High School Auto Mechanics

As I got ready for high school, I got to choose which classes I wanted to take. There was a wider variety of choices. Since I was going to be driving my own car, I wanted to take Auto Mechanics, so that I would be able to take care of the car myself (and I didn't find my Dad to be a good teacher in this department because he would criticize me anytime I merely asked a question about something he considered common knowledge).

But there was a trick to registering for Auto Mechanics. It was set up by year. Auto Mechanics I was a one-hour class for sophomore year, and Auto Mechanics II and III were two-hour classes for the junior and senior years. Only sophomores could register for the I class and they were REQUIRED to take the two-hour classes the next two years. The first year was spent taking an actual class to learn the ins and outs of vehicle motors. The next two years, the students just worked on cars for the whole two hours. The Auto Mechanics teacher had a school-sanctioned side business in which he would buy junked cars, have the students fix them up and then he would sell them for a pretty incredible profit. Basically, he was running a legal child labor chop shop.

This would explain why the teacher was requiring everyone to stick with the class for three straight years. He probably had a couple of I classes in which some of the students didn't stick around for the next two years, which would have reduced his staff. Not to mention that those students probably got in over others who were willing to continue the other classes.

Let's put it like this: The sophomore class had 30 students in it. Let's say that five of the students move out each of the next two years. For the junior and seniors who worked on the cars, that would be a total of 45 students working two hours each, or 90 man-hours a day. Most of the local garages had nowhere near that many people on their staffs. And because the teacher didn't have to pay the students, he made a lot of money selling those re-furbished cars. (My Dad bought me one of those for my first car.)

I guess if I'd really wanted to, I could have gotten out of the junior and senior year classes. However, in retrospect, I really would have been out of my element in the actual class part. The other boys had likely spent a lot of time with their fathers learning how to work on cars. I didn't. I recall the episode of "Happy Days" in which Fonzie is teaching auto mechanics and tries to show how to change a carbuerator. He goes through it so fast that none of the students knows what's going on. I think that's how the class would have been for me.

But I found that I learned a lot about cars from the many situations I managed to get myself into. I still couldn't fix them, but at least I could tell when something is REALLY wrong. I just wished we'd had an Auto Mechanics teacher who would rather educate students than make sure he could always turn a profit.

Lessons to last a lifetime

One of the biggest things that was to happen to me during my teen years was upon me. I was going to learn how to drive! A car! Who needs that motorcycle? I can really go places in a car!

The only problem was having to learn how to drive. Learning to ride the motorcycle wasn't that big of an issue. However, it seemed like I caused more than my share of frustration on anyone who was trying to teach me to drive. I got lessons from both my parents and they both screamed at me at various times. Mind you, I never got us in an actual accident while learning, but I did come close a few times. I really can't blame them for screaming.

Up to this point in my life, I had heard my father use swear words from time to time. However, I had never, ever heard him use the "f" word. That changed the day he was trying to teach me how to drive a stick shift. I heard him use that word just one time and I knew he had never been angrier. I forget everything he said after that point because all I could think about was him using that word.

Learning how to drive from my parents was one thing. I still needed to learn from certified instructors. For whatever reason, it seemed like all the coaches I had to deal with in the sixth and seventh grade Athletics classes were the only certified instructors available for the school's Driver Education program.

At that time in New Mexico, you had to be 16 years old to get a driver's license. However, if you took Driver's Ed, you could get a license when you turned 15. This has caused problems lately when I have signed up for insurance on the Internet. When I would enter what year I started driving, the computer would freak out because it shows I was driving at 15 when, for the rest of the nation, the legal age is 16. And it's even worse if I try to put in 13, the age I got my motorcycle license.

The Driver's Ed program took place over the summer. It was composed of three phases: Class instruction, course training and road training. The class instruction was to involve 30 hours of class time. I thought it would be two hours a day spread out over 3 weeks, or maybe 3 hours a day for two weeks. I was wrong. It was six hours a day all in one week. There were about 30 students in my class, and none of us had spent all day in the same class room in more than six years.

The only part of the class anybody liked was watching the gory films of the real-life accident scenes. When I watched those, I didn't really think of it in terms of something like that happening to me. The thing that scared me was knowing that I might do something that would cause someone else to wind up like that.

The course training took place in the auditorium parking lot over two days. The lot had streets and blocks drawn on it. The instructor put out stop signs. There were six of us students taking part in the training. We were put in three teams and each car had a one-way radio through which the instructor would give directions. We basically drove around the blocks on the first day to that we could get used to braking and signalling our turns.

The second day, we had to practice parallel parking. The instructor had set out orange cones for us to park between. This was actually not the best way to learn how to parallel park. When you're parking between two real cars, you can see them clearly. The cones barely came up above the level of the hood and trunk. My partner was the only one who never ran over the cones. Still, all six of us passed and could go to the next level.

The road training took place over the course of five days. The person who was my partner from the course was also with me in this phase. The instructor had us driving around town. The car had a "chicken brake" for the instructor to step on in case something was about to get out of hand. The last thing either one of us wanted was for him to have to step on that brake. He did have to use it a few times while we were driving around. Our instructor also cussed a lot.

But we passed that. I would have to wait 2 months before I got my license because of my 15th birthday being in September of 1979. This meant I had to go the first two weeks of high school without a car. I had to walk a whole mile to school every day. (Keep in mind that I couldn't take my motorcycle. As I've mentioned before on a YouTube video here, I had to fight to keep the guys away from my motorcycle. Mom also said that if I rode a bicycle to school, I would get laughed off campus. That turned out to be a false statement from her.) I couldn't wait to take my driving test.

That day finally came after my birthday. My parents took me to the DMV. I passed the written test. The driving test went pretty smoothly, but the woman conducting the test questioned my having my right foot on the gas and my left foot ready to hit the brake at the same time. I told her that was how my Dad taught me to do it when backing up. I don't remember anything going wrong with the driving test. I just know that I passed and I was able to drive my car to school the next day.

I got so excited when I arrived at school and parked. I went in thinking I was hot stuff because I had a car. After a few minutes, I reached into my pocket. My keys weren't there! I immediately ran out to the car. I had left it unlocked with the keys in the ignition. I couldn't believe I could be that stupid during the first 24 hours of being an official driver.

I'll have more about my adventures with my car in a future post. Stay tuned.

An anniversary I no longer have to recognize

Today is December 27th. It was on this day in 1962 that my parents got married. If they had remained married, last year would have been their 50th wedding anniversary. Interestingly enough, that milestone never occurred to me until this year.

When I was growing up, their anniversary wasn't really something we celebrated. Mom and Dad just did their own thing that night and Loyd and I stayed with Grandma Bend or someone else since it was just two days after Christmas. On that note, Loyd and I never got them any cards or gifts or anything because we felt like it was just something between the two of them. We didn't think it really had anything to do with us.

That changed when I was 15. I guess Mom got some idea in her head that Loyd and I were going to get them something. That night, she and Dad sat us down. Mom did all the talking. She said that she was very disappointed that we didn't get them anything for their anniversary. We explained that we didn't know we were supposed to get something and that we'd never been asked to do anything in all the years before. That didn't matter to Mom.

I didn't really like having that guilt trip laid on me. I was somewhat determined to "forget" the anniversary the next year. However, when Christmas rolled around, Loyd said he didn't like that we had done that to Mom and Dad and suggested we get them something. I just wanted to get them a card, but he wanted to spend actual money and get them a present. We got them weights because it was something they both could use.

So, it went like that the next few years. On their 25th anniversary, a party was thrown at their house. It was Grandma Bend who did most of the organizing, but we still had to send out all these invitations. The good thing is that it meant that we didn't have to buy them any presents that year because the party was their present.

It was a good party. A lot of people came. One couple that Mom and Dad knew in college came all the way from Virginia. I was shocked. When I saw their name and address on the invitation list, I almost didn't want to send one to them because I knew for sure they were not going to come all this way. The funny thing was that they were not at Mom and Dad's wedding because his parents were celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary and they had just come in from their 50th anniversary.

Two years later, Loyd was in Spain and did not spend Christmas with us. This left me to get their anniversary present. Even though I had just been fired from a really terrible job and had only been able to line up a minimum wage job, I had a lot of money to spend on Christmas that year. I spent the most money I ever had for a present for Mom and Dad. I got them a CD player. It cost $127. I was proud of myself.

About a month later, Mom called to tell me that Dad had left her. She told me not to worry, that they were going to try to work it out. After getting off the phone, my first thought was, "Dang! And I just spent $127 on an anniversary present."

So obviously, they didn't work it out. They both got married to other people and they are still married to those other people. Dad and Gred have been married 22 years and Mom and Dend have been married 19. Even though I was at both their weddings, I have not sent as much as a card for their anniversaries. I have only called to congratuate them on their 10-year and 20-year anniversaries.

I don't plan to do more than that if they hit 25 or pass the 27-year threshold.

A Rant for Friday

Another note about the holidays, but this is very recent.



The stupid thing is that, despite what just happened, I will likely be ordering from the Bradford Exchange again in the future.

The most dreaded part of the holidays

While there was a lot of joy during the period between Thanksgiving and Christmas, there was also a lot of dismay. There was an activity that my family participated in for seven years that had Loyd and me feel like pulling our hair. It would have been a lot better than what we wound up having to pull.

There was a retired teacher in Artesia that my parents knew. She lived close to Hermosa school. She had three pecan trees in her backyard and every fall, she needed to have all the pecans picked up off the ground. I'm guessing that she used to have kids, but they grew up and moved away, never to return to help with the pecan crop. Somehow, my parents volunteered the whole family to go pick up all those pecans. I have no idea how we got roped into it. I guess it had something to do with us getting half the pecans to use for holiday recipies. This meant that Loyd and I did not get paid any money for something we never wanted to be a part of in the first place.

The pecans started hitting the ground in October, In November, we began picking them up. It wasn't so bad the first couple of days. However, because there were three trees, it took more than just one weekend to pick them up. We would have to go for a couple of hours after school a couple of days a week. It would be the middle of December and we would still be picking up pecans.

One problem with the pecans we picked early in November is that they would still have their hulls on. The hulls were these soft, moist coverings. After awhile, they would dry up and fall off the pecan. But since we started picking up pecans early, we had to remove the soft hulls, which were still moist and contained sap. If this sap got on your hands, they would be stained for three weeks. There was no way you could avoid getting the sap on your hands (unless you were wearing gloves, for which we were never given the option.)

For the first couple of years, we would take the pecans to Granddad Ogolon, who would shell them. Then, I guess he got too old to do that (or got fed up) and we had to start doing it ourselves. So, on the days that we weren't picking them up, we had to remove the shells. We had this metal device powered by rubber bands that would crack the pecans open. Then, we would have to dig the little shell pieces out of the cracks with a pick. Yes, we had to do them one at a time.

During the two weeks before Christmas, Mom would make all her Christmas candy using the pecans. It was during this brief period of time during the year that we got to have sugar in the house. A lot of the candy was really good because they contained chocolate. However, one year, Mom started "barbequing" some of the the pecans. She would put this seasoning on them and stick them in the oven. This made the whole house STINK for THREE DAYS. I thought she learned her lesson the first year, but she kept making the barbeque pecans and never figured out how to do it without producing that odor.

If I remember correctly, 1979 was the last year we had to pick up pecans. I think the woman died and the pecan trees got cut down. I don't know if it was the new homeowners or her children who made that decision, but it was apparent someone thought those pecans were more work than they were worth.

To this day, I avoid pecans as much as I can, especially around Christmastime. I will not even eat pecan pie.

The joy of opening presents whenever!

In a previous post, I wrote that I was not able to open any of the gifts my family gave me until Christmas Eve. This was a ritual we had all through grade school and college and the first few years after I graduated as I kept spending the holidays with my parents.

I was 28 years old when I spent my first Christmas way from all the members of my family. My mother sent me a package in the mail. I had to go to the Post Office to pick it up. When I got it, it was partially opened and damaged. There was a jar of jelly inside that broke and there was jelly all over everything. Mom had wrapped up a gift for me inside that withstood the jelly, but there were other unwrapped items that were not so lucky. I opened up the wrapped gift. It was a dual cassette player/recorder. I called Mom to let her know the package arrived.

"You didn't open it yet, did you? You're supposed to wait for Christmas!"

"Well, yeah, I had to open it. Some of the box had torn and there was jelly all over everything. I had to open the gift to make sure there was nothing wrong with it."

"Well, okay, but you're not supposed to open your gifts before Christmas."

"Right."

After getting off the phone, I realized that without my family around at Christmas, I was under no obligation to wait until the 24th or 25th to open my gifts. So the next few Christmases, I would open my packages as soon as I got them. I felt justified in opening them because if something happened and I died, I wouldn't be able to enjoy that gift.

Mom got mad every year because I would open up her gifts. However, one year, she sent the box so that it would arrive the day after Christmas. I still didn't learn my lesson from that.

So I had to stop this a few years ago when I became romantically involved with the woman I would eventually marry. My Mom actually talked to her and told her to keep me from opening my gifts early. I haven't been able to get the early Christmas since.

Thank you notes

After all the gifts have been opened, after all the food has been eaten, after all the relatives have been seen, and after the mess has been cleaned up, there is still one last detail to attend to: Writing thank you letters.

I do understand the etiquette in properly thanking people who have been generous enough to give me presents during Christmas. However, I had issues with sending letters to people who were there when I received the present and whom I had already thanked in person. This was the part that simply did not make sense.

For the first several years that I was growing up, we spent Christmas Eve at Grandma Bend's with Aunt Mard, Uncle Ord and Aunt Cind. We would open packages one at a time. After I opened each package and saw what was inside, I would express my gratitude right there and then in front of everybody. I had witnesses, but that didn't matter to my Mom, who forced Loyd and me to sit down and write the letters.

Most etiquette guides and advice columnists will say that the letter does not need to be very long. According to them, all you have to do is write a brief note mentioning the gift and letting them know you appreciate them thinking about you. Mom did not see it that way. We had to write long letters that detailed how much we appreciated the gift and what we were going to do with it. We also had to write and let them know what else we did during the holidays, how we were doing in school and how our family was doing.

She also did not want us writing "form" responses. Every letter had to be completely different. I can only assume this is how she was taught to write thank you notes by Grandma Bend and she felt that Loyd and I had to do the exact same thing.

Considering that my mother cannot be the only parent on this planet who inflicted this on her children, is it any wonder that we have generations of people who don't write thank you notes, or at the very least, look at them as some sort of insurmountable task?

Before, it was considered tacky to call and thank someone over the phone. No, a note had to be sent as it was the proper thing to do. I guess they came up with that rule when they had the postal service and the telegraph. When the telephone was invented, no one old enough wanted to sway from it because they had to write everything out and didn't have modern technology to make the etiquette easier to handle. They wanted everyone to suffer the same fate.

It seems we have the same problem with e-mail and texting nowdays. Those are certainly viable options for acknowledging receipt of gifts, but the older people will not accept them. Since this stubbornness goes back beyond the telephone, I'm surpised we don't have to carve thank you notes on stone tablets and mail those out.

One of these days, we'll be able to transmit our thank yous through thought control, but there will still be people who will want everybody to write letters.

My taste in presents has changed

I'm certain everyone has gone through this phase.



Nowadays, I'm lucky to get anything for Christmas.

Christmas tree dreams

As a child, I knew that the Christmas season was in full swing when we brought the tree home and decorated it. As I mentioned on a recent YouTube post here, it was a major pain to put up the Christmas tree every year. However, I loved having the tree in our living room once we were done decorating.

I would wake up early every morning before school and turn on the tree lights and just sit there for an hour watching them blink. It was still dark in the morning, and even though it was cold in the house, the tree appeared to provide much warmth. I would examine my reflection in the bulb ornaments. There were a couple that were silver, so they looked like curved mirrors that altered the shape of reality.

After school, I would examine all the packages under the tree and see if there were any new ones with my name on them. In the early years, the wrapping paper was not 100% opaque, so if Loyd and I held the gift under the light, we could make out the words on the package underneath. This was the routine for a couple of years. Then Mom and Dad got wise to our "x-ray vision" and started wrapping the packages with newspaper before putting the Christmas wrap on. The only thing we could read on the package was the daily Police Blotter.

For several years, we had an annual tradition regarding the tree: At some point during the holiday season, it would get knocked over. Sometimes it happened when Loyd and I crawled under it. There were a couple of times that it appeared to have fallen over by itself and one time when the dog knocked it over. All the dog did was run into the base, and that caused it to fall down. Mom and Dad would always get mad because it resulted in pine needles, tinsel and broken ornaments falling all over the floor. It was a pain in the butt to clean up, and Loyd and I always had to do it.

It was always hard to bring down the tree, and not because we had to spend hours afterward cleaning up. It meant an end to the season, an end to the dreams and the fact that we had to return to school.

In 1984, when I was a junior in college, a funny thing happened. On Christmas Eve, I realized that for the first time ever, I had not even attempted to look at the gifts underneath the tree to see which ones had my name on them. I didn't know if this meant I was growing up or becoming disenchanted with Christmas. It may have had something to do with this being the first Christmas we spent in the new house that my parents had moved into. I no longer felt like I was home for Christmas that year.

I doubt I will ever regain the same feelings for Christmas that the presence of the tree provided me in my past. But I will still have those memories.

What's up with the gifts?

One thing I enjoyed when I was growing up was going to see relatives. My mom had nine aunts and uncles from Grandma Bend's side and almost all of them lived within a 3 hour drive from our house. My father also had a large number of aunts and uncles, but they were scattered all over the country, so we didn't see them that often. Nevertheless, Mom's family was more than enough for us.

It was even better during Christmas when I was much younger, because we would show up somewhere and the relatives there would give Loyd and me little gifts. Sometimes they were toys, sometimes candy, but they were wrapped up very nicely and felt like Christmas Day had arrived a little early and gave us something to occupy our time until the Big Day arrived.

After I turned eight, I noticed that these same relatives stopped offering me door gifts, but they still gave them to the younger cousins. I was taken aback by this. I didn't realize that you reach an age in which you're too old to get trinket gifts. It was a very sad realization to know that Christmas would not be the same at that point.

So that does appear to be a part of growing up. What you receive around Christmas becomes less as what you give becomes greater.

This brings me to my next point, which is the receiving of the gifts that supposedly came from Santa. As the nearly weekly beatings Loyd and I received from Dad would attest, we had been fairly naughty during the year. However, come Christmas Day, we got almost everything we asked for.

So, what happened? Could Santa not see that we were bad? Or maybe he also saw that we got severely and unfairly punished, so that evened things out? I will tell you that it was clear it didn't matter how bad we were. We still got stuff from Santa.

I have to wonder if everything we got from Christmas was a result of Mom and Dad feeling guilty about the way they treated us during the rest of the year. That makes a lot more sense.

So now, when I see kids getting everything they want for Christmas, I get a little miffed because I know they likely did not suffer all year long as Loyd and I did. I appear to be of the mindset that you need to suffer to make Christmas truly worthwhile.

I realize it's not very healthy to think that, so I'm glad that Christmas only comes once a year.

Environmentalists will love this!

I was not able to come up with a Christmas-themed Friday video, so I decided to do this.



Now, there are some fast food drive-thrus that are fairly efficient, but it's never the case at In-N-Out.

A big Christmas surprise

Since yesterday's post was somewhat Christmas-themed, I thought I would just spend the next few posts reflecting on my past experiences with the holidays. You may recall that my first actual memory is Christmas related.

I think I'll start with the time I was seven years old. It was a couple of weeks before Christmas. My family took me and Loyd to Roswell to go to Sears. When we were walking down the main aisle, I got the biggest shock of my life up to that point. I SAW SANTA! He was just in the middle of the aisle talking to other kids. There was no display with a huge chair for him to sit in. He was just there and appeared to be hanging out for the sake of it.

I didn't know what to do. I knew that I had been a bad boy at times during the past year. From all the stories and songs, I knew that he would be able to see right through me and know that I had been naughty time and again. I tried to run off, but my father had a pretty good grip on me.

I know I was crying the whole time. I don't remember anything he said to me. I probably just stayed quiet and hoped that if I didn't say anything, it wouldn't be taken as a lie. I don't remember how Loyd was reacting.

It's interesting, but every year after that, when I saw Santa, it wasn't that big a deal. I guess it's because I still kept getting everything I asked for and more.

However, the anticipation that Santa would be visiting us continued to be a big deal. On Christmas Eve, it would be so hard for me to fall asleep. It was even harder when we were told to go to bed so that Santa would come. However, we could still hear the adults in the living room talking and making noise. I always wondered why we had to go to bed so early and everyone else got to stay up late. We knew Santa wasn't going to show up when people were up and walking around the house. We might as well have just been allowed to stay up late with everyone else as well. (Of course, I understand that they were setting stuff up for us to find the next morning, but you'd think they'd be a LOT more quiet about it.)

One year, Loyd and I started pushing back. We would not go to bed and were very firm in our stance. Mom, Dad and Grandma Bend were getting very irritated with us. Then the next thing we knew, we could hear sleigh bells outside! Mom and Dad said that Santa was there and we had to get to bed right away! We were in such a rush to get into our pajamas and sleeping bags. But again, we were in bed, and I could still hear our parents and everyone else, still awake, talking and making noise. I guess it was someone outside running around shaking sleigh bells for the heck of it, but it was something Mom and Dad decided to jump on since Loyd and I were being so difficult.

I remember one night in which I woke up and was hallucinating that I could see images of the nativity on the wall of Cind's bedroom, where Loyd and I were sleeping. I must have had a really rough night that year.

I stopped believing in Santa when I was 10 years old. This came about after I had broken something that "Santa" had brought me. My Dad yelled at me and said that cost a lot of money. I was confused. I thought Santa got it for me. That meant it was free, right? Well, if Dad says he paid money for it, maybe Santa didn't get it for me. I pondered that for the next year. When Christmas Eve rolled around, I told Mom and Dad I wasn't into the Santa thing anymore. They said I still needed to go along with it because Loyd still believed. I got a good night's sleep that year.

When I was 16, I just wanted to keep on sleeping. Even though Loyd had stopped believing at that point, Mom still made us get up early for Christmas.

As a grownup spending Christmas by myself, it seemed like I just never really looked forward to the holiday season. For a long period of time, I felt like I was missing out on that magic. But since I fell in love, got married and started my own family, I can feel it returning full force this year. I hope this trend continues.

Vegas, baby!

Even though my family had finished with summer road trips with the death of my Grandfather just a few months prior, we would still go on trips during the holiday season. One such trip took us to Las Vegas after Christmas of 1978.

My uncle Ord was working as a store manager for Woolworth's and he had been transferred to a location in Las Vegas from Spokane. He moved there with his wife Merd and their daughter Jend. Jend was my first cousin born on my mother's side of the family. She was born when I was 11 years old, so I didn't really get the chance to grow up with her like I did the cousins on my Dad's side.

My aunt Cind had met the guy she was going to marry, Jid. She brought him to Grandma Bend's house for Christmas that year. Jid was a farmer who raised pigs and cattle. He really didn't like being away from the farm, but decided to come out and get to know the family. He had long hair, a mustache and a beard. If someone today were to see him, they would think he was homeless. He looked like what my Mom was probably afraid I would look like when I grew up.

After all the festivities on Christmas Day, we loaded up the family car and Cind's pick-up and started off on the road to Vegas. We had planned to stop and spend the night at a motel in Flagstaff, AZ. However, when we were driving through, all of the road signs were missing their reflective material, so we could not read what they said, and by the time we realized that we had driven past Flagstaff, it was too late to turn around and go back to find a motel. We decided to keep driving.

We arrived at Hoover Dam at around 2am. We stopped and got out and looked at the view. At this time in my life, we had started discussing what kind of car I would have when I started driving the next year. I wanted a purple car because purple was my favorite color. This led to all kinds of disagreements as to how purple was an ugly color. At Hoover Dam, there were yellow lights illuminating the parking lot. Cind's pick-up was blue, but the yellow lights made it look purple. I pointed this out to my parents and told them that purple was a good-looking color. They still didn't like it.

We kept driving to Las Vegas. When we arrived, Dad thought it would be a good idea to drive down the Strip and through the Downtown area, so that's what we did. I didn't realize it at the time, but I was getting what would be one of my last glimpses of the classic version of Vegas. Everything was just as I had seen it on TV and the movies. All the color and neon is still burned in my memory.

We drove on to Ord's house. Because it was almost 4am, Mom decided we should sleep in the car because she didn't want to disturb Ord and his family. Loyd and I knew we were going to get into a fight over who got to sleep on the backseat and who was going to have to sleep on the floor. We told Mom that Ord wasn't going to mind if we went up and rang his doorbell. We thought he would be happy to let us in. Mom still insisted that she didn't want to be a burden. Somehow, I wound up on the floor and couldn't sleep one bit.

Thank goodness it doesn't get freezing cold in Vegas in December. Dad got up at 7am and rang the doorbell. Ord was surprised to see us because he thought we would be spending the night in Flagstaff. We brought everything in the house. Ord and Merd told us they wouldn't have minded letting us in if we had just rung the doorbell. Loyd and I groaned.

A few hours later, we were out and about seeing everything in Vegas. At this point, the adults didn't do any gambling. This was all new to Jid. He was used to being on the farm and having his meals at specific times. When it was 2pm, he finally said, "When do you people eat around here?" All the adults were stunned. They were so excited about being in Vegas, they had plain forgotten to eat. We found a Pizza Hut with an all-you-can-eat buffet. The only problem was that it was close to the end of the buffet and all the pizza had onions on it. I complained and they finally made a pepperoni.

Somehow, Loyd had gotten in touch with a friend of his who used to live in Artesia. This friend now lived in Los Angeles and they asked Loyd to come out and spend a few days with them while we were in Vegas. His friend's family was wealthy, so I guess they offered to buy his plane ticket. We saw him off at the airport. That left me alone with the family. I was getting a vacation away from Loyd. I was ecstatic!

The adults had gone out gambling and had left me with Merd. After awhile, she asked me if I wanted to go catch up with them at Circus Circus. We went and we found them. I spent a lot of time in the arcade area there. Later, we went to Ceasar's Palace. At the entry, there was this woman handing out these slips of paper in which people could get free spins for prizes. She handed me one. I smiled. She saw the braces and asked how old I was. I said 14 and she took the ticket back. Mom and Dad had me stay in this one particular area while they ran around the casino. At the time, I don't think Ceasar's Place had an area for children like Circus Circus. I knew that as a child, I was not allowed within five feet of a slot machine, so I had to stay put.

While I was waiting, I saw this gentleman walk by with a couple of people. I could hear him saying, "I don't want to be rich. I just want to be happy." I thought this was an odd sentiment to be speaking out loud at a casino. It made me wonder what had happened to him just prior. Did he just lose a lot of money on a stupid bet? I guess I'll never know.

I never got to go to the casinos again. I did get to go out and see "Superman." I had been looking forward to this movie for more than a year and was not disappointed. It was at the Fox Theater. This was the largest movie theater I had ever been to. I got there half an hour early, and bought a ticket and a souvenir program. There were plenty of seats when I went into the auditorium. I started reading through the program. Before I knew it, the theater had completely filled up. There were people directly on both sides of me. I was so entrhalled by the movie that I stayed all the way through the closing credit. I was probably the last one left in the theatre. The usher came up to me while the credits were still rolling to inform me that I could not sit through another screening. I told him, no, I just wanted to sit through the credits. The wait paid off. When it was over, the final words came on the screen: "Next Year: Superman II." I wondered how many people sat through all those credits to experience that.

I left the theater and Mom and Dad were outside waiting for me. I guess they had seen everyone else leave and wondered when I was coming out.

The next day, I just hung out at the house with Merd and Jend. I was reading through the newspaper. One of the funny things was the ads for all the shows in Vegas and how many featured Elvis impersonators. That night, I was watching the TV show "Dick Clark's Live Wednesday." There was a comedian on there and he started talking about Vegas. And then he started talking about all the Elvis impersonators. He mentioned many of them by name, the same names I saw in the ads. This blew my mind that someone was talking about someplace I actually happened to be at the time and I totally got it.

Loyd came back from LA. My family left. Cind stayed and worked at Ceasar's Palace as a tour guide in order to make some money before she would marry Jid about 8 months later. It was hard for me to leave because I had such a good time without doing any actual gambling and also because Loyd wasn't around.

I wouldn't go back to Vegas for 10 more years. I did get to gamble then.

We're a week away from Christmas!

So many Christmas trees, so many bad memories.



And I don't even go into the big mess that we had to clean up after it was all over. It's no wonder I now use fake trees.

The BIG talk

When I was a teenager, I was aware that at some point, I was due for a discussion about sex with at least one of my parents. I was not looking forward to that. While my father had been quick to discipline me by yanking off his belt when I was younger, he was not so forthcoming with regular advice to help me through my adolescent years. I knew that, at best, such a discussion would be very awkward.

I also wondered how he would present the information. Every day, since I turned 13, I anticipated this conversation. Then, one day, Mom told me she needed to talk to me. My first thought was, "Oh, great, this is the sex talk and my Mom's going to do it. This is even worse."

"Fayd, you're growing up and your body is going through a lot of changes right now."

"Yeah?"

"Well, you need to know that this is going to cause your skin to break out in pimples."

"Uh..."

"Now, it's nothing to worry about. We're going to take you to see a dermatologist so that maybe it won't mess up your face so much."

And that was it. I never, ever got the sex talk, from either parent. I don't know if it was because they had no idea what to tell me, or if they were saving it for a later day, or thought that I would learn all I needed to know in 10th grade Biology. I started dating the next year, and you'd think they would have sat down with me then. (In a future post, I will detail what happened with my first girlfriend. It's worth waiting for.)

It wasn't until after I had turned 40 that my father said anything about sex that wasn't tied to some joke. My mother has never brought up the subject.

That left me to sort of figure out stuff on my own. This mainly consisted of hearing other guys talk about it at the school yard. While a lot of people frown on sex information being dispensed this way, I found most of what was said to be fairly accurate. Although I highly doubted many of their claims of conquests.

At this time, no one ever talked about condoms. I had seen the vending machines in truck stop bathrooms up to this point, but I had no idea what they were for. I wouldn't know until I was in my 20s.

I should let you know right now that I did not have my first sexual encounter until after I had graduated from college. Yes, it's going to be a long wait for that. Keep in mind that you're going to have to pile through my stories for the next couple of months before I get there, but I had to live decades before I got to experience that.

As for my skin, I did break out. I did go see a dermatologist. I put cream on my face and took capsules for a couple of years, but I still kept getting pimples. I still get them to this day, at about the same rate I had when I was a teenager.

Chaos in the Choir, Part 2

In Friday's blog post, I dumped a lot of negative comments about my ninth grade choir teacher, Ms. F. The article ran so long, I had to continue it into today. But this is not going to be as negative. For today, there will be something somewhat sad, something very positive and will end with something that gave me perspective about her.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Ms. F appeared to be biased toward the girls and tended to cut down on the esteem of the boys. Most of the boys in the choir noticed this. I had always assumed that all the girls loved Ms. F because of this, but I found I later that I was wrong.

Ms. F was organizing the Spring Concert that would be a joint effort between the junior high and high school choirs. She had all these musical numbers and medleys planned out. I actually attended a few rehearsals that took place in the evening. However, I was aware that things were not progressing they way they should for a production on the scale of her vision. We weren't 100% certain of what was supposed to happen or when it was supposed to happen and we never seemed to get enough rehearsal on the medley numbers, one of which included the boys singing songs by the Village People. (Oh, we were so naive!)

I mentioned in the previous post that Ms. F had directed the high school choir's production of "Oliver!" I thought it was a very good production by Artesia High School standards. So, I was suprised by how disorganized the Spring Concert appeared to be.

Ms. F had set aside a Saturday in which all the choir students were supposed to come to the high school auditorium and help set things up for the concert. We were also going to rehearse all the numbers and figure out what order they were supposed to be. We were told to be at the auditorium at 9am.

I don't think I have mentioned that I have an obession with being prompt. This came from the dedication of my parents, who knew the importance of being on time (because they were teachers). I was never late for school, except for those times I had to go see the orthodontist. On those occasions, I would start having little panic attacks when I knew there was no way that I was going to make it to school on time.

It happened that the Saturday we were going to work at the audtiorium, my parents and brother were out of town for some reason. My parents allowed me to stay at home by myself all weekend. I had stayed up Friday night watching TV until about 1am. When I woke up, it was 9:10am. I was late! I started freaking out and put on my clothes. I ran outside, jumped on my motorcycle and drove over to the auditorium as fast as I could. I was expecting to get there and have Ms. F yell at me for being late because everyone else showed up on time.

When I got to the auditorium parking lot about 9:20am, there was only one car there. I saw Ms. F sitting outside the back door with her head down into her knees. I realized that no one else had showed up and she had probably been crying. I don't know if this was a co-ordinated effort among the choir students from both the high school and the junior high. It wouldn't have surprised me if none of the boys had shown up, but I was taken aback that the girls had decided not to come even though they had been the beneficiaries of Ms. F's accolades.

Ms. F decided to go along with her plans to start setting things up and asked me to go with her to a few locations. We had to get these benches for the Village People gym number. We had to put two benches in her car. If you've seen the episode from the fourth season of "Arrested Development" in which Gob is driving a limo with a giant cross in it, that's how her car looked with the benches sticking out of the windows.

We didn't talk much that day. We just ran a few errands and took stuff into the auditorium. We probably did stuff for about three hours before she said I could go home. Back at school on Monday, I told some of the other boys that I was the only one who showed up. The only reason I'm not certain if the "strike" was co-ordinated was that no one responded to my story with something like, "Oh, we all decided not to show up. Didn't you know?" Ms. F came into the classroom and announced that we were not going to do the Spring Concert. No one seemed disappointed. I was just kind of mad that I had to waste three hours of my Saturday helping her set stuff up when she was probably already aware at that time that she was going to cancel it.

I should point out she did not scold the other students for not showing up. However, I don't know if she did the same for the high school students earlier that morning.

The big positive thing about Ms. F is that during the short time that she was in Artesia, she met someone and fell in love. He asked her to marry him and they planned the ceremony for that summer. Because her fiance was the son of a man who lived across the street from our apartments and my Dad knew him, we were invited to the wedding.

I have to admit, it was the BEST wedding I've ever been to. (Yes, even better than mine.) They held it outdoors in the mountains. The sun was bright and shiny and made everything sparkle. The ceremony was filled with music throughout. The groom even sang a number with two of his attendents before the wedding got underway. There was so much music that we actually expected the bride and groom to sing a duet after they had exchanged vows. (Ms. F actually did not sing anything herself.) And the food was amazing.

(A side note: Remember that girl Tad from the previous post, who had gotten to play the title role in "Oliver!" and got to audition for All-State? She sang at her own wedding. I wasn't invited, but I read about it in the paper afterward.)

Ms. F did not return to teach the next year. She probably decided that since she had found a husband and her students despised her so much that it wasn't worth all the heartache to try to continue teaching music. (In fact, I even believe when she had her head in her knees at the auditorium, that was the moment she decided not to return to teaching the next year.)

And as for the item for which I had gained perspective: At the beginning of the school year, Ms. F had sorted us all out by vocal range. Soprano I, Soprano II, Alto I, Alto II, Tenor, Baritone and Bass. However, there was an additional section I had never heard of. She put some of the boys into what she called the "Cambiata" section. She explained it as being a range between Tenor and Baritone. I didn't question it and for years, I thought that the section that should be Tenor II was called Cambiata. Since I only ever participated in the choir in college and didn't take any actual music classes, I remained ignorant of the meaning of the word.

However, after I had graduated from college, I bought a synthesizer. Mom bought me a subscription to "Sheet Music" magazine. One of the premiums that came with the subscription was a music dictionary. I thought about the Cambiata section in junior high. I looked up the word. The dictionary said it meant "a note without tone. A toneless note." I WAS ENRAGED! This meant she thought the boys she put in this section couldn't sing! It reminded me of an episode of "Newhart" in which Bob said he was put in a special section of his school choir called the "Monotones." I thought this was Ms. F's way of doing the same thing. And I should add that she had no such special section for the girls.

Even though Ms. F continued to live in Artesia, the only other time I saw her again was when I was 16 years old and took part in a piano recital. I never saw her again when I was an adult returning home from time to time. If I had seen her, I probably would have managed to work the whole "Cambiata" issue into the conversation.

As it turned out, I would never get that opportunity. About five years ago, on the day after her 54th birthday, she collapsed at a banquet and died.

I'm actually glad that I never got to confront her about the "Cambiata" label. A couple of days before writing this post, I did some research on Google. When I typed in "Cambiata," the auto-fill offered "Cambiata Voice." I clicked on that and found that a Cambiata Voice is one that is in the process of changing, as when a boy enters adolescence. I realized that I had been wrong about my anger for 27 years. Ms. F wasn't being cruel. She was accurately labeling the voices, although she was a bit deceitful in saying it was the section between Tenor and Baritone.

After she died, the services were held at the high school auditorium and my mother attended. She told me they played a recording of her singing. I found it ironic that she did not sing at her wedding, but did sing at her funeral.

Chaos in the Choir, Part 1

My main source of frustration in the ninth grade was related to something I was very excited about in school: Music. The choir teacher I had in the eighth grade (the one from the fire drill story) got pregnant the previous year and decided to be a stay-at-home mom for the first few years. This meant we got a new teacher to take over the choirs at both the junior and high schools. We knew the name of the new teacher before the end of the previous school year. My father had actually gotten a call from her when she was looking for an apartment to rent. She previously taught in Beaver, Oklahoma before coming to Artesia. As we discovered, she was actually rather young at the time. She was 24 years old. This was going to be her second year teaching. I will refer to her as "Ms. F."

I have to start out by saying that my frustration grew from the fact that I both admired Ms. F and despised her. I admired her because out of all the music teachers I ever had, including grade school and college, she had the most musical ability. She was able to play piano and guitar perfectly. She was able to take modern pop songs and do piano and guitar arrangements by ear. She was able to conduct, sing and had perfect pitch. She may have been a musical genius. I'm surprised that with all that talent, she didn't try to pursue a career in the music industry. I'm certain that she could have been a big success behind the scenes. However, one thing I don't think she could do was compose.

Understand that is not praise that comes lightly. I am very passionate about music and admire those who do it very well, so even though the good things I am saying about her only fit in the one seemingly small paragraph above, it should rightfully cover about 10 pages. I'm not that good of a writer when it comes to handing out acknowledgements like that. What follows is everything I despised about her and it tears me up that it's going to take so much more room than the positive stuff.

It's so hard to know where to begin. I guess I will start with the issue I liked the least: She appeared to show favoritism toward the girls in the choir. The girls frequently received high praise from her. The boys, not so much. I was not the only one to notice the discrepancy. At the end of the school year, there were only two boys who had pre-registered for high school choir the next year. I was one of them. The other one always denied being that other person.

Why did she do this? Did she think girls were precious and boys were rotten to the core? (I should mention that Loyd had Ms. F as his sixth grade music teacher that same year. He also noticed that the girls appeared to get more attention from her.) This was a question that plagued me until I saw something on "20/20" a few years later. It was a report on how female high school students don't do as well as their male counterparts. The report included footage from a teachers' seminar that showed how instructors typically treat male and female students differently, with the females usually being talked down to. It struck me: Ms. F must have gone to one of these seminars and decided that she was going to single-handedly reverse that trend. How she was going to do it when she was just teaching music classes, I don't know, but I guess she wasn't going to let a 5% total student body contact number stand in her way. (I should add that attempting to reverse that trend would have been a complete waste of time in Artesia. Every graduating class I saw in the next six years had a female valedictorian and the majority of those graduating with honors were female.)

As for this accusation, I can only cite anecdotal incidents. For starters, there were the All-State tryouts. All-State was this event that took place every year that took the best singers and musicians in high schools from across the state and brought them to Albuquerque to perform in Popejoy Hall. Students in grades nine through twelve were able to participate. When I was in the eighth grade, at least 10 ninth graders got to go to the audition. I was looking forward to my chance to take part. However, I never heard anything about it until Ms. F had called for an evening practice of our pop ensemble. When I arrived, the high school choir students were wrapping up their rehearsal for their production of "Oliver!" One of the girls from the ninth grade (I'll call her "Tad") had been selected to play the title role. I had no idea that was going on. Ms. F didn't let us know anything about auditions for that. But it didn't really matter because I still wouldn't have been picked for the part as my voice had dropped to a bass level that year.

When the "Oliver!" rehearsal finished, Tad said something to the effect that she was coming back later for the All-State rehearsal. I asked Ms. F about getting into the All-State tryouts. She said I couldn't do it. I asked why. She said that the junior high principal only allowed her to take four students that year. So she selected two girls to audition and two girls to accompany them on piano at the tryouts. I guess because none of the ten ninth graders who auditioned the year before made the cut, the principal decided to reduce the number of students who could get out of school that day. Ms. F simply selected the students she liked best and held no auditions whatsoever. In the end, the two girls she pegged as having the best chance to make it were not selected for the choir.

One year later, I auditioned for All-State and I made it. The day I got the news that I was going to be in All-State, I actually saw Ms. F. And if I hadn't been under arrest for shoplifting at the time, I would have rubbed it in her face. (That's a story for later.)

Tune in Monday. There will be more, a lot more.

A special song for Friday

You really have to be into 80's music to get this reference:



"Doubleplusgood" was my favorite song on the "For the Love of Big Brother" album. It rocks! I still have the cassette somewhere.

Best and Worst Birthday Presents

When I turned 14, I received two presents that had major impacts on my life that year. As the title of this article suggests, they were the best and worst birthday presents I ever received. And to get them both the same year is just less icing on the cake.

The best present was a motorcycle. My parents had let me know way ahead of time I was getting one, so this wasn't a surprise. I had to get a motorcycle driver's license in order to start riding it on my birthday. I went to the DMV and took the written test. I got 100%. Then I took the driving test, which consisted of me driving in a circle in the parking lot. My father watched while the woman from the DMV administered the test. I took a turn and hit a telephone pole with my rear tire. And then, when I came to a stop, I forgot to pull the clutch, so the engine died. The woman from the DMV shook her head and told my Dad I didn't do too good, but since I got a perfect score on the multiple choice test, it was enough to issue me a license.

While I immensely enjoyed the motorcycle because it represented a form of freedom, I did not like that I mostly had to use it exploring dirt and primitive roads around camping areas. When we were on solid paved roads, it was a blast. Off road, it was a nightmare because I can't go very fast on those kinds of roads and I actually fell off several times. It's not a fun experience to believe for a few milliseconds that you're about to be taken to the hospital or even die.

Many years later, Mom wrote in the reunion newsletter for Grandma Bend's family that she felt like I hated that motorcycle. That's right, she actually made me look like an ungrateful spoiled brat to everyone in the family. She just didn't get that I hated risking my neck taking the motorcycle to places I didn't want to go to in the first place.

Now, before you start thinking that motorcycle was also the worst present at the same time, keep reading: My birthday that year was on a Friday. (I'm going to go off on a tangent here to complain about my birthday.) Since my birthday is September 1st, more often than not, it winds up on the Labor Day weekend. Every year for Labor Day, my family went camping. This meant my birthday was usually spent away from home, normally with my parents' friends (the ones from the Radio and Bible Stories Christmas incident). This also meant that I almost never got a normal birthday party that my friends could attend. Loyd got a birthday party almost every year with his friends, but I didn't. And it also didn't make sense that we HAD to go camping for the Labor Day weekend. I mean, we had the whole summer to go camping. Why couldn't we do it before school started? Even worse was that it rained every year in the location where we went camping, so I was completely miserable. Add my attitude problems during my teen years and you have a perfect storm of discontent.

As usual, we left for the campground on Friday after school. This particular year, Grandma Bend and Aunt Cind went with us. My birthday would be more of a celebration, or so I thought until I got my birthday present from them.

I had opened up presents from Mom, Dad, Loyd and my parents' friends. I can't really recall what they gave me, but I'm certain they were things I requested. However, Cind gave me this plain brown bag with something inside and said it was from her and Grandma Bend. I opened it up. It was a disposable razor and shaving cream. I was not pleased. I mumbled, "Thanks," but I know the look of disappointment on my face could not be ignored.

Mom got on my case later and said I should appreciate the gift from Grandma Bend and Cind more because it showed that they thought I was mature enough to shave. At the time, I couldn't really express my feelings properly because there was so much going on in my mind.

This was the biggest problem I had with the gift: On the way up to the campground, we had stopped at a convenience store to get a few supplies and snacks. It looked like Cind and Grandma Bend had just bought the razor and the shaving cream at that store. The thought occurred to me that they forgot it was my birthday and they scrambled at literally the last minute to get me something. That's what Mom didn't get. If they had gotten me one of those nice shaving gift sets, I would have appreciated it. If they had just filled the bag with candy and gum, I would have appreciated it. But the razor and shaving cream off the shelf at the convenience store? There was no thoughtfulness in that gift, so they shouldn't have been expecting any thoughts of appreciation from me to come their way.

As it was, I wouldn't even be able to start shaving for another year. And I never used that razor or shaving cream. But I did use that motorcycle.

Welcome to the ninth grade!

With all the drama that took place during the summer of 1978, I was ready to return to school. I would be entering the ninth grade. Although in most places, that marks the beginning of high school, it just meant the end of junior high for me and everyone else who lives in Artesia.

One thing no one ever explained to me (including my parents, who were both teachers) is that for the first time in my education, my grades were actually going to count for something. They would be used for my transcript that would be accessed by colleges that I would apply to.

I should also explain that I went through a strange phase during the summer in which I didn't expect to see myself going to college. At this point in my life, I wanted to be a cartoonist and sort of didn't know what college was going to help me to make that my career. However, I also had no idea how I was going to make a living being a cartoonist. I just thought you set out for something and it just happens. When I read Charles M. Schulz' autobiography, it just appeared that he didn't have a set plan for accomplishing what he did in life. Things just happened to go his way. My parents weren't very clear about what was waiting for me after I got out of high school. They had no idea how cartoonists got started, either.

And I appeared to be getting really sick of school at this point. Eight solid years of frustrating education can really wear on someone and I just felt like blowing off steam and my classes. I just wasn't aware of the consequences. Eighth grade would have been a better year to goof off. I wish I had gotten all that out of my system then. I could have probably landed a higher rank in the Class of 1982 and graduated with honors or better.

However, I guess that didn't really matter in the end. It wasn't like I was trying to go to Harvard or Yale. But it would have been nice to have left school with a higher rank and grade point average. As it was, I was number 22 out of 200 students in my graduating class. I missed the 10% mark, but that's because about 20 students didn't complete all their requirements needed to actually graduate.

So, the ninth grade had its challenges. Coming up in a future post, I will be examining my biggest challenge for the year: Choir.

The aftermath of my Grandfather's death

With my Grandfather gone and the rest of the summer of 1978 ahead of us, there were still some things that had to be done that impacted my family life.

I don't know if there was any official will, but one of the things my family got was my great-grandfather's blacksmithing equipment. It was an anvil, a sledge hammer and a hand-cranked blower. Of these three items, only the anvil remains in my father's possession.

There were a number of other items of value that belonged to him. My grandfather could play the fiddle. I never saw that again. My grandfather had won two belt buckles competing in the rodeos at Madison Square Garden. I never saw those buckles, but I know they existed. They wound up going to my Dad's sisters.

Another thing that I know was in my grandfather's possession was the Ogolon family tree. Yes, it was an actual fully-researched geneological timeline that went back several generations. I only ever saw it once, and I got rather angry about it at the time. The tree had apparently last been updated in 1963, the year before I was born. The tree listed my father and showed he had married my mother. It also showed that Aunt Pand had three children up to that point: Wend, Sted and Grid. But it stopped after that. When I saw this, I felt like I wasn't a part of the family. I immediately said, "Hey! Loyd and I aren't on here! Somebody get a pen and a ruler and let's make a few additions!" Dad said I couldn't do that. We had to get someone official to do it or something like that. The tree hadn't been updated in more than a decade at that point. Why did we have to wait to have a specific person to do it? At any rate, I never saw that family tree again. I have no idea where it's at.

An odd thing of Granddad's turned up a few years later. Every morning that I spent at the ranch, I saw him drink coffee out of this jade mug. I didn't realize it at the time, but I actually had grown to associate him with that mug. About five years ago, I was staying with Loyd in Santa Fe. Among his dishes, I saw this jade mug. I immediately wondered if it was Granddad's. Without me saying anything about it, Loyd said it was Granddad's. I guess he had gotten it after Grandma had been sent to the nursing home.

The biggest thing after Granddad's funeral was helping Grandma deal with not having her husband around anymore. My father and his two sisters decided that what they could do was have us grandchildren each come up and spend alternating weeks with Grandma. One week, Loyd and I went. The next week it was Pand's children and then Berd's children. Then we continued the cycle again.

The first night Loyd and I went to Grandma's, we went to bed in the guest room. This was the first time for us to be spending the night since Granddad died. In the dark, I could hear Loyd crying and he cried for a long time. I felt really bad, because I felt like I should be crying, too. However, no tears came. That made me question whether I actually loved my grandfather. I never heard Loyd cry himself to sleep again that week.

Our days were spent doing chores around the ranch. We collected eggs out of the barn in the morning. We did some raking in the garden and some general cleaning up. We then spent the rest of the day running around the ranch.

This was also the routine for our cousins. Everybody thought they were doing their part to help Grandma through this tough time. More than 30 years later however, I found out we weren't considered that helpful. When I went to see my grandmother in the nursing home for what would be the last time, I took a video camera and recorded our conversation. Grandma was suffering from dementia and didn't really recognize anyone, not even her own children. I got lucky because when I went to see her and told her my name was Fayd, she said, "Fayd... Fayd Ogolon! How are you?" A big smile came across her face and I could tell that she knew who I was. Unfortunately, that only lasted a few seconds as she quickly forgot who she was talking to and didn't smile again. (Loyd had seen her several times. He said he never even got that much recognition out of her.)

She continued talking about things that had happened in her past. One of the things that she mentioned was that after Granddad died, the grandchildren came up to visit her every week. However, since we were kids, we weren't able to do a lot of the heavy work needed to run the ranch. She needed the grown children to come and help her out, not us grandchildren. She felt like her children had abandoned her at that point.

But just because someone close to you dies, they never completely leave you. They just leave you a little less complete.

A bit about bullying

I know everyone's been subjected to some form of bullying in some point in their lives, but for me, it sometimes feels like it just happens all the time.



I often feel like giving up before any kind of confrontation has a chance to begin.

Losing my Grandfather

One of the saddest chapters in my life was the death of my Grandfather. It happened during the summer of 1978. My family was starting off on a road trip to go to Washington, DC.
We had been looking forward to this trip all year. We were going to do all the touristy stuff: Go to the White House, Congress, Lincoln Memorial, the Smithsonian. I thought it was going to be more fun than Disneyland. (Yes, I actually thought that.)

When we started the trip, we stopped at the hospital in Lubbock, TX. Granddad Ogolon was there getting a knee replacement surgery, or something like that. We visited him in his room. Grandma Ogolon was there. I remember him breathing into this machine that had a small picture of a clown on it.

It seemed like we were there for a couple of hours. I don't remember this part, but Loyd says he and I went and played on the elevators. The tallest building in Artesia was three stories high, so we didn't get to ride in elevators very much. I only remember spending time with Granddad.

We left the hospital and I really don't recall very much about the trip up until the point we got close to Nashville. I do remember when we crossed a bridge and wound up in a new time zone. It was neat because it was very obvious when we had to change our watches. It's not like driving from New Mexico to Texas, where you see the "Now Leaving New Mexico" sign and a mile later you see the "Welcome to Texas" sign. (Is that line on the map that marks the boundaries between the two states actually a mile wide?)

When we got to Nashville, we went to the GREATEST KOA KAMPGROUND IN THE WORLD! I couldn't believe all the stuff they had there, compared to the other KOA Kampgrounds we had been to before the last few years. They had this amazing arcade! They had mini-golf! They had a huge swimming pool! And since we were in Nashville, they had live music!

The fun and games ended that night. We received word that Granddad had suffered a stroke at the hospital and that he might not make it through the night. None of us could sleep. The next morning, Dad called the hospital and found out that he had died.

The first thing we had to do was get Dad to the Nashville airport so that he could fly home to help the family take care of things. Then, Mom had to drive Loyd and me all the way back to New Mexico where we would meet up with the rest of the family. For my Mom, it was a nerve-wracking experience because she had never driven the camper on her own. We only made one overnight stop along the way. I don't remember where we were, but the KOA Kampground we stopped at was really cruddy. (Not just compared to Nashville, I might add. It was probably the worst one we'd ever been to.)

We made it to the ranch the next day. Loyd and I got out of the camper and sadly hugged Grandma. Other family members were there. I don't remember too much about what happened between the time we got there and the next day when the funeral took place. I recall Aunt Berd talked about how her two youngest children, Rid and Jud, would not be at the funeral because they were too young to know what was going on.

At the church, we all came in together as a family. My cousin Wend was especially broken up before the service started. I didn't cry or anything during the funeral. There were a lot of people gathered outside the church because there wasn't enough room inside to hold everyone who had come. The pastor delivering the sermon expressed how well-known my grandfather was throughout the state of New Mexico. I wasn't aware that many people knew much about my grandfather, but judging by the turnout at his funeral, I guess it was true.

As I've mentioned before, I had been to one funeral before this one. However, that was just for a friend I only knew for 3 1/2 years. This was someone I'd known my entire life. On top of that, if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be around. This started to sink in as the service continued. When it ended, we waited for everyone to walk by his open casket, then it was our turn. I didn't really spend a lot of time at the casket, I just felt like I had to keep the line moving.

The graveyard was in the next block over, so we didn't need to drive over there. The layout of the graveyard in Grady is very strange. You never know whether you're standing on someone's grave if you're not careful.

The graveyard service was concluded and we all sort of went back to our lives pretty soon after that. However, the effects of my grandfather's death would continue into our lives for a little bit after that. I'll get into that in the next post.

Just like I was unaware that our visiting Granddad in the hospital would be the last time we would see him, I was unaware that summer would also be the last cross-country road trip vacation our family would go on. We never did get to go to Washington, DC and I myself have never gotten to go.
It feels like we lost a lot more than we bargained for that summer.

Friday fun with business

Sometimes I just tell jokes when no one is around.



Very bad jokes. That's why there's no one around.

What's the big deal with 12/07/41 anyway? It's not like it's 09/11/01. (Redux)

There's something I noticed during my first eight years of public education: In all that time, I never once had a class in which we completed the textbook. This means English, Math, Spelling and History, especially History. It seemed like every time we got close to World War II, it was already the last day of school.

I think the reason for this was that the History teachers were alive when World War II was going on and remember that period very vividly. To talk to students about things they lived through probably made them feel old, so they probably delayed getting to that subject as long as possible and spent a lot more time on the Civil War, which they likely didn't experience (although I don't know about some teachers I had).

So when we came to my first period English class on 12/07/77, the teacher asked if we were aware the occasion that this particular day marked. None of us knew. She got really upset and went on this rant about the importance of this day and how we should know what happened in 1941.

None of us knew what to say. I mean, we all knew about Pearl Harbor, but no one ever made a big deal about the date. She made it seem like it was our fault we were ignorant. It wasn't. I felt that if she felt so strongly about everyone knowing what December 7th was, she should have been a History teacher. We probably would have been better off.

However, I will point out that she made no mention of the anniversary for 11/22/63 when that came to pass two weeks prior.

I will say this: After that incident, I always knew what December 7th was about.

So this makes me wonder if the events of 09/11/01 will be regarded in the same fashion come 2037. Eighth graders that year will have been born in 2024, which is just 11 years from now. Will they know the date, or will they just know about that time that terrorists crashed jets into the World Trade Center? It also makes me wonder how much history students are going to have to learn at that point in time. It seems like every year, we gather more and more history. This means some stuff gets pushed out of the way.

What's the big deal about 12/07/41 anyway? It's not like it's 09/11/01.

There's something I noticed during my first eight years of public education: In all that time, I never once had a class in which we completed the textbook. This means English, Math, Spelling and History, especially History. It seemed like every time we got close to World War II, it was already the last day of school.

I think the reason for this was that the History teachers were alive when World War II was going on and remember that period very vividly. To talk to students about things they lived through probably made them feel old, so they probably delayed getting to that subject as long as possible and spent a lot more time on the Civil War, which they likely didn't experience (although I don't know about some teachers I had).

So when we came to my first period English class on 12/07/77, the teacher asked if we were aware the occasion that this particular day marked. None of us knew. She got really upset and went on this rant about the importance of this day and how we should know what happened in 1941.

None of us knew what to say. I mean, we all knew about Pearl Harbor, but no one ever made a big deal about the date. She made it seem like it was our fault we were ignorant. It wasn't. I felt that if she felt so strongly about everyone knowing what December 7th was, she should have been a History teacher. We probably would have been better off.

However, I will point out that she made no mention of the anniversary for 11/22/63 when that came to pass two weeks prior.

I will say this: After that incident, I always knew what December 7th was about.

So this makes me wonder if the events of 09/11/01 will be regarded in the same fashion come 2037. Eighth graders that year will have been born in 2024, which is just 11 years from now. Will they know the date, or will they just know about that time that terrorists crashed jets into the World Trade Center? It also makes me wonder how much history students are going to have to learn at that point in time. It seems like every year, we gather more and more history. This means some stuff gets pushed out of the way.

Piano Lessons

Since I was a little kid, I had wanted to learn how to play the piano. It drove me nuts when we went to someone else's house and they had a piano. I wasn't permitted to touch it because I didn't know how to play. (Years later, I would understand the logic of that statement because it's very easy to knock pianos out of tune.)

I had asked my parents several times over the years to learn how to play. The answer was always "no." It actually had to do with us being poor until we owned apartments and collected rent from them. So, imagine my surprise when Mom asked me if I really wanted to learn piano. My favorite rock star at the time was Elton John. I said, "Yes!"

My parents bought an upright piano that they kept in their bedroom. My teacher was a preacher's wife who gave lessons to a lot of other older students. The girl whose weekly appointment was scheduled before mine was three years older than me and she was starting at the same level.

I was actually glad that I didn't learn how to play piano until I was 13. At that point, I had a greater understanding of music and how the notes corelated to the keys on the piano. I got to start out learning to play chords. The funny thing is that I never learned how to play "Chopsticks" like everyone else did.

A lot of the kids that I knew when I was younger who took piano lessons actually stopped by the time they reached the age of 13. Many didn't see the point since they had decided not to take part in the school music programs. For others, music was stuff only sissies did and it wasn't cool.

Mom told me I had to practice an hour every day. This wasn't a problem at first, but after a few weeks, I got tired of having to play kids' songs, even though I was playing chords. I also tried figuring out to compose. The only problem was that I had only learned three chords up to that point. (I understood the cliche that rock musicians only know how to play three chords. While it's technically true, you figure out that the three chord structure makes for a very familiar sound. All those minor, suspended and 7 chords just make it sound more interesting.)

Another issue is that I would make a lot of mistakes. It didn't matter how much I practiced, I could almost never get through a single song without making at least one mistake. It was very discouraging. Mom would accused me of not practicing enough because there were a lot of kids out there who played the piano and never made mistakes. Like my handwriting, my fingers could not move as quickly as my brain. This is what caused the mistakes. I would also have the same issue when I was learning how to type in the ninth grade.

The only real problem I had with learning the piano that that Mom and Dad decided to allow Loyd to learn how to play guitar at the exact same time. He was ten years old. I thought this was very unfair because I wasn't offered that opportunity when I was that age. And it wasn't like that cost anything at first. My aunt Cind had a guitar when she was younger and my parents borrowed that for Loyd to learn on. Why couldn't they have done that for me?

However, I doubt my parents would have let me take lessons to learn both instruments. In the end, I lucked out with the piano because when I got electronic keyboards later in the future, I didn't have to tune them.

But I still think they should have made Loyd wait until he was 13 before he got guitar lessons.

Dealing with death

While I was going to school, I was aware that a couple of fellow students had perished. I didn't really know them except as faces in the hallway, so I wasn't really affected by their sudden lack of presence.

One Sunday evening, my Mom told me she had gotten a phone call that one of my friends had died riding his motorcycle. I guess he got hit by a truck. I was stunned. I didn't know what to think. I went to my room and all sorts of thoughts went running through my head. I thought about how he was trying to get somewhere and the person in the truck was trying to get somewhere, and how my friend was never going to get where he wanted, but the person in the truck would likely get to arrive at his planned destination. I was not angry at the person in the truck, because I didn't know who was at fault. (I actually never did find out.)

I thought I was only one of a few students who knew about it, but when I got to school the next day, everyone was talking about him. He was one of my classmates for first period English and when I went into the classroom, I saw my English teacher talking to another teacher. While I couldn't hear the conversation, I could tell by the look on her face that she was being given the news for the first time.

Two days later, the funeral was held. Students were permitted to leave school to go to the funeral. My father took my brother and me out of school. The funeral was being held at his church. After picking up my brother, we drove by the only funeral home in town. There were two of my classmates waiting outside. Apparently, they thought the funeral was there. We offered them a ride to the church.

We were seated for about 10 minutes before the services began. The family members were ushered in. I remember one woman crying and screaming out loud. I was rather disturbed by this showcase of emotion because I certainly wasn't feeling anywhere near that bad. I wondered if I was supposed to be acting like that. No one else was, so I figured not.

I don't remember anything said during the service. We eached walked by his casket and then went outside to watch the pallbearers move the casket into the Hearse. We became part of the funeral procession and slowly made our way out to the cemetary. This was all new to me. I really didn't know what to think of it. I was really confused as to why we had to go to the gravesite since the services were held at the church. Whenever I saw funerals on TV, everything took place in the graveyard. I would later realize that this was the pattern for virtually all funerals.

I would also discover that this would be the beginning of my own pattern for attending funerals. I've never shed a tear at funerals, not even at those of close family members. That probably has something to do with my possible Asperger's in that I just emotionally detach myself from these situations. However, I should note that I always see Loyd get choked up at those funerals. I don't know how I'll be at the funerals of my parents or my brother, but I can wait to find out.

UPDATE (07/11/17): My father and his wife passed away in October of 2016. However, I will be writing about that experience in a blog post way in the future.

Things I actually liked about junior high school

For a lot of people, junior high school was the worst place imaginable as far as public education goes. While I tend to agree that there was a lot to deal with emotionally (and physically), it wasn't all that bad (even though I've done nothing but complain about it up to this point).

The number one thing I liked was that I was not required to take Physical Education for the two years I attended. I had just been through two years of torture with Athletics in intermediate school. It was a nice break from being pushed around and bullied by any P.E. teacher that I would have gotten.

On that note, I also enjoyed not having to stay after school for Athletics. I was able to just leave school at the end of the day and go straight home. I realized later that staying after school didn't really do anything but keep me there for an extra hour every day.

I also did not have to take Science classes. Don't ask me why they didn't force this upon us for two years. I'm actually surprised that anyone signed up for Science. Science wouldn't have been so bad if I'd had a decent teacher, but I always got the feeling that the teachers were somewhat forced into a subject they had no interest in. If the teacher didn't really put in the effort to show that he had command of the subject, then I would have no interest in showing respect for the subject.

I got to take Choir for an actual class. And the class was right before lunch, right after two solid hours of English. It was a great way to get to the midway point of the school day.

In the eighth grade, I had Arts and Crafts for my final class of the day. It was a nice way to wind down. (However, in ninth grade, I had Algebra for my final class. I couldn't really wind down then.)

The lunch room was a lot more spacious. It had this really high ceiling and it just felt like there was plenty of room for everyone. Quite frequently, I was able to have one table all to myself.

And of course, there was knowing that I wouldn't have to deal with my parents at school for the two years I was there.

Yes, there are times when I am very negative about a lot of stuff, but from time to time, I am able to find a few bright spots here and there, especially in places where other people cannot find them.

More on the (a)bus(e) to Park Junior High School

I thought I would visually demonstrate the major problem with blaming the late bus on the junior high students.



I would like to think that some kind of agreement was reached between the principal and the students, or maybe they just made the bus leave earlier. I don't know.

Predators at Park Junior High School

My mother had warned me to be careful during lunch time at junior high because there were a lot of boys from the high school who would, during lunch, cruise along the stretch of road behind the school next to the playground. (Actually, it wasn't a playground. It was a big field where the junior high football team practiced after school, but I don't have a better way to describe it.) I wondered why anyone would want to waste gas driving around the junior high school for a half hour every day.

I found out why the first day. The high school boys were coming over to pick up on the junior high girls. They were always there, every single day. It didn't matter if it was raining or snowing, they would drive up and down that road, pull over from time to time and talk to any girls who would approach their cars. And there were always girls who would get in and ride.

The boys who would do the lunchtime cruise were not the best and the brightest from the high school. The Alpha males, like those who were on the starting and secondary lineups of the football team, did not need to troll the junior high to get dates. The ones who did were more apt to wind up as employees of the refinery once they graduated from high school or dropped out when they were 16. (Yes, back then, you could drop out of school at the age of 16.)

I actually regarded these guys as losers. That says a lot coming from me. I swore that I would never sink to that level to get a girlfriend. When I got to high school, I actually understood why those guys were driving around the junior high school. The girls in high school were either dating the Alpha males or dating older guys who were no longer in school because they had already graduated (probably because they picked them up when they were in junior high). I kept my promise to myself and during the three years I was in high school, I never once drove by the junior high during lunchtime. I kept that promise even though I only ever had one girlfriend all during high school.

Since my mother had warned me about the high school boys, this meant that this had been going on for some time before I started eighth grade.

The problem did not just end once those boys graduated or dropped out of high school. There were actually a number of what I call the scary punks from the refinery. These were the 16 to 22-year-old guys who never had to worry about school again. Unfortunately, they had to worry about getting girlfriends. Since most of them had done the lunchtime cruise while they were still in school, it was something they never got out of their system that this was how they were supposed to get girlfriends, especially since cruising by the high school was a waste of time because all the girls there already had cars and didn't stick around the campus for lunch.

So imagine that for at least for seven years, guys as old as 22 (maybe even older) could go over to the junior high school to try to pick up on girls who were as young as 13. Chris Hansen would have a field day with this. I don't know if the cruising situation had anything to do with this, but when I was in high school, some interesting changes took place. First, they started classes at junior high at 8:45am. This would put lunch at 11:45am. The high school lunch didn't start until 12pm. This cut the time for cruising by half. I wasn't around the junior high, so I don't know what, if any, impact this actually had. It likely meant less time for high school boys to stake their claim and cut down on the competition for the scary punks who worked the night shifts at the refinery and didn't need to heed by regular lunch hour restrictions.

I know that after I graduated from high school, they put up a fence around the field at Park and declined to let anyone leave the campus during lunch. I'm pretty certain the cruising came to a stop after that. They also put a fence around Zia and closed the campus there as well, even though they didn't have a predator problem.

But for a long time, parents and teachers seemed to put up with this behavior.