I began walking at the age of six

December 9, 2021 Revisited originally printed on Condensed Milt www.densemilt.com

After years of standing upright and moving my legs, I began walking at the age of six. Of course I could crawl with the best of them. My pratfalls were legendary, once falling down a concrete stairwell at the ripe age of two and losing my front baby tooth. Later at age eight, I zigged when I should have zagged, and broke off half of the same adult front tooth, resulting in my silver cap years. As a Canadian, you would of thought I would have gone for the bronze.

My silver cap led to much teasing from older brothers. When I underwent the White Suburban Ritual of braces, they nicknamed me Metal Mouth. Careful! Don’t go out in the lightning storm.  Lightning will surely strike you in your little metal mouth electrocuting you.

When I say I began walking, I am embracing the full meaning of walking, where a walk is not just an exercise of placing one foot in front of the other. A walk is an escape, offering a directionless expansion of the mind. When we walk, when we truly walk, we are open to the senses around us. But we also open to the senses within. 

I have always thought that I was ruminating. I thought ruminating meant luxuriating in thought. Lost in that room of my own, content in my own cloistered mind. In reality, the meaning of the word ruminate is to obsess or brood on repetitive negative thoughts. I had walks like that too, but more often, the walking was a process of letting my thoughts wash over me. Kinda like raining on your own parade.   

I remember at age six, trudging down a steep snowy hill, the snow as high as half my body. I was bundled up and pushed out the door, alone, in the general direction of the school. As I walked, my mind wandered. Ideas came to me, and I made up songs in my head. I have no memory today of any of these songs or what they were about.

I would think about home, about my older brothers, my younger sisters, the horrible black cat we had inherited from family friends who moved away. They had  left him with us for safekeeping. I never asked for a cat, in fact, like my mother and her intense dislike of all things melon, cats were anathema to me, and still are to this day. I have relented on the melon.

Besides walking, I would visit friends, go to birthday parties, and compete for playground popularity by bringing Miss May to the playground. Miss May was from a Playboy calendar belonging to one of my older brothers. I got into much trouble for disseminating the photograph of this blonde beauty, bringing shame to my mother when my indiscretion was revealed to her by my third grade “battle axe” teacher.  Somehow the fact that I had stolen this photo from my older brother was never considered the crime. The crime was one of shame.

I had a friend next door named Kevin, whose family was Catholic. They had the dubious distinction of having more kids that even our family. We had seven, and they had over ten. Due to the multitude of kids, their house smelled like urine and honey.  

There was also a friend named Alan, a weird kid who chewed pencils, and ate the paste that the janitors supposedly made from horses. Alan had a collection of giant gallon glass jars under his bed filled with, you guessed it, more urine. There were over 10 large jars under his bed, which was one of the earliest examples of how the male species will collect anything. God knows there was probably a list detailing volumes, dates, colours, food choices, along with baseball stats.

I say baseball stats as I often played a dice game called Strat-o-matic. I had begun this dice game fascination with a global war game I invented for myself, keeping charts on graph paper of all the names of the countries of the world, who their leaders were, what the capital of the countries were. I would then put them against each other in wars decided by the roll of the dice. Sorry Argentina. You have been beaten by Andorra 12-2. What if real wars were carried out like the whims of seven year old boys, and decided by the roll of two dice? It’s makes about as much sense as going to war just to resolve differences.

I remember a birthday party for a friend in Grade 3, which resulted in a fire in their kitchen, flames rising up the walls, before my friend’s parents managed to put it out. Another memorable birthday party in Grade 3 was thrown by my friend Johnny Mercer. Johnny sported a jacket and turtle neck, and his 7 year old birthday party was the first boy/ girl birthday party that I had attended.

Johnny played The Beatles Rubber Soul, and kids danced. Johnny Mercer had a Beatle cut in the days when I was still slicked up, hair parted on the side, then combed over with the front up and over the combed part.

You can see the silver cap that I sported.

At the time, we were living in Montana, a strange place of snow, blue skies, and little white crosses. The white crosses were placed on the soft shoulder of the highway for each person who had met their end in an accident on that particular stretch of road. Montana in those days did not have posted speed limits, just white crosses. Some bad stretches of road had enough white crosses to effect a natural slowing down.

Once, I went for a drive in a land rover with friends of my parents. We went up these mountain passes, which was exciting until we ran out of road, and had to turn around or go back in reverse. I remember looking out the window at the sheer rocky cliff below us, thinking that today would be the day I would die.  

Montana seemed like a land of great violence. My eldest brother joined the Air Force to avoid the draft for the Vietnam War. My next oldest brother was assaulted in a parking lot at the mill where he worked, his back slashed with a razor requiring hundreds of stitches. My Father was assaulted in the same parking lot by a guy he had fired. This angry employee broke my Dad’s jaw. He had to drink from a straw for months with his jaw wired shut. Worse still, he punch pinched a nerve in his face, leaving that side of his face numb for the rest of this life. My third oldest brother bought a beautiful sky blue Chevy Malibu SS, and then drove it off a cliff, totalling the car.  He was banged up but thankfully he survived.  

From the snowy hills of Montana, one day I learned we were moving to the wet, grey and forever dying small town of Aberdeen, Washington, or Warshington as we called it.  Aberdeen was the future home of Kurt Cobain. At one time in the 1920's, Aberdeen was a logging boom town with 5 times the population that lived there when we arrived. Aberdeen was also famous for being the home of the Grays Harbor Ghoul, Billy Gohl, aka Billy Montana, who supposedly killed between 2 and 100 people. I say supposedly, as he was a Union official who may have been framed by influential local businessmen in the docks and timber industry.  

How small was Aberdeen? If I walked from our house to the right, it would take me across a bridge, and through a section of town where there were large houses.  My friend Jeffrey lived there.  His dad was a DJ on the radio, which meant that even though the house was large, they were relatively poor. 

Another friend named Guy Morton lived in that neighborhood as well. Guy was an overweight kid, who the other kids bullied. They hold him down twist his big boy titties for laughs. This humiliating act was known as a Purple Morton.  

At some point in an easterly direction, you would come to a Chinese owned grocery store, where my next younger sister spent my prized Indian head Buffalo nickel on some candy. I had not given it to her to spend, as it was part of my paltry collection of coins of little distinction. Further east, you would come to a hill with an easy grade that sloped down to what a small town calls their downtown. This part of town featured shops and the local theatre. In the summer, young boys would race their family made creations in the Boy Scouts Soapbox Derby down this hill.

One summer, I remember my mother bought me a pass for ten movies. I could lie and say it was all about my early film education, but really, she probably wanted some time to herself. I walked all the way downtown to watch matinee movies like The Seven Faces of Dr. Lao with Tony Randall playing all seven faces. In the 60’s, nobody questioned the decision to have a white actor play all seven Asian faces.

I also saw That Darn Cat, Herbie the Love Bug, The Parent Trap, and every movie ever made by Hayley Mills. As Mills was my last name, I dreamed that she was my distant cousin. Sorry to say we are probably not related in any way. 

One day I was walking across a bridge, an older kid stopped me. He pulled a knife and told me to give him all my money. My money in those days was usually just some coins I had in my pocket to buy candy, and was definitely less than a couple dollars. I was terrified, but I saw that the older kid was scared as well. Even though he was the one threatening me. Somehow I felt both pity, sympathy and fear.  

My daily walk to school was down a very steep hill called Scammel Street. Unlike Montana, this hill was paved, and had the luxury of a sidewalk. But it was incredibly steep. The school was at the bottom of the hill.  For most of the year, it would rain, massive amounts of rain, and the rain would flow down and often flood the Flats where the school was. Houses down there were little smaller, and more rundown than our neighbourhood, which was higher up on the hill. 

Don’t think I was high and mighty, as we were definitely middle class when middle class existed. In Aberdeen, wealth was distributed according to the altitude of where your house was situated on the hills. The higher up the hill, the richer the family. Up near the top of the hill, where the streets ended and the forest began, we spent many a day in those woods, coming home only as dusk approached. My mother would send us out saying only to be home for dinner. With seven kids, just getting a few out of the house was probably essential for her sanity. 

As I grew up, walking became more than a solitary endeavour, it became something I would do with my best friends. In junior high school, we moved to Portland, and my best friend Doug and I would walk all over the  suburb, past the boundaries of our subdivision, around the golf course that the subdivision was built around, to the very edges of civilization and on down to the big pond.

Doug would say “Wanna go down to the pond? Wanna?” There were ducks, and giant bullfrogs, snakes and mud. Lots of mud. Doug had guns as his Dad was military. My mother never allowed us to have guns, although one of my older brothers did have a rusty air pumped BB gun rifle. My mother hated it, and forbid me to play with it, which only made it more attractive. 

But Doug had real guns, and we would take his gun to the pond to shoot the bullfrogs. That sounds horrible in the context of today, but as teens growing up in the suburbs, we had very few rules, other than don’t get caught. So we would set off with his shaggy dog, Harry, for our walks. Harry was a great dog, always getting into things. We would see a garter snake on Doug’s front lawn, and shout Harry! Snake!  Harry! Snake! Get the snake. And Harry would grab the snake in his mouth and shake it until the poor snake became two halves, each crawling away in opposite directions. 

A few years later, we would take girls with us down to the pond. When I say we, I mainly mean my friend Mark, whose Italian mother warned him to be careful with that “thing”.  “You could hurt someone with that,” she said. That “ thing” had porn star potential, and Mark knew it, and used it religiously. The rest of us were in awe, but were content to live vicariously through Mark’s “Big” adventures. 

In grade ten, we moved back to Canada, and I spent a year as an outcast in the conservative town of West Vancouver. My self-esteem was so low, that when a kid called me Derek all year long, I never even corrected him. After all, at least he was talking to me!  

One of my favourite stories came from this year. I was in an English class taught by a German lady. While she was writing on the blackboard the intricacies of grammar, the boys next to me picked up a small desk, and were able to throw it out the window, where it crashed 5 stories below in a courtyard. This teacher didn’t even turn around from the blackboard.

However, the teacher in the classroom below ours definitely noticed. He was called Mr. Bonehead. He burst into our classroom and demanded that the teacher explain to him what had just happened and who was responsible.  

The teacher turned to the class, looked directly at me and said , “Dennis, did you see a desk go out the window?”  

I was not going to snitch on my classmates, because if I had, they really would never speak to me.

I said to her,” No, I didn’t see a desk go out the window.”

“Well, there you have it, Mr. Callow,” she said to Bonehead. “Obviously no desk went out the window.”

You could almost see the smoke coming out of his ears. He turned and furiously slammed the door behind him.  

I always loved the simplicity of this argument. Desk? Did you see a desk fly out the window? No! Well then, since he did not see this desk fly out the window, obviously there was no desk that flew out the window. 

I do have to give Mr. Bonehead credit for teaching us about the effect of Capitalism on history, as he told us history was told by those with the most money.

“Follow the money”, he wisely instructed.

Years later he was fired for incompetence.