Birth to Brighton

I was born on July 26, 1948 in Chicago. My parents told stories few about my early life and those are all I have to go on. Apparently (pun intended), shortly after my birth they moved to Manteno IL, where my father became one of the staff psychiatrists at the Manteno State Mental Hospital. My mother claims that I was the delight of all the patients some of whom were used as baby sitters.

But my memory is blank until a vague vision surfaces of driving a push-pedal firetruck around a large table with some people I didn't know looking down at me. Guesswork suggests that this may have been during the brief period that we lived in Jamaica Plain, MA. This was probably where I had my first unfortunate adventure.

My parents had these candies (or so I thought) that they ate and they wouldn't share. So one day I found the jar of those candies and hid with it behind the sofa. They were maroon and a little squishy. I squished one so hard that it popped and yellow stuff came out. It didn't smell like it would taste good, but I wiped my hands off and started to eat. I'm not sure how many I ate, I'd like to think that I was ambitious enough to eat the entire jarful, but I probably only ate a few. It was more multivitamins than my parents wanted me to consume and the next memory is of being in a room with a lot of people, a lot of machines, and a plastic tube up my nose.

In 1952 we moved from Jamaica Plain to a house in Brighton, MA, which was partly, stucco. I was bothered by the rough surface. Since it wasn't smooth, my brain was telling me that it was somehow flawed or incomplete.

It might be just as well for me to tell you now that, unlike those little boys made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails, I am made of ADD, OCD, with a touch of something else which, for want of a better term, I’ll call distance. Things that aren't right jump out at me. That's why I was such a good editor. I see patterns in things and anomalies, such as misspellings or inconsistent lists, become obvious. My brother Jonathan can do the same thing with code that I do with words.

I think that I adapted early to these quirks. I think that my lifelong difficulty retaining names and faces may be rooted in my habit of not looking closely at things that will distract or confuse me while trying to follow a conversation. It’s as if I cultivated my own version of Asperger’s Syndrome as a defensive strategy. As for OCD, I still struggle with whether to arrange the books on my shelves by height or subject matter and often default to height within subject. It takes a conscious effort for me to walk down a street without noticing all the stuff that's disordered. I don’t read a book until after I remove the price sticker. The feel of it on my fingertips is too distracting. I dislike my own handwriting because of its inconsistency. I take copious notes and never read them because they're not comfortable for me.

I’m also unusual when it comes to how I relate to other people. An early indication of this was my reaction to the damage left behind by Hurricane Carol in 1954. I was about to start 1st grade at the Alexander Hamilton public school (foreshadowing?) when the storm hit at the end of August 1954. On September 1st, I walked out of the house to see branches and trees down everywhere. Brighton, at the time, seemed to have lots of trees. I had made friends with Susie, a girl who lived across the street and a few doors down. She was going to be in the same class. What interested me most about the destruction was the fact that the large tree in front of Suzy's house had blown over and crashed through her roof. I remember asking if she was hurt or dead, and being oddly disappointed that she was neither.

The basement of our three story house was on two levels. You emerged from the stairs onto the higher level (which I think was about 10' square) with another set of about 3 or four steps to the lower level. This was pretty much my area. I would leap from the upper level into piles of pillows. I had a set of large cardboard blocks which were useful for fortifications and towers.

I once got a splinter in my foot. My father set me on the kitchen table and went to get something to extract it with. As he came back toward me he had a slightly manic grin on his face as he reached into his pocket and pulled out something. There was a click and a bright, shiny, length of dangerous-looking steel appeared. He had confiscated the switchblade from one of his students and decided that this was the time to use it.

The next time my father tried to kill me was when he made octopus soup for dinner. Unfortunately he thought it would be best if cut into large pieces. The panic that resulted from having to reach down my throat to try to extract a piece of tentacle that would neither come up nor go down, provided a spicy dash of adrenaline seasoning.

I tried my hand at dying young by collaborating with my cousin Billy on a particularly stupid stunt. Billy was already in trouble for pilfering my Aunt Ruth's cigarettes; the punishment was to smoke the rest of the pack until he turned green and threw up. So I knew he was a wild and crazy guy. For some reason there was a box of empty coffee cans somewhere in the house. This was back when the cans were opened with a key (the only place you see them now is on those weirdly shaped tins of corned beef). As you turned the key a strip of metal was peeled off. It was extremely sharp, as was the lid of the can.

I'm not sure who first came up with the idea, but Billy and I decided that the best way for us to prove our 7-year-old manhood was to put the lids on the cans to hide the sharp edges, pile the cans onto my bed, stand on the windowsill and fall backwards onto them. This exercise in stupidity and masochism lasted only a couple of rounds until one of the lids popped off and the back of my right hand hit it perfectly. The lid sliced my hand down to the bone.

It was really cool to be able to look into my hand and I studied it carefully as we rushed to the hospital. Instead of stitches, the doctor patched me up with butterfly bandages. Still today there is a lip-print shaped scar there. The good stuff about the incident was that I got to see inside my hand and from then on I always had a way of remembering which way was right.

The backyard had a flat area near the house and a few yards back rose steeply to a stone wall that separated us from an enormous empty lot. The yard was dominated by two trees; a Black Cherry near the back door and a Catalpa catty corner up on the hill. I tried (and failed) to dye my face red with the cherries and use the Catalpa pods as rattles to do what I imagined was some kind of war dance. I was a kid in the 50s. What did I know about cultural appropriation?

Two regular visitors to the house were the milkman, who delivered all kinds of dairy products, and the Nissen man who delivered fresh baked bread. They both came to the backdoor (the kitchen door) with the basic delivery and some optional items like cottage cheese, raisin bread or cookies. I always pleaded for a package of Hermits, a soft and spicy cookie made with molasses and raisins.

Other visitors were my father’s students and collaborators, some of them were from other countries and would live with us for the duration of their stay. One of them was Jose del Castillo who lived in a room on the 3rd floor. My father’s method of waking him for breakfast and the commute to MIT was to stand in the hallway on the ground floor and sing at the top of his lungs, “Jose can you see, by the dawn’s early light.” It was funny once, but it became a daily irritant. My father never could resist a pun no matter what its quality or frequency.

Another thing about Jerry was that he was immensely strong but didn’t always think things through. One day he and my mother got into an argument and she decided to go stay with her mother for a couple of days to cool off. He didn’t want her to go. Instead of hiding the keys to the car or taking off the distributor, or pulling the spark plug wires like a normal, commonsensical person trying to prevent someone from leaving, he opened the hood and removed the spark plugs … with his bare hands.

I started reading very early, and by 1st grade I could read well enough to tackle Sherlock Holmes and I was working my way through “The Sign of the Four”. One night, I awoke in the middle of the night and saw what seemed to be a head silhoutted against the light from a streetlight. I was convinced that Tonga, the Andaman islander from the story was outside my window with his blowgun.

My tabby cat was named Zebra (with a short e as in Zebediah) had her kittens in my underwear drawer, a blond Steiff teddy bear named Randolph, an imaginary friend named Ommi-Ommi, an Irish setter named Moose (whose Milkbone dog biscuits I liked to share), a sister named Ruth, and a brother who, although I argued strongly for the name “Howard Johnson's," was named Jonathan. When we moved to Cambridge in 1955, Moose had been exiled to a farm (really! I visited him there) for protective custody. He had a habit of chasing cars and the cars had a habit of catching him.