The first year that I lived with my parents at the House in Shirley I very rarely was taken anywhere else except to be babysat by our retired landlord. My Mother walked me to his house roughly twice a week and I stayed with him and his wife for two or three hours, almost always outside. Other than that I can remember only about a dozen trips during that year to Fort Devens. An average of one a month.
There were trips to the commissary and the PX (post exchange.) I was never allowed to go in with my parents to either one. They left me to wait in the car. That would be the trip. A fifteen or twenty minute ride to the commissary, wait in the car an hour with Koko, 5 minutes to the PX, wait in the car an hour with Koko, a fifteen or twenty minute ride home, done.
There were also trips to the Devens Nursery. I considered the Devens Nursery a new kind of Hell on Earth, different from the ones I'd got used to.
I was still going through the re-toilet training the first time I was taken there. My parents really didn't want to be seen in public with a diapered 4 year-old. They waited as long as they could stand it. But they had to go out for an evening dance, and the old retired farmer didn't want to take care of me evenings. So, not knowing any alternative, they took me to the Nursery, wearing pants over diapers. They brought extras and told the staff my problem and begged them to change me as needed. Then they left, telling me they were going to a party, but they'd be back in a "couple of hours."
I could tell time by then. I also knew a couple meant two, not eight.
They dropped me off at around seven. The institutional clock on the wall said I was still there at just before three in the AM. My parents were liars.
It was my first encounter with a mass of disinterested children, ever. The Devens Nursery was a one-story wooden structure just west of Headquarters, across the road from a big marching field. Once inside there was an administrative counter with staff desks to the left and a big room to the right where the children could be distracted with toys indoors. Beyond the big room was a hallway past bathrooms, janitorial closets and such, which eventually came to a door that opened to a yard that was corraled with the building on one side and a five foot high chain-link fence on the other three sides.
While it was still light out, all of us temporarily abandoned kids (there were at most about forty of us) were marched out to the corral and sat at picnic tables and fed graham crackers with milk. Then we were forced to nap against our wills. As it got darker, we were brought in, and made to play with toys, even though there weren't enough toys to go around. This meant that those of us who weren't bullies got to see the toys hogged by those that were, for a couple of hours, occasionally being threatened with bodily harm if we objected to the status quo.
At some point in all of this I had to go. There was an embarrassing "special" trip to a staff bathroom so one of the women in attendance could change me privately. The other kids figured out what was going on, and I couldn't talk to any of them after that.
Then we were all told it was bedtime. Curtains were set up and children were given wool army blankets and assigned to cots. It was actually long past bedtime by then for most of us. I think the staff put bedtime off as long as possible because it was a pain. Nobody wants to go to bed when they've been abandoned. You're afraid that if you drop off to sleep you'll miss the moment of your rescue. They'll come, but they won't see you because you'll be under covers somewhere, so they'll say, "must have run off," and forget about you. There was a lot of screaming and crying.
With all the rape and beatings, the concussion and all, you're probably wondering why I wanted my parents to rescue me. The truth is, they fed me, and they were the evil I knew. Very little in my experience led me to believe that my parents were unusual. To me, good parents would have been unusual, and I didn't know where any were or how to get any that I found to take me away.
They did rescue me, to take me back to the House in Shirley. Trips like that made me appreciate the isolation of that house. I didn't miss being around other children so much thanks to the occasional overdose.
Showing posts with label shirley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label shirley. Show all posts
Friday, August 24, 2007
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
Rains Bleed
[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened shortly before my fourth birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
At first I had excellent company in my isolation on the farm. I had my two personalities!
I've read that people with dual personalities often go through stages in which the personalities strike many radically different arrangements of body sharing, as if looking for the best way to manage the problem. That was my experience.
In Hawaii it was like this: If we're home, I'm usually Kona. If we're away from home by ourselves, I'm Alaka'i. If we're away from home with our parents, we wing it.
At the House in Shirley, Kona and Alaka'i had conversations. It seemed to me that whenever I was one, the other was behind me and could step forward, and the first would go back behind. We had conversations like this where we took turns speaking for long periods of time.
Once my Mother was in the hall upstairs and overheard me doing this while I was in the playroom by myself. She walked in and asked me who I was talking to, knowing full-well the correct realistic answer had to be "myself', since no one else was there. My answer was "Alaka'i." She had never heard that name before, and she had trouble getting the pronunciation right. So she said, "how about I call him Alex, instead?"
Alex was fine, I said. For all I knew at the time, maybe Alex was English for Alaka'i. If you think Alex comes from Alexander the Great, a case could be made that the connotation is the same, even if the root meaning is entirely different.
After that my Mother eavesdropped on our conversations regularly. When I was outside we would be talking and I'd catch her peering out the kitchen window at me.
The conversations outside would be conducted almost as if in a trance. Just south of our house was a house sized rectangular hole in the ground with concrete walls where another house had been. Near it were other holes where there may have been a shed or an outhouse. I developed a route that took me around those ruins in a figure eight, and just followed it over and over again like a caged bear at the zoo, carrying on my dual person conversation. We mostly talked about how much we missed Hawaii and Lani and Lono. Sometimes Alaka'i would sing a Hawaiian chant and then explain it to Kona.
Soon after we moved in my parents were lucky that the farmer who rented to us agreed to babysit for them so they could have some time out by themselves.
The first time I was turned over to the old man my parents drove me there and dropped me and the dog off in his back yard. The farmer's house was at the foot of a steep slope and rested on a gentle rise up from the highway. There were long stairs up to the porch. It seemed like too many stairs for such an old man.
I vaguely recall the old man's name was Bob. Let's say I'm right. Bob talked with my parents for about ten minutes, then they drove off to have some fun on base. Maybe they were going to a party, or maybe to have dinner at the Officer's Club. As they drove off, the old man sat on a hammock in his yard that was strung between two trees. His wife worked in a garden near the stairs to the house, in the distance behind him. Just twenty feet away an old disk harrow was rusting in overgrown grass.
Once my parents were gone, there was a long period of awkwardness. I had learned to be afraid of Americans. Whether relatives or total strangers, I'd come to think of them as either feeble or treacherous. I didn't think any good could come of talking to this old man.
As it happened, there was just then a beautiful vivid rainbow in the sky to the east. I'd seen countless rainbows in Hawaii. They have many words for the different kinds. Some are called uakoko, literally meaning blood rain, or bloody rain. I thought of it as meaning the rain bleeds.
Bob didn't know I was familiar with rainbows. From the way I was gawking at it he got the false impression that I'd never seen one before. After several minutes, he said, "Well, aren't you going to ask me what it is? Don't you want to know what makes it and what it's called?"
If I was curious about it I certainly wouldn't have asked him, given the lack of trust. But I also wasn't go to say, "No, I don't trust you." I didn't want to get in any trouble. I was sure that anything I said that could be seen as impolite would be reported in detail to my parents. So I didn't say anything.
Then he said something amazing. He said, loud and angry, "Who did this to you? It's that Father of yours, isn't it? This new generation, they're all alike. 'We saved America from tyranny! We preserved freedom in the world!' But they don't know what freedom is! What does he do when you ask him a question? Does he yell at you?"
It was one of the most transforming moments of my life. All it took was for him to realize what was going on and put it in words. I didn't need to be rescued. I couldn't be rescued in that day and age. But he could help me see the leash better, so I could learn to resist it on my own.
After a good cry, I admitted to him he was right, and we got along well. The conversation remained our secret, and I had finally found an American I could trust.
[Below: Shiny polished disk harrow, lovingly maintained in a museum.]
At first I had excellent company in my isolation on the farm. I had my two personalities!
I've read that people with dual personalities often go through stages in which the personalities strike many radically different arrangements of body sharing, as if looking for the best way to manage the problem. That was my experience.
In Hawaii it was like this: If we're home, I'm usually Kona. If we're away from home by ourselves, I'm Alaka'i. If we're away from home with our parents, we wing it.
At the House in Shirley, Kona and Alaka'i had conversations. It seemed to me that whenever I was one, the other was behind me and could step forward, and the first would go back behind. We had conversations like this where we took turns speaking for long periods of time.
Once my Mother was in the hall upstairs and overheard me doing this while I was in the playroom by myself. She walked in and asked me who I was talking to, knowing full-well the correct realistic answer had to be "myself', since no one else was there. My answer was "Alaka'i." She had never heard that name before, and she had trouble getting the pronunciation right. So she said, "how about I call him Alex, instead?"
Alex was fine, I said. For all I knew at the time, maybe Alex was English for Alaka'i. If you think Alex comes from Alexander the Great, a case could be made that the connotation is the same, even if the root meaning is entirely different.
After that my Mother eavesdropped on our conversations regularly. When I was outside we would be talking and I'd catch her peering out the kitchen window at me.
The conversations outside would be conducted almost as if in a trance. Just south of our house was a house sized rectangular hole in the ground with concrete walls where another house had been. Near it were other holes where there may have been a shed or an outhouse. I developed a route that took me around those ruins in a figure eight, and just followed it over and over again like a caged bear at the zoo, carrying on my dual person conversation. We mostly talked about how much we missed Hawaii and Lani and Lono. Sometimes Alaka'i would sing a Hawaiian chant and then explain it to Kona.
Soon after we moved in my parents were lucky that the farmer who rented to us agreed to babysit for them so they could have some time out by themselves.
The first time I was turned over to the old man my parents drove me there and dropped me and the dog off in his back yard. The farmer's house was at the foot of a steep slope and rested on a gentle rise up from the highway. There were long stairs up to the porch. It seemed like too many stairs for such an old man.
I vaguely recall the old man's name was Bob. Let's say I'm right. Bob talked with my parents for about ten minutes, then they drove off to have some fun on base. Maybe they were going to a party, or maybe to have dinner at the Officer's Club. As they drove off, the old man sat on a hammock in his yard that was strung between two trees. His wife worked in a garden near the stairs to the house, in the distance behind him. Just twenty feet away an old disk harrow was rusting in overgrown grass.
Once my parents were gone, there was a long period of awkwardness. I had learned to be afraid of Americans. Whether relatives or total strangers, I'd come to think of them as either feeble or treacherous. I didn't think any good could come of talking to this old man.
As it happened, there was just then a beautiful vivid rainbow in the sky to the east. I'd seen countless rainbows in Hawaii. They have many words for the different kinds. Some are called uakoko, literally meaning blood rain, or bloody rain. I thought of it as meaning the rain bleeds.
Bob didn't know I was familiar with rainbows. From the way I was gawking at it he got the false impression that I'd never seen one before. After several minutes, he said, "Well, aren't you going to ask me what it is? Don't you want to know what makes it and what it's called?"
If I was curious about it I certainly wouldn't have asked him, given the lack of trust. But I also wasn't go to say, "No, I don't trust you." I didn't want to get in any trouble. I was sure that anything I said that could be seen as impolite would be reported in detail to my parents. So I didn't say anything.
Then he said something amazing. He said, loud and angry, "Who did this to you? It's that Father of yours, isn't it? This new generation, they're all alike. 'We saved America from tyranny! We preserved freedom in the world!' But they don't know what freedom is! What does he do when you ask him a question? Does he yell at you?"
It was one of the most transforming moments of my life. All it took was for him to realize what was going on and put it in words. I didn't need to be rescued. I couldn't be rescued in that day and age. But he could help me see the leash better, so I could learn to resist it on my own.
After a good cry, I admitted to him he was right, and we got along well. The conversation remained our secret, and I had finally found an American I could trust.
[Below: Shiny polished disk harrow, lovingly maintained in a museum.]
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Crops of Stones and Solitude
[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened a month or two before my fourth birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
We called the farmhouse our "House in Shirley" even though Shirley was two miles east of where our long driveway met Leominster Road. The location is still just about as isolated as ever (from the point of view of a four-year old), as the recent aerial image below shows. Leominster Road runs along the bottom of the image and north is up. [Image stolen from the site of an interstellar corporation. The Harkonnens work for me, though they know it not.]
The image shows a railroad terminus (you can see a line of freight cars bending down the tracks from the north.) The structure in the middle of the picture is just about exactly where our house stood. The road leading from that to Leominster Road follows the exact same path as our 800 foot driveway, but appears to have been widened. Of course there were no railroad tracks back in 1953. In fact the woods to the east came right up to the house and so did the woods to the north.
An examination of the business listings near Shirley indicates that the unworked farm we lived on has since become a gravel mine, and we are looking at the site where the gravel is loaded onto freight cars to be hauled out.
It's fitting, because the old farmer who gave the land up once told me that his best crop was rocks. The land grew new rocks every year, pushed up by the cycle of freezes and thaws.
Other than that little change of the gravel mine most everything else is familiar. Oh yes, there is one other big difference. The house where the old farmer lived with his wife should be off to our left and on the south side of Leominster Road. It's gone.
Well, the point of showing it is, to see the isolation. Our time there was, for me, especially for the first year, a crucible of social isolation. I spent hours and hours every day playing by myself. I had a play room upstairs in addition to my bedroom. For most of the first year, when we had poor weather, I was expected to spend all my time alone in the play room, out of my Mother's hair. During good weather I could go out, and wander, as long as I stayed by the house or the driveway.
It's to this extended isolation that I attribute my skill at amusing myself endlessly without requiring any help from other people. I never feel lonely, only alone. Solitude is an ocean I've learned to swim, I've spent months and years there, and if circumstances toss me back in, I'm at home in it.
We called the farmhouse our "House in Shirley" even though Shirley was two miles east of where our long driveway met Leominster Road. The location is still just about as isolated as ever (from the point of view of a four-year old), as the recent aerial image below shows. Leominster Road runs along the bottom of the image and north is up. [Image stolen from the site of an interstellar corporation. The Harkonnens work for me, though they know it not.]
The image shows a railroad terminus (you can see a line of freight cars bending down the tracks from the north.) The structure in the middle of the picture is just about exactly where our house stood. The road leading from that to Leominster Road follows the exact same path as our 800 foot driveway, but appears to have been widened. Of course there were no railroad tracks back in 1953. In fact the woods to the east came right up to the house and so did the woods to the north.
An examination of the business listings near Shirley indicates that the unworked farm we lived on has since become a gravel mine, and we are looking at the site where the gravel is loaded onto freight cars to be hauled out.
It's fitting, because the old farmer who gave the land up once told me that his best crop was rocks. The land grew new rocks every year, pushed up by the cycle of freezes and thaws.
Other than that little change of the gravel mine most everything else is familiar. Oh yes, there is one other big difference. The house where the old farmer lived with his wife should be off to our left and on the south side of Leominster Road. It's gone.
Well, the point of showing it is, to see the isolation. Our time there was, for me, especially for the first year, a crucible of social isolation. I spent hours and hours every day playing by myself. I had a play room upstairs in addition to my bedroom. For most of the first year, when we had poor weather, I was expected to spend all my time alone in the play room, out of my Mother's hair. During good weather I could go out, and wander, as long as I stayed by the house or the driveway.
It's to this extended isolation that I attribute my skill at amusing myself endlessly without requiring any help from other people. I never feel lonely, only alone. Solitude is an ocean I've learned to swim, I've spent months and years there, and if circumstances toss me back in, I'm at home in it.
Monday, August 6, 2007
The Black Snake
[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened a month or two before my fourth birthday. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]
It was late Spring 1953 when my parents and I arrived in Massachusetts. I recall an arrival through the gates of Fort Devens while it was still light, and a stop somewhere on base to check in briefly. Then we were back in the car driving for miles. I didn't understand. If that was our destination, why weren't we staying there?
Of course, there's never housing on base right away. There's always a waiting list. We had to find a motel to stay at while looking for a house to lease until on-base housing materialized.
Fort Devens lies between two towns, Ayer to the East Northeast, and Shirley to the West. Neither was very large. Ayer may have had a population of 3,000 then. Shirley was smaller. I don't believe either town had a motel in those days. But if there were they had no vacancies that night, and we ended up near Clinton, about 12 miles away.
We stayed there a week or two, with no place for me to go and nothing, literally nothing and nobody to play with. Then one day my parents loaded me and everything else in the car, and I thought maybe were we giving up and driving back to Hawaii. I asked if that was what was happening. My father yelled at me. He said I was an idiot, and told me to shut up and never ask him a stupid question ever again. Especially while he's driving.
We ended up on a beautiful country highway, with a forested hill to our left and farm land with occasional lines of woods leading away from the highway to the right. I now know we were traveling west on Leominster Road away from Shirley toward Leominster, and the lines of woods followed streams leading from culverts. A couple of miles from the town the road itself was lined with trees. We turned right and north into a driveway. The driveway bent softly right just until the highway was lost behind us in the trees, then it turned back north.
It was a private 800 yard driveway to a two-story cinder-block farmhouse for a farm that was no longer being cultivated. The owner, the farmer who had worked the land, was by then retired. He was there when we arrived to hand over the keys. Later I learned that he lived in another farmhouse on the other side of the highway beyond where we turned in, altogether a quarter mile away. Our next nearest neighbors were a half mile away, the other direction.
The house faced west to the driveway. There were woods behind it, and overgrown grass stretched out before it. It had a flat roof. We found out later just how shabbily built it was (the first time it rained). To my parents it probably looked like a dump. To me it looked like a palace on the edge of a mysterious forest in a magical kingdom.
As the farmer left us, my Mother strode toward the front door to be the first to go in. I was right beside her, having already inched to it while the adults talked. Just as she stepped onto the first of two steps up the porch a shiny sleek four-foot black racer shot up from bushes from the left, onto the porch in front of her, and darted across her path and off to our right.
My Mother screamed bloody murder. I squealed with utter delight. I'd never seen anything so gorgeous and so purely alive. Pure concentrated life poured over the porch of that house! The place WAS magical!
It was late Spring 1953 when my parents and I arrived in Massachusetts. I recall an arrival through the gates of Fort Devens while it was still light, and a stop somewhere on base to check in briefly. Then we were back in the car driving for miles. I didn't understand. If that was our destination, why weren't we staying there?
Of course, there's never housing on base right away. There's always a waiting list. We had to find a motel to stay at while looking for a house to lease until on-base housing materialized.
Fort Devens lies between two towns, Ayer to the East Northeast, and Shirley to the West. Neither was very large. Ayer may have had a population of 3,000 then. Shirley was smaller. I don't believe either town had a motel in those days. But if there were they had no vacancies that night, and we ended up near Clinton, about 12 miles away.
We stayed there a week or two, with no place for me to go and nothing, literally nothing and nobody to play with. Then one day my parents loaded me and everything else in the car, and I thought maybe were we giving up and driving back to Hawaii. I asked if that was what was happening. My father yelled at me. He said I was an idiot, and told me to shut up and never ask him a stupid question ever again. Especially while he's driving.
We ended up on a beautiful country highway, with a forested hill to our left and farm land with occasional lines of woods leading away from the highway to the right. I now know we were traveling west on Leominster Road away from Shirley toward Leominster, and the lines of woods followed streams leading from culverts. A couple of miles from the town the road itself was lined with trees. We turned right and north into a driveway. The driveway bent softly right just until the highway was lost behind us in the trees, then it turned back north.
It was a private 800 yard driveway to a two-story cinder-block farmhouse for a farm that was no longer being cultivated. The owner, the farmer who had worked the land, was by then retired. He was there when we arrived to hand over the keys. Later I learned that he lived in another farmhouse on the other side of the highway beyond where we turned in, altogether a quarter mile away. Our next nearest neighbors were a half mile away, the other direction.
The house faced west to the driveway. There were woods behind it, and overgrown grass stretched out before it. It had a flat roof. We found out later just how shabbily built it was (the first time it rained). To my parents it probably looked like a dump. To me it looked like a palace on the edge of a mysterious forest in a magical kingdom.
As the farmer left us, my Mother strode toward the front door to be the first to go in. I was right beside her, having already inched to it while the adults talked. Just as she stepped onto the first of two steps up the porch a shiny sleek four-foot black racer shot up from bushes from the left, onto the porch in front of her, and darted across her path and off to our right.
My Mother screamed bloody murder. I squealed with utter delight. I'd never seen anything so gorgeous and so purely alive. Pure concentrated life poured over the porch of that house! The place WAS magical!
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