The Red Badge of Specialness

Looking back to my childhood, it’s easy to see that attitudes about health have changed over the past 60+ years. People didn’t go to doctors then nearly as much as they do now. I only remember going to the doctor’s office once when I was about seven or eight for a slight crack in my left forearm. My neighbors, Helen and Leon, a brother and sister duo, thought it would be great fun to catapult me through the air. (I was a shrimp.) Helen launched me with her feet, and Leon was supposed to catch me. (I think the circus with a human cannonball had just been to town recently.) Leon, for some reason, missed the catch. I went bawling to my house, and Leon ran home. Helen ran after him, trying to beat him up for failing to catch me.

Dad and Mom were Depression-Era kids, when money was an issue with everything – doctors were not necessarily a luxury, but only for extreme situations. Plus, Mom was a farm girl, with an attitude that humans, like livestock, usually get over whatever’s ailing them. In spite of all this, they took me to the doctor, who took an x-ray and gave me a sling. I had a slight crack in my left forearm.

But here’s the thing, I didn’t always want to get better. Even before the catapult incident, I instinctively knew that if you were sick in our house, you got special treatment. I enjoyed having my arm in a sling. It gave me the status of a wounded warrior. I’d wanted a cast, but still thought of the sling as my Red Badge of Specialness.

 I knew even before the catapult incident that if you were hurt, you got special treatment from mom. And as important (or even more important), you got to stay home from school. This, of course, led to faking sickness, by me and probably my brothers and sisters.

It wasn’t easy to fake sickness at our house. My usual tactic was to sit in the corner by a heat register looking glum and trying to look sick while everyone else got ready for school. It usually didn’t work. Mom would then take my temperature. She had a guideline for this - 99°. Over this you could stay home, under it was “Off to school with you”. Sometimes I would try to boost my chances by rubbing the thermometer with my hands to bring the temperature up; one time I clandestinely held it over steaming kettle. None of this ever worked.

One faking-it incident sticks in my memory [I hope it is from early grade school and not junior high or high school]:  One morning in winter, I was doing my usual, sitting on a heat register trying to look miserable. I don’t remember why I didn’t want to go, I didn’t want to go most days, but this day I really didn’t want to go. Mom took my temperature, it was less than the required 99°. I sat there looking glum for quite a while, pushing up against that time I had to leave, or be late. “Finally mom said, ”Bob, are you sick?” In a weak (I'm sure pitiful) voice I said, “No”, and went upstairs to get ready for school. I suspect that if I had said “Yes”, she might have let me stay home.

Why did I not say “Yes”? Was I afraid to lie to her? Probably not, I had lied before. Was I reluctant to see myself (and be seen) as a malingerer in a house full of “can do” people? Probably. I was living in the house with “Put me in, coach! I’m alright” people.

Dad’s idea about health was similar to Mom’s, except his came from a slightly different perspective. His was the 1950s manly attitude of “suck it up”. Then there was the money. Not much cash in the budget for health care.  For some reason I think of my youth as the good old days of health care.

Bob

Bonus Postscript:  

My brother Alan received special recognition at his high school graduation for making it through all 12 years of schooling without missing a day. Alan said there were several times in his later high school career when he went to school sick – he just wanted the record. Here’s what else he has to say on the subject:

“…the real truth is there is no one in the world who was as sick of school as me. I hated every day, including kindergarten.

Oh yea, I did miss 38 days in kindergarten.”

When I asked Alan why he had so many absences in kindergarten he said it was the usual childhood maladies, chicken pox, measles and the not usual malady of blood poisoning which kept him out for at least 10 days.

I ask if he ever faked those kindergarten absences. His answer:

            No faking. This doesn't mean I didn’t hate every day of school.

Let’s Talk About Money

(Gasp!) You know - money – who has it, who doesn’t . Who has more, who has less.

It’s confusing, and often taboo to talk about money. On the one hand there is the myth that the U.S. is a classless society. You know, “all men (snic) are created equal”. And yet we can plainly see inequality all around us.

Now specifically regarding 828. Back in the 1950s, during the Kerber expansion period, our family’s appearance, if you didn’t look too closely, would have been considered middle class. Lower middle, but definitely middle class. Dad worked full time as a baker. Mom did the kids and the house. We presented ourselves as middle class. We had a clean car, clean clothes. We attended school regularly and got good grades; we had bikes and paper routes.

We were only peripherally aware of the “other two” classes. The upper (we called them the rich) lived in north Sidney. Or they had large houses outside of town. The “rich” kids had nicer clothes than us, newer bikes, and seemed to have more confidence in themselves.

The lower class we called “the poor”. They mostly lived in the west side of town and had fewer nice things than us. There weren’t many obviously poor kids at my school, which was a Catholic school. There was a stigma about the west side of Sidney. Poor Caucasians  lived there. We called them hics. And most African-Americans. We called them Negro and colored. Dad (not Mom) called them colored and “coons” on rare occasions would call them worse things, but not with any real emotion behind it. A child of the Depression, Dad grew up in Sidney, a small manufacturing town. Mom grew up in German-Catholic farm country where there were few, if any, African-Americans.

Back to 828. What were we? Certainly not upper. We looked middle, but financially we were lower. Just considering Dad’s paycheck we would have been classified as “poor”. We looked middle class because Dad, and especially Mom, decided that’s who we were. Not that they made any actual decision. That’s just who they were. In this regard they were, on a micro scale, financial geniuses. Their ability to make Dad’s paycheck cover the necessities and a few of the small luxuries for up to fourteen people was (and is) inspiring.

Mom augmented Dad’s paycheck in various ways. There was the garden and hand-me-down clothes, of course. And the neighbors fruit trees. Mom cultivated the benefice of our older neighbors by sending us kids over to sweep their sidewalks in summer and shovel them after a snowfall. And they repaid with fruit. U-pick. Mom’s genius was that she would have sent us to clean their sidewalks even if they didn’t reciprocate with fruit. That’s just who she was. A “globalist” before the word originated. You know, “We’re all in this together.” People recognized that in Mom and Dad, and probably Mom and Dad recognized that in people.

Utilizing other resources, our parents tapped us kids for additional income. When things occasionally got tight we paperboys had to throw a small amount of our collection money into the common fund. When we graduated to a paycheck, she sometimes took a small percentage.

Another part of our parent’s genius was that I don’t remember resenting getting dunned. Or even thinking that it was unfair. Mom kept her “nickel and dime” money in a jar in a kitchen cupboard. I never stole from it, I always had enough change for my daily candy/ice cream fix. I don't think I even thought about stealing from it. 

Earllier I said we really could have been classified as belonging to the economic “lower class”, the poor. Back then I felt poor. I knew that our being part of the middle class was false, that we were faking it. (Of course I didn’t think any of my classmates were faking it.) But that feeling only lasted until I turned 16 when I got a part-time job packing groceries. Then I was a “working guy”.

This was Dad’s and Mom’s genius – teaching us (usually not verbally) that money need not be the central focus of our life’s pursuit. And for teaching us that we did indeed belong to the middle class back then. This has helped me to realize that now I belong to no class - unclassified.

Sibling Pairs

I met with my brother John yesterday. He lives about two hours away so we met at a park in a town mid-way between us. I had an electrical problem in my truck camper and John is an electrical engineer. We worked on the problem without success. (AC don’t mix with DC.) Oh well.

John and I often meet halfway to have lunch or dinner. We talk for a couple of hours then drive home. John is the sibling closest in age to me. As kids, we were paired by our place in the family. We did much together – boy scouts, paper routes, pick-up sports.

By the luck of the draw, all of us 12 kids were paired up. Dan and Bill were both born during World War II. Then John and I, the first of the baby boomers. Then Linda and Nancy, born next, back-to-back in the midst of ten boys. (There must be a god to have divided our family thusly, as least that what Linda and Nancy say.) They are the dividing zone between what’s called the four older and six younger boys.                

Then George and Mike, Fred    and Alan, and Joe and Gary. But while Fred and Alan, while paired with each other, they were also floaters. Fred sometimes ran with George and Mike, to make a triad. And Alan, sometimes teamed up with Joe and Gary to make (in my mind) the “three little kids”.

The most visible pair of course are Linda and Nancy. Born a year and a half apart, in the midst of all those boys, they always were an obvious twosome. They had their own room in a house with only four bedrooms. With Mom and Dad in a room that left the boys in the other two. If you’re keeping score [which I’m of course not], that’s two girls per room and five boys per room. [This fact, though, does provide me with plenty of ammunition in any present-day

argument about who was special in our parent’s eyes, and who, as kids, got all the gravy.]

But, on the other hand, what a delight it is to watch Linda and Nancy in one or the other’s kitchen, preparing a meal together. They’re like one brain with four arms. All that togetherness through the years melded into them a kind of a closeness that brings faith to the godless. This is not to make a ranking of the closeness quotient in the sibling pairs in our

family. I think closeness is not something that can be measured or counted. Maybe it can only be observed.

The pairings of the past have easily been carried into the present day. While circumstances and experiences have changed the internal workings of John and I for instance, something indescribable in us, has not changed. During our recent lunch, I looked across the table at John while he was talking and realized the bond we share. And it was good. John and I have gone down different paths in life.  We have different but not necessarily opposing outlooks in life. Differing politics, differing religious beliefs, but not differing views about family. This just makes the bond John and I share even more special because differences that could drive us apart seem trivial inside the bond of family.

Bob