Of the many experiences one can rack up over the years, sometimes it’s nature’s unexpected revelations that become the most memorable. Your first tornado, your first look at birth, your first foray into Poison Ivy, but it was the onset of puberty that gave me an unparalleled hormonal triumph that I would never forget. You simply don’t see it coming. You’re strolling along, all little boyish, and bang, girls are suddenly on the map and life has a new complication. Pig Latin and mud pies should have been enough of a challenge but the gravitational pull of the female...
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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...
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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,...
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I’ve always had a problem with cliques; the little exclusionary groupings that insulate people from one another for, usually, superficial reasons. Cliques are most common in school settings, even through college (although they’re usually on the wane there) and, hopefully, by the time a person enters the real world, these things are gone for good…but don’t bet on it. My basic distaste for cliques started in grade school where the seeds are sown, junior high school where these divisions normally germinate, before coming to full bloom in high school. Everyone receives a random category and is expected to act...
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At 16, when I started working at Jack’s music store, I didn’t really know Jack all that well other than to note that he was a divorced, forty-something, musician friend of my mother’s who owned a couple of stores in the area. A professional organist himself, Jack set up a brisk business selling organs to churches, supper clubs, lounges and private homes. This was the ’60′s and it wasn’t all that unusual to find a Wurlitzer, Lowery or Hammond sitting in someone’s living room, although it was a bit unusual to actually see someone playing it. It was as...
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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...
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I was 16 when I started working at Jack’s music store and there’s plenty surrounding that employ but one terribly distracting feature of the job was Pam. Pam was the store manager and was in charge of phone calls, ordering instruments and keeping track of student appointments for the teachers. I started guitar lessons at Jack’s store when I was 13 and 3 years later I was working for him as a general gopher…and then there was Pam. Pam was about 21 or 22 and I had the most magnificent crush on her that was legally allowable by a...
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For as long as I could remember back, during most of my pre-teen years, my dreams were an exercise in lurking terror followed by wild flight and occasional escape. It was an almost nightly rerun and there were many variations on the theme as to who or what might be doing the chasing, but the story always followed the same linear plot line. It began with an unknown fear masking itself in the dark, although I could sense its presence. Then as it revealed a partially shadowed self I would try to nonchalantly walk away from it, hoping against...
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What a weird, weird thing that junior high ‘shop class’ thing was, and what was the point really? Of all of the nonsense that I created in shop class, none of it could have held a spec of worthiness compared to ‘home ec’ (home economics). You have to cook to eat or sew to keep your clothes in one piece but nobody needs a coffee pot wall-hanging made out of a coat hanger…nobody. But ‘home ec’ was for girls and ‘shop’ was for boys and I’d say the girls came out ahead on that sexual pigeon hole. So I...
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