Treasure Hunting: A Journey Toward Intimacy-An Autobiography

By Howard S. Fuller

This is a story of a boy growing up in a Boston suburb near where his ancestors had settled three centuries before. He attends elite private schools and Union Theological Seminary, training to be a Protestant pastor. He marries Annette and they raise four children in suburban Rochester and the inner-city neighborhoods of Buffalo, New York. They help Saul Alinsky create a mass-based community organization to empower the dispossessed. Annette teaches social work at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

Always moving West, they settle in Berkeley, California. They lose their political innocence during the Vietnam War, join a commune and are blind-sided by the power of cults. The family backpacks every summer in the Sierra Nevada. Annette teaches in the University of California School of Public Health. Howard, trained now as a sociologist of religion, advises groups planning to begin new churches in West Coast suburbs.

Through meditation, creative use of their imagination, and workshops at Esalen, they explore aspects of themselves that had been cut off by their East Coast upbringing. They move to Benicia, California, where Annette blocks the railroad tracks over which munitions trains pass; Howard has a compelling dream of descent into the Void. After his ten-year pastorate, they retire to Claremont, California, where Annette dies in 1997.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 4, 2007
• ISBN: 9781467066891

Howard S. Fuller

Howard Fuller, an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ (UCC),  was born near Boston and received his theological and pastoral training at Union Theological Seminary, N.Y. C. After ten years as pastor in upstate New York  and community organizer in the inner city of Buffalo, he was asked to be a Western representative of the national staff of the UCC.  He and his family moved to Berkeley, California where he studied the religion of Protestants and Roman Catholics  in  the highly secular communities of  the 1960s and 70s.  He received his Ph.D. in the Sociology of Religion from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1973.  Soon after he  was gifted with  a transforming spiritual experience that Christ loved him unconditionally.  He studied the trans- personal psychology Psychosynthesis for five years and taught its theory and practice to hundreds of Roman Catholic pastors.   He was called to be pastor of the Benicia Community Congregational, California, from late 1978 until early 1988. He is  also the author of  the autobiographical _Treasure Hunting-A Journey towards Intimacy_ (Authorhouse).  He was married to Annette for 46 years.  They were parents of four children and four grandchildren.  She died in 1997.  He is now married to Polly P. Gates.  

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgments

Part I

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

PART II

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

APPENDIX A

APPENDIX B

APPENDIX C

NOTES

About the Author

To Annette

And for our children and grandchildren

Acknowledgments

My deepest appreciation to those who have read all or some of the manuscript: Stan R. Moore, John Denham, my children and brothers; Sid Hall, my copy editor and his intern Christy Clothier; Walt Davis, proofreader of the galleys; writing teachers Sheryl Fontaine, Bev Sloan, and Millie Tengbom; The Write Group of Pilgrim Place; and Author House facilitator, Robert Walters.

A special thank you to Polly Gates, who painted the picture on the book cover.

Part I

THE EAST

CHAPTER 1

1928–1941, birth–13 years of age

My birth in Boston and life in Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts

At 3:30 p.m. EST on September 21, 1928, my 28-year-old mother gave a final push and I slipped into the hands of her obstetrician, a Dr. Irving, in a brightly lit delivery room of Boston Lying-In Hospital. I weighed 8 pounds, 14 ounces, and measured 22 inches long.

In those days Wellesley Hills matrons stayed in hospital beds for several weeks after giving birth. It must have driven my mother wild. Dozens of aunts and female cousins and Wellesley neighbors came to visit, leaving behind sweaters and booties and baby bands. When the obstetrician agreed, my father brought me and my mother home. My mother handed me to a nurse engaged to take care of me for a few weeks, and weakly mounted the front steps.

My mother loved the home at 9 Hundreds Circle which she and an architect had created. Indeed, said my mother, the architect said he should have signed my name to the drawings. They represented mostly my ideas. The three-quarter acre wooded lot had been carved out of land owned by Louisville Niles. The acreage and house cost $20,000. To buy it my parents borrowed some money from Will Fuller, my father’s father. Building supplies were bought at wholesale cost from the Fuller Lumber Company where my dad was treasurer.

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My home until I was 20 years old

As the days grew shorter and colder I was carried outside by my mother to look upon a mossy lawn edged with oaks and maples. My father raked up the fallen leaves and carted them off to a compost heap in the woods. The next spring daffodils and violets bloomed, planted around an outcropping of granite; at the side of the house a dogwood tree sparkled with white blossoms. Robins, blue jays and chickadees sang their mating calls. All this, of course, I imagine from small photographs mounted in a scrapbook.

My mother was quite beautiful, as photographed by B. Bachrach in soft airbrushed portraits, dressed in modest black cocktail dress. She was smart as a whip, and had graduated from Boston Girls’ Latin School, and Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts in 1922, where she majored in social work. She boasted that she spent most weekends at house parties in neighboring colleges, particularly Wesleyan. She was close to Curtis Johnson, who wanted to marry her in the worst way. My mother also dated my father’s brother George, who was her age, and who loved to dance. However, it was my father she accepted when he proposed in 1921, after he returned from the Great War. My father and my mother’s three brothers used to meet with their Sunday School teacher in the attic in some kind of a club. In his family my father was the oldest; my mother was second to youngest and the only surviving daughter, much loved by her father, tolerated by her mother. They married March 4, 1922.

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Ruth Fuller, my mother, in her twenties.

Dad’s mother had wanted him to marry someone else. Even though they lived in the city of Brighton, Massachusetts, it was like living in a village, everyone watching, everyone making suggestions, everyone having expectations. Why did you marry my father? I asked once, sensing her endless frustrations. I don’t know, she replied. I couldn’t marry George. He wasn’t to be trusted. But I loved to go dancing with him.

I remember these early years with several emotions. Some weekends my parents gave dinner parties. My mother, with a maid’s help, arranged fine linens, crystal and silver. Candles were lit. Neighbors and friends arrived, drank cocktails, dined on my mother’s hearty cooking. Afterwards there was dancing and singing around the piano. I probably watched for a short while from the upstairs landing before the maid tucked me into bed.

But after a while the parties stopped.

My mother was a worrier and a perfectionist and something drained her energy and gave her sleepless nights. She couldn’t seem to relax. She read and clipped magazine articles about child raising, and landscaping, and spot removal, and how to manage the help. Her chaise lounge was covered with advice columns. In the mid 1920s, Boston pediatricians were influenced by psychological behaviorists like JB Watson, who combined rigorous views on childcare with a dire estimation of the dangers of maternal affection . . . Mother love is a dangerous instrument, An instrument which may afflict a never healing wound . . . which may make infancy unhappy, adolescence a nightmare, an instrument which may wreck your adult son or daughter’s vocational future and their chances for marital happiness. Parents were advised never to hug or kiss [their children]. Never let them sit on your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when you say goodnight. The influence of the oedipal theories of Freud was pervasive.Watson reinforced a tendency left over from the late Victorians who raised their children to act like little adults, emerging from their weaning ready to stand alone. I hope I am wrong, but I do not remember being hugged by either of my parents until I reached out to them much later. My family acted rather formally towards each other in private as well as in public. Too much bodily enjoyment might dissolve the necessary distance which was to be maintained between parents and children.

After two years overseas in France as an ordnance officer, my father had joined the Fuller Lumber Company as treasurer. My older brother, Granville, was born on May 19, 1923. My parents had rented a flat in a house owned by my grandfather Fuller across the driveway from their home. On Sundays after church, Mary, my grandparents’ maid and cook, would open the door to the sun porch and our little family would enter a well-heated sunny space where we sat until dinner was announced. Standing at the head of the table, my grandfather, Will, a beardless, portly gentleman with a football-shaped face and brown hair parted in the center, carved the roast of beef. My grandmother, Elizabeth, white hair coifed close and curly, powdered by stuff that came in a round box, presided at the opposite end of the table near the kitchen. She loved butter on her oatmeal. Grandfather Fuller would go into the dark, heavily-draped living room after lunch to play When the Red, Red Robin, Comes Bob, Bob, Bobin’ Along . . . Aloooooong, with pudgy fingers adorned by a great Masonic ring. When I visited their white-tiled bathroom, I tasted the exotic Ipana toothpaste in its striped box.

They had a son named George who was born in 1900 and a daughter Roselle born in 1903. George and his various wives never seemed to come to Sunday dinner when we were there.

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My grandfather and grandmother Fuller out for a ride. My father is standing on his father’s left.

My mother’s family lived but a quarter-mile away, across from a brick Roman Catholic building, in a white Victorian cottage with a steep roof. We saw them at Christmas and in the summer at Hampton Beach. My grandfather, Edward, was tall, sharp-nosed, and white-hair haired. He was very thin. His wife, Marion, was squat and heavy, wearing a pince-nez on her pudgy nose.

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My mother’s parents Edward and Marion Hutchinson.

She read a lot and cooked but never washed the dishes. Ascending a long straight staircase to a dark second floor, I passed bedrooms for their three sons, Howard, Raynor, Philip, and my mother, born in 1900. Clair, a little older than my mother, had died of some childhood disease when she was four. My grandfather Hutchinson, taught manual arts at the Brookline High School, but when Marion’s father died, she (as my mother constantly reminded me) an only daughter and granddaughter, inherited a sizable sum in her own name. Soon Edward left teaching and spent time as a kind of all round handyman and dishwasher for his wife. I think he was also the mother of her family.

As I grew older, I observed that my mother presented two faces to the world. One was her public face—a young, vivacious, bob-haired slim woman with a beautiful body and a personality which attracted men to her. The other was the private mother who turned off this persona when she was at home where she often became bitchy and angry. Suddenly a life that was so hopeful in its possibilities had become narrowed to the dutifulness of a housewife in a marriage with an increasingly absent husband. As time went on, she cut off her ties to civic activities and even to female friends and stayed pretty much alone. She was no longer a free-spirited carefree young woman who enjoyed life. What had happened? My parents seemed to get along together; they seemed to enjoy each other’s company in small doses. My mother said that she never had to worry about my father although women loved him. She said, He never spoke an angry word all during our marriage. But there was something which did not satisfy her. Perhaps my father never learned to share his hidden thoughts and emotions.

At some time, her parents gave her a fund under her control to help with the extras. I wonder about this woman who was determined to fulfill her homemaker’s responsibilities. She really did not have a choice. If my father had been poorer and she had been forced to work, maybe she would have been less angry, though more embarrassed. Only one or two wives in our neighborhood worked. People felt sorry for husbands who had to send their wives to work. Husbands did not want their wives to earn money. It reflected badly on them. There was not enough money for my father to get his teeth fixed because our teeth were getting straightened and our lives enriched. The stock market plunged in 1929. Banks closed, people jumped out of buildings, fortunes disappeared. Sales at my father’s lumber business fell way off. But we had a maid who was paid $8 a week plus room and board. Maids came at first from French Canada and then from the Negro community in Boston. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency (1933–45) was only a few years away. It was the lull between two horrendous World Wars; the breath of the shanty and white-curtained Irish, the Jew, the French Canadian, and the Catholic Church smelled foully in the nostrils of proper old-line New England Yankees used to being at the top of the heap. In those days, where I lived, no Jews would be allowed to buy. There were housing covenants written into deeds which stated that the property could only be sold to white gentiles. Negroes came into our neighborhoods only as servants. Divorce was unheard of. People suffered unhappy marriages in silence. I remember my great Aunt Mattie, my father’s aunt, married to Fred, who the family had defined as a ne’er-do-well, saying to me, Live a lot when you’re young, Howard.

The United States closed its borders to immigration in the 1920s. The State electrocuted Sacco and Vanzetti, two supposed anarchists, who may or may not have been innocent. Poor whites hung poor blacks to the limbs of trees. Tariff barriers protected home industries. Hitler and Mussolini marched. Labor unions won victories in Detroit and Akron, and organized the truck drivers in my father’s business. People moved—blacks to the north, Oakies to the West; Yankees to the suburbs, Irish and Italians to the inner cities. I knew these facts only from the history books and yet I absorbed the anxiety of a world collapsing into economic and social anarchy with my mother’s milk. She suffered ulcers, severe headaches and an early hysterectomy. Yet, rattled and shook up, she kept us together and nurtured in our beautiful family residence until we boys had left home.

When I was one year old I was carried to the Brighton Evangelical Congregational Church on Washington street to be baptized. I was the fifth generation of the Fuller family to be sprinkled. My forebears on both sides had been deacons in the church. However, when we moved to Wellesley, my father took me to the Unitarian Society of Wellesley Hills for Sunday School classes. I remember a 4th grade teacher of our boys’ class telling stories of murders, executions and tortures to keep us interested. But the teacher who I know was influential in my life was Mr. Arthur Chapin, a tall, white-haired man who lived with his family up the street from us and worked in the Necco Candy factory. He told us stories of Jesus in a soft voice.

My mother did everything she knew to keep us safe! But she couldn’t protect me from serious childhood diseases. I spent many weeks in bed during my first five years. In 1928 there were no penicillin or other antibacterials. We were quarantined in our homes when we had chicken pox, measles, and mumps. When I was 30 months old I had whooping cough for seven weeks—housebound all that time. A year later, I woke up with terrible pains in my ears. Dr Richards operated on me for a double mastoid infection. I was in the hospital for 12 days. When I was almost five I awoke one night unable to bend my head to look at my belly, a classic symptom of polio. Fortunately it was a misdiagnosis. On my 10th birthday my family was caught in the great New England hurricane of 1938. We dodged trees crashing down around our car as we fled towards home. And later, while swimming, I was drawn out to sea in a vicious undertow off of North Hampton Beach. When I was five, I put on eyeglasses which I wore from then on; my uncle Ralph, an orthodontist who later was confined to his bed with Multiple Sclerosis, began to straighten my teeth; I was fitted for arch supports to help improve my posture, and tested for allergies. My ankles were weak and I skated on Rockridge pond very slowly back and forth.

I saw myself in those days as a frail overprotected thing, propped up by the medical establishment and an anxious mother, as I edged into life!

On the Sunday evening before Christmas we sat in a candle-lit sanctuary, a living nativity scene in front of a red curtain. A procession of tall, very tall, serious men walked slowly down the center aisle. Afterwards we exited into the cold starry night. My mother had a healthy skepticism towards the Protestant and Roman Catholic clergy. They’re mostly hypocrites, she would say, meaning, I suppose, that they preached one kind of living and lived another.

On the night before Christmas Eve we walked through the woods to a small cabin owned by the Niles. Real candles filled the single room with soft light. It was a fairy house, just like the ones in my picture books of Christmas in the far North. We sipped hot chocolate and sang carols and were carried home in our parents’ arms and laid in our beds. In those days we had three Christmases—Christmas Eve at Aunt Roselle’s and Uncle Ralph’s with our cousins (not including George and his families!) and grandparents on my father’s side; Christmas morning at home, and then we drove to Hingham to feast and share gifts with my mother’s family. My mother lavished us with gifts on Christmas. On one memorable occasion I came down the stairs to see my parents standing at the bottom watching as I caught sight of a marionette stage set up in the front hall. Inside was a cage with a canary who sang to me. Boxes of marionettes, handmade of papier-mâché and bits of cloth were under the tree.

We lived in a comfortable, four story home, clad with a stone outer wall on its first floor. A sun porch, a living room, a hallway with a curving staircase to the second floor, a telephone closet where one could speak to a rare caller privately, a dining room with fireplace, and a kitchen and laundry room. Off the back hall a stairway led to the second floor and then up to the attic. Up a few more stairs in the attic, past a closet, lined with fragrant slabs of cedar, past a small bath, and past the maid’s bedroom, there was a large room which we used as our living quarters for six months when I was a boy, after the oil furnace discharged a veil of oil over the first and second floor. It looked out on the backyard and the Martin birdhouse perched on a four story tall pole stuck into a ledge of granite. In the attic my father stored wooden boxes filled with greenish-gray picture books of the maimed, blinded, starving victims of the Great War and a captured German helmet and empty shells.

My parents and we three boys each had our own bedroom on the second floor. Mine was the middle one overlooking the driveway. There was space for a small single maple bed, a desk and lamp, and an exit into the passageway to the bathroom which my younger brother, Peter, and I shared. I remember very distinctly my mother bathing me, pulling back my foreskin to clean it. I later discovered tiny squiggly pubic hairs, while sitting on the toilet. I spent lot of time in that bedroom, being sick in bed, hearing Dr.Wallace wash his hands in the downstairs lavatory before ascending the stairs with my mother.

What was I doing? One day when I was five years old, I stopped reading back to my mother the words she had been reading over and over to me. Suddenly I saw some black letters on a white page and I pronounced the word for the picture on the page. I could read! The contemporary Canadian novelist Robinson Davies’ early reading experience was very much like mine. He started off on nursery rhymes like the Three Little Pigs, Jack and Jill, and Humpty Dumpty in illustrated books, and then he read, as he says in his book The Merry Heart: stories like the Little Red Hen who found some wheat; she called on the cat, the dog, and the pig to help her plant, reap, grind, and make bread from the wheat but they refused. But when she said: Who will help me eat the bread? they were eager for a share. This was not the Little Red Hen’s finest hour. She declared, You would not plant the wheat, you would not cut the wheat, you would not grind the wheat, you would not bake the bread; you shall not eat the bread. My little chicks shall eat the bread (Viking Pilgrim, 1996, p.4 ). I remember the one about the Dutch boy who held his finger in the tiny opening in the dyke so his land would not be flooded. I am sure I developed lifelong moral postures from these children’s story books. Like Davies, I was introduced to Christina Rossetti’s poem Who Has Seen the Wind in a book which had a blue cover with a silver crescent moon on its front cover. Inside, on separate pages, were words which sang, and created beautiful images of summer evenings and snowy nights and life by the fireside.

I saw landscapes drenched in moonlight with silvery seas and small boats setting sail toward the horizon. Sometimes there were owls and pussycats on board. Later I read the romance novels of Robert Louis Stevenson and Howard Fast, with illustrations by A.C. Wyeth. Suddenly I was wandering across the Pacific Ocean or the Caribbean to Treasure Island and to ancient Rome and Greece and medieval Europe.

When I was a little older my mother gave me small paperback books illustrated with line drawings of ancient buildings in Athens, Troy and Egypt. I was enchanted by these strange ancient civilizations. Later when I walked out onto a London street for the first time, or up the hill to the Acropolis I felt a rush of excitement because I was surrounded by old friends I had seen first in picture books. I had a library card and rode my balloon-tired bike home from the Wellesley Hills library with an armload of mysteries about houses with secret doors and occupants who drifted out of their rooms only when everyone was asleep. We owned our own set of The Book of Knowledge. This was an eclectic collection of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Greek and Roman myths with descriptions of far-off places. Articles described how machines like telephones transmitted my voice and how airplanes flew. I read these volumes from cover to cover. Many of the illustrations of fantastic lands and exotically costumed characters were sepia-colored, which created an aura of dark mystery. I often received several books for Christmas, some with exquisite illustrations. As I read I absorbed thousands of images inside my head and laid a foundation to which every subsequent reading and everyday action might compare. Now I lived in many places, no longer just Wellesley Hills Massachusetts in the years before World War II. I lived in ancient Greece and Rome, in the cowboy and Indian West of the United States, in medieval England, and ancient France—but not in a Muslim or Hindu world, or a woman’s world, or Latino or Black or Jewish worlds. It was the world constructed by the imagination of white men as they pondered the stories of Europe and North America. But, even though limited, the images and the stories were wonderful. In a book review Vivian Gornick writes: Randall Jarrell once said . . . Reading . . . gave us back ourselves in a way that no other kind of nonmaterial nourishment could match. In the ordinary dailyness of our lives we are alone in our heads, locked into a chaos of half thought, fleeting angers, confused desires. When we read, the noise clears out. We start having full thoughts. Full thoughts begin an internal conversation. Soon we’ve got the company not only of the writer but of our responding selves as well . . . We’ve made a society.¹

Could it be that my passion for reading led me to having complicated thoughts which I could put together into a conversation with myself and others and which made sense of my life? I learned how to ask questions which enabled me to make some connection with another’s life. This disinterested questioning of others led me to become an interesting social creature who was accepted and even popular. This gave me a very deep assurance that I fit into the world I was entering. Being at least as much an introvert as an extrovert, I turned more and more, as I grew older, to my inner thoughts as a source of comfort and companionship. The more I read the better I was able to place thoughts into paragraphs which had a beginning and an end and made a point. When I learned to write these paragraphs down in papers and tests I could get good marks. This was what was meant in my youth by being smart. I was a bright boy!

But there was something else that wide-ranging reading gave me: empathy with people different from myself. Jane Smiley writes: The novel is essentially a form in which the interior of one person’s mind comes into the interior of another person’s mind . . . There’s no novel that doesn’t unfold the author’s sensibility. So the more novels I read, the more sensibilities I have in my head, and the greater my sense of empathy.²

Jane Smiley insists that novels are all about being human. My life story is all about the search for ways to learn to be more human.

In addition to reading, I looked at photographs and motion pictures. I read the National Geographic and Life magazine each Friday night and the funny papers which arrived with the Sunday newspaper. Mutt and Jeff, Mr. and Mrs. Jiggs, Blondie, and Mandrake the Magician, Mickey Mouse. The first film I remember seeing was a dramatization of Captain’s Courageous with Spencer Tracy and Freddie Bartholomew. There was a scene near the end when Tracy is caught with his arm pinned as the sailing boat sinks steadily into the black and white, churning waters: I’m stove in, boy, he groans to his young friend as he drowns. I also cannot forget The Wizard of Oz, where black and white suddenly turned to color as Dorothy entered the land of the Wizard after being swept out of her Kansas home in a tornado. Nothing was as exciting or fueled my sense of the dramatic, comic, and outrageous more than the films shown each Saturday afternoon at Bensleve’s Theater and Ice Parlor in Wellesley. I must have exclaimed with joy when my father took me to a stage performance of Hellzapoppin’ at the Schubert Theater in Boston, a Gilbert and Sullivan performance of Pinafore at the Wellesley Maugus Club, and a marionette show production of a Dickens’ novel.

Early on, the content of my inner life was created mostly by reading rather than travel—reading filled my imagination with images which helped me, as I day- or night-dreamed, to translate my subconscious energies into varied colorful images which I could remember and learn from. I told stories to myself which helped me to find meaning in my life. I give thanks to my parents, especially my mother, who provided me with the tools by which I could communicate with my unconscious to discover a realm of life which nourishes me every day of my life. The background music in my life is the music of word and sentences on the written page. I suppose that is part of my compulsion to write these memoirs—words of gratitude for a family who gave me the wherewithal to satisfy this great hunger for images and essays and poetry and short stories and novels about people growing up in various worlds, some like mine and some vastly different.

Although there was a ping-pong table and a hockey table in the basement, my brothers and I spent a lot of our time, when we were home, alone or playing with our own friends. When we five came together there seemed to be a constraint between us.

Imagine that it is an early winter day. My father arrives home at 6:30 p.m. after a twelve-hour day, shifting into second as he drives his 1936 Plymouth up the drive which my brother Gran and I have just shoveled. My mother, having changed out of her house outfit into something dressier, greets him with a kiss in front of the living room fireplace. My father mixes their drinks, usually Johnnie Walker Red Scotch and water. They sit across from each other and present an account of their days to one another before we join them for dinner. They do not discuss their private life in front of us. We never hear my father raise his voice.

A bell is rung and we three sons come down from our rooms—Gran, 14 years old, golden blond, wearing silver rimmed glasses, a sleeveless sweater, and long pants; six-year-old brother, Peter, red haired, like our mother used to be, without glasses, pale from a bout with chicken pox which left pits on his face and neck; and myself, a slender nine year old, wearing glasses, narrow chest, curly brown hair and thick lips. My dad sits at one end of the table facing my mother who is closest to the kitchen. She has her foot on the metal ringer, under the carpet, which will summon the maid. My mother takes up her fork. We eat the salad, pineapple slices dressed in homemade French dressing, until my father says:

So Gran, what have you been up to?

Well, I played hockey after school.

How did you do?

We won by a goal.

I look at my older brother. He is good at hockey, and tennis, playing on teams. He has been to a boys’ camp, gone on canoe trips into the Maine wilderness, participated in serious pranks on elders. Soon he’ll be off to Kimball Union Academy.

And you Howard? I look up from my hunched over position. My mother instructs me how to report to my father:

Sit up straight, Howard. Use your napkin.

Nothing much.

I didn’t think the fact I had been reading all afternoon in my room would be a suitable response from a growing boy.

What about the Cub meeting today, Howard? my mother prompts me.

We almost finished the kayak which we’ve been working on.

The maid removed the salad and brought on the first course. A roast. My father stands, takes up the silver-handled sharpener and a Swedish-made, steel-bladed knife and carves the roast. His carving does not satisfy my mother