Sputterpub's Blog

The first couch I remember was medium-green, upholstered in something like damask, pretty and soft. Its seat cushions needed plumping after anyone sat down. Mom would jump up and dart to the couch whenever one of us stood up from it, and she would spank the butt depressions out of the cushion.

I’m sure there was no flame retardant in whatever stuffed that sofa. No one was imbedding chemicals in our textiles then. Our pajamas were 100% cotton. Our sheets acquired wrinkles when laundered.

We ate our dinner together every night. This was some policy decision by my parents; other families we knew let the kids eat early and tried for an adult meal for the grownups. My brother and I envied those other families’ kids; we would have appreciated kid food and no criticism for some of our evening meals. We sometimes resented having to wait till Dad got home. We even thought separate dinners would be easier on Mom, although she complained when we mentioned it that she wasn’t a short order cook (whatever that meant), and she wasn’t going to be making separate dishes for us (oh). Dining with our parents we had to answer questions about our day (we never knew what to say), and we had to listen to them chat about theirs, which included them arguing whenever repair of the car or an appliance had been one of my mother’s tasks, because according to Dad she never told the repairman the right things.

But Lay Down Time was always delightful. We’d be finishing our dessert (something fruit-based) and Dad would get that happy look, when his grin pushed his cheeks up to make crescents of his eyes, and he’d say “What time is it?”

And my brother and I would yelp “Lay Down Time!” but Dad was already on the move. He always got to the couch before us. His long body filled the sofa from one armrest to the other, and we crawled on him.

It’s such a sweet memory that I recall it like it happened every day. I’m sure that wasn’t the case. I probably made a tradition out of half a dozen episodes. My brother is two years younger than I am and we had that couch till we were at least eight and ten, and he has no memory of Lay Down Time at all.

Dad sometimes got into poetry appreciation with us all gathered in the kingsize bed on Sunday mornings. That’s when he recited Wordsworth and Shelley and reached for Keats, Lindsay, Service. We often discussed science and philosophy on the walks that grew longer as I did. But it was during Lay Down Time that I remember some of his most enduring advice, those phrases that rumbled through his chest to our ears on the plushy green couch.

Maybe the lessons were more memorable because they were flawed. They seemed awesome wise when he told some of them to me, but after I grew and tested them out by saying them and living them, I learned that they were incomplete. Clever and symmetrical but missing an alternative view, one that shoots out at a tangent, maybe perpendicular to the black and white of Western argument.

Like when he said everyone’s either a leader or a follower, and told us to be leaders. We got it. And it made sense; neither my brother nor I sought a hero we’d obey. My brother acted out cowboy and soldier roles before he settled into his fantasy career as a race car driver. If I couldn’t be a wild horse then I wanted to conquer one, and after that, together, explore the world.

We neither one was a follower, but I tended to go my own way, and my brother was a very good sport. Over time he appeared to be a team player and he wasn’t the quarterback. I matured into what some folks would call a black sheep, although I was never sheepish.

I did not get high marks for working with others. I never wanted to be a teacher. The fact is, I don’t give or receive supervision well. Dad’s wisdom was incomplete when he said you’re either a leader or a follower. There’s a third way of neitherness, and my favorite people choose that.

There was another Lay Down Time when Dad first warned us that we could have the best idea in the world, but if we couldn’t communicate the idea, we might as well not even have it. It was a pithy argument for mixing the humanities into a good old science/math education, and I understood it even though I was a bit young for it (probably in third grade).

That advice lodged in me. I heard it a few more times from Dad but mostly from myself. I had ideas, and I thought some of them were very good, but they weren’t useful unless I could describe them to others. I kept reading, building vocabulary and constructing argument, but even so, I didn’t often prevail.

Over time it occurred to me that there’s more to the subject than Dad’s succinct advice. You can have the best idea in the world, and you can communicate it with accuracy and force, but you still may not get it across to the other person. For that you need effective communication, and effective communication depends as much on the listener’s receptivity as on the speaker’s skill. I have made countless articulate arguments about the meaning of life, the opportunity to create new theories, the fierceness of agnosticism and, most often, my interlocutors turned (politely) away from me, to discussions they found more attractive. Sometimes they were ruder than that. I got shined on.

I learned to speak more softly. I was conscientious about gentling my facial expressions. I started getting through to some friends.

And I didn’t like the results. I collected smarmy acolytes. I bored myself. Eventually I fell off the civility wagon and reverted to declaration.

Recently a close friend commented about me. We were relaxing at my place after a Sunday walk when Annie said “Sometimes you blow me away with your kindness. You never tell me what to do. You’re surprisingly patient.”

“Wow. Thanks.”

“No really,” she continued. “Why don’t people know that about you? It seems like they have to really get to know you before they understand how kind you are.”

“That’s because I speak with such confidence and vocabulary. The immediate reaction from most is ‘Oh she thinks she’s always right. She’s obnoxious.”

Annie was silent for a moment. “Yeah, that’s it,” she said.

“I’ve learned how to talk the way people want, but it bores me. I’m no longer interested in it.”

“But …”

“Yeah. I know. The way I communicate isn’t effective. But I don’t aim for effectiveness any more.”

“I guess that’s what’s striking me. Lately all I aim for is effective communication. I’m really trying for it.”

“Uh huh,” I said. “I used to be that way. But I’m done with it now. I’ll lay it out and if someone wants to run with it, they’re welcome. But if they want to shine me on, then fuck ‘em. I just don’t care.”

Annie made marveling murmurs.

“Anyway,” I continued. “Effective communication carries too much responsibility. If I’m effective it means someone listens to me. And then I feel responsible for the results of whatever actions they take or words they pronounce that were triggered by my communication. I don’t need that anymore.”

Annie chuckled. “What do you need now?”

“Some time with my grandboys.” I patted the firm cushion of my ultrasuede sofa (a different green, and firmly packed with mystery stuffing). I brought my legs up under me. “They always settle me down. Just the way they look at the world reminds me how awesome it is.”

“I’ll bet you try to communicate effectively with them.” The smile was on her face and in her voice.

“True. True. But mostly I want them for Lay Down Time.”

It was good that Norah and I found each other. We were alike in feeling quietly superior to everyone else. We were similar in our early shifting for ourselves. Most of the boys and many of the girls thought we were gay. We weren’t. But what we got from our friendship was more than worth that reputation.

Norah had a twin brother. It was as if she and Keith were two halves of some big thing. He was as stupid and mean as she was intelligent and nice. He was as prone to violent anger as she was to patient wit. He was grossly favored by their alcoholic father, and unfairly indulged by their reticent mother, simply because he was male. It’s no wonder Norah raised herself.

We used to spend the night at her house because her parents were older than mine and less observant. We stole shots of whiskey from her dad and menthol cigarettes from her mother. We disliked both but we agreed that no childhood would be complete without trying them, several times. We were always careful.

On the other hand, we rather enjoyed sneaking out. We would wait for Norah’s parents to retire, which was never later than 10. Sometime between then and midnight we’d slip through Norah’s door to the porch and then wander the roads of her small town, ducking behind bushes when the one patrol car cruised by. We owned those quiet streets then. I remember lying down on the middle of the asphalt sometimes, mouths up to the tree-framed starshine, straining to discover the meaning of life.

Norah and I are still close. The thing is, we did begin to figure it out then, and we’ve each spent the ensuing 45 years walking our separate but equivalent paths by it. I even reproduced, after somewhat scientifically selecting the boyfriend with what seemed to be the best genes. I got a girl and a boy, and I raised them to be awake instead of among. They’re a little bit lonely, because they don’t have many peers. But they know how to think, they live to learn, and they can be embarrassed with grace.

Norah didn’t have babies. By the time she found a suitable man, both of them were too old. She went into pastoral counseling. Her father peeled away from her to an alcoholic death, her mother to a gentle institutionalized dementia, her brother to a succession of angry marriages and disgruntled jobs, while Norah studied and sought ways to wake others.

I keep blabbing the reveille. Writing it in prose and verse, blurting it, murmuring it, tilting with it like Quixote at the windmills.

My daughter asked me recently, “Why is it so important for people to be right?” As we chatted on the subject we realized it might be because of the way we raise kids. Parents lavish the praise on the toddler who gets anything correct: oh, what a genius! will you look at that! I’ll bet this child will grow up to be…

What would it be like if we praised the babies for the process instead of the answer? Imagine a world without endings…

Grownups are so stupid.

So it was that when I entered kindergarten, I switched classes on the second day. I was looking for more than I found on the first day, in my assigned room. I told my mother about it and she taught me the meaning of “absent.” Even after I was returned to my proper teacher I didn’t accept the routine. When rest time came, and we were all expected to take to our mats, I remember looking around – so many of us, not tired, and just one or two in charge, dictating stillness – and I began my school-long question of: why? Why were we resting, when we so outnumbered the teacher? Not only was I always surprised that the authority figure commanded obedience; I was struck at how few even asked the question.

I kept asking. Confronting. I dropped out of Sunday School at 8 when the teachers all stammered and refused to address my “But who created God?” I took on racism and ecology in junior high, proclaiming with such passion that I invited peer sarcasm then and self-mockery later. But the thing that was most remarkable about me was my total inability to subordinate my opinion to anyone else’s.

I couldn’t act either. Unless I played myself. I lacked what the drama teacher called negative capability. I was so good at debate that most said I should be a lawyer, but they were all wrong – I never could have argued well for a position I didn’t own.

Meanwhile I was raising myself. I ran a kind of home school for me, to supplement whatever institution I attended. So I encouraged me to read the Greek mythology I liked, in junior high. Although I understood I was just skating when I reread an old favorite like the biography of Clara Barton, for the tenth time, while snacking on something, I also knew my time with Zeus and Athena was well-spent. I was rather pleased with myself for riding my bike to the library every week, and checking out a dozen books that I’d finish before the next trip.

I thought a clubhouse was a necessary experience for any growing kid, so I found an old barn at the edge of the big estate that abutted our new-built neighborhood, and I talked my neighbors and brother into cleaning it and fixing it up into our place. When I was a junior in high school, my friend Norah and I agreed that no childhood would be complete without running away from home. Even though we were neither unhappy with our parents, one rainy afternoon we made a break for the adjacent college town and holed up with our friend Meg’s older brother until discovered, three hours later, when my mother called Meg’s mother and Meg forgot to lie for us.

We were punished for that one. Corny as it sounds, Norah’s parents blamed me as a bad influence on her, and my parents said she was corrupting me. Our telephone conversations were limited for a time.

But Norah and I were incorrigible. If we had a mantra, it was “No childhood would be complete without…” and we continued our soft excursions into eccentricity. We shoplifted just to do it, and only got caught once returning the items we’d taken (we had no need for them – we were anti-materialistic intellectuals). We rose at 3 the first morning of our senior year, so we could walk the 15 miles from Norah’s house to our school. Just because.

My parents managed to find a stupid pediatrician. Either that or they lied to me, and the mistakes were their own decisions. But they told me the enema was doctor’s advice, and they insisted that their silence before my tonsillectomy was prescribed.

I remember. Without a shrink or hypnosis or melodrama I recollect. For you see, the issue was one of control; apparently no one else was in charge, so I had to be, and that meant I needed to remember.

Don’t misunderstand: my parents were cute. They were bright. They were filled with energy. They loved one another and they loved me. But they were each the youngest of their own family, and they were both clueless about how to talk to me. They thought a baby was of a different species, like a pet. They thought their child was a continuation of their own bodies, so they didn’t respect mine.

I’m sure they meant to console me, but mostly they found my fear of the washing machine amusing. I had to come to my own terms with the monster in the circular window
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And I’m certain now that my mother must have decided it was time to toilet train me based on her readiness and not on mine. She’s impatient. That would account for a situation where a dumb doctor might recommend the use of an enema, to give them control over when I defecated. I remember the offense as repeated: me bent over my father’s lap daily, my anus penetrated against my will. They now assure me that they only did it once; I must have been so outraged that they were too intimidated for more. I also recollect that they tried to bribe me with promises about a doll carriage like my neighbor’s, but they have no memory of that. I think I knew then that they were behaving incorrectly, but perhaps I concluded that later, and then recast the event. I know I was angry. I believe I forgave them.

It may have been as early as then, around 2, that I assumed my own reins, but probably it was later. I think I witnessed a succession of small parental errors, many in how they treated my younger brother compared to me, and I probably didn’t take full charge till I was almost 6. I remember feeling confused about some of their choices, disappointed even, but reserving some judgment then. He still seemed godlike. She was his busy and beloved consort.

The tonsillectomy cured that. They stayed with me in the waiting room, but they could just as cruelly have dropped me off. There was illogical talk about me getting a ballerina doll I coveted, tomorrow, but no conversation about today. I assumed when the nurse took me away that I’d be returned to my parents within minutes, but I didn’t see them for ages. First I had to endure the elevator ride with the idiot nurse, the humiliating injection, a lonely vigil in a wheelchair, ether, nausea, pain, a bed with rails, nausea, pain, the unending night, pain, and nausea. Nothing but chaos and confusion above me. I had to conclude that everyone working in that hospital was stupid. By the time I saw my parents again, I still loved them but I no longer needed them.

That’s not to say I didn’t learn from them. I carried my father’s stubborn “Time is not the fourth dimension” like a banner throughout junior high school. Our philosophical discussions helped form my environmentalism. And I’ll never forget the lessons Mom taught me about how to select well-made garments, and that one good piece is better than a dozen rags.

No, I was still a child at 5½. But I formed my own opinions. And before too long I began to map out a program to raise myself.