Sputterpub's Blog

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.

Jane thought she was done with abnormal mouth then. She continued to brush and floss and see the dentist twice a year, but she enjoyed 20 years of strong normal-looking teeth. Then the gum disease appeared.

It had to have been brewing for awhile. It was immediately diagnosed when she saw the new dentist. She might have stayed with old Dr. Hall forever but he sold his practice to the rookie who used to be his hygienist, and Jane didn’t trust the youngster. She visited Dr. Adams and asked him if she should follow Hall’s persistent advice to remove her wisdom teeth.

“We can discuss that later,” said Dr. Adams. “First we have to address your acute periodontal disease.”

Jane was beyond shocked. Dr. Hall and his successor had regularly checked her gums for pockets, always pronounced her normal, and then talked about how much they’d enjoy pulling her wisdom teeth, ostensibly because that would make it easier for Jane to clean back there, but always sounding like they just wanted the experience of extraction. To learn that she had some large pockets, two close to 10 mm, and measurable loss of jawbone, well that was news of an astounding and hard-to-accept nature. Jane had no tooth or gum pain. It took her awhile to believe it.

But she had to fast-track her credibility, because the dentist didn’t stop with words. He referred her to a periodontist in the city. Jude came with her for the first appointment, and then kept driving her to her procedures because she wasn’t allowed to leave on her own.

Jane had deep cleaning regularly, surgical planing sometimes, interventions because of sudden swelling, extractions, bone grafts, implants, crowns. She learned to floss with white baby yarn, carry interdental brushes of four different sizes, use techniques no regular mouths encountered. She had her anatomy explained to her. What with root proximity in her upper jaw and a deformed gum line for her lower teeth, her pearly whites (by this time a light caramel in color) were anything but regular. And according to the periodontist, her saliva was like elixir to the anaerobic bacteria that cause plaque and decay. Jem advised her to just have them all pulled and be done with it, but Jem was the extreme sister. Jane agreed with her periodontist that she should keep her teeth as long as possible. Besides, what with sinus lift and bone graft, each extraction-to-implant process would take over a year and cost about $7,000.

As Jane puts it, she has a potty mouth. Or the orifice of Dorian Gray – the only place she seems to age is in her increasingly tender mouth. But she found some silver linings. Her condition often limits what she eats, so she has had diet success. She tends to enjoy the narcotics that are prescribed after each procedure. And her disease produces perverse inspiration for her writing.

She heard awhile ago that Jonathan Swift was plagued and also inspired by a chronic digestive complaint. She read his scatological verse then. And Jude told her that Martin Luther suffered so that he wrote almost all of his stuff while sitting on the (undoubtedly then wooden) toilet seat. Jem said they ought to check the Internet to see if these were true facts, but her sisters reminded her that the Internet got “weird” wrong (or incomplete), and they all knew that whenever they looked at anything about which they had independent knowledge, the news reports – on whatever media – were inaccurate.

So no one looked into Swift or Luther. But Jane has started writing from the energy, angry or dismayed or resolved or mystified, supplied to her by an unremitting cascade of periodontal problems.

And she notes as she types this paragraph, that she’s going to need a lot of practice and a ton of edits. She’ll have to dumb down the vocabulary and crank up the narrator’s conventionality. She’d better expand the parts about Jude and Jem; right now Jane’s teeth are eating up all the evolution and entropy. The whole process is weird, but she’ll have time to work on it while recovering from next week’s extractions.

But they’re grown up now, like the rest of us, and their weird ideas have grown up too. Young Jem is an enlightened pessimist (her term). She’s been contemplating existence all her life and she has concluded that our species is toast. It was when she first tried to learn Spanish that this train of thought started chugging. She noticed that a tool like a broom or a saw could be used in “the” correct manner or in “an” incorrect way. Hmm, she thought. One correct path and an infinite number incorrect? Soon after she cracked us up by stating that there are an uncountable number of nonsequiturs to any statement but only one or few sequiturs. And then she was exposed to the concept of entropy. From her perspective, riding as she described it a planet that was racing away from its neighbors, sitting in a frantically expanding universe, she embraced the inevitable tide of disorganization. Jem has concluded that there are so many more wrong choices than right ones that it is statistically impossible for people as a group to choose the wise path.

Jude is worse, in a way. She’s negative too, but some folks accuse her of blasphemy along with heresy. What grabbed her about science, when she was 12, was DNA and photosynthesis and evolution. She learned the rungs-and-ladder components of genetic material, committed to memory the formula for converting oxygen, water and energy to sugar and CO2, and embraced the game theory of natural selection. She was bowled over by the elegance. Jude even built a learning “computer” out of matchboxes and jujubes. This was for our puny science fair, in eighth grade. She played tic-tac-toe with the boxes and, whenever they lost, she removed a candy from the box that made the losing move, which decreased the box’s ability to make that move. Within a couple of dozen games, the boxes couldn’t lose. The simple system of only letting the winner play the next round resulted in progress that looked exactly like learning, like intelligent design.

That was all okay. She won an Honorable Mention at the fair and would have taken a ribbon if she’d had a flashier display. But what got to rankling Jude was the type of winner that the evolutionary system favored. There is no payoff for wisdom or restraint or consideration. The slash-and-burn hero is the money-making children-producing prevailer. That’s the subject Jude wants to throw in God’s face. Nice system, Deity, but have you really thought this through? Hers is not a popular attitude, even among us peers.

Jane’s weirdness has become darkly humorous. She has chronic mouth disease. No one else in the family has had oral experiences like hers. When she first saw a dentist she was five. She had eight cavities. She refused the needle and endured the drilling and nerve exposure with clenched neck and tight fists. Forever after, the smell of hot tooth enamel has turned her stomach.

Her situation didn’t improve with age. Although she was scrupulous about brushing and even started flossing by seven, she continued to develop holes in her teeth that required packs of amalgam. She got over her novocaine aversion and accepted the needle after two years, but she has never relaxed in the chair.

By 11 she had fillings in most of her molars. She also had all of her molars, including the eruptions of (non-impacted) wisdom teeth. Again, strange. Her dentist even whispered the word “abnormal” at that exam. And he told Jane and her mother that the only ways to take care of the gap between her upper front teeth were surgery or orthodonture. They opted for a snip.

The dentist cut the ligament that ran between her front teeth. That didn’t hurt, but the shot of novocaine up into the front of the roof of her mouth was excruciating. If pain could be compared between others, Jane would know that that shot hurt more than delivering twins would pain Jude.

For months after the procedure, Jane followed the dentist’s instructions; whenever she was alone reading or otherwise quietly occupied, she’d use her fingers to push her front teeth toward each other. The gap disappeared within a year.

We called them the weird sisters but that had nothing to do with destiny. If you google “weird” now you get origins in “wyrd” and references to the Greek fates and the Scottish witches, but they and we doubt it. The weird sisters looked the word up when we were younger and dictionaries were printed on paper.

Weird came from “we-ïrd” then. Short for “way-ward.” That made sense. It agreed with our “not in the mainstream” understanding of the word. Even Shakespeare referred to his Macbeth crones as “weyard.” But the wayward meaning has now been swamped out of Internet search engines.

Our weird sisters are not old or ugly or triplets. They share no vital organs. They are three white suburban siblings, the only children of lower middle class parents, and they were born two years and two months apart, dropped like cabbages by their fertile mother, into the barnyard of our little society. Jane, Jude, and Jem.

Their mother had dark blonde hair and their dad was a redhead. The daughters have varying shades of strawberry blonde waves around narrow faces with nice eyes, generous noses and thinnish lips. Jane has slightly prominent ears. Judith’s notable feature is a rack of standup breasts. Jemima needs glasses for astigmatism.

Their parents are Jenny and Jack. Their pets are Jazzy and Jiggles. The family is brought to you by the letter J. That’s a little odd, but not so weird. Jenny changed her name from Leilani. Jack was originally Jason.

The sisters have always been close. They were near enough in age to go through all the sibling battles and reconciliations necessary to create intimacy and they happened to have opinions and interests different enough that they never had to engage in competition about favorite subjects or favored dates. They made it to the ages of 35, 33 and 31 before any of us tried to write them up.

Maybe they wouldn’t have been quite as weird if they were raised elsewhere and by other parents. Our little CDP isn’t a real community, our school didn’t have enough kids to provide real diversity, and the Jacksons were among our strangest neighbors. It wasn’t that odd, then and here, for a family to have no visible means of adequate support – there was always a component of the population involved in extra-legal entrepreneurship – but the tattoo-inscribed culture the Jacksons worked to create/describe, complete with the renegade Ja-Mule “army” they founded (going as strong as it ever did after 20 years of recruitment, with its six dozen members) created an unusual environment for the sisters to inhabit.

Jane and Jude and Jem attended school but not whole-heartedly. They were all early and good readers, and they seemed to obtain most of their education on their own. Along the way they acquired odd attitudes too. Like Jane refusing to accept the notion that time is the fourth dimension. She was the sister most apt at math/science, but she dug in her heels like a fundamentalist about adding time to the spacial three. Jude grew into such a sincere vegetarian that she offered brussel sprouts to trick-or-treaters (their house was regularly toilet-papered on Halloween). And little Jemima became the champion of garden snails. Something about the molluscs fascinated her from the age of five. Her passion grew to include slugs and other pseudopods. Maybe it was all about home climate; snails were rare in our native aridity, and therefore precious.