Bethel Daze (eBook)

Too Inquisitive For My Own Good

Paradise. To a boy just arriving from the concrete jungle that was Brooklyn at the age of three, Westbury New York in 1962 was such a wonderland. Each house in the community of Levitt “slab” houses rested on what seemed like a vast oasis of lush green grass, with at least one pine tree in the front yard. By the time we moved there, a dozen years after thousands of acres of old potato fields became housing for the post-WWII baby boomer generation, our 60’ x 130’ lot also sported a cherry tree just outside the bedroom at the front of the house, and two apple trees, a pear tree, and a maple tree in the back yard.

That yard provided enough room for throwing and hitting baseballs, that is until my older brother Ed and I outgrew it to the point where we had to climb the next-door neighbor’s rickety wooden fence to retrieve the ball nearly every time we made contact. At other times the yard served as an airfield, fulfilling Ed’s primary passion (and my sometime casual interest) of building and flying U-control model airplanes.

I spent many summer days feeling like the king of the world perched on the upper branches of one of the apple trees that was perfect for climbing.

One of my fondest early memories of that property was the year that Dad turned it into an ice rink. He then hurled me, Ed, and my sisters Peggy and Patricia across it, one at a time, on garbage pail lids. It never occurred to me what skill it must have taken him to push us off with enough force for the ride of a lifetime, yet miss the fence belonging to the neighbors directly behind us. I guess I always just knew that whatever Dad did was done just right, and we would never get hurt if he was involved.

There were public baseball fields everywhere one looked in Westbury. The closest one to our West Cabot Lane house was a short walk from the Carman Avenue pool, another amenity of life on our part of Long Island just thirty miles east of Brooklyn Heights. All each family had to do was prove they lived in the neighborhood, and they got a pool tag for that year with no charge.

With all of those benefits, it never occurred to us four kids how little we actually had. There was only one car in the household, so in the days before we were old enough for Mom to leave us home alone for the twenty or so minutes it would take to drive Dad to the train station, he would have no choice but to drive himself, leaving us car-less. That was OK, since we only had to walk three blocks to get milk and other necessities at the deli, or other supplies at the nearby drug store – all on the side of Carman Avenue opposite that glorious pool!

We had a train set that was mostly a hand-me-down from my paternal grandfather, dating back to the early 20th century, and supplemented no more than once per year with new train cars, tracks, and even a Berkshire engine. We had a sled that served us well when we would sneak through the illegally cut chain-link fence to the storm basin at the end of our road (we called them “sumps”). Each of us had a bicycle, a rite of passage in those days. We went everywhere on our bicycles.

In later years, when all I could ever want was the new album by The Beatles, Jethro Tull, or my hero Eric Clapton, I was happy to get even just one of those, so long as the music and lyrics met my parents’ standards. Nothing else mattered. How does a kid know how little he has when he has nothing to compare his circumstances to? Really, we had a lot. We even had a black and white TV that we could actually watch when the horizontal control wasn’t having a complete conniption. Guess who we were watching on February 9th, 1964 on the Ed Sullivan show!

My parents were very conservative, including when it came to social fixtures like hair and clothing styles, entertainment, the friends we could have, and so on. I rarely had friends over, because it seemed like every time Dad got home from working in downtown Manhattan, New York City all day, he would figure out exactly what we were doing during the day. I swore it must have been that he had inexplicable magic powers. But alas, there was no magic wand to wave to get out of the punishment that might come our way.

There were two families on the block we were not allowed to associate with, and others that were always creeping up toward to the top of that same list of banned people. In hindsight, there were good reasons for that. But we couldn’t understand it at the time.

Saturday mornings were often frustrating, since all we really wanted to do was stay home and watch cartoons. The man who spent over twelve hours each weekday commuting and working had other things in mind for us when we finally got to see him on the weekends.

At one point Dad bought a barber kit from Sears in order to save money on haircuts for us boys. I hated the short bowl cuts he gave us so much that I swear haircut days were the worse times of my life (up to that point). After all, by the time I was ten years old, long hair was a necessity if a boy expected to be perceived as cool.

Even though lots of kids at school wore “rough play” clothes to school, we were not allowed. I always had to be the nerd with the casual-but-neat trousers, the button down shirt, and the weird shoes that seemed to be designed only for St Stephen’s Lutheran church, where Mom dragged us to Sunday school every week. Another thing I hated. At least we had a laugh explaining all the things we DIDN’T learn, describing the goody-two-shoes twin sisters with the white, lacy, perfect clothes and matching Bibles they never unzipped, and sarcastically pining for the day when we might be allowed to use scissors to complement the construction paper, crayons and paste we played with there.

The Lutheran church was selected by Mom as a compromise between her Baptist background and Dad’s Catholic background. To my knowledge, Dad never saw the inside of a church unless it was for a baptism, wedding or funeral. But somehow it mattered that we not be brought up Baptist.

Arrival at the grand old age of fifteen brings with it a certain amount of wisdom, experience, and depth. At least according to the one who is fifteen.

By the summer of 1974, I had finally got to see my hero, Eric Clapton, play live at the Nassau Coliseum in support of his new album, 461 Ocean Boulevard. Stephen King had just published his first novel, Carrie. Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles was still playing in the movie theaters. PBS television began broadcasting Monty Python’s Flying Circus. I had gone to my first concert, Hot Tuna, late in the prior year – unaccompanied and with a ticket I had bought with my own paper-route money.

But there were other developments that were increasingly disturbing to me.

The United States had just crept out of the 1973 energy crisis.

India successfully detonated its first nuclear bomb, joining the club that had up until then consisted exclusively of the United States, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and France.

The news was ever more frequently saturated with reports of terrorist attacks on England by the Irish Republican Army.

The US Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, having been convoked as a result of the break-in at the Watergate Hotel in Washington DC in 1972, carried out televised hearings during the summer of 1973. The committee finally published its Report on Presidential Campaign Activities on June 27th, 1974. President Nixon would subsequently announce his resignation on August 8th, effective the following day.

It felt like my country and the whole world were falling apart.

I had observed enough of children starving in Biafra, developments in Viet Nam, the Watergate scandal, and other country- and world-wide events, to wonder about the purpose of life. Add to that the fact that seemingly every December there were news stories of some family’s house, along with all of the Christmas presents inside, burning to the ground in a fire usually caused by a badly decorated Christmas tree. For several years leading up to 1974 I didn’t see much point in celebrating Christmas. How was I supposed to be happy getting more sleds, bicycles, and music records when there were kids somewhere that weren’t going to get ANYTHING?

Obviously, the wisdom and knowledge I had gained up to that point did not include the art of seeing the positive things in the world, as opposed to seeing things through the bleak lens presented by network TV news.

I began wondering about the future. The purpose of life. Having recently read Dante’s Inferno, I wondered about the condition of the dead.

There were no answers at the Baptist church Mom finally began bringing me to when I was thirteen or fourteen years old.

Would I ever get those answers anywhere?

The “Truth” That Leads… Nowhere

Charlie D and I had known each other since the age of three, when I had just moved to Westbury. His house sat catty-cornered from ours, the two properties sharing a border of just about ten feet. I could either walk around the block to his house in about five minutes, or squeeze between the fences and into his back yard to be there in a fraction of that...