As I’ve mentioned all too often, my childhood was a time of terror. Nothing actually terrible happened, I just hated being a child, had no idea how the world worked, was afraid of almost every situation, and knew that, being a child, I was at the bottom of the human ladder.
Still, I thought now is as good a time as any to bring up a couple examples of those dread days. To me, they fit right in with the current world tune.
While I was living on Hastings Ave. in semi-rural Havertown, from age 4-7, I had no friends, but there were a very few kids I that I… played with? Flexible term.
That I did things with.
Donald lived down the block, same side of the street, on the way to the creek. He was a year or so older than me and, in retrospect, pretty much of a useless shit. We did things in the back yard I won’t go into, except to say that they often had to do with piss.
One day, down at the edge of the creek woods, he pissed on my leg. When I got home, my mother wondered why my shoe and sock were wet and, ummm, maybe smelled funny?
For some reason, I told her what had happened. I guess I couldn’t dredge up the proper lie, but it was stupid on my part. What I didn’t tell her was that he did it because I dared him to. Anyway, I was then forbidden ever to play with Donald again. [I did, but of course I was terrified of the possible consequences at home.]
The particular incident I’m getting to took place in Donald’s back yard but did not involve Donald. His family had bought a new refrigerator and the cardboard box was lying on its side back there with a big section cut out as a sort of hideout to loll inside.
This scene requires three additional characters: another boy, no memory who, sitting in the box with me, and two girls outside the box, holding us prisoner. The older girl was Barbara, who terrified me the most of any young human I knew. She lived on the corner of the block on the way to the creek.
The only direct encounter I had with her, prior to the box, was on her front porch while I was talking to her younger brother, David. She told me in no uncertain terms that I was never to talk to David without her permission, with threats both implied and specific. Apparently she had assigned herself David’s ownership.
Barbara had a thinner, younger associate, maybe my age – I don’t recall her name – who acted as her lieutenant. Anyway, this day, behind Donald’s, they camped outside the box and told us we were not allowed to leave.
We stayed.
Why would we have allowed that to happen? Were we physically afraid of them? I doubt it. For my part, I think it was the local manifestation of my overarching terror.
At some point Barbara had to go home – possibly to torture a small animal – placing her lt. in charge. I asked the lt. to let me exit the box. NO! Yet, oddly, I did flea, and there was no physical altercation.
Once I reached home I told me mother what was going on. [Again, why be such an idiot?] She handed me a corn broom to hold upright and demanded I go back to confront my captor.
I remember walking down the block with terror in front, terror behind, but don’t recall what actually happened. Probably pointless posturing from both me and the lt.
I look back on that day and that self with disdain for my fearful, insipid little schmuck, someone for whom I can find no empathy.
It’s easy – and psychologically more or less correct – to say I couldn’t help being what I was,. But I should not have been that! It feels unforgivable.
The second situation, which extended over a few months, happened during my freshman year of my Catholic all-boys high school.
Those of you who might have shared the misfortune of growing up a practicing Catholic, especially in the routinely oppressive 1950s, may recall the horror of saying a Bad Confession.
It was one of the scattershot of mortal sins – which also included deliberately missing Mass on Sunday or eating meat on Friday – that could zip you straight to the tinderbox of Hell, should you be hit by a speeding garbage truck or have a block of serpentine marble fall on you from a highrise.
It didn’t help that a couple of our parish priests and a few of the nuns thought the best way to keep kids in line was to treat them as worthless scum escaping perdition by the skin of their evil-stained teeth.
As for a Bad Confession – wooee!
To take communion at Mass – by dissolving the remarkably pleasant body of Christ on your tongue – you had to be clean of mortal sin, preferably by going to confession the previous Saturday evening. But, should you deliberately neglect to mention a mortal sin in confession – meaning that sin could not be absolved by the priest – that was a Bad Confession, the rough equivalent of dropping your drawers and mooning the Baby Jesus. And should you dare ingest the body of Christ following a Bad Confession, it would tie your soul in knots that Thomas Aquinas could not unscramble.
Here’s what happened with me: One afternoon, in the backyard of our house at the end of the courtyard off 37th St. in Powelton, I viciously kicked a pile of bibles that my mother had for some reason stacked against the brick back wall of the house. I kicked them because they were her Episcopal bibles, thus not true, Catholic bibles.
Mom, naturally, lay into me about my sectarian limitations. After a bit, I felt chagrined. Then I felt awful. Finally, I felt I had done something truly evil. This horrified me so much that I couldn’t even face confessing it; then it horrified me more because by not confessing it on Saturday, I’d made a Bad Confession.
That marble slab was waiting to drop on me.
Escaping evil is never easy for a confirmed believer. Until I confessed my Bed Confession, I could not receive communion. On a Sunday, that lapse could be somewhat ignored, since I went to Mass with only my Catholic father. But at high school we also attended Mass on Wednesday at the church a block from school; where I could not receive communion because of my self-perceived Mortal Whopper.
For the first couple weeks it wasn’t that bad. While everyone else in our pew went to the altar rail to swallow God, I knelt in my place, later explaining that I had forgotten and drunk water that morning [at the time, you could take nothing by mouth before receiving Christ’s body, including Philly’s foul tap water].
But this went on week after week – pew after pew emptying while I knelt alone – though I will never understand why none of the priest-teachers, always watching, asked me, “Why?” I’m glad they didn’t, but it made little matter, because I was pilloried in my own mind… singled out by the finger of God, again and again.
Somewhere along the line I finally confessed my Bad Confession to our parish’s most understanding and decent priest [to whom I should have confessed my bible-footballing to in the first place], who told me that, technically, it never was a Bad Confession, since my sin was hardly mortal.
When I took communion once again, it tasted good.
Thank you Father Whoever, and I hope your name eventually escapes my declining mind. You were a good man, and I pray the angels to provide you with a daily bowl of cookie-dough ice cream.
No, I do not actually pray for anything, not even whipped cream.
* * * *
This test is well outside the discussion above, but Linda, my beloved potter, wants to make a clay pie-plate that will hold one-half the volume of a standard pie-plate that we put in the oven to bake a pie.
Besides the reducing the volume, she is planning, for simplicity sake, to form her model with a straight vertical side, rather than the standard slopped side.
Assuming that the figures below correctly represent a standard pie-plate, how should she determine the diameter of a one-half volume pie-plate?
height of pie-plate – 2 inches
diameter at top – 9 inches
diameter at bottom – 7 inches
[These measurements assume an even side slope.]
Using the formula for the volume of a cylinder – πr2h –r being the radius, h being the height of the cylinder – what diameter should she use for achieve one-half the standard volume?
Please include your answer and reasoning. You will be quizzed on this next week.
lickhaven 