By the fourth grade I should have known better. I should have known that I was going to take my lumps for hanging onto Santa Claus the way I did but, damn, I’m nothing if not dogged in my point of view and that pretty much brings up another associated problem at the time.

My dog was involved in the entire mythology of Santa and if I was going to still believe in Santa I was also going to have to buy into Santa’s otherworldly ability to talk to animals and that meant accepting my dad’s (father #2) assertion that my German Shepherd, Pal, spoke to Santa about me often and that I should consider that in any future behavior.

For me, the behavioral issue was no big deal but the fact that my dog spoke to Santa was a really attractive possibility and something I wanted to be true because it was cool and gave me new found respect for Pal. On television there was Mr. Ed (the talking horse) communicating with his owner, Wilbur, but this thing with Pal was the real deal and I wasn’t afraid to share it.

And, of course, I was met with resistance from two principle sources.

First, there was fourth grade classmate, Eugene, who took great umbrage with my story, feeling it necessary to debunk Santa and my dog all in one fell swoop. This only strengthened my resolve to stand behind my reality because it had to be true and the only way to cement that truth was to sell it with all the conviction I could muster. So, I sold it, sold it and sold it some more until Eugene threatened to beat me up if I kept on, which created an immediate impasse and an end to all future discussions.

Hell with it, I’d keep it to myself.

But I didn’t, because the next day at my baby sitter’s house (I stayed there during the day when my parents were at work), I let loose with the same story and everyone involved said, in other words, that I was full of shit. “Your dog can’t talk to Santa Claus!”, said her son, Gene. “Yes he can…my dad told me”, said I, and so we went around and around until Gene’s mother sided with her son and confirmed that dogs couldn’t talk to people and my dad was just telling a tale.

Now, here’s exactly what I thought and felt during all of this and I still feel pretty much the same way.

Intellectually, it seemed like a monstrous long-shot that my dog could talk to Santa Claus but I wanted to believe it, I was 9 years old and, obviously, wanted to suck every last ounce out of the legend before dull reality set in. The talking dog aspect fit the paradigm perfectly. Santa was already talking to his reindeer and they all seemed to understand what he was talking about so what would be far-fetched about Santa talking to dogs? This is Santa, and Santa carries with him some serious magic mojo so it was all working for me. If I believed in Santa, I’d have to believe that he could talk to my dog.

Now you expect kids your own age to be a little brutal with their righteous truth and I could forgive that but when Gene’s mother and other family members, as a group, shot down my story I thought, what a bunch of assholes, ripping the illusionary joy right out of my head because they had to be right.

I don’t know why someone would do that to a 9 year-old but I do know that, unlike today’s ‘fast-lane’ kids, there’s no reason to make a mad dash for the mediocrity and very un-magical reality that is adulthood. In fact, if I could put my knowledge on hold and buy into that whole Santa thing again, I’d do it in a heartbeat.

When I was growing up in the ’50’s and ’60’s, environmental concerns weren’t on the average person’s radar and, in fact, Rachel Carlson’s ground breaking 1962 book, Silent Spring, was the only serious look at pollution and was primarily concerned with the use of poisonous chemicals, dispersed in the ground water supply.

So, when the fall leaves dropped to the ground by the bushel, we raked them up on the curbside into a tidy mound and set them on fire; a blazing heap that chucked out smoke like a runaway barbecue pit. Oddly, the expected acrid cloud was rather pleasant, with an aroma similar to a campfire.

Multiply that single act with designated leaf burning days and you had what amounted to a neighborhood bonfire with nearly every curbside contributing to the fog that spread across the adjacent streets and filled the air with the unmistakable smell of fall.

It’s the smell that, in the sensory memory of those who experienced it, will always be associated with the season. Leaf burning was something that brought neighbors outside to talk and kibitz with one another; a giant social event with a 5-alarm ambiance and a role for everyone to play.

Children did a lot of the raking, if for nothing else than the payoff of diving headfirst into the pile, so it was a chore of joy that was so good we had to do it repeatedly because our leafy playground would end up spread far and wide as if we’d never raked in the first place. At some juncture, the adults took over the operation and the fires commenced. Leaf herders with a constant watch over their fallen flock had to make sure the fire stayed within the confines of reasonable although me and most of my little pyromaniac friends were just prodding the herders into bigger and brighter blazes.

Before there were multiple electronic distractions to dumb down social events for kids, sanctioned fun with fire and smoke was something to look forward to. It plays into every irresistible urge kids have to control the potentially uncontrollable, so what could be better than an entire neighborhood flickering at dusk?

“Hey kids, let’s go outside and play with matches!!”

We weren’t even content with our own fires so we made the ‘flammable tour’, roaming the rest of the neighborhood to check out the fires of our buddies on other streets.

Now, to be honest, this wasn’t a risk-free activity because there was the outside chance that a pant leg might catch on fire or somebody’s house was a little too downwind but those were acceptable hazards to be dealt with if necessary. In practice, the only regular danger we encountered was leaping into the pre-burned pile only to discover some kid-maiming surprise, like a rake or other mystery object.  But that’s part of the charm of the unknown and if you were going to get squeamish about a rock in the side of the ribs or a ground steak upside the head, then leaf pile jumping wasn’t for you. We really didn’t weigh the negatives of inhaling tons of toxic fumes because, well, we just didn’t because we were as oblivious as the 1950’s sometimes were. If you didn’t consider the disasterous effects of 3 packs of Lucky Strikes a day then you were hardly phased by pile of burning leaves.

At its peak, the haze just hung in the trees, like one of those World War II movie battlefields covered with artillery smoke. It completely changed the character of the neighborhood and made it, in an odd way, sort of an exotic getaway. I always loved it when the familiarity of home morphed into something else, whether it was 10 feet of snow, an ominous sky before a tornado or, as in this case, scads of little bonfires.

For environmental and safety reasons, nearly all cities have put a stop to that kind of thing and now you see the leaves raked and stuffed in those biodegradable paper bags, lined up neatly on the curb, waiting for trucks to pick them up.

It’s probably a good thing we didn’t have those back then because I’m sure we would have set the bags on fire too. Sorry, Smokey.

When I was at the peak of my ‘Trick or Treat’ powers, primarily the grade school years, neighborhoods far and wide opened up like candy dispensaries.

It wasn’t just a particular street or area that opened up its doors but every street and nearly every door. As long as you could keep walking was how much bounty you came home with and we didn’t use conventional bags or those plastic pumpkins because that limited the size and poundage of what we could carry. Instead, the large-scale operators like myself used pillow cases. By the end of the evening, if you did your job properly, you looked more like a candy hoarding Santa Clause with a full pillow case tossed over the shoulder.

There was something so communal about the event, so many children out there with one common goal, that no one was really alone and although the youngest children still had a parent on hand, this was primarily a no-parent function where everyone watched over everybody else. Potential perpetrators, if there were any lurking, were relegated to the sidelines due to excessive foot traffic.

My friends and I used to do a geographical sweep that always involved note comparison. The protocol for running into another group of kids was an exchange of information about areas they had been in which you had not and vice versa. What were they giving out? What house had the best stuff? Was it possible to go back twice? What houses to avoid and what was just a waste of time. You ran into so many children that it was like having an advanced social networking reconnaissance.

Unlike today’s TOT environment, the most sought after and heavily traded information had to do with treats that were made by homeowners; things like popcorn balls and candy apples. The folks that usually made these things knew their craft and loved what they were doing. They’d make the stuff from scratch and the treats were, by and large, fantastic. Treats like this were coveted because any kid could walk into a store and buy a candy bar but homemade fare was a random Halloween delicacy largely unavailable but for one day a year and you had to canvas a neighborhood to find it.

I don’t remember exactly when the homemade Halloween food scare took hold but it shut down a valuable mom and pop industry that had thrived for a very long time. Exposed as an urban myth (with no documented evidence to the contrary), the ‘razor blade in the apple’ story not only stopped the flow of candy apples but, for a period of time,  it virtually put a halt to the tradition of Halloween, proving once again that we are a very skittish and hyper-reactive people.

But back when I was walking the streets (should I rephrase that?), that bag got heavier and heavier and eventually dictated how long you stayed in the game before the strain on your shoulder forced you home. Having a bag full of candy that was three times the size of your head was a much sought after accomplishment, so most of the time we suffered for our diligence.

When you finally lugged that sack of sugar into your house it was like hitting the finish line in the Boston Marathon but, unlike the Marathon, the exercise was incomplete until you dumped out everything onto the floor and took inventory. It wasn’t uncommon to have an inordinate amount of Smarties but, then again, that’s hardly the worst thing that can happen to you. Chocolate was the goal though, and you needed plenty of chocolate to call the evening a success, but what put you in the upper echelon of TOTers was the ‘homemade’ tally…lovingly referred to on our block as the ‘good crap’.

After inventory there was the customary trading portion of the event and the living room floor became the New York Stock Exchange and you might either enhance or downgrade your initial investment. In the end, though, it was win, win all around because you’d had a great night of bumping into friends, getting exorcise, half-freezing your ass off, unraveling the great neighborhood treasure map and coming home with enough candy to kill 50 kids.

It’s a shame what happened to Halloween. It was a magnificent piece of childhood entertainment, screwed up by malcontents, weirdos and wild rumor, never to be experienced the same way again. Even though it has made a modest comeback in recent years, it’s just not the same kinetic experience that had us looking forward to the night like it was Christmas Eve. Trust has leaked out of our society and parents are assuming that there are hordes of evil beings just waiting to scoop up their offspring. Beyond that, there’s an actual theory that suggests just walking around in a costume, especially a mask, increases the risk of falling down and premature death by as much as 4 times. Maybe they’re right and the scaled down version of Halloween was necessary because we live in more dangerous times, or kids are clumsier, I don’t know.

Whatever happened though, it’s a shame that children can’t experience the night with the same wild abandon that we did, in neighborhoods that looked like New York City streets at rush hour, because that was some awesome, cool, shit.

I don’t think I ever quite got the worth of Kindergarten. Back in 1956, pre-school hadn’t been created and kindergarten was the launching pad for your school years. Most of the kids in my class were discovering the wonders of their newfound social circle, while others were simply enthralled with their own boogers or the taste of white paste.

After careful examination of all the circumstances involved, I decided that kindergarten might hold some untapped value; the only question being what and how.

First of all, the teacher was well past the nurturing stage and into basic little-twerp management. So, there was nothing to be had there.

Secondly, 5 year olds are so random in there interests that I had a difficult time connecting with anybody. Why did I want or need to be there? You sat around all day dicking with insignificant whatnot and making a mess and I could do that at home. Really, nothing to be had there either.

Thirdly, my main mover, music, was commandeered by a dispassionate piano hack (hereafter referred to as Mrs. Piano Hack) who turned off her hearing aid every time she led us in song. My innate musicality found that approach highly offensive and I just wanted her to stop mauling the piano.

Finally, as a result of points one, two and three, I was painfully bored and needed a reason to hang in there long enough to make it to the 1st grade. That reason was to work on my performance skills and give my classmates a lift at the same time.

Most of the kids just banged around gormlessly but others brought their own specialties to the table. One little dweeb, Jimmy, liked to set fire to the boots in the coat closet using lighter fluid until Mrs. Piano Hack would see the smoke and have to douse the flames with a fire extinguisher. That was Jimmy’s go-to move and while temporarily exciting, the long-range consequences were potentially disastrous.

My go-to move was far less dangerous and, hopefully, a lot more memorable, although to Jimmy’s credit, burning boots are hard to forget. No, I decided that the one thing that was lacking in that boring classroom was good entertainment and I devised a plan to provide that.

The plan went thusly: At exactly the same time every day, Mrs. Piano Hack left the classroom to go down the hall to retrieve those little milk cartons for us on a metal tray. I could pretty much estimate how much time it would take for her to plod her way down there, stack the cartons and get back. As soon as she left I would leap on the table, air guitar in hand, and lay into a blistering rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog”. By the time I got halfway into the first verse all the kids were surrounding me, dancing and yelling as I swiveled my 5 year old hips and sang my ass off. The kids loved it and I made it a daily ritual, but there was one fatal flaw to the plan.

I had a hard time getting off stage and lingering too long on the table always led to Mrs. Piano Hack walking back in, grabbing me by the back of the shirt collar and tossing me into the hallway and its makeshift solitary confinement. I’d have to sit out there for long stretches until Mrs. Piano Hack figured I’d served my time and then she’d let me back in.

Actually, there was a flaw in her plan as well. I liked it in the hallway and I’d rather be there than in the classroom with all that chaos and bad piano playing. So, it was kind of a win, win for me because sitting out there allowed me ample time to let my mind wander and daydream all sorts of wacky things and it gave my imagination quite a workout. That imagination was atrophying in Hack’s classroom so the hallway was a blessing in disguise.

Periodically, my mother would be called down to the school to deal with my constant removals from the classroom and the first time she came to find me in the hallway, she said, “I’ll go down to the principal’s office and get you back into class”. I begged her not to do that and explained my reasoning for not wanting to return. Unfortunately, I was going to have to get back in the classroom or I was in danger of repeating kindergarten.

It was hard for me to believe that I had to go back to that soul killing kindergarten room but faced with another year of Mrs. Piano Hack, I lightened up my table show schedule and made it out of there at year’s end.

Kindergarten wasn’t a total waste because I learned some valuable lessons in show biz and public relations: size up your audience carefully and know when to stop basking in the glory and get off stage. When I finally became a professional musician, those revelations became useful in nearly every gig I’ve ever had.

Mrs. Piano Hack wasn’t much in the guidance department but her quest to squash my performance creativity helped give me that rock and roll edge.

Rock on, Mrs. Piano Hack!

My dad (father #2) loved the grandiosity of staged illusion and made it a major part of his performing repertoire. When he spoke of the history of magic and magicians it was with great reverence for the craft and he worked hard to hone his own skills so that they were a worthy contribution to the greats that came before him.

He made himself, Frederick the Great, and while that smells a little like Michael Jackson dubbing himself the “King of Pop”, my dad realized the marketability of ’sounds like’, ‘acts like’, ‘is like’. So, he was Frederick the Great and all his promotional material lauded his superior feats of prestidigitation.

My mother was his assistant and between the two of them, they cornered the market in the looks department; she, statuesque and beautiful and he, dashing and debonair. Coupling that asset with my dad’s work ethic to the act and they had a very successful regional show.

The legendary illusionist, Harry Blackstone (from the same state), was his benchmark and he carried himself with as much class as the great master, decked out in tucks and moving through his routines like a ballet dancer. He was serious about this art and meticulous with detail, and before long they were not only working locally but traveling to other cities to open for other, bigger acts.

To my dad, this was show biz on a grand scale and, while I never asked my her if she really enjoyed this act, I have the feeling that my mother joined him in the small scale glory that was theirs. As good as my dad got, however, he still ran into the same road block that always seemed to arrest his dreams.

The nearby bar.

On the road or 500 feet from our house, the challenge was always the same…how to keep Frederick the Great out of the bar and going on with the show. Sometimes he just didn’t make it because he tried to mix the two worlds and they would, like a bad lab accident, create a cloud of mayhem.

They performed a large illusion surrounding a wooden coffin on wheels that my mother would lie down in and then the Great one would light the thing on fire and the audience would eventually see her skeleton ablaze, Frederick hunched maniacally over the charbroil, madly dumping more lighter fluid onto the remains. This was a real crowd pleaser and he would take bow after bow, the crowd cheering over my mother the ember.

The only problem was that, one night, in a less than sober state he had gone a little too theatrical with the lighter fluid and some had leaked into the chamber below where my mother actually was lying and her dress caught on fire. Frederick the Great wouldn’t notice this because he was still in the process of soaking up the adulation.

Fortunately for my mother, an off-stage hand saw the smoke and tore into the box, getting my mother out before she suffered additional burns and this, to my dad’s dismay, took a little of the sheen off of the illusion.

Another time, during an Elks Lodge performance, Frederick found the lounge before finding the stage and was so besotted that he, for one of the rare times, couldn’t go on. What to do? They’d already been paid, the audience was primed and so my mother, thinking quickly and taking stock of what she knew and didn’t know, assembled every trick she thought she could handle, made up a story about Frederick and went out on stage and did a show.

At this point in time, the fabulous 50’s, there were no female magicians on the circuit and her appearance got a little more attention than normal that evening. Not only that but she pulled off what she could with enough style, having watched my dad rehearse, that the show was a smashing success and the Lodge owner deliriously happy.

Several days later, the Lodge owner called our house, not to re-hire my dad but to check on my mother’s availability. This struck a mortal blow to the ego of the Great Frederick and he made my mother come up with an excuse why she couldn’t make it.

It was hardly a surprise, then, that when Frederick was hired to levitate a woman on top of a downtown building to celebrate the grand opening of a hardware store, my mother politely declined the gig and dad had to find another assistant for the day. She hasn’t lived a long life because of bad judgment. Yes, the fill-in survived but my mother recognized a gamble when she saw one; tall building, levitating on a  board, nearby tavern.

On those days, though, when all his brain cells were in line, for the relatively small man he was, his skill level was exceptional. His hands were so small that those tricks, like handling ping pong balls, coins or other small props, requiring such agile manipulation, were made even more impressive by the constant work he put in to making it look that good.

Although unintentional, perhaps his greatest moment was in Milwaukee at a large hall, opening for Jack Benny. He was in the middle of one of his tricks where a chaffing dish was lit on fire (a dangerous running theme), the top of the metal dish was put on to smother the flame then lifted off to reveal a live dove who would be taken out of the dish and quickly placed in a cage.

Nifty trick, except this time the dove, sensing opportunity, took off into the auditorium, eventually landing on a rafter at the top of the building. Since this wasn’t in the script, neither my dad or mother knew what to do to get the dove back to the stage.

Finally, just taking a stab in the dark, my dad pulled out his blank revolver and fired a shot in the direction of the dove. The bird jumped and, probably sensing familiarity, flew straight back to my dad and landed on his finger. The audience, amazed at Frederick’s aviary mastery, burst into tumultuous applause, thereby deifying what was essentially dumb luck.

Ah, the occasional randomness of show biz.

In later years when his lavish visions succumbed to the reality of his lack of motivation, a few cans of Stroh’s would get him to talking about putting together a traveling 1920’s style Chautauqua, complete with musicians, jugglers, magicians and other assorted entertainers and tour the countryside, moving through hundreds of little towns.

Even though he’d constantly revisit this idea when I’d go over to his house after my parents divorce, I think we both knew that it was never going to happen and the magic equipment would remain in mothballs.

In many ways it was ridiculous that he gave up so easily but he was a chain-smoking, full fledged alcoholic in a mind-deadening job and, regardless of his bravado, he would never give that up until the day he crapped out on his sofa at age 57.

If you’d seen him through my eyes when I was growing up, you’d have seen how great he really could have been. You’d have seen that his pretentious moniker had tremendous potential. He was Frederick the Great and if only he could have gotten past his own demons and not drifted into hopelessness, sky was the limit for that guy.

I’m not sure at what point it became clear to my mother that my biological father (father #1) was not going to make good family material but a clear indicator might have been the occasion of my birth.

As my mother tells it, he was around briefly for the actual birth but sort of dropped the ball after that point. Why wouldn’t he? By this time, even though I was my mother’s one and only child, my father had already cranked out 3 others in a prior marriage, so I guess you might say that the novelty had worn off. You know; you’re in, you’re out and then chance lays a kid on you or not.

To prove to us that he didn’t have the ‘right stuff’, he left the hospital not long after I was hatched, with the words: “I’ll be back tomorrow”, and then, of course, he never showed up again and my mother was unable to get him on the phone for the next 3 days or so. In the meantime, she needed clothes for me and herself that were back at their house and and would be necessary when she was discharged from the hospital.

So, she did the only thing she could do and that was to enlist the aid of one of her brothers to perform a little B&E and crawl in through their bedroom window, get the clothes and bring them back to the hospital, which my uncle did.

‘Where is this guy?’, she’s thinking, and I’m just hanging around in my diapers thinking the same thing…’I've just about had enough of this hospital and I’m ready for my new digs’. Wherever he was, it was apparent that he wouldn’t be answering the phone. Distraught and befuddled that her newborn’s father went AWOL, she eventually transitioned from worried to pissed and on the day of her discharge, much to the consternation of the nurse on duty, she called a cab.

As hospital staff escorted us out of the hospital and into the waiting cab, ‘husband of the year’ appeared. Somehow, without ever communicating to my mother, he had found out the discharge date and worked us into his schedule.

By the time she opened the front door of our house it was clear what the problem was, since there were wall to wall musicians and their instruments to navigate over and around. My father had gone ahead and scheduled a jam session with his bandmates, effectively driving me and my mother straight into the bedroom for the evening.

As we slipped past the horn players and my dad’s drum set, my mother gave him the stare from hell, the guys in the band were looking at each other uncomfortably, and even I mumbled something like “asshole” as we passed by on the way to my new crib, although I hadn’t quite mastered the English language yet and perhaps it was just angry gibberish.

To add insult to insensitivity, while most of the musicians would finally leave, one of them, eighty-sixed from his own house, took over the guest room for the next month until my mother forced him out.

From then on, for the next couple of weeks, on those rare occasions when my dad was in line to change my diapers, I made sure there was a little extra chef’s surprise in the gift wrapping. None of it mattered though because, in his disengaged head, he was already planning the escape route and looking forward to the next conquest and knock-up.

He was just a guy who liked to make the babies but didn’t want to have much to do with any of the rest of it. You could sort of understand it if I was, say, a Bassett Hound or a goldfish, but seeing that he had no intention of caring for a small human like myself, well, it was pretty pathetic.

Barb moved in about a block and a half from our house when I was 16 and, because she was new to the neighborhood, slowly and shyly melded into our group of pals that included several other houses on our block.

We mostly hung out around my house because I had a yard big enough to play softball in or we just sat around and talked. Barb’s shyness didn’t stop her from having fun with us but she always seemed to be playing it a little on the guarded side.

She was very pretty, very sweet and also, seemingly, very fragile. Early on I didn’t know what it was that caused that fragility but I would eventually find out. We were friends at the start but, by the time my high school graduation rolled around, we started dating.

Somewhere in my head, I knew that our ‘all too young’ relationship would have a time limit since she would still be in high school when I would be going off to college in the fall. Whether we would progress beyond those months apart was speculation but I figured we would eventually drift away to our separate paths, and that’s pretty much what happened.

That summer leading up to my departure, however, we spent lots of time hanging out and she soon invited me over to her house and I met her mother who was as sweet and gracious as Barb but with that same odd fragility about her. That ‘fragility’ was really a profound sadness, but I didn’t get the full impact of it until I went to her house.

From the very first visit, there was something in that house that made me extremely uncomfortable, something unnatural and oppressive that made the very air feel confining. If I was there too long, getting out and walking home was a relief.

As far as I could detect, that ’something’ turned out to be her father, whose only discernible interests seemed to be The Jackie Gleason Show, booze, and a police scanner that was on all the time. I’m probably missing a few of his other interests due to faulty memory or lack of discovery but, suffice it to say, booze and the police scanner were two of his principal passions.

When I say that the scanner was on all the time, I’m not exaggerating because he, apparently, had a need to know where and what might be happening in the world of crime and law enforcement at any given time. Even if it was a Saturday night and Gleason was on, so was the scanner and if there was something better on the scanner than the TV, then it was in the car and off to the scene of the crime.

In and of itself that didn’t account for what I was sensing in Barb and what I felt in the house, so I asked Barb about her father. She was reticent to say much because it was embarrassing for her, but what little she told me said a lot about why I always felt strange around her dad. Of course, I would see her dad in the early evening and by the time I left to go home there was still plenty of ‘family’ time left at her house.

According to Barb, her father often drank to exhaustion and, in the process, morphed from tracking police violence to creating his own homegrown variety. While her mother was the primary target, Barb was occasionally in the path of a kick to the shins as well, and then it all began to fall into place; the sadness that permeated the rooms of her house was fueled by the unpredictability of her environment.

It was a troubled home that smothered her gentle spirit and it pained me to leave her there with a mother who, at least when I knew her, appeared resigned to tolerating the disorder. Having gone through some of this with my own family, I had a good idea of what she was up against. Still, my mother had been more proactive in eradicating the offending party, leaving me with some breathing room, whereas Barb had no real peace.

Barb and her mother had each other but that hardly guaranteed their safety unless they were suddenly moved to pick up that scanner and fireball it across his sleeping cranium. Short of that, they were sitting ducks who went about their days with as much normalcy as they could find.

By the end of summer I was gone to college across the state and our dating was essentially over with the exception of a couple of visits back to the neighborhood. A new phase of my life was taking me out of my childhood for good and, consequently, away from Barb. I thought of her from time to time and just hoped her survival skills would keep her going until she could leave home and find her own way.

Maybe it was the culmination of an insecure home life or maybe just bad luck that put her in the wrong place at the wrong time but, less than a year later, my mother called me at school and asked me about Barb and “what was her last name” and so on. Then she read to me from the local paper a story about a young woman who left a bowling alley late one night and took a shot gun blast to the face from close range.

It was all unclear as to who did the shooting or why, but it appeared deliberate and Barb did not survive.

Had she latched onto something eerily similar to the situation she was raised in? Was she bred to be a victim, eventually slain by some horrible, irrational act? My heart sank after my mother finished the story because I knew what conditions had paved the way for her demise and it was a sad ending to a sad life.

Barb was too young and too vulnerable to have been left to such a twisted fate and, if there is some sort of an afterlife, may she have the comfort and care she deserved all along.

I’ve always operated as if I was an only child and, in any way practical, that’s exactly what I’ve been. But I do have half-siblings, by-products of my biological father’s (father #1) breezy dabble into parenthood.

I have 2 half brothers and a half sister, none of whom I really know that well except Harry. Harry was the youngest of the three and the most connected to my mother (his step-mother) after our father took off, once again, to find his sanity, that elusive comfort he probably couldn’t identify if he tripped over it. He’d just procreate, move on and repeat. Sort of like washing your hair; shampoo, rinse and repeat. Same deal, but with the latter at least you get clean hair.

Harry loved my mother because when he was younger and sent to visit his dad, she gave him a lot of the attention that he didn’t seem to be getting otherwise, especially from his dad. I really never knew Harry’s own mother, much like I really didn’t know my own father (other than he was an alcoholic), but when I got into my pre-teen years, Harry reconnected with my mom and started coming over to our house and hanging out and, as an added perk, started spending time with me.

I bonded with Harry pretty quickly, not only because it was rather revelatory to have a big brother but because he was a really sweet guy. I could see the warm spot he had for my mother and he and I were, after all, brothers, even if it was only the ‘half’ variety. I looked forward to him coming over for a game of Monopoly or some such time filler, but I just liked being around him because I felt a part of something that was bigger than me.

Probably like a lot of only children I felt somewhat isolated but when Harry came around I suddenly had an extension of myself, a real brother by blood, a piece of my elusive father, if you will. I liked that because I didn’t know much about our mutually mysterious sperm donor and, ‘hey, look, here’s another one just like me’ and he doesn’t know a whole lot more than I do. Misery was a little more blissful when there was company to share it with.

Like me, Harry wanted to know his father, spend some time with him, have a relationship with him, make that ghost come alive but our father didn’t want the same thing and was secretly living in another state, married once again and denying the existence of all the children he had helped to create. That did not stop Harry and through various means discovered our father’s whereabouts and set out to pay him a visit.

Father #1 caught wind of this somehow and was ready when Harry, who had crossed several states to get to our dad, wound up never even getting in the front door. Father’s wife met him in the yard, told him that our dad wouldn’t be seeing him, handed him $10 and told Harry he should turn around and go home.

Harry left, devastated, with the frustration of knowing now there would never be anything he could do to bridge this gap in his life. It would just be left empty. It was the same for me only I never had the guts to try what Harry did, although I considered it over and over, up until the day we had found out he died. Harry and I were partners in parental loss, knowing there was this man out there whose DNA we shared but who wanted nothing to do with us for reasons we couldn’t fathom.

For Harry and I, this incomprehensible rejection followed us around like a wounded animal crying for help. We looked at ourselves wondering what it was that a father would be repelled by and since we couldn’t even have a conversation with him about it, the mystery would never be solved in our heads. I know that this tortured Harry and maybe that’s why he turned to alcohol in such a ferocious way, or maybe that was only part of many other reasons. I’ll never know because we were a little afraid to talk to each other about it.

We stayed connected throughout my high school years, playing a little pick-up hockey in a night league and occasionally getting together with his family at our house; he’d married and was raising a couple of kids. We eventually lost contact altogether as I went to college on the other side of the state and finally moved across the country but many years later, after I had come back to Michigan, I got a phone call out of the blue from Harry.

Actually it was Harry’s wife who reintroduced herself and announced that Harry would like to talk to me. “Sure”, I said, wondering why Harry didn’t call me himself but, whatever, it was nice to hear from him. We talked a little and I started to get excited about seeing him again as we made plans to meet at a tavern right next to the old Tiger Stadium in Detroit, a renown player’s hangout, and then we’d go to the game right after having something to eat.

All of a sudden, during the phone call, Harry wasn’t there and the line went dead. I didn’t know what had happened but about 10 minutes later the phone rings again and it’s Harry’s wife, giving some cryptic explanation for the hang up and, “here’s Harry again”. I thought, ‘What the hell was that? She had to dial the phone number back and reintroduce my half-brother to me? Was that his wife or his secretary?’ But I just ignored it during our call and we finalized our plans. I had a source for the tickets and me and a friend would meet him at the bar on the designated day and time.

My friend and I got there on the day of the game, found a table and ordered some snacks and a couple of beers. Harry wasn’t there yet and so I kept looking around for him, thinking that he’d pop in at any minute and I was anxious to introduce my real-life brother to my friend. We eventually finished dinner and it was close to game time and he still hadn’t showed so we had no choice but to leave. I didn’t have Harry’s phone number and who knows how long we might have sat there waiting for no one.

I was pissed because this was more of that lost potential I had grown so weary of. Again, I was caught waiting around, like an excited puppy, for something that was never going to happen. Now my half-brother was just as invisible as my father and just as unreliable, and all that nonsense during that initial phone call suddenly made sense. If he couldn’t dial the phone on his own, how was he ever going to navigate his way to Tiger Stadium?

My suspicions were confirmed when my mother talked to his wife a few days later and she explained that he’d forgotten the details of the call and blah, blah, blah, maybe a tad too much booze at the time? So, what she was saying, in effect, was that my half-brother had become as big a boozer/loser as his/our father.

“Well, congratulations and thanks for playing our game.”

I made the decision right away that I would have none of that craziness, not because I didn’t have a place for him in my heart, but because I didn’t have the stomach to watch him turn to ineffectual mush like my father.

Harry chased the ghost, did not survive the challenge, and then became the ghost.

That was about 15 years ago and I’ve never seen him since and I probably never will. You might think me cold and unsympathetic but it’s more complicated than that. I truly miss him, or at least the ‘him’ that I knew as a kid but somewhere along the line this kind and good person surrendered to complete hopelessness and self-punishment.

It’s wonderful to have family but it’s healthier not to be swallowed into the undertow.

It didn’t take a detective to see that there were aspects of my childhood that struggled for lack of a paternal influence and with my biological father (father #1) hiding out in parts unknown, avoiding his children like the plague, and my adoptive dad (father #2) just plain ineffectual, my mother decided to pull a card from beneath the deck and took me down to the Big Brothers of America office.

I have to say I didn’t see this coming. I was in Junior High School by this time and somewhat resigned to being ignored for the remainder of my youth. I thought she felt the same way and we’d both call it a loss and go on with her single parenting but she also realized there were large gaps in my development that she couldn’t fill.

I wasn’t all that excited about this but, then again, I had nothing to compare it to since I was an only child so, what the hell, let’s at least hear what they have to say and so we met with the representative. My situation was discussed, likes and dislikes, and finally my consent was given and a Big Brother was chosen for me. We left the office with an appointment made for our first meeting at my house.

Beaver had Wally (Leave it to Beaver), Ricky had David (Ozzie and Harriet), Chip had Robbie (My Three Sons), so maybe I should have a big brother to show me the ropes and make manhood a little easier to grow into…at least that was the theory and since it looked good on TV, then…

Todd showed up on the designated evening and met me and I can’t say that I was all that connected to this, because I wasn’t, but he seemed like a very nice guy and I decided to give it a fair shake, for both our sakes. Here was someone, who had no part in my history to date, willing to step into my life and give something to it, and that was awkward for me, a kid who was already awkward in most social situations because I didn’t have a decent frame of reference who wasn’t my mother. I didn’t know how to relate to this.

But I’m sure that he felt equally awkward in his role and, though I sensed his sincerity in wanting to do this, I also felt the trickiness of the situation that he had signed up for. This whole Big Brother/Big Sister thing is, no doubt, a wonderful concept and something that has lead many lost kids out of isolation and into a life of being cared for but it is, nevertheless, an unnatural setup despite its nobility.

Where are the folks who originally signed up for this duty? I’ve got a middle reliever coming in from the bullpen because the starters couldn’t go the distance and, I’m thinking, am I so impossible to be around that a father couldn’t care for me? And now here’s this stranger who I don’t even know, trying to insert himself into my life and I’m confused. I was confused then and, writing this many, many years later, I’m still confused. Who found it so incredibly difficult to be my father that they either doused themselves in alcohol or ran far away so as not to be found?

I was that much trouble, eh?

I did what I knew to do with that confusion. I stuffed it deep down in the little reservoir I kept for such shit and I soldiered on like everything was fine and steered the boat myself even when I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no father to reference when things got ‘male perspective’ crazy. All I had were my own instincts and those, frankly, weren’t always reliable because I didn’t have a lot of life experience to rely on.

If you’re reading this and you have a son or daughter who you marginalize or neglect for any of a hundred no-good reasons, just remember that you’re setting them adrift to sort it all out in ways that aren’t necessarily reliable or healthy. I am someone who believes that everything works from the top down, from corporations to fast food joints to parenting. You do what is necessary to make the business strong, the customer happy and the child strong and self-reliant. Anything short of that is just one big fuck-up.

But my hats-off to Todd because he put in the effort and really tried to relate to me even when I was relatively disengaged and mostly quiet. I had learned to relate to myself and that made it hard to relate to Todd the way that Big Brothers would have envisioned.

I didn’t know how to do Norman Rockwell.

Todd became a friend and I have many good memories of our time together. I was very much into cars during my early teens, as was he, and so we went to the drag races and the auto shows and I remember those times very fondly. He taught me to drive a stick shift in his prized 1965 canary yellow Pontiac GTO and endured, with patience, as I popped the clutch over and over to the dismay of both of us. He was a good companion and he was very earnest in his attention to me and for that I will always be grateful but after a period of time, as I got older, we drifted apart and saw each other rarely until I left the state altogether and lost contact.

Still, Todd did, in a short time, what my fathers were unable or unwilling to do and that’s to give me attention that wasn’t warped by their own nonsense. We spent time together that was really about me and, for that relatively short period of time, Big Brothers of America worked. Todd wasn’t perfect but he didn’t need to be.

He made a magnanimous gesture that was unfamiliar to me; unselfishness. So, if I walked away with anything from our relationship, it was that and I’ll never forget it. Thanks, Todd.

P.S. 12/11/08

It wasn’t until I had written this story about half way through that I realized what an impact Todd had made on my childhood and I’m sure I did not or could not articulate that when I was a kid. Subsequently, I’m making it a priority to find him (I’ve narrowed it down) and let him know what I think I revealed to myself in the process of crafting this piece. This oversight of gratitude probably occurs often in Big Brother relationships (we were children afterall) but I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge what I gained through this program and, specifically, Todd’s addition to my life.

I was still in grade school when I started playing Youth Football and my baby sitter had to pick me up from school and trek me over to the practice field every week day during the season and then the blur of practices began and that blur melted into the blur of league games.

It wasn’t a blur because I was unable to compete, it was a blur because I was playing ball for all of the wrong reasons. I loved sports but wasn’t the least interested in organized football at that point in time and was doing it for the sole reason of having my dad (father #2) see me play in what was his favorite sport.

As other stories here have mentioned in so many ways, the desire of attaining my dad’s interest in me was my own little Myth of Sisyphus where the struggle becomes the only thing achievable. I wanted it because he was ‘dad’ and I needed to look somewhere for that person and know that he wanted to see me and I’m sure that scenario has replicated itself ad nauseam for millions of children throughout time but it is nevertheless true, especially for boys and their fathers.

When I was small, I admired so much of what he could do as an artist and performer that I was willing to turn a blind eye to his failures if only I could have his attention. That’s why I joined the youth league that year because he told me he would come and see my games; maybe not all of them but at least some of them and that would be good enough for me.

I busted my ass in those practices and pretty much hated every minute of time I could envision spending elsewhere but I had a mission so I ignored my boredom and half-heartedly got back in the tackling line to smack some kid with my helmet.

My mother got me to the games and ended up working a little in the concession stand which became a minor blessing since I would rather have chugged hot dogs than play defensive end but duty came first and I’d trot out on the field to play my position and save the treats for after the game.

That’s when the trouble began.

Dad told me he’d be at the opening game and so I was keeping a lookout in the stands for his arrival. Unfortunately, I was doing this while I was on the field and if I was doing that then I wasn’t paying any attention to the fact that they were running a sweep left and it wasn’t until I got slammed to the ground by the pulling guard that I realized that there was a safety factor that I was forgetting here.

I tried to split my time between saving myself and scouting the stands but it was hopeless and I ended up getting splayed out several more times before the game came to a merciful end and I carted my bruises off to the concession stand for a junk food band aid.

Dad said he was sorry he missed that one but would try and make the next game and so the whole thing happened again and I got caught over and over looking into the stands only to wind up on my back. He apologized for missing that one but the pattern was pretty clear to me that he was never coming to any of my games and he never did.

During that season the coach would pull me out of games sometimes and ask me where my head was at but I didn’t have the heart to tell him. I was embarrassed to say I was looking for my dad when I was supposed to be playing football. I was embarrassed to watch other boys interact with the their fathers before and after a game and hear them cheering for their sons. But I was mostly embarrassed that I took so many blind-sided hits because I was looking for my dad’s sorry ass to show up. Now how could I answer the coach’s question with any of that?

I know my mother felt bad for me but there was nothing she could do but get me another dog and bag of chips and make sure I got to and from the games. So I played the season out because I couldn’t bring myself to quit anything after I’d started it. I was a bit of a masochist that way.

In every situation there are those damn lessons to be learned and I suppose the most immediate one here was ‘always watch your blind-side’ but obviously there are larger ones. Although I never ceased trying, I couldn’t change the dynamic with my dad but I could experience what he couldn’t allow himself to enjoy. When I had the chance to be a presence in my nephew’s life I jumped at it without reservation.

Although I have no children of my own (an essay for another time) I can give that part of me to my nephew that I never received and in many ways it is a win, win for both of us. He knows that I love him and care about his life and what he does and I know that he values that and loves me in return. I may never have experienced a father that cared about me but I can know what it’s like to give unconditional love to a child.

It lifts you right out of whatever idiocy is flying around in your head and puts you squarely in someone else’s life and I think if my dad, depressed and alcohol dependent as he was, could have understood that he would have lept at the opportunity.