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All things considered, I was an exceptionally obedient child. That's not to say that in some essential aspects I didn't ruffle parental feathers from time to time (the messy state of my room comes immediately to mind), but all in all, I was a pretty low-maintenance kid. For most of what might be described as my "formative years," my world consisted of my parents, my grandmother, school, a steady stream of library books, and the television.
My parents were a bit on the overprotective side. Scarred in her youth by sensational coverage of the Lindbergh kidnapping, my mom held the steadfast conviction that I was the one and only target of every kidnapper on the face of the planet - or at least Queens - and for that reason, on those rare occasions when I was allowed out to play, I was admonished to remain within sight of our apartment's windows. Failure to comply would result in her coming downstairs to look for me, so I learned not to wander.
My stepdad was a survivor of the Second World War and believed in hard work, but unlike many of his generation, he didn't believe in corporal punishment. On the contrary, his approach to my upbringing was more psychological, and he often commanded my obedience with simply a look or a withheld word. I never raised my voice to him or disagreed on any fundamental issues.
For the longest time, I had no neighborhood friends to speak of, nor were there any overnight trips anywhere, or to anyone's house, or any Cub Scout meetings. My parents didn't believe in giving me "spending money," nor in paying me for chores that they felt were a family obligation to begin with. My friends at school were exactly that: people my age with whom I associated during school hours, though as I passed through junior high school, I did manage to form three fragile friendships.
I watched a lot of television in my youth. As a child, I amused myself by perfectly imitating the voices of cartoon characters with names like Woody, Bugs, Elmer, and Yogi, and I later aped the shtick of Moe, Larry, and Curly and Bud and Lou (even though "Officer Joe" Bolton, who hosted such after-school fare on WNEW, warned us not to). At night, after finishing my homework, I'd sit in the corner, quietly, and watch my stepdad's favorite shows with him and my mom until I was told to go to bed. I never asked to stay up.
Throughout this all, I was happy enough, never suspecting that life could really be any other way. In any event, I did have my grandmother as a counterbalance to any unease I may have felt from time to time. Despite the fact that she and my mother thought alike on a number of subjects, my grandmother seemed ever so much more… approachable, more friendly. I felt free when I came to visit her, and when we went out, I could almost always count on her buying me some amusing bauble at the five and dime.
She taught me rudimentary cooking skills, and songs. She tried to teach me some elementary phrases in French, too. (In fact, I still have her set of 78 RPM Assimil language records!). She showed me old letters and photographs of my grandfather, who died when I was an infant. And despite her frail health, she took me - not just once, but several times - to the New York World's Fair just a few stops down on the elevated at Flushing Meadows Park, where we wandered the pavilions and she let me get high on the promise the future held for all of us.
In my junior year of high school, my parents moved to Long Island. The dislocation was not as serious as it might have been for me, though it was serious enough, for I lost track of my friends from Queens. Yet I continued to be an obedient adolescent through the rest of high school, and even went along with the idea of limiting my college applications to Hofstra and Stony Brook so as not to end up at a school too far from home after graduation.
Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon during the summer between high school and college, and the only two things I remember from my first year at Stony Brook was how impossibly hard freshman chemistry was, and running to make the Long Island Railroad train for the trip home every Friday afternoon.
You see, I was still quite entangled in the apron strings of home. As always, my grandmother - who had moved in with us after contributing a hefty share of the down payment on the house - was a beacon of solace, although her health now was really beginning to fail.
Things changed, slowly. In the summer between freshman and sophomore year, I saved some money working as a golf caddy at a local country club. Then, during the first half of sophomore year, I discovered the writings of Ayn Rand and began to meet with other "students of Objectivism" on a regular basis. I began to ever more frequently skip weekends at home, citing the press of my university workload.
Then, somewhere in the run-up to the December holiday vacation, our little group began to discuss the idea of driving down to Florida, to Ft. Lauderdale, for the January intersession. I held back from such discussions, knowing that such an adventure would never gain the approval of my parents. And yet…
And yet, as the New Year loomed, the idea gnawed at me. Not only did I want to go to Florida because my friends were going - we all got along well together, and it promised to be a great trip - but also because one girl in particular was going.
I guess that must have been the tipping point, because one night - incredibly, unbelievably - I broached the subject of the trip to my parents over dinner.
"You're crazy," said my mother, "Florida? That's out of the question!"
"Why?" I asked.
"Well, for one thing, who are these people you're going with?" she replied. "Anyway, it'll take you a week to drive down there, and another week to drive back. You'll be exhausted! What a silly idea. Put it out of your mind!"
When she paused for breath, I tried to answer her objections, but she did not want to listen. Instead, she looked at my stepdad for support.
"How do you plan to to pay for it?" he asked. I told him about the money I had saved from the previous summer. He shrugged his shoulders.
"Listen to your mother," he said, and ate another forkful of food.
"No. No. Absolutely not!" said my mother, not letting me get a word in. "I forbid it!"
I got up and fled the kitchen, as I felt tears coming on.
I ended up in my grandmother's room. I don't know why, maybe because it was a place I could feel comfortable. It certainly wasn't to cry on her shoulder, as I was utterly certain that she would share my mother's opinion of my proposed two-week trip a thousand miles from home with a bunch of young people my own age. Instead, after telling her of what had happened at the dinner table, she rocked me to the very core of my being.
"I think it's a wonderful idea!" she said. "There's no reason you shouldn't go and have some fun with your friends. You're certainly old enough!"
Buoyed by this support, I screwed up my courage and stormed back to the kitchen, half-dried tears still on my cheeks.
"I've thought it over," I said, "and I'm going. I've made my decision, and I'm going."
My mother looked at me, then looked down at the table, sorrowfully. In a disappointed tone, she mustered up as much drama as she could and said: "If you go, it will be against my express wishes."
With that, she turned to my stepdad, who was now reading the evening paper. "What do you say?" she asked him.
He looked up at me over the top of the newsprint and said, "If you get in a jam, don't expect us to help you," and went back to reading the editorials.
It was that easy.
The trip was a blast. It didn't take long at all to get to Ft. Lauderdale. Once there, the girls moved into a house belonging to one of the girls' parents and the boys moved into a motel room not far away.
During the days, we did what all tourists our age did: we went to the beach, visited the Everglades, sailed in the Intracoastal Waterway, debated whether to report a UFO (the strange glow in the clouds to the north turned out to be a satellite launching from Cape Kennedy), and just drove around in the sun. At nights, we'd cook dinner, socialize, listen to records (we about wore out the grooves for I'm in Love with a Big Blue Frog, which we played several hundred times), and then part company until the next morning. It was a great vacation.
We left for home on the last day of January, a Sunday. We ran into some traffic near Cocoa Beach, and we couldn't understand why until we learned that a moon shot was going to launch that afternoon. We got off the highway and joined the expectant multitudes. There was a holiday mood in the air and we found a good spot from which to witness the launch of Apollo 14.
The launch - the first I saw in person - was spectacular. What caught my eye in particular was seeing how the flaming exhaust from the first stage engines was at least one-and-a-half times the length of the Saturn launch vehicle, which itself was 36 stories tall!
Something happened to me at that launch, because for a few moments, while the rumbling of the rocket was fresh in my chest and before the Saturn and its payload disappeared entirely into the sky, I felt as if, literally, the sky was the limit. For the astronauts, for me, for everyone.
In subsequent years, I managed to shed many of the limitations - imposed from both without and within - that I had lived with in my youth. I became a double-major and graduated with two degrees. I learned a foreign language well enough to be mistaken for a native speaker. I joined the Marines. I became a stage magician and performed in a show under (yes, under) Broadway for a while. I got a job in the USSR and got married there. (Heck, I even started a LiveJournal back when the idea was brand new and, frankly, a little weird!)
I'm no guru, nor a saint, and Providence knows, if Homer sometimes nods, then I sometimes snore, and loudly. But through it all, I've been guided by the thought that life is grand, and the sky really is the limit!
Cheers…
My parents were a bit on the overprotective side. Scarred in her youth by sensational coverage of the Lindbergh kidnapping, my mom held the steadfast conviction that I was the one and only target of every kidnapper on the face of the planet - or at least Queens - and for that reason, on those rare occasions when I was allowed out to play, I was admonished to remain within sight of our apartment's windows. Failure to comply would result in her coming downstairs to look for me, so I learned not to wander.
My stepdad was a survivor of the Second World War and believed in hard work, but unlike many of his generation, he didn't believe in corporal punishment. On the contrary, his approach to my upbringing was more psychological, and he often commanded my obedience with simply a look or a withheld word. I never raised my voice to him or disagreed on any fundamental issues.
For the longest time, I had no neighborhood friends to speak of, nor were there any overnight trips anywhere, or to anyone's house, or any Cub Scout meetings. My parents didn't believe in giving me "spending money," nor in paying me for chores that they felt were a family obligation to begin with. My friends at school were exactly that: people my age with whom I associated during school hours, though as I passed through junior high school, I did manage to form three fragile friendships.
I watched a lot of television in my youth. As a child, I amused myself by perfectly imitating the voices of cartoon characters with names like Woody, Bugs, Elmer, and Yogi, and I later aped the shtick of Moe, Larry, and Curly and Bud and Lou (even though "Officer Joe" Bolton, who hosted such after-school fare on WNEW, warned us not to). At night, after finishing my homework, I'd sit in the corner, quietly, and watch my stepdad's favorite shows with him and my mom until I was told to go to bed. I never asked to stay up.
Throughout this all, I was happy enough, never suspecting that life could really be any other way. In any event, I did have my grandmother as a counterbalance to any unease I may have felt from time to time. Despite the fact that she and my mother thought alike on a number of subjects, my grandmother seemed ever so much more… approachable, more friendly. I felt free when I came to visit her, and when we went out, I could almost always count on her buying me some amusing bauble at the five and dime.
She taught me rudimentary cooking skills, and songs. She tried to teach me some elementary phrases in French, too. (In fact, I still have her set of 78 RPM Assimil language records!). She showed me old letters and photographs of my grandfather, who died when I was an infant. And despite her frail health, she took me - not just once, but several times - to the New York World's Fair just a few stops down on the elevated at Flushing Meadows Park, where we wandered the pavilions and she let me get high on the promise the future held for all of us.
In my junior year of high school, my parents moved to Long Island. The dislocation was not as serious as it might have been for me, though it was serious enough, for I lost track of my friends from Queens. Yet I continued to be an obedient adolescent through the rest of high school, and even went along with the idea of limiting my college applications to Hofstra and Stony Brook so as not to end up at a school too far from home after graduation.
Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon during the summer between high school and college, and the only two things I remember from my first year at Stony Brook was how impossibly hard freshman chemistry was, and running to make the Long Island Railroad train for the trip home every Friday afternoon.
You see, I was still quite entangled in the apron strings of home. As always, my grandmother - who had moved in with us after contributing a hefty share of the down payment on the house - was a beacon of solace, although her health now was really beginning to fail.
Things changed, slowly. In the summer between freshman and sophomore year, I saved some money working as a golf caddy at a local country club. Then, during the first half of sophomore year, I discovered the writings of Ayn Rand and began to meet with other "students of Objectivism" on a regular basis. I began to ever more frequently skip weekends at home, citing the press of my university workload.
Then, somewhere in the run-up to the December holiday vacation, our little group began to discuss the idea of driving down to Florida, to Ft. Lauderdale, for the January intersession. I held back from such discussions, knowing that such an adventure would never gain the approval of my parents. And yet…
And yet, as the New Year loomed, the idea gnawed at me. Not only did I want to go to Florida because my friends were going - we all got along well together, and it promised to be a great trip - but also because one girl in particular was going.
I guess that must have been the tipping point, because one night - incredibly, unbelievably - I broached the subject of the trip to my parents over dinner.
"You're crazy," said my mother, "Florida? That's out of the question!"
"Why?" I asked.
"Well, for one thing, who are these people you're going with?" she replied. "Anyway, it'll take you a week to drive down there, and another week to drive back. You'll be exhausted! What a silly idea. Put it out of your mind!"
When she paused for breath, I tried to answer her objections, but she did not want to listen. Instead, she looked at my stepdad for support.
"How do you plan to to pay for it?" he asked. I told him about the money I had saved from the previous summer. He shrugged his shoulders.
"Listen to your mother," he said, and ate another forkful of food.
"No. No. Absolutely not!" said my mother, not letting me get a word in. "I forbid it!"
I got up and fled the kitchen, as I felt tears coming on.
I ended up in my grandmother's room. I don't know why, maybe because it was a place I could feel comfortable. It certainly wasn't to cry on her shoulder, as I was utterly certain that she would share my mother's opinion of my proposed two-week trip a thousand miles from home with a bunch of young people my own age. Instead, after telling her of what had happened at the dinner table, she rocked me to the very core of my being.
"I think it's a wonderful idea!" she said. "There's no reason you shouldn't go and have some fun with your friends. You're certainly old enough!"
Buoyed by this support, I screwed up my courage and stormed back to the kitchen, half-dried tears still on my cheeks.
"I've thought it over," I said, "and I'm going. I've made my decision, and I'm going."
My mother looked at me, then looked down at the table, sorrowfully. In a disappointed tone, she mustered up as much drama as she could and said: "If you go, it will be against my express wishes."
With that, she turned to my stepdad, who was now reading the evening paper. "What do you say?" she asked him.
He looked up at me over the top of the newsprint and said, "If you get in a jam, don't expect us to help you," and went back to reading the editorials.
It was that easy.
The trip was a blast. It didn't take long at all to get to Ft. Lauderdale. Once there, the girls moved into a house belonging to one of the girls' parents and the boys moved into a motel room not far away.
During the days, we did what all tourists our age did: we went to the beach, visited the Everglades, sailed in the Intracoastal Waterway, debated whether to report a UFO (the strange glow in the clouds to the north turned out to be a satellite launching from Cape Kennedy), and just drove around in the sun. At nights, we'd cook dinner, socialize, listen to records (we about wore out the grooves for I'm in Love with a Big Blue Frog, which we played several hundred times), and then part company until the next morning. It was a great vacation.
We left for home on the last day of January, a Sunday. We ran into some traffic near Cocoa Beach, and we couldn't understand why until we learned that a moon shot was going to launch that afternoon. We got off the highway and joined the expectant multitudes. There was a holiday mood in the air and we found a good spot from which to witness the launch of Apollo 14.
The launch - the first I saw in person - was spectacular. What caught my eye in particular was seeing how the flaming exhaust from the first stage engines was at least one-and-a-half times the length of the Saturn launch vehicle, which itself was 36 stories tall!
Something happened to me at that launch, because for a few moments, while the rumbling of the rocket was fresh in my chest and before the Saturn and its payload disappeared entirely into the sky, I felt as if, literally, the sky was the limit. For the astronauts, for me, for everyone.
In subsequent years, I managed to shed many of the limitations - imposed from both without and within - that I had lived with in my youth. I became a double-major and graduated with two degrees. I learned a foreign language well enough to be mistaken for a native speaker. I joined the Marines. I became a stage magician and performed in a show under (yes, under) Broadway for a while. I got a job in the USSR and got married there. (Heck, I even started a LiveJournal back when the idea was brand new and, frankly, a little weird!)
I'm no guru, nor a saint, and Providence knows, if Homer sometimes nods, then I sometimes snore, and loudly. But through it all, I've been guided by the thought that life is grand, and the sky really is the limit!
Cheers…
