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.