Civil disobedience could have been Juley Brahnstein’s middle names. Should have been. He was born to rebel.

He cut his second day of kindergarten. He found his own class insufficiently fun the first day, so on the next he followed his friend Aaron. Sure enough, they did something his dull class hadn’t done. Aaron’s teacher read each kid’s name, and the kid got to say “Here.” When Juley told his mother about it, she said, “Except you.”

“Huh?”

“The teacher didn’t say ‘Julian Brahnstein,’ did she?” her mother asked him, holding the heavy door open as he climbed out of their green Buick.

“No.”

“And you didn’t get to say ‘here,’ did you?”

“No.”

“That’s because you were absent. Not there.” Juley would live another eighty years and never forget learning that word. “Your teacher was probably calling your name just about then. And you weren’t there to say ‘here.’ Don’t you think you should go back to your own class tomorrow, so you don’t have to be absent any more?”

It was one of those rare moments when Juley agreed with his mom. What she said made sense. He thought absent was a wonderful word.

In general Juley liked kindergarten. It was more fun than tagging along with his mother on her shopping trips and coffee visits. It was better than hanging around home with his mother and his cute stinky sister Ruth. But he never enjoyed rest time.

The kindergarten day was only four hours long. He didn’t understand why resting had to be part of it. But halfway through every day, in Aaron’s class as well as his own, all of the kids were expected to lie down on little mats for a time, as if they were napping. Juley never liked naps even when they made sense, at home on a bed after some hours of roughhousing, and he detested the little school exercise. As far as he could tell, no one (except maybe the teacher) got anything out of rest time. It didn’t make sense to him.

But what really made no sense, then or after, was the way the kids went along with it. Juley kept looking around. He was a good counter, and by his tally there were no less than nineteen other children. All of those kids to one teacher and Barbara, the Wednesday aide. Juley couldn’t figure out why all the kids did what Miss Adams said, even when none of them wanted to. It was obvious to him that they could simply tell her: no. What could Miss Adams do? He would have loved to find out. But the other nineteen didn’t seem to see it that way. In fact, as far as Juley could tell no one else even considered disobeying.

He asked his parents about it. His mother looked at him blankly over the bright cover of her McCall’s. His father spoke about “authority.” When Juley asked what that meant, his mother told his father he should stop using such big words and his father told his mother to shut up, which made her return to her magazine, paging fitfully, and made Juley leave the room. He was too young to look up the word in a dictionary.

He learned to read the next year. He was very bright and rather motivated. He wanted to decipher the big Funk & Wagnall’s that sat on the carved oak stand in the family room. He longed to read the text that accompanied the illustrations in his father’s slim volume of Candide. There was one picture especially, of a naked woman held spreadeagled by four soldiers, her round rump up and the side of one round breast down, that made Juley tingle warmly in the base of his young penis, made him want to stroke its underside slowly full length, and he needed to understand the words around that picture.

He paid attention to the alphabet and quickly learned to read. He paid attention to numbers and mastered arithmetic. He didn’t care much for the subjectivity of history. His prodigious capacity for numbers balked at remembering dates. This contrary condition stayed with him all his life. Even as an old man he remembered his childhood addresses, his wives’ Social Security numbers. But he never could recall the year of the Battle of Hastings, or when the Magna Carta was signed.