MY LIFE AND TIMES
^{(as if you care)
by Ric Carter}

Being a collection of memories, suitably edited and expunged either consciously or otherwise, purportedly of some import in the continuing development and future prospects of the author, or whatever.

EARLIEST TIMES

I can't drag up much from my infancy, of course. A few years in the house next to my uncle's, around the corner from my grandparent's minifarm (truck garden, chickenyard, walnut grove), the yardful of beagles in between. Pulling a cup of scalding hot coffee off the drainboard, scalding and scarring my chest. Moving a few miles away when I was five.

I don't remember my sister Patty, who died of scarlet fever when she was three and I was one; or falling from a moving car a few months later and fracturing my skull; or the Korean War; or climbing into a farmer's truckload of garlic and being banished for days. I barely remember measles and chickenpox. All ancient history.

But there were all those days with Grandma Carter reading me tales, and me playing with the poultry and climbing the walnut trees, and poking around Grandpa's garage in the Model T and the boxes full of old picture postcards. The garage door was always open, fronted with bare and padded rocking chairs. We could safely consider the burning sun or pouring rain.

ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

I somewhat remember my elementary school days. Kindergarten at tree-shrouded Kinglsey School in Pomona, in a good neighborhood. (The child star of the LASSIE television series was rumored to live across the street.) Got kicked out for being a ruffian. Or we moved to a new suburban realm of Pomona and I was entered in kindergarten at Montvue School, and was kicked out of there. I think I finished that year at a church school somewhere.

There was a beautiful kindergarten teacher at Montvue. I was in love. She ate dinner at students' homes. She at dinner at MY home. But only once. Even though I behaved well. Often I did not behave well. Maybe I ate too much sugar. Maybe it was my head wound.

First grade, second grade, they just flew by. Third grade, ah, Miss Eames (the old spinster Christian Scientist from Claremont) led us through California history. Later she sent me post cards featuring talking cats, addressed to Master Richard. Fourth grade, fifth grade, whatever. But I didn't even make it through public school in fifth grade - expulsed again as a ruffian.

Most of fifth grade was spent in a local private boarding school, Scudder-Oaks in Claremont. I was utterly miserable being so far away from home, five miles. The discipline, the sanitation, the rigors, the organization into just two classrooms. The 7th-12th graders were a world apart. We 1st-6th graders were a weird collection of middle- and upper-middle-class misfits, else we wouldn't be there. The olive heirs, the cereal scions, the bed-wetters, the compulsive runaways from The Good Life, the community at Scudder-Oaks.

Sixth grade, no attempt was made to place me in public school. I was sent to an antique gloomy Lutheran school with nearly Catholic rituals and a former "Veet-Naam" missionary, Mr. Tewes, who scowled constantly. My class was assigned a project, to write an outline. I cribbed from HG Wells' THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY. It propounded evolution, with which Mr. Tewes disagreed violently. I was kicked out sometime afterwards. Not sure if there's a connection there.

[Note: My family were NOT Lutheran - Dad was raised a Quaker, and Mom's folks were Methodist I guess, because I was baptised at Westmont Methodist Church where Walter (Berry Farm) Knott was a member and we always attended modern antiseptic suburban Montclair Methodist Church. Maybe the Lutherans had the cheapest rates.]

At Pomona First Lutheran I made a friend, whose name I don't recall. We folded origami and celebrated our November birthdays, becoming the Amber Club. I bicycled regularly to his home in the foothills, where we folded origami and played games with marbles. He lived in a new suburb above Cucamonga, then a sleepy faded rural zone of vineyards surrounded by eucalyptus-grown roadways with foot-deep curbs. In rainy winters those roads became rivers. Once while bicycling back home I narrowly avoided being crushed by a semi-truck at a remote occluded intersection. Would the world be a better place now, had the timing been slightly different?

I have a few other memories of those years, but not many. I can't write a drama of my youth because it's long gone, and well rid of. Those were not the best of years. They didn't improve much either - my main recollections of my time at Emerson Junior High involve fears of nuclear war (there was a missile plant in town so Pomona was a target) and the reality of JFK's assassination. And ostracism for being a tall skinny weirdo who actually read books.

OK, I'll say it: FUCK CHILDHOOD! If you're not tightly integrated into some clique or gang, childhood sucks. I was never so tight, so it was a miserable experience. And a fitting prelude for an unfocused life, training for the further worlds of adolescence and adulthood. And then?

AT HOME THEN

The northeast Pomona corner neighborhood was fresh with cloned houses surrounded by inverted orchards, orange groves uprooted and upside-down awaiting further developments. These trees were immense playforts while they lasted. What was later a major interstate highway was installed a couple blocks north, just past the old stone houses surrounded by chicken coops and tree corpses and rocky alluvial grit. The traffic sound was the undertone of life.

Mt Baldy hovered blue a few miles north, over 10,000 feet high and covered with trees and the peak circled by large birds. (That was then. A few years later as the smog thickened, new arrivals had no idea a two-mile-high mountain range was nearby.) The next mountain eastward looked like a hairy killer boar with massive tusks.

From under the jacaranda tree in the backyard Dad had sculpted I could just see those peaks, the boar leering down over the rooftops and redwood fences and the splashing in the neighbors swimming pool. I marched plastic soldiers thru the irrigation circle and conquered the muddy terrain, often at the cost of many ants.

JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL

Emerson Junior High was a two-mile walk from home, and I walked nearly every day hauling a briefcase full of that day's library books. I read a dozen a day. The briefcase was heavy. The walk through new suburban tracts was long and tedious. Many long blocks to walk and read and observe and probe.

On trash days the cans would be set on the sidewalks and I'd dive for goodies, especially looking for castoff magazines and paperback books. Paperbacks in those days were all trashy splendors, worthwhile prizes for the eager student. Memoirs of hookers and spies and junkies and actors. Good stuff. And sometimes cast-off hardware, radios that almost worked, toys only slightly broken, metal and plastic and glass stuff that glinted hard and cold and inviting. And every day the missiles didn't land was a good day.

Emerson Junior High: falling asleep in Science class except when a sugar-acid volcano was demonstrated, or reading books on mythology. Dropping out of Geometry, which I couldn't comprehend. Being humiliated at athletics. Being excused from Typing when JKF died. Listening to an English teacher talk of her tour-Europe-by-Citroen vacation. Spending as much time as possible in the library, reading of spaceships and atoms and dinosaurs and maniacs. At least I wasn't kicked out.

This was the early 60s in Greater Los Angeles, surf music and hot rods and smog, Camelot far away. No surf nearby, so I skateboarded everywhere, even six miles to public swimming pools (where VOLARE was always on the sound system) and my grandfolks' place in the old neighborhood, semi-rural South Pomona. Downtown Pomona had been rebuilt as a pedestrian mall so I'd skateboard there to poke through bargain shops and shoplift stationary from drug stores.

Sometimes I had a rideable bicycle and so could scoot my skinny ass around to remoter parts of the Pomona Valley. I patched many flat tires and cursed the stickerweeds (tribulus terresteris) that pierced my tires and feet. I skidded and crashed a lot. Sometimes this was due to reading while riding.

I'd been certified as a Mentally Gifted Minor (MGM) and given an adult library card. Every couple days I'd bike to the library and check out records, novels, paintings. I'd ride home with the bike basket filled with Herman Wouk and Ray Bradbury, with records of GB Shaw plays and obscure musicals and Hawaiian language lessons, with abstract canvases, as well as with whatever I'd found discarded along the way. At home I'd put the records on the livingroom stereo (a Heathkit that Dad had assembled) and prop the pictures under my galactic bedroom wallpaper and read the adult literature, and be taken away. And solder scraps together.

Sometimes I'd roll north to Quaker/college town Claremont, whiz past the colleges, shoplift the bookstores, peer into the Japanese art-craft shop RAKU, lay back in the great public park and watch the Friday peace vigils. Later I'd finger records and strum stringed instruments in the Folk Music Center and watch the clock run backwards. But that was later.

Things could have been worse. I had no peer group, few friends, no lovers, but I wasn't beaten much, wasn't molested, wasn't abducted, wasn't starved. No movie material here.

More memories to come. Stay tuned.