Homegrown

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Writing about childhood is interesting, because we usually focus on the bad stuff. The non-stop angst of it all. The unrelenting cavalcade of pimples and terrifying bullies and emergency room visits from falling on our heads. Trying desperately to fit in, showing up for the first day of school or camp or swimming lessons, seemingly always the only kid who hasn't already paired-off with somebody else. Clothes never quite right, hair always pointing the wrong way, everybody already better at everything you thought you had a fighting chance at. Your lunch neatly packed by your Mom, with a little smiley-face note she dropped in there to make you feel better but somehow, it just ends up making you unbearably sad. She thinks you're ready for this....but would form her own secret-service detail around you if she knew you felt this way. But you'd be marked forever.....the fear dripping off you like sweat. You take the note and hide it so nobody finds it and calls you out for being a mamma's boy. But you never throw it away, because you are one.

***

Somehow, you made it out alive. You survived mainly by hovering on the fringes, staying as far away from the personality cults as possible without it affecting actual party invites. You tip-toed around the violent nuns, pretended to care about sports, and were completely ignored by every female in the class until that day when one of them got up in your grille and said "my friend likes you", which kickstarted a psychological decline that didn't arrest itself for decades. You build up an impressive list of acquaintances.....guys you could lie about girls with......but were lucky if you had a single true friend who you could confide in. You learned that people one at a time were one way, and people in groups were another. There were less surprises when you were alone, so that sorta became the norm. Just show your face enough to not be considered a weirdo. A balancing act, Bubba. High wire stuff.

***

It was carnage, really. At least that's the way we remember it.

But it wasn't all bad. Parents were always there.....admittedly not always understanding the problem du jour, but they'd go to the mattresses with you if required. The greatest generation understood tears well enough. You didn't dare tell your Mom about the bully at recess, but only because it was bad optics for her to show up in the parking lot like Patton looking for some payback against Rommel. It was nice knowing that she'd throw hands on your behalf, even if it was against the code of the jungle.

Your siblings weren't any less cracked than anybody else's siblings, but you didn't have to pretend around them, and while they could torture you until you cried, they'd make sure nobody else was allowed the same privilege. Around your family was the one time you could laugh at what you really thought was funny and cry at what really made you sad. All that juvie angst slowly faded, but all these years later I can still conjure up every minute in the back-back seat of the family station wagon, 6 kids on the way to the same Jersey Shore beach every year......getting lost on the way every year. We were a self-contained gang, and even this many years later, with time and distance and pandemics taking their toll, we still are.

As a kid I fretted endlessly over the affections of at least a dozen classmates, and that doesn't even include the girls. Today I probably wouldn't recognize half of them if they were in front of me in the check-out line. The less of a kid you become, the more you realize that adolescent "fitting in" was like a desert mirage. You were searching for something that was never really there....like the QAnon TrumpIsGonnaBeSwornInSoon goal-post that keeps moving.

What we are is homegrown. My brothers played the guitar. That made me want to play. My sister's had glorious taste in music. That sent me careening down that path. My father had a love affair with words that he injected into me like a vaccine. All of them had flaws they spread liberally around the house, but my brothers never locked away their guitars, my sisters never locked their bedroom doors so I couldn't pillage their record collections, and my father left the black Underwood typewriter on the dining room table, in case anybody got the itch.

You can't choose your family.

Thinking of all the mistakes I made as a kid choosing friends, I'm glad of that.

I’ll take what I have.

On this Saint Patrick’s Day, I’m reminded of what Freud reportedly said about the Irish…

”this is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever…”

It’s like he was in that station wagon with us…..lost in the swamps of Jersey.

In a bit..

--tf