Chapter Three - Awareness

I wonder what it is like to see, and hear, and be aware that stuff is going on around you, but you have no words, no language to anchor down these sensations flooding into your brain.  It happens to animals all the time.  I am sure I believe that my dog Tucker understands language.  

I can say, “Are you sure you want to come in before you take a pee?”  

Tucker will look at me, his ears go back, his eyebrows rise, he pauses, and then turns around and walks out into the yard, takes his pee stance, and there is the sound of his release.  Tucker doesn’t talk with words, but his face can be expressive.  But Tucker seems to have some awareness that some combinations of words, or some keywords, are asking him to have a response.

I imagine that undomesticated animals, like a sparrow, tap and stretch and push on the shell of their egg and crack their egg.  The little chick feels that tiny flow of cold air and the drive to get out grows.

Once the egg is opened enough the little bird rests exhausted but she feels hunger.  A shadow suddenly covers the nest and there is a huge bird, mama, with a plump grub in its beak, and the chick raises its head and its own tiny but surprisingly wide mouth opened and receives its dinner, properly called grub.

But the chick has no language.  What goes on in the mind when they feel the air, but have no word for air?  It sees the shadow cover the nest as the mother lands on the nest and it’s wide wings block the sun, but the chick has no words for big bird [awe that’s a cute accident] no word for hunger, no word for grub?

That was what was going on with me as I moved from unaware baby, crying over sensations, to a toddler.  People talk to babies all the time.  Sometimes the big people talk in a stupid manner, the way often referred to as baby talk:  “How's my little smooch woochy?  I could just eat you up -- uh boo, boo, boo, boo, poo.”

Despite the goochy-goochy stuff, there are consistent words said to a baby and connections start to happen.  Mama, Dada, and best of all, the child’s name.  That happens to babies.  Very soon a parent can say the child’s name and even very young babies will turn and look toward the sound of that voice.  Still, mostly the baby transitioning to toddler is aware, but has few words to connect to all they are becoming aware of, and making sense happens slowly.

When I saw The Miracle Worker on TV, the one starring Patty Duke, I remember wondering what was going on in Helen Keller’s mind all those years when she had no words to make sense of herself and the world around her.  It was clear that even without words Helen would smell food, touch food, eat food, and she knew what she was doing.  Those action/sensations were familiar to her but without words she had to have some way for her brain to distinguish between touch, smell, the sensations of heat and cold.  This is not a guess, this is known.  Helen Keller wrote a book and describes some of the things that happened to her before she had any words to attach to those events.  Even without words, the brain figures out a way to make sense out of being aware of the world around us, and of our own selves.

I don’t remember going through that transition but I know that I did.  Being unaware, and then becoming aware is interesting and I would like to know what that is like.  So it is frustrating to me to know that it happened to me, that I went through that very interesting time, and I remember doodly-squat about it.

Once I started having words to attach to everything, I also started storing some things that happened.  Memory.  

But I haven’t remembered everything.  Memory is like lugging around this big burlap bag full of grains of memory, and each grain is about the size of a grain of rice, and the bag holding your memory  has a little hole in it.  As we traveled through our lives little grains of memory drop out and are left behind.  From time to time you might check the bag, check the rice, pour it out on a table and examine it, and maybe you notice some grains are missing.  Maybe you don’t  notice until someone asks you to weigh the bag, but memories are forgotten, but what do you do?  Once a memory is gone, really gone and not misplaced, well, it is gone forever.  That hole in your bag of recall is hastily repaired, repacked, and more rice grains are added as you journey on, but the repairs are poor done and the hole opens up and we just keep on forgetting stuff.  Towards the end of life the hole in your memory bag has an even larger hole in it.  For some of us it is a damn tear we call dementia, and dementia becomes a rapid loss of memory for the remainder of your life, and sometimes your bag of memory is unfairly light, and unfortunately way too empty.

I wonder what my earliest memories are, and can I actually put those memories in some sort of chronological order? I remember being in the backyard of my grandmother’s house.  She took this tiny, wispy twig off a tree, put the twig between my legs and swished them back and forth.  I remember feeling stings.  I was being punished for some baby crime.  Or was this a story my father told about something that happened to him, and as I search tirelessly for my history, I somehow took up this story about something that happened to daddy, and it became something that happened to me.  If it happened to me, it had to have happened before the time we lived in Bishop, Texas, because I had a lot of memories from the time we lived in Bishop.  I was 3 and almost 4 years old when we lived in the small town of Bishop. That would mean I had a memory when I was 3 years old.  That seems unlikely to me, but if you ask me now, right now, at this moment, when I am 66 years old and looking way back, I would tell you that it seems like something I remember happening to me.  Would I bet my life on it?  Hell no, I wouldn’t bet a nickel on it.  Still that seems like a memory of something that really happened to me.

I believe, when we are very young children, our bag of memories is light, and it may be easier for a young child to remember further back that adults.  For example, when we adopted Ryan, at three weeks of age, we took him the first morning of his life with us, on a trip to Walmart to stock up on baby stuff.  It was winter, so we were concerned with the cold and  so Ryan was wrapped up and even his face was lightly covered with this blanket.  As wheeled around Walmart buying all the stuff needed for a baby [we got one day’s warning that Ryan was coming to us, and had nothing when placement was made.  I remember putting the blanket over Ryan’s face because I realized he was looking up towards the ceiling, and the harsh fluorescent lights were in his eyes.  But after a few moments I just had to look Ryan’s beautiful face, and I pulled the blanked back.  Then I covered his face again.  Blanket covered, blanket uncovered, covered, uncovered.

Now I’ve forgotten exactly when it was, but it seems like Ryan was around two years old when we took him to that same Walmart.  While we were there Ryan looked up and said that he remembered looking up at that ceiling and that it would get dark and then light and dark and then light.

Did Ryan really remember something that happened to him at three weeks of age?

I’m a proud father, so, for me, he did, he actually remembered something that happened to him at three weeks of age.  When I told teenager Ryan this story about himself, and asked him as a if he remembered telling me about the lights and the blanket, he said no.  The tiny hole in his bag of memories was fuller, and the weight of the new memories press down on the older memories and more of those oldest memories are forced way down, and many of them fall away.

I believe my first clear memory was waking up from a nap. I remember I was looking through my eyelids.  My eyes were shut tightly, and what I was seeing were colors.  Red was the biggest part of the color, but there was yellow and green, and even a little blue.  I remember thinking that what I was seeing was polio.  I remember thinking, “This is what polio looks like.”

I remember feeling too hot.  It was sea coast Texas hot and I could feel the sheets on my bed and they were damp from my sweat.  I opened my eyes and looked around.  I was in my small big boy bed.  The room was a light mint green, and there were things around me.  I had blocks on my bed.  I remembered that my mother told me I had to take a nap during the hottest part of the day, or I might catch polio.  It was clear from the way she said it that catching polio was bad, but I had no clue what polio really was.  The nap part made me think it was like a lion or something that only came out in the hot part of the day, and that was why I couldn’t stay outside to play.  

“Mama,” I asked, “is polio something big with teeth?”

“No, no,” she said.  “Polio is a germ.”

“What’s a germ?”  

“Germs make you sick, but they are so tiny they can’t be seen.  If a germ gets inside you, it can make you very, very sick.”

I remember thinking, if you can’t see it, how do you know it is there? Of course we can’t see God and He’s there, right?  I thought maybe a germ was more like the devil and it was moving around the streets during the hot part of the day and when they saw little kids playing they would go over and get inside the kid.  I was afraid.  I didn’t want that devil polio getting in me.

“How does the polio get inside?” I asked my mother.

My mother paused to consider this, to select the right words for a 3-year-old, and then she said, “We are not sure.  Maybe it floats in the air and goes up your nose.  Maybe it lands on your fingers and if you rub your eyes the germ gets inside you through your eyes, or if you put something in your mouth it get inside through your mouth.  Some germs get inside you through a bo-bo [or word for a nick or scrape].  Maybe it gets inside through your ears.  We are not really sure how, but we know it happens and sometimes it is very bad, you can get really sick.  That’s why you have to take a nap every day.”

Looking back, I can see this scary story was, at least in part, self-serving.  Naps give mothers a break.  Later, when my twin brothers were born, I had my own experiences with baby/toddler care, and I knew how exhausting that responsibility can be, and I too would lie with impunity to a child if it could get me a little respite.  I may have inflicted psychological wounds that bothered those two boys the rest of their lives and at the time that seemed worth it just to get them to lay down and give me a break.  Maybe my lies were not inflicted with impunity.  I feel some guilty about that now.

I’m not sure if my mother’s explanation was good or bad, this pep talk about the dangers of polio, but as an old guy, looking back, I have some doubts that the hot part of the day made one more susceptible to catching polio. I think people caught polio from each other.  I can remember that when polio cases started to pop up in your town that they city closed the public pools, and people were leery about being in movie theaters and even attending church.   The connection between polio and naps may have been one of those “old wives’ tales” and my mother was given to accepting and repeating “old wives’ tales” even when she was a young wife.  I don’t begrudge her trying to coax me to be in my room, lying down, and not play, but the fear factor is something else.  I must add that this was before my family had a TV, and had we owned a TV I am not sure there was that much children’s programing, so mothers couldn’t plop a kid down in front of Beanie-Einstein-square-pants and turn them little booger into a toddler zombie, so there were just not that many respite arrows in a mother’s quiver.

Knowing now, how significantly fears have impacted my life, perhaps the fear-germ got into me, way back then, in Bishop, Texas, when I was 3 years old, and like polio I was infected, and fear and I have limped through life together.

I am sure I have lots of memories from our time in Bishop, Texas, and I don’t think our time there was long, still, in my museum of memories, in the first room, visitors will first see the things that occurred while me and my parents were living in Bishop.  I remember there was a  Chinaberry Tree in the front yard, and it was a small tree.  I remember being told that the berries on the Chinaberry Tree were poison, and if I ate even one of them that I would get sick, my tummy would hurt, and then I would die.  That’s another dash of fear.

I remember my daddy making me a bow and arrow out of branches of the Chinaberry Tree.  I could see him making notches in the branch [it was more like a twig], notches on both ends, and taking a string to tie a string on the twig, bowing the twig out a little, and tying the string to the opposite end.  Then my daddy took another twig and cut another notch.  He demonstrated, by putting the stick against the string, pulling the string and stick back, causing the bow to, well, bow out, and then he let it go and the stick flew two feet in the air and dropped to the floor.  

I picked the bow up, and saw that it was good.  I tried to do what my daddy did, but the stick arrow would not stay up.  It took both hands and three tries before I got the arrow to fly forward.

The me now, 66 years old at the moment of this writing, is wondering if a bow and arrow, even a tiny one made from twigs, was a good toy for a 4 year old.  This was something that should have been feared, and yet my 20 year old mother and 22 year old father did not seem to think there was anything dangerous about playing with a bow and arrow made from thin sticks cut from a Chinaberry Tree.

I remember we had a cat and while I played with and held the cat, my mother tells me the cat didn’t like me.  My mom said that when I was playing in the grass the cat would come up behind me, stop, wiggle as he planned his next move, and then he would suddenly shoot out at me, jump on my back, push me over, and in a flash the cat was totally gone, disappeared like part of a magic act.

One of my oddest memories from my ¾ year old mind happened when I woke up in the night.  I was in my room, but it was not totally dark.  Being summer, it may have stayed light as late as 9 PM, and so maybe i’d just been asleep a couple of hours, but I was awake, or awakened by something.  I heard voices.  I hear laughing.  The voices were coming from my parents’ bedroom.  

I got out of bed and walked toward the sound.  The house was full of shadows but there was light streaming out of the open door of my parent’s bedroom.  I walked until I stood inside the light and I could look into their room.  My parents were both sitting on the side of the bed.  They were naked.  I don’t remember knowing the word naked then, but I knew their clothes were missing.  My father was sitting to my left, my mother to my right.

“What are you doing up?” asked my father.

“Go on back to bed,” my mother said.

“Wat’juh doin’ “ I asked.

“We’re playing,” my father said.  To prove it he reached over and sort of play slapped at my mother’s chest.  What I saw were breasts, but at the time it was just odd to me.  My mother responded by reaching over and play slapping at my father’s chest.  I thought it odd that their chests were different.

“No back to bed, right now,” barked my father suddenly no longer playful, but mad.  I did.  Maybe I had been punished before, but I don’t remember that.  All I remember from that moment was that when my daddy was mad I was better off not being near him.  

I went to bed.

The Start

I don’t remember my birth.  I remember reading Carl Sandburg’s autobiography, volume one, where Sandburg describes his birth, his actual birth, in first person.  He wrote about what it felt like being pushed from his mother’s womb, forced through the birth-canal, and squeezed into a cold, bright, frightening world.  It was an interesting.  Sandburg was a good writer, and his  account of his own birth was interesting, but give me a break, he did not remember his birth. 

But there is nothing wrong with writing about stuff you know happened, but you were not there, or were in no position to actually remember.  The thing is, Sandburg wrote about the feelings of his fetal self, but Sandburg was writing as if he actually remembered something that he could not remember.  I don't want to do that.  I don’t want to invent my past as I write about my past.  My aim is to leave a record of myself.  But let me warn myself, my siblings and any friends that read this, that inventing what happens will happen.  Memory is at best a jumble of recall filled in with honest guessing.   

But why write about my life at all?  To leave a trace?  To vent? 

Yeah, yeah, I know that nothing lasts.  Some creative stuff outlasts the life of the maker, but eventually the plays of Shakespeare will be dust, the paintings of Vincent Willem van Gogh will crumble into dust,  and since I am not successful, since I am an insignificant being, really, that what I leave behind, is going to last just a tiny bit longer than I do, nevertheless, I am certain that I will soon be forgotten, my paintings will rot in a landfill, and my writings will dissipate like cigar smoke on a windy day.  I wish I could have a lot of readers and recognition, but there is value in this for me, so I will continue.  I will eventually publish a version of this autoblogaraphy using Kindle Direct Publishing.  And yes, I did just create a new word:  autoblogaraphy.  This new word may never catch on but still, I did it.

I started life, being born to a child mother, and a barely legal father.  I heard about all this, so take it with a grain of salt.  (parenthetical notation:  Hypotheses of the phrase's origin include Pliny the Elder's Naturalis Historia, regarding the discovery of a recipe for an antidote to a poison.^[2] In the antidote, one of the ingredients was a grain of salt. Threats involving the poison were thus to be taken "with a grain of salt", and therefore less seriously.)

                                             

What I have been told is that my mother was still in high school, but she wanted to be a medical doctor, and she felt that graduating from a Cameron, Texas high school just might be a disadvantage, so she asked her father if she could stay with her grandparents who lived in Austin, and finish up her high school graduating from an Austin, Texas high school.  

My soon to be mother moved to Austin in the mid-summer, and one Sunday my soon to be father saw her.  It was like what Eve did  in the Garden of Eden:  saw it [the fruit of the tree of life] it looked good and it was pleasing to the eye, and also desirable. That same thing happened to my father.  He saw her, she was pleasing to his eye, and she was desirable.  In other words, he thought my mom was one smokin’ hottie [or some version of that sort of saying] and he immediately introduced himself and asked her on a date.  

My grandparents told me that they knew they had spoiled my father and he was ill prepared to be an adult, but their plan was to use this same summer to teach him some basic life skills like:

washing his own clothing, making a budget, learn how to shop, and shit like that.  It didn’t happen.

As soon as my father saw my mother he fell into lust, but, being raised in the Church of Christ he knew he would never get any sexy business from any woman until he married that woman, so, at that moment of lust, my father started doing what he needed to do to get him some sex.  Before that summer was over my father and mother were engaged.

It is odd how life and fiction have some similar characteristics.  If I were making this story up, I would have to throw in some complication at this point in the story, and guess what, in the case of my parents and their engagement, a complication was thrown.  My parents told me their plan was just to be engaged until my father finished a year at college and my mother finished her high school education and graduated.  After that year of educational stuff, then they would get married.

The complication came from my Aunt Dorothy, who, I think was already married and living in Wyoming. Aunt Dorothy wrote my granddad Crawford to say she thought it was just scandalous for a young girl [like my soon to be mother] to be living somewhere away from her parents while engaged to someone the family didn’t know.  Apparently my granddad agreed, because he wrote my mother a letter that my mother said included these words: “Get married, or come home.”

So my mother  got married.  She was maybe sixteen, because I was born when she was seventeen years old and my father was 19 years old.  It seems that almost immediately she was pregnant.  I guess, on the honeymoon, my father preferred it "bareback." (parenthetical documentation:  Bareback sex is physical sexual activity, especially sexual penetration, without the use of a condom.) 

I can’t believe that sedentary me out swam a million other sperm.  I am not and never have been athletic, but apparently I won just this one time.  It was the first and only time in my life that I came in first, but it happened.  I got to the egg first and that win gave me life.  I’m happy about that.  I know I have been an annoying whiny butt, much of my life, but as of right now, I am happy to be alive.

My mother notified the Austin High School she intended to attend, and let them know that she was married and pregnant, and, in 1950s Texas, they did not allow pregnant girls to attend high school.  So my mother had to dropped out. My mother finally got her GED after he was 60+ years old.  More about that GED stuff later.   I believe my parents were living with my grandmother and grandfather Norman.  I haven’t heard much about my birthday.  I don’t know if they drove to a hospital, or if my grandparents had to drive to the hospital while my mom and dad sat in the backseat, or what.  My folks could’ve taken a bus to the hospital for all I know.  Very few of us know many details about their actual birthing day.  Only Jesus and Carl Sandburg remember being born.

Now that I am closer to my death day than my original birth day, I think more about death, and life.  I wonder about prelife, you know.  Where was I before I was born.  After ejaculation propelled me into the vagina, (parenthetical documentation:  The average man's ejaculation happens at a speedy 28 miles per hour) and before my long swim through the cervix and up the fallopian tube, where was I?  Billions of sperm die every day.  Only a few sperm run into the right egg, woo that egg properly and finally the egg relents, and sperm is allowed inside and they couple "doing it" make a baby.

I wonder if being dead is like what it was like during that pre-birth stuff.  It is my recollection that I was not worried about a thing before I was born, therefore I assume that I will not be worried about a thing after I’m dead.  I may be lying to myself [I do that a lot] but I don't think I am afraid of death.  I have accepted that I will die.  What I am afraid of is dying.  I hate the thought of drowning, and the death rattle sounds like someone is drowning in their own spit. so I am afraid of that part of dying.  I would hate dying in a crushing and blazing car crash, but after the dying part, I don't think I am afraid of death.  It disappoints me.  After years of depression I am finally happy to be alive, so I am sorry that I have an end, but I do, and I accept it.

Obviously there is a lot that I don’t know, and a lot that is UNknowable.   

                                                   

If I was a fundamentalist I might believe that humans are souls that have a body instead of bodies that have a soul.  I might believe that birth is a lot like all these souls are crammed into this gumball machine looking thing.  When people “do it” it is like the gumball drops, the soul just falls from heaven and plop it is no longer sperm and egg it  conception and the little zygote is a human being.

If I was a progressive Christian, not a fundamentalist, I might have been a charismatic spiritualist of some sort that believes in mystery and other dimensions.  Perhaps I might be given to chon

                                                               

If I was a pantheist, and it is possible I am a Christian pantheist, I would say something like this: 

Matter can not be created, or destroyed, it can only be changed.  To me this means that matter has always existed.  That is a little like what some say about God, that God is eternal that God has always existed.

I start to imagine that matter is God and God is matter.  Maybe, possibly, perhaps, God is not at all like traditions and cultures have made him out to be, God is matter, and there is something about matter that wants to organize itself.  Matter has to wait until it is just close enough to a sun to be warm enough without being too warm,  and not so far from a son that it a frozen ball of ice, and it has to have elements required for life, like water has to exist, for instance, and  there has to be a lot of carbon and stuff on that periodic table.

When conditions are just right it seems as if matter starts to react to sunlight and other elements and somehow, and I have no clue how:  matter becomes a cell, and then cells react to stuff and become multi-celled organisms and they start farting oxygen and on and on things go until matter creates part of itself into something that can contemplate itself.  We are all made of star stuff, the atoms of matter that have always existed, and for a time some of those atoms arrange themselves in such a way that matter has made me.  Soon I will die and the atoms that made me will be mixed back into the sea of star stuff and this particular arrangement of atoms I call me will never happen again.  I want to enjoy the briefness of life because death is a long, long time.

If I was an atheist, or an agnostic, or maybe just some sort of scientist I might believe that while a lot is known about life, that eventually we will figure out how life comes to be; how chemistry becomes biology will be known.  What we are pretty doggone sure of is that life is an explainable thing that requires nothing from God or any higher power, and that one day, if we have been alive we will stop.  Life is like some old oscillating fan that just shorts out, it stops working and that’s it, we throw it out.  We are alive one second, and we are just a pile of dead meat the next.

Telling What I’m Told -- Chapter Two

What do I know about the immediate days after I was born?  Nothing.  

I was told stuff and there are pictures.
                                     

                                             

I don’t have many photos of myself as a child, but more about that later.

I was told that I lived with my parents in the same house with my grandparents, my Uncle Bert, and my Aunt Patsy, who goes by Pat now.  I don’t know how long I lived with my Norman grandparents.

My father, wanted to be an artist, but since he was suddenly married, and a father, well, my father took jobs as a bank teller.  That happened mostly because my granddaddy Norman was vice president of the First National Bank of Austin and he knew people and could get my father hired.  

I know that at some point my parents moved.  I was told that as an infant we lived in an apartment in Houston, Texas.  While we were living in Houston my mother found out she had something wrong with her spine.  My father told me about this and his words, as I remember them were like this:

“I came home from work and found out that your mother had done no housework at all.  The house was a mess, you were crying and needed to be changed, the dishes had not been washed,  I thought, ‘well maybe I just married, you know, a lazy woman.’   

“Your mother was acting odd, but she cooked dinner.  It was pork chops and succotash.   Your mother held the meat steady with her fork, she cut into the meat, and her knife cut through and just tapped hard on the plate.  Suddenly your mother just started trembling and crying.  She didn’t seem to be able to stop.  I got you ready, got your mother in the car and we went to the hospital.  

“Eventually we learned that your mother had something wrong with her spine and they needed to fuse some of the vertebrae together.  The doctor that was going to perform that surgery had only seen the operation done once and had assisted someone once.  We were told it was a very dangerous operation.  Bone was taken from her hip and used to fuse part of her spine together.”

That was the story.  My mother was dramatic in her telling of the story.  My mom told me all the muscle of her hip had to be cut and pulled back.  I imagined the cut one of her butt cheeks to the bone and peeled the muscle back.  Now I don't think they did it that way.  Then bone was sawed off her hip bone.  The only saw I’d ever seen was one of those handsaws. So I imagined a doctor cutting her hip bone like it was a two-by-four.  Then the bone was fused to her spine.  I had no idea what that was, but I knew it was an operation and it sounded bad.  The muscles of the hip were sewed back where they go, the spine fusing was done and that cut part was sewed up and she survived.

As I write this now I am 66 years old and I think my mother was overly dramatic.   Nevertheless, my mother told me that she was in agony through much of her recovery.  My father could not work, care for me, a newborn, and a wife who has had this agonizing surgery and painful recovery.  For these reasons, my parents decided to move to Cameron, Texas, and to move in with my Crawford grandparents.  My grandmother, Pansy Crawford was an LPN [a nurse] and she could give morphine shots and follow doctor directions.  My grandmother could also take care of the infant me.  So we moved to Cameron, Texas.

My father looked for work in downtown Cameron, and all he could find was to do the books for a guy who ran the drug store.  My father told me that he would go to the drug store after it closed and do the books for that day.  He told me how much he hated Cameron, how much he hated small downs, and that he was not comfortable around my mother’s parents.  My father said that one night, while doing the books he decided he just could not stand to keep working there.  He called my mother from the drug store and told her he was driving back to Austin.  My father said he would look for work in Austin and that once he had a job, then as soon as she was healthy enough, he would return to gather up his wife and son and take them to Austin.

My father, in a rare moment of self-reflection, said, “Can you believe it?  I just left and when the pharmacist opened up his store the next morning he found the book work not done.  The pharmacist calls your mother to ask where I am, and I left your mother to explain to the druggist that I had walked off the job and left town.”

The story says a lot about my father’s character.  Like all children I did, for a short time, idolize my father.  Over time I came to view my father as a self-centered, selfish man with a short temper.  

It took me years to learn that when you have a problem the best choice is almost always to face up to the problem.  You go through difficulties, not around them.  You stand up to trouble, you don’t run from it.  My father’s pattern of behavior is perfectly epitomized by how he coped with living and working in Cameron, Texas.  My father did not stay by mother’s side while she recuperated from her surgery.  My father left my mother to explain his behavior to the boss he walked off from.  My father left my mother to explain his behavior to her parents.  My father was the sort of person who has to have what he wants as soon as possible.  What he liked is what he would do, and if anyone was with him they did what he wanted.  My father never learned to be polite, to take turns, to postpone his wants to provide for the needs of his wife or children.  

I don’t know what happened next.  My memory of life goes fairly far back; I remember things that happened when I was 3 years old, but these infant/toddler times are dimly lit.  I know that we moved around.  I was told that we lived with my Norman grandparents, and that my mother worked as an elevator operator in a down town department store.  I remember both my mother and father telling me that they figured up the extra cost for clothing for my mother to work and they decided that it was cheaper for my mother not to work.  This sort of rationale dominated decisions by my parents.  My mother’s working days were short.