Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes:
Boy on a Ram (1786/87)

"I had been Becaming all that time before."

I lived at TenFifteen for thirteen years, from when I was five until I was eighteen. I did not grow up there, certainly not completely. I continued growing up there. Mostly I was Becaming. Becaming occurs as a result of aspiring to become something. While still aspiring, you have not yet become whatever you aspire for. Later, you might surprise yourself to see that you achieved that dream, or some significant piece of it. Then, the effort expended might seem as if it was more than mere dreaming. Then you notice that you've changed and that you're no longer a mere aspirant, but that you embody an actual achievement. You had been Becaming. There was scant evidence that you were making much in the way of progress until you manifested the difference as if by magic.

Those thirteen years seem absolutely magical in retrospect. They hardly seemed unusual in the moment, in the interminable string of moments growing up and out entails. I often felt impatient and inconvenienced, though I was fortunate to have parents who held no grudges and insisted that I slap a smile on it when I didn't feel all that happy, and just get on with it. My dad worked multiple jobs. He had a good-paying union job with the Post Office, but five kids and a tumble-down Victorian easily consumed all he could earn. He cleaned a drive-in restaurant early mornings. My brother and I accompanied him to sweep the parking lot of paper straw wrappers and cigarette butts. He delivered newspapers in the even earlier morning, a rural route where his baseball arm allowed him to throw papers over the top of his car to land squarely on a porch. He washed dishes in a downtown diner, after hours, on the midnight shift. My father taught through object lessons rather than lectures. He taught hard lessons in self-reliance.

My birth family members were my first teachers. They were largely unaware that they were teaching, for they were merely going through their usual activities of daily living. I was likewise largely unaware that I was absorbing essential life lessons, but those activities and their rhythms served as the primary teaching medium. Dishes were done immediately after supper and without complaining, or without too much complaining. People were on time for supper because nobody was waiting for any straggler. From about 4th grade, if I wanted a shirt ironed, that was my job. My mom insisted that she refused to release either of her boys out into the world without them at least acquiring ironing skills. The girls did housework and the boys, yardwork. We had the better part of an acre of lawn to mow, usually with a corded electric mower that challenged us to avoid running over the ever-inconveniently present cord. We learned how to order work so that it might eventually get done. We were just a little too young to help very much when our dad reroofed that towering house and repainted it, even though he didn't take that well to heights. He sucked it up and got it done.

In the 4th grade, my mother's aunt's boyfriend left an old Washburn guitar for us to play around with, and I fell in love. That being my first love, I fell completely and hard. I played that thing every waking hour. I'd play until my fingertips bled, tape them, then play some more. I'm confident that I became a total bore, for I would play in the background while everyone else was trying to watch their television programs. My mom hired a one-legged country singer to teach my brother and me how to really play the guitar and we both took to it like little ducks to water. It wasn't long before I started writing my own songs. I wasn't any good for the longest time, but love protects the novice by coating experience in a kind of pixie dust. In my mind, I seemed fabulous. I practiced every minute I wasn't otherwise engaged.

My brother and I started delivering newspapers on the same morning. He was ten, just old enough for a route, and I was an insistent nine. The distributor, seeing an opportunity to pawn off two routes at once, relented and allowed me to assume that responsibility a whole year early. I learned how to enjoy getting up before ungodly o'clock in the morning.

I was chosen to be in a smart kid's class after they administered an IQ test to all the fifth graders. There, we were exposed to a few of the finer things in life like classical music and high-brow literature. I wrote a play and the class staged it. That one performance proved to be a hit and my classmates carried me out of the multipurpose room on their shoulders. I’d become a writer. That might have been my peak experience of all those years at Thomas Alva Edison Elementary School, a place where I always felt at home.

I've written elsewhere about how Junior High was terrible and high school little better. By the time I graduated, I'd accumulated three or four years of experience delivering newspapers, two or three years experience as a pharmacy stockboy, summers cutting onions and weeding spinach for Mr. Arbini, learned to smoke, and had written a few dozen songs. I headed out into the world and directly into the Selective Service Office, where I would spend the better part of two years getting myself designated a Non-military Conscientious Objector. I would fledge to Seattle where I would live on a series of unheated sleeping porches in shared apartments in the U District with my to-be first wife while she earned her degree in Occupational Therapy. I found an agent and played a few gigs, pursuing the only career that seemed as if it would have me then. I didn't know at the time that my thirty-somethingth great-grandfathers in Aquitaine were the inventors of the Troubadore profession. I wrote and performed my songs as if I had been born into that profession. I had been Becaming all that time before.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

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