Why I did what I did
Or rather, perhaps, why did I remember this stuff and not other stuff?
Ok, I’m still working through all this. I guess that’s a good thing to do if you’re seventy-nine years old. So, many of these thoughts go back to second or third grade, around then, some a bit earlier or later. They may need some working through!
From second grade on I was singled out for my intelligence. I’m sure I never had the best grades. But I grew up confident that I understood other people. What comes to mind are moments of ‘adult avoidance’, adults giving specious reasons for decisions that were most convenient for them. That’s just the way people were. There were a couple ways in which adults were ‘lazy-minded’ or dismissive in their answers, and I guess I picked up the habit of not asking questions.
Whatever gift of intelligence I had was a potential given life by the books that my mother provided. She read me Little Golden Books. There was one of men in miner’s hats that has haunted me ever since. Maybe something to do with the dark depths of barely awareness. The papa bear who wanted honey so bad he ended up smashing the beehive and diving into the stream with just his nose showing. We read that over and over. Little Black Sambo and all the pancakes. We read that over and over. Recognizing the offensiveness of the stereotype, this was not an issue to a three or four year-old. Nor was skin color. A child that age has no idea what exists in the world. If I were the publisher today, I’d do it differently. At Grandma Powers’ there was The Gingerbread Man. The Three Little Kittens. Over and over. The Gingerbread Man was a bit traumatic. Probably not a bad way for children to be introduced to big questions such as death.
In school we were occasionally asked to write about possible future occupations, going back to fifth grade. In 8th grade Bill Mahoney, from the other eighth grade and who was a jock, which I certainly was not, walked over to me on the school courtyard and said his mother thought I might enjoy this book, handing me the Pocket Books edition of Sailor on Horseback. By the time I finished it, my life path was set, I would be a writer.
Perhaps it was my enthusiasm and love for these books that induced Mom to purchase Colliers’ Junior Classics – The Young Folks’ Shelf of Books. These were ten large hardbound books, each with its own distinctive cover and olive endpapers with scenes from two dozen stories. Ever since I thought about my path – probably early high school – these books seemed of decisive influence. I assumed that grownups read the adult classics. This became relevant when I won a scholarship to a school that taught Greek and Latin. At the same time I realized that my life would be spent writing.
Fourteen years later, the youth was still seeking hir metier in Manhattan on 73rd Street between 1st and 2nd Avenues. And lo! Everything came together as I walked down the stairs of our walkup, finally sitting down on the door step of The Lion’s Den, recently defunct restaurant on 70th and 2nd Ave. I realized a) that the psychological box I’d been in no longer existed. b) that I’d figured out the genre of lit I’d use (perception of daily experience at a level beyond physical appearances). c) that no-one would stop me from following this activity. Even if they locked me in Belleview, they’d no doubt let me write. But it seemed that being sane is a relatively simple achievement.
Shortly after that I got rid of all my books, left Annamaria, lived with Doug Currie and then on my own, finished a year of going over highly respected authors: Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, Carson McCullers, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, before returning to the study of ancient Greek, August 1977.
Then I left NYC spring 1978, and spent ten years writing Grandma’s biography and a partial biography of myself, The Longbow. Also a lot of other stuff that was jettisoned. A translation of Diogenes Laertius Lives of the Philosophers. Freedom of Speech. In the 90s I spent a lot of time with Spanish, and with human potentials. Got a Master’s Degree in Philosophy with a thesis Two Major Worldviews in April 1995. After that I began to look into human potentials more deeply, and in 1998 write What Life Can Be (A Manual for Transformation), and put out a newsletter. Had groups.
In 2001 returned for a doctorate in Human Development, with a dissertation “The Scientific Approach To Wisdom”.
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