Greetings, friends. (LIX)

Greetings, friends. We’re down to the final phases of clearing and sorting and repacking.

Brian the Liquidator pronounced the barn finished today. He and his crew have filled two empty shipping containers with the refuse from my mother’s estate, wholly aside from all of the items they have carted away for sale or put by the side of the road.

Having finally identified every single object in the estate that I had any interest in keeping, and having suddenly rid ourselves of the rest, the time has come for me to start winnowing it down to what will fit in the pickup truck, and packing it up to get it out of the way of the real estate photography and subsequent viewing.

In fact, I pushed my flight to Portland back to Wednesday to have a little more time to get it all done. I spent a decent part of the weekend sorting through two 18 gallon plastic bins containing a variety of papers from the entire first half of my life, ranging from instructions from Pennsylvania Hospital to the parents of newborns under intensive care, to philosophy essays I wrote in university.

I found some weird shit in there. Apparently I was issued a certificate for my bris? Honestly, I thought the work spoke for itself. I also found a handwritten bundle entitled “Nursing Schedules” containing a log of every single feeding of yours truly for a period of nine months, including duration in minutes per side, from December 1977 through July 1978, recorded with the precision of an archaeologist’s field notes. I don’t know whether to be creeped out or impressed. Or both.

Anyway, spurred by my own admonition to you all a couple days ago, I located and discarded probably hundreds of pages of bad teenaged poetry, and even worse fiction. I saved a few things that made me really happy to find, like a bunch of childhood in-jokes, and some song lyrics I once wrote that Mike later set to music and that Dave Brown used to play a lot.

But the happiest discoveries were the cache of personal letters. Evidently I saved nearly every letter and every postcard that anyone had written to me, clear through my university career. Remember when we used to write letters? Long winding epistolary things, composed in an era before email was ubiquitous, back when long distance calls were charged by the minute?

I found a draft of a letter addressed from my mother to Clayton. Dated January 1978, she admonishes him for not having kept in touch, complains about the cost of long distance phone calls, and then kvells for a solid page about her baby boy.

He’s now a month old, he looks like the Burnstons, & has huge hands and feet that suggest that he’s going to be a big person. He’s been a pretty good baby, for a baby… He’s disgustingly cute.

David has been wonderful throughout. He hung in there all the way through a labor & delivery that were longer & messier than either of us expected. He “coped” for both of us during my recovery period, especially when the baby wound up in Intensive Care w/ jaundice & I kind of came unglued. And he is proving to be at last as good a father as I knew he would be. (My only complaint is that he’s already started teaching the baby raunchy songs.)

I wish I remembered the songs! For somehow who has no memory of his biological parents together as a family, this kind of stuff is really sort of sweet to discover.

I found my first book report. Dated in my mother’s hand to “first grade”, it reads:

ferdinand

ferdinand was a bull. He did not want to be in the bull fight but he wanted to smell the flowers. I hated it.

ferdinand by munro leaf
Schuyler

Ouch! Harsh, dude. I don’t remember hating this book at all. I think what I hated was having to write a report about it.

I found a bunch of copies of the ill-advised “underground newspaper” my friends and I published in high school, and even a copy the cartoon published about it in the actual school newspaper.

I found and discarded a lot of nonsense, like infant doodles saved by my mother, and Hebrew language workbooks from second grade that I can barely read now. I found a lot of report cards, and a couple of psychological evaluations.

The first psych evaluation dates back to 1982, when I was slightly over 4 years old, and my mother was trying to get me admitted to kindergarten at the local private Jewish elementary school later that year.

Schuyler’s cooperation during the testing was somewhat limited. He would only willingly participate in tasks he felt he could master. If he perceived that he might fail; Schuyler became defensive, withdrawn and “willful”. He was a difficult child to test and interact with.

Schuyler had no difficulty in understanding directions, however, his performance was often hampered by incessant talking which distracted him; causing him to momentarily forget or disregard the task.

Constant talking, a need to defend against perceived failure and an obvious need to succeed suggest that Schuyler is an undisciplined, somewhat insecure child (e.g. low self-confidence) with probable anxiety.

Here I have to excoriate the unfortunate tester for their repeated failure to use the Oxford comma. Anyway, they go on to say:

Schuyler’s reading recognition skills are approximately at a fourth-grade level… He can do simple addition and subtraction problems… [but] had difficulty counting objects beyond five due to distractibility (previously described).

Even 40 years later, this feels familiar. The second evaluation, dated 1989 for a private middle school application, contains much the same content, but in greater detail, and references my “low frustration tolerance” not once but twice.

Truth is, I have never liked being bad at things. I eventually learned to get over it, and stopped letting a lack of talent keep me from pursuing things I really wanted to do, like music and swing dance and taekwondo… but I only gave up my “need to defend against perceived failure”, mmm, maybe sometime last year?

Apart from the glowing marks I got for Ham Radio class in seventh grade, the report cards are pretty much a well of sadness. Over a span of years, they consistently and uniformly depict an unhappy child, who could do well in school if he would only stop being disruptive, start paying attention, and maybe do his homework even once. Even the teacher from 1985 who started out describing me as a “brilliant autodidact” went on to tut-tut about my inability “to conform to classroom behavioral norms.”

Reading these cards today, I find myself overwhelmed with sympathy for my unfortunate teachers. I must’ve been a massive pain in the ass.

Some of this maladjustment was obviously the condition of an upbringing whose primary feature was benign neglect, but anyone who knows me well knows that I still struggle with “low frustration tolerance”… so maybe some of it was just character?

I’m not sure why I bother to share all of this. I guess it was a bit of a shock to find the actual documentary evidence that points to why I have never been a particularly happy person, until maybe very recently. I can’t help but wonder what kind of person I would be today, or what I might’ve accomplished in life, if I’d had parents that weren’t so deeply inadequate. Not abusive, just inadequate.

And please don’t get me started on just why my mother was the way she was. I mean, she was the kind of mother who somehow had the capacity to record every single breast feeding for months and months in excruciating detail, but never the time or energy to teach her son how to chill the fuck out, or to sit him down after school and make him do his fucking homework for once? It makes me feel like a character from a John Irving novel.

I swear that I’m not complaining. I just… definitely had some weird complex feelings about what I found. I’m grateful to have had parents that tried, maybe, to do their best, even if their best wasn’t nearly good enough. At least there were psych evaluations and private school applications. It’s more than most troubled kids get, I suppose.

There’s something freeing about getting rid of all these papers, after all these years. I took about 4 cubic feet of papers and whatnot, and filtered it down to roughly ¼ cubic feet of stuff I’m keeping because it will make me happy to see it again someday. Besha wisely suggested I burn the rest, which I will do when I have the chance.

I must say this: If the experience of the last month and a half has taught me anything, it is the discernment to know which things are Christmas decoration, and which are clown statue.

And, as I said, the hope I found at the bottom of this Pandora’s box was, well… you all. The proof of all the wonderful people I’ve had the privilege of knowing and loving and writing letters to and receiving letters from over all these years. All the lovely sentiments, the professions of care and interest, given and received and exchanged. I threw out the terrible teenage poetry and the terrible construction paper art and the terrible report cards… but what I’m keeping is mostly the letters from you. The ones that still bring a smile.

Thanks for being there for me, friends. You’re the best. More tomorrow.