It has come to my attention that every post I make about my childhood makes my father seem like some sort of evil villain whose only goal is to beat women and children. That is certainly not true. Therefore, I will type a bit in defense of the man that I have so demonized with the majority of my posts.

Scanning my mind for memories, the first one that pops up is not necessarily good, but keep in mind that I am trying to think of memories, not hearing a sound, sensing a smell, or otherwise having a memory triggered. Dad thought that it was pretty damn funny to show his friends how us kids could smoke, even when we were only four or five years old. Thing is he really didn’t want us to learn how to smoke, more like we were puppies that he was teaching new tricks to. By the time he actually caught me smoking for the first time, I think I was 12, he was terribly angry about it (which was good). Not necessarily the way to raise a smoke free child though.

Again, that was a bad example. Moving on.

I liked to play with matches as a child. I don’t really know why. It was sort of like a little package that provided 20 fourth or July’s. Since matches cost (even today) way less than a dollar for fifty books, it was never noticed when I snuck them out to play with them. Most of the time I would just go outside while mom was busy and just light them to watch them burn. Sometimes I would light little pieces of dry grass (while holding that in my hand also) just to watch the shape it took as it went from the yellowish to charcoal. I really can’t explain what it was about fire that so captivated me because I really don’t know. It could have been a power over the elements thing but, honestly, at six years old I don’t think my mind was yet at that level.

One day I happened into the back yard with a book of matches, which I had stolen out of the kitchen drawer while mom was washing the dishes next to it. I fired a few of those suckers up just to watch them burn. I must note that I didn’t really ever move from the spot I was firing off the matches during this entire time. When the book had only a few matches left in it, I figured it was about time to see how much bigger the flame would be with more than one match. The problem was that since I was only five or six at the time, I mistakenly believed that only the matches were flammable, not the cover itself. As I lit the remaining matches, then watched the huge flame burn down closer and closer to my hand, I was pretty confident that it would just go out…Any second now…It never did.

The second that the flame became too hot for me to hold onto is when I dropped the matchbook. It is also one of the most vivid photos in my head. I wish I were an artist so that I could recreate the exact moment when that matchbook touched the ground. There were no ’embers’, there was no ‘smoldering’, that matchbook hit the ground and there was instant fire. It was pretty small at first; probably only a couple of square feet, which I thought I could put out alone. Boy was I ever wrong…

I was playing with the matches next to an old, broken down stationwagon when the fire started. The nearest liquid, of any sort, was in a little yellow pail next to the broken down car. To this day I am not entirely sure what that liquid was, and there was very little of it in that little yellow bucket. I think it must have been gasoline or some other accelerant though, since the second I dumped it on the fire it went from bad to holy fuck (yes I was only five or six, yes I actually did say ‘Holy Fuck’). Now the whole back yard was on fire. There was no way I was taking on flames taller than me, mostly since I didn’t have anything that resembled water anywhere nearby. I ran like hell back to the house. I was screaming “Fire!” with every step.

Mom called the fire department the very second she heard my screams, while the neighbors had taken hoses from their own homes to start battling it. It was put out before the fire department got there, yet they still had to investigate, I guess they were looking for signs of arson. In my little mind I was thinking that the fire was out so I was in the clear. Turns out those fire station guys are pretty good at finding the source of the fire. They found the matchbook, as well as the little yellow bucket, and were able to pinpoint the exact spot that the fire started, of course they didn’t have any DNA evidence so they had to let me go. Truth is that the fire department knew that I was the one who started it, even though mom said that I hadn’t been out of her sight long enough to do it. Anyone with a brain (except possibly a five or six year old) knew that that story was absolute bullshit.

Mom knew that I did, she had to have known. Yet I had to wait until dad got home to see what my punishment would be. Sometimes, when you are a child, the waiting for punishment, while knowing what you did wrong, is far worse than any punishment that the parents can give you. I am pretty sure that Dad knew that I did it the very second he walked in the door. The first time he asked me if I did it, I am pretty sure that I phrased my answer with a question mark, “no?”. When he asked me again I knew that the game was up, if there ever was a game. I told him that I did it. He asked me how I felt, I told him that I felt bad and scared. When he asked me why I lied to him the first time I had to tell him the truth, “I was scared.”

I don’t remember my punishment for that offense. What I do remember is that it did not involve his belt. Also, Dad said that it “pissed him off more to be lied to” than to “hear the truth, no matter how bad it is, the first time he asked the question”. That is one lesson that I know I have taken to heart. You can call me anything you want, except a Liar. I will take offense to that. My word has been absolute truth since that point, except for the occasional white lie to keep from injuring others feelings.

Keeping that in mind, I took dad’s girlfriend’s car for a joy ride one night (I was probably 13 at the time). My brother Dan was still living with us at the time, and was also in the car. I was probably drunk (I had had a couple of beers, but was only 13 or so, so yeah, drunk), and on top of that I actually took a hit off of a joint that one of Dan’s friends happened to have. Then we went out joy riding. Dan was pretty capable of keeping it on the road (the road being all gravel in rural Oregon), and he did a few fishtails just to show off. Once we reached the end of the road, that being the cul de sac less than a mile away, I told him I wanted to drive it back. Big mistake.

I had more drugs in me than Keith Richards (as an infant) but thought I was good to drive, even though I wasn’t licensed to drive in the first damn place. It went pretty well for the first half of a mile, then I decided to do some fishtails on the loose, gravel road. That was when all hell broke loose.

I did a couple of fishtails, just enough to throw around the gravel, then, as if some outside force were acting on the car (inertia possibly?) the whipping motion grew larger and larger. I often like to fault my brother Dan for not pulling the emergency brake, but, seriously, this car was a front wheel drive, no amount of pulling the emergency brake was going to stop the car. When I went to hit the brake pedal, my foot slipped off of it and fell directly on the gas pedal. It powered the car into the inevitable spin that I already had it in, this lead to landing the car in a ditch of sorts. If you can call a ditch a twenty foot vertical drop that is only stopped by a very small tree fifteen feet down.

When we touched down, as it were, I assessed the situation and figured that I was probably “pretty fucked”. I ran back home with my brother and told him that he should go immediately to bed so that I alone could take the punishment for this one. Dan did go to bed. I left a note on Dad’s door that said I was sleeping on the couch and really needed to talk to him. But, dad was wise to us, he knew that if I was gonna take the fall for whatever happened that it must be Dan that initiated it. He woke up Dan first, just to see what happened. Dan must not have said a word to him about it since Dad woke me up next, with no idea why I left the note on his door.

Remembering that Dad really hated to be lied to, I never lied. Well, with the possible exception of not mentioning Dan’s name during questioning. I did this, it is my fault and I will take the wrath. I told Dad that I had dumped his girlfriend’s car into a ditch. Dad seemed a little too happy at that revelation, I expected a beating or something. Still, I had to go show him where I “dumped the car into the ditch”.

It took two travels (two each way) up and down that road before I finally spotted the car. Here I must note that he was pretty pissed that I told him that I put the car into a ditch, yet it took driving by that ditch four times to find it (some ditches are deeper than others, right?). We ended up busting out a couple of tractors to pull the thing out of the ditch (Dad called it a ravine).

No harm, no foul, right?

There was a lot of harm though. The little Toyota Celica was never going to look the same again. I caved in the driver door (when the car hit the tree in that little ditch) but the rest of the damage was so not me. The car hit on the driver’s side (which was when I told dan to run and let me take the punishment) the trees never touched the front or back of the car. Somehow the front end of the little car was also pretty mangled.

It turns out that my dad had wrecked the same car only a few days before, but failed to mention that to his girlfriend. My wrecking of the car gave him the perfect scapegoat (thanks dad). He laid all of the the blame off on me, my punishment was to drag scrap from the forest (5 acres of which we lived on) back to the burn piles, every day, for a year. (thanks dad). But there was no beating with a belt.

I must note that I only know the truth about the celica since I overheard him talking to a friend about it. Which probably pisses me off even more. He should have thanked me for wrecking that car so that he didn’t have to fess up to it. Instead, I got year round forest patrol, but no beating with a belt.

I started this post to defend my father, it has gone horribly the other direction. I really have to call it an end.

Dad was a good guy. I learned a lot of lessons from him. Perhaps, in time, I will have visual or physical triggers that bring him back to mind. As of now I really don’t have anything.

Growing up isn’t exactly easy, it’s not meant to be, it is something that you have to do to, well, grow up. Every time that I think I may have had it bad as a child, all I have to do is look at some underdeveloped countries to see kids who have it far worse. At the same time I can look to other people, say George W. Bush for example, who have had it so easy that my story seems like that of a child from an underdeveloped country. That is neither here nor there, simply an observation. I do have a lot of memories from my youth, some good, some bad, and another one leapt into mind today.

Moving from school to school as a child is a very difficult thing. In all honesty the reason that I moved back to live with my dad in the 8th grade was so that I would be able to start making friends that I would have an alliance with for the remainder of middle school, who would then go to the same high school. That was a comforting thought.

I must say that the musical chairs game of schools started even before my parents got divorced. There were at least four grade schools in the town I grew up in, a fact I know because I attended four different grade schools there; Riverside, Fir Grove, Eastwood and Rose. My first year of school was at Riverside, where I got my first student of the month honor, which happened to be my very first month in any kind of school (there was no kindergarten for us kids, we could read and write better than most classmates by the first grade though, thanks to Mom’s at home teachings). Of course, in my tiny little mind I thought that the teacher really had a thing for me, yet, in retrospect, I don’t think Mrs. Crane was really into that six-year-old action.

Riverside was closed after my first year there. I don’t know exactly why. I know that the talk I heard at the time was that it was too close to a busy street (Garden Valley Boulevard), which it was, but had always been, the other topic was how close it was to the South Umpqua river, which was a hell of a trek from the school, at least a mile. In hindsight I think the more likely reason is that there simply wasn’t enough money in the school district to keep all of the schools open and Riverside simply didn’t have the number of affluent parents that the other schools did. Net result; Riverside closed and the students were relocated to the three other schools based on where they lived (well four different schools, since some of the kids ended up going to a school called Sunny Slope, which was a couple of miles out of town).

As I sit here now, looking through an old school years book that Mom recently gave me, I note that the friends that I list in the second grade do not include any from the first. The likely reason for this is that they were transferred to the other schools and I had to start fresh. Another oddity for the second grade was that I had torn through the second grade math (you know addition and subtraction) and was well into the third grade math (multiplication), finishing each of the tests with, at lowest a 94%, yet the teacher took time to note that I needed to work on my penmanship on math tests. You see, these tests were timed, first you had to do it in 6 minutes, then 5, then 4, etc. Of course it is going to be a bit sloppy as your seven year old hands try to scribble out calculations that your brain makes in fractions of a second. Jeez.

(To this day I have horrible penmanship. If I try to write anything in cursive it is illegible, and my block print isn’t far behind. Such a plus that paper is on its way out…)

Third grade brought about two very distinct things. 1) I was accepted into the Able and Gifted program. 2) My parents separated (I don’t know when they actually got the divorce, so bear with me). At first I excelled in the gifted program but, once my parents separated it got more and more difficult. One of the challenges that we had, the one that I can still remember like it was yesterday, was a very simple task: Move a brick further than anyone else using nothing but a mousetrap. The mousetrap and brick were supplied, if you wanted any other materials it was up to you to get them. I lost horribly, though I did learn to read the fine print. See, it said that if you created any sort of apparatus to meet the goal, the length of travel would be measured once the brick left that apparatus. I still think I got screwed since the kid that won put the brick on a skateboard that went down a ramp (exactly like the one I created: two boards nailed together at a right angle stood up and held in place by a dowel that the mousetrap ripped out of place, thus making a hill to go down.) I didn’t have a lot of material to work with so I just covered my ramp with glossy pictures from magazines, did the same to the brick, and it went off the end by a few inches. The kid that won went many, many feet, but he was still on his apparatus when he won…Evidently the skateboard didn’t count as an apparatus (of course if I wanted him to be faulted by the skateboard I would have had to be faulted for the glossy paper. What can I say, I am a sore loser).

Anyway.

Fourth grade happened. At least I think it did. It must have since I did get to fifth grade. Thing is I started this grade out at Eastwood (that is three different grade schools in four years if you are keeping track at home), but got a note to go to the office one day and then wound up at a grade school in Benson, AZ a couple of days later. (totally as an aside, I had leant this cool sharpie that wrote in silver to a girl named Melissa at Eastwood and never got it back before we moved out of town. If you are reading this, Melissa, can I have my cool sharpie back? Thanks.) My teacher in Benson was Mr. Davis, he had a lot of medical problems and spent the majority of his time rolling cigarettes while he let us figure shit out on our own (that is no joke). Thankfully I was whisked away to a new teacher, in a new town, only a couple of months later.

The new teacher’s name was Mrs. Ingram. She was nice because she understood that while I might not be at exactly the place that her class was, I had learned a lot that they hadn’t and vice versa (since grade schools don’t all use the same books, especially if they are not in the same state). I remember one time when she put a complex equation on the board (it was fourth grade so it was likely only long division) and asked the class to solve it, when no one else could she asked me to come to the board and do it, which I did, thus shunning me from this entire class of students. I was now entrenched as the ‘stupid geek’, if they actually had that term at that time. There was another kid in this class, we all called him Mooney ( I don’t know if that was his real name or not), who was also an outcast and we kind of teamed up. Isn’t that the best kind of friendship? The type when you become friends because no one else will accept you? I don’t know if it is the best kind of friendship, but I do know that other than Asher Arnold (who was in the same class and happened to be a seventh day Adventist) who was also my friend only because we were all outcasts, I don’t remember a single person from that class or that school.

Another aside. I accidentally broke Mooney’s leg one day at recess while we were playing a complex game of keep away with all the other kids. It certainly wasn’t intentional, hell he was on my team. I actually got the nickname legbreaker after that, well that and another incident at a different school, which I am just about to get to.

My brief stay at the school in Tombstone was punctuated by breaking my best friend’s leg. Woo hoo? The I was back to Benson, where the teacher thought I was stupid and lots of the other kids just plain didn’t like me. Why? I don’t know. They had all been together in school for four years, I had no idea who any of them were. There was one girl though, I don’t remember her name, that like to sucker punch me any chance she got. She actually grabbed my (well put me in a head lock) and screamed, “why did you come back?” the day I got back to school. Warm welcome eh? She went on to push me to the ground and pummel me until I finally just punched her square in the nose, an action that I was scolded for since, you know, she was just a girl. (that girl was later in trouble after she ripped so much hair out of my cousin’s head that he was bald in places). Love that fourth grade.

Now on to the fifth grade! I have already been in five schools (six if you count Benson twice) what fun! My teacher was one Mr. McKay. He was such a jackass. The school in question is in Cochise, AZ. At the time I was there there were exactly 42 students total, and that covered Kindergarten through the 8th grade. Each teacher taught several years. McKay had 5th and 6th, which was probably the biggest class since there were like 14 of us there. I never made any friends there really, and beyond that, McKay put me into a remedial reading class. Why? He was giving me workbooks that I had done years before at other schools, it bored me to tears. Funny incident regarding the guy though, he sent a letter to my mom about my brother’s poor performance in reading, which my mom let my brother correct and sent it back to him. Other incidents that I can attribute to Mr. McKay include, but are not limited to, being the subject of sexual harassment claims against a 12 year old girl, forcing a student to stand on top of a fire ant hill for detention, then adding additional detentions when the student moved away from the ant hill, and my personal favorite, though not nearly as heinous, spending ten minutes trying to retrieve a penny, which had been super glued to the sidewalk, then putting it into his pocket and driving home.

McKay was some piece of work. My IOWA test results (I am not linking to a site since I don’t know which might have been the official test in the mid eighties) averaged in the 92nd percentile of everyone my age. All of the math skills were above the 96th percentile. The reading skill (remember he gave me remedial reading) was in the 94th percentile. Thus proving my theory that you can skate through college with a D average and still become a teacher. Seriously, think about it, someone is Valedictorian, someone is Salutatorian, the rest are just people that did progressively worse than the others, someone had to just barely make it through with a low D average and graduate at the very bottom of the class, right?

Cochise had so few students that they required a couple of classes that you don’t normally have to take. Such as band. You were required to be in band. I thought that would be cool, I really wanted to play the drums or saxophone, those positions had been filled for years, so I got the trumpet…I hated the trumpet…We were also required to participate in team sports (I think that the K-3 kids weren’t required) since if we weren’t all there there wouldn’t be enough to make a team. We never practiced much, in fact the track and field event that I participated in would make a really great story, but not today. Soccer is what is on my mind, or it was when I started this post.

Sorry Angie! It was during Soccer practice that I broke Angie’s leg. Thus I had broken the legs of two separate people in less than a year. I was well on my way to mob status. I really didn’t like soccer, well I didn’t hate it, well, hell, I don’t know. I had to play it, I played it, and I was pretty good at it, provided people’s shins stayed out of the damn way. After two horrible misfires (resulting in broken legs) you would think that the other kids would eventually figure out that they should just get the hell out of the way when I pulled back to kick, and they did. This gave me the illusion that I was actually good at the game, when in reality it was only that people knew that I broke Mooney’s leg, then Angie’s, and they just didn’t want to have the ball anywhere near me, at least that is how I see it in hindsight.

Now that Soccer is my new best thing I want a shirt to show off that fact. I asked my mom if she could buy me a shirt that said #1 Soccer Player, then, while talking to her I tried to fact check myself, “maybe #2 soccer player, I know that David is way better than me. Maybe #3 soccer player just to be sure.” I didn’t want to lie, you see. I just wanted to stake my place on the totem pole that is soccer.

When I woke the next morning there was a pretty white shirt laying across the edge of the couch that proudly proclaimed, “#1 Soccer Player” in bold blue letters. Turns out that mom had a lot more faith in my ability than I did. For one glorious day I was the “#1 Soccer Player”. I wore that shirt with pride. Unfortunately, as it turns out, Mom had spent her night awake stenciling that onto a plain white T-shirt, using only the magic markers that she had on hand. That bold statement, “#1 Soccer Player” washed away just as fast as my interest in soccer. Her sleepless night spent making that stupid T-shirt is a sacrifice that I will not, can not, ever forget. We might not have had much, but she did have a T-shirt and a stencil set, and she stayed up to make sure that my humble wish came true.

Mom may not have had the materials to make the shirt I wanted, and thank god she didn’t since I totally sucked at soccer, but she made my (then) dream come true. I am not entirely sure if I ever told her, or if she otherwise knew, that the lettering washed away, it doesn’t seem to matter. She made me that shirt out of love, and love was really the only commodity that we had at that point…

Mom certainly had the market cornered on the love thing, well some was reciprocated but I don’t think it will ever be enough. While it is difficult to find a way to thank her for ripping me from my roots (abusive father), it is easy to find ways to thank her for everything else, such as ripping me from my roots (abusive father). Mom, you did a damn good job, if anyone ever tells you different I have people that can take care of them…

Another aside, but still a question, did you ever notice that no one ever thanks their dad when they win a sporting event?

Yesterday while I was at work, and for reasons that I can’t remember, I ended up talking to the cashier about a portion of my childhood. It started with the story about how I stole a bag of chips from the local IGA store, then went a bit deeper into why I did it. If you have actually read through the archives on the left side of the screen you have probably seen the story already, if not, in a nutshell, I was really hungry, and hungry for tortilla chips in particular. For unknown reasons I went further into my childhood than I have ever spoken of to anyone other than my mother, yet I found that it made for an almost unbelievable story so I will type it here.

Before I get into it, however, I must mention that my Mother actually reads this page, while my Father is dead and can not defend himself. I remember things the way I remember them and if my memory is horribly flawed I am pretty sure that Mom will let me know. Of course Mom might not be the most objective person, since she is one of the two factions at war, but I will do my best to tell it like I remember it. While the mind does seem to dull with age, it is amazing how vivid these memories from 20+ years ago really are.

First up will be a couple of fractional, at best, memories that I have of the impending divorce. I have a scar on my right wrist that is slightly over an inch long, I got that while in Arizona visiting an uncle. I don’t really know why we were in Arizona, but I do know that Dad was not there with us (I have not actually tried to fact check this one with Mom, but that was at a point when Dad was pretty drunk and abusive nearly every day). My wrist got cut when I was trying to fuck with a cat on my uncle’s couch. Unfortunately, the uncle had a solid mirror coffee table that had jagged edges on the side nearest the couch. When the cat finally swiped at me, and I jerked my arm away, I hit the coffee table and split my wrist wide open. It was really bad. While I don’t remember the verbatim dialogue that followed, I do remember exactly what I said to my mother the instant after it happened, “Mom, I need to go to the Hospital.”. In the fuzzy part of the memory, I think she may have actually scolded me for interrupting while the grown ups were talking. I know for sure that she really thought that I needed to get to the hospital immediately once I shoved the wound in front of her face.

Funny thing about scar tissue is that it stays the same forever, while the normal skin continues to grow. As I look at that scar right now I can still see the 8 suture marks around the scar, yet they are now a good quarter of an inch from it and spaced apart even further. Now it looks like it was a nick, when it happened it pretty much looked like my wrist wrist may fall off, or I would lose the use of my thumb. It all worked out for the best though, I still have full use of all of my digits, not to mention a story to tell (and that one went over HUGE at show and tell back in the day. Yet, as I have found over the years, chicks don’t really dig scars.).

The car ride to the hospital was a bit unnerving. I didn’t know how this would be taken care of. I posited my theory that they had bodies laying around that they could take spare parts out of to fix the patients. Mom told me that this was not the case and that I would have to be sewed back together with a needle, at that point I am pretty sure that I told her that I was fine, didn’t need to go to the hospital or anything, but we ended up there anyway. The funniest part of the car ride, as I look back on it, is that my uncle stopped to ask a cop for directions to the nearest hospital, his exact quote to the cop was, “My partner hurt his arm, we need to get him to a hospital! (that sticks out in my mind only because he called me partner, not nephew, not sister’s child, not bastard son of 100 men, no, he chose partner)” That doesn’t seem funny, but as I look back on it with adult eyes that is probably the first time in his life that he had spoken to a cop without being in handcuffs, possibly the last as well.

I got stitched right up once we got to the hospital, it didn’t hurt at all. There was a small tinge of pain when the doctor shot the (insert name here)cane into the wound to numb it, but after that it was smooth sailing. When the stitches came out, however, wow, boy howdy, that shit hurt. The suture removal was performed by the same uncle that took me to the hospital, but with no pain killer, and it really hurt. Or at least I thought it did, but what was I six? Plus they gave me a candy for every one that they pulled out, I bet I was amped that night.

The next fuzzy memory I can’t really date, I remember the events but I can’t possibly place the time. It was at my uncle Steve’s house, Steve moved so frequently that I also can’t remember exactly which house it was in. Dad was horribly drunk, yet wanted to drive home. He asked the three of us kids “Who wants to go home with Dad?” He was horribly wasted at the time, and Highway 42 in Oregon has claimed more lifes than air travel, but we all wanted to go home with him, thankfully, Mom nixed that idea and we had to stay in that old, stinky house. Again, with adult eyes I am able to look at that experience and realize that Mom really did have our best interests at heart. Not to mention a broken finger, since dad had thrown her down the stairs outside the house. One of the images that is so burnt into my memory that I am sure I will never forget it is the image of Dad squatted next to the wood stove when we all got home the next day. I don’t think he ever actually knew what happened that night.

I have two other fuzzy memories on this subject that seem to blur together. One involves a horrible pounding against the house as Dad tried, while horribly drunk, to back his truck out of the driveway (which was steeply sloped towards the house). It happened over and over again for a long time. The other was a pounding sound that was (as my Mom later described) Dad beating her head against the floor (interesting aside on that one is that I thought she was lying, while I was six, there is no way to beat someone’s head against the floor while they are standing up. It took a bit of living to realize that he had her pinned to the floor to make that possible). After at least one of the said fuzzy memories, Dad was passed out in the yard. Mom told me that he tried to do a Hand-Spring but forgot to put his hands down, I dunno, that seems like a pretty flimsy alibi.

All of my fuzzy memories aside, that was the situation that my Mother was in, and it certainly was far worse than my memory. The divorce was a good thing for all parties involved. Well, all parties except for Mom and the kids.

When the divorce finally went down, Mom just sort of gave up all material possessions for the custody of the children. Unfortunately the child support laws back then were not quite what they are today. She was getting about 100 bucks a month to support three children. That doesn’t even cover the cost of food, but we got food stamps, so that helped. She was dirt poor… She was dirt poor, but she did her best and I think that we all (her children) turned out pretty good.

Living accommodations along the way could have been better…

The first house that I lived in with my mother, post divorce, was on Curry road. It was not so much a house, more like enough plywood leaned together to make what passes for shelter. There was no indoor plumbing, well, there was a sink, there was a shower, but I am pretty sure that the water from those just drained directly onto the ground below. The toilet, I will never forget the toilet, was on the outside of the house, and some twenty yards away. Some may call that an outhouse, I called it my salvation. When you really have to shit, right now, snow be damned, you are gonna foot your way out to the little box in the pasture to make it happen. How many people who are alive today can remember taking a dump in an outhouse?

Over the next several years, it seemed that we were trying to keep one step ahead of the building inspector. We moved into Hartz Cabins, a facility that was condemned only a few months after we moved in. A few misfires later, we ended up in a house on Shoestring road, Just outside of Riddle, Oregon. We were there for some time, a few years I think. (there may have been a couple of houses in Arizona between the latest listed points, I dunno, the mind seems to alter the facts after all these years).

We never had much, and what we did have we were thankful for. Mom did her best with what she had, which was very little. Dad could have stepped in to offer some compensation, maybe even did (I dunno), but Mom went it alone and raised us alone. That must take a great deal of resolve to accomplish. Three children raised with no help from the father (virtually). Kudos to mom.

I have been less than honest with my Mother for all of the years since. While I loved her “indian bread” (deep-fried flat bread), I was not so keen on her actual bread. The bread tasted kind of doughy, with the additional taste of yeast…Not all that tasty, yet, when soaked in butter, that was good stuff. I did my best to keep up the charade, but, as she told me recently, I lost a lot of credibility.

When we all lived in that tiny little dive (the one without indoor plumbing), we each had a birthday. The gift to each of us was a really itchy green blanket (donated by the local military reserve) and ten dollars in food stamps to spend however we wanted. I don’t remember exactly what I spent mine on, but I would guess it was probably on sugared cereal.

Fast forward a couple of years, perhaps rewind. In my memory this event was long after the military blanket, yet before I moved back to live with dad. There was a Christmas that happened. We lived in a slightly better dive than the last one (this one had an eagle claw bathtub), and we each got cards from Dad. Each card contained a ten dollar bill. While I don’t remember what the rest of the money was spent on, I do remember that I spent a couple of bucks on Christmas wrapping paper. Gods be damned! There might not be a gift under the tree (which is not entirely true, we did get gifts just not many of the flashy, store bought ones that we so craved), but what little we had to exchange was going to have the “have yourself a merry little Christmas” logo on it.

I don’t remember all these experiences as being bad per se, I don’t have another childhood to compare them to. Each one of these experiences helped to make me who I am today. If it weren’t for having to camp out by Cow Creek eating nothing but barley soup for a few days I might not appreciate everything that I have now as much as I do. If I hadn’t seen how badly it hurt my Mother when Dad beat her (and I don’t mean physically, I mean the transformation from the vibrant, beautiful woman she was in her senior photo to the shell of the woman she had become when she finally had the resolve to walk out on him), I might not have such tremendous respect for women, I might even be abusive to them myself, who knows?

Your childhood is something that you really had no control over, as such there can’t be any regret. Just as every scar on my body reminds me of a particular place or event, every memory that I have of my youth reminds me of conscious decisions that I made. While it may seem hard to believe that I made a vow, at the ripe old age of six, to never hit a woman, I did. That is a vow that I am quite happy to say I have never broken (well, once in the fourth grade, but that bitch was holding me on the ground and literally pulling my hair out. And once in my junior year of High School, but again I was provoked; I called a certain girl a slut, based only on the fact that she had had sex with at least three guys at a party the night before, her younger sister took offense to me calling her sister a slut, walked up and kicked me square in the nuts. I fell to the ground immediately. When I got back up I saw her laughing with her friends, I walked up to her and gave her a right that bloodied her nose and put her to the ground, she had it coming.), although I did accidentally break Angie Dixon’s leg in the fifth grade while playing soccer, sorry Angie.

But this post is all about the bread so I guess I better get to the point. Mom told me recently that she knew that I didn’t like her homemade bread as much as I let on. The way that she knew was that on one occasion where I was able to spend food stamps however I chose, I bought a loaf of bread. She never told me that she knew that I didn’t like it all that well until very recently, I think that she was just glad that I was making my brothers look like a couple of little whiners. Older brothers don’t like to be made to look like babies you see.

The truth is that I could probably list a couple dozen things that I really didn’t like to eat but ate and pretended that I liked. That was all we had and with my brothers bitching about it already what good would it have done? I will list just a couple though, for sentimental value. Barley, while when combined with hops, fermented and aged, is certainly my favorite drink, yet Barley soup is just plain disgusting (I don’t even know if I was able to disguise my disgust at this soup when I was young). Potato pancakes weren’t all that bad, but they weren’t all that good either. I didn’t have to pretend much with those though, since my brothers both seemed to like them. Corned Beef Hash, now this one is complex as I actually do like it sort of. This was a dish that we often had pre-divorce, but even at the time I didn’t really like all of it. I loved the taste that the potatoes had after cooking with the corned beef for so long, but the meat itself was so salty that I had to pick it out and give it to one of my brothers. Chicken is quite similar, I don’t mind the taste of chicken but I hate the skin, simply won’t eat it, of course since my brothers would fight for the skin I didn’t want it was all good.

On the up side, there were a lot of dishes that our finances forced on us that I really liked. Ramen noodles for instance. Those things were damn tasty, a child can make them (though why mom let me do that, considering the horrible burn scars on my chest and neck is beyond me), and after you eat the noodles you have a cup of warm broth to drink. An entire meal for a child for, well you can get them 10 for a buck now (on sale) so probably 15 or 20 for a buck then, so like 5 to 7 cents. Then there were the potatoes. Those things were practically free back then so we had a lot of them. I love mashed potatoes, not so much the pancakes they turn into the next day, but mashed potatoes is one of the things that is on my plate at every buffet. There is a certain way to make them though. The ones that are made out of dehydrated flakes simply aren’t edible. Even if you use real potatoes, if you mix them with a power mixer they have the consistency of an orange Julius, also not edible. They must be mashed with an old fashioned masher, they must have only pepper as seasoning no salt! Salt can be added by the consumer but not taken away. Finally they really should be made with real butter. I have had to use margarine to make them for Thanksgiving the last few years and they still taste pretty good, but butter is certainly the best way to go.

To finish this off with the thought that started it, the real reason that I wanted the store bought bread had nothing to do with the taste of the home made bread. The thing about the home made bread is that you have to slice it yourself and that makes for some pretty awkward looking sandwiches. Sometimes, no matter how down to earth you try to be (for a small child) you just want to have a sandwich that looks the same as the ones that all the other kids are eating. Is that so wrong?

Over the last week or so I have been performing a different duty than normal while at work. Mostly involving standing around a lot while tending to the cash register. What I don’t understand is why this makes my legs and lower back hurt so bad. And hurt it does.

Why is it that I can stand on my feet for six, eight, or even ten hours at a time, while throwing heavy boxes (60-80lbs.) around with no ill effects, yet when I am forced to stand and work in a smaller area it just kills me? I know that I usually walk at least a couple of miles per day, under normal circumstances, and I do throw a lot of heavy shit around. So do my back and legs ache from lack of stress/impact? That seems completely opposite to the way it should happen.

Seriously, is it the lack of motion that makes my joints hurt or what? Is it kind of like starting your car on a cold morning; no lubrication of moving parts for a few minutes? All the stop and go moving adds up? I simply don’t understand why I can carry heavy stuff around for eight hours or longer, yet, when I have to stand still for minutes at a time, over the same length of time, it hurts my back.

I need to dispose of this body and try to develop an exoskeleton. I will probably keep this body until I have the exoskeleton working though…