A stupid stunt

The night before we started going to Central Elementary, I did something really idiotic. Idiotic enough that if it was on YouTube, the word "Fail" would be in the title.

My mother taught at Park Junior High School. The teachers decided to hold an ice cream social on the evening after the second day of school. The teachers could bring their families to enjoy some ice cream.

After we had eaten ice cream, Loyd and I went outside to hang out with the other kids. At the front of the school was a concrete porch and steps with metal handrails. We were sliding down the handrails, which were only a few feet long, as they only had to cover about five or six steps.

I decided to try to slide down the handrail headfirst, thinking I would be able to stop myself before I got to the bottom. Guess what? I wasn't able to stop and fell on my face on the concrete. I don't remember feeling any pain, but knew that I had scratched up my glasses. Come to find out that the glasses had created an inch-long gash in my forehead above my right eye. We went to Mom and Dad and after much discussion with some of the other teachers, they took me to the emergency room.

The doctor said I was going to be okay, but he was going to have to give me three stitches. First, he put this stuff in the wound. He said it would sting for 10 seconds. That was the longest 10 seconds of my life, but he was right, it stopped hurting after a short time. He gave me the stitches and told me to come back in a couple of weeks to have them removed.

I was kind of disappointed that the stitches were not that obvious, as my hair at the time covered the wound. I was hoping I was going to get to freak out the new kids I was going to meet the next day. I thought the stitches would make me look tough. (Actually, the stitches just made me look like some uncoordinated twerp.)

A new school

When we moved into our new house in town, we were somewhat outside the district for Hermosa Elementary School where Dad taught and where I had attended for four years and Loyd attended for one year. Someone had asked Dad if the new house was in the Hermosa district. He joked with his reply, "We're going to make it Hermosa."

The first day of school came. Loyd and I returned to Hermosa and were getting back in the groove. After the end of the second day, I went to the lobby where Dad would get us to drive us home. I saw Loyd looking around the library. I asked him what he was doing. "Oh, I'm just getting one last look around here."

"Why?"

"Because they're making us go to Central Elementary tomorrow."

I was shocked. I did not see this coming. I loved Hermosa. I had friends at Hermosa (or so I thought). I didn't want to leave. Dad had told us before school started that we didn't have to change schools. He was wrong.

Central Elementary was actually four blocks away from our house, so it kind of made more sense to go there. At the time, Central was the oldest elementary school in the state. It was considerably smaller than Hermosa, as each grade only had two classrooms, as opposed to three for Hermosa.

When I first showed up in class, I recognized some boys who used to go to Hermosa. Apparently, they had moved into this district sometime in the past. However, they acted like they didn't want anything to do with me. This was my first indication that things were not going to go well here.

All day in class, I kept hoping that someone was going to come along and say there was a mistake and I could go back to Hermosa. Every single day, I wished that I could go back, but it never happened. Even on the last day of school, I hoped that they would let me return just for that one day, but that didn't happen, either.

Just as I was somewhat adjusting to the situation after a few months, I found out that someone I went to Hermosa with had just moved into the Central district, but he still kept going to Hermosa. I felt like if Dad had not opened his big mouth and told everybody about our great new house, they wouldn't have forced Loyd and me to leave. (I realize now there was no getting around having to let the school district know where we lived.)

Years later, Dad said that if he'd known that he had the ability, he would have filed a lawsuit against the school system to keep us at Hermosa. Dad recognized that the move affected both Loyd and me academically and keeping us at Hermosa would have helped us to flourish. He also said that a few years later, they stopped forcing students to change schools just because their address had changed. I would point out that any lawsuit he filed against his employer would have put his job in jeopardy, even if the only desired result was just to get Loyd and me back in Hermosa.

There is so much bad stuff that happened during that year, I will have to devote a few individual chapters to it. However, I should say beforehand that despite me hating it at Central, I was actually thankful for the experience later on in my life. As noted above, I learned pretty quickly that I was not a popular as I thought I was. That was something I needed to know. I was going to go to Zia Intermediate School the next year, which was comprised of all the students from all the elementary schools. I was going to eventually find out my status among my fellow students. I was likely going to face other kids telling me, "Guess what? Your daddy's not around. We don't have to put up with your nonsense anymore." This way, I found out a whole year early and did not have to deal with that confrontation because they probably thought I had already learned my lesson the hard way. I did.

Mom and her cooking

Although she suffered with depression, my mother had a strange sense of humor. I get the idea that if YouTube were around back then, she would be posting stuff she did to my brother and me and sending it to Jimmy Kimmel.

One time, the whole family was at Grandma Bend's. This particular day, Grandma Bend was at work. Mom made lunch for all of us. The main course was meat. I'm pretty certain it was pork and there was pepper on it. It was very good. Both Loyd and I complimented her on the food.

My mother then said, "Yes, I got the meat from that box over there." On the counter was a box with a drawing of two dogs on it. Inside the box were fake hamburger patties that were meant for the dog. That was dog food.

I said, "Mom, you're kidding, right?"

"No, that's where I got the meat."

"Mom, do you know that's dog food?"

"No, it's not. It's meat. It says nowhere on the box that this is dog food."

"But there are two dogs on the box!"

"But they're salivating. That means it's really good meat!"

I started calling her on it. "Mom, I don't think it's possible to get this kind of meat out of those patties."

"Well, I did! I cooked it, and that's how it came out!"

Loyd and I stopped eating. We probably didn't eat more than 1/4 of our meat. Later, Grandma Bend came home for lunch. Mom served the meat to her. Loyd and I went up to Dad and said, "Dad! She's making her eat the dog food!" He said, "The two of you just shut up about that!"

Mom never admitted that she was kidding around. Dad never said anything, either, except to hush us when Grandma Bend was eating.

Years later, Mom would complain that Loyd and I never seemed to like her cooking.

It was hard to get my hands on soda when I was a kid

This is typically what I experienced on a regular basis when I was much younger:



Stuff like this made growing up seem like an endless hazing ritual.

Another big change in the family

During the summer before I started 5th grade, my parents decided that they were going to buy a house in Artesia. The reason being that the rent was being raised on the two-bedroom house where we lived. My parents paid $10 a month and it was being increased to $50, so they figured they could just go ahead and buy a house if they were going to have to pay that amount. Loyd and I didn't want to move. We considered that house in the country our home and we weren't ready to go to the "big city."

We spent about a month looking at houses. It was weird to go into homes while people were still living there. We finally found a house that Mom and Dad liked and we moved in. It had two stories and a basement. There was definitely a lot more room and a lot less yard to take care of.

When we lived in the country in the two bedroom house, Loyd and I shared the same bedroom. The new house had a master bedroom downstairs and two bedrooms upstairs. We thought we were finally going to get our own rooms. We didn't. Mom decided that we would still share a room and the other room upstairs would be the guest bedroom.

A few years later, I got fed up with having to share the room with Loyd, so I started sleeping in the guest room. I guess Loyd didn't like that I got to sleep in the other room, so he would go to bed even earlier in the guest room. After awhile, Mom and Dad just went ahead and took out the bed in the guest room and put Loyd's bed in there. I got to stay in our original room.

One funny thing is that we had moved into a house with two bathrooms. One upstairs and the other in the downstairs bedroom. My father hoped that this meant he wasn't going to have to always wait to go to the bathroom when he needed it. No, he was wrong. There would be several times when both bathrooms were occupied, so he would have to go to the gas station across the street and use their facilities.

Moving into the new house caused a new set of problems for Loyd and me. You'll see that in a future blog posting very soon, but not tomorrow.

I assaulted my brother

I'm not proud of the fact that I caused my brother Loyd some major pain when he was seven years old. However, in my mind, things had gotten out of hand that particular day and I dealt with it the best way I knew how.

One day, my Aunt Pand and Uncle Rid and their children Wend, Sted, Grid and Mad came to visit. Wend was 4 years older than me, Sted, the only girl of the group, was 2 years older and Grid was 1 year older. Mad was 7 years younger than me. Remember that my brother Loyd hated being younger than me and wanted to hang out more with the older cousins. Chilling with Mad was not going to cut it for him. So, he came up with a plan to sort of put me in my place. (I should add that our cousins were pretty good at giving both of us equal attention. It was not like I completely monopolized them.)

Anytime I said something to my cousins, he would say, "Fayd's stupid" and other comments along that line, like, "Fayd doesn't know what he's talking about because he's stupid" and "Fayd's the stupidest person in the world!"

I'd had enough of this, so I went and told Mom and Dad what was going on. They were enjoying the company of Pand and Rid and pretty much ignored me.

Loyd continued with his "Fayd is stupid" campaign. I got really fed up, so I picked up a wooden baseball bat on the ground and threw it at him real hard. It hit him square in the head. (Please note that I was not holding the bat when it hit him. I wasn't trying to bash his skull in.) I immediately felt bad for doing it.

Everybody started freaking out. Mom and Dad kept yelling at me and asking why I did that. I started crying and said, "I don't know." I guess they forgot about me complaining about Loyd's behavior earlier.

For whatever reason, a decision was made not to take Loyd to the emergency room. Pand just advised Mom and Dad not to let Loyd go to sleep for awhile, or else he might not wake up. Loyd turned out to be okay afterward.

I don't know if Loyd got the message, but he never called me stupid after that. However, I believe it caused him to find more subtle ways to undermine my intelligence. Even to this day, when talking to others in my presence, he will say something regarding my character that makes me look not so bright. Even worse is that he will do that and I might not realize until later that he had just insulted me again. He likely did this on purpose to begin with, but has now been doing it for so long that he just does it without really thinking about it.

Since that incident, no one has ever brought it up again, not even Loyd. I'd be willing to bet that no one remembers anything that transpired before I hit him with the baseball bat, but they'll all remember him getting smacked and how it was my fault. I keep hoping that he'll ask about it, but so far, he hasn't.

Do it yourself Friday video!

I'm not much of a cook, but I love sharing recipes:



Let me know if you try this!

4H was no fun

Early in the fourth grade, my mother asked me if I was interested in joining 4H. When she asked me, I didn't really have a response. I just figured if I didn't answer the question, she would forget all about it. I was wrong.

One night, she told me she was taking me to a 4H meeting. I told her I didn't want to join. She told me that because I didn't say anything in the first place, that meant I was joining.

They showed me a list of projects I could take part in. The only one that interested me was Photography. I knew this meant that my parents were going to have to let me touch the camera. So I got the 4H booklet and learned how to take pictures with our camera. I took a few pictures, nothing really special.

One thing no one told us during the entire year was that the goal of these projects was to enter things into the county fair. I guess someone eventually told my Mom that I was required to get presentations ready for entry and we only had two weeks to do them.

Almost none of the pictures I took during the year were going to work. We had to do certain categories of pictures and we had to run out and take them ASAP because it took a week for pictures to get developed back then. I had to do three-photo stories, pictures of landscapes, buildings and animals. Then I had to put everything together in these folders so that the judges could view them.

It was irritating because I never wanted to be a part of it in the first place and now, Mom was mad at me because none of this stuff got done. No one told me I was supposed to enter photos in the fair. The one thing I didn't understand was if there was supposed to be some consequence for not taking part. I think that we would have been just fine not competing, considering we were not ready.

Things really came to a boil when I was filling out the 4H forms and putting things together. We had all these papers, pictures and things used to create the presentations all over the place. Mom kept telling me to what to write where and I wasn't understanding what was supposed to be going on. Mom got so frustrated that she kept smacking my head with a plastic ruler until it broke. Many years later, she expressed regret for over-reacting like that, especially considering that it wasn't my fault.

I stayed in 4H two more years. While they were nowhere near as hectic as that first year, we always faced some sort of crunch two weeks before the county fair. I was done with that nonsense when it became clear I would have the same issue every year.

A big change in the family

As I've mentioned before, my father grew up on a ranch. He was used to doing a lot of chores before and after school every day. It was a lot of hard work.

One day, he took Loyd and me to town and went to a location south of Main Street. He said, "Do you see this house? We own that! You see that building of apartments? We own that, too!" Loyd and I were bewildered as to why we needed to buy 14 residences. We did not get the concept of living in an apartment or a house that was rented. The ironic thing is that, at that time, we lived in a house that my parents rented from the school district.

What we were most unaware of is that this meant that we were going to have to learn how to work hard because my father was not about to hire people to maintain the properties. The apartments also included a swimming pool and a separate office building that was occupied by the local Office of Urban Renewal. (I still have no idea what they did.) For my father, spending all your time working was the life he grew up with and that's how he wanted to spend his spare time after school and on weekends. Loyd and I were about to get a big taste of what he went through growing up.

Basically, it meant that for the next several years, we were going to have to mow all the lawns, clean the pool, pick up the trash, do janitorial work in the office building, set up the air conditioners, re-shingle the roofs and clean up the apartments when the residents moved out, among other duties. Life as we knew it was over.

It's not like we did it for free. Dad paid us two dollars an hour, but that was still below the federal minimum wage at that time. Also, keep in mind that the going rate if you were doing that for a living at the time was likely $4 an hour. And we didn't get to keep all the money. Most of it was put in our savings accounts, which we had no access to. And I didn't know this at the time, but Dad got to write all those wages off as a tax deduction for the apartments.

One of the things that made it really rough the first year was that there was some sort of oil leak underneath the apartments that acted like a superfertilizer on the grass, and we would have to mow the lawns, even when there was snow on the ground.

I was relieved when I went to college because it meant I wouldn't have to work on those apartments any more. I even went to summer school after my Freshman year just to avoid it. However, I didn't go to summer school after my Sophomore year and spent the whole summer mowing lawns again and cleaning the office building, which now housed the Welfare office. A couple of years after that, Dad sold the apartments.

A few years later, there was something weird that happened that whoever bought the apartments defaulted on the payments and the ownership reverted back to my father. At this point, my parents had divorced and my father had gotten remarried to a woman I will refer to as Gred. Gred had a son (named Tad) from her previous marriage. She and my father already owned several other properties around town. My father told Loyd and me that he and Gred had written their wills so that, in the event that something happened to both of them, Loyd, Tad and I would have equal shares in the apartments. I told Dad it sounded like a good arrangement, but knew that the chances of us actually taking ownership were very small. However, Loyd called me on the phone and was very angry about it. "Tad did not spend years mowing all those lawns! He shouldn't get any of it!" Anyway, it became a moot point as my father and Gred wound up having to sell all the apartments as they got older.

The biggest impact this experience had on me is that I swore that I would never mow another yard again. I do not plan on owning my own home so I won't have to take care of the yard. Although, when I lived in Denver and could see the possiblity of buying a home, I did find one that I was interested in that did not have a lawn. However, I didn't continue to live in Denver or progress enough in my career and earnings to be able to purchase it.

UPDATE (07/11/17): I own my own home now, but I do not have a yard I have to mow.

Dirty work on standardized tests

I actually enjoyed taking the standardized tests in school. It was a whole afternoon of not having to do any writing. Most of the time, I finished the test way ahead of the rest of the class and I was able to spend class time on one of my favorite hobbies: drawing.

When we took the tests, we were told that no one at the school, including the teachers, was going to know how we answered the questions. We would just receive a total score when the results came back about two months later and that the tests would not have an impact on our report cards.

The teachers never explained that their jobs somewhat depended on the outcome of these tests. If it looked like the students were not learning the bare minimum in the lessons, there could be consequences. As I've mentioned before, I felt like I was kept in regular classes with other advanced students so that we could raise the average score on the standardized tests and make the teachers look better.

When I took the test in the fourth grade, I was on the English section. One part of the test had us do "This is to this as that is to _______" comparisons. This was fairly easy to understand. However, one of the statements was rather unusual. I do not remember the wording of the question, but it had to do with scuba diving. I also don't remember all of the choices, but I do recall that "Frogman" was one of the answers. That seemed to be the only one that fit with scuba diving and that's what I chose, but I was aware it was probably the wrong answer.

When Dad drove me home from school that day, he got mad at me because I had picked some really stupid answers on the test. I thought that he wasn't supposed to know how I answered, but I didn't question him about it. Later, I figured that my teacher had probably gone through the test and punched out holes on an answer sheet with the correct answers and compared it with some of the students' sheets. She must have told my father about my mistakes.

I consider that some sort of fraud, because it appeared that the people conducting the test lied to us about the teachers not knowing our answers. I'm also surprised that the testers would let the teachers come anywhere near our answer sheets. However, I guess they need the teachers to inspect the sheets to make sure the students had put their correct names on the test. The testers wouldn't be able to do that efficiently. It would be during this point that the teacher would have had an opportunity to quickly compare answers on the sheets.

I read a story recently about how some teachers in some school got a hold of the sheets and started erasing students' answers and putting in the correct ones. They got fired anyway. However, I am surprised that would happen in this day and age. You would think they'd come up with answer sheets pre-printed with the students' names on them.

Anyway, when I took the test in the fourth grade, I don't think they had that much of an effect on the staff, because everybody kept their jobs the next year. I really don't think they ever had anything to worry about.

Asperger Syndrome and Fast Food

When I go out to eat, I've got to have it MY WAY!



It's very hard to be nice when you feel like no one is listening to you in the first place.

The worst thing I heard from my mother

As I've mentioned before, my mother lived with depression for a great deal of her life before realizing she had a problem. One of her biggest issues was dealing with my brother Loyd as a baby. She probably spent the first two years of his life wondering why he couldn't be more like me and saying this out loud.

More than 35 years later, my mother would express regret that she was not able to enjoy Loyd for the child that he was instead of mourning for the child he could not be.

Now, even though my mother says that she was never able to enjoy Loyd, I think there was some level that she had some idea what he had to offer as a child. This was realized in what I consider the worst thing my mother ever said to me.

In our town, there was a clothing store called Main Place. (I would wind up working there one day, but that's WAY down the line.) They sold women's shoes under the "Personality" brand. When my mom was getting dressed once, I saw a Personality shoe box. "Personality" was a word that I'd heard before, but wasn't certain of what it meant. I asked my mother what personality was.

"It's something that Loyd has that you don't."

I was absolutlely stunned by this response. I was asking for a simple definition, not an attack on my lack of character or confirmation that Loyd had some. So I asked her why Loyd had something that I didn't and I asked her what she meant. I asked her what I needed to do to get it. I guess Mom figured out she had plain said the wrong thing to me and ignored my requests for more details. I know I kept asking for at least ten more minutes before I finally gave up on getting an answer.

Now, the reason I say this is the worst thing she ever said to me is because I remembered it up to the point that I finally learned what personality was. I looked back and recalled this incident and discovered that it was a very cruel thing for a mother to tell a child. Even worse is that she offered no explanation and no apology for what she said.

But, like I say, her acknowledgement of his personality and me not having any does demonstrate that there was some joy in her heart that was created for her by Loyd. It's too bad that she doesn't really remember ever feeling that way about him.

A friend who took another path

I really can't say that I had a lot of good friends when I was in elementary school. I thought I did, but I really didn't. However, I had one good friend in the fourth grade that I actually considered my best friend. His name (for our purposes) was Wild.

Wild was probably about a year older than me and had gotten left back at some point. When you got right down to it, we probably didn't have that much in common, but we enjoyed calling each other best friend. When you're that young, there's not a lot else that seems to matter.

He actually came over and spent the night at my house one Friday night. We had a good time. We went out to a junior high basketball game. I kind of made a fool of myself by running out on the floor at one point. (However, I should add that the basketball court floor was very wide and I was yards away from where the game was happening.) My mother yelled at me in front of him because she felt like everyone could see me doing that and it embarrassed her. As you'll see in future posts, that happened a lot. To tell the truth, I got really bored at school sporting events.

I honestly don't remember what we did on Saturday. I know he just spent the one night and that we had a good time, but he never spent the night again.

The next year, I wound up going to a different elementary school, so Wild and I were no longer best friends. Back then, if you were a kid, you were not permitted to use the phone to call ANYONE. If grandparents or aunts or uncles wanted to talk to us, they would call us, or your parents would call them for you. But you NEVER picked up that phone to make an outgoing call.

When we wound up back together at the Intermediate school for 6th grade, we did not resume our "best" friendship. We didn't even have any classes together. That's a real friendship killer. (However, in a later post, you will see how he stepped up to defend me at one point.)

We are now going to fast-forward about four more years. I was a junior in high school. Wild had dropped out when he turned 16. Back then, you could drop out at that age. Most students who dropped out either worked for the refinery or the City of Artesia. I guess Wild went to the refinery.

Around this time, my mother saw his name in the paper in which he was arrested in connection with a shooting. What supposedly happened is that Wild and a friend of his were out in a field at night and were just shooting guns in the air. One of the bullets struck and killed someone. He wound up spending time in jail for that.

A few years later, I was in college. I went to a convenience store near the campus and I heard someone call my name. He looked very familiar. I then realized who it was. "Wild!" Despite my excitement my first thought was, "When did you get out of jail?" He appeared to have been chatting up the girl behind the counter. We exchanged pleasantries and I never saw him again.

About a year and a half ago, Ms. Ogolon and I were driving home from a road trip. My phone rang. I was driving, so I could not answer it. Whoever called left a message. Ms. Ogolon called the voicemail and said it sounded like it was Bob Suchandsuch. I said, "I don't know a Bob Suchandsuch, but I know a Wild Suchandsuch." The phone rang several more times before we got home. I was never able to pick it up and no more messages were left. When we got home, I called the voicemail. It was indeed Wild.

He had gotten my phone number by calling my father. He basically called to apologize about stuff that happened in the past. Now, I have been the victim of a lot of mistreatment in my youth, but he was definitely not one of my tormentors. Over the course of the very long conversation (with him sounding drunk), I told him not to worry about it.

I had previously told my father that, under no circumstances, he is NOT to give my phone number out. What he was supposed to do is take their information and call me with the message. He had done this a couple of times before and it hadn't been a problem. I called him up the next day. He apologized and said that Wild sounded drunk and was very insistent on getting my number, so he gave it to him to get him off the phone. I then told him that if anyone else ever needed to get a hold of me, they could look me up on Google and find my e-mail address. That way, he wouldn't have to take a message.

Over the next few months, Wild would call me up. Sometimes, I would answer the phone. Sometimes I wouldn't. It's bad that my main impulse was to get him off the phone, but we really didn't have much in common anymore. After he called a few more times and I didn't pick up, I stopped hearing from him. However, I had let go of him as a friend almost 40 years ago, so there was no real emotion there. I do feel bad that he wasn't as willing to let go.

Halloween Video Fun!

How good would your Halloween be with these?



I won't touch them!

I'm going blind!

One of the largest changes in my life occurred when I was in the fourth grade. A few weeks in, I was having trouble seeing the blackboard. I was not aware that anything was wrong with my eyesight. I just started noticing that I had to squint a lot to see things that were further away.

The weirdest thing about this is that I was taken to see the school nurse. She had one of those eye charts and asked me to read the smaller letters. I said I couldn't see them. She basically accused me of lying. I kept telling her that I couldn't read the letters and she kept telling me that I could. A week later, I went to see an eye doctor, who said that I did indeed need glasses.

Three weeks later, we went to the eye doctor to pick up the glasses. When we left the building, I looked down the street and realized how clearly I could see everything.

The worst thing about when you first wear glasses is that for the first few weeks, you are constantly aware that you are wearing glasses. That was always the first thought in my mind. It didn't matter what I was doing. It wasn't until a few weeks later at a Cub Scout meeting that I realized that I had stopped thinking about having glasses on my face.

My first pair had these thick black rims. Yes, I definitely looked like a geek. However, if you were a kid back then, you really didn't have much of a choice of designs, and I really didn't like the wire frames. I wanted it to be very obvious that I was wearing glasses.

I wore that design for three years. In the seventh grade, my parents made me switch to the wire frames. I didn't realize it at the time, but Mom says those glasses looked really small on my face. When I was in the ninth grade, I got glasses with a gradual tint in them. I wore that design for the next 18 years. After that, I got round wire frames with grey-tinted lenses and have stuck with that ever since.

When I got older, I was offered the opportunity to get contact lenses. I had a problem with using my finger to stick something smaller than a dime into my eyeball. I had also heard horror stories about people who accidentally fell asleep with them in their eyes. Even though they now have the plastic lenses that you can fall asleep with, I still am uneasy about having to poke my eyes every day.

While I am also eligible for the Lasik procedure, I am uneasy about the long-term effects. At any rate, I still don't think I look like myself when I am not wearing glasses. I guess I really identify with having them and will likely wear them the rest of my life.

While my eyesight has remained fairly steady since I started wearing glasses, I have noticed some deterioration. A few years ago, I noticed I was experiencing eye strain when I was trying to read something close up. However, I found I could read everything fine if I took my glasses off. An eye doctor recommended bi-focals. Oh, no! I refuse to admit I'm getting that old.

I WON'T GO BI-FOCAL!

The battle over hair

One of my favorite things to do when I was a kid was to go to the barber shop. I loved going there with my Dad and my brother to get my hair trimmed. The owner of the shop was Bill (one of the few times I'll use someone's real name in this blog, especially since I don't know his last name and he's probably dead by now).

There was no appointment needed. You just walked right in. And it was good if you had to wait a bit because Bill had a lot of comic books in his waiting area. Most of all, I enjoyed the regular chance for male bonding. I way I understood it was this: "Barber shops are for boys, beauty shops are for girls."

Right about the time I turned nine years old, my mother took me get my hair done. This wasn't a big deal. She had taken me to Bill's when Dad was busy with something else. But this time, she didn't tell me we were going to the beauty shop. I said I didn't want to go inside because beauty shops are for girls. I wanted to go to Bill the barber. I was a boy.

Somehow, Mom was able to make me get my hair cut there. The result was pretty much the same as if Bill had done it, but I still didn't like that I had to do it at the beauty shop. I was thankful that no one from school saw me there.

I never did find out why Dad stopped taking Loyd and me to Bill. Years later, I remember him talking about how Bill would cut the hair very short and this didn't make for good repeat business, but I don't think that had anything to do with it. It didn't matter, Loyd and I continued to scream to be taken to Bill instead of the beauty shop, but we never went again.

My story does not stop there. When I was in the fourth grade, Mom took me to the beauty shop. When the woman was finished with my hair, I was shocked! She had hardly cut any of it off!

"Mom! My hair's still long!"

"Well, that's the way all the boys are wearing their hair now."

"I don't care, Mom! I don't want to look like a hippie!" (The only two things I knew about hippies at the time were that the guys had long hair and they were not generally respected by the population at large.)

Sure enough, Mom was right. The other guys were starting to wear their hair long, but I still wanted to look like a boy. This is especially surprising considering that, at this point, my Mom was already afraid that I was going to grow up gay. You'd think she'd want me to promote my masculinity instead of chipping away at it bit by bit, starting with the hair.

The thing is that after awhile, I actually enjoyed having long hair. However, by the time I reached high school, the fashion trend swung back to short hair for guys, but I still left my hair long. This led to many arguments with my Mom for two decades over the length of my hair. She kept screaming at me to get it cut and I wouldn't do it. When I was in college, she'd write me letters begging me to cut my hair. I'd write back that she should be thankful that my hair was the only thing about me she had an issue with, because I could have just as easily have become an alcoholic, a drug addict, a criminal or worse. There were times when she would talk me into cutting it, but I always grew it back and the argument started all over again. I kept pointing out that having long hair was her idea and if she didn't like arguing with me over it, she shouldn't have let the beautician cut my hair long in the first place.

When I was 34, I had gone through a seven-year period in which I didn't cut my hair. It became very damaged during that time, so I decided to shave it all off. The plan was to keep it short until I turned 40 and then I was going to grow it long again. That never happened because I had met the woman I was going to marry before then and she said she wouldn't find me attractive with long hair. It's been short ever since.

I still have dreams about my hair being long. I hate waking up from them.

My father and my mother got to be my teachers

My father taught fourth grade at the elementary school I attended. I did not have him for my official teacher when I entered the fourth grade, but this year was different in school because they separated the students into three groups for the reading classes. These were the higher level reading students, average level and low level. My father taught the higher level, so I wound up with him as a teacher one hour every day.

This was a means of helping us adjust to the upcoming 6th grade, in which we would not be stuck in the same classroom every day. This was also done during the 5th grade.

My father was the only male teacher at the school. A lot of the boys were afraid of him because he had a reputation for pulling out the paddle to administer punishment and everybody said he could whip even hard than their own fathers. I wouldn't know. The other boys' fathers never tried to put the whup on me.

When I was in class, I was not permitted to call him "Dad." I had to call him "Mr. Ogolon." He practically treated me a little worse than he did at home, save for any beatings. Once I loudly yawned in class and exclaimed, "Oh, boy!" He screamed at me in front of everyone. For my first mid-quarter report card, he gave me a B for the class. (However, I was able to turn that into an A for the rest of the year.)

I really felt that there should have been a rule in place that said that teachers were not permitted to teach their own children or even allow them in the same school together. Even though my father only taught me one hour a day, it was hard getting through that hour knowing that everybody in class was carefully watching every interaction between me and father.

When I was a senior in high school, I wound up with my mother as a teacher. She taught Distributive Education and was in charge of the school's chapter of Distributive Education Club of America, or DECA. She more or less coerced me into her classroom. She wanted me in there because she know I would do well in the regional and state DECA competition.

One day, before school, my mother asked me to go get some gum and bring it to her in class. I came in the classroom and said, "Hey, Mom!" and tossed her the gum. She told me later that me that my calling her "Mom" was a glass-shattering moment for her. She didn't mind me calling her "Mom," and didn't ask me to call her "Mrs. Ogolon." She was upset because, for years, students would call her "Mom" and she would respond by saying "I am not old enough to be your mother." That day, she realized she could no longer say that.

I would like to add that Loyd never had to deal with having Dad or Mom as a teacher.

It wasn't my fault I got to be the oldest!

Loyd likely had a muddled view of how I got to be the oldest.



Even though Loyd knows how random having children is and I am less than a year from being 50, I think he still wishes that he was the oldest.

Panicking over school

One thing I will say that pretty much characterizes my brother Loyd: He HATED being the youngest of us two. He could not stand that I got to do things before he did, including going to school. He did not like being left all by himself with the babysitter while I was in class.

I would like to note that Loyd got to do a lot of things that I didn't get to do at that age. He got to go to actual Kindergarten. Because he was in Kindergarten at a church, a photo of the class was featured on a brochure promoting the Kindergarten program there. I got really envious when I saw him and his classmates on that brochure. I guess I felt that other people would see the brochure and think those kids were really special. I wanted people to think I was special.

In addition, Loyd got to "graduate" from Kindergarten. The ceremony involved the students doing presentations and receiving their "diplomas." I never got to graduate from anything until I finished high school. (That's right, I didn't even graduate from junior high school, but that's another story.)

When I was about to start fourth grade, Loyd was getting ready for the first grade. However, he didn't like the idea of being so far behind me. He was 2 1/2 years younger than me, but 3 years behind in school. He told Mom and Dad that he didn't want to go to first grade. He wanted to go to third grade. Mom and Dad responded by saying something like, "Okay, we'll see what we can do." A part of me knew that they were just patronizing him and that he was going to have to go to first grade like everyone else. However, I started going through a range of emotions. I was angry because no one offered this option to me when I was going to school and it kind of looked like Mom and Dad were actually going to do something to make it happen for Loyd. I then started experiencing anxiety at the idea of Loyd being just one year behind me in school. I couldn't stand the thought of him almost always being at the same school I went to.

Fortunately, Loyd went to first grade and the issue was never brought up again. My father told me years later that Loyd got angry after the first day of school because, from his perspective, I went to school the first day and I came home knowing how to read. Loyd was expecting to also know how to read his first day at school and didn't get that accomplished. (As I mentioned before, I knew how to read long before starting first grade.)

Tomorrow, I will post a YouTube video that demonstrates what probably made Loyd a lot more frustrated about being the youngest.

Unfairness at the Pinewood Derby

When I was in the third grade, I got to join the Cub Scouts. I had a lot of fun and got to take part in a lot of activities, but there is one thing that bothered me all three years I was in it. That is the Pinewood Derby.

Now, I'm not talking about how the scouts' fathers do all the work on the cars. I mean, my father did almost all the work on my cars because he didn't trust me with power tools at that age. No, my issue was the method used to determine the winner. I don't know how the rest of the country did it, but in my town, it was a Double Elimination tournament.

In this method, everyone is paired up with one other competitor in the first round. Those who win go to the second round. Those winners go to the third round and so on until you have one person who has won every round in the first half. Anybody who loses at any point during the first half has to wait until the second half to race again.

So, in the second half, everybody who lost is paired up again with one of the other losing competitors from the first round and the process starts all over again until a winner is declared for the second half, who then goes up against the winner of the first half.

My problem was that if you lose in the first round, you have to wait until the second half before you could race again. This could take more than an hour. If you lose in the first round of the second half, then you don't get to race again and you are forced to sit through the rest of the tournament to see who won.

This happened to me the first two years I participated. There were about 100 scouts taking part in the competition each year. This means that 25 scouts, a full fourth of the boys there, only got to race their cars twice. What fun was that?

Now, I don't know if the gameplay has changed since then, but it appears they could have come up with a better system of determining a winner by having everyone participate in an equal number of races before final rounds. I have noticed pictures of some tracks that can handle four cars at one time. I hope that contributes to scouts being able to race a few more times.

In the third grade, I designed the car myself. I drew the line on the block of wood and my father cut it out. He placed a ballast inside the body of the car and slapped it together with glue. When we went to the practice, my car exceeded the weight limit, so my father had to take some of the ballast out. When we took the car to be weighed at the event, the judge shook his head. My car was very much UNDER the limit and there was no way we could make any adjustment to it. I lost my two races.

In the fourth grade, I had seen a picture of a Pinewood Derby car shaped like a banana, with the stem pointing up. I wanted to make a car like that. At the last Derby, my dad had talked to other fathers and learned that we needed to make the car more aerodynamic. He went nuts trying to design the car to look like a banana and be aerodynamic. It did not have a stem. Well, it didn't work. I still lost my first two races.

In the fifth grade, I was in Webelos. This year, my dad took complete control of the car design and building. He was determined to have me win at least one race. It actually worked. I won enough times that I came in 9th place. It would have really stunk if I only got to be in two races again.

I don't think winning at all costs would have been that much of an issue if they had a method in place to allow the boys to be involved in more races. This might allow the scouts to be more involved. We could have fun and learn something without always having to win. That should always be the main consideration.

Friday Follies

You were probably already expecting this from a few weeks ago (because I posted a "Part One"), but I obviously didn't get all the yelling out of my system.



And I know the driver didn't see or hear me. It's too bad they don't have audio on Street View.

Issues with manners and sharing

Right now, I would like to dispel the myth that it's a good thing to grow up with a brother or sister because you learn how to share as a child. Whoever says this has never had to deal with my brother Loyd.

There was a lot of stuff that I did not get to learn during my early years. My parents never taught me table manners or to say "please" or "thank you." It seemed like my parents decided to teach my brother and me these very important lessons at the same time. I used to think that it would have made more sense to teach me these things first so that I could set a good example for Loyd. At the time, it seemed bewildering that we were getting subjected to these new rules without any actual cause. Prior to writing this blog, I figured out that Mom and Dad really had their hands full with Loyd in dealing with his constant crying and screaming that they just didn't think about teaching me this stuff first. They say that once Loyd learned how to talk, he stopped crying and screaming. I guess when that happened, they finally had some room to teach us some important things about life.

I do want to mention the day that my mom decided we had to learn how to ask for permission to be excused from the table. There were a lot of words I didn't know at the time and "excuse" was one of them. At dinner, out of the blue, she said we needed to ask, "May I please be excused" before leaving the table. On a later date, she served all food I couldn't stand to eat. I immediately said, "May I please be excused?" Boy, she got mad.

As for sharing, apparently, my brother didn't like doing it. Loyd seemed to use these main rules for sharing:

1. Take all you want until someone tells you to stop.

2. If no one sees you eating it or playing with it, you don't have to share it.

3. When you're in a situation in which you have to share, try to delay releasing the item or items as long as possible. Maybe everyone else will forget you were supposed to share.

4. Don't wait for someone to offer to share something with you. Put them on the spot and ask them if you can have some.

This is something I don't really remember, but I had been reminded of it by my mother. It must have happened when I was five years old. Even though my first real memory was around the Christmas season that year, I do not recall this incident. My mother and father had these friends they knew through teaching. They treated us like family. For Christmas, they gave Loyd and me two presents. They apparently tried to communicate that these gifts were for both of us and we were supposed to share them. However, they were unaware that neither one of us knew the meaning of the word "share." Loyd opened his package. It was a transistor radio. I opened mine. It was a book of Bible stories. I was told I appeared very disappointed. Again, they tried to stress that both gifts were for both of us and we were to share them. Lloyd was two at the time and the words were not getting through to him. He never let go of that radio and took it everywhere with him.

A few years later, we came across that radio again when we were moving from the country to Artesia. My father said we had gotten it years ago, but didn't tell the full story of who gave it to us. I didn't remember the incident at the time and wasn't told about it until I was in my 30's.

In a separate incident, my mother decided to split a Butterfinger bar between us. If you've ever had any experience with Butterfinger bars, you know that they are not like Hershey bars, which can be broken off into segments. Butterfingers will never break exactly in half, and any attempts to break them that way just result in a lot of little pieces flying all over the place. Add that you can almost never find a Butterfinger in a wrapper that isn't already broken and you have the most unsharable candy in the universe.

Well, my mother broke the Butterfinger and tried very hard to make sure that Loyd and I had exactly the same amount. She didn't pull out a scale or anything, but she separated all the various bits into two piles and put them in front of us at the dining room table. We started eating them. Among the little pieces on my side was this big chunk. Keep in mind that my unshattered part of the bar was shorter than his and this helped to make up for it. I was saving that big chunk for last after I finished eating all the little pieces. Well, Loyd decided that all his shattered pieces were too small and actually reached across the table to try to grab that big chunk. I was able to keep him from getting it. I always wonder why we only had one Butterfinger to share. Getting us separate candy bars would have saved us a lot of trouble.

I have another amusing story regarding sharing with my brother that I posted on my A Liberal Christian YouTube channel. Here is the link: "A Liberal Christian vs. Colonel Sanders."

Now, this whole battle over sharing had a lingering affect on me. I did not "learn" to share. What I learned was that sharing is not an option. I was required to share. When I started going to college and entering my adult life, I was very selfish. If I had a bag of candy, I wouldn't offer any to anyone who happened to be around. If I went to a restaurant, I would not leave a tip. I didn't start leaving tips until I was 25 years old. Fortunately, none of the wait staff that served me ever hassled me about it.

A little about Aunt Mard

Up to this point, I really haven't gotten into a lot of detail about my dealings with my aunts and uncles. They rarely had that much impact on my life. They were generally just these people my parents would take us to see every once in a while.

I need to tell you about my mother's sister Mard. Mard was one year older than my mother. Mard had some problems that were not apparent to me when I was growing up and no one told me there was anything wrong with her.. Later on, she would be described to me as "somewhat retarded."

It may not have been actual retardation, but some sort of neurological disorder. Mard was really good at English and spelling, but she was terrible at math. Because she could not comprehend math, she stayed in high school two years longer than usual. This meant that for one year, my mother and Mard were in the same grade. My mother graduated from high school, but Mard had to continue going back the next year.

Mard got tormented quite a bit at school. The tormenting got worse after my mother went to college. Mard came home from school one day in tears. Grandma Bend told her she didn't have to go to school any more, and she didn't.

When I was a kid, the general understanding was that if an adult told you to do something, you were to do it, no questions asked. One snowy day in Fort Sumner, Mard saw Loyd and I sitting around the house. She said, "You kids need to be outside playing. Put your jackets on and go outside."

Loyd and I did what she said and went outside. Dad was out there working on something. He sees us and asks, "What are you doing out here?"

"Mard told us to come out here."

He started getting angry. "You two get back in the house, right now!"

We went inside. Dad went up to Mard and started yelling at her. "THESE BOYS ARE SICK! THEY ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO GO OUTSIDE! YOU HAVE NO BUSINESS TELLING THEM WHAT TO DO!" It was the first time I ever saw Dad yell at someone who wasn't Loyd, Mom, or me. And I thought for certain that he had plenty more yelling left in him and he was going to start on Loyd and me. But he didn't. At this point, I somewhat realized that there might have been something wrong with Mard.

Mard eventually got married to this guy named Hed. Hed was of at least average intelligence, but he wasn't able to drive a car. He had a hard time holding on to a job. No one in the family really liked him except for Mard. Mard lived on disability. My Dad always said that Hed just sponged off of Mard. However, I'm pretty certain that Mard always longed for a near-normal life, and if she was ever going to find someone to love her, this was going to be it.

One day, toward the end of the school year, we were told we were going to see Mard and Hed graduate from college. I thought that this was quite an accomplishment. We drove up to Roswell, where Eastern New Mexico University had a satellite campus. We went to the area where the ceremony took place. Mard and Hed were the only ones who received degrees. I thought this was rather odd, especially considering that most of the other people in the room kind of appeared to be "off" somewhat. Just three months ago, I found out that she and Hed had actually graduated from Job Corps.

Mard and Hed never had children. They remained married for 22 years, until 12/31/96, when Mard was struck by a vehicle while she was trying to cross the street.

I felt really bad because I hadn't really kept in touch with Mard after I grew up and knew that things weren't right with her and Hed. It was even worse because she had called my Mom's house at Christmas while I was there and I was in a rush to hand to phone off to someone else. I never knew that would be the last time I would hear her voice.

One interesting aspect of the relationship Loyd and I had with Mard is that we saw so much of her while we were growing up. Since she lived with Grandma Bend most of the time, she was always there at the house when we were there. The other cousins on my Mom's side of the family did not get to know her anywhere near as well as we did. I do wonder what their impressions of Mard are.

I was still a loser in Little League

Unfortunately, the torture that I had to endure for not being able to play baseball didn't end the summer after I finished first grade.



It's not like my brother was forced to watch me practice for the plays I did in high school.

The 2nd and 3rd grades

Okay, I got the first year of real school out of the way. It was time to start second grade. The first day of school, I walked past my first grade classroom. There was a line of kids waiting to go inside. In that line, I saw someone who was in my first grade class the year before. He had been left back. He looked at me and rolled his eyes. I could tell he didn't want to do the first grade all over again.

When I was in the first grade, one of the first things they taught us was math. We learned stuff like 1+1=2, 1+2=3 and so on. On the first day of second grade, we learned 1+1=2, 1+2=3. What? We learned this last year! Why aren't we learning something new? My father said it's because too many students forget too much stuff during the summer and a review is in order for the first few days of the school year. Well, if that's the case, why did that one guy have to do the first grade all over? Why isn't there some sort of test we can take for those of us who remember everything we learned so we can go on to the next grade?

So, aside from that, second grade was fairly uneventful. It was almost the same as first grade, but we had to stay in class an extra half-hour. I'm just going to move on to third grade.

In third grade, we finally got to do some more advanced stuff. For starters, we learned cursive writing. I will tell you that my cursive writing is absolutely terrible. I always got bad marks because of my handwriting. The teacher kept screaming at me to make the letters like they do in the book. When I got older, I heard it explained that the smarter you are, the worse your handwriting is because your hand is trying really hard to keep up with your brain in writing down your thoughts. This actually made sense as I noticed those who appeared to be the D and F students had the most beautiful handwriting. They seemed to have time to write their words with care. Teachers have to have seen the phenomenon all the time, so I'm surprised that my teacher hollered at me so much about it.

I also want to discuss something that started in third grade and plagued every student in Artesia for this and the next three years. This was the year we learned how to do multiplication and division. While there would be issues with that by itself, the big problem was the new textbooks we received. One thing you need to know is that the State of New Mexico's education program has a special fund that can only be used for getting new textbooks every four years. I would always watch TV sitcoms in which the younger characters would always complain about how their textbooks were 20 or more years old. That bewildered me. We got new textbooks on a regular basis, so I couldn't identify with that.

When I was in first and second grades, our math books were designed to give the main lesson on a few pages and then we would do the problems written in the book, tear those pages out and give them to the teacher. I know that there were similar books for the third and fourth grades because I had seen them. But when I got to the third grade, we got these thick books that were published by Harcourt Brace and Holt. These did not have pages that you could tear out. Now, the books included the lessons on a few pages, followed by a page with problems on it. We were supposed to copy the problems onto a piece of paper and solve them. That wasn't the problem. The issue was that the font size was very small and included all the problems in as many as 10 or more columns and rows. The teachers would assign the entire class to complete one page of the problems without realizing they had just assigned 100 problems or more. (And these are supposed to be math teachers). Now, I'm smart, and it would take me about 15 seconds to solve each problem. That means I could do it all in about a half hour. Now, imagine that it takes a below average student at least a minute to solve each problem. Add to that that they were required to re-write the problem from the book, which we didn't have to do before. They would be working on that single page for almost two hours or more. It's no wonder a lot of students could not stand math. It was more work than it was worth. The fact that the whole four years that I used those books, I never once saw a teacher assign less than the full page means they weren't paying attention to the havoc they were creating and were probably wondering why so many students just did not do very well.

We didn't get new books until the 7th grade and I was so relieved to see we got a much thinner math book with fewer problems. However, by that time, calculators became more prominent. If we had had calculators in the 3rd grade, we would have more students able to whiz through their homework.

The third grade was also the first time I got in trouble with the principal. A fellow student had asked me to watch his jacket. After waiting awhile, I kind of felt put upon and threw the jacket over the school fence into the bushes on the other side. He told the teacher and we had to go to the principal's office. The principal made me go around the fence and through the bushes to get the jacket. He then gave me a spanking with his paddle. He didn't hit me nearly as hard as my dad did. It wasn't even punishment.

As you can see, my first three years in school were really not very eventful. No, the fun didn't start until the fourth grade. We'll get to that in a later blog post.

Disneyland and more!

For our first family vacation, we actually went a lot of places. It was a rather dizzying tour of the West Coast.

I remember we left Portland and went north. I was somewhat asleep in the back of the camper shell when I heard Mom saying that we were in Washington. I thought that meant we were going to go to Washington, DC. They didn't teach us much about geography in the first grade. (What was surprising was that when I was in the 11th grade, there were about 10 students in my History class who still thought Washington, DC was in Washington state. And this was after Mount Saint Helens erupted. One of those students wondered why the Federal government wasn't being affected by it.)

I don't remember us doing much in Washington state. I remember going to Canada and visiting a few places there. I remember eating at a Space Needle-type restaurant and then going to a planetarium. One of the first images they showed was of the surrounding city and that building could be seen in the background.

I knew one of the highlights of this trip to Canada was that we were going to get to see The Banana Splits. It started off with a parade. We got to see the Splits pushing some go-cart. In front of us, one of them was able to get it started and then they drove off. It was exciting to watch. The strange thing was that Fleegle's fur was this light green color instead of the shades of brown that I was used to seeing on TV.

This parade led to something called "The Land of Milk and Honey," which looked like a state fair of sorts. There were a lot of rides and activities. We went to a show featuring the Splits. For about 30 minutes, they performed a few songs and comedy routines to what I later determined was a pre-recorded track. We ran around the Land of Milk and Honey for a few hours and saw another show with the Splits in another location at the park. It was the EXACT SAME SHOW! I wanted to see something different.

One other memory I have about Canada was getting hit in the head by a bear holding a giant key. Actually, it was a statue of a bear with a low-hanging key. I just didn't see it before hitting my head against it. It hurt.

So we worked our way down to Southern California and Disneyland. We got there early in the morning before the park opened. It was a lot of fun packed into one day. Back then, you had to purchase a packet of tickets to go on the various rides and attractions. If I recall correctly, there were A, B, C, D and E tickets. The C tickets were for the rides, and for whatever reason, we had fewer of those tickets than the others. Once you ran out of tickets, you went home. Because of this system, lines were not a problem at that time.

We took some pictures of us at Disneyland. In one of them, Loyd and I are posing with Pinocchio and I am crying. I don't remember why. I guess I might have been freaked out by the sight of this giant Pinocchio standing next to me.

A lot of people seem to have this same experience going to Disneyland: When we left the park, we were unable to find the car. (I guess we parked in the "Itchy" lot.) We walked around and around and just could not find the car. Finally, Dad had the rest of us stay put in one place while he ran around to find the car. About 15 minutes later, he showed up with the car. I got mad because that hour we spent looking for the car would have been better spent inside the park.

Our next stop was the San Diego Zoo. I don't remember a lot about the zoo, aside from some of the photos that were taken. And I really don't recall driving home immediately after the zoo. Apparently, Dad drove for 22 hours straight to get us home. I think we had run out of money and didn't have enough for a motel room.

So, that was our first family vacation. There were more to come, but not a lot more. I probably won't get to go into much detail about them, but this one was special because it was our first as a family.

A new vlog for Friday!

A lot of stuff happens in school that you just don't get answers for.



I can only recall one specific student who I know for a fact went into that new classroom. I would like to run into him after all these years just to find out what they told the students who got re-assigned. However, I have a feeling he wouldn't remember.

My first plane trip!

With Little League out of the way, we were ready to go on our first family road trip!

As I mentioned in my previous post, my father had spent the first few weeks of the summer working for his uncle in Portland, OR. He drove up there. I remember he took a package of peanut patties with him. There were nine patties in the bag and it was going to be a three-day road trip for him. I wondered if he would eat one patty for breakfast, one patty for lunch, etc. for the next three days and that would be his entire food supply. I don't think that's what he did.

The day after the attempt to throw me to another Little League team, Mom, Loyd and I took off for Albuquerque, where we were going to fly to Portland. (For the life of me, I cannot remember the arrangements for how we got to Albuquerque. It's possible someone drove us up there, but unless that person was going to Albuquerque anyway, it would have meant eight solid hours of driving. I really do not remember how we got there. Neither does my Mom, who I called in hopes of getting an answer to this question.) We stayed overnight with one of my Dad's cousins.

The next day, we went to the airport. This was going to be the first time on a plane for Loyd and me. Mom had us take some air sickness pills when we got to the airport. I swallowed mine. Loyd chewed his. AAAHHH! It tasted terrible! He had to spend the whole time at the airport with a wet washcloth in his mouth.

On TV, I had only seen airplanes boarded from the outside. This was how I thought we were going to get on the plane. We walked down this long hallway. Then, we appeared to be in some sort of vehicle. I thought this was the shuttle that was going to take us to the plane. Somehow, I realized that we were actually on the plane.

We had assigned seats. Every row had three seats on each side. Mom decided that, since we were going to be changing planes in Denver, Loyd would get the window seat on this flight and I would get the window seat on the flight from Denver to Portland. I didn't really mind, but Loyd was asleep virtually the entire time.

We got off the plane in Denver and got on the connecting flight. This plane was much bigger, with a section in the middle. The sides had two seats in each row. The way the seats were assigned, we had two seats in the middle section and one seat on the left side. This meant that I didn't get a window seat, again. I suddenly got mad about the situation because Loyd had wasted his window seat sleeping and I never got a window seat. Even worse was that it would be 11 more years before I got on a plane again.

I guess we got in late at night. I also don't remember how we got from the airport to my great-uncle's house in Portland. I just know it wasn't Dad who picked us up. I remember going inside and walking down a long stairway to the room where we would be sleeping.

The next morning, I woke up and walked up the stairs. I saw Dad at the top. He looked different. He had grown a mustache. I don't remember this part, but Loyd did not recognize Dad with the mustache after not seeing him for more than a month. He saw Mom kissing on this guy and wondered what was going on.

Dad had been working for his uncle so he could make some extra money for our road trip, in which we went through Washington state, Canada, and back down to Southern California and Disneyland. We covered a lot of ground during that first family road trip. I'll be going into more details in the next blog post.

Looking back at this, I'm surprised by how much I remember, but also at how much of the mundane, such as getting to Albuquerque and being picked up at the airport, has vanished from my mind.

Thrown off the team

One of the unusual aspects of school is the concept of the "last day of school." I had no idea there was going to be a last day of school. I guess it didn't sink in my mind why my family would go live in Portales for a couple of months each year and not teach school during that time. The idea of a summer vacation was very foreign to me even though I had experienced it several times before without realizing it. I just thought that we kept going and going to school and it would just never end and that we students would eventually become the teachers. That's what seemed to happen with my parents.

Toward the end of the school year, some cards were passed around to the boys inviting them to take part in Little League. I knew what Little League was. My father had coached the Little League team at the school next to our home the previous year. I was very interested in playing baseball. My parents bought me this funky green cap with white polka dots and a baseball glove. I was ready to play.

This particular summer, my father had gone to Oregon to earn some extra money working for his uncle, who was a developer in Portland. This meant that he wasn't around to help me learn how to properly play baseball. The plan was that my mother, brother and I would go up to Portland after a few weeks, meet up with him and we would start our first family summer road trip.

One thing that I may not have mentioned is that, up until I was almost 10 years old, we lived in the farming community about 10 miles outside of Artesia. That meant that going to town was a major undertaking and we always needed a good reason to go to town, like to go to work, go to school, get groceries and go to church. There were also social occasions which would require us to make that drive to town.

What that means is that if my mom was going to drive me up to Little League practice, she needed to find something to do to make the trip worthwhile. So, she would drop me off at practice and go run errands for an hour and then come back, pick me up and we would go home. We did this Monday through Friday. One particular day, the coach made us stay an extra half hour to practice. My mother had gone to the grocery store and had gotten some ice cream. She was so angry that the coach didn't let anyone know ahead of time that he was going to make us stay extra long that day and the ice cream melted.

Now, I had a good time at the practices. I got to hang around with some boys I went to school with and got to know some other boys who went to the other elementary schools. The Little League teams were not necessarily broken up by the five elementary schools in town.

I was having such a good time that I didn't realize that in competitive sports, you need to perform well, or else you're not going to get to play. The coach was always yelling at me for not touching all the bases, not knowing how to slide and being completely inept at catching a ball and batting. I didn't know this was a real problem. We were just having fun, right?

The day before we were supposed to make the trip to Portland, the coach had three of us players get into a car with one of the assistant coaches. We were driven to another elementary school where they were holding Little League practice. We met the coach there and he explained to us that we were going to have to start showing up and practicing with their team. He grabbed the funky green cap off my head and said he was going to get me a real baseball cap. The three of us were stunned. We didn't know what was going on. We got back into the car. One of the other boys asked, "What's wrong? Does the coach not like us?" The assistant coach said something to the effect that the team we saw didn't have enough players so we were being sent over there.

When my mom came to pick me up, I was about to tell her what happened, but the assistant coach talked to her first. She told him that it really didn't matter because we were going to go to Portland the next day.

Looking back, I realize that regardless of whether the other team needed more players, we were still sent over there because we didn't play well enough. That was surprising, considering that one of the other two boys was remarkably tall for his age, so you'd think that would be considered an asset. I guess incoordination comes in all shapes and sizes.

It also appears that my parents just put me through a big tease with Little League. They knew full well I was not going to be able to complete the season or play any games because we had already planned that big trip, which I will go into further detail in my next post.

The next year, toward the end of second grade, I got the Little League card again. I told my father I wanted to play. He said no and didn't offer an explanation. I think he thought I wasn't able to play and didn't want me to be treated badly by the coaches again. And I guess Little League would have been a lot less fun if we lost due to me making mistakes, but there was no way of knowing if that was going to happen.

The real schooling starts

So, here I am, in an actual school, in the actual first grade. Do you remember how I mentioned earlier that my family lived next door to the school where my father taught? (No? Then read the rest of my posts!) Well, they closed that school this particular year and sent its students and my father to Hermosa Elementary. He taught fourth grade there. One thing I should mention is that when we lived next door to the school, my father would bring home puzzles for my brother and me to play with on a daily basis.

The one thing I will focus on during the first grade is that a few weeks in, my teacher had me taken out of class once a week for at least two weeks. I was driven to another location in town. There, this man asked me several questions and had me solve puzzles. I had no idea what was going on and I really don't know why any of the other students weren't taken out of class to take part in this. I just know that the second time, I arrived back at the school late for lunch, literally with five minutes to eat before class started.

I was never taken out of class again. I never asked what was going on. Nobody explained what happened until I was about 25 years old. My father told me that when I was in the first grade, the teacher noticed that I could put the puzzles together really fast. These happened to be the same puzzles my father used to bring home. They moved them from the old school to Hermosa, so I was very familiar with them. Add to this that I could already read at least at an eighth grade level. The teacher is trained to recognize advanced mental development and had me taken out of school to be tested. My father says that what they determined was that I was of average intelligence, but I could put puzzles together really quickly.

I don't buy the "average" intelligence label, but I was definitely not "off the charts" intelligent. All the same, I have no idea what they would have been able to do if I had been. Maybe they would suggest I be sent to a private boarding school somewhere. There was definitely nothing in Artesia designed to accommodate someone at a "gifted" level of learning. Gifted programs in Artesia weren't put into effect for another 30 years.

And this brings me to my biggest complaint about public education as I experienced it. What does a school do with a first grade student who is able to read and write at least at an eighth grade level? Well, they just keep him in the first grade and keep him with the other students his age in order to raise the school system's standardized test score average.

Another problem is that the teachers were very ill-prepared to deal with students who were clearly several grade levels above their peers. One of the things I would do during down-time in class is read ahead in the book. You have no idea how many teachers would get angry when I did that. Usually the problem was that you would learn something, and then later in the book, it would explain that there were several exceptions. Trying to point out these exceptions during the first encounter with the material really irritated the teachers, who were trying to teach the material according to the agenda set forth in the book.

When I was in the sixth grade, one of the teachers had a newspaper clipping showing a picture of a 10-year-old boy who was attending college in El Paso. I really don't know what the point of this was. Was it something for us to aspire to? We were already 11 years old. It was too late for us to go to college. The thing that got me about this is that the teacher who passed around the clipping was one of those who got on my case for reading ahead in the book.

Something else that gnawed at me about that story was that there was this kid, who was going to graduate from college in four years. He was going to get on with his life. In my mind, he would be considered an adult and could move out of his parents' house, get a job, get a car and start really living. I now know that's not how it likely worked for him. He probably had to go to college at least another three years to get a Master's, become a doctor or a lawyer and still be living at home. But again, in my lack of life experience, that was how I viewed his situation.

I should point out that I was not the only one who was not properly serviced by this approach to exceptionally bright students. I met several who were much smarter than me and definitely deserved a better level of education than the one we got. And there was nothing we could do about it.

I don't know that I would have had a better life if I had been able to finish school any earlier. I just know I was miserable later on in high school and would have done anything short of dropping out to get it all out of the way.

I will have more on my issues with public education in an upcoming blog post.

Memories in my corner of the car

You may remember my post on my first actual memory and how I had a set of rules to correspond with selecting what it was supposed to be.



I've also experienced a large number of other memories from my early childhood that will pop up from time to time due to suggestion. However, I'm not going to write about all of them.