Two Scrapbooks

©2015 by John LaTorre

I recently ran across two collections of memorabilia from my boyhood, one compiled by my mother and the other by me. The first was an album of some of the various landmarks in my life that seemed important to her. There are old report cards, a certificate of vaccination from when I was eleven months old, various reports and essays I’d written for school, a handmade Mother’s Day card, and other memorabilia. It’s a thick book. I’m not exactly sure how it ended up in my bookcase; I must have received it from my father when she died in 1994, or from my father’s effects when he died ten years later. Most of the items were taped in with pieces of cellophane tape, which lost their stickum many years ago and now fall like snowflakes as I turn the pages.

I wonder if my mother intended this collection for me or for her. Most of it is stuff I would never have saved on my own. Was it an attempt to freeze in time a child who was growing and changing before her eyes? Far better than I did, she knew that these scraps would soon be all that was left of my boyhood, and she resolved to save them from posterity … whether my posterity or hers, I don’t know

There are pictures of my first, second, and third grade classes. It’s easy to spot me. I’m the kid with the shockingly white hair and a toothy grin, usually in the back row. Despite the grin, the eyes convey a sort of anxiety or insecurity; my smile is meant to elicit approval rather than express confidence.

These classes were the product of the post-war baby boom, so they are large. The schools I attended, I found out later, had just been built to accommodate the multitude of children that sprang up after World War II. It was probably the biggest school-building boom in American history; until I went to college, none of the schools I attended were in existence when I was born. I doubt if my father or his siblings could say the same. I doubt if many of today’s students could, either.

There is a certificate of my having completed kindergarten. It looks like a diploma. There is an “Honor” sticker with a blue ribbon attached to it. I wonder if all the “graduates” got a sticker like that, or if I had in some way been singled out for distinction, such as my proficiency at nap-time. It is signed by one “Virginia L. Stine.” I have no memory of her at all.

The second-grade class portrait identifies my teacher as “Mrs. Wood.” I don’t remember her, either. It appears that she taught two grades – second and third – in the same classroom. (Chalked on the blackboard behind her are these “New Words:” Bozo, smell, eyes, loved, strange, chase, and together. I’m trying to imagine what the reading assignment might have been.) Not only is the teacher a stranger to me, but every one of my twenty-seven classmates is, too. I could run into any of them tomorrow and not know who they are, because I moved away the next year and never saw them again. That’s the “military brat” life-style in a nutshell.

I see a picture of my first communion class at the Holy Family Catholic Church in Hillcrest Heights, Maryland. My mother thoughtfully drew an arrow pointing to me on the border of the picture, showing which of the eighty-odd children I was. And here is a report card from my third grade at the Wyngate Elementary School in Montgomery County, Maryland, signed by my teacher, Gertrude W. Robertson. I don’t remember her, either. If she’s still alive, she probably doesn’t remember me, although I was a pretty good student, getting mostly A’s and B’s. The grades for the fourth quarter are missing, because my parents pulled me out of school that spring when we moved to Frankfurt, Germany. That, too, is not uncommon among schoolchildren of the military.

Mom saved some of my artwork from those years, the sort of artwork that stereotypically ends up on refrigerators nowadays. It includes a comic strip I drew at age nine, featuring “Sam the Scarecrow.” Sam’s adventures must have struck me as hilarious then; now they’re just crude drawings without humor or punch lines. Since it’s not likely that she saved them for their artistic value, I can only assume they were reminders of those pleasant times when I was quietly scribbling away at my drawing board and not pestering her for something. Those rare, blissful times must have been altogether too short for her, and I'm not surprised that she would have wanted to remember them.

She also saved some of the plays, poems, and stories I wrote back when my major writing implements were crayons. Some of them are typed, though, so I assume that she was the one who typed them up. They don’t show much literary talent, but I guess everybody has to start somewhere.

There’s my report card from “Religious Instruction” class in the fifth grade. I got straight B’s in “Attention in Classes.” I was a very devout little boy back then, even doing a short stint as an altar boy. I attended catechism classes all the way through high school, and didn’t stop attending Sunday services until I was in college.

And here is an artifact of a moment in my life when my mother must have been proud of me, at least at first. It’s the program for my first (and last) piano recital. For me, it is one of the worst memories of my childhood. If I had been the one in charge of keeping or discarding this stuff, this document would probably have been the first thing to get tossed, but now I’m glad she kept it. At the recital, I was playing the traditional air “Long, Long Ago” from page four of my piano primer. I got lost somewhere by the twelfth bar, and my tempo deserted me. I still remember Herr Nesswetha, my piano teacher, furiously whacking his baton on the top of the piano in an attempt to get my timing back on track. Somehow I managed to finish the piece and the ordeal was over, but Herr Nesswetha evidently lost faith in my musical future. He simply stopped coming to lessons. But then, I had been skipping a lesson or two at that time; to a twelve-year-old boy, a piano lesson was simply no match for playground on a sunny spring day. Those piano lessons were the only music instruction I ever had, although I came to be familiar enough with other instruments to play them without embarrassing myself. I can even play “Long, Long Ago” on the piano, but not very well. So please don’t ask.

I find two large photographs of me when I was a junior in high school, probably taken by a friend of mine in my Explorer post who was learning photography. The first shows me in a leather jacket, scowling at the camera, doing the best impersonation of a juvenile delinquent that a pimple-faced kid could muster.

The second shows me in a hospital bed only a few months later. I am in traction with two broken thigh-bones after having been hit by a car.

My face still has the pimples. I was wearing that jacket when I was hit by the car. When I was in the emergency room afterwards, I remember being conscious just long enough to plead with the orderlies to spare it when they were cutting me out of my clothes. They let me wriggle out of it without harming it. That jacket meant a lot to me, although for the next eighteen weeks wearing it was out of the question, since I was either in traction or a full body cast, and I wasn’t going anywhere.

I remember something else about that hospital stay. When I was laid up, Herr Nesswetha came to see me. I hadn’t seen him in five years. As we talked, he kept glancing at the guitar my father had given me, now leaning against the bed. After a while, he said, “You know, I teach guitar, too.” So maybe he thought that there was hope for me, after all. At least, he may have realized that a student couldn’t skip a lesson when he was in traction.

The remainder of the album mostly consists of playbills for the dramatic productions that I’d worked on in high school and at the neighborhood amateur theater, and newspaper clippings that mentioned me in passing: a scholarship citation I won, a couple of “man in the street” interviews printed in some military publication, wherein I provided viewpoints of your Typical Teenager on the subjects of the Beatles (still in, or now passé?) and cosmetic surgery (nose jobs: good idea or not?).

The other collection is also a scrapbook, but this one consists of stuff that I collected, not my mother. From the looks of it, I must have started it when I was twelve or so. It contains things like a ticket stub to a concert, Mass cards that were given to me at relatives’ funerals, and souvenir programs for historic places I’d visited. There are ticket stubs to rugby game in Northampton, a brochure on London’s Baden-Powell house for Boy Scouts, and various other mementos that bear witness to a visit I’d made to England in 1964.

One thing that startled me was a mechanical drawing of a “mountain tent” much like the pup tents we used to camp in when I was in the Scouts. Did I somehow sense that, some thirty years later, I would be a professional tent-maker? Or did I have some memory, when drawing up plans for my later tents, that I had done something like this years ago, and that it was, in a sense, just more familiar territory? I also made a detailed floor plan of a two-room cabin that consisted of a kitchen and a bedroom. The kitchen was to be heated by a wood stove, the bedroom by a fireplace. There are no provisions for an indoor bathroom. It was a cabin intended for one person, drawn at a time when its confines would have been room enough for one person.

Another thing was a pair of essays I’d written in high school, showing a decidedly conservative political bent: anti-drugs, pro-Goldwater, and pro-war. I suppose that my upbringing in a military-base environment had a lot to do with that. It took two years of college to bring me out of that mind-set, after which I became a dope-smoking hippie involved in anti-war protests, running a coffee-house, and learning the songs of Phil Ochs on the same guitar that I had in the hospital.

I also saved a few humorous articles and cartoons (mostly Peanuts) that amused me. Those things amuse me now, too.  My taste in some things apparently hasn’t changed much in fifty-some years, even though my politics have. And I saved a long letter my older brother wrote me when he heard about my accident, along with two get-well cards. One was from my chemistry teacher, who typed out the poem Invictus by W. E. Henley in the inside of the card. The second one was from a couple whose names I don’t recognize at all.

Apart from the photos in my family album, these albums are now all that remains of the boy I was. I don’t know whether to keep them or throw them away. They mean nothing to anybody but myself. But the first album is a better testimony to my mother’s love for me than anything else I own, better than the photographs, better than the few keepsakes of her that I have. They call out to me over the years to say, “This is the child you were. I loved that child. Please don’t let him be forgotten, because this album is all that’s left of him, and my children are all that’s left of me.” How could I throw that away?

The second book is a little easier to dismiss. The only link I have with it now is a realization that these things meant something to me at one time. They are the landmarks of the valley I see below me after I have climbed the mountain and know that I will never be returning to that valley again. I have left these things behind along with my youth, and now they have no more value to me than the clothes I don’t fit into anymore.

They do give me a little perspective, though. I never did make that mountain tent, but I ended up making hundreds of other tents. I never built that cabin, either, but for months at a time I have lived in an even smaller Volkswagen camper, which also lacks an indoor bathroom.

By a curious coincidence, the last items in that scrapbook were added in the mid-1960s. That was roughly when the first commercially successful hang glider was being developed in Australia, a half a world away, an invention that would shape a great deal of my working life and much of my recreational life and my personality, as well. As I sit now on the pinnacle of my life, I reflect with some awe and not a little puzzlement how I ever got here from where I was, and how I ended up treading paths that I never dreamed existed.  The boy who collected those mementos long ago probably had a good idea of where he would be heading, and what he would find when he got there, and who he would be. He would go to medical school after college and become a doctor, like his childhood role models. He would have a large, Catholic family and take them to church every Sunday. He would probably have lots of money, and vote Republican. 

My mother never got that son. She got me instead.  There isn’t much left of that little boy in the school pictures. The only thing I can do about that is to try to keep something of that little boy inside me, and let him not grow up too much. Let him not be so well hidden inside the man that nobody will ever see him again. Let him come out and play once in a while, so people can get a glimpse of the child my mother loved. I think she might have been satisfied with that.