Self-Identity

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. In this post I'm relating events that happened in the Fall of 1957, after my 8th birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

My new school was Van Asselt Elementary at Beacon and Myrtle. It's almost virtually unchanged from 1957. What's more, I was assigned to a class that met in the old building, which was the school building my Father attended when he was 8. What's still more than that, my teacher was one of his former elementary school teachers.

[Above: Van Asselt today, showing the 3-story old building that was the school when my Father attended. The long low building in front and to the right of that is a "modern" 1-story addition that was present in 1957. The other smaller structures are portables. We had those in '57 too. The only significant changes from the 50s are the trees in the foreground, part of the beautification of Beacon Avenue. Interesting that from the 20s to the 50s, all the change was to expand the school, while from the 50s to the next millennium, all the change was to pretty up the road passing it by.]

Army Brats regularly have the problem of having to reprove themselves over and over again at each new school and in each new neighborhood. But you usually don't have to prove yourself to people who have expectations based on who your parents are. This was a weird situation.

This is how I wrote about it a few years ago for a writing exercise. (I've brought up this incident before in these memoirs in A Tale of Two Parents I.)

Self-Identity

My father was stationed in Korea at the start of hostilities. He was part of an Army Intelligence team assigned to break the Chinese code. He was shot at, once. The sniper missed his heart but nailed his soul. When my father returned on my first birthday he took it out on me. I'd be dead today, except for the intercession of the memory of a certain red bird, which prompted a response from me that saved my life.

Speaking of red birds, I'm reminded of something that happened in the third grade.

The first day of class our teacher, Mrs. Haugen, took note of my name and asked if I was any relation to John Wesley Browning, who had been one of her students more than thirty years earlier. I said yes he's my father and then she went on and on and on in class about what a great student he had been and how if I was even half as bright as him I might be the best student in the class.

This was not complete hyperbole since my father got nothing but A's in all his classes in all his years of school from 1st grade through 12th; I know because I've seen the plaque the Seattle School District gave him in commemoration of the achievement. But my own school records showed C's and D's from the first two grades so there was no chance that I was going to get a plaque like that. And anyway I had already decided that I didn't want to be just like my father. There were things about him I didn't care for and if he got that way by being a perfect student then maybe being a perfect student wasn't worth it. So all in all I didn't appreciate the comparison, and in hindsight I think it might have shown.

A few days later Mrs. Haugen had given us all a reading test and based on the scores she assigned us new seats. She put the high scorers in the file furthest right, the next highest in the next file over, and so on. Then she told us that according to which file we were seated in we were Bluebirds, Robins, Finches, Sparrows, etc. As I had gotten one of the highest scores I was therefore going to be a Bluebird.

That was too much for me. I said, "I don't WANT to be a Bluebird!"

She laughed and said, "But you ARE a Bluebird. Bluebirds are the best and your score was ..."

"I don't care. I don't want to be a Bluebird, I want to be a Redbird."

"Well, we don't have Redbirds, the closest we have are Robins and you wouldn't want to be a Robin, Robins don't read as well as you do."

"I'd rather be a Robin than a Bluebird, at least they're a little bit red."

All through this the class had been laughing (except for the Robins, of course) and Mrs. Haugen had been grinning like I was playing a cute joke on her, but I meant it. If I was going to be a bird I was going to be a red one and that was that.

Then with mock seriousness she said, "You can be a Robin if you want but that means you'll have to sit with the other Robins and people won't know what a good reader you really are."

So I said OK and got up and picked up my books to move to the Robin's file and now everybody got quiet because it wasn't funny anymore.

Mrs. Haugen told me to sit back down where I was and there was a long silence, as she just stared at me as if she was trying to decide whether or not to call for the men in the white coats. But finally she smiled again and announced, "All-RIGHT class, we have Sparrows over here, and Finches in this file, ..., and over here on my left we have five Bluebirds and one VERY unique, STRONG-HEADED, Redbird."

The Growing Gift

Even at the time, at the ridiculously young age of 3 and a half, I had enough sense of irony to realize what a joke it was that my Mother suspected Lani of being a pedophile. I think now it was based on 1) racism, 2) the fact that he was much older than she expected him to be (she later said she thought he'd be six or seven), and 3) she was a rapist, so it was easy for her to think anybody could be.

I've often noticed that the people I most have to worry about stealing from me are the ones who most often voice such suspicions of others. They suspect others because they do it themselves. If a priest berates his congregation about tithing every week, I bet he cheats on his taxes. My Mother taught me the pattern early.

Seeing me talking with Lani set her at ease, though. I assured her he was good, but I think what really settled her was how comfortable I was with him.

I explained how suspicious my Mother was to Lani, and pointed out the irony. I told him she thought he was evil like herself. He asked if I was really sure she didn't understand Hawaiian, and I proved it by looking at her and insulting her with a smile on my face. She just smiled back.

My Mother began asking him questions through me. I already knew the answers to a lot of her questions but she insisted on answers from him, so he had to say he was from Ni'ihau and a maintenance worker, etc., so I could translate and say the same things I already knew to my Mother.

Then she asked him things I didn't know the answers to. She asked him how old he was. The answer was a word I didn't recognize. Lani then showed that he knew some English words after all. He said in English that he was nineteen.

She asked him how well I was speaking Hawaiian. He said I was speaking just right for my age, and was ready to start school. She was surprised and said, "Start school? How old do you think he is?" He said he thought I was five or maybe six. She laughed and told me to tell him how old I really was, and I held up three fingers plus one bent finger to show the half.

So all along Lani and Lono had thought I was about two years older than I was, probably because I was bigger than a typical Hawaiian child my age, and they'd grown up among Hawaiians on Ni'ihau.

Lani said that, if I was that young, then my speech was very good for my age. He said my main difficulty was with number.

That one stray comment had a major impact on my life. I now realize that he meant grammatical number. Grammatical number is much more complicated in Hawaiian than in English. As well as singulars and plurals, there are duals, and additional sorts of "we" and "us" depending on how many of us there are and whether you are included in us, and different kinds of theys than in English, and I hadn't got it all down yet.

But I thought at the time he meant counting numbers. So later on I became obsessed with learning all about counting numbers, thinking I would make Lani proud. This ultimately led to a doctorate in mathematics.

Had I understood better what Lani was saying, it might have been a doctorate in linguistics.

I showed Lani the ball my Father had given me. He said it reminded him of something he had for me. He reached into a deep pocket and pulled out something. It was a sliding whistle. On top of it was mounted the carving he had been working on for months. It had turned into a bird which was painted red. The basic whistle itself, he said, was store-bought. It was white to begin with, and he had added decorations in red and black along the sides. He attached a feather to it. He apologized for not being able to get an 'i'iwi feather. It had to be a dyed feather. He also apologized for the shape of the bird's beak, he couldn't do a long 'i'iwi's beak with the wood he had.

He said that he made the whistle thinking I was older than I was. It was made as a hō'ano'ano gift.

'Ano means kind. 'Ano'ano means seed or to grow in accordance with one's kind. Hō'ano'ano means to help cause something or someone to grow the way they are meant to grow. Lani said that it was a tradition for a kahuna expert in such things to give a hō'ano'ano gift to each child when he or she reaches the appropriate age. Since human beings are creatures of ideas and imagination, the seeds of humans are ideas also. The gift is designed by the expert based on his knowledge of the individual child, to point to and stir the germinating idea that is already trying to grow in the child.

Lani said he was giving me the whistle even though I was younger than he thought, because he wouldn't be able to give it later. He told me I was supposed to meditate upon it once a day. It wasn't the physical object that was important, but the idea of it.

That, he explained, was why he worked so slowly and carefully on the carving. It was why he only carved it in my presence. Seeing him carve it was part of the gift.

He explained a little of the symbolism. The red bird is my 'aumakua because I was drawn to it by its song. Therefore there must be a song inside me, as part of my seed. Some of the decorations on the whistle represent the drum music I loved, and some pointed to questions about life I asked. There was a design that stood for flight, and for imagination, and the feather also did that.

But the main idea was that the bird needed the whistle to sing. The bird was very red and very Hawaiian, but he needed the white non-Hawaiian whistle to be heard. Lani said I wouldn't be able to sing my song to the world in Hawaiian.

[Below: Just an artistic suggestion of it, not really accurate.]

The Omega

When I tell people I lived three memorable years in Hawaii they often ask me how I liked the beach and the palm trees and the sand. I was in Schofield Barracks most of the time, which, as I've said, looks like a low-income suburban housing project. It's situated almost at the center of O'ahu, miles from any of the beaches. There was very little that would seem exotic to a lower forty-eighter, apart from the beautiful hills in the distance.

The only thing that I remember about Schofield that really separated it from anywhere I've been on the continent is the soil. The soil was amazingly red clay. It was very soft, almost muddy, and it had a strong smell that most people didn't like.

I'll describe my first birthday in detail.

It was late in the afternoon. The sun was still out. My Mother had been drinking on the porch. I had been under the house, possibly for most of the day. For some reason I decided to come out into the sun for a bit, and coincidentally I was out crawling around on the front lawn as a staff car drove up and delivered my Father to the curb.

As soon as he stepped out of the staff car it was driven away. My Father was holding the present, a dark brown teddy bear. It had a bow around its neck.

I remember the front yard being small, with maybe no more than thirty feet from curb to porch. There was a public sidewalk that ran next to the road and a narrow private sidewalk that ran from the main sidewalk to the covered porch. Saplings had recently been planted along the public sidewalk in the adjoining yards. The porch had a big chair, with my Mother in it, and a table to hold my Mother's drinks.

Just as my Father was being delivered to the curb by staff car, I had to have a bowel movement on the grass.

When I saw my father I was thrilled. I'd thought I'd never see him again. My Mother had been awful to me. But I didn't think about that. I was just happy to see my Father after missing him for six months, which was half my life.

My Mother's first reaction to seeing that my Father had arrived and that I'd left a deposit on the yard was to start laughing loudly and say, "Look at that! He made a present for Daddy! He saw you coming and he made a present for you!" (I'm reconstructing dialog from the sense I got of my memories of it later. I don't recall the exact words of most of this.)

My Father looked confused. Then my Mother said to me, "Go on, show Daddy your present!" She was smiling. I thought she was happy for me that my Daddy was back. I didn't know what her words meant, or that she was being cruel.

Suddenly I had a realization though, that the sound "Daddy" referred to my Father.

That's one of the most painful things about this whole event. It is hard to believe the amazing convergence of circumstances that happened that day. I arrived at the idea that words have meaning just then as my Father approached.

My Father was by now right in front of me. I had understood that he was Daddy, and all of the sudden I also figured out what my Mother had meant all along by "You made a present for Daddy!" So I picked up my shit and held it out to him, to show him what I made for him.

At that point my Mother was standing right behind me and roared with laughter. My Father turned bright red. My Mother laughed all the more. She said to me, "tell Daddy who your present is for!" And I said my first word, "Daddy." My father dropped the teddy bear and started screaming at me, "What are you doing?! How dare you!" or something like that. As he reached for me she snatched me up and told him he was stupid.

He grabbed me out of her arms and slammed me head first onto the concrete walkway. The top of my head took all the impact.

For a few seconds it seemed like my eyes were spinning in my head. I would try to stand and fall and try again and fall again. There was shrieking from my Mother. Then laughter again. She said "Ha, ha, you said you wanted a genius son, now you're going to be taking care of a basket-case the rest of your life. And he just said his first word! Instead of being proud you broke his head for it!"

When my Father said I had it coming for what I had done, my Mother told him he was an idiot. "He's only one year old today, he doesn't know what it means. And anyway I taught him to do that."

She then shouted out to him a long invective about how she never wanted a kid anyway and how miserable she'd been being stuck with me those six months, and gleefully described the toilet training ritual to him. She said she was going to leave him and HE'D be stuck taking care of the basket case. IF I didn't die.

About then it started to sink in to my Father that I could have been very badly injured. But when he suggested calling an ambulance, my Mother said, "What about your career?"

That led to a heated debate about whose fault my injury was. My Mother said it was my dad's fault, obviously, he'd done the deed. But my Father said it was my Mother's cruel joke that led him to do it. My Mother said what he did still wasn't right. My father said they'd see what a judge thought about that.

At that my Mother said they had to bring me inside to talk about it in private. No neighbors had intervened, but it was always possible some were watching from cracked curtains. They took me in and laid me on the kitchen table. My Mother was by now panicking. The more they threw accusations back and forth, the more they seemed to convince each other that I would die. My Mother convinced my Father that they were both going to be charged with murder. They argued some more about whose fault it was, then my Mother said they had to finish killing me to put me out of my misery, at least, and then worry about who was to blame.

My Father actually bought the mercy killing idea. He was also losing his head by this time. My Mother brought him a pillow and he held it over my face. I started to lose consciousness. Then there was screaming, "Stop, stop, I can't stand it!" My Mother called it off because she couldn't stand seeing me turn blue. My life was saved for the first time that day by a phenomenon of blood oxygenation and light reflection.

After that they left for a while. It turns out they drove to a bar in nearby Wahiawa to discuss the situation over drinks. They came up with a plan there to finish killing me by running me over with the car. The idea was that with the drinking they could pass it off as an accident. They supposed the damage from the previous injury would be lost in all the new damage to me. No one would guess that there had been two traumas, if they got their stories straight and stuck to them. I learned all this much later from eavesdropping on my parents while they recalled the sequence of events and rehashed accusations.

By the time they got back it was getting dark outside. I had passed out. I woke up to them leaning me up against one of the saplings next to the road. Then there was a last minute argument in strained whispered voices, which I only heard, about who would drive. My Father lost the argument and got in the car. The car started up. I heard a thump, which was probably the lead right tire jumping the curb. I have no memory of my head being hit, but I remember being suddenly on the grass.

My life was saved for the second time that day by the clay soil. The lead tire rolled over my chest. There were cracking sounds. All the air was squeezed from my lungs. But I didn't die because the soil yielded to me. The car pushed me deep into it.

My Father came out of the car and squatted down in front of me. I couldn't see him very well at first because blood was pouring over my eyes. My Mother was screaming in the background. First she screamed, "Oh my God he isn't dead! It can't be!" Then she said, "Don't you know what that means? If that didn't kill him, that means the other thing wouldn't ever have killed him!" Then she said, "We've done it now, you have to finish him." She screamed at my Father to finish killing me with a punch.

I could see a little better as my father made a fist and drew his arm back. As he did, I had a vision. It was a flashback to the I'iwi, the Red Bird I had seen the day he left for Korea six months earlier. It was triggered by seeing my Father's pained expression as he looked at me. It was just like the expression he'd had that day just before I had seen the Red Bird.

As the vision proceeded, the Bird's song filled my head, then I heard the sound of my Father saying, over and over again, "Say Goodbye Daddy." I still didn't know what it meant but for some reason I mimicked the sound anyway. Maybe I guessed that the reason all this happened was I hadn't said it before. I said "Say Goodbye Daddy."

My father immediately started crying and shouted to my Mother to call for an ambulance. I was saved for the third time by a vision.

**********************************************************************
[Left: Me by a garden on Tripler's grounds. First picture after the coma.]

The ambulance arrived at 9:05 PM Hawaii time. They thought I had to be dead when they found me because a third of my skull was swinging loose on the right side. Then I opened my eyes. Saved again.

On the ride to the hospital or infirmary the oxygen revived me. I heard them talking about how my parents' account didn't add up. They called my parents noho. They were natives. Noho means crazy.

The doctors' report specifically mentioned that the ambulance attendants had said that I was found in a depression in the grass. I know that's where they found me because I can still close my eyes and smell that clay. But the doctors dismissed the ambulance attendants' account because I had two head injuries, one consistent with a blow to the side of the head by the car front bumper, and one which they said must have occurred when I was subsequently thrown to the pavement striking the top of my head.

After all, who are you going to believe, a white officer of the US Army and his wife, or two Hawaiian natives?

So my Father got a DUI. The sentence was suspended because he had suffered enough already, having run over his precious only son. Years later my Father would often brag that he had a perfect driving record all his life and my Mother would start to say, "Well, there was that one DUI... " and he'd say, "SHUT UP!"

What I got, according to the doctor's report, was cracked ribs, one punctured lung, a dislocated shoulder, tire tracks over my chest, severe damage to about half the right cerebral surface, less severe damage to the top of the cerebrum, and, just as the ambulance was dropping me off, severe shock. The doctors said I would have died if I'd got there a minute later. Saved again, by fast driving.

The sapling was destroyed. It had to be replaced.

I don't know where I was treated initially. I didn't read that part of the report. But I know I woke up with bandages over my head in a ward in Tripler Medical Center in Honolulu. I had no sense of how long I was in a coma, but heard "four months" repeatedly from my parents when I eavesdropped.

Before I woke up in the hospital my mind was increasingly active. I ran through my memories of the preceding year of my life many times. As I did I applied the idea that words meant things to all the sounds that I remembered. So by the time I was conscious I knew what "Say Goodbye, Daddy" meant, and I knew better what "You made a present for Daddy" meant.

The Doctors had assured my parents that, as my left temporal lobe had not been damaged, my speech development would be unaffected. My Father was sure they were right since I'd spoken to him after being run over.

It turns out I'd been one of the exceptional cases that was developing language on my right side. The damage hadn't stopped me from mimicking my Father, but after the shock and the coma I couldn't make the sounds I had managed to make before. I had to learn how to babble all over again.

But outside my window, which was on the second or third floor, there was a birds' nest, and as I became conscious I awoke to bird song.

My parents were called in, and they sat by me and tried to get me to speak, while a doctor and nurses watched.

I whistled the bird song of the bird that was outside my window!

My Mother almost fainted.

Here I am outside on the grounds of Tripler, the day I was released, wearing shoes on loan from one of the nurses. The bird's nest was in the tree behind me in the picture.


By the way, I hate that teddy bear forever.

When they let my parents take me I felt betrayed. I had believed that the people at the hospital had rescued me from my parents. That hurt. Not being able to make speech sounds hurt.

What hurt the most was I missed who I had been. I didn't feel like I was the same person anymore. I felt like the original Wesley was taken away and replaced with me, and I was lost, and I shouldn't be here.

That's why I call the end of that first year the Omega. It was more than the end of a year. It was the end of a person.

[Hell of a post for a Mother's Day, wasn't it?]

The Red Bird

Two weeks after my first Christmas, around a week into January 1950, my Father had to go to Korea. The Korean War hadn't started yet but it was already a hot spot in the Cold War. My Father was apparently assigned to a cryptanalysis unit that was trying to decipher coded messages in the field to and from all the parties. I say apparently, because he took his oath of secrecy seriously and never told me or my Mother what he actually did there, except that he was in a tent typing a lot and got shot at after the war finally did break out. The sniper missed my Dad but shot out the light bulb that was hanging inches away over his head.

At the time, I knew nothing at all from wars or armies. One day my Dad drove us down to Honolulu and my Mother sat down with me in a downtown park, while my Father said his goodbyes, with a camera up to his face.


At first I was too cold to care. Hawaii is usually warm but it can get chilly sometimes and this was one of those days. It was January after all. My Mother put a hat on me to warm me up and I could pay more attention to Dad. Just then though, a red bird landed on a branch above me. He's just out of sight in this next picture, about 4 or 5 feet above and to your right. I heard the fluttering of his wings and looked up in time to see him land on the branch.


My Father didn't show any awareness of the bird. I was mesmerized by it. First it danced from one end of the branch to the other, then danced back again. I was starting to think I recognized my self in the creature, as if I was looking in a mirror, when he began to sing. When I heard his song I was sure that I had finally met someone who was like me, like what I was meant to be.


[Click the I'iwi to hear him sing. ]

All this time my Father was saying, "Say 'Goodbye Daddy', Goodbye Daddy!" over and over again as if he actually thought that I was going to say my first words at exactly that moment, and they were going to be precisely the words he commanded me to say. And I only heard him as an annoying background noise to my glorious new life's model. But I did hear him, somehow, and that would turn out to lead to salvation.

Finally, a khaki Army staff car drove up. Dad put his camera away and left.

As soon as he was gone my Mother shooed the bird away. "Stupid fucking bird, get out of here! Why'd the fuck you have to show up then? And you! You little filthy BRAT! Why couldn't you just say 'Goodbye Daddy'? Once! Creep." And she put me in our car and drove me back to the house in Schofield.