It's My Story and I'm Sticking to It

By John MacEnulty

John MacEnulty was hired in 1962 by the St. Louis Symphony to become the youngest principal tuba player in a major U.S.orchestra. After twenty years with the orchestra, Bell’s Palsy interrupted his career, and he became Conductor and Executive Director of the Belleville Philharmonic. Nine years later, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and he changed course again. Since a near death experience and his recovery from cancer, he has been a painter, a spiritual guide, a drum maker, a Native American flute player, and speaker and healer — as well as being a friend, companion, and loving father, grandfather, and brother.
Written as if he were conversing with you on the front porch, this book tells the stories behind John’s accomplishments — the hardships he managed to turn into new avenues of expression and the relationships that impacted his career and his personal life. He opens up about his experiences with alcoholism, recovery, and cancer, experiences that bring with them opportunities for transformation and transcendence. It’s no surprise that his “Emanations From The Still Point” (writings on life, love, and the power of meditation) have been read and treasured by thousands of people.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Prism Light Press
• Release date: Jun 8, 2022

John MacEnulty

John currently writes, paints, plays Native American flute, and grows tomatoes. He has made numerous recordings on the Native American flute and has published a novel, Harry Wins the Lottery; a collection of poetry, Amazing Is Quite Often; and a collection of his spiritual writings, Finding the Love. Find him on Twitter @JohnMacEnulty.

Book preview

When my brother said he was working on an autobiography, I was thrilled. My initial feelings were vindicated when I finally got to read it. As a family member, I knew many of the stories he relates in the book but only partially. That’s how it is with families. We hear a story once or twice and we remember it but vaguely. Now with the publication of this book, I will not have to rely on my faulty memory. The stories will be at my fingertips. And what delightful stories they are — full of wonder, wisdom, and humor.

What I love most about the book and the discursive style in which it is written is that it feels like I’m sitting with him on his front porch in St. Louis, drinking coffee and talking for hours the way we do on the rare occasions when I get to visit.

In addition to enjoying these stories for personal reasons, I find they offer a fascinating glimpse into life in the 20th Century, especially in the south. As a historical fiction writer, I’m always on the lookout for narratives that tell the stories of life as people actually lived it in a particular era. The newspaper route, streaking, innocent joyrides in borrowed cars — these anecdotes from my brother’s youth depict a very different life from that of young people today.

I’ve always been proud of my brother’s accomplishments: the youngest solo tuba player in a major U.S. orchestra; conductor for the Belleville Philharmonic; and extraordinary Native American flute player. The narrative of his musical career chronicles his encounters with many important and influential people in the classical music world as well as with people whom you’ve never heard of, but may come to appreciate through these tales. His autobiography tells the stories behind those accomplishments — the hardships he managed to turn into new avenues for expression, and the relationships that made such a difference in his career and in his personal life.

For people in recovery, the book will be inspirational. Like many of the men in our family, he succumbed to alcohol addiction. But unlike most of them, his story is one of triumph. He used his experiences with alcoholism, AA, and cancer as opportunities for transformation and transcendence. It’s no surprise that his Emanations" (writings on life, love, and the power of meditation) have been read and treasured by thousands of people. This book gives us a chance to peer into the psyche of a man with a curious mind and an enormous heart.

I hope others will follow my brother’s example and write their life stories. Write them for family members, for oneself or even for some random stranger who may be curious about what it was like to live in a particular time and place. It’s a wonderful way to look back on our achievements and even our failures, to acknowledge the obstacles we’ve overcome as well as our moments of grace, and to honor the people and events that made it all worthwhile.

Pat MacEnulty

INTRODUCTION

2022

How would I distinguish between an introduction and the telling of the story? It’s all fragments. Each fragment, the tip of a pyramid of seemingly infinite depth and breadth, stories interconnected and jumbled in my consciousness so as to defy my efforts at making a rational continuum of my life: I did this and therefore that, and that and therefore this, this led to that and that led to this sorts of things.

However, there are things that have a long term sense of something resembling destiny or pattern. I do like the soul code concept that was explored by a Jungian analyst, James Hillman. The basic idea is that we are all born with a soul code.

One example that he gives was the great bullfighter, Manolete, who as a child regularly hid behind his mother’s skirt. In later life he was, of course, hiding behind a bullfighter’s cape. We all have tendencies that develop with age, things we seem to be drawn to. We need to be allowed to follow those aspirations, tendencies, dreams, however they manifest.

Unfortunately our education system wants to put us all in one box, develop similar abilities, and live our lives within the norms that have been forced upon us. Not my cup of tea.

The reality tunnel is one of the great concepts I have encountered. It was first expressed, as far as I know, by Robert Anton Wilson. He proposed that we can all take other reality tunnels if we choose. We simply say, What if? and we go down that road.

One of the problems with humans is that so often we refuse to take each other’s reality tunnels. We refuse or are unable to look at things from another viewpoint. Being able to say, What if? is one of the most important creative abilities. I know it’s impossible, but what if? There it is in a nutshell. Freedom of the mind and soul in What if?

Another of my favorite metaphors is the cascade. When we have an insight or make a discovery we learn something in a particular context. But life is so much more than one situation. So, for instance if I realize that I need to be more loving toward a particular person, that’s an insight. Then the cascade is the realization that I need to be more loving toward another and another and another. The cascade continues as long as I stay open to the new insight, as I realize more and more situations in which I need to be more loving.

So the cascade is, for me, a beautiful metaphor for how insights gestate and become significantly life changing. The process seems to be endless. The older I’ve gotten, the richer it has become. It’s amazing how many simple things have taken perhaps sixty or seventy years to cascade fully into bloom. And there is still so far to travel. This life thing is truly amazing.

This little tome is about the things I did and the things I thought. Probably what I thought is more important than what I did. Ideas are what I’m mainly about, which I suppose explains why there are a lot of things I never got around to actually doing.

What I end up doing here is telling my random stories and free associating so that different time periods overlap, mix in together and whole tangents flow out into the endlessness of the story. If I were talking I might forget what my original point was. But with writing you can eventually get back to the story and say, Oops, the point of this was…. and plug in the rest of the story from which the divergence occurred. A lesser person might even edit out the wider divergencies. Not me. I’m leaving the whole shebang in.

One of my all-time favorite quotes is by Mark Twain when he said, I would have written you a shorter letter but I didn’t have time. That may be a wisdom I should heed more closely. But the tales unwind in a this-reminds-me-of-that fashion

I had decided that my poetry was another animal, that the autobiography would be too self-indulgent if I put my poetry in it. It turned out that I couldn’t help it, there were a few poems that felt like they needed to be included. I meant to not do that. But that was, apparently, not meant to be.

Walt Whitman published his Leaves of Grass in 1855 with twelve poems that expressed his philosophy and love of life. As time passed he added poem after poem to his little volume. By the end of his life Leaves of Grass was comprised of over four hundred poems. My story is doing the same sort of thing but with a bit of a time differential. The stories do pile up. I found myself daily adding four or five more little stories or fragments that I wanted to include. Anyhow, it’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

So here goes.

CHAPTER 1

Vermont

I was born in Springfield, Vermont, January 7th, 1943. A few years ago I went back to Vermont to catch the flavor of where I was born. My parents taught at the Newton School in the Vermont mountains. It was a school for rich boys who needed discipline in their lives. I wanted to track it down.

As I drove up a mountainous Vermont road, I watched the beautiful deep woods on both sides of the road going by me and I couldn’t resist. I pulled over, got out of the car and went into the forest. No more than ten feet in and it was dark. A canopy of leaves forty or fifty feet above enclosed the woods. The forest floor was at least a foot deep with layers of leaves decaying slowly into the rich ground. It felt like I had traveled into the past.

I found out later that logging was difficult in the Vermont mountains and that this was, indeed, a natural, undisturbed forest dating back who knows how long. The trees grew and fell, decayed into the ground, fed the new trees. That had to be some of the richest soil on the planet. I stood there for a long time in reverence for the perfect presence of nature. Then I walked slowly back to my car and continued on my way to Springfield.

When I got there I went to the Springfield Hospital to get copies of my birth certificate. While I was there I asked if anyone knew where the Newton School was. Not a clue. No one I talked to had ever heard of it. I started driving around asking various people. After several hours I found someone who not only knew about the Newton School but knew the woman who had been the head of the school for many years. I got directions to her house.

When I got there I was able to talk to a neighbor of hers. It turned out that she had passed away two weeks before I got there. She would have been someone who might remember John and Rosalind MacEnulty. The bad timing was absolutely stunning.

The neighbor was able to give me directions to the school. So I began the winding drive up the mountain roads again and finally arrived at a couple of white buildings that didn’t seem like they could possibly have been the Newton School. But they were.

There was a handyman doing some work that day and I spoke to him. He told me that this was, indeed, the Newton School many years ago. Now it was owned by someone else and it was not being used for anything. He did occasional maintenance for the owners but he really couldn’t tell me anything about the Newton School. I told him my parents had taught there and I had been born in Springfield. He was very sympathetic and let me in the main building to look around.

There was hardly any room there. What appeared to be a couple of classrooms would each probably have held maybe ten or eleven kids and a teacher. There were some dormitory type bedrooms on the second floor. The faculty must have lived in the other building or maybe some had to live with the boys.

I went outside and walked around the grounds. There was a small creek that I followed to a spring bubbling out of the ground. It was a sweet place altogether.

I remember Momma telling me that in addition to teaching mathematics, Daddy had to chop wood for the fireplaces to keep everybody warm, so he got plenty of exercise. Imagine how much wood you would have needed to keep the school warm in a Vermont winter up in the mountains.

There were a couple of stories about me in Vermont. One was that Momma took me with her to Springfield in the dead of winter on a horse drawn sleigh. I fell out of the sleigh and into the snow. It was a mile or so before she realized I wasn’t in the sleigh. They back tracked and found me in a snowbank. I guess I was bundled up pretty well because I did survive.

The other story was that the Newton School boys looked at my face and decided that I looked like a tough little Irish cop. They started calling me Joe. My father was John and my grandfather was Jack. To avoid confusion my parents cut off the h and the n and called me Jo. That was my nickname growing up. That’s what my family still calls me.

One other thing: I was originally named David. But they thought my father might have to go into the service, World War Two, you know. So they changed my name to John in case he didn’t come back. It turned out he was 4F because his glasses were as thick as coke bottles and they wouldn’t let him go. But my name stuck, John Forrest MacEnulty the Third. Subsequently they named my brother David.

CHAPTER 2

Spartanburg

David Field MacEnulty was born in North Hampton, Massachusetts, on August 6, 1944. Six months after my brother was born we moved to Spartanburg, South Carolina where my father taught piano at Converse College and Momma taught music history.

I have a few memories of Spartanburg. One is of a time when it had snowed. I was four years old. The snow had a thin, icy layer over the top and I remember being so small and light that I could walk on the top of it without sinking in. When I stomped on it my foot went through and down deep into the snow.

I remember that one of the piano movers broke his back trying to get our grand piano up to the second floor where we lived. And I remember Jenny Briggs, the little girl next door, and sitting under the steps with her doing little boy and little girl things together. I remember that our phone number was something like J25. That was all the numbers you needed back in 1947 in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Every call involved an operator. Sometimes you just told her the name of the person you wanted to call.

I remember, as a child, looking down the long street and seeing Converse College way far away, and in the other direction at a cemetery that seemed to stretch into the distance.

Years later I took a trip back to Spartanburg to see if I could find our old apartment. It had been razed for a student union building. When I looked up and down the street my childhood memory was way off the grown up reality. The college was maybe five houses away down the street and the cemetery was about fifty feet away and was only about a hundred feet to the far edge. Everything looked ridiculously close compared to my childhood memory.

I had planted some peas and they were just beginning to peep up out of the ground when we moved from Spartanburg to Jacksonville, Florida. That was in 1948. One of the things that stayed in my mind was thinking about that pea patch sprouting and growing, giving lots of peas. I somehow felt that I would get to see them again.

Our first house in Jacksonville was down a dirt road in a section of town called Ortega. We were in the country. My father needed a practice room so he bought a prefab cabin that some workmen put up in a day. It was back away from the house, off in a cornfield.

There are a few fragments of memory of a boy from the area who came over to play. He wanted to play Cowboys and Injuns. I thought he said engines. I never understood exactly what we were doing.

I remember walking down the dirt road barefoot. I stopped for a moment and suddenly there was a huge snake between my feet. I took off running like nobody’s business. It felt like my feet never touched the ground, like I was flying. I ran all the way home in a completely mindless panic. I don’t think I have ever been that afraid since. That memory is organically stored in me. It is the image that comes to me when I think of running away from something, or just running fast.

We moved from Ortega to the Southside of Jacksonville into a neighborhood carved out of the woods. It was divided into Peachtree Circle North and Peachtree Circle South. We lived at 1621 Peachtree Circle North. The streets bridging Peachtree Circle were Pinewood, Redwood, Birchwood, and Rosewood with Ridgeland going up the middle, dividing the neighborhood in half.

Years later my brother and I did a little tour of our past. We asked the current residents of 1621 if we could look around. They invited us in. It was shockingly small. It seemed like we had plenty of space when we were growing up. Now it looked unbelievably cramped.

Even more shocking was when I googled our old address. Our tiny old house sold for $275,000 in 2018. I think our parents paid less than $5,000 for it back in 1949.

The practice cabin moved with us to Peachtree Circle and stood in the back yard next to the pine tree that Lewis Wallace and I used to climb and sit in our tiny little tree nest. It wasn’t big enough to call it a tree hut. We made a flag and called it the Jo-Lewis Club. There was a magnificent view as we towered over the house. You could see the whole neighborhood. When the wind blew it was wonderfully frightening to sway in the top of that tree. It sometimes felt as if the wind would blow it down, snap off the top of the tree, and down we’d go.

The cabin stood for years after my father left us. It was the model of dilapidation, windows broken, floor caved in, roof leaking. But it was ours. We played in it, stored things in it, kept snakes.

Jackson Borden was the boy next door. He was a bully. I had no understanding of that behavior. He would beat me up almost every day. I’d come home crying. The next day we’d be friends and he’d end up beating me up again. He was the one who convinced me that I could fly if I jumped off the roof with a towel around my neck.

I remember when the Bordens moved away and the Harrison’s moved in. Mr. Harrison was a Baptist preacher. You couldn’t say gosh or darn around him because they were too close to God, taking the Lord’s name in vain, and damn.

I remember when they moved away, the bill collectors swarmed over us trying to find out where those deadbeats had gone. We had no idea. We ended up going through their house at the request of the Bordens, who had rented the house to them. One of the few things they had left in the house was a placard on the wall that said, The Lord will provide. My mother was vastly amused by that, because the Harrison’s certainly hadn’t provided much of anything, including the rent.

The woods behind our house were our playground. There was the monkey tree. It was a strange tree. It had four limbs going out about three feet from the ground and a trunk about the size of the outer limbs going straight up and branching out at the top so you could climb up one of the lower branches and swing over to the center trunk like a monkey. My brother and I played Tarzan in the monkey tree. I was always Tarzan and he was Cheetah.

One day one of our more reckless friends, Barry Smith, was leaping from limb to limb and the limb broke. He fell ten feet and hit his head on one of the thick branches. When his head hit the branch there was a loud crack and his body flipped over and there he lay bleeding and unconscious. He looked like maybe he was dead. I ran back to his mother’s house and Davey stayed there with him. She came running. An ambulance was called and they took him away. He lived but it turned out to be a very serious concussion. Barry was never the same after that.

There was a second monkey tree about fifty feet further back in the woods. It was a little higher but nowhere near as much fun as the first monkey tree. We called it, the second monkey tree.

We used to dig holes in the woods to make huts. We’d cover them with branches and Spanish moss. The trouble was that in Florida in those days the water table was about three feet down. We’d dig a hole and the next morning it would be filled with water.

Ah, Spanish moss! It was everywhere, hanging on all the trees. It made the oak trees even more magnificent and noble.

The live oaks were especially beautiful. They could be huge trees, spreading out with branches low to the ground claiming a huge circle maybe a hundred feet across.

There was a live oak, called the Treaty Oak, down by the St. John’s River that was absolutely enormous. It had a trunk over 25 feet in circumference, rising to a height of 70 feet. It shaded a circular area, about 190 feet in diameter. Its limbs reached out and touched the ground all around it. You could go and hide in its low hanging perimeter.

I don’t know if it’s the largest live oak in the world but it sure seemed like it. When we went anywhere near it we’d say, Let’s go look at the big oak tree and our mother would dutifully drive by it very slowly. Sometimes we would get out of the car and go run around underneath it. She wouldn’t let us climb very high in it, but we could go up maybe ten feet or so in the low hanging branches. They were huge. As big as the trunks of most of the large oak trees in our neighborhood.

Alfred I. duPont High School had started off as a grammar school and evolved into a Junior-Senior High School. It was many miles away, out San Jose Boulevard. On the way to school we passed by the duPont estate. It was a stretch that seemed to be a mile long and you could see the huge mansion back by the St. John’s River.

Across from the duPont estate was a beautiful home with a hundred yard long driveway that had huge gardenia bushes lining the driveway. In the springtime the driveway was white with gardenias. There was an amazing gardenia smell that started a quarter of a mile before you actually got to the gardenias. It was something we waited for, stuck our noses out of the school bus window for, as we drove past the estate.

The myth was that you got redbugs from handling Spanish moss. We played with it all the time and I don’t ever remember getting redbugs, whatever those were. We’d build moss huts above ground.

One time we built a really nice moss hut and lit a fire inside it to keep warm (even though it was Florida summer heat). The moss hut caught fire. We nearly burned down the woods except someone called the fire department. That was exciting! A fire engine actually driving into our little woods, a big red truck and guys in rubber suits and hats, big men putting out our fire. How it started stayed a mystery. We weren’t talking, I’ll tell you that!

There were two gangs in the neighborhood, Sammy’s gang and Petey’s gang. We were in Sammy’s gang. Sammy lived on the other side of the neighborhood, Peachtree Circle South, the heart of Petey’s territory. We were all of six to twelve years old. There was a constant war between Petey’s gang and Sammy’s gang. I don’t remember anybody ever getting hurt. But we thought you could. Sammy told us that Petey’s gang would pull your hair and fingernails out if they ever caught you. And we believed him.

Tracy Moore was the neighborhood sissy. It wasn’t politically incorrect in those days to call him a sissy. In fact, there was no such thing as politically incorrect in those days. Tracy ended up going to New York and dying of AIDS. But in those days he was just a sissy. There was another boy in the neighborhood, Joe Couden. Joe was a bit of a sissy too, although I never thought of him that way. He was probably my best friend for many years growing up. We played Monopoly and Parcheesi and all sorts of games. Joe was the only friend that Tracy had. It later turned out that Joe also died of aids.

Joe had a little brother, Wilson. Wilson and my brother played on the duPont High School football team together. I remember one Christmas my brother got Wilson a ball of string for a Christmas present. Momma and I both told him that was not an appropriate Christmas gift. It turned out to be Wilson’s favorite present.

The best Christmas of my life was the year after my father had left us. We had hardly any money. My mother explained to us that this was going to be a Christmas without much in the way of presents. We just didn’t have enough money. My brother and I got it. We were poor.

My mother was extraordinary at explaining things to us completely and honestly. It was that way all our lives. She would talk to us about so many things. She was incredibly well informed. After all, she did have a degree from Yale. And to top it all off she was wise and compassionate.

So Davey and I accepted the fact that we weren’t going to get much for Christmas that year. Momma created a Christmas that meant more to me by far than any other Christmas in my whole life. It was simple. We were together. We were grateful for the love we felt for each other, she and my brother and I. The small gifts we managed to give each other expressed that. The cliche that it’s the thought that counts came to precious life that Christmas. I’ll never forget the closeness we felt. All our self-pity was transformed into gratitude for what we did have, not sadness for what we didn’t. She convinced us that this Christmas was extra special because we didn’t need the expensive gifts to prove that we loved each other.

The Coudens’ father was an obstetrician. He was the doctor who delivered my sister. Mrs. Couden was a very beautiful woman. One day I asked her if she used Ivory Soap. She said, Why do you ask? I said, Because that’s the soap of beautiful women. She laughed and smiled and gave us some cookies.

I wasn’t trying to be cute. I had just read the ads for Ivory soap and it said it was the soap of beautiful women. It just sort of made sense that she would be one of the beautiful women who used Ivory Soap.

Tracy’s father wanted him to be accepted by the other boys so he built us a big tree house up in a huge oak tree in the woods behind their house. It was a great tree house, about fifteen feet up and there were vines all around the tree. Although the tree house was great, his effort to make friends for Tracy failed miserably. Tracy tried to hang out a couple of times. But ultimately he wanted nothing whatsoever to do with us.

The weapon of choice in our neighborhood in those days was the slingshot, made by cutting an inner tube into a strip of rubber and cutting up an old shoe tongue for the slingshot pocket and tying it to the rubber strip with a shoelace. There was no Y stick involved. It was just a strip of rubber you held in your hand, pulled it back and let it fly. We fired clay balls at each other.

There were actual slingshot duels. We’d walk away from each other maybe twenty feet and turn around and fire. Sammy always supervised the duels so they were fair.

There was a creek behind the houses at the east side of Peachtree Circle. We used to play in the creek. We built dams to create large pools. The sand was easy to scoop up. There were snakes and minnows in the creek with an occasional catfish or brim.

I remember coming upon a large snapping turtle one day. We tried to catch it but there was no way. You could turn it upside down but it would just flip itself over. You couldn’t hold it because it could reach with its ferocious mouth all the way around to the back of its shell. You couldn’t even hold it down with a two by four. I gained a whole new level of respect for snapping turtles that day.

We’d wade down the creek until we got to what we called Muddy Creek. There was one spot that was like quicksand. It was mud about four or five feet deep. We’d put branches down in the mud so we could wade in it. We would be in mud up to our chests. One day we came home so filthy that Momma was more charmed than appalled, though she did hose us down before we were allowed in the house. The cover of this book is the photograph that our mother took to capture the glory of two young boys who played in the mud.

We mined the clay for clay balls down at Muddy Creek. There was a clay bank right near the creek. It was behind Sammy’s house which was in the heart of Petey’s territory. A mission to get the clay was a big deal.

A duel with fresh clay balls was one thing. Fresh clay was still soft. But put them out in the sun all day to bake brick hard and it was a whole other world. They were as hard as marbles.

Petey’s gang warned us they were going to attack us. We holed up in the tree house. We had built a huge slingshot cannon. It was a big strip of rubber tied to a wooden Y nailed to the wall of the tree hut. We could fire a brick if we chose to. It was mounted so we could fire it at the vines if anyone tried to climb up them and get to us.

Came the day of the raid. We were all loaded up in the tree hut. The battle commenced and we were firing clay balls at them. They were throwing sticks at us and one of them had on a catcher’s mask and chest protector and was climbing up the vines to get to us. We fired the cannon at him. Missed. And he kept climbing. We fired hundreds of clay balls at him and he finally gave up and climbed down. Then Petey’s gang left and that was the end of it. We had won the war, defended ourselves.

But Sammy warned us it wasn’t over. We had to be on guard. The next few days we gathered in the tree house ready to do battle. Nothing ever happened after that.

Years later Sammy was still the great guru. He put us hip to Mad Magazine. Wow! What a revelation. In those days it was a comic book like all the other comic books except it was crazy stuff making fun of everything.

Sammy discovered weightlifting. He was practically grown up. He was in high school. He had created his own gym in his father’s garage. My brother and I went over to Sammy’s to work out. He was our coach, our trainer. He taught us how to work out, how many reps to do with how much weight, resting in between.

He read Strength and Health Magazine and was up on all the techniques that Bob Hoffman taught. At that time (still in the fifties) weightlifting was controversial. The conventional wisdom was that weightlifting would make you muscle bound and it would hurt your athletic prowess rather than help you. Sammy was in the vanguard as a teenager, coaching maybe five or six of us daily in his garage. As it turns out weightlifting is now regarded as a powerful tool for athletic development.

Don’t even talk to us about bodybuilding. To Bob Hoffman and Sammy that was a contemptible thing. Weight lifting was purely about strength, not about trying to develop a beautiful body. Bigger was NOT stronger. We were officially snobs about strength training versus bodybuilding.

I remember that a guy named Joe Dube used to work out at Sammy’s. He went on to become the American heavyweight weightlifting champion. I won the Duval County heavyweight weightlifting championship. The guy two divisions below me totaled three hundred pounds more than I did. That was Joe Dube.

But for years I had a trophy that said Duval County Heavyweight Weightlifting Champion, 1960. I think I was a hundred and eighty-eight pounds soaking wet. Of course in those days there were hardly any competitors. I only competed against one other guy. Nevertheless, I can say that I am a weightlifting champion. Not everybody can say that.

My brother claims he lifted more than I did at that meet. But I think that it was the following year that he lifted more than I did, when I was off at college. We will never agree on that one. But I have to admit that a year later he was probably actually stronger than I was. He was a lot more diligent about going to Sammy’s to work out.

I just saw a television show about the Mandela Effect. The Mandela Effect is when two people have different memories about the same thing. It was first named by a woman who remembered clearly that Nelson Mandela had died in prison in South Africa. It turned out that he was still alive. But she knew several other people who shared her memory. So she named it the Mandela Effect. I had heard about it years ago and so when I recently came across a TV show on the Mandela Effect I thought, How interesting. I’ll enjoy hearing more about this.

It turns out that there is a marvelous lunatic fringe set of ideas at the heart of it. I hadn’t known this when I first heard of it, but the woman believed the explanation of the Mandela Effect was that in the quantum multiverse we traveled different reality paths and that it wasn’t a matter of faulty memories. It was that realities diverged and came back together. Nelson Mandela had actually died in an alternative reality. She had just diverged from that reality path onto a reality path where Mandela had not died in prison, but rather went on to become President of South Africa.

The television show was a documentary of a convention of Mandela Effect fans who all believed this alternate reality quantum universe explanation. Someone had filmed the whole thing. It makes great science fiction, but it really shows you another example of how people can stray from the rational path. In fact, they make it seem as if the rational path is seriously flawed.

My brother and I have had many experiences of the Mandela Effect, as mentioned above, but so far we’ve managed to keep quantum physics out of it.

CHAPTER 3

The First Old Shack

Let me preface this part of my story by saying that in the fifties the correct racial terms were Negro and Colored. The N word was the standard racist appellation.

The woods behind our house were a treasure for young boys growing up. And a tragedy for one elderly Colored man who had the misfortune to live in what we called, The First Old Shack.

It wasn’t a shack when we first moved into the neighborhood. It was a residence in the woods just beyond the second monkey tree. Somebody lived there.

One day when the owner was away some of the older boys broke into the house and took all the furniture outside. It rained several times before the owner got back to his house and found that all his belongings had been strewn to the winds. He took what he could and abandoned the house. After all, some White kids had done the damage and there was no hope that it could be remedied. The safest thing was just to recoup what he could and leave.

I went back in the woods to look at the First Old Shack and the old Colored man was there, trying to salvage what he could. He asked me what I had done. I told him I didn’t do it. He just kept picking things up.

I told my friends that the house wasn’t abandoned and that the owner was a Colored man. It didn’t seem to matter. The First Old Shack was universal property now, ours to play in and break as many windows as we wanted to.

He never came back.

Further back in the woods was the Second Old Shack. It was a much larger house, also abandoned. It became a major play place. There were bean plants growing wild in the area around the house. You could pull them up by the roots, strip off the leaves and there was your spear. The root formed a pointed end and made a perfect warhead. We would pick hundreds of them in season and have magnificent spear wars from the roof of the Second Old Shack.

Back beyond that was the shanty town that we used to visit. We thought they were so friendly and polite. Little did we know how terrified they were that something might happen to us. Boy, did they take care!

There was a wonderful swamp near the Second Old Shack. We built a raft to go out in the middle of the swamp. We hunted for water moccasins. We hoped to find an alligator, but alligators were practically extinct in Florida, at least in north Florida in the fifties. The everglades still had plenty of them. But I don’t remember ever seeing an alligator in the wild anywhere near our neighborhood swamps.

I’ve never quite understood why Florida decided they needed alligators again. They passed a law to protect alligators and the alligators flourished. Man, did they flourish! It used to be safe to find a swimming hole and jump in. Now you are risking your life to do that. There are alligators everywhere.

I remember driving down to Cape Canaveral many years later, like 1994 or so, and pulling over to the side of the road where there was a great big lake. I got out of my car and stood on the bank playing my flute to the wilderness surrounding. I looked down at the end of the lake and there was a funny little rippling pattern in the water. I watched and the pattern was moving toward me. As it got closer and closer it gradually slowed down.

When it was about thirty feet away I could see that it was an alligator, probably eight feet long. He was gradually drifting closer and closer. I was feeling a sense of awe. Here was a prehistoric creature doing what it had been doing for millions and millions of years. I was being stalked. I went and opened my car door so I could jump in fast if I needed to. Then I went back to experience being hunted by this old force of nature.

There were two fishermen close by. I waved to them and pointed at the