Not Ice, and Other Stories

 

 

When I was a wee small child, I got a lot of things wrong.

Until I was about seven or eight, I had recurring ear infections, so I don’t know whether or not that played a role, causing me to mishear things. It sounds logical, so I’m sticking with it.

My oldest brother has always been amused by things I say, and several people in my adult life have suggested I try stand-up comedy.

The thing is, I don’t actually know how to write comedy. I just know that sometimes the things I misinterpret, or just the way I say something makes other people laugh. I don’t think it would work if I tried to do it on purpose.

Part of the reason some things happened was my total failure to ask questions when I didn’t understand something.

Why, you might ask? It wasn’t shyness or fear of being laughed at (I was laughed at quite a bit growing up). It was simply that for most of my early childhood, when I asked my mother, “Why?” about anything, she would reply with, “Because I’m your mother, and I said so.”

So I knew the answer. It didn’t solve anything for me, but it taught me to not bother asking.

When I was small, we had a very silly way of interrupting my mother when she was talking to another adult. Now, the three of us knew that interrupting adult conversations was a huge no-no, but in an emergency – and what isn’t an emergency to a child? – I would stand quietly for a few seconds and then, if they didn’t stop to pay attention to me, I’d say, “Excuse me, Mother, but the house is on fire.”

Granted, I thought that was the craziest thing in the world to say, and tremendously funny when I was three or four. But of course, I didn’t ask, “Because I’m your mother and I said so.”

There actually was a history to that one. My eldest brother came running in excitedly once when he was small, saying, “Mother, Mother, Mother!” while she was having a conversation. She excused herself from the adult conversation and turned to my brother and said, “You do not interrupt when adults are having a conversation. I don’t care what’s going on. If the house is on fire, you say, ‘Excuse me, Mother, but the house is on fire,' and then wait.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, she realized how ridiculous that statement was, and she and her friend both had difficulty keeping a straight face. But she solemnly went on. “Now, what do you want?”

It turned out that whatever it was my brother thought was such an emergency wasn’t for an adult. But because of that, he told my other brother when he was old enough to interrupt that that’s how it was done, and the two of them passed it on to me. They didn’t pass on the entire story, only what you had to say to my mother in order to interrupt. I was in school before I learned the whole story.

Another thing I was told as a child was to look up and down before crossing the street. This was the single most ridiculous thing I had ever heard. But again, “I’m your mother…” kept my questions unasked.

Common sense told me to look in both directions before crossing the street. But up and down? Why? Were there helicopters and submarines just waiting beyond my peripheral vision to kill me?

However, an obedient child, I dutifully looked at the sky and the ground before I crossed the street, while secretly looking to my left and right so I wouldn’t be hit by a car.

My mother thought I was being silly or a smart Alek or whatever she thought, but her complete lack of curiosity as to why I would do such a thing is a marvel. Maybe by the third child mothers are worn out with trying to understand their kids. Or maybe I was just too weird, and she didn’t want to go there.

Prayers were another fun place for misheard words. Being Catholic, we had a whole repertoire of formal prayers from which to choose. Somehow, The Lord’s Prayer I learned without a glitch. The Hail Mary had a word I wasn’t familiar with (womb) so I thought everyone was saying, “And blessed is the fruit of thy wound, Jesus.” How Jesus was considered a wound was anyone’s guess. I assumed it was something to do with the wounds from being on the cross, since that’s the only way he was pictured in school. But what he had to do with fruit, I didn’t get until several years later.

The Hail Holy Queen had several wrong words in my version. I would pray, “Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy, Our life, our sweetness and our hope. To thee do we cry poor vanished (banished) children of Eve, To thee to we send up our sides (sighs) mourning (I thought it was morning, though) and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then most gracious advocate, thy knives of mercy toward us (thine eyes), and after this, our exile, show unto us the fruit of thy wound, Jesus.” It didn’t strike me as terribly odd, since prayers had lots of old fashioned words, so I just thought it was more of the same. Besides, so much was in Latin in those days, it could’ve been something Latin.

Then there was the Pledge of Allegiance, which I got mostly right. “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for witches stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Since I didn’t understand half the words, putting witches into the mix was perfectly normal. There had been witch trials, after all.

But the best was a sign I saw at the bottom of the church parking lot, stapled to the telephone pole. I saw it every Sunday on the way to church. I had only recently learned to read, but I could only see the top line to read from a distance. While the parking lot also doubled as our recess yard in school (people who attended schools with real, actual playgrounds shudder that we played on a sloping lot of asphalt) we weren’t allowed to go close to the road, and the sign was right beside the road.

I was proud of my reading skills, but what I read made no sense to me. At the top of the sign were the letters N-O-T-I-C-E. Now, I only knew three and four letter words so far when I saw that sign. So, one fine Sunday morning I said, “Not Ice. What does that mean?” My parents didn’t know what I was talking about, so I pointed to the sign. “It says, ‘Not Ice.’ That doesn’t make any sense. What does it mean?”

My mother started to laugh, and it was several minutes before she had herself under enough control to teach me a new word: Notice.

Now, in our family, whenever something doesn’t make any sense, someone is bound to say, “Not ice, huh?”

I’ve had friends who have asked if we laughed constantly when I was growing up. No, I was a rather serious child, actually. They couldn’t believe these things happened without gales of laughter.

The end of childhood didn’t end my occasional failure to understand.

I had a rather untalented teacher in high school chemistry. She was essentially a warm body with a science degree, but chemistry wasn’t it. The only way she could explain anything to do with chemistry was word for word out of the book.

Can you put it another way? She could not. Unfortunately, not all of us could understand the concepts quite the way the authors of the book wrote them.

When the time came for our first exam, more than half of the class failed the exam. This was a class that now would be classified college prep or AP. The students in this class were not ones who were used to failing anything. Ever.

We reviewed the questions, and one in particular had people asking repeatedly for her to explain the concept. She did, using the same words over and over.

I have been convinced throughout most of my life that I have a short-circuit somewhere in my brain between my understanding of some things and my conscious mind. Either that or I’m possessed by demons.

This situation intervened just at that moment in class.

I raised my hand and asked, “Do you mean – ” and I launched into a 5 minute explanation of whatever concept was escaping my classmates. I used totally different words than the teacher had, actually saying it a different way. All around me I heard, “Oh, now I get it!” and “Is that what she meant?” The lights had come on. My teacher’s face lit up like the understanding of her students.

“Yes! Yes, that’s it!” she replied.

I wrinkled my face and said, “I don’t understand that.”

How I managed to not get sent to the principal’s office or at the very least kicked out of class, I don’t know. I wasn’t being a smart Alek. I truly didn’t understand any of what I’d just said. It was as if an alien was speaking through me. I guess my totally mystified look was the only thing that kept the teacher from sending me out. Instead, she angrily told the girl in front of me to explain back to me what I’d just said.

To this day I can’t do chemistry.  The closest I can come is a cooking recipe, but how it works is complete magic. Mine is not a chemically-oriented mind. I’m convinced my chemistry teacher ruined me for that science, and if I’d had a competent teacher, I might have actually understood the subject. Or not.

I had a similar experience regarding electricity. A friend was trying to explain how electricity works, and try as he might, he couldn’t impart that wisdom to me. He explained in several different ways. I finally explained it back, and he told me I was right. Again, I told him it didn’t make any sense.

He was exasperated and had run out of different ways to explain it. Someone who lived in the same house he did happened to come in and heard our discussion. That person then explained it to me, and I somehow understood what he was saying. His words weren’t that different, but enough that I got the concept. The second person was English, and my friend insisted that the only reason I understood was the accent.

Of course, then my friend followed up by saying, “Picture the wire like a faucet. Water runs through the faucet. Electrons do the same in a wire.  At that point (mind, I was an adult, if you consider someone in their 20s an adult) I picked up a wire, closed one eye and squinted at the end of the wire.

“Where’s the hole?”

I never did manage to live that one down. But my friend got to see firsthand how my brain short-circuit works. And while it’s frustrating to me, it certainly provides my friends with a certain level of amusement.

 

 

Kids Today

 

 

“Kids aren’t like they used to be.”

“You can’t raise kids the way you were raised because the world isn’t what it was when you grew up.”

“It takes a village to raise a child.”

These sentiments have been chanted for years now, and I don’t think they’re entirely true.

Kids haven’t changed over the decades. What has changed is adults’ attitudes toward them and the adult expectations. They are no longer seen as moldable pieces of clay without individual personalities. Adults don’t treat them with the “Do not speak until spoken to” rules we were given, and they accept that children have opinions. They’re no longer told, “You’ll do it and you’ll like it,” as we frequently heard on “Leave It to Beaver.”

Instead, they’re allowed to have opinions, and they’re listened to, sometimes far beyond what their experience and knowledge indicate they should be.

In the dark ages, when I was a child, I was more likely to get a backhanded smack on the mouth if I tried to argue once I was told to do something. No, I didn’t come from some repressed family. Most kids in my era had a similar upbringing. And the backhanded slap was more of a flick that startled rather than hurt.

My opinion was only considered when I was choosing what to eat in a restaurant, or what I wanted for Christmas. Even then it was taken into consideration as part of what my parents could afford. When my mother took me clothes shopping (before about age 10), she shopped for the clothes, and once she had decided what clothes were in her price range and what style she liked, I was consulted on which of three or four items I wanted and what color – as long as it wasn’t purple, since my mother hated purple. As I got older, I had more choices, but she had the final say on price range and level of modesty until I bought my own clothes, when I was finally allowed to choose purple. I was never without opinions and desires. They simply weren’t always taken into consideration.

So, it wasn’t kids that were different, it was what was acceptable behavior that changed.

As far as the world being different, yes it is. Of course there have always been differences according to where one was raised.

My parents grew up in the city. There was a certain sensibility one had living in the city that wasn't the experience in the suburbs or in a rural area. Most of my cousins grew up in suburban areas that were more citified than my more rural suburban area, so they had more street smarts than I ever needed. I was seen as the unsophisticated country mouse who didn’t think ducks and chickens in the next yard was any big deal, but was impressed by sidewalks and street cleaners.

Our city parents moved to the suburbs ostensibly to have more room to raise a family, and demonstrate more prosperity than their first-generation parents. What was less apparent to us kids was our parents’ desire to stay in a white neighborhood as the cities became less segregated.

I’m not ashamed of where I grew up. I had no say in that decision. I think I missed opportunities for growth and understanding in my childhood because my parents saw racial segregation as somehow protecting their children. From what? I’ve never been clear on that.

And yes, we’ve thankfully moved beyond people being allowed to refuse to sell their house to someone of another race, so children are exposed to and more comfortable with people of other races and ethnicities. Even still, I heard a couple of high school students complain not long ago that there isn’t as much racial and ethnic diversity in our area as they would wish.

Many of my friends’ adult children are moving back to the city our parents couldn’t wait to flee.

As far as education, children don’t learn in the same way we did. They print and some don’t know cursive. They use chrome books and tablets and not copybooks and looseleaf. Their textbooks are often written in “soundbites” rather than full-length pages or double columns with few pictures. They sometimes sit in “pods” or around tables, sitting on therapy balls instead of chairs. They don’t sit in desks with the chair attached, in long rows facing a blackboard. Many kids today would ask what a blackboard is. (Psst: it's a white board that you use chalk on.)

But my generation was subjected to changes in the curriculum, too. Starting at about age 9 (4^th grade), we had this anomaly known as “modern math” in which we had to organize objects into sets and subsets. What this had to do with math, I still can’t fathom. I never used it in subsequent math classes, but for four years we wasted the first two months of school with a repetition of this nonsense before we got down to the business of learning arithmetic. And it’s only gotten worse, at least in the schools I’ve worked in in New Jersey.

A “new” method of setting up algebra problems made the subject more difficult for me until I finally got a teacher who taught algebra equations “the old fashioned way,” which was what clicked with me.

Education has always evolved, based on what subjects were necessary and what was no longer relevant.

But school education is not about raising children.  Teachers  aren’t in charge – even in religious schools – of forming a child’s behavior, values and empathy. That’s the parents’ job, although there are some who would prefer to dump all learning on the schools.

A teacher’s job is more difficult if parents don’t teach basic good manners and consideration of others’ rights and feelings. While a child needs to learn subtle differences in acceptable behavior in different environments, such as the classroom and the school yard, if the basics aren’t there, the subtleties will be meaningless.

It’s still the parents’ job to instill basic good behavior in their children, just as it was for our parents and grandparents.

So, yes, you can and should raise your child with morals and values and a sense of acceptable behavior. Maybe the morals and values are slightly different, but there are still some,  regardless of how “modern” society becomes.

I believe the greatest disservice we do to children is to raise them with an inflated, entitled sense of self and no manners.

And then we come to the village.

While it’s true that no man is an island, I wouldn’t want the village determining what sort of people my children would become – if I had children. As my mother told me when I went away to college, “I had 18 years to instill my values in you, and if I didn’t succeed, it’s a little late now.”

And the village’s values didn’t always align with what she wanted for me, which is why she taught me to fight against peer pressure. If I complained about not being allowed to do what “everyone else” was doing, she’d reply, “And if everyone else jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you jump off after them?” At the time, I didn’t know where Brooklyn was.

When I was a child, neighbors wouldn’t hesitate to correct anyone’s child who wasn’t behaving. But if you needed correction by the neighbors, you heard about it from your parents when they found out. As the parents saw it, they were being judged by your bad behavior.

I think neighbors trying that now might be in for a good telling off by some parents who think their children are too precious for correction. But they can still tell you to get off their lawn.

While the village was reinforcing what behavior was acceptable, it was your parents who had the final say. Now, sadly, many people don’t even know their neighbors, so the village suffers by not being allowed to help as the guardrails of society.

So, while each of these assertions has some level of truth to it, none is entirely true. We need the village to guide acceptable behavior, not to teach it. And while the world continues to change, kids are kids, and they can and should still be taught basic civility and manners because kindness and empathy never hurt anyone.

 

How I Spent My Summer Vacation

 

 

One of the more bothersome exercises of my childhood was the annual “How I Spent My Summer Vacation” essay we were required to write from about 4^th grade to 8^th grade.

Unfortunately, the only two times my family went on vacation during my childhood happened at the end of first and second grades, and we went to the same place both times.

“My family doesn’t take vacations,” doesn’t make for much of an essay. Hinting that we were too poor for vacations wasn’t something a not-very-popular child would willingly admit, although that’s what my mother would have me believe.

Years later, my brother and I were talking about our dearth of vacations, and he said it had little to do with money. My father simply didn’t like going on vacation.

I knew he hated going to the shore. As a result, I was 13 the first time I ever went to the shore, and it wasn’t with my family. A neighbor I used to babysit for invited me.

Days in the ocean and afternoons at the arcades on the boardwalk were payment for the one or two evenings of watching the kids while the grownups went out on the town without children in tow.

It was great, despite the worst case of sun poisoning I’ve ever had. Those were the days before sun blocks with SPF numbers.

Looking back, the grownups were taking a bit of a risk that probably wouldn’t happen now. In the late ‘60s a 13-year-old could babysit without question. But there were no mobile phones. In fact, I’m not sure there was a phone in the house they were renting. It wouldn’t have mattered. I had no idea where they were going, so there was no number for me to call in case of emergency except the police.

That’s a huge responsibility for a child barely into the teen years watching three children under the age of ten. But nothing happened, so I thought nothing of it.

I also had a good deal of responsibility for the two older children when we were at the beach (the youngest was an infant). I was in charge while they were in the water, although at least one adult was always nearby. I was more the entertainment so the adults could enjoy the beach.

At the time, what was being asked of me didn't seem like much, but  that responsibility now strikes me as too much for the child I was at the time. It’s what was expected then. I wouldn’t have traded in the chance to go to the shore for anything.

The only thing that marred the trip – aside from the pain of glow-in-the-dark, Santa-suit red skin – was a demand my mother had made of me. She didn’t know the neighbor all that well, since she hadn't been in the neighborhood a year. I’d spent that time babysitting for her once or twice a week. Still, my mother didn’t want to be beholden to someone she barely knew for my upkeep for two weeks. She gave me some money and told me not to let them pay for everything I did.

I tried paying for ice cream or amusement park rides, but they didn’t want me spending all my money when they had invited me. They didn’t understand. I thought my mother would be upset if I came home with all the money she gave me.

After being repeatedly refused the right to use my own money, I ended up one night crying in the bathroom. I was found out, and they thought I was homesick. Despite insisting I wasn’t, that’s what all the grownups believed. How humiliating! I was 13, after all, far too old to be homesick because of a two-week vacation. But I couldn’t tell them the real reason I was crying. That was a confidence between my mother and me.

Still, the following September, I finally had an essay to write. Of course, I left out the part about crying, and focused on the amusement park in Wildwood and jumping through waves in Cape May.

My childhood was pretty good, despite the fact that we didn’t go on vacations. We went to local state parks to swim and have picnics, and I had a few friends with swimming pools who sometimes invited me over. There was also one local creek (pronounced crick where I'm from) where we swam on weekends, and my brother sometimes took me with him to swim there during the week. (When I was older I went there on my own, another risky endeavor.)

There was always the hose in the back yard to cool off with on steamy days. On the not so hot summer days there were woods to explore and sometimes blackberries to pick.

I adored the days off from school from mid-June to Labor Day, days where there were no school requirements, when I could sit in my tree fort and read the books I wanted to read, or ride my bike all over the neighborhood.

There were days I accompanied my mother to the grocery store and learned about comparison shopping, and why some products were better to get as the brand name while others were just as good if you had the store brand. I learned estimating totals and reading labels, how to order lunchmeat at the deli counter – and my mother always wanted the American cheese sliced thin – and which aisles to find particular items.

In reality, those things would have been great to include in the summer vacation essay, so my teachers would know I hadn’t squandered my time in the summer. But I was looking for the glamorous vacation – or at least a week at camp – and came up empty. So I tried to glamorize days at friends’ pools and never mentioned the continuing education at the grocery store or the ecological education in the woods and state parks.

At 14 I had the ultimate summer vacation, not because of where I went, but because of how I went.

My aunt, who lived in a suburb of Chicago, was visiting some of our relatives in Philadelphia. During a family get-together, she invited me to come visit her family in Illinois.

As the youngest and only girl, whenever I wanted to do something, the answer was usually no. My parents wouldn’t be going, so the idea of my traveling alone halfway across the country was not likely. But parents can be surprising.

I would have to fly to Chicago alone. That kind of flight was expensive by my family’s standards. But we learned about a program the airline TWA had for teens up to age 21. It was called the 50/50 club (I still have my membership card, even though TWA no longer exists). A teen could fly for 50% off the ticket price. The ticket was stand-by, so I might have to wait for the next flight. But in 1969, especially midweek, mid-afternoon, it was generally expected that I could get on my chosen flight.

My mother took me to the airport, and my aunt would pick me up in Chicago. In those days before the first plane hijacking, family members could accompany the person flying right up to the boarding gate, no security or x-rays, and the traveler could be met at the arrival gate at the other end.

At 14, getting on the plane unaccompanied was exciting. I remember I had a window seat. I must have looked like a wide-eyed country bumpkin to the stewardesses – they all looked like my Barbie doll when she was wearing her stewardess uniform, only without the cotton ponytail – but at least I wasn’t a trouble maker. I don’t think I even took off my seat belt through the entire flight.

I arrived at O’Hare International Airport and started looking for my aunt. I had no idea where I was supposed to meet her. Since I didn’t see her, I began following the other passengers to baggage claim.

I had only gone a short distance when I heard my name called. I turned and came face-to-face not with my aunt, but with my uncle. He’d come in from a business trip and waited until my flight arrived to save my aunt the trip.

While the vacation itself wasn’t extraordinary, traveling solo sparked my love of travel. I spent a month with my relatives where five children – three boys and two girls – provided entertainment I didn’t normally have. At home, one brother was away attending university and the other was back from Vietnam, but still in the army.

Because we had always lived at least a state’s distance away from this set of relatives, I didn’t know these cousins as well as many of my other cousins. I did know that the oldest boy, who was a year younger than I was, hated me.

The girls were quite a bit younger than I, but we got along. I think most little girls enjoy it when an older cousin pays attention to them. We played games together and generally got to know one another. I didn’t have to worry about anyone making fun of me for playing with younger girls since they were cousins.

I also spent time playing with the two younger boys. The one who didn’t like me was away at scout camp or something through most of the time I was there.

The film Romeo and Juliette, with Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey came out that summer. I desperately wanted to see it. I imagine my aunt called my mother for permission – I’m fairly certain it was R rated, and I wasn’t old enough to go unless accompanied by an adult. She said she wanted to see if it was appropriate for her two eldest sons, and would I like to go with her to see it?

What an exciting afternoon! We had a great time, just the two of us, and I felt quite grown up because she thought I was mature enough to see the film. After seeing it, she decided the boys were too young.

As with most women I was either related to or otherwise close to at the time, I felt more comfortable talking with my aunt than I did with my mother. My aunt wasn’t the disciplinarian or the one who usually said no. She was also 10 years younger than my mother, and shared with me the distinction of being the youngest in the family and the only girl (and left-handed) – although she had four older brothers (one being my father), and I had two.

We talked about a lot of different things, and I felt comfortable around her, despite the fact that we had so seldom seen each other. She even recommended me as a babysitter to one of her friends whose regular babysitters were all busy one night. So, I even had the chance to make some money on my vacation.

My aunt went back east for a wedding one weekend, and my uncle took us all to the Milwaukee Zoo. He couldn’t believe that, at 14, I’d never been to the zoo, especially since I lived so close to the Philadelphia Zoo, the oldest one in the country. I told him my father always said if the zoo wanted me badly enough, they could come get me.

The real reason was that my mother was allergic to animal dander, although I don’t think dogs and cats bothered her. But never let the facts stand in the way of a good story.

I also saw the moon landing while I was at my aunt’s, as well as Prince Charles’ investiture as Prince of Wales. By the end of that day, I had his investiture speech memorized – I was quite the monarchist at the time.

After a month at my aunt’s, I returned home, a seasoned traveler. I had taken my first trip ever on a plane, and I’d done it alone.

Unfortunately, after such a monumental achievement, I was about to start high school, where the focus was on the writing of authors like Shakespeare, Ibsen, Dickens and Dostoyevsky, so having finally been armed with the fuel for the summer vacation essay, I didn’t get to write it.

My next plane trip wasn’t until seven years later, when I flew to England for a semester abroad. While I was technically with classmates then, once there I had to navigate life on my own.

The experience of solo travel and my parents’ trust in me to take such a trip by myself set me up to fearlessly travel abroad after college, and if I had no one to travel with, I would simply go alone. Probably because of my lack of going somewhere for vacation as a child, I took every opportunity to go places as an adult.

My mother was never comfortable enough to travel alone. Her biggest solo adventure was flying to Florida to visit my brother, where I took her to the airport and pointed her in the right direction in Philadelphia, and my brother collected her in Florida. She was a nervous wreck the whole flight.

My father grudgingly – probably due to ill health – went with us to Colorado twice to visit the same brother when he lived there, but my dad never really cared to travel. Since I have relatives scattered all over the U.S., his dislike of travel meant that I never met a fair few of my cousins until I was an adult -- and a couple I've never met.

My wanderlust is definitely not inherited from either parent, although both brothers have traveled to the limits of their purse strings. I sometimes wonder if the three of us are changelings left by the fairy folk, and somewhere three other sibling are living with a family that can’t understand their dislike of travel.