The Pascagoula Basin On Steroids

It was not only my parent's work as teachers they brought home with them in the late afternoons of the school year, but mostly their attitudes of student discipline in the classroom, to the ramshackle rental houses we lived in all over the coastal plains of southeastern North Carolina. It usually took a while after we got home in the afternoons for me to become their blood-kin child again, instead of just another student disputing their word.

About the only time I could be a little boy free of the academic evil eye (as school teachers my parents were agents of The State) was to take my library books and my trusty hatchet/tomahawk out into the edge of the woods where I hid away from prying eyes, and lived in my own fantasy world as regular children seem prone to do. The coastal plains are full of woods and there were always some patch of woods very close to wherever we lived. Like our neighbors, we lived on the sandy ridges between the swamps that drained the Appalachians and hinterlands further west into the Atlantic Ocean.

I not only had to compete with my siblings for my parent's attention (and they with me), but with my parent's students who absolutely adored them. Well, for the most part. It was easier to compete with their students who thought they were assholes then with their favorites.

I hated that my father spent more time with his students AFTER school, even, than with me and/or my siblings. And when he and my mother were at odds, he easily found some activity away from home with his student's projects than to come home to Momma. Momma be bad when she mad at her man.

There weren't many days they won't screaming and yelling and acting like they were gonna kill each other, sometime in easy perceptual range of our neighbors, and then turn around and scream at us kids if we did anything that might embarrass them as public figures. As an adult, that seems just crazy, but as a kid I didn't make the connection that they were actually performing the very acts they warned us against in the process of "teaching" us how to act. I doubt if they did either.

One of my default bugs that came with my software is that I give people credit for being a lot smarter than they themselves think they are. I get accused persistently of being a flatterer and bullshitter, but the problem is that I actually do think they're at least as smart as me, and maybe they could be, to be fair, but, on the other hand, they sort of have to cooperate and believe it themselves or it makes me look naive. Who isn't naive?

I've cruelly wondered just how intelligent my parents were. They were not the intellectual type, but smart enough to get four-year college degrees, even though it took them longer because they tried to go to college during the Great Depression, and they did. They had three children already with me as the baby when I father graduated from Mississippi State at the age of thirty-three.

If someone asked him why it took him so long, he would tell them he'd been too busy coon-hunting up and down the Pascagoula River basin. He was a great kidder. A real card. He was the only one of his nine siblings who even finished the seventh grade.

They had five children when my mother finally got her four year degree at the age of 48 years old. She taught on what was called a "B" certificate for lesser money and considerably less prestige among her co-workers for years. They both took a tremendous amount of pride in her/their accomplishments.

I don't know how to define "intelligence" when their raw personal accomplishments were seemingly met by tremendous determination. They wanted us to be proud of them, but we were children and didn't know what they had done. The other professional they socialized with were as accomplished or even more so than themselves.

We didn't/couldn't know the price they'd paid because their first three children were only born during the last of the depression, and the other two after World War Two. My oldest sister, a half-sister whose father was my mother's first husband, was old enough to remember the really hard times down in Mississippi before the family moved to North Carolina when I was two.

I distinctly remember the feeling I had after I had joined the Navy and was sent to California to go to Recruit training in San Diego. It was a completely different geographical environment, and wildly astonishing to me in that way, but the chief reason for my elation was that I was three thousand miles away from anybody who even knew who my parents were to tell on me. I was free. I could do what I liked, and pay for my own sins.

That first taste of real freedom I had from my parents attempts to institutionalize me makes me wonder this morning what moving from Mississippi to North Carolina a thousand miles away from home and hearth, where nobody even knew their name. They moved here to a ready-made job. My father's first actual job as an agriculture teacher, which was his college major, whereas he had taught high school math just outta college, and had to pay a politician 10% of his check each month to get that job.

Moving to North Carolina was a big career move for him, but he had to leave his aging, but beloved parents to fend for themselves at the home place. I wonder what new personal freedoms they discovered in North Carolina they hadn't had the opportunity to indulge in Mississippi. East central Mississippi around the Meridian area is still a very stifling place for free spirits to be fledglings.

I bet I start remembering how they opened up as individuals when they got away by themselves. I was there. Like any other child, I watched my parents like a hawk. I noticed everything as if my life depended on it. All my other kin folk were at least a thousand miles away, and I was a little boy. I was scared they were going to desert me somewhere or even give me away to some gypsies or something. I never had no place I could call home until I built this place, and nobody wants to share it with me because I'm a rude asshole who won't go along to get along. Damn!

I was in the Wal-Mart SuperCenter grocery a couple of days ago, and suddenly some child, some toddler, started screaming bloody murder at the top of it's lungs. My heart shriveled in my fear of death and I had to move all the way across the store to get away from the realization that's what I'll sound like again in my second childhood. The end is the bejinning and the bejinning is the end.