Incidence In My Life

By George Sherblom

If the unexamined life is not worth living, it follows that even the most insignificant life is worth examining. No existence, looked at carefully, is uninformative. Every life is a story worth telling, even if nothing happens in it.

There are no childhood traumas here, no family dysfunction; only episodes devoid of drama, confrontations that go nowhere, dreams that remained dreamt – just a life lived. These are tales of minor incidents that reveal little truths and small insights

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 24, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312782181

Book preview

Incidence In My Life

Incidence In My Life

George Sherblom

"Incidence - … impact on who ultimately bears the burden."

Encyclopedia of Tax Policy and Taxation, 

Cordes, Eber, and Gravelle, eds.,

Urban Institute Press, 2nd ed., 2004, p. 399.

©  2014    G. Thomas Woodward.  All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-312-78218-1

Cover by Elizabeth Chesterman.  Used by permission of the artist.

Excerpts from Great Is Thy Faithfulness by Thomas O. Chisholm.  © 1923.  Renewed 1951.  Hope Publishing Company, Carol Stream, IL 60188. Used by permission  All rights reserved. 

Author's note on names in this volume

George Sherblom is who I am when I write creatively.  It is not my name at other times.  The name used within these stories is the one by which I am commonly addressed, not the one on the book cover. 

The names of family members are those that they use in real life.  Place-names are also unchanged.  However, because I have combined other people into composites and telescoped events, the names of neighbors, schoolmates, teachers, and everyone else have all been altered. 

The reader is reminded that this volume – like all autobiographical work – is fiction.

Prologue

Location, Location, Location

I now live in the kind of community in which many homeowners hire professionals to maintain their yards.  Every day, someone here has a yard-maintenance crew show up to mow, pull weeds, mulch and trim bushes, looking like groundskeepers on a wealthy estate.  In the neighborhood of my youth, this would have been unthinkable.  I mean this in the literal sense: not that it was an option rejected, but one never considered, never imagined. 

True, when growing up, I witnessed a few residents who were fastidious about their lawns, who fertilized and limed them each spring or fall, who killed dandelions and mowed the grass obsessively, and who removed dead leaves as they fell.  Yet, the biological character of their focus was still evident: one could see individual blades of grass, and the green of the lawn transitioned gradually to brown as it encountered the roots and shade of trees.

Today, xxx-treme yard care as embraced by a number of my newer neighbors is technological.  It eschews local flora entirely.  The native chlorophyl is exterminated.  Irrigation pipes are buried.  Flatbed trucks deliver grass that is then rolled into place in the fashion of welcoming celebrities to a benefit gala.  The imported lawn is chemically nurtured to a density slightly more absorptive than a gravel parking lot.  The turf begins and ends at a sharply-defined perimeter; each newly-planted tree and bush is allocated a geometrically-defined domain filled with mulch and free of anything else green.

I've never moved.

***

I was eight months old when we took up residence in Anne Arundel County.  Much about who I am is the result of living in that new home.  That was, I suppose, whole idea.

Raised in the coal country of western Virginia, my mother did not trust the city where she and my father owned a row-house, and in which their first two children were born.  She did not view it as a suitable place for children.  It was a hard sell to my father who had lived all his life in Baltimore, but she got her way: they bought 6 acres in what was then considered the country, a proper place to grow children.  The $240 purchase price my father borrowed from his boss – each week thereafter pulling five dollars from his pay and stuffing it into the pocket of an old overcoat in a corner of the former stable that served as their shop, so that by the end of 1951, he was able to repay the loan with a wad of ones and fives. 

My parents visited their newly-acquired property on weekends with their two toddlers in tow.  They cleared trees and undergrowth.  They saved enough to have a basement bulldozed.  They hand-dug a well.  They mixed each batch of mortar with a hoe, sawed every board with a hand saw, dug every trench and hole with a shovel.  Through all this, my mother kept up with my dad, bearing her share of the construction tasks even as she eventually swelled with their third child.

For three years, they squeezed a few dollars each week from an already tight budget to buy materials.  The wood floor was salvage from a demolished bowling alley.  The bathroom waste pipes came from a renovated gas station.  The roof was made of boards that were once boxes that held glass – some stamped with Maryland Glass & Mirror Co.  S. Charles St. visible still in the attic today.  They obtained at a deep discount windows that had been specially ordered by customers who failed to pick them up after laying down deposits.  Factory seconds rounded out the building components.

***

Although part of a subdivision, the property is relatively isolated and adjacent to land that is yet undeveloped.  Neighbors encroached more closely as newer homes came to occupy previously empty building lots and bigger homes replaced the houses constructed in the 40s and 50s; but still only a few can see any part of my yard.  We have so far avoided the imposition of public water and sewerage.  The place still feels more rural than suburban, with trees, fields, and perennial streams. 

Even with mapping software, we can be difficult to locate.  Our lane, one of two separated segments of the same theoretical road, scarcely looks like a street open to the public, with the homeowners who front upon it providing its meager maintenance.  To compound confusion, it shares its name with a major thoroughfare in a nearby jurisdiction.  You don't get here casually.  You find us by really trying, or you wind up here by mistake. 

In a region of the country in which out-of-staters are the norm, my children attended the same school system I did.  While virtually everyone I worked with came from somewhere else, I am a native: I know words to the state song, can list the state's counties, and know how to properly fly the state flag.  Many of my acquaintances bought bigger or smaller houses when their current homes no longer suited their needs.  I am rooted here; I know who was here before and what has happened since.

This has its consequences

The absence of neighbors' eyes assessing the state of my lawn, the clutter of my yard, or the amount of time my empty trash cans sit by the road has made me secure in my own preferences.  I feel less judged.  I have less hesitancy about disagreeing, about choosing my own way.

Our relative isolation and the difficulty in finding us means that my connections are by choice.  I do not feel that society imposes its values on me.  Because I join by volition, I do not resent that I have to.

The environment leaves me both less alienated from nature and more appreciative of what improvements we have made upon it.  I have no problem with the wildlife about me, including the arthropods who live with us.  I am not afraid of dead trees that threaten to fall on us, and I am at peace with the hail-like damage that acorns inflict on our cars.  Yet, I have no romantic notions about the virtues of living a rugged existence.  I feel no shame in loving central heat.  I feel no desire to raise chickens nor grow vegetables.  I see no point in buying organic.  I have been up close to the trimmings of the simple life and know how complicated it can be.

That I have been in the same place all my life makes me more rather than less attuned to how much things change.  The house has additional rooms and renovations.  A second house, built by my parents when I was a teen, graces the property.  The fields are now horse paddocks.  I didn't move into a place that already was, but saw it built, or built it myself.  To have witnessed the transformation is to know the inconstancy of things; I see not just how things are built up, but how they deteriorate.

Rootedness makes me more secure, but with the side-effect that I am more dismissive of those who experience the world differently.  I resent the Dick-and-Jane neighborhoods and the people in them for the damage they have done.  I feel more entitled to my place in suburbia because I have some acreage and have always had it.  I feel that my continuous occupation of several acres since childhood makes me somehow environmentally pure.  I sit in meetings where people bemoan the decline of the Chesapeake Bay and reflect on the fact that they live in the developments that helped sicken it.  I think that I have not offended nature to the same degree as they.

This place may have made me more independent, less afraid, a better steward, more comfortable with the rhythms of change, and given me deeper roots.  But it also makes me smug.

(1) On Memory

On the floor in front of me is an array of big, steel bodied, toy fire-engines of the heft and detail that is probably no longer made.  My older brother, Patrick, is reminding me which is his and which mine, there being two complete sets of different manufacture and design, and of mixed ownership, such that I apparently own the pumper of one set and the hook-and-ladder of the other, so that it is easy to become confused.

I say remind because it is clear that he is telling me over again, although I have no recollection of being told before.  Indeed, I have no memory of receiving these toys, nor of anything.  It is as if this allocation of possessions coincides with the dawning of my consciousness.  Patrick knows what has been given to me, but I don't.  Until this moment, it seems, I have eaten, slept, talked, cried, and played with these toys, but have yet to become self-aware.  Until this moment, an explanation of what is his and what is mine has been meaningless to me because only in this moment do I first comprehend that he is him and that I am me.

Yet, I have independent confirmation that this is not my first memory.  There was an unauthorized visit next door.  Mrs. Simpson is speaking on the telephone.  I see the end-table on which her telephone sits, one of the few things there that is at my eye-level.  There is a phone book stuffed into its single shelf.  I hear her telling my mother; I don't yet know that I am in trouble.

The trip to her house required a journey through the woods, 231 adult paces door-to-door – but many more for a toddler.  Mrs. Simpson, like other people's mothers everywhere, was nicer and more fun than my own.  This, no doubt, was my motive for the visit.  As if to confirm my assessment of the relative likability of these two women, my return trip is expedited by swats on the behind every few steps I take on the path. 

My recollection conforms to my mother's account of her method of ensuring that I would not repeat the adventure.  She says I was two, younger than I would have been during the division of the fire trucks. It is her recollection of the episode that gives coherence to my memory of it, and it is the repetition of the event in my mind that has preserved the remembrance.

***

I come from a family of story-tellers.  My mother told stories of her childhood and early marriage, and encouraged my father to tell his stories as well.  These were repeated and elaborated.  Although perhaps not the intent, the continual retelling reached a point at which we learned them by heart, and could jump in to provide details and color.  Our family became like those preliterate tribes who impart heritage to their descendants by recounting stories until the next generation learns them, and so absorbs the history of the family going back through distant ancestors.  As a result, my recollections are not just mine.  I participate in the maintenance of a larger communal memory. 

We are dependent on the recollections of others to fill out our partial pictures of our lives.  One's own memories can be suspect, and must be aided by a process in which parents and siblings join in to complete them.  I do not know what my first memory is.  No one can.  Early recollections exist in fragments, insufficient to give them a reliable temporal ordering.  Even if memories are associated with a significant event placing them in time, the other mental remnants of our past might precede those that we can date.

Memories are principally reconstructions.  They are like those skeletons of proto-humans that we see on educational TV.  They seem to be complete.  But upon closer inspection we see that the actual fossils are only a small part of the whole.  There is a tibia, a lower jaw, a couple of vertebra, and a few square inches of cranium.  That's all they really found in the gorge; the rest is inferred from earlier finds and our understanding of how they fit together.

In a sense, therefore, I have an earlier memory.  It is 1932.  Through my mother's three-year-old eyes, I see my grandfather and grandmother.  Their features are dark and fierce, their figures gaunt, their dress plain.  She sits as he stands in an ordered, spare kitchen illuminated by the first rays of dawn, in the half-hour before he leaves for work at the coal mine.  He pours raw egg into a funnel above her upturned head.  The yolk slithers down a tube that substitutes for her throat, removed two weeks before by surgery.  The transformation of her mother's appearance is enough to alert the little girl that a life transition is at hand.  The woman will be dead within a year, the man within three.  Yet, this moment embraces that which has not changed in their lives, devotion, futility, perseverance.

This memory took its shape in the telling.  It changed and grew in response to the reactions of its audience.  It took meaning from the hearing of it.  I have part ownership in it because I listened.  I contribute to it because I retell it.  My memories, therefore, will still be forming after I am dead.  Sadly, re-expressing stories in print causes them to lose the flexibility of the oral versions; but this is an unavoidable cost of delivering them in this form.  I record these recollections in writing not to lock them in place, but to put them in play.

(2) The Naked Truth

Maybe they did it because they were bored and needed amusement.  Maybe they were being mean or felt jealous.  Maybe they did it regularly on a schedule that I, as a preschooler, was too unsophisticated to recognize.  At any rate, they did it more than once.  And it always proceeded in the same way.

One can't capture it in print.  You have to hear the words.  In written form, they are innocuous, completely true and unobjectionable.  But spoken, one hears the particularity of the first word, the implied uniqueness of the accusation.  Then there is the rest in that sing-songy tone that only children can use, that nyahh-nyahh-nyahh effect that in adulthood must be achieved through sophisticated linguistic constructions and subtle changes of pitch. 

More than four years older than me, but only a year and a half apart, my brother and sister could intone the calumny together, in perfect humiliating unison.  "Tommy was born without any clothes on."  And so it would start again.

My simple denial of the libel should have been enough.  But they laughed.  It was obvious to me that I needed to provide more detail to recover my dignity.  One might be in clothes, after all, but still be laughably dressed.  To overcome this base accusation, I would have to specify what I was wearing.  Pants and a shirt for sure, that much I knew.  But Patrick and Mary Jane would laugh all the harder.  It was evident that I had left out something critical, the absence of which made my newborn appearance funny looking.  I amended my statement.  Of course there was underwear.  Oh, and socks, and shoes. 

By this point, they were rolling backwards into the dirt roaring with hilarity.  If I could just come up with the critical missing item of clothing, I could bring this embarrassment to an end.  So I added more items, certain that with quantity I would stumble upon that one thing the absence of which made this so funny to them.  A coat, hat, and gloves were appended.  God knows, in my total desperation and perplexity, I may have even gone for a belt and handkerchief.  As I added anything plausible I could think of, the laughter got worse.

It never occurred to me to go in the opposite direction.  I knew where babies came from (though not how they got there).  Yet it was inconceivable to me that that people could enter the world in such a humiliating state.  Nakedness was unnatural.  I never saw anyone without clothes.  Only for brief times – at most a few times a week for a bath – was I ever without clothing.  While they never actually said so, the clear implication of my siblings' tone was that they had not been afflicted with this shameful condition at birth.  Although I knew that some children came into the world with birth defects, I was sure that I was not among them.

My mother attempted to explain it to me.  She began, however, by telling me that I had indeed been born with such a fundamental shortcoming.  Consequently, I heard nothing more than this betrayal of trust, that she had become part of the communal slander.  Convinced that my own mother had joined in the conspiracy to degrade me, I did not hear her go on to explain that my brother and sister had come into the world the same way.

Patrick and Mary Jane would repeat the accusation for as long as I denied it.  The point at which I learned the truth and it all stopped I don't recall.  It didn't matter.  My consciousness was raised about the ways in which young children are demeaned.  I resented any effort to do so.  Few things would upset me as much as being characterized as cute, for I realized that this was just adult code for amusing.  I avoided at all costs wearing short pants, the universally recognized attire of young children who were not to be taken seriously.  I tried to make sure that my thoughts were fully formed before I articulated them, and I avoided doing anything in front of others unless I felt confident that I could do it well. 

These habits persisted into adulthood.  Even as I neared retirement, I paid close attention to how I dressed, exhibiting a preference for wearing suits to work well past the time that casual Friday became casual any-day-of-the week.  In short, I have ever since endeavored to comport myself with the dignity demanded of a person born fully clothed. 

(3) Improbable Conveyance

An abandoned automobile is the best recreational facility a child can have.  Ours was a 1939 Dodge panel truck. It had been driven on its last journey to a location in the woods within sight of our house.  The windows were intact.  Its doors opened and closed properly.  The two seats were in relatively good condition.  It still had its engine and wheels.  Consequently, little imagination was required to power it.

It had apparently belonged to a house painter.  The exterior of the truck was a light blue that was detaching itself in large flakes from the sides and top, betraying the expedient of using house paint for a final attempt to extend the useful life of the vehicle.  In the back were a few dozen one-gallon paint cans, each with a residue of a different color paint in it.  In the glove compartment we found a collection of shiny cardboard sheets on which these same colors were arrayed in little rectangles. 

Patrick, five-and-a-half years my senior, always drove.  This, he explained, was necessary because only he knew how to properly shift the gears.  Mary Jane, a year-and-a-half younger than Pat, always rode shotgun.  I was relegated to riding as cargo in the back with the paint cans and whatever else we had decided to store there.  We all supplied engine noises and tire squeals, as well as the sounds of traffic around us.  These might be