Digest_8

The Night of the Sharpeyed Chicken

Golden Gate Park at night feels abandoned. It’s darker than dark, as streetlights have been extinguished. A lone police cruiser moves along the winding road, enforcing the emptiness and stillness. I keep several car-lengths behind, as the Park is No Entry in the wee hours, and I park closest to the most advantageous spot for beginning the 400-foot climb up Strawberry Hill.

Yes, I’ve lived in San Francisco for 40 years now, and, after the mind-blowing meeting with Frenchie that I described in Issue #1of this Digest, I felt I had no choice but to get myself to the spot most sacred to me, the deserted, empty pool atop Strawberry Hill that once fed Huntington Falls in the Park. It’s a magical place. Over the years, my visits there have revealed the remains of mysterious rites that had been held there on Full Moon nights.

I needed the darkness, the stillness, the numinosity, to process the profound rearrangement of my self-image: of who I thought I was and how that could be integrated into my future self. I had just been told that I was a “sharpeyed chicken.” A chicken? I had never thought of myself as a predator. But, a chicken?

In order to explain, I need to provide you with more about who I am, where I’ve been in almost 81 years, what I’ve done. Given that I moved more than 41 times in my first 40 years (but never since), telling even the outlines of that will take a while, so I hope you’ll settle back and enjoy the story.

I’m a 12th generation American, though I was born on Cape Sable Island off the southern coast of Nova Scotia. Since both my parents’ progenitors were founding settlers in Ipswich, Massachusetts In 1631, I am a citizen by what’s known as jus sanguinis (“right of blood”). My father was pastor of a church in the fishing village, West Head, serving only five families.

We moved to Biddeford, Maine less than a year later and began a series of moves, my father serving several small, Fundamentalist churches in Illinois, Vermont, and Connecticut. For the record, my grandfather was a minister in the same denomination, but I call myself a “recovered” Fundamentalist, as I became an early, serious doubter.

Eventually, I attended six different grammar schools. I always had to deal with adjustments and ADHD, then known simply as hyperactivity, though I never got an official diagnosis until I was 78. In those days, we were usually called under-achievers, and were constantly admonished to sit still and pay attention. I now know that ADHD is, in fact, a mild case of Autism, which is caused by hypersensitivity. Just one example: I did not learn to read until halfway through second grade, when my mother somehow managed to find a phonetics teacher in northern Vermont. Once I had learned to connect those strange, abstract letters to sounds, I began reading voraciously, and by the end of second grade had gone through more than a dozen books. I once asked my mother if I was as much of a problem as my father insisted I had been. She replied immediately, “I don’t know, dear, I just thought of you as being resourceful.”

Hoping to provide structure and some discipline, my mother got me into a prestigious New England Prep School (The Mount Hermon School for Boys), where I spent four years as a “scholarship boy.” It was a lot like Lord of the Flies, with some pretty mean hazing, but I managed to avoid being either a target or a teaser, and did get an old-fashioned Classical education which has always served me well. I went back several years later for a Choir reunion, and no one knew who I was. I asked my father about that, and he said, “You were not then as you are now, my son.”

When it came time to apply to colleges, I was advised to look for schools that advertised they would accept “under-achievers.” I would have been very successful if there had been a career field taking aptitude and IQ tests, as long as I didn’t have to perform to their expectations. I was accepted at Kenyon College in Ohio, given a small scholarship, and did well enough my freshman year, working two part-time jobs; president of the pledge class in my fraternity; playing baseball and Contract Bridge on the college teams; but then they raised the tuition and slashed all scholarships in a “cost-cutting” move.

My parents were divorced by then, had amassed no savings, and there were no federal loans, so I decided to work for a year before resuming my education. It was 1958, and Universal Military Service (aka the Draft) was still the law of the land. So, before I could even get started at my regular job in the chicken processing plant I received my draft notice. I did not relish being in the Army, so I enlisted in the Air Force. Following six months at Lackland Air Base in San Antonio, Texas, I was sent me to The Institute for Far Eastern Languages at Yale University, to study Mandarin Chinese.

After 12 months of Immersion Learning, six hours a day, five days a week, and a too-early marriage (I was 20, she only 17), I was assigned to Okinawa, where I never used the language. Peacetime Military is an oxymoron. We were between wars, thank goodness, and the military was dysfunctional, to say the least, so I ended up writing Intelligence briefings for my Commanding Officer.

Having completed three years, six months and two days of active duty, I returned to New Haven and took a job as a credit reporter for Dun & Bradstreet, analyzing financial statements for small businesses seeking credit. By then, I had a daughter and a son on the way. In 1964 I was hired by Allstate Insurance, to manage an operations department consisting of two dozen women who created punch cards for our room-sized IBM computer. Just as I had finally decided to make this a career, I was called in by my supervisor and told that Allstate had been purchased by Sears, which had a firm policy that no one lacking a college degree could be promoted.

In early 1966 I was hired by White, Weld & Company to be a stockbroker in Hartford. Likely, they believed I would have potential customers from my days at upper-crust Mt. Hermon. I didn’t, but was able to find clients, many through civic organizations such as the Community Chest and the Jaycees, where I became a Vice President, successfully promoting a Professional Bowling tournament, creating the first North American Snowboarding Rally, and becoming active in local politics, which was my real love.

In 1969, my first marriage ended in divorce. I lost my motivation as a stockbroker. The Dow had dropped from 1000 to 500. My customers had lost a lot of money, and I was let go in early 1970.

If you’re still with me, thanks, but I will have to finish this story next week, so that I can wrap up my saga on behalf of the Sharpeyed Chicken. Stay tuned.