Part XV

Dad immediately got me into personal therapy, a little group thing near Stanford University with other disfunctional youth. We also began to attend family counseling, which was one of the least enjoyable experiences of my life. Dad was willing to go, so long as no therapist tried to tell him he was wrong, or could be wrong, or might be wrong. We didn't go to that for too long.

Dad enrolled me in a different school than Country Lane. Now I was attending Easterbrook Elementary. They were both pretty close to the house so I am sure we straddled a boundary or something. I had developed a remarkably thick southern drawl in the short time I lived in Fort Smith, I wore cowboy boots and had real short hair. It was 1979 in California and none of these things made me the cool kid. Additionally, I was a smart kid with a fairly extensive vocabulary. The vocabulary was a Dad thing. He would use big words and if we wanted to know what it meant, he would say, "look it up."

I think it was the second day there that I began fighting everyday. This is the first time that kids seemed to really aim to get in fights with me and I was always up for a fight. I remember a kid didnt like my boots, so I beat him up (in fairness, he was picking a fight and kicking my boots). I had another kid who was supposed to be the meanest kid in school, he came out to teach the new geek a lesson, so I beat him up. The was a kid named Mike who stole my wallet, but he was huge, so I pretended it didnt happen. Then Dad heard me telling Darin about it. He told me, "you kick his ass or I'll kick yours." So I beat Mike up...well, I guess I did. It is still one of Darin's favorite stories. He hid in some bushes nearby to step in if I could not handle this kid (I didnt know he was there). The kid didnt want to fight me, but I was way more afraid of Dad than I was of Mike, so I made him give my wallet back. After that, the principal of our school grabbed the largest boy in our class and told him he would get in trouble if I got in another fight. His name was Jerry and he was a nice Christian kid, and was about 6 feet tall. No one wanted to mess with Jerry, so I didnt fight for the last month of 6th grade.

Near the end of the month, the San Jose Civic Light Opera was holding auditions for "Oklahoma!" and a friend got me to try out. I had to sing and not having anything prepared, I sang the Carpenter's song, "close to you." Then they asked me to do a little choreographed dance number and I was horrible. Somehow amidst all these trained singers and dancers, I was cast for chorus. Go figure. It was fun, but I screwed off too much to get much out of the experience. We also got a chance to stay on some friends' land up in the Santa Cruz mountains. They had a huge Hog, I mean Huge! They had goats and chickens and rabbits. It was pretty fun. The son of the owners was showing me how to feed the rabbits and we decided to pull a prank. After cleaning out the cage, we put out raisins and when my brother came up, we ate the raisins and told him that rabbit poop was tasty. Not nice, I know, but you should have seen his face after he ate the real poop.

Mom moved out to Northern California and stayed with us for a couple of weeks. I did not see my Mom & Dad in the same room again until my son's first birthday and have not since. Within a month she had found a new guy, William "Bud" Petersen, and moved in with him. I don't remember when she married him, but he was her 5th husband. As it turned out, he was her 6th also, because she forgot the pesky little detail of divorcing Larry prior to marrying Bud, making her a bigamist.

That summer Darin and I would go to the theater and see such great movies as Airplane and The Shining. One day in late July, we were walking down by the bowling alley when our stepmother Carole pulled up in her car. She had a huge black eye and told us she was leaving Dad. When we got home, Dad showed us the marks on his leg where she had tried to kick him in the privates and missed. I wasn't home and don't know what happened, but I assume that Dad was just as violent with her as he was with me. A little bit before this, Dad had seen that spanking didn't work anymore and had moved into more aggressive behavior. One night at the dinner table, I began humming a song. I never saw it coming. Dad punched me in the jaw hard enough to knock my chair over and fling me against the wall. When I looked up at him with tears running down my cheeks, he said, "no singing at the table, no humming at the table." After Carole left, Dad broke out in hives and was prescribed Valium for the stress. He swallowed it down a couple of times a day with a healthy dose of Scotch and things got pretty bad around the house. It was not a fun place to be.

reflection

Today is my oldest child's last day in Elementary School and I have to say, it feels odd. There are few days in my life that I can remember feeling a little older. There was my 30th birthday, when I woke up feeling older. There was the day that I graduated from High School, when I knew my life had just changed but I wasn't sure what that meant. There was today.

Time passes with a speed which perplexes me. Most days the drudgery of daily existence is the norm and then all of sudden, I will feel like I am missing something and I want to hold on for dear life. I look around frantically like someone who is going on a long trip and does not want to forget anything. It is a strange combination of sadness and excitement, for while I will never have those times again, I will get the joy of spending the new times with the kids and Cathy and all of my friends.

I told my Dad about how I was feeling today and fully expected him to not understand, to blow it off or to make some trite statement about having to let them grow up. You know what he said? "Spend the time with them, son. You never get that back. I didn't make time for you boys and I will always regret that." You have no idea what a big deal it is for him to say that. I appreciate it more than he can know. Although I spend a lot of time with my kids, it always feels like it is not enough. I am not a distant father who does not interact with his kids, but I appreciate that my Dad knows that he didn't experience all he could with his kids. He still doesn't, but...baby steps, right?

I guess I want to say how proud of my son I am. He got through a year with a teacher who just didn't connect with him. It won't be the last time he has an authority in his life he does not know how to connect with. Life is like that. I think he managed the year better than Cathy and I did and he is getting so big, so teen. Beyond the fact that he is my son, he is a young man that I am glad I know. He is smart, sensitive and a funny guy. I could not ask for more. I love you, Zach!

multiple personality disorder

I have two personalities. It is true, I have two distinct persons residing in one body. Most of you do not know this because they are both named Chris and this makes it confusing.

One is kind, the other is selfish. One is easy-going, the other is harsh. One is accepting, the other is judgmental. One does the right thing, the other does the wrong. One is a good husband, the other can be mean. One is a man of faith, the other a man of fear. One is calm, the other a loose cannon. One is me, the other is also.

I feel a tension everyday between being the man I want to be (and indeed sometimes am) and the man I hate. I struggle with what the Bible calls the flesh and yearn to live as only a child of God. I want to make the right choices, to live the right life, to be the person God desires me to be. And everyday, I fail. It is what makes me human.

There was no special sin today, no great failure to mark this day as different. There was only a lack of patience with my kids, an attempt to gain respect from those around me, a lack of control of my words or my thoughts. It is like every other day, but I have begun to realize that I have two persons living inside me. I live every day letting/hoping/forcing the good to grow while the more base nature gets smaller.

One can hear the theologians speak of this attribute as sin nature. But, I read my Bible everyday and I think they have it wrong. One would better describe it as sin habit. I was born with a sin nature, but by accepting Christ, I have become a new being. I have changed and am a new man. I have a nature of Grace. Why don't I act like it?

Part XIV

When we moved to Larry's apartment/condo/townhouse (I am really not sure which it was), I slept on the couch. He had HBO and I watched Christmas programs over and over and over. I really don't remember much about this time as we lived there only about a month and a half. One night Larry hit my Mom and we moved back to Granny's in Fort Smith. We spent the week between Christmas and New Years at Granny's and shortly thereafter, Mom came to talk to me. She said that Larry wanted us to come back, that he agreed to be nicer and that we would live in Fort Smith. She said it was up to me. I am not kidding, up to me...an eleven year old. Even though it is how I grew up, I am still shocked that my Mom was so incapable of making a difficult decision that she asked her eleven year old son what to do and let me make the decision. What was I to do? She wanted to go, so I agreed. My decision making was not very good at the time either.

So, we moved into a house a few blocks away from Granny's house and when winter break was over, I went back to the school I had been attending in Fort Smith. Larry was a truck-driving delivery guy for a distributor of pre-packaged food, so we were always full up on biscuit and sausage sandwiches, TV dinners and the like. Larry was mean and it took him no time at all before he started to beat Mom again, except now he began to beat me too. We were prisoners in the house and I was only allowed out of the house for school. Mom was not allowed to leave at all, if he even thought she had gone out without him, he would fly into a jealous rage and both of us would get hit.

Sometime that winter, I got the Russian flu and at one point my temp went above 106 degrees. Later a biology teacher would tell me that one gets brain damage at that temperature and I believe it, I have never again been as smart as I was at ten. During the week and a half I was off school with the flu, I watched General Hospital a lot. It was during the "Luke & Laura" times on that show. I also began to be weirded out by my body. Pre-pubescence is not fun for anyone. I began to get hair in strange places and thinking it was all wrong, I took Larry's electric razor to my privates. This is not something I suggest...it was painful and not at all an experience all boys should have. Additionally, his after-shave said it was cooling and could heal the roughness of shaving. You know that scene in Home Alone where McCauley Culkin puts aftershave on his face and screams? This was much, much worse. I didn't buy an electric razor until I was almost 40 and I think it is due to this one stupid moment.

In March, we celebrated my 12th birthday by going to Granny's house. Larry had to work but had approved this one little outing. We never went back. Five days later, Mom put me on a plane for California and I moved back to Dad's house. It was early March of 1979 and I just remember that we went that night to Aloha skating rink and for the first time, it was safer to be with my Dad than to be where I had been.

pimping for archuleta

okay, I have avoided the urge to blog about good old American Idol, opting to leave that to others who are better than me. But, I have to say how amazingly offended I am by the pimping I am watching. The judges decided long ago that no matter what Archuleta sang, they would love it. It shows when his songs sound the same every night. Tonight the sickeningly sappy praise over his pre-pubescent ick was just too much. If Archuleta loses it will disprove that it is rigged, but I am beginning to side with the conspiracy nuts on this one.

His groban-esque, world-loving, unity songs drip with the kind of teen naivite which makes all of us who have lived a life chuckle. Who knows? I was telling Cathy that he will probably sell just as many CD's as Clay Aiken, but I could not name a single song which Clay sings. Perhaps Archuleta will be the new Zamphir, Master of the Pan Flute.

business words

I am a direct person, or at least I like to think of myself that way. It is always a problem to me that I need to translate business language into real meaning because it leaves a lot of room open for interpretation and I just want to know what someone means. I also detest when people position themselves, it seems very dishonest to me. So, here are some examples from my morning:
"We are keeping ourselves open to all alternatives" - this could mean they are not interested in what I am proposing, or that they are since I am proposing an alternative.
"Our insurance provider needs proof that we provided an option for insurance when you started" - this means they want to imply that an option was offered...it was not.
"We are meeting with a lot of brokers right now, but will make a decision this week" - I am pretty sure this means that I didn't get the listing.
"Good morning, son." - this means, do you have good news for me or should I go play golf now?

Tell me what kind of translations you have had to make lately, just for fun. I need to feel that it is not just me. Thanks!

Part XIII

Summers in Arkansas are hot and wet. We lived in Ft. Smith which borders Oklahoma on the East side of the Arkansas River. Here in Colorado, that river is a nice easy river with some wide rafting areas and some pleasant flowing areas. If memory serves, in Ft. Smith it is a raging torrent. During the summer there are Cicadas, these beetle like bugs which make a loud croaking noise. There are June Bugs with their metallic green sheen which were a delight to a young boy's mind. There were fireflies at night, buzzing through the air like fairies, magically producing a small light as they fly. I still think one has not lived if one has not beheld the beauty of the bugs of summer. All my life I had thought that bugs were disgusting, but in Fort Smith, there were bugs of such great beauty that I found them intoxicating.

I slept on a couch in the living room of Granny's house. Couches were my bed in many of our houses, and I still find it easy to fall asleep on one. Moving to Fort Smith, we quickly realized that the type of contemporary church we had attended in LA was not to be found in Fort Smith. We began to attend two churches, both Baptist. That summer, I went to my first ever Vacation Bible School. They did "sword drills" where the fastest to find a passage won an award, but since I knew nothing about the bible really, I felt inadequate and awkward as I fumbled through the exercises. No one helped me and the kids looked at me with a mixture of sadness and disdain which screamed to me that I was a heathen. We only went to church for about 5 or 6 weeks and then Mom's experiment in Christianity was over. Everyday, Granny watched the Christian Broadcasting Channel (or whatever it was called). She loved her some Pat Robertson. I found the churches we attended in Arkansas and the TV which Granny watched to have the same shallow, cardboard, pasty-white feel that still turns me off in some circles of Christianity today. The kind of faith which allows one to judge and criticize others, call yourself a lover of God and people and yet still hold on to generational racism. It did not make it easy to see God through all the faults of His people.

In early June, a Boy's Club opened down the street. They had ping pong and air hockey and foosball. They had different sports and I finally got to take martial arts classes semi-regularly. In this case it was Judo, but we could not afford the uniform (gi) so I only trained for the summer. All of my friends went to Boy's Club and we had a blast. In the fall we all tried out for tackle football together. I was not as successful in that program as I had been in other programs. I probably screwed around too much.

On one trip into Oklahoma, we went to a slaughterhouse and bought fresh pork rinds. Real pork rinds (no the kind you buy at the supermarket) are fried pig skins and fat. They are delicious and disgusting all at the same time. Southern food in general is disgusting in theory but wonderful once you get by the idea of it. It came from extreme poverty, all of it. That is why Collard Greens and Kale are for decorating a dish in most of the world, but for eating in the south. Grits are the left over portion when other people get the corn. Whatever one can make from the unused portions of regular society's food can be called good southern cooking. In many areas it is now considered a delicacy. I am not kidding. On the same trip into Oklahoma, I found a tortoise in the desert. It was a box tortoise, but I don't remember its name. I left it inside a cardboard box in Mom's datsun on a 100 degree day when we went inside to play and it cooked. I buried it behind Granny's house.

In August, I began 6th grade. 6th grade was a blur for me in a couple of areas and clear in others. I had been in glee club at Burbank Elementary in LA, and now I was asked to sing in a special group. I got my first real lead in a play. It was one of those teacher-written, pathetic excuses for drama which one can find in any elementary. It was about economics. In 1978, paddles were still used in Arkansas schools fairly liberally. Our principal always gave out a maximum of 6 swats, no matter how many kids were involved. The paddle was a huge wooden job with holes drilled into it to cut up the wind-resistance and we figured her arm could only swing 6 times. So, it was with some reason that when we went to throw clay at the bathroom windows, we did it in a group. It was neither the first nor the last time I would receive swats, but it was memorable because we did wrong with the right number, 6 kids. We each got one swat and laughed about it later.

During this time my Mom started dating some guy named Larry. He was a greasy trucker type. I always remember him wearing the kind of hunter's ball cap which one might see in a parody of the south. If you were my mother's 4th husband....you just might be a redneck. They married in November and we moved to a nearby town of Greenville and I changed schools again.

Mother's Day recap

Mother's Day for the past 11 years has been all about my wife and only a little about my mothers. This is a fact I sometimes remember better than others but that my mothers do not remember at all. For Cathy, I think the day went well, she called it her favorite so far (correct me if I am making that up, honey, but I thought I heard that). We got her the big item on her wish list, a garment steamer, and I took care of meals for the day. She got to sleep in and just enjoy her day, and I am grateful that this is how the day went. It did not go quite as well with the Mothers.

For Cathy's Mom, we invited her over for dinner, had been out the night before and generally enjoyed the time. I think she had a good day too and this was the highlight for the Moms.

My mom was another story. When I called and got voicemail, I thought I had hit pay dirt. You see, I am a little upset with my Mom over some choices she has made which have a direct impact on our relationship. I had not yet talked with her about it and definitely did not want to discuss it on Mother's Day. So, I left a nice message wishing her a good day and telling her I loved her and would talk to her another time...then she called me back about 10 minutes later. Stupidly, I answered the call. Not a minute went by and she began to tell me how she was spending time with her ex-husband, Jerry. She says this is only as friends, but this is the issue which concerns me. I let her go on for about 15 minutes before telling her that I knew all about it and thought it was best not to discuss it today...that did not work. To make a long story short, I made my Mom cry on Mother's Day. In honesty, it was a ordinary, fake, manipulation cry, but she cried none-the-less. I feel bad for making her cry on Mother's Day.

Then I placed a similar call and left a voicemail for my Step-mother. No return call and I felt okay with that one. Then I was talking with my Dad on Monday and he lays a guilt-trip on me about not sending a card. You see, I get the heat when her son, John, does not behave. John is 4 months older than me and we have spoken 3-4 times in the last 25 years, but I get to hear that my efforts are not enough, but only when John has not done his duty as a son. For some reason, because John did not call or send a card, my call was not enough. I told my Dad I would try to find an apology card which just said, "sorry, it appears that I am an a-hole." He thought that was funny, but I think he is waiting for just such a card.

You want to know the funniest thing about it all? Neither of my mothers sent a card or called Cathy on Mother's Day. They have both forgotten things like my birthday before and though it sort of bummed me out, I didn't make a big deal out of it. I think it comes down to intent. When I spoke with my brother Darin about it (he has no relationship with Dad or my step-mom and a strained one with my mom), he wanted me to remember that the reason it really bothers me is that I choose it. I choose these relationships. Some could argue that one can't choose who their family is, but I could respond as he has and not have the relationship. He is right, I could choose that. He is also correct that this is why it is so hard. As my wife tells me all the time, I want to be a good son and it does not matter to me if they are good parents. I do not want the attitudes and actions of my parents to change who I am. This is my act of rebellion, I will be a good son in every situation I am able.

update

For those of you who were praying for me for my meeting yesterday, it went well. There is no final conclusion as of yet, but I think it went very well. We will know within a week or two how well. It is a simple solution to the difficulties facing the restaurant industry in these times. It is simple, but new, and nobody likes change. So if you can continue to pray for both me and the folks I am dealing with I would appreciate it. The hardest part for me was coming back to work and working on the mundane deals which I work on day-to-day, because I have so much fun doing this other thing. I can help an industry I care about a great deal, this process could save jobs and help local economies and it feeds all of my big-picture idealism.

Thanks for your prayers and for talking me through all of this when I need to process, for I am a verbal processor. Have a great day!!

Part XII

I flew back to San Jose and began 5th grade at Country Lane elementary. Being out of the mean teacher's class was an upgrade, to be sure. I don't remember my teacher's name, but he was russian and had a name and look similar to the music professor of the TV show Fame. There was a kid who sat in front of me that just needled people until they were ready to explode and one day the girl who sat next to me punched him in the stomach so hard that he had to go home for the day, I thought that was so cool. She didn't even get in trouble. Later that year, I decided to "like" someone. For those of you who don't remember, liking someone was the 5th grade version of being in love. My friends were teasing me because I would not tell them who I liked and one of them, Chris (there were 4 Chris' in my class), said that I liked the gross girl, Mary (not her real name, I can't bring myself to add that to a public journal). Mary was a relatively poor girl who did not dress well, had an unusual number of freckles and by smell, did not bathe regularly. I am not sure why, but I said, "yep, I like Mary." This caused the boys to all laugh and send it around the school, which the girls found adorable. One of the girls who told me how cool she thought it was that I liked Mary, was the real girl I liked, Jill (and that is her real name). I am not sure if my Dad and Carole learned from Darin, or I said something but it became well known that I liked someone. My step-mother took me to a huge toy store and she bought a locket for me to give my "girlfriend" for Christmas. I don't remember everything, but I remember Mary asking me if I had a present for her. To my recollection, this was the first time we had spoken and I gave it to her. We did not speak again until we were in 8th grade.

That Christmas eve, I decided that Darin and I would put on the Christmas Carol for our folks. We played all the parts and did our best rendtion. I think of this every time my daughter has a show she wants me to watch. In my memory, it was very well done and we carried off the whole story without issue. Looking at it through the lens of experience with my own kids, I realize it may have not been quite as good as I remember. Lets just leave it at that.

In March of 1978, things came to a boil much as they had in the same month of 1977. I was crying, Dad asked why and this time I told him the truth, "I want to live with Mom again." So in late March I boarded a flight and moved back down to the San Fernando Valley, to lovely Sherman Oaks, to my Mom's one-bedroom apartment, where I took up residence on the couch.

Mom had "lost the baby" and by all accounts had a nervous breakdown. She had supposedly made a decision for Christ and we attended Jack Hayford's church the Church on the Way. I got my second bible, the first had been a kid's Living Bible and this was "The Way", an adult version of the same paraphrase. Pat Boone and his family went to the church and I actually got him to autograph my bible....like an author. Geez, I was messed up. His daughter Debbie had come out with a song that year that was very popular, "You light up my life." She sang it in Church one Sunday. During that time I read the Hal Lindsey book, "the Late, Great Planet Earth" about the end of times. In this book he stated (as I remember) that the tribulation would begin 40 years after Israel became a nation, which would make it 1988. I decided then that I would not live past my 21st birthday.

The LA Unified School District began bussing that spring and I went to school at Luther Burbank elementary in South Central LA. I am not joking when I tell you that I found Marijuana plants growing up between the cracks of the school playground. My greatest memory of that school was that we had to memorize the pre-amble to the Constitution. Since schoolhouse rock was just getting off the ground and my favorite songs at the time were, "I'm just a bill", "Conjunction Junction" and "We the People"...I aced that assignment. All you had to remember was to put "of the United States of America" after "We the People" and say the lyrics of the song. In early May, Mom told me we were moving to Arkansas to live with Granny. She now says it was due to the bussing, but it is the first I have heard of that. My parents never did anything for any reason which concerned us, so I have a hard time believing it. We drove across the country in a mini-station wagon Datsun and arrived in Fort Smith Arkansas on May 4th, 1978, less than 5 weeks after I had moved to LA. In that time I had attended two schools, but I was used to that. During elementary school, I averaged 4 schools a year. From 1st through 6th grade, I attended 24 schools. The 4th of the year was Sunnymede Elementary, just two doors down from Granny's house.

shout out (or however one says that in portugese)

I can not tell who individually is looking at my blog, but I can tell what country someone is viewing from. Also, for some strange reason, it tells me what browser they are using. Go figure. Anyway, every week or so, someone reads my blog from Brazil which makes me feel very metropolitan and cool (even it really does not signify any such thing). So, I wanted to say hi to my Brazilian reader, but I don't even know how to say that in Portuguese. But, since they either read English or are fascinated by sounding out words, I will just say hello. If you know how to say hello in Portuguese, please leave me a note to tell me.

On to the days interests. I read a lot on the Internet, a lot of blogs, articles, reports, blah, blah. I read a reader submission for an article which I regularly read (did I use read enough?)and enjoyed one of the paragraphs a great deal. He was writing to politicians in general:

"First, ignore the polls. Fire your spinmeisters. Flush all the handlers. Dancing bears have handlers, we expect more from our President."

I could not have said it better and any reference to dancing bears is worth noting.

(the spell-check just suggested I change spinmeister to spermicide, now that is funny)

so sorry

Sorry for the scarcity of posts in the last week or so. I would like to say it is because of how busy I have been, but it has simply slipped my mind. I need to get in the habit of writing from my home office instead of my work office, then I would think of it at times I am working from home also.

Anyway, big hub bub from last week's Men's group. The issue is Sub-prime and economic crisis. What is the responsibility of the church in such times? I don't mean the local church, although what we do is important too, but what does the body of believers do in this circumstance? We live in a conservative area and it seems lately that Christian has come to mean Republican. But there is a reason I am not a registered Republican (I am an independant in case you were wondering). I find conservatives to often be mean and a little heartless, even though I may agree with some of their sentiments on certain issues. This week I got into a discussion with two especially conservative people at my group. I asked what do we do to meet people's needs and one answer was, "educate." This caused me to crack up thinking he was joking, unfortunately he was not. The other person said, "this is just the chickens coming home to roost." We wag our finger at people and think we can change the world? People who make a difference do not judge, they serve. What do you think? What do we do for people in this crisis? What is our responsibility?