19
The title was meant to be "In his own words" but I just went for a 6.42-mile New Year's morning run along Highland Ave and my fingers are cold and I mistyped. My name is Max Alan Godsil and fittingly my name is a technically also a misprint. My name was supposed to be Max Allen Godsil, after my Father, Martin Allen Godsil but my mom Sandra Ruth Badgley Godsil did not know the correct spelling of my Dad's middle name, and true to form, he wasn't there (not that it was a like a ceremony or something, but I expect he was off sanding the bottom of his sailboat or something) and my mother, not the best speller anyway, just sounded it out phonetically, "A-L-A-N, Alan" like Alan Ladd or whatever, and I like my spelling better anyway, so thanks Mom; as we English major's say at the end of any minor comedic escapade involving confusion of identities, "Alan's Well that ends Well."
I was born December 6, 1965.
I was always spoiled rotten and from the beginning made a very big deal of and I'm grateful for that. The fact that I'm loved and the purity of my childhood vision of the world has sustained me at times when the darkness would overwhelm. Because you see that the same time that Sandra Ruth Badgley gave birth to a health baby boy a little piece of the void followed him into existence. Maybe I've given it too much attention over the years and that's why it grew. Maybe if I'd ignored it, it would have just gone away. Maybe it still will - regardless, it is fascinating, The Darkness (the cancerous existential spot of blackness on my soul, not the band) and I've always been allergic to dander - I was subject to horrible asthma as a child - and so I needed something to nurture and care for and so The Darkness was always there, and it needed a friend and attention to, so a symbiotic relationship was born - and we've grown up and now to a comfortable suburban middle age together - the two of us.
Just a few more stats.
I was born in Seattle, Washington. I'm one of those people whose hometown is such a part of the their identity that within 5 minutes of meeting me, I will tell you that I'm from Seattle and that I was of the initial punk/grunge music scene, not that I mean to take any credit - actually, I was a sub-par bass player and had a lot of personal problem at the time - thanks for the Darkness, who fucking loved the whole Jean Genet/William Burroughs/junkie slime of it all. Fucking fed off of it. So me and the Darkness, it's only fitting that the thing that 'makes us cool' is the thing we're most ashamed of and almost killed us.
Aside: Winston Churchill called his Darkness "The Black Dog" or "my Black Dog" which is a much more interesting name but denotes the sort of pet relationship status I was attempting to capture.
My Mom was born on January 8, 1939 in Portland, Oregon, the oldest of 5 kids. Her mother, Dorothy Codd Badgley was a 17 year old orphan when she met her husband - maybe 19, the same age as my kids now - when she had my mom, so my Mom was almost a sister to her and helped keep house, if not raise the younger of the siblings, especially after the alcoholism kicked it - classic, hiding bottles in the hamper, etc.
They moved around a lot but ended up in Seattle on Capitol Hill for High School, where my Aunt Karen says probably half the moms of their friends were closet drinkers and alcoholics. That's some vintage St. Joseph's Parish goodness right there.
Here are the names of my Mom's parents, and their brothers and sister.
(Mamu) Emma Ruth Badgley- was born in Spokane
Father: Ray Badgley
Father: Edwin Mines Badgley, born - October 30, 1907-1983 - he was born in Seattle
Mother: Dorothy Codd Badgley, born 1920. (A)
Progeny: (dates as of February 2022)
Sandra Ruth Badgley Godsil
(Mary) Karen Badgley
Eddie Badgley (deceased) (A)
Jimmy Badgley (deceased) (A)
Betsy Badgley Korb
On my Dad's Side
Father: Dennis Godsil (A)
Mother: Alice Gamer Godsil
Michael Godsil (passed)
Martin Godsil (passed
Dennis Godsil (A) (passed)
Susan Alys Godsil (living)
Patrick Godsil (living)
******
I've marked the alcoholics in the family gene pool with an (A). My gene pool is swimming with the Alcoholism. Alcoholism and the Darkness have a close relationship. Like Jaime and Cersei Lannister close. But that's another story we'll get into. The odds aren't always in your favor.
My Dad, Martin Allen Godsil was born on January 22, 1932 in Fairbanks, Alaska. At dinner, he's fond of telling you that he was the first child born in Fairbanks, Alaska that year, in the midst of the Alaska winter, in the midst of the Great Depression. But more about that, later as well.
***
On December 6 of this past December I turned 56, and turned my face to the cold biting wind of impending old age. When I say I feel old, I mean I am old. And people always say "oh, you're not old." And I think, you misunderstand me. I have no interest in being young. I've been young. I made the most of it and have no desire to hang onto it. This middle age thing seems good and it interests me. I will live it fully. Not that my wife subscription to AARP doesn't creep me out, big time.
When we were raising the kids we would take them to Ruby's Diner - when they were really young, we would take them to the one on the hill, up at the matchbox sized PV Mall, that was never crowded. We'd eat overlooking the hockey ring, or when they were really young, we would get the triangle table and we had the sort of kid seats that you could connect right to the table. So each kid - and this is when they were about 2? And so like I said it was a triangular table out on on one of the main thoroughfares right in the middle of the restaurant and each of the 3 kids got a side of the table. And then we would just destroy the place. When we got done, you'd be frankly surprised that they got any food at all into their mouths. The floor and table were covered with French Fries, spilled stick liquid, napkins, straws and placemats and the remnants of the buildable car that came with the meal. See, at Ruby's, that was part of the deal. Every kid would get to build a little 50's era hot rod car. I'd always leave a hefty tip. The bus boy was a hispanic guy named Martin would clean up. Martin was tall and sort of distinguished looking with a receding hairline that perhaps made seem older than he was. I had no idea as to his backstory and with my smattering of Spanish there was no way I was going to ask. But I always treated him with respect and dropped a fat tip on our way out. Like, this is for you. Concrete cash appreciation. After awhile, we'd catch each other's eye when we would show up and share a smile. When we left I'd say, "Gracias, Martin" and he would grab his bus tub and start in.
At any rate, at Ruby's at that time you could join The Jitterbug Club at 55 which entitled you to discounts and so on. From the outside looking up, 55 seemed old, like retirement age. My uncle Denny used to talk about getting the breakfast discount at Dennys and I was like, singing Old 55, like Tom Waites.
So I always figured 55 was a big deal so I decided when I turned 55 I was going to do something special. One Daydream I believed in was going on to L.A. and running the Santa Monica Venice Run. There's a little coffee shop on Windward right at the finish line called Menotti's. It's run by this extraordinary guy from Seattle called Nicely. Nicely and I started talked when he was a barista at Intelligentsia on Abbot-Kinney - I used to go there on breaks from Deutsch. We started talking one day - maybe I was wearing some UW gear or something - and he went to Rainier Valley H.S. and was a classmate of Nate Robinson so we talked basketball for a bit. The first time I walked into Menotti's he said "Hey Seattle" or something along those lines. He's one of those remarkable people that never forgets a face. So Menotti's serves great coffee and we have this connection. It's a little thing that's big. So I was thinking that I would go out there and do the 10k when I turned 55. Or else go somewhere warm. We've never really been anywhere warm. But then the pandemic hit and so we kicked the can down the road.
It seems like all that ever happens on my birthday is bad stuff. If I make plans then there's some big new business pitch. I get taken off another account or something else happens. I remember thinking something along these lines as a stood on a deck overlooking 3rd Street in the Museum Row neighborhood of L.A., smoking a cigarette, working on some ripomatic for some presentation, the Asahi Beer shining blue neon behind me. "I'm 30."
I'm ___ (fill in the age) and what have a really accomplished with my life.
So when I turned 56 I thought I'd make up for lost time. This year, I thought, I'm definitely going to a trip. Something just for me. But then the more I thought about it, the less comfortable I was with something "just for me." So I decided that I would go visit my Mother. Get it over with, check the box. Be in Seattle. Then I wouldn't have that hanging over my head. "Guilt Trip 2021" I called it. I love my mom but she's really difficult right now. A cloying nervous neediness has turned into early onset dementia. She's drowning in her own confusion and everyone is a life ring, especially my sister Dorothy. To be positive, at least she's positive. But it's an ordeal. I told her 3 times I was coming out before it stuck.
So my sister and her husband bought a house 4 doors down from the house I grew up in. They bought "the Thompson's House." They live in a blue Colonial that looks a lot like the Blue Colonial that I live in right now here at 387 Highland in Montclair, NJ.
We grew up at 1633 Calhoun, Seattle WA. The house is across the street from Montlake playfield. As you face the house, my room was the one on the upper right. When I couldn't sleep at night because of the asthma medication or what-have-you, what's so interesting about sleeping anyway, when there is life and consciousness to be explored, I would turn around on my bed so I could see out the window - the lights of cars passing on the 520 bridge and off to the left I could see the green neon of the Greenwood hotel at 45th just across I-5 and I would wonder if there was a man sleeping in a hotel room or maybe he was looking out the window watching the traffic and wondering what his life would amount to, if anything. Maybe it was even his birthday.
I remember when "Wash" became WA and all states received two-letter location abbreviations for postal reasons.
I remember when zip codes were new - a way for the postal service to "zip" your mail to you more quickly.
I remember when "going Postal" wasn't a thing.
Our first phone number was EA3-1940, or East 3, 1940. At that time, phone numbers were still divided up into regions, probably because a switchboard in an ancient Bell Telephone building was arranged that way. I remember when they added area codes. Seattle, as Nicely at the Minetti's coffee shop will tell you, is 206.
Our childhood home has undergone extensive renovation recently. My sister says it's now owned by some Russian lawyer who doesn't speak to anyone and smokes pot constantly, irrespective of who's watching and whether or not he's pushing his kids on their bikes or in a pram or what not. Basically a really weird guy, but obviously somewhere he's got a little bit of that Oligarch Billions teat to suck on because like I said, the renovations are extensive.
Gone are the trees, the deck, the redwood hot tub, most all the trees, the spectacular Rhododendron. The house doesn't even really look like the red brick (first floor) and white-painted second story Colonial it once was at all - it looks more like one of those brick homes you'd in Dallas or around Rice University in Texas - not really sure of the style. Texas upper middle urban well-off.
I don't mean in anyway to turn this into a melancholic take on days-gone-by, Delta Dawn. It's just different and a weird dude lives there. On the other hand, being in my sister's house is like completely nostalgic. Even the layout is sort of the same. My sister Dorothy Alice Godsil Ambuske quite literally never left home. And I envy the grounded-ness that comes with that. The popularity and vast friend group that she had in High School translated directly to adulthood. As a teacher at St. Joe's, she is "Mrs. Ambuske" to generations of well-raised and mostly well-off private school kids. In addition, she's had three kids of her own. Not that she doesn't have issues and I don't begrudge her the Lexapro etc and we all have our family-of-origin junk in the closet. Imagine things from her point of view. Drug addict older sibling - absent. Mother constantly partying with her Canadian Sailor friends, Robert Butt, Willie and Ralph Clasby. I missed a lot of this, because I was out adventuring with The Darkness, but Dorothy said she would catch my mom smoking and once caught her making out with Ralph. So, she just wants to be Julie on the Love Boat and there's nothing wrong with that. And she's not great at Academics, but she's a more than solid athlete, runs track and is good gymnast and a Cheerleader with a huge friend group. But brother is absent, Mother is reenacting her own adolescence and Dad is working on the boat. Can't people just be normal? Is that too much too ask? So she marries the extraordinarily normal and healthy Aaron Ambuske and family. But she can't escape because she never left.
And I ran to California and then across the country, but I'm still here. Montclair is a lot like Montlake. Even the names are alliterative, which is one of the things I've told my Mom that she actually remembers in her early/mid dementia. "You can take the boy out of Montlake but you can't take the Montlake out of the boy." Montlake and the house I grew up in is the geography of my dreams. For months and even years after I moved to California I'd be walking down the stairs and turn to walk toward the kitchen and then I'd be on Boyer almost to 23rd headed toward the Arboretum. The dreams have stopped but I'm still caught in the labyrinth. Nowadays, I just wanna go home. But I just can't escape and fuck, I'm 56. I should not have been surprised at the amount of Rhododendrons here.
[For a fuller description and some good pictures of boats with 1633 East Calhoun in the background, see The Boats, section 2, Mistral.]
**********
Every kids favorite holiday growing up is Christmas, because you get presents. Then comes Halloween, because of the candy. Then comes Easter, which is good because of the Candy but you don't get as much as on Halloween and you don't get the whole costume aspect. If you're going to fit your own birthday somewhere, it probably comes second, because you get presents. After at, the other 361 days a year are pretty much the same, except for my generation, Saturday morning was special because there was no school and all the best cartoons were on.
December was a big month for our family and for little Max Godsil in particular. My birthday is December 6, 1965 and everyone always made sure that no one would cheap-out and gave me just one present for both Christmas and my birthday. The Holiday time of year would commence with Thanksgiving, and then the Christmas season would begin in earnest but only after my birthday; that's when we would get a tree and put up decorations, etc. My Dad and parents weren't big on putting up lights outside the house but the tree was always really nice and the living room and we would have big family gatherings with lots of family coming over. But first, as I said, came my birthday and I was always made a super big deal of. In fact we had three birthday celebrations. One, was just the family, Mom, Dad, sister - maybe Grandma Dorothy or Aunt Karen. Maybe not presents at this one but mom would cook a special meal and maybe we had a cake or dessert. Then, number 2, was the kid's birthday where we would have all my friends over for cake and presents and games - boy time. Finally, and this was special - was the College Club. My Grandfather Ed Badgley belonged to the College Club and in my young mind I equated it to the Yacht Clubs that Dad belonged to. The College Club was an old school men's social club where men would play squash, drink, play dominoes, drink, or other card games and drink and not be around their wives and drink. They had a big board room and every year we would have a more formal lunch here, where the elder generation would show up and celebrate little Max. Stars in attendance, my namesake Max Gregg. Max Gregg was a relative once or twice removed on my Grandmother's side of the family I believe, not really sure how, but my Dad worked his way through college at Gregg's Greenlake Cycle. My Dad's biological father wasn't really much of a father. And at Gregg's my Dad was such a part of the family that Max Gregg became not so much a second father but the only functional father figure he ever knew. My Dad revered Max and that's why I've got this name. Not Maxwell. Not Maximillian. Just plain Max.
So Max Gregg would come to the College Club lunches, as well as my Grandpa Ed, his friends Roy Goodwin and Teewee (not sure of Teewee's real name, but he was a memorable character, mostly because I associated him with the pet duck, Quack Quack and he would always start singing after dinner was done and he had enough alcohol in him.) My Dad's friends and colleagues from his work would come as well, like Phil Hutchinson. I think I remember my mom being there and maybe grandma, but honesty not sure. I think it might have been a men's only club.
But the point is, they made a big deal out of me. I felt really special with all these grownups around, celebrating me in my little clip on tie, brown jacket, knee breeches and saddle shoes.
An inventory of Memorable Gifts.
1) Someone gave me this huge sort of space age rifle that shot pellets. Somewhere around here is a a picture of me holding this huge rifle above my head. I had never been so happy in my life. As soon as I got this rifle home all of the disc-like bullets disappeared. I thought, where did I lose them? However, I should have known. I was so damn happy with this gun that my mom stole all of the disks. But I still had the gun - i could pretend. Until that disappeared one day. Maybe my mom was sort of a progenitor of Waldorf School educational ethics, and didn't believe in violence. Maybe. It's much more likely that she simple didn't want to clean up the mess, or have anything get broken. Like the cat, for instance.
So that was one memorable gift and I don't remember who gave it - maybe probably it was Phil Hutchinson, a colleague and very close friend of my Dads at the law firm of Casey & Pruzan. Phil crewed for my Dad for a bit. Smart guy. He saved my Dad financially by simply getting into a Vanguard Large-Cap fund when my Dad was staring down the barrel of middle-old age, and realizing he'd spent his entire saving on sailboats and going to Europe every summer for 13 years in a row, from the time he was 40 until 53. A big fun life.
2) Max Gregg, my namesake, owner of Gregg's Greenlake Cycle, gave me many memorable gifts. One year he gave me a perfectly-fitted deerskin jacket, with fringe only on the arms, understated, complete with a silk-lined interior. I'd say this jacket would cost a few thousand dollars if it were adult size, and on sale today on Rodeo Drive. He'd had it made from a deer he'd shot himself - he was a hunter and had retired to the Okanagan where he had a ranch. I believe that he meant this jacket to be worn - so I could play Indian Scout like a real Indian. And if I'd been given more confidence as a kid that might have happened, but as things stood, the jacket had two problems. 1) It was way too nice, and it would be a discussion piece and call attention to itself at best; or, more likely, I would be made fun of. 2) Since yes it was nice, my Mother's attitude was that it should be saved for special occasions and that I shouldn't "ruin" it. So it was kept in the closet, occasionally looked at, and eventually mildewed.
I remember the smell of the deerskin leather when it was new.
I remember the smell of the jacket, old and damp after hanging in the closet for many years, unworn.
Another gift that Max Gregg used to give me was silver dollars - actually silver dollars without the copper in the middle, and some, I believe, just normal. One year he gave me collector's item gold Kugerrands. These would have cost $40 or so now, and are worth thousands apiece. Also, I specifically remember receiving coins commemorating the 1972 Olympics, probably silver of some sort - I distinctly remember the 5 rings. Unless my mother has them hidden away somewhere, all of these coins, plus a budding coin collection were stolen when my our house was broken into when I was a kid.
Our house got broken into a lot when I was a kid. The most popular theory is that we were right across the street from Montlake playfield, so it was easy to see if someone was home. Are the lights on? Where are the cars? And teenagers could kind of keep an eye on the house and plot.
I still have a little piggy bank with the ears and eyes burned off with a blow torch that was stolen and then recovered when some teenagers were seen walking through the Arboretum with my Dad's pajamas on. I can remember my parents explaining to me in a matter-of-fact way that our house had been broken into. The people across the street, a very nice old couple in a tiny Grandma house, had their house broken into and feces were smeared all over the walls.
I don't know if this gave me a sense of vulnerability or toughness.
I do know that growing up in an urban environment, and going to schools with a strongly represented African American population gave me ambivalent feelings about race. On the one hand, I was bullied a fair amount. On the other, my best friend from elementary school was my cousin Morgan, who was bi-racial.
Before we get into that, let's talk about my coin collection.
I collected coins when I was a kid. I had these blue heavy cardboard books with round circles where you could stick the coins from each year. I had ones for pennies, nickles, dimes, quarters. I knew when each coin changed in design. For example, the modern penny was released in 1909 with Lincoln on the front. For many years it had a back which featured a design of wheat. In 1959, to celebrate the sesquicentennial of Lincoln's birth, they put the Lincoln Memorial on the back and that's the design we still have today. All of the pennies from 1909 to the present are the same shape and look basically the same except during World War II, when they needed the copper for the war effort, they made the pennies out of something else. So those pennies looked more like a faded steel color.
I did get my hands on a 1909 penny. Once day a little girl from down the street - younger than me, came by and showed me her allowance. She was very excited - it was ten cents, ten pennies. I looked at the pennies and I my eyes practically bugged out of my head when one of them was a 1909 penny, the first year they were made. I gave her a dime for that penny and we both walked away happy. That penny would be worth a few dollars today.
I had Lady Liberty actual silver dollars, and a few other things. Gone like three-quarters of my memory and nearly all my innate optimism.
*********
Morgan
Growing up in Montlake gave me a complicated relationship with race. Let's start with my cousin Morgan.
Cousin Morgan. Was he actually a cousin? Not a first cousin, but related. Let's see ... my Mom Sandra Ruth Badgley and his Mom, Gretchen Galbraith were cousins. They were daughters of Dorothy and Joe? Codd. So they were second cousins so we were maybe 3d cousins on the Codd side of the family, which is my grandmother's side.
We loved telling people were cousins and watching their reactions. Morgan's Dad was black and he had a fro and was a light skinned black guy. His Mom was white. Basically, think Barack Obama. Handsome, more honey skinned and with a broader nose, but that's the look. White mom but definitely black.
We would tell grown ups we were cousins and we'd get basically three reactions. 1) No you aren't. 2) Disbelief but not saying anything. 3) Shrug of acceptance. So that was the reaction from grown-ups. From kids at the playground, they would always call us out on it. "But you're white and he's black. You can't be cousins." So we'd explain.
And we were as close as brothers for a while.
Here's how it started. My Mom asked one day, "Is there a boy named Morgan at your school." I said yes, but I didn't tell her that he seemed kind of tough and intimidating. He could fight and hung out with this older kid named Tony. Regardless, I gussied up my courage and walked up to him. Morgan looked at me defiantly and said, ... God knows what he said but I remember it as having the sensibility of "What do you want, pipsqueak." Like I said, he wasn't much bigger than me, we were basically the same size, he was a little taller but I was heavier - and I said "My Mom said we're cousins." He said, "No we aren't," and walked away. The next day he approached me on the playground and said something to the effect of "My Mom says you're right. We're cousins." He smiled and he came home with me after school, met my mom, had some snacks and we were inseparable for 2-3 years, a huge and impactful spread of time to a kid. That was third grade I think? Could have been second. And we were inseparable until fourth grade.
God, it seems like so much longer.
Second grade, our teacher was Miss Kimball. I don't remember much. One of the boys had a comic book with Miss America in it and said, "Imagine Miss Kimball wearing this." And I did, and that was the first time that Miss Kimball's youth and attractiveness really hit me. I also had a sense that the other boys were on to something that I had no idea about - that they were more mature than I and in on the secret.
I remember drawing in class. Kids' figure drawing has three phases - or at least it did at our school. 1) You can draw a face. 2) You stick arms and legs onto the face. 3) You add a body and then all of a sudden, miraculously, your drawing actually looks like a person. We would get these pieces of paper that were probably 11-11, with wide lines for the story on the bottom and the top half left blank for where we could draw the picture. They were that really thin, brown disposable kind of off white paper - like butcher paper but less weight to it - and it had a smell. The smell of cheapness and wood byproducts.
Mike Albright could draw really well. He was older than us because he'd been held back a grade. He wasn't academically super smart, and later on in Junior High we would call him stupid Mike and then Macho Mike he just took it as a matter of course, he was an incredible draftsman. Later he became a carpenter and then a contractor and I'm sure he was successful. I think he'd built a house when I was still trying to get sober, and working for minimum wage. There are conclusions to be drawn here regarding the utility of different modes of intelligence.
I drew a lot of sailboats. They sort of looked like Dragon Class Yachts, like the ones my Dad built, but then I started adding fin keel and a forward slashed stern, so that they looked more like an Etchells. I remember there was a kid art show and one of my boats was in it. It was done with this technique were you would cover an piece of paper with rainbow pastel
3rd grade I was kind of nobody in the school. Miss Pace was our teacher. I was terrified of her and I was the teacher's pet. I never did anything wrong. She would yell at people if they needed to go to the bathroom during class. Her favorite saying was, "Immediately, if not sooner." (Which I have modified for use as a call-to-action on for various retail campaigns over the years.) She scared the piss out of me, literally. If you were a good little boy and got your in-class work done you got to go to the back of classroom and work on a puzzle. One day I was in the back of the classroom working on said puzzle and I was so scared to ask to go to the bathroom, I peed my pants. I was wearing brown pants - I was dressed up for some reason. Either it was my birthday, or I had to go someplace with my mom. I never said anything - I was too scared. The next day, Miss Pace noticed the wet spot on the floor and I remember her quite clearly saying that the janitor must have spilled something out of his flask - which is actually pretty funny. She had a sort of Midwest-nasal way of talking, like a old school newsreel person. Here's a picture of my 3rd grade class.
2) Max Gregg, my namesake, owner of Gregg's Greenlake Cycle, gave me many memorable gifts. One year he gave me a perfectly-fitted deerskin jacket, with fringe only on the arms, understated, complete with a silk-lined interior. I'd say this jacket would cost a few thousand dollars if it were adult size, and on sale today on Rodeo Drive. He'd had it made from a deer he'd shot himself - he was a hunter and had retired to the Okanagan where he had a ranch. I believe that he meant this jacket to be worn - so I could play Indian Scout like a real Indian. And if I'd been given more confidence as a kid that might have happened, but as things stood, the jacket had two problems. 1) It was way too nice, and it would be a discussion piece and call attention to itself at best; or, more likely, I would be made fun of. 2) Since yes it was nice, my Mother's attitude was that it should be saved for special occasions and that I shouldn't "ruin" it. So it was kept in the closet, occasionally looked at, and eventually mildewed.
I remember the smell of the deerskin leather when it was new.
I remember the smell of the jacket, old and damp after hanging in the closet for many years, unworn.
Another gift that Max Gregg used to give me was silver dollars - actually silver dollars without the copper in the middle, and some, I believe, just normal. One year he gave me collector's item gold Kugerrands. These would have cost $40 or so now, and are worth thousands apiece. Also, I specifically remember receiving coins commemorating the 1972 Olympics, probably silver of some sort - I distinctly remember the 5 rings. Unless my mother has them hidden away somewhere, all of these coins, plus a budding coin collection were stolen when my our house was broken into when I was a kid.
Our house got broken into a lot when I was a kid. The most popular theory is that we were right across the street from Montlake playfield, so it was easy to see if someone was home. Are the lights on? Where are the cars? And teenagers could kind of keep an eye on the house and plot.
I still have a little piggy bank with the ears and eyes burned off with a blow torch that was stolen and then recovered when some teenagers were seen walking through the Arboretum with my Dad's pajamas on. I can remember my parents explaining to me in a matter-of-fact way that our house had been broken into. The people across the street, a very nice old couple in a tiny Grandma house, had their house broken into and feces were smeared all over the walls.
I don't know if this gave me a sense of vulnerability or toughness.
I do know that growing up in an urban environment, and going to schools with a strongly represented African American population gave me ambivalent feelings about race. On the one hand, I was bullied a fair amount. On the other, my best friend from elementary school was my cousin Morgan, who was bi-racial.
Before we get into that, let's talk about my coin collection.
I collected coins when I was a kid. I had these blue heavy cardboard books with round circles where you could stick the coins from each year. I had ones for pennies, nickles, dimes, quarters. I knew when each coin changed in design. For example, the modern penny was released in 1909 with Lincoln on the front. For many years it had a back which featured a design of wheat. In 1959, to celebrate the sesquicentennial of Lincoln's birth, they put the Lincoln Memorial on the back and that's the design we still have today. All of the pennies from 1909 to the present are the same shape and look basically the same except during World War II, when they needed the copper for the war effort, they made the pennies out of something else. So those pennies looked more like a faded steel color.
I did get my hands on a 1909 penny. Once day a little girl from down the street - younger than me, came by and showed me her allowance. She was very excited - it was ten cents, ten pennies. I looked at the pennies and I my eyes practically bugged out of my head when one of them was a 1909 penny, the first year they were made. I gave her a dime for that penny and we both walked away happy. That penny would be worth a few dollars today.
I had Lady Liberty actual silver dollars, and a few other things. Gone like three-quarters of my memory and nearly all my innate optimism.
*********
Morgan
Growing up in Montlake gave me a complicated relationship with race. Let's start with my cousin Morgan.
Cousin Morgan. Was he actually a cousin? Not a first cousin, but related. Let's see ... my Mom Sandra Ruth Badgley and his Mom, Gretchen Galbraith were cousins. They were daughters of Dorothy and Joe? Codd. So they were second cousins so we were maybe 3d cousins on the Codd side of the family, which is my grandmother's side.
We loved telling people were cousins and watching their reactions. Morgan's Dad was black and he had a fro and was a light skinned black guy. His Mom was white. Basically, think Barack Obama. Handsome, more honey skinned and with a broader nose, but that's the look. White mom but definitely black.
We would tell grown ups we were cousins and we'd get basically three reactions. 1) No you aren't. 2) Disbelief but not saying anything. 3) Shrug of acceptance. So that was the reaction from grown-ups. From kids at the playground, they would always call us out on it. "But you're white and he's black. You can't be cousins." So we'd explain.
And we were as close as brothers for a while.
Here's how it started. My Mom asked one day, "Is there a boy named Morgan at your school." I said yes, but I didn't tell her that he seemed kind of tough and intimidating. He could fight and hung out with this older kid named Tony. Regardless, I gussied up my courage and walked up to him. Morgan looked at me defiantly and said, ... God knows what he said but I remember it as having the sensibility of "What do you want, pipsqueak." Like I said, he wasn't much bigger than me, we were basically the same size, he was a little taller but I was heavier - and I said "My Mom said we're cousins." He said, "No we aren't," and walked away. The next day he approached me on the playground and said something to the effect of "My Mom says you're right. We're cousins." He smiled and he came home with me after school, met my mom, had some snacks and we were inseparable for 2-3 years, a huge and impactful spread of time to a kid. That was third grade I think? Could have been second. And we were inseparable until fourth grade.
God, it seems like so much longer.
Second grade, our teacher was Miss Kimball. I don't remember much. One of the boys had a comic book with Miss America in it and said, "Imagine Miss Kimball wearing this." And I did, and that was the first time that Miss Kimball's youth and attractiveness really hit me. I also had a sense that the other boys were on to something that I had no idea about - that they were more mature than I and in on the secret.
I remember drawing in class. Kids' figure drawing has three phases - or at least it did at our school. 1) You can draw a face. 2) You stick arms and legs onto the face. 3) You add a body and then all of a sudden, miraculously, your drawing actually looks like a person. We would get these pieces of paper that were probably 11-11, with wide lines for the story on the bottom and the top half left blank for where we could draw the picture. They were that really thin, brown disposable kind of off white paper - like butcher paper but less weight to it - and it had a smell. The smell of cheapness and wood byproducts.
Mike Albright could draw really well. He was older than us because he'd been held back a grade. He wasn't academically super smart, and later on in Junior High we would call him stupid Mike and then Macho Mike he just took it as a matter of course, he was an incredible draftsman. Later he became a carpenter and then a contractor and I'm sure he was successful. I think he'd built a house when I was still trying to get sober, and working for minimum wage. There are conclusions to be drawn here regarding the utility of different modes of intelligence.
I drew a lot of sailboats. They sort of looked like Dragon Class Yachts, like the ones my Dad built, but then I started adding fin keel and a forward slashed stern, so that they looked more like an Etchells. I remember there was a kid art show and one of my boats was in it. It was done with this technique were you would cover an piece of paper with rainbow pastel
3rd grade I was kind of nobody in the school. Miss Pace was our teacher. I was terrified of her and I was the teacher's pet. I never did anything wrong. She would yell at people if they needed to go to the bathroom during class. Her favorite saying was, "Immediately, if not sooner." (Which I have modified for use as a call-to-action on for various retail campaigns over the years.) She scared the piss out of me, literally. If you were a good little boy and got your in-class work done you got to go to the back of classroom and work on a puzzle. One day I was in the back of the classroom working on said puzzle and I was so scared to ask to go to the bathroom, I peed my pants. I was wearing brown pants - I was dressed up for some reason. Either it was my birthday, or I had to go someplace with my mom. I never said anything - I was too scared. The next day, Miss Pace noticed the wet spot on the floor and I remember her quite clearly saying that the janitor must have spilled something out of his flask - which is actually pretty funny. She had a sort of Midwest-nasal way of talking, like a old school newsreel person. Here's a picture of my 3rd grade class.
I'm in the front row, lower left, first one in. For some reason, I'm wearing a little tie, vest and the brown pants I was talking about. I swear to God, this is the day that I peed my pants. Morgan is wearing a red shirt, two over from me, right behind the sign. I can remember various kids' names. Yvonne Meyer, top back row with the pig tails. I went all the way through Middle School with her. Scott Fogdall, red shirt first in from the right, middle row. Kinda nerdy, but always one of our gang. And then I think two over from him wearing the maroon shirt with the blue sleeves was John Williamson I think. He was the cool kid. I always wanted to have a normal name that people wouldn't make fun of, like Bobby Sekki, the Asian kid in blue in the row behind me used to call me "Maxi-pad" over and over and over again. One reason I named my son "Will" (among other reasons) is that I wanted him to have a name no one could make fun of. Anyway, John was the best athlete, the best fighter, always done with his multiplication tables first. John Williamson was cool he even made math cool, in the way he strode long-legged to the front of the room to hand in his paper first. The most chill, relaxed confident guy in school. His dad was a hippie sort, young, fun and in-touch. (My Dad always felt a bit busy, older, intense, cold and remote.) Once I actually got to hang out with John Williamson and when his dad brought me home in his Dune Buggy. Fun, right?! - Not for uptight Mr. Walker, our next door neighbor, who said announced as well pulled up, with a sour look like he'd just smelled Limburger-flavored diapers, "This is not a drag strip."
The next day John Williamson asked me at school, "Was that your Dad?" No, it wasn't I said, but it was already too late. I would never be cool enough to hang out with John Williamson ever again.
John Williamson wore waffle stompers and if he got in a fight with an older kid he wasn't afraid to just kick them in the nuts.
John Williamson was the King of Montlake elementary. The fastest. The coolest. And in the special reading group that met in the library with the librarian who was kinda big and friendly and looked like the original Arnold from Happy Days.
The last memory I have of John Williamson was watching him play king of the bridge in 5th grade and Madrona. This was a game where you would try to knock the other person off these little dock-like bridges that crossed the sandboxes in the playground adjacent to our school. They weren't really high - maybe only about 8 inches, nor were they long - I can see in my minds eye that they sort of zig like a z or 7 - more like little low rise platforms, really. John and another older kid - probably a 6th grader - approach each other. I'm watching from afar and I think, even though the other kid is big, John's never been beat. But the older, bigger kid just throws him off into the sand. There's no fanfare. No audience to gawk in awe. The world doesn't stop turning. The planets don't break out of their orbits. John gets up and brushes sand off and walks away and only I see.
**********
My Dad used to put me to bed when I was really little and he would read me a book called "Cousins by the Dozens." Or maybe it was called Dozens of Cousins since i can't find a kids' book called "Cousins by the Dozens" and he would talk about my cousins. This gave me a sense of warmth and community; like I was taken care of and a part of something. As it turns out, though, I didn't have a dozens cousins - not first cousins anyway.
Here's what the cousin picture looked like.
Dad's side.
Uncle Mike - no kids. (wife, Delphi)
Uncle Denny - Three kids + (Gary, who was either his wife's kid from an earlier marriage or something; can't remember. Anyway.) - What was his wife's name? Linda or something.)
- Aaron Godsil
- Mike Godsil
- Susie Godsil (later, Colleen)
Aunt Susie & Marcio- no kids.
Uncle Pat & Aunt Nancy (still living the vibrant fun-hog life - ageless and amazing.)
- Scott Godsil (Wife, Heidi - kids - Sasha & Max)
- Steve Godsil
Mom's side.
Aunt Karen (First husband Jack; second husband Frank, the airline pilot) - no kids, but Frank did have two daughters older than me that seemed pretty normal but ended up kinda fucked up after their Dad Frank left Aunt Karen and had serial affairs with a series of Asian flight attendants.) Their names were:
- Karen Francisco (later, Brie)
- Mindi Francisco
Both were super neurotic and sort of expertly ineffectual as adults, without long term success either at relationships or professionally. Quirky, in terms of diet and stuff. For Christmas they always gave me a multipack of lifesavers that were shaped like a book that you could open. I can taste the green ones like they're still stick in my molars, and leaving your mouth that sort of sucked-on chapped feeling after.
For my Aunt, it actually ended kind of happy - she had a long, enduring relationships with Herman Blumenthal who was a truly class act and well-off. He was older but took care of her with a significant amount of Microsoft stock and a house on the shores of Puget Sound which I just gotta assume is paid off.
So that's Karen. Karen and I are close.
Uncle Eddie - no kids.
Uncle Jimmy - no kids.
Both uncles earned their diminutives and never grew up. I think Eddie was still borrowing money from my Mom right up till the end. Both horrible alcoholics. A rough road to go. No judgment here.
Aunt Betsy (husband, Uncle Steve Korb)
- Michael Korb
- Justin Korb
- Darcy Korb
Aunt Betsy was the baby of the family and got stuck at home with drunk Mom (Grandma Dorothy). I believe their story was that Steve was headed off to Viet Nam and so they got married at 18 and made it work. Aunt Betsy is thoughtful, insightful and perhaps even intellectually formidable but unlike Aunt Karen and my Aunts and Uncles on my Dad's side, she never went to college. She also mentioned once that she felt a little less than because her older sisters Karen and Sandy were very attractive and and so maybe she felt a little less-than. With Steve and Betsy, this is definitely a case of City Mouse/Country Mouse, with them being the Country Cousins. Never went to college, of Christian and conservative bent. I have good memories of clamming and fishing with them as a kid; I know Steve liked to hunt.
Michael did OK; I think he got out and went to Law School. Ended up in England maybe after marrying a British girl. Smaller financial footprint, no progengy, I think he just drives for Uber and watches his stocks now. Chill.
Justin got someone pregnant super young, got married still in High School, and promptly got hooked on Meth. I mean, no judgment but don't judge me.
And then Darcy got pregnant at 16 or so with twins and yeah. The whole things just sort of a cliche.
But good people and they all turned out okay. I think Darcy is in Arizona - got married again. Her twins are maybe a year or two ahead of ours, in college somewhere. Betsy got to raise them as sort of a second mother. Aunt Karen speaks highly and is close to all of them.
So, at any rate I count 8 official cousins, of which I'm still in touch with Scott & Heidi who are extraordinary in their own way. We stayed at their house in Nederlander last time we were in Colorado.
And now, Grandparents.
Mom's side.
Grandma Dorothy.
Grandpa Ed.
Dad's side.
Grandma Alice.
And Grandma Alice
Grandma Alice and I had a special relationship. It's just a vibe thing, but always felt judged by my parents. Like they were keeping an eye on me and just waiting for me to fail. From Grandma Alice I felt what I later came to identify as unconditional love.
*****
When I was 14 or maybe 15 or so I got caught by the University of Washington police stealing a sprinkler. My friends and I were running back from the University District and University Ave. which was the center of alternative life then, with its head shops and record shops, and I had taken a few too many of my asthma pills which I had discovered were basically speed with a short steep up and a horrific, deep depressive crash but like I said, we were 15 and this was all we had except for maybe a little weed now and then and I had been generous enough to share with my friends and so we running. It felt good to run across the cool night-time lawns of the UW, lawns that are no longer there, as the space has been filled with research building after building, medical and otherwise, and as we were running I saw a sprinkler - and upright sprinkler. At the time, I had my first job across the street at the Montlake Playfield. I was always over there. In the Winter, I was playing basketball and I would scorekeep for the adult league and volunteer coach youth league basketball and floor hockey. And so it was summer and at this time I was working as the groundskeeper for the softball field. I would lay down the white chalk foul lines for the adult softball league and water down the field - and we didn't have a sprinkler. It had broken, I believe. So when I picked up the sprinkler and ran with it - we weren't running away, to be clear, we were already running for the sheer joy of it - we used to do that alot, night running, sometimes running all the way home from downtown - but the cops must have thought it looked suspicious because that was the first time I got to be alone in that small, soundproof room with only one tiny window on the door.
The parental reactions were predictable.
My mom was nervy and verging on hysterical. (He's turning into brother Eddie - a real juvenile delinquent reprobate!)
My Dads fears telegraphic more quietly and sternly (He's turning into my no-good father, or brother Dennis.)
Only my Grandma Alice - who was staying with us at the time - seemed to grasp what was really going on and know how to reach me. All she said on the phone was simply "Remember the family name." What I got out of that was, having some pride in yourself - it wasn't so much about the name, which I inherited from a drunken Irish deadbeat (apparently, never met him) - but that she knows who I really am, I know who I really am, and have some self-respect. Make good decisions. Simultaneous I heard love and support, no judgment, just hey look at this - you can take this moment and go one of two ways, just like any other moment.
Despite my drug use, I never relied on petty crime to support my habit. I didn't enjoy it - I wasn't a thrill seeker - and maybe I was just saved by my own fear and anxiety - the same terror that kept me from ever learning to surf or sky. I just didn't want to looks stupid.
I could also say that I did not like being in that little fucking room. I highly prize the first of the free freedoms, as outlined in Wengrow's The Dawn Everything - the right to come and go as I please.
Not that long ago, I had a dream that I was back in that room, only now I was an adult and I had drugs on my person. The dream is related here. as a sort of run-on prose poem. It's called, predictably, Dream Last Night.
Steeped in dream logic, imposter syndrome, with a dash of survivor's guilt.
Other run-ins I've had with the police, all pretty minor: (like I said, not at our any particularly moral goodness, but fear, insecurity and sneakiness kept me out of most scrapes - and, when pressed, an ability to dip into the sincerity pot and talk my way out of just about anything.
Example,
A Friday night in 1984.
I was 17 and a freshman at Seattle University. There were no parties that night, and for some reason my girlfriend and our normal gang wasn't around. It was just Dario and I a half gallon of Pancho Villa. Tequila always had the opposite effect that other alcoholic drinks did, which made me sloppy and sleepy. With Tequila, I would get wired, alive! and I would want to just get busy. Go places, break things. So we're just about to the bottom of this half gallon of cheap tequila, and we decide we're going to go to the Eastside and rip off hood ornaments from the cars of the rich. At this time, Bellevue and Redmond didn't have high-rises yet that you could see from Seattle but it did have Microsoft and rich people.
I'm not sure I need to tell you if this is out of character for me, and I have no idea in particular where the inspiration came from, but that's what we decided to do.
By way of backstory: the previous year, a carload of drunken teenagers had tried to do a 180 on the Evergreen Point Bridge, and killed themselves and a cop. A cop had even come to our high school to talk to the student body about drunk driving. At the beginning of the assembly he dramatically removed a glove and showed us he was missing fingers. He had scar tissue on his head and face, too. Obviously it was memorable tactic but any effective-ness it might have as a deterrent dissolves in a solution of adolescent testosterone and alcoholism. So it wasn't really a good idea to get behind the wheel and drive directly into the maw of the angry beast. They were looking for us.
So we get in my Dad's 1972 Impala and start driving across the bridge, two decades before Google Maps, and no idea where we're going. But we've got a mission. In fact, I think that was sort of a our catch phrase for the evening - quoting the Blues Brothers "We're on a Mission from God." Through the veil of memory and drunkenness, it's a little blurry, but we got quite a number, including a Cadillac and a bunch of others but we missing a Mercedes so we were specifically on the hunt for a Benz - which had the stand up logos at the time. And I do have a crystal clear memory of this: we stopped at a condo which looked promising and sort of ritzy. We parked the car outside and walked into the garage which was under the building and there she was - a Mercedes. I started twisting the hood ornament around and around and around. With each crank, the aching stress echoed throughout the garage. It was loud. Dario started edging nervously toward the exit. "Come on; let's go." But I kept turning - I could feel the metal cables turning. "Just one more." Finally, it gave way with a sound like a gun going off. The bang echoed as we ran for the garage exit and back to the Impala.
Now we're driving with a glove box full of hood ornaments, looking for the way back to Seattle. Another memory as we're winding our way through a maze of car dealerships - wide 4 and 6 lane suburban streets lit by the yellow luminescence of sodium vapor lights. Dario says, "You're driving on the wrong side of the road." "I am not." "You're driving on the left side of the road." "Right! I'm driving on the ... oh shit!!" And then I turned hard to get into the right hand lane. But it was too late. At this point a cop car starts to tail us. And we're driving super exactly the speed limit and being oh-so-good as we're looking for the bridge back to the city and home. And soon there's another cop car following us. And then another. And then another. So there's this little caravan of cop cars led by our '72 Impala and for some reason we have it in our pea brains that if we can just find the onramp to the highway headed back home they will leave us alone. "You got no jurisdiction here, coppers, back off." So we're winding around and somehow miraculously find the on-ramp - without any traffic violations, I might add - and whoop! On go the lights, and they pull us over. I'm out of the car in a second, practically running to confront the cop - "Why were you following us for so long?! Why didn't you just pull us over?"
"Get back in the car."
(As I think about it now, knowing what I know, what could have been going on with a 1972 Impala, driving slow through the suburbs, is a little bit of Racial Profiling. When they saw it was just a couple dumb white kids, the officer who spotted us no doubt, said I got this - and the other three cop cars peeled off.)
So the officer makes us a wait a bit, radios in the plates - not stolen - and then approaches the car. "License and registration."
Dario opens the glove compartment and out pour a dozen hood ornaments. The officer doesn't notice.
We give him the license and registration and then I'm out of the car. It's time for drunk tests.
He asks we to say the alphabet backwards, which I of course do in record time - I get to M or so and say "should I keep going?" (Of course, I couldn't do this sober, then or now.)
I then have to walk a line, and do some other circus tricks which I do perfectly - all of them. Like I said, Tequila turns me into superman. Just want to get busy. And then the last test I'm supposed to close my eyes and look up and stand on one foot. He shines the flashlight right in my eyes and I can feel the heat on my face. I almost pass out and lose my balance. "Well that last one you didn't do so good."
He gets Dario out of the car. He says, "You guys shouldn't drive. Do you have any friends on the East side?"
Dario chimes in, "Sure - we'll call Glen (or someone.)"
I think we even try to call Glen (or someone) and no one answers.
The officers give us a ride closer to Bellevue where we supposedly have friends - about 4 miles away from our car. We don't really have anywhere to stay so we basically have to walk all the way back to the car while we sober up. I'm practically skipping, because we had an adventure and I'm not in jail. Dario doesn't like walking as much as I do and he's tired and grumpy but I'm sky high as we reach the car as the Pacific Northwest sun is rising across Lake Washington.
As a visual epilogue, Dario keeps the hood ornaments, hung from string, a necklace of scalps from the hoods of rich people's cars, a monument to gonzo stupidity. The funny thing is, I don't remember us talking about it ever again - to each other or anyone.
Another time I got pulled over the the '72 Cutlass was when I was coming up on Acid or MDA - maybe both. So we headed out with a carful of people to get beer before the drugs kicked in. It was a dark winter night and it had recently rained - it wasn't pouring rain but just sort of northwest misting, ie like it always was. The interesting thing about the 1972 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme is that is used to belong to Gene Fraley, and it was good for towing Dragons. I can't remember off the top of my head the name of Gene Fraley's boat - I think he was another guy that bought a boat from my dad ... Wings. That was it. Wings. Always reminded me of Paul McCartney.
At any rate - the Cutlass Supreme had a powerful engine but also hydraulics in the back of the car so when the back end was loaded down by a trailer, the tail of the car wouldn't be dragging on the ground. But, if there was no trailer in the back, the hydraulics would lift up the back of the car like a hot rot - it was pretty stupid looking, actually, because it's not like the back wheels suddenly became oversized racing flats - they were still the same stupid little wheels, only now they looked really small inside the wheelwell, because the back end of the car is raised up. And if say, you were showing off the feature to your friends while you were coming up on MDA and maybe just a little Acid when you were headed out to buy beer before the drugs hit you in earnest, it might compromise your traction in a rear wheel drive car. So if you're coming up to an intersection with Iggy and the Stooges playing at a loud volume and then you see a cop parked by the side of the road and you jam on the brakes, and the streets are slick with a light coat of rain, you might just skid through the intersection.
Further train of events might go like this.
You end up in the cop car having a nice discussion with the officer. He asks where you're going. You say you just got some beer and you're headed back to the house and you're staying in. He asks for your driver's licence - you don't have it, because you'd had it altered and stenciled over so that you could buy beer, even though you're under age, and the last time you were in a cop car you had taken it out of your wallet - while the cop was out of the car, talking to someone else - and stuck it between the seats of the cop car because you didn't want to get caught with an obviously altered Driver's Licence, which you figured was a heavier offense than simply not having one - and you say you don't have a driver's license but gee officer, so how do I get a new one? And you're getting talkative and friendly because the drugs are starting to hit you and the cop says you just go home and stay there and get a new license as soon as you can.
So, back against the wall, I apparently have that gift. "You can be charming when you want to." my Mother used to say.
*****
I had a really deep intuitive connection with my Grand Alice - and I'm not sure why really. She had a stillness at the center of her that I found comforting.We used to take trips together in the summer. I had two memorable trips that I took with her to Colorado to visit my Uncle Pat, Aunt Nancy, and their kids, my cousins Scott and Steve. Scott and Steve were a little bit younger than me. Scott was always fire-y. I remember him spitting my my face when I was teasing his little brother.
Anyway, this trip with my Grandmother was very formative. We went camping up in the Rockies, driving in 4WD Broncos. Pretending we were minors, walking bowlegged around old mining ghost towns. Climbing peaks. I got the sense that the wilderness went on and on forever. I never went camping with my Dad - maybe once - because the focus was always on sailing, you know? I'm not saying that this is an issue or that I necessarily missed it. I have a an extensive list of petty grievances and regrets but this is not among them.
Actually the once we went camping for campings's sake was quite memorable. We went out to the rainforest on the Olympic peninsula. We took the van and lifted the top. All of our vans were combi-vans that were customized at Chef's Campers. Chef's Campers was owned by Bob Pebble, the father of Linda Pebble who was really close friends with both my mom and my aunt Karen. They were all sort of in the same friend group, I gather in their 20's. Chef's Campers figures into my biography pretty strongly at two points. One - it's where Dad built Mistral (see "Boats | 2. Mistral") and later as my first job after High School where I was the janitor, which is definitely worthy of its own Detour. (Maybe in this case you could call it the trail system).
We had two Ford Econoline vans growing up. They were both used primarily for towing Dragons, but the first one, the white one, was a full on camper. You could raise the roof so you could stand inside. The roof was this sort of accordian fold that went up, with slit windows to let in light. Inside it had a table, bench seat, stove, the works. There were cute little curtains on the windows that maybe my dad had made from canvas. This is was the original #Vanlife. So it had all of this stuff, and captain's chairs that would pivot, but we never really used any of this - not at regattas, not really ever. It was filled with tools, boat gear, sails and canvas bags of foul weather gear and smelled like a sailing locker. Much later, the Thunderbird had a lot of the same stuff. A table, a stove a toilet and bunks. But everything was made as light as possible and stowed away for racing purpose. The Thunderbird was designed as a blue collar cruising boat but we never cruised.
Everyone I've ever been attracted to in my life is extraordinary because they're obsessive and obsessed with an overriding goal or simply with a process to the exclusion of all other things. Without an obsession, I feel lost. Dad, Frank Zappa, Easwaran, Vivekananda, David Foster Wallace. Around these parts, balance is overrated.
So, due to my father's justifiable wonderful obsession with sailing, we went van-camping once. We got a camp site out in the Olympic rain forest. I don't remember much but going off to a little kid activity nature story time with a ranger, along with some other kids that were staying at the campground.
My relationship with forest, mountains, and rural places was through my Grandmother. Two big summer trips, and summers spent in Glenwood, Washington near Mount Adams where my Aunt Susie was the librarian at Glenwood Elementary.
The first big trip I took with my Granda Alice was to Colorado. We visited Uncle Pat, Aunt Nancy and their two sons, my cousins Scott & Steve. I'm still friends with these people and partially out of admiration for them and the beautiful state of Colorado, my son is now a freshman at the University of Colorado.
The second trip was to Alaska. My Uncle Mike worked for the army corp of engineers, and he was stationed on Biorka Island off the coast of Sitka, Alaska. We did a lot of salmon fishing while we were there. There was a family there that had two kids. The boy was older, probably 15 maybe 16, and even though I was 13 or so and he wanted nothing to do with me - he was always wearing overalls and a tool-belt and self importantly carrying ladders and saying he had work to do. There was also also a daughter that was my age or maybe a year younger and we would play together a lot. I wished she was a boy and more rough-and-tumble it was frustrating I think. Once I made her cry I think because we were sword fighting with sticks and I starting playing to rough. Honestly, I was probably about that age where I needed to get the shit beat out of me and get a little less spoiled and the humility that comes with a good ass-kicking was not forthcoming.
So Biorka Island is a mid sized island with a narrow isthmus in the middle. There were trees, and moss and ferns and deer. All of the nature in Alaska is bigger. The Douglas firs are bigger. The mosquitos are bigger. The banana slugs are as big as bananas. Even the raindrops are bigger. The salmon we caught were bigger and my Grandmother caught the biggest salmon of the trip - a 22 pound Chinook. But the coolest thing about Biorka Island, for a kid anyway, was all of the World War II era defensive gun emplacements. You see, when World War II broke out, they believed that one way the Japanese might invade was to create a foothold in Alaska, and then work their way down through Canada to America. Who knows; maybe they weren't too sure about the Russians, either. Sitka was in fact founded by the Russians.
Finally, my knowledge of rural life was informed by my visits to Glenwood. My sister and I would spend our summers in Glenwood when my parents went off to sail. I have what the self-help books might call heavy duty abandonment issues around this. My first experiences with the pitch-black panic of lonely, unwieldy, un-talk-about-able depression were on these trips. My Aunt Susie transparently took out her anger on her brother on me and favored my sister in whom she saw herself. Oh, and I felt like a complete pussy when I was paired up with the local farm boys for fishing and other excursions. Other than that, it was a great time. I could see them sort of toggling through boys that could show me the ropes of fishing and throwing cowpies like frisbies once they dried. I have a distinct memory of one of these boys attempting to untangle my fishing reel as a stood there, limp armed, while he swore and swore and swore. Don't think I went fishing with that kid again.
I would go fishing but I didn't really like the killing-the-fish part. That was ultra traumatic. I mean, I didn't even like killing the worm to put it on the hook. I thought it was a sort of sissified queasy inability to simply deal with the guts. But in hindsight I would say that there's nothing admirable about learning to kill and watching even a worm writhe in agony is disturbing. I did learn to kill fish by striking them hard on the head and I learned how to overcome my compassion and clean them. There is something about this that makes one feel self-sufficient - maybe for me, it would have been good to give it a spiritual grounding, to acknowledge the sacrifice of the fish. At any rate, after awhile I did learn to fish and kill and clean what I caught. I learned how to spot the flat shady pools without rapids where trout would surface for flies. I would use hot dog slices sometimes for bait. Afternoons I would ride my Schwinn Scrambler to my favorite spot on the creek, where a little flat bridge crossed. I'd catch fish and bring them home Once I caught a trout - ok size, about 8 inches - and it had swallowed the hook. As I pulled the hook it had swallowed it pulled all of the fish's guts up and out through its mouth. This was maybe the moment I became vegetarian.
They paired me with various boys and it seemed that we hung out exactly once. Finally, they paired me with a boy that had lived in Seattle and had been adopted. He was diabetic. I felt a sort of kinship with this kid.
The kid that showed me how to toss cowpies killed a baby duck by accident once. We were throwing rocks at a mamma duck and her babies. They were in a stream - we didn't really mean any harm, but one of the rocks hit one of the duckling and broke it's neck. He held it in his hands and said "don't tell anyone." So I didn't. Until now.
I'm a peace-loving soft-hearted guy that loves animals and children. This war in the Ukraine that's about to commence is really haunting me. (Written, 2/20/22)
One of my favorite memories of being up there was playing in a big barn full of hay on one of the local farms. The barn was partially open - more of a huge covered tin-roof modern shed - two to three stories high. And the hay inside was already formed into rectangular bales that were like huge building blocks that could be rearrange to create forts, you could dig through them to make tunnels and you could jump from 20 feet up without getting hurt because they were soft enough to give. Along with the gun emplacements on Biokra Island, this was the best place I ever played as a kid - better than any amusement park.
*****
When I was older and a wreck from drugs and even after I got clean I would get on the Amtrak train from Seattle to Portland. When I had my little drug habit going, I would go down there for four days or so just to get away from it and clean up. I would go back to Seattle and think - just one - and then I'd be off and running again. I'm not even sure that getting clean was always my intention, but it worked to take a break and I wouldn't do drugs while I was with her. Something about the lack of judgment - that with my Grandma Alice, I couldn't do anything wrong. I tried to give my kids that feeling. Somehow I failed miserably - all they felt is the lash I whip myself with. In many ways, I a creepy tortured guy and intimacy with me can be punishing - as I'm always punishing myself.
(Time to go for a 10 mile run in 20 degree weather. - 2/20/22)
However, I do have a vague memory of going into Portland and hanging out with some kids my age, smoking dope and maybe dropping Acid and having things just get weird and impressionistic. Don't remember much.
I've always liked hanging out in Portland. Portlandia.
[Portland memories - Powells, the NA Convention, going to a ballgame w Denny, walking around with Tracey, going to the AA clubhouse near 24th Street, Tracey saying - why didn't we move here, I didn't know it was so cool. Portlandia. Not interviewing and W&K. WTF. Going there with Kathy for that @Will Vinton open house. Good times. The Rose Garden.]
[So yeah, Sorry Einstein, God does play dice.]
[Obsession & Focus vs. Enjoying where the ride takes you]
[Hey College Boy | Working at Chef's Campers and also for Buchan Construction]
[playing basketball at Montlake elementary - no mom we're not doing coke]
[going down the the Seattle Center and going to Sonic games at the kingdome - Dave Davies]
litltI've never had any nicknames. I guess having the name Max was enough. My name used to get made fun of a lot. There was a popular spy spoof on TV when I was a kid called Maxwell Get Smart. So that was a nickname of mine, I guess, a nickname that was actually my name. Maxwell Smart was a comedy but when you're little you don't see it that way. You don't get the joke. So you go through the phases of taking it seriously, - like, oh my God, they're tied up, are they going to survive? And then to the stage of "this is kind of stupid" and then finally "ohhhh, it's a parody." It was was the same, even more so, with Batman. All those cliffhangers and the violence. Pow! Bam!
Bobby Seki used to call me Maxi Pad. Maxi Pad! Maxi Pad! Maxi Pad! I had no idea what he was talking about. I wonder if he did.
Another List:
Best TV theme show songs.
1) Johnny Quest
2) Hawaii Five-O
3. ) Mission Impossible
4.) Peter Gunn
5.) Batman
6.) The Adams Family
7.) Kung-Fu Theme
8.) I dream of Jeanie
9.) The Streets of San Francisco
10.) Scooby-Doo
List of cats my parents had.
1) Jazzy.
2) Foxy.
3) Lothar.
Our cats.
1) Shiva.
2) Lalu and her kittens, Raja, Rama and Sita.
I also lived with a cat named Xerox - it was Lisa Steadmon's cat and peed in my shoes.
Jazzy,
or Jasmine was a loud, lazy, wimpy, quirk Siamese cat that my dad bought my mom round about the time they had me. She was a classic Siamese gray and she had the cross-eyed blue eyes that Siamese cats get because they are cross-bred so much. They had no idea that I would be allergic. I had horrible asthma as a kid. I was most allergic to Horses, which, I mean, who would have known? Except my mom liked to ride horses and apparently the first time I went horseback riding with her I got really sick - she had no idea what was happening. I was also allergic to dog and cat dander as well as pollen. Exercise would set me off, too. We'll come back to that at some point.
Jazzy was a really boring cat. And by boring, I mean to Didn't do much of anything. When she would start having a hairball my Mom would say "Jazzy, go outside and eat some grass!" And mom would pick her up and throw her out the backdoor. She would finish hacking up her hairball and then go out to the little strip of grass between our house and our neighbor's, the Watsons and then she would sit by the backdoor on the welcome mat and howl to be let back in. Once inside she would sit right by the heater and suck up all the heat so that none got in the room. Regardless, Jazzy and I had a good working relationship. In later years when was a teenager I would come home late and lay on the kitchen floor and watch Fridays or Saturday Night Live and she would sit on the my chest and look down at me. I would warm up some leftover and we would share. Since Jazzy was kind of old, I would pre-chew the meat for her a little bit which she appreciated. When I got super sick at the beginning of Junior Year - some sort of microbe, possibly from drinking the tainted water out at the cabin - she was the only other one that got sick. When Jazzy was too sick to continue living, ,my Mom and I went to the vet together and said goodbye. My mom always appreciated this. My Dad was always too busy to deal with death, even and including his own.
Foxy was an amazing, gentle, intelligent cat - a flame-tipped Siamese, with blue eyes. He was mostly my sister's cat. When my parents moved out to Kingston, Foxy jumped out the second story window and was never seen again. Presumably he was trying to find his way home.
Shiva was a bengal. We had him when Tracey was pregnant.
Lalu showed up at our house at 559 Calle Miramar when Tracey had already had the kids. We named her Lalu because when Will was really little he would say "La-loo, La-loo" all the time, like he was sort of exercising his little tongue, learning how to use it. Lalu was a barely more than a kitty - sort of a teenie little teenage cat. But, one night we heard some howling when she was outside and before we knew it and before we could get her fixed, she was pregnant. Her tummy grew and grew and then one night she came into the kitchen with a bloody butt and she wasn't pregnant any more. We thought, she's so teenie she probably lost the pregnancy. But then I looked over the corner of the deck, and down nestled in the grass were three tiny baby kittens. She nursed them and then one day maybe a day or two later she picked each of them up in turn and carried them inside all the way back to the back of the house into the closet in one of our bedrooms. That wasn't such a great spot, and we can't remember where she put the kittens after that. Tracey had just had her litter of Morgan, Ally and Will so she was kinda busy and then I couldn't stand the sound of the crows and a crafty real estate agent told us of a house just up the street that we couldn't afford but the kids were going to keep growing, unless we simply stopped feeding them, and that wasn't really an option so we bought the 5 bedroom house with a view of the ocean which we really couldn't afford and the toilets didn't even flush - the first thing we had to do was fix the outflow plumbing which had root intrusions for 10k or something like that - instead of simply talking to Gunter and his bossy agro wife we made a claim in small claims court (foreshadowing, of how things go down when you don't just talk to people) and then I had a midlife meltdown and quit my job with this huge 1.6 million dollar mortgage hanging over my head, and I freelanced for a bit and it was all good, but then the bottom fell out of the economy (this was 2007) and the music quit playing and it was time to find a seat.
So the kittens weren't really a top priority and they fell through the cracks a little. We carried them up to the new house but they were confused, because we lived so close to the old house - the move was from 659 Calle Miramar to 705 Calle Miramar. I don't know where Lalu went. She just disappeared. The littlest cat and the female of the three, Sita, got hit by a car trying to go back to the old house. That left Rama and Raja. Rama grew faster and was bigger than Raja and would sort of bully Raja and swipe at him. Rama was big and white and black and fluffy and very affectionate. Raja would sort of creep around then edges and was a little skittery. One day Rama disappeared - he just wandered off - we didn't know where. We thought he was dead but years later Tracey got a call from a vet, saying they had him and that he was dying. Tracey was mortified. There was nothing we could do though, as we lived in New Jersey so Rama - however he had lived his life, ended it far from us. I always thought Tracey liked Rama more but the truth was that she really had a connection to Raja. This connection really blossomed after all the other cats were gone and the kids were a little older.
Raja had a long and interesting life. Or should I saw lives because Raja had at least nine.
Raja was an orange tabby with stripes - marmalade as my Dad called it.
The first life was at 705 Calle Miramar, when he was one of the kittens and sort of shy and would run away.
The second life was when he was the only cat and he wasn't spaded yet and he would get in fights all time time. The only person he would get close to was Tracey. He wasn't big but he was protective. This was how he go the torn ear, always fighting.
The third life was when he got spaded. Tracey took him to the vet and as it turned out, he had eaten some rat poison and it gave him "kitty aids" or an auto-immune disorder. This was about the time we moved to Texas
For his fourth life. In Texas, Raja new went outside. The house we rented at 6338 Bryant Parkway had a granny studio apartment over the garage. Tracey had an art studio and her office desk out there. Raja stayed in that apartment for the entire year we were there until we moved back to California.
During the move, he stayed with my parents in Kingston. Lothar had died somewhat recently and so they had a cat. Not really sure what went on, but my Mom wasn't really good and looking out for kids, much less animals and Raja walked out the back door one day and disappeared into the woods. In other words, like Foxy, he disappeared. It took awhile for my Mother to admit this and come clean. Tracey and Morgan and Ally were very upset. They finally did a puja to let Raja go. A day or so later - realize, Raja had been gone for a month now, there was a big fall thunderstorm in Kingston on Sandy Beach Lane. Now neither my mother or father have particularly good hearing but over the sound of the 6'clock news and the thunder and rain they heard a cat meowing. And they opened the back door and there was a wet Raja, a little bit skinny but other than that, in good health.
My family has a sort of way of making grandiose promises and then sort of hemming and hawing afterwards. Like my Aunt saying she's going to help with the kids' college and then no even sending a card for Christmas. My mom said that Raja could live with her and then she sth aid, oh no I misunderstood, I thought he was just staying here while you moved. Well that may be but regardless somehow spiritually etc Tracey had reconnected with Raja so we returned him to California for another new Life, probably his 6th or seventh - who knows, we're just using this as a random construct. The point is that the cat had been through a lot of shit.
Returning to California, we found out that Raja no longer was dying of AIDs. So that was sort of miraculous.
This time in California, from 2009 to 2016 or so was his fiercest time. No other cats came into his territory and he because an adept hunter, bringing home birds and rodents. He once fought, killed and ate a possum - it was some sort of cage death match I think where they were both in the trampoline. In hindsight, I remember the screeching and in the morning I pieced together what happened from what was left of the possum in the trampoline. At this point in time, he because fully the family cat - not just super connected to Tracey, but also to everyone else.
Then we moved to New Jersey. I know. It seemed like a good idea at the time. This was Raja's last life. He was an older cat and very affectionate, part of the family. It was evident from the way that he communicated that he believed that we were cats, or that he was human, or that regardless, we were all part of the same pack. He was very connected to Tracey and would spend the nights on the couch, cuddling and getting petted. This was their special time together. He had various vocalizations and you could basically tell what he wanted. He had a different relationship with everyone in the house. When we first moved here, he hid upstairs in Ally's closet and then floor by floor, foot by foot added to his territory. At first he would go outside, but in the end, he didn't. It's pretty cold here in the Winter particularly. It isn't California. (Our California house had a lot of doors; you couldn't have kept a cat inside if you wanted to.) Toward the end, he started having some sort of kitty dementia where he would lose his mind a little and get aggressive. He had some health issues too. But overall, he stayed sweet and cuddly and himself to the end, always purring, always a good companion - particularly throughout the first year of the pandemic when he would hang out with me all day. He died in 2021 - I guess he was about 18 and there for entire kids upbringing. He was still purring when they put him to sleep.
I want to be like Raja - purring up to the end.
Bobby Seki used to call me Maxi Pad. Maxi Pad! Maxi Pad! Maxi Pad! I had no idea what he was talking about. I wonder if he did.
Another List:
Best TV theme show songs.
1) Johnny Quest
2) Hawaii Five-O
3. ) Mission Impossible
4.) Peter Gunn
5.) Batman
6.) The Adams Family
7.) Kung-Fu Theme
8.) I dream of Jeanie
9.) The Streets of San Francisco
10.) Scooby-Doo
List of cats my parents had.
1) Jazzy.
2) Foxy.
3) Lothar.
Our cats.
1) Shiva.
2) Lalu and her kittens, Raja, Rama and Sita.
I also lived with a cat named Xerox - it was Lisa Steadmon's cat and peed in my shoes.
Jazzy,
or Jasmine was a loud, lazy, wimpy, quirk Siamese cat that my dad bought my mom round about the time they had me. She was a classic Siamese gray and she had the cross-eyed blue eyes that Siamese cats get because they are cross-bred so much. They had no idea that I would be allergic. I had horrible asthma as a kid. I was most allergic to Horses, which, I mean, who would have known? Except my mom liked to ride horses and apparently the first time I went horseback riding with her I got really sick - she had no idea what was happening. I was also allergic to dog and cat dander as well as pollen. Exercise would set me off, too. We'll come back to that at some point.
Jazzy was a really boring cat. And by boring, I mean to Didn't do much of anything. When she would start having a hairball my Mom would say "Jazzy, go outside and eat some grass!" And mom would pick her up and throw her out the backdoor. She would finish hacking up her hairball and then go out to the little strip of grass between our house and our neighbor's, the Watsons and then she would sit by the backdoor on the welcome mat and howl to be let back in. Once inside she would sit right by the heater and suck up all the heat so that none got in the room. Regardless, Jazzy and I had a good working relationship. In later years when was a teenager I would come home late and lay on the kitchen floor and watch Fridays or Saturday Night Live and she would sit on the my chest and look down at me. I would warm up some leftover and we would share. Since Jazzy was kind of old, I would pre-chew the meat for her a little bit which she appreciated. When I got super sick at the beginning of Junior Year - some sort of microbe, possibly from drinking the tainted water out at the cabin - she was the only other one that got sick. When Jazzy was too sick to continue living, ,my Mom and I went to the vet together and said goodbye. My mom always appreciated this. My Dad was always too busy to deal with death, even and including his own.
Foxy was an amazing, gentle, intelligent cat - a flame-tipped Siamese, with blue eyes. He was mostly my sister's cat. When my parents moved out to Kingston, Foxy jumped out the second story window and was never seen again. Presumably he was trying to find his way home.
Shiva was a bengal. We had him when Tracey was pregnant.
Lalu showed up at our house at 559 Calle Miramar when Tracey had already had the kids. We named her Lalu because when Will was really little he would say "La-loo, La-loo" all the time, like he was sort of exercising his little tongue, learning how to use it. Lalu was a barely more than a kitty - sort of a teenie little teenage cat. But, one night we heard some howling when she was outside and before we knew it and before we could get her fixed, she was pregnant. Her tummy grew and grew and then one night she came into the kitchen with a bloody butt and she wasn't pregnant any more. We thought, she's so teenie she probably lost the pregnancy. But then I looked over the corner of the deck, and down nestled in the grass were three tiny baby kittens. She nursed them and then one day maybe a day or two later she picked each of them up in turn and carried them inside all the way back to the back of the house into the closet in one of our bedrooms. That wasn't such a great spot, and we can't remember where she put the kittens after that. Tracey had just had her litter of Morgan, Ally and Will so she was kinda busy and then I couldn't stand the sound of the crows and a crafty real estate agent told us of a house just up the street that we couldn't afford but the kids were going to keep growing, unless we simply stopped feeding them, and that wasn't really an option so we bought the 5 bedroom house with a view of the ocean which we really couldn't afford and the toilets didn't even flush - the first thing we had to do was fix the outflow plumbing which had root intrusions for 10k or something like that - instead of simply talking to Gunter and his bossy agro wife we made a claim in small claims court (foreshadowing, of how things go down when you don't just talk to people) and then I had a midlife meltdown and quit my job with this huge 1.6 million dollar mortgage hanging over my head, and I freelanced for a bit and it was all good, but then the bottom fell out of the economy (this was 2007) and the music quit playing and it was time to find a seat.
So the kittens weren't really a top priority and they fell through the cracks a little. We carried them up to the new house but they were confused, because we lived so close to the old house - the move was from 659 Calle Miramar to 705 Calle Miramar. I don't know where Lalu went. She just disappeared. The littlest cat and the female of the three, Sita, got hit by a car trying to go back to the old house. That left Rama and Raja. Rama grew faster and was bigger than Raja and would sort of bully Raja and swipe at him. Rama was big and white and black and fluffy and very affectionate. Raja would sort of creep around then edges and was a little skittery. One day Rama disappeared - he just wandered off - we didn't know where. We thought he was dead but years later Tracey got a call from a vet, saying they had him and that he was dying. Tracey was mortified. There was nothing we could do though, as we lived in New Jersey so Rama - however he had lived his life, ended it far from us. I always thought Tracey liked Rama more but the truth was that she really had a connection to Raja. This connection really blossomed after all the other cats were gone and the kids were a little older.
Raja had a long and interesting life. Or should I saw lives because Raja had at least nine.
Raja was an orange tabby with stripes - marmalade as my Dad called it.
The first life was at 705 Calle Miramar, when he was one of the kittens and sort of shy and would run away.
The second life was when he was the only cat and he wasn't spaded yet and he would get in fights all time time. The only person he would get close to was Tracey. He wasn't big but he was protective. This was how he go the torn ear, always fighting.
The third life was when he got spaded. Tracey took him to the vet and as it turned out, he had eaten some rat poison and it gave him "kitty aids" or an auto-immune disorder. This was about the time we moved to Texas
For his fourth life. In Texas, Raja new went outside. The house we rented at 6338 Bryant Parkway had a granny studio apartment over the garage. Tracey had an art studio and her office desk out there. Raja stayed in that apartment for the entire year we were there until we moved back to California.
During the move, he stayed with my parents in Kingston. Lothar had died somewhat recently and so they had a cat. Not really sure what went on, but my Mom wasn't really good and looking out for kids, much less animals and Raja walked out the back door one day and disappeared into the woods. In other words, like Foxy, he disappeared. It took awhile for my Mother to admit this and come clean. Tracey and Morgan and Ally were very upset. They finally did a puja to let Raja go. A day or so later - realize, Raja had been gone for a month now, there was a big fall thunderstorm in Kingston on Sandy Beach Lane. Now neither my mother or father have particularly good hearing but over the sound of the 6'clock news and the thunder and rain they heard a cat meowing. And they opened the back door and there was a wet Raja, a little bit skinny but other than that, in good health.
My family has a sort of way of making grandiose promises and then sort of hemming and hawing afterwards. Like my Aunt saying she's going to help with the kids' college and then no even sending a card for Christmas. My mom said that Raja could live with her and then she sth aid, oh no I misunderstood, I thought he was just staying here while you moved. Well that may be but regardless somehow spiritually etc Tracey had reconnected with Raja so we returned him to California for another new Life, probably his 6th or seventh - who knows, we're just using this as a random construct. The point is that the cat had been through a lot of shit.
Returning to California, we found out that Raja no longer was dying of AIDs. So that was sort of miraculous.
This time in California, from 2009 to 2016 or so was his fiercest time. No other cats came into his territory and he because an adept hunter, bringing home birds and rodents. He once fought, killed and ate a possum - it was some sort of cage death match I think where they were both in the trampoline. In hindsight, I remember the screeching and in the morning I pieced together what happened from what was left of the possum in the trampoline. At this point in time, he because fully the family cat - not just super connected to Tracey, but also to everyone else.
Then we moved to New Jersey. I know. It seemed like a good idea at the time. This was Raja's last life. He was an older cat and very affectionate, part of the family. It was evident from the way that he communicated that he believed that we were cats, or that he was human, or that regardless, we were all part of the same pack. He was very connected to Tracey and would spend the nights on the couch, cuddling and getting petted. This was their special time together. He had various vocalizations and you could basically tell what he wanted. He had a different relationship with everyone in the house. When we first moved here, he hid upstairs in Ally's closet and then floor by floor, foot by foot added to his territory. At first he would go outside, but in the end, he didn't. It's pretty cold here in the Winter particularly. It isn't California. (Our California house had a lot of doors; you couldn't have kept a cat inside if you wanted to.) Toward the end, he started having some sort of kitty dementia where he would lose his mind a little and get aggressive. He had some health issues too. But overall, he stayed sweet and cuddly and himself to the end, always purring, always a good companion - particularly throughout the first year of the pandemic when he would hang out with me all day. He died in 2021 - I guess he was about 18 and there for entire kids upbringing. He was still purring when they put him to sleep.
I want to be like Raja - purring up to the end.
**
I had asthma a lot when I was a kid. I think that I value feeling good so much. It was a big reason that I became reliant on drugs, and why I value physical fitness so much now. That's why I work out, it's why I practice yoga - because I know what it's like to feel like you're suffocating and your body is a broken down house that you're stuck in.
As a kid, I always had to manage my running and playing and my other athletic exploits. It was a gift when I felt good. One memory is etched in my mind.
I was running along the grass parking strip that connected all of our houses on East Calhoun Street. It was still summer, and the sun had gone behind the hill, and the air was cooling - the light non-directional with no shadows - magic hour, I later heard it called in my professional capacity. I was running, just for the joy of running and I could smell the grass and the life around me in all the plants and feel it in the homes and in the park across the street and as I ran faster and faster, the energy of life flowing effortlessly through my limbs I felt I was so light that my bare feet just brushed the tops of the grass as I ran and I felt the distinct possibility that I might cease needing the support of the earth at all and just fly, first as a rock skips and then just forget to come down.
What I miss most about being a kid is that feeling of lightness.
*****
My first memories:
I have a distinct memory of being in a crib, a vision of the sideways bars. I have a sense that the bars represented a project. Something to be overcome. I was inside and I wanted to be outside. These horizontal bars kept me from the rest of the world. I remember the bars being vertical as sat up. Now the bars faced a different direction but still kept me in. I remember standing up, supporting myself against the bars. The bars had a top where I could put my hands. I could stand and look over the bars. I remember being able to put one leg up over the top bar and then slide down so that I was in the same position, standing with my hands on the top bar. Then I dropped down to the floor. I walked downstairs to the kitchen where my parents were surprised to see me. Mom no longer had to get me up. "I guess he's ready for a real bed" said my Dad and the crib went away.
I remember my Mom once said, "You woke up on the wrong side of the bed," which I thought was a curious phrase. So the next day I pushed my bed away from the wall, went downstairs and announced that I got up on the wrong side of the bed.
Another early memory is of men coming with a cement truck and pouring concrete in the backyard. My Dad had clients that owned construction companies, notably the Merlino Brothers, and I remember him greeting them and I felt pride that my Dad knew other men - men who did stuff with big trucks. My Dad was widening the driveways so that he could I was absolutely fascinated. as they poured out the concrete and then brushed it even with big brooms. The roar of the engine and turning of the concrete - the motion and noise was absolutely intoxicating for a boy my age - I was maybe two. Old enough to talk. I wanted to watch but my mother or some authority figure, maybe a babysitter - told me I had to take a nap. I asked if the trucks and men would still be there when I woke up. I was assured they would so that I could take a nap. When I woke up, I rushed to the window but they were gone, work done. I cried. I was inconsolable.
Grownups like to ask kids "What are you going to be when you grown up?" I never had an answer. I'd think to myself, nothing you do looks as interesting as what I do. When I was a kid I liked being a kid. I had no interest in growing up. Adulthood seemed terrifying and unknown and full of unnamed responsibilities. I liked what I did. There were certain activities that I found peace, contentment and focus in that I did not want to lose - a sense of play, for example. We used to build dams on the beach and I would think - someday, I'll be a grownup and lose interest in building dams on the beach. But you know what? I never lost interest in building dams on the beach. And a lot of what I do is still "play" - I like to create ideas and systems - build worlds, using the building blocks of marketing campaigns. That the most engrossing part of my job anyway, the build of brand "worlds."
I've had basically three obsessions in my life. Basketball, Music and Advertising - each of them I've pounded to the the bitter end.
Sailing is also part of the equation, definitely, and I really miss it.
*****
These are the schools I went to, and how I got there.
Montlake Preschool at Montlake Playfield. This was across the street and I went there for three years. My mom would walk me over I'm sure. I thought I flunked a grade after 2 years because I was stupide when my friends moved on to real school, but my Dad was always the youngest and smallest in his grade and he wasn't letting that happen to me. I see the wisdom of what he did but I wish he'd been more forthcoming.
Note: I'm the most forthcomingest person I know. Always verbalizing, always sharing my deepest innermost thoughts and feelings. I have no idea whether I entertain others as much as I entertain myself. We say in AA that the mind of an alcoholic is a bad neighborhood - we shouldn't go there alone. I like going there and I like inviting other people to come with. I know I must exhaust people. I remember Victoria Arriola saying after we'd spent an afternoon concepting together that she felt like she'd dropped acid. I think I am overwhelming. Hurricane Max. Today I am trying to be quieter. Gandhi would keep Mondays as a dias de silencio. He did that to conserve his prana. I wonder if I talk less, I'll be able to write more - to finish things.
Montlake Elementary. We would walk. I think maybe for kindergarten my mom would walk with us, but I do remember definitely by second grade I was walking on my own to school and walking home with friends. I remember once I brought I new baseball mitt to school and I was so proud of it. I was going to show it at show and tell. But this kid - I think his name was Eric, or something - he was in the same grade but bigger than me - said that's stupid - why bring a baseball mitt to school for show and tell? Everyone's seen a baseball mitt. I was so ashamed that I hid it in the ivy outside of school thinking that I would retrieve it when school was over. Of course it was gone, and it was quadruple shame spiral, once again, I was inconsolable.
I had good memories too - running home in a light rain with our jackets open - it felt so good! They used to pin notes for our parents to our jackets. Sometimes they would make it home, sometimes not - you'd see them crumpled and strewn along the street.
In third and fourth grade Morgan would come home with me after school or sometimes I would go to is house. Or Victors. The three of us were inseparable. I think maybe fourth grade was pretty much the happiest time of my life, when Victor and Morgan were my best friends. I don't know. Just looking into the wrong end of the telescope right now - but there's something charming about boys before the obsession with sex sets in - I really enjoyed that period. It was so much simpler without hormones and ego.
Madrona Middle School. We were the first generation of kids that was bussed. They took black kids from the central district and bussed them north and they bussed us into the central district to a mostly black area.
Meany Middle School. My Dad would give us - Mike Albright and I - a ride in the morning and we would walk home the 1.9 miles from Meany. The rule was that you had to live 2 miles from school to be bussed. This gap between school and home was where a lot of unsupervised adolescent stupidity began. We smoked Catnip, for instance, because we didn't have older brothers to get us loaded and were too terrified to ask around. (Should I just highlight all of the things from my childhood that I'm ashamed of and embarrassed about? Create a visual system? If jealousy is green, what is the color of shame? Blush pink?
Seattle Preparatory Academy || Matteo Ricci - Dad gave me a ride on his way to work and I would walk home.
Seattle University. I actually don't even remember. I think I lived a number of different places during my one here there - I probably took the bus to Capitol Hill and walked.
The University of Washington. I would walk when I was living in my parents basement, or take the bus.
The School of Visual Concepts. I would probably take the bus, or ride my bike, but the first time I went to class I walked. I saw a car run a redlight, hit a truck, which flipped over and skidding upside down for maybe 30 or 40 yards, before it came to a rest. I sprinted for the truck, thinking that I would find a decapitated person inside but thinking I needed to help or maybe not even thinking at all, just reacting - I got to the truck just as the driver was getting out, we grabbed each other, interlocking arms, grabbing each others elbows and we just looked into each other's eyes, and then we broke apart. He was in shock I'm sure, but his head was still on. Other people started getting out of their cars and I sort of drifted off - even before the cops came. I had a career to start. Should I have taken it as an omen?
My first job was at Borders, Perrin and Norrander. I'd ride my bike for take the bus. Pete Hatt, the CFO, hated that. I'd show up in a weatherproof jumpsuit, looking like a Gen-X otter. I think he wanted to pretend advertising was a respectable business and wanted me to wear a tie, or at least a polo shirt. Pete Hatt didn't understand advertising - not in the least, not the creative branding part - but Bill Borders, and the other two guys on the letterhead were very grateful to him because he'd figured out all the numbers and turned them into a real company. In gratitude, they allowed him to run the Seattle office - into the ground as a turned out.
But that's another story. (henceforth, BTAS).
Anyway, one of the wonders of my life - that may not impress other people but always impresses me - is that I ever did anything. That I ever got a job. That I ever left Seattle. That I ever learned to present to people. I was so terrified, and anxiety-prone and fearful - maybe the biggest fear of my life has always been fear of not looking like I know what I'm doing. Fear of looking stupid. That's what kept me from every learning to surf or ski. I think if I hadn't been able to play basketball in my backyard, or hadn't been able to play bass in my room, with my jury-rigged system where I could play along with the band - I don't know if I'd have been able to do it. And what's the real fear? Of being laughed at. The rule is, I can make fun of myself, but don't you dare. I know I don't have a big dick, but no one else better point that out. Or the fact that I have fat feet, thick legs, I'm short, pudgy, whatever. As a kid, my self-image wasn't great.
Oh, and fuck you world.
That was the thing about Bob Vynne, right? - that I was writing about yesterday (and may or may not have lost because the computer won't turn on). He was at ease because he was physically imposing. Us little guys - no wonder we're ill at ease - the world is a scary, threatening place. No wonder I have a chip on my shoulder. Always compensating.
I've always been terrified of physical altercations and violence, though like all boys my age, I had fascination with boxing - thanks to Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier and George Foreman - and Howard Cosell.
Howard Cosell, with his distinct elocution, was the narrators of my childhood. Howard Cosell, along with Dan Meredith and Frank Gifford - called Monday Night Football - and Cosell called all of the Heavyweight fights. His interviews and interactions with Muhammad Ali were legendary, and always entertaining.
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As a kid, I really liked my hot wheels. And legos. I never really enjoyed following directions, building models, but rather, I enjoyed creating systems, setting up parameters and watching how things end up. for Example, let's create a bracket, and race the hot wheels - sometimes on tracks, or even down the side that the park. We even had graphite that we would spray into their wheels to make the go faster (that I remember, worked initially but then would gum up the works). We had Hotwheels and Matchbox cars. The Matchbox cars weren't as cool and were more cheaply made but there was one that was always the fastest and got the place of honor, in the pecking order in the rack I kept them in, in ranked order of speed. I think it was a Ferrari or something. Many of the games I played were more like experiments. For example, I would build vehicle out of legos and then drive them off the top of the stairs and see which one would fall apart the least. In this way, I discovered that if you want an object to endure, it needs to have the least number of protruding elements and a minumum of unreinforced surfaces. Eventually, I settled on a cube as the unbreakable shape - probably because you can't build a smooth sphere out of legos - the building blocks themselves define the most durable shape, itself a block.
I'm still the same way. I have little interest in controlling outcomes, but rather, I enjoy setting up parameters - a system of input and if/then statements - and then seeing what will happen. This has served me well at times, and not so well at times. It gives me an ability to roll with the punches, and a marathoner's ability to endure - but in situation where a controlled outcome is demanded, I've come up short. I'm not big on finishing things - novels, ads, whatever - because if the ending doesn't naturally emerge from the system I've set up, or I get distracted, bored, uninspired or simply forget - then it won't happen.
Specifically, I've really fucked myself over at Merkley. That's the sort of place that required iron fisted (yet pleasant) creative direction.
BTAS.
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Recently my aunt sent me a box of pictures and other crap from my parents house. You really need to be careful what you save. Nostalgia has a scent - like the ratty carpet in an old folks home, mildewed greeting cards. But at any rate, there were report cards in there from Junior High school. And it was a reminder that I didn't always do well in English. I had straight A's in Math - which was individualized progress, and I loved that - I remember my teacher was David Humphrey's and he had cool, swept back 70's hair and an easy manner, a relaxed smile as I turned in my work. On the other hand, I had bad grades in English - because I just couldn't wrap my head around diagramming sentences, etc. So this was sort of backwards from what I would have thought.
I've always been attracted to "flow." Basketball, when the game flows. A band that improvises. I tried to explain to the little girls I was coaching in basketball that sports could be like dance - and they thought I was crazy. But when you know what you're doing, and you're tapped into the creative source, that's when you're closest to the Divine, in my experience. Making, with help from the maker.
I felt that flow when I was playing floor hockey. I don't think I ever could dribble well enough to feel it playing basketball. I think I was talented at sailing - maybe not world-class, not in dinghies, I didn't have an affinity for the physicality of small boat sailing, I preferred keelboats. I did have a facility for upwind tactics - I could see the board and all the angles in my head. In addition, I have the ability to concentrate with complete focus while steering or trimming sails, without taking my eyes off the tell-tails. Sailboat racing is a sport of constant adjustment. You're never actually completely in tune - not in light air, anyway. Between the infinite variables of wave action, current, wind strength and direction and the momentum of your boat, you can always tweak something to be further optimized. I like that about sailing.
Regrets: I really feel I should have sailed instead of playing basketball, which was dumb. But no one was really guiding me. No big brother, non-communicative father with baggage, mom with baggage. At a very basic level, there was always something awkward between my mother and I. Now that she's getting sort of drifty, it's not really worth addressing, but I can do the math - I know damn well she missed her period, and my Dad and mom ran off to White Fish Montana to ski and get married. My sister says that she used to sit in church and just cry and cry - because she had sinned. It could be my imagination, but could this be part of the tension, ambivalence? That I was an unplanned pregnancy? I'm not saying that I wasn't spoiled rotten - I just think my mom is sort of a romantic and maybe she was hard on herself - she wanted to have a wedding in a church.
My Dad, on the other hand, couldn't give a squirrel's tail. He grew up getting Christian Science down his throat, and all he got from that was a propensity to not eat aspirin when he had a hangover. I found in another box a letter to his mother about my Mother - announcing that he was heading off to Montana to marry my mom - and he was definitely smitten and was aware that he had lucked out.
At any rate, it's very possible that I'm reading too much into this - but I have zero recall of any instance physical affection from my mother. We were really good buddies - we would go to the library and go to Dick's Drive-In - and I absolutely loved these dates we had, but I don't remember her as warm in any way. Great memories, but here's the deal: I know how the story ends - me sitting here, insecure, unhappy, scared of my own shadow - it's a natural instinct to want to trace it to its source. The wisdom and insight of the psychiatric model is to look at Family of Origin stuff. I used to think that I'm the only one that's fucked up - look at Miss Perfect, my cheerleader sister - but I don't really see it that way now, either. I see her as super effed up, honestly. I mean (like me) she has this great life (beautiful children, kind, ambition clearly successful and visionary husband) and still she's all torqued out and has to be on anti-depressants.
Is it nature? Nurture? Kooky genes? We used to laugh our fucking asses off. What the fuck. I want to run in the grass as night falls with the scent of warm nature in my nostrils, feet flying, limbs free as a glide across the tips of the grass.
Not free.
We are the mirror image, now. I could say the same.
I choose battles and then complain.
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My parents weren't really into providing chores. They were into guilt. Like, I'm going to do all this stuff and basically you're a mess and it's my job to clean up your mess. I tried to address this and give my kids chores. But this ain't a farm or Bonanza or Leave it to Beaver and we had triplets and we were outnumbered. My son was just like me - never wanted to do anything unless he was getting paid. I would ask my mom if there were any "money jobs" when I was ten or eleven; I was saving money to go to Europe. (I got to go to Switzerland with mom and dad when I was eleven; my sister did not. She probably still resents this. Ha.)
I guess when I was teenager I got an allowance and I would mow the lawn. Which I hated because I was allergic to grass and there was always dog shit on the lawn that would make me dry heave. When I was growing up, people never cleaned up after their pets. Which was literally super shitty because we had a house on the corner. Sometimes we'd look out the window and some neighbor would be just letting his dog lay a big steamer, like yeah, doh-dee-doh, just going for my evening constitutional, walking my shitty little dog and leaving a shit on your lawn. So if anyone thinks looking around today, that everything is really terrible and there's been no progress, I would disagree. People clean up after their pets now - and that's a good thing.
When my son would ask me for money before he did anything, it would annoy me - because I was the same way. I wish I'd been more generous of spirit. I wish I'd had more simple gratitude and expressed it - for the food my parents put on the table - for everything they did to raise us.
My Mom was always vacuuming. It was like, her therapy or something. Or maybe it was driven by guilt, because she knew I had asthma, and we still had the cat.
I can remember when I was later in my teenage years, if I didn't get up by noon she would start running the vacuum, and bang into my door as if to say "oh, did that wake you up?" So sorry.
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My first "real" paying job was at the park across the street. I was the groundskeeper for the softball field, and kept score of the men's league games. In the winter I was a volunteer coach and also the scorekeeper for adult league games. I think there's a whole story here about "the sprinkler incident" that came up earlier. I think I made maybe 4.25 and hour - who knows. Minimum wage back then was maybe 3.35 an hour.
Another regret - while we're on the subject.
I was offered a job at Penny Lane records, and I didn't take it. That could have been so cool - i would have met the right kind of people and been mentored in the right way - people like Scott McCaughey of the Young Fresh Fellows, and later, REM. It was partially just ego, I think? Dario - or whoever - what the fuck, was making more money than me and I couldn't think of making minimum wage - but they said I'd get discounts on records. Instead I working at fucking Chef's Campers.
"Hey College Boy."
(bitter worker dumps metal shaving on the ground)
"What - gotta give the janitor something to do, right?"
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I gotta short guy's resentment at just about everyone and just about everything. Getting bullied by black kids growing up. Getting bullied by uneducated construction fucks. Weak, small, little dick - all fed my insecurities. Like Bill Wilson said "I'd show the world I was important." I'm not sure if I was born with a chip on my shoulder but I can't remember not having one. Maybe it's something I got from my Dad. He always talked about how he was the smallest kid in his entire high school - he had to carry the homecoming queens crown. Can you imagine? Once I made a lighthearted comment about a Napoleon complex. He did not laugh.
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Yeah, so I ain't no Tolstoy and I ain't no Gandhi and I ain't no Thoreau. I'm not making an experiment and I don't want to change the world.
I've got an awareness of what it was like to be raised in my family but I got no problems with either of my parents, base-level, gut level. And I'm not doing that AA bullshit letting 'em off the hook gently "They did the best they could." The did a damn good job by any measuring, setting a good example, allowing freedom, and I'm damn glad my Father was who he was because it made me who I am. Unlike my sister, I have no desire to be "normal" - whatever that is.
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My Sister seems to be dealing with some sick-ass depression (at this writing, March 2022). It makes me understand and have compassion for my own struggles but also see my Father's struggles as he aged. I think it's genetic and blameless. Something is going on with brain chemistry - the fact that he felt so shitty and out of control and lashed out - now I see it as brave and inspiring. If he was dealing with this stuff (the writer takes his hands off of the keyboard and points at his head) without a program - I've got nothing but respect. That's rough.
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There's so much that my parents didn't tell me. So much my father didn't tell me - he just seemed to cycle around the same shit over and over again. My mom is, sadly, a caricature of that right now. It's hard to even write that out loud - but it's not like she's ever going to read it and it's just so damn sad. She's incapable of having a conversation. She nervously cycles from the weather, her walks, to how beautiful her 6 grandchildren are, to asking how they are doing and when their birthdays are - and then cycles through again, forgetting where they are, how many there are, what they're doing, how old they are and when their birthdays are.
Birthdays - Jesus. Looking through these boxes of pictures is to suffer through the ritualizing of one birthday after another. I don't know why it's depressing. I would have liked I guess - to have celebrated the other 364 days of kid life. That's it I guess. That's what we did with our kids - you know? We went to be beach. We played sports. Life wasn't just a series of candles to blow out.
And yet, what else is it.