As alluded to elsewhere, the novelty of parenting was
definitely over by the time Amy was coming along, and to this day she likes to
point out that she missed out on some things.
I mentioned dropping out of Indian Princesses. I also should mention that I coached some of
Bobby and Michelle’s soccer and baseball teams, but was “over it” by the time
it was Amy’s turn to play sports. For
one thing, I had discovered running by then, which takes a lot of time and
energy not already being devoted to a career.
Amy also points out that we never took her to the zoo, as we did her
brother and sister. I used to tell her
that the real sign of a disadvantaged childhood was not seeing ET or Star
Wars. We had seen both of those at the
drive-in theater, and she was so young she fell asleep in her porta-crib in the
back seat while Michelle and Bobby enjoyed the movies. Of course, she saw them at one time or other
later in life, and Star Wars has had a number of sequels and prequels that she
has probably seen, and I have not…no longer a big deal. Sandy said Amy never needed braces, so I
don’t think that counts as parenting on autopilot, as she may call it.
Amy has no doubt heard me talk about how the novelty of
parenting a new born wore off before she came along. With Michelle, when she would cry in the
middle of the night, I would let Sandy stay in bed. I would go to Michelle, change her diaper,
and then bring her to Sandy to nurse. I
think I even put her back to bed, unless Sandy had to get up anyway. With Bobby, he would be so hungry that there
was no waiting for me to change his diaper.
I would go get him and bring back to Sandy as fast as possible in order
to stop his loud, plaintive squalling for food.
All would grow quiet as he nursed, during which time I would go back to
sleep. Sandy would then change him and put
him back to bed. With Amy, I would just
stay in bed and let Sandy take care of her.
I’m sure that didn’t affect Amy in the least, but hearing about it adds
weight to her accusation about getting short changed growing up.
One of Amy’s closest friends during the Indian Princess
years was a girl from a Jewish family, Diana Jaynes, who later invited us to
her Bat Mitzvah when she turned 12 years old.
I don’t imagine many gentiles ever get to experience a Bar (boy) or Bat
(girl) Mitzvah, so I felt quite privileged, and it was very interesting and
entertaining. At least that is an
experience that neither of Amy’s siblings ever had! An experience that she would like to forget
had to do with her first and only snow ski trip. She went on the church bus with a couple of
dozen other kids and apparently left her warm clothes inside the bus, which was
then locked. She stood around freezing
for several hours before she was able to get back into the bus, and never tried
snow skiing or any other winter sports again.
Until Michelle was 12 or so, the girls shared the same
bedroom, and Amy just drove Michelle crazy.
In 1983 we did the remodel on the house that added a 4th
bedroom, but I think it was before that that we had to move Bobby downstairs
into a “bonus room” and split the girls up before they killed each other. Michelle would have been 13 in 1983 (14 at
the end of 1983), so I think we split them up before the addition. They are about 4 ½ years apart, and I tried
to reason with Michelle to be more tolerant and patient with Amy…to overlook
things and not stoop to the level of someone so much younger. Be bigger than that. But it was just not in her to let any injustice
or unfairness go. We used to call
Michelle the princess of fairness. Now I
know that all girls go through something similar in their pre-teens and early
teens. Michelle might admit that she is
now the queen of fairness, with the innate ability to recognize when something
is not fair and to let us all know about it.
Amy has a very pretty smile, but I remember in her early
teens how she played soccer and participated in cheer leading with hardly any
facial expression at all. She played
select soccer, though not at a level that required a lot of travel and parent
involvement. She generally played center
midfielder, where the all-around best athlete on the team often plays. The position calls for speed, power, solid
passing, sharp shots on goal, defensive instincts, offensive instincts,
intelligence, leadership, etc, all rolled into one player. The midfielder probably does the most
running, covers the most ground and so needs to be in great physical shape. Amy did it all, but we noticed that she nearly
always had a blank expression on her face: she didn’t look like she was having
fun, but she didn’t look strained or tired, wasn’t grimacing, wasn’t red in the
face. If anything, maybe she looked like
she was concentrating. We didn’t think
much about it until we saw her as a cheer leader, where all the girls were
smiling, except her. She had all the
choreography and yells down, but performed with the facial expression of
someone reading a book.
When Amy graduated from Cal Poly, she moved home after a
few months of trying to live and make a living in the San Louis Obispo
area. She then met a guy ten years older
than her (Jimmy Hamilton), whom Bobby had known and did not recommend. But Bobby is so tactful that he would only
provide some anecdotes as to the kinds of things this guy had done, and
therefore the kind of person he was.
Along with being a hopeless romantic, I want to believe that people can
change; that what someone has done in the past is not necessarily indicative of
the person he is today. Wrong
again! Amy had always said that she
wanted to marry a tall guy, and along comes 5’6” Hamilton, complete with the
classic “small man complex.” But he put
the “full court press” on and was very persuasive. Amy could not say ‘no’ to what she thought
was love. Ever the hopeless romantic, I
wanted love and romance for Amy and did not give her any cautionary counsel.
I don’t beat myself up as much here; none of us could see
this one coming, except Bobby. But
whether we want to call it naiveté, cluelessness, abdication, or what, once my
kids were in their early to mid twenties, I felt I had no basis for
understanding life better than they did, and certainly no basis for thinking
that I knew better than they did as to what they should want out of life and
how to get it. In fact, in rationalizing
Bobby’s situation prior to meeting Paulette, I declared at the time that I was
willing to accept the idea that there is more than one valid approach to life;
that the decisions and directions he was taking may be just as valid as the
ones I took: Who was I to say? I can
hear my life’s theme in my mind as I write: “Whatever.” Upon further reflection, I received no real
parenting from Mom after age 17 when I joined the Army. I hadn’t received any useful parenting from
Dad since I was about 15. So I had no
personal experience in how to be a parent to a young adult. That’s not an excuse, just an observation.
It is said that the measure of how well you did as a
parent is really seen in how your grandchildren turn out. What that says to me is that it is how your
children are doing as parents that matters most. If the grandkids are doing well, then your
kids are good parents, and that is the most important thing. And based on that, Sandy and I did pretty
well…giving most of the credit to Sandy.
My best contribution to the kids was to love their mother and help her
provide a secure, loving home to grow up in.
A growing number of their classmates and friends were experiencing the
“broken home” syndrome. Our kids were
able to look at us and feel confident it wasn’t going to happen to them. All three of our children’s eventual spouses
said that they were attracted to the quality of the family home life that our
kids came from. Some of that may have
just been talk, but I think some of it was real.
I did receive periodic letters from Mom while in
Germany. In terms of advice, I mainly
remember, “Don’t come home with a tattoo, and don’t come home with a German
bride!” That was good advice, but I
wasn’t inclined to do either, anyway. It
wasn’t until I started reading historical novels surrounding World War II that
I realized how common it was for GIs to bring home young brides they had
“fallen in love with” overseas. There
were a few German girls that I drank with, but I never saw them as relatable in
any way. Most of them had hairy legs and
underarms, and very few were cute until after a few strong German beers. It seemed they hung around the GI bars for
free drinks and cigarettes; they weren’t prostitutes, but they also weren’t
looking for husbands. If they were,
maybe I was too young to be a candidate.
It is true that the only young men who had any money in Germany in the
early ‘60s were American GIs. At the
time the German Mark was equivalent to a quarter, which even us broke GIs had
plenty of. It was like pocket change.
Prior to conversion to the Euro in 1999, the German Mark was worth close
to $2, a nearly 8-fold increase!
If I may descend for a moment into the vulgarity of young
GIs, we were joking negatively one time about the hairy legged German girls,
and one of the black guys piped up to the contrary with, “I gets a raggedy nut
behind that shit!” I think he meant he
liked it. I remember when another black
guy, having been spotted on two or three occasions with the same girl, was
accused of having fallen in love. He
announced, “I don’t falls in love; I gits in love.” As mentioned, I had very little exposure to
black people growing up on Long Island, so what they said and how they said it
struck me and stuck with me as somewhat unique and revelatory. I also remember, “Do sumthin’ if it’s
wrong!” The expression that was in vogue
at the time was, “Do something, even
if it is wrong,” meaning that it is better to take action, even if it turns out
to have been the wrong thing to do, rather than to do nothing. The way the young black guys were saying it
meant that you should do something because
it is wrong: “Do sumthin’ if it’s wrong!”
The comical part (to me) was that they didn’t seem to realize that they
were expressing a different and wrong sentiment.
The biggest celebration in the town of Mainz, where I was
stationed, was something called Fasching.
It was like Oktoberfest, but wilder, and it took up most of the month of
February. There were parades every
weekend and there was live music seemingly everywhere, every night. I literally saw youngsters under the age of
10 and grandmas over 80 staggering down the streets waving partially-consumed
bottles of wine, singing and greeting friends and strangers alike. Anyone who felt like it could join a parade
and wave at the people watching along the curbs. To warm up, we would converge on a beer hall
where lively music attracted us and - as is (or was) the custom - be invited to
squeeze in and join a table of partying Germans. It was great fun. We would all link arms while gripping our
beer mugs, sway from side to side and sing loudly and poorly along with the
band. Many times, as instigated by our
new friends at the table, one or more of us would be invited by the band to
come up on the stage. Most of the
musicians wore leather shorts called lederhosen, even in the cold; we would
roll our pant legs up to fit in. We
taught them some English and they taught us some German.
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