Stars, Stripes and My Bedroom Massacre; Stories From Maybe Boomer

The doldrums of summer seem longer and hotter when you’re twelve. June days are whiled away in nervousness about the future. July is hotter, but as the month progresses, you feel less vulnerable somehow. By August, anxiety turns to excitement – you’re no longer an elementary school pip squeak, but big middle schooler, about to start fresh in a better school this fall, that is, if you don’t blow it. Better get ready.

I surveyed the entire space. With just a little help from Mom, maybe I could renovate my bedroom. Time had come to scrap the deplorable furnishings I once thought were cute during elementary school days: grandmother’s old and dirty hand-braided rug; the pastel, curlicue flower wallpaper; the orange curtains that looked like a Halloween costume massacre. What I really wanted was mod wallpaper, something resembling the big, bold, blue vertical stripes I’d seen on shirts the Beach Boys wore. Imagine having my entire room surrounded in stripes! Other guys my age probably had their bedrooms done up just this way. Now it was my turn.

To keep the momentum going, I asked Mom to buy some new wallpaper in exchange for my agreeing to help put it up.

It must have been the rare offer of labor that explained Mom’s drive to the wallpaper store that afternoon, the closest I’d ever come to riding shotgun in an ambulance. Anticipation was building. Modern wallpaper was meant to be.

Energized, I flashed through hundreds of wallpaper sample book pages with Mom, trying to find a design I liked.

As the hours passed, excitement waned, patience thinned, and the quality of selections deteriorated.

“How about this one, Michael?” she asked, her right hand displaying a light orange-striped pattern.

“Mom, I want wallpaper for a boy. This is for a boy’s room.”

“Oh, and look at this one,” a stupid pea-green stripe design. “And this one here is really something,” an implied stripe motif using tiny rabbits. “When you look closely, it’s really tiny little …”

“Mom, Mom, I’m not a girl.”

“Okay, then what is it you want? This?” Her hand slapped the sample sheet of eggshell white.

“No, Mom, I don’t want …”

“Then don’t use that tone of voice with me, young man. Now, what do you want?”

“I dunno, it’s not here, but it’s gotta be around somewhere.”

Ten minutes more and the search was done.  I’d given in. One of her designs won. I hated myself.

A week later, I stared at thin, tiny, microscopic, vertical baby-blue stripes surrounded by large Revolutionary War battle scenes pasted all over my bedroom walls. I knew Mom suffered from Colonial Stylism – the pervasive affliction of many sixties housewives – but this had gone too far. As our home decorator, she’d colonialized everything: pillows, couches, mantle piece decorations, probably her own underwear, and now my room had been captured and sterilized.

Johnny Tremained-out, I didn’t want anyone to witness this massacre – ever, particularly guy friends. What could have been a place to share with them was now a museum of Boston Tea Party scenes. I felt half-dead realizing all my years ahead would be spent gaping at deadly rifles, horses, ships, whips, and men running around in three-cornered hats.

This excerpt is from Chapter Three, “Boys,” in my memoir, “Maybe Boomer.”

Crawling Through Summer When I Could Have Backflipped

The YMCA’s summer swim lessons sucked. They’d never compare to lighting firecrackers or jumping off the roof of our back porch for fun. I hated the long, sweaty bike ride to the Y, then quickly getting into my bathing suit, taking a shower, and waiting in the claustrophobic, damp, echo-filled indoor pool for our mean instructor to yell at us.

“In my Tadpoles course, you will learn the crawl stroke. It’s that simple. Anyone who cannot demonstrate strong crawl stroke technique will not pass my class.”

Is he kidding? I’m still shivering from the shower, and I’ve had ten minutes to recover. All I want to do here is swallow as little water as possible and never have to throw up.

For most of our first lesson, the instructor lined us up in the water to learn the leg kick. The following week, he drilled us on the crawl stroke, repeating several times how the arm motion had to work in precise tandem with our breathing.

After obeying his strict guidelines, my attitude changed. Maybe I was ready to put all the components together into one stroke and swim like other kids.

On the third week, I watched four other classmates swim to the other side and back, performing the crawl stroke adequately. It was my turn now. Standing in the water along the wall, I took one last breath and thrust my body forward into the chlorine sea of opportunity.

The first three strokes went very well. Wow. If I’d already gone halfway across the pool on just three strokes, I’d get to the other side and back with strength to spare.

The fourth and fifth strokes weren’t as spectacular. By the sixth stroke, my head surfaced for air whenever it wanted. My leg strokes took vacations. My arms worked anything but in tandem with my feet or my breaths. Remembering how and when to do all these motions together seemed too hard. My mind had turned to mush. Fortunately, however, I did not throw up.

I hated rules. I hated lessons. They were always complicated. I craved freedom and wanted to have fun like I did on Saturday afternoon family outings at the pool. Don, Doug, Cathy, and Mom would scatter to different areas of the pool to swim, but I’d sink straight to the water’s bottom and sit. Holding my breath for half-minute periods at a time, I’d linger in the clean, sun-warmed water to play with the little rocks on the pool’s bottom that weren’t supposed to be there. I enjoyed life away from lifeguards, swim instructors, and spazzy kids who hovered just above me, not to mention Don, Doug and Cathy who – having made it all the way to the Minnows class echelon – annoyed me with their swimming and diving prowess. They weren’t the type to appreciate things like dangerous tobogganing and jumping off bikes, so we never talked much about sports. In fact, whenever whistled out of the pool for Adult Swim sessions, I sat by the pool’s edge with my siblings in silence, sucking SweetTarts, wondering why adults chose to do grueling laps when instead they could backflip off the high dive and crash in the water back first.

I guess we all know now why adults don’t backflip off the high dive and crash in the water back first. That would hurt.

But nothing like the pain of swim lessons.

The excerpt above is taken from the chapter, “Competition,” in my memoir, “Maybe Boomer.” Check out the “Stories From Maybe Boomer” archives tab for more posts including memoir excerpts. 

 

Remember This? Splendiferous Summer Camping and the Family Ties That Bound

One Friday morning in August of ‘65, we packed all our clothes and gear into the Plymouth station wagon to head off to Thurmont, Maryland, and a camping area in the mountains called Crow’s Nest Lodge.

Mom – setting civilized rules from the get go – declared dried fruit as the official family snack food for the weekend. Oh, great. Flatulence City. Steadily munching on dried apricots in a vehicle that had no air conditioning would be suicide.

Well, ha! Talk about eating her words. Mom barfed all her dried fruit snacks only an hour into the drive.

By the time we’d set up our gear at the site, I’d already begun to see what it meant to live in the wild outdoors.

With camping, Mom now had the beauty of nature in which to feed the family, do the dishes, pick things up, and take care of the kids. Similarly, Dad could set up the tent and go straight to reading the newspaper to the sound of bucolic bees and whippoorwill. It was beautiful to watch both my parents unwind in the out-of-doors, particularly Mom, who got away from unnecessary modern conveniences like pillows, clothes washers, chairs with backs, and flush toilets to become one with our forefather’s bygone days of outhouse living.

Dad was a natural in the outdoors with his talent for knowing just how to erect the two-hundred-twenty pound quarter-inch-thick canvas army-style six-man box tent that when fully constructed looked strikingly like a cinder block.
And I noticed how Mom brought the same cooking skills with her from home to the campsite. At dinner Friday night, her meals cooked over the Coleman camp stove were as brittle and overdone as ones charred on our electric range at home. I picked at my food, trying to separate the blackened parts from areas that still retained some semblance of color.

To truly scar my first camping experience, I discovered I was a high maintenance sleeper who repelled a sleeping bag at night – I actually woke up Saturday morning bound by rope. What? Maybe I did wiggle a bit, but rope? I was too sleepy to remember this rodeo, but come daylight, the memory of Dad sloughing it off by saying it was all part of roughing it in the wild rang a little hollow.

Then, after Saturday night’s dinner of Mom’s Crow’s Nest special of very baked beans and scorched franks, I filled up on real food – Jiffy Pop. It was not only satisfying, but shaking the aluminum encased platter of corn kernels over an open flame was a metaphysical experience for me. By ten o’clock, I was still there, igniting everything short of the picnic table. Eventually, with all wood articles incinerated, I burned wax, Play-Doh, foil and anything I could get my hands on, all as if I could burn my varied anxieties away.

Sunday morning, loosening myself from rope once more, I heard raindrops hit the tent roof. Scrambling to get out of the tent as fast as I could, I saw how the entire campsite had been protected from soggy wetness by a huge tarp that completely covered it.

Hallelujah. I knew Dad had to be good for something someday.

As the rain fell harder, the tarp began to leak. Drops of water plopped into the bowl of milk that had already drenched my cornflake breakfast. Everyone ate, but no one talked. Just plop, plop, dink, plop, plop.

When my sister, Cathy, couldn’t take the silence anymore, she turned on her transistor radio. As Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party” screamed out, Mom frantically spun the dial for relief, finding the only other audible, stable voice – the local weatherman.

“The National Weather Service has just announced a severe weather bulletin for Thurmont and the surrounding area…. ”

Mom flipped off the radio and, along with Dad, decided it was time we pack up all of our belongings into the Plymouth and head home.

During the long, lackluster drive back, I reminisced the weekend experience.

Camping wasn’t fun. I hated rain. I hated commodes. And I hated our tent, the biggest six ring circus on Earth. Not only was there my rope fiasco, but the tent had been too small for everyone’s sleeping bags, blow-up mattresses, and clothes left strewn all over the musty floor. The only thing that was remarkable about the weekend was how each of us tiptoed through every one of these articles and managed to never touch them or another Andberg for two entire days.

I felt an inexplicable but strong urge to strike back, as if to swing in the air at everything but hit nothing. That’s because there was nothing solid to hit. Everything lurked somewhere below the surface in my world. In venturing out into the wilds of dangerous woodland with basically only tents, flashlights and Jiffy Pop, I’d been afraid of change. As it turned out, camping wasn’t any different than being at home. In fact, the saddest thing of all was that there was no change.