Where am I from?

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I come from a very poor family. We moved from house to house across two states because my father kept bouncing the rent checks. Bouncing checks was a habit in an era where it was punishable by jail and I did have to bail him out once due to a bad check.

In my high school years, we had no car, no phone and no money for a baseball glove. Naturally, I had no dates and was isolated in my school. We frequently had no money for lunch and no lunch from home.

We were wealthy once when my mother’s mother, who owned oil wells, lived with us. She was sick and irascible, but my father, and mother, knew which side of their bread had the butter. So, a long time ago we had two new cars every year, a new house, and an airplane. My brother and I, of course, loved the airplane and the cars. We didn’t know anything and thought that it was just part of life. My grandmother bought a business for my father to mess up and lose. She provided for his trips to the country club for drinking and gambling. When she died she willed the estate about one-half to the American government out of stupidity and one-half to 27 children, grandchildren and cousins. Obviously, it all came unraveled for us.

Now the family I cam from had changed drastically by the time I was about 8 years old. We sold the house and moved to a rental on the stinky side of the small oil town where we lived. Dad got a traveling salesman’s job and behaved like every traveling salesman joke you ever heard. My mother was miserable. She was an excellent house keeper and a good cook, but she slept a lot and didn’t say much. We never paid the rent on time. She would sit in a chair and stare. Occasionally, I was directed to take the rent check down the street to the landlord who gave me hell for all the bad checks that my dad wrote. As I noted, this was a time when bad checks carried real penalties and real moral outrage. I didn’t understand it but I did understand the abuse this woman heaped on me.

My dad turned out to be a good salesman and wound up landing a good job with a firm in neighboring state where he had travelled. It was a respectful job, well paid and he started out well. Sadly, it was well paid which gave my father another opportunity to waste our money on drinking at gambling at the country club where he felt like a big shot. He did just that.

It was soon bad check time again and as a young teenage, I had to field all the telephone calls from angry merchants threatening jail. At a time when I was keen and sounding grown up and mature, I sabotaged myself on the phone calls because my voice convinced the merchants that my dad had answered the phone and that he was lying. More abuse. Lots of it. Naturally, that all ended when my dad was fired by the decent, small town business man and was forced out of town. His reputation was miserable and we moved at a ferociously critical time for me.

I was approaching my junior year in high school. I had been working hard to garner popularity and skills. I had scored a major win by making the school dance band playing clarinet and tenor sax. The next thing to accomplish was making the school football and basketball teams.

Throughout America, you did not want to be a short boy—like me. It was especially true in the Midwest and in farmland particularly. You were instantly judged to be not worth much. Couldn’t bale hay, not strong enough to squeeze the cows teeth, not able to build things and fearful of bulls and cattle. Just good for feeding the chickens, gathering eggs, slopping the hogs and other girls’ work.

But I was fast, very fast and I had played with the other kids on the team in our backyards. They couldn’t catch me and they couldn’t tackle me and I was strong. I would make the team because the other boys knew what I could do.

Then we move back to the largest city of my birth state. Because of my father. We rented the first in a long series of rental houses in a somewhat affluent school district. The phone company would not give us a phone because the money Dad owed them. I saved up money working that summer and tried to get the phone in my name. They wouldn’t do it. We did not have a car. No phone, no car, no social life, no athletic life. Still, much to the amusement of my new “friends,” I still played in the band.

I did the proverbial walk to school every day even in the deep of winter. Misery, loneliness, that was where I was from. I frequently went without lunch at school. My mom dropped deeper into depression and sat around the house all day smoking cigarettes. She drank gin mostly and would get quite maudlin. That was where I was from.

Except. The most inexplicable thing. I smiled a lot. I was a cute little boy. Girls and women saw me that way and the guys in the school were generally friendly. I didn’t have any real friends but they didn’t pick on me much. They picked on other short kids, but not much on me. I was elected Captain of the band. The band director told me that all the girls voted for me. What?

Again, I smiled a lot and I was very smart. People recognized it. In fact, the school counselors used to call me and chastise me for being so smart and not doing any better in school. Well, I got all A’s and B’s and never did my home work. I turned in papers at the last minute or two days late and they were generally good. 

I tried to go out for football, but the six foot two coach, ridiculed me in front of the other boys. That did not work out well. I didn’t even try for basketball. Still, I smiled a lot.

Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. I never did my homework because I would just come home after school and lie on my bed. We had a television set and I tried to watch it as much as I could. I easily memorized all the scheduling.

Through loans that were granted in the day when the US government was trying to help students and not help greedy universities and loan monsters, I managed to work a bit and hang on in school long enough to get a degree. I didn’t learn much because, like high school, I never studied. But, I smiled a lot and became kind of popular on campus. Plus, I got to play all the sports that I wanted to. It was only intramural sports; this public university had a very serious football team, but I loved every damn second of it—every single one.

From college, I became an Army officer, went to war, got a job, lived a very active social life, got married, had two beautiful children, girls, and spent some time as a corporate CEO. Sadly, I never lost the stigma or the habits of my childhood. Money was something I just couldn’t handle well, I constantly sabotaged myself in the business world, we went bankrupt and I died of a heart attack on a basketball court. Oddly, they had a brand new defibrillator in the gym and returned me from the dead. That was just before the bankruptcy. 

Still, I smiled a lot. My girls both went to good colleges and graduated. My wife and I saved what pennies I could make and we bought a small condo in an area as close to paradise as you can get anywhere in the world.

Now the question is, where am I from? Misery, hardship and heartbreak. Or, self-destructive, but unbreakable spirit. The tech world, where I settled has many leaders who suffered in their childhoods more than I did and still rose to greatness. I suffered in my childhood—the poverty, the moving, the social isolation, the lack of sports, a seriously depressed mother and a rambling, gambling father, but somehow I smiled my way into a reasonable, comfortable life. My wife and I even handled the bankruptcy well.

You tell me, where am I from? This country bumpkin.