Spelling
One thing I have wondered my entire life was why couldn’t I spell?
In Elementary School one of the standards was the spelling test. You got a list of words on Monday. You were expected to look up the definition of the word, use the word in a sentence and learn how to spell the word. Often the teacher would kill a bunch of time by doing In Class Spelling Bees. The children would line up against the wall and we would get one of the words from that week’s list. If you missed your word you had to sit down. Eventually it was down to a small handful of good spellers. I was always first to sit down.
On Thursdays there was a Pre-test Spelling quiz. You passed your paper back, the teacher went over each word, and your peers scored the quiz. It didn’t count, unless you made a 100. If you made a 100 on Thursday you could sit quietly at your desk while everyone else had to take the Friday spelling test. [Thinking of it now, that does not sound like that great a reward.] I was never one of those who was excused from the Friday spelling test.
Thursday nights throughout Elementary School, I would bring my Spelling pre-test home. I was ordered to write the words over and over again. Then one of my parents would come in and give me an oral quiz. After the parent involved was sufficiently frustrated I was given lashes with a belt each time I misspelled a word.
I grew to hate spelling tests.
I had this thick Texas accent, so when EGG was one of the spelling words I pronounced the word and spelled the word AGG not EGG. It sounded like it started with an A to me. I remember being yelled and and hit with the belt each time I misspelled EGG. Eventually, I was allowed to go to bed having successfully spelled the word EGG.
When I got home Friday afternoon, my mother wanted to see my paper, and I’d spelled the word AGG.
I was mocked for my inability to spell. I was a joke at home and at school.
In the third grade I broke my left shin bone in four places and I was homebound for a long time. My mother tried to keep me up with some of my work.
Once, I was reading from the Social Studies book, aloud. I came to a hyphenated word:
Rich-
ard told his brother, blah, blah, yadda, blah
I was stumped. Rich and then ard.
My mother gave me several chances to figure it out. The word was Richard.
My mother gave me a hint: “It’s your name.”
But I went by TEX not Richard so the hint didn’t help.
Suddenly my mother slapped me on the face. I had a broken leg so I was not getting a belting.
“You can’t even read your own name you stupid idiot.”
I’ll forgive my mother by saying her father had died a couple of months earlier, she had a kid with a broken leg, medical expenses they could not afford and two other children younger than me. My mother was tired. My mother was frustrated.
What my mother did is inculcate a lesson I continue to learn: I am not a smart person.
Years later I took a class at East Central covered learning disabilities and one of them was dyslexia. As soon as I read about dyslexia I knew that was at least part of what was wrong with me.
STILL MORE OF MY STUPID
I feel sure part of my stupidity came from never staying in one school very long. I can’t be sure, but I once counted it up and I recalled attending 33 schools before graduating from high school. I changed schools so often there was little to no continuity in what I was learning. I got this habit of zoning out when I didn’t like what was going on around me. If I’d allowed this zoning out to go on the way it seemed to be going, I might have developed multiple personalities, but, that never happened.
I didn’t pay attention in school. When I went to college I had no recall of grammar rules, I could not spell, I knew almost nothing about history. In college it turned out that I could write pretty well, and I was insightful in literature classes.
Hutchinson, Kansas
While I was a piss poor student through grade school, and junior high, things started to change my sophomore year in high school. My father had spent two years as a missionary preacher for the 35th and Cherry Church of Christ in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Everyone hated Milwaukee. It was so foreign and cold. My dad “tried out” at several churches and was eventually hired by the church of Christ in Hutchinson, Kansas. We only lived there one year, but it was that year I started to wake up.
I started to read.
I was also active in the school vocal music and orchestra classes. I could sing fair, and I could play the viola terribly. But it was during that year that I started to read things on my own. I remember reading The Art of Loving - By Erich Fromm. I was underlining stuff and this kid sat down next to me and said, That looks like intelligent markings.
That comment lead to talking and I developed one of my closest friends from my school years. He was sometimes called Flip, but his name was Phillip Fields. Phillip was a fantastic clarinet player, and a very smart kid. Being friends with someone smart helps you be a tiny bit smarter.
Flip would tell me about what he was reading, and I would read that stuff too. I read a ton of books during the time I lived in Hutchinson. I remember powerful works like: Long Day's Journey Into Night, Summer and Smoke, The Glass Menagerie, In Cold Blood, The Trial. I read a ton of poets. I will never forget reading William Stafford’s poem Traveling Through the Dark, and it turned out William Stafford was actually raised in Hutchinson, Kansas. I read the blank verse poems of Robert Frost and was especially moved by Home Burial. I read stuff Flip liked: Pilgrim's Progress, Surprised by Joy, and the Screwtape Letters. I read stuff that changed me forever: East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath, Travels with Charlie, The Red Pony, The Pearl, The Old Man and the Sea, and the book that knocked my socks off, The Catcher in the Rye, and I am still sockless.
It was in Hutchinson that I discovered Eric Hoffer, a guy I have read and admired my entire life.
I also started writing my own poetry. I’d actually started writing poetry in Milwaukee, but I got a little better in Milwaukee.
My grades improved. In English, if we studied literature I earned all A’s. The semester we diagrammed sentences and did grammar I earned D’s.
I struggled with algebra and passed with a D for each semester. I’m pretty sure they were sympathy D’s.
Other Hutchinson Stories
There was a man that my friend Flip Fields wanted me to meet. He ran a Bible Camp in the area, and he was a minister the Gospel Chapel church, and operated the Kansas Bible Camp.
The night I was supposed to meet him I went to a park where Flip was playing a concert with a band. Hutchinson was a very musical loving place. After the concert ended, and before I could meet up with Flip, this man just stood in front of me with a shocked look on his face. He had a Five O’Clock Shadow and was wearing shorts and a polo shirt. He wanted to meet me. I found this a little off putting, but about that time Flip shows up and says, “Oh, you two have already met.” Mr. Bartlett, the name I’m giving him here, was just a guy who worked with kids out at the Bible Camp and somehow he had come to know Flip. Flip wanted me to meet Mr. Bartlett. I knew his first name, but never called him anything but Mr. Bartlett.
Mr. Bartlett invited Flip and me to come out to his house where I was invited to read my poetry. He said he would make pizza. When I got there the following night, there was an young adult guy there that had known Mr. Bartlett for years, and he also wrote poetry. We read the poetry and talked and I had a great time.
I started going out to the Bible camp, sometimes with Flip and sometimes on my own. Mr. Bartlett introduced me to poets he liked, and he started asking me about the church of Christ. The Gospel Chapel people were also a group claiming to be non-denominational. He did not believe everyone was going to hell. He seemed to really care about me.
I was invited to stay at the Bible Camp free of Charge if I would do poetry writing sessions with some of the other youth campers. I agreed.
I loved Mr. Bartlett. Mr. Bartlett filled the hole that should have been filled by my father. My father was always critical, distant, preoccupied, grumpy, and very selfish. I always felt like a bother, and burden to my father. Here was an adult man who really seemed to care about me. Mr. Bartlett asked me questions and listened to my answers. He asked questions designed to make me think, but he also asked questions just to know me better.
At one point, Mr. Bartlett had been going over some of my new poems and he asked, “Are you aware that you might be a literary genius?”
Mr. Bartlett was so supportive of me that he actually paid to have 2000 copies of a chapbook of my poems to be published and they were for sell through the Kansas Bible Camp for a little while. I entitled that book, Reflections In A Tear.
What a thing to say to a 16 year old boy. The attention from Mr. Bartlett was like nothing I’d ever experienced. I was starting to think maybe the Gospel Chapel people have it right.
Then came time for me to stay at the camp and do those poetry writing sessions.
One evening I was told that Mr. Bartlett wanted to see me over at his house. I went over, knocked and was told to come in. I stepped into the living room and there he was standing there looking at me in an odd way. I was puzzled. Mr. Bartlett said nothing. He just walked up to me and embraced me. It was a powerful hug by a grown man. He started rubbing his face against my face and his cheek felt like sandpaper. He started to kiss my neck. I could not figure out what was happening. He kissed my mouth and his hands went down my back and cupped my buns.
I pulled away.
“I need to get back,” I said.
One night, I was sleeping in the lower bunk in a room filled with sleeping boys, I woke up feeling that sandpaper cheek being rubbed and rubbed against my face. I have no idea how late it was, but all the boys in the room were asleep. Mr. Bartlett was on his knees hugging me, and kissing my face and neck.
“People will wake up,” I whispered.
His passion seemed to slow. He embraced me hard, and then he was gone.
It happened one more time. The third time I asked him what he was doing.
Mr. Bartlett told me that he loved me.
I said nothing.
Then Mr. Bartlett said, “I think it is sexual love.”
I was stunned. Sexual? He had a wife. He had children. He was a preacher. What was happening.
“What should I do about the sexual feelings I have for you?” he asked me.
“I think you should try to control it,” I said.
Mr. Bartlett nodded his head, and these sorts of incidents never happened again.
I am not sure why it did understand that Mr. Bartlett was probably a sexual predator. He had the perfect job if he was looking for victims, a Summer Bible Camp. When this happened I thought it was just something odd that happened, and it was an anomaly.
Now, after teaching school for years and then working as a social worker in the area of child abuse, I am sure he was sexually abusing boys and had been doing it for years, and continued to do it after I left. Now I can see all these signs.
Like, in every camp he called the boys in, gave them a pamphlet he’d written about masterbation and he explained that masterbation was not a sin, it was fine for boys to masterbate. Once he said to me, “Masterbation is like taking a pee or having a really good bowel movement. There is nothing wrong with those activities, but you still want to do them in private.”
I remember Flip and I discussing how odd it was that masterbation seemed like such a big deal for him to discuss with the campers.
This sexual attempt to seduce me dealt an unneeded blow to my self-esteem. I didn’t have much self-esteem anyway, and then I had this father figure guy who built me up, praised me, listened to me, and appeared to admire me, and then I find out he is sexually attracted to me. It wasn’t me he cared about, it was a target he could groom to satiate his own lust.
Moving On
My dad’s job did not last. He’d followed a very popular preacher and he could not measure up to the guy he replaced. We moved to Virginia when I was 17 years old.
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