My mother pretty much tackled everything as far as parenting in my teenage years was concerned but there was one nut she couldn’t see fit to crack (excuse the pun soon revealed).

That was the ’sex talk’.

The sex talk is famous in parenting lore as an exercise in discomfort and probably every tact has been taken and few of them effective but, hey, this one’s a toughie so you have to have sympathy for the lecturer.

My mother decided to turn the duties over to my dad (father #2) and set it up so when I’d go over to his house (4 years divorced from our house) to visit he would impart his vast knowledge of the forbidden fruits and I’d have what I needed to carry me through the rest of my life. I wasn’t aware of this plan when I went over there.

I can’t imagine how my dad said yes to this, knowing his reluctance for anything substantive in the parenting department, but there he was getting ready to make his major speech on the reproductive act and all of its ramifications and I never even saw it coming.

The night started normally enough with the opening of the first Stroh’s beer can (sort of like the lighting of the Olympic torch – “Let the games begin!”) and the subsequent supportive openings of the many more beer cans (the athletes enter the stadium). Nothing out of the ordinary here, just the natural progression of my dad’s ritual. As his intellect turned to mush I sensed a level of urgency and social stutter that wasn’t usually there when he was getting hammered.

Anyhow, I’m sitting at his kitchen table when out of the blue and I mean with absolutely no warning whatsoever he blurts out with almost crazy intensity: “Do you jack off?”

‘Jack off’, of course, was the crude slang for masturbation that was in vogue at that time in the ’60’s.

Well, by now I was 13 and had a full year or more of hormone development under my belt and definitely knew what he was referring to so I started to giggle. I never replied yes or no, I just giggled, which left him even more insecure than when he popped the first beer can. He repeated the same sloppy question like I’d lost my hearing: “Do you jack off?”

I giggled some more and squirmed in my chair because the question was just as poorly delivered as the first time and just as humorously so I was stunned and unresponsive. I wasn’t deaf, just mortified, thank you.

My quasi-silence was killing him so he followed that up with, “Well, if you do, it’s O.K. I’ve done that once in a while myself”. And that was it, show’s over, thanks for coming…good night! That was ‘the talk’ and it was over in a blink with few casualties and no real benefit.

Now, don’t get me wrong, emotionally I was relieved we were moving on to other subject matter but, intellectually, that’s it? No ‘fill in the blanks’ for your boy? No detail? No warnings?

I don’t think my friend Dan got any better results; his dad acknowledging his son’s burgeoning sexual awareness and then demanding that Dan “keep his penis in his pants!”

Can you imagine? What if Dan had taken that literally? An entire life with your penis in your pants. Why, the guy would be afraid to use the public restroom for fear he’d hurt somebody and, yet, we both survived this blot on good parenting skills and now have nifty stories to tell.

Poor dad. Parenting was never one of his talents and I never mentioned the results of the evening to my mother so she never found out how badly he bungled the deal. For all she knew he could have recited the Kinsey Report with annotation.

I’m not sure who taught me more about sex, my friend Bobby down the block or my own curiosity but I’m pretty sure that either of these were contenders for the crown with my dad’s extensive encyclopedia of erotic education coming in a distant last. Apparently, I’d have to struggle on a while longer as a sexual moron.

By the time I was 3 years old I was still without the use of the English language. I indicated my preferences with finger pointing and various grunts and groans. “Son, would you like some potatoes?”, and then I’d give some garbled response that, I’m assuming, my mother had learned to decode because then I got the potatoes.

She was distressed that a 3 year old was still communicating like a caveman so, thinking that I might be retarded; she took me to the doctor for an examination. After the doctor had given me the once over he announced to my mother that no, I was not retarded, just extremely lazy. “Whenever he wants something he makes those noises”, theorized the doctor, “and then you give it to him. He doesn’t have to use language.”

So, there it was. The doctor busted me out and ruined a potential lifetime of relationships uncomplicated by meaningful discussion. But what could I do as a 3 year old? First it would be this speaking thing and then that would lead to tying my own shoes and after that, God knows what.

Around this time our household consisted of my mother, father #2 and his mother, who did a short stint with us for reasons that I don’t recall but that I’m sure didn’t make my mother particularly cheery. My grandmother was my dad’s personal tormentor but seemed to find it necessary to expand the operation to include my mother. By virtue of being 3, I was immune from her toxicity. Oh, glorious youth.

Anyway, one morning my dad, mom and grandmother were huddled around the kitchen table doing the coffee ritual when I came bounding in to dick around with my dad who was one of those people who had to complete the ritual before fully functioning. I poked and poked the bear until he told me to “Go on; go outside and play”, to which I turned on a pivot and began marching towards the front door chanting:

“Get going you sonuvabitch. Get going you sonuvabitch. Get going you sonuvabitch” and on and on until I marched right out the door.

As my mother explains it from here, the reactions were as follows: my dad started laughing because he always loved a good bit, my grandmother was appalled and exclaimed, “Did you hear what he said?!?” and my mother said, “I don’t care what he said, he spoke!” My mother had reserved a spot in her scrapbook of my existence for ‘baby’s first words’ but that idea was all shot to hell and left blank.

Perhaps that time spent down at the other corner of our street hanging out with the older boys made an impression after all and so from that moment on I spent the next week doing nothing but swearing up a storm and it seemed that this was my entire vocabulary. If they wanted speech, I’d give them speech.

My dad, mom and I were driving down the road a few days later when my dad started grumbling about the car ahead of him not moving fast enough. He groused a bit more, at which point I stuck my head out of the left rear window and yelled, “Get the hell out of the way!” to the horror of my dad who feared some sort of reprisal. It was explained to me that if I kept this up father was bound to get punched in the head so, please, stop doing this.

Sure enough, I eventually tired of the thrill of expletives, as kids tend to do, and moved on to normal speech patterns but it’s a time I vaguely remember fondly; a time of liberation and freedom couched in ignorance; a time to really let my freak flag fly.

Occasionally during the summers my mother and I would go and visit my Great Aunt Louise at her cabin in Brainerd, Minnesota but from about the ages of 10 to 12 I got to go alone, put on a bus with a note pinned to my chest and Greyhounded off to the north, land of a 1000 lakes and, just as importantly, Paul Bunyan! More on that later.

In those days the world was a little less threatening and mothers could usually trust other adults to ‘watch out’ for children traveling alone. Today that concept is so foreign as to be foolhardy and almost criminal but back towards the end of the ’50’s/early ’60’s threats did not take the same form and adults actually did watch out for me during those trips. The Mackinaw Bridge was an engineering marvel that finally afforded travelers a straight shot into the Upper Peninsula and on to Minnesota so the only real peril was making sure I made any bus transfer that might arise along the way.

I always enjoyed visiting my Aunt Louise, not only because I thought she was a wonderful person but probably for many of the reasons that most kids today would find boring. Aunt Louise’s cabin had virtually no modern creature comforts. No plumbing or running water and electricity was about the highlight of the property. If you wanted water for anything you had to go out and prime the old handle pump in the back yard, which consisted of pouring a bit of stored water in the top of the pump and working that handle until you got a payoff. If you wanted to go to the bathroom, you again traipsed out in the backyard to the outhouse that stood near the embankment leading down to the lake to do your business.

That outhouse was especially funky at night when all you had was a flashlight and not enough hands to cover the flashlight and the act. Sitting there in total darkness on a piece of weathered wood was definitely roughing it but the thought that spiders and other insects might be roaming the area always sped things along considerably.

I loved my Aunt Louise and whatever she floated past me including fried liver and onions I just knew had to be good so I was more than happy to put up with the arachnids in the outhouse. But one thing that made the visit highlight reel was the trip to Paul Bunyan Center, home of the big guy and his blue ox Babe.

If you know nothing of the legend of Paul Bunyan and Babe, here’s the quick skinny: Paul Bunyan was a giant product of folklore, a baby as big as house who grew up to become a giant lumberjack, walked west to find more forest and eventually lumbered around Minnesota accidentally creating the 1000 lakes with his footprints! Oh ya, and he found Babe, a giant blue ox, along the way, or so they say. I tend to think that story has more legs in the present environment where toxic water supplies might actually cause something like that but whatever; it’s still a good yarn for its day.

I’ll never forget the first time that Aunt Louise took us there. Once you walked through the doors of the old log fort, there he was in all of his 26 foot glory, a massive animated 3D replica of Paul…and then he spoke. I’m sure the parents had a hand in this but Paul knew my name and welcomed me to his Center. I thought that was pretty cool but what really got my attention was the chicken who played the bass drum.

There were a few of these ‘educated’ chickens that did different things but, of course, I went for the musician and he didn’t disappoint. Basically, you dropped a nickel into a coin slot that rang a bell which gave the chicken the high sign to walk over and bang on a bass drum pedal with his foot. The chicken knew that after his brief performance a food pellet would drop down and deal done. Forget Pavlov’s dog, I loved that chicken thing because he did way more than just salivate, he played the frigging bass drum!

The penny arcade was exactly that, an antiquated penny arcade filled with these old cast iron viewers that flipped cards quickly to produce a little film. There was a stuffed horse staged in a bucking position that you could mount and get your picture taken. There was a small steam locomotive that traveled around the outskirts of the park, several animated lumberjack scenes and just outside the park there was an actual Mitchell B-25 Bomber that you could climb into.

Paul Bunyun Center folded in 2003 after a 53 year run. The state was in an uproar, the governor intervened but nothing could stop the auctioning off of the park that was costing ma and pop a little too much to operate. Fortunately, a local farm bought most everything including the giant statues that now partially reside a few miles away but it’s not the same and never will be.

All things must pass, but in our heads there needs to be a reasonably constant order.

Then it follows that Doris Day can’t be 84, my high school was never torn down to make way for a supermarket and that frigging chicken is still beating the hell out of a bass drum in Brainerd, Minnesota and I don’t care what anyone says to the contrary.

We’ve all got our various acquaintances based upon common interests and work relations and we’ve got friends we see on a more casual basis (often because of distance and time) and those that we see much more often and are a part of serious bonding and history. Friendships are a part of life that sustain us in so many ways that we’re probably not aware of but in nearly all instances, friendship takes work and mutual understanding and can even change form and shape through different stages of our lives.

I value good friendships but I realize that we are all beholden to our schedules and commitments and there is a natural ebb and flow to these things. I think my wife struggles with this concept, as do I, but she tends to believe that her need for ‘down time’, in light of a heavy work load, means that she’s letting friends down; that she’s not a good friend.

That I would strongly disagree with and suggest that what I have witnessed in her over the past 19 years transcends all that I have ever been capable of as a friend. I constantly strive to be a better friend to those I care about but watching her is like watching a clinic on how to relate to a friend, not when times are the best, because we can all do that, but when they are at their most difficult. This is where you find out what people are made of. You’ve heard the saying: ‘When times are bad, you find out who your real friends are’? It’s dead-on true.

This past weekend, when my sister-in-law’s mother passed away (see the prior blog entry), my wife made the quick decision to leave a day and half before me so she could be there for the family and booked a train and plane and was gone. Amidst the natural chaos that is the passing of a loved one, she helped with whatever needed her aid and then I met her later on and we were immediately off to the visitation at the funeral home.

Now I can tell you that there was no formal arrangement that I was aware of as to what our roles were other than to be there for the family. My wife and sister-in-law are not related by blood but by a common friendship and love that is remarkably strong so I should not have been surprised when my wife assumed the part of support mechanism for my sister-in-law.

I was anyway, and in many ways I’m always amazed with the selflessness she employs to help friends that are hurt.

My wife stayed close to my sister-in-law and held her at times and shared the tears, the pain and the loss, and when she wasn’t doing that she was greeting mourners, extending a hand and generally directing traffic. I pretty much stayed with my niece and nephew and did what I am best at doing; entertaining the kids. But what I witnessed in my wife is the kind of friend I hope we all have at some point in our lives; a person that steps up to the plate when you most need it and does so without hesitation.

I can’t say that I’ve always been that sort of friend but after watching my wife do this kind of thing countless times with other friends, sensing when someone is in crisis, I hope that I’ve learned something from her. Over the years I’ve watched my wife get the short end of the stick from people she thought were her ‘friends’ when she was in need but that never deters her a bit.

She simply knows what needs to be done and does it without complaint and usually takes it a step further than that. I really believe that this quality in her has touched me in ways that I’m not even aware of but of the ones that I am aware of, I know I take more time with people and listen to what they say. I look them straight in the eye and listen, not casually but with real interest and that’s not always easy because our days are filled by quickly moving from one task to another and to hear someone you have to stop moving.

Now if you think I’m writing this just to rack up brownie points, you’d be wrong because I’m too lazy for that. No, I’m writing this because that friendship quality in her blows me away and I just want to run around and tell everyone but then I’m too lazy for that too. That’s why I have this blog.

Contemplating all of this, as I am, I realize she’s the friend I’ve always wanted to have.

Lucky me.

There is no primer for how to deal with the passing of a loved one. There’s no simple formula, no self-help book, no real advice that can ever make it go down easier. There is only one tried and true procedure and although you’ve probably heard of it, here it is again in print:

You stand there and let it hit you like a Mack truck and then get up and see how you feel. Sometimes there are some minor scrapes and bruises and other times there are complications.

Birth and death are such primal life experiences and in each one we are pretty much bystanders to the event. Oh, we try to control various factors such as place, time and environment but in the end we control nothing and especially when a person that we have known and/or loved dies we are left feeling powerless and vulnerable as to how hard that Mack truck is going to hit.

My sister-in-law’s mother, Grace, had been managing a bout with lung cancer, a battle no one ever wins. Recently she had entered into the care of Hospice and had but a couple of estimated days remaining.

Today she died.

Grace was many things and, like all of us, there was the good, the bad and the just plain nutty. I’m sure that I’ll be able to apply that epitaph to each and every friend and relative that passes, including myself, because that is the nature of our crazy little lives on this earth. For whatever shape her neurosis took Grace was, at her essence, a caring mother, grandmother, wife, friend and, as she should, will be missed by many people.

Grace always played it ‘large’ and if you didn’t know she was in the room then you were completely missing a pulse because her commanding voice and penchant to express herself at family meals with a mouth full of flying food definitely established her presence. Her opinions were carved in stone; she had the touch of a sledgehammer and, really, I liked her for all those reasons.

She especially enjoyed yanking my chain by asking my wife why she married a bum like me and other assorted wisecracks but she would always make sure it happened within my earshot and then I’d see that grin on her face and I’d walk by and crack back at her and she’d laugh. It was this comedic fencing that we’d do over and over to our mutual amusement.

One inadvertent act endeared her to me forever. While I was writing dining reviews for an arts and entertainment magazine in another state, I was critical of a particular restaurant’s cannoli and mentioned Grace’s connoli as a reference standard as to how it should be done. What I considered a simple A/B comparison she took as high compliment because I wasn’t only writing about food I was writing about her food and food to an Italian is like a full time occupation interrupted by an occasional timeout for those lesser moments that don’t have anything to do with food.

I doubt that Grace would argue that her finest achievement was her daughter and for that we are all thankful that she took the time, with her late husband Louis, to create another truly wonderful person in this world.

I have little patience for fakes and phonies, people who waste my time trying to convince me they’re something they obviously aren’t. I appreciate real people for who they are even if I don’t agree with them all the time. For whatever her faults or triumphs, Grace was unapologetically herself and for that alone I mourn her passing.

From one kook to another, I’ll miss you Grace.

Having no siblings meant a certain freedom, one closely associated with solitary confinement but a freedom nonetheless. The freedom of being alone allowed me to dream, design and create without the distractions of a larger family. It didn’t help me socially at all because I was never challenged in the way that siblings challenge one another so I lagged behind in that development but…

In the vacuum that was my home and my head I could just go wild without restriction and so there were many tasks that I gave myself to do and one that I decided upon at age 13 was to become a singer. Not a hack but a good singer. Being born into a home full of performing arts I knew the difference.

Father #1 gave me the DNA, he being a guitarist, vocalist and drummer of some renown and my dad (father #2) gave me the atmosphere, something like an on-site workshop.

Besides being a skilled musician and prestidigitator, he had his hands in several different aspects of performing and would, on occasion, give music lessons or help individual performers fine tune their craft; comedians, singers, magicians and instrumentalists practiced their shtick at my house. It got so I recognized a couple of them but most I just watched come and go.

My dad would help them work on their act and I would listen on the sly from around the corner because, frankly, the whole thing fascinated me and I wanted to take a swim in that pool, so why not eavesdrop on some helpful advice? In addition, my dad used to work his own magic show in our basement so I had the privilege of watching my mother go up in smoke or skewered with swords like a shish kabob, only to reappear as good as new.

I also got familiar with local celebrity. One night my dad invited Clare Cummings, a.k.a. Milky the Clown, to our home for a little socializing. Now, Milky the Clown was a legendary figure in kid’s television in Detroit throughout the ’50’s and early ’60’s and to have him, even sans costume, standing in our rec room was a big deal. He played with me a bit, pulling a cigarette out of my ear and entertaining me with various slights of hand.

And so it was pre-ordained that the entertainment biz would guide my world. I was groomed unintentionally and the pull was too great for me to make a more sensible choice. It was part of my development and, primarily, it was what I knew the best.

In that light, it was hardly out of the ordinary for me to decide that I would learn the skills of a good singer. I had, in the same year, taken up the guitar so I had the necessary accompaniment and all that was left was to work at it until I thought I was good enough to perform.

My mother did not want me to become a musician and gave thought to forbidding me from even picking up the guitar until a musician friend of ours suggested that she let me go and do what I was obviously talented enough to do. Nearly every time I got the chance to be alone I worked at it and that usually meant waiting until the weekends when my mother would go out on a date and I could practice unobserved.

I sang and played in almost every room in the house because there were different acoustics in each space and the timber of my voice took on different colors depending on my location. If I was looking for ’small room’ reverb, it was the upstairs bathroom. If I wanted ‘medium room’ reverb it was usually the basement, and so on. I did this, literally, for years.

When I hit high school I’d try to incorporate a friend or two into my musical sphere because it gave me a chance for live harmony but it only left me frustrated because their constant pitch problems drove me up the wall and, again, I had no choice but to go solo.

I did, however, take one big fat chance and brought my guitar over to my dad’s house. Who was going to give me better feedback than this musical guidance counselor I’d watched in action for all those years? Besides, he was family and wouldn’t family give me more attention than a stranger? I admired him musically and more than anything I wanted to show him what I could do.

But he was oddly detached from the beginning to the finish and while I wanted his opinion of my technique and skill all I got was commentary on the song itself or the songwriters. It was disconcerting but in typical OCD style I kept coming back with my guitar and my songbooks on the off chance that there would be a more substantive reaction to ME, but that never happened and I eventually gave up.

By the time I was in college I was performing in clubs but it wasn’t until one night in my freshman or sophomore year that my mother decided to visit and hear me sing at a local bar. That night I noticed how surprised she was at my talent level, but it wasn’t until later that I realized that she’d never really heard me before and had no idea what I was or wasn’t.

I only practiced when she wasn’t around because I was embarrassed to reveal myself until I was sure of my abilities. As an adolescent I only really sang for my dad and all his responses were, in hindsight, colored by his own considerable talents being marginalized by his mother which in translation meant what it always meant for me: ‘Sorry kid, I’ve got too many of my own psychological demons to make room for you’.

Ah, the Wonder Bread years; full of alone time and working in a complete vacuum.