When I went to school at age 6 (my parents didn't send me to kindergarten), school went smoothly the first 2 years. What I remember most was that it was my first rich social experiences with other children. These were very positive, but I still liked to spend a lot of time alone. As an adult now, I have made sure that my children have richer social experiences starting around age 3 than I had.
I had always thought that my loner mentality had to do with the environment with my mother. However, my first daughter, Angela (age 10 1/2 at the time of this wriging), is a lot like me. I could see it in the way she plays alone. In her first years on the school playground, she was very popular with other children but she liked to go sit alone in a quiet place and ponder things. The in-laws sometimes complain about this. She would come home and avoid the kids outdoors, instead playing in her imaginary world with her toys. She often has wonderful questions.
Likewise, she won't physically fight with other kids. She's big and strong and could flatten any kid her age, but she will only talk, and will quickly walk away as soon as a seriously threatening emotion is expressed by another kid, even if it's a conflict between two other kids and not involving her. Angie is as sensitive to violence as I am. So many times I have seen my mother's personality in Angie, and sometimes call her Little Elizabeth.
When I was a child, I learned the most valuable things from my parents, my sister and my brother, and not much from other kids.
When I was 8, we moved across the Arkansas River to Little Rock. My father had started up a private practice in Little Rock, and has also started teaching at a college for minorities as well as the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He was doing a lot of work.
My father basically bought a small residential piece of land in what was a forested area at the time. My father had a custom home built for us, and we watched them cut down the trees and build the house, which took a few months. We were on the side of a little hill which was just forest, a brook, lots of rocks, and a lot of wildlife. There were wild dogs in packs (and afraid of humans), raccoons and other furry mammals, and the streams had a variety of fish. I loved our new home.
Most of my life over the next 4 years was spent with the rhythms of natural life, just myself hiking around in the environment. After those 4 years, I went parttime social.
Unfortunately, unlike the school in North Little Rock, the new school in Little Rock was a long distance away and I was the new kid. I clearly came in at the bottom of the established pack social order, and I don't think I moved up for years. Some kids near the bottom rungs sensed my aversion to violence and would frequently take advantage of me. Sometimes I would cry and then I was really the laughingstock. I hated school. Practically none of the kids in the school lived near me, but they lived near others. I was the one out, and hung around only with other a few other new kids as they arrived over the next few years (and most had the same fate as me with the established pecking order -- so the new kids hung out together). My brother fared much better, but he was always my opposite in a lot of ways, very socially skilled. For example, he was an artist with amazing drawing capabilities at a very young age, whereas my drawing and even my handwriting was very bad after growing up, never comparable. Likewise on social skills -- he had them, I didn't.
In national scores, my vocabulary and verbal tests were a little under the 50% level, whereas my math scores were always in the upper 90s, and I was way up there in other areas, too. I had little interest in school, and was often an irritant to my teachers because I would daydream and get behind on lessons. If they called me by name, I was clueless about what was going on, and I resented the ways they would try to embarrass me. I just retorted with a quiet, perfectly still don't give a shit attitude. What I remember most about school is the feeling of returning from daydreams or from reading pocketbooks or the wrong lesson and not having a clue what the rest of the class had been doing ... I wasn't following, and needed to figure it out and catch up enough to get by. I didn't like the teachers and they didn't like me, but we didn't care and let everything slide. I kept up with the lessons from skimming the books. However, people were amazed that I did exceptionally well on national tests in the areas of math and science. In English, I was down in the pits. (This explains my "unique" writing style.)
I loved being outdoors at home, and that's what I remember most. The forests were rich with many kinds of life, and the geology had diverse kinds of rocks. After exploring the region within walking distance, I would bicycle way out, hide my bicycle, and hike all day, sometimes jogging to places on the horizon. I was in a hilly area, but there were small mountains just a few miles away, and they were splendid on the ground when I got there.
Day after day, I felt very happy hiking for hours in the forests and nature, and in the summers enjoyed the streams. I wondered a lot about the universe and life, and was awed by the sheer size and complexity of the world and the universe.
This is something I didn't share with any other kids at that time, as I felt very different. For other kids, hiking into new places was an adventure and exciting for awhile, but got bored quicker than I did, and sometimes killed or damaged things and did other irritating things. I preferred to be alone with the other life in nature.
Most other kids just thought of some personified "God" which they had little idea about, except he was some holy "father", and then some guy named "Jesus Christ" who would be their savior if they followed some rules. I thought what typical idiots, but they couldn't let go of their security beliefs. For some, nature was "God's country", but who, or what, was "God"? A holy spirit for Goodness and evolutionary progress is something I could identify with, but careless consumption and exploitation in purely self-centered ways was not what I think a good "God" has in mind.
Indeed, most of the other kids thought the Earth was created 6,000 years ago and everyone came from Adam and Eve. Disagreement was fine, but I was taken aback by the emotional animosity of this sort of disagreement, and the ganging up against me of particular subcliques. I learned to be quiet and not raise issues with some kinds of people. On the other side were the reasoned who just got quiet and thought about it, but many were uncomfortable. There weren't many kids in Arkansas to talk straight with.
It created a yearning for me to someday head to a place of higher learning, though I didn't want to go to any institution according to my young outlook on institutions. I didn't like school. I just wanted to be in a better society.
I was impressed with the no-nonsense people and diversity of New York City, where my grandmother lived and I had visited very briefly. They seemed reasonable and functional, and very tolerant and openminded. New York City was fascinating.
Church was important to many kids, both socially and to give them security beliefs to relieve them of fear of death. My parents had brought us to church (Calvary Baptist) for a short time as kids but had decided it wasn't for our family. For me, religion was fascinating and full of a lot of good morals and concepts, and a lot of good people. On the other hand, it was also full of hypocrit kids who attended but didn't practice the moral precepts in their private life, and maintained a simplistic dogmatic view of life and the universe.
(Ten years later, at the university, I was shocked to find that some of the top academic achievers in my classes thought the Earth was 6,000 years old, and people of other religions would go to Hell because Jesus Christ wasn't their savior. Church had many totally idiotic and spiritually clueless attendees, ironically. I felt sorry for people who were raised in that dogma from the very beginning of their lives.)
If there were no promise of the one big benefit -- life after death and something called "heaven" -- then they would not be following their religion. It seemed that religion was a way of shepherding the masses. It was a code of sheep shephards thousands of years ago who were mostly illiterate and ignorant. It kept people morally in line. If-thens. If you do good, you go to heaven. If you do bad, you go to hell. (And then you have egomaniacs like Bin Laden who are drunken with power and exploit other negativistic head cases. How can anyone kill people in the name of "god" and religion? A great god doesn't need their help. They are just drunken with power and ego.)
What is "heaven"? (Forget the body and virgins... so ridiculous.)
In my view, the good parts of religion were descriptions of enlightenment, and people like Jesus Christ, Muhammad, and Buddha were enlightened, but they wront nothing. (Muhammad was illiterate.) Many of the writers of the Bible and Koran were too drunken with ego and power. The dogmatic part was manmade, for ignorant illiterates thousands of years ago, and counterproductive in the modern world.
Speaking of the modern world, back in Arkansas (semi-modern), there were people from modern cities out-of-state who were moving in, in droves, as a major golf course and an interstate bypass had been built near my scenic neighborhood, and modern homes and amenities were going up all around us. The beautiful natural area was a magnet. Most of the people moving here were coming from bigger, more modern cities of other states, mainly the northeastern U.S. and midwestern cities like Chicago, and these kids had generally more enlightened ways of thinking, thank Goodness.
That the neighborhood was growing up all around us meant three things: destruction of the environment, lots of building materials, and refreshing new friends.
I became very aware of ecosystems. Downstream, far from the construction, the fish, mussels, and other water related wildlife died out. Mammals also disappeared. Some of my favorite places were cleared for construction. All of this had a profound effect on me.
On the other hand, I enjoyed watching the houses be built, by going inside and seeing everything they were adding and doing.
I stole construction materials and built tree houses, dragging the materials considerable distances. Some were multi-level. Some were just a little bit off the ground, and others were way up, with a lot of time and effort attaching and pulling wood up on a rope every day and building. I had all the free time in the world as a kid, and looked forward to getting home from school every day in order to resume the next stage of the project. I spent a lot of time in school dreaming up designs, as well as at night.
I lived in my own world most of my childhood, though I had a few friends towards the end of my "childhood".
My social life didn't really take off until I hit adolescence and the hormones started flowing. My brother had started getting facial and body hair at an exceptionally young age, and mine wasn't far behind. Kids called me "Link" and "Dar-baby" in reference to Darwin's "missing link" and my promotion of evolution. It kind've fit me. My newly blooming social life seemed to follow my newfound interest in the opposite sex.
At about the same time, I entered a big new school at age 12 and ventured into new social groups, entirely different from the ostracizing establishment from age 8 to 11, and that was a new beginning in my social life as a kid. Part of this was due to "desegragation" whereby the government started mixing African-Americans and Caucasians in the schools by bussing us around to bigger schools. Also, as the local neighborhood grew up, I had more "new kids" from other parts of the US to make friends with. We were bussed together since we were from the same neighborhood. The "establishment" was just over a border. They bussed the new kids in the new neighborhoods to avoid resistance from the establishment.
This was the early 1970s, and my parents had always raised us to treat minorities of all races and types equally. My father taught at an all-black community college on the weekend, and would take me to mixed race social events and clubs. When I entered this school desegregation program, I was shocked at all the racism, on both sides, because I was so accustomed to no racial friction between my father and his students and extracurricular activities. As a hispanic, he identified with them, something I came to realize. I became one of the leaders of the middle merge group, which was basically the blacks from good families and the whites with similar upbringing to mine, not the bigots on both sides. America had just passed thru the 1960s, the beginning of the Civil Rights era, but attitudes didn't change quickly in society, and this was the first time that many white kids had seen black people like that. Now, in 2004, it seems laughably barbaric, but these civilized changes happened within our generation.
In another way, I had felt socially "excluded" during ages 8 thru 11, and I empathized with others who were similarly excluded for various reasons. As I established higher social rank, I still wanted to remain "inclusive", and felt that every person had their special talents. As long as someone wasn't hostile to others, then they were OK to me, and I would reach out to a lot of "excluded" kids of every race, height, and immigrant status. I hung out with various groups in diverse places.
However, during that period, I also did some regretable, rebellious juvenile things, like hotwiring and borrowing motorcycles without consent and going on long joy rides, and other testosterone-driven behavior (but always returning them to their owner who I felt for). However, I did have my limits. Never did drugs for fear of brain damage, though I smoked marijuana sometimes, and grew my own, too. I did some bad things to other people, but not very serious, and I always felt guilty and empathised with what they must feel and think afterwards. My confession. The details are not important. Wish I could right some wrongs, but it ain't feasible, so best to just move on.
My new social life combined with poor school discipline resulted in my nearly failing grade 7. I daydreamed all day in class. I had D's and F's in everything by the end of the year, and they said I'd need to either need to repeat grade 7 or else go to summer school. As one old acquaintance said, he was shocked that the "walking encyclopedia" was actually failing a grade. (A lot of my education was extracurricular in the library.)
My mother didn't want me to go to summer school because it was full of "bad" kids, so she persuaded the school authorities to allow me to enter 8th grade.
That summer, my mother taught me English at home, and I went from hating English to enjoying the rules of grammar, the origins of words, the history of exceptions and slang, and so on. My mother is a wonderful teacher. I always loved history. I also straightened out my worse juvenile attitudes. My mother was much more effective than my father in persuading me about things. She was also a better teacher than my school teachers. I think she sensed that, and had a lot of self-confidence in her ways. She always had confidence in my and encouraged us in independent and divergent thinking. She wasn't naive about the real world when it came to teaching, though in other ways she was isolationist and quite naive.
At ages 13 and 14, I was bussed all the way across town to a school in a black neighborhood, whereby the school was 37% white and 63% black. It was in terrible condition, as were the books, but socially it was heaven for me because almost none of the kids from my childhood past went. Instead of the busses being full, they were nearly empty, except for the kids from parents willingly living the desegregation experience of that era. The more established local households had put their kids into private schools or pulled strings to get them into the closer public schools so they wouldn't be bussed. For me, it was an adventure, and I thoroughly enjoyed and explored the new environment.
Nearby neighborhoods were also sprouting up outside mine, with lots of kids new to Little Rock, coming in from all over the country (and a few from other countries), and my social life was all apples. More and more new kids were getting on the bus. The initial mostly empty bus routes were merged into one bus and that route became quite wide.
I remember one girl who just cried and cried on the way back from school on her first day. She had gotten on the bus from a new home area on a scenic hilltop which I'd previously hiked on, but had been razed for houses. Nobody knew anything about her, so I went and talked to her. Surprisingly, she could hardly speak English, and she had just arrived from France. I thought of how my father must have felt going to school, though he's a lot tougher.
I was a very poorly self-disciplined kid and still wasn't doing well in school, but for the first time I can remember, I started to like my teachers and got along with them. I also enjoyed school for the first time. The teachers were a bit more advanced in intellect, and were very humble and earthy in the desegregation schools.
I had also transformed into a socially self-confident and proud person, as well as very naughty. I was considered "cool" and quite popular. I was still quiet, but I made friends easily and seemed to get along with most everyone at the new school. I had never been judgemental of other people, but I really enjoyed other people for the first time, and I had diverse kinds of friends. The emotional and social transformation is something that's hard to convey in writing.
Decades later, I watch groups of teenagers in shopping malls, trends and the media, and it reminds me of my years almost long forgotten, the feelings and social dynamics.
This is a photo of me hiking with a girlfriend, me with the long hair, she with the short! (She tore the photo. I had a lot of girlfriends and switched often.) I usually preferred to hike thru nature alone, but hiking with country girls was OK, less so with city girls.
By the time I got into high school, ages 15 thru 17, I was making all A's, except for English. It was not by any strong effort, as I didn't do homework. I just enjoyed school and paid attention in class. I remember Reverand Howard, my black science teacher of the 8th grade who taught evolution during the week and was the preacher at a church on nights and weekends. Everyone sensitive who used their brain and their heart loved him. I cried when he died of a sudden heart attack, as did so many others of most different kinds, especially my favorite teachers.
I wasn't ambitious or competitive like some other kids, and I usually still sat towards the back, but I was engaged. My grades surprised me. I couldn't understand why I was doing better than most of the kids at the front, who I felt sorry for because they took books home. They were too rote and conformist, I figured, and had never learned to think much on their own.
Once, there was an annual statewide exam competition between high school achievers, held about 50 miles out of town at Arkansas State University, and teachers encouraged me to get on a bus and go. At the end, we all got into an auditorium and they started to announce the names of the winner, second place, and honorable mentions. I was bored and not paying much attention, but much to my surprise, I got a couple of honorable mentions in math and science. I think based largely on prior reading of pocketbooks by Isaac Asimov, not the classroom book. People around me were just turning and looking at me and saying "congratulations!" and I was just stunned. My name called out in that audience of all those top students statewide... I just couldn't believe it. This included some good students from the rich kids school I'd hated in yesteryears and who I'd seen there. Likewise, they probably just couldn't believe it was me, that name over the loudspeaker in the auditorium at the end.
Watching the other kids from other towns, who were so friendly and well behaved, I wished it had been them to go back to their town proudly. What are the teachers and library like in Bauxite, Arkansas? What's it like living there?
This was a new element to my identity that wasn't easy for me to accept. I was more comfortable being anonymous. I didn't want people to start to have expectations of me, or start watching me. I didn't want to conform nor did I want to disappoint anyone. I got very shy about my achievements.
I was clueless about my future. I didn't know about politics and society like some of the other kids such as the Ledbetters, who asserted themselves in school politics and journalism and had a politician father. I couldn't engage in debates because I didn't know the issues, and it was better to stay quiet than make a fool of myself by opening my mouth. When people started to ask me what my future plans were, like the career counsellors at school, I was completely blank, and embarrassed. I felt stupid. I didn't even know about universities around the state, much less the country.
I'd never been very competitive though I did enjoy sports and played baseball and one season of football in a light non-school league. I didn't like contact sports (agression). But in my senior year, I actually got into a school sport, at the encouragement of a close friend of mine, Bruce Jeffrey. It was called "Cross Country", an autumn season sport, whereby teams race over a grass course, such as a golf course, over a few miles. My school had won the state championship the year before, so I didn't expect to even make the team, but just to run with them socially. However, I improved quickly, made the team, and came in fifth in the state, second on the team, in the championship run. (Our school won the state championship again.) Bruce was the only person before me, by 2 seconds, and he was lucky I didn't know the course from the previous year because I thought we were still far from the finish line. I finished with too much left in me.
A young guy on the team, Martin Fulk, had gotten me interested in recreational/social running. Little Rock had recreational running clubs, "road races" and "fun runs" which attracted hundreds of people per event, and were normally run over scenic areas. There was also the Little Rock Hash House Harriers which ran every Sunday over rougher terrain.
In track, the spring season running sport, the longest race was the 2 mile event, and that what I specialized in. On the championship night, I had a stupid idea that eating several spoonfuls of honey 30 minutes before the run would give me an energy boost and advantage, and didn't listen to a friend, Robert Addington, who warned me against it. I thought I'd win this one, the only one that counted. Instead, in the championship run, I got a terrible cramp and dropped out. My science was bad. It was also a hot night, and a competitor from another school, Phil Sudman, walk up to the starting line with a soaked head, soaked shirt and trousers. His science was smart -- artificial sweat to keep him cool on this unusually hot night. Phil won the race, and he was the youngest guy in it. I was disgraced, though it wasn't anything intense. I was happy to have made the team and lettered.
Back in school, practically all of the other people of high academic achievement had been applying to Ivy League schools, special private universities, and out of state universities based on their chosen career. I had done nothing. People kept asking me where I was applying, and I had no answer.
About to enter the university, I had no idea what I wanted to do in my life. I wasn't going to waste my father's hard earned money on no clear ambition, so I just decided that I would enroll in my state university, which was cheap for residents of the state. I did decide that I would leave home and go to the main campus 200 miles away in Fayetteville.
A few months later, high school was over. As usual, I didn't attend any ceremony, as I get very bored with customs.
Late that summer, I enrolled at the University of Arkansas, the main campus 200 miles away in the northwest corner of the state. It was in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. It looked like heaven to me.
Here's a photo of my father in our back yard in Little Rock. He provided a wonderful environment and financial support in so many ways.
