Places

New and Old: My childhood home as it appears in 2018

It’s wondrous how certain experiences can trigger a memory that transports us back to an earlier time. It could be an old song. It could be the sight of somebody who resembles an old friend. It could be the scent of a fragrance or a musty odor.

For me, it’s all of these, and also about a place. Two places, actually.

I was raised in South Euclid, a suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. I lived there since before I have memories and didn’t move until I was 17. Then I moved to Clinton, Mississippi. After living with my parents for a year, I moved into the dorm at Mississippi College, also located in Clinton.

Old and New: First day of Kindergarten in 1966

So my entire childhood until the age of 22 was spent in one of two places. Virtually all of my childhood and adolescent memories are set either in South Euclid or on the campus of MC.

I was in Ohio recently and decided to visit South Euclid. Although I didn’t write letters to anyone in Ohio, the trip was very much in the spirit of this Six Months project.

This was only my third trip to South Euclid since I left there 35 years ago. As I’ve written before, I didn’t feel like I was leaving any friends when I moved from there. I’ve never spoken to anybody in South Euclid since I left. I don’t have so much as a Facebook friend from there.

So I got to look at buildings, streets, and houses. I saw my childhood home again. I was surprised to see how small it is. I get the sense it could fit completely inside the house I live in now. Because it was what I knew, the size of the house seemed very normal to me. Everybody in the neighborhood was lower-middle class. Or maybe just 1960s middle class.

I don’t know how nostalgia feels to most people, but for me it feels like an empty, painful yearning. Part of the problem is that there’s nobody to see in South Euclid. I have the same issue when I visit MC. I don’t usually visit MC while classes are in session, so the campus is typically empty. It feels cold and soulless, like a cemetery, with brick buildings standing like tombstones.

The emptiness brings back the loneliness of my childhood, the lack of friends and poor socialization. Although I finally found a group of guy friends at MC, my poor experiences with girls—and lack of experiences—reinforced my own belief that I was defective and unlovable. I wouldn’t be able to fully shake this belief until I was in my forties.

When I visit South Euclid or MC, I inevitably feel regret. I want to go back and have a do-over. I fantasize that I can be reincarnated with all my existing memories and social skills and be placed back into my own past. Then I remember what it was like to be a teen and wonder whether that’s what I want after all.

I think what I’m describing here is trauma and its effects. I never considered myself to be a victim of trauma. After all, I had a good, intact family. I wasn’t abused. My parents provided for my every need except for my emotional needs.

But psychologists are now expanding the definition of trauma. We don’t have to suffer a big, momentous tragedy or unspeakable abuse to suffer the effects of trauma. Small suffering over a very long period can produce the same symptoms. And I was socially isolated for my entire childhood.

But… this trip was a little different. I didn’t experience more than a tiny twisting of the gut I was used to feeling when stepping into my past. I visited the place in the woods off school property where I used to hide during recess so other kids wouldn’t see that I was alone. But I wasn’t transported back into that lonely little boy as if I was reliving the experience.

I credit my Six Months experience with this. I was able to stop going back to the places of my past, and truly experience the people of my past. These experiences are what philosopher Martin Buber calls I-Thou encounters, “a turning toward another with one’s whole being.”

Through this project, I’ve had the excuse I needed to revisit the people of my past, particularly the young women with whom I felt inadequate throughout my painful adolescence. I’ve kept a couple of their letters private due to either their wishes or mine.

I can now see that I wasn’t defective. I was just hurting, self-protective, and self-absorbed (as anyone in chronic pain would be). And others weren’t rejecting me specifically. They were just hurting too, and trying to figure things out as best they could.

I no longer yearn to have a do-over with my childhood, because I am content with my own self-image in the present. Though I still think it would be cool to get to relive parts of my life. Maybe I’d buy stock in Apple.

I am filled with gratitude to the people who gifted me with the healing of my past. And there’s still more people to see!

There is a creek behind my childhood home. On the other side of the creek is a narrow strip of woods. I would play in the creek and in the woods almost every day.

As my 57-year-old self was walking down a trail through these woods, I was suddenly transformed into the little boy from a half-century earlier.

But this time it wasn’t painful. I felt free, like children do. I wanted to run, like I used to do so often in those woods.

Unfortunately, my body protested. I would have ended up out-of-breath and sweating, which wasn’t the feeling I was going for. So I just kept walking, and imagining, and being that little boy. And it felt good. I was happy to be him.

Is this what nostalgia is supposed to feel like?

The most important group of friends in my life came to me at a most important point and rescued me from my own isolation.

But let’s start many years earlier, when I was six. It’s a story I’ve told many times.

I was in the second grade before I noticed that other people had friends, and I did not. Most of the other boys would play a game called “Smear the Queer” where one person would dare to pick up a playground ball and all the other boys would try to tackle him and strip the ball. I was sensitive; roughhousing scared me. I wanted to be part of the group, but all I could do was stay close and not go for the ball or try to tackle anybody.

But there was Tim. During recess he would race me from the lunch room to the other end of the parking lot. Tim was fast. He would always beat me. From this, I concluded that I must be the second fastest kid in my class.

I wanted a friend. In complete naiveté, I asked him if he wanted to be my friend. He agreed. I knew that friends invited each other over, so I asked if I could come over. He agreed.

That’s how I found myself at Tim’s house one afternoon. After we played for about 20 minutes, Tim found a group of neighborhood friends and ran off with them. I was alone. In his house. After a while I decided to just go home.

This was the first time I had ever felt the pain of rejection. I was determined to never feel it again. So I isolated myself.

I didn’t sit with anybody during lunch. This pattern would continue through elementary school, junior high, and high school.

I seemed to be the second least popular boy in class. The least popular boy was actively persecuted. They hit him and called him “bullet head” and “chisel chin.” For the most part I was left alone. I don’t know if that was any better.

During recess I didn’t want the others to see me playing alone. So I found a place in the woods off school property and spent every recess alone there. My view was a parking lot and a McDonalds. I was only caught once there, by a teacher. She yelled at me to get back on school grounds. Other than that, not even the teachers noticed me.

When I started noticing girls, I found myself woefully under-socialized. I hadn’t developed the social skills needed to make friends, let alone carry on a nerve-wracking private conversation with a girl. It was the first time I really wanted to get out of the comfort zone I created for myself.

This scared kid with crippling social anxiety enrolled as a freshman at Mississippi College in 1979. I was assigned a roommate: Randy. Randy did the most to pull me out of my shell, and I will cover this when I write about him.

Randy knew a high-school friend named Greg who enrolled at MC the year before. At some point, Greg put together a group of friends to play a new game called Dungeons and Dragons. Randy attended the first game, Greg was the dungeon master, and Randy very nearly pulled off a legendary heist of everyone else’s treasure on their first trip into the dungeon. Randy invited me to join them, and so I got to know my first group of all-guy friends.

Some guys would drift in and out of the group, but a smaller group of hard-core gamers quickly formed. We would have all-night games and then talk about what happened all the next day. It was frustrating for others, because we were in our own world (literally). Once, Greg’s girlfriend and future wife exploded in frustration, exclaiming, “Do you know what it’s like to date the dungeon master?” After that we tried to be more inclusive when Tammy was around.

We all had nicknames for each other. Mine was “Saf”—my first and only nickname. There was Tack, Bro, Grubber, Mage, Holi, and more.

Most of our group consisted of Physics and Computer Science majors. We enjoyed messing with the teachers. The most legendary tales came from the Physics majors. The stories are theirs to tell (I won’t have the space) but I will mention their coup de grâce: One day they bricked up the entrance to the Physics lab.

Yes, bricks. Actually, real brick veneer mounted on a sheet of plywood and held against the door from behind by a lab table. At the beginning of class that evening, the professor unlocked and opened the door, and was presented with a brick wall. He silently closed the door, re-locked it, walked back to his office, and sat down. One of the onlookers who wasn’t in on the prank exclaimed, “You’ve gone too far! You’ve just gone too far!”

We computer science majors had our fun too. For instance, one of our professors assigned programs that were intended to take a few weeks to complete. But we would wait until the last day to get started and then spend an all-nighter in the computer room.

The professor got tired of this, so he required that we do the program in phases, with a separate due date for each phase. The day we got received our assignment, we spent an all-nighter in the computer room, completed all the phases in one night, and turned in the entire project the next day.

As a homework assignment, Jim (Grubber) had to write a blackjack program. He asked for my help. I knew some advanced programming techniques, so we decided to write the program in as few lines of code as possible. We spent more time optimizing the code than it took to write it in the first place. I think we got it down to under 200 lines of code, a major achievement.

The college had just added a computer science major, and hired a new computer science teacher. She was pretty green and was keeping just a few weeks ahead of her students. Jim turned in his assignment, and a few days later the teacher called him into her office. She confessed that she didn’t even begin to know how to grade his program.

One of us managed to get his hands on a master key for the dorm. Within 24 hours we all had a copy. That summer a group of high school kids were on campus and staying at the dorm. One of us ended up with an item missing, and suspected one of the high school kids took it. So a few of us used the pass key to enter every room, found the stolen item, and then trashed the room.

Sometime after that, the school administration discovered that we all had pass keys. But because we were mostly scholarship students, we were only made to turn the keys in and told not to do it again.

This group of guys gave me an identity. I still had a hard time being alone with girls, but I was secure that I had a good group of guy friends who truly cared about me. This was pivotal because I had brought a deep sense of shame from my childhood. Shame is defined as a sense that we are deeply defective and therefore unworthy of love and belonging. I had finally found my love and belonging.

It surprised me to learn that I wasn’t alone to find our group to be special.

After graduation, we were in each other’s weddings. That helped us keep in touch.

Then, one of our own died in a tragic car accident.

I didn’t attend the funeral, but I’ve heard the story told so often I can almost tell it as my own. We all realized that we’d have to do something intentional to stay in touch. Otherwise the next time we’d see each other would be at the next funeral. So we arranged for our families to spend a week together over the summer.

We would meet for 30 summers. Four or five families each summer.

Not all of the wives were initially enthused to give up a week of vacation so the guys could have reunions. But they’ve now become great friends. Our kids grew up together. They each have a set of additional cousins.

Only in recent years has our ritual begun to fall apart. Vacation days are at a premium for at least one of us, and for decades he was unable to do much more for vacations than attend our reunions. He never went to Mexico and wanted to go. So he declared his intention and said anybody else could join him. We did.

Then another member of the group declared his intention to take a Mediterranean cruise and said anybody could join him. I don’t know if anybody did, but for the first time it wasn’t a group deal.

The writing was on the wall, and people started opting out. We needed a break. It’s been a few years now.

Guys, you changed my life in ways you can’t even imagine. This letter only scratches the surface of the level of friendship, connection, and belonging we experienced together. When I was young, I thought it was just me who felt this way about us. Now I know.

We needed a break. I felt it. That’s why I didn’t jump in and plan the next one either. Have we had enough of a break yet? Do we need to meet less often?

I’m prepared to wait longer for us to yearn for connection again. I’ll plan the next one when you’re ready. I think it’s time to renew an invitation to a family who hasn’t joined us in 20 years.