Thursday October 20/Friday October 21
After returning from Dr. Palchak's yesterday. I was exhausted and took a two hour nap. Then Jasmine fed me some spicy shrimp and a cabbage dish made with eggs and we watched Will Meet A Dark Stranger, the kind of movie that Woody Allen seems able to crank out on demand.
I awoke refreshed this morning at 3AM. When I stepped outside the temperature was about 60 degrees and I could hear the surf. (I wonder why the sound is so much louder early in the early morning?) Orion is high and to the South. The Pleiades are almost directly overhead. Realizing that I hadn't thought about my medical condition since awakening, I began to compare my current mental state with the way I felt as my daughter was dying.
With Kristin's sickness the dread was always there. With my own illness, I seldom think about the future. I'm aware that full realization probably awaits the rocks on the path ahead. But generally, I am focused and very busy cleaning things up and not dwelling on a foreshortened future. When those thoughts do come, I can feel the impending loss of the sweetness of life, but even that thought leaves me thinking about the opportunity for joy in life. When I speak of these things with Jasmine, she describes the more overwhelming sense of foreboding--the one that I recall from my daughter's illness.
Yesterday Dr. Palchak told us that Stanford was offering us an excellent treatment but expressed concern about the time spent traveling back and forth. I was able to tell him that those trips would not be wasted. Although Jasmine and I might prefer to be in our own home, we both liked driving and loved one another's company. There will be many good moments in the commute as tiring as it may be.
Although I eventually want to review my career, I've been thinking quite a lot about my early childhood from about 6 to 14. These were truly formative years. Though school was important, my father probably had an even greater influence on my education until I was 13 or 14.
Early Education Years
In 1950 my parents were looking for a house. I was 7 years old. We were all still living in the cramped one-bedroom apartment on 7th St in NE Washington, D.C. and we children were getting bigger. My siblings, Sue and Geoff, were now the occupiers of the single bedroom. I slept on the screened-in porch, an unheated room that made it more difficult to get out of my sleeping bag to use the bathroom inside the house. I remember having some fears about criminals and unsavory characters coming to kidnap me, having but to slit the screen to gain entry. Sometimes my Dad slept out on the porch as well, and, despite my wariness of him, I felt safer at those times.
My parents were unable to afford an older, more graceful home in an established neighborhood. They finally put a deposit on a yet-to-be built model in a cookie-cutter development about a mile north of the D.C. line. The development was named Parklawn and it was analogous to the Levittowns springing up in various places throughout the country. The baby boom was in full swing and there were increased needs for housing. The same type of mass production that had been applied to building airplanes and ships during World War II was now being applied to housing.
Parklawn was a community of about 150 homes, all of which were 2 story, 3 bedroom, 1 bath, 1200 square foot boxes placed on lots of about 110x50 feet. There were three varieties of living room window. The bottom floor was of brick, the second floor exterior was asbestos shingle. One had a choice of green, grey or white shingles. Mom chose the double window with green shingles.
My parents were careful in their choice of a lot and selected the last lot on a dead-end street with woods on two sides. We moved in sometime in early January of 1951. It was a sea of mud for two months. Sod was finally put down on my birthday in March. I was fascinated by the process of unrolling the grass. The workmen let me help.
I went to a new school, Our Lady of Sorrows in Takoma Park, about a ten minute walk. It was a relatively new, one story cinder block building. The class size was about 60, seated in 6 columns of 10 desks each. The desks were put on runners. The construction was such that each desk unit contained the built-in seat for the pupil in front. You could always reach forward and poke the person in front of you.
The teaching methods at the new school were "softer" with greater use of games and contests for learning. Art and music were also incorporated into the curriculum.
I was very glad to be leaving the old neighborhood where I was frequently tormented by the Smith boys who lived across the street. Their parents were really serious Catholics and the family was living in a 1 bedroom apartment with at least 8 children, three of whom were boys about my age, each meaner and tougher than the next. They hadn't developed their protection racket to the point where they were extorting my lunch money, but it was coming. In our annual flower show at school, the Smith boys had told me that I better cast my vote for their brother's arrangement. I did. In order to avoid the Smith's I tried to make sure that I was out of the apartment and down the alley before they set out for school.
At least with the Smith's I was not dreaming about them. The Chens terrified me. They ran a cleaning shop on 12th street and had a family that included several boys. An industrious family, the boys each had a wagon and spent Saturdays at the shopping district waiting to be hired to carry home bags of groceries. This was still a neighborhood where most families did not have an automobile. The term "thrifty" would do an injustice to my mother's grasp upon her pocketbook. There was no way the Chens were getting any of her money. She had a portable, wheeled basket that she used to cart her own groceries.
Harry Chen, one of the brothers, was my age and attended Brookland Elementary School with me. He was selectively mute. He would not talk to the teachers or say a word to anyone during class time. He could talk up a storm with his family after school. Henry had been "adopted" by one of the little caretaker girls in our class who spent recess hovering over this intentionally speechless child. I was never unkind, but it seemed that every day after school, one of his older brothers would grab me by the front of my shirt and demand to know if I had hurt Harry. It was scary. Soon I was having nightmares of being chased by a Chinese man holding knife. I recall working with this nightmare and trying to teach myself to wake up or to remind myself within the dream that it was not reality. My recollection is that I sometimes succeeded. However, memory is a funny thing. I would give this particular memory of dream intervention only even money for validity.
Escape from the old neighborhood's early childhood "gang" structure was wonderfully liberating. I liked my new school partly because it put Sr. Marie and her henchwomen far behind me. Best of all I had two new pals, Buzzy Carragher and Johnny Robson, who lived within a stone's throw of my front door. Johnny would be in my class at school for the next six years. We also attended the same high school and often commuted to the University of Maryland together.
Shortly after my parents had made this big move taking us to the 'burbs', my Dad came home in July or August with a major announcement that shocked my mother. We three children were too young to understand the implications and the manner in which it would change our lives. My father had quit his job and decided to go to college. One of the benefits of military service during World War II was the so-called GI bill that guaranteed help with housing (my parents had already purchased a no down payment house) and with further education. There was an expiration date for using these benefits. My father had to take the benefit or lose it.
More About Army Bill
Army Bill was how I thought of my Dad while I was a toddler to distinguish him from my uncle Bill who was in the Navy. Both men were married to red headed women who lived at 912 Quincy Street. After he returned home from the war, Army Bill became thought of as "Dad."
My father's life was difficult. Both parents were from disturbed families.
His dad's father (my great grandfather) had committed suicide. The story is one of a German immigrant, a brewer, who immigrates to New York and opens a bar. However, rather than drinking at his own establishment, he parties elsewhere and goes broke both financially and health wise, and at some point was wheelchair bound and dependent upon his wife's ironing to survive. One day he asks his wife for a nail file and uses it to gouge out his throat. As he is bleeding, the ambulance is summoned. My grandfather is about 9 and playing nearby. He follows the ambulance to his own home and sees his father, bleeding from the throat and fighting with ambulance attendants in order to continue to hemorrhage and complete the suicide. And he succeeded in exsanguinating shortly thereafter. My grandfather then quit school and helped to support the family. He volunteered for WWI and was a stretcher bearer and worked on a sanitation train...analogous to the modern hospital ship.
During the depression my grandfather moved the family 13 times in order to obtain jobs as a maintenance man for apartment buildings. During WWII he became a steelworker and finally moving to Erie PA to continue to work his union job.
My father's mother, Florence Kiel, had been dropped off at the orphanage on two occasions during her father's hobo days. She quit school in fourth grade to work in a hat shop. She was a binge alcoholic who would disappear for a few days at a time apparently in the company of men. My grandfather always took her back. By the time I knew her, the drinking days were over. She was a great baker and I think of her whenever I see blueberry muffins.
Her mind was very sharp. My mother claims that Florence could add up the grocery charges faster than the machine. Her favorite past time was keeping up with the "stars." When she saw that I had received a "Warfield" scholarship to medical school, she pointed out that this was Wallace Simpson's family. I really didn't know my grandmother until she had put aside her wild side. I loved her sense of humor. To describe a difficult situation, she would say. "And that would put you up the well-known creek." I didn't understand the allusion until I was fourteen or fifteen and heard "up shit's creek without a paddle."
At the age of 17 my father migrated to Washington D.C. from Yonkers and stayed with his mother's first cousin and her family. He was an incredibly efficient typist and obtained a job with the Federal Government as a clerk. He joined the D.C. National Guard and he once described the wonderful feeling of coming back from Guard Duty with a hundred dollars in his pocket and getting on the early evening train to New York to visit his friends. He remembers having a drink or two and feeling incredibly high.
In 1940, the D.C. National Guard was called to active duty and Dad advanced rapidly to Sergeant. He became bored with the peacetime army and wanted to join the Canadians who were already at War with Germany. He wrote a letter to his commanding officer asking to be allowed to enlist with he Canadian rangers and to rejoin the American army at a later date. My Dad's stated reason was "for the good of the Army." Dad says his commanding officer replied with the question "Whose Army?"
Dad never talked about his wartime experiences except when he was drinking or drunk. I'm sure that he was significantly traumatized. When I was three I was given a motorized toy army tank that was battery operated. It had rubber treads and could climb up over cushions and it made a chattering sound as it moved along. It was the most wonderful toy ever, even better than my Native American Doll who had the papoose doll on her back. I remember staying up very late playing with it. The following morning I was up early, eager to play with the tank. I couldn't find it. When I asked my mother where it was, she feigned ignorance and claimed the events of the previous night had never happened--that it must have been a dream. My father backed her up. It never happened! I didn't find out until many years later, that the sounds of the toy tank was too disturbing for my father. He had been under attack from tanks.
As children we went through the top drawer of his dresser fairly frequently (probably not as frequently as my mother who would have been looking on a weekly basis for evidence of his philandering). We found his bronze star, service medals, and two purple hearts.
We eventually got some of the story from him. He was in Patton's army. They had crossed over from France to Germany. One evening he was part of a four jeep convoy that made the mistake of attempting to return by the outgoing route. The were caught in an ambush. The first jeep had been damaged and the second had taken fire. Those in the third and fourth jeeps abandoned them and sought cover in the woods on the side of the road. Dad says that he could hear two buddies calling for help, so he crawled toward the first jeep, but it was completely destroyed with a mortar. He crawled under the second jeep and reached up to grab the hand hanging over the side. When he pulled, the entire arm came loose. He crawled to the edge of the woods where a soldier was lying on his back sobbing and complaining about arm pain. Dad grabbed and began dragging him toward the remaining Americans. From time to time the soldier would scream about his arm and Dad would tell him to "Shut up!" there were Germans all around.
The wounded man died at about the time that they reached the medic. When the soldier was turned over, he had a large penetrating wound of the back in the lung area. The sobbing and screaming about the arm was really referred pain from the chest and lungs.
When my father returned to school, he apparently wrote a short story based on his experiences. One of the fellows in his outfit was called "Baby Doll," who had a liking for German and Swiss watches which he sometimes expropriated from the dead. In my dad's story he writes of a firefight where "Baby Doll" is removing and throwing away seven or eight watches because he had heard that the Germans would immediately execute Americans who were found with war trophies.
When my father quit his government job, he took his retirement money and enrolled at the University of Maryland, about a 3 mile drive from our home. My grandfather, Walter, was selling cars at the time and found a used, 1948 hunter green Studebaker sedan. My mother's lot in life was to have to leave her homemaking and go to work full-time. Except no women really leaves the homemaking--it just gets done evenings and week-ends.
In the fall of 1951 my father began classes in Political Science and I started the 3rd Grade. He was home most afternoons.
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