Installment # 17

Popu was only about 5 foot 6 inches, and wiry when I knew him, but the story was told and retold of how he was the only man in the machine shop who could single-handedly lift a 500 pound roll of steel and put it in place on his lathe machine.  It was a long, pole-shaped piece of steel, and he would line it up on the floor, then get one end up on the machine somehow and then work from the other end until it was in place.  It may be just a family legend; perhaps the weight grew to 500 pounds over time, like the fish story…”the one that got away”.  At any rate, I inherited his height, topping off at 5 feet, 8 inches (now closer to 5’7”, while Dad was 6 feet tall).  I inherited a muscular build, though I’m not sure how Popu was built when he was young.  I did not inherit that kind of strength, however.  I’ve never been as strong as I looked. 

My latest theory is that I have had a weak, unstable low back, which kept me from developing my core, which in turn is critical to athletic performance and strength.  When I took up running, which I discuss at length elsewhere, it was years before I realized why I wasn’t able to reach my full potential – to achieve the speed I thought I should be capable of.  Our core supports nearly all physical performance in one way or the other.  Since I didn’t know to - or know how to - compare my core strength to others’, I didn’t realize for years what my limitation was.

I was attracted to gymnastics in high school, but I didn’t pursue it enough to conquer my fear of the “giant swing” on the horizontal bar, which is basic to many of the more advanced moves.  The fear is that of losing one’s grip at a critical point in the swing and flying across the gym, or landing on one’s head or something.  It was easier to learn back flips and front flips, as a coach and an assistant could stand on each side holding a rope or belt around me and only give me as much help as I needed, until I didn’t need any help at all.  I remember when they introduced the standing broad jump in gym class and I could leap further than anyone else.  I could also do the most pull-ups, and I could do the rope climb all the way to the top in an L-shaped sitting position, using only my arms.  I could do one legged squats and one arm pushups; the iron cross on the rings, etc.

I still have a large scar on my left ankle from showing off in the caddy yard when I was 16.  I placed one hand on the seat of a bench and one hand on the top of the back rest, and went up into a hand stand.  But instead of coming back down the way I went up, I thought it would be more impressive to go into a forward roll.  I crossed my legs to take up less space when landing and my left ankle came down hard on the top of the back rest.  I remember seeing really deeply down into the wound.  At first it was pure white; then some color started to appear, and soon I was bleeding profusely.  I had it wrapped in the administrative offices and went out and caddied for 4-5 hours.  When I got home I could see that the bandage was totally soaked with blood. 

I guess I thought it would stop like any other cut that you put a band aid on.  Fortunately, my cousin Flo called.  She was a young wife and mother in her early twenties at the time.  Perhaps Mom had asked her to check on me.  Anyway, I told her what was happening and she drove right over and took me to a hospital emergency room.  If I recall correctly, the doctor there said that it was too late to stitch it up.  I should have come in as soon as it happened, and I certainly should have not walked around on it, caddying, for the rest of the day.  To this day, when teenagers do dumb things I am able to empathize.  I did a lot of dumb things and am lucky to have survived some of them!

Flo’s younger sister, Vickie, was also a young wife and mother who lived just a few miles away.  I had just gotten my driver’s license at the time that she asked me to drive her two children from one place to another…maybe to Flo’s…I don’t recall.    I was surprised that Vickie would trust me, as a 16 year old boy, to drive carefully and responsibly enough with her two precious children.  Instead of making me feel proud and overconfident, though, it made me feel a tremendous seriousness and sense of responsibility, and I was in awe of Vickie, that she would do this for me.  I felt at the time, and still feel, that she was being very courageous in order to help me mature and believe in myself.  I reminded her of this incident just a few years ago, but she didn’t remember it.  I wanted to emphasize it here because it stayed with me all my life, and I suspect similar kinds of actions by adults may have similar impacts on the teenagers in their lives.

I wasn’t close to Mom’s parents, as mentioned, and we were not very close to most of our aunts and uncles and cousins.  Growing up, I was always told that I had 39 cousins on Mom’s side and one on Dad’s side.  Cousin Harold was the one on Dad’s side, the only child of Aunt Dot and Uncle Harold.   I only recently tried to add up all the cousins on Mom’s side, and it comes up a little short.  Out of the 13 Dwyer siblings, I know that Uncle Billy had no children, and that Aunt Ceily only had 1.  If we assume the 39 includes Donald and me (so 37 cousins), then there are 10 siblings, not counting Billy, Ceily and Mom, to come up with 36 cousins, or 3.6 each.  Catholic or not, that seems a little high, but maybe not too far off.

I know from personal experience, sadly, that the introduction of in-laws into a family can create friction, fracture and irreparable hard feelings.  In the case of a huge family, little subgroups form based on who can stand whose spouses.  One of the sisters had married a man who was in management and wore a white shirt to work.  She started to put on airs and act like she was above the others (or at least that is what the others felt; it may have been simple jealousy).  One married a bum who never worked; one (Mom) married a guy who didn’t drink and swear (and so didn’t fit in very well).  One married an Italian who was a gardener (the opposite sin from the one who married a guy in management).  One of the derogatory terms for an Italian was “Guinea”, as in New Guinea (don’t know where that came from).  But, anyway, this guy became “the guinea gardener.”  Dad differed in another way, as well: in an argument - generally about politics or sports - he would try to use logic and reason.  The Dwyer men would just repeat their one or two phrase opinions in louder and louder voices, becoming red in the face and screaming, until the other fellow gave up or gave in.

When I returned from Germany at age 20 after being discharged from the Army, I met Harry Brown, Mom’s new boyfriend.  He was 35 years old and Mom was 41.  That was a little unusual in those days, but not exactly a scandal.  What was weird was that Harry had never been married before.  As far as I knew, if you weren’t married by age 35, you probably had too much wrong with you and no one would ever want to marry you.  (What we today call “too much baggage”).  I also thought at their age they were too old to be interested in anything but companionship.  Hah!  Harry was a car salesman, which was higher up on the status chart than Mom had ever associated with before, and she was quite impressed.  He wore a clean white shirt and a tie to work and didn’t get his hands dirty!  Mom bragged that Harry was in the 40% income tax bracket, whatever that meant.

{As a quick aside, we did have a very progressive income tax structure in the 1960s and 1970s, “progressive” meaning that as your taxable income reached higher and higher levels, your marginal tax rate went higher and higher.  I’m not sure, but I heard that marginal rates were as high as 70% or more at one point.}

One of the other derogatory terms for Italians was “WOP,” which I was told stood for “without papers,” and in turn referred to coming through immigration on Ellis Island legally, but without certain documents.  Or else ‘WOP’ was an imitation of the sound of the approval stamp hitting the papers. It is a little like the term “wet back” that we use for illegal aliens sneaking across borders by swimming across waters that separate two countries.  It always amused me, by the way, that the local Catholic churches were filled predominantly with the Irish and the Italians, who basically had no use for each other.  The picture I get in my mind of all these parishioners dressing up once a week and turning their minds toward spiritual matters, but sitting there harboring ill will toward half the others in attendance is so incongruous that it is comical to me.

But getting back to our family, the jealousies, misunderstandings and prejudices, combined with rumor, gossip and story-telling, served to keep our little family of four away from most of our aunts, uncles and cousins for most of my time on Long Island.  Eventually, many started to move out of state, and long distance phone calls were quite costly in those days, so contact really ended.  I left for the Army at age 17, which I will talk about later, and essentially never lived in New York again, so never got to know my cousins after that.  Donald had stayed in New York a few years longer and had a chance to get to know some of the cousins better.  He also lived in New York for a year or two after the Army, and moved back to New York from California in 1989, so had more opportunity to build relationships and was also more inclined to do so than I was.

Long distance phone calls were so expensive in 1964-65 when I first hit California, and I was so broke, that letter writing was the only real alternative, until I found a telephone on the airport grounds that I could dial long distance from.  Most phones required you to dial 9 to get an outside line, then another single digit number for long distance.  If you didn’t get the beep-beep-beep from dialing the 9, you got it from dialing the next number.  You could always dial 0 for operator and ask her to put you through and see if the other party would accept the charges.  Among us common folk, you better have a real emergency if you were going to go that route, but it was at least comforting to know that was available if needed.  Well, I wasn’t used to calling long distance for anything, and my relatives were not accustomed to receiving long distance phone calls that were not emergencies, and I did not carry a bunch of phone numbers around with me, so I didn’t make very many of those calls before that phone was removed from its location.  Oh well.

I suppose sooner or later I should comment on what happens to the sex drive and the sex life as we get older.  I suppose we all wonder about that.  I know I did.  But I only know about one husband and one marriage…a sample size of one…so I don’t know how relevant my experience is.  I also don’t know whether my experience is relevant to a man who is not in a relationship as he gets older, or who is in multiple, less serious relationships.  But my experience has been that men transition from the almost constant “sex on the brain” stage of youth to a much less frequent and much less urgent appreciation of sex as we get older.  The longer we live the more control we have over our thought lives, developing the mental discipline to – in this case - turn away from certain thoughts before arousal occurs.  One old British guy described his attitude towards sex with, “The cost is exorbitant; the pleasure fleeting; and the position ridiculous,” or words to that affect.  That is not relevant here; just comical.

For the young man who can’t imagine not wanting sex at all times, think of the sexual appetite as similar to the appetite for food.  If you are not hungry, you are not motivated.  But if you hang out in the kitchen smelling all the wonderful aromas and seeing all the delicious looking food, it won’t be long before you start looking forward to meal time.  But if someone dangles a piece of steak in front of you, and you are not hungry, it is pretty easy to ignore.  I was being fed intravenously once during recovery at a hospital, and I noticed that I gave no thought to food.  But when someone showed up with a tray of good smelling food, I suddenly found my appetite and was very glad it was time to eat.  That’s not a perfect analogy, but maybe it helps, and I hope Sandy doesn’t find this insulting or offensive in any way!