The Home Page · The Integral Worm · My Resume · My Show Car · My White Papers · Organizations I Belong To
Technical Writing · Exposition & Argumentation · Grammar and Usage of Standard English · The Structure of English · Analysis of Shakespeare · Analysis of Literary Language
Advanced Professional Papers · The History of the English Language · First Internship: Tutoring in a Writing Workshop · Second Internship: Advanced Instruction: Tutoring Writing
Visual Literacy Seminar (A First Course in Methodology) · Theories of Communication & Technology (A Second Course in Methodology) · Language in Society (A Third Course in Methodology)
UMBC'S Conservative Newspaper: "The Retriever's Right Eye" · UMBC'S University Newspaper: "The Retriever Weekly" · Introduction to Journalism · Feature Writing · Science Writing Papers
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Non-fiction Creative Essay 1 · Non-fiction Creative Essay 2 · Non-fiction Creative Essay 3 · Non-fiction Creative Essay 4 · Non-fiction Creative Essay 5
Non-fiction Creative Essay 6 · Non-fiction Creative Essay 7 · Non-fiction Creative Essay 9 · Non-fiction Creative Essay 10 · Non-fiction Creative Essay 11
Yes, I'm late. I'm always late. The ongoing joke within my small circle of friends my epitaph will read, "The Late Christopher Paul, he didn't even arrive on time to his grave." I was born late: twelve and a half-hours exactly.
My mother and father shopped for a new car in 1957. The two walked into a Chevrolet dealer. Mom was expecting with me and quite close to the due date. In conversation, the salesman asked my mother when the baby was due and she responded, "February 22, George Washington's Birthday." The salesman made an offer my parents couldn't refuse: "If the child is born on Washington's Birthday, I'll give you the car for free."
And so, because I was late, my father had to pay for his 1957 Chevy wagon.
I was born at the height of the Cold War between the United States and the U.S.S.R. and months before the launching of the Soviet's Sputnik satellite, which ushered in the Great Space Race. All children from my time period had to live with what I will now define as the Macro Cold War. We all learned to "duck and cover."
In grade school we would have to practice air raid drills. The alarm had a shrill, eerie, ominous tone that distinguished it from the warm tones of the fire drill. The sound of the air raid alarm drove down into the marrow of your bones heightening our sense of alarm. When activated, we all marched into the hallways of the school, sat down with our backs to the wall, knees drawn in tight, with our heads tucked down. Teachers filed past us checking that we coiled into tightly wrapped little balls of flesh and we received admonishment if we weren't. To keep the angry giants at bay, you did as they said and assumed the position a centipede uses in order to protect its soft, vulnerable core when danger ensued. You never knew when the "Reds" would strike. "We have many military airfields here," the angry giants would say, "Long Island is a prime target,"
But I had to live through a second cold war while the first raged on. I lived through a micro cold war. A war between the giants: my parents. They waged a war of their own against each other more detrimental than the Macro Cold War. At school we played pretend duck and cover. Real duck and cover occurred at home. I could not hide from this war. Hard as I tried to muffle the sound of the bombs being so lightly thrown with my pillow, I had no way to escape the sound as they reverberated through the house. When did this micro cold war begin? That's hard to say. I know when my life changed, but for my parents? It may have gone further back.
According to my mother's account it went back to when they first dated. Charlie dates two girls at the time, one from the right side of the tracks and one from the wrong side, my mother. When it came to marriage, my father's parents approved of Miss Right Track and deemed her the better choice. My mother, Gina, claims that Charlie asked for Miss Right Track's hand in marriage and she turned him down. My mother became Charlie’s second choice in marriage. The truth becomes more obscure from this point on.
WWII had begun and the draft put into place. Gina claims that Charlie married in order to avoid serving overseas. The more likely possibility, my mother was pregnant with my oldest sister, Susan; therefore Charlie and Gina had a shotgun wedding. The date my parents got married, my older sister’s birthday and her age point to the latter as closer to the truth. Premarital sex in the 40's, Oh my! Some things never change. The relationship between my mother and father began as a rocky relationship. My father will never discuss his version of the truth.
Others considered my mother and father as attractive young people of their time. My father, Charlie, a thin small framed man of about five foot five had short cropped, wavy dark brown hair parted to the side, as the style of the time. His eyes of dark brown squinted down tight when he laughed. Charlie had a thin forlorn face with high cheekbones. He received his high cheekbones from a distant American Indian mother in his past. When he smiled his warm smile, his yellow tobacco stained teeth would show.
Charlie grew up in the Bronx, but I know little of his past as a child. I know his alcoholic father quit drinking when his doctor told him he had to stop drinking for his health. At age twelve, Charlie's mother died and his father remarried his mother’s best friend. As a child of an alcoholic, raised by a stepmother, my grandmother’s best friend, and also a child of the Great Depression may account for his withdrawn sadness and his love of money. When released from the Army, Charlie took advantage of the GI Bill of Rights in order to better himself and attended art school at night at Pratt Institute for his Associates degree in commercial art. All through his childhood Charlie loved art and constantly created drawings and paintings.
My mother, Gina, originally lived in Cuba and came to the United States at age three with her Mother and her five-year-old sister. She lived in Flushing Heights while growing up. As feisty child of the streets, Gina found herself quite capable of taking care of herself and standing up for her rights when the occasion arose. Gina’s best childhood story dealt with a confrontation between the neighborhood boys and the girls. Somehow it switched over to sex and one boy kept scaring the girls by threatening to whip out his penis by undoing his belt buckle. The other girls ran, but my mother stood her ground. "Okay big man! Show us what you've got!" The boy took Gina quite seriously and half jokingly backed down and walked away laughing with his friends; one of the many times Gina stood up for her rights.
Gina of average weight had curves in all the right places even up through her forties. The reason I know, as a child of ten, men would honk their car horns as we walked to the local stores and I would get scolded for the driver's actions. "When you grow up, I expect that you will not do such things as it's degrading and disrespectful to women. She stood at about five foot three with long dark brown, almost black wavy hair cascading over her shoulders halfway down her back. Gina had dark brown eyes, a squarish face typical of a Libra, medium complexion with full lips and a friendly look unless crossed. Gina would have made a great district court judge utilizing her strongest personality trait: her sense of fairness. She would consider all sides as all side hold some version of the truth. Then she would deliberate for long hours to determine the truth and what she considered just.
Details of my parent’s relationship with each other from my birth up to about age seven remain sketchy and tainted with confusion. I only have the accounts of Susan and my older brother, Ronald to go by who are ten and eleven years older than I. Up to age seven I only receive accounts from Susan who has a tendency to distort the truth. As a Gemini, Susan displays two diametrically opposed personalities. She can lean towards maternalism and other times display indifference. Susan and my younger sister, Liz received their looks from my father. Both are small-framed women, Susan being five-foot one and my sister at five foot four and have Charlie's slender build but lost out on my mother's curves. Both of my sisters have lighter brown hair than either Charlie or Gina and have straight hair while everyone else has wavy hair. Liz received the dark brown eyes everyone else had, but Susan has gray eyes. My brother Ronald and I received my mother's body build but where Liz and I received the dark brown eyes, my brother has gray eyes like Susan.
Susan, also an artist loved to draw but found herself more fascinated with animals. She used to bring home dead creatures that she found by the side of the road, evidently hit by cars and dissected them in the bathtub. Her love of science and animals led her down a path to pursue a degree in veterinary science something she never completed because she decided to marry at the age of twenty.
Ronald born under the sign of Capricorn remains quite serious about work and entrepreneurial things. School didn't challenge his intelligence and left him absolutely bored so he would act out as the class clown. As a born know it all, his fatal flaw lead him to hang out with the wrong type of boys; the troublemakers and the hoods of the time.
Liz, born under the sign of Leo, is not someone you want to anger or get on the wrong side of. Liz would fight you to the death when it came to an argument and like my mother would stand her ground until someone walked away victorious, most likely her. She too had an interest in art and wanted to become a runway dress designer when she grew up. Liz would spend many hours drawing and coloring models in her latest creations. She too had forgotten her aspirations and married at age twenty.
For me, the year I turned eight years old marked the beginning of the micro cold war. This year Ronald married Cathy McNair. The entire family underwent monumental change. This year Ronald married Cathy McNair. Susan had moved away the year before to attend college. Now, Ronald would also move away to Holbrook, Long Island. When I asked mom where’s Holbrook she said, "It's out east about an hour away." An hour, I thought, that's almost a lifetime. My six-year-old sister, Liz, and I would remain the only ones still at home. The family I had known for only a short period of my life began to disintegrate and I stood helpless. Susan and Ronald had become adults and I didn't understand anything going on. I understood that I wouldn't see Susan or Ronald very much which made me sad.
At age eleven my mother caught me playing doctor with the girl next store. She pulled me into the house and in a torrent of rage gave me my first lesson in sex. Within this scolding I also learned why Ronald had married and moved away at age eighteen.
My father had not performed his manly obligation in explaining the birds and the bees to Ronald, my mother said. My brother had not used contraception and got Cathy pregnant. The morals passed down from my grandparents, to my parents, then to us said the man’s obligation was to prevent pregnancy and in the case of unwanted pregnancy he was obligated to marry the girl. Adoption and abortion compromised unthinkable options at the time. My brother’s shotgun wedding did not mark the turning point. As a child, I understood the momentous event occurred at Cathy and Ronald's wedding reception. At the reception something happened that changed the entire marriage in a New York minute. I didn't understand why the change occurred until only a few years ago. My mother and Susan reconstructed the scene of events from that evening. Neither my father nor Ronald will elaborate further on this event. Their silence indicates that my mother and Susan told me the truth.
My father, born under the sign of Sagittarius, had a driving necessity to be the life of the party in order to gain acceptance and approval by his peers and constantly flirted with the opposite sex. My mother saw my father as a player and a womanizer. Gina had suspicions that when Charlie said he needed to work late and didn't come home, that Charlie did more than just work overtime. My mother ever proved her claim plus my father’s paychecks supported the fact that he did indeed work tremendous overtime.
At Ronald’s wedding reception, my father drank himself sick. That I clearly remember. The reception was held at the bride’s house only a few blocks away from our home. Ronald had to drive us all home and my father, once he got in the house, threw up in the bathroom and threw up the rest of the night. In his inebriated state at the party, Charlie told horribly sexist, vulgar jokes and spent the evening flirting with one of the guests. From this point on, relations in the household remained tense at best. My parents still slept in the same room but everything changed from that night on. During a good week when Liz and I went to bed only one fight would break out with the two giants screaming obscenities at each other and slamming doors. A bad week consisted of daily fights. I would cover my head with my pillow in order to muffle the sounds of the angry giants fighting and I would cry myself to sleep wishing that I would die or that the battle would just stop. I wanted anything that would help me to escape from the sound of the angry giants. Little did I know that the war had only begun. At least in fighting, my parents made an attempt to settle their difference. This would change.
A few months after I got caught playing doctor with the girl next door, my mother's birthday arrived. My father had given my mother a dozen roses, something that I had never seen in the household. My father never gave my mother cut flowers that I could remember. An argument broke out about the Matador painting my father had just finished which hung where the flowers were placed. If my father created the painting for my mother is unclear. I do know that the argument revolved around the Matador painting and the roses. What the painting had to do with the argument I still don't understand to this day. The rest remains all too clear to me. Liz and I sat in the kitchen when the fight broke out and my mother rejected my father's gift. The fight continued to build with obscenities being hurled by both sides. The fight escalated out of control. And then... my father crossed the line of no return. He struck my mother. That was the last straw.
In the next moment, my father grabbed both of us by the hand, ushered us into the car and took off with us. I knew a man hitting a woman was terribly wrong. I received the same scolding a million times when Liz and I got into fights and received a good beating for it, so I knew my father had done something terribly wrong. But why did my father break such a morally wrong household rule especially in front of us? My sister and I cried hysterically. We feared for our lives. My father said nothing. He kept driving. We wondered if we would ever see mom again. We hardly knew dad. He spent all his time working and on weekends, even then, he worked on something. We were afraid of him. We could always talk to mom. We didn't talk to dad. You listened to dad.
We wondered if we would ever see our home again, or our friends, what about school? Wasn't school important? I just wanted to stay home in my bed so I could just cry in my pillow and forget the whole thing. I just wanted my warm blanket. Being rushed out the door without coats or anything familiar in the third week of October left us cold and scared. We had no idea what would happen to us. When we crossed the Pennsylvania State line I understood that we would probably stop at Susan's old farmhouse which at least stopped my sobbing. At age ten, Liz couldn’t make this association so she continued to cry the entire four hours it took to arrive there. Evidently, my father took off to cool down. But what purpose did taking us serve? What did he intend to do with us initially? This remains an unanswerable question to this day.
My sister's farm represented sanctuary for my sister and I. There we could get away from my father. We could get away from the war. Both of us could disappear for hours on end. We could ride the old horse, Rome or go down to the forest and hunt for frogs in the pond. We could wander around in the wheat fields. Most of all we could get away from the cold war.
We could get away from the bombs, the artillery and the machine-gun rat-a-tat-tat. The deadly silence at times of cease-fire, a silence louder than bombs became the worst of all. It gave the angry giants time to re-group, plot, plan, and scheme of new tactical techniques to employ against each other. Enjoy the silence? How could you, Liz and I knew the next battle would occur just over the ridge. In the silence we walked through an invisible mine field. In war, soldiers have an idea where the minefield exists but don't know where the deadly mines lay. This was worse. We didn't know where the minefield would show up: at home, in the car, at the supermarket, in the open-air shopping mall? All we knew when you heard the first mortar explode, duck and cover. Without the two angry giants together in the same place we lived in guaranteed sanctuary.
A few days later, the three of us returned home. We didn't even miss school. But the atmosphere was different now. Before, there was a semblance of warmth, there was oxygen to breathe, there was light, there was... something... even if it was artificial. Now, it was cold, dark, difficult to breathe, and silent. Liz and I found ourselves lost in space. The cold war and the space race began at the same time within my household. The new challenge became who could build the largest arsenal of weapons in the shortest period of time. My mother had taken all of her belongings while we were gone and had moved them upstairs into Ronald's old room... everything. They never slept together again.
At this point everything going on in the macrocosm of the world; the Cold War, the Space Race, civil rights, women's liberation, all became part of our microcosm. It was anarchy and it wasn't in the U.K. It was at 6 Merry Lane. The house was still there, but that was the only thing left standing that had a semblance of a nucleus family.
We saw mom during our prime time hours from 2:36 p.m. till about 7 p.m. Once 7 p.m. arrived, the time my father normally would come home from work, if he came home at all, mom would go up to her room. If we needed her for anything or wanted to socialize, we had to knock on her door and announce ourselves and then we received admittance. I'm surprised she never punched a little hole in the door like in a speakeasy from her mother's time.
For a few weeks, divorce entered into discussions. After weeks of deliberating, my mother decided not to file for divorce until my sister turned eighteen. We had to endure eight more years until the divorce proceedings would start. Everything changed. My sister and I now became responsible for washing our own clothes. We had to fix our own meals. Sitting down together as a family to eat dinner no longer existed. We found ourselves on our own. Most of the time we ate frozen pizza: one of the few things we knew how to fix. We would change the aluminum foil on the cookie sheet, set the oven to 400 degrees and wait fifteen minutes. A friend of mine once made a joke about dinner at my house.
"What are you having for dinner?"
"Pizza," I replied.
Snickering, he said, "With blue napkins or pink napkins?"
I found it funny because of his wit and I still had a good nature where I could laugh at myself, yet it wasn’t funny. He didn't understand the behind the scenes stuff and I never explained it to him. The situation became too sad and embarrassing to explain.
In sixth grade I maintained an A/B average. When I turned thirteen and went to junior high school, my grades fell. I became part of the third tier. Some B's, but mainly C's. I didn't care. No one cared anymore. No one watched our grades. We no longer received help with homework. The focus of the household became the cold war.
While attending sixth grade I was being groomed to follow in my parent’s footsteps as an artist. When I got to seventh grade nothing mattered. I started to turn out garbage. I lost interest in everything. My art teachers expected much higher quality work from me and they didn't get it. I didn't want to participate in most of the assignments. My parents never explained to me that there would be times when the boss would put me on projects I didn't want to do but because the boss wanted it, I had to do the best job I could, regardless if I didn't like it. No one sat me down and explained this to me so my interest in art and doing well fizzled. Waging the cold war had a higher priority. Any possibility of following in my parent's footsteps of becoming an artist was dashed to hell.
At age thirteen, word circulated in school that Newsday and the New York Post wanted boys to deliver the morning and afternoon papers. It seemed easy enough and they enjoyed getting paid for delivering the paper. I brought the idea up to mom, she referred me to dad but not before reminding me that I had to keep up with my studies. Why, I don't know because no one kept up with anything I did anymore. Dad seemed OK with the idea but it came with a big hitch.
"Sure, you can earn your own money, but you're not going to get an allowance too. Now that you'll be earning your own money, you can pay for your own entertainment so you don't need an allowance. Also, I expect you to buy your own clothes and pay for your own lunch."
This added up to one big blow for a thirteen-year-old. My father could take the wind out of anyone's sails. I took the job though and with it I learned entrepreneurship, I got to socialize at the paper pick-up office, I had spending money and most of all, it kept me away from the horrible deadly atmosphere of home.
The same year, I gained acceptance into the all-boy chorus. This also kept me busy practicing after school in preparation for concerts. I sang in the chorus for two years. At the end, most boys didn't continue, I tried out for the choir and was accepted. I love to sing, but I didn't stick with the choir and dropped out a year later. We sung everything in Latin. I couldn't stand singing in Latin. I dropped out when I learned that all the music had religious connotations.
At this point of my life I had no need for religion. If God existed I couldn't understand why I found myself in a loveless household. I felt punished for something I hadn't done. Of course I had no knowledge of Hinduism or that a soul may return on the wheel of life or reborn and forced to suffer for errors in past lives. In the not so famous words of Eddie Munster, "I didn't know. I'm just a dumb kid." God wasn't the only one I lost faith in. Anything considered an institution I had lost faith in; the Roman Catholic Church, the federal government, the military, high school and at the top of the list of course, the institution of marriage.
At the same time, I practiced my father's technique on how to avoid feeling anything at all. By loading myself down with so many activities, commitments and work I didn't have time to reflect on how I felt inside. I remained busy maintaining a schedule. I learned how to stay away from the desolate, hopeless atmosphere of home.
The fights finally stopped but the atmosphere became bleaker than before. Neither parent spoke to each other unless they had to. It became a desolate cold atmosphere. But this wasn't enough. The techniques of the cold war were not causing either side to concede. Changes in techniques became necessary to win the war. When Liz and I thought things couldn't get any worse, my father would switch to a new technique. He waged a war of attrition. As the wage earner, he also controlled the bank account, so he controlled the supply lines. We couldn't continue to hang in and hang on when supplies begin to dwindle. My father became clever about it and reduced supplies a little at a time.
It began with the television of all things. The old black and white television we had for years had come to the end of its useful existence. My father said he didn't need it so he wasn't going to replace it. A few months later, my mother realized he meant what he said and mail ordered our first color television from Sears and Roebuck. Color television had been around for years and all of my friends had at least one in their household, so this constituted a big move up into the later half of the 20th century. If we wanted to watch TV we had to knock on mom's door and she would let us in. For three years we watched television upstairs with my mother. This drove my father crazy because without the TV, he found himself alone on the ground floor of the house. This forced him to buy a new television in order to have some kind of life in the house. It didn't work though because my father remained so pig-headed he controlled the television and we had to watch what he wanted to watch. With mom we could at least negotiate with her to watch some shows we wanted to watch, so we would still watch TV with mom. Once again, my father lost.
A stereo system came next. My mother and father could make due with a basic radio, but I loved music and FM radio. I purchased a stereo system mail order from Montgomery Wards at fifteen. The money I earned from my paper route wasn't enough to cover all my wants and needs. I only earned an average of $40 per week. We didn't take vacations anymore like a normal family so summer became the opportunity for me to earn extra money. I cut three people's lawns on a regular basis and I also did other kid's paper routes when they went away either to summer camp or on vacation. Some weeks I did three to four paper routes other than my own. One route consisted of the residents of the nearby hospital and had 110 customers.
Some weeks it took five hours to deliver all the papers. I would do a route, come back to home office, pick up my next load and go back out again. I became the first to arrive and the last to leave home office. That's how I managed to afford necessities and goodies. I kept the stereo in my room located upstairs across from my mother's room and above the master bedroom, where my father slept. The stereo became my weapon in the cold war.
My taste in music consisted of rock n' roll from the 60's and 70's. Because of my love of singing and music, I made friends whose tastes extended further out from music played on the lower end of the FM dial. They introduced to what most called "the bleeding edge" of music. The worst group for any adult to hear had to be "The Mahavishnu Orchestra." If the searing highs of Mahavishnu John McLaughlin's lead guitar weren't bad enough, Jerry Goodman playing an electric violin, exceeded McLaughlin's high notes 100 times to 1. In third grade I tried to learn how to play the violin but gave it up because I couldn't endure the ridicule of the other boys for playing a sissy instrument. Seven years later I rediscovered my love for one of the most berating sounds on a human's nerves. The only irritable sound that could compete with Jerry Goodman's electric violin screeching high notes consisted of the sound of nails on a chalkboard.
I loved to play a twenty-five minute live jam at midnight before going to sleep called "Dream." It started out real slow and then would build and build and build until it became like the frenzied dance of the Hindu goddess Kali as she dances and spins, with her multiple arms flailing, in her dance of death and destruction, summoning the end of the universe. My mind would travel to the edges of the universe and back to be gently dropped off safely at home when the music ended. Thinking IS the best way to travel.
Midway through the frenzy, Jerry Goodman would take the lead on his electric violin building the notes higher and higher until he would hit one note so high it would make the first vertebrae just below the base of my skull pop. This orgasmic sound to my young ears created hell for an adult. Even a good portion of my friends found this music torture to their eardrums. My taste in music went so far out on the bleeding edge, years later, friends said that a whole genre of music existed in the not so popular record stores known as, "Chris Music." In reality I wasn't the only one listening to it. The music became filed in categories later known as "the NY underground, post-punk, post-nihilist pop, pre-industrial, depression rock, the Manchester movement, hip-hop and scratch music.
My father's last technique in the war of attrition became food. This was the death nail. This technique began when I turned sixteen. No more fresh fruit, no more junk food: potato chips, cookies, or ice cream, no more Twinkies or Ring Dings. Anything considered junk food wasn't on the shopping list. Dad made the shopping list and did all the food shopping at this point. My parents no longer went out in public together. "You want junk food? Go buy it with your own money! There's plenty of food," my father shouted in one of our many bouts over the lack of food in the house. Then he would open the cabinets to emphasize we had food in the house and point to the cans of tuna fish and Campbell's bean soup. My father, now at the top of his game as a seasoned professional, paid off the mortgage in full and worked more overtime than ever before so money wasn't the problem. We didn't know until years later that he maintained a secret bank account to prevent my mother from getting his money.
As a big advocate for the necessity of vitamins to supplement one’s diet, my mother increased our doses in order to make up for the lack of food in the house. It became difficult to take all those vitamins, but we took them. We didn't want to anger the one and only giant still on our side. The household struck its lowest point.
Finally the divorce came two years ahead of schedule. It came at age eighteen but it didn't bring relief, it only brought more grieving. The divorce became final at the end of my first semester of college. It couldn't have come at a worse time, but then again, there would have never been a good time. My first real girlfriend, the girl I learned about the art of making love with, broke up with me that summer. I had just wrestled with eighteen credits and only did well enough to prevent from being expelled. My soul finally collapsed from all the pressure in my second semester in college.
I brooded over the divorce and the loss of my girlfriend. At the gas station I worked at, the boss became short-handed and kept putting me on the work schedule for too many hours. The transmission in my car blew up in the second semester. When I presented the problem to my father he flippantly said, "You're studying Automotive Engineering, fix it yourself! It has nothing to do with your college tuition." As a loner and an introvert I had no friends at school. As a pleaser, I would do anything to appease the angry giants even if that meant not getting my own needs met. I had no idea of how to express my needs. Nobody cared about my needs. Only the cold war and the war of attrition were important.
My weakest subjects in high school and college consisted of math and physics. In high school I had taken four courses in math, but I only had two math teachers. The first teacher, Mr. Van Brink, taught through intimidation. He would slam his hand on the board and go into a yelling tirade when we didn't have the right answers. He slammed his hand so hard one day he broke the crystal on his watch. We always suspected he did drugs. Van Brink had weird eyes to begin with. He had big highly separated eyes like a bug and his wiry blond hair resembled a Brillo pad. Well over six-foot and lanky, he frightened us when he went into a tirade. The smallest thing would set him off. Van Brink was a bachelor and we were in the late sixties when drugs gained popularity. This led us to suspect that he did drugs. In the last year I had Van Brink, a twenty year old girl who was left back twice confronted him. During the class, Van Brink asked her why he wasn't getting through to the students. She was quite frank,
"There's nothing you can do to me because whether I pass this class or not I'm graduating. I'm older than the rest of them and I'm not afraid of you. You scare the hell out of them. You go into rages and tirades at the front of the board when they have the wrong answers and then wonder why they don't ask you questions. It's obvious. They're afraid of you."
Things improved for about two weeks and then Van Brink slipped back into his old familiar tirades.
My other math teacher, Edward Cotch, would constantly in a calm voice recite that, "It's a communist plot. I know it is. That's why none of you do your homework. It's a communist plot." No it was never a communist plot. Van Brink shortchanged us in teaching us what we needed to know. Most math books have the answers in the back of the book except the ones we used. With no answers in book you never knew whether your answers were right or wrong. Plus Mr. Cotch did all the homework on the board, so all we had to do was copy it and practice it to get by. If only a few of us didn't do the homework, he would call us up to his desk one by one and go over the homework while we sat next to him. Mr. Cotch had body odor. If none of us did the homework he would have to do it on the chalkboard which spared us from having to sit next to him. I think this is where the conspiracy came in.
I entered college mathematics and physics with these handicaps. I had two more though. First, math and physics were taught at 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. respectively, my worst hour. Mentally, I don't actually wake up until after lunchtime. My seventh grade science teacher, Mr. Meo confirmed this when I took driver-ed class during the summer of my eleventh year. "Now if we time Mr. Paul's reflex action to stepping on the brake pedal in this situation, at 8 a.m., we would find it would take him at least three seconds to react, which of course would be too late. Now if we test his reaction at 1 p.m., we would find his time well within the one-tenth of a second limit reaction time," he said with a wily smile. Technology became my second problem.
Texas Instrument calculators had been on the consumer market since 1973. In 1975, a calculator with trigonometric functions cost around $230. My father remained animate in his refusal to pay $230 for a technology he knew in ten years would come down to $25. As a technologist I understand today his position, but while in school this placed me in a handicapped position. College remains extremely competitive and without the proper tools to compete you can't possibly succeed.
I didn't have ten years to wait for the price of the technology to come down, I was in college NOW. I had to opt for a calculator without the log and trig functions and I had to use log and trig tables, plus other means to do calculations. This handicapped me on exams because other students could simply push a button and get the necessary figure, while I wasted time flipping through tables.
All of this wore on my soul and reduced me to apathy. It was all hopeless. Instead of doing the right thing and withdrawing from my classes or talking to someone... anyone, I just stopped showing up to class. Some professors entered me as a drop, others gave me an F.
Liz felt the pains too. She stopped going to gym in high school. At the time, gym was a mandatory requirement by the state of New York for graduation. She completed all her coursework, but never received her diploma because she never fulfilled her gym requirement. Billy Joel didn't receive his high school diploma for the same reason. Years later, Hicksville High School granted him his degree and wavered his gym requirement. My sister approached the administration of William Tresper Clarke High School after she had learned of this but her argument was to no avail. She wasn't famous. Years later she took a swimming class in a community college and Tresper Clarke granted her the diploma.
The damage done from the cold war never left us. Susan turned to religion and changed her faith when she married. After thirty-five years of marriage, having five children and countless grandchildren, she divorced in 2004. At this point in her career she mainly does odd jobs and is now currently working for Wal-Mart. Ronald divorced Cathy I think after seven years of marriage and had two daughters with Cathy. Two years later he remarried and is still married to the same woman to this day. In all, he had four children, three girls and one boy. He worked an elevator mechanic for many years and lost his job due to an injury and now also does odd jobs. Liz married three times. In her first marriage she had two children, in her second she had three, and in the third marriage, well, she's given up at this point, she had her tubes tied. As with everyone else she does mainly odd jobs.
I went back to college at age twenty-six and never stopped going. My father paid the tuition for my first degree. The other two degrees I paid for by working during the day and attending classes at night. I'm still struggling to earn my fourth degree and struggling for acceptance into a graduate school. I'm still struggling to get a real job even with all the education I have. I once had a wife, but it didn't last long at all. I married at twenty-eight, the oldest out of all the children and also had the shortest marriage. After three years, I applied for a divorce and never remarried. Once I lost my professional position in New York, I never obtained another career position, which has also prevented me from remarrying. I pine away for the day when I can have a real career, a wife that loves me through think and thin, a car and a home that I can call my own. Children? They're out of the question now. If I had a child tomorrow, I'd be sixty-eight when he or she would go off to college. The emotional damage from the cold war was for life. I still have bouts with depression and I've been in and out of therapy for years. I've had three different therapists and none of them have helped in undoing the damage done. They manage to stitch the wounds together only temporarily, but the wounds never properly heal and only open over and over again. Think of it as "controlled bleeding." Would things turned out different if my parents immediately divorced after my father struck my mother? I don't know. It may have been worse, but I'll never know because the angry giants didn't decide to pursue that fork in the road. This history I can never escape as a child of the cold war.
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