Part Two - Blaming the Excellent. Music is the key to everything with me. As long as I can remember I have reacted emotionally to music. The lyrics to my favorite songs have always felt intensely personal, as if I was already feeling that way and somebody else had trespassed just enough to find it and set it to music. Maybe most everyone feels that way... I don't know. All I know for sure is that I always felt a special connection to the songs I loved that I felt like others wouldn't or couldn't "get," at least not the way I got them. And I certainly loved a strange mix of tunes. By the end of grade school my favorites included AC/DC and FOREIGNER, as well as the soundtracks to ANNIE and GREASE. (This makes much more sense to me now, but I already know how this story goes...) And at times when I would hear, on the radio or at the roller skating rink, any of the songs that have now come to be known as classic New Wave, I felt like there must be something more out there specifically for me and whatever others out there like me that may exist. Maybe I wasn't aware of it consciously, but my subconscious was paying attention and taking notes; preparing me for the days that music would change my life forever. Days that were not all that far away. But they were still at least 4 or 5 years off, and that's half a lifetime for a ten year old. So there I was in grade school. (I guess I will dwell just a little longer on those years.) I was a small kid, not strong or fast or particularly good at much of anything physical. I was told I was loud and hyperactive, but the source of that observation was most often my mother and I cannot dismiss the possibility that she was negatively biased towards me in this regard (if only because she had so many other things to deal with that could have caused the energy coming off a young boy caught up in a Star Wars induced imagination frenzy to seem "excessive.") Whatever the case may be, that aspect of my personality did not seem to lend itself to any abilities that would be considered useful to a scrawny kid who couldn't even finish the long run in gym class and got picked last for every team sport. Add to that the fact that my family was poor and caught up in my brother's declining situation and you could well have had the makings for a wreck-at-life of a kid with no friends and dim prospects for any kind of future. Thankfully, this was not the case. I had a lot of friends. I don't think I was aware of it at the time, but I seemed to possess an amount of social skill that allowed me to transcend the usual pecking order BS that should have relegated me to outcast status. I definitely knew kids that weren't so lucky: kids who were relentlessly picked on or even shunned outright. Those kids were usually my friends as well. I always felt bad for them, and could almost always find something that I liked about any of them. I hated it when kids would pick on other kids. I don't mean the good-natured ribbing of friends; that was usually a good time. What I hated was the belittling of kids that were not friends in a truly mean spirited way. I realized that it was normal and common, but I still hated it. When I would get picked on, it usually didn't go on for long, and the person instigating it would invariably apologize. Enemies would become friends, and it rarely if ever worked the other way. The only kids that I really disliked were the bullies, and there weren't that many of them. Those that there were did not get any attention from me, aside from the occasional talking my way out of a fight. There were really only two "mean" kids that I remember hating, and because there were so few to dislike I really hated them intensely. (One of these ended up becoming one of my closest friends in junior high and being one of the more important influences in my life, but that chapter is still to come.) I mention these things because they have pretty much never changed. I am still very much that kid to this day, albeit possessed of a few more worthwhile skills. I still endeavor to find something to like about everyone I meet, and I still hone my hatred for those few who have earned it to a razor sharp edge. This is just who I am and was born to be. I never consciously chose to possess this level of empathy, and I doubt that I ever could have changed it had I wanted to. Best Birthday Cake Ever. In any realistic examination of my childhood I would be remiss were I not to include an account of the incredible run of luck I had when it came to teachers. From the 2nd to the 5th grade, I was blessed with two of the greatest teachers to ever grace a classroom with their presence: Educators of such high caliber that nearly all others to come after were paled by comparison. This also had the effect of rendering most subsequent teachers far less effective at inducing my increasingly contrarian brain to learn anything willingly. It seemed to me that if they didn't feel like taking the time to teach well, I probably didn't need to make them look better than they were by learning well. This was certainly not something that I could have explained at the time, but the rare occasion in my later school years in which someone with some spark of genuine educational desire was able to pull excellence from me does support my theory in retrospect. Still, I don't blame the average for being mediocre: I spend just about as much time swimming in the middle of the stream as anyone. No, in this instance I blame the excellent for instilling unrealistic expectations in my naive little mind. And I wouldn't change any of it for anything in the world. I walked into my first day of 2nd grade terrified. Mr. Hart was to be my teacher this year, but somewhere along the way I had picked up the idea that teachers were supposed to be women. I assumed that a male teacher would be mean. To make matters worse this Mr. Hart had a beard, and I was still a little freaked out by beards. I didn't know what to expect, but I had a 7 year-olds certainty that I probably wouldn't survive it. Mr. Hart turned out to be the single greatest teacher I have ever known. By the end of my first day in his class most of my trepidation had subsided. By the end of the first week, I loved him like family. He was perhaps the kindest man I have ever met. He taught us extremely interesting things, and made me want to learn the boring stuff just so I wouldn't feel like I had let him down. He had a way of listening to a kid like you were actually a real person, something that I had not experienced from other adults, and would usually find a way to answer a question in a way that made you feel smart for having asked it. He read us stories every day, and did excellent voices for all of the different characters. Best of all, he took us on a field trip every week. Good field trips. Sometimes AMAZING field trips. Long hikes up mountains to look at old abandoned mines and camps, or along beaches to collect rocks and shells and dead sea animals. We once walked for hours to get to a place where we could chip fossils out of the side of a cliff with rock hammers. And the in-class learning was almost as good. A skunk once got trapped and killed in Mr. Hart's garage door, so he brought it in and spent the day dissecting it in front of the class. Afterwards he carved a skunk-shaped block of wood that was used to display the animal's hide in the classroom for the rest of the year. This was EDUCATION. How could I have known that it would rarely, if ever, be like this again? A Typical Example of Quality Classwork. The next year I was one of a handful of 3rd grade students who were placed in a split class made up primarily of 4th graders. I was happy that my friend Billy was one of those older kids in the class. I was also happy that an extremely sweet first-year teacher named Miss Emmons was running the show. She was nowhere near as interesting as Mr. Hart, but she was hilarious, and that mostly made up for it. And we did have Billy in the class to provide excitement from time to time. (Just see the previous page for some examples of his shenanigans.) Miss Emmons read a lot to the class, and encouraged a lot of reading. She did a wicked Miss Piggy impersonation, and she took us out for ice cream sundaes when passed our timed arithmetic tests. She was just generally fun, and we all loved her. So in the 4th grade I had some lady named Mrs. Batten. I showed up on my first day to discover that Miss Emmons had been married over the summer and I would get to have her again under this new name. Life was good for another year. My 4th Grade Class. I'm the kid in the front with the HAN SOLO t-shirt. 5th grade. Guess who? Mr. Hart again! He had stepped up to teaching 5th, and I started the last great year of my childhood. Everything that had made him awesome in the 2nd was still in play, but now that we were all older he had decided that we could handle even more. Two things stand out in my memory about this year in his class. One was The Woods. The Alderwood Elementary play area and sports field was, and I assume still is, surrounded by a fairly dense wooded area. We were forbidden by school policy from entering The Woods during recess. This seemed a silly rule to most of us, and was casually ignored despite it being a fairly serious violation. I knew every turn of every trail in those woods, and they were essentially Billy's back yard. There were probably good reasons for the school to not want us out of sight in a dark, wooded area two or three times a day while they were responsible for our well being, but we were pretty much too naive to consider such things. At some point Mr. Hart asked the class what things we thought were unfair, as the word "fair" was beginning to pop up more and more. The subject of the school rule about the woods was brought up, and the fact that most if us had now been playing in them for half of our lives so it seemed stupid that we couldn't during school hours. Mr. Hart listened to our arguments and made us this deal: we would be allowed to go into the woods during recess as long as we always without fail would return to the playground immediately if he blew his whistle. We agreed, and we never lost this privilege. He listened to us and made us a deal, and we honored it. I was ten. I am now 36. To this day I have rarely encountered anyone this reasonable. The second item that stands out, and the last story I will tell here, is the one that people have found the most shocking when I have related it in the past. Mr. Hart set up a "Frontier Week" at the school for our class. For one week we would prepare, and on Friday we would dress and eat like pioneers. On that Thursday, the boys and girls were separated. The girls were to do "women's work," like churning butter and whatever. Mr. Hart had something else entirely in mind for us boys. He led us out into those woods that we all knew so well behind the school to a place where we found an axe, a chopping block, and a number of live chickens. These chickens were to be the main course in the next day's "Pioneer Dinner," but first they needed to be prepared. Some of the boys held the chickens in place on the block, while other boys did the chopping. I was a holder, and to be honest I was a little frustrated by this. If there was going to be chopping, I wanted to chop. My classmate Donny chopped the chicken I held, and he wasn't entirely thrilled about the idea. I remember clearly that he said, "go to heaven, guy" right before bringing the axe down. Of course, being boys, we were all very curious to see if the chickens would actually run and flap around with their heads cut off. We were not disappointed. Afterwards we plucked the chickens and got them ready for the girls to cook. And the next day we ate them. True story. Straight up. Mr. Hart was the greatest teacher in the world, and so much of the blame regarding my lack of interest in my education in the years that followed can be laid squarely at his feet. God bless him. I could keep talking about my childhood experiences and fill page after page, but that is not the point of this site and so I will have to save those tales for another day. It is time to move on to Junior High, what we called Middle School, and the new friends and experiences that would set the stage for everything to come.

Click here for: Part Three - Fear and Limitations.