Tales from the Oak Hammock: A Memoir

By David Charles Gossman

Other than black and white TV, the baby boomer boys growing up in the little oak hammock east of South Floridas everglades dont have much to entertain them. Personal computers and the Internet are still decades away. Organized youth sports are all but non-existent in their environs. Rock and roll is king but exists only on an AM radio station and a stack of black vinyl disks.
So how does a brotherhood of youngsters come of age while manufacturing adventure from an otherwise uneventful existence in the early 60s? How do they spend their summers when girls are still mysterious, undiscovered creatures and the bicycle is the only mode of transportation? And how do they face lifes unanswered questions while anticipating their once-in-a-lifetime trip to the New York Worlds Fair?
Tales from the Oak Hammock chronicles the amusing answers to these questions as it recounts the misadventuresand misdemeanorsof boys who sometimes catch a glimpse of lifes meaningbut more often merely observe its puzzling complexities. They are the first generation raised by TV so they surely dont have all the answersbut this one thing they know: Life isnt always fair, but its almost always in black and white!

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 23, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469757117

David Charles Gossman

Dr. Gossman spent his teen years during the 1960s in suburban Miami, Florida. Having worked for 30 years in the field of engineering and as a college professor, his fondest memories still return him to the four-acre wood of his boyhood—and the summertime adventures he will never forget.

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Tales from the

Oak Hammock

A Memoir

D. Charles Gossman

Writer’s Showcase

San Jose New York Lincoln Shanghai

Tales from the Oak Hammock

A Memoir

All Rights Reserved © 2001 by David Charles Gossman

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the

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ISBN: 978-1-4697-5711-7 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Epilogue

About the Author

To Mom and Dad who, like the oaks, demonstrated strength in their toil against life’s squalls—and wisdom in the gentle wind that yet murmurs in my reminiscence.

Preface

As native Floridians know, a hardwood hammock is simply a stand of trees that has grown on higher ground. This hammock of stately old oaks was really no different than many others. It had taken shape over 150 years as these trees, above all others, learned to conquer the rigors of life on the edge of South Florida’s everglades

Through the decades, the little oak hammock endured floods, fires, and wars between Indians and settlers. Each tree had been individually challenged, had endured, and ultimately had been elected to its place among a hundred oaks that formed a miniature rain forest. Its immense canopy, blanketing a 4-acre county block, permitted only a rare ray of sunlight through its thick foliage to the earth below. Like a rain forest, too, it was teeming with life. In fact, the oak hammock seemed to protect the lives of its inhabitants while sheltering them as they grew in stature and knowledge. And, although its branches fashioned a perimeter that limited the range of its residents, it encouraged in them a limitless imagination that perceived no boundaries.

Some say that simple tales about ordinary people could never achieve the stuff of legend. Others believe that if stories are instilled with some enduring truth—and are retold often enough—they may well approach that lofty status. But these stories are certainly not the tales of legend. Nor would the boys who learned to conquer life’s rigors in the hammock consider themselves family legends. No, they were mischief-makers—never mean spirited or malicious—but rascals just the same.

As for me, I’m not sure how family legends are born but I suspect that the very first vapors coalesce when someone feels the compelling need to commit memory to the written word. What follows here is a first step. These are the tales, the characters I remember. They are embellished a tad and the sequences rearranged a bit but they are otherwise pretty much as I recall them. I surely cannot foretell that they will ever endure through the ages or that they might somehow possess unique truths—that’s for you to decide. I’m sure the oaks know—but they’re not talking.

D. Charles Gossman December 1998

Acknowledgments

Iam especially indebted to the family members who encouraged me to record some of the many stories my brothers and I have shared at family gatherings over the years. I also owe a deep debt of gratitude to my wife, Eve, for her proofreading and constructive criticism during the many edits of this briefest of efforts.

Some are writers, some are story tellers, and a very few are artists who splash their canvas with words. I cannot capture the visual image of a night train racing through the countryside nor the spectacle of a circus coming to town like Thomas Wolfe could. I lack Faulkner’s gift for placing us into a horse-drawn wagon to experience its deliberate pace over a rutted road. I will never be able to convey the hopelessness of an Erskine Caldwell family nor the restlessness of Jack Kerouac’s spirit. It is beyond my capabilities to offer the taught human drama of fictional men caught in factual turmoil as did Hemmingway; or of factual men brought into fictional focus as could Doctorow.

I don’t possess the skill of a Sinclair who changed us by describing the jungle in society or a Conrad by describing a society in the jungle. I can’t manufacture an earthly future as other-worldly as that envisioned by Huxley nor could I develop an earthly stranger as other-worldly as Heinlein’s Valentine. I can neither spin a yarn like Jean Shepard nor welcome you to my childhood as Homer Hickam has. But to all these, especially Jean and Homer, I am indebted. Their work has both inspired and humbled me and, in some small way, has revealed the face of true genius for the enjoyment of all.

Introduction

Until I was married with children, Mom and Dad never knew the entire truth about many of the childhood yarns I’ve chronicled in this memoir. The displays of bewilderment and dismay were more than a little comical when details finally slipped out as my brothers and I reminisced at family gatherings. On occasion Mom would cry out in denial How could that have happened? I was never more than a block away the whole time! Remarkably, it soon became apparent that she felt hurt—somehow diminished as a mature and responsible parent— upon learning of escapades that had happened 10 or 20 years earlier. She knew we were typical American kids engaged in playful antics but had no idea we were often a mere step away from disaster. And this leads me to a universal truth I discovered about parents—be they parents of pre-teens or middle-aged adults. The fact is that they forever harbor a searing question in their minds: Have we failed our children or have they failed us? Time and again I look back at what Mom and Dad faced in the mid-sixties when I was in my teens and stand amazed that they retained any semblance of sanity as they dealt with my perceived failures. And the fact that they could worry all those years later by fretting Where did we go wrong as a parents? just proves the point.

Surely there are other collective truths we can glean from hundreds of generations of parents with child-rearing experience. Why, for instance, is society constantly focused on sex and violence when nearly every person eventually matures and gets on with a productive adult life? It is precisely because we have thousands of children who turn 12 or 13 every day of the year. It’s a new generation discovering life for the first time and it’s all going on simultaneously in a culture with the rest of us so-called mature parents who discovered all those things the first time 10, 25, or even 50 years ago. We all coexist in a civilization that is perpetually reborn and coming of age each day, every day, and forever. And it has been thus since the earliest hunter-gatherer hominid family fearfully scurried from a humid rain forest into an open savannah thousands of years ago. A hominid family, by the way, whose parental figures no doubt failed a few times along the way too!

On the contrary, I used to be a solid, mature parent. That is, until I had kids. It’s amazing how humbling it can be. Before children, I was always quick to offer unsolicited advice on child-rearing strategies to friends who were constantly facing challenges with their offspring. Especially regarding how to handle their unruly teenagers. A lot of it was truly good advice. The recommendations actually worked on my brothers and me—but that was at a time as different from today’s as the 1960s was from the Great Depression. After having children of my own, however, I found my expertise had deteriorated from PhD to DumB. With years of soul-searching and self-analysis, I also discovered a simple yet profound truth about children: first they’re born—then they break your heart. Yes—they fail you. Or is it that you failed them?

OK, OK, it’s cynical—I know. But it’s always true—even with wonderful kids. And at the core of the problem is—you guessed it—a well-meaning, wonderful parent. I believe we are all failures as parents somewhere along life’s saga. Show me a parent who boasts of having a perfect child and I’ll show you a mom or dad begging for a major tumble in the parent-child relationship. For every bumper sticker that announces My child is on the honor roll at Washington Middle School, there is an equal and opposite sticker that reads My kid just hacked into the school’s computer and changed your kid’s grades! In other words, somewhere along the way your kid will rebel, turn his or her back on you, and seek a different path. And that’s when your kid will break your heart! Why? Because whoever failed—you or your kid—both parties suffer the consequences.

I believe sometimes this rebellion is the result of the parents’ shortcomings. To explain, consider a father who was a poor athlete; It is no surprise that this dad enjoys living vicariously through a son who has shown a meager talent in the sports arena. Like a trained pet, the child can be coerced into performing for others as the father gloats from the stands of a baseball or soccer game. To make matters worse, a child is always expected to live by the old adage of standing on the shoulders of giants. If Mom was good at math, she’ll expect her daughter to start with the fundamental gift of numbers and then parlay it well beyond— perhaps into some yet-undiscovered form of multivariate differential calculus that could only be understood by Roswellian aliens.

So, let me get this straight: kids are expected to compensate for their parent’s shortcoming while expanding on their collective strengths? Darwin himself would have poked a few holes in that theory of evolution. If it were entirely true, our kids would all have an IQ three times the size of Sir Issac Newton’s while running around twice as fast as third century Olympians from ancient Greece. No, we are not pigeons bred for our homing ability nor are our kids the culmination of generations of faster and smarter people. Somewhere, in every family tree, there were a few dumb, slow guys. This dichotomy makes for a decidedly no-win situation, and it ultimately plants the seeds of rebellion. Like most kids, I was not immune to this rebellion as I often failed to discern the wisdom of my parents. I’m sure I broke their hearts a couple of times along the way, too, but isn’t that a right of passage?

My brothers and I came of age like millions of other kids in the so-called baby boom generation born after W.W.II. By the time most boomers had entered the world, the art of parenting had finally been perfected. In fact, it had been elevated to perhaps its most highly evolved form in the history