Episode

There’s a gap in your life that your memories can never fill in, that only an older person’s memories can fill in for you. It’s the time between your birth (or, if you prefer, your conception) and the earliest moment that you can now recall as an episodic memory, whenever that moment occurred, probably sometime around the age of five, if you’re like most of us, possibly when you were only three or four. 

I used to think a lot about that gap, in the year or two after you were born. It’s staggering to watch an infant learn, savor, chortle, and scream with fury, hurt, or delight, all the while knowing that not one of those vivid moments will be available as memories to that child, grown up. I circled around and back around to this conundrum as I watched you, returning to the subject in poem after poem after poem.

Assuming they survive the vicissitudes of preservation, the thousands of photos and numerous short videos that your mother and I made of you during those pre-episodic years, plus all of the usual documentations that accompany personhood in this era, will stand in for actual memory. Sometimes they may even jog it (and warp it as well). I was startled once, recently, staring at a small snapshot of what appears to be my third Christmas, when I would have been two. I was struck by an eerie memory, not of that moment, but of that day. It had been exceptionally grey and dark, and my Uncle Jack and Aunt Karen had come over to our house to celebrate. Something about the darkness of the photograph, which had to have been taken Christmas morning, brought back in a rush the unsettled combination of strangeness and excitement I had felt.

My pictures were fairly rare, mostly taken on special occasions; yours have been vastly more numerous. I don’t know yet what that may mean for the way your memory functions in you. Here’s just one picture I took of you at your third Christmas when you were two. It’s a terrible picture, but I chose it for the Christmas morning parallel and for the strong sense of that day’s atmosphere. The odds seem long against it giving the same jolt of recognition to you that the blurry, ancient snap of me in my sailor hat gave me. But, maybe.

What can I fill in for you today? I often tell you stories about your younger self. At this age of seven, you prefer the funny stories that will embarrass you when you are older: how you used to like to grunt when you danced in your diaper; the time you hopped off your training potty to stand tall and calmly poop on the floor. When you were four, you loved to hear the story of how you were born from Mama’s belly and how I caught you, almost dropped you, startled by your open eyes. Now that story’s old news. Who knows what you’ll want to know by the time you read this, if you do.

The memories I would like to keep include all the ones when you collected outdoor things, all those leaves, petals, clods of dirt, gobs of mud, worms, beetles, lizards, tadpoles, toads, snails, slugs, butterflies, ants, praying mantises, and bugs. I hope you still like bugs. Even tarantulas never frightened you, and you and I together once ushered a whip-fast snake out of the house. It was non-venomous, of course, but your calm, collected help in herding it back out the door was impressive for a three year-old. In Canada, you used to chase the occasional garter snake, calling them “gardener snakes,” which always delighted me.

Speaking of “gardener snakes,” your language development itself was ordinary and bewitching. You started out calling everything “nyah-nyah,” and it used to amuse me when your mother and your grandmother would both insist it was the other you were naming, each secretly believing, if I had to guess, it was she who you thus addressed. Between one and two, you developed a massive repertoire of animal sounds you could produce on cue. My favorite was the giraffe. “What does the giraffe say?” You remained stoically silent, having been taught that the giraffe says nothing. It gave me hope you would defeat all trick questions when the time came.

There was “ye-yo” for yogurt, “lellow” for yellow, and of course, “Sukha” for Sequoia, which enchanted your mother, sukha being the Pali word for all things good, in the early Buddhist sutras. For years, you demanded that we call you Sukha, and by the time you changed your mind and demanded that we call you Sequoia again, I had a hard time switching back. I still rather like the name you gave yourself.

All cute things must pass, however, and in any case, I doubt that the memories most darling to a father would prove most precious to you. I wish I knew. I rack my brain for some ideally worthwhile scene from your forgotten years, something never caught in any photo, nor narrated to you repeatedly already, nor referenced somewhere in a poem. 

The summer you were two, which was also the summer you discovered leopard slugs and garter snakes, we rented a cabin that was only a modified trailer. You could run around by then, which meant I was already somewhat dependent on your sweet-tempered behavior to not have to worry over much about you running away from me and my bandy legs. You were getting too big already for tottering me to carry, although almost any other adult could still scoop you up easily. In the mornings, your mother, who was battling insomnia, would sleep in, and you and I would entertain each other in the small front room for hours. I was amazed, frankly, at what a good job you did, even at two, of playing quietly so that your mother could sleep while we colored or pretended to be monsters. Still, you had your moments of defiance. After all, you were a toddler.

One sunny morning we drove over to Wendy Harlocks’ place, to pick up something she had for us and to spend a little time with her. When I was ready to get back in the truck and needed to buckle you into your car seat, the imp mood struck you. You refused to climb in, then you ran around the trees near the truck and hid. Then you hopped out of reach. After a while, I stood by the driver’s door simply waiting. Wendy asked if I wanted her help grabbing you and seating you forcefully into your chair. I said, no, I trusted you would heed me eventually and get in. Besides, I couldn’t always count on having a spare adult around to catch and carry you for me. After a while, Wendy shrugged and went back into her house. (Years later, she asked me “Did you ever coax her into the truck? I mean, I assume you did. The next time I looked you were gone.” But I hadn’t really coaxed you, that’s the thing.)

For a minute or two, after Wendy had left, you continued playing the defiant little truant. And then you looked at me with some kind of comprehension I’m still not sure I could explain. “Okay, Papa,” you said, nonchalantly. “I sit in my seat.” And you climbed up contentedly and let me buckle you in. I felt neither triumphant nor relieved, exactly. I felt like we had a deal, and I felt that I, who couldn’t chase or capture you, was also content with it.

I wish I could give you back that memory, that contented expression of yours to savor. It was like a pact between us that we kept, and although you sometimes stalled or complained, after that you never gave me much trouble about climbing into a car again. (Although you did go through a silly phase when you insisted on getting into the car through the door opposite or farthest from the seat you were aiming for.)

If you could remember that episode for yourself, perhaps you could also explain to me exactly what you felt. That’s what finally locks a memory in, what gets the distortions and facts to gel--when we remember, when we think, this happened, way back when, and this is how it felt.

A Missoulian

What was it about Missoula, Montana? It was just a town, a small city. A third of a century ago, it was only a less expensive, less populous version of what it is today. It had generic shopping strips, a compact “historic” downtown, a few movie theaters, hotels and motels, a state university. By the time you read this, you’ll probably associate all of Montana more with your Grandpa Joe from Chinook than with me. And that’s alright. He’s a genuine Montanan. I was a sojourner for whom, for a couple of years in the eighties, Missoula was mightily appealing. And I’m still not entirely sure why.

One of the happiest days of my life was the day I arrived in Missoula, in June 1985. It was ridiculous. I’d fled New Jersey after breaking up with my girlfriend and walking away from my desk job. I was twenty-two, bearded, disabled, and nearly destitute, with all of my remaining money wadded up as twenties in my boot. I was a three-time college dropout who had wangled his way into a graduate program at the University of Montana. I had no prospect of fresh income until I was to begin a lousy $400-a-month teaching assistantship that fall. I had no friends or connections in town, and I’d never set foot in Montana before. I was on top of the world.

My first week, I hardly spoke to a soul. I found a cheap basement apartment with a shared bath in a Craftsman-style bungalow across from campus. I found a bookstore. I attended a service at the corner Episcopal church, just for the hell of it. In one of the most heroic physical feats of my life, I limped all the way up the trail on the face of Mt. Sentinel to sit on the stem of the giant, white concrete “M,” admiring the view, and then, half walking, half sliding by the seat of my pants, and somehow without breaking a bone, I made it back down again. I bought myself a pizza to celebrate.

Ten days in, I made my first friend. A tall, goofy guy with curly hair and spectacles who served sandwiches at the “Chimney Corner” asked me if I liked jazz. I didn’t really know. What kind of jazz? Miles Davis kind of jazz. I didn’t know Miles Davis. He gave me a look like I’d confessed that I couldn’t add and invited me to hear his quartet play at a downtown bar called “Mary’s Place” that night. His name was Matt.

That first summer passed in a haze. There, in the most unlikely of places, between all the cowboy joints and hippy hangouts, was my Jazz Age. Mary’s Place turned out to be a dark, upstairs dive haunted by musicians, alcoholics and local poets, who often amounted to one and the same. A block away in one direction was the square-jawed Stockman’s Cafe (“Liquor Up Front; Poker In The Rear”) and a few blocks past that the air was usually thick with Patchouli and Oolong inside Butterfly Herbs. Wander any other direction—more bars, more cafes, more poker places such as The Ox, plus a porn cinema where Tracy Takes Tokyo played. 

The whole town felt like a movie set to me: too compact, too small to be so complete. In northern New Jersey, despite the millions of us packed tightly together, most of our media and entertainment came from New York City, “The City,” as though there could be none other, but here, in this town of maybe forty-thousand, surrounded by nothing but sprawling, grassy ranch land, crop-top mountains, paper mills, and stands of lodgepole pines, they watched their own TV stations that logged off the air right at midnight, listened to their own range of radio call letters, read their own flimsy newspaper, bought books by their own writers, and divided up the world amongst themselves. 

All over the sidewalks that year, leftist students had stenciled, “SANDINO SAYS USA OUT!” while back and white POW-MIA flags, looking vaguely like Jolly Rogers, were displayed at auto dealerships, in the plate glass windows of cowboy bars, and hanging off of pick-up trucks and almost every Harley Hog. The most popular movie in Missoula that summer was Rambo: First Blood Part Two, yet in the shady yard behind the bungalow that I shared with four other renters, the evening air was thick with cannabis every night, and all the talk was of literature and Earth First. A sign over the communal downstairs toilet read, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, send it down.” 

Each midnight, when the TV stations signed off, Lee Greenwood vocalized over a picture of the proudly waving Stars-&-Stripes, and the side streets were mostly empty for hours. After being slipped free gin-&-tonics by the friendly barmaid at Mary’s, I often prowled the river paths and lawns with friends or alone. One night, wandering home a bit too drunk from sitting through back-to-back gigs by my new, Cool Jazz-worshipping musician pals, I spotted a classic Thunderbird with a teal-and-white paint job parked under a handsome maple. I liked the look of it so much, I lay down in the grass beside it and slept until dawn. No one disturbed me; no one complained.

Near the end of summer, Mt. Sentinel caught fire. It looked like a field of hell from the campus footbridge at night, thousands of glowing patches like the campfires of an army in the dark. Classes started. I began my improbable new existence as a graduate student and composition teacher. I made more new friends. I moved. I moved again. When winter set in early, I bought my first pair of Sorrels.

Around my twenty-third birthday, hinged between the fires and the fall, a good friend from New York flew out to visit me. I had no car but borrowed someone’s to meet her at the airport. (I’d wasted twenty minutes waiting for a taxi the night I’d first arrived myself. Finally, the flight crew walked out of the airport and asked me if someone was picking me up. I told them I was waiting on a taxi. They laughed and took me into town with them in their hotel’s van.) My friend, Terry, was immediately struck by the airport’s impressive display of taxidermy, including the bison, cougar, and rearing grizzly.

A couple of days into her visit, Terry and I got on a bus and headed north to Glacier Park. It was the first time I’d left town since a visit with the jazzmen to Billings in July. Terry and I rode up in the back seats of a Greyhound, past Paradise and Flathead Lake. A middle-aged man with a Stetson and handlebar mustache decided he liked the looks of Terry and, as soon as he overheard her mention New York, began regaling her with wild animal yarns. She was too polite to dispute him when he claimed the mountain lion he’d killed and eaten had tasted pretty much like chicken. I rolled my eyes.

We got off at Kalispell and walked to a “Rent-a-Wreck.” The wreck itself we drove up Going-to-the-Sun Road. Here and there, we got out and wandered around. We didn’t have time or equipment to camp in the Park, but from up there, Montana looked grand. It looked a bit like Switzerland would, if no one had finished properly taming and tunneling it.

By the time we got back to Missoula, we were satisfied. Terry had seen enough to say she’d been there and enjoyed it. (As far as I know, she never returned.) I had seen enough to know I wanted to stay. When Terry flew back to New York, I was sorry to say goodbye to her, but for the first time in my life I was glad to not be the one flying away.

I finished my degree in two years. I learned a deeper appreciation of winter, of winter complete with brown ice and inversions and whole weeks of subzero. I wrote a lot of what I was proud to call poetry. I taught myself how to teach. I found out I taught pretty well.

When I finished, I had to leave. There was a professorial career and, first, a fat stipend at Emory University calling me South. I had turned some kind of corner. I was no longer a delinquent, a drop out, a black sheep. I wouldn’t ever be one again, not until about the time I started writing you these pieces.  

But for the next several years, Missoula, strange Missoula, visited my dreams. Over and over again, I would have some form of a dream in which I knew that I was dreaming but was enjoying it all the same and was determined not to wake. Always in that dream I had returned to a version of Missoula, even weirder than the original, usually much smaller and more remote, but recognizably the same. And each time I could stay. Then I’d wake.

The first time that I did, very briefly, return, I brought my Alabama girlfriend with me. She’d heard so much about the place from me, I was certain she would love it. I was delighted to show it to her, to finally be back. Then we spent a day in miserable rain, got stuck in traffic behind a downtown accident, and ate a lousy lunch. The forecast for the next few days was similar. We were in the middle of a massive, seven-week cross-country roadtrip, and my girlfriend was eager to move on to somewhere better. By the next day we were in Idaho, eating trout by the sunny Snake. It would be a decade before I came back through Missoula again.

On a May Sunday in 2001, I passed through on my way down from the Yukon to Salt Lake. The weather was crystalline. The town was quiet. For some reason, I chose to drive over to what had been my second residence back in 1985, an attractive, single-family brick Victorian where I had lived upstairs, splitting three rooms with two friends. We’d had a good ghost story there, when one of my roommates had shrieked that a solemn-faced little girl was staring at her through the second-story window late one night. On this fine spring Sunday morning of the new millennium, a pleasant-faced woman was out working in her yard. I chatted with her about the place, which she now owned. Had she known the previous owner, our eccentric landlady, I asked, a towering blonde named Sandra who announced one day that she was henceforth to be called Inge and began affecting a faux Swedish accent? No? We used to call her “Sandringa” among ourselves. The woman gave a little chuckle. She was interested in the ghost story, though. No, she’d never seen one, but she’d always suspected. 

After that, I revisited Missoula a couple more times on my own. I never did anything special other than rent a hotel room on the Clark Fork, stroll around campus, maybe take in a show at the old movie palace, The Wilma, where you could still order cocktails with your popcorn. Mostly I just went back to soak it in. The suburban sprawl had grown quite a bit and the neighborhood near campus had subtly gentrified, but the campus and downtown itself had hardly changed. For me, it was still a little unreal, like stepping into and out of an odd but comforting dream.

In 2008, I brought your mother to town with me. We were in love, and although she’d been all over the mountain west, she’d never been to Missoula. Again, I thought she’d be delighted, and again, as with my Alabama girlfriend, the trip did not go well. It was hot. There seemed to be nothing to do all weekend, and then we discovered that we’d just missed a free outdoor concert by one of her favorite musicians. All for the best, I guess. The next day we left to go exploring and ended up discovering Nelson, the town of your birth, although of course we didn't know that yet.

We did try to visit Missoula again, more than once, but largely because the town happened to lie on the shortest route between our winters in southern Utah and our summers in BC. I swear, every time we stopped there, something went wrong. One time we spent a night there when you were a nursing baby and had a lovely summer evening ruined when you choked on a piece of fresh melon our friendly restaurant server cut for you. For a second, we thought you'd choke to death. It was always something like that. Yet, whenever I passed through alone, the place still charmed me somehow, the light on the river, the off-key rhythms, the quieter streets.

Here’s what I think. There’s no good rhyme or reason for why we love a particular city or a landscape any more than for why we fall in love with a person or even just a charming face. Either that, or the landscape is secretly capable of loving us back, and we’re too small to recognize its jealous embrace. When I go through Missoula alone, Missoula is happy to see me again. But if I arrive with a human lover, that peculiar little city dwelling on what was once the bottom of a glacial lake is jealous and cold shoulders us. I don’t appreciate such pettiness, but I’ll confess I’m still a little crazy for the place.

Fears

At the time I’m writing this, a time that will be long ago for you by the time, if ever, you read it, you’ve been going through a prolonged phase of fear of the dark, especially the solitary dark. You’re seven; it’s not that surprising, but you’re generally a brave girl, so theories for your fears have been tempting. Your mother and your grandparents vote that the cause is too much exposure to Lord Voldemort, and you do seem to fear Rowling’s villain, but I’m skeptical that the culprit’s him, and I have reasons.

There’s the conundrum of where and when your fear begins. The more I think it over, the less certain I am how far back it actually goes. It might not even be yours. More than once, I’ve gone to the woods with your mother when she was exhilarated by the prospect of a long hike while I waited for her, only to have her return quickly and insist she could go no further alone. It’s not the actual risk that gets to her, as she will happily camp and wander by herself for days across desert landscapes twice as dangerous as any forest in California or BC. She used to fixate on bears as the problem, but she mostly conquered that fear through a few random, harmless encounters. In any case, I think it was the shadow she made from the idea of bears that terrified her, not the bears themselves. Her fear of going into the woods alone still comes and goes, but when it strikes her, it’s exactly like your fear of entering an empty room in the house. It’s an abrupt, stubborn, absolute refusal to go into a particular shadow zone alone. I could never reliably predict when her fear would hit her, as I can’t entirely predict when your fear will possess you, but once in the grip, neither one of you will budge. Coaxing or reasoning with either of you only makes you more upset. I wouldn’t claim that it was down to genetics, not without better evidence, but the pattern seems inherited, in some way. 

As an infant and a toddler, you were always a light sleeper, equally prone to wake from nightmares or happy dreams of flying alike, but never in need of more light. It crept up on you after you reached about four: a nightlight, a soft lamp, a hallway light all night. You were five when you started annoying your mother by demanding that one of us accompany you, at least as far as the bathroom door, every time you had to go pee. This didn’t seem to be a problem for you at school or outdoors, just at home. I can’t be sure, but I suspect that you initially did this only when you didn’t want the two of us talking without you in the room, perhaps because you knew we talked about you a lot, or you were jealous of our affection for each other, or perhaps because you felt your presence could prevent us from ever getting upset with each other. 

For at least a year, as I recall, you would be fine moving around the house on your own so long as you and I were home alone, but if the three of us were in the kitchen or at the table, you would invariably beg for one of us to follow you if you wanted for any reason to leave the room. Fear was just an easy excuse at first that gradually became more real. By the time you were six or six and a half, you started insisting that I stay in a room with you or accompany you into an empty room, whether your mother was around or not. I suspect this may also have had something to do with an inherited character trait of yours, but one that neither your mother or I have, a longing to be around people, someone at least, almost all the time. I’m a terrible hermit and your mother says she played at her happiest for hours alone as a child. It drives her to distraction when the only way for you to be contented by yourself is if you’re immersed in a screen for a while. 

Again, I suspect inheritance, and this time it would almost have to be genetic. My father, the grandfather you never knew, was social in exactly the same way as you. Throughout his life, he found it depressing, not to say distressing, to be in a room or a house alone. His own mother was convinced that this was down to his invalid childhood, but I was an invalid kid, too, and I was uninterested in too many visitors, usually happier with a stack of books and a window with a good, green view. 

So, I think you begin already with a bit of your mother’s abrupt fear reflex and a bit of your paternal grandfather’s loathing of being very long alone. Toss in a bit of the typical kid fear of dark closets and such. But why has it amplified more recently? The answer no one seems to want to touch is that your mother and I broke up. 

Indeed, breaking up seems more of an exact description than a dead metaphor in our case. We disintegrated as a couple, bit by bit, over the past two years. I won’t go into all the reasons here, and I’d bet that by the time you’re old enough to read this you know them well, maybe understand them better than I now do. But you’ve got a sensitive emotional barometer, and you probably could always tell. You may have sensed it before we could tell or admit it to ourselves.

And simply, physically, well before we fully separated, you were spending more and more time with one of the other of us, less and less time with us both. Your mother went on meditation retreats and long solo camping trips lasting as much as weeks. I took you to school each morning but came home late. For two weeks, I was on a road trip across the breadth of Canada. And so forth. Likely, it all cemented the sense at the base of your awareness that, whenever  you were with one or the other of us, there was no one in the other room, anymore.

I’ve been living with your grandparents the past few months, and I’ve noticed your fear seems less when you’re with all of us. Grandpa Joe is up early and stomps about the kitchen, then heads downstairs to his office. Grandma is upstairs on the second floor much of the time, always available for visits and coming down throughout the day to see what is going on with us. It’s your sort of world, where there’s always someone with you who loves you and someone else who loves you somewhere about the house. Ditto when your grandparents stay with you and your mother down south.

But there was that one weekend when Grandma and Grandpa Joe were down there with Mama, while you were up here with me in the big, three-level house, mostly empty. It snowed heavily for two days and then it really was just us in our snow globe. We binged on your Harry Potter books and rewatched the first two or three of the Potter movies, along with more little kid stuff. It was fun. We snuggled and stayed in our PJs and spoiled ourselves with a bowl of ice cream each night. But as full as the house felt to me, given that you were in it, I could see how empty it seemed to you with only me.

And that’s what fear is, ultimately, for all of us, the dread of not enough. Oh, there’s the sharp shock of startlement and fright, that’s different, yes. Sometimes we shriek. But that’s not the kind of fear that incapacitates any of us. It’s the dread of loss, of sinking unsupported into a world that’s insufficient, that’s inhospitable to us that can paralyze and start us projecting our boggarts into the corners, our hungry bears and Voldemorts. 

When I was a year younger than you are now, on one of my surgical trips to the hospital, I had a terrible fright. I was in traction, awaiting surgery, immobilized in my high, barred bed, watching a television hung from the wall opposite me. This was before they started outfitting pediatric beds with remote controls, so I was left to watch whatever the nurse had put on for me, at least until the next nurse came around. The Friday Night Flick, or whatever it was called, happened to be Vincent Price’s 1961 adaptation of The Pit and the Pendulum. The final scene is of a person accidentally left to die in a torture chamber being walled up, helplessly gagged and locked into an Iron Maiden. Through a small, barred grill you can see the pleading, hopeless, horrified eyes. To my small self it was the most terrible thing I’d ever seen, the most terrible I could possibly imagine. It frightened me, and then it haunted me for years.

Of course, whenever I told the story of being terrified by that scene to adults, they clucked their tongues and said something stern about the inattentive nurse who had let a six-year old watch something so inappropriate for me. My mother didn’t approve of TV or movies to begin with, and only grudgingly conceded they helped the boredom of long stays in the hospital. Letting me watch something like a Vincent Price movie was just a sin, a literal sin, as far as she was concerned. 

I retold the story with increasing relish as I grew. I often emphasized how my terror had caused me to wrench in my traction, causing me considerable pain, and how the face in the iron maiden was a ghastly shade of green. Once, a girlfriend I was telling this to pointed out to me that I had said it was a black-&-white TV. So it was, I realized. I must have imagined that sickening shade of green. I put it down to how upsetting, indeed nauseating, the scene had seemed to me.

It was decades before something else occurred to me. I hadn’t been scared just because of the movie on TV. I was already scared because I was in the hospital. I was scared of surgery. Back then all hospital wards, even pediatric wards, were the same creepy shade of sickly green that continued around the halls, in the color of the scrubs, and into the Operating Room.  I had been frightened of surgery since I was four, not because of the cutting, the stitches, or the pain, but because I had a grim memory of the first time a stranger held the awful black rubber mask over my face and ordered me to breathe deeply. You see?

Today, I would probably still say that the nurse was a bit negligent who left me with that particular movie on the TV. But I no longer think that she in any way harmed me. In fact, I think that scene may have helped my fears overall. I was a small child caught in a miasma of distressing experiences that were out of my control, unclear, and alarming to me. That scene’s close-up of the wide eyes trapped behind the iron lid gave me a focal point, a single sum and substitute for all the real things I was afraid of—an image, most importantly, of something that I knew was unreal, was not happening to me, and likely never would happen to me. Neither will Lord Voldemort will ever be lurking in an empty hall for you, which is why he’s a good scare for you to seize upon, however inappropriate he may seem for a child of seven to be considering, and even if just reading about him lurking can still make you jump a little, years from now, at the thought of a half-empty house.

Prejudiced

In my family, in my neighborhood, when I was a kid, no one ever used the word “race,” not that I recall. We had more than a dozen racial and ethnic categories that we deployed freely, often vividly, but we viewed most of those terms as fixed, as givens. The only potent, contested word regarding such things was “prejudiced.” Are you prejudiced? Who’s prejudiced? I’m not prejudiced! 

Of course, we were all prejudiced. But on the spectrum of prejudices in our mostly white neighborhood, my parents, your grandparents, likely held the least flagrant position, and I grew up believing that we were the one family in town truly beyond the risk of prejudice, at least of any racial kind. (Given my local, Catholic friends, I could see pretty easily that my mother was quietly but stubbornly sectarian: she once suggested orange as a good color for us kids to wear on St. Patrick’s Day, and she expressed skepticism that the Pope was a Christian. “He might be, if he’s truly asked Jesus into his heart as His Lord and Savior,” she observed one evening at dinner, “But I doubt it.”)

In the era of white flight, assassinations, riots, and the ongoing fight for Civil Rights, my parents made a point of preaching racial tolerance and equality to their children. One of the earliest children’s hymns I learned was “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” and I learned it in the Hausa language, which my mother had learned in Nigeria. From it and other cues, I got the gist that skin tone was irrelevant to Jesus, and so should be irrelevant to us. Once, when we had stopped somewhere in rural Georgia on a family trip to Florida, my mother made sure that I took note of a segregated water fountain that she’d found, and then that I understood why such an item was hateful and wrong. The summer that I turned five, 1967, the summer of the nearby Newark riots, my parents had two children come to stay with us from Harlem, on the Fresh Air Fund, for two weeks each, first a boy named Ronnie and then a girl named Cheryl. My mother felt it would be helpful both to them and to me and my little sister Alleene, given how white our neighborhood was then. Before that time, I was so unused to encountering dark skin that, when we visited Manhattan, which was scarcely twenty miles distant, I asked my mother if this was “the country of the brown-skinned people.” 

The next year, 1968, a few months after Dr. King’s assassination, my parents took me out of the local public school, which was nearly all white, and enrolled me and my sister Alleene in a Baptist elementary that was thoroughly integrated. The switch had more to do with the fact that the public school felt uncomfortable about my disability and was unwilling to let me attend regular classes when I was in a wheelchair, whereas the church school didn’t care. But in practice it meant that, even before the adoptions of my Korean, African-American, and mixed-race siblings, I was habituated to interacting with Latin, Black, and Asian children as playmates and classmates, from the age of six. At eight, I was given a tri-color Afro pick with a folding handle by my best friend David Mordecai. I took it home and proudly folded and and unfolded it for my father, intoning solemnly, as David had taught me, “Black is for the people. (Point to the black plastic comb.) Red is for the blood they shed. (Fold over the red half of the handle.) Green is for the land. (Fold over the green half of the handle.)” The land was Africa. My mother agreed it was green and that an awful lot of blood had been shed.

There were inconsistencies of course, some that I'm sure I missed but some that I noticed. My father still held, at least jokingly, a variety of ethnic stereotypes that he didn’t think were really prejudices. Poles could be dumb, Scots were often skinflints, Irish liked to drink and join the police. "But I'm not prejudiced," he'd say. His official policy was that Black people as individuals were just as capable of accomplishing anything as White people were, but that as a group they had a harder time of it because Africa had fallen behind the rest of the world and was backwards, which made no causal sense at all in 1960s New Jersey but satisfied him. 

My mother was a bit weirder. Her faith mandated that all humans were identically wicked at birth and identically capable of salvation and rebirth. She was also proud of being a New Englander, descended from centuries of New Englanders, on the right and godly side of the slavery issue and of the U.S. Civil War. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was a staple hymn of our church and household, and my mother always sang it as if it were still a marching chant, hitting the stressed syllables like hammer blows. “EYES! SEEN! GLOR! COME! LORD! TRAMP! VINT! GRAPES! WRATH! STORED!”

Yet, she likewise held the rural New Englander’s pride in the great virtue of her own skepticism and common sense, which led her into odd reasonings about race. She couldn’t see the validity of calling one group of people “colored,” for instance (“We’re all colored some kind of color!”), nor of referring to “White” and “Black” people (“‘Pink’ and ‘Brown’ is more like it! Why not say that?”). On one occasion, she confided in me that she felt it was exceptionally stupid for “prejudiced people” to compare Africans to apes because, after all, apes had thin lips like Europeans and also had skin that, under their very straight ape hair, was pale. I stared at her blankly, being all of about six or seven years old myself and not yet acquainted with any apes, but she gave me a triumphant look, as if she’d just solved a geometry proof, and said no more on the subject.

I remained innocent of the capacity for prejudice in myself or in my friends until I was a teenager in boarding school. (It’s amazing that any naïveté at all about one’s self survives high school.) My junior year, I befriended an introverted giant of a boy, a senior named Scott, who could have been typecast as a Viking. He had shaggy blonde hair, stood just shy of 6’4,” and had powerful arms. He was the kind of guy automatically recruited to be a linebacker for the football team, even though he didn't particularly care for football, wore thick glasses, was painfully shy, and always strode about campus in a hangdog attitude, staring at the ground.

We had a fondness for punk music and science fiction in common, otherwise not much, and yet we bonded. In addition to being a football player and a star wrestler, Scott was a townie and an art geek who was constantly sketching and who obsessively collected Marvel comic books. I was a disabled boarding student who couldn’t draw a straight line, knew next to nothing of Marvel comics beyond the Spider-Man and Wolverine characters, and whose own obsession was novels. I wanted to act in plays. Scott wanted never to have to see a play. 

What united us was really just loneliness and marginal status. From a schoolmaster's description, you might not think we were outcasts: he was a jock, the son and grandson of prominent alums; I was a goody-goody, a scholarship boy, a dorm prefect, an academic standout, and an occasional actor. But we were weird. We looked weird, especially as friends, the huge Viking and the little crip. Moreover, in some way that we couldn’t quite define to ourselves, we were cynical about enthusiasms other students took seriously and, no matter how involved we were in those officially important high-school sorts of activities, we didn’t fit in. So, we were friends.

About this time, one of the most popular seniors in my dorm was a jovial, roaring, good-looking Southerner named Jon who enjoyed sounding like Foghorn T. Leghorn, booming out “Boy!” this and “Yo, boy!” that. I never picked up on the fact that he only addressed fellow white boys in this manner, much less what it meant. I wasn't part of his circle. My only pals in the dorm that year were a literary-minded Chinese-American named David Yuan and a rich, ugly Venezuelan kid named Sam. (Sam had a Frida Kahlo unibrow. If we teased him, he would mutter, without apparent irony or humor, "Dafid! Mark! You are my berry, berry good friends. But now I'm go-eeng to haf to keel you." David and I would fall about laughing at this, Sam would frown as if trying to concentrate his magnificent eyebrow into a single exclamation point, and then our conversation, which was usually about music, would move on.) We didn’t hang out with either the cool White boys or the cool Black packs. So, I was ripe for stupidly walking into the middle of a nastiness I didn’t yet understand.

One Saturday night, I was hanging out in the dorm’s lobby, by myself, doing nothing that I can recall, probably reading a book. A senior named Dave, who was the most popular of the upperclass African-American guys in the dorm, swaggered by with a couple of his younger friends and teased me about something irrelevant. I tried being cool and jovial in my response, imitating the retort style of that very popular boy, Southern Jon. I don’t know what I said, exactly, but I do know that I tossed a “boy!” in somewhere in my witty reply. 

In a split second, my dormitory Tiny-Tim mascot status notwithstanding, Dave had grabbed me, literally, by the throat and was cursing me to my face. Before I could even get past the immediate shock, I heard a roar over my shoulder and Dave himself was being lifted into the air by Scott, who had just stopped by to say hi. There was more cursing and even some body slamming, thankfully on the other side of the lobby from me, and then our dorm master, Russell Witherspoon, popped his head out of his doorway down the hall to see what the hell was going on. A lean, dark-skinned Black man, nearly as tall as Scott, with a lilting baritone purr of a voice, 'Spoon had all the combatants separated in a second or two.

Afterward, in the sit-down interview with Mr. Witherspoon, I learned exactly what it meant for me to call a Black man "boy." I was shaken. I protested my innocence as well as my ignorance and cited popular Southern Jon’s bluff habit of calling people “boy,” but I apologized. Dave calmed down. Witherspoon excused us. Scott stalked home. 

That lesson about the danger of using "boy" was embarrassing but easy to absorb. It was like the time in fifth grade that I had gotten in trouble for a caricature. I had been doodling at my desk, trying to make something interesting-looking by drawing with a compass. I had gotten as far as a neat semicircle with a triangle on top, but I was stuck. The girl who shared my desk looked over at my drawing and hissed, “give it a face with slanty eyes.” I complied, then looked at her for further advice. Our fifth-grade teacher, Miss Storm had just been engaged to a man by the name of Eng. “Now, write ‘Mr. Eng’ on it and hide it on Miss Storm’s desk,” the girl giggled. Thinking that I was impressing my classmate, I did as she said. When Miss Storm found the drawing, she was visibly shaken and demanded to know who did it. I knew nothing yet of the coolie stereotype I'd just drawn, but I was ashamed and confessed. It was an embarrassing lesson in prejudice, but easily learned.

So should have been the lesson in high school, but it was the discovery in the wake of the “boy” incident that was harder to process. Giant Scott, my friend and my rescuer, my hero of sorts, couldn’t let it go. The next summer, after he’d already graduated and I’d gone to work as a camp counselor, I would get letters from him containing sketches of new superhero characters he'd invented and, uncomfortably, edgy rantings about “our Black friends.” At first, I tried to pretend Scott meant only Dave and his pals, that their blackness was incidental to his irritation with their behavior to me, but the queasy feeling in my gut kept indicating that my hero friend was probably a racist. Or, as I passed it off to myself then, my pal Scott was “very prejudiced.” 

I had another friend like that, the same year, and although he and Scott never met, in my mind now the two are lumped together. Jim was another outsider type, smart and sarcastic, but he lived in ‘Jersey, the oldest son of a church friend of my father’s. Jim was superficially unlike either Scott or me. He was pale, runty, and thin. He played the piano and composed meandering songs out of batches of chords as if he were tossing logs on the keyboard. His hobbies were camping, beer, and affecting a corncob pipe as if he were Huck Finn. He and I took canoeing trips together that summer. He was smart and creative, but it slowly dawned on me that Jim, like Scott, had a festering resentment within. He and I had both taken a couple of years of high school German. At first, it was an easy bonding routine, to exchange greetings and trivial conversations in our execrable Deutsch. We’d both been to see Apocalypse Now, and I thought it was merely funny when Jim strapped a cheap tape-deck to a strut of the canoe and played “Ride of the Valkyrie” one afternoon as we paddled down a quiet stream. But then he started asking me what I thought of an idea he had for a club he was calling “Viertel Reich,” and he asked me to help him work up a sketch for a modified swastika logo for it.

Feeling queasy again, I attempted a redirect. I told Jim that we should make it clear that this club of his was ironic and clever and mocking of anything like an actual fascination with the Nazis. I drew him a “swastika” that was composed of four question marks rotating clockwise, like a pinwheel, around a single period. Jim didn’t like it. We drifted apart pretty soon, and, except at his father's funeral, I never saw him again.

I stayed friends with Scott, however, at least through our correspondences, and I excused myself by carefully avoiding any direct reply whenever he asked me a leading question in a letter about how things were the next year in my dorm with "our Black friends." I visited him one time in Chicago, several years later, after he had graduated from an evangelical college and married into money. He and his bride were only twenty-three but owners of a lofty condo opposite the Lincoln Park Zoo. Scott was struggling to sell his drawings and lived off his wife's trust fund. We never mentioned race at dinner that night, I should say, not in any way. Outside their guest bedroom window in the wee morning, I could hear the eerie combination of sirens and lions roaring. That was the last time I visited them.

As for the Dave whom I'd insulted, incidentally, although he and I were never very friendly, and although I doubt he really believed that I hadn’t meant anything racist by addressing him as “boy” that evening that Scott had tackled him, he did do me the favor of introducing me to the music of George Clinton and P-Funk the next school year, and for that I remain grateful to him. His own best friend, Louis, who was there in the lobby the night we all scrapped, ended up at Princeton with me. Unlike me, Louis graduated. 

The past is a pond, pretty much like the one on my Grandma Wetherbe’s farm. It's pretty from a distance and it silts up over time. Plants shove in from all sides, if you don’t disturb it or dredge it, and the surface can paper over solidly with water lilies, as if it a were a grounded flowerbed. There’s plenty of muck at the bottom and clear water that will run, with some work, even then. These days, I think of boys like Scott and Jim and me whenever I read of some punk white kid who’s snuck off to join up with white supremacists or ISIS. There’s that dream of belonging to a unified, dangerous outsider’s club that haunts certain uncool young loners, always has and will. And, once caught in that dream, a prejudice, of whatever type, is body armor against the demons.

In the decades after high school, I never hesitated to tell people how my mother, her evangelical sectarianism aside, had raised me to see all others as equals and race as irrelevant. I told stories of her and of my multiracial siblings to my fellow grad students, then to my students at Utah, Alabama, and Morehouse. I still believe it was a good thing to have grown up singing, “all are precious in His sight," whatever the language I sang it in.

But there was a day in the late nineties, I forget exactly when, perhaps just after my father had died, just before the millenium, when my brother Jimmy and I were going through an old cardboard box of family snapshots that included a few early pictures of our parents as a couple, from before I was born. And there we found a Kodachrome square, blurry but still lurid, of Dad and Mom dressed up for a Halloween party, a few weeks after their wedding, in1961. What costume my father was wearing in the photo, I forget. I was too startled by my mother’s get-up to notice him. There she sat, smiling broadly, in a floral apron and with a red polka-dot bandanna knotted around her head, completely made up in blackface.

I never did talk to her about that. And now it's too late.

Clark’s Ballgames and OK Corral

You’re an only child, and mercifully healthy so far. Peer play, for you, has usually meant play-dates with neighbor children, often singletons themselves, in which you romp freestyle around a house or playground while one or more adults keep watch. That concept, the “play-date,” didn’t exist when I was a kid, nearly a half century before you. Mostly, my siblings and I made do with each other’s company, with the occasional neighbor nearly randomly dropping in or out, and the permutations of play could get intricate in a family of multiple adopted and disabled kids, sometimes even a little nuts.

For instance, at least in theory we had enough siblings to play our own softball games, but the accommodations that we had to make of the rules to our various limitations were necessarily so baroque as to verge on the surreal. If it weren’t for my brother Clark’s obsession with playing ball, we probably would never have tried it at all.

Clark, adopted from Korea, first by a family in Florida who rejected him after a year, then by my parents, arrived at our house at approximately the age of eleven, his actual birthdate unknown, speaking little English yet but having already somehow acquired a fanatical fascination with baseball and the New York Yankees during his unfortunate Floridian sojourn. 

As an orphan in Seoul, Clark had contracted polio, which left him quite bandy-legged and prone to abrupt collapse whenever he attempted a walk more swift than a stroll. So, Little League was out for him, unfortunately. That fact did not prevent him from craving baseball gloves and vividly fantasizing about being an outfielder for the Yankees, whose games he listened to on a small transistor radio that my mother let him keep only because, unlike me, he could be trusted not to use it to listen to rock-‘n-roll. (In point of fact, Clark loved Muzak, although he forever refused to explain why.)

It was Clark who attempted to organize our all-sibling softball games, with that occasional, able-bodied neighbor kid added. A typical summertime configuration circa the mid-seventies might involve, of course, Clark, plus Peter, Jimmy, Richard, me, possibly Alleene or even baby Alice, never Kim. If he was around, Donny Murphy, who had really played in Little League, might join in.

We played in the back yard behind the old dog run and the boxy little greenhouse that served for a few years as a chicken coop. Donny might be the lone outfielder, out in the roots of the second-growth trees. He could cover ground. Alleene might be the infielder. Clark would be pitching while also calling his typically demented play-by-play, a  non-stop homage to his beloved Yankees’ announcer, Phil “The Scooter" Rizzuto, filtered through a thick Korean accent. Once in a while, one of us would yell at him to shut up and pitch already. He would pitch, then, but without a break in his commentary.

There were no teams, really. Batting and running the bases were done by duos. For instance, I, who could barely hobble, might pair with Richard, who had strong legs and a notoriously mulish disposition but was legally blind. Since he ran straight at the fielder, whom he could see, and not at the base, which he couldn't, Richard was a hazard to try to tag out at first. Meanwhile, Peter, who had spina bifida, might catch. Donny would have to come in from the outfield to run for literally legless Jimmy, who batted from his wheelchair, or perhaps to run for Peter, while Jimmy took Peter’s spot behind the plate. (Donny, who could actually play baseball, was rarely allowed to bat. We considered it unfair.) Since Clark’s pitches were often wild, Alice, the ultra-hyperactive toddler, might be coaxed into tracking down balls that rolled out of Jimmy’s grasp. Or not. She mostly ran around and shrieked a lot. 

I can’t recall a single game that ended with anything like a score, although play could go on for hours and was guaranteed to generate a lot of gleeful mockery plus more than a few hot arguments. Everybody but Donny and Richard got multiple turns at bat. 

Most of us didn’t try all that hard, but Clark competed furiously, aiming at whatever mysterious goal constituted winning in his mind and always declaring himself and the Yankees the victors, while Richard invariably muttered, “luck!”, as if that word were a curse expressing the nth degree of disgust. Clark was, in fact, desperately competitive over any contest—ping pong, table hockey, croquet. He was determined to win at all costs, and ideally underhandedly or wickedly. He was guaranteed to try to knock your croquet ball into the woods, preferably into a patch of poison ivy.

In 1980, my last summer before college, I brought my high school girl friend, a ferocious tomboy and natural athlete, home for a weekend visit. The siblings tried including her in one of our bizarro softball half-games, but it didn’t go well, as her softball prowess humiliated Donny, who was trying hard to show off his able body. Plus, neither Richard nor Alleene was there. Then Clark came up with something truly mad and actually dangerous.

Our mother was in the house sleeping off her night shift at the nursing home. Our father was running noisy table saws in the garage-cum-cabinet-shop. Clark fished out his entire collection of air rifles and passed them around. Time for war. Was my girlfriend in? She most definitely was. Donny didn’t dare back out then. We had added another brother, John, to the family a couple of years earlier. He was able-bodied except for juvenile diabetes and always game for any kind of mayhem. Jimmy almost chickened out, but then he got the best rifle in the draw. He rolled out of his wheelchair and quickly took up a nearly impregnable defensive position, using an overturned aluminum rowboat behind the house. Being slow and awkward but dead-eye myself, I headed into the woods to take advantage of the trees.

In the ensuing fire-fight, Jimmy and I both saw relatively little action, however, and we ended up with the fewest purple welts to show for it. Donny, John, and Pamela ranged all over the property on their nimble legs, dodging and firing on the run. Donny tried being chivalrous and ended up with a cheek welt courtesy of Pam. Shots at the head were technically against the initial, impromptu rules, as were any shots point blank, but once Clark saw Pam “miss” that shot that caught Donny in the face, he went full guerrilla commando, stalking and shooting up close from ambush to minimize  the disadvantage of his unreliable gait, until even Pam and John gave up for fear of actually losing an eye. Whereupon, Clark declared victory and strutted around the yard like a bandy-legged bantam, holding his BB rifle up in triumph, and refusing to shut up until all the shouting woke our mother up.

Then we were all, appropriately, in trouble. The air rifles were confiscated and locked up. Donny was sent home and punishments and warnings and “you-older-children-especially-should-know-betters” were doled out to everyone but Pam, the guest. Clark never stopped smirking and showed his battle scars off for a week. Speaking of scars, the best part of that foolish war game for me was the secret taking stock of injuries afterwards, when Pam hiked up her shorts to show me one welt she’d caught in the back of the thigh, half an inch below her bum. I was seventeen. As much as I could, I consoled her.

On the whole, recalling all this almost forty years on, I have to say as your father that I hope you stick to those supervised play-dates of yours for the rest of your happy, healthy childhood and never get too chummy with any family as lunatic as us.