Growing up – Sage Telling Your Story

May 22, 2018February 26, 2019

Gym 3, by Ricky

(A tale of 3 “gyms”)

Gym1

It was in early June 1956, when I was banished (due to divorce proceedings) from California and sent to Minnesota to live with my grandparents on their farm. I had just turned 8 years old on the 9th. At the time, I expected to be gone for only the summer; but it turned into a 2 year “prison sentence” away from home and “loving” parents.

I shared a room and bed with my uncle, Dixon, who was 11 in December of 1955 and 11 ½ by June of ’56; and about to enter 6th grade, while I was looking at starting 3rd grade. Due to that traumatic spanking I received when only 4 or 5, I was extremely shy and reluctant to let anyone see me dressing, undressing, in my underwear, or bathing; and would “pitch a fit” if someone tried. Of course, I couldn’t do much when Grandma bathed me the first two times in the summer kitchen’s galvanized “wash tub” because I hadn’t washed all the dirt off by myself. I quickly learned to do that however. I was dirty because farm life is not soil free and baths were only on Saturday nights to be fresh for church on Sunday. I had to use my uncle’s used bathwater so perhaps I never really got clean.

When school began, my uncle, who by then knew from personal experience of my extreme reactions to any attempt to breach my “modesty”, began to tell me about having to take showers naked with other boys present after gym classes beginning in 6th grade. Daily school showers were a necessity back then as most farms did not have indoor plumbing and once a week bathing on the farm just wasn’t sufficient in a close social environment. Pubescent boys smell as they perspire during gym activities and recess playtime.

As a result of my uncle’s teasing about showering naked with other boys, I began to develop a fear of 6th grade, even though it was 3 school years away and I expected to return to California soon. The months of my exile passed and a new school year began and I realized that 6th grade was now closer than desired and my fear level increased but mostly ignored for the time being. Fortunately, I was given a reprieve and my “sentence” was commuted in late May of 1958 and I was taken back to California to live with my mother and her new husband.

When I began 5th grade at So. Lake Tahoe, I discovered that there were no showers after recess or any P.E. classes in elementary school, those being reserved and mandatory in high school only. I was able to put my fear and stress level on hold for 4 more years, while I got to “enjoy” the beginnings of puberty.

In September of 1962 I finally had to face my fear as I had finally arrived at high school and the dreaded after P.E. mandatory naked showers with other boys. By now, due to my well-established desire to see any boy naked, I no longer feared being naked among boys (or girls for that matter). What I was afraid of was having a spontaneous erection while showering, because at 14, I was still having random ones.

At school, they mostly struck when I was sitting in front of my 9th grade English teacher, Mrs. Joyce Holmstad. She wore low cut blouses and sat on the front edge of her desk (directly in front of me) and would often lean forward revealing to me (or maybe exposing to me) some bra and more than sufficient for erection purposes, cleavage. I always had to hide my crotch with books when I left at the end of the class period. But I digress from the gym. In all the four years of mandatory PE showers, no one ever got an erection that I could tell, and I certainly took every opportunity to look for one.

Gym2

Actually, gym2 is really Jim #1. I met Jim Robertson when he was 11 and I was 13. We became friends and he asked me to go to church with him one Sunday and we went for about one month until the pastor and his baby were killed in a car crash. I invited Jim to join Boy Scouts with me and he did. We were two of seven boys who ended up starting a new troop at So. Lake Tahoe. I taught him about sex and we became sex-playmates on sleep over nights but never did anything together during scout campouts. He ended up going to live with his aunt and, according to him, began to really enjoy sex with his female cousin.

Gym3

As you may have guessed, gym3 is really Jim #2. Jim Dunn was the son of a California highway patrolman and joined my scout troop when he was 12 and I was 14. He was taller than most boys his age and matched my height of 5′ 11”. His hair was blondish and eyes a very nice shade of blue. I liked him for his looks and gentle personality. Strangely, I was never sexually attracted to him probably because he did not look “interested”. I was so naïve about that stuff.

As we aged and moved into Explorer Scouts, we shared a couple of experiences that should have tipped me off that he was interested in boy sex play but I never caught on. As an adult, I learned that he died early from AIDS.

That’s all of my “gym” memories.

About the Author

I was born in June of 1948 in Los Angeles, living first in Lawndale and then in Redondo Beach. Just prior to turning 8 years old in 1956, I began living with my grandparents on their farm in Isanti County, Minnesota for two years during which time my parents divorced.

When united with my mother and stepfather two years later in 1958, I lived first at Emerald Bay and then at South Lake Tahoe, California, graduating from South Tahoe High School in 1966. After three tours of duty with the Air Force, I moved to Denver, Colorado where I lived with my wife and four children until her passing away from complications of breast cancer four days after the 9-11 terrorist attack.

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010. I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com

December 8, 2017February 26, 2019

I Did It My Way_How Else? by Ricky

When I was a toddler, my parents wanted me to do things their-way. While potty-training, my dad demonstrated how to pee standing up. As I did not like to wear wet diapers and the fact it was fun to “aim” at different spots in (or at least near) the toilet I adapted quickly; although my mom probably wished my “aim” was a lot more accurate. No one ever demonstrated how to go “number 2”. They only verbally explained the “procedure” and the expected “outcome”. At this time “Houston we have a problem” became my-way’s “game of choice”.

Their-way involved them standing there watching me sit on the juvenile-throne expecting me to do my business. My-way involved them leaving me alone in the room. Now, I had never had an issue with mom or dad watching me pee standing up or sitting down, but for some reason I didn’t like them watching me for “operation number 2”. It was either that, or I took some kind of sadistic pleasure waiting for them to release me and then going outside and squatting, filling my training pants with the material I’d been holding back. Besides the sadistic streak, I probably enjoyed their cleaning my private (or to them my public) parts after I’d made the mess. The warm or cold water washcloths rubbing and scrubbing those sensitive genital regions undoubtedly felt as terrific back then as it does now.

Finally arriving at the terrible part of being 2 which came with the twin concepts of “I have choices” and “the-others-keep-asking-me-if-I-want-something-and-offering-me-things-as-they-ask-the-question”, it became inevitable that my growing self-awareness finally made the connection with the fact that I could say, “NO!”. At that point their-way became, “their-way-or-else”. The “not-their-way” always had unpleasant consequences. Did I ever mention that I got lots of spankings? Apparently, I was either a slow learner, just plain willful, headstrong, or addicted to “my-way”.

Anyway, many months and spankings later, I finally arrived at age 4. By this period, I realized that their-way was less painful, but I kept to my-way when not being closely monitored. However, outright lying was not yet something available to me due to insufficient brain development and lack of an example I could recognize. Nonetheless, my developing self-awareness allowed me to understand that their-way involving eat-everything-on-your-plate did not fit into my budding comprehension of what my taste buds and throat muscles were trying to communicate to me. There was a serious mismatch between their-way (eat-everything) and my-way (eat-everything if it tastes good or doesn’t cause gagging). With lots of “prompting” on their part, I really tried to do it their-way, but ultimately, it was the “second-coming” of my dinner that finally convinced them that my-way was best.

At the age of 5, their-way still involved expectations of strict and swift obedience; as in “go to your room and change all your clothes”. I was perfectly willing to do just that, but there was another “Houston we’ve got a problem” moment. In 1953 ADD had not yet been invented, if it had I could have been a poster-child. I only have a mild case but it was combined with a well-developed sense of 5-year old scientific curiosity. So, my-way manifested as, when I was naked changing clothes the scientist part of me wanted to learn all about the hard little “spiky-thing” attached to me. Thus, changing clothes became a secondary pursuit and exploring the unknown phenomena briefly became my primary concern, just before the exploration was interrupted by yet another spanking of which I’ve written about before. My-way for several types of scientific self-exploration which followed also included the catch phrase, “explore in private” or in other words, my “don’t-get-caught-way”.

At age 10 their-way was effectively my step-father’s-way. In the summer of 1958 I was his deckhand on his tour boat. I readily agreed that his-way was the only-right-way. It was a fun time that summer and I didn’t want to screw it up. I couldn’t swim so I didn’t want to risk either falling overboard or, worse, being thrown overboard. I didn’t know him very well at that point.

He was a good man and never bothered me, nor I him. At age 12 I lied to him once and he caught me in it. I had to explain why I did it and he just told me to never lie to him again and I never did, nor did I need too.

During my teen years, their-way was really mom’s-way. Her-way mostly involved getting me to “promise” to do one or two chores before she got home. My-way was to promise and then do or not do as I desired. There were no consequences for not doing and I mostly procrastinated until it was too late and I needed to go to bed before school in the morning. Those were the golden-years of my-way.

School classes, Boy Scouts, and life in general did successfully teach me that some of my-ways were not as good as other-ways. In one area, child rearing, my-way was the only-way because their-way was for me to be the 18-hour/day live-in babysitter while they stayed in the bar until closing time. Under those circumstances I had no examples of good parenting to follow. The only parenting book I knew of was by Dr. Spock, but fortunately, I didn’t even try to learn his-way, because I was sure I already knew everything I needed to know about that subject. I was wrong, but it’s too late to sue me.

My enlisted time in the Air Force was good for me. My-way was to follow their-way as exactly as I could because there were very serious consequences for failure to do so. I did well.

My time in a marriage relationship was wonderful, not perfect all the time but great nonetheless. My-way was to follow her-way as often as possible. Life was simpler that-way. Once she heard of an interview given by the wife of the leader of our church. The wife was asked what was the secret of their long, loving, and happy marriage. The wife’s reply was, “If you ask your husband to move a mattress from upstairs to downstairs and he then opens a window, throws the mattress out the window, walks downstairs and drags it in to the house—you hold your tongue.” After my wife heard that interview, the stress between us lessened quite a bit—her-way now included details on how to do things her-way. This in turn resulted in discussion of the other-possible-ways and a negotiated lets-do-it-this-way was often the result.

As an Air Force officer, I had lots of leeway with the their-way vs. my-way issue. In the management of my assigned enlisted and officer co-workers I had great latitude, but no leeway with the regulations. The greatest problem with their-way involved using training situations or exercises to punish weaknesses in performance. My-way is to use training situations and exercises as a teaching tool to strengthen performance. This issue ultimately led to our parting-of-the-ways.

After years of experiences traveling the highways, one-ways, two-ways, byways, bi-ways, and waterways of life, I’ve arrived in the senior-citizen zone. Now all but one of my-ways are open to suggestion. The only-way that is not up for alteration is the one-way where I get ice cream, my-way.

Baskin Robin’s “Baseball Nut” — Hmmmm Yummy!

About the Author

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010. I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com

May 3, 2017February 26, 2019

Away from Home, by Lewis Thompson

I have shared here before my story about my first summer camp experience when I was about eleven years old and, after about four days of utter misery and homesickness, wrote a letter to my parents saying, “If you love me, you’ll come and get me.” Well, that experiment didn’t work out as I had hoped so I adapted and learned that being away from home wasn’t as bad as it first appeared.

After high school and two years of community college, I was actually eager to go away to university and leave my parents to fend for themselves. I suspect that they were as relieved as I was…or, at least, that was likely true for my mother. I remember that it was at about this time that my dad first started giving me a hug at home-comings and -goings.

After graduation, with engineering degree in hand, I began applying for work. I had only two interviews in my home state–one with Kansas Power and Light and the other with General Electric in Kansas City. My other interviews were with corporations in Ohio or Michigan. When I told my parents that I was accepting a job at Ford, I was pretty certain that Dad would be proud, as he had always been a “Ford Man”. But I also knew that he would be sorry to see me move so far away. I was his only child. (My mother had a son and daughter from an earlier marriage who lived in nearby Pratt, Kansas.)

My parents were both pleased when I married and became a father in my own right. They both liked my wife, Jan, and she them. When Jan and I married and bought our first house, I approached my parents about a loan for the down-payment. My mother nixed the idea. It wasn’t a lot of money, only $1200, with a promise to pay it off within a year. (The year was 1972. The mortgage was only $24,000. In those days, you could buy a lot of house in Detroit for that money.) We ended up borrowing the money from Jan’s parents, interest-free. I never quite forgave my mother for that slight.

My parents and I exchanged visits back-and-forth as often as we could and even took vacations to Colorado together with Jan’s parents. My mother, always reserved, seemed to look down her nose a bit at my in-laws, neither of whom was college-educated. Mom did not have a diploma, either, mostly due to the inability to pay for it as her parents thought that sending a daughter to college was a waste of good money. Perhaps that fact sheds some light on why she was so reluctant to help Jan and me out financially. (This thought just occurs to me as I write this. See what writing one’s memoirs can do to shed light into long-darkened corners!)

I have attended every high school reunion for the Hutch High Class of 1964 since graduation. On one such occasion, after both of my parents had died, I parked my car across the street from the house I had lived in until I was of kindergarten age. As I sat in the car alone, I was overcome by a wave of grief that left me sobbing uncontrollably–no particular memories, simply gut-wrenching emotion. It was as if a part of me were still there, trapped in that house, and could only be redeemed by getting away from home and never going back.

[P.S. Nothing in this story is intended to be, can be construed to be, or has even the slightest relation to anything “experimental”.]

About the Author

I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and I came to the beautiful state of Colorado out of my native Kansas by way of Michigan, the state where I married and had two children while working as an engineer for the Ford Motor Company. I was married to a wonderful woman for 26 happy years and suddenly realized that life was passing me by. I figured that I should make a change, as our offspring were basically on their own and I wasn’t getting any younger. Luckily, a very attractive and personable man just happened to be crossing my path at that time, so the change-over was both fortuitous and smooth. Soon after, I retired and we moved to Denver, my husband’s home town. He passed away after 13 blissful years together in October of 2012. I am left to find a new path to fulfillment. One possibility is through writing. Thank goodness, the SAGE Creative Writing Group was there to light the way.

March 22, 2017February 26, 2019

Purple, by Ricky

In the early days of my memory, colors were not memorable or perhaps my brain was not developed enough for colors to form memories. My oldest memory of color was my first home in Lawndale, California. The house was painted yellow with white trim abound the windows and front door. Next to the front door was a wall with a small octagonal window also with white trim. I still have no memory of the colors of the inside of the house.

I finally arrived at that age of mobility and language. Along with it came a bit more of color memory. We got a pet dog. It must have been viewed as MY dog because I was allowed to name her. The song “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean” was popular then (at least within my home or nursery school) so, I named her “Bonnie”. Because she was a purebred collie, my parents listed her name on the registration papers as “Lady Bonita” thinking that it more closely befitted her. To me, she was just Bonnie. Bonnie was black with a white mane as I remember. She was a good toddler sitter and playmate playfully knocking me down and licking my face as she was still less than a year old. She would pitch a fit barking and whining whenever I would open the gate of our home’s white picket-fence. I can “see” in my mind the fence, gate, and the yard but, not the grass. I have seen photos of the house and yard so I know it had grass which logically was probably green but I have no memory of its color.

As I wrote above, Bonnie would pitch a fit if I left the yard but left her inside the fence. Of course this would bring my mother out to see what the fuss was all about and managed to cut my explorations (interpret that as “freedom”) very short lived. This happened so often that my escapes lasted increasingly shorter and shorter.

Necessity, being the mother of inventions, and Shirley, being my mother, often had major discussions about me. Mom wanted me to stay in the yard. Necessity provided her with methods of securing the gate so I could not open it. They both failed. I opened every attempt to keep the gate locked. Necessity’s son, Precocious, had been arguing that I should not be confined to the yard since I needed to explore. So he decided to defy the two mothers and keep me safe at the same time. He gave me the idea of taking Bonnie with me whenever I would leave the yard. First, I would put Bonnie in my red wagon and pull her about the yard. Then when I judged that no one was looking, I opened the gate and pulled her out with me. Guess what! No fit pitching. I was then off-to-the-races. My mother worried less because she knew she could find me by looking for the dog also. Besides, I always went to the house two doors down to visit another boy who lived there — without permission of course.

At the age of three or four, my color memory was beginning to yield results. Arriving at that age about the same time that we moved to a new house in Redondo Beach, California. That house was purchased through the VA. It was white stucco on the outside with a brown porch railing. The windows were trimmed in a mid-range light-blue. My bedroom had a circus motif linoleum floor with blue walls and a red ceiling meant to resemble a circus tent. I had a Bozo the Clown light switch whose red bulbous nose was pushed up or down to operate the ceiling light. Blue became my favorite color ever since then up to this day.

In 2010 I finally admitted to myself that I was normal and attracted to males. Surprisingly, along with that attraction came an increasing appreciation for and interest in shades of purple. This interest in purple is vying for the position of my favorite color. It is so strong an attraction, I asked a friend if gay men gravitate to the color because they are gay — a manifestation of gayness perhaps. In my case, it may be true but, I am not convinced yet. I remember another possible cause. When I was two-years old, my mother took me to a baby show, which was a popular thing to do back then. I was crowned King of my show.

Purple has been associated with royalty for many centuries. I think that my attraction to purple has to do with my royal past inserting its influence over my favorite color changing from blue to purple as it is more fitting to my heritage.

The next time I attend our Telling Your Story group, I will be wearing my Royal Purple shirt. You may then call me “Your Highness”, “King John”, or “Purple Dude”. Just don’t call me “Late for Dinner”.

About the Author

I came out as a gay man in the summer of 2010. I find writing these memories to be therapeutic.

My story blog is TheTahoeBoy.Blogspot.com