When the Atheist Went to Church

Once a native, now a stranger. Photo by keeva999 via Flickr. http://bit.ly/1FPtg14

I am presently on vacation in a delightful corner of Pennsylvania, staying with two dear friends, Jason and Allen. Yesterday I joined them at their church, my first Christian service since 2008 and first service of any religion since 2012. I didn’t have to go. I could have stayed home, and my friends wouldn’t have thought anything of it. But my friends are important to me, and I wanted to participate in something that was important to them.

We arrived at St. Paul’s United Church of Christ several minutes before the beginning of the second service, and as we stood about in the foyer, I was hit suddenly with an anxiety attack.

Potato Salad

So  I’m going to make a couple of confessions here. The first is that I never liked potato salad. The second is that I had never eaten potato salad until a couple of weeks ago. But it didn’t matter that I’d never eaten it; I was certain that it was simply terrible and I’d never touch the stuff.

A couple of weeks ago my friend Chris threw an impromptu party before heading off for an extended stay in Portland. I was the first to arrive at his place (a bad habit of mine, showing up early), and we hung out whilst he prepared for the rest of the guests. Chris had bought fried chicken from Cub Foods supermarket, which I was very happy about, since I love their fried chicken. He also set about making potato salad.

It looked vaguely like this. Photo courtesy Steven Depolo via Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/stevendepolo/ CC License: http://bit.ly/1mhaR6e

40

At this time ten years ago, when I turned 30, I had just moved to a new city. In the city I’d moved from, most of my friendships were pretty new. I moved very suddenly because I had to; my opportunities had completely closed up. So I settled into a big city to start a new life. The world was so big and fresh and wonderful. Life begins at 30, I declared.

Today I turn 40. I’m about to move to a new city. In the city I’m leaving, many of my friendships are pretty new (at least judging from my party RSVP’s). I am moving with plenty of advance notice because I get to. The city I have been living has opened up possibilities to move on. So soon I will be settling into a little town to start a new life. The world is so big and fresh and wonderful.

Life begins at 40.

When the Aints Came Marching In

Photo courtesy of Pete Miller via Flickr.com. https://www.flickr.com/photos/pmillera4/

I like baseball. I can’t say I’m the perfect fan – I don’t follow it the best in the world, and I don’t understand the finer points of the game. But I enjoy watching a game, especially live. As an American of a certain age, I think  it was unavoidable that I would have some connection to baseball. I remember when I was two or three, my mom bought me a little plastic Baltimore Orioles helmet (although I thought the logo was of Chilly Willy).

When I was older, I watched baseball on TV. Indiana doesn’t have its own major-league ball club, so we split our loyalties among the closest teams: the Chicago Cubs, the Chicago White Sox, and the Cincinnati Reds. Our local TV station aired the Reds, so that’s who I followed. Later, the station switched affiliations to the Cubs, and though Harry Caray was fun to listen to, I couldn’t really get into the Cubs.

A Hard Man to Understand

I return from an extended – and unintended – hiatus. It was never my intention to be gone from this blog for so long. I had got wrapped up in the finishing touches of my undergraduate career. Three weeks ago, I completed my Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing. This is a milestone that, three years ago, I never thought I’d reach. And now I move on.

To Alaska.

I accepted an offer from the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and this August will be relocating to pursue an MFA in creative writing, with a focus in nonfiction. I am both excited and nervous as I move on to this new phase of my life, but I figure that’s typical of anyone making a major life change.

***

I’m not quite sure when my father died. I remember that his funeral was Memorial Day weekend, 1997. At the time I was in a haze of pharmaceuticals, intended to bring me down from what was believed at the time to be a manic episode but what is now understood to have been a severe anxiety attack brought on by the perils of trying to turn into a heterosexual within a homophobic environment. When I was 23, there was much I could not articulate to myself, let alone to the doctors, so they took their best guess based on the precious little information I permitted myself to divulge to them.

So, when I got the news that my father (whom I had not seen in five years) lay comatose in a Louisville hospital, I was already emotionally buffered by a medicinal regimen that had me sleeping sixteen hours a day. My aunt Joyce, whom I hadn’t seen since I was three, called one evening with news, flew me out to Louisville to see my comatose father. There, I met an entire side of my family who had had zero interest in my siblings or me until that point. They had to make a good showing of seeing their dying brother, even though several of them hadn’t bothered to tell their own spouses he existed.

What put my father into the hospital was tricky to unravel. Ostensibly, he had a heart attack, but the full story was more sordid. By all accounts, he had contracted an STD, and for treatment, he had obtained a topical ointment from the Amish neighbors his family has been friends with for decades. But my father, his mind muddled, took the ointment orally, which left him keeled over on the side of the road. Heart attack via poisoning. One of the teenage sons of the Amish family found him and arranged for an ambulance.

Thus I found him intubated in Louisville, surrounded by a family who had regarded him at best as a black sheep. My father was the only one out of the seven Baker siblings who was not sent to college; in fact, he was barely literate. Though I don’t know too many details, he was brutalized by his parents – my grandparents – growing up. As I’ve done some digging, I’ve discovered this abuse may have been a chief cause for his antisocial personality disorder.

I was once told that you can’t psychoanalyze dead people, but sometimes you don’t have a choice. My father was always resistant to treatment, because, as he put it, he was the only one in the world who didn’t have a problem. Yet when my mother, suffering a mental breakdown from his abuse, checked herself into the hospital, her doctor, after hearing my father rant a mere five minutes, deduced he had schizophrenia.

But, from all the digging I’ve done, I think that antisocial personality disorder is the most accurate diagnosis. First of all, my father seemed genuinely unaware of what a friend was, or how to make them. This affected my childhood greatly, since he didn’t allow me to make friends. When I was five, he bought me a dog because I was lonely, and when I was seven, he proposed that he and my mother adopt a child so that my siblings and I would have someone to play with.

He was also notoriously impulsive. In second grade, I came home from school one Friday to find that I was to get in the truck because we were taking a weekend vacation to Opryland. We kids crammed in the back, in the covered flatbed. When we got as far as English, Indiana, we picked up my maternal grandmother, who took the front seat whilst my mom joined us in back. The rest of the way to Nashville, my father cussed my grandma out in every way imaginable. We all crammed into our pop-up camper-trailer for the weekend. At Opryland itself, we didn’t do really do anything – my father ranted about the cost of concessions, so we didn’t eat or drink at the park.

On the flipside, he could be cold and calculating. When I was seven, I came home from school to discover that no one was there. This had never happened to me; there was always, at least, my mom and siblings. My father didn’t allow my mom to go anywhere but the grocery store, and he monitored the fuel gauge in the car to make sure she didn’t go anywhere else. I thought that my family had disappeared off the face of the earth and that I would be all alone in the world for the rest of my life. At seven.

They showed up an hour later. My father declared that he had just custom-ordered a brand-new Buick Park Avenue. (Custom-ordered mostly to get a Diesel engine, because my father, a truck driver by profession, stated that the only real automobiles had Diesel engines.) My mother was distraught; she didn’t understand how we could afford another car when we couldn’t afford groceries. She also didn’t understand why we couldn’t afford groceries. All she knew was that the grocery budget he gave her was getting smaller and smaller, eventually to the point that he no longer gave her money for food at all. She didn’t know that the money was going towards drugs and sex workers.

Now, this sounds pretty random and impulsive, right? To buy a car on a moment’s notice, when you aren’t exactly wealthy? Here’s the thing: he demanded that the car be put in my mom’s name. So, later, when he wanted to make himself look good to others, he would demonstrate his generosity by pointing out how he bought his wife a car, never mind that he forbade her to drive it. And if he wanted to make my mom look bad, he would tell people how she was wasting his money by buying a new car.

There were efforts at various points to get my father the help he needed. But antisocial personality disorder is notoriously slippery, for some of the reasons I mentioned above. As far as he was concerned, he didn’t have any problems, so he wasn’t about to pursue help for himself, even in the face of his obvious struggles in life. At one point, my mother, in fear of her life, had the police ambush my father when he came home from work, and they put him in jail for twenty-four hours for observation. But he was released on his own recognizance. They told my mother, “He’s high as a kite, but there’s nothing we can do about that.” And my mother, completely naïve about drug culture and possessing a singular grasp of the English language, had always thought the expression “high as a kite” meant “angry”, not “on drugs”. And when my father held up his fourth wife – the one after my mom – at gunpoint, he was put in jail for three months and then underwent a psychological evaluation. He was then released. He later told my mom, “They tried to put me away, but they didn’t know what they were doing. They had me checked out by a woman.” Implying that he knew his way with women, how to manipulate them to get what he wanted.

My mother barely escaped with her life when I was eight. My father (who, remember, was a truck drive and hardly ever home) was awarded temporary custody because he had a job and my mother didn’t. For six months he put us under the care of an estimated 20 random strangers. He offered a free home and generous pay to anyone who would take care of his kids. And he didn’t know any of these people because, remember, he had no idea what a friend was or how to make them. These were people he knew of second- and third-hand through work acquaintances and suchlike. Some were serious drug users who had no business around any kids. One couple had never been in a house with plumbing before, and didn’t understand how anything worked, including the thermostat, which they asked me to operate. I, at eight, thought you set the thermostat for the temperature outside, and we were going through a record-breaking heat wave. One was an eighteen-year-old with a one-month-old baby.

None of them were fit to take care of us, But they all quit as soon as they realized how dangerous my father was, he with the always-loaded pistol and the constant, very real threat that he’d use it. As far as my father was concerned, the only thing that mattered was that my mother not have any access to us, because that was the one thing she wanted out of life, and he was bound and determined to take it from her. After six months of this random, half-assed caregiving, my father broke his leg on the job, and “cared” for us the rest of the summer. I don’t want to say what all we kids went through because I don’t have the permission of my siblings to divulge some of what went on, and I likely will never get that permission. Suffice it to say that all four of us endured things no child should.

You would think the courts would have been more observant of what was going on with us kids, given the circumstances. But remember that my father “knew his way with women”. We were assigned a caseworker named Cecilia who was to come to the house once a week. And my mom warned Cecilia up front that my father would try to manipulate her, and would start treating her like his first wife Leila, who died in a mysterious motorcycle accident that many believe my father planned, but was able to slip through the fingers of the law by having the right last name in a small town. When Cecilia would come to the house, my father would ask her to make him a cup of coffee. And she obliged. And when the courts asked for follow-up on Cecilia’s observations, she merely stated, “Oh, he’s doing the best he can under the circumstances,” at which point she was dismissed from our case for loss of objectivity. She later confided to my mother that she was dead on, that my father was trying to turn Cecilia into Leila.

After nine months of divorce proceedings – intentionally dragged out by my mother’s attorney so as to get past my parents’ ten-year anniversary, thus qualifying us children for my father’s Social Security insurance – my mother was awarded custody. And my father began his slow drift from our lives. (At one point, he lived in Houston for five months without anyone knowing it.) He would drop by our home haphazardly, in bald defiance of the one-hour notification ordered by the court. He made such a stop one weekend towards the end of my high-school career. I was busy with extracurriculars that weekend, so I didn’t get to hear him declare that he didn’t love us kids and never did, that he thought he didn’t know how to love. It was probably the most honest he’d ever been.

The last time I saw my father conscious was at the beginning of my first year of Bible college in St. Louis. He showed up unannounced on campus with a hundred-dollar bill. (My father’s family only ever pays for anything with hundred-dollar bills. You cannot look poor.) He’d done the same after my high-school graduation, promising me a hundred dollars a month until I graduated from college. I saw the money three times total, the last being that visit the beginning of September 1992. That was the last I saw or heard from my father again.

The Amish family showed up at the funeral before the service began, but left before the actual funeral, because to stay would have been a violation of their faith. The only people at the funeral were his extended family; he died friendless. My aunt Joyce was selected to write his eulogy for the funeral director to deliver, because my father was the oldest and she was the youngest; thus, she knew him the least and was therefore the most likely to be able to say something positive about him. The best she could muster was that he was “a hard man to understand”. My father had grown so heavy, it took eight of us to carry his casket. When he was buried in the cemetery of Mt. Pleasant Baptist Church that Memorial Day weekend 1997, alongside Leila, his siblings remarked how odd it was that he was born on Veteran’s Day and died on Memorial Day weekend, yet never served in the military. The military was lucky to not have had him.

So, this weekend, as I am bombarded with the red, white, and blue of militarism, my thoughts don’t go to my culturally expected obligations to the relative location of the uterus from which I plopped, an obligation I will never understand. Instead, I think of the man who was hard to understand. I think about all the folks out there who need proper psychiatric attention and will likely not get it because of the red, white, and blue they plopped into at birth. And I think of how my goal in life ever since that weekend has been to be understood.

On the Impossibility of Turning into a Giraffe

You will notice above this post a link to a new page. This page will lead you to the .pdf of a multigenre essay I wrote this past summer, entitled “On the Impossibility of Turning into a Giraffe”. (Alternately, you can click here.)

The essay details the history of Exodus International, from the perspective of former leaders and clients, as well as from my own experience. I have chosen to publish this story for free and online so that anyone may have access to the information therein, and learn about the inherent dangers of attempting to change one’s sexual orientation. I hope that this work might help anyone who wants to know more about this history, or who might be considering such treatments.

Out of Order (Forever?)

Photo by Andrea R (flickr.com)

Claire Robertson* is one of the strongest people I know. She survived a kidnapping as a child and a sexual assault as an adult, and fights Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder as a result. She worked as a nurse, but a serious accident meant back surgery and physical disability. During the surgery, doctors discovered that she has a rare congenital connective-tissue disorder that will only get worse.

She fought for several years through multiple denials to procure Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). When she finally received it, her monthly payments were $650 per month—nowhere near the $1,000 per month she had been told.

Her husband Brian holds a Master’s degree in history. However, the downturn in the economy has eliminated all hiring in his field, vacancies only coming when someone retires or dies. He looked into going back to school to teach junior-high or high school, but a change in the curriculum meant that he would have to work for a semester in a full-time unpaid internship, with no time to earn an income. He works from home as a medical transcriptionist, a field in which wages have plummeted over the past several years as more and more of the work has been outsourced to India.

Claire and Brian have two children, both of whom have autism. Their daughter Alexis graduated from high school a year ago, but presently lives at home as she struggles with major bouts of depression and suicidal ideation, as well as with the same connective-tissue disorder Claire suffers. Alexis hopes to go to college to study veterinary medicine. She has been trained as a PCA and serves in this role for their son Ethan, but the work is only sporadic—Alexis made less than $4000 last year. Ethan is nine. A bright and loving child, he nonetheless battles severe autistic symptoms. He is enrolled in special-education courses and requires various rehabilitative services.

Brian averages $1400 a month; however, his income can vary greatly because it depends on how much work he is assigned. Sometimes he earns nothing in a pay period. On rare occasion he gets paid overtime. When Claire started receiving SSDI, the family lost their food stamps entirely, and Ethan’s monthly SSDI payments dropped from $641 to $350—not really enough to pay for Ethan’s medical needs. All but Brian receive medical insurance through the state of Minnesota, which has one of the most generous state-insurance programs in the United States. When Claire began receiving SSDI, she was automatically moved to Medicare insurance (she had no say in the matter), for which she must pay $101 per month out of pocket, on top of high copays on her dozen-plus medications. Brian was dropped from state insurance entirely because his employer offers insurance—never mind the fact that the premiums in the employer’s program exceed Brian’s entire income. Thus Brian has no way to treat his own multiple medical issues, which include high blood pressure, sleep apnea, and depression.

Two years ago, the Robertsons were kicked out of their home illegally by a new landlord, and didn’t have the resources to fight it in court, so they found themselves temporarily homeless, living out of a motel. They found one house in their price range and bought it, but it has major structural issue, including a roof that needs to be replaced, for which they lost their homeowner’s insurance and now must pay for the roof out of pocket. Moreover, the house does not have a ramp for Claire to use her wheelchair, and the Robertsons cannot afford to build one on their own. They have requested assistance from Habitat for Humanity, but that organization must wait for funding approval from the government before they can proceed. They hope to have the ramp installed sometime next year.

The Robertsons just received a letter stating that, because of the handful of checks for which Brian was paid overtime, not only have they lost Ethan’s $350 monthly check entirely, but Social Security has declared the loss retroactive—the family must pay Social Security $1400 to repay the SSDI payments they had been receiving since May.

I write all of this for two reasons. First is to bring awareness to just how severely broken the assistance system is in the United States. It operates on a binary structure—either one is entirely on the System or entirely off. Furthermore, the income threshold at which one is kicked off the System is well below what one can afford to live on (unless one is in subsidized housing, which, because of long-standing application freezes nationwide, for all intents doesn’t exist unless you’re already living in it). Almost anything one can do to move oneself into safe financial straits is prohibited. Some people “know” the System is broken (and even more broken now because of cuts to poverty programs like Head Start and public housing, thanks to Congress’s sequester). But knowledge often is not enough to prompt one to action, which is why I asked Claire if I could share her family’s story. I wanted to put a face to what is going on in America.

The other reason I am relating this story is because I wish to serve notice to anyone who would dare write off the Robertsons as “lazy” and would tell them to “just get a job”. If you think that, first off, you haven’t read a damn word I’ve written up to this point.

And where do you suggest they “get a job”? Jobs are scarce, and the ones that are available are part-time and/or pay next to nothing nothing (thanks in large part to profit-hoarding and a refusal to invest in the country’s infrastructure, education, etc.).

If you had the gall to express such ideas to my face or to the Robertsons’, I wouldn’t blame myself or them if I/they slapped you—and I’m a pacifist. But folks never express these ideas face-to-face. They do so from the safety of blog comments sections, ballot boxes, and legislative office.

Finally, if this is your response, I’m going to question how you were raised. I was raised not to judge any human being until I had walked a mile in their shoes, and if you were raised differently, then I would ask you to make up for your poor parenting and re-educate yourself. If you don’t, you’re the lazy one, for not exercising your brain or your heart.

*Names changed to protect identity.

Introductions

I realised a couple of days ago that, for the first time, I am blogging and have at least a small handful of people reading my writing who do not actually know me face-to-face.  This is of course a good problem to have.  But it does leave me feeling like I should impart a bit of my autobiography to aid those who are coming into my my blog and the life it revolves around in media res.

I was born and grew up in Southern Indiana.  I have three siblings younger than me who all came in quick succession.  I was a bright but awkward child, the latter aided by the fact that my father was an abuser, and abusers use social isolation to hide abuse.  Thus, I did not really grow up around any children my own age.

When I turned eight, my mother escaped with us and filed for divorce.  After a fiasco of my father having temporary custody during the divorce, my mother won custody.  However, owing to the abuse, my mother suffered permanent disabilities.  Added to the fact that my father did not pay child support and my mother could not get the courts to get him to do so, I grew up quite poor, in a community with a very sharp class divide.  This experience made me very aware of class-consciousness.

Once we escaped my father, I took an interest in going to church, in part because it was one of the things he forbade.  I ended up in a congregation in the Christian Churches and Churches of Christ, and then attended one of their Bible colleges in St. Louis.

During this entire process, I was slowly coming to the realisation that I was “not like other boys”–because I liked other boys.  Not knowing what to do, I turned to the authorities in my life–the college authorities–and the short version of the story is that I was required to attend ex-gay “therapy” in order to remain in school.  I remained in the “therapy” much longer than I remained in the school, which I had to leave for financial and health reasons.

I relocated to my hometown of Bloomington, Indiana, and transferred to Indiana University, where I majored in philosophy.  This was a misguided choice of major for a few reasons, chief of them being was that I wanted to go into creative writing for at least a chunk of my career.  It took me awhile to realise that the Jean-Paul Sartres and Ursula LeGuins are by far the exception in the world of philosophy.

But you don’t make every decision in life.  Some decisions get made for you, quite unexpectedly.  In May 2004 I received two letters from the State of Indiana.  One informed me that I would lose my medical insurance, which I needed for the treatment of disabilities, and the second stated that there would be major cuts to my school funding.

One month later, I boarded a Greyhound for Minneapolis, sight unseen.  I only knew two people here, both online–one remains a dear friend.  But I had heard great recommendations for the city, and as I researched it, it had everything I was looking for: progressive and gay-friendly (offering me my first realistic chance of coming out), with a large arts community, a stable economy, and good health-care and transit services.  It was one of the best decisions I ever made.

I got a job in customer service at Minnesota Children’s Museum, which I held for four years until the museum was hit in the first wave of recession cuts in November 2008, when I was laid off.

I was adrift for a while after the layoff, and I got really depressed.  Changes in student-loan laws opened up the opportunity for me to return to college, which I did in January 2012 at Metropolitan State University, this time majoring in Creative Writing where I belonged.

In the midst of all this was a sea change spiritually.  After having to leave the evangelical Church for entertaining the idea of living a celibate but openly gay life (which takes more explaining than this format allows), I ended up in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, where I found a safe space to ask the questions innate to my sceptical nature.  And those questions led me right out of Christianity.  And it was okay.  I spent a while with a small Quaker group, and more recently have sporadically attended a Unitarian-Universalist church.  I mostly see myself as a pilgrim, always journeying, as one friend put it, “always an emigrant, never an immigrant.”  I pick up something valuable wherever I go that I keep.

My day-to-day life now is focussed on school, which I attend year-round.  In my free time, I sing with Twin Cities Gay Men’s Chorus and serve on Metropolitan State’s arts-and-literature editorial staff.  I half-joke that I am terminally single.  I do, however, live with a bicycle named Wilbur.

Piano

Warning of abuse trigger.

*****************

I used to be obsessed with learning how to play piano.  I would go to the music room at school during class time, and try to figure it out, and my music teacher would coach me a long as much as she could without exactly giving me a lesson, as she had her own duties to attend to, as well.  In high school, I had lunch right after orchestra class, and it wasn’t uncommon for me to pluck out chords and melodies well into lunch period.  My church held an auction, and was getting rid of an old, very out-of-tune piano.  I was going to use a $50-dollar savings bond that I had won in a competition to pay for my bid for the piano–never mind the fact that there was no room in my family’s apartment for a piano, that the piano was in desperate need of repair, and that I still wouldn’t be able to take lessons.  I ended up placing the second-highest of three bids.  Undaunted, I went to the church in my spare time, just to try to teach myself how to play the piano and write music.

Last night, I realised why I was so obsessed with playing the piano.

My mother’s only chance to escape my father’s abuse, and to treat her own failing health due to starvation and beatings, was to go to a hospital whilst my father was on the job as a long-distance truck driver.  He had forbidden us to go to the doctor, or to really carry out any business, in our own county, as a means of hiding the abuse.  It also helped him, in that he had often established local social contacts such that he had prejudiced their opinions against my mother before she had a chance to speak with doctors, psychologists, and such in our own town.  So, if my mom was going to get help, it was going to be one county over, a half-hour drive south of where we lived.  She checked herself into the emergency room, and they kept her.  She weighed barely 100 pounds, and had suffered extensive internal organ damage from beatings.

But, there were four children, ages five through eight, with an incapacitated, barely-alive mother, and a father working hundreds of miles away.  We were not in our own county, and there was no-one we could stay with.  (Another way my father kept us socially isolated was by making it known he kept a loaded gun, and threatening to use it on us or our neighbours if we made any social contact.  He acted so unstable that neighbours who wanted to help us out of our situation worried that if they did, we or they might end up murdered.)  So we were placed in emergency foster care.

That night, as they pulled my screaming five-year-old brother off my mother, we headed off to our new residence.  We had no idea who these people were, or how long we’d be living with them, nor did they.  It was a father and mother, with three children of their own, daughters age 9, 7, and 1.

I had never been happier in my life.  It was the first evidence that I had that a man, not only did not have to yell, scream, and threaten to murder his wife and her family, but that he could treat her with love, respect, and decency.  The children were bright and well-adjusted, and we had fun having other kids to play with.  (We were not allowed to associate with other children outside of school.)  And the nine-year-old took piano lessons.

The piano was in the kids’ playroom.  It had stickers on the keys, brightly coloured little monsters labelled “C”, “C#”, etc.  The daughter would play bits of her lessons for me.  And I fell in love.  From that moment on, I wanted to play piano more than anything in the world.

My mother, still in the hospital, regained enough strength to file divorce papers.  My father returned from the road, and he was to receive temporary custody, because he had a job–even though that job kept him away from us kids for weeks on end.  We left the foster family.  I did not want to leave them.

Curiously, when I started college, as a music major, I was required to take piano lessons, but I had none of the passion I had when I was younger.  Granted, there were many intervening psychological, social, and medical reasons to not want to practise the five hours a week required to earn an A, but there was still no more fire to learn the piano.  Perhaps it was because it went from being an internal desire to an external requirement.  Perhaps it was just a childhood fantasy I shuffled off upon becoming an adult.  Or, perhaps, the piano symbolised a place of peace, of love, of hope, and that symbolism was more important than actually learning to play.

Learning

This is my final “I’m From Driftwood” story, originally published in May 2009.

***********

One fine morning in third grade, I awoke in a very good mood. As a pretentious eight-year-old addicted to public broadcasting, I planned to spend the day, as sometimes I would, speaking in an English accent. Befuddling classmates and fooling strangers as to my origin, I was just quirky me expressing my happiness. Halfway through that morning, my mood would get even better.

We had times when we were allowed to wander the classroom in order to investigate different “learning stations.” It was a good idea in theory, but I dreaded the “listening” station. It consisted of a record player with eight bulky headphone sets slinking from it like an octopus. The rule was that the first child to arrive at the listening station could pick the record. We had a collection of perhaps a couple dozen records, but you’d never know it from the class’s listening habits. Every time, I arrived late, and every time the first arrival had pulled out the “101 Dalmatians” record. Not only that, but every time they selected the same track–the “K9 Krunchies” dog food commercial. They would play the track to the end, lift the needle, and play it again. It drove me absolutely mad to hear that inanity over and over. And there was no convincing my classmates to play anything else, even from the same record.

But this time would be different. Finally, I was the one to reach the listening station first. And this meant…a different record! This time I could play anything I wanted–anything other than those simpering puppies and their corny commercial! So I pulled out a different record, some sad Russian tale of a little boy who had to eat lentils all the time, and placed it on the turntable. “No, we don’t want that!” cried out the other children. “Play something else! Play ‘101 Dalmatians’!”

“But I’m the first one here,” I retorted in my approximation of British schoolboy English, “that means I get to pick the record.”

Quite the brouhaha ensued, enough to bring the teacher over. “What’s the matter?”

“Mrs. Benson, he won’t let us play the record we all want!”

“But I was the first one here, that means that I get to pick out the record, that’s the rules.”

“But,” Mrs. Benson replied, “no one else wants to listen to the record you chose, and we need to pick what’s best for everybody.”  Angry and broken-hearted, I sat back as the poor little Russian boy gave way to that damn dog food commercial.

My voice was noticeably Midwestern the rest of the day.

There was a lot for that eight-year-old boy to absorb that day. “The rules” are fluid and unpredictable, and cannot be called upon to determine order. “The one in charge” can be put down with a revolt. And most importantly, the rights of the minority must cede to the caprice of the majority–individuality must yield to mob rule.