Home Alone: 1965
18 April 2011 Leave a Comment
My father and sisters are fond of telling a story of my antics as a two year old in GrandHill. As our visit to OriginSun ended, we were checking out of the hotel to go to the airport. The other four kids and my parents were at the front desk when they realised I was not with them.
A frantic search ensued, and they went back up to the rooms to look for me. After desperately calling my name and receiving no response, they were becoming a bit concerned. Finally, one of my sisters pulled back the shower curtain, and found me in the bathtub, wearing a shower cap, fully clothed. Apparently, I had a good chuckle, and judging from when I see my daughter do similar things now, no doubt I thought myself fabulously entertaining.
After returning to America, my father and sisters taught me tremendous respect and admiration for the East, far more than what is common even now in America. I frequently heard stories of our experiences there, and my family’s impressions of the people and places were invariably favourable. My mother and sisters would regularly make Burmese food for dinner.
When we returned to America, we settled in the Rochester, New York metropolitan area, initially in Penfield, and then in Pittsford, both suburbs of Rochester. On at least one occasion when I was about five years old or so, our family went for a picnic in Powder Mill Park with a number of other families. As I recall, there were probably a hundred or so people gathered in a large clearing around picnic tables. The clearing was large enough for several baseball fields, at least.
I distinctly recall starting to walk away from the gathering. I walked in a fairly straight path to the tree line on the far side of the clearing. I kept walking once I crossed the tree line, despite their being some undergrowth, fallen trees to climb over, and just normal brush in the woods. I think I walked for a long time, perhaps an hour or so.
The weather was pleasant. I recall not being the least bit afraid. As I recollect this incident now, I can’t help thinking I was a bit of an idiot, but then this would not be the last time I did something which in retrospect might seem excessively adventurous.
Eventually, I came to a clearing in the woods with several picnic tables. Except a couple, perhaps in their twenties or thirties, enjoying a romantic, soon-to-be less than solitary picnic, there was no one there. One can imagine the surprise look on their faces when this approximately five year old boy comes walking out of the somewhat dense underbrush.
I vaguely recall their surprise. This was before mobile phones were common. After their initial concern was overcome, I think they flagged down a police patrol car that was out looking for me. I distinctly remember the police car by the side of the road in those woods, a forest that, to a five year old at least, seemed fairly dense in retrospect.
I also vividly recall my triumphant return. Not every five year old gets to ride by himself with a cop in a police car. The drive back to my family’s picnic was not far or long, but one can imagine the social kudos I must have received from my peers when I alighted from the back of that police car.
Hippies, fags and freaks
Rochester is a curious blend of progressive conservatism. In 1960 the City of Rochester had just over 300,000 people.28 However, Kodak, Bausch & Lomb, Ritter, Lawyer’s Cooperative Publishing, Gannett, the Mormon religion and Xerox are headquartered and/or started in or near Rochester. Rochester is more than 400 kilometres from New York City, but less than 400 kilometres from Cleveland, Ohio. This geographic location makes the Rochester culture more Midwestern than East Coast, despite being “New York.”
Many of the families of the executives of these large multinational companies lived in our neighbourhood. For example, across the street lived the parents of the President, Chief Executive Officer and Chairperson of Xerox, known as Fuji Xerox in OriginSun.29 The family of the founder of Gannett, the leading printing and publishing company in the US,30 lived a few streets over. The closest cross street to our home was the street on which George Eastman, the founder of Kodak, built his home.31 In 1820, the Mormon God first revealed the faith of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to the prophet Joseph Smith about 30 kilometres from our home.32
According to Incubator wisdom, the Rochester metropolitan area is a test market for new products. Rochester had an independent phone company, Rochester Telephone (RT),33 years before the antitrust action splitting up American Telephone & Telegraph, the national phone company. The Incubator claimed that, despite serving only the Rochester municipal area, RT was the second largest phone company in America because there were so few phone companies in the United States before the AT&T antitrust action.
Beginning in the 1960s, America began a system for a single phone number for all emergency calls.34 I suspect because of RT, our area was one of the first areas to try the new system. Instead of 119 as used in OriginSun, America reversed the sequence to 911.
Besides sensual exposure of a positive nature, I was also exposed to several incidents causing me to question the heartlessness of my surroundings. I suspect this is also historically rooted in Asian methods to breed compassionate individuals. For example, about this time my brother and I were riding in the back seat of the car while my mother was driving, pulling out of the driveway of our home.
Our car collided with the blade of a snowplough. I was told that if anyone had been sitting in the passenger’s seat, they would not have survived. I still have an image in my mind of my brother and I sitting in the back seat of the car, looking out of the passenger side of the front seat of the car, the exterior of the automobile peeled away to expose the snowplough and the outdoors.
On another occasion, I was leaving the Wegman’s supermarket in Pittsford Plaza with my mother. In those days, the cars would pull up in a line in front of the supermarket. A supermarket employee would load customers’ groceries into the cars from a metal track that began inside at the registers. My mother and I only had a few bags of groceries, so my mother and I carried our groceries out to the car.
As we were five or ten meters past the line of vehicles being loaded with groceries in front of the store, we heard a crunching noise and both turned around. Someone standing behind their car loading bags into the trunk was crushed at the knees by the car pulling up. The victim keeled forward into the trunk. As my mother pulled my hand to bring me back to her Delta 88 convertible, a steady pool of blood was forming into a stream flowing in our direction.
In 1971 we moved from one suburb to another in the Rochester metropolitan area: from Pittsford to Brighton. In academics, the public school systems I attended rank at the top. From my observations, my classmates who left to attend private schools did so because they were not performing well, not because the public school was not performing well.
The house we moved to in Brighton was considerably larger, and I told my Pittsford friends we were moving to a “mansion.” My sister heard from someone that I had said this, and my siblings enjoyed teasing me for years because I told people we were moving to a “mansion.” I now live in a mansion35 in OriginSun. The OriginSun people use the British term ‘mansion’ to refer to a large building divided into apartments.36
Pittsford is a predominantly Christian suburb, and Brighton is predominantly Jewish. During adolescence, I regularly attended Jewish Temples, including the Bar and Bat Mitzvahs of many of my schoolmates. As an adult I later attended weddings in Temples and Churches.
Due to our family’s domestic situation, my elder siblings enjoyed the influence of our family as their primary source of upbringing during their adolescence. Our domestic situation deteriorated such that during my adolescence, I enjoyed the influence of the community to a greater extent than my elder siblings did during their formative years.
One example to illustrate the differing domestic situation for the elder and younger siblings in our family would the contrasting recollections of my second eldest sister’s most memorable incident with our parents, and my most memorable incident with our parents. My second sister once told me that her most vivid image of our biological parents was of them dancing together in formal dress in a ballroom. She recalls her approximate age, the place, and the experience of seeing them enjoying each other in a happy atmosphere.
In contrast, my most vivid image of my biological parents would be my mother telling my father she wants a divorce, and my father dismissing her request as not serious. I recall approximately where my parents and my younger brother were standing at the time our parents had this heated discussion. My younger brother, in contrast to his elder siblings, received very little attention or influence from the community, or our family, including myself.
Also, because my elder siblings moved to the predominantly Jewish enclave at a later age than I, I had more opportunity to acclimate myself to Jewish surroundings, Jewish culture and Jewish friends. To a much greater extent than any of my siblings, until college, I had considerably more Jewish friends than Christian friends. Although our home was not Jewish, a DNA test indicated I have Ashkenazi blood.
Essentially, I was raised more Jewish than Christian for several reasons. First, my surroundings were predominantly oriented to Jews, Jewish custom, and Jewish thinking due to our move from Pittsford to Brighton. Second, as explained above, due to familial circumstances my home life was not terribly influential during my adolescence. Third, we had no formal religious structure or upbringing in our home. The extent to which the Incubator is the community is an issue which is unclear to me.