The Early Years
I don’t know of anyone who has self-awareness during the first two or three years of his life. You just suddenly become conscious one day of a few things you can vaguely recall that happened to you after you have been alive for about 1100 to1500 days. Hence, I was unaware that my father had passed away just after my third month in this physical world.
My mother had no formal education past the 6th grade, having been raised on top of a Grant County, Kentucky hill that fell off to deep hollers below near a joint called Dry Ridge. If you were in her family, you rode a horse or walked. Her home had no toilet or running water. You stepped out into the back yard - snow, rain, day or night - and walked a piece down the hill out of sight of everyone and did what you had to do when nature demanded a response. Need water? A bucket was carried outside to the cistern and hung over a spout. As you cranked away, a chain would rattle inside and eventually water poured into the pail. Inside a long-handled community ladle in a bucket tipped the water past your lips if you were thirsty. Her bed in the kitchen looked across from the wood burning stove that slowly ticked down from red hot to as cold as the water that was frozen solid like iron in the bucket during a winter morning.
No wonder I also slept in the kitchen through high school and we never had any heat in the house at night.
When she was about 20 in 1926, she married a fellow she had known as a young girl. But that didn’t go well. Though that marriage produced my half sister who was 19 years my senior, she was often the subject of a series of beatings, which precipitated a divorce after a few months.
In 1941, she married again. This time it was my 57 year old, divorced father. She was 36. Much to their surprise, he became a father again at 61, but he was also gone in 96 days. On the day of his death in 1946 - her birthday, no less - she turned 40. With my father now deceased and my sister on her own, there was no source of income or anyone to care for her bouncing baby boy. It was imperative that my mother find a job. So a cousin who lived across the street stepped in and kept me while Mom entered the work force during the day and resumed her role as mother in the evening.
I was gradually becoming conscious of some of the life I had been born into before I went to school, probably around 4 years old, or about 1950. I had been farmed out on a weekly basis to a relative out in the country while Mom worked and was brought home occasionally on weekends. But eventually one of her cousins just a few blocks away offered to care for me during the week. In the wee hours of a Monday morning - about 4:30 am, she would wake me up, give me a piece of toast soaked with butter and carry me to an automobile filled with car poolers headed to Crosley Radio Corporation way over in Cincinnati, Ohio. This is the only way my mother could have gotten to what was considered to be a very good job fo her status and education because never once in her life did she ever drive an automobile. She was a hoof and bus person, and Crosley’s was too far away at that hour for that kind of travel.
The car rolled me down to 718 Main St in Covington where my mother would jump out of the car and drop me off inside the door of her cousin by marriage. With the toast in my hand, I was always left crying for her not to leave me because I would not be going home with her again till Friday evening when she got home from work and raced like a savior to Corrie’s to pick me up. As a single mother living alone with no help from anyone, I can only imagine how extremely difficult it was for her to tear herself away from her sobbing little son as she had to think about what she had done as she hustled back to that car and quietly meditated on lingering regrets while they all commuted to work. I can still taste that buttered toast and feel that loss as my mother left me in this place.
This arrangement lasted until 1953. Mom had actually placed me with a very loving and kind Pentecostal woman by the name of Corrie Kinman who was in her 70s. She had 2 grown sons living with her, Connie who was short and stocky like a wrestler and Cecil, a thin man with sparse hair except those sprouting from his nose and whose feet were tormented by corns and bunions. He wore horn rimmed glasses. Neither of those two worked a lick that I could see.
She also had a husband named Elmer.
Elmer was an aged, slender, tall but slightly hunched codger who chewed on his tongue like it was bubble gum and wore black clod-hoppers and railroad engineer clothes. He always donned a blue striped railroad hat with the matching coveralls. When he came off of the locomotive at retirement, he locked himself in train mode the rest of his life. The only thing I ever saw him do was drop his his backside into a soft rocking chair like it was an anchor and tilt back and forth in front of the coal fireplace while puffing on a pipe.
Both Elmer and I had gifts. Elmer’s gift was that he could curse like nobody’s business. It was worth whatever you could instigate to set him off. And very comical. He was a grumpy soul, spontaneously explosive and as fluent as an auctioneer in the art of swearing. But until then he could sit for hours in that rocking chair without mumbling a word, happy as he could be doing nothing. Just eating the wonderful homemade vittles and buttered biscuits Corrie made for him and wanting and enjoying only peace in his last days.
Until I appeared, being somewhere between 4-6 years of age.
That is when my gift would be activated. Elmer was known to be naturally inflammatory and impetuous, but I possessed a talent that could bring Elmer to a scalding boil faster than anyone had ever seen. All kids, especially boys, are fascinated by fire. If there is a boy in the vicinity, a fireplace is not just going to sit there and burn. No. It is going to be coddled, poked at, moved around. Sparks are going to fly and the coal will to fall out of the andiron and cause concern for adults who are always leery when a kid gets near burning things. I was no different. With Elmer sitting back in front of the fireplace as if he were a cemetery monument, I would hoist one of the pokers next to the coal bucket filled with chunks of black bituminous and start in on the blazing fireplace till the poker gleamed a brilliant, almost neon, orange. Meanwhile, little did I know that as Elmer sat and watched all this, he was entering the initial stages of the same cycle as Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park. Pressure was building and welling upward. He didn’t say a word. All that was needed was a spark to light him up. I did not disappoint. I was just about ready to strike the flint. It was only seconds away. He just puffed the pipe and chomped on his tongue.
Connie and Cecil, with nothing to do, would also usually be sitting there staring in silence at the fire, irritated as I plunged the luminous poker into the flames and broke up the coal. Comments from them to all young fire hounds like the following always interrupted the atmosphere, “Careful now, you’re going to set the
house on fire.” But those were nothing like what was coming. Since no one sprang to his feet, raised his voice, or started cursing, I continued on.
When I had lifted one of the red hot chunks of coal and let it tumble out of the grate with a splash of sparks that spilled out onto the hearth rolling toward the new linoleum, that is when the smoldering Mount St. Helen’s caldera within Elmer broke through the thin crust of his restrained intolerance and blasted into a detonation. Elmer would rocket out of his chair like Jack Nicholson in “As Good As It Gets” with the very same epithet Nicholson so deftly vocalized as if he had been sitting in the fireplace himself and commenced to lace the atmosphere with a cacophonous and continuous volley of profanity and blasphemy, waving his fists around his red face while flecks of spittle from his mouth sprinkled the linoleum. In uncontrolled rage and at the top of his lungs, he would roar every expletive he could recall just as if I had driven a car in front of him across some double tracks around a flashing gate at a railroad crossing when he was pouring on the coal at 80 mph in his Iron Horse cascading down the steel road. He liked the word “hell” a lot, but His favorite reference for me was that I was the direct and immediate male descendent of a feminine canine. Corrie would eventually get him calmed down, and he would slink back into his chair as mad as hell, trying to return to the solace he had enjoyed in the valley of peace until he was forced into recycling another discharge of impatience, aggravation, and a coarse rupture of obscenity, particularly called forth by me.
One of the most lasting impressions left on me in my stay there was Corrie herself. She was a godly Christian woman for sure. She would take a jar of buttermilk and jam bread down into it and eat that for a meal. She called it Clabber. Foul stuff. But at night after she had tucked me into bed on the sofa and gave me my yellow rabbit, she would go into the front room, get down on her knees and in a thunderous voice beat on the doors of heaven like the importunate woman that Jesus talked about. I have read stories about people who prayed so much in the same spot that they left their breath stains on the wall or they wore indentations into the hickory or oak floor boards where their knees rested for years. Most prayers on our knees by the vast majority of us Christians wouldn’t be there long enough to leave an impression in a memory foam mattress. But she was a woman that I actually saw kneeling and heard praying and pleading with the Lord long after I was nestled in the loving arms of Mr. Sandman. Elmer, Connie, and Cecil were held high and close to heaven by her prayers as if they were vying for the pole position on the racetrack to Hell - especially Elmer. Often times, I and my eternal destiny was the object of her intense supplication as she called out my name and plead my cause years in advance of the life I was to live.
I was there before I started school, all through Kindergarten, and first grade. I was home with Mom on Friday night and weekends, but it was back to Corrie’s at 5 am on Monday morning. Corrie ate clabber, Connie and Cecil died, and I kept igniting Elmer at the fireplace like an IED.
My mother had no formal education past the 6th grade, having been raised on top of a Grant County, Kentucky hill that fell off to deep hollers below near a joint called Dry Ridge. If you were in her family, you rode a horse or walked. Her home had no toilet or running water. You stepped out into the back yard - snow, rain, day or night - and walked a piece down the hill out of sight of everyone and did what you had to do when nature demanded a response. Need water? A bucket was carried outside to the cistern and hung over a spout. As you cranked away, a chain would rattle inside and eventually water poured into the pail. Inside a long-handled community ladle in a bucket tipped the water past your lips if you were thirsty. Her bed in the kitchen looked across from the wood burning stove that slowly ticked down from red hot to as cold as the water that was frozen solid like iron in the bucket during a winter morning.
No wonder I also slept in the kitchen through high school and we never had any heat in the house at night.
When she was about 20 in 1926, she married a fellow she had known as a young girl. But that didn’t go well. Though that marriage produced my half sister who was 19 years my senior, she was often the subject of a series of beatings, which precipitated a divorce after a few months.
In 1941, she married again. This time it was my 57 year old, divorced father. She was 36. Much to their surprise, he became a father again at 61, but he was also gone in 96 days. On the day of his death in 1946 - her birthday, no less - she turned 40. With my father now deceased and my sister on her own, there was no source of income or anyone to care for her bouncing baby boy. It was imperative that my mother find a job. So a cousin who lived across the street stepped in and kept me while Mom entered the work force during the day and resumed her role as mother in the evening.
I was gradually becoming conscious of some of the life I had been born into before I went to school, probably around 4 years old, or about 1950. I had been farmed out on a weekly basis to a relative out in the country while Mom worked and was brought home occasionally on weekends. But eventually one of her cousins just a few blocks away offered to care for me during the week. In the wee hours of a Monday morning - about 4:30 am, she would wake me up, give me a piece of toast soaked with butter and carry me to an automobile filled with car poolers headed to Crosley Radio Corporation way over in Cincinnati, Ohio. This is the only way my mother could have gotten to what was considered to be a very good job fo her status and education because never once in her life did she ever drive an automobile. She was a hoof and bus person, and Crosley’s was too far away at that hour for that kind of travel.
The car rolled me down to 718 Main St in Covington where my mother would jump out of the car and drop me off inside the door of her cousin by marriage. With the toast in my hand, I was always left crying for her not to leave me because I would not be going home with her again till Friday evening when she got home from work and raced like a savior to Corrie’s to pick me up. As a single mother living alone with no help from anyone, I can only imagine how extremely difficult it was for her to tear herself away from her sobbing little son as she had to think about what she had done as she hustled back to that car and quietly meditated on lingering regrets while they all commuted to work. I can still taste that buttered toast and feel that loss as my mother left me in this place.
This arrangement lasted until 1953. Mom had actually placed me with a very loving and kind Pentecostal woman by the name of Corrie Kinman who was in her 70s. She had 2 grown sons living with her, Connie who was short and stocky like a wrestler and Cecil, a thin man with sparse hair except those sprouting from his nose and whose feet were tormented by corns and bunions. He wore horn rimmed glasses. Neither of those two worked a lick that I could see.
She also had a husband named Elmer.
Elmer was an aged, slender, tall but slightly hunched codger who chewed on his tongue like it was bubble gum and wore black clod-hoppers and railroad engineer clothes. He always donned a blue striped railroad hat with the matching coveralls. When he came off of the locomotive at retirement, he locked himself in train mode the rest of his life. The only thing I ever saw him do was drop his his backside into a soft rocking chair like it was an anchor and tilt back and forth in front of the coal fireplace while puffing on a pipe.
Both Elmer and I had gifts. Elmer’s gift was that he could curse like nobody’s business. It was worth whatever you could instigate to set him off. And very comical. He was a grumpy soul, spontaneously explosive and as fluent as an auctioneer in the art of swearing. But until then he could sit for hours in that rocking chair without mumbling a word, happy as he could be doing nothing. Just eating the wonderful homemade vittles and buttered biscuits Corrie made for him and wanting and enjoying only peace in his last days.
Until I appeared, being somewhere between 4-6 years of age.
That is when my gift would be activated. Elmer was known to be naturally inflammatory and impetuous, but I possessed a talent that could bring Elmer to a scalding boil faster than anyone had ever seen. All kids, especially boys, are fascinated by fire. If there is a boy in the vicinity, a fireplace is not just going to sit there and burn. No. It is going to be coddled, poked at, moved around. Sparks are going to fly and the coal will to fall out of the andiron and cause concern for adults who are always leery when a kid gets near burning things. I was no different. With Elmer sitting back in front of the fireplace as if he were a cemetery monument, I would hoist one of the pokers next to the coal bucket filled with chunks of black bituminous and start in on the blazing fireplace till the poker gleamed a brilliant, almost neon, orange. Meanwhile, little did I know that as Elmer sat and watched all this, he was entering the initial stages of the same cycle as Old Faithful in Yellowstone National Park. Pressure was building and welling upward. He didn’t say a word. All that was needed was a spark to light him up. I did not disappoint. I was just about ready to strike the flint. It was only seconds away. He just puffed the pipe and chomped on his tongue.
Connie and Cecil, with nothing to do, would also usually be sitting there staring in silence at the fire, irritated as I plunged the luminous poker into the flames and broke up the coal. Comments from them to all young fire hounds like the following always interrupted the atmosphere, “Careful now, you’re going to set the
house on fire.” But those were nothing like what was coming. Since no one sprang to his feet, raised his voice, or started cursing, I continued on.
When I had lifted one of the red hot chunks of coal and let it tumble out of the grate with a splash of sparks that spilled out onto the hearth rolling toward the new linoleum, that is when the smoldering Mount St. Helen’s caldera within Elmer broke through the thin crust of his restrained intolerance and blasted into a detonation. Elmer would rocket out of his chair like Jack Nicholson in “As Good As It Gets” with the very same epithet Nicholson so deftly vocalized as if he had been sitting in the fireplace himself and commenced to lace the atmosphere with a cacophonous and continuous volley of profanity and blasphemy, waving his fists around his red face while flecks of spittle from his mouth sprinkled the linoleum. In uncontrolled rage and at the top of his lungs, he would roar every expletive he could recall just as if I had driven a car in front of him across some double tracks around a flashing gate at a railroad crossing when he was pouring on the coal at 80 mph in his Iron Horse cascading down the steel road. He liked the word “hell” a lot, but His favorite reference for me was that I was the direct and immediate male descendent of a feminine canine. Corrie would eventually get him calmed down, and he would slink back into his chair as mad as hell, trying to return to the solace he had enjoyed in the valley of peace until he was forced into recycling another discharge of impatience, aggravation, and a coarse rupture of obscenity, particularly called forth by me.
One of the most lasting impressions left on me in my stay there was Corrie herself. She was a godly Christian woman for sure. She would take a jar of buttermilk and jam bread down into it and eat that for a meal. She called it Clabber. Foul stuff. But at night after she had tucked me into bed on the sofa and gave me my yellow rabbit, she would go into the front room, get down on her knees and in a thunderous voice beat on the doors of heaven like the importunate woman that Jesus talked about. I have read stories about people who prayed so much in the same spot that they left their breath stains on the wall or they wore indentations into the hickory or oak floor boards where their knees rested for years. Most prayers on our knees by the vast majority of us Christians wouldn’t be there long enough to leave an impression in a memory foam mattress. But she was a woman that I actually saw kneeling and heard praying and pleading with the Lord long after I was nestled in the loving arms of Mr. Sandman. Elmer, Connie, and Cecil were held high and close to heaven by her prayers as if they were vying for the pole position on the racetrack to Hell - especially Elmer. Often times, I and my eternal destiny was the object of her intense supplication as she called out my name and plead my cause years in advance of the life I was to live.
I was there before I started school, all through Kindergarten, and first grade. I was home with Mom on Friday night and weekends, but it was back to Corrie’s at 5 am on Monday morning. Corrie ate clabber, Connie and Cecil died, and I kept igniting Elmer at the fireplace like an IED.