Young and stupid.

It was likely suggested by some parent dazed by their child’s disregard for personal safety and lack of good judgment in the face of the obvious. I’m not saying that those in the older ranks can’t come up with disturbingly inane ideas, I’m just saying that it comes more gracefully to the younger generation and at that age their miscalculations can be dismissed with the above phrase and nobody gets hurt…unless they actually get hurt.

What got me thinking about this was that recently my 18 year old nephew asked me what I thought of the idea  of he and some buddies buying a canoe kit, building the thing and setting sail for their local university where a sea of equally dopey freshmen would be hanging out. Now when he asked me I immediately played the ‘adult’ card and asked him what his mother had thought of the idea. Of course, she thought it was a lousy idea and I chimed in with the “Listen to your mother, she has your best interests at heart”.

Crossing the ravine bridge the hard way

Then I went on to explain a few things that he might never have considered; logistical things like after you and your buddies have anted up for the canoe, who keeps the it? Where do you store it? Will you ever use it again? John Denver built his own airplane and look what happened to him? I felt that I had him fairly talked out of the whole canoe thing.

Then, inexplicably, I went on to tell him a story of a time in my second year in college when a friend and I bought a two-person blow up raft from army surplus, dropped a case of canned beer in the middle of it and set sail down the large river that led to our school. From where we started it was going to cover many miles and would be slow because of those crappy little oars that aren’t much more efficient than paddling with your hands. Anyway, to condense a story that took nearly all day to complete, we ended up discovering where local companies dump their waste, received a sunburn the virtual equal to running into a burning building, found out that there are more mosquito nests than you can count on the banks of the river, beer gets warm quickly and, finally, there are no bathroom facilities on a raft that you can’t stand up in.

In the end, I tacked on a ‘by the way’ that identified my mother as the one who drove us to the park where we put the raft in the water. I knew I was shitcanning my entire ‘good judgment’ argument but I couldn’t stop myself and I think I know why. Somewhere in the recesses of my addled mind lie the thought that young people do ridiculous things because there is, when you’re in the process of expanding the world beyond your parents backyard, a need to test just how far you can go with an idea and still talk about it the next day.

In the late teens everything is still very new and when my friend and I hopped in the raft that day we ended up crossing several things off the list of  ‘never going to do that again’. Fortunately, we didn’t drown, we weren’t swallowed up by toxic waste and we didn’t end up in a burn ward. But what did we learn? Well, principally, that staring at somebody for hours on end makes you, at the end of this torturous period, never want to see them again so be prudent with your time spent with others.

After I hung up with my nephew I started to think back on the litany of dumb moves I’d made when I was younger so here, for your consideration, is a sampling of acts a sane person would never take part in:

1) In my mid-teens I had a homemade go-cart that I would race around our backyard where there was a sharp turn right before a sapling. Nearly every time I took that turn I cut it too sharply (the ruts were there to prove it), dumping the cart over sideways and narrowly escaping a crushed skull by a large metal railing that missed my head by about 2 inches. Proving that I’d learned nothing, I continued to flirt with the same danger repeatedly. Fortunately, the worst damage done was to a defenseless barbecue.

2) Around the time of a particular July 4th I had built an elaborate structure in our backyard out of two by fours and sheet plastic. Then I figured we could camp out back there even in the rain. So when the 4th rolled around I thought it would be a cool idea to seal ourselves in and light sparklers since it was fairly roomy and would light up the place. Fire, especially 2,000 degree flaming magnesium, needs a lot of oxygen but, amazingly, it took me awhile to figure out why me and my buddy had monstrous headaches and sudden nausea.

3) In college, to get from one side of the campus to the other, they had built a 230 foot steel bridge that crossed over a very deep ravine. It was 70 feet to the bottom of the ravine so, naturally, I decided that it would be a great idea to traverse the bridge…underneath the concrete walkway moving from girder to girder just to taunt gravity.

4) When I was in my mid-30′s and living in New York City, on the way back into the city via the New Jersey Turnpike, I saw a plodding turtle crossing the deadly highway and decided that I needed to stop and rescue the thing. Just stopping on the turnpike was insane but navigating the multiple lanes of constant traffic like some daring real-life game of Frogger was truly foolhardy. I eventually snagged the turtle and tossed it into the ditch out of harms way where it probably crawled up the other side and got crushed by the traffic headed the other way. But what was I going to do, give him cab fare home?

In all of these cases I lived to dumb another day and the log of mildly amusing stories can be inserted into various social situations. But, for youth, there’s a commitment to diving head first into life’s dangers and to ignore basic instinct. It’s not safe but it is instructive and if you’re taking mental notes along the way, and observe even a modicum of self-preservation, you’ll probably survive.

And, in the end, isn’t it the length and breadth of life that gives us a fuller experience? Isn’t throwing caution to the wind, on occasion, a good thing? If you’ve never done anything remotely stupid in your time, you either weren’t trying or you grew up in a monastery. Maybe I should call my nephew up and encourage him to build that canoe after all…

Nah. It’s a dumb idea.

I had an elevated opinion of my interests in explosives as something much more high-minded than the annoying, jackass kid screwing around with fireworks that I was. No, I appeared to myself more like a Mr. Wizard (popular TV science kid’s show of the ’50′s and early ’60′s) or the latter day Mythbusters, conducting experiments in the impermanence of matter. I would always say: “What would happen if we…” and then go blow it up.

Stand back from this story, kids, and don’t try this at home.

My two favorite weapons of crass destruction were those deadly old standbys, M-80′s and Cherry Bombs. After all my teen years acquiring those items illegally from Ohio, you’d think I’d be minus a finger or two, or been tagged ‘Stumpy’ by the neighborhood kids but all my limbs and digits remained intact because I also had a healthy fear of their power. Fascination and fear go hand in hand if you have any sense of self preservation.

M-80′s were the acknowledged powerhouse but Cherry Bombs were waterproof (fuse and all) and having that extra special trait opened up a host of possibilities around the water theme. For instance, I liked to put water in various metal containers to see what sort of blast might displace the water to such an extent that it came apart.

Let me be clear. This is a stupid thing for a kid to do. There is a lot of powder in these things and blowing up metal objects is like sitting around in the back yard playing with hand grenades. And yet, I did it, and repeatedly, sometimes doubling the charge. The idea was to dream up a scenario (decide on what to blow up, figure the necessary size of the blast), light the fuse, drop the Cherry Bomb(s) and run fast and hard. I had a big backyard so there was plenty of room to run and still witness the results.

Initially, I blew apart a few metal wastebaskets, spewing water everywhere and ripping them apart at the seams. Then I found an old teapot, small but just big enough to get a Cherry Bomb taped to a small rock (so it sank to the bottom) through its opening. This would be a very confined space so, we theorized, the blast would have a lot of compression and the water nowhere to go; meaning that if we were to stumble on the ‘run away’ part of the experiment, there was a decent chance we could make a trip to the ER.

It exploded with unbelievable force and actually tore apart the metal crimping that adhered the bottom of the pot to the top, leaving a trail of water beads and shooting the dismembered top more than 200 feet in the air. Try as we might, we never found the top half of the pot even though we watched its descent into the vacant field next door. Imagining a Cape Canaveral scenario, we decided that it must have burned up upon re-entry.

Obviously, all of this had nothing to do with celebrating the birth of our nation. Not only that, but the nation, as I knew it on our block, was not kindly toward my pyrotechnic experiments. My next door neighbor, Mr. King, was a really good guy but, unfortunately for him, he was surrounded by a houseful of boys on his right, a houseful of girls across the street and Wernher von Braun on his left. The guy had nowhere to go but down into the bomb shelter and there were several occasions where he expressed his displeasure over my July bombing run.

All these years later, I can sympathize with his shell-shocked plight and wonder why he never played the ultimate trump card and called the police to stop my illegal blasts but, as angry as he would sometimes get, he refrained from sending me into a life of juvenile incarceration. He was a good neighbor and I was a myopic, disrespectful dumb shit. I thought I was entitled to set off nerve-destroying fireworks in my backyard. Isn’t that what we fought for in the revolutionary war…fireworks displays?

While I was constantly fascinated with water explosions (I even tried the lake), I also made forays into buried charges beneath a battalion of plastic army men and machines, and eventually took to the air in a stunning exhibition of the frailty of cheap wood.

My friend, Bobby, and I decided (actually I decided and he assisted) to strap an M-80 onto one of those inexpensive balsa gliders and let the splinters fall where they may. First we rigged the glider, Scotch taping the bomb in place and then I shimmied up the tree around 25 feet or so. From there I would light the fuse and toss the plane into the air while Bobby watched from below. Making a couple of dry test runs (sans lit fuse) we quickly realized that the smaller gliders we were using suffered from the weight of the M-80 so we went back over to the dime store (a couple of blocks away) and got one of the big gliders, not only with a larger wing span and fuselage but a wind-up rubber band propeller to help sustain the flight.

The tree was about 10 feet from the house but I’d be sending it out towards the backyard where there was plenty of room for its eventual destruction. Everything was set and the test run was a complete success so I went back up in the tree, farther up this time, wound the propeller, lit the fuse and let it go. At first, it sailed beautifully out of the tree, sparks flying from the fuse, both of us in delightful anticipation of the great blast.

And then, it turned.

Balsa gliders are notoriously fickle. There was a slight breeze and the plane began to bank and turn back toward the house, right where Bobby was standing. There was a moment where I flashed upon a life behind bars, having killed my boyhood friend with a weapon I devised and delivered from a tree top. Bobby still had those young legs to rely on and took off running but the maniacal suicide plane turned every time he did and the way it followed his every move started to make me giggle because it looked so Buster Keatonish. I know, I know, amuse yourself with a predicament like this and you’re flirting with a trip to hell, but I couldn’t help it. I was both appalled and entertained at the same time.

Finally, Bobby dove out of harm’s way and the glider exploded with a deafening thunderclap and there it was…50 cents well spent. Bobby was a bit shaken but unharmed, declaring that next time he would be the one in the tree and I could run around the yard in fear of the balsa-blaster. But testing was temporarily suspended after Mr. King came out in his back yard to tell me, in more gentile wordage, what a crazy fuck I was and why didn’t I go do something useful.

I’m not an authority on children but, if I’m not mistaken, flirting with danger is pretty routine for a kid, and flaunting authority is a close second. I wouldn’t have been doing my kidley duty if I weren’t tempting fate. Even though he had no children, it’s likely that Mr. King understood that, but I’m sure that tidbit of knowledge didn’t make the noise any more palatable. In his place, I’m calling the police and shutting the ammunition dump down.

I liked Mr. King’s style when he’d finally blow a gasket and had to tell me about it. He was like a cranky Wally Cox and it would just all come spurting out in a stream of frustration which was both instructive and entertaining. As I’ve gotten older and looked into the crystal ball of my future I’ve been practicing some of Mr. King’s classic old style rants and figure I can use them when I’m finally confined to the front porch with nothing to do but bitch at the neighbor kids.

Remember that golden moldy from Franklin Roosevelt’s 1933 inauguration speech in the midst of a bank panic (run on banks)? This was sage advice from a leader who was talking the country down off the ledge. Rather a contrast from a recent administration that devised a colorful graphic to track the current terrorist threat level in a way that assured we’d be constantly looking over our shoulders.

Yellow? Getting nervous here. Orange? Oh geez. Red? God help us all…run for it! In general, there was little difference in our daily lives other than an ominous color graph hanging over our heads. And why? If there were something as serious as orange in the works, wouldn’t you think the government would already be all over it? I mean, they’re the ones who made the graph. They would have a sense that real shit was coming and, if that’s so, what would be the point in our knowing? Would we form a posse? Would we buy ridiculous amounts of duct tape?

The point was to ratchet up civil unease and create a more malleable electorate because fear is a tremendous motivator. It will get you to do shit that defies logic, reason or any other attribute that suggests we are an ever-evolving species. Fear gets people to make unbelievably bad choices and dumbs down the entire thought process.

Just protect me and I’ll do anything.

During the infamous Y2K scare, we were to believe that nearly all the computers in the world were ill-equipped to process the date change from 1999 to the year 2000 and, since so much of our economy and infrastructure was now based on global computers, this break down would send us hurtling back to the stone age. Our savings would be gone, our economy would collapse and I wouldn’t get my license tabs in the mail. It was talked about by so many so-called authorities that this had to be a real fear.

Reputable publications (PC World for one) started putting out Y2K emails every day with ‘need to know’ tips. Anti-virus kingpin, Symantec, began selling a $50 program designed to straighten the whole mess out, at least as far as your home computers were concerned. For the giant computing grids it was already decided too much time had passed and there was little chance of averting a complete societal meltdown.

Y2K fear-mongering was off and running and every retailer was in on it. People were building bunkers in the desert, hoarding water and supplies, hooking up generators and buying enough batteries to run a freight train. Guns and ammo were flying off the shelves because, of course, there would be roaming gangs in search of the food and water you were hoarding so you were going to have to pick them off to protect your stash. We wouldn’t have electricity so crank radios were a big seller.

People made a tremendous amount of money based on fear. In the mail I received an advertising circular with the words “Blood Will Run In The Streets” emblazoned in red on the cover and an offer for a book to protect yourself, and a two year subscription to supplemental tips that, ironically, would have done you no good if the circular’s prediction of a postal service collapse was correct.

Just to demonstrate how effective this fear retailing was, even though I wrote an article for a local magazine that basically debunked the impending doom as nothing more than a reason to sell you things, just a little part of me, the bone-headed ‘but what if’ part, broke down and got a couple of jugs of water and one of those crank radios. Cha-ching.

That New Year’s Eve, as we were all waiting to see if chaos ensued, I flipped on an old computer running the ancient Windows 95 before leaving for the party. If anything was going to fall apart it would be Windows 95 because it was teetering on the edge of disaster on a regular, non-Y2K, basis anyway.

Of course, we all partied like it was 1999, nothing happened at all except many of us now owned crank radios and had so many canned goods that we could supply our own food drives for the poor. And when I got home, the only notable event that occurred with Windows 95 was that it rolled over to the year 2000 and looked at me like I was some sort of loser-ass for doubting it could figure out what comes after 1999.

While the U.S. collective psyche has been headed for the analyst’s couch for quite some time, 911 put it over the top and ushered in a mass neurosis that has to be unparalleled in our history. There are things to be afraid of but not as many worthy ones as you might think. And these days almost everybody’s lugging around some fear of something or someone.

Maybe we’re not hardened or battle-tested enough. European countries that have suffered through horrific wars and plagues seem to have a better grip on daily life than we do. They don’t seem to sweat the small stuff and so issues like gay marriage don’t keep them up at night wondering, “oh my, how can I defend my family’s sensibility from the marauding bands of marriage-happy gays?” Having defended themselves from Nazi V2 rockets, turning whole cities into rubble, they tend to have perspective.

Which brings me to apocalyptic predictions based on organized religious interpretations. These guys don’t have a very good track record. In fact, it’s a big O-fer all of time immemorial. And yet, every once in awhile some self-appointed apostle of doom makes a bold proclamation that the world will end on such and such a date and you should get your house in order because judgment day will settle the issue of heaven and hell and who’s assigned where.

The latest came from California televangelist, Harold Camping, who, after studying all of the biblical dates carefully, decided that May 21st, 2011 would begin the end of mankind. Seemingly, he was so sure of this that he spent money on billboards all over the country stating this ‘fact’ and steering believers back to his website. On the surface of things, this was a generous and compassionate thing to do, all of these dollars poured into billboards just for a kindly heads-up to the human race.

But that’s the view from the surface. Looking a bit further than that, one might logically conclude that this effort was nothing more than investment capital because what Camping received in donation returns greatly outweighed his initial outlay. And what did the faithful get in return for their offering? Another big nothing. Another payday for Camping and another bank withdrawal for the enlightened. People quit their jobs, turned their backs on worldly endeavors and sent their moolah to Camping.

After initially explaining that he was “flabbergasted” that the rapture hadn’t gone down as planned, a few days later Camping explained it away as a ‘silent judgment day’. I had no idea that there was such a thing but this is how fear works. Just toss a bunch of crap against a wall and hope that most of it sticks. Very little research would have revealed that Camping made the very same bold predictions on May 21, 1988, and September 7, 1994, so either Mr. Camping is a lousy mathematician or he’s another PT Barnum.

More troubling is why these believers would think it made sense to give Camping their money since the natural assumption would be that Camping was ascending to heaven and would have no need of earthly monies, right? But that’s not how fear works, for the threat, in this case the fear of God, took hold of reason and shook it like a pit bull with a kitten in its jaws.

Which leads directly to my own fears. Yes, I have several of the neurotic variety but, while they hinder me in certain areas, none of them disable me to the point of inaction or lack of intelligence. There is one societal fear, however, that truly shivers my timbers.

That is stupidity. Mine included.

Sometimes people accept statement as fact just because somebody says so. All of the above scenarios have something in common: somebody said so. People say things everyday that they know to be untrue (or blindly believe are true) in the hopes of getting someone else to believe them. They do it for as many reasons (personal, religious, political, criminal, etc.) as you can imagine, and if individuals lack critical thinking skills (the ability to critique and analyze beyond the surface of things) they are cannon fodder for every manipulation in the book.

In other words, with so many actual fears to pay attention to (getting work in a down economy, putting food on the table, dodging tornadoes, tending to bad health issues) why waste so much time on the absurd and superfluous in life? Let’s decide that we’ll listen to our brains when they warn us that something might not be as it appears.

Last night on CNBC’s “American Greed: Scams” a hedge fund scam artist was promising absurdly high return rates on investments and one of the scammed (a stock analyst himself!) actually said this after losing a boat load of his money: “It seemed a little fishy but the deal was too good to resist.”

Really? I mean, really?

So, with Roosevelt as my inspiration, here’s my bumper-sticker quote to remember the next time stupidity starts creeping in:

“Think more, fear less”

Certainly, my late DNA buddy and me shared much in common. Physical stature: lean and lanky, slightly round shouldered with big hands and long fingers. Our musical tools were the same: drummers both, guitar players both, singers both and adjunct comedians both. My mother tells me that when she sees me perform she sees a lot of him in my performances. I’m only sorry there’s no existing film of him playing because I’d love to have seen it.

Sometimes I feel like my identity is incomplete because I don’t have but the most brief recollection of the being that co-wrote the preface to my life. All the years of screaming “author, author!” yielded next to nothing and I was left to rely on third party anecdotes. You take what you can get.

Fortunately, my mother, who always leans towards sanitizing the text (carefully parceling out the bad parts) has been a bit more matter of fact recently when discussing Larry. That was his name, Larry, or, Lawrence, if we’re being more formal. I have no idea what to call him since I never had a chance to call to him but we’ll go with the Larry moniker for the sake of this story.

Keep in mind that this is not only a third party recollection but a third party recollection once removed since it occurred before Larry met my mother and was something he relayed to her after they were married.

In the mid-forties the big bands were thriving and the sole focus of popular music. Larry was working as a drummer/singer (somewhat of a rare combination) in various local bands (wherever local happened to be at the time). His skill level was good enough to draw the attention of touring big band leader, Les Brown, who happened to catch one of Larry’s gigs in a Detroit nightclub called The Night Hawk.

In town for a tour stop, Brown asked him to come downtown during the day and audition with the band and, as Larry relays it, the gig was all but his for the accepting. Now, it’s easy to see why Larry would tell this part of the story. He was confident in his abilities. He was one of the best players in the area and it was impressive that Les Brown was showing interest in bringing him into the fold.

I suppose the prudent thing would have been to let it go there and make up some fanciful ending but Larry was obliged to answer the “what happened then?” question with the truth.

On his way to the audition he found a 20 dollar bill on the sidewalk. In the 40′s that was not an insignificant piece of change and it looked like luck had not only handed him a big career break but a cash prize as well. I’d like to report that Larry pocketed the loot, went to the audition and had a long and glorious run with one of the great big bands in the country but then I wouldn’t be telling the truth.

No, dear reader, Larry had $20 and, since he had arrived downtown early, figured he’d do a little pre-celebrating by dropping into a bar and grabbing a beer…or two…or whatever the final total turned out to be. Twenty bucks went a long way in those days and on that day it went long enough that he never showed for the audition.

At this point, I hope you’re shaking your head like I am because what dumbshit would blow that kind of chance over a lousy glass of beer? My dad, that’s who, and the entire story spooks me to my core since I am dumbshit’s direct descendant and suddenly I’m psychologically holding his ghost up against my history and wondering, am I like that?

The first thing I asked my mother was, “do you think he was afraid of success?” and she, without hesitation, said, “Yes, he was.”  I have dealt with that issue myself but I can safely say I would never, considering the enormity of the opportunity, have done what he did.

While I find Larry’s story disheartening, the next Quixotic flame-out, via my stepfather, Fred (father #2), is just a case of bad judgment or lack of foresight. I’m not sure which but, in hindsight, another golden opportunity drifted away into the mist of nothingness.

Fred was a pretty good trombone player and worked quite a bit in smaller combos around town but he definitely had the chops, as we say. Before he and my mother were married he made his way out to California looking for band work and ended up with a Los Angeles audition for Lawrence Welk. Welk was in the process of putting together the unit he’d bring to television and Fred had a shot at being part of that.

Unlike Larry, Fred not only showed up on time but got offered the job in the horn section. Now, unless you’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on another planet or plane of existence you’re probably aware that The Lawrence Welk Show was around for a very, very long time. It got picked up by ABC in 1955 and ran in prime time weekends for 27 years.

Twenty-seven years…and still runs on PBS in syndication.

I let that sit there for dramatic effect but, holy crap, 27 years! And on top of that his musicians stuck with him forever because he took care of them with top pay and perks galore. Welk was a pretty straight-laced guy and maybe Fred couldn’t handle the rules and regulations that were going to come his way but he turned down the gig, called home and, in the immortal words that he would be reminded of every Saturday night until he died, said:

“I don’t think it will last.”

So, who gets you?

Usually, this other person is a mate, otherwise why would somebody be so foolhardy as to hook up with you if they didn’t know what it was they were getting themselves into? Short answer: a whole hell of a lot of people marry people they know little to nothing about. They are usually attracted to some aspect of the person, hoping that all the rest of it will fall into place and, while it always falls, it’s not always into place.

In the days when I was doing psychotherapy (just in case you thought I was well-adjusted) there were therapists that I could manipulate with such ease into thinking that my issues were minor and my self-knowledge was all encompassing that they were of no use at all. Even when it was their job to see through my BS they were woefully inadequate at outsmarting my defense mechanism and I was able to divert their inquiry so well that one guy decided all I needed were some relaxation techniques.

I’d done such a masterful snow-job that there was no point in ever seeing him again.

We want to be seen for who we are but we don’t want any prying, if that makes any sense, so we create a persona to do the work. In casual life, that’s a given and a necessary protective procedure. Before I eventually moved to New York City, during visits I found many random encounters with people to be chilly affairs and this idea that most New Yorkers were curt and unfriendly. After living there for a time, I began to see that it was the circumstances of crowded living that created this impression and, really, I befriended some of the most warm and wonderful people I’d ever met. However, it took an understanding of the environment for me to understand the people and, I suppose, you could say that I more or less got them…at least, in a social sense.

When I eventually found a therapist that was my intellectual equal I was relieved. Yes, I’d have to pour out the truth, talk about uncomfortable things, own up to my shortcomings…do actual work to improve my life, but for all the discomfort there was a comfort equivalent that made me feel safe and secure knowing that someone understood the real me.

This is the problem when no one gets you or you don’t allow yourself to be gotten. It’s very, very lonely in that little cavern on your shoulders and why people would want to hide out in there is beyond me. I’ve likened it to someone standing at the bottom of a well and pretty much all they see are the walls of the well and it’s comfortable in that you know your surroundings but it’s also a dead end and nothing comes in and nothing goes out. Now, if by some wild chance you get a boost (or the right medication) and are able to see up and over the top of the well, you might find things you never even imagined and that would beat the hell out of the bottom of the well.

In my personal life, my wife has the most substantial portrait of me. I know this because she calls me out on things that I know other people miss and she praises things that other people miss. Even though there are days when I want to go running for the psychological Kevlar vest, I also wouldn’t want to be without this person who knows me so well. As wonderful as it is that someone lauds your attributes, you’d be surprised (for the most part) how loved you feel when someone knows what an absolute idiot you can be.

I was 3.

While most, if not all, children at that age lack the knowledge and dexterity to handle such a chore, I moved around the kitchen with the grace of Fred Astaire and before long had settled upon a classic menu: eggs, toast and coffee. It was, of course, the fabulous ’50′s and there was no reason to go beyond the basics; just make a good, solid American meal.

I began my project at 5:30am Sunday morning and, having little concept of time, planned on a meal time of 6:30. Also, wishing to make this a semi-formal affair and remembering the old phrase ‘fancy pants’, I went the extra mile and actually put some pants on. Then I went about assembling the necessary food items from the fridge, selecting the proper fry pan, utensils and prepping the toaster.

Finally, I located the can of Maxwell House coffee and tried to deduce how an adult might make a pot of coffee. Pot, check. Coffee, check. Stove, check. Water? I was not sure about the proportion of water to coffee. In fact, I wasn’t sure about the proportion of coffee, period, but went about tossing in an approximate amount along with an approximate measure of water and cranked up the burner to an approximate temperature for an approximate time.

Since the toast was going to be the easiest task (because what 3 year old can’t make toast?) I concentrated on the intricacies of frying eggs in a pan. I’d never had the occasion to do that before but assumed, through my superior intellect, that one had to extract the egg from the shell and then toss it in the pan. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen it done on TV, watched others perform the task, or read a detailed essay in the Ladies’ Home Journal. I didn’t know how hungry everyone would be so I splurged (hell, it’s Mother’s Day!) and cracked open nearly all the eggs in the carton.

When everything was complete to the best of my knowledge, I went to gather my parents, still asleep from their late night adult lives, and while my father appeared a bit resistant at first, I explained my efforts and called upon their celebratory selves to join me in a festive breakfast created as an homage to my mother on Mother’s Day. Slowly, they gathered themselves together to see the good deed I had done.

“Happy Mother’s Day!”, I exclaimed, waiting for the plaudits I knew were to come. My mother replied, “Oh my!”, with almost delirious surprise, but my father only stared at the kitchen with what can safely be termed ‘awe’, which I interpreted as reverently impressed beyond speech.

Sounds good, right?

Now, at this point the story tends to differ between my mother’s recollection and mine but I believe, due to my mother’s advanced age, my account is likely more accurate so here it goes:

Then we all sat down at the table I had properly set between food preparation. I poured their coffee, politely offered fresh squeezed orange juice to any who wished it and served our entrée. I recall them being a bit too voracious to speak through the consumption of such delicious fare but some of the comments went like the following.

Mother: “Son, I am deeply touched by your wonderful gift and amazed at your remarkable skills in the kitchen. You are surely the most talented 3 year old in the world!

Father: “Yes, son, I was always a big fan of yours but this food is almost better than your mother’s…ha,ha! From now on, whenever you want to toss the ball around or spend some quality time, just ask and I’ll be there. Thank you for being you.”

My mother went out to tend to her garden. My father went to work on his stamp collection and I cleaned up the kitchen until it sparkled. What a wonderful start to a great day.

My mother’s version mentioned coffee grounds everywhere on the floor mixed with broken eggs, a hearty pat on my backside for a nice try and my father grumbling something all the way back to bed to sleep off the prior evening’s indulgence, but I don’t think that’s right. I should know, I was there.

Happy Mother’s Day, mom…and, once again, you’re welcome.

Since this is merely an account of my life as a young man during that time, I won’t get into much more of a political debate about the geopolitical ramifications of the war other than to say that 58,000 American dead and 350.000 wounded was our sole reward for having invested 20 years of escalation into what, today, is a quaint tourist destination. But that damn ‘Domino Theory’ (the suggestion that if Communism wasn’t stopped there, Indochina would fall like dominoes) was the bottom-line clarion call to arms and by 1969, the selective service system had instituted a draft by lottery number.

I graduated high school that spring and started college in the fall so I was right in line for this almost comical draft mechanism (something similar to the one used during WWII) that was based on two traditionally celebratory events: your birthday and winning something. In this lottery, you could possibly escape with stateside deployment (i.e. your life) if you were fortunate enough to get any of the numbers 201 or higher. Every number prior to that was dicey to dire as 101 to 200 put you in the ‘iffy’ column and from 1 to 100 pretty much ensured that you’d be on your way to the front lines in ‘Nam.

The resistance to what most of us considered a worthless sinkhole resulted in a serious schism in most of the guys I went to school with. Were we students or boot camp trainees in waiting? I had a 2-S student draft deferment (good until I graduated or left school) but my next door dorm neighbor, because he was older than me, was facing the end of his deferment. His act of desperation was to embellish his already stout build by going on an eating binge, achieve official obesity and earn a 4-F (unqualified for military service).

We had both entered a local pizza eating contest, he for the aforementioned reason and skinny me just for the hell of it. We would be given 12 inch pies with nothing but cheese and try to eat as many of them as possible in exactly 30 minutes. A friend (hmmm) had shown me the clever method of lining my stomach with milk as to ward off any kind of revolt my stomach might have in mind. My dorm neighbor was big but a slow eater and I was lean but much quicker and by 20 minutes in the rest of the competition had melted away and it was just he and I for the finish line.

More on that later.

On December 1, 1969, all the guys and many of the girls in our dorm gathered down around the TV in the commons for the televised draft lottery, 366 capsules in a large glass jar with birth dates in them. One by one you waited for your birthday fate and the tension remained until your were finally relieved with good or bad news. As the time passed and my birth date remained out there, I eased my mind by remembering that I possessed a 2-S and had some immunity, at least for awhile.

A sigh of relief as they went barreling through the 200′s without calling my date and, finally, the pull placed me square at 303. I’d made it deep into the safety zone and even if worse came to worse and this war continued I’d still be protected from shipping overseas for jungle duty. I was relieved until someone pointed out to me that because of how my birth date fell in the calendar year, I wasn’t eligible for a lottery number until the following December 1, 1970. Shit. I’d just been tossed back into the deep end of the pool.

At the Village Inn Pizza joint I had successfully knocked down 6 3/4 pizzas in a half hour, only to be edged out by my dorm neighbor who rang up exactly 7. Besides a second place finish I hurtled towards the front door of the restaurant only to hear a contest official warn me that if I tossed my cookies I would face disqualification. I held on because of stupid pride but my dorm neighbor, charging towards morbid obesity, celebrated his victory by…ordering an extra large pizza with everything on it. If he’d applied the same dedication to his studies, he would have surely been valedictorian.

With occasional indigestion he got that 4-F, and he wasn’t the only one. There were lots of guys who did much worse to themselves in an effort to avoid the war.

During the year leading up to the next draft lottery I’d talked to my mother about the war and my strong feeling that this was an endless trap without a clear objective and I’d be willing to go to jail or Canada rather than become canon fodder for a politically misguided adventure. She seemed to sympathize with this position and, unknown to me until recently, had approached her bosses at Bell Systems and put in for a transfer to Bell Canada, most likely Toronto. The process was merely waiting for fate to be decided.

In the meantime we continued to protest the war and slowly but surely public sentiment began to catch up with the question of what were we doing there? You could feel the tide changing but President Nixon only dug in further and, in fact, pushed us deeper into the fray by beginning a campaign into Cambodia. So instead of drawing back we were widening the field which mobilized the protests to an even greater degree if that was possible.

Next lottery, circa 1970, I drew number 47 and was on the fast track for Vietnam once school was completed. It would have been sooner since they stopped issuing 2-S deferments shortly after I’d gotten mine but allowed all current holders to maintain that status until graduation unless you quit school or failed to maintain a full-time load of studies.

As a group, every night in the dorm commons we watched the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite because, unlike today’s curious lack of nearly any war coverage, the news of that time brought us face to face with the combat, the strategies, the protests and the return of flag-draped coffins as they landed in the states. Cronkite was the ‘most trusted newsman in America’ and it was the only program we watched religiously. We needed to know what was going on since the war’s path was so directly intersected with ours.

Watching the news today and its sanitized description of the multiple battlefronts the U.S. is involved in, the wars feel remote and almost detached from the reality of the homeland. Other than fictional movies or documentaries, most Americans have no sense of the immediacy of what we’re doing in these countries, but during Vietnam, like World War II, that was not the case. We were involved.

As young men of draft age we were forced to pay attention to the war because our futures would depend on it but today young guys can choose to ignore these conflicts and get back to texting their girlfriends. I’ve often thought that, despite our military being stretched woefully thin, a resurrection of the draft has never occurred because history, especially that of Vietnam, tells policy makers that the public would put an end to some of these pointless incursions if their sons and daughters were at risk.

As the 1973 New Year approached and my draft status neared its end, more and more pressure was applied to Nixon and the war machine. I had lost the draft lottery but somehow gained the luck of timing as a cease fire was eventually put in place and by spring I graduated without the war hanging over head.

I can’t speak for my peer group but I’d be surprised if they didn’t have some of the same feelings about the war that I had. I felt oddly connected to the soldiers who went over there and while they were often ignored or abused when they returned home, I couldn’t help thinking that but for a minor twist or turn I could have been one of them. I felt compassion and a certain amount of guilt for having navigated a way out of that hell, much the same way that I imagine plane crash survivors feel walking away from wreckage that maimed or killed so many others.

After that, for years I read, watched and learned as much as I could about the war, thinking, perhaps, that by digesting this knowledge I was somehow sharing an experience that I never had. Of course, this was a bit of obsessive lunacy since I would never really know what that was like and I was fortunate I didn’t have to.

The one thing that survives in me from that time is critical thought about what we are doing when we attempt to militarily shape another country into our image. But the reasons for what we do as a country and the obvious lost lessons of Vietnam are the reason I always lead with skepticism until proven otherwise. Even Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, expressed in his 1995 memoir what he privately thought even before leaving his cabinet position; that the war was “wrong, terribly wrong.”

Building a relationship with a hair stylist is a very crucial element to allowing someone to ‘have at it’ on your head. The first time you go to a new stylist it’s with some trepidation and a little fear since the outcome is in doubt. If the first visit yields no discernible ugly or, if by some great stroke of luck, you end up really liking the result of their work, you start booking on a regular basis and walk in with a little more confidence each time.

My stylist, Miko, and I had developed that type of relationship and we’d even get a little playful and ‘experiment’ occasionally. In 1984, when a lot of those wild temporary spray-in colors were in vogue, we’d add a little of this and a little of that, going so far as to (at my suggestion) spray in every single color in the collection just for the hell of it. I looked like I dove head first into a vat of melted crayons but I’d just go home and wash it out and get back to normal (if I ever had such a state of being).

Around this time I was lovin’ me some Hall and Oates and was particularly impressed with the luscious, girl-magnet locks of Daryl Hall. He had this wavy blond coif that I thought would look great on me as well because we were similar body types and both musicians and both, seemingly, really cool guys. Remember, this was Flock of Seagulls era where there was some seriously assed-up hair but not Daryl’s…it was just cool. I’ll bet John Oates was envious of Daryl’s hair too. Hell, I bet Daryl’s girlfriend was envious of Daryl’s hair. OK, I’ll stop.

Anyway, after studying the desired result and looking at my ‘somewhat wavy’ but not wavy enough hair I figured the job for Miko was to get better wave action going and then style it accordingly and then as soon as I stepped out of the salon, chicks would be falling all over themselves trying to touch my golden mane. This, in turn, would increase my visibility, marketability and, if nothing more, make me think I looked really cool like Daryl Hall. In the 80′s, I was a sucker for all sorts of nonsense.

I also needed to make it form retentive. When you have short hair like I have now (out of sheer necessity because there’s a shortage of participants) all you have to do is wake up and, bam, there’s a style. You don’t even have to run a brush through it. Instead of personal attention you let the pillow do its work throughout the night. But with this Daryl Hall, 80′s doo, there was going to have to be a method of keeping the wavy hair wavy. This, Miko decided, should probably be a perm.

Miko told me that by using large rollers we’d get a larger, more wave like curl and then styling it from there would be a snap. There was logic in her explanation and I already had visions of happy Hall hair dancing through my noggin’. To help Miko along I cut out a few pictures of Daryl’s hair to give her a template to work with. I wasn’t going to rely on anecdotal hair, I was giving her frigging hair pictures to work with. “Make me look just like that!”

Finally, it was perm day and I was all psyched up and ready for the transformation. We’d gone over everything, Miko had the pictures and all systems were go. Everything seemed fine although I noticed when she was rolling my hair that I expected the rollers to be larger but, hey, she’s the professional so just stay clear. And then, after some dryer time, came the reveal where my inner Daryl Hall would finally come out.

But what came out had absolutely nothing to do with anything we discussed. No Daryl Doo. No golden mane. No luxurious wavy locks. Nothing but a head full of medium sized pin curls that made me look, for want of a better phrase, like a fucking idiot. And now these chemicals had frozen this fine look onto my head like super-glue and I was doomed for the life of the perm.

What had gone so terribly wrong? Miko must have seen the shocked look on my face as I stared into the mirror in horror at the bad case of the aforementioned Brillo Padnian Disorder and mumbled something about wanting waves not curls and “what happened to the waves?” and “you killed Daryl Hall” and other rambling things. And then Miko said, “Maybe I didn’t use big enough rollers.”

I’m thinking; ‘Didn’t you see those pictures? You’ve got to use the biggest rollers you own to get a Daryl Hall wave like that. Are you crazy?’ But she was a very sweet woman and I couldn’t find it in my heart to stab her in the head with her own sheers like I wanted to so I mumbled a few more incoherent things, paid the bill and left.

Instead of leaving the salon cool and confident like I’d envisioned, I made a beeline for my car, hoping that I wouldn’t run into anyone I knew or even anyone at all because I imagined all of them thinking, ‘he’s got fucking idiot hair.’ When I got home, I stared at my hair in the mirror for hours, just repeating over and over…”fucking idiot hair, fucking idiot hair.” The curls were still so tight that I imagined I could clean the tub out with nothing more than some Comet cleanser and my head.

Thankfully, there is no photographic evidence that I’m aware of. Through the entire long duration of it’s growing out I probably ducked out whenever somebody hoisted a camera in my direction. Somewhere, however, there is video because, not long after, the old national/local show, PM Magazine, came to our house and did a feature on our stage show and our subsequent relocation to New York City. In that video, there’s old Brillo head in all his glory but in the ongoing process of traversing the country I’ve lost the VHS copy. Oh, bummer.

It was all my fault, really. I aimed unrealistically high trying to achieve Daryl hair. Who was I to think that I could effortlessly run with that? You leave that kind of responsibility to the PR machine that can afford to maintain it, not some local musician with limited resources. But as I sat, hang dog, head in hands, I couldn’t shake the question of what possessed Miko to use those small rollers…and then, as clouds parted and strange electrified harps played, a vision of Daryl Hall appeared to me and sang:

Oh-oh, here she comes
Watch out boy
She’ll chew you up
Oh-oh, here she comes…

We always want clarity…a reason…a sign from the universe that something so wantonly chaotic makes sense and that’s just not how the universe works. As ill-equipped humans, we struggle to understand that which we can’t.

I was 25 when Catie and I began living together. Her given name was Catherine, most friends called her Cat, but I had affectionately christened her Catie. Just to preface everything to follow I’d say that our relationship was, regardless of our love for each other, an incomplete, sometimes juvenile attempt at something just beyond dating. She was 22 and, considering that both of us had the maturity of a 15 year old, we were truly banging around without a sense of purpose.

That’s not to diminish the fact that I was in love with her, but to make clear that we were two people hardly ready for much more than a casual relationship. Still, there we were trying to make a go at cohabitation and limping along with it, not knowing how to relate with one another when we were busy, at the same time, hanging with friends and acting out our crazy youth.

In 1976 I had a jazz-fusion band and we were working a lot of the clubs in Portland, Oregon and struggling to gig as much as possible. In Northwest Portland there was a small pub called Bogart’s Joint that we played from time to time and one Saturday summer night we were there and Catie had brought along a few friends to hang with.

The gig went as usual but somewhere along the line I lost sight of her and at the end of our set I asked one of her girlfriends where she’d gone. She told me that Catie and a guy I didn’t really know (but one of the band members did) had stepped out for a quick motorcycle ride and while this gave me a slight case of boyfriend angst I didn’t think about it much until we were well into our last set.

The night was winding down and she still hadn’t returned. We dutifully started tearing down our gear and loading out into our vans, and I hung with the club for as long as possible but the owner finally had to shut the doors and turn out the lights. I had this terrible feeling in my stomach that this was not a simple case of lost time but something gone bad. Apparently my band mates felt the same way since they all stood with me in front of the dark club wondering what had happened.

As we hashed out the possibilities and worried ourselves into an endless loop, an explanation suddenly appeared coming down the street, a wrecker with a mangled motorcycle and two helmets dangling from its winch.

I don’t remember anyone saying anything for awhile. There was hardly another vehicle on the road, just this apparition sent from hell, moving in slow motion, as a guide to what we knew must have happened. I just remember hoping somehow that the wrecker and our missing persons were disconnected events. We were riveted to the passing visitant until eventually somebody broke the spell and suggested that the hospital was only a few blocks away and maybe we should go there.

I knew this wasn’t going to be good and I couldn’t even talk as we walked into emergency so a gal from the band, who knew the driver, went to ask if there had been an accident and had they been taken there? After getting the answer she turned around with tears in her eyes and told me that their bike had been broadsided by a newspaper truck, tossing Catie around 100 feet, landing on her face, while her friend had been killed on impact. Catie was in critical condition with a broken jaw and severe brain trauma and no guarantee that she’d make it through the night, and if she did, what then?

The room was filling up with family and friends and I was just in shock, my throat knotted tight, anxious with the desire to run. People were consoling each other but I was overwhelmed and had to get clear of the waiting room and deal with things the only way I knew how. I found a small room off of the hospital chapel around the corner and just sat there for awhile and begged any deity who would listen to make this all better; just fix this one and I’ll do this and that and a hundred other desperate promises I knew I couldn’t keep.

After awhile she came out of surgery and was transfered to the intensive care unit where I would spend the night in the waiting room and several more beyond that as we waited to see what would become of her life. I just couldn’t leave that room and even when the doctor came out and told me that he didn’t expect that she would ever overcome the crushing trauma of her brain injuries and subsequent coma, I was blindly defiant, as many people are in those situations, and told him he was wrong. She would come out of this somehow and he would see her strength, but what did I know about any of this? I was talking out my ass because I was so scared of what he was saying and, most of all, that we were stuck in this holding pattern while death decided which way to go.

For her friend who had been killed in the crash, there was some quick finality and all that was left was to mourn and remember this person who had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but for Catie it was going to be, if she made it out of the woods at all, a drawn out slog.

I went home to our apartment, got the dog, grabbed some clothes, came back to the hospital and, basically, never left except when necessary. My van had been set up with a bed when I came out to the West Coast to begin with so I parked on the street across from the hospital and the dog and I spent most of our days and nights there. I wanted to be involved in whatever happened to her but, more accurately put, I couldn’t leave. It was like I had a responsibility to watch over everything so she got what she was supposed to get and had an advocate on the ready if needed.

She was in a coma for weeks so, initially, I was on sit and watch duty. On occasion her mother would join me but she couldn’t be there all the time because she was fighting an ongoing battle of her own with Multiple Sclerosis. Her father (long divorced from her mother), to my knowledge, never came to visit her a single time. I didn’t think about that much initially because that was pretty much the way it always was, but he would eventually show up down the road for other reasons.

As I had ignorantly predicted to the doctor, she did not die, she finally came slowly out of the coma, and she began to communicate again. To a degree, I was lucky-right. Although her emotional level had regressed to that of a young teenager, her intellect remained unusually sharp and while her equilibrium was barely functional and her total understanding of where she was and why was in doubt, she progressed farther than anyone might have expected back when initially assessed.

She had one mantra and that was to “get out and go home”. Even with her jaw wired shut, she begged me to take her out of there and, of course, I had to explain repeatedly that her condition prevented that but the truth didn’t stop her from trying. She was on the 5th floor of the hospital and right outside her room was the elevator door and a couple of times when I’d leave for lunch or something other she’d be intercepted by a nurse as she weaved back and forth toward the elevator in her backless dressing gown, looking like she’d downed a case of whiskey and forgotten where she’d left her clothes. The good thing was she was easy to spot and easy to catch, but it was troublesome for me (and I assumed for the nursing staff) that she was so dedicated to a breakout.

There were times when she’d be agitated to the degree that bed straps were necessary but, for the most part, they tried hard not to resort to those. For the sake of safety, her mother and I notified the nursing staff of the loose screen on the room’s sole window and, while we didn’t expect that to be an issue, we felt obliged to tie up any loopholes.

I think friends and family were considering the depth of what I was doing with some trepidation far before it ever dawned on me but, for all the myopic dedicated energy I was expending there, just what did I think I was doing? If she continued to progress but never moved beyond a certain road block, was I going to severely modify my future to accommodate all of this? I was barely handling myself properly so why did I think I could tackle something so gargantuan as caring for a brain injured patient? I was an ill-defined 25 year old with the will of a Pit Bull and not enough sense to know how hard I was tugging on my leash.

I sat in on all psychological evaluations and physical rehab sessions. The doctors and nurses got to know me as well as they knew the patient because of the amount of time I was spending with her. On occasion they would even consult privately with me, asking questions about things I might have seen or heard that would be helpful indicators as to the status of her condition. They would ask me what I thought of this and that but I was never sure whether I was helping or not. I was running on empty, didn’t want to be around the hospital anymore and my emotional fuel gage was down to about a quarter tank, but I never quit.

A couple of months into the hospital ordeal the band had another stint back at Bogart’s Joint and it was another Saturday night to boot. I think we were maybe two sets into the evening when I noticed a couple of policemen had come in the front door and were talking to one of the waitresses. Then they were gesturing in my direction and as soon as we took a break I went over to find out what was going on.

From the moment they walked in I was having that sick feeling again, like disarray was heading my way once more. They asked me, “Do you know where Catherine is?”

“What are you talking about?”, I asked, “She’s in the hospital.”

“No, she’s gone and the nursing staff can’t find her.”

I’m asking over again and again, so where is she? She can’t walk more than a few feet without tipping over. What are you saying?

Finally, they asked me to come to the hospital and, once again, I ditched an understanding group of band members and set out for some fresh new hell. My head was swimming and I was furious that somehow she’d managed to get out of the hospital we all knew she was trying to get out of.

I walked into the head nurse’s office and she told me they were doing a thorough search but, in the meantime, if there were any places that I knew of where she might have gone maybe I should conduct a search of my own just in case she managed to get a ride somewhere outside the hospital. The nurse indicated that she was wearing nothing more than that flimsy hospital gown and I tried to understand how someone wouldn’t have spotted her before she got very far in a get-up like that.

A small portion of Laurelhurst Park in the daytime

There were only two immediate thoughts and that was our apartment in southeast Portland and Laurelhurst Park a couple blocks away where we often walked the dog. Laurelhurst was a large city park with a huge pond in the middle surrounded by lots of trees and rolling terrain. The nurse had given me one of those big, long police flashlights so I could navigate my way around the park where there were no streetlights. I wandered through every inch of it, asking passersby if they’d seen her but after a couple of hours of retracing my steps I gave up. The entire time I just kept envisioning her right around the corner and I’d get her safely back to the hospital but I was just going in circles..

I went to our apartment and hunted around outside and on our porch…just anywhere she might have knowledge of but she was not to be found so I decided I had to go back to the hospital in the off chance that she had shown up or had been found elsewhere. When I walked in the front door the head nurse spotted me right away and asked me to come in her office. The way she asked me to sit down and the look on her face told me I was in for a world of wrong.

“We found her.”

“Where is she?”

“When we were searching the area, we found her on the grounds at the base of the building. Apparently, she had no idea she was on the 5th floor and went out the window.”

And with that, I snapped the last spring in my already fragile psyche and screamed at her, “You stupid fucking assholes. I told you that screen was messed up and you did nothing and now she’s fucking dead. You dumb fucking assholes” and I flung the flashlight she’d given me so hard into the wall that it nearly stuck like an arrow and I ran out of the room. I couldn’t be in there anymore. The nurse followed me trying to console me but there was nothing more to be said. I screamed at her to leave me alone.

It was over and I was broken…emotionally broken into a million little shards that I was holding together by sheer force of anger. Through all of this, it wasn’t a motorcycle accident that finally ended her life but a simple act of neglect. I don’t know how long I sat there in the front lobby, staring off to nowhere, but I couldn’t move because I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I just sat there in a state of shock trying to comprehend what all just happened. I didn’t want anyone to talk to me or even approach me…just stay…the fuck…away.

From the time of her death to the time of her memorial service I remember very little. I was just going through the motions and stunned into a stoic silence. It had exhausted me in a way that leaves you drained, seemingly beyond repair, looking for guidance from any source available. It was not so much the duration of all that happened but the intensity over those 3 months that sucked the life out of me.

At the memorial I sobbed uncontrollably and then, when it was over and the last tear had come and gone, emotionally a part of me was closed for business. For the next several years I was incapable of crying over anything and I was worried about it and knew that I needed help but in typical me fashion I decided I could handle it on my own. But no one walks away from something like that and blithely flips the page onto the next thing.

There is accumulated wreckage to deal with and I was a walking mess. Many of the nurses that I had gotten to know during the time she was there went out of their way to contact me, bring me food, take me out for a beer and be sure I wasn’t alone. They were incredibly generous but I was my own disaster area and it was going to take a long time to put the psychological trauma of those events in a safe place…a very long time.

Catie was hopelessly trapped and her fierce energy had no patience for her circumstance and, as a result, I’ve often wondered over the years: what if she did know she was on the 5th floor and didn’t care what method she used to escape?

I’m a quarter American Indian (my grandmother on my father’s (father #1) side) and so it was more or less a natural inclination to want to learn something about my own cultural heritage. If you see my oh, so pale self you might wonder how this might be possible but the Scandinavian bulk of my background apparently had the Indian part surrounded.

You’d think a trip to Wounded Knee, South Dakota, where just that prior February members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) had occupied the town, forcing a violent confrontation between the tribal members and the likes of the FBI, might be a better bet than Duluth for where the action was but there were good reasons for choosing Minnesota:

1. Minnesota has a very large Indian population and there were many AIM sympathetic reservations (mostly Chippewa) throughout the state and my plan was to make an unannounced visit and hope for the best.
2. Just to the south of us, in St. Paul, AIM leaders like Russell Means and Dennis Banks would be meeting the Secretary of the Interior and we were sure we could weasel in as faux journalists.
3. Finally, and this was the best part, my great aunt, whom we would be staying with, knew of a fella by the name of John Costa, the resident of a shack down by the railroad tracks (yes, my friends, there are actual souls who live in cracker boxes with just the bare minimum of amenities). He was a loner who happened to have made it his passion in life to study the various tribes that make up the Sioux nation. He agreed to talk to me in advance so it was only a matter of going there. John, so we were told, knew everything about the culture one could know and not only knew many of the historical figures personally but spoke the language fluently.

John lived in a small ramshackle trailer, piled high with the Indian studies that he so thoroughly digested and a mound of dirty dishes that indicated his priorities. This might have been a mini-episode of television’s Hoarders but for the fact that John hoarded very little and it was more a relation to the size of his space. He was more minimalist than hoarder. Everything about the space related to his sole presence so when we got there, accommodating two more guests required some precise rearranged seating.

He had worked, and still worked occasionally, for his neighborhood railway but, at the time, was largely retired to his private research. Why, exactly, he cared so much about Indian culture, I’m not quite sure and I was certainly remiss in not asking but I suspect that he, like me, had some ancestry there and it drew him to want to learn something about it. It’s probably something akin to why I wanted to know more about my biological father, in the hopes that I’d discover something about myself in the process.

Crazy Horse

He told us endless stories of spending time with the son of Crazy Horse and other notable figures and tried to help us understand the mindset of a race that had been marginalized on such a massive scale that it was astounding that there were not riots in the streets of every reservation in the country. Reservations, he explained, were almost universally poor on a scale that would shock most Americans (this was long before casinos would dot the map like car dealerships).

But he also talked of the traditional lifestyles, religion and lore of the Sioux, even taking time to tell us some children’s stories and how those stories fit into the overall culture of the tribe. Not only speaking in English, he often inserted the native language where appropriate and where we would understand, and sometimes he would stop to educate us on various word meanings and intent.

The multiple days we spent visiting with him were enriching far beyond anything that I’d known of Indian life prior to the trip and by the time we were ready to leave Duluth we felt, at least, marginally empowered by out newfound knowledge. But this is where education and experience often do not totally reconcile. It’s one thing to learn things intellectually and entirely another to experience them first hand and that became the next task at hand.

So between Duluth and St. Paul (and the AIM convention) we were heading directly into a woodland reservation where we, standing out among the residents, were surprisingly approached by a man at the reservation gift shop asking us why we had come there and how he could help. I thought, ‘wow, what luck’ and I didn’t hesitate to ask if there was anyway we could see the reservation beyond the facade that is there to serve white visitors. He enthusiastically offered to show us his own home and around the area where he lived. Again, what great luck…sort of.

Sure enough, we saw his family’s house, which upon first glance seemed much nicer than what I had expected, thanks to an arm of HUD (Housing and Urban Development) that had constructed the homes under a federal grant. But as he took us inside it was in striking contrast to the exterior in that there were no inner walls and, hence, no insulation. Keep in mind this was Minnesota. What had appeared as a modest, but pleasant, suburban home was really nothing more than a shell. Inside, heat was provided by a pot belly stove and little else. The only other notable amenity was a small television in almost every room (apparently cheaper to acquire than walls). What must winters be like in a house like this?

He also showed us a rough, clapboard shack on the side of their house that they used to dry meats and hides. Almost as an aside, he added that before receiving their present house/frame, the entire family lived in that little shack. Oh my.

We were very young and not savvy enough to understand what was transpiring here. A man approaches us and becomes our very own guide through a neighborhood that is very depressed and hardly display-worthy and as we drive around we see that people are giving out those looks that meant we were unwelcome. It took longer than it should have but my naiveté finally made an adjustment and I realized that we had to leave there. This was disconcertingly personal and, as I was told later by another tribal member, our effervescent guide was commonly referred to as an Uncle Tomahawk, a pleaser whose only interest was in what we might eventually give him, monetarily or otherwise.

I was a little embarrassed but also enlightened as to how native Americans lived in this country and throughout the rest of our trip, and to this day, I carry those images with me, which makes me somehow cheered at the thought of another Indian casino opening. Maybe this shakedown of willing white people with cash to burn is partial revenge for years of humiliation and hopelessness. Even so, while casino funds bolster communities as a whole, per capita income levels on many reservations are still at poverty level.

And the reward for our intrusion into their privacy? A full scale attack of ticks, gotten by walking through a small cemetery plot with our guide. Our parting gift had to be removed one at a time and took about a day to locate in their entirety.

Happy Trails.