©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.
