February 15th, 2024

I grew up in what was, at the time, a small town. I aim, at least for now, to leave names, dates, and places out of these words, though I have no doubts that I will eventually grow tired of holding back, and will let detail by detail slip through. I plan to be writing this for a very long time, perhaps a lifetime. My aim now is to write a lot, and I don’t think that will change. Any reader will probably gleam from these first few sentences, that I have no strictly-defined purpose for what I am writing now, that I will swiftly bounce between ideas, and that I will be hard to follow, at times. This might be explained in the future. But for now, I do not have all the answers. I was born in a hospital in a big city next to the small town I grew up in. I spent the first little-more-than-a-year of my life there. When my younger brother was born, my mother, father, younger brother, and I moved to the town. That is where I spent the next 20 years. Suffice to say, I do not remember much of these earlier years. I remember the first house I lived in only from photographs. There are a lot of photographs.

I can be more specific about the time I grew up than I can about the places. I was born in 2000. I wonder if it was an isolating time to grow up in. I think it is today, at least. I at least was afforded a childhood I can remember. I used to ride my bike to the various playgrounds in and surrounding the neighbourhood. I would do this with my brother. We would play with the kids, a little bit, but we were and always have been, poorly socialized. The psychologists say that if a child is not properly socialized before age four, he likely never will be. I don’t know what I think of that, I don’t know if anyone can be so certain. But I do know that I had little friends growing up and that interacting with others was always difficult for me. Rejection from other potential play-mates at an early age seemed to affect me more than it did others. To top that off, every friend I did have from when I was very young, ended up moving far away. I sometimes wonder if that truly is the case, or if it was something my mother told me to harbour me from the truth: that I was a terrible play-mate.

I remember one boy that I ended up being friends with at around age seven. Eric. Eric came from Czechoslovakia. He actually came from the Czech Republic (Czechoslovakia dissolved into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1992) but this is just one of those things I say for my own amusement. Anyways, Eric came from Czechoslovakia and ended up being in a homeschooling group that I was a part of. I don’t recall the specifics as our mothers were the ones who made us friends, but Eric became a childhood friend nonetheless. The reason I think about this specific part of my life so often, is because I was old enough to remember bits and pieces, and young enough to have a malleable brain. These are the ages, I think, when the negative emotions you experience, can easily affect you well into your adult life.

My homeschooling years lasted until I was 11 years old at which point my mother put me into public school. I do not know how I feel about this. On one hand, I believe I have achieved somewhat academic successes in part due to my homeschooling. On the other hand, I was thrust into public school with the lessons ingrained inside of me that I should be polite above all else, I should only speak when spoken to, and I should sit down, shut up, and learn. One might argue that these are all good lessons, and I do not disagree; however, sometimes the pendulum can swing too far.

I was once in an after school tennis program. I can’t be certain of how old I was, but I reckon it would have been the same time I knew Eric: I would have been about seven years old. At seven years old, I did not have the social reservations that consumed me at 11. I was not fearful or anxious. I misbehaved, as kids do. The stark contrast of my Self at seven years old versus 11 years old, is something I often think about. A couple girls in the after school tennis program found a stinkbug on the tennis court one day. It was a big green plump stinkbug. Of course, young children would be fascinated by such a bug, and they should be. I don’t think I’ve seen a bug like that since. Anyways, in a turn of events that might’ve intrigued Carl Jung, I wanted to squish the stinkbug; the girls wanted to protect it.

I recall looking down at the gray velcro shoes and baggy jeans of a homeschooled kid. Nearly a foot away from my toes was the stinkbug, and on top of it was one of the girls tennis rackets shielding the innocent life from my destructive tendencies. That is where my memory of the event ends. I have an inkling of a feeling that the instructor intervened and took the bug to the grass never to be seen again. At least, I hope that’s what happened. That’s probably the last time I talked to girls my age for a few years.

I can’t even remember if it was the same day or not, but during one of these tennis lessons, my mom showed up just outside the chain-linked court. I did not see her at first until the instructor pointed her out to me. I approached her and asked:

“Do you have any apple juice”

I was thirsty. I don’t remember her response, but she led me to the white Dodge Caravan, still thinking she had apple juice for me.

As soon as I sat in back seat right behind her, she shut her door and screamed.

“I can’t believe my son is a bully. I can’t believe I raised a bully.”

She repeated this on the four minute drive home, sounding like she was on the verge of tears. To hear your mother screaming on the verge of tears is more than enough to make a seven year old child immediately start bawling his eyes out. I profusely apologized with all the wit and grace of a child my age, and she threatened me with the fabled wooden spoon that her father used to use on her.

I don’t remember if she ever actually ended up using the wooden spoon or not, but I at least got a good spanking that day. That wasn’t the worst part though, the worst was always being abandoned in your room with your bed and the lights off for an unspecified amount of time. My parents gave up spanking. I was probably only spanked a handful of times, less than my brother, I think. But being told to “go to your room” persisted right up until it would’ve stopped working on me. There have been times in my adult life where I would be laying in bed with the lights off crying and feeling exactly like I did at seven years old. Most of those times, I wasn’t sure why I felt the way I did. I just know I felt it and that I had felt it the same as a child.

My paternal grandfather, Opa, is someone I know very little about. He died when I was six, he liked pickled herring, he was a smoker and a drinker for a long time, and he was in Germany during World War II. My father does not speak to me about anything that can be construed as an emotion, that’s why I think it’s hard for him to speak about his dad. He told me once that Opa spent some time in a Soviet work camp after World War II and that the Soviets starved him until his teeth fell out. The only reason he told me that was because I was 16 and flirting with the ideals of communism. My father still has some sort of family in Germany. Rick and Patty are married and have some relation to my dad. They live in Germany, but visited us twice. The first time they visited, I was too young to remember anything. The only thing I remember, in fact, is that the day after they left, me and my brother were forced to spend the entire day in our room. This did not have the consequence I think it intended, because the next time Rick and Patty visited, I was terrified to act out of line. They tried to give me and my brother $50 and we seriously declined until they insisted. I remember being afraid that my mother would hear that they gave us $50 and notice that we failed to show the correct amount of gratitude.

My mothers side of the family seemed easier to get along with when I was a child, granted, that’s probably got more to do with my cousin on that side of the family. I’ve talked to him rarely since we were kids, but he and I once both reminisced on the phone. The times we had together as kids were some of the best childhood memories.

We would’ve been 11 years old when his mom and my aunt died of cancer. I wish I remembered more about her because I don’t need to remember much to remember that she was always kind and that everyone loved her. Most of what I remember, unfortunately, is her pale, frail frame, sunken-in eyes, her hairless scalp that once held hair down to her waist. I remember her being tired and spending what felt like forever in the bathroom because she needed to work with the colostomy bag. I remember my hardy redneck uncle crying at her funeral, and I remember the small object that held her remains. That a real human life could be reduced to something so small and unobtrusive.

Which then reminds of when my mom was diagnosed with cancer, and somehow I don’t remember what I felt. I think I was escaping into video games during that time and eventually going to school. I remember my mom telling my brother and I how the doctors caught on early enough that it wasn’t really a worry. I wonder if that was entirely true or not. It must have been difficult for her to see her brothers wife succumb to the same disease that she was fighting. Eventually, though, after the radiation, the durag, the sick days sleeping, she was cancer free.

I would’ve been in the seventh grade at this time and just starting real school. If I was in any preceding decade, I would have been completely out of my element. But in 2012, it seemed I was only an outcast in small ways and that there were plenty of similarly maladjusted kids who recognized my social incompetence, but did not find it so off-putting that they wanted nothing to do with me. Noah was one of these kids. But perhaps this is something I will continue later.