Back to the Garden

The world was a buttoned up place in the late fifties and early sixties. Fathers went to work in uniforms depending on their professions. Plumbers in overalls, cops in uniform with hats with shiny brims, doctors in white lab coats and TV shows about Dads who always seemed to have office jobs, wore hats, carried a brief case and wore suits with thin ties. Born in 1951, I think my generation was one of the first to be educated, informed and influenced by the artificial worlds that made it past the censors of television. The content of those programs met the high social and moral standards of cigarette, cereal and soap companies.

My first introduction to social interactions were cats chasing mice and hunters chasing rabbits. Followed by Indians chasing settlers in covered wagons and two six gun holstered men standing in a dusty dirt covered street with saloon doors swinging as one drew first and the other magically quicker remained standing as we cut to commercial.

To this day whenever I see a Wells Fargo stagecoach sign I think of the masked bandits ready to shoot the driver and steal the strongbox lashed to the roof. As I grew older I learned valuable lessons in teamwork and how the best laid plans can go awry by watching Abbott and Costello, especially when they met other familiar faces like Frankenstein, Dracula and my favorite the Wolfman. I’ll never forget Abbott explaining the baseball lineup to Costello: “Who’s on First,” with “Tomorrow” pitching, “Today” catching, and “I Don’t Give a Darn” at shortstop.

I learned the joys of swimming watching the Bowery Boys jump into the East River and from Spanky and Our Gang how not to bake a cake. Examples of family dynamics and sibling antics were provided first by the Marx Brothers. Whose timeless quote “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read” and then Mo holding Larry’s nose for a good face slapping and Larry turning to Curly who managed to escape his efforts. “nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.”

In addition to belly laughs families gathered round the black and white TVs to watch Bonanza a father and three sons who have a Chinese cook instead of a wife and mother. At school the next day everyone, teachers and students would be discussing what Pa said to Little Joe. I Love Lucy first aired the year I was born so my infant ears must have rung with Desi’s conga drums and the sound of him calling at the top of his lungs “oh Luceeee”. The episode in reruns that has burned an image into my mind is when Lucy and Ethel get jobs at Kramer’s Kandy Kitchen wrapping chocolates on a conveyor belt. I couldn’t stop laughing. With more lessons on what not to do than how to grow into constructive members of a civil society, we were witness to news that featured two major super powers with nuclear capabilities using underdeveloped countries to play out their war games. Meanwhile, mostly unreported domestic issues related to race, religion and personal freedoms for women were creating pockets of change in fledgling subcultures that would become the Age of Aquarius, a time of peace, love, and social change with a single aim of returning to the Garden. A journey that I began in my teens.

Our culture began to morph and change with the impact of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the assassinations of John F. Kennedy in 1963, Martin Luther King in 1968 and Bobby Kennedy the same year and as I grew into a teenager already thrown off kilter by the death of my father in 1966 there was no clear path towards adulthood, toward how to be a man. My father wasn’t there when I turned eighteen to ask about the draft or the war in the Far East’s justification. He fought in World War II a just war. He was a liberator although he rarely talked about it. He and I would make prints from his wartime negatives. He had been assigned to the photo unit of the Army Signal Corps and served in Italy, France and Germany. After the war and for most of my childhood he worked in his brother’s factory as a foremen before returning to night school to get his teaching certification and then taught Physics and General Science. Our kitchen table was his lab and I was both his assistant and test case. My father used Mr. Wizard’s teaching method. It was hands on, curious and practical. My father practiced with me as his subject. He didn’t lecture about science he did science in front of you. If my eyes were wide and mouth either forming the word oohh, or wow he would use that experiment in his next class. If there was just a puzzled look or no reaction at all he would go back to the drawing board.

After he died I was raised by an enlightened older sister, a mother who was an MSW and a grandmother who was as close to a living saint as one could be. I was drawn to both the sciences, curiosity turned to wonder at my kitchen table and the study of human beings and their struggle to free themselves from their childhood demons as well as those lessons in bigotry they had been spoon fed growing up. While my peers were fists raised marching against the war, I saw my focus on the sciences that helped individuals and groups learn to interact in ways that served all. I immersed myself in the new psychologies growing from institutes on the West Coast like Esalen and Gestalt Therapy.

Maybe it was being the stranger in a strange land in Newburgh, watching crosses burn in the hills above that once-bustling river town, our own special breed of redneck making their position clear. Or maybe it was something stamped in me from the beginning. My mother always said that I had a therapeutic personality, whatever that meant. Either way, I carried both, whatever I was born with and whatever those years had taught me to my father’s funeral when I was a few months away from fourteen and he was just a few months shy of forty-four. A year later when the loss of my father was still a raw wound we moved from New Windsor to White Plains. It was culturally a decade ahead of the town I grew up in. It was also closer to Manhattan and the Village, the heartbeat of folk and rock music in the 60s.

In the chaos of my life and the growing anxiety in the country over the war in Vietnam, civil rights at home and the blur of fact or fiction coming from TV I turned inward to soothe my soul reading Sidhartha, Hesse’s tale of a man on a spiritual journey and Strangers in a Strange land a fantasy as much as a science fiction book about the magical and god like characteristics of a man who was born on Mars and the only survivor of the first expedition from Earth. He gained his super powers from his adoptive Martian parents. I practiced tai chi, began to use the word Grok Robert Heinlein’s word for the sudden and complete understanding of the meaning of the subject and began to meditate.

White Plains in the mid-sixties was a bedroom of New York. Mornings saw caravans of cars making their way to the Harlem line of the Penn-Central railroad. My friends and I would take the old troop trains to Grand Central and then go underground to the Village stepping off the subway at Astor Place and then first wandering haphazardly around until we became familiar with the tiny streets, alleys and mews.

At sixteen, in White Plains’ brand new high school, it must have been my rantings about the burning cross on the hill, my ragged long hair and musketeer mustache that caught the attention of my social studies teacher. He recommended that I represent the high school at a two week camp in the summer of 1967. The camp, run by the National Conference of Christians and Jews brought kids of different cultures together to bridge the gap between religions and races. The first day at camp the kids and counselors gathered at the base of a marble staircase in a building called Shadowland at Monmouth College. I sat with Bobby Tuck; the other kid selected from our high school. First to speak was the director of the program, Steve Birnbaum, a tall thin balding man stood at the podium. He began by introducing himself and talked about the opportunity each of us had over the two weeks. It was simple premise. At home we lived in pockets of people who came from the same background as we did. Over the next few weeks we would have the opportunity to meet people from Harlem, Westchester, Manhattan, the boroughs and Long Island. Kids whose parents or grandparents might speak a different language. Kids who drove expensive cars, and those that took buses and subways to get to school. This was an opportunity that they may never have again if they had stayed in the familiar surroundings of home. At times you might feel uncomfortable, which made perfect sense, since this was all new but eventually you might lose some of the preconceptions that had been formed by hearsay and gain some of the clarity about the differences and similarities of those from different backgrounds, races and religions. He explained the concepts of encounter sharing, visualization and other techniques to foster blame free communication and break through the barriers that segregation and fear of the unknown, had helped to form.

Next to speak was a short squat powerfully built black man whose name was Frank White but he had taken the name Clorox. He spoke with passion about the dangers of growing up in Harlem, eating dinner with two forks one raised to stab one of his brothers in the hand if he tried to take food off of his plate and the other to shovel what ever was on it. Clorox described the layers of linoleum in his kitchen floor and the fact that he could see into the downstairs apartment through the holes in the floorboards beneath. He stopped for a moment and slowly looked into the eyes of each of the ninety high school kids seated on the floor. There wasn’t a sound in the cavernous marble hallway. He started again and spoke softly, so softly we had to crane our necks forward to hear him. He spoke about the older brother he admired. Without a father in the house his brother was the closest thing to a father he had ever known. One day he followed him and watched during an argument at a pickup basketball game. He didn’t see the knife only the wound in his brother’s chest. He was dead by the time the ambulance finally arrived. He told us that he was the first member of his family to be in college. He was studying law so that he could fight for justice and support his mother and his younger brothers and sisters. By the time he finished kids were crying and other kids who had been strangers a moment before were hold them in their arms. I wasn’t sure if the tears flowing down my own cheeks were for the man who didn’t know his father and whose brother died needlessly or for myself, fatherless and set adrift in a world that was changing.

A few years later I would be following Clorox telling my story of what it was like growing up in a town where I learned to fight with a brick or a stick to even the odds against the gaggle of kids that believed that Jews and somehow me in particular had killed Jesus Christ. If that wasn’t tough enough in elementary school the son of the head of the local Klan told me that Jews were just N…gers turned inside out.

But I am getting ahead of myself. At the summer camp I had a lot to learn about the people and cultures of groups I had never met before. I entered this community as a participant, went back my Junior year as a counselor in training, then as a counselor in my senior year of high school and during the summer break of my first year at NYU. I became a facilitator of groups that were digging deeper into our hidden fears as people of a particular background and deeper into our basic fears as humans which to our surprise we all held in common. Each two week session had its own unique rhythm but all began with distance, exploded with catharsis somewhere in the middle and ended with bonds and new perspectives that have lasted a lifetime. I thought I had found my calling. The science of the mind, the science of healing used as a fulcrum for moving and shaping our culture one group of disparate teenagers at a time. Seeding the next generation with folks who were forged in the heat of the encounter sharing sessions that we led. That Summer program would have an impact on the rest of my life for more than one reason.

When I turned eighteen in the summer of 1969, John Wayne wasn’t going to make it as my role model. That fall entering NYU I learned that college campuses were where “Be Ins” took place, draft cards and bras were being burned and we found out later that the DOD was doing experiments using LSD.

That first semester at NYU in Greenwich Village in September of 1969 made me think of the comedian George Carlin’s routine about “Stuff.” He traveled to Hawaii on vacation. He packed some of his stuff into a suitcase and left the rest of his stuff at home. When he got there he put some of his stuff away in the hotel room and packed some in a smaller bag for a trip to one of the other islands.

Fractured and fragmented are words that come to mind when I think about my emotional and mental state that Fall at NYU. I had left parts of me in Newburgh, and White Plains. Parts of me that I would never be able to retrieve. They say you can’t go home again but it isn’t home that has changed it is you. What was left of me was living in a dorm in NYC. In just 36 months I had gone from being part of a thriving, busy family of five, to a latch key teenager living in a stark single parent household with an older sister and mentor away at college while sharing a room with my younger brother. Then quite suddenly off to school and on my own. The transition from a collegiate kid in button down shirts living in the boondocks, to a tie dye, Frye boot wearing long haired kid amongst his fellow misfits in White Plains and then to a freshman living in the Village the beat/folk/anti-war center of the universe was as confusing as the times we were living through. None of my friends had followed me to NYU instead they were scattered across the country. Technology hadn’t caught up yet so it was snail mail, home phones or pay phones. The first time you might see high school friends was when you were back home for Thanksgiving at the Annual Turkey Bowl.

The first year of school was chaotic at best. Our campus was the Village. My roommates Jesse from Montana and Billy from the North Shore of Long Island and I walked each tiny, cobbled street surrounding Washington Sq. Park. We explored the stores, restaurants, and coffee houses that my high school friends and I had walked past but never entered on our way to the Bitter End, and Café Wha?

We three pot smokers made student films, ate cold pizza for breakfast, drank dark beer and ate bratwurst for lunch at Zum Zum’s on University Place. We went to Chinatown for dinner and often ended the night at Bradley’s to listen to jazz and drink cappuccino with a snifter of Sambuca. In between we would attend classes filled with a few hundred other freshmen. We would stay up to the wee hours of the night discussing the “Great Books in Sociology” we had been assigned, and the great books we had found on our own. Books by Fritz Perls, Gestalt Therapy and Lao Tzu’s, The Tao Te Ching. During my second semester I had fallen in love with my English professor, British she let me call her Pommy when we weren’t in class. I would follow her like a puppy onto the uptown subway to continue our discussion about the short stories and poems I had shared with her. She told me that my work was promising as we stood packed together in the crowded car. As we were jiggled and jostled together to the rhythm of the subway it took all my will power not to try to kiss her. If there had been a major in unrequited love I would have been at the very top of my class.

The year ended and I had managed to get passing grades so as not to lose my student 2S deferment. In addition to being a counselor I had been offered a summer job with the NCCJ. The office was on 57th street between Fifth and Sixth. I got to know Clorox and the other counselors as peers. I was still a junior peer but now was really part of the crew, planning for the two week program instead of just showing up and jumping in.

1970 was the summer when Ann a student from Scarsdale just one town over from White Plains attended the two week summer session. I led groups where we explored the most difficult times in our lives and the ways we had survived them. She talked about her childhood. When her father was a diplomat, the family had moved to abroad where they lived like royalty. When the family returned to the states she and her sisters had suffered the neglect of her mother who had become an alcoholic. The story ending with her mother’s death. One by one each member of the group joined in the group hug that surrounded and enveloped her.

Each storyteller – black or white, Asian from Lower Manhattan, Hispanic from East Harlem or Jewish from Hauppauge – told human stories. Stories of divorce, being bullied, and deaths of loved ones. We shared about how we felt when the story was being told and after when we held it up to the light of our life experience. The more we listened the more we understood that these stories were universal: although we looked and sounded so different, we teenagers living mid-century had more in common than not. As we cried together, as we laughed at our own ignorance and surprise at our commonalities, we grew closer. Each summer we became a strange new multicolored, multi religious multi background group. A new us instead of the us-and-them we had begun the session with.

I dropped out of NYU the following Fall semester. President Nixon had instituted a lottery system for the Army draft and my birthday was selected so far down the list that there was no way that I was going to be selected and end up marching through the jungles of Vietnam. Friends from camp and I were going to drive cross country. I told myself I was just taking the year off. The trip West never materialized and I moved into an urban commune of sorts that housed a guerrilla theater group led by Peter E. one of the counselors from camp. The fall of 1971 I went back to White Plains to a local bar and Ann the girl from Scarsdale walked in and we were both surprised to see each other in the real world. She introduced me to her friend Norma, the woman who would become my wife five years later.

Somewhere in this mish mash of a culture, advancements in technology, scenes of children burning in SE Asia, mass demonstrations, America’s first loss in war, exposure of our president as a crook, the truth about government complicity with big business poisoning our waters, rewritten history with revelations about the drift of radioactive matter west from the Nevada test grounds to the population in the bay area we the children born in the post war fifties and raised in the 60’s dreamed of a society that mirrored the garden before our first bite of the apple.

I was one of the lucky ones. Instead of Eden, the garden I lived in for five decades was in the arms of the woman whose warm embrace, graceful carriage and insistence that she would never suffer fools led me on a journey through career and fatherhood that I had never imagined. Now that I am alone again I have begun a new journey, no longer at my side she travels with me in my heart as I seek the path to the doorway that will lead me back to a garden of my own design.