Installment # 34

We chose to live in a court in San Jose because it seemed safer for the kids to play in the street.  Again, they were 6, 4 and 1.  I was 31 years old, and Sandy was 30.  There were several young families in the court and lots of kids for our kids to play with.  As of this writing, our kids are 44, 42 and 39.  I am 69, and Sandy is 68.  After watching our kids and their contemporaries grow up, start driving and leave for college, we watched other families come and go over the years and other children grow to adulthood and leave.  There are nine homes in our court, and we are the only couple left from our original neighbors.  There is one woman who was widowed and has remarried, but we are the only remaining couple.  We remember the births of several babies that are now teenagers and still living in the court.  There is one young man in his mid-twenties in the court that we saw brought home from the hospital as a baby. His younger sister is a teacher living in San Francisco.  One of the moms said that she thinks of us as grandparents to her kids. Yikes!  What happened?

We had chosen a court not only for the kids’ safety, but for additional security, or at least the feeling of additional security.  Aside from less vehicular traffic, we reasoned that most burglars and vandals would not choose a house in the middle of a court, with only one escape route – going back the way you came in.  It would be too easy to get trapped.  If they went over one of our fences, they would be in someone else’s backyard.  This court idea actually has worked out well.  There has been a dramatic rise in home burglaries and car break-ins in Almaden Valley in recent years, but so far nothing has happened in our court.  With my usual tendency to see the humor in situations, I noted after an extended stay at Michelle’s in Canada that up there we would fall asleep listening to the coyotes and dogs howling in the distance; in San Jose we fall asleep listening to the sirens as the police and fire trucks roar by.

Another status symbol shock for me was braces.  Sandy insisted that both Michelle and Bobby needed braces.  I protested that absolutely no one I knew growing up wore braces, and we all turned out fine in terms of our teeth and smile.  Of course I hadn’t seen any of those kids after childhood, except Donald and Harold, so really had no basis for my statement.  But I voiced my suspicion that, because of fluoride in the water and the improved toothpaste products, kids were having less cavities, so the dentists had to find some other way to make a good living – hence braces.  I refused to pay for braces, and really couldn’t afford them, anyway.  So Sandy took a 4-hour per day job as a school crossing guard, which qualified her for dental benefits, including braces for the kids.  This was not my idea, by any means.  She found out about the opportunity somehow, and went for it.

This was the beginning of a pattern.  When Michelle transferred to Cal Poly, Sandy got a paper route to help pay her tuition and living expenses.  When Amy went to Cal Poly we moved into a small rental home for a couple of years and rented our house out to Bobby and his buddies.  The amount of rent we received was significantly less than market, so helped the boys, but still twice as much as we were paying out in rent on the smaller place.  That extra money helped put Amy through Cal Poly.  Both girls worked part-time, as well, while earning good grades and graduating on time, so it was a win-win all the way around. (Chipettes of the old block maybe?)

Bobby started at West Valley Junior College, which is where Michelle and Amy started, but he just wasn’t ready for the discipline of learning.  He was up in the wee hours of the morning folding and delivering his newspapers.  He managed to attend classes, but sitting and being lectured to was never his style.  During the rest of his 24 hour day, when he wasn’t catching up on his sleep, he was training for downhill mountain bike competitions.  In the evening, with a few hours to sleep before the paper route, he would try to do some school work, but he was usually too tired to accomplish much.  And he was taking classes like, “How to Study,” “How to go to College,” etc, getting nowhere.  There is no question that Bob has as good a mind as his sisters.  He reads and understands technical manuals.  He has a general contractor’s license, which required him to take and pass some difficult courses and exams.  He supports customers and Outside Sales in the high-tech industry.  He just has different interests.

Since I had delayed any post-high school education until age 23, I suggested that he could/should maybe drop out of college until he was ready to apply himself and learn.  I didn’t realize that my circumstances had been fairly unique and that not everyone could do what I had done.  So, sadly, he never went back to school.  Some of his friends completed their college educations, and some did not.  Bob moved in with some friends during his early 20s, and then moved back home.  He was 26 years old, living at home, training to be a professional mountain biker, with a paper route as his only source of income, when he met his future wife, Paulette.  That’s when I gave a second round of bad advice (the first being to drop out of school).  I encouraged him to hang on to this girl who seemed serious about marrying him.  I guess I am a hopeless romantic: I believe in true love. I want that for others, especially my own children, and I tend to believe that any two reasonable people can have a happy, fulfilling marriage relationship.

I had been growing increasingly concerned whether Bob was going to be able to make the transition to fully-functioning adulthood, and I saw marriage as the way to get Bob out of the house, into the job market, and on with adult life.   By way of contrast, at 26 I had completed 3 years of military service, had a full-time job since I was 20, was married, was a homeowner, was a parent, and was completing my junior year at Stanford University.  The fact that he was marrying someone older, more mature, more educated, and seemingly more motivated than him didn’t faze me.  Again, I was married before I started college; I was in college when we started a family.  I figured she would be a good influence on him. 

I am not going to put any labels on what has happened, except to say that I did not give Bobby the parental advice and guidance that he needed at the time that he needed it.  These last few paragraphs are really about me, not Bob.  I don’t mean to single him out, except to make the point that I wasn’t much of a father to my son and now we have a superficial relationship – not as bad as my father had with Donald and me, but not very good.  I think Bob is a much better father than I ever was in terms of his relationships with his kids, and that is probably what matters most.

I remember Bobby as a 2 and 3 year old.  He had a blanket that you would think had been surgically attached to him somehow, and he usually had a wad of it stuffed into his mouth.  When you held him and took the blanket out of his mouth it really stunk from all the bacteria.  Uncle Norm, Pam’s first husband, used to say he was such a mama’s boy, being held and munching on his blanket.  On his 3^rd birthday, while he was distracted, I remember that Norm and Don and I took the blanket with us to the store and set fire to it in the parking lot and destroyed it once and for all.  Earlier efforts to hide it from him and substitute something else were to no avail.  While we were gone, apparently Bobby found his birthday presents in a closet, and he was found sitting in there by himself, opening his presents!  They brought him out to the party to finish opening his presents in front of everybody.

I dreaded putting him to bed that night without his blanket.  We had gotten him a Winnie the Pooh bear to take its place, but he was having none of it.  I stayed with him until he finally fell asleep, and got up and went in to him when I heard him crying in the middle of the night.  It only took a few nights, as I recall, for him to get over the loss of his blanket, but he never accepted Winnie the Pooh or any other substitute.  When he was 4 years old, Bobby seemed to make the transition from “baby” to “boy.”  At the preschool in San Jose, he and another boy would be all over the playground, attempting the most difficult tricks on the equipment and setting the example for the others.  We used to say that they “terrorized” the playground, but of course not literally.  They just ran and played harder than anyone else.  Around that time I came across a poem called “Little Boys of Three” that really spoke to me, and still does:

 Look tenderly on little boys of three; their softness is as fleeting as a flower.
The cheeks like petals such a little hour, The deepest dimple theirs so transiently;
Even tomorrow softness may be hard. The little cotton cushions on the knees
turned into bony knobs for climbing trees. The fists so like a rose grow lean and scarred.
His full moon cheeks will narrow to a line, the silken hair becomes a brush of bristle,
As Mother's little flower turns to thistle, And there will linger not one little sign
To prove the cuddly cupid that was he. Look tenderly on little boys of three.

I remember Bobby’s first haircut.  I wanted him to have a good experience so that he would not fight us about it in the future.  So I sat him on my lap in the barber chair to help him feel secure and to hopefully help him hold still.  Unfortunately, the barber handed him a lollipop, which he began to enjoy.  But then some of the hair being cut from his head started sticking to the lollipop, which he continued to put into and pull out of his mouth.  Then he started choking on the hair and crying from extreme unhappiness, but putting the hairy lollipop back into his mouth for comfort, which was having the opposite effect.  My attempts to hold his arms and stop him only made things worse.  He really started crying and squirming, and the haircut went drastically downhill from there.  What a disaster.  I don’t recall the quality of the haircut, but when we got home, Sandy said, “What happened to you two?”  I guess we were both hairy, sticky, harassed looking messes. 

Prior to that incident, we had the scalding hot coffee incident, which left burn scars on Bobby’s neck and shoulder, which I think are now gone (40 years later!).  We had one of those old-fashioned Corningware electric percolator coffee pots and had left the cord hanging down from the kitchen counter.  Bobby was just learning to walk, and reached for the cord for balance, pulling the coffee pot over on himself in the process.  His screams were enough to give us heart attacks.  I grabbed him and held him under the kitchen sink tap water for a minute, then took off for the emergency room.  We still lived in San Carlos, and Sequoia Hospital was less than 5 minutes away.  I held Bobby in my left arm as I managed to steer and work the VW gear shifts with my right hand.  I left the driver’s side window down for air on his burns, and he very nearly jumped out of my arm and out the window, meanwhile screaming his head off. 

As I ran into the emergency room, his screams got the doctors’ attention – got everybody’s attention - and he was whisked away into an operating room as I ran behind telling them what had happened.  Sandy was only a few minutes behind me in her car and said she could hear Bobby’s screams from the lobby.  It is heartbreaking to know your child is in so much pain.  I don’t recall what they gave him for pain or for the burns, but we were able to take him home, all bandaged up, with instructions for proper care for the next week or so.  Although Bob has heard the story many times, I’m sure he remembers none of it, which is no doubt a good thing.

 I remember when Bobby was about 10 years old, he went to stay with Pam and Norm and his cousins, Matthew and Kimberly, one summer when they were living in the Denver area.  Apparently, he taught them and their friends how to catch and handle lizards and snakes; how to pop wheelies on their bikes, and I don’t know what else, but Norm was surprised and delighted to report that Bobby was not the little mama’s boy that he had been.  By age 6 Bobby was playing team sports – soccer and baseball – but he popped his right knee out swinging the bat at around 11 years old, and was advised not to continue with activities that could make that happen again.  He dropped out of team sports after that, but discovered bike riding and later motor cross, and finally downhill mountain bike racing.  We could see that some of the things that he did and some of the chances he took meant he could just as readily play team sports again, but by then he had lost interest in them.  Possibly, if you do not keep up with your peers when you are young, you fall hopelessly behind, or at least feel like you have.  Several of his buddies played high school football, one a star quarterback and one a top running back, but he was not tempted to join them.

Bobby was a natural on a motor cycle and later on a mountain bike.  I may be a little biased, but when I went to my first motor cross race, when he was about 12, and saw how he handled the bike, compared to the other youngsters, I marveled.  He looked like he was born to ride, like the machine was a natural extension of his body.  He actually travelled and competed in the California circuit with some of his buddies and their older brothers who drove trucks, doing very well in the novice class.  He eventually took a bad fall, suffering a significant concussion.  That was not necessarily the end of motor cross for him, but he transitioned to downhill mountain bike racing (just as dangerous) sometime after that.  At first he used mountain biking for fitness in connection with motor cross, but eventually met and started training with some very accomplished professional racers…and he was keeping up with them in training!  He had his heart set on qualifying to become a professional downhill mountain bike racer (to “turn pro”, as it is called).  Unfortunately, the governing organization kept raising the bar on what it would take to qualify, and at the same time the amount of money the pros were making was falling.  That was the situation he was in when Paulette came into his life.