For My Daughters: A Father Reflects on Family, Friendship, and Faith

By Tom Pfizenmaier

A Father of Three Millennial Daughters describes his journey and passes along practical and spiritual wisdom

 

At the request of his daughters, Tom Pfizenmaier, a dad, pastor and professor, shares the life lessons, experiences, convictions and st

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen2Paper Press, Ltd.
• Release date: Jan 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798885677011

Tom Pfizenmaier

TOM PFIZENMAIER is a native New Englander who grew up in Hingham, Massachusetts. He has been married to his wife Donna for forty years and has three adult daughters: Lenevieve (aka Lennie), Katherine (aka Kate) and Ann (aka Ann). Tom holds Masters degrees in Theological Studies and Divinity, and a Ph.D. in Theology. He also earned a D. Dad. (Doctor in Dadology) the hard way. He served as a Presbyterian pastor for thirty-two years, a seminary professor for three years, as well as dean of the faculty for the last two before retiring in 2019.

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Copyright © 2023 by Tom Pfizenmaier.

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Introduction

This book has been gestating for many years. It started with a conversation Lennie and I had walking on the beach at Pajaro Dunes long ago when she was in college. She just turned and looked at me and said, Dad, you and Mom should write a book about raising kids. I think you’ve done a good job raising us.

I almost keeled over. My mother used to say you can’t brag about your kids until they are thirty, and we were nowhere near that mile-marker. If Lennie were about 19 then, that would have put Kate at 15 and Ann at 11. Instant maternal disqualification. Not to mention the sheer absurdity of the claim that we had done a good job. Like most parents, I’ve always felt like the rodeo clown--foolishly jumping into the midst of circumstances and situations for which I was inadequately prepared and destined to be trampled to death—all to save the endangered rider(s) on the bull of life! So, I simply dismissed the idea out of hand, but it sat in my being like a dormant seed waiting for spring.

The idea entered the embryonic stage when Kate graduated from Mizzou. As I watched her walking across the stage at the Hearnes Center I was thinking that a college education is a wonderful thing! Then I felt nauseous. It hit me like the boom on a jibing boat. There’s a lot they can’t teach you in college, a lot they won’t teach you in college, and a mind-load they don’t teach you in college. They can’t, because they can only catch the mountaintops of human learning in four years (or is it five now?). They won’t because they don’t want to. Professors have prejudices and there are certain things they steer you away from, like a serious discussion of God. They don’t teach certain things because the subjects don’t fall into the classic college curriculum—which almost no colleges teach anymore anyway.

So, Lennie (and Kate and Ann) the book you asked for long ago is now crowning. This last push came from our new pastor here in Poulsbo. He asked us in church quite recently, If you could share anything that is important with someone you love, and leave them your thoughts, what would they be? What would you say?

Lennie, it is now probably fifteen years or so since you popped the question, so now I’m popping the answer. Not yet born, but as I put the words down on the screen it is beginning to appear. Call it Dad’s Curriculum Vitae—a curriculum of life. Actually it’s just my musings on certain matters I think it’s important for you to know, or at least be thinking about, as you all move deeper into the project of adulthood (not adulting which is pretending to be what you’re not, but the genuine article of living an adult life). Some of these are topics you’ve asked me to muse on, and others I thought might help. As with all things you read, feel free to separate the wheat from the chaff.

There’s also a more selfish motivation at work here. I want you to know your Dad better. We are all close, know and love each other very much. But sometimes l get the haunting feeling (especially at graduations!) that there was more I should have said, more I should have told you, more you needed to know as you went out into the world. I think about stuff—a lot. You’ve seen me sitting in our library reading, or in my basement man-cave studying or praying in the morning—now relocated to my eagle’s nest in Poulsbo overlooking Liberty Bay. I guess I’d like to pull the curtain back and let you know a little more about what I think about, worry about, and care about. I want you to know a little more about how I see the world and try to do life. I’d like you to learn from my mistakes, so you don’t have to make them, and even to understand why I have, and will, sometimes fail you.

I love the three of you beyond measure. I once asked Lennie how she saw her relationship to her two younger sisters. She replied, Oh, that’s easy, Dad. Kate’s the head, I’m the heart, and Ann’s the soul. When I asked her to explain she said, Kate’s smart, is always the one I turn to for a balanced, rational, dispassionate view on what’s going on. I’m the one that gets all fired up and passionate about stuff. And Ann just always cuts through it. She always knows the right thing to do.

Lennie, I was astonished at this answer for two reasons. The first was that you had clearly already thought about it. The second was that it was such a perfect description of who you all are. Naturally, all of you contain the three components, but you definitely lead with the ones Lennie mentioned. So, I will try to speak here in the head voice, heart voice, and soul voice in the hopes that all of you will hear something in your native language.

As I move through the writing, I also want to introduce you to some friends I’ve never met. I say this because I know them through their writings which have shaped me deeply. A few you’ll meet are Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, Karl Barth, the great Reformed theologian, C.S. Lewis, the Oxford don and Christian apologist, Fredrich Buechner, a fellow Presbyterian pastor and novelist, N.T. (Tom) Wright the Anglican bishop and expert on New Testament origins, Henri Nouwen, the sculptor of souls, and a whole boatload of others.

You’ll also notice that I used endnotes extensively in the last section of the book. I did this so that if you ever want to track down the quote or the original thought I used; you could find it. It drives me crazy when I read something, and the author doesn’t share the source! There were a few items where I couldn’t find the source, and I’ve tried to make a note of those.

One of the elements I’ve struggled with here is consistency of tone. I tend to duck in and out of various voices which are aspects of who I am: Dad Dr. Rev. So I’ve decided to just let the material dictate the voice and make peace with it. I hope you can too!

A final word here. As you well know, I’ve been a Jesus lover my whole adult life. That love for Him creates a perspective which pervades the way I think and feel about most everything. Not only will you find elements of that perspective woven through these pages, but in the third section of this book, chapter 10, I’ll tell you the story of my own spiritual journey of God’s faithfulness across the course of my life. Then I’ll go on to speak of why I became, and remain, a Christian in terms of reasons of the mind, reasons of the heart, and reasons of the soul.

I Love you each, and all, beyond measure…so here goes!

Dad

PART 1: ON FAMILY

CHAPTER 1: On Apples and Trees

In Africa, ancestral connections are essential, for to be human is to have a history. Without this history, one stands in the air, and he who is in the air has no identity. --Joseph Byamukama, one of my students from Uganda

The Wisdom Imperative

If you ask me what I think is one of the core imperatives of life, it is to become wise. Not smart. Wise. There is a huge difference between Sophia and Scientia, between wisdom and knowledge. This is so crucial in fact, that the Bible has five books which are referred to as Wisdom Literature. Those books aren’t reference books, not an ancient version of Wikipedia, they are not places you go for information about stuff. They are wells of wisdom from which we are intended to drink. These books are filled with aphorisms (Proverbs) poetry (Psalms) life-coaching (Ecclesiastes) stories of tragedy and triumph (Job) and of how to celebrate the joy of intimacy (Song of Solomon). If other books are revelation (Thus says the Lord) and therefore declarative truth from above, it seems to me the wisdom literature is truth from below, wisdom which grows out of human experience. I’ve always loved the passionate invitation to Wisdom in Proverbs, chapter 3.

Blessed are those who find wisdom,

those who gain understanding,

for she is more profitable than silver

and yields better returns than gold.

She is more precious than rubies;

nothing you desire can compare with her.

Long life is in her right hand;

in her left hand are riches and honor.

Her ways are pleasant ways,

and all her paths are peace.

She is a tree of life to those who take hold of her;

those who hold her fast will be blessed.

In fact, I’ve developed my own working definition of wisdom which is this: Wisdom is experience, reflected upon, in light of the word of God. I came up with this definition years ago as a way of encapsulating the components of how I believe people become wise. So, let me break it down for you.

The wisest people I have known led lives wrapped in a rich quilt of experience. In other words, they lived. Some of those experiences were rapturous, some devastating. Some were formative, some were shattering. Some were full of light, others full of darkness. The wisest people I have known were people who took risks, who ventured out, and by doing so, were stretched as human beings. In the process they learned something about life and about themselves—and about God, which they would never have known apart from the experience of taking some risk or becoming adventuresome.

Lennie, you remember that years ago I gave you the picture of the sailing ship near the iceberg. The caption said, Ships are safe in the harbor, but that’s not what ships are made for. The wise ones that I have known have had many adventures. Some glorious, some disastrous, but they were adventures. Remember the refrain from Garth Brook’s song, Life is not tried if it’s merely survived, if you’re standing outside the fire. How can we become wise if we have no experiences in life? So, the first ingredient in wisdom is experience. You must live your lives.

The second component to my little formula is reflection. "Experience reflected on… One of my greatest fears for our world and its future is what I perceive to be a growing lack of our capacity for reflection. We are experience junkies, but we cannot become wise without subsequent reflection on those experiences. Therefore, people have serial relationship failures, job failures, financial failures—they never take the time to examine and reflect on what happened for good or ill. They simply move on to the next big thing.

When we don’t take the time to reflect, the lessons are never internalized, never become part of our character by fermenting in the vat of our values. It would be like taking grapes, crushing them, and bottling them right away. So many people live grape juice lives when they could live Bordeaux lives. The difference is simply time in the barrel of reflection. But reflection is hard, it is a discipline which is required for wisdom. Slow down, do the post-mortem, process what has happened, and internalize what you’ve learned. That is key for developing wisdom.

One of my favorite movie scenes is from Top Gun. It’s not any of the cool flying scenes. It’s not even the heart throb stuff with call sign Charlie. It’s the scene after Goose is killed when the training exercise goes south and the jet wash from another plane causes a flame-out of Maverick’s engines, and the ejection of both Goose and Maverick. Maverick lives, but Goose is killed. It is a tragedy which becomes the defining moment of the movie. It becomes a wisdom moment. Maverick is on the edge of quitting the navy.

The younger man goes to seek the perspective of Viper who is the training instructor at Top Gun. Viper offers Maverick deep sympathy embedded in deep wisdom. Maverick says, What are my options? Viper says, Simple, you can graduate with your class, or you can quit.

Wisdom always involves choices. He goes on to tell the young pilot, The simple fact is you feel responsible for Goose, and you have a confidence problem. He is referring to the fact that Maverick can’t seem to fly the way he used to. Viper goes on to say (and here comes the wisdom) A good pilot is compelled to always evaluate what’s happened so he can apply what he’s learned. Viper is calling Maverick to do some reflection, some deep soul searching-- not to make a snap decision, but to evaluate what he’s learned from this terrible experience. This is an invitation from a wise man to a young man to become wise—to learn to reflect upon his experiences, even, and especially, the tragic ones.

So, wisdom is experience reflected upon. Most people are pleased to stop here, but that isn’t enough. We must add the final ingredient. Wisdom is experience, reflected upon, in light of the word of God. This last piece is crucial. The reason is simple. Not only are eternal truths given to us in scripture, but a myriad of stories of heroes, villains, victors, and victims, all from whom we can learn. The eternal truths are essential in correcting our amazing capacities for self-centeredness, and self-deception, and self-justification.

There are many people who have bountiful experience, who have reflected on it deeply, but whose frame of reference within which that reflection takes place is itself faulty. Speaking of Navy pilots, Uncle Jeff has told me that during his Navy carrier pilot training, part of the syllabus included flying under the bag. The student pilot would be under a sort of canopy where he or she could not see any of the outside environment of the aircraft—only the instruments. The instructor would then mess with the plane’s altitude, heading and everything else—putting it in an inverted configuration so they were upside down in a descent—whatever would most disorient the student. The point of the exercise was to learn to trust your instruments and not what your senses tell you. The point was that a pilot’s subjective experience could not be trusted; but there were objective instruments which could be, and that your life depended on trusting them.

God’s word functions like that for us. The Bible says, The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Here fear means something along the lines of an awesome respect and submission to the expressed will of God. Notice what the writer is saying. Without this prior posture toward God and his will, we can never become truly wise. Why? Because in the end the wise person lives in accordance with the nature and design of life. In his compassion and mercy God has revealed those to us. They are His to give, and ours to receive.

Somewhere I read that people never break the commandments of God, they are only broken upon them. But when we live under his gracious reign, according to his design for us, we can become wise. Without this prior orientation of the fear of the Lord we are left to a life of discernment based upon guesswork, hunches, and opinion polls. Fear of the Lord is the sine qua non, the that without which a life of wisdom is an impossibility.

It is like trying to find one’s way across the country with no objective aids for orientation. No GPS, no map, no compass—we simply drive around in circles and become utterly lost in the process. Without God’s cluing us in, we don’t know who we are, why we’re here, what we are to do, or why we are to do it. And the beautiful thing is, we don’t have to live that way. It took me twenty-two years to realize this, but that story is for later.

Wisdom is the apt deployment of our learnedness of life through action that is correctly applied to any given situation in the right way at the right time, for the right reasons. One of our Bonhomme elders, an old Naval Academy man, taught me how to understand the difference between wisdom and knowledge: Cliff Schoep told me, "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad." At the heart of our calling to be fully human is the calling to become wise.

Family is the Cradle of Wisdom

In our family, wisdom was shared around the kitchen table. It’s interesting to note that the social scientists of our time have identified that a regular dinner together is one of the strongest predictors of family well-being. You all know my former colleague and friend, Don Everts. Don just published a book that said the same truth applies in strong Christian families.

One of the tragedies of our culture is that parents have too often outsourced the dispensing of wisdom to our children. We expect that the schoolteacher will stand in, or the Sunday school teacher, or the coach or whomever, for us, the parents. But the history of civilization, not to mention the biblical picture, has always given the primary role of wisdom traditioners to parents. Wisdom begins at home, around the table.

Lennie, when Mom and I were downsizing, you asked for the dining room table, which we were happy to give. For you, I think it symbolized hospitality, and for that I’m glad, because we indeed wanted all of you to be hospitable people. But the kitchen table was a place where we talked about how to do life. We talked politics, faith, and what happened at school today. We discussed how to care for each other (and how not to do that!). We (me mostly) told a lot of stories. For me, wisdom it seems is best served at the kitchen table through a menu of stories. Stories are a natural medium for wisdom transmission because they involve real people making real choices in their real lives.

Here’s one of my favorite family stories, which I didn’t learn ‘til I was probably in high school or college. One of my relatives (and therefore yours) was named A.A. Cooper. I believe he was on my grandfather’s side. At any rate, he lived in Dubuque, Iowa where he built an amazing wagon business in the late 1800s. It was the largest wagon works west of the Mississippi. He sold wagons in Asia and, during the Boer War, in South Africa. One article at the time stated that he had made one shipment of 13 railcars of wagons! He became a very wealthy guy and built two mansions in town, one for himself and one for his daughter. I believe one was since torn down but the other still exists.

Family lore has it that he was once approached by a budding entrepreneur who wanted to make a horseless carriage. He wanted A.A. to provide his carriage expertise to design the suspension system for this new thing. The family story is that old A.A. Cooper listened to the man’s pitch and dismissed him saying he thought his idea for a horseless carriage had no future. Yes, you guessed it, the young man was Henry Ford!

We are talking about wisdom, and kitchen tables, and family stories. When I’ve taught on leadership, and particularly vision I’ve told this story because it serves as a cautionary tale for a very unwise decision A.A. made, as it turns out. The profoundly disturbing thing is that his blood runs in my veins (and therefore yours) and that, as you well know, Cooper is my middle name! And Kate’s!

The point is that stories for good or ill can point us toward wisdom. We can learn as much from our family foibles as we can from our family moments of genius (spoiler alert—we don’t have too many of those in my family—maybe Mom’s?).

As you girls well know, I told a lot of stories, and repeated them a lot. That wasn’t by accident, but because repetition is how we have the story come to live within us, so that we begin to live within it. I would encourage you to begin to identity the stories in your life which have been wisdom-shaping and tell them early and often around your own kitchen tables. The truth is we are shaped by our stories: individuals, couples, families, tribes, nations, faith communities are shaped by the stories we tell—sometimes more than we know. This is a wonderful thing which can give us power for living and a sense of confidence as we live our lives.

Winston Churchill is a great example of this. Churchill possessed an irrepressible confidence in his abilities because of his family’s ancestry. His ancestor was John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough, who Churchill’s biographer refers to as the greatest soldier-statesman in British history. Andrew Roberts writes, Churchill’s sublime self-confidence and self-reliance stemmed directly from the assurance he instinctively felt in who he was and where he came from.

Churchill commented in the obituary of a family member that he, Churchill, had been born into one of the three or four hundred families which had for three or four hundred years guided the fortunes of the nation. When he was courting his wife, Clementine, he admitted that he was a worm, but always thought himself something of a glow worm. Churchill was shaped by the stories of his ancestors, their achievements, their wealth, and their status in a tightly drawn society.

But of course, there are other stories, other narratives, which can cast a shadow or even a pall over our lives. These stories have the power to hamper and hinder our lives. They usually begin with phrases like, No one in my family has ever… or I’m not…enough or nobody believes in me… You get the idea. Some stories liberate, some constrain; some empower, some enervate; some elevate, some hurl us to the ground.

We must be careful how we steward the stories in our families, they are the nuclear fuel for great good or woeful destruction. I think stewarding the stories is one of a parent’s key roles. Not only are stories the webs in which we are woven into community, but they are the beacons which guide our lives together. We don’t do our families any favors by telling only the good ones. No family has only good stories to tell. Your family has stories of alcoholism, broken marriages, abusive parenting, out of wedlock pregnancies, and bad business decisions (remember A.A. Cooper).

But those aren’t the only stories. Your family also has stories of faithful wartime service, hard work and business success, academic achievement, and personal service to the good of the world. My point is that your family is like most families. There is a blend of the good, the bad and the ugly. But all the stories are important, and they can serve, like channel markers in a harbor, to both keep us off the shoals as well as to guide us home to a safe anchorage.

Know Thyself (first part of the Great Inclusio)

So, if the journey is one toward wisdom, let’s consider how to get it. We’ve already heard the invitation from Sophia herself in the book of Proverbs, we know that the "fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (more on that shortly), and that families are a primary source of wisdom. But there are other voices which offer worthy counsel on the seeking of wisdom as well.

Socrates said, Know Thyself. That’s important, but it isn’t as simple as it sounds. To know yourself also means to be aware of the forces that have molded you. It’s like looking at mountains and becoming aware of the plate tectonics or subduction zones that formed them. It’s like looking at a Rembrandt and learning about the faith that produced his art. People are complicated, and so are you. All three of you are the products of all kinds of genetic, social, spiritual, and intellectual forces. In other words, not only do you have baggage, you are baggage; we all are. It’s important to know that. We are products of much that has come before us, and the more we know about that much, the better chance we have of being aware but not controlled by it. And the more aware, the more we can become part of our own conscious shaping.

The beauty of being human is that we have been granted power to morph the baggage into shapes, sizes and expressions which can bless the world. I think the key word here is grateful. Be grateful for what has come before to shape who you are, even what C.S. Lewis called the severe mercies. Become aware of the deep and various currents of life which swirl beneath your surface. Psychologists speak of the unconscious, or the shadow self where we store our pains and hurts unwittingly, only to have them erupt and kidnap our reactions and behaviors in startling and surprising ways. Part of becoming wise, it seems to me, is to learn to mine your own soul, so that there are no surprises, no hidden caches of fear, pain, suffering. Let me go autobiographical for a minute as a way of helping you to do the same, by making of myself two case studies; two tales from the crypt.

Two Tales from the Crypt

No. 1

It took me many years to realize that I carried shame because of how deeply I felt things as a child. My Dad was the emotional one in our family. Dad cried, Mom didn’t. Dad hugged, Mom didn’t. I remember my father kissing me on the cheek when I would go to see him in Scituate after he and mom divorced. As an adolescent boy it felt awkward to be sure, but I also remember the way it made me feel. Loved.

As you know, my dad was an alcoholic, and a very mean, and sometimes violent one. My older sisters and my mother bore the brunt of this. But when Dad was sober, he was the nicest guy in the world. Dad loved people, all kinds of people and he had some crazy friends. One of them was a Jack Larson. He captured wild animals in Africa and would bring them to America. I remember him coming over with some of them occasionally.

People liked Dad (not drinking Jack, sober Jack) and Dad liked people. Mom tolerated them. I never understood this about my mom. She could seem cold and aloof. She was an interesting person who lived and loved the abstract world of ideas (a penchant I must confess that I share) but she was not a warm person. She spent her Sunday afternoons curled up on the couch in her stocking feet, doing the New York Times crossword puzzle in ink (okay, maybe six years of Latin has its advantages). In contrast, her mother, my Nana, cried at the drop of a hat. I always resented my mother’s stoicism until one day I heard a piece of her story I had never quite picked up on before. And for the first time I began to understand how my story had been affected by her story.

My mother at age 17

My father in Berlin 1945, age 23.

My grandmother Nana age 18, c. 1900

My maternal grandfather, Francis Augustine Cooper

My maternal grandfather, Francis Augustine Cooper

My mother loved her Dad. She admired him and idolized him the way young girls often do. He took her swimming on hot Iowa summer evenings at the natatorium down on the Mississippi River in Davenport where they lived. He would let her hold the steering wheel while he drove down a country road and she cried out, Daddy, go like sixty!

By all accounts Frank Cooper loved his kids. He and your great-grandmother Modesta (yeah, I know) Harrington met at a picnic. Your great-grandmother was an old maid of 35; Francis Augustine Cooper was a convinced bachelor of 43. They fell deeply in love. One night, about fifteen or sixteen years later, the night before Thanksgiving, my grandparents went to bed and my grandfather told my grandmother he had a stomachache and asked if she would get him a hot water bottle. When she came back to bed with it, he was dead. Massive, fatal heart attack. My mother was thirteen and this was during the heart of the Great Depression. In good Catholic fashion, the wake was held at the house, and my grandmother, who cried at the drop of a hat, was a wreck. She wept and wept. Nana lived to be 99 and every Thanksgiving was an emotional calvary for her.

Now the curious thing was the impact all this had on my Mom. She was telling me the story, which I had heard before, and for some reason I asked her how she felt at this point, a question Pfizenmaiers were never taught to ask, they always asked what you thought. Mom’s response startled me. Embarrassed, she said. Embarrassed? Embarrassed? Are you kidding me? The more we talked the more I understood. It wasn’t just the wake. Following her father’s death, they moved to Baird, Iowa to be with relatives for a year. My grandmother cried for a year, and my mother, who was always a private person, found it agonizing to have all this attention focused on them.

Listening to her that day, the pieces began to come together for me. A young girl who suddenly loses the father she idolized, stuck with a grief-stricken mother, who was probably incapable of helping her daughter because her own grief was so deep, and an 8-year-old sister and an older brother in a small town. I think she just shut down. The premature death of her father, and her mother’s way of grieving that death was her wound, and I think she spent the rest of her life bearing, nursing, and protecting it. She would never be hurt like that again. I never saw my mother kiss or hug my father, unless he forced it when he was drunk—but let’s save that for later.

In our family dynamics, shaped largely by my mother, the main message I internalized as a kid growing up was, He who emotes first, loses. Emotional display is a weakness. Strong people don’t cry. If you lose control, you lose the game. So, I learned early on to suppress what I felt, to stuff it, and to cry into my pillow at night—but quietly, so as not to wake my brother. My father, who was emotional, was also volatile. Being like him was not to be desired. Better to be cool, calm, collected. Better to have mastery of yourself and check your heart at the door of decision. Rationality, dispassion, self-control, they were the triumvirate which, I was taught, should reign over me. Better to be a Cooper than a Pfizenmaier.

It took me a long time to realize, and to own, that I am a lot more like my father than I had realized. Lennie, you always make fun of me because I cry during Hallmark movies. You don’t even turn around. You watch the scene, and just ask, Dad, are you crying?

No, I blubber, and you laugh, because you are crying too. I cried a lot as a boy. In fact brother Buzz used to intentionally tease or torment me and then he would look at me and say, Cry! And I would, out of anger and frustration.

As we got older, he’d point out that a lot of pictures of me as a little kid were of me crying. And I’d remind him that it was usually his fault, and we would both laugh. But eventually I learned not to give him the satisfaction. But by then I had already internalized the lesson that in my family, crying was weakness. So, I sold my tear ducts on the auction block of self-control and decided I would follow the rational course like my mother. After all, emotions were terribly overrated, and those ruled by them were weak people—like my father, who had by then entered an affair which resulted in their divorce. As I said, it took me a long time to realize that I was a lot like him. So, part of my middle years was spent doing what the Jungians call embracing your shadow or coming to grips and trying to integrate that part of me I had disowned, but which never disowned me. I had taken up the family script, put on the mask, and played the part. I’d be a Cooper-- rational, calm, coolly collected, unflappable, and aloof. I learned that my heart was not to be trusted, and I should live in my head.

Along the way in those early teenage years, I migrated from my first family to my second family. My first family had eight people in it and was a hub of busyness. My four older sisters were all in high school (two were twins) and we lived on the main street, in fact it was called Main Street, in the middle of town near the high school, which guaranteed lots of visitors.

One of my early memories of those years was having wooden cases (24 bottles) of Coca-Cola stacked in the backroom as we called it, for when the kids dropped in. Our house in those years was a turnstile of young people. I remember one night, it was my mom’s birthday, the boys found out and brought her a cake. When folks were called for a piece there were over twenty people in the house. Just another night at the Pfizes. I was the little kid, around eight or nine, and was generally treated like the mascot, and I think I loved it!

But that all changed very quickly,