Gentle Readers, given the events of last week, Marlow has struck out in an adventure that includes collusion, of a sort, one generation reflecting change against the one that give them life. Balancing the joy of a crisp morning and full light creeping up the pastures, I gave a prayer of thanks for the things I had a chance to do to arrive at this peaceful place. And then hearing of the terrible word from Sri Lanka about the attacks on churches and the number who perished on this Easter. Jesus, grant them peace. – Vic.
Marlow says:
Let me briefly unMueller by sharing the following, stream of consciousness personal recounting. I promise that there will be no redactions, obstructions or collusions, just occasional, unlawyer-edited mis and un remembrances:
My mother gave birth to me around 730 in the evening of a cooler than normal spring on March 22, 1949, in Columbus, Ohio. With me wailing away in my mother’s arms, the obstetrician stepped out of the delivery room, lit up a cigarette and called my father. Dad was at Olentangy Village Bowling Lanes anchoring his league bowling team. He had gone to the lanes, since the doctor had told him his wife wouldn’t likely deliver until well after 9 PM.
Dad responded to the news of his firstborn’s arrival “I’m in the middle of a hot streak in the second game of three. I’ll be back to the hospital by 9.”
This was my first lesson in setting parental priorities. Always respect the streak.
That brings me to my name. Or names — Stuart Jonathan Thad. Yup, that’s right, those were the first words I heard my exhausted after 12+ hours of labor mother utter. Perhaps that’s why I was so inconsolable. In addition to an eleven letter long, always misspelled and mispronounced last name, I had to contend with this amalgam of rarely heard monikers that made it difficult to fill out completely my given names on elementary school test sheets and papers as well as later applications for loans, security clearance requests, licenses, and so on. Accordingly, I changed my last name’s pronunciation, and created several aliases early on to avoid hand and finger cramping and making all these forms a penmanship nightmare.
The Franciscan nuns didn’t like my shortening my first name list to the unsaintly Stuart. Everyone had a baptismal saint, and the Lives of the Saints volumes had no tales of Saint Stewie. Despite multiple interrogations, I never told them about how I came to be so named, since I knew I would have been screwed. My recalcitrance marked me for special treatment.
I also blame my numerous, lengthy names for my eight straight years of D grades in penmanship. Report cards are available upon request or subpoena.
While I was able to eventually shape what people called me, I’d rather have had a way to choose my names. You see I was named after the Roman Catholic patron saint of lost causes (yippee), Jude Thaddeus, in order to fulfill my mother’s pledge when praying for her mother’s survival from mastoid surgery in the mid 1930’s. My father was not happy to learn this secret promise four months after their marriage and me being in oven for three months that his firstborn would likely have to be called Jude or Judy.
At his insistence, they shopped names with multiple priests until they found one who came up with my trinity of names as an acceptable compromise in fulfillment of my mother’s distant promise. I have long suspected my father used good whiskey on the padre to achieve this level of success during those strict, rule following days in American Catholicism.
For some odd reason the parental units named their next child, also a son, Thad with no middle names. We called him Thud – much to his eternal dislike. While anger displaced at one’s name is not a pretty thing, it’s somehow lessened my load and early on encouraged me to be a wise ass.
This served as lesson to not make promises whose results would scar your children, subject them to bullying or set them along the dark path to become class clowns.
Elementary school work for my first two years was a breeze, since I came to 1stgrade able to read, recite my ABC’s and do elemental arithmetic, thanks for the relentless drilling my my father. What made my smarts toxic was that I was a confident, talky kid, who wouldn’t shut up, since class was relentlessly boring and I loved to entertain.
I blame my mother for this, since she was in national NYC radio broadcasts back in the 40s. Her time there also graced me with an abnormally extensive vocabulary of Yiddish for a midwestern kid that added spice to my patter. These hearth raising gifts got me front row seats in school for teachers to eyeball my errant ways, scotch tape over my mouth to silence me, and several ruler whacks by various nuns of St Francis for uttering what had to be evil or demonic words. Well, in retrospect, maybe I shouldn’t have loudly called those jerks bullying St Vitus Dance shaky Billy Hughes schmucks.
Rather than learning any lessons from these missteps, I perfected my smart mouth and never held myself back from uttering weird things out loud whenever the mood struck or my pals encouraged me. While funny things were often spoken, my educational career suffered at times from too much humor at the wrong time. Bad conduct report card grades were frequent but tolerated as long the police didn’t appear at the front door.
My early job career training started with being a slave to my father’s life long lawncare and gardening addiction, digging countless holes for plants, trees and shrubs, endlessly weeding the dozen or so planters we built, mowing the 1/3 acre lawn two or three times per week and then lawn vacuuming the entire exacting crisscrossed pattern free of clippings. The fall leaf drop was a two-month long sentence to Dante’s 7thlevel of hell with two, very tall and leafy, one hundred year old oaks and one 40 foot high maple tree gracing our front and back yards.
The results of my early stoop labor by the age of 9 made me desirable as a lawn and plant care boy for the neighbors. They even bought me better equipment to use than what we had at home, including riding mowers. I was able to charge hourly rates for non-mowing activities that included later on motor maintenance and tool sharpening. I was rolling in dough at least on paper since I only could keep two dollars per week as spending money with the rest of it going into a S&L savings account fund for college.
Needless to say, I and my brothers and fellow gardening slaves had less than 0% body fat and learned very early how to money launder and skim our side earnings (NB always insist on cash, no checks) to finance our go-karting addictions.
This later became a late adulthood obsession for Thud and me with fast cars and driving them at ungodly speeds on roads and tracks. The cops never caught us speeding in our alky-powered karts along the streets back then and have yet to catch us now in our big boy cars.
Perhaps at this juncture, it would be best to admit here that my approach to life was to go with the flow and take the opportunities that presented themselves, rather than make a strategic plan.
To be continued.
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