My Unhappy Childhood

Tolstoy wrote somewhere that all happy families are boring and all unhappy families
are the basis for bestsellers, or something like that. But what did he know?
As an old man he lost his marbles and ran away from home to live in a train
station, or something like that. Writers: they don’t know from nothing most of
the time.

Including me, of course. Whenever I make a conscious effort to be a ‘writer’ I
usually descend into bathos and moody wordplay. So this time around I’m just
scribbling and jotting down the flotsam and jetsam that surfaces on a Sunday
morning after a good night’s snooze and the prospect of ham and eggs with
buttered toast smothered in marmalade for breakfast. I don’t think Proust has
anything to worry about.

I’d like to write that I was a misunderstood child prodigy, which caused me
enormous misery. But my parents understood me all too well -- I was a
rapscallion with the instincts of a guttersnipe and the work ethic of a three-toed
sloth. By turns moony and cranky, demanding and put upon, I was an open book
to them. Why they didn’t pack me off to Mao’s China to be re-educated by the
Red Guards in some dismal rice paddy I really couldn’t say. Lord knows
I deserved it.

Maybe they kept me around just for laughs. I remember a great deal of laughter
while growing up.

On Tuesday nights I sat entranced in front of the television, drinking up
the lowbrow antics of Red Skelton. One Christmastime sketch had him
playing a would-be Santa on a snowy slippery roof, with all the attendant pratfalls
and inevitable slush down the front of his pants. I howled in merriment to such an
extent that I had to take a second bath that night.

There was my mother’s spaghetti. It was good -- no, I lie; it was superb.
The pasta was Creamette brand and the sauce came straight from a bottle.
But she made her own meatballs and the combination perfectly suited my taste
buds. I always had seconds and strenuously wangled for thirds. Her spaghetti
put a saucy red smile on my face that didn’t completely wash off until the next day.

Every spring produced baby rabbits in the decayed trunk of old Mrs. Henderson’s
crab apple tree next door. I couldn’t bear to touch them, because I was told that once
the smell of humans was on them their mother would abandon them. So I just gazed
at them and let the warmth and wonder of creation flow into me.

And despite the oft-repeated cry that we were all going to the poor house in
another minute that echoed around my house like waves crashing on a lee
shore, I knew that if I asked mom to buy me another Little Golden Book it would
be in my hands PDQ. I had The Pokey Little Puppy fully memorized by age six.
And I doted on my copy of The Wonder Book of Clowns as if it were a narcotic.

Each year for my birthday I got a cake from the little bakery that was adjacent to
the Red Owl over in New Brighton. A white cake, with white frosting, with my
name spelled out in thick blue icing on top. And I always got to cut it myself and
was allowed to slice myself the biggest gooeyist piece of all. You may prate about
the woes of famine and want, but there’s something to be said for pure
unadulterated gluttony on a little boy’s birthday. My Grandma Daisy always
gave me a mere coloring book, but along with it she gave me lavender-scented
hugs that linger with me still.

Wild games of flashlight tag with the neighborhood kids on a sultry summer night.
Water balloon fights that left me hoarse from screaming and chortling as I
bombarded my sisters unmercifully -- there is nothing more satisfactory in life
than drenching your own sister with a water balloon. Kickball games in the alley,
with the inflated rubber ball ricocheting off garage walls with a bell-like peal.
Rhubarb pulled fresh from the garden, dipped in a brown paper bag full of sugar.
The first snowman of winter, with one of my father’s disreputable old trilby hats
snug on the head. The Kool Aid stand in the front yard  where I drank most of
the grape-flavored stuff myself. Kites. Roller skates. The advent of Mountain Dew,
with a grinning hillbilly stenciled on each green bottle. The elm leaves piling up
in autumn, when the whole world was allowed to become messy and musty smelling.
Silly Putty. MAD Magazine. A new Duncan yo-yo. And roaring blizzards on a Sunday
morning, which meant not having to get dressed up to go to Mass -- instead lazing
about in my pajamas while mom made cinnamon rolls for breakfast. Fishing off
the dock at Como Lake, where the aggressive little sunnies would bite at anything.

And my dad’s rasping laugh -- a rarity, indeed. I recall a Sunday afternoon
when he and I sat together in front of the TV watching W.C. Fields in
The Bank Dick. At one point in the film Fields is driving a open sedan
past a busty blonde and raises his straw hat with the greeting “Hello, toots.”
This tickled my dad’s funny bone enormously, and he began laughing.
I looked at him in wonder: so the old man could do more than yell and
take naps on the couch -- he could actually laugh! Someday, I said to
myself, I’m going to make the whole dang ornery world laugh, too.

And, by thunder, I did, for a while, as a circus clown.

Ah, memory is such a pleasant companion -- but such a terrible master.
It’s about time to let those recollections float back to their misty homes and
think about breakfast. Those ham and eggs aren’t going to cook themselves.
And, come to think of it, I believe there’s a bit of pickled herring left in the back
of the fridge. That stuff never goes bad (or as my children firmly believe,
it already is bad.)