An American Story

(Null)

My earliest memory is of an earthquake in Bakersfield, California. I remember my mother holding my brother Stuart in her arms. At the time, she was pregnant with my brother Scott. With things rattling in the house and my mom's general panic as she ran out of the house, I got the idea I should do the same. I was just learning to walk, but I thought that I had better forget about walking. Instead, I dropped to the ground and crawled out of the house as fast as I could.

My next memory is of Sister Mary Charles, the head nun at the local Catholic grammar school. I remember her holding me by the arm and digging her fingernails into the soft part of the back of my arm. She had me standing on my tiptoes. Because I was only three feet high, it was easy for her to keep me off balance and keep me separated from the other first-grade boy that I had been fighting with.

I survived the earthquake and Sister Mary Charles, and I actually had a very happy childhood. My mom, my brothers, and I lived with my grandparents on their little farm just outside of Madera, a small farming town in the San Joaquin Valley in California. My friends were the Mexican kids down the street and an old French couple who lived across the road from my grandparents' house. My grandparents raised fruit, nuts, and chickens. The farm was like a park with all the orange and almond trees blossoming in the spring and the fresh, sweet oranges, apricots, and plums right off the tree in the summer. It was wonderful to wake up on a quiet spring morning and lie in my bed smelling the scent of blossoms on the breeze that came into my room, along with the hum of the bees outside of my window. In addition to the chickens, lambs, and cows on the farm, there were the occasional wounded wild animals that we would nurse back to health: a fox, a tortoise, and wild birds.

When I started high school, it was a shock. I had spent eight years fighting my way to be the most popular kid in the Catholic school student body. I had been a big, tough eighth-grader, and suddenly I was a lowly ninth-grader cowering from the big, tough, twelfth-grade seniors who ran the high school. I realized then that it's nice to strive for something, but that you also have to enjoy the moment you're in and be happy where you are.

Rock and roll had always been an important part of my life. I remember as a young child, borrowing my grandfather's radio and listening to Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly. Later, I listened to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. My friends and I used to drive around until the late hours of the night listening to the music of rock-and-roll legends. During those teenage years, I made friendships that I thought would last a lifetime. Most people that age think the same thing, but people drift apart: jobs, families, and tragedies separate people from those lasting friendships. The tragedy that separated me from my friends forever was the Vietnam War. A year after I graduated from high school, I left for Vietnam. I came back "burned out" and tired, like an old man, as though I had lived ten lifetimes in the short span of 14 months—the 14 months I was in the war. I couldn't relate to the friends I had had in high school. They still seemed childish, concerned with childish things that weren't important to me. I was still trying to cope with the death, destruction, and evil I had seen in Vietnam. I felt like we had done terrible things to innocent people there and, in turn, I had seen terrible things done to my friends. Nobody won there and everybody lost.

I withdrew from my friends and started college, then I quit college and took many different jobs. I spent a lot of my time and money on alcohol and other drugs. Finally, in an effort to get my life going in the right direction again, I sold everything and took what little money I had and bought myself an airplane ticket to Israel. I went there to study history and archaeology. While I was a student at Haifa University, I met my wife, who was also an American student.

To make a long story short, I now teach high school back in the United States. I look at my students and see them struggling with so many of the very things I struggled with so many years ago. As their teacher, I try to help them over the rough spots as best I can.

From Read to Write, Jeri Wyn Gillie, etc. The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. 1997.