A Paine In The House. A Genius In The Closet

When I was in grade school, we had a genius who lived in my closet and smelled of garlic. He lived on the third floor of our house, slept at odd hours of the day, and kept his mail in our cereal cabinet. It's a credit to my absolute belief in the normalcy of my family, that I didn't find this strange in the least.



The genius and I shared the third floor, which was basically a converted attic. His bed was near a large walk-in closet and that is where he kept most of his processions including his TV. Most nights, while I was trying to fall asleep, he would be watching TV. The light would emanate from inside the closet like some weird Close Encounters moment, backlighting his inert body. The sound would be just loud enough to be distracting, but not loud enough to be entertaining.

How he came to live with us escapes me now, but what I do know is that my father had known him for years, and the genius, being without a place to live at the time, had been invited to come live with us. His name was Tom Paine.

Tom was an honest-to-god, off the charts brainiac. He was a charter member of MENSA and in fact was close personal friends with the founder. Tom's IQ was off the charts, be he suffered from serious food allergies, various medical problems and emotional issues. Because of his many issues, Tom was on permanent disability. As a way to try and combat his illnesses, Tom was very into holistic medicine and ate raw garlic as a way to cleanse his body. It's safe to say that Tom wasn't sneaking up on a lot of people. When he was in the room, you knew it.

In the years that he lived with us, and even years later when he would get his mail from us, he would walk in unannounced, with this hair doing a pretty good impersonation of Albert Einstein, wave, open the cabinet over the stove where we kept the cereal and retrieve his mail. Despite his troubles, he always seemed happy, always had a nice word to say and though weird, was a gentleman. He had become such a fixture over the years, that we barely noticed him. I could be sitting in the kitchen with a friend and Tom would come in, say hello, get his mail and leave. My friend would just look at me.

"What," I'd say.
"Who the hell was that?"
"Oh, that's just Tom," I'd say.

Then we would go back to watching cartoons. Almost nothing fazes kids. And I never really felt the need to explain Tom. He was a friend of my father's. He lived in my room. He smelled powerfully of garlic.

What else was there to tell?

Driving God's Tractor

It's funny to think that I have to beg, threaten and plead to get my soon-to-be-fourteen-year-old stepson to mow the lawn. When I was ten, I mowed the lawn where my father worked, for free—several acres at least—and considered it a favor that they let me do it.



Carl was a seminary student, and also the groundskeeper for a time, at Biblical Theological Seminary. And for a short time, my boss. Biblical was exactly one block away from our house, and it was not only the reason we lived in the house we did, but why we lived in Pennsylvania in the first place. We moved from Oklahoma so my father could take a job as the Director of Development, basically a one-man ad agency/public relations firm/fundraising/recruting office and mail house. His duties encompassed any and all correspondence with the outside world from marketing the seminary to prospective studnets, to mailing out fundraising newsletters. He designed, wrote, photographed, layed out and printed everything from business cards to invitations, annual reports and ads. His domain was a little side building about fifty feet away from the main building and he walked to work each day, even in the rain.

Direcly behind his office was the groundskeeper's shed. Carl's office, if you will. As I said, Carl was a student there, and in return for some sort of break on tuition, he was the head groundskeeper. I assume that he was in charge of other operational duties in addition to the landscaping, but for a few short summers, I was his assistant. The seminary owned a John Deere riding mower and since this was the closest thing to driving a car I could find, I jumped at the chance to mow the lawn. I can't even imagine the liability issues you'd have today if you wanted to let a ten-year-old mow several acres of your lawn, I don't care if you are a non-profit.

This was before Sony introduced the walkman and forever changed lawnmowing as we know it, so for the several hours that it took to mow the lawn, I amused myself by singing popular songs I knew from the radio, as well as songs I made up as I rode along. I daydreamed and I watched the ground pass beneath me.



Carl was an interesting guy. Eventually, he moved off campus to a small cottage a few doors up from the seminary, and I used to stop by and see him. He made his own birch beer—some of which would occasionally blow up—shot rabbits with a bow and arrow in his back yard, and always had time to talk to me. Years later, he was living with an Amish family in Lancaster, and they allowed a bicycle touring group I was with to stay on the farm for the night. They fed us homemade ice cream and, of course, homemade birch beer. I don't know how they made it, but I swear I got drunk of that birch beer.

I have no idea of Carl's current whereabouts, but when I think back to that time, I'm amazed by his patience with me. I've often wondered if he married and had kids of his own. I'm sure he would have made a good father. I can't in my wildest dreams imagine entrusting a tractor to a ten-year-old boy for the day. I have a hard time watching my stepson mow the lawn. And it's nearly impossible to do so without a few comments and corrections. Carl had a big beard at the time, and had a mellow way about him that I found soothing. He never seemed to get worked up about anything, even when I would run over tree roots and ding the mower blade. I don't ever remember anything from him but gratitude that I had worked hard.

There are a few people in my life that have served as reminders for how easy it is to take things slower, especially when dealing with children. To listen more than talk. To allow more than you think you should. To leave room for mistakes, as opposed to stepping in at the first sign of trouble. Carl was different than I am most of the time. He was more interested in letting me help, than in having a well mown lawn.

I'll have to remember to think of Carl the next time one of my kids is helping out. What would he have done?

Drugs, Guns & Porn

A Summer Job
When I was fourteen, I got my first job working at the Hatfield Pharmacy, a block from my house. This was before companies like Eckardt, CVS and Rite Aid bought out all the mom and pops. The Hatfield Pharmacy was still a family business back then and the owner was your typical entrepeneur. He was into a little of everything. His father had, I believe, owned quite a bit of real estate, and he had inherited not only the building that the Pharmacy was in, but several of the buildings to which it was attached. Directly next door, and in fact attached by a back hallway, was the area's first video store. This was long before Blockbuster and the whole concept of video rental was new. The video industry had not yet discovered the idea of "sell-through" and so the cost of movies on video was close to $100 a piece. No thought of buying videos. You rented them.



But first you had to make sure you had the right kind of technology. VHS was not yet the dominant format, and Beta was still a presence. Beta was the higher quality, but more people were buying VHS format players. Laserdiscs were supposedly even greater quality but almost no one had those.

Hatfield Video actually began as an arcade. Again, this was at the start of the video game revolution and things like Atari, Nintendo, and Intellivision was just coming on the market. The highest quality games were still only available at arcades, and they demanded a constant diet of quarters.

I can't remember how exactly I got the job, but it probably entailed walking in and asking. I might have even tried to get a job next door at The Trolley Stop, a place where I eventually also worked and which the Pharmacists owned a piece of. They may have sent me to Charles.

Charles was the son of a pharmacist. He had followed in the family business and had taken over the pharmacy some years before. So what does a 14-year-old do in a pharmacy? Mainly I dusted the bottles of overstock drugs. Often in the upstairs storeroom of the pharmacy. Looking back, I have to wonder what the shelf-life of some of these drugs actually were, and whether or not I was a mercy hiring. I remember finding bottles so old, I was half expecting to find the words "miracle tonic" on them.

Because pharmacies stock dangerous and addictive prescription drugs, they can be targets for drug addicts and criminals. Anything from people with fake precriptions, to outright armed robbery, the pharmacist had to be ready. Or so I was told as to the reason for the number of loaded handguns lying on back counters. Charles, who looked like a pharmacist, as opposed to a member of the NRA, did not carrry a handgun so much as keep a little heat handy at all times. Being fourteen, I didn't think twice about it and went about my business in the precense of serious fire power.

I don't remember how long, or how often, I worked in the Pharmacy, but it seems it wasn't long before I moved to the video store/arcade, which was connected to the pharmacy by a back hallway.

The video store/arcade, commonly known as Hatfield Video, was half video store and half arcade. The front half, or two thirds to be more exact, was an arcade of 25¢ video machines like DigDug, PacMan, Star Wars, Centipede, Galaxian, Frogger, Defender, Donkey Kong, Asteroids, Space Invaders, and Missle Command. They even had several "machines" set up to play the latest Atari, or Intellivision game.

The back section was reserved for video rental featuring VHS, Beta and even a small selection of laserdics. We had classics, and new releases, but the selection was fairly limited as not that many titles had been release on video. Back then, a video had to be out of the theaters for several years, not several months, before it was released on video. But in addition to the selection of new releases like Airplane, 9 to 5, Friday the 13th, The Shining, and Xanadu, we had Hatfield's first collection of porn.



The adult titles were in a case on the back wall and were in plain view of the general public, but were not in their original boxes. Each tape was in a generic case with the title written on the spine. Oddly enough, the porn industry likes to spoof popular movie titles, so at first glance they appeared to be mainstream movies. In fact, one day my mother was in the store and began looking at the titles until I informed her that she would probably not be interested in those titles. Now that I think of it, it's amazing that she continued to let me work there.

But that wasn't the only porn available in the place. In the bathroom, located in the back hallway that connected the video store to the pharmacy, was a casual assortment of magazines for your viewing pleasure. They weren't in plain view, but they were never hard to find. After Charles' nephew and I got caught watching "Debbie Does Dallas" one night while we were minding the store, the magazines dissappeared.

Not long after, I changed jobs when I moved over to The Trolley Stop, a combination deli, hoagie shop, and convenience store that Charles was also part owner of. I made a lot more money, got more hours, and was busier, but it never quite lived up to that first job.

Bibbity-Bobbity-Boo

The first time I remember being aware of my mother teaching ballet was out of our home in Nashville, TN. I know this doesn't sound right, but I believe the classes were held in a refinished garage. In fact, I think I remember my parents putting in a linoleum floor; the kind with the 12x12 tiles. Only this was back before the self-stick kind. These were the kind you had to spread glue, or something like it, then place the tile down. It's possible it wasn't the garage, but only a spare room, I was only in nursery school, so it's a little fuzzy.



Back then, my mother used a little record player, the kind that folds up into a box and has a speaker attached. She would put on old 45s and the kids would dance around the room. I'm sure it was more complicated than that, but that's how I remember it.

Later, after we moved to Oklahoma, she opened a big school in Edmond. This was the largest operation she ever undertook in her 30-odd years of teaching ballet and gymnastics. Her speciality had always been teaching young girls ages 3-7, but in this school, she had hired other instructors and the school had classes for every age and level of accomplishment. There was the requisite ballet and gymnastics for the young girls, which my mother continued to teach. But there was also, more intensive ballet classes, as well as a full gym, complete with uneven bars, a balance beam, and a vaulting horse, for the gymnasts. There were even classes developed for college cheerleaders.

For a short time, I even took lessons there. The problem was, the class was a mixture of classical ballet and gymnastics. I was the only boy and while I really liked the gymnastics, I hated the ballet part. I just didn't truck with the girly nature of ballet, with it's pink shoes and tutus. I don't even think I lasted the entire class before I bailed.

But that didn't keep me from coming to the school with my mother. But instead of taking ballet classes, I hung out next door at Toddy's Crafts. Toddy was a Native American Indian from the Hopi tribe. I remember this because it registered pretty big with me at the time. I was a little blond boy with a dutchboy haircut, and she was a long, black-haired Indian woman with a craftstore full of turqoise, hemp and beads. This was the early seventies and I have often thought she was probably the closest thing to a hippie that I ever knew.

Next door was a auto supply store that had a coke machine that still sold ice cold, 10oz cokes in glass bottles, for a quarter. Toddy would send me over with fifty cents and I would put the money in, open the narrow glass door and pull the bottle out. I spent many an afternoon with Toddy.

In 1976, my father decided to take a job with Biblical Seminary in Hatfield, Pa. For awhile, my mother maintained ownership of the school, with another woman running it. In those first years, I remember coming back to Oklahoma in the summer and attending recitals on a stage at the local park. A few years later, my parents sold the ballet school, it turns out she never really liked managing in the first place, and managing a school from 1500 miles away was not something my mother was cut out for.

I don't remember the name of the woman who bought the school, but I remember she wore a lot of makeup and always looked a little overdone and fake. I also remember she was the one who asked our housekeeper, Bachtu, a vietnamese woman, "Now what's your name dear, I always forget. Is it back-to or come-from?"

After we moved to Hatfield, my mother started a new school, this time in our home again. For close to thirty years, my parent's house at 13 East Broad Street in Hatfield was home to the Creative Ballet & Gymnastics School, taught by Miz Jan. Literally generations of mothers and daughters took ballet classes from my mother over that time, and thousands of girls came to know my mother as Miz Jan. She is forever etched in their minds as a powerful part of their childhood.

For the entire time I lived in that house, from the third grade till I graduated high school, a room we called the "sun room" and an adjoining room which we referred to as the "dining room" were dedicated to the ballet school. These were rooms in which no other furniture was kept, but on days when classes were held, the entire first floor, with the exception of the kitchen, was the domain of girls ages 3-7 and their mothers.

The driveway was also off limits for the most part, as it filled up with parents picking up, or dropping off, their kids.

But for all the disruption, my mother was rarely away from home. She had one of those rare jobs where she actually worked from home and made a decent living. There were years, I know, when she was clearing more than my father, who was working for the seminary. She also managed to put three of her six kids through college on what she made working Saturdays. But she did it from home. As a general rule, we did not disturb her while she was teaching, but if we really needed something, or we wanted to go somewhere, all we had to do was open the door leading from the kitchen to living room, walk in, wait for her to notice us, then quickly ask our question or make our request. She never scolded us for this, but rather often introduced us to her class.

If you were in the house during classes, you were treated with a steady littany of music, mostly classical ballet numbers and Disney tunes. Since classes repeated not only throughout the day, but also the week, you came to know the week's class pretty imtimately. And since many classes were repeated year after year, we children could probably recite with near accuracy, the words to most of the songs my mother used over the years.

Misplaced ballet shoes and small musical instruments filled a basket in the corner of the dining room, a practice balance beam (one that laid directly on the floor and that had been covered with carpet to soften it up) rested against one wall. In the sun room, against the outer wall, which was lined with windows surrounded by dark wood trim, there was attached ballet bars. My father had taken old bicycle tires and cut pieces to guard against anyone hurting themselves on the brackets that held the bars in place. Also in the sun room were the gymnastics mats. Folding mats used for tumbling. These had many uses beyond the ballet school. For years we made alternative use of them as forts, wrestling mats, and even cushioning for the back of the station wagon on the long trips back to Oklahoma.

In the winter of 2003, my mother made the decision to hang up her ballet shoes and black wrap skirts. She would be Miz Jan no more. Forever after, she would be know only as Mimi. After a brief moment of doubt, my mother has never looked back. She really did love those girls, but everyday wakes up and she giggles with the knowledge that no little girls will be knocking on her door. She had had enough. Not only had she raised six kids of her own, but she helped to raise, if only for an hour and a half at a time, thousands of girls. One part of her life was over, but a new one had just begun.

We're still not sure where she'll end up, but she still calls me and says just a little guilty, "I'm having so much fun, I can't hardly stand it. I just don't think I've ever been this happy in my whole life."

But because she is my mother, and there is still a part of her that remains, she has to add, "Of course, I loved my time with you all, too."

"It's okay, mom," I tell her. "You're allowed to be happy."

"I am," she'll concede. "It's almost not right how happy I am."

No one deserves it more than her.

The Great Earphone Experiment

There we are, three of us, sitting in front of the TV enjoying our show, with not a sound coming from the TV speaker. I picture my father sitting proudly behind us, admiring his work and basking in the sound of silence.



It was one of my father's great experiments. We wanted to watch cartoons, and he didn't want to have to hear it. Solution: earphones. Lots of them.

After a trip to Radio Shack for supplies, my father set to work, stripping wires, joining cables, attaching plugs. When he was done, he presented it to us with pride. It looked like an octopus.

What he had done was buy four sets of earphones, the old kind you stuck in your ear, the kind that came with a little transistor radio, there being no such thing as today's modern headphones, and attach them all to one single plug that could be inserted into the front of the TV. This meant there were eight individual earphones, all connected to one plug. And because he didn't want us to sit too close to the TV, he had extended each wire by eight feet. When put in place, we could all sit comfortably eight feet away from the TV, and listen in stereo, each of us in our own little world.

If you wanted to watch TV, by yourself, you chose two of the earplugs (you might end up with two left channels), and you watched by yourself. Over time, of course, the long wires became entagled, and try as we might, there assembled a rats nest of sorts near the base of the contraption. We began to sit closer and closer to the TV, until finally, two us would be huddled together several feet from the TV, with our heads nearly touching as we fiddled with the wires to combat the constant shorting of the various connections.

Finally, one by one, each of the earphones died, until the whole contraption ended up in the middle drawer, the one above the drawer full of pictures, and under the one full of gloves and hats. I assume my mother just threw it out finally. But you never know, it could be in a box in the attic somewhere, waiting to be untangled.

Who's In Charge?

It certainly wasn't the last time my parents would be summoned to a school of mine, but it might have been the first. I was in the first grade at Clegern Elementary School in Edmond, Oklahoma and my parents had just gotten a call from my teacher. It seems there was a problem with their son, and she wanted to talk about it with them.



It seems my class had just gone through picture day the day before. We had all filed into the gym in an orderly manner and were taking our places on the risers, when the problems started.

"Well, you see, he was telling all the kids where to go and where to stand," the teacher told my parents.

My parents sat and looked at the woman. She was a young teacher, her first year, but she could tell that my parents hadn't understood the seriousness of the event.

"I don't understand the problem," my mother said.

"Well, the problem was," she whined. "They were all listening to him."

Better Put Your Name On It

It all started with my sister, Stacy. Since she was the oldest and had started a family first, she began requesting, or in some cases, commandeering things from my parents house. Nothing huge. The first I remember is that she took all our original Winnie-the-Pooh books.



"What do you mean she took them?" I asked my mother.

"I don't know," she said. She was sitting in the living room floor, working on that week's ballet class. She looked up at me and said, "She asked if she could take them, and since I wasn't doing anything with them, I said yes."

I just looked at her.

"Oh honey," she said, "I didn't know you wanted them. They were just a couple of old books. You can have something else."

The thing was, I didn't really want anything else. I was a bachelor living in an apartment in Philadelphia. I had no wife, let alone kids. I don't even know what I would have done with the books, but it was one of the few artifacts from childhood that might have meant something to me. I would have liked to have them, but I had missed out. Apparentlty, the memories of my youth were already being plundered and if I was going to get in on the action, I was going to have to start thinking ahead.

Looking back, I realize it didn't really start with my sister, really. In college, I got the idea that since my grandmother was getting old, I needed to go visit her and write down some of her stories. I took a week off, and flew to Oklahoma City, OK and spent a week at her house. We looked through old photo albums and she told me stories of great aunts and uncles, great grandparents I never knew, and her days growing up in Kansas. During that time, I showed interest in some of her old books.

"Well," she said. "I'll just have to put your name in them, and when I die, they'll be yours."

This started me thinking, and I asked her about some of her paintings. My grandmother, who we called Nino, was an amatuer landscape painter. Her work was quite good, but they were all copies. To my knowledge, few of her paintings were original compostions. There was one in particular that I especially liked. It had hung in the den in my grandparents old house and I had spent hours as a young boy, lying on the old leather sofa and staring at it. The painting was of an old horse-drawn wagon filled with hay, on a country road. My grandmother said that getting the hay right had been the hardest part and she had struggled to make it not look like a big hairdo. It was by far, my favorite. But again, I was too late. An older cousin who lived in Oklahoma had already claimed it. So I asked about another one. The painting of the old dutch windmill. She put my name on it, and years later, much to my Aunt Carolyn's dismay (it had been one of her favorites, too), I was given the painting.

My wife, Jane, considers my family's discussion of post-death memorabilia to be peculiar at best, and morbid at worst. She calls it my family's preoccupation with death. I simply like to think of it as a practical way to avoid a bitter family argument over who gets what. It's not a perfect system, but then what is?



Surprisingly, we haven't split my parents house completely up, yet. For one thing, they're still young and very much alive. But we have begun dividing and conquering already. My little brother, Brad, and his wife somehow got to the piano first, but not before I'd snagged the piano stool, which had been my Uncle Will's. Somebody got Uncle Will's old chair too, but I don't remember who. Probably Stacy.

Stacy and I have different connections to the things in my parents house than our younger siblings do. Stacy and I, for instance, remember when that stationary rocker sat in my Uncle Will's house in Joplin, MO. To my other brothers and sisters, it's just a chair they've always known. It doesn't hold any more, or less, sentimentality for any of us. It just has its basis in different memories.

The grandfather clock, that I managed to snag, probably has more sentimental value for some of the younger kids, because they probably don't remember living in the house without it. In fact, as far as my youngest brother is concerned, my parents have only ever lived in one house, whereas I think of their house on Broad Street in Hatfield, as just their most recent home. But I think I grabbed the clock when I found out the piano had been taken. It was more of a desperation move.

Some of the items we've claimed, my parents have given up to us immediately, like the piano. But others we will have to wait, either until they die, or until they move into a smaller home that won't accomodate the massive amount of stuff.

As I am the executor of my parent's will, I'm hoping that our continued discussions on who-gets-what will end up in a smooth dispursement of the spoils by the time my parents pass away. In fact, to my knowledge, other than dividing whatever money is left over in the estate, no specific items are mentioned. Rather than my parents deciding what they will leave to whom, we've started calling dibs. As a big family with a lot of kids, you learned early on to call for what you wanted. Whether it was the front seat or the wishbone, we have a long history of claiming things of value.

But, seeing as my parents are only in their early sixties, and in good health, this is all a little premature. They have a good many years to both accumulate memorable artifacts, as well as to lose or give them away. They'll probably move at least once, if not more. And each of us will find new attachments to old things, or old attachments to new things, whatever the case may be.

But when it comes time for my parents to leave us, as sad as it will be, we'll all be ready to yell, "Shotgun."

Asian Fusion.

She had avoided capture by lying facedown in the sea and pretending she was dead until the soldiers left. She had lived in a large beautiful home, had boxes of jewelry and cash and being that her husband was an important man, she lived a life of luxury. She had escaped on a boat with hundreds of other people, with no place to lie down, no place to go to the bathroom, no water, and no food. And now, here she was in America, cleaning our house.



I don't know who was taking care of her kids while she was taking care of us, but I know she had kids around our ages; a little younger, even. I remember meeting them once, but I don't ever remember ever socializing. They never came to play and we never went to their house.

Her name was Bachtu. I don't even know if that's how she spelled it. I don't remember ever having to spell it, even though I know I was reading and writing by then. She was polite, as Vietnamese always are, and kind to us. I think she had genuine affection for us although I don't remember giving her any reason to do so. Her English was sketchy at best and I remember ignoring her demands and running away from her.

My father was working for FIFE, a manufacturing company that made guidance systems for printing presses. My mother had turned her small ballet and gymnastics school into a full-blown school with students that ranged from 3 years old, to college cheerleaders. There was a ballet studio, with mirror covered walls, as well as a large gymnastics arena that included all the basic equipment like tumbling mats, uneven bars, balance beam, rings, etc.

So during the day, when my parents were at work, Bachtu came and took care of us. I'm not sure how long this went on, but I don't think it was long. We only lived in this house for two years and I remember that later she got a job at the high school cafeteria. I also remember that one of her sons lost an eye in an accident with a B-B gun that ricocheted off the sidewalk.

For the most part, Bachtu came to our house, watched over us while she vacuumed and cleaned the house, then left when my mother came home. But on a few occasions, my mother was going to be late, and Bachtu offered to cook dinner as well, so that when my parents got home, everything would be ready.

The first time this happened, she cooked us a traditional Vietnamese meal. There were some stringy noodles that tastes like they were made out of plastic, some sort of eggroll, and a rather large pot of rice.

In the Midwest, where my parents grew up, rice was not a staple on the dining room table. In fact, it was rarely offered, because if you were going to have a starch with your meal it was most certainly going to be potatoes. If you did happen to have rice, it was considered a side and you might get a cup of rice on one corner of your plate that you would soak with butter to make it palatable.

This was enough rice to last us a few weeks. I'd personally never seen so much rice at one time. Of course I was in the first grade, so what did I know, but I don't believe my parents had ever seen a quantity of rice like this either.

"Now that's a lot of rice," my father said.

Bachtu gave my mother a worried look, and my mother quickly added that everything looked wonderful, thanking Bachtu again for making dinner, which made Bachtu smile.

We used to laugh about it. Not in a mean way. We just didn't know any better then. We'd never seen anyone eat a plate of rice. Even potatoes were just a side, with meat, or at least fish, being the main component of the meal. It had never occurred to us that rice might be the main ingredient.

Even before our diets were so influenced by Asian cuisine, my father was eating large bowls of rice. I'd think back to Bachtu and wonder what she'd started.

Later, after we had moved to Pennsylvania and my father was working for the Seminary and we were poor again, I'd think back to the time when we had a maid. It was strange to think that there had been a time when such things happened. And I'd wonder what Bachtu was doing.

Bachtu eventually started some small company along with her husband, and I'm sure they were successful, but like many immigrant families, their main concern was building a better life for their children. I don't know about Bachtu, but her children all went on to very good colleges, and became successful doctors, engineers and lawyers. It's the American way, after all.

The Children of Pacifists

From nursery school through the eighth grade, I attended seven schools in three states. I remember more than one nursery school, one in Oklahoma when we lived with my grandmother, and one in Tennessee. For the first and second grades, we lived in Oklahoma and I attended both the local public school, which I could walk to, and a weird experimental school, to which I couldn't.

In third grade we moved back to Pennsylvania and I returned to Penn View Christian School, where I had attended Kindergarten with Ms. Black. I stayed there for third and fourth grades, then, in my fifth year, we transferred to Plumstead Christian School. Plumstead was a bit of a hike, and my father had to drive us fifteen minutes just so we could catch the bus to school, which was another thirty or forty minutes away. A year later, we were back at Penn View, the commute proving just too long.



I would stay at Penn View until I graduated the eighth grade, at which time I went on to the public high school rather than attend Christopher Dock, the high school associated with Penn View.

Penn View Christian School was a Mennonite school. We lived in a large Mennonite community and while we were not Mennonite ourselves, it was a Christian school and that was good enough for my parents.

Mennonites, I was to learn, were followers of Menno Simons (you do have to wonder why they didn't call themselves Simonites). Menno was born in Switzerland in 1492, the same year Columbus discovered America. In 1536, he resigned his post as a Catholic priest and became an Anabaptist elder in Zurich. Though not an imposing figure, his writings were very influential in the Anabaptist community until his death in 1559. Around 1620, the Swiss Mennonites split into Upland Mennonites and Lowland Mennonites because of differences on excommunication, buttons and shaving. All, very important theological distinctions. The Upland Mennonites became our modern day Amish, and the Lowland Mennonites became the people I went to school with.

Even modern day Mennonites are divided into groups. They ranged on a scale from orthodox conservative to rather lackadaisical. One the one end, are black bumper Mennonites, so called because they paint the chrome on their cars black, so as not to appear flashy or worldly. Of course, they are already a step up from the Amish who refuse to own cars, use electricity or even zippers.

Next come your run of the mill, old-school Mennonites, who dress "plain" and whose women wear the traditional "bonnet" on their head. This was in response to a part of scripture that demanded that women's heads remain covered. Presumably this had started out with something closer to a burka, but had been whittled down to the current white lace doily that they bobby-pinned to their head like a bun.

Finally, you have your modern Mennonites who look like everyone else. They go along with the whole pacifist thing, so they aren't very good recruiting material for the armed services, but as far as I could tell, they didn't look or act any different from anyone else I knew.

The kids I went to school with came from families who were a combination of the above. They were sons of farmers and daughters of bankers. Some of the girls wore makeup and short skirts, and some of the girls wore traditional bonnets and long wool stockings. Some kids lived in brand new developments, some kids lived on 150 year old farms.

They were not necessarily all pacifists.

I wouldn't say I got in a lot of fights, but a lot more than you would think in a school of pacifists. I guess you could say that pacifism is not a natural state. It is a philosophy that must be learned. But as kids, not everyone had fully embraced the ideals of their elders.

I often wonder how commited those kids I went to school with are today about their pacifism. Especially in light of our current state of affairs in the Middle East. Of course it's easy to claim to be a pacifist when you live in a country with a volunteer army. Most people don't want to necessarily go to war. Most people aren't pro-war. But does that make you a pacifist? I guess no one knows for sure, but there are a few kids I'd like to meet up with again and ask.

A Plague Of Locusts

The year we lived in Nashville, TN, there was a plague of locusts. I guess they didn't really call it a plague then, but the locusts showed up around every seven years or so, and the one year we lived there, they were everywhere.



I was in nursery school at the time, and somehow I got the idea that I could sell locusts to the neigbors. The fact that everyone's yard, and even inside their homes, were crawling with locusts, did not squelch my enthusiasm. I can only assume that locusts were the only thing I had in abundance, so that's what I decided to sell.

I found a cardboard box that wasn't being used and began collecting bugs from off the trees in the front yard. When I had collected what I deemed was an adequate amount, I began going door to door.

Now my product may not have been that appealing, and you would be hard pressed to position my product against the competition, but my packaging was right on target. Never underestimate a cute, blond preschooler. I sold several of those nasty little buggers. Although I did find it a little strange at the time, that while a few of the ladies in the neighborhood bought locusts from me, they refused delivery. I may have been confused but was not offended in the least as it meant that I could keep selling without having to restock.

Today I'm a Partner and Director of Creative Services for a national advertising and marketing agency. Coincidence? I think not.

The New School Experiment

In my second grade year, my parents decided to enroll us in an experimental school. Actually it wasn't all that experimental; amatuer was more like it. The year we attended was, I believe, the first year of its existence, and it might have been its last although I don't know for sure because the next year we moved to Pennsylvania.



We were living in Edmond, Oklahoma and friends of ours from church had decided to join this school. So we did too. It was a private Christian school and all the teachers were parents of other students. I don't know if they were paid or unemployed, but few of them seemed qualified. One teacher I remember was our science teacher, that is when we had science, which was whenever he felt the urge, or we pestered him. Science usually amounted to stories of his time in the Navy. It seems like he'd been in a war, but I can't remember which one. I have a feeling it was WW II. The only thing I remember us ever doing that was remotely scientific, was when we dug up an ant hill and put the contents into a big mason jar so we could watch the ants work. This we found fascinating, so that whenever we had science after that, we'd just pull the ant jar out and have a look. Occasionaly we'd throw spiders and scorpions in for the ants to attack, dismante and then presumably, eat.

We met in an abandoned school, or maybe it was an old church. Either way, it wasn't designed for us, and I think we were the only ones there. There were only about 30 students in the entire school, so we were grouped into small groups that were at least close in grades. My group included something like Kindergarden through the third grade. There were five of us. I don't remember how far up in grades it went, but it couldn't have been beyond middle school as my sister was one of the older kids and she had to have been in the sixth grade.

This was the year I had Mononucleosis, the kissing disease. I was not happy about this, most of all because I was told it was called the kissing disease and I hadn't been kissing anyone. I was also not allowed to do anything remotely active so that my spleen didn't burst, which usually isn't a problem because one of the main symptoms of Mono is that you're really tired. Some patients have to be hospitalized, especially children. I had no such luck. I was never tired the entire time I was supposedly sick, and so was just a second grader who couldn't run, jump or play.

I do remember one time when an older boy threw me down on the ground and my sister beat the crap out of him. I may be exaggerating things as she might have simply slugged him and called him names. She was being very protective. Of course, if my spleen had burst, I could have very well died.

One of the girls in my "class" (I forget her name) had perpetually chapped lips. She must have licked them continually to the extent that all around her mouth was chapped. Because of this, her mother, who was a piece of work herself, would cover her lips, and all the area around them, with red lipstick. She looked like bozo the clown. I was constantly creeped out by her.

Her mother was one of those big-haired women who wore loud clothes and too much makeup. She was a stage mom, only without a child worthy of the stage. At lunch time, when the rest of us would be unpacking our brown paper bag lunches, she would swoop into school, bringing with her takeout from someplace she'd stopped on the way. She and her daughter would sit with us and eat fried chicken, or hot sandwhiches, or whatever she'd picked up, while the rest of us stared at our soggy peanutbutter and jelly sandwiches.

We had a school recital (I don't know what else to call it) which was kind of like a variety show. I was supposed to sing, "I'm A Yankee Doodle Dandy" and had learned the part and was prepared to sing it. But there was a part in the song, when I had to sing about my "yankee doodle sweetheart" and at that point, Bozo, the lipstick girl was supposed to walk up and stand beside me. This I could not do, so I backed out of the part and let my friend Sam do it. Instead I recited some stupid poem or something. I liked that song, but there was no way I was going to call her my "yankee doodle sweetheart."

It was a strange school year, to be sure, but I must have learned something. I do remember it was the year I learned how to write in cursive. Also, the following year we went to a new school in Pennsylvania, and I had to go to the next grade up when it came time for English class.

My new school had normal teachers, and buses and a gym and a principal and all the other normal things a kid expects his school to have. It didn't have red ant hills, and no one showed up with takeout, but no one told us war stories either and everyday was pretty much the same. It was when I first realized that normalcy is overrated.

Never underestimate the entertainment value of unpredictability.

Quacks | Volume I

The list of questionable medical practitioners my family has been involved with over the years would blow your mind. We've tried it all, or at least it was tried on us. I'm not sure which is the cause and which is the effect, but the people in my family have more strange illnesses than you could stake a stick at.



And these aren't your run of the mill illnesses either. We don't get colds like normal people. No, our ailments are far more complicated and usually undiagnosable by traditional medical personnel. These are the kind of ailments that defy diagnoses; that end with the doctor saying, "Well, we can't really find anything wrong with you, so we're not sure what's causing it."

Now, my father would tell you that having an illness that modern medical personnel are unable to diagnose would lead even a normal person to alternative medicine. And I have to agree with him. But personally, I have to look back and wonder at some of our doctor choices. I'm sure I've forgotten more than I've remembered, and I more than likely don't have all my facts straight. But this is how I remember them, in no particular order.

Sugar Pills
The Sugar Pill doctor was one of the stranger doctors I remember. We had equally wacky treatments, but this guy was strange to boot. I never quite bought his story. He may have been the last of the dying breed of snake oil salesmen from another time. Maybe it was a family business and he was just trying to make his father proud.

The office was somewhere in Philadelphia, or at least close to the city. It was old and fairly large. I think it was an old home, dark wood, large windows, the whole deal.

To start your session, he had you sit in front of this machine and grip two metal cylinders that were attached to wires. Ostensibly, these were hooked up to the machine and told him something of your condition. But I'm not sure of that. I don't remember asking him what it did, but even if I did, I'm sure I didn't understand his response.

Normally, I would do the metal handle thing, then I'd have to go wait in another room. Not to sound too spooky, but I really can't remember what happened in there. Our whole family would be there, each of us in a different room. Or at least some of us, so that several of us were being "treated" at once.

Once though, I almost began to believe that the doctor actually knew what he was doing. I was sitting there holding the metal handles, and he was watching the machine when he asked me a question. It was like he was reading my mind.

"Do you have to go to the bathroom?" he asked.

I was speechless. In fact, I DID have to go the bathroom. And it wasn't going to be quick. I was going to be awhile and would probably need a Highlights or a Ranger Rick or something. How did he know?

At the time, I credited the now amazing machine. But in reality, I was probably squirming around and passing gas. You probably didn't have to be a medical genius to realize the kid needed to use the facilities.

At the end of each visit, my mother was given a small brown glass bottle with a white label on it, one for each of us. The label had instructions as to dosage and was hand written. Inside were irregularly shaped white pills. Actually, they were all pretty much round, but they weren't all exactly uniform. The thing is, all our pills looked exactly the same, except for the fact that they were different sizes. And they seemed to change from visit to visit. One visit, I'd come home with tiny white pills, and the next, I'd have huge ones.

There was one quality that they all shared. You see, you didn't swallow them, you sucked on them till they dissolved, and they all, no matter what size, tasted like sugar. I was told they were homeopathic, but I know confection when I taste it.

Hot Treatment. Cold Treatment.
The next medical advance I remember was in Jenkintown, or thereabouts. This was as good as it got for doctor visits. Not only because the treatment was pleasant, but because my father had gotten hooked to listening to the all news radio station KYW, and at that time, they broadcast all the Phillies games in the evenings. So on the way home, we invariably listened to the Phillies. I must have been at just the right age, because it's the only place I remember listening to baseball on the radio, but to this day, I get all nostalgic whenever I hear baseball on the radio. I don't even have to like the team. I just love to listen.

I seem to remember that this office was in a tall building. When you were in an examining room, you could look out the window and I remember there being a view.

We were always there at night, presumably because we went after my father got off work, and my father usually took my sister and I. I don't remember my mother coming, or my little brother either, though I'm sure they did at some point or another.

This office was much different from the Sugar Pill guy. This was professional, and much bigger. It had a normal waiting room with plenty of magazines and soft seating. But one thing that was unusual for a doctor's office, is that it was warmly lit. I know that sounds like a strange thing for a kid to remember, but it was almost dark, with table lamps and sconces instead of the bright institutional flourescents you'd normally associate with a doctor's office. It was lit like you'd light a spa.

And that's kind of what it was. Your initial consultation was with a doctor and involved first taking your pulse on your left wrist, then taking your pulse on your right. The idea, was to be balanced, or something like that. I forget. But if your right pulse was strong than you left pulse, you needed one treatment, or if it was the other way around, you needed a different treatment. That was it. There were just two treatments for whatever it was that ailed you. Here's the thing with all these doctors. I don't remember being sick. I don't remember anything ailing me. But we were going to get well anyway.

The best of the two treatments was called a Warm treatment. The idea being that your arteries were too constricted and were not letting the blood flow naturally to the whole body. To remedy this, you'd lay on your side, and a nurse practitioner would massage your back down the topside of your spine. She (it was always a female nurse) would rub in little circles starting from just below your neck to the base of your spine. How long she did this depended on how constricted you were which they figured out by taking your pulse. When your time was up, you'd switch sides, and she'd massage the other side of your spine. It was very pleasant. Normally, I'd bring a magazine from the waiting room and read while they worked. Occasionally, I'd get a talker, but the idea was to relax, so they usually worked quietly.

The other treatment was called a Cold treatment and while it wasn't quite as nice as the Warm treatment, it wasn't as bad as it sounds. When you tell someone you're going to give them a cold treatment, it brings up images of Puritanical dunking or some Soviet interrogation technique. When your arteries were too relaxed, they also didn't let the blood flow properly, and so to remedy this problem, you needed a cold treatment. A cold treatment involved the same pulse taking, the same dimly lit room and also laying on your side. But this time, instead of a nice long back rub, a nurse came in, lifted your shirt and with a long cotton swab that looked like a king sized Q-tip, dipped it in Witch Hazel and ran it down the length of your spine. The cooling action of the rubbing alcohol constricted the blood vessels around your spinal chord and got your blood moving again. This had to be done at specific intervals and for a specific number of times, depending on what they'd learned from your pulse. So you laid on your side, read a magazine, and every five minutes, a nice nurse would come in and run a cold swab up and down your back. This was especially nice in the summer, which is as long as I remember going.

The warm treatment/cold treatment facility also had homework. The office was where we checked in and got our prognosis, but we had to continue with the treatments once we got home. That meant if you were on warm treatments, you got someone to rub your back, but if you were on cold treatments, you had to learn to self administer.

To do a cold treatment, you simply took the swab, dipped it in a bottle of witch hazel, and started at the base of your neck and went down as far as you could reach. Then you went under your shirt and went as high as you could, presumably to the point you left off, and continued on down. If you had to do this 15 times, with three and a half minutes in between, a treatment would take you nearly an hour. Not that you couldn't be doing something else, like watching TV, but you couldn't really leave the house.

A word about witch hazel. I have no idea why it's called that but at the time, I'd never heard of it before. I knew what rubbing alcohol was, but assumed witch hazel was something used for cold treatments only. It was, after all, called "witch" hazel. It sounded quacky. I was stunned later to find it in drug stores and supermarkets. I wasn't so simple as to not realize our medical habits were strange. I had a hard time believing that witch hazel was something the general public needed.

I had seen my father giving himself a cold treatment once and after he swabbed himself, he stood in front of the air conditioner, the one in the upstairs hallway outside his bedroom, lifted his shirt and allowed the forced air to dry his back.

So the next day, I was ready to go to the public pool when I was told that I had to give myself a cold treatment (I always seemed to be on cold treatments, never warm) before I left for the pool. This seemed ridiculous to me because it was June and the pool was still fairly cold. Wasn't the entire pool experience one big cold treatment? But, I did as I was told.

Only I didn't want to wait an hour before I left. I wanted to leave as quickly as possible. So taking a cue from my father, I gave myself my first swab then stood in front of the air conditioner. This was great, I was dry in 20 seconds and on to my next swab. I was done the whole thing in less than five minutes.

I started to leave for the pool, when my father stopped me.

"I thought I told you to give yourself a treatment," he said.

"I did," I answered. "I'm done."

"How can you be done?" he asked. "How many did you do?"

"Fifteen," I answered brightly.

"In five minutes?" he asked.

"I stood in front of the air conditioner," I told him.

"Why would you do that?" he asked, a little agitated.

"You do it," I said.

"So my shirt doesn't stick to my back," he said. "You can't just do fifteen strokes in five minutes! Good grief!"

He seemed a little concerned at this point, and he called my mother in to commiserate. I don't know what they thought would happen, but I guess they thought my blood pressure would go through the roof or something. As it happened, I had to stay around for another hour for observation, so I didn't get out the door any faster than I would have. I did end up going to the pool that day and I never had any deleterious effects that I knew of. But that was the last time I tried to give myself a lightning cold treatment.

Like everything else, the warm treatment/cold treatment practice lasted for awhile then went by the wayside. Although this one did last for longer than most. For one thing, the treatments didn't cost anything. We stopped going to the doctor's office after that first summer, and I doubt I ever got or gave myself treatments after that summer. But for years after that, my parents, who were obviously both perpetually constricted, gave each other warm treatments. At least that's what they claimed. I think it was just a good excuse to get the other person to give them a back rub.

Hey, all in the name of medical science.

Toll Booth Operators

Every summer, we'd load up the old family station wagon, and make the 24-hour drive to Edmond, Oklahoma from our home in Hatfield, Pennsylvania. There were three kids at that time, so with my parents in the front seat, we had more than enough room in the back. Or so you'd have thought.



Before the start of the trip, my mother would pack everything we were going to need, from a thermos of ice water, to snacks, games, coloring books, etc... You name it, we had it. We even had one of my mother's gymnastics mats stretch across the wayback area for comfort. If you were all the way in the back you could lay down with your pillow and blanket and just zonk out for a state or two. Eventually, however, you got tired of laying down and you'd begin fighting with one of the other siblings to sit in the middle seat. Invariably, they would at that point, have no interest in getting in the wayback.

But that's not my point of the story. I wanted to talk about toll booth operators. And not just any operators. Southern ones.

When we started the trip, in the great Northeast, you'd go through a toll and the person, man or woman, manning the booth would barely look at you. By the time you got through Ohio, you might get eye contact. But once you reached St. Louis, things began to change. The toll booth people started to smile at you. Some might even wave to us kids in the back. By the time we reached Missouri, they were asking where we were from and where we were headed.

About the time you started to notice the dirt on the side of the road was red, they toll booth operators were friendlier than a long lost aunt.

The Noon Whistle

In Hatfield, when I was a boy, and in many small towns around the country, the siren from the volunteer fire department sounded at noon. For us, it was how you knew the public pool was open. The siren blew and the kids who worked the pool opened the doors and we came pouring in.



The siren helped us keep time, and I don't mean settting your clocks. I'm talking about the rhythms of life. The siren would sound and you say to whomever you were with, "It's noon." It didn't matter that the siren sounded every day, or that invariably, the person you were saying it to, knew damn well what the siren meant. But you said it anyway. And if you didn't say it, you certainly thought it.

If you had somehow lost track of time, you might pick your head up and tilt it slightly, like a dog hearing a high pitch, and you'd wait to see if it would be one siren blast, which would mean noon, or would it keep going, in which case it was a fire and you'd have no bleedin' idea what time it was.

The noon whistle is gone now. New people moved into the neighborhood and built big expensive homes where there used to be corn fields. A few of them got together and decided that the siren disturbed their peaceful abodes, so they had it done away with. That's progress for you.

Fortunately, the town I live in still has a small volunteer fire department, and just like the home I grew up in, it's just down the street. At noon everyday, the fire whistle blows, and everyday at noon, my dog howls right along with it. Sometimes, I have to cock my head and wait to see if there will be a second round, but it's usually just noon. And I smile since it's how I know everything is right with my world.

The Bell

I know it's hard to believe, but there was a time when, if your mother wanted to reach you, she didn't call you on your cell phone. Back then, you were lucky if your mom knew the phone number to your friends home. For that matter, I can remember times, when she'd have been lucky to know where I was at all.



So when we were young and not permitted to venure too far from the house, we had the bell. It was an old hand held school bell that my mother picked up somewhere, and when she wanted us to come home, usually for dinner, she'd walk out back and ring the bell. You'd be surprised how far you can hear one of those things.

We'd be sitting on our bikes, down at the loading docks of the textile factory, talking, aruging, telling lies, when we'd hear the bell.

"Gotta go," we'd yell, hop on our bikes and race home.

The bell wasn't only my mother's tool. If one of us happened to be in the house and she wanted the other children, she'd just ask one of us to ring the bell. You'd grab it from a shelf over the kitchen sink, walk out the back door, through the closed in porch till you stood on the back steps. Then you'd ring the hell out of that bell. It made your ears ring as well.

I never thought anything about it at the time, but now that I think back, I don't recall any of my other friends being called home with a bell. It's a little von Trapp family if you think about it. I have no idea where my mother got the idea to call us home with a bell.

Papa Was A Rolling Stone

By the time I was in the third grade, I'd already lived in five states, crossed the country several times (including a trip through the desert in a car with no air conditioning in the middle of the day), been to four schools, and owned eight dogs. Even as an eight year old, you sound more than a little worldy when you're talking to someone who's never left the county and you're telling stories about a girl you met at a truck stop once in Missouri.



Whenever people hear about my rambling youth, the first question they invariably ask is, "So, was your father in the military?" Unfortunately, I don't have that simple of an answer. I usually just tell them that it wasn't so much that my parents had a good reason to move, as much as they didn't have a better reason not to. That usually satisfies them. It just seems far too complicated to go into the litany of reasons from my father selling bibles door to door, to his working for a manufacturing firm, to working for a seminary. When I was a kid, I often thought it would have been easier to just say, yeah, he's a fighter pilot.

The truth is more complicated, of course. It always is. In fact, I really only know some of the story. I remember some of his jobs and some of the reasons for our moves, but there are houses I remember that I can't remember why we were there, and there are jobs I remember that I can't remember where we lived.

What I do remember, is that I was always happy. It's true. I had an idyllic childhood. We were a tight family unit and I always felt loved and safe. We didn't have a large extended family who lived down the street, or with whom we enjoyed Sunday dinners. Even when we finally settled in Eastern Pennsylvania, we lived 1200 miles from our nearest blood relative. We were on our own.

Frankly, I don't know if it would have been any different if we'd lived down the street from every relative we had. We were a pretty insular family. My parents didn't have many friends and if it hadn't been for church, we would have no social life whatsoever. I'm not complaining. It's just how it was. At the time, I really didn't think about it.

A few years ago, I even wrote an article about it called, "I'm Not From Here" that was published in New Jersey Monthly. It was about feeling at home nowhere and everywhere, all at once. And it's true. I believe that my childhood prepared me to accept change better than most people. I am comfortable in my own skin, enjoy my own company, and can amuse myself for hours if not days. I don't feel connected to any one place, but I am fiercly loyal to my family.

I saw the movie "Garden State" recently and the main character reflects at one point, "Maybe all I miss is the idea of home. Maybe that's all family really is, a group of people who miss the same imaginary place."

I wonder.

Often Wrong But Never In Doubt

"Often Wrong But Never In Doubt" has been our family motto for some time now. This is simply a description of a family filled with opinionated people. As has often been said in jest, "It's a good thing no one in this family has a strong opinion about anything."