actually can get accomplished what I set out to do, and increases the “can do” spectrum, perhaps to include my on-line project research.   So, now, I’ve “traded off” doing the specific school project chore to talk about the personal struggle of doing the chore.  And, I suspect, I will be “trading off” further as I relate the history of the project in blog posts to come.  And in so doing I will be not only telling my story, but also I will be re-setting my emotional predisposition sufficiently to occasionally chip away at the research, and at other elements of the school project itself. 

In the end, which ever lever is working, at least I will be getting work done and, after all, getting something accomplished to someone suffering Depression is a big deal, a definite sign of moving in the right direction and of sustained movement out of the deep psychic hole.

Doth Media Images Provoke Days of Rage and Revolution?

We think the media are responsible for everything, George Will sarcastically quipped to Sam Donaldson’s considered thought about the vital role of broadcast and social media, especially, in the uprising in Egypt on ABC’s This Week-Jan. 30, 2011.   Off handedly Mr. Will was expressing a sentiment I encountered in undergrad school of the mid-1970’s.  We Communication Arts majors of the time believed every post-WW II social-political uprising around the world, and those urban riots in the 1960’s U.S., were a consequence of failed expectations borne from an extreme contrast between all those middle class images of American television broadcast throughout the country and exported into world cultures, and the impoverished circumstances of those consuming those images here and abroad.  

The middle class images from cigarette, car and personal care product commercials and shows like Dallas, Mary Tyler Moore and even All in the Family were said to excite the desires of the working classes and the poor for the American Dream.  These folks, the idea went, identified with and aspired to the American middle class life-style, creating and increasing the expectation of eventual acquisition of that life-style.  But, when over time it became ever more impossible for the masses to acquire the American Dream a failure of expectations was created, turning into individual and then social discontent.  And the more intense the discontent, the longer it simmered, the greater the likelihood of uprising until a spark, like a severe rise in the cost of food, or the jailing or execution of one too many dissenters, or a self-immolation coalesced the anger and out to the street the masses would come.  Well, it is a good theory.  And it might have a grain of truth. But, it seems to me rather ethno-and class-centric in that we think the American middle class images are the be all and end all of how life should be lived, and thus we think everyone in our country and around the world thinks, and should think, likewise.  And if we do not life the American middle class way because of powers preventing it from happening, well, then we just have to do something about it, like riot, rebel and even cause a regime change.  But, I have to wonder the degree media images do force discontent and such discontent rage, rebellion and revolution.  I suspect real life, real time experiences are a far more powerful influence.

At the moment I am not about to put my late middle-aged body in front of rows of riot control police, no less columns of National Guard troops with rifles ready.  I do believe in civil disobedience but I've decided to leave such tactics to the young who can far better tolerate the physical abuse than I.  Besides, my real life, real time experiences are not so life threatening to me or to my family's health and well being to radicalize me into action, although it is getting tougher as the price of living keeps rising and the social contract stitched together during the FDR and LBJ administrations is being rolled back by radical libertarians who favor big corporate interests over the common good, but we are not yet anywhere near to a radicalizing situation.  But it may come sooner than we like.

Still, today remains a bastion of plenty and even if a lot of that plenty disappeared, I would not be so inclined to see it as cause for radicalization.  And certainly the televised images of what I do not have and would like to have really have not moved me to take up street protesting.  So, my family has been enjoying blueberries from Chile recently on sale in our local supermarket.  If I can’t get blueberries in January which has been the rule up until recently I definitely will not feel it a cause for me to be on the way to the barricades.  We tried Rachael Ray’s Egg Foo Young a couple of Saturday’s ago, the one we saw her preparing on one of her shows several months ago.  I would certainly miss the oriental vegetables like bean sprouts, bac choi and water chestnuts along with the variety of Chinese noodles if somehow we were prevented from enjoying them, but the inability to secure these types of food commodities is, for me, equally not a cause for going into the streets.  Likewise, that there is absolutely no way we can afford any of the exotics as seen on BBC’s Top Gear like the Ferrari California or the Lamborghini Murcielago, or the Bugatti Veyron, no less my favorite, the Aston-Martin DP9, or the new American entry into the exotic market, the SSC Ultimate Aero, or that when we had to buy a car we settled for a Nisson Sentra instead of the GTR which was featured on a Top Gear episode, creates no cause for me to feel disillusioned, disappointed or dispirited, especially to the degree that I would be on the streets with a placard parodying the Janis Joplin tune:  “Oh State, guarantee me a Mercedes Benz, my fiends all have Porches, I gotta make amends…” , or the libertarian version, “Oh, Corp, won’t chu buy me a Mercedes Benz…” And finally, that we live in a tiny bungalow instead of a palatial house as seen on Homes of the Rich and Famous, and like television programs, really does not force a resentment in me of any degree, no less one which would propel me onto the barricades.  Indeed, while I would like the money to afford the life-styles of the rich and famous, I am okay where we are and hold no resentments for those who are better-off, much better-off, whether I see them on television or in their natural habitats in New York City's exclusive neighborhoods, or in the Hamptons on eastern Long Island, or on the Island's Gold Coast, the North Shore.

But I have to wonder if, along with tens of millions of neighbors, friends and colleagues, my family could no longer afford the staples we have come to rely on to survive, like guaranteed safe bread, rice, beans, potatoes, milk, fish, chicken, eggs, fruit, vegetables, along with clean water and air, as might happen if the radical libertarian agenda becomes the law of the land, transferring the wealth of the nation continuously upward to the top two percent leaving the rest to fend for scraps, then, we just might see uprisings here and I will disregard the fragile state of my aging body and face down the symbols of oppression of the common good, the police and both the National Guard and the U.S. Army.

Indeed, I have to wonder if this radical personal responsibility-small government society comes to pass eliminating or reducing to starvation levels the Social Security upon which my wife and I will be in need in five to eight years when we both stop working, upon which our one hundred percent disabled son relies and will need to depend for the rest of his life, if it eliminates or reduces to death inducing levels the Medicare upon which my 94 year old mother needs to live to be 95 and upon which we will need for life sustaining medical payment when we no longer have job provided medical coverage, if it excludes or reduces to insolvent levels the Medicare Drug benefit my mother needs to sustain life and my son to stay mentally even, and on which we will rely eventually as much because of the health problems created by the government supported toxic American corporate-industrial diet as inherited predispositions, and if it eliminates or drastically reduces accessibility to Medicaid to all those who in spite of working as they are told to do yet still can’t afford life saving medical care, I think you will see me definitely on the barricades, bent over, ill and aged as I might be.

And you bet you will see me on the barricades if the society of wealth hoarders and privilege, backed up by the power of the state, dictate the only shelter my family can afford in our old age with our disabled son is a tarpaper shack or a cardboard box!  Yes, sir, if we revolve to a world like that of the nineteenth century, or that of the 1930’s, then regardless of age and infirmity, I will be in the vanguard of the revolution!

Perhaps it is what is happening in the real world, the living world of daily existence affecting health, sustenance and survival, rather than the world of images which has the more profound affect on bringing people into the streets demanding a restructuring of social, political and economic orders.