Sinner, Sailor, Saint: The Autobiography of James B. Dreme

By James B. Dreme

About the Book
James B. Dreme shares his experiences both in the Navy and serving full-time for voluntary missions for the LDS church. With this knowledge and occurrences, Dreme has many skills and messages to share with others that he has learned in his journey!

About the Author
James B. Dreme spent four years as a sailor during the Vietnam War, then served two years doing voluntary missions for the LDS church. Graduating from Mesa Community College and Arizona State University, Dreme has a teaching degree and certificate. After teaching and working as a drilling reservist, he retired but continued tutoring before retiring completely.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: Oct 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798889257868

Book preview

Preface:

WHO AM I?

Epiphanies, recorded and combined, are a portrait of the soul of the one, who in a timely way, records them and the practical jokes life plays, as few as they may be in times of shadow, provides the humor that may soften the otherwise bleak, black, white, and shades of gray with a hint of color.

I’m a fifth generation Mormon, and all of my lines nun through the polygamous Mormon colonies of Mexico before polygamy was banned in the Church. I’m a Veteran of the Viet Nam era, an honorably returned Mormon missionary, and I am still sealed to two wives that I’m legally divorced from in the mundane legal system. I’m also an admitted pragmatic agnostic, and even though this hodgepodge of my reality that I’ve recorded here is but a small sample of my life, it seems to me be a very ordinary life. But then it is the only one I know. However, when I think of it in the context of my own existence, it does resemble the unpredictable dust devils, common to my childhood in the Sonoran desert.

I feel that I have always had a close relationship to my guardian angels. However, I believe everyone is loved, protected, and guided by superior unseen beings in spite of what they believe rather than because of it. I personally don’t believe in any kind of eternal precepts on which organized religions have cornered the market. I believe everything that exists does so because natural laws have allowed it to come into actuality. If there is a spirit or energy dimension, then it seems reasonable to me that it was born of the so-called big bang just as our physical or mass dimension was.

What I believe we need more than to have superstitions to guide us is education. I do feel strongly that what we Jack as a people is free public education for everyone, with no top limitation, other than one’s own will and ability to learn. Our present form of government doesn’t function properly as a representative form of democracy because one main ingredient is missing, and that vital component is a truly educated electorate. If public education with no limitation was available, I really believe that we might gradually evolve a truly workable form of democracy where capable educated people, instead of bleating sheep, become the majority of the body politic.

Even in hard times, we have the resources to pay for this, if education for all, were higher on government priority lists than corporate interests in the resources of the underdeveloped countries of the world and religious concerns about holy sites on the other side of the planet. Religion must not continue to be surreptitiously supported by government. We cannot allow ourselves to be continually caught up in the crossfire of holy wars, and we certainly can no longer afford to be the world’s policeman.

But setting aside my own personal philosophical views, I really do regret my recklessness and careless ways. Much of my youthful conduct has, I believe, caused a lot of the extra work that had to be done on my behalf to keep me in this physical sphere of existence for so long. I don’t understand the love that must motivate such efforts, but I feel that I would be ungrateful if I allowed my life and experiences to become nothing more than ashes on the wind at my final demise. And so I feel that the least I can do is make an attempt to record with my poor skills, my experiences for better or for worse, and with them some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way. For all that we are is the sum of what we ever have been becoming. Whether or not many read the record of my existence is to me almost irrelevant. I’ve already used up a lot of space, time, and resources on this rocky planet, and I must not allow all of what these resources have made of me, evaporate as if they never were.

THE FIRST BOOK

OF DREME

Early Memories

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Some of my earliest memories are of Christmas, and of my Christmas memories, the magic of the Christmas tree stirred the kind of emotion that burns permanent pictures into the mind. To my wondering baby eyes, the most fascinating ornaments on the tree were by no small coincidence, the delicate glass globes my mama tried to steer me away from. The more she attempted to use slight of hand, bait and switch, and other tricks to get my dedicated curiosity distracted with other things, the greater grew my desire to examine those large jewel-like baubles and get to know the secrets of their worth. You would think that the more fragile the ornament, the more secure would be its mooring, but that alas was not how those mysterious godlike giants known to me as Mommy and Daddy operated. And why didn’t my little fingers always do what they were told? The thin little wires that held those crystal balls suspended before my enchanted gaze were not stingy, they willingly shared their prize, perhaps a little too easily, but that in no way lessened their virtue in my eyes. I could never grow tired of gazing at them. Some had a smooth roundness, and others were angular jewels with intriguing lines, all had fascinating shiny surfaces. But like other interesting things in my world, including puppy dogs and bugs, those little glass wonders would at first chance leap from my not so fast fingers, and in the case of those beautiful forbidden orbs, self-destruct on the hard, bare wooden floor. Altogether too many of them seemed to choose this fatal escape route from my treacherous grasp rather than sit patiently and be of some help in my effort to understand and appreciate some of the mysteries of that part of the universe to which I had some access. These ornaments were not special to the world, they were not designed by some great artist like Faberge, but they were superior to what is found in most of the various wide and tall Marts of today. Many of those spherical globes that I still cherish in my memory had delicate silk screened designs added to their mirror-like surfaces, others that had intricate faceted sides like over-sized jewels might it seemed have been stolen from some rare dragon treasure. Today the ones folks like mine could have afforded are rather plain, as if to provide any special intricacy would cost the CEO of the company that produced them his multi-million dollar Christmas bonus. Cheap electronic tricks have since replaced art and quality in our present bubble-like existence.

There is no doubt in any working person’s mind that the worth of our money has been deflated so tremendously over the last half century or so that you are hard pressed to find hand crafted detail and quality in any of the little things that ordinary people can afford. This deterioration of our economy has been carefully hidden with smaller amounts of product in larger and larger packaging and in the molded or stamped out plastic that has replaced wood and more expensive durable metal. There are a million ways that advancements in electronics have been used to mask the thievery of large corporations, who now shuttle to the robber barons at the top, all the profit that once allowed one adult to support his family where two now struggle to do so. But the time I am remembering was a time of innocence and naivete. It was an era when all white Protestants felt that the panorama of existence was unfolding just the way Jesus intended. Mormons like ourselves could pretend we were a part of that happy family, which in a later time would be called by some the silent majority. After all no one could tell by the color of our skin that we were not of the accepted kind, that we were not one of them. I would not learn of such complications until I met those little elementary Christian kids, who though they were the minority in our town, had been taught well their rightful status, which assured them that they were among those who were predestined to live in mansions with addresses in the gold streets section of maybe a cloudy but Holy Heaven. According to some that lived next door to me when I reached kindergarten age, they had learned this in Sunday school. I can still hear their chants across the sod berm that kept our irrigation segregated from theirs Jesus loves me, yes, I know, for the Bible tells me so. It was a lovely little ditty written in the forties by Dale Evens, wife of one of everybody’s favorite Hollywood cowboys, Roy Rogers, but their rendition of it gave it a sort of NA NA, NA NA NA sound. Some of the little protestant kids in school would ask to see my horns, which seemed a little stupid because I usually wore a crew cut or a buzz job in those days. Their torments and name calling never ceased until from older children the censure evolved to cold shoulders and sneers. It was a hard facade for them to keep up when they became old enough to realize that in the community that they lived in, the most popular kids, including athletes and class presidents, were Mormons. Worse yet for them, the Mormon wards held regular weekly dances for teens, basketball games, and etc. in the big air-conditioned (important in Arizona) rec halls that were a part of all the modern Mormon church buildings, and these could be found in every Mesa neighborhood. Many a Southern Baptist teenager in those days decided that giving up the coffee that the Mormons banned, for the more intimate dances that the Baptists outlawed, was a fair trade. The Baptists would never cease being peeved at the nearly one-way traffic going from Southern Baptist to Mormonism. I myself, one day, would have a hand in putting my fair share of both Catholics and Protestants under some Mormon water, though upon reflection, as far as leading them out of emotional bondage and into the freedom of empirical fact, the choice I presented to them at that time was little different than if I’d offered to lift them out of a glowing red BBQ pit onto a grill. I’m sure I didn’t do them any favors, but I doubt that I did them any greater harm either. But alas, in this account, I refer to a simpler age: gone are the days when the economy was verging on true, but the people were content with the falsehoods of their fathers taught to them dutifully by their mothers.

Whether plastic or tin, silk or rag, children don’t worry about the complexities of the world and its economy. Of the toys that Santa brought me, I remember best my brown Teddy bear, my version of a safety blanket, and a boy baby doll that closed its eyes when it was laid back. These may have been clever bribes that would hopefully get me used to the fact that Momma now had to spend time that once was all mine caring for my new baby brother. Later on, before I got to the age where Dad thought a boy should lose his dolls, I would pull its rubber head off of the stuffed cloth body and look inside to see what made its eyes open and shut. The mechanism consisted of a simple but clever little wire frame on a rotating horizontal axis that went through the eyeballs with a weighted prong extending away from the face, so that gravity was allowed to do all the work. The head was not much harder to put back on than it had been to take off, and I would use this new skill from time to time to demonstrate for my brothers and sisters, as I eventually acquired some (who may or may not have actually cared), how their dollies’ eyes worked. From the earliest times, I can remember I wanted to understand not only that what I could see and touch existed but how and why it was or was not what it appeared to be. However, early on from an emotional standpoint, what I really loved most was my dear brown Teddy bear, with eyes that though they stayed open, glistened like those of a tiger, and care for him as I did, I don’t recall the day I last saw him, and I can only suspect that my dad, who in my early days was always afraid that his boy might grow up too soft hearted, was the napper.

The second Christmas that I remember, which was actually my third (I was only nine-months-old the first time Christmas rolled over me), brought a black and white Panda and a Lionel train set. I enjoyed the Panda, but it could not, as I suppose was intended, replace my dear old Teddy. This, coupled to my loss of quality time with my momma to my new little brother, was the first hard lesson of the impermanence of our mortal existence. But possibly for such a poor family as ours, at least partly from a sense of guilt, I was showered with many gifts that Christmas. Among the major ones was a shiny new red and white trike. I was way too young to even dream of assembling or operating my train set, but my dad took care of that for me. I strongly suspect that the Lionel train set fulfilled some of his latent desires to experience a normal childhood, one that could never have been allowed in a poor rural dairy farm setting. His own early years were submerged in the needs of the large family he was born into. As one of nineteen children (though more than one of them did not survive long enough to have their own families), Dad sort of got lost in the shuffle of a dog eat dog survivalist atmosphere that permeated his early existence. It’s impossible to know for sure why my grandpa felt the need to sire such a large family, other than the fact that he was doing what his own father did. By the time he was a young married man in the late nineteenth century, the Mormon Church was giving up on plural unions and banning new polygamous marriages. Though I’ve never seen a study on the subject, I’ve noticed that married people (and probably it’s whichever one has the most to say about how many children there will be in their family) don’t seem to want to quit bringing in more kids until they’ve acquired the one that seems to represent their own self; sometimes the criteria is their numerical place in the family, such as first or last boy or girl, or it might be based on just the sex, facial features, and/or even the color of their hair, depending on what criterion are available. This may be the natural effect of the modicum of narcissism that all healthy people enjoy, which enables them to feel good about themselves. If they are unsuccessful in their efforts to field a replacement, they may feel an incompleteness that they can never explain or rectify. It may also be a sort of pseudo attempt at immortality, just in case there is no after life. For whatever excuse there was for my grandpa, he seemed to feel that his life would not be complete unless he left behind a family that his father or his father’s wives would be proud to recognize. Grandpa outlived his first wife, who produced eight children before she passed away. Then he married Grandma, who was nearly twenty years younger, and bore him eleven more. So my dad was just one of many, lost somewhere too near the middle, to have any real identity that would stand out in such a large herd. Life on a farm during the depression was a sunup to sundown struggle, where they worked from can to can’t just to stay afloat in a world flooded with the poverty of the first great worldwide depression. Dad just never did have a life outside his share of the work to help keep the large clan fed and clothed. Mom, too, was a child of the depression, though in a family less than half the size of Dad’s, unlike him, though her family was poor by today’s standards, still she didn’t grow up in utter abject poverty.

Our own little family seemed always to hold onto a shadow of the depression and war since those were the two conditions my folks knew best. Some portion of the siege mentality that was part of our identity was due to the fifties approach to the cold war, which happened to fit well the beleaguered history that spawned our Mormon culture. Our first basement was originally intended to double as another bedroom and also a fallout shelter, and the idea behind our year’s supply of stored food was inherited from the times when the church lived under the threat of having all its property confiscated if it failed to conform to the Christian marital doctrine, which had been written into federal law for that very situation. So the Prophet of the Mormon Church at the end of the nineteenth century blinked, and to appease both sides, issued a manifesto, not an overt revelation from God (so the fundamentalists couldn’t squawk too loud), yet a law issued by the First Presidency of the Church that would be enforced with excommunication if needs be. That fear of the federal government was built around the long war over polygamy. The conflict between Church and state was enough of a war that the federal government had sent Johnson’s army to Utah in order to prevent Brigham Young from joining the Mormons up with Mexico, a country with liberal laws regarding polygamy. But it would seem highly unlikely to anyone who has studied the history of the Church that Brigham had ever entertained such a foolish notion, after all he had sent a 500-man battalion to join the federal forces and march into Mexico as an additional show of U.S. military might. But this whole episode spurred the Church to remain independent and self-reliant, not tying its fortunes too closely to those of the federal government. When the Great Depression of the twentieth century hit, the Mormon Church didn’t wait to see what the government would do, it began its own welfare system. When Roosevelt decided to do something similar, he sent a delegation to Utah to study the Mormon system, which was based on providing food and clothes in exchange for work. Roosevelt’s initial system used the same principles.

Before we actually owned our first house and began building that bomb shelter, we rented and moved around while Dad searched for that elusive job he could build his career around. We lived in quite a few places by the time I was two-years-old, and I can only remember a few of them. When I was born, we lived in a really small mobile home according to my mother, but I can’t even remember ever having seen it later on.

LIVING IN AN ENCHANTED DESERT

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One of the places we lived that I remember was a small house out in the desert near Apache Junction. The yard was set in desert landscape but bore little resemblance to the phony-looking pseudo desert landscapes that eventually became popular in the phoenix suburbs. These often consist of colored gravel, covering small, out-of-place-looking artificial mounds that are laced with contrived unlikely combinations of vegetation, which are intended to represent the native flora of the Sonora. But this little house that we lived in for a while was built in the desert in such a way as to leave in place much of what nature had put there. The exceptions were rock boarders made of the rustic natural desert rock of the area and a display in the center of the back yard that consisted of quartz, obsidian, and a prodigious amount of iron pyrite (fool’s gold). It was sort of a rock hound’s shrine.

The inside of the house was designed, no doubt, by some evil desert witch to attract little munchkins like myself and tempt them with trouble. It seemed as if there were no empty spaces on walls or in the comers. Any place that could hold a stand or a set of ornate shelves did so, and on those myriad of surfaces were knickknacks of every conceivable type, especially the kind sold at every roadside tourist trap that dotted the countryside from sea to shining sea. Every untouchable creation under the sun must have had a representative somewhere in that house. I don’t remember breaking any of them. But I remember the feeling of almost busting my buttons, straining at the seemingly unbearable desire to put them all on the floor where I could admire them in a more personal way. Surely lost somewhere in my memory is at least one roar from my father as I was taught the seriousness of such a breach of house rules. A roar that is easier to remember is that which emanated from the lair of the neighborhood King. We lived within hailing distance, at least it sounded like it on Saturday mornings, of the small local zoo. The king of the zoo and the chief attraction was the zoo’s lone male lion. One day, when Mama took me to the zoo, the zookeeper was bragging about all the beer she always gave to this big old King of beers. Right in the middle of her guffaw-laden speech, the King lifted up one of his royal hindquarters and urinated on her. Mama couldn’t stop laughing, and finally the old lady had to join in the laughter as the rest of the crowd did, though her half chortling attempts at mirth seemed somehow sour and insincere. Later Mama said the old bag deserved what she got for trying to inflict human vices on such a majestic beast.

Now that the King had made a monkey out of the zookeeper, the word seemed to get around, and the zoo became even more popular as all the people wanted to see the local royal celebrity.

IN A SMALL TWO-ROOM COTTAGE

WITH CARDBOARD WALLS

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I never did know why we moved to Apache Junction. Dad no doubt had some job out there for a short while. But our home base, so to speak, was in a small two-room cottage that Dad had worked for on his own father’s dairy farm. In a family of so many kids, there were no inheritances that the individual child was unable to carve out for himself, each kid had to make it on his own, and until each one married or left home, all his or her work went to help support the entire family. Dad would never get over resenting his in­laws for their different way of approaching things. My mom’s dad subdivided his small farm and gave each of his sons most of an acre apiece to build a house on when they got married. Dad had to humble himself and put our little cottage back behind his sister Velma and brother-in-law Lamar’s house. Velma was Dad’s sister, and Lamar was Mom’s brother. Our families had identical gene pools, and so we were double cousins. There would eventually be seven of us and eight of our double cousins, who would grow up together almost as if we were one family. One of the reasons Mom had married Dad was because she loved and admired my Aunt Velma so much that she didn’t think she could go wrong marrying into a family that had created such a saint. To this day, I can still say I never did meet anyone more giving and patient than Aunt Velma, plus she was intelligent, too; she had been the salutatorian of her graduating class in high school.

IN A COTTON WOODS

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While Dad was working to pay for our little cottage, we lived in an even smaller house, which he also purchased from his father; it was no doubt a package deal. Our little one-room whitewashed house was situated right on the edge of a cotton field on Grandpa’s eighty-acre farm. In collaboration with my mother’s memory, I determined that I was just less than two years of age when we moved to my paternal grandfather’s farm. By then I had been walking and talking for a while but was in no way as precocious as my own son would be someday. My son Cameron would not only recite the alphabet and count to thirty by one and a half years of age but would take it upon himself to identify them when he saw them in public. The first time he did so, I was nearly as shocked as I was impressed. I was carrying him into a movie theater, and as we approached the door, he stiffened as if he were going into a convulsion, but as was actually the case, he was standing up in my arms with his right arm outstretched, index finger at attention, hand going almost into an Atlanta Braves hatchet chop as he shouted at the top of his little baby lungs. Four! Four! Four! There was a big number four over the entrance to theater number four that we were about to enter, it was if it were some kind of epiphany, and suddenly he recognized one of the aspects of numbers and letters, the fact that they were universal symbols of some kind, and he could expect to see them out in the world in other than the park I frequently took him to in Midland, Michigan. This park had large, colorful wooden letters and numbers that he loved to see and touch. Now he could see that those beloved symbols that his big sister Kristen had drilled him on continuously had relevance in a world that would now always seem to be a little more familiar.

When my parents and I lived on Grandpa’s farm, it almost seemed to me that we lived in a little cabin at the edge of a copse of woods of indeterminable size. The Jong staple Pima cotton stands up in my memory as tall as nine or ten foot saplings, yet I know for a fact that it doesn’t grow to much more than half that height in this part of the country.

One day my black Cocker Spaniel Flossy and I decided to investigate the Cotton Woods that ran alongside the house. We plunged into a washboard landscape of irrigation furrows in the shady green unknown to see what we might see. The wide shallow trenches created neat little paths between each tall row of plants, and we could either follow a path or we could go between the plants to look down new paths; we did both. Everything was beautiful, and I had no thought of what could go wrong. When without warning, I found myself surrounded by thousands of wild red warriors, and they were taking no prisoners that day. I howled for the cavalry after I felt the first hot stab of one of their fiery lances. l don’t believe I had ever been attacked by large, angry red ants before, but I know now that their sting will hold its own against that of any bee, and they don’t hesitate to use their stingers because unlike the honey bee, these little Amazon warriors don’t have to be martyrs and give their life to the cause, like honey bees do when they sting. Flossy joined in my call for help, and it was my little dagger’s directions that Mama was able to follow as she rushed in to the rescue. I believe that the reason I still have that memory is because it was combined with a set of strong emotions. I’ve learned over the years that if emotion can be paired with learning, the retention rate is much higher. Maybe the learning curve goes up because the emotional stimulation of adrenaline usually indicated an extremely acute situation to our hunting and gathering ancestors and quick learning from situations that had been dire, no doubt often meant in actuality the difference between life and death, and so more effective learning when strong emotion is present in the learner is probably a nearly universal human trait.

OUR FAMILY COMMUNITY

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Shortly after my fight with the red denizens of the wild wood near our little white house, we moved into our only slightly larger home. Dad and his brothers had somehow loaded it onto, I believe, a large flat trailer on which they ordinarily hauled bales of hay. It wasn’t a completely amateur job considering that my dad’s half-brother Uncle Clarence, for a time, made good money moving much larger and more complex structures. But they brought the not too sturdy wood frame house, which because of its fragility, had to have been a precarious load from their family farm to the lot behind my double cousin’s home.

We now lived in what might be described as my maternal grandparent’s family compound. On this three-acre property, there were five houses, besides our own small one. The homes there included Grandma and Grandpa’s, plus the houses belonging to the families of their four sons. If ever there was a paradise for cousins, that was where we lived.

Mom and Dad were the youngest couple, and we began as the poorest of the poor, but what we didn’t know about wealth didn’t seem to hurt us as children. We took baths on Saturday so we would be clean enough to go to church on Sunday. The boys used one galvanized tub full of water, and the girls would use another. Since warm water had to be heated on Grandma’s stove, the effort was economized. I think we kids had our community baths at Grandma’s house, for the same reason we did so many things there, it was because Grandma was the matriarch of the family, which was patriarchal more in name than in actuality.

It truly was other, than its matriarchal undertones, a community born of the self-sustaining doctrine and structure of the Mormon culture and of the depression. For instance, when a family needed a new outhouse, it was a cooperative project. The small cousins were useful because we could be lowered into the hole that had to be dug and then we had room as small kids to dig and fill a bucket on the end of a rope with dirt, which was then lifted up with a hand cranked windless. The hole, not being much more than four feet across, left little legroom for adults. Admittedly I was not allowed to be lowered into an outhouse hole to help dig until I was nearly five-years-old, but before I was a full participant, I had witnessed the process more than once. An outhouse pit was dug at least thirty feet deep, or until water began to seep in. It was difficult to lower someone of any weight thirty feet down and then pull them back up again, even with a windless. But the job had to be done. We were outside the city limits and therefore not eligible for city sewerage, and I don’t think anyone had a septic tank yet in our little part of the world. But during my time on the family property, we did indeed live in a different world. The ice man brought ice up the lane in a small truck, took a block out with his big pincher-like ice hooks, and walked right into grandma’s kitchen, emptied the drainage pan, put the ice in the top compartment, and left, never missing a note of the tune he was whistling. The milkman, though he didn’t come in, always left Grandma’s order on the kitchen porch. I was familiar enough with the routine of both to do their jobs, if I could have only lifted their loads. I was at that following age and stuck to them like a shadow from the time they arrived to the time they went on up the lane to meet the needs of my cousins. My maternal grandmother had a butane gas stove, unlike my paternal grandmother who cooked on a woodstove ‘til late in the fifties. My dad’s mom was good at putting just the right amount of wood in her wood stove so that she got the perfect temperature, and the fire burned itself out just when it was no longer needed. She hated the idea of switching to a modern oven and having to start all over again as a novice cook. And she would not let them tear down the old house with its wood stove still in the kitchen. It was a number of years after my uncles had built a new modern house in her big front yard before Grandma stopped sneaking out back to use the old wood stove. But my two grandmas did have one thing in common; they both did a lot of cooking when I was young, and they themselves were not yet too old.

While I was still around two years of age, our own little house in the bare vacant space behind and to the south of my Aunt Velma’s stucco adobe home had for a very short while a cardboard-covered frame wall between the two main rooms, a money saving trick no doubt learned during the depression. There were of course many problems associated with using cardboard as a building material, the least of which was not the fact that it was the kitchen that was being separated from the living/bedroom, a kitchen with a volatile coal oil stove. One day I remember Mama taking me into the kitchen and showing me that the wall was burned and black. I don’t know where I had been when it happened, but I suppose that I was at one of my cousins’ houses. Dad managed to budget in a little money for better building materials after that, and thank God I never saw a cardboard wall again, outside of forts built by kids.

Eventually my crib was moved into the kitchen, and little Davie’s bassinette stayed in the living room with Mom and Dad. One morning I woke up to a miraculous revelation. It was as if the Heavens had opened up and revealed to me the secret of utter joy. My crib was only about ten feet or less from the kitchen sink. Under the sink was a whole percussion section; it didn’t bother me that the more musical part of the band was missing. The cymbals looked a little like the lids from some of Mama’s stainless steel copper bottomed kettles, and I easily could have mistaken the drumsticks for big wooden ladles had I not been endowed with the wisdom of a toddler who knows what to do with fun when it is left within his reach. I climbed over the high but not high enough sides of my crib as quick as I could; there was no time for needless delay. The racket was sweetness to the ear, or so I thought. My dad, who later would remind us all with an occasional short, impromptu concert, was very nearly tone deaf, but though he had difficulty distinguishing a low note from one either higher or lower, he could hear sounds none the less, the way one might imagine an elephant could, and he had no trouble hearing my recital, but of course he was unable to appreciate it. Dad came racing through the door dressed like a ghost in his archaic, long handled Mormon temple garments and whisked me away to I don’t remember where, but I’ll grant myself one guess since it was a two-room house, and Dad was unlikely to go outside in his in-law’s neighborhood dressed in his undies. I guess Mom and Dad were sure they had distracted me in a timely fashion (before I got addicted to drumming) because they made no effort to put my steel drum, band equipment up out of reach. The next morning, their own first-born taught them another lesson in parenting (later some genius would give it a name: child proofing, putting things baby can’t have out of baby’s reach). Dad and Mom may have been novice parents, but they weren’t stupid. It didn’t take more than one entire weekend of sleep-in opportunities gone forever to teach them the lesson. I got to be in my own big band on both Saturday and Sunday mornings. Never again as a toddler did I get my grubby little hands on Mom’s bread, frying, or any other kind of pan, and you know, I don’t remember missing that wonderful opportunity for even an instant, toddlers are opportunistic. I would simply turn to eating caliche dirt for entertainment. I can still remember what caliche dirt tastes like. Whenever I happen to be walking past a vacant lot in a rainstorm, it takes me back to around the age of two and the smell of wet caliche dirt, which is almost identical to its taste.

AN INTRODUCTION TO: A MONSTER IN THE NIGHT

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One aspect of self-awareness is demonstrated in our use of the emotion we call fear. Fear helps us prepare for danger and conditions us to proceed towards the unknown with caution. If we do not confront and evaluate the reasons for our fear in a timely and effective manner, we may develop neurotic behaviors, paranoid attitudes, or even paralyzed reactive reflexes when confronted with the still dark edges of what we don’t understand. Since our fears are most often based on what is supposed but not known to us; gaining knowledge relevant to our circumstances will, when warranted, aid us in replacing a fear of what might be with a healthy respect for what is.

If we fail to make the transition from fear to understanding, we risk reacting ineffectively in the face of danger. When we perceive a threat and lack sufficient information to identify it clearly, our first reaction, inherited from primitive times, is a flip of the coin, fight or flight. Regardless of the results of the ensuing encounter, if we survive, our choice of reactions will set a behavioral precedent. The next time an even remotely similar occasion arises, we will be strongly motivated to handle it the same way. After a while, we will react that way without thought. When a strong emotion like fear is paired off with any new experience, the learning process is very efficient, whether what we are learning is the best or worst way to deal with that situation. The same is true for other strong emotions, such as passions, including hatred, which may in some cases be a secondary response to fear. This efficacious erudition process that nature has provided to enhance our survivability has at least one drawback; it makes it difficult to break patterns of emotionally driven behavior. Even when habitual activities produce repeated negative results. Eradication may depend on evoking even stronger opposing emotional responses for extended periods of time.

My thoughts on this subject have their roots in a very early personal experience. My mama guided me through what was perhaps my first major life crisis. In solving my dilemma, I believe my mother helped me cross over one of the major coping watershed experiences of my life. An account of the first chronic nightmares in my memory, at around age two, is given in the following narrative.

A MONSTER IN THE NIGHT

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One of the hardships of toddler-hood, for me, was the garish existence of the chronic nightmare. The earliest dream that I still remember must have been inspired by my introduction to the beast we so lovingly call dog. I would set my age at close to two because we were living in the little house Dad had moved from his father’s farm. I would guess that the dream had to be based on some older memory of an encounter with a stray dog, probably before I acquired my black cocker spaniel, Flossy; maybe I was given Flossy as a protector because of such an incident. Based on the contents of the dream, a likely scenario would have one of my parents scolding a potentially unfriendly stray that may have growled at me, maybe even snapped a warning at me. I am led in this direction due to the fact that my first dog, Flossy, was a Cocker Spaniel with a bobbed tail, so even defending her pups she would not fit well on the suspect list of possible inspirations for my nightmare. In this dream, I would find myself being pursued by a monster. I seemed to know it would bite me and believed that the bite would hurt beyond anything I could imagine if it caught me. In my dream, the monster pursued me relentlessly, gradually gaining on me. But just as soon as I was sure it would catch me, I would wake up screaming. Mama would come in and comfort me, and everything would be all right. I’d go back to bed and sleep peacefully until the next night.

I don’t know how long this went on, but I’m sure my mother was ready for some relief by the time she came up with a solution that she thought had promise. By then she knew my dream about as well as I did, so on the night she was ready to try her new strategy, she came in to comfort as she had numerous nights before when I woke up screaming for bloody horror, after another near miss at being devoured alive. This time though, instead of simply calming me down and putting me back to bed again, she told me that dream monsters are not real and they can’t really hurt you, even though the monster looked real and his teeth were very scary. Then she told me that she was going to share the secret of controlling a dream monster. Mom said that when the monster began to chase me, if I would turn around and face him, he couldn’t hurt me. She said that if he tried to bite my arm, his teeth would go right through me and it wouldn’t hurt at all. I was still at the age when I believed everything my parents told me could be nothing short of the entire truth in any matter they might care to address, I wasn’t aware of any other possibilities.

The next night, when my dream nemesis began chasing me, I went through the same horror as before. But before the monster got close enough to catch me, I remembered what my mama had told me. I was deathly afraid, but I forced myself to stop and then to turn around and face it. The creature was wolf-like in appearance, and when I stopped, it also halted, as if to evaluate these new unsettling rules, of which he had not been made aware. Finally the big dark hairy thing with a mouth full of very large fangs lunged at me. I stood my ground, and just as Mama had predicted, its teeth passed right through my arm without causing any pain or even leaving a mark. And as if ashamed of failure, the monster turned and tucked its tail between its legs and slowly slunk away. The dream reoccurred several more times, but each time the monster was more hesitant to even be a participant in such a sham pageant until finally he didn’t even bother to show up.

There are too many lessons there to even list, but one thing is for sure, because I had a wise mother, I learned at a very young age that the best way to deal with fear is to face it.

THE ICE CREAM MAN LIVES IN MY HOUSE

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Dad got a job driving an ice cream truck; it had a small freezer compartment in the back full of delicious treats that were quite rare to families that had only a few ice boxes (powerless refrigerators) between them. Sometimes Dad would take me with him on a few rounds through the nearby non family neighborhood. Whenever I got to go with him, he always let me have a little taste of the profits. The truck played the Merry Widow Waltz, which has to this day remained one of my favorite melodies, though it may have been over twenty or thirty years since I’ve heard it played. But to me it comes with that ultimate recommendation, the magical feelings of personal nostalgia.

EXILED TO THE PINEY WOODS

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Outside my own mother, my very favorite companion during toddlerhood was my maternal grandmother. My mama was her youngest and rather obviously her favorite child, and I think for just as obvious a reason I felt like I was Grandma’s favorite grandchild. But I believe she had the capacity to make all her grandchildren feel that way. Since I was my mother’s only child for the first eighteen months of my life, I was more than a little spoiled by all the attention and adoration I got. So when my baby brother was born, my relationship with Grandma was quite fortuitous. Things for me changed drastically, the loss of most of Mamma’s time to the care of the baby, was neither completely understood by me, nor was it appreciated. Yet I adjusted by turning to Grandma for the attention I was used to getting from my mother. I needed her more than ever before, and Grandma was there for me. Whether I was my grandma’s favorite or not might easily be disputed by a number of other cousins, with Grandma gone, who’s to say? I’m quite certain that it is human nature to place ourselves at the center of the universe we think of as ours, especially while we are young, and Grandma so it seemed was at the center of what I supposed to be my universe with me.

It seemed that no sooner had I adjusted to the loss (as it were of Mama), Dad got another temporary job, this time in Prescott. Before we had actually made the move, I was homesick for Mesa and Grandma. I must have slept most of the way to Prescott because I still remember the car coming out of the forest from the south, going around a bend, and coming into town. It isn’t a complicated memory; a nice long sleep while we traveled up from the desert to the nearly mile high city simplified things in my own mind. It had to have been a long sleep because in those days, you didn’t do more than thirty-five miles per hour in a car like ours on level ground, let alone climbing Yarnell ill, one of the most treacherous highway grades in America at that time.

Mama called our little car Tin Lizzy. It was equipped with wire spoke wheels, and best of all, a rumble seat. The rumble seat compartment opened up like an upside down trunk door to create a little open air riding compartment in back of the cab of the car with a seat for two. I loved that little pre-World War II coupe because until just before, we traded it in on a metallic green 1949 Oldsmobile sedan. I was the only occupant of my own private back seat cockpit. It was a special feeling to be back there with an unobstructed view of everywhere we had already been, but I was glad to share it with Little Davy when he was old enough to stay sat safely in his seat; unfortunately for him, I think it was not all that long after he was allowed to sit back there with me before we lost it in trade to the car dealer. The trip from Mesa to Prescott is around a hundred and twenty miles, but I had lost my opportunity to get any kind of perspective on that when I succumbed to the sandman early in the journey. At home I had always been able to walk up through our little family neighborhood to Grandma’s house for a visit. I might have to walk a lot farther now, but I felt that I remembered the way.

One morning, after we had been away from Mesa and Grandma, altogether too long from my young perspective, I knew I needed to go see Grandma. She was never able to walk down to see me because walking with her cane was a bit difficult, and so it was my responsibility to go up to see her. So Flossy and I set out to visit Grandma. The street we lived on didn’t go in exactly the direction I was sure I must go, but it was that way at home, too. I never walked the longer distance down the lane to Grandma’s house; I always took the footpath, which was more direct. So I headed out across a vacant lot until I came to a road whose direction looked more promising. Flossy and I passed by some construction workers working up in the rafters of a new home they were building. The workers called out a friendly greeting and asked me where I was going so early in the morning. I said that I was on my way to Grandma’s house for a visit. They told me to have a good visit, and they waved good-bye. I returned their wave and continued on my way. My little companion and I hadn’t gone far, and a man in a white shirt and tie drove up in a nice new coupe. He pulled over to the side of the road and got out of his car. We held almost the identical conversation I had just had with the carpenters. The man asked me if l thought my mama would be worried about me. I said I didn’t think she would, she was too busy tending little Davy. He offered me some gum if I would let him take me home to Mama; I patiently declined. I was used to having to repeat myself to adults.

Sometimes Mama would nod and say yes, sweetie, and then when I asked her something, she would say, I’m sorry, what were you saying, dear? So I told him again that I wasn’t going home right now, I was on my way to visit Grandma. He started to approach me as if he thought the decisions made by little two-year-old boys, wandering through the countryside by themselves, should be disregarded. Flossy begged to differ with him using concise yet quite curt, logger expletives. He was wise enough to avoid arguing with her and hurried to get back inside his car. Without further discussion, he drove away.

I thought the matter was settled until not more than fifteen minutes later, he was back, this time with some authority. Out of the car stepped Mama! I told her the same thing I had told everyone else I had seen since I had started out, only Mama explained to me that it was too far to walk and she needed me at home to help her tend to little Davy. So we all piled into the man’s car, Flossy, too, and Flossy was not at all cross with him this time. At home Mama began to find new ways to make use of my ability to be helpful.

It wasn’t long before Grandma and Grandpa responded to Mama’s very next telephone conversation, in which she related my would be adventure to them. In spite of all the difficulties in such a long arduous journey, they soon came up to Prescott to see me.

CHANDLER’S RANCH

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After Dad’s Prescott job was finished, we moved onto Old Lady Chandler’s ranch (that was what my father called it). We lived in a little house directly across a dirt lane from her. One day I went over to look at her new car, which was parked in the open-ended carport attached to the side of her house. Little Davy was at an age where he followed those who were older, the way a devoted pet follows its master or the way I had followed the iceman and the milkman back in the family compound. Her brand-new car had a strangely unsettlingly anemic look to it. I pondered what was wrong with it and then I spotted the problem. There was a big bucket of black (axe grease) near the car; I told little Davy that it seemed like Old Lady Chandler had not had time to put the black on her car yet. It must feel odd having to drive around in a car that was not black like everyone else’s. Old Lady Chandler was a busy lady, but I had plenty of time to spare, and little Davy and I would be glad to help her out. The lid was not on the can, and the contents were obviously ready to be used. By the time we had applied the black as high as we could reach, I figured that we had saved her a lot of work, and so we went on to other things.

That night Dad told me that Old Lady Chandler didn’t like the work we’d done on her car. He said that when she had gone outside and seen her car, she commenced howling like a witch who had just been splashed with a bucket of water. She said she didn’t even have to be told who had sabotaged her like that. She had gone looking for Dad, and when she found him, she fired him on the spot. Dad said that it was all right; he’d been looking for a reason to quit her anyway. She was, he said, a bitter ‘old maid’ who blamed men for everything wrong in her life. Of course I wasn’t a man, but I was the son of a man, and that I guess was good enough for her.

HOME SWEET HOME

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When we left Chandler’s Ranch, we moved back to the family compound. I was thrilled; I would be near Grandma and so many of our cousins. There were five girl cousins that lived in our little community. There were a few others, several of which were a year younger than me, but they were not a part of our gang. Also, there were a couple more that visited quite often and some that lived up in Prescott that came to visit Aunt Velma from time to time. These girls ranged from about three to five or six years older than I was. I think because I was always at Grandma’s house, I became the mascot so to speak of at least the local portion of this gang of girls. I recall the flock of us running like the wind, all flapping our arms as if they were wings; in a way we were like the unbalanced V formation of migrating ducks, which are not quite as graceful in flight as their cousin geese, and in other ways, we were as much one as any flock of birds could ever care to be. The particular time that sticks in my memory, we flew past the shop where Uncles Rodney and Lamar worked on automobile upholstery, north to Uncle Rodney’s house. It was all I could do to keep up, so I was one of the tail feathers on this flapping swooping host of birds.

One morning I went over to visit my cousin Virginia at her house. She and Robin, Uncle Rodney’s oldest daughter, were sitting on her front porch, her brother Phil, who was severely brain damaged, was tied on a leash to a cottonwood tree in the yard. This was Aunt Barbara’s way of keeping him safe while allowing him some fresh air. She didn’t seem to be too big on fresh air herself; she stayed holed up in her house re-breathing all the smoke she exhaled into the small confined atmosphere. I rarely went inside of the house. I didn’t care for the lingering stench of cigarettes that permeated the little cottage, even when she didn’t have one in her mouth. Besides her seemingly insatiable desire to imitate a dragon, by flaring her nostrils and sending out puffs of smoke, about the only vision of her my mind refused to turn loose of, was when she backed up against the side of the empty front doorway writhing back and forth and up and down, scratching her back against the door frame like a big mother bear. Now that was an impressive sight for an almost three-year-old to behold; she must have had powerful legs to move such a mass around so rhythmically.

Soon after I arrived on this particular morning, Virginia showed us the front page of a newspaper. She pointed to an article that she said was about a woman who had a baby. Her mother, she claimed, had told her all about what you had to do with a boy to make a baby.

She proceeded to give us a brief explanation, then Robin said, I can get my two brothers, and we can go out in the field and try this out. When the two brothers showed up, the girls told me that I couldn’t go with them, and I never did hear the results of their experiments.

Then one day one of the girls took me into the outhouse south of Virginia’s house. There were two or three other girls already at the privy waiting for us.

After we had all crammed into this mini-building, one of the girls said, We want you to take your shorts off and show us your wee-wee. I hesitated a bit and then told them that if I did, they had to show me theirs, too. So without any further negotiations, we all pulled down what we were wearing. After admiring each other’s equipment for a while, there came a knock on the door. Several more girls were admitted after a brief recap of events. When they attempted to pull down their panties, too, they discovered that there just was no longer enough room in the little outhouse, so one of the girls decided (and everyone agreed) that we would move our little science class into the tall Johnson grass between Virginia’s house and the out-building. The Johnson grass was nearly head high on me. The girls all gathered around me in a circle. One of them told me to put my wee-wee in hers. So I moved up close and tried to force my floppy little thing between the lips of her vagina. I just couldn’t make much progress, though we both pushed our bodies together as best we could with me trying to guide with my hands my little uninterested arrow into its more anxiously expectant new quiver. None of us knew enough about our own anatomy to have any chance of doing even a close approximation of what it was that we thought we were trying to do. Some of the other girls began to grow impatient, telling my first partner to hurry up and let the rest of them have a turn. I was eventually passed around to each, with the usual complaint, He’s not getting it in very far. I don’t know how long it might have gone on but for a big shadow that suddenly fell over the group. I looked up to see what had blotted out the sun. What I saw was