PhoneBoy Says

My oldest apparently has an extra tooth that, if it grows in, would mess up his teeth pretty bad. Tomorrow is the appointed day to have it removed, so he's going in for surgery at a very early hour in the morning--something the wife isn't looking forward to. Neither is Jaden. He is a bit scared of the whole thing.

This is one of those situations where I'm probably not the right person for the job. Fortunately, mommy will be with him tomorrow, which is a good thing. We don't expect any major problems, of course. Being there is surgery involved, there's always a risk, but we won't think about that.

A seemingly recurrent theme throughout my years in school--even through college--was that I wasn't popular. Not that this is particularly a bad thing. But what was clear to me as I got older and moved through school was that most people simply didn't understand me. And, quite frankly, I didn't understand them. I had a hard time getting on with most people.

I wanted so desperately just to fit in.But I stood out. I was not particularly good at most of the schoolyard games. I wasn't really all that interested in most of what everyone else was doing anyway. I didn't get most of the jokes--the ones that weren't about me anyway. I was, supposedly, smarter than average. Smart enough that dad thought I should skip a grade. Probably wouldn't have helped in hindsight.

One of the few things I had going for me was that I was good with computers. This skill didn't really matter much until I was in high school when we all had to use computers for various tasks. I found I had a knack for showing people how to do things. I also discovered, through some cajoling from Mr. Hall, was that I was able to write it down to help other people over and over.

As people figured out I was "the computer guy," I started having some limited popularity. I wasn't someone you wanted to invite to the dance or anything, but if you needed help, yeah you called me. In college, I was able to prove myself enough to play a very important role in maintaining and managing the main engineering computer lab, which gave me some visibility too.

As I moved on from college, I ended up making a name for myself doing something else--knowing about Check Point FireWall-1 (now called something like VPN-1 Power/Pro/Whatever). I learned stuff and shared it well. Despite the fact I do little with the product today, it is perhaps what I am best known for, even in the group of people I work with. But whatever I'm working on, I find a way to share knowledge and help others.

I guess that's my path towards popularity, or maybe it's what others do too, I don't really know. It's what I've always done, I think, and it seems to work for me. It seems a little one-sided at times, though, but I guess that's the nature of the beast.

I guess as an adult, the things we and other people obsess over as teenagers and earlier don't really end up mattering all that much when you're an adult. At least to some anyway. Popularity is one of those things. I don't really think about that too much.

My memory of what exactly happened when during the period of 1982 and 1983 was a little sketchy, so you will have to excuse my meandering thoughts.

Like I said in my last post, 1982 started out a bit differently than the previous years--a major flood hit the Santa Cruz area. Getting home from school that fateful day was a bit more challenging than usual. A lot of places, including Granny's house, ended up being without power for several days. Outside of the cities, especially in the mountains, roads were treacherous. Up on Bear Creek Road in the Santa Cruz Mountains, there were mudslides galore. We used old fashioned oil lamps for lighting. We may have had gas heat, I can't remember now. But everything else was a challenge without power.

I was recently reminded of my experiences back then when we had our wind-induced power outage for a couple of days. We didn't have heat in our house thanks to the electric-fired blower, and it was downright cold in our house. Unlike back in 1982 where we were poor, outages were more widespread, and basically had no choice but to deal, in this last round of outages up here, we stayed in a hotel for two nights.

One thing that was particularly cool about the third grade, which I was in during the early part of 1982, was that I had a blind teacher named Mr. Jones. Yes, they let him teach, and yes he had sighted assistants in the classroom. I don't remember much about his teaching abilities, but he was a fantastic story teller. He always had these fun stories about Jack and the crazy things he used to do. I'm sure there was some moral to the stories he told, but they were one of the best parts of the class.

Mr Jones as also big on music. His classroom was where I heard Buddy Holly and many other popular musicians from the 1950s. We also used to sing what I later learned was Tom Lehrer's Pollution song.

To put some perspective on this, I essentially had two people in my life at this time that were disabled in some way--Granny in her wheelchair, and Mr Jones without his eyesight. They got along in the world just fine, and this was before there was all these legal requirements to make things more accessible. I mention this not because I am against these requirements, but because I saw that, despite physical handicaps, it was possible to function in the real world. It is inspiring to think about now.

I'm starting to lose track of when this exactly happened, but I believe at the time, mom was living in the guest house of an airline pilot out in Bonny Doon. I was living with dad, but I would come visit her from time to time. The guest house was basically a small kitchen and one large room. When I stayed with mom, I would sleep either in a floor-level storage area that was more than large enough for me, or the large walk-in closet, depending on when exactly we're talking about. Kind of weird to think about now.

During one of these visits, my mom had taken me and my friend to Bonny Doon Beach, where as I previously described, I broke my arm. I remember lying on my mom's couch that first night after I got the cast. I felt like crap and I couldn't sleep. Everything was a challenge. Doing school work was a challenge. But I got through it with a wrist that won't turn completely around.

Somewhere in there my mom also moved to Hawaii and was living in a condo with her long-time boyfriend Richard. I remember it being a big deal that I got to go over there. I can't remember if I was supposed to be moving there or just visiting for a while, but I eventually came back. The problem with living in a condo, particularly in a complex where the condos were getting rented out for a week or two at a time, was that while there were a lot of kids there, most of them were transient. I spent a lot of that summer working at the miniature golf course next door. Made some money, played a lot of miniature golf. Discovered that the landscape guy for the condo owned the place. Stranger things have happened.

I'm sure there is more from this time, but the hour is late. There is plenty more in this deranged mind.

I seem to be tripping merrily along memory lane at the moment, so let's continue. This post was triggered by my dad's comment to my last post, which immediately struck me because, well, I have a very different memory of my 7th year on the planet.

By the time I started going to Vine Hill Elementary and riding the bus on my own, it had to be 1981, or damned near close to it. His claim is that he didn't allow me to come home on the bus because I would come home to an empty house. I don't dispute that I did spend some time with Cindy after school--she did live just up the hill from the bus stop I had to walk to.

Cindy is as wonderful a mother as anyone could have. Even though I wasn't her kid, she cared for me like her own, long after Dad and Cindy split up. She was always nice to me, even when I was being a little turd. Now David, on the other hand, Cindy's new husband/significant other/whatever, was a class act. He would berate and belittle me. He had some anger management issues for sure. Once had me go across the street to the Standard station and buy him a pack of smokes from the cigarette machine. He even gave me a note to show the station attendant if I got caught. There is one other event involving David that happened around the time that I won't get into here, but needless to say, David was a winner. I'm surprised Cindy put up with that asshole for as long as she did.

While it is possible I stayed at Cindy's house at times until dad picked me up, if it did happen, it was the exception and not the rule. I have plenty of memories of taking the two city buses home and showing up to an empty house. In fact, one of the most frequent complaints I can remember from this timeframe was how I was supposed to come home and leave him a note where I was. I most certainly didn't want to sit around an empty house, though I'm sure I occasionally watched cartoons on our black-and-white TV that took a minute to warm up. More often than not, I went out on my bike and rode around the neighborhood to see which of the neighbor kids were around to play with. Or I went and explored the area around the river that ran behind our house.

And, of course, being a kid with no particular idea where the hell I was going, I usually just left a generic note--something on the order of "out riding bikes." Dad didn't like that I wasn't specific enough about these little notes. Hard to write a note where you are going to be when you don't exactly know where you're going. But I rarely didn't venture beyond Lazywoods, down by the river, which did include a couple of friends houses on the street. And no, I was smart enough not to go in the water.

1981 was a rough year financially speaking. Aside from living without power for some of the time, there wasn't always a lot of food around the house. In fact, I remember one night where we split a packet of ramen because we didn't have much else than that. Some nights, particularly on nights where he worked late, I ended up having dinner at the neighbors.

Later in the year, we moved in with his mom--Granny. Now Granny lived in an apartment in Capitola. Given the fact she was handicapped, she had a sweet deal on rent. I have no idea where her money came from, considering I don't believe she was working, but I do know where some of it went--poker. Between my Uncle Andy and her, I learned a fair amount about the game long before I was able to gamble in a casino. Not that I would be dumb enough to do that for any serious amount of money.

The good news, for me at least, was that with this living arrangement, which started around the time I entered the third grade, I always came home to someone. Granny being confined to a wheelchair meant she didn't get out all that often. Her feet seemed larger than usual and her knees were locked in a sitting position. Some childhood disease, as I recall. She did have a specially fit car so she could steer with one hand and work the gas pedal and brake with a special handle, and she could get her wheelchair in and out of her car unaided. She also cooked fairly well. Her chili--more like a soup than the usual thick chili--was fairly memorable.

At least 1981 ended on a good note, but the beginning of 1982 started out a bit differently. I'll save that story for another day.

The Year Was 1980 and I was 7 years old. When I talked about the world shrinking, and dad had mentioned a few things that happened around that time, I had a rush of memories. And it kind of raised a question--a question that I might have had at the time, and may have gotten the answer to as well, but I have long since forgotten the answer to. Why is it that in 1980, even though I lived across the street from a school, did I have to take two city busses to get to the school I ended up going to?

Well, okay, it wasn't exactly across the street. I had to walk up Lazywoods to Highway 9, cross that street, and a little more walking got me to SLV. But instead of that little bit of walking, I got on a city bus from Felton and headed into Scotts Valley, where I changed busses, and went to the other end of Scotts Valley Drive and then walked some more until I got to Vine Hill Elementary school. Why did I do that exactly?

Vine Hill wasn't the first school I went to in 1980. I had actually went to Boulder Creek Elementary school first. I have a memory or two of walking home from Boulder Creek Elementary. It was about a mile from where I used to live, at least according to Google Maps. It wasn't five miles, uphill, in the snow, and barefoot, but to a 7 year old, that was a long way to walk. And Highway 9 wasn't exactly a country road, either. A potentially dangerous road for a 7 year old to be walking along by himself. And my mom let me do it. More than once.

But something happened at that school--I had caught impetigo. I was pulled from school for two weeks as I remember, and I had my first experience with penicillin. And I didn't go back to Boulder Creek Elementary, ever, nor did I go to any school in the San Lorenzo Valley Unified School District. And that school across the street from dad's place? In that district.

Now this is where things get a little sketchy, probably because there was a fair amount of trauma involved. Somewhere between catching impetigo and going to Vine Hill Elementary, I changed parents. I remember that my mom had driven me over in Emma, her white VW bug, over to dad's new place in Felton. And I did not want to go live with dad. I was sobbing as mom dropped me off, and I remember Pink Floyd's Have a Cigar playing in her car as she pulled away. Yay, feelings of abandonment. A therapist could have a field day with that whole scene as well as every other time I moved between parents.

My best guess, and dad can feel free to confirm this, is that I moved with dad because he was closer to the schools in Scotts Valley, which were supposed to be pretty good, or at least cleaner than the SLV schools. And, of course, because of that move, I got to experience some of the results of dad's financial troubles at the time. Those troubles were probably a large reason why we ended up moving in with his mom, which lived in an apartment in Capitola, and also had half-way decent schools.

Now that I sit here and think, another possible reason I had moved was because mom was going to move to Hawaii to go be with her long-term boyfriend, the person I refer to as my step-father. I can't remember when exactly she did that. But that, along with some of the other memories swirling around in my head, is a story for another time.

But they are penguins.

He's off in the distance. Need a proper camera with a zoom lens to get a good shot.

Taken with my Nokia N73 yesterday at the zoo.

This post from one of Ken Camp's lesser known blogs (Edit: that's his son. Ken Camp Sr.posted it on Vox) got me thinking about what happened between his generation and mine that caused this radical shift from being utterly carefree with kids versus wanting to know whom they are with, what they are doing, is there a parent present, and how they are getting back and forth.

Us Gen-Xers are probably one of the last generations that can relate to many of the statements that were in Ken's posting. When I was six, I walked by myself up the street to catch a school bus on an extremely busy road. I frequently stayed out until the street lights came on--and sometimes even later than that. When I was seven, I took a city bus to school--even having to change buses, and I had to cross a very busy street to get to the bus in the morning! This was the late 1970s. Even well into the 1980s, I was riding my bike to and from school, and just about anywhere else in between.

Then something happened. I don't think it was one event, but it was several events that, over time, brought us all closer:

• Cable TV. Cable TV started back in the 1970s--heck where I lived, that was pretty much your only choice if you wanted to watch TV. But it didn't really start growing much until the 1980s when we started seeing more than 13 channels. CNN. MTV. ESPN. This gave us a different world view than we were getting from our local TV stations, which really didn't even cover our local area. They either covered San Jose-north, or Salinas-south. Santa Cruz was hardly a blip.
• Bulletin Board Systems. One thing that was starting to become popular in the 1980s were Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes). Think dialing a phone number to reach what amounts to a specific web site today, except no fancy graphics. Now, granted, personal computers weren't in every home. Only the rich or someone lucky enough to beg, borrow, or steal one from someone else had a personal computer, let alone a modem. But what BBSes did was provide a connection to a wider area of people within your local calling area. But even BBSes evolved to permit communication beyond local calling areas. Think FidoNet and UUCP.
• The Internet. Now granted the Internet started much earlier than the 1980s. However, in the early 1990s, a lot of non-academics started discovering and using the Internet. Then, of course, Netscape hit the scene. Then Yahoo. Those two events did more to shrink the world than anything I experienced previously.

Back before all this stuff came about, we were a bit more isolated. You had no idea how many weirdos were out there. And for the most part, the weirdos didn't know either. Much like all of these advancements has brought average people closer together, it has also brought the weirdos closer together, too. Now they congregate just like, say, people who like Pink Floyd might do. And, of course, where the weirdos congregate, they share stories, swap tips, and make the collective group of weirdos much smarter. And that makes them that much more dangerous to our kids.

I would argue that, statistically speaking, things that weirdos might do to your kids is probably not that much higher than it was when, say, my dad was a kid. What has changed, though is that we have heard a constant barrage of these stories for the past 20 years or so. And while I can't say with any certainty what the rationale is, I believe that my parents and my parents parents just didn't know the risks of what they were allowing us to do. Or maybe they did, but they took solace in the though that it couldn't happen to my kids. It probably won't, but everytime it happens somewhere else in the country, you will be sure to find out about it.

The end result of this is now we won't let our kids walk the 1000 feet or so it is between our front door and the school bus stop just up the street, at least by themselves--a walk my parents would have had no problem letting me do when I was my son's age. Nor will we let them go off somewhere and play outside without an adult watching. It's a changed world for sure, or at least our awareness of it has changed since the 1980s. And, as they saying goes, you can never go back.

It seems appropriate that a song by Pink Floyd captures the experience of airline travel in their song "Point Me At The Sky" which I'm sure had nothing to do with their motivations for writing the song.

For if you are stout you will have to breathe out
While the people around you breathe in

People pressing on my sides
It's something that I hate
And so is sitting down to eat
With only little capsules on my plate

I had posted the lyrics to this song earlier, but I realized what I had was incorrect. There are actually a number of transcriptions of the lyrics, and they are all wrong in at least one place.

And yes, this means I'm home now. :)