Chapter 27
Love and pain ain’t nothin’ but the marrow of my life
I might be an emotional man, but I’m not in disguise
So, if you’ll take me as I am, I think you’ll find my love is true
And that I’m one of the passionate few
“Passions”
That year on Starmount Drive, we lived like boys inside a biosphere bubble, but the 1970s were happening all around us. A virtual meteor shower of culture, politics, and intensifying conversations entered our airspace in a constant barrage. That harder-edged external life lay beyond our little Utopia, but its mutterings rang in our ears like tinnitus, a reminder that the bubble wouldn’t last forever. At some point, the world would require us to make our mark.
Hints of what we would care about in the years to come began to materialize slowly, and like the long-term effects of wind and water on the mightiest of rocks, the cultural rivers we encountered began to carve tiny nooks and crevices that would form our post-Starmount lives. In between the casual casts of a fishing rod, a rock kicked down the road, or a foolhardy idea made triumphant, tiny impressions were made and subconscious ideas debated. All would be the building blocks of an adolescent life in-waiting and an adulthood not yet conceived. Surrounded by and occasionally confronted with a sometimes dark-tinged real world, all the while having the opportunity to play safely in the sun is perhaps what defines a perfect childhood, or at least, a lucky one.
My family’s dinner table resonated with the issues of the day, most of them mine. Homework was a recurring topic. There were science projects, like cardboard cutouts of the galaxy; my half-hearted attempts at mastering cursive handwriting; and art projects that included the dreaded trifecta of Popsicle sticks, glue, and cotton balls. I planned, questioned, lied about, and eventually completed all my assignments, just in time, around that dinner table.
There was also my daily fishing report, which included how many fish I had caught, almost caught, cleaned, put in the freezer, and would never eat. There were other critical counts as well, like how many lures had gone missing in the Spanish moss above my head or in the thick weeds that blanketed the pond. I recounted how many feet we had cleared over the plywood ramp in the middle of the street on our bikes, and when I say, “how many feet,” we cleared, it was both a measurement of distance and body parts. We often raised the stakes of a jump by lying beneath it, risking life and limb for the all-important Guinness Book of World Records. We convinced ourselves, or at least the poor sap lying beneath the jump, that having a place in that book would make us famous. And that being famous was worth every risk.
Last of all came the day’s pocket count. It was, as the name suggests, a quantification of what had poured out of my dirty denim pockets and onto the beautifully adorned dinner table for all to behold. In a tidal wave of ten-year-old enthusiasm, out spilled football cards, marbles, pre-chewed gum I was saving for later, questionably authentic arrowheads, cool-looking rocks, bent bottle caps, cicada shells, BBs, a rusty pocket knife, and the occasional worm, sometimes plastic and sometimes real. Everything I cared about from day to day, I willingly shared at the dinner table, whether anyone wanted me to or not.
One of my favorite dinner conversations was the subject of “tomorrow.” By the time we sat down to eat, at least on weekday nights, much of what was going to happen that day had already happened. My parents and anyone else that wandered in around suppertime expected me to recount the day’s adventures, and I was happy to do just that, so long as I could also talk about what would come next. I would boldly announce the gist of the next day’s calling, but sheepishly deny any knowledge of its riskier details. There is the truth, and then there is the whole truth. Even at ten, I understood the difference.
Ponder, if you will, the impact of the same story told with only slight changes to the details.
First, the carefully abridged, parentally approved version: “Hey Mom and Dad, we’re goin’ snake-huntin’ again tomorrow.”
Now for the statement as I heard it in my head: “Hey Mom and Dad, we heard a big-ass rattlesnake today under the old rotten log down at Catfish Pond. Yes, the one half-buried in swamp muck and stinkweed. Well, tomorrow we’re gonna go dig it out with our magic snake-handling gloves.”
The first version barely merited the patronizing, “That’s nice, honey. You be careful now, and have fun.” The latter would certainly have elicited an entirely different response, likely one akin to, “Like hell you are! You’re cleaning your room all day instead, and, by the way, don’t say the word, ‘ass.’ It’s not nice.”
Another example: “Hey Mom and Dad, the boys and I are gonna build a rocket ship at The Fort tomorrow.”
That gentle pronouncement elicited a patronizing but supportive, “Wow, that’s great, Mark. I guess you guys are like real rocket scientists now.”
If I were having that same conversation while under the influence of some CIA-administered truth serum, it would have come out differently: “Hey Mom and Dad, tomorrow we’re gonna tie a rope from the top of The Fort to the old pine tree, nail together a few thin boards, stuff John into it like a sardine, and send it flying.”
Neither version was a lie, but one of the statements represented a degree of honesty that could easily be defined as overrated.
Even at ten, adults tended to treat me with a significant degree of mature respect. My parents and their friends allowed me to confront issues head-on, and by doing so, I learned to accept similar direct responses to my thoughts and actions. My questions, no matter how awkward, were fielded with a healthy balance of deserve-to-know versus need-to-know, with deserving-to-know usually carrying the day.
More often than not, the outside adult world seeped into my soul subconsciously, via conduits beyond my usual focus. I heard the impassioned tones of my father and his fellow Florida State University doctoral students debating all manner of politics and social policies out in the carport. Jimmy Carter had just taken office after beating Gerald Ford in a close election, effectively ending the infamous era of Richard Nixon and Watergate. I heard words and concepts thrown around in sharp exchanges that hinted to me then that they would become important to me later. I overheard the terms, “energy crisis,” “ERA,” and “Civil Rights.” The phrase most striking to my ear, however, was, “The Starke Electric Chair.” Florida’s electric chair, nicknamed “Old Sparky” if you can believe that, was located in the Florida State Prison just outside of Starke, Florida.
The United States Supreme Court had just reinstated the death penalty the year before, and Utah was the first state to make use of that option again with the firing-squad execution of Gary Gilmore on January 17, 1977. My father and most of his friends were adamantly opposed to the death penalty. In fact, my dad was so opposed to it that he would later lead Florida’s anti-death-penalty movement as the Executive Director of the Florida chapter of the National Association of Social Workers.
Many might think that talk of crime, justice, poverty, and irreversible punishment would be a far too heady conversation to expect a child to take in. But I was as drawn to those debates as much as I was to more easily understood conversations. These big-picture concepts served as bridges between the playful affairs of my life on Starmount and the life I imagined I’d encounter in one way or another in the years to come.
Fairness was a concept I was already intimately familiar with through the simple challenges of friendship and play, long before the Innocence Project exposed wrongly convicted and condemned prisoners awaiting execution. Fair-mindedness was an important and pure concept in my mind, as it is for most children. I didn’t have the words to articulate my opinion back then, but the concept of a permanent punishment, the kind that you cannot take back if it turns out you were mistaken in doling it out, seemed plain wrong and fundamentally unfair. Responsibility, fault, and punishment were easy concepts to grasp when I was ten, but I knew from the thoughtful voices around me and how I felt in my gut, that the more complicated concept of justice was a far murkier subject than I could yet understand. It was not until later in my adolescence that I came to grasp the nuanced arguments about life and death debated in my carport back in 1977. My sense of the unfairness of capital punishment has grown over the past forty years from complex discomfort to simple disgust. The death penalty is state-sponsored murder and an abomination to the concept of justice.
The Equal Rights Amendment, as well as the broader issue of women’s rights, was also hotly debated that year, both on television and in my carport. But in the end, the political and cultural debates swirling around me were not what influenced my view of women and my understanding of what others called the ERA. My mom did that.
While my dad was getting his PhD in social work and taking care of me, my mom was the primary breadwinner. She was often out of town, working as a human services consultant on child welfare issues. I would not have known what “child welfare” meant back then, but my dad once told me that Mom was out of town doing “work that matters.” That explanation, I understood. I didn’t know anything about the pay equity she had to fight for in the workplace or the glass ceilings she helped break, but I remember feeling pride in the fact that she was out in the world, making things happen.
What I did know was that whenever she was in town, she fed me Cap’n Crunch cereal, wore pantsuits, argued as voraciously as my dad did, hosted fun parties, and flew airplanes. That’s all I ever needed to know to understand the significance of equality and to respect women’s rights.
Race was another topic intensely discussed in my house. I had a few African American friends at school, but I didn’t grow up alongside any children of color in the neighborhood or in social circles outside of school. Starmount was about as white as white could be, except for the one African American family that came to Alligator Pond to fish every so often. Their race was not what caught our attention, though. It was their method of fishing.
Their favorite spot was about halfway around the pond from the dock, down a steep bank on the near side, close to where I would hang out with my water moccasin buddy and fish for bass. The boys and I rarely had much luck catching bream in that spot, but that family surely did. They wielded cane poles with a technique that was a cross between a western fly rod and a Samurai warrior’s sword. Back and forth in a continuous motion, they dropped their bread-and-worm bait on small hooks with red-and-white bobbers into a narrow clear-water hole surrounded by pond scum. Within seconds, their lines went taunt, and with a snap of the wrist, they sent the fish flying straight out of the water, through the air, and up the embankment. The fascinating part to watch was how the fish dropped off the line while still in the air and then magically fell into the five-gallon buckets of water they used to keep the fish alive. They rarely had to use their hands to pull a fish off the hook.
Their methods looked like a factory assembly line, with fish flying out of the water and into buckets at quick intervals. Once their buckets were full, they’d gather up their cane poles and chairs and walk back up the hill to their car on the main road. As soon as they vacated the spot, we’d race over and try to copy their methods. We were far less successful at even getting the fish to bite in that spot, much less fly through the air and land perfectly in our buckets. We usually just ended up slinging our bait and sometimes our bobbers into the low-hanging branches of the large live oak tree behind us.
My primary exposure to people of different races and cultures came through the college students, professors, and community organizers of every creed and color streaming into the house. From that experience alone, race was never really a big deal to me. It was never a big deal until, that is, I found myself on the receiving end of an intense lecture about the word “nigger.” It’s a hard word to type, much less say, but using a euphemism like “the N-word” seems to do an injustice to the struggle to overcome the real word.
I honestly can’t remember ever using the word at that age and rarely ever heard it used by those around me. I can’t imagine the context or situation in which I would have uttered that word, but I must have said it because it caught the ear of my father. I was in the car with him, riding down John Knox Road, when he asked me if I knew what that word meant. Did I know that it was a word of unparalleled pain and hate? Did I know that it wasn’t a punchline to a joke? And did I know that some people thought it was okay to say and that those people were wrong? I can’t remember what I thought before that conversation, but I have never forgotten how I felt after it.
My sensitivity to race, racial slurs, judgment, and intolerance calibrated quickly and unambiguously in that short ride with my father. I never felt like I was in trouble, but I knew that if the conversation ever occurred again, I wanted to find myself on the righteous side of it.
When it comes to politics, culture, and all the things we as individuals, especially as adults, choose to care about and debate, I imagine the other Sons of Starmount have different views and experiences, all of which had equal impact on them. And I imagine that we are as different from one another today as we were alike back then. We didn’t talk politics, religion, or much of the world beyond Starmount with each other in 1977, and, for the most part, we don’t now either.
Nineteen seventy-seven became 1978, and ten years old became eleven, with no discernible differences in my every-day existence. Our daily pilgrimages to Alligator Pond, the dark woods, and everywhere in between continued on as routinely extraordinary. We built rafts to ferry us around gators and moccasins, wielded fishing luck that led to overflowing buckets and weighted-down stringers, and pelted each other with red clay mud, chert rocks, sweetgum balls, and dares that would cower boys twice our size. And we catalogued it all in what seemed like a never-ending board meeting beneath the evening glow of the streetlights. But my time on Starmount did end. It had to.
We had been renting a small property at the end of the street, and Mom and Dad were now looking to buy. They felt cramped living in that house and were looking to move us to the outskirts of town where we could have a larger home and more land. More land. I remember being curious about that prospect, but incredulous as to whether it was even possible to have more land than I felt I already ruled over on Starmount.
Leaving Starmount should have been at least disorienting to me, if not outright shocking, like being thrown from a moving vehicle and landing in some moonless field in the middle of nowhere, unable to get my bearings. But it wasn’t. I was not ready to leave, but I had never been opposed to the idea of trying something new. I had already moved several times before: twice in my native Oklahoma, twice in West Virginia, and then to Starmount. A strong vagabond gene may be the most significant pre-Starmount influence on my life, and it has always come in handy when it’s been time to go.
We settled on a small farm about fifteen miles northeast of Tallahassee that my dad dubbed, “The Chicken Ranch.” It was a big house surrounded by woods, swamps, and a handful of new friends. I loved living on that farm. The chicken coop was an excellent place to hunt for snakes, especially the large oak snakes I had become fascinated by on Starmount. We had a big garden, an above-ground pool, and a long enough driveway to where you couldn’t even see the main road. It also helped that on any given weekend my old friends would come out to spend a few nights with me, or my parents would drop me off to spend the weekend with them.
Somehow, even with those amenities and the frequent visits with my friends, I knew that what I had on Starmount was gone forever, except inside my soul. With that realization, I was instantly older and time no longer existed in a bubble. A few weeks after turning thirteen, I left Florida forever, starting a new life in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Falls Church, Virginia. I would soon be fourteen, fifteen, twenty, and before I could catch my breath, I was thirty and then forty. Seasons turning at an increasingly unacceptable speed delivered me to the doorstep of fifty before I ever had a chance to protest the whole affair.
The process of growing older began as The Eight-Track with an Engine in Back rolled off the Starmount asphalt for the last time, but, as I would discover in my later years, the growing-up part does not always exist parallel with age.