Eighth graders took PE, but we didn’t shower.

Freshmen in high school showered. Fifty years later, that seems no big deal.

But. The summer before my freshman year, I still didn’t have hair on my balls. Determination was my long suit, my key to success. I willed hair to grow on my balls. It didn’t grow. I’d seen the locker room and the shower room at the high school. It was a long walk with no cover.

That summer, if anyone had asked me what worried me–and if I’d been able to articulate–it was the fear of ridicule.

And with no more than three weeks of summer to go, I sprang ’em, I qualified for the walk.

Even now, as I write this, I sigh with a sense of relief. Because my fears were grounded. Two boys with little pink dicks and scrotums, but no hair, were laughed at and ridiculed (maybe not daily, but once would have been too much).

That year, I still resided near the bottom of the pecking order in a tough school. But nobody laughed at my dick. I remain grateful to my family tree. I don’t think will power had anything to do with it.

I didn’t eat for several years.

My mother prepared dishes that were unable to go down my throat, dishes consisting of soggy and over-cooked frozen vegetables, dishes with cream corn from a can–not even worthy of bluegill bait–and shriveled peas, dishes with roast beef so over-cooked that it would not only suck out all the saliva in your mouth like a stale chicharon, but if left in too long, would start to collapse the entire bone structure of your cranium.

My father’s over-used response was the same every time:  “Son, you don’t have to like it, you just have to eat it.”  And if you didn’t eat it, you sat there until bed time, all the while hearing your friends outside screaming and laughing and playing.  (I once responded with, “Would you eat dirt if you didn’t like it?”  That was not a good outcome.  I think he thought I was talking about his wife’s cooking, but I was really just using dirt as an example of something that doesn’t taste good to most humans.  So shoot me for trying to reason.)

My first attempt was cliché, stuffing as much into my mouth as possible, asking to be excused to use the bathroom, and then spitting it out in the toilet.  That attempt failed–not the spitting out part, but the keeping-from-being-detected part.  I got a whippin’ with a leather strap, and that was without proof.  I learned my lesson:  be smarter than the warden, and don’t get caught.

I tried everything: packing the chewed and compacted food way back into my mouth in places I didn’t know even existed; secretly keeping extra napkins with me to discard the food, bundling them up and shoving them down my underwear until she noticed inappropriate stains, hiding them in my pockets until my pants started smelling like oil & vinegar, packing them in my socks until she noticed that the stains weren’t from dirt.

Every night, before I was excused, I was required to go to the kitchen so my mother could interrogate me, followed by a full-body search, ending with her digging her finger throughout my mouth as if I were smuggling in drugs.  I even tried the dog–which actually worked for a short while–until I got lazy and forgot to wipe his mustache.  Dried tamale pie on a wired-hair mutt can be a dead giveaway to a discerning mother whose sole purpose in life was to detect any wrongdoings.

Once in a lifetime, every human is blessed with nothing less than a miracle, an end-of-the-rainbow find, if you will.  Struggling through my  refining process, almost at my wits end, I discovered a board (or shelf) under the table, running the full length.  In carpenter’s terms, a 1″ X 6″.  In my terms, a “magical” shelf, sent from heaven, letting me know that God is good, God is merciful, and the world is just.

From that point forward, it was a slam dunk.  I’d wait for everyone to leave the table, as usual, then I’d grab handfuls of whatever was on my plate, cupped it, turned it upside down and smacked it down on top of the magical board like a wad of clay.  At night, when everyone was asleep, I’d scoop the substance off the shelf and into napkins, walked out into the back alley, and slung them into the neighbor’s yard.  Even though it was always dark, I could still see my frozen vegetable and tamale pie grenade, unfolding in mid air like a parachute, the particles dropping first, then the white napkin following, as if in relief to get rid of its package.  I launched them into a different backyard every night to avoid suspicion.

My mother thought that I was eating better and/or her cooking was getting better.  The Warden thought I was maturing, owning up to my eighteen-year sentence.  But the truth was, I beat the system.

As time went by, I got lazy, and sometimes I neglected to get up in the middle of the night to throw food grenades.  Until finally I just stopped altogether.  What the hell, the shelf was as long as the table, endless.

Years later I did start eating everything on my plate and forgot about the magical shelf and how it saved my life.  Until one day.  My parents decided it was time to refinish the table.  When they took it apart they could not, for the life of them, figure out how these concrete mounds got formed under the table.  A fuzz like mold covered them, further concealing their true identity.  They brainstormed for awhile before arriving at their Aha! moment.

Until your eighteen-year sentence is up, you are never too old for an old fashion whipping.

When he was done, I had a shiny new helmet of perfectly symmetrical, meticulously groomed, "Dry Look" hair.
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On the weekends, at a dance, away from school, --in the real world, we would pull that length of hair out from behind and drape it over our ears. Wild!
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My family had a rule: No comic books.
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As a historical novelist, I love doing research. I can and do lose days at a time finding and reading background information from which facts, or a sense of place or time will emerge to inform my story. I am often asked where I learned about the story in my recently published novel, Even in Darkness, and the simple answer is, from my family.

Apart from serving to inform parts of my novel, the research I did into WWI German Jewish soldiers had another meaning to me. My grandfather, Ernest (aka Opa Ernie) was a gifted storyteller. Half the tales I remember him telling during long Sunday dinners around his dining room table were about the antics of the commanding officers and the other soldiers in his WWI cavalry unit. Never mind that it was the German Army, or that his hard-won Iron Cross First Class medal wasn’t enough to keep him from having to escape with his life from the Nazis two decades later. He fought for his country in the Great War as a Jew and a German just as he’d fought for his saber-fighting Jewish fraternity.

It’s hard to imagine, with the Holocaust looming in the recent past, that any young Jewish man would have joined the German Army to fight in the Great War, but they did in droves. My own eager grandfather left his legal studies at University in Munich to fight. Later, he would practice high-powered law in Berlin for 20 years, escape Germany, and eventually be re-admitted to the German bar in order to help Jews secure restitution from the German government. As much as he loved America and was forever grateful for the opportunity to live here, he never lost his pride in his WWI military service, or his identification as a German. He traveled frequently to Germany, and provided a welcoming home to every German consular official that came to our city.

This duality, which allowed him as a refugee from Nazi Germany and a practicing Jew, to also proudly embrace his heritage as a German, seemed not to bother him at all. It bothered a lot of other people, creating many uncomfortable moments for me as I grew up in the 1950s and 60s , realizing that others, particularly in the Jewish community, did not approve of my family’s continued connection to all things German.

But it was precisely my grandfather’s and his sisters’ capacity to embrace boundary-defying change, to live with resilience and to refrain from painting the evil that inevitably confronts us with a broader brush than necessary, that informed the best of who I have become, and that underlie the themes in the novel that is truly the story of my heart.

In first grade, I started ballet lessons.  Two sisters – Bernice and Therese – taught in the old craftsman-style home they shared.  Two adjoining front rooms were converted into one large studio, with a barre along one wall, carefully polished floors, and an old phonograph in a corner.  Bernice and Therese seemed about a hundred and twelve years old, one a widow one a spinster, always dressed in black.  One was stout, the other a fragile little bird.  Beginners like me got Bernice.  I stuck with it and by fifth grade had graduated to being en pointe, where Therese took over.  She had the mystique of having once been a professional dancer (I was much too young, unworldly, and intimidated to ask where and when.)  Ironically, she was the stout one.

One year we performed Peter and the Wolf.  The sisters had found an adult female dancer friend to be Peter.  I had the great distinction of being cast as the duck.  My mother made the most fantastic costume that I still remember.  The base was all-white leotard and tights.  Mom found some yellow oilskin, and cut out a big beak and attached it to a yellow satin cap that covered my head.  I also got some duck feet of oilskin, that sort of flapped loosely over my ballet slippers, hooked around my ankles with elastic.  (Side note, my mother was a genius seamstress and queen of DIY before DIY was cool!)  But the triumph of the costume was two sets of real feathers, pasted onto some kind of stiff base, that were pinned to my shoulder and elbows.  Et voila!  Wings!!

In the original story, the duck is swallowed alive by the wolf.  This was considered much too violent a plot twist for the elementary schoolers we performed for.  So instead I narrowly escaped being swallowed and dashed dramatically offstage, flapping those marvelous wings.  I can’t remember how this poetic license was reconciled with the true story line.

Like most who took ballet lessons as a child, I still yearn for leotards, tights, and pink toe shoes.  And I love the oboe playing the duck’s theme music when I hear Peter and the Wolf.  (Curse you, french horns and wolf!)