The Freak

I don't know cars. Here's a picture of the car my parents used to run me over, taken when my Father first bought it. I wish someone could tell me the make and model.

It's also visible in two of these next snapshots. All these pictures were taken in a downtown Honolulu park the day I was released from Tripler Medical Center. It's amazing what a difference a haircut and a change of clothes can make. That's me, the same kid on the same day as in the shaggy hair and hospital gown from two posts ago. My Father was NOT going to have HIS SON looking like a GIRL anymore. The haircut was the first item on the agenda.

While we were getting my haircut, my Mother pitched a fit because the shoes that I had been allowed to wear on the hospital grounds were taken back by the nurse who loaned them.

When she got tired of complaining about that, she returned to the more important subject of telling my Father what a fool he had been in not killing me when he had the chance. Now, she said, they were stuck with "the freak" forever. She started calling me the freak when she found out I couldn't speak but could whistle exactly like a bird (complete with warbling.) She also called me the basket-case a lot. My Father would occasionally try to correct her but mostly gave up. Neither of them realized that I was understanding a lot of what they were saying. I got about every other word, and I was learning more fast. Just because I couldn't speak didn't keep me from learning the meanings of words, and I was obsessed with that.

When we left the hospital I was crying. I was terrified. I thought they'd finish killing me right away. By the time we got to the park for the photos I was calmed down and I could laugh at my Father's attempts to amuse me. That's what's going on here. You can see the process in the circular-cut pictures going from top to bottom. Top: uncertainty. Next down: warming. Lower: almost comfortable. Bottom: scared again. Whenever I looked at my Mother the fear returned. You can see why in this enhanced closeup. Her eyes and that grimace show exactly what she wants. She wants me dead. She's tolerating the little freak because she expects to get her way.

She didn't know yet how much of a freak I actually was. Because my parents were told that I wouldn't suffer any speech loss, when I did they decided together that the psychologists knew nothing. So they didn't bring me back for the tests and therapy they were asked to. As a result they were never in a position to be told that I had two major symptoms of brain trauma besides the obvious ones.

One, they wouldn't ever guess on their own. I came out of the coma with an eidetic memory. Not only could I phonetically remember a great deal of my first year the coma, but now I could remember every conversation and sound I heard during every day and play it back in my head at the end of the day or weeks later. My phonographic memory was near perfect. I also had a good photographic memory. But without being able to speak, and without trained psychologists observing me, my parents wouldn't know about it. By the time I learned to speak English, I was advised not to let them find out about it. Later my Mother suspected it and she would test me to try to confirm her guess, but by that time it was mostly gone.

The other symptom was found out right away by my Mother when she changed my diapers, but I don't believe she knew it was a symptom of brain damage. I had the condition made famous by John Waters' A Dirty Shame. At 16 months of age I was over-sexed. She discovered I would get erections from the smallest of stimulations. It was enough to just unpin my diapers.

The increased sex drive condition is quite common in cases of severe head injury. The eidetic memory condition is relatively rare but happens and if it lasts it can be identified as a form of Savant Syndrome. It's sometimes associated with left brain damage (my injury was to the right, but my development was reversed also) or limbic damage or both. Limbic damage is apt to occur whenever there is any severe head trauma because the limbic system lies at a focal point of the skull. It would have been easy to miss in a case like mine. The eidetic memory is believed to result when more normal "higher" mechanisms of memory are inhibited forcing the brain to fall back on more primitive mechanisms.

The fact is that having an eidetic memory is not an efficient way to take in information of a large range. In the long run it's narrowing. I'm glad I lost it eventually, or rather, that normal memory function returned and took over. That happened after my 4th birthday. So until I was 4 I reviewed every day's experiences in detail at least once before sleeping every night. As a result I have a very detailed memory from ages most people barely remember at all.

If I don't remember anything from a day or a week back then, I can be pretty sure nothing interesting happened, from my perspective at the time.

A Tale of Two Parents II

My Mother was born in 1914 on a farm near Okaton, South Dakota. Recently I read a census report that said Okaton's population is now 3.45% Asian/Pacific islander. That sounded impressive to me, until I found out that was entirely due to one Samoan. I'm very sure there was no Samoan when my Mother lived there.

My Mother was born to James and Jennie. James had four daughters and no sons. He wanted a son badly. My Mother was his fourth try at getting a James Jr. When she wasn't a son they named her Jennie instead of James, but soon they were calling her Jemmie, as if he couldn't let the original plan go.

The oldest of the four sisters was much older than the other three. She died in her twenties of an infection, while waiting for medical help to arrive from the nearest town that had a doctor. She had been left in the care of the second oldest, Alta, who might have been 9. I believe this story accounts for a detail my Mother added only months before she died. She says that Alta tortured her sexually.

Knowing Alta, I suspect my Mother got a urethral infection, and Alta, fearing she'd be responsible for losing another sister, tried to fix it on her own. That was the way Alta was later when I knew her. If you had a problem, she'd fix it, lovingly, with the help of God all the way, with a straightened out wire coat-hanger, if necessary. I didn't learn until it was too late, never tell Alta you have a problem.

Here's a picture I was told was taken the day the family left the Okaton farm. My Mother is on her Dad's knee. I imagine the men standing by the car were from the bank.

Suddenly, after Okaton, James had a farm outside Strafford, Missouri, near Springfield. James probably benefited from a helping hand from his own Father, who had connections in Missouri.

I love how in all the photos of south-western Missouri the horizon is tilted. It makes you feel like you're out on the ocean, and the ship is listing. That's how it feels when you're there too.

The shot below of my Mother's high-school graduating class is a treasure not only because 3 of the 4 guys are in overalls, but because it shows the trait of my Mother I am most pleased to share. She's the third female seated in front from our right. She can also be identified as the only one in the picture giggling. Other traits of my Mother I enjoyed: she was relatively good at math, although untrained; she could return putdowns at twice the strength dealt; I have her hair.



Out of school, my Mother could have stayed on the farm, if she wanted to have no kind of life, if she didn't want to find men, if she didn't want to marry some man with a career who would lift her out of overall-country and set her up pretty in the land of silk. So, OK, she left. For Washington D.C.! And landed work in a department store! Close to the Government Printing Office! The plot moves!