The Journey to the West (3)

It’s Sunday. Here is the third installment of my “sort of memoir.” This is to be the basic skeleton that could be fleshed out with much more detail, should I ever desire to write an autobiography, which is unlikely. Having been an avid reader of biographies and autobiographies, as well as a collector of life histories, I know that a truly factual and completely thorough autobiography is an impossibility. First of all, no matter how mundane one’s life might have been, it would be far too detailed to be book-length. Second, and more important, the writer would have to be willing to share moments of his or her life that would almost certainly be too embarrassing to admit. Even beyond that, one would almost certainly be privy to the secrets of others, their parents, lovers, and friends, that no honorable person would expose. Thus writing a complete and honest account of one’s life is, in a sense, the ultimate challenge a writer could face, a test of courage far beyond any other literary form. If I live long enough perhaps I will attempt it, but for now I am engaged in merely outlining my Journey to the West.

The end of the fourth grade, and the summer that followed, continued my predetermined journey to the west. I learned that school was more serious than I had previously believed (or even thought about). This was so because one of my closest friends, Donald, was held back and not permitted to move with the rest of the class to the fifth grade. Although we thought it was peculiar that Donald could still not tell time, we didn’t think that was a sufficient reason to fail him. Looking back, of course there were other reasons. Donald was a clown and a bit of a troublemaker. But it was a sobering moment for all of us.
That summer my mother decided to take me with her to Los Angeles to visit my eccentric Uncle Otto. There will be more on Uncle Otto later, but for now, let me just say he was building his own sailboat, a 35 foot cutter, and said he was going to sail it around the world. This was somewhat unusual in that Uncle Otto and his German wife, Ilse, had never sailed. But Otto, who did not like his first name, and insisted he be called Harold, was undaunted. He had a degree in engineering from Stanford and was also a master mechanic and builder. So Harold and Ilse became part of my life and, being the romantic I was, I immediately idolized them. I learned to use Otto’s drafting instruments and spent the summer designing boats of my own, swimming off the dock, and in general having a good time. Otto even arranged for my mother and I to take our first plane ride, in an old biplane above the city of Los Angeles. It was wonderful. I saw my first TV. In fact, it may well have been the first TV. It was in a window and crowds stopped to ogle it even though it produced mostly a kind of patterned static. Otto took us for rides around the city and the harbor. I wondered what he meant when he said, “they’ll be sending that back to us soon,” as we passed some freight trains loaded with scrap metal destined for Japan.
I also learned to read while I was visiting Uncle Otto. I mean I learned for the first time that what you read might be as important as the fact that you could read. I had always been an avid reader. I don’t know how this came about as I do not recall my mother or father ever reading to me. But I learned quickly and exhausted books in our elementary school library so quickly the librarian suspected me of lying about it. I especially liked a series of children’s books on American Indians. Anyway, at the time I was reading a Big Little Book. These were five cents apiece and were about four inches by two or three inches and were mostly just cheap adventure stories. One day Uncle Otto picked up my book and began reading it out loud: “Bang, the slender young cowboy jumped to his feet! Crash! He buckled on his six-guns! Boom! He leaped aboard his trusty horse…” and like that. Even I immediately understood that I was reading crap, and from that moment on I actually began to pick and choose more carefully.
I experienced one of my most traumatic moments, however, when Harold and Ilse took us to lunch one day. We sat at the counter and everyone ordered from a menu that was posted on the wall above the counter. Uncle Otto asked me what I would like. I said I couldn’t read the menu. He became somewhat upset and asked me again. Then he told my mother that she had to take me to an eye doctor as soon as we returned home. It turned out, of course, that I was extremely myopic and had to wear rather thick glasses. This totally turned my life around as I could no longer play the rough games we played or engage in athletic encounters, and so on. And I was teased, “four-eyes” and all that (see Morialekafa, January 1, 2005). I have no idea why neither my parents or my teachers had not discovered this. As for me, I guess I had assumed that everyone saw the world as I did.
Mother and I returned home by way of Seattle where we visited and stayed with Ausman and Annie. I have never understood just who they were or what their relationship was to us. But they were very nice. Ausman was a longshoreman and they lived in a small comfortable home in Ballard where they had a marvelous cherry tree. I spent the greater part of a day in the tree eating cherries. It never occurred to me there might be worms in them. Ah, the innocence of youth. My youthful innocence was beginning to disappear rather quickly. I stayed up late one night with Ausman listening to the radio. It was sometime in June of 1940. The announcer said that Italy had joined the war against England and France, on the side of Germany. Ausman tried to explain this to me, and although I didn’t understand it very well, I knew it was a terrible thing. I was going on eleven. I had to share a bed with my mother. For the only time in my life I wet the bed. Excruciatingly embarrassing. Fortunately my mother had not heard of Freud.