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Sera venientibus ossa. Latin Expression |
D Vautier
9/22
My Life started when I was 10. It really did.
I don’t remember much of my life before I was 10 years old but this never did trouble me because I feel that I was probably not ready to start life until then anyway. But I did -- and it was OK. I only remember blotches and splotches of exciting things that occurred before that time but I had no continuous flow of memory as most people usually have.
It was a lot of fun being a little kid.
I had a bunch of mischievous brothers and a sister so to me life was
nothing but fun. I don’t remember
any particular trauma or great stress that may have caused me to forget
most of my early childhood. Believe
me, there remain a lot of blank spots for sure (see the Forsitan effect) but I don’t
care much about doing any deep dive into missing childhood memories or fear or
anxiety or mental injury because, whatever it was, I don’t think it matters or
had any lasting effect on my life. I
didn’t feel damaged or disadvantaged or depressed or disrespected or dis-anything.
I only have happy thoughts about being a kid.
I always thought that we ate well.
We never had much meat. Bacon,
ham, stake and hamburgers were beyond reach but not hot dogs and eggs and spam.
Peanut butter kept me alive--absolutely. My
dream was to some day go to heaven surrounded by milk and peanut butter
sandwiches. I hated spam, because
they used to sell it for practically nothing and mom bought anything that sold
for practically nothing. They made a
lot of spam for the war I suppose and a lot was left over so it sold for
practically nothing. But mom always
kept us supplied with lots of milk and cereal which was great. She made mush for breakfast and baked her own bread and pies.
She prepared our lunches for school and wrote our names on each bag with
crayon. I always got a peanut butter
sandwich and a cookie. I was always
surprised how other kids could actually threw their lunches away.
Once in awhile I would get the wrong lunch and have to suffer through a sandwich of sliced tomatoes and mayonnaise (yuck!) and god knows what else. One of my brothers liked tomatoes and another brother liked pickles (double yuck!). Mom was always careful to get the right sandwich to the right kid.
Butter was something we never got. It
just was not available or way too expensive. Instead mom got this weird
white stuff called margarine and it came with a yellow powder that could be
mixed with the white margarine to make it look like butter. I have no clue
why but it never tasted like butter anyway.
We were not rich kids. Rich kids had new bikes, TV, and BB guns and got to watch Ed Sullivan and
the Mouseketeers. God knows, those
rich kids probably had ham and bacon too. Every
thanksgiving we got to go down to the Elk’s Lodge and get a free Thanksgiving
Day dinner with real turkey breast, mashed potatoes, and gravy - absolute pure paradise.
Being a little brother has huge
advantages in the hand-me-down category and I was more than willing to accept
that fortunate position in life. It was just handed to me. The
concept of giving perfectly good stuff away to Goodwill or something did not exist in my world-view
because it was a hand-me-down world. Things
were used until they broke or wore out or out-grown in which case they were
passed on to the next-in-line sibling. My
first great gift was the “blue” bike of unknown origin. It was just a plain
blue girl’s bike, nothing special but it was gold to me. My older brother
got it then he gave it to my other brother because he got a Schwinn with actual
shifting gears (wow). Then my other brother got a Raleigh and I got the Schwinn.
It was a world where gifts keep on coming. This happened to all sort of objects, baseball gloves, clothes, shoes,
underwear, socks and especially tennis shoes which were the only shoes kids wanted to ware anyway.
We had 4 theaters in
Everett where I grew
up. They were the Roxy, the Everett,
the Granada and the Balboa. I went
to the movies at least 2 or 3 times a week and they always had double features
with cartoons and Newsreel and some times a Pete Smith Special which were always
funny. There
was an intermission but we never cared about it or starting times. We just went.
As good Catholics us kids followed the Legion of Decency (a publication of good and bad movies). We always tried to catch the bad or “condemned” movies because they usually showed some boobs or something fun. In particular we looked for the “Swedish” movies which did play often at the Balboa and were almost guaranteed to be enjoyable. The more interesting “Swedish” films would not make it to Everett but would play in Seattle at one of the “low brow” movies like the Blue Mouse which had 24 hour shows and lots of Swedish movies. Seattle had a ton of movie theaters and was less conservative.
Once “One Summer of Happiness”, a
great Swedish film with lots of boobs played at the Balboa and me and my brother
saw it at least three times. My mom
was curious and asked about our interest in just this one film. “Oh it’s just a dumb western with lots of gunplay.” My Brother
said. Fortunately she did not pursue
the issue any further. Wow! That was
a close one.
I was totally and absolutely into
sci-fi movies, I mean like insane about it. I actually would look up the starting times of these movies and be able
to see the movie from start to finish and thereby enjoy a more sensible
presentation. I also saved enough
money to get popcorn. Once I was
late for an opening and I had two dimes in my hot little hand and I fell down.
The two dimes fell down a sewer and I could not reach them. In a complete panic I raced home and mom gave me two more dimes.
I ran back and was able to get there in time only to miss the cartoon.
Theaters changed and so did the experience. The Everett theater was remodeled and had all these flood lights in front to announce it’s big new grand opening with “The Robe”. Later I took my sister to the Everett to see the “Scoutmaster.” I tossed my popcorn box down from the balcony which was always the customary thing to do because it showed up on the screen. The manager came up and threw us out. I never went back there again.
I first became interested in photography. It was absolutely fascinating and I quickly converted the one bathroom we had into a darkroom. Needless to say this brought much grief on the family and how I was even able to get away with it was something I never understood. But I did develop emergency protocols because I would try to process prints at times when the other kids were gone. I also developed a “dark box” to load film into a tank and once in the tank the lights could come on and the bathroom became available.
This insane hobby continued through my high school and college days.
Photography led me logically into other
fields like optics and astronomy. I
became an absolute nut in these areas. I
worked out the laws of optics. I
built all kinds of telescopes and microscopes. I drew maps of all the constellations and tried to identify each one.
I memorized stars and planet magnitudes, just as normal kids memorized
batting averages. I plotted the
movement of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn for several years. I joined the Seattle Amateur Astronomical Society and talked with many of
the members. It was a lonely life at
times because it seems that I could only share ideas with adults. In 7th grade I met a kid who was also into astronomy.
We had a wonderful time together talking about things like expanding
universes and moon origins, but he moved to California the next year and I never
saw him again.
Being the youngest son and having a very devout catholic
mom and having a loving but largely missing dad, I decided, or it was decided
for me, that I should devote my life to the priesthood.
Still, being a kid was a lot of fun.