Did I live in two different worlds, depending on Dad’s presence?
Was Dad two different people?
Was I?
His particular form of bipolar disorder—with episodes beginning during his late teen years, fast escalations into grandiose bouts of mania, miraculous recoveries after months of incomprehensible behavior, and remarkably normal functioning in between episodes—was striking. Some call this pattern “Cade’s disease,” named after the Australian psychiatrist who pioneered the use of lithium therapy for bipolar disorder during the late 1940s and whose accounts of the condition reflected this classic pattern of cycling. Not everyone with bipolar illness shows such distinct manias and depressions. In fact, a majority show lingering symptoms during the periods in between episodes. But until relatively late in his life, Dad showed the extreme, classic pattern. Not surprisingly, when he took on a separate personality, so different from his usual self, my world turned upside down. When he vanished, I was frozen in time, not even daring to wonder where he might be. Following his return after weeks or months of shut-down, he was rational, calm, and responsive, my go-to person when confused or upset.
As strong as Mom was—holding the family together through sheer force of will—she didn’t want to see me sad or angry. It might remind her of another male in the house whose emotions could threaten destruction. I learned to keep things in.
Throughout, no one could let on that anything had changed. We were all engaged in serious play-acting, the costumes stiff and the scenes perplexing, without rehearsal. Over time, we ended up pretending that we weren’t pretending—enacting the ultimate in fantasy role-play. Each performance was live, and we acted out our roles as though our lives depended on their success. Why were the most important things in our family’s existence such an ongoing mystery? Whatever lay behind the silence must have been so devastating that it would have destroyed us if brought into the open.
For the past couple of decades, beyond my career-long research and teaching in child and adolescent mental health—which was inspired by what I began to learn from Dad all those years ago—I’ve been engaged with the concept of stigma. This term is defined as the shame and degradation meted out to members of social groups believed to be unworthy, dirty, or untouchable. From its Greek origins, stigma signifies a literal mark or brand. Coming to the agora, the public marketplace, a citizen in ancient Athens might have wondered who had fought for Sparta or who was a former slave. A burned mark into the skin publicly announced such status—a physical stigma, an observable mark of disgrace to define those not deserving of full citizenship, true outcasts.
In modern times, such actual marking still sometimes occurs. Concentration camp inmates in Nazi Germany were branded with numbers. During the early days of the epidemic, individuals with HIV in certain countries were also physically marked. Yet the vast majority of stigma today is psychological, referring to the subtler but still devastating mark of simply being part of an unfit group. Stigma pollutes any interactions between such individuals and members of mainstream society, containing the clear message that the outsiders are unworthy and despicable.
Throughout history and across cultures, many characteristics have been stigmatized, including physical deformity or disability, diseases like leprosy (now known as Hansen’s disease), minority status with respect to race or religion, any sexual orientation other than heterosexual, being adopted, and having a mental illness. Some of these are overt and visible, such as race, physical disability, and many chronic diseases. “Lepers,” as they were called—noxiously equating the person with the disease—could be distinguished by their scaly, dark-toned, disfiguring skin lesions. Yet other stigmatized traits, like sexual orientation, being adopted, or having a history of mental disorder, are potentially concealable. These kinds of hidden stigmas can be especially troublesome, because the individuals in question may constantly wonder whether their characteristics are “leaking,” adding layers of tension and uncertainty to every social encounter.
Think of the questions and decisions people like my father faced—and, far too often, still do: Can anyone tell? If my secret of being insane, a madman, comes out, I’ll be shunned. Covering up completely is the only course. Stigma breeds shame; stigma breeds silence.
As cultures evolve, a number of formerly stigmatized traits or attributes can become far more acceptable. Left-handedness was formerly disgraceful but hardly seems an issue today. Strikingly, rapid shifts in societal attitudes toward gay marriage have emerged over the past two decades, fueled largely by young people. Such positive trends are unmistakable, giving real hope for tolerance and acceptance. Yet mental illness and intellectual disability, a newer term for mental retardation, have both been extremely stigmatized throughout history and across nearly all cultures.
Three attributes, in fact, rank at the bottom of social acceptance in current attitude surveys: Homelessness, drug abuse, and mental illness. The general public does not wish for close contact with such individuals, revealing a strong desire for social distance. Even more, on the typical scales and questionnaires used in such research, respondents are likely to underplay their negative attitudes to avoid being perceived as bigots. Privately held attitudes may actually be far worse.
During the silent 1950s, when I was young, mental illness was stigmatized to the extreme, linked in the public’s mind with utter incompetence as well as major potential for violence. Over half a million Americans were placed involuntarily in crowded, inhumane public mental hospitals, many of which resembled snake pits. The very term “mental illness” made one a complete outcast. Our family was caught in the crossfire.
As a boy I knew nothing of the term stigma, which became publicized after the 1963 publication of Erving Goffman’s classic monograph on the topic. What I did know was that something unimaginable lay just beneath the calm exterior of our family—and whatever it was could never be mentioned. What I did feel, in the rare times I allowed myself emotions, was that I might plunge so far down a steep chasm I’d never claw my way up to the surface. To invoke an overused phrase, the shame and silence were deafening. There were no awards handed out to our family for acting ability but we deserved, at the very least, nominations in all the major categories.
* * *
While home, Dad would periodically take me aside to discuss his family out in California. In the beginning, he escorted me into the living room of our house on Wyandotte Road, with its soft carpet and long, flower-patterned drapes. Later, as I proceeded through grade school and began junior high, we would go to his library in our new home. Each time, he asked whether I might like to talk about his family. Not knowing when he might vanish again, I always nodded. He planned his presentations carefully, laying out an assortment of photos neatly on the table. The room was still, the eagerness in his voice impossible to mask.
“Take a look,” he said. His brothers and all those other relatives out West seemed to be a mysterious tribe, as distant from Columbus as Siam or Brazil. Southern California was mystical, I was sure, with oranges growing on trees all year long and vast beaches fronting the Pacific. Dad’s eyes lifted upward as he spoke. If I had questions, I stifled the urge to ask, taking in each syllable without interruption.
The family spent their early years in La Grange, Illinois, outside Chicago. Grandpa Hinshaw was chairman of the Prohibition National Party from 1912 through 1924. The Eighteenth Amendment, enacting Prohibition, was ratified during his leadership, in 1920. I hoped that someday I might make history, too. Yet the wait seemed interminable. If I wondered, over the years, how the son of a Prohibition leader delighted in making cocktails at dinner parties, I kept that thought to myself.
Virgil Sr.’s interest in Prohibition arose from his Quaker background, including the firm belief that alcohol was the root of many social problems, like crime or the abuse of children. At 12, he joined the “Band of Hope,” the children’s branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Dad showed me old newsletters he’d saved, which reported that while in his twenties, his father toured 203 college campuses to speak about the evils of alcohol before obtaining his law degree. I was inspired but stunned. Where did that kind of energy and devotion come from? What kind of family was this?
Photos revealed the four boys: First was Harold, known as Bud, born in 1912. Strong and athletic, he began to have troubles as a teenager. Showing the ultimate in defiance, he took up drinking. He worked sporadically as an adult, including a long stint as a golf caddy. Though I didn’t yet know the meaning of the word “irony,” I had a sense of the utter shame related to becoming an alcoholic in a Prohibition home.
Next, Randall was born in 1915. Slighter in build than the other boys, he contracted rheumatic fever as a pre-teen and was confined to bedrest for a year. To make up for his lost schooling he decided to read the Encyclopedia Britannica from cover to cover, starting with volume “A” and proceeding in order. There was no masking the high levels of scholarship in the Hinshaw family.
Early in 1918, Robert emerged. Dad said that he and Bob were close. As an adult Bob became both a psychologist and psychiatrist. Years later he told me that when he witnessed the aftermath of his younger brother’s fateful flight from the porch roof in 1936, he decided then and there to become a professional in the mental health field and work toward both an M.D. and Ph.D.
The fourth of four, Junior came into the world in November of 1919, a year and a half after Bob.
Dad sometimes spoke of other relatives. One was a second cousin who had become one of the first woman physicians in the West. Another relative, my great-uncle Corwin Hinshaw, was a research physician on the team performing the first trials of antibiotics to treat tuberculosis in the 1940s. It was reported that he had just missed receiving the Nobel Prize. There was no mistaking the message: Big causes and high accomplishment were part of the Hinshaw family.
But other relatives, I learned as I got older, had experienced serious problems. Beyond Uncle Bud with his drinking issues, a cousin of Dad’s died in her late twenties. She had problems with eating the right foods and keeping up her weight; she might have even killed herself. Dad’s voice trailed off; it was clear that this was not an easy topic to discuss. Others had spent time in asylums, the old name for mental hospitals. The more I learned, the clearer the divide became: In Dad’s family people either did great things or collapsed. I told myself that I’d need to push hard to stay on the right side of the divide.
Dad spoke of his mother, a missionary to Latin America who later became committed to the Prohibition cause. Tenderly, he showed me close-up photos of her broad, kind face. But then he glanced down. “A tragedy occurred early in my life,” he said when I was further along in grade school. I didn’t know the meaning of the term, so he explained grimly. “If Mommy were to die, that would be an utter tragedy.” In early 1923, his mother became ill and had complications during surgery. Shortly after his third birthday, she died at a hospital in Chicago.
Dad’s first memory was of standing in his living room. A large box was in the middle of the floor—a coffin, though he didn’t know the word. Holding Junior above it, his father told him sternly, “This is your mother. You’ll never see her again in this lifetime.”
Among Dad’s folders I saw an international Prohibition newsletter entitled World Dry. The spring 1923 issue featured a long article on the life of the recently departed Eva Piltz Hinshaw, describing her early missionary work outside the United States and praising her dedication to the Prohibition cause. It included a striking photograph of her four sons, aged 3 to 11, in and around a wagon on the sidewalk, captioned “The Motherless Hinshaw Boys.” Bud stood to the right; Randall, Bob, and Junior sat inside.
In this photo, as I study it today, Dad’s three older brothers show half-smiles for the camera. But from his seat in the wagon, Junior—three years old, dressed in a kind of androgynous gown—displays a facial expression those who study attachment might term frozen. He’s neither sad nor happy nor shocked. Instead, his facial muscles appear paralyzed by a distant fright, which he may be trying to ward off.
Accumulated research reveals that the loss of a parent between the ages of three and five places a child at particular risk for a mood disorder later in life. There’s something about grief during those tender years that may be hard to comprehend and resolve, given the child’s lack of full development of language, memory, and attachment bonds to others. Yet the quality of the child’s remaining relationships, inside and outside the home, is an even stronger predictor of life outcomes. Early loss, in other words, does not inevitably lead to lifelong emotion dysregulation. It would take many years, though, before I learned about the impact of those remaining relationships on Dad.
In a large cardboard box, Dad had kept copies of many of his father’s letters. In one from the spring of 1923, written to a relative, Virgil Sr. stated that Junior cried inconsolably for his mother at bedtime while the older boys tried to soothe him. There was nothing anyone could do to calm him down.
Dad discussed his family’s subsequent move to Southern California. He cleared his throat as he began speaking, as though beginning a small seminar. Needing a fresh start after losing his wife, Virgil Sr. moved his brood of four boys out West. Two years later he remarried, to another missionary who’d worked in Latin America, just like his first wife.
Dad beamed as he talked about his new home in Southern California. He attended a public school dedicated to John Dewey’s progressive ideals. The San Gabriel Mountains lay close behind, with the Mt. Wilson Observatory at the summit. It was there, Dad recounted, that the first evidence for the Big Bang was detected. Through the huge telescope, the astronomer Hubble saw that the colors of faraway stars were shifting toward red and realized instantly that the universe was expanding. When a train passes a station, Dad explained, you know it’s heading away because the clanging bell gets lower in pitch, the wavelengths longer. Red light, with long waves, is like a lower sound, so the stars must be rushing away from one another as space expands. The deduction was clear: There was a beginning to the universe eons ago, everything initially merged but soon flying apart, perhaps for eternity.
All that knowledge, I thought, right behind Pasadena. Mysterious patterns could be discovered if you knew where to look and had a prepared mind.
Dad’s father resigned as head of the Prohibition National Party in 1924 to become president of the International Reform Federation—a worldwide extension of the Prohibition movement—expanding his horizons to the global scene. Two more boys joined the family, Dad’s younger half-brothers Harvey and Paul. With my grandfather away so much for Prohibition work, Dad was involved with their upbringing, later helping them with their homework.
In 1929 the stock market crashed. All the older boys, including Junior, pitched in to support the family. Virgil Sr. lost most of his legal and real-estate work but kept up his international reform efforts. Dad’s first real job, assisting a gardener in Pasadena, paid 17½ cents an hour. Later, he hauled huge blocks of ice to homes and businesses, to restock their iceboxes. One evening, Dad recounted, Grandpa Hinshaw pulled the family together to see who had money for dinner. Only Junior had a dime in his pocket, funding the meal of apples. Listening, I couldn’t remember having ever been really hungry. I silently vowed that one day I would leave my complacent life and try to do something important.
In eighth grade Dad was P.E. squad captain for a group that included Jackie Robinson, the multi-sport athlete who became the first African American to play major league baseball. “I taught him everything he knew about sports,” Dad said, with a wicked grin. As a teen he put on muscle. He played football and was a shot-putter. Years later, his half-brothers Harvey and Paul told me that they never forgot the sound of Junior’s grunts during practice sessions at home, including the thud of the shot as it landed in the gravel driveway. At the same time, he was a regional debate champion. Academics and sports: The model was right there in front of me.
Dad showed me a letter his father had written to a relative at the height of the Great Depression. One sentence stood out: “I never saw a day that I did not want to live a thousand years.” Where, I wondered, did that energy and dedication come from? With hindsight, I can only imagine that Virgil Sr. possessed a kind of chronic form of manic energy, though he never appeared to experience major depression.
As I heard of Dad’s past, two concepts lingered in my mind: achievement and mystery. It was completely clear that the stakes were high for learning in the Hinshaw family, but why were some relatives ultra-successful while others crashed? Something frightening, something unexplained lay just out of reach of my understanding. The weight of the unknown sometimes stopped me in my tracks.
* * *
Dad’s departures hung like lingering smoke after a long-expired fire, ashes smoldering. I half-wondered whether something I’d done—or maybe something I wasn’t doing enough—made him leave. The terror hovered below the surface of my controlled life.
Elementary school was my salve. The structure of each lesson, the homework I performed with almost religious devotion, the regular hours of the school day: My focus and effort constituted a futile attempt to keep any wandering thoughts at bay. All through school, when tests were returned in class and I saw another near-perfect score, I exulted. Like mainlining a narcotic, the bliss was overwhelming but fleeting, the surge of joy quickly evaporating as I faced another walled-off day.
As I got older, victories in football, basketball, baseball, and track yielded moments of triumph but each loss stung, filling my bloodstream with venom I couldn’t seem to extract. How was I supposed to solve our family puzzles completely on my own?
Ever so slightly, things could leak. Sometimes, entering a room where Mom and Dad were talking, I could sense it: a furtive glance between them, a hidden signal to keep things in check, a message transmitted up in that adult zone, above my line of sight. What is it, I kept wondering, I’m not allowed to know?
Looking up at Dad’s makeshift home library one cloudy afternoon, I asked, on a whim, if he were writing any books of his own. He turned quiet for a moment before replying. “I’m pulling together my ideas,” he said softly. “But this takes real time.” He told me several years later that he had never been able to organize his thoughts and ideas into a book, only single articles. As he spoke, frustration covered his face. As an adult I came to understand that his episodes and hospital stays had robbed him of his prime academic years. Back then, though, what I saw for the first time was his vulnerability, some kind of hole inside him.
Sitting in his library I asked him where ideas come from. He replied that this was a fascinating question, explaining that philosophers debated whether ideas existed inside people when they were born or whether people learned ideas from looking out on the world. I wasn’t quite ready for discussions of nativism versus empiricism, but this was the kind of issue he pondered all the time. “How few new ideas there really are,” he continued. Even though a person might believe he had an original thought, it usually turned out that someone else had already thought of it, maybe even centuries ago.
Right then and there I felt it: Dad feared that he had no original ideas of his own. To my surprise, he was expressing regret over his life. Something was blocking him; something that had cast a pall over his life—but what? Another side of Dad existed, somewhere I couldn’t see.
* * *
Once our own set of conversations began when I was a grad student in clinical psychology, Mom told me that, when Sally and I were quite young, she drove out to the old Port Columbus airport to pick up Dad from an academic conference. She’d dropped us off at Grandmother’s in order to have an evening with her husband after his half-week trip.
In that era anyone could go right to the gate to greet returning passengers. With real anticipation, Mom got there early to watch him walk down the small stairway leading from the plane’s front entrance. As he made his way across the tarmac and opened the door to the terminal, she caught a glimpse of his eyes. Without warning her knees buckled. She nearly collapsed.
There it was, unmistakable: the glint in his gaze, the inevitable sign of an episode ready to emerge. It was a particular sparkle, giddy yet menacing, which only she understood. She struggled to stay upright. From past experience she knew all too clearly what would soon take place: exuberance, wild energy, suspicion, sexual fervor, quick bouts of rage. She knew, too, that there was nothing to stop the runaway train once it had left the station.
The worst thing, she told me, was her utter powerlessness to do anything about it. The terror was hers and hers alone. Would he end up in the hospital again, after her secretive calls to the philosophy department chairman or to Dad’s doctors, telling them just how outrageous his behavior had become this time? Would someone need to contact the police?
Mom rarely showed anger. But as she recounted the story her eyes narrowed. The ultimate in frustration, she said, were those times she tried to tell Dad’s doctors of her intuition about his quick changes of mood, when it was completely apparent to her that his brain chemistry was undergoing a radical shift. Yet each time the doctors let her know that the perspectives of a mere spouse were preposterous. Unless he were in grave danger and required imminent hospitalization, confidentiality must be upheld, so they typically refused to speak with her at all. And even if they engaged her, what could a Midwestern housewife—even a brilliant one with a Master’s degree in history—know about the unconscious mind, the standard of the day for understanding mental disorder? Her ideas about biological changes related to the onset of mental illness were obvious folly. Only those trained in psychological theories could comprehend deep personality dynamics and initiate lasting change through years of interpretive therapy.
Given the accumulated knowledge of the ensuing decades, it turns out that Mom’s intuition was entirely correct—alterations of key neurotransmitters are undoubtedly linked to bipolar episodes, and the psychiatrists of the time were betraying their ignorance and arrogance. Part of the reason for the continuing stigma of the entire field, I’ve come to believe, is its long-standing resistance to bringing serious science into the enterprise. How could the doctors of the 1950s believe they knew it all? People who experience mania are notoriously poor historians, so it’s essential to include significant others in the process of diagnosis, in order to get the right information. And how could professionals relegate underlying biology to the stuff of myth? The treatises of the time betray elitism, arrogance, and the ultimate in narrow-minded thinking.
As I listened, my rage smoldered. Going further back in Dad’s history, why did the superintendent at Norwalk fail to call Virgil Sr. until the eleventh hour in 1936, when his son was about to receive last rites? Do people with mental illness, and their families, deserve such callous neglect? Only recently did I learn of the 1975 film Hurry Tomorrow, a searing documentary from the 1970s about Norwalk (later renamed Metropolitan State Hospital), with torturous images of forced medication and utter dehumanization. The history of “care” for people with serious mental illness reveals how stigma predicts an unspeakable lack of concern for basic human rights, too often leading to brutality.
Back in the airport, Mom gathered herself and hugged her husband as if everything were fine. They walked slowly toward baggage claim as she attempted to conceal her panic. She knew enough not to set him off once he’d begun to escalate. Over the following days, completely helpless, she watched and waited until he once again emerged into complete madness.
Who supported her? She couldn’t tell her mother, a Daughter of the American Revolution, that her husband sometimes went insane. Or even her closest friends, whom she’d known since kindergarten. Some had seen Virgil as he’d bulled his way through a social event, but how could she speak of the voices he heard, Columbus State Hospital, or electroshock therapy? The shame was so great that she always covered: He’s visiting family; he’s at a conference; he has a physical ailment. Even when his brother Bob had to fly in from California to find treatment for Virgil, no one else knew. The stigma was supreme.
The aftereffects of the silence and suppressed terror stayed locked inside her as she held the family together year after year. It took every ounce of her fortitude to maintain the family. Until one day, 20 years later—after Sally and I were grown—the cumulative effect would unleash its force and erode every cell and tissue in her body. For the last four decades of her life, she battled severe rheumatoid arthritis, which was clearly triggered by the stress from the mortal battles she’d fought, alone and without support, throughout her marriage.
* * *
Dad’s talk of grown-up relatives got me excited about the idea of becoming an adult. In first grade, my teacher announced an assignment that caught my interest. Older than the other teachers, with her stiff black hair molded into a severe flip, Mrs. Deacon always spoke calmly.
The first-grade classroom was in a brand-new, low-slung building down the block from the main school building. The grassy fields behind had dirt areas, perfect for making trails for the marbles I brought in from home. Scents of paint, crayons, and construction paper permeated the colorful, airy room, but the sticky, sour scent of white paste was the strongest. Some kids said that the paste was made from horses’ hooves.
“Today, class, we have a special project,” said Mrs. Deacon with enthusiasm. We were to draw a picture of the job we wanted to have when we grew up. To prepare us, she asked us to think about what we’d want to be. Some kids raised their hands right away: teacher, fireman, doctor, policeman, dancer, nurse. But my idea was still forming.
As the others started drawing I called her over, telling her that I wanted to have two different jobs. She thought for a moment before asking whether there was one that I’d like more than the other. I replied that I couldn’t decide on just one. “I want to be an astronomer, to learn about the stars and planets. But if I practice a lot, I want to be a pro basketball player, too.”
She pondered before slowly raising her head. “Yes, Steve, I believe that you really could try to be both.” Excited, I asked whether I could divide my drawing into two parts. She nodded.
I finished the next day. On the left side, the astronomer peered through a telescope, a few stars showing through the opening in the observatory’s ceiling with the roof retracted. On the right, a tall basketball player took a shot on a wooden court, as the crowd—little circles in the stands—cheered.
Several years later, Mom and I sat in the kitchen of our new house as I pondered my future. Thinking back on that drawing, I asked if I could be both a pro basketball player and a scientist. Starting off brightly, Mom replied, “Now Steve, playing sports is wonderful. Keep it up as long as you can.” Yet her tone quickly changed as she stated, with authority, that they’d never be the main thing I’d do in my life.
“It will be fine to keep playing sports,” she went on, “but remember: Your contribution to the world will be with your mind. Not through sports, but with your mind.”
I started to protest but stopped in my tracks. I knew Mom was right before I could emit a word. The legacy in our family was to contribute through learning and knowledge. Yet as she made her pronouncement I had the strange sense that I’d need to stay alert at all times and keep my mind sharp. Without real effort, things might happen to a person’s mind. I couldn’t say precisely what, but something about Dad’s relatives who hadn’t fared well—and something unspoken about his disappearances—gave me a chill I couldn’t quite comprehend.
* * *
First grade was coming to a close. On a bright Saturday afternoon our back yard felt wondrous. Each blade of grass invited my bare feet. As dusk approached the sky turned luminescent, faint yellow streaks off to the west. Smoky shadows from the neighbor’s trees crept up our lawn. I could sense myself growing up, the possibilities endless. I walked over to Mom’s chair, hoping she’d agree that becoming an adult was as exciting as I thought.
“Can I be older?” I called out. “Big people know so much and get to do so many things. It’s unfair to be small!” I paused. “Can’t I grow up sooner?”
She gazed at me with a smile and then looked out toward the middle of the yard. Light on my feet, I wanted to run somewhere just to feel my body moving. Yet before she answered, her mouth drew in at the corners.
“Stevie, you shouldn’t be in such a rush to grow up.” Though devastated, I tried not to show it. I can still picture her silhouette and the sky behind her, while she spoke with a blend of tenderness and conviction I’d never before heard.
“You don’t know this yet, Steve, but there are many worries when people get older, many important things to take care of.” I stood there, staring. “Once you’re grown up, you’ll wish you could be a boy again.”
What did she mean? What was she protecting me from?
Grown-ups have big responsibilities, she went on, telling me to be glad that I was still young. With a wistful look, she summed up. “There’s no rush to grow up.”
I couldn’t think of anything else to say. We lingered outside for another few moments but it was by now getting seriously dark. I tried to hold on to the rapturous feeling I’d had all afternoon but it was fading faster than the daylight. Deflated, I trudged inside. For a long time I couldn’t shake the glimmer of doubt in Mom’s face as she talked about all those responsibilities grown-ups have.
On a warm evening not long after, Dad was barbequing outside on the grill. He started up the fire by dousing the briquettes with gasoline from the red can he used to fill up the lawnmower and then waited a few moments before throwing in a match or two. I knew it would take a while for the fire to get going, so I tried to be patient. Yet once the fire was raging, he reached in toward the fire, squirted extra gas right on top, and quickly leapt back. Roaring ever louder, the flames shot up straight toward the sky, the whoosh tremendous, everything wavy in the air above the yellow-orange flash.
As Dad looked back toward me, his eyes gleamed with supreme enthusiasm. With a sly grin he did it again, once more revealing his thrill.
I was excited but scared. I half-knew you shouldn’t pour gas right on the flames, but the feeling was tremendous all the same. The updraft and surge: What power! Yet I was terrified over what might happen if things got out of control. Dad craved this kind of thing, but I couldn’t help thinking of the consequences. Something pulled me back from too much excitement.
Toward the end of the school year we examined my first-grade school photos, the group shot of the whole class and the individual, wallet-sized ones of me. I was wearing my favorite shirt, silvery-gray with thin black and red stripes, the opalescent buttons fastened all the way to the top. “School Days 1958–9,” said the small writing at the bottom.
“Do you see it?” Dad said to Mom, gazing at the photo. “Steve has a Mona Lisa smile!” Mom nodded.
I didn’t know what they meant, so they got out an art book and showed me da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. “It’s a small smile but a profound one,” Dad said. “It’s the smallest part of a circle, an arc. From some angles it hardly looks like a smile, but from others you can see it. Look from here, then here.”
I looked at the page, tilting my head for different angles. I did see it: mysterious, slightly thrilling.
When people came over to the house, Dad opened his wallet and showed off the photo. Could everyone see Steve’s Mona Lisa smile? he asked eagerly. Each time, heads nodded. At those moments I was weightless, floating through the day, larger than life. The surge in my body was overwhelming, just like the flames shooting above the glowing coals.
But I knew I couldn’t stay there for long. Strange things might happen in that zone above my line of sight, where adults conversed and flames flared. When I came back down from such heights, where might I land?