Among the meanings of “explanation” is one which implies justification. That’s not my intention here, nor, I hope, has it ever been; at most, what follows is a basis for understanding and acceptance, nothing more. File this is the category “Valediction”.

First Person, Singular

Forty years ago I had the notion to write my autobiography. The working title was “It’s not about me” and the entirety of it—today it would be far shorter than it might have been then—was to be written without first person singular pronouns: I, me, my, or mine would appear nowhere in its text.

The challenge of writing about oneself without actual self-reference appealed to my sense of challenge; we often test ourselves far more than do those around us, or am I projecting? So, to accomplish this, I had intended to write several other biographical sketches and vignettes depicting people of my acquaintance and the situations in which we often, even habitually found ourselves. In short, I heartily agree with Alfred Lord Tennyson that I am a part of all that I have met and, reciprocally, they have become part of me. Could a biographical sketch of our friend Cecil Elliott, for example, first do justice to the person he was and, second, reflect in the person I knew a bit of who I may have been at the time. Likewise, am I today a different (better?) person than I might otherwise have become?

To write about Cecil is to reflect on our relationship and its evolution, and to a large extent, Cecil and many others who I would have portrayed are here already, in Agincourt—and are likely to remain after me, so long as the internet exists. In that sense, I’m glad to have shared my memories (with any of you who read this thing), because, as James Carse has written, “If you can’t tell a story about what happened to you, nothing happened to you.” To tell you about them is to relive the experiences I had of them and with them. Read the “Ghosts of Christmas Past” series and you’ll see what I mean.

In the beginning I ruminated about “first person, singular” and the likely sequence of those pronouns in my early development. “I”, for example, is probably the last of them we learn. “Me” is far more probable, because it’s in the objective case; I act, while me is acted upon, the recipient. Things come to me—my mother’s teet (yeah, fat chance of that!) or my bath or my teddy bear. And there’s a likely close second in the arrival and awareness of that possessive pronoun group: my and mine, since we are acquisitive little bastards at the start and some have never given up the quest to possess, to own, everything in their reach and some distance beyond.

“I” is the last of those personal pronouns to enter our vocabulary and our self-awareness. For (again in the words of James Carse), “I am the genius of myself.”

VALEDICTION

The end of the academic year is a time for reflection on many things: done (well or badly) and undone. And since this is the forty-seventh opportunity given me to engage in such personal introspection, and since I see at most three more years of this, I’ve grown warmer to the idea of saying goodbye. If I’m able to withstand the rigors of the job six more semesters, a friend in Las Vegas has promised a farewell that my employer is not soon going to forget. So during those 3:00 a.m. epiphanies, when the words flow more readily and eloquently than when I’m fully awake, I nightly reconsider that valedictory address. You have no idea how many very rough draughts have gone down the mental drain. So here I go again.

It was a difficult birth, eight hours, I’m told. Probably even long before the trip to the hospital, Marge had decided one of these was enough; I’m actually surprised that the pregnancy wasn’t terminated. At any rate, she had her tubes tied, to prevent another conception.

Frankly I do not ever recall feeling wanted. Which is not to say that Marge and Roy were bad parents. As their first and only child, they were without experience, as ignorant as I. Hindsight suggests I was merely a symptom of the problem: a marriage gone terribly wrong for reasons that are now much clearer: First, do not create a child out of simple biology or because you think it might patch a failing relationship. No child, however miscreant, ought to be introduced to such a household and shaped by it.

Second, never move in with your in-laws; the mother/daughter-in-law relationship is toxic and only intensifies under a mutual roof. I do not know if I actually saw this, or that I’m simply recalling something I was told, but there was one morning scene involving a meat cleaver and a flying loaf of bread. It’s no surprise I have few memories before the age of seven. Looking at myself then—if that’s even possible—I understand that Marge had no love to give and Roy did but didn’t know how and did the best he could.

In 1953 I was eight years old and Ike was our president. It was a soggy spring when, one evening in March or April, Mrs Shake came to visit. While my grandmother and I sat in the kitchen and entertained her, Marge was upstairs packing, unbeknownst to us, a suitcase of lingerie and loose cash. She took it out the front door, then came into the kitchen, chatted for a moment, and left with Mrs Shake to run some errand or other. That was the last we saw of her.

Eight-year-olds are inclined to bear the weight of the world. I tried then and for the next fifty years. My grandmother and I would walk to the corner market (operated by the Bieniek brothers) and along the way—it was just two blocks—we might stop to chat with Mrs Schiewe or Mrs Pluto (do you get the feeling we lived in an Eastern European ghetto?), but of course I was never part of the conversation. That spring, especially, I was talked about, never spoken to. And heard phrases like “Oh, isn’t little Ronnie taking this all so well”, delivered as a statement of fact, rather than a question. And so I understood my role in all this as threefold: I was its source; I was its victim; I was its responsibility.

I have absolutely no memory of my father speaking to me of what had happened to us; not a word of the divorce and, especially, of child custody. We had little experience with divorce in the early 50s, so I was unaware how rare it was for a father to retain custody. Abandonment simply reinforced the notion that I was not wanted — excess baggage. If I had been “a choice”, Marge would have found space in that suitcase amid the lingerie and loose cash.

FERAL

I was a feral child, self-motivated, anxious to explore the world, and allowed to go where I pleased and do what I chose.

<to be continued>