in the beginning

"...because of a deeper grief which is peculiar to childhood and not easy to convey: a sense of desolate loneliness and helplessness, of being locked up not only in a hostile world but in a world of good and evil where the rules were such that it was actually not possible for me to keep them."

George Orwell

I was in a meeting the other day and the counselor asked us the following question:

"How did you find childhood? Because for me, the experience of being airdropped into life on earth is so, I still feel weird about it, I still feel the alienation. How do you all feel about yours?"

Nobody said anything.

They were either too scared, shy, embarrassed, uncomfortable or really trying to give his question some serious consideration.

For me, I suspect, it was a combination of all those things.

No one had ever asked me a question like that before.

I wasn't stunned by the question; I was just confused by it.

Not that I hadn't given my childhood a good going over.

I'd think about it from time to time.

And I'd get pissed off at things my parents said or did or my siblings or my teachers or schoolmates or friends or cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, whoever...

Or things I did or didn't do.

Jobs I took, settled for.

People I befriended.

Relationships I tried to get in or get out of...

My first crush, my first kiss, my first girlfriend, when I lost my virginity.

Friends who influenced me, good or bad, but even if the influence was kind of bad, it was still kind of good.

You know what I mean?

I'd think about those things every now and then but I don't think I ever really took the deep, dark high dive into the ocean of my soul.

Not that I'm going to do that now, but...

The more I thought about it, the more the counselor's question intrigued me.

But I wasn't ready to share my experience of childhood with the group.

The question was too intimate to be discussed in that sort of setting, at least for me.

I guess some people are just so thrilled they've finally found a place to talk about their problems that they just blurt out all their innermost thoughts and secrets in front of everyone, and do it with such eagerness and gusto, and don't feel self-consciousness or hesitant at all about doing it.

It's amazing.

I don't know how they do it.

I can't do it.

I'm way too introverted.

Too many filters.

Too many censors living in my head.

So, while several members of the group prattled on about how so-and-so abused them or what's-his-name was rude or sexually harassed them, whatever, they moved, they worked some shitty job, I just sat there, a quarter of me listening to them, three-quarters of me replaying the question in my mind.

How did I find my childhood?

How did I find my childhood?

My first impulse was to make a joke about it.

I didn't know I lost it.

But maybe I had lost it.

As I lay awake that night, I knew I wouldn't have any epiphanies if I tried to answer the question.

It would not be a cathartic experience for me.

There would be no lessons learned or conclusions drawn.

No personal investigation of my identity.

No self-portrait constructed.

Just a total lack of structural form and an abundance of perceptual ambiguities.

I turned the radio on; that goddamn Magnavox AM/FM clock radio I bought in 1999, still in working condition after 20 years, even though I accidentally spilled Jack Daniels into the speaker.

Tchaikovsky's Meditation, Memory of a Dear Place, was playing, followed by Elgar's Wand of Youth Suite.

I'm not kidding.

I began to think about the beginning.

The birth.

The facts.

Born in Winsted, Connecticut Saturday, December 5, 1964 (Leap Year) sometime after midnight during the worst ice storm on record.

My father stayed home with my three siblings and they cooked hot dogs in the fireplace for dinner because the power was out.

I was named by my doctor.

Not the pediatrician who delivered me, our family doctor.

Because after three children, who has the time or energy to name a fourth child?

Not my parents.

"I've always liked the name Philip," Dr. Levy suggested to my mother, who agreed.

He and his wife became my brother's and sister's godparents.

My family is Jewish, so I was circumcised by a Rabbi and given a Hebrew name, Pinsach Pasach.

Who could forget a name like that?

I looked up "Pinsach."

It rhymes with tintock and the meaning of the word is unknown.

"Pasach" was the son of Japhlet, a descendant of Asher.

That's about all I know about my Hebrew name.

Believe me, it's enough.

It's not like it's useful or anything.

I've always been a little confused by my name because Philip was one of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus according to the New Testament.

And yet we're Jewish.

So, I have a Christian first name, a Hebrew middle name (Paul) and a Jewish (eastern Ashkenazi) last name (Gaber).

This is where I usually say "No wonder I'm so fucked-up."

But I'm not going to say that this time because it's easy and it's stupid and it's shallow and it's corny and I'm bigger than that.

I recalled the stories I was told about life before I was born.

My parents, Natalie and Joe, met in Boston while they were in college.

She at Emerson College, and he at Babson College.

He was nineteen, she was twenty.

My father's sister (Evelyn) was friends with my mother and set them up on a blind date.

Love ensued and they got married.

My father dreamed of entering Filene's Basement executive training program, but his father Morris had other plans.

He wanted my father to move back to Winsted to help him with his dry-cleaning store, which had been in the family for a generation.

Although he never admitted it to me, he must have agonized over the decision. My grandfather probably laid a real extra-strength Jewish guilt trip on him and my father probably felt a heavy-duty obligation to take over the family business and what other choice did he have?

So, my father and mother returned to Winsted where they moved in with his parents, his fraternal grandparents, his maternal grandfather, his two sisters, and their husbands.

Yeah, it was like that for a while.

My mother was born in Bradford, Pennsylvania, the only child of a Jewish father and a WASP mother who claimed her ancestors came over on the Mayflower and settled in Simsbury, Connecticut.

As a child, she enjoyed ballet and drawing.

Her father, Nathan (or "Nate,") whom she adored, owned one of the first Bell and Howell 8 mm movie cameras in the country.

Throughout his life, Nate probably shot over a million feet of film, three hundred thousand of which consisted of my mother, from early to middle childhood, walking out the front door in various outfits and costumes.

She looked like a little dark-haired, half-Jewish Shirley Temple.

Her childhood had been a lonely one and she vowed that when she got married and was ready to start a family, she'd have more than one kid.

My mother's relationship with her mother was a lot like my relationship status on Facebook...

Complicated.

Even though Marian had married one of the Chosen People, she pleaded with her daughter to choose somebody who shared a different covenant with God.

Whether this was because of her prejudice or the prejudice she and Nathan experienced as a result of being in a mixed marriage and living in a small, predominantly Catholic and Methodist western Pennsylvania town, no one ever really knew.

It wasn't like she would broadcast it or anything.

Knowing my grandmother, if she did express any ambivalence toward my father, it was likely done in a very passive-aggressive way, especially if she was "tight."

In those days people didn't get drunk. They got tight.

My mother always hated going out to dinner with Marian because she knew she would drink too much, raise her voice, and eventually say something embarrassing.

On the plus side, my grandmother spent time with me whenever my mother and I came to visit.

We'd play "Hearts", "Old Maid" and "Fish".

I always had a bike to ride.

We'd even toss a ball around now and then.

But it never lasted.

She became winded quickly and I knew she was struggling because she'd blow the air out of her mouth by puffing out her cheeks, and tell me she had to sit down.

I don't think Nate was a drinker.

By all accounts, he was a quiet, gentle man.

A staunch Republican.

He owned a furniture shop.

When I was a toddler, he'd bounce me on his knee.

I'd put my tiny little hands on his cheeks and touch the stubble on his jaw with my fingers.

I liked the way it felt.

It intrigued me.

He had a big smile.

Always smelled of aftershave.

He had a really nice leather toiletry bag where he kept his shaving kit.

The mug with the shaving soap in it.

The shaving brush.

The heavy-duty double edge safety razor.

The chrome talc powder shaker.

As he grew older, he developed hearing loss and heart disease, wore a hearing aid and was put on a strict diet.

The joke was he would turn off the hearing aid whenever Marian was around.

Honestly, I never knew much about the man.

If he ever weighed in on my parents' marriage or was a member of Temple Beth El or appreciated art or music or what his favorite TV show was.

I know he and my parents argued often about politics.

They were Dems, he was a Repub.

It was the 60s and 70s.

And because Nate was half deaf, my father always had to raise his voice so Nate could hear him.

Naturally, Nate thought my father was yelling at him, so Nate yelled back.

Eventually, my father had to say, "Nate, Nate! I'm not mad at you. I'm not yelling at you! You just can't hear me."

And then there were my father's parents.

Leah and Morris.

Again, what the hell do you really know about your grandparents?

Especially if you're my age and didn't grow up having a meaningful interpersonal relationship with them?

What do you really know about them?

Other than your father telling you his mother was a lousy cook and his father always talked shit about his children?

Mind you, he never said anything directly to the child he was talking shit about.

He'd tell one child what a fuck-up the other child was.

And vice-versa.

Although I have a bit of a soft spot in my heart for Murry. as my grandmother used to call him.

One time I skipped an entire week of school when I was third grade and didn't even really get in trouble for it.

I was caught when the school secretary, who was friends with my parents, called to check on me.

"Philip hasn't been in school all week. Is he OK?"

Shortly thereafter, Leah and Murry popped over for a visit.

My father told him the story.

I don't remember if he said anything, but he did reach into his pocket and toss me a silver dollar.

That's right.

Pissed my brother off.

"He gets a silver dollar for skipping school?!"

That's what I got, son.

Not that I came out of that experience thinking a person could actually be rewarded for bad behavior.

I've always wondered if Murry gave me that silver dollar because he thought what I did was kind of cute.

Apparently, Murry had very little patience for my father's lack of mechanical aptitude.

He was always yelling at him whenever he tried to help him fix something.

Hmm.

Murry must have passed that gene onto my father because he was always yelling at me for my lack of mechanical aptitude.

Especially whenever I tried to help him fix most of the lawnmowers we owned, which seemed to be continuously in need of repair.

"Don't touch that!" my father would say. "Nooo, don't do that!" "Phillips head, that's a flathead! I need a Phillips head!" "Watch it, watch it!" "Don't force it, easy!" "No, no, no!"

He really instilled a lot of confidence in me.

No wonder I hated shop class so much.

Anyway, I don't really have a lot of stories to tell you about Leah and Murry or Marion and Nate, so I'll just leave you with that for now.

Some memories:

One of my chores as a little kid was tidying up the shoe closet.

When I was at the beach, I would run my Matchbox cars across my mother's back as she laid on her belly.

I used to take my penis out and rubbed it all over my mother's bare feet while she was napping. Or maybe she was "napping." Didn't want me to know she was aware of me diddling her feet.

I meditated this morning and the woman reading the meditation asked, Consider what you want to manifest in your life I connected with the first thing that came to my mind:

I want to be able to walk out my door without feeling self-conscious and paranoid or like I'm a foreigner and an outsider living in my own world.

My thoughts took a deep, dark dive into the flophouse of my soul.

i am the son who everyone had such high hopes for.

The Thing is to Go, and Go Fast

A Memoir of Running Away from Yourself

Vestige of my Former Self

A deficit of self-esteem

I tossed my ambition into the garbage.

Years ago.

Somewhere between being loosed from my mother's loins and growing my first pubic hair.

It was either a case of sudden poverty or wanderlust

the wind will be talking and she will be breathing. Soon it will be spring, the season of alcoholism. Soon it will be Monday, the day of wisdom and getting old

became a starship navigator

I've got my beautiful outfit - now I'm ready.

She attended the funeral.

Voice over: Apparently, allegedly, anecdotally, according to sources, this is how I was conceived:

Cut to: An aggressive man fucking a woman in the missionary position. He's pumping away. She's despising the act. He comes. Pulls out. Enough is enough for him. Rolls over and goes to sleep. The woman is shaking and frightened.

Your Personality May be Killing You.

The year my father performed the Passover Service by transcribing the dialogue from the Passover scene in King of Kings.

That little motel in Encino.

Noah discovers America not Columbus

People There Who Care a Little About Me.

struggling writer buys used computer from a consigment shop/Salvation Army, Goodwill, etc... only to find out that when he hooks it up, there's a completed novel from a well-known writer still in the documents.