Addendum

I finally found a scan of a photo I had of Kathy from her Going Away Party. It's up at that entry.

The Going Away Party

In spite of having the hots for a couple of dozen girls and several age-inappropriate women, I still kept myself chaste for my wife-to-be Kathy. We saw each other frequently while I was in first grade, not so often in second, but maybe every other week. Then there was a month or so I didn't get a chance to see her, and my parents kept saying it will be soon.

When "soon" finally happened, I was told we were on our way to Kathy's going away party. Her Father was retiring from the Army and they would be leaving Fort Devens for good.

This was an outcome I was totally unprepared for. I was already more than 7 years into being an army brat, but the rootlessness of it hadn't really sunk in, because we'd only had the one major move from Hawaii to Massachusetts. The move from the House in Shirley onto base didn't count, because Devens was where the friends were in either case. In spite of countless kids coming and going at school, it never occurred to me that Kathy or I would be one of the ones going. Or that we wouldn't be going at the same time, or in the same direction. Kathy was going to Alaska, for freak's sake. Alaska! How would I get to Alaska?

But the going away thing was a PARTY. Not a funeral. Kathy was happy to be having a party, and who was I to spoil it by crying over the fact that I might never see her again? So I pretended I was OK.

I didn't have much choice anyway, because for almost the entire party I had no opportunity to be alone with her anyway. There were several families there and close to twenty kids, most of whom I didn't know. And there were party games.

I don't remember ever having had to participate in party games before. Certainly not these kind of party games. The games I was expected to play all triggered what i now recognize as PTSD symptoms, the earliest I can recall.

First, there was dunking for apples. This was out of the question. I simply could not get my head into that water. Some kids tried to pull me to the tub. I screamed as if I was being murdered, or as if my Mother were holding my face under a faucet.

Then there was Spin the bottle. The version we played involved going into a closet to kiss or whatever. When the bottle pointed at me I had a full blown panic attack. I couldn't face a closet either.

But the worst was Pin-The-Tail-On-The-Donkey. I got as far as letting them put the blindfold on and spinning me around. I could deal with wandering around the room with the tail in my hand while kids laughed at me when I went the wrong way. But when I finally found the wall, the idea that I was supposed to pin the tail to the donkey's butt suddenly took on a significance it wasn't supposed to have, and I burst out into tears.

My Mother was watching. When I took the blindfold off I saw her with a smirk on her face. She knew what the problem was. She thought it was funny.

Toward the end of the party I finally got about ten minutes alone with Kathy, and got to tell her I wished I could go with her. Then we left, and I never saw her again.

Lessons For The Growing Body

In 1st grade PE was called PT, Physical Training. There was no need for it. Every day on the playground I worked up a gallon of sweat.

At first I favored the see-saw with my wife-to-be Kathy at the other end. This didn't work out, as Kathy, as gifted as she was, couldn't grasp the fact that if the bell rings when she's at the bottom and she jumps off suddenly to go running in to class, I would come crashing down and probably suffer a new concussion.

The swings didn't work out because of swing bandits. Bigger kids would stop you, before you could get up to speed, and throw you off the swing so they could have it. A similar thing went on at the slide.

The do-it-yourself merry-go-round was only fun until you up-chucked.

So my favorite playground attraction, besides watching girls cartwheel, came to be the jungle gym. We had a lovely heavy-duty triple-decker with a kind of mini jungle gym on top. I'd climb up one side right-side-up, then keep going and climb down the other side up-side-down. There were kids who wanted to hog the jungle gym, like everything else, but they could only control the top of it. It was that big. It was so big, in fact, that it wouldn't be allowed today, because the danger from falling was so great. I'll have more to say about that as we near the end of the school year with these memoirs.

[Above: Ours was round, had thicker pipes, gravel rather than sand at the bottom, no rubber coating, and a pole from the top down the center to slide down Batman-style. Other than that, this is the basic kind of triple-decker with upper mini-gym structure I'm talking about. By the way, in the winter they had to warn us not to lick it.]

In addition to recess work our teachers also led us in physically active games. We were taken outside and taught games to do with A Tisket, A Tasket, and Ring Around The Rosie. Indoors we were led to play games like musical chairs that weren't supposed to be very physical but became so when kids got rough.

Anyway, all that sweaty exercise we were getting on the playground and in organized games wasn't enough. Our ignorant child bodies had to also be trained in a course of instruction. So we had PT classes.

There were no grades for PT, but you wouldn't know it for the way the PT teacher acted. The guy would make all of us line up in the gym room. Boys and girls both, wearing their regular clothes, would have to line up together and stand at attention while he instructed us by telling us PT related facts. Then we had to touch our toes, do jumping jacks, deep knee bends, and the like.

One day his instruction was a long discourse on how important it was to obey him because if you horsed around you could end up like one kid he had years ago who got another kid's teeth embedding in his brain. Not only did he have brain damage, the teacher said, but the kid whose teeth they were lost them, and almost bled to death out of his mouth. This was the story he told us toward the end of his lecture, after we'd already been listening to the creep for 20 minutes, at attention.

I passed out and woke up on my back to smelling salts. Kathy was leaning in among a crowd of others bent over me, showing more concern for me than she ever showed on the see-saw, strengthening my love for her.

I was seen by a nurse who tried to get at the cause of the fainting. I told her right away about the long standing at attention and the PT teacher's gruesome lecture, but she wasn't satisfied with that. She kept pressing for another explanation. Finally she asked what I'd had for lunch that day, and I had to tell her I hadn't had any. I didn't tell her that my lunch was stolen, because that would have been snitching.

My parents were called. I was turned over to them to take me home early that day. The official explanation for my fainting spell was that I was not eating enough. The PT teacher's lecture and the standing at attention weren't even mentioned to my parents, who just wanted to know why I wasn't eating the food my Mother sent me to school with.

[Below: A do-it-yourself merry-go-round my Mother might have puked from, in her day.]

Social Development

My relationships in grade school took an abrupt new direction when I finally learned to tie my own shoes. It was sometime into November, the weather was getting chilly, when the whole chasing the rabbit through the hole clicked.

Immediately, I told Dave I didn't want to be in his gang anymore, and I hoped he wouldn't mind. I was really getting tired of standing along the sidelines watching the other gang members harass someone. Besides, Dave had annoyed me by telling me that my imaginary friend George wasn't real. I knew he wasn't real. That's what "imaginary" means. Duh. But he didn't have to rub my face in the fact that my best friend wasn't real.

To Dave's credit, I wasn't given a goodbye beating. A lot of gang leaders would have arranged one. Maybe he was too new to the business. Maybe by the time he was a teenager and more experienced he would have learned to incorporate those little finesses that define gangdom to the connoisseur. When he wasn't in jail.

Not being part of the dominant gang did mean that my lunch began to be stolen from me regularly. Not by the old gang members, Dave wouldn't allow that. But by other kids that would have stolen my lunch before but had been afraid of Dave's guys.

On the other hand, girls liked me more. I was independent. I went my own way. I didn't have to come running when Dave called. I could tie my own shoes.

Meanwhile, Kathy, the wife-to-be who was placed in second grade, got put in a different class that took a separate lunch time, so we now never saw each other at school. The move had something to do with her being a disciplinary case. I don't recall if she was put back into the other first grade class or what. My parents claimed they knew it was bound to happen -- that was why they didn't let me skip a grade. But I was a disciplinary problem, too!

Anyway, I was therefore lonely for female company. And, at that time, I had no abstract concept of faithfulness. I could be engaged to marry Kathy, that didn't mean I couldn't kiss and hug anybody else. I mean, it was just kissing and hugging. I wasn't marrying any of them. If they'd let me and I knew how, I could have had intercourse with them and it wouldn't have occurred to me that I was cheating on Kathy in any way. The only way I could violate a trust was to promise myself in marriage to another girl.

So I spent more and more time with the girls, getting to know them, and asking for kisses and hugs. Even after I told them I was promised in marriage to another, very few girls turned me down.

An unfortunate incident occurred. A new girl arrived who was gorgeous. I hit up on her at a recess. I got so wrapped up in flirting with her I didn't notice the first warning bell to end recess. By the time the second bell rang I was sucking her face and had a hand halfway up her thigh, and without looking around said, "That's just the warning, we still have five more minutes." Then, after what I thought was five minutes more, but was possibly closer to thirty, I peeled myself away and looked around expecting to see some other stranglers, but there were none.

I was late getting in from recess often, but never this late, and never with a disheveled girl in tow. When we tried to sneak into the classroom the teacher caught us, screamed liked she'd seen a nest of rats, and dragged us to the principal's office, who yelled at me more, threatening to call in my parents.

Apparently they suspected us of fluid exchanges, we'd been so late. I didn't know what the hell they were going on about. I had done everything I could think of to do with her, and none of that was what they were on about, so I wasn't able to confess anything more.

Finally the principal calmed down and deposited us back in classroom. I felt terrible for having ruined my new friend's first day in the class by dragging her down to my level of delinquency.

The principal did call my parents and told them to talk to me. I had to face the same weird questions over again from them. It wasn't quite so bad, because they had trouble with the idea that I shouldn't be liking girls so much.

The result of it all was that I lay low for about two weeks and thought carefully about my previous behavior. I concluded after long deliberate consideration that I hadn't done anything wrong but that I should be more systematic in the future. I decided to see if I could kiss every girl in my first grade class by the end of the year without getting caught.

I Join A Gang

First grade in Fort Devens happened at a school on base. Unlike the kindergarten, the grade school had a large playground and a gym. I believe there were 4 classrooms, two for first grade, two for second grade. It was a federal school. Children in higher grades were sent to a public school off base, in Ayer.

Of course, I was a baby boomer. There were always too many of us, all through my education, in public school, and in college. So there were too many of us when we all appeared for the first day to be sorted out. All the new incoming pupils had to mass in the playground area with parents or guardians and wait to be processed and given temporary assignments to classrooms. I think I had my first experience of agoraphobia that day. The crowd was overwhelming.

Initially my future wife-to-be Kathy and I were assigned to the same first grade class. Our teacher was named Parent. I thought that was weird. She was a nice woman.

The first few days were spent impressing upon us the importance of a test coming up and cluing us in to the testing procedure. There was multiple choice practice, so we got used to that sort of thing. Then there was a long test, or actually a sequence of tests. It was in fact an IQ test.

We weren't allowed to know the raw scores, but on the basis of the scores some of the kids were offered placement one year ahead, in the second grade. Kathy and I both were granted that opportunity to skip first grade, on account of acing the IQ test.

Kathy's parents went for it. My parents decided that I needed to stay back in the first grade with children my own age, because that would be better in terms of getting me properly "socialized."

So after one week Kathy and I were split up. It was probably for the best. During that first week we spent every free minute we had smooching and hugging, and completely disregarding anybody who had a problem with it, including Miss or Mrs. Parent. And we were still able to get together on the playground during recesses.

Because we were army brats the students that finished the year were not those who started it. Families moved away and were replaced by others all year round. I'd estimate about 10 left, and about 10 replaced them.

There were other kinds of attrition. At least one girl died of pneumonia. At least one boy was suspended for bad conduct. His name was Dave. That bad boy was my best buddy.

Dave organized a schoolyard gang. His peeps ran the playground. They stole lunches from the dorky kids. They made fun of the creeps and freaks. They ran from one end of the playground to the other, every lunch and recess, threatening anyone with whippings who didn't acknowledge their ruler-ship .

But Dave was not a bad kid. If you accepted his ascendancy you could be his friend and he would protect you.

Remember, I couldn't tie my own shoes yet. I also couldn't dress and undress myself. That was still the case. In the classroom Miss or Mrs. Parent and her assistants could take care of the shoelaces. Miss or Mrs. Parent also made special trips to the bathroom with me to help me.

Dave's first reaction to that was to decide I was a retard. He could tie his own shoes and he didn't need special help going to the bathroom. But when I told him I wanted to join his gang he only asked me if I would be loyal and obedient. When I said yes I was accepted, with all my flaws, and Dave personally took care of my shoelaces on the playground.

So I socialized very well, didn't I? The social landscape was harsh, but could be worked!

New Old Photos

Every single month I have to submit to an inspection, of my room. At least, I tell myself, they don't do cavity searches.

This comes from living in subsidized housing. It's bad, but it's good. The good thing is that periodically I get ambitious and decide to really clean, instead of just find clever places to hide crap from the inspectors. This happened yesterday and today.

Which was bad, because I stirred up a lot of accumulated dust, which caused me to have an asthma attack, which necessitated a walk down to the Pioneer Clinic for a nebulizer and a new inhaler, but hey, it's all good, I have a new inhaler, and I found cool stuff in the dust.

The cool stuff were old photos I thought I had lost, and a little bit of old artwork. The latter is now up on Somewhat Art, the former will end up here eventually. I'll start with three of them.

I was going to talk about how, in 1955, my Father took me fishing. He went to the trouble of procuring a kiddie size rod and reel.

I caught a fish! It was a perch, just barely legal. It was a thrill until Dad told me how great he was going to taste knowing that I'd caught him myself. I didn't know the idea was to eat them. I thought we were going to keep him for a pet. Always the failures of communication.

This picture next was taken on April 4, 1955. It shows Dad hauling in trout that look paltry to me, but what would I know. The photographer was Corporal James H. Bissett, and this ran in the Fort Devens Dispatch, to prove that the fish were biting on opening day. Another note stamped onto the back of the photo says, "PLEASE CREDIT U.S. ARMY PHOTOGRAPH. The Department of the Army has no objection to the publication of this photograph. It's use in commercial advertisement must be approved by the PUBLIC INFORMATION DIVISION, OFFICE OF THE CHEF OF INFORMATION, DEPARTMENT OF THE ARMY, THE PENTAGON, WASHINGTON 25, D.C." Good thing this site isn't commercial, that would be a pain. Anyway it was Dad's success that day that enabled him to get me to go fishing with him a week or two later. So now I know when that happened!


I also found the following outstanding picture that I'd even forgotten I'd ever had, of my fiancée Kathy making dream eyes at me, while I savor the moment. The picture was taken in Kindergarten on a day when a reporter from the Dispatch dropped in looking for human interest stories. This shot wasn't used in the paper but we got a copy anyway.


Finally, proof that I graduated Kindergarten. The class picture, less Kathy, who was out that day. I'm in the back row, third from your right. There we were the future of America. Note the coonskin cap on the guy directly in front of me. The future of America will remember the Alamo, and know Fess Parker was there.

Opportunity and Temptation

One of the problems I've always had is a slow learning curve when it comes to complex motor skills. An example is riding a bicycle. I don't believe most people take two months learning that. Another is dancing set moves. I enjoy dancing, but when I say "dancing" I don't mean "choreographed." I have to be dancing by myself moving to the music. I can't dance a routine or match a partner.

I have tried to learn to type with all my fingers several times. I have never been able to type faster than 11 words per minute using ten fingers. That's exactly how fast I type with 2 fingers. So why use ten? Anyway, I don't care, because I also think at 11 words per minute. So it suits my needs. I'm not a scribe copying other people's writings, I'm composing this stuff as I go along.

[Right: Even in my dreams I don't do the kind of dancing that guy's doing.]

I have long suspected that my difficulty learning motor skills is a leftover symptom of brain damage, from one of the 1950 or the 1953 head injuries. There were later head injuries I'll be getting to, but I'm sure they aren't responsible for the learning disability, because the disability preceded them.

The first sign I had of it was in 1953-54 when my Mother was trying to teach me to dress myself and tie my own shoes. She got nowhere. My Father blamed her genes.

As I came to have more contact with other children my slowness became a social challenge. The first inkling I had that I was comparatively slow this way was when another couple visited with a girl my age in tow. The girl was astonished that I needed help tying my shoes still.

Fortunately, this girl, whose name was Kathy, decided that not being able to tie shoes didn't make me a pathetic wretch, and I fell in love with her, and she agreed to marry me. So I was engaged to be married before the age of 5 to a beautiful curly haired freckle factory. It wasn't just a one day affair, either. We got together a great deal in the next few years. Whenever we did there was mass kissing. We never had sex, because she wanted to save herself for marriage.

Anyway, back to the House in Shirley and 1954. My Mother, therefore, had to dress me and tie my shoes, all the time.

She made matters worse than they had to be by insisting that I sit down to pee. Her feeling was that doing it standing up was "nasty" and spread germs (because of stray drops.) Great, but that meant my pants had to come down, and back up, each time, and that put Mom in the driver's seat. So to speak.

All of this had an impact on her sexual abuse of me. The more physical involvement she had to have with me during the day, the more opportunities and temptations there were for molestation.

Sometime in February or early March, 1954, my Father had to engage in a couple of weeks of war games. So he didn't come home for two weeks. His absence also added to the opportunity and temptation to molest. The abuse increased during that period. It was a pattern that repeated many times in years to come.

One vivid memory from this time is hearing the phrase, "I'll make you black and blue where it won't show" in connection with rape. It didn't refer to beating me where my pants would cover the signs. It referred to the intention to cause internal bruising of the rectum. It was a form of punishment she came up with that was sure to never be caught, because I would always be too shy to tell people where it hurt.