My father was brilliant in buying me things (I won’t call them toys) that captured my imagination. The first was a Meccano set with little nuts and bolts, to build model cars and cranes and Ferris wheels. It even had a motor to drive them. I spent countless hours on the floor fabricating them from the complex, picture instructions and learned precision, as a single misplaced screw would ruin the whole. It was early instruction in reading ‘blueprints’.
Another kit he bought me was even larger, a glider with a three-foot wingspan. The struts and pieces all had to be cut out of thin sheets of balsa wood and glued together and finally, to this skeleton of a plane, light paper to cover the fuselage. We spent weeks after dinner building it on the kitchen table and took it to parks on Sundays to watch it fly. He was just as interested in the project as I was, the best way to be a father to a seven-year-old.
My sister Paddy helped me start a stamp collection at this time, along with her own. I spent most of my allowance each week buying packets of stamps from around the world, arranging them neatly in my book. I continued this hobby till I started college.
In the summer of 1964, my father’s job there was over, and we sailed back to America on the S.S. France, an ocean liner. The trip lasted three days. Once back my French had no outlet and so it faded. I’d been thinking in it up to then. I resumed it in courses in high school. But by then it was half-forgotten. In university I took a few better courses but it was my private reading which restored the facility. I can read older French authors (15th, through 19th century) with ease. When I hear or view modern slang or Quebecois, I’m stumped.
As I look back upon this time and think of the memories it revives, I realize that most of them are common to all boys growing up, my first bike, flying kites, friends and school, ‘generic’, boring and a waste of time to describe. In character I was meek, quiet, slight in size, curious of the world and friendly, good at making friends, and the three years in France I’m sure expanded my intellect, challenged and nourished it, and made me feel richer in character and more confident in myself after my return to the States.
We moved to a house in Connecticut on a two-acre lot, on the edge of a town called ‘Weston’. It had a running creek through it and was surrounded with woods. I started a rock collection there and explored the woods and creek alone as I made no friends in the nine months we lived there. But I never felt alone and developed a love of exploring nature and walking in the woods by myself. My father commuted to work in Hartford.
A year later he was transferred again, this time to Geneva, New York. He bought a similar two-acre plot on the edge of town and had a house built just like the last one because he liked it so much. It was a split-level house with the living room, kitchen and dining room upstairs, along with two bedrooms and a bath. Downstairs was my bedroom and a family room and the large garage. There were a cluster of six houses up the street, and three of them with kids my age. It was rolling hill farm country, less than a mile from lake Seneca and behind our house all woods. I made fast friends with two boys and a girl, Jane. We roved the woods together, built tree forts, skied down hills in the winter and led an idyllic life. Even school was fun.
Jane was a tomboy, in part, I think, because there were no other girls her age in our group of houses, and the next nearest houses were a half mile away. So she played with us in her jeans and we never thought of her as a girl. Her father was rich, owning a small steel mill and her house was twice as large as ours, a small mansion. She was the youngest of the children by four years, all brothers, three of them. The two oldest we never saw, except speeding away in their convertible cars, older teenagers.
Her brother Tom, about fifteen, we had nothing to do with, except on one occasion. He was a few years too old for us in all his interests and too young to join his older brothers, an unhappy boy. But one day Jane and I were throwing rocks at a bee’s nest twenty feet up in a pine tree in the middle of their very large front lawn. He was riding the power mower and just as he was driving under the tree Jane made a direct hit with her rock, dropping half the bee’s nest right onto the hood of his little mower. He ended up with about fifteen bee stings to his face and neck. Jane was grounded for a week and he was less friendly than ever to any of us.
Their household had a maid, a French maid. I was invited over to meet and speak French with her, as a curiosity. Jane’s mother watched us exchange a few sentences and the experiment was over. But that day Jane showed me her bedroom. It was all pink, with a pink phone and dolls on the bed which surprised me, almost a shock as I realized she was a girl, which I’d never thought of in all the days of playing with her.
When we moved there in the summer of 1965 my first friend was the boy next door, Steve. He was meek and timid, what everyone would call a sissy. He might even have been gay, but at eleven you don’t know these things. He liked to stay indoors and so we did, having sleepovers and watching movies and the first ‘Lost in Space’ episode, cowering under a blanket together for the scary parts.
A few months later I made friends with Kevin, a ruffian living down the street, right across from Jane. It was with him we hiked and did daredevil things together, and often Jane, skiing down crazy slopes in the snow where you were almost bound to crash at the bottom into a creek. But we had fun. He was a bully to his two younger brothers and tried to bully Steve one day in Steve’s driveway. I punched him to stop it and he pushed me on a sharp rock. That put a gash in my knee that required ten stitches, but at the time I just got up yelled at him, feeling nothing. When he saw so much blood pouring down my leg he grew scared and apologized, quit bullying Steve forever and we were best friends again. My mother drove me to the hospital.
I always seemed to be the go-between between all types of people. I made all of them my friends, even people who couldn’t stand each other. Jane liked me best of all the boys, coming to my house to visit, rarely alone but in company with Kevin. Kevin liked me because I would take up his frequent dares. In the winter we had a game. There was a creek, wide at points and with thin ice and we’d walk along it till one or the other fell in, up to our neck, the loser and the laugh, a twelve-year old’s game. But we enjoyed it.
A few months before my father was relocated once again a new boy moved into a house with just his mother a little further down the rural street from Kevin’s. He was a few years older than us a foot taller, a red head and a savvy manipulator. One day he found me and Jane walking along and lured us into a low tree fort we’d built, down the hill by the creek, quite a ways away from the houses. There he told her: ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours’. She reluctantly agreed. Soon we were all pants-down with him as he explained to us the mechanics of sex, hands on, trying it out, both Jane and I prepubescent. We each took a brief turn, my first experience. He was just using us but I’m glad I had something like sex with Jane because we were such friends and felt a mutual pleasure holding each other tight for those few minutes. I wanted it to last longer. But he broke us up and said we should leave and swear never to tell anyone. It was the only such experience for me for a decade more. But it was an innocent and sweet beginning to the realm of love.
