The Story of Dan, Part Two
The Neighborhood
I grew up in a suburb bordering the City of Chicago. This meant rectangular blocks—a regular precision of eight per mile on the long side, and sixteen across, just like the big city. The East Chicago and Hammond refineries and steel mills were only 10 miles away, so things would get fragrant on a day with the breeze blowing in off the lake. There were taverns on the corners of the secondary streets, and long alleys behind the houses for garbage pickup and we thought, while growing up, that the rest of the world was arranged this way. This gridiron was the stage of the drama of my youth.
I got a refraction telescope for Xmas one year when I was in my heavy science phase and I would set it up on the sidewalk and point it straight south and watch people walking up to a half a mile away. Since the focal length was focused at near-infinite, the people looked to be at the same distance from me, even though some were a block away, others at the half mile. An entire town, scrunched down to several yards.
My grammar school was less than a block away, so I walked there for K through 6th. One afternoon when I was in the first grade, they let us off school when President Kennedy was killed. I remember being more amazed than sad or upset. A few years later they were building a new gym at the school and the ground was excavated before they poured the foundation, so we used the trenches they left and the dirt chunks to play war. We were almost always outside. TV watching was reserved for cool shows like The Monkees or for Saturday morning cartoons. The school had a playground of incredibly dangerous steel bars over asphalt, which was fun for a while, but nothing like the nooks and crannies in the alleys for hide-and-seek or the street for hockey or kickball. Spring meant breaking out the roller skates to fly up and down the sidewalks. Fall was for raking giant piles of leaves to dive in. After winter snowfalls, two groups of kids would engage in an epic snowball war up and down the street and between the houses. I’d get totally exhausted from chasing and throwing, sweating through my jacket like making it through a battle. When we got big kid bikes, the fights would move elsewhere. Across the border in the city were the black kids, and there were inevitable skirmishes. It was the racial tensions that existed at the inner ring of Chicago suburbs at that time. Our parents would typically socialize outside on the porches in summer, swilling beer and yelling out at us kids to come home before it got too late.
School
My parents had a conference with the school to decide if I should start in kindergarten or 1st grade because of my aforementioned reading geekiness. It was decided to keep me with my age group, which was a good idea as I was shy, of average height and very skinny and would have basically got abused by the older guys. As it happened, I got knocked around anyway, and ended up getting bored by most of my subjects. When I think back, I typically remember the traumatic and embarrassing moments: When I brought the fancy model car I had built for show & tell, but I dropped it before I got to my desk, and ended up crying into the bag so nobody could see me. Or when I was cramping up with diarrhea and ended up squirting in my drawers in class and had to beat a hasty retreat. There were the high points, as well, mostly when teachers would call on me to help them teach the class as I was typically pretty far ahead. My mom got a call from our local library when I was 10. I tried to loan out The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, as I was a World War II addict, and the librarian was apparently worried that I would arrange a beer hall putsch and seize control of the orange belted crossing guards or something. She was disappointed when my mom laughed and gave her OK.
I’d back down from facing off against the bigger kids, but I had this strange lack of fear about other things. I was walking home for lunch with this kid from across the street who’s dad was so alcoholic that he would leave empty bottles strewn on the lawn and fall asleep in his car after parking in front of the house … anyway, we were walking along and I asked about his dad and he got upset and hauled off and punched me in the eye. I didn’t swing back or run away, but just kept walking with him, arguing my point. He looked at me very strangely, said nothing, and went home.
By the time I got to Junior High, the compartmentalized classrooms matched me up with other math and science students and I was relieved there were other kids as nerdy as me. My 7th grade science fair project was about the Apollo 11 moon landing, and 8th grade covered stereo components. Waving bye to my earlier Astronomy interest and saying hello to high fidelity music. Both took place at the Illinois Institute of Technology which became my college of choice four years later.
I remember going to class in 1971 dressed in a bizarre combination of elephant bellbottoms with paisley shirts. We saw hippies on TV and thought that was their uniform. In gym class I was Pete Maravich, with patent leather red, white and blue sneakers and large floppy socks. Ugh. I do not long to go back to these days.
Family
It was the four of us in our brick bungalow house with the white picket fence and our lot stacked like dominoes with those of our neighbors. I was big brother to my sister and helped teach her how to read, and then how to play ball like the guys in the neighborhood.
We vacationed on a lake in Wisconsin in the summers where I discovered a total disinterest in fishing, but swimming and hiking took hold. I was in Boy Scouts from age 11 to 14, rising to the fairly non-achiever level of First Class with 4 merit badges. My troop was sponsored by our Catholic church, who had priests who were mainly drunks, but not pedophiles (at least to my knowledge). Best recollection of my Scout experience was an initiation of the Tenderfoot boys when the older guys blindfolded us and walked us out to this immense prairie field in the dead of night and disappeared before we took our blindfolds off. We had to find our way back to the campground in the dark without any sense of direction. Until we looked up. I never saw so many stars before in my life (and never since, until I visited Denali National Park a couple of years ago). This was back when I knew the constellations pretty well, so I guessed which way to go, but kept it to myself for a while since I didn’t want to leave. My time with the Scouts ended with the arrival of High School, girls, and cars, and effectively chased any interest in camping out of my system. These days, I’ll willingly beat myself up during the day hiking or knocking around, but I want to get back to the hotel for a shower and a bed at the end of the day.
Vintage First Class Scout patch
I took two years of piano lessons between age 10 and 11 and formed a dopey band with two friends from the neighborhood. “Hey Jude” was our awesome closer. In 1970 I got a cassette recorder for Christmas and starting recording hit songs off the radio. This turned into borrowing albums from friends and recording them, to making mix tapes for parties, to the ridiculous collection of CDs and mp3s that I have today. There was a neighborhood recreation center in our town that hosted bands every Friday. That’s how I got to see Mahogany Rush and Styx (they grew up about 2 miles away) for a quarter.
My dad had a box full of Playboy magazines in the basement that he never looked at, but of course it’s a Man Law that you are not allowed to get rid of them, ever. My friends and I would sneak into the basement to check them out, being careful to replace them in the original order, as if my Dad would check. My first full blown monster crush was for a girl named Linda in the 7th grade. I found reasons to talk to her incidentally during class, found out where she lived, and buzzed by on my nightly bike rides, occasionally waving to her if she was outside. I was too shy to stop and talk. She was a “socialite”, and I was a “brain”. Wrong sides of the fence. After 8th grade graduation, I never saw her again.
Death
It started with a cough in late 1969. Dad had been a pretty heavy smoker since he got out of the Marines after beating the Japanese single-handedly (actually, he said little about the war, except that the Marines were the first soldiers to hit the beach and many died around him—it amazes me that he went through that trauma as a 6”1” 140 pound 17 year old). His cough got worse and he started taking a lot of time off work to rest on the couch. He got crabby and short with me as I was a goof off kid who forgot what he asked me to do and left stuff lying around. I was unaware of what was happening between him and his doctors, but I knew he was in pain, but selfishly was angry at him for being short with me and bossing me around (OK, Dad, for the record – I’m sorry about all this). He was a guy with a silly sense of humor who held down two jobs to keep us going and would play and wrestle around with us. That goofiness and hugginess I’ve left with my own kids, so they are kind of like who he was. One day in June 1971 he went to the hospital and didn’t come back. Mom finally admitted that he had lung cancer that became cancer-of-the-everything. I remember falling to my bed and crying for a long time, with my mom trying to comfort me, but at the same time I was also floating above myself, thinking about my new reality: my mom’s a widow, I’m a half-orphan, and what will everyone think? The next day, my crying was done and I never cried about it again, but I still think about him—what would he have thought about the man I turned out to be? After I passed the age of 45, it was like uncharted territory as he never made it that far.
I became the man of the house, taking care of the lawn and the snow shoveling and the car maintenance and our furnace or whatever. Later, I researched my own college choices, applied for the scholarships myself. Mom and I became more like partners—her holding down a job and taking care of the finances, me taking care of the house and being big bro to my sister. I kept pulling good grades, but I also did my fair share of goofing off and she was always understanding of that—like I had to blow off steam somehow.
Eighth grade culminated with me finishing second in the class and getting confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church by John Cardinal Cody, Archbishop of Chicago, no less. But changes were on the way.
