Attracted and disgusted

 

I heard some “bad” boys reciting a rhyme on the school ground. I so wanted to listen to it, but felt guilty about that and thought the boys were wicked for speaking it out so boldly. I think this is the poem (thank you, Google):

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I gave her inches one. She said, "Can you make me come?"

I gave her inches two, she said, "John, you sure can screw."

I gave her inches three. She said, "John, I have to pee."

I gave her inches four. She said, "Now it's getting sore."

I gave her inches five. She said, "That damned thing's alive."

I gave her inches six. She said, "Give it six more licks."

I gave her inches seven. She said, "Feels like I'm in heaven."

I gave her inches eight.  She said, "John, I just can't wait."

I gave her inches nine.  She said, "Do it from behind."

I gave her inches ten.  She said, "Let's start once again."

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I was also both drawn and repulsed when boys would pose the riddle, “What is the definition of a kiss? Answer: an upper persuasion for a lower invasion.”

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My mother thought genes trumped home environment

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In the argument between the importance of environment versus genes, my mother, even though she provided the best child-rearing environment possible for us kids, always came down on the side of genes. I heard her say many times, “You’ve got great genes.” Later, when I learned about my father’s bipolar condition, which she already knew about, I wondered whether she was lying either to herself or to us when she said that.

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Killing a boy?

 

It was morning recess. I loved the rough-and-tumble game of “King of the Mountain.” A three-foot-high hill of dirt on the school ground provided the perfect prop for us kids. Everyone scrambled and pushed and screamed to get to the top of the hill and stay there. I was in the fray and loved it. Suddenly, the other kids were silent. I looked around and everyone was looking at a classmate lying motionless on the ground. We thought he was dead. I heard questions, “Who did it? Who pushed him?” Quickly a consensus arose among the kids. “Dwight did it.” Although they may have said, "Stinkler did it," as I was called by some of the other kids, with Stinkler rhyming with my family name Minkler. 

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Did I push him? I didn’t know. But being blamed for it felt just the same as doing it. I thought to myself, “I’m only eight years old and I’ve already killed someone. My life is over.” I cried for the rest of the day. During the afternoon recess, I stayed in the classroom with my teacher, sobbing uncontrollably.

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Up until this happened, I was pugnacious, often getting into scrapes and I was always “right.” When I was six, I attended another kid’s big birthday party. Before the party was over, I had given three separate boys a bloody nose. 

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A life-changing promise to myself

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On that day, when I thought I’d killed that boy, I made a life-changing decision: unless a family member’s life or my life was threatened, I would never fight again. I kept that rule absolutely except for a brief scruff I got into in the Marine Corps Reserves when I was twenty-two. A bunkmate had refused to return $20 I had lent to him. When his punch cracked the top of one of my front teeth, I quickly stopped fighting and thought to myself, "Fighting over $20. This is stupid." By the way, $20 then is about $170 today.

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A few days later I found out that the boy was not dead; he had just been knocked out.

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Is there really hell?

 

This was the deep south, heavily Baptist, in the middle of the Bible Belt in 1953. My family attended a Presbyterian church at that time, until a few years later when the Sunday school teacher told my younger brother, “If you don’t behave, Jesus will be sad.” My mother was furious at that Sunday school teacher.

 

My father was the one who wanted to attend church, but that was the limit for my mother. She told him, “If you want to go to church, that’s fine. But we’re not going.”

 

Anyway, while playing on the school ground, I must have mentioned to a classmate that I suspected that there might not be hell. My comment was so scandalous it got passed up to Mrs. Martin, the principal of our four-room schoolhouse. She asked my mother to come in for a sit-down. My mother gave Mrs. Martin a lecture about the separation of church and state. And that was that. Of course, I knew nothing of this at the time. My mother told me about this years later after I was an adult.

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Conversation over potatoes 

 

I never doubted my mother’s love. But what she gave me, maybe even more important than love was liking and respect. One way I felt this was when I would arrive home from school each day at about 3:30 PM, after a mile-and-a-half walk. She had pan-fried potatoes with ketchup waiting for me.

 

We sat at the kitchen table and talked. Not about school. Not about my grades. Not about anything that I should or shouldn’t do. We just talked about life. About people. About things. About ideas. We enjoyed sharing our thoughts back and forth. I felt loved, liked, listened to, and respected.

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Crying because you got cookies?

 

Spending a long summer holiday on the Cumberland Plateau on my grandparent’s farm in Tennessee, I savored the smell of oatmeal cookies, my favorite, as my grandmother, Beebe removed them from the oven. “I want some...I want some,” I exclaimed. She gave me two and told me I would have to wait until after dinner for more. I wolfed down those two cookies. I asked for more. My grandmother said, “no.” I began to cry. My grandfather, Boog, queried, “You’re crying because you had cookies?” In frustration, and silently to myself, I reluctantly acknowledged a certain logic to his question.

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So my father wouldn’t lose face

 

At that time my father was not able to keep a steady job as a brick mason due to his bipolar condition, which was then called manic-depression. I later found out about his mental illness when I was ten and he claimed, in a conversation with me, to have discovered something that was going to change the whole world.

 

My mother was sometimes desperate to keep us in food. One of the neighbors was aware of our situation and happy to help out, but my mother knew my father would be too proud to accept “handouts.” She arranged with the neighbor to leave some canned goods at a hiding place in their yard.

 

I think those neighbors must have been the Clinkscales who lived across our country road; my sister was friends with June Clinkscales, who was just about her age.

 

When my father was asleep, my mother would sneak into the neighbor’s yard to retrieve the food. I didn’t know this until decades later after my mother had divorced my father and she felt free to tell us many of the secrets she had kept.

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I hated eggs and tricked my mother

 

There were only a few foods I didn’t like. Two were eggs and cottage cheese. I still dislike cottage cheese. But eggs were a relatively cheap form of protein and iron, which my mother was concerned about us getting enough of. So my mother said I couldn’t leave the kitchen table until I finished the eggs on my plate.

 

Our house was still under construction and we had only sub-floors over an airspace, with one-half inch cracks often between some of the boards. When my mother wasn’t looking, I would drop the eggs from my plate through a crack under my kitchen chair. Then, when my mother noticed that “I had eaten my eggs,” I could leave the table.

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The benefits of growing up poor 

 

I didn’t have any self-consciousness about being poor, perhaps because my mother never complained about it and never mentioned envying anyone else. She just said matter-of-factly, “We can’t afford that,” whenever one of us would ask for something that was too expensive.

 

But, relative to most of our neighbors in Flatrock, South Carolina, we were poor: they had cars, telephones, TVs, and running water long before we did. We took a bath in a big tin tub once a week on the kitchen floor. We lived in a two-room shack and then a half-built house. We ate out in a cheap restaurant just once a year. We didn’t have money to buy soda pop. My mother cut my hair and made some of our clothes to save money. 

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But I got paid for some chores around the house. We got a nickel for washing the dishes. And neighbors would sometimes pay me to do some chores for them. I remember being so proud of myself, making 50 cents an hour when I was twelve years old. I even created a budget in my head about out how I could support myself on 50 cents an hour if I worked 40 hours a week. And it was my business what I spent the money on. I learned to save and manage my money early.

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Richer than an emperor

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Today, with all I have, I feel richer than an emperor. In contrast, I wonder if many of those richer kids may have had problems with later feeling as fortunate as I do because they will have no “poor” childhood to compare it with. Also, rich kids can have a big problem learning to save or manage their money well, because their parents just “give them money” whenever they ask.

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Benign neglect

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Because we were poor, we kids were short on store-bought toys compared to the other children and we were largely left alone to find our own play. The best way to raise kids is with “benign neglect,” my mother would say. I suspect that I became more inventive and creative because of this.

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Healthier diet

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Because we were poorer, we probably ate better than our neighbors. We couldn’t afford as much meat. And no soda pop. And we couldn’t afford to buy many of the more processed foods. I remember helping my mother home-canning vegetables from our summer garden over a fire in our backyard for us to eat during the winter. 

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At school, other kids’ parents had packed them meat sandwiches. My mother made me pineapple sandwiches and peanut-butter-and-raisin sandwiches, my favorite, probably more healthy overall than meat sandwiches, although neither my mother nor I knew that then. We thought meat was so healthy.

 

Why no allergies?

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Researchers have since found that kids having a “very clean” childhood often ended up with allergy problems later in life. I was a pretty dirty kid. Not only did I run barefoot all summer long outside, digging holes in the yard, and playing in the rain and the mud during the summer storms, but, as I said, I got a bath only once a week. As a child and adult, I’ve never had allergy problems. It could be related. Many of the friends of my age who had a “clean childhood” do suffer from allergies.

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Dateline 1953

 

• Playboy Magazine's first issue debuted in December and features Marilyn Monroe as its first cover girl and nude centerfold.

• Edmund Hillary becomes the first person to reach the peak of Mount Everest. 

• Famous physicist Albert Einstein warned the world that a nuclear war would lead to mutual destruction.

• "I Love Lucy" premiered on television on the CBS network.

• The first issue of the comedy-driven MAD Magazine is published.

• The Double Helix DNA Model is revealed by Francis Crick and James Watson.

• The world's population reached 2.68 billion.