Words Not Spoken

We each have reasons we give ourselves that stop us from saying some things. I am not referring to expressions of sarcasm or wit or rage or fear, because many of those blurt out spontaneously.
I mean the emotions that come from a place I can only describe as our ‘core self’. It is the concept of what we believe to be our essence dwells. It is a place that has both the strength of tempered steel and the fragility on fine porcelain.
So, we give ourselves reasons… “It is not the right time.”, “it is not the right place.”, “I don’t know how to say it the right way.”, “the one I need to say it to cannot or will not hear me.”, “It gives me pain to say it.”, “It will cause someone else pain to hear it.” … and we remain silent. Yet, because they come from our core self, simply hiding them or trying to ignore them does not mean the feelings cease to exist.

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Worthiness and Self-doubt
For as long as he could remember, at family gatherings after dinner the men would play poker at the dining room table and the women would share stories in the living room (usually about their husbands or children). When he was younger, the kids would be outside playing hide-and-seek or building forts out of hay bales in the barn loft. As he was approaching his teens he became bored with those games and started to hover around the poker table. As long as he was quiet the men would tolerate his presence, although they would frequently send him to fetch another beer from the kitchen. He tried hard to learn the game in the hopes that some day he would be old enough to to sit at the table and play too.
Many times, while passing the living room, he would pause long enough to hear some of the stories the women were telling. Invariably his mother would repeat the tale of giving birth to him and the pain she endured. She tell about how he was two weeks late and was not born on their wedding anniversary as they had hoped. She would say they realized they could not make it from the farm to the hospital in time and decided to go to her brother’s house in a nearby town and have the doctor meet them there. Then she would mention what he considered to be her favorite part of the story because he had heard it so many times in several contexts. At her brother’s house the bedrooms were were on the second floor, so she had to climb the staircase while going through labor. Then came the “punch line” to the tale. “Never let anyone tell you that you cannot see stars from pain… just like in the cartoons.” Most of the aunts and older female cousins would shake their heads and some would gasp. If he was in sight he would get disapproving glares. Depending on how much they had to drink at that point, one of the aunts who seldom had a kind word for anybody would say, “Shame on you for hurting your mother that way.” That would be followed by several “Tisk, tisk, tisk” and chuckles from the others. He was usually headed back to the poker table at that point rather than suffer the humiliation, even if they were meant in jest. Sometimes the story would also include that his mother was expecting a girl since they already had a boy. This added to his feeling that not only was a source of great pain, but also a disappointment.
Beyond his mother’s stories other incidents reinforced his apprehension about causing pain and disappointing others, especially those close to him. He was never very good at sports in elementary school and if they played baseball at recess, he was one of the last ones picked for a team. When his turn came to bat, he usually struck out. One time he actually hit a long fly-ball and as he was coming to second base, he glanced back to see if it was safe to go to third. That was he noticed everyone was crowded around home-plate looking down at the ground. As he rushed to see what had happened the urgent voices of the adults grew louder, so did the cries of pain coming from the boy on the ground, his good friend Jimmy.
During the excitement of actually hitting the ball, he simply let go of the bat and took off running to first base. His friend Jimmy was playing catcher for the other team and the bat had flown back hitting him in the mouth and breaking two of his teeth. Blood was everywhere.
Shock and quilt cascaded over him as he ran back to the schoolhouse, past the arriving ambulance, and searched for a place to be alone. It was almost more than he could process. Once again through no intent, he had become the source of pain for someone he cared about.

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His brother was four years older than him which led to both bonds and rivalry during different stages on growing up. It was his brother who taught him how to spot bullfrogs and catch tadpoles when they lived on the farm. His brother was the Boy Scout Den Leader for the Cub Scout Pack he was in. His brother was the one who helped him learn to ride a bicycle. From his brother he learned to identify different species of butterflies. His brother not only taught him how to braid three pieces of bailing twine to make a stronger rope, but also shared the principle that as long as there was an odd number of strings, one could make the braid as wide as he wanted.
It was also his brother who would “leave the little kid behind” because he couldn’t ride fast enough to go on the bike trips. His brother was the one got a .22 caliber rifle for his twelfth birthday from their father. After his brother refused to let him into a tree house, he decided to build his own. His brother tried to warn him that the boards he was using for the floor were not strong enough, but out of defiance he began jumping up and down on the floor and fell through. Laying on the ground listening to his brother’s laughter, he knew he had to find a way to out-smart his brother. His brother would pin him to the ground and tickle his ribs until he cried from the pain and begged him to stop.
One day walking down the upstairs hallway past his brother’s room he noticed his brother kneeling on the floor playing with something. His brother’s back was to the door with one arm by his side. Taking advantage of the element of surprise, he rushed in, grabbed his brother’s free arm and twisted it up behind his back. To prevent his brother from struggling free, he put a knee in the middle of his back and using both hands twisted the arm as far as he could. His brother finally begged him to stop, but he didn’t let go until his brother promised never to pin him down and tickle him again. Later when their parents found out, they were both scolded for fighting and he was warned that he could have caused serious injury by dislocating his brother’s shoulder and made to promise not to do anything like that again.
When he was ten the family moved from the farm to a small town in another state. The difference in their ages became more apparent and the boys spent less and less time together.
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Adjustments (Part One)
That first year after the move was the most difficult. Besides the initial disappointment of the new house being pink instead of red, it was also tiny. It only had four rooms. The living room at the front of the house, closest to the road, had a small bedroom at one end of it. The kitchen, about half the size of the living room, had a narrow hallway connecting it to a second bedroom. Halfway down the hall there was a bathroom on one side and the house’s only closet on the opposite side. The hall was so narrow that both doors could not be opened at the same time. The bathroom was so small that his father joked you could sit on the toilet, wash you feet in the tub and shave in the sink all at the same time. On the back side of the house was an enclosed area off the kitchen that had three steps down from the kitchen door to a small landing. From the landing you could go left and out the back door or you could go right twice and go down five more steps into the basement. In the center of the basement, off to one side, was the huge coal furnace. The basement ceiling was low and the overhead duct work from the furnace made it seem even lower. At the far corner of the basement and to the opposite side of the furnace, two partial walls formed a small room with no door. That room had a short half window to the outside. When that window was opened the coal could be dumped from the burlap bags they filled at a local strip mine into the corner room. The house had no second story, not even an attic. His parents had the bedroom off the kitchen hall and his older brother the one off the living room, he and his younger sister slept on a fold-out couch in the living room.
He really missed the old farm house. It was two and a half stories tall with an attic you could stand up in. The first floor had a large kitchen with a laundry room on one side. Coming into the house from the back porch you could go straight through the kitchen to a large dining room where his mother had set up a sewing area by a window on one wall. If you went straight ahead you could go down the steps to the basement which was dry and warm and had books on shelves. That was also where his father had the shoe last and leather working tools for repairing boots. If instead of going to the basement you turned left there was a door to a large bathroom. Or you could go diagonally through the dining room to the living room which had a big couch, three over-stuffed chairs, the television set and wall with double windows that provided a view of the driveway beside the house and the large apple tree on the other side and if you stood at the windows you could see the bee hives across the gully and part of the hay field beyond. At the far right corner of the living room was a door to the front entryway to the house. Standing in that entryway, you could go left out the front door across a small yard past the lilac bushes toward the dirt road that ran past the house. Or you could go straight through a second door into his parents bedroom that was as large as the living room. It had a long closet the length of the far wall to the right. Straight ahead was an area his mother had set up in front of the south facing widow with a small table where she would hand colorize the black and white photographs his father took. Beyond that in the corner was his father’s drafting table. Also, from the entryway you could turn right and go up the stairs the second floor. He, his brother and his sister each had their own bedrooms on the second floor. Also on the second floor was a large walk-in closet the his father had converted into a darkroom for developing photographs and down a long hallway past his sister’s bedroom was a spare bedroom that his father used part of for reloading his own ammunition. The house was heated by natural gas they got from a well on their land.

Adjustments (Part Two)
It wasn’t just the house that seemed to have suddenly gotten smaller and more crowded. The land had too. His whole life up to that point had been spent on a seventy-five acre farm with fields and trees and hills and animals. Their farm was one of the small ones in the area. Although a neighbor’s house from the second story of his house, it was only because both houses were near hilltops. It was still almost a mile to the closest house down a dirt road. Now the family was living on two and a half acres near a U.S. Highway. There were houses on three sides, there were no rolling green hills, with few exceptions the trees were short scrubby thorn bushes, and most of the animals he came in contact with were domesticated.
He was basically shy and didn’t make friends easily for fear of rejection or ridicule. Even at family gatherings he had gotten into the habit of staying in the background. He had never been a straight “A” student, but that year was the first time he had gotten a “D” and an “F”. When he would come home from school, after changing clothes, he would take long walks through the scrub thorns to the one big oak tree he could see from the house. Somehow sitting under that tree he made the determination that despite what others told him he could or could not do, he was the only one who could make that choice. Gradually his grades improved and he avoided failing fifth grade. He had learned from books and movies that even while enduring oppressive conditions, as long as he continued to do what he knew was right, things would be alright. The seeds of his rebellion were beginning to grow and so was his self-confidence.
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Years passed and his experiences accumulated. some good and some bad. Even as his self-confidence grew those early doubts lingered in the background, making him wonder if he was worthy of any praise he received. It became his default self-assessment when things didn’t turn out the way he hoped. When he placed 6th out of 10 in a college scholarship audition, he reminded himself the he “wasn’t quite good enough”, since there were only 5 scholarships awarded.
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