6th of seven
5 houses by five
Loud times
Lots of chaos
Lots of Martians
Too many cracks and broken backs
Buckeyes everywhere
Plastering and whistling
Shouting, screaming and yet no slamming doors
Railroad tracks to football
Poison ivy
School as an escape
Sleep as an escape
4 am fishin’ trips, never any catches
Doggie in my bed
More plastering and whistling
Football, wrestling, baseball… football, wrestling, baseball
Garage bands
Garage roofs
Railroad tracks to trouble
Tricks on Mom and Dad
Tricks on siblings
Funeral home and 6 ounce cokes
Friday night mix and match
Big A whitto A
Beatles in the basement
Lonnie Tucker eatin’ his cages
More plastering and whistling
Sheets, boxes, and plaster
Saved in 7th
Walkin’ everywhere
Throwing papers and collecting poor tabs
Choir on Wednesday, Choir on Sunday, Choir everyday except Saturday
Guitar lessons… no guitar
Acapella in the locker room
Maggie Mae the respite
German and love of English in a Dutch world
Catholic Wedding Parties
More poison ivy
Basketball on top of wrestling
Passion for the law
Model United Nations
Cross Country, Track, and Wrestling
More plastering, whistling, sheets, and boxes
First love
Walking everywhere
Itchy, itchy, itchy
Mowin’ lawns, not enough tips, haulin’ metal scrap
Drooling old people… getting hebee jeebeed
Shingles on the roof, shingles on the face
Wrestling, wrestling, wrestling
Lock-ins and eschatology
RA’s, GA’s, Hand bells, and Choir
Looking for escapes
Learning to learn a long way from chaos
Three schools, one determined end
BSU, IV, and friends
Wrestling and dehydration
Walking everywhere
Washin’ whites in the sink
IV and a house of V
The Catholic-Presbyterian Debate
The right choice – God’s Providence made manifest through God’s Providence
Are you sure you’re doing the right thing? Huh?
You bet!!
Bye, Bye Plastering and whistling
{ 25 comments… read them below or add one }
Lots of questions 🙂
You had such an eventful childhood. You should write a book!
Cool poem. When did you write this and what was your inspiration to do so?
For example, my first question is what you mean by “lots of Martians.”
Phyllis. It just came to me last night. And I wrote it as fast as I could type it.
Gary. “Lots of Martians” refers to many times between the ages of about 3rd grade and 7th grade, I was convinced that I was different from anyone I knew. I convinced myself that many people were not from this earth and must be built differently and for a different purpose.
How interesting! Did you see the movie about the boy who tried to convince everyone he was from Mars?
OK, here’s another question: What does “plastering and whistling” mean? It seems to be a dominant theme.
Yes, I was wondering the same thing, Daddy. It was cool to read!
What hidden talents you have!
Yes. We did see that movie… on your recommendation, I think, Gary. Plastering and whistling refers to the fact that my dad bought the home I lived in from Kindergarten on (we rented a different home every year before that) – it was a real fix-er-upper. Every night and all day on weekends he would plaster walls and whistle. He was/is actually an expert whistler. He was even better than the famous whistler than Johnny Carson used to have on the Tonight Show. We lived among plaster dust most of my life, as my dad was meticulous and took years to remodel a dump that became a masterpiece. Physically (and in other ways) our house was in constant chaos. That’s why I like to have a “tidy” house. I grew to hate living in a mess.
OK, very interesting. So why does it end with plastering and whistling, and it seems the last three things–or maybe four–kind of go together. ???
The reason it ends with plastering and whistling is summed up, I think, in my previous post… that it was so prevalent and I grew to dislike the plaster dust so bad, that I couldn’t wait to get away from it.
The last 6 lines do, in fact, go together and are listed in chronological order.
IV and a House of V: This has to do with the fact that I met Janice (and one of her best friends and one of her roommates – Sulin at Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. Janice lived in a house with 4 other girls, one of whom was Sulin, who later died of a brain tumor. Thus, I met her at IV and she lived in a house of V.
The Catholic-Presbyterian Debate: I was invited to the House of V, by a mutual friend (Tim Carlson) to play trivial pursuit. I initially had an interest in both Janice and Mimi. I have been with these girls (the House of V) in several group setting before I realized I had an interest in both of them. (The three whom I did not have an interest in were Sulin, Marta, and Cindy). I debated with my roommate (Ken) my dilemma of whether I should ask Janice or Mimi on a date. I figured that if I was turned down, it would be kind of awkward to ask the other one. Long thinking process made short, I decided that, because Mimi was Catholic, it would never lead to anything lasting. At least Janice was a Protestant, so there was a chance.
The Right Choice… God later revealed to me that the choice was providential… the very hallmark of the PCA doctrine, with which I struggled for a long time.
… Doin’ the right thing? Huh?: My parents questioned why I would get married when I did not have a job or a plan for the future. The very day before the wedding, I was wandering around a mall in the St. Louis area when I ran into Woody at a Burger King in the food court. I shared with him my second thoughts and doubts. Woody was very reassuring. Talk about Providence. I had only met Woody once before.
You bet: Even without a job, and Janice only having a 1/2 of a job (Teaching Kindergarten in Chicago), I knew that I was doing the right thing. We had no money, no prospect of a job, we just got back from the most populous honeymoon in the history of mankind, and Janice put the wrong envelope of money (the only $800 we had) into the offering plate in church our first Sunday, instead of the $80 tithe envelope. But God was faithful
Bye Bye Plastering and Whistling: Even with the trials our first year, it was a welcome departure from plaster dust and endless whistling.
Very interesting! But then I knew this already! 🙂
God is great and God is good. Thank you for sharing all of this.
By the way I know meeting Woody was providential— so how did God get him there at that time?
Woody, do you even remember that? Was Sharon in the mall with you? I know when I saw you, you were alone.
4 am fishin’ trips, never any catches
During the ages between about 5-11 I was a deep and long sleeper. I would go to bed about 7-8 pm, even in the summer. My brothers would wake me up occasionally on weekends when they were going to bed (between 1am and 4am). They would tell me it was time to go fishing with my friend Eric and his family. I would get up, get dressed, eat a bowl of cereal and look for fishing gear. Then my mom and dad would come down to the basement to see the racket I was making looking for fishing gear I didn’t own. They’d tell me what time it was and to go back to bed. I would essentially “wake up” from my sleep walking (although I always remembered everything) and be very mad. My brothers did this probably a total of 30 times over those 6 years or so. I never did learn, because I was essentially asleep. I never went fishing with my friend Eric and never even owned any fishing gear. Lots of fishing trips with nothing to show for them.
How about the “railroad track” theme: to football and to trouble.
We lived only a few houses from the railroad tracks (dishes shook every time a train went by). Little league football practice was (for about 5 years – and then later changed) about 3 miles away. My parents rarely drove us anywhere and my next oldest brother and I quickly discovered that the railroad tracks by our house led almost directly (through the woods)to the park where we had practice. This cut the distance to about 1.5 miles. So, every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday I would walk the tracks to practice.
During summer days, my friend Eric and I would set up beer cans on the tracks and test our aim and through rocks to knock them off. We hung out on or near the tracks a lot. During the same 5 years I walked the tracks to football (about in 3rd grade), one day, my friend Eric and I (and on this particular day, one of my two sisters – Deborah) were hanging out by the tracks and were sitting on the steps of a caboose of a train that was parked there a long time, as it often did. We lived by a Weyerhuaser box factory and the train would often stop to load and unload freight there. We were engrossed in a mind game of some sort when we realized that the train was moving at a pretty good speed. We had passed the box factory, my grade school and high school. My sister and I jumped off as quickly as we realized. I shouted to Eric to jump but he was too scared. He finally jumped more than a mile later and came back 30 min or so crying and screaming. Eric broke his arm, Deborah had to go to the emergency room to get rocks taken out of her arm. I had scratches and bruises. A neighbor lady witnessed part of this and apparently ran after the train trying to help us. She told our parents and Eric’s parents. All three of us got in very big trouble.
Interesting. Have you added some since you posted this? Anyway, what about German, English and Dutch?
Not sure what you mean by your first question. As to the second… I loved English as a subject throughout primary and secondary grades. I often received 100’s or A’s on my work. I even won some awards in grade school. I took two years of German in high school. I don’t think I appreciated foreign languages back then. I grew up in a very Dutch community. It seemed like about every 4th person I knew had a last name that started with Van… Many of the people for whom I mowed yards (who were 70 years or older) spoke very little English and mostly spoke Dutch. And they were born and raised (and never lived anywhere else) right there in Belleville, IL. It was such an insular community that some of these older people had never even been to St. Louis (about 12 miles away) and had never been beyond Belleville or Millstadt their entire lives!
Regarding the first part of my question: when I last looked at your poetic list of significant events, it seemed to me you had added some since first posting. But maybe I just didn’t remember some of them.
I like your poem Uncle David. It reminds me of the kind of poem I might’ve studied in one of my English classes.
I see, Gary. No, I didn’t add any. I wrote all the lines in one entry.
Thanks Andrea.
Why don’t you explain the “throwing papers and collecting poor tabs”.
Throwing papers and collecting poor tabs:
From 6th grade through 9th grade, I had a paper route. I wanted one so bad that I went to the newspaper every week for nearly a year and bugged them to give me one that would open up, even if it wasn’t in my neighborhood. They finally did… two routes, not near my neighborhood. I had so many houses/papers that I had to take two trips, finishing one half and then riding my bike back across town to home and getting the rest and then going back.
The hardest part was that, back then, a newspaper boy had to go house-to-house and collect payment from each person. They didn’t mail it in or have automatic deductions. I had to turn in money every Saturday morning, and if I people weren’t home or told me to go away (which happened often), I had to forgo my salary (1.5 cents per paper) or add my own money to it. If a newsboy was short more than two weeks in a row, he lost the route. I grew up in a relatively poor area in a relatively poor time, and many people had “newspaper stamps” like food stamps, with which to pay me. I didn’t ever really know what they were called and when I turned them in one time, the lady at the circulation department (new at that time) didn’t know what I was giving her. She asked what they were and I said that I thought the newspaper should know. After all, they were the ones giving them out. So, I said “they come in a booklet that you pull off like tabs and they are for poor people, so I guess they are ‘poor tabs'”. I used to keep my collected money and poor tabs in a special drawer so I wouldn’t lose them and have to dig into my own pocket or get in trouble on Saturday mornings. I was always telling my family, “don’t mess with my poor tabs”. My mom always got a big kick out of me talking about poor tabs.