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Childhood In A Skinner Box (+77 Signs) [1]

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Date: 2023-06-28  

“The difference between Democrats and Republicans is they feel patriotic by waving the flag and telling the world we’re #1 and we feel patriotic when the world is waving our flag and telling us we’re #1. So when they call us unpatriotic, they’re wrong: it’s just that their idea of patriotism is our idea of being an asshole.”*

-My Dad

See that scrappy young lad pointing at the globe? That’s my Dad. And that fancy lady beside him is his mother. And his father was a War Hero! How lucky could a boy get? This picture and the accompanying article about Seattle’s “boy genius” and “geography whiz kid” came out in the Post-Intelligencer in 1932 as the country was entering what would be the nadir of the depression. He’d been crazy about maps from the age of three and by the time he was six he helped pull his weight by winning prize money in a sort of rag-tag vaudeville circuit in Seattle theaters at the time. You could ask him anything — within reason — about U.S. or World geography and he could answer it. Show him the outline of a state and he’d name it, it’s capital and all the states that bordered it. Name a destination and he’d find it immediately on the globe. He’d bring in between $2 and $6 in prize money, two or three times a month, which was a lot back then. When I was six just pretending to help was a big deal.

Reading about my dad’s childhood** it’s hard not to think of it as a musical: “Gee Whiz!” It would open with the rousing title song — a call-and-response between the Whiz Kid and the crowd as he answers their questions, throwing in some wry commentary: like “The Music Man” except it’s The Geography Boy. The song practically writes itself: fast-paced and exuberant, filled with rhyming and alliterative place names, exotic animals and languages... a celebration of the amazing world awaiting this plucky young lad. punctuated throughout with “Gee Whiz!” as an exclamation of awe and delight. Other songs in the first act will be about the power of love and sticking together as a team, life on the road and how great it’ll be someday when they finally find a home. That should give you a pretty good idea of just how things weren’t for my father.

The Early Internet.

As expressed in musicals, itinerant living is kind of jolly, and requires little more than an upbeat song with references to both freedom and fresh air, and best of all it’s over and done with in three or four minutes. In real life however migrant living’s a lot more intrusive, there’s barely any money left after room and board and fresh air starts to lose its novelty when it’s your chief source of entertainment.

And it’s certainly no way to raise a kid. Dad’s childhood was spent being boarded out to friends or relatives, or left alone in rooming house rooms while his parents went door to door compiling listings for the R.L. Polk city directory, which was essentially the phone book before we all had phones. They didn’t leave him alone because they were cruel, but because they were paid piecemeal and had to be fast. Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, B.F. Skinner was conducting similar experiments using caged rats that would revolutionize behavioral psychology. I’m convinced that dad’s early fascination with maps came from being left alone for extended periods at such an early age in rooms where maps were the only colorful or even remotely interesting things to be found. Without them his attention would’ve probably be drawn to motion instead of colors and he’d become fixated on flies. After that, who knows? Since he was exceptionally smart I’m sure whatever it was he’d be remarkably good at it.

His parents would use their time together to grow tired of each other and use their pioneer spirit to file for divorce long before it became the popular form of couples therapy it is today.

Something — or virtually everything — about that six year old kid doing what he could to keep the family together just makes it all the more tragic that the adults couldn’t hold up their end of the deal. Dad would spend the rest of his childhood in a succession of foster homes, and see very little of his parents. Act One ending with a mournful reprise of the Title song, It would still be punctuated by “Gee Whiz” only having evolved, like the term itself, into its sarcastic, disappointed opposite.

Despite having plenty of reasons to, my father never once complained about his parents or the way they did, or didn’t raise him. And despite the fact they couldn’t support him, he took care of them when they could no longer take care of themselves. However, his father’s apartment really wasn’t big enough for a caretaker, and since his mom had a whole house and a caretaker all to herself… well, you didn’t need to be a whiz kid to figure out the efficiency of consolidation.

So almost fifty years after splitting up in the middle of the depression, Dad’s family was back together again. And it actually worked out quite well: turns out they just needed some time off. His mother had Alzheimer’s disease, but it was the gentle sort: slightly befuddled but essentially happy. The kind where you make new friends every day. (If it seems like I’m making light of it, it’s because my other grandmother had the other kind of Alzheimer’s, where instead of befuddled and happy she was tormented, and every new day was a fresh hell.)

Speaking of every day being a fresh hell, my Dad’s dad was okay with the situation too. If there was anything good about serving in the trenches in the First World War, which is arguable, it would be that you probably didn’t complain a whole lot about whatever happened after that. Even the trenches of the Second World War would seem like an improvement. I think one reason dad never complained about his upbringing was understanding what his father had been through, and understanding that his mother was a woman who’d stuck by him for as long as she could.

Although I thought that last sentence sounded good, I realized it was pure guesswork on my part and after writing it I thought maybe I could back it up by thinking about the things my father actually did complain about. After over a minute of drawing a complete blank I thought “That’s weird...” and after more than three minutes ticked by and all I could come up with was modern classical music and Evangelical Christians***, I realized Oh my God the man practically never complained! Jesus Christ! How could I have not noticed that until now?

Another five minutes or so reminiscing didn’t dredge up much else worth mentioning, and I realized most of our family’s discord quota had indeed come from mom: not so much from complaining though, but from worrying aloud — which is a bit like complaining about stuff that hasn’t even happened yet. The more I thought about it, the more I realized my memories of my father’s voice were proclamations of praise, observations that were overwhelmingly positive and stories that were set in an amazing world filled with interesting people who were essentially good.****

We all live in two worlds: the one that we share and the one inside our heads. Dad was one of those people whose primary residence was in his head, and one of the skills little doubt cultivated in the solitude of his childhood was his ability to be perfectly content with nothing more than his thoughts. He said that one thing he never really experienced was genuine boredom, just because there was always so much to think about. Over the last twenty years I’ve come to know what he means: I’ve always had something to think about, and I’ve felt just about everything there is to feel except bored.

Now you might look at the number of signs I’ve painted and think “That’s gotta be boring.” Nope. That just means I need time to think. Tracing and painting doesn’t take up a lot of mind space, especially when you’ve been doing it for awhile. As for Dad… he made maps. Theirs was still the siren call of salvation echoing out those toyless, joyless Skinner Box rooms of his childhood. But the difference was they no longer showed where he’d be going, but where he’d been, and apart from a couple of ice shelves, there wasn’t much of this world that Seattle’s geography whiz kid missed. I forget what the total number of countries was, but seventy-five would probably be low. And it might not surprise you to hear the kid who could look at the outline and tell you the state, its capitol and all the states that bordered it at six grew up to be something of an America nerd. These days the more you hear someone refer to the Constitution the less likely they are to have read it. Dad taught Constitutional Law, but what you really didn’t want to get him started on was our system of Checks and Balances, at least if you needed to be somewhere. If there was any benefit to dying at sixty-five it was being spared the sight of what’s happened to his country.

America was what my father had instead of parents. It took care of him when they couldn’t — and thanks to the foster care system, the Armed Forces, Foreign Service and being incredibly smart, he was able to have as fine an education and rewarding a life as any. Almost all of which was spent in service to his country.

Obviously he was and still is an inspiration to me, and it feels almost shameful to admit this, but my real inspiration was listening to people in the media who haven’t done a damn thing for this country except use the airwaves to shit on half the people in it call him unpatriotic.

More than anyone I’ve known, my father was both a patriot and a self-made man who never once referred to himself as either. Because the country I’m living in seems like barely a shadow of the one he loved and since whatever it is I’m trying to accomplish is as much for him as anyone, I don’t consider myself a patriot, but I’m damn proud to be a patriot’s son.

*While it’d be easy to attribute this observation to simple common sense, I do think part of it came from his respect for the people of other nations. He was talking about Reagan Republicans at the time, and the dynamic behind it — tarring Democrats with the label of being unpatriotic — still goes unanswered despite becoming substantially worse. We continue to ignore it at our peril.

**Dad never talked about any of this stuff. All my information about his childhood comes from a chronology of his life compiled by his eldest son. That’s a story all it’s own for another time.

***Dad’s dislike of Evangelicals only crept out into the open later on his life, and it was just the ones the came to the door. Likewise he only complained about modern classical music when it was intrusive, namely at concerts when he had to sit through it while waiting for the Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, etc. (I, on the other hand, find modern classical to be intense and complex: both an intricate portrait of, and personal journey through, some of the darker elements and events of the 20th century that ultimately becomes a raucous and a joyful celebration of the human spirit. But that’s because I just stick to reading the program notes. The music itself is unlistenable.)

****You’d think not having noticed these things made me an unobservant and unappreciative son, and certainly to an extent I was. But in my defense, when I was growing up my Dad was simply my Dad. If there’s anything we take for granted it’s the people we’re surrounded by every day. This is why I feel memoirs are important: writing forces you to focus in a way that simply remembering tends to gloss over.

Some of the 469 signs I’ve put on freeways this year:

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