The World Turns, Bites

Years after the fact my Mother told me that I missed almost half of Kindergarten due to childhood diseases. I remember being sick frequently but have no independent sense of how often. What I clearly remember is that none of it bothered me until the time I got mumps.

I remember having the measles. No problem. The doctor came with his black bag. The worst part of it was the stick in my mouth. I'd spend some time being nauseous, some time counting bumps, some time drawing, some time being delirious with fever, and then it was over. At no time would I feel like I was suffering. The disease wasn't an alien force invading my body. I didn't feel under attack. There was no sense of injustice.

It was still like that when I got the mumps on one side. I coasted through that. I also coasted through the chickenpox that I came down with the same day the mumps ended.

Then, I came down with mumps on the other side, the same day the chickenpox ended. That did it. Now, it was personal. The germs hated me. I broke down. Forever after, diseases were an assault. I've never been able to take them easy since.

I think it was soon after that triple whammy finally ended, in the late Spring of 1955, that there was a big ASA party out at a lake on base.

Mirror Lake was about fifty acres. An access road led to a bathing beach with restrooms, picnic tables, and BBQ grills. For the party a PA system was set up. Actually, anytime the ASA held an official party there was a PA system. The ASA did electronic surveillance. They were into it. They had the wires, they had the microphones, they could buy cheap speakers.

Boy, were they cheap. It was a little like listening to arrivals announced in a New York subway hub.

Nevertheless a lot of attention was paid to the speakers because when there weren't announcements pertinent to the party ("Three-legged races are about to start! Choose your partners!") they patched in a radio broadcast of a Boston Red Sox game.

I was intrigued by all the interest people had in it. My Father had watched some games on TV with interest, but I didn't know baseball was so popular. I hadn't assumed that my Father's interests matched those of the general public.

My Father noticed how intrigued I was. So he tried to make points with me by promising to take me to a game. The way he said it, "We'll go and watch the Red Sox win a game!"

The party started in the morning and lasted until dusk. My parents let me run and play in the shallow water for several hours without sun protection. Around 4 in the afternoon I started to burn. Within an hour I was in agony. My entire body from the waist up was on fire. It was a new way for nature to attack me.

The next two days half my skin peeled off. At one point a sheet of about a square foot of burnt skin came off my back all at once.

At least, through it all, I could look forward to that Red Sox game I was going to with my Dad. I didn't blame either him or my Mother for the burning, I blamed the sun and the Universe apart from us. That was the injustice. What had I done to hurt the Universe?

In retrospect it's surprising that the trip to Fenway Park ever happened. My Father tried to make points with me by promising to do other things later, and then never followed through. This, the baseball game promise, was an exception.

My Father and I went alone. Mother stayed home. That was awkward. I was no longer accustomed to speaking directly with him.


The tickets turned out to be so far up in the stands the diamond looked like the size of a postage stamp held a foot from my face. To see it at all I had to crane my neck from one side to the other, because a pillar blocked my view. I had to stand in my seat to look over people in front of me, a trick that didn't work any time they also stood, like whenever something was happening. I never saw a ball or a bat. The players looked like ants running around for no evident reason. The proof that anything ever happened was in the cheers of the crowd that was nearer who could see something, and announcements over the PA system. The announcements meant little, since no one, least of all my Father, had seen a need to explain the rules or the terminology to me. I was supposed to have been born with it wired into my neurons, or to have learned it in a Kindergarten that had no yard.

The high point of the game was getting a hot dog.

The Red Sox lost. Two weeks of being told, "We're going to see the Red Sox win a game" ended with, "Oh well. Next time will be better! I promise!"

There never was a next time. I refused to go again. To this day, I've never seen another baseball game. I can't bear the thought of spending three hours being reminded that all my Father's best efforts to bond with me could be summed up by his pointless BS, "We're going to go watch the Red Sox win a game!"