I just started writing one day about me

POINTS OF IMPORTANCE IN MY LIFE, AND PEOPLE (NAMED) IN IT!
(I was having fun when I started this. @1997~ And I was in a mind of Kurt Vonnegut JR., at the time, so I lamely tried to echo some of his style and phraseology!)


Omaha, Nebraska, August 18th, 12:14am, CST, 1953
This was the first significant event in my life, though truth to tell, I make this assertion on pure assumption as it was the moment of my birth, by Western standards of reckoning such things.  I freely admit that if forced to use the Oriental calendar I would be unable to pin down this particular event.  I believe I feel some small relief that we on this continent favor the Gregorian system, though I freely admit further that this assertion is probably due in no small part to a tendency towards laziness.

I should make mention at this point that I expect to make full use of the phrase I freely admit throughout this... I shall endeavor not to render it useless through severe overuse, though I freely admit I may fail miserably in the end.  To borrow from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.: "...and so it goes."

The next significant event in my life occurred again at a particular moment in time, however it was never marked on any calendar that I'm aware of.  If indeed it were noted on someone's calendar somewhere, it no doubt had nothing to do with the significant event in my life to which I'm now making reference, so for all intents and purposes, it was never recorded insofar as I'm concerned.

Birth must be considered a significant event.  Any dullard will grant the point, so I see no reason to elaborate.  However, I will recap:  Birth must be considered a significant event!  The next significant event I refer to however, strictly as concerns my life, was a THUNDERCLAP!  It shattered the world around me and shook me to my very core!  It was awareness!  I was AWARE of myself, of being alive and on my mother's bed.  I was AWARE of breathing and of the sunlight coming in through the window.  I was AWARE that I was small.  Not small, as in a young human being, but small as in how much space I actually took up in the universe!  The aforementioned dullard will again grant the point that the universe is too big to take a mental or spiritual measuring stick to, so suffice it to say this strikes me as a sound realization.  Yes, I was very young; certainly no more than a couple of years old.  But all of you reading this right now may have to take a moment out for reflection if this "significant event" of mine doesn't resonate somewhere in your own life.  Perhaps you're too numbed by having  been aware for your past five, fifty, or ninety years to remember.  Go ahead, take a little breather from me and try to remember when you couldn't remember.  I freely admit that awareness was not a special gift or ability granted to me alone.  No more than breathing oxygen is.  It is something we all experience.  Perhaps some remember it as I do, and perhaps some barely remember, and perhaps I have no business belaboring the point...?  But being aware of being AWARE for the very first time is a life changing event!  It's miles more important than love or voting or puberty!  You can't love without awareness, voting just clouds awareness, and puberty is nothing more than a biological event that occurs whether one is aware or not.  So awareness certainly moves to the front of that line.  Ok, moving along...

So now here I am, stuck with being aware.  Now I have to be responsible for my life.  I have to start learning!  Bummer.  No longer free to just lie about pissing my drawers and drooling my lunch all over my shirt and leaving the mess to my mother or some other adult who seemed to care about such matters.  No, now I began to become aware that IF I pissed my drawers, it got mighty cold down there after a few minutes, not to mention chafing.  I must insert here that I'm not claiming that all of a sudden I was responsible because of becoming aware.  But I could no longer go about being a living vegetable.


Let me begin now to list the names of the people I remember, up to this point:

Leona Jean Morrison Zakaras, my mother.
Casimir Alphonso Zakaras, Charlie, my father.
Mary Alice, my oldest sister.
Catherine, AKA Cathy, my older sister.
George Zakaras, my paternal grandfather.
Stella Dzieminski, (JUH-MIN-SKI), my father's sister.
Elizabeth Dzieminski, AKA Liz, my cousin.
Mary Jusevitch, (YOO-SUH-VICH), aunt, via dad.
Michael Jusevich, AKA Mike,  my cousin.
Annie Bidrowski, (You can do it, c'mon!), my father's sister.
Leo Bidrowski, Aunt Annie's husband.
Eddie, Jimmy, Rita, Rosie Bidrowski, cousins all!
John Zakaras, my fathers' brother.
Joseph Zakaras, dad's youngest brother.
Bernice Zakaras, Uncle Joey's wife.
Ronnie and Joanne Zakaras, my cousins.
George Zakaras, dads' younger brother.
Maryann Zakaras, Uncle Georgies' wife, and my Godmother!
Jerry and Carmel, my cousins.
~There certainly are other cousins, but I don't remember much more than a name here and a glimpse of a face there.  I have no doubt that they only remember me, if they do at all, as just one more of a bevy of tiny, crawly, dirty faces, or as a name on the back of old photographs.  Please don't feel slighted?  After all, I'm the one who's owning up to forgetfulness here.

There're more...
William Morrison, My mothers' baby brother, and a scamp!
MaryAnn Morrison, Uncle Bill's wife.
Thomas Morrison, mom's brother.
Clarice Morrison, Uncle Tom's wife.
Janice and Annie Morrison, my cousins.
John Morrison, Mom's brother.
"Mickey" Morrison, Uncle Johnnies wife.
Charlie, Judy, and Milah Mae, my cousins.
Daniel Morrison, via mom's side.
Annadene Morrison, Uncle Dan's wife.
Sally, Suzi, Sherry, my cousins.
MaryEtta, my mothers' sister.
Jeannie, Kay, and ???, my cousins.
Estelle Morrison, AKA Aunt Toadie (No shit!  I swear!), via mom.
Alice Naylor, (My most favoritest Aunt!), mom's sister, and near look-alike.
Harvey Naylor, her husband.
Patty Jean, Rocky and Skip Naylor, my cousins.

I have purposefully saved this relative for last~

Bernice Lewis Morrison Eastridge.
This is the only grandmother I ever knew.  My paternal grandmother died before the above mentioned significant event about "awareness", so I barely remember her.

Any and all who know me knows I'm a very emotional person who cries easily-  But  when my Grandma Kitty died, while I was in the Army and in what was then West Germany, I was truly saddened for the first time in my life!  Another form of awareness, sadness...

Other persons in my life at this time were:

Mike Tippery.
Mike and I were the first friends either ever had, at least as it seems to me.  I freely admit that I presume on Mike's part, but so I do.  Mike used to beat me up.  Not daily, and not as a matter of course because he could, but in the flow of growing up, boys will fight, and I was never a fighter, so Mike beat me up and I cried and ran home and soon came out to grow up some more with Mike.  We were real friends!

Mike had a younger brother named Nick.  Nick was pretty much a pussy like me, but I was a better one, so he never got near the notoriety he might otherwise have gotten.  He broke his arm one summer and got to wear a cast for a few weeks.  That cast became a fearsome weapon, and for the space of those weeks, Nick became one of the stalkers in the neighborhood:  one of the Movers-and-Shakers!  Way to take advantage of an opportunity, Nicky!

Patty Olmstead.
Hi Patty.  I know, you go by Pat now, but then, I don't go by Paulie anymore, either!
        Patty was my very first female companion.  She was the friend who just happened to be a girl.  There were no females in South Omaha in the late '50's in my world.  Just boys, girls, and adults!  The adults all had titles, like Aunt, Uncle, Sister Carla, Mr. Reeves, Father Dorsey, et. al.  Some of them were female, but the distinction held no relevance for me.  Patty was a girl, though she's no doubt a female after all these years.  Patty was the first girl I ever saw with her clothes off, as she was the first girl to see me in my "birthday suit".  My parents would've gone nuclear (which was THE BIG SCARE in those days of Communism!), had they known.  Sins galore just in the initial stages!!!  We didn't sin.  We didn't even touch.  We only knew we felt funny standing there naked.  What was the big deal?  Of course I noticed she didn't have a pecker- but hell, I already knew girls didn't have peckers, so really, the incident was nothing more than verification of a known fact.  I don't know what went through Patty's mind when she saw how cluttered my groin area was, or for that matter, if she thought much of anything at all.  I earlier presumed on Mike Tippery- I shall not presume on Patty!  Shortly after disrobing, we re-robed and went about playing.  I only remember the incident because we knew we weren't supposed to be naked in front of each other, so we needed to find out what the big hoo-hah was all about.  It was all about so much hot air, I declare!  There is another thing I remember growing up that Patty was party to, and this also revolved around sex, as much as sex can revolve around two very young Catholic children in a seriously Catholic enclave like South Omaha, circa 1960.  We were sitting on my Aunt Stella's porch and Patty related a story to do with how children actually come into being, and without going into graphic detail, in its' own peculiar off-kilter way, it actually covered the basics, especially in retrospect.  So dipshit Paulie goes home and promptly begins to show off his newfound knowledge, only to have his ship blown out of the water by his mother, and I can only assume she was Christianically stunned and angered!  She called Mrs. Olmstead, lodged her objection, and the upshot was that I was not allowed to play with Patty for the next thirty to forty years!  (The Sentence was eventually reduced to "Time Served" after a week or so, but I remained on "Probation" for some time thereafter.)  And so it went...

No child should grow up being afraid to die.
I cannot speak specifically for any of the other kids I knew then, but I was VERY aware that I was horribly afraid to die before I was old enough to receive the blessed sacrament of confession, because according to Catholicism, that Grande Olde Dame, were I to die before I could confess my egregious sins to a priest, who could (and presumably would) grant me absolution and thusly a fresh start, I would never be able to go to heaven.  Sure, I wouldn't have to go to Hell, but so what?  I would go to Purgatory.  The eternal waiting room!  Some reward.  And all of this because of Original Sin.  Adam and Eve.  They stepped on their cranks, and now I HAVE TO SURVIVE until I'm old enough to go to confession so that if I get hit by a truck or am unfortunate enough to be in the path of a tornado, (automatic weapons weren't as popular then!) the only way I'd go to Hell is if I farted off going to confession.  My young mind could deal with getting the short end of the Eternity Stick if it were my own fault- but ORIGINAL SIN???  What an abominable thing to stick a kid with!

I learned to play war in South Omaha, while I was waiting to be old enough to receive the blessed sacrament of Confession, which, as I mentioned, would allow me to escape Purgatory and proceed directly to Heaven or Hell upon death, which the discerning reader will note, I was practicing preparing myself for by playing war with the neighborhood kids.  The irony took years to catch up with me.

We rarely played anything else, unless it was baseball, but baseball is mostly a fair-weather sport, while war can be played or conducted year round, fair weather or foul.  We assaulted and defended, attacked and retreated, shot, stabbed and otherwise killed each other with great exuberance year 'round!

This too I currently view as an abomination, that mere children should spend their learning years becoming inured to death, dying, blood, anguish, pain and suffering to the degree that it becomes a fun thing to do.  I myself remained aloof about the moralities involved well into my adult years.  I enlisted in the U.S. Army on November 22nd, 1971, and remained either on active duty or in the Reserves until sometime in 1993!  You could say I was somewhat slow on the uptake.  I began my military career with the Vietnam war and ended it with the end of the Gulf war.  Verrrry Slow!

But I'll have more to say on this subject later on, when I'm older...  Right now I'm still pre-pubescent... not yet equipped with hindsight.  Call this a time burp if you like.

As I mentioned earlier, South Omaha in the late '50's, early '60's, was a Roman Catholic enclave, as far as I was aware.  In fact, as far as I was concerned, aside from Rome, it was the very cradle of the Catholic world.  Actually, for me Catholicism was the axis the world rotated on.  I knew, through hearsay and TV that not everyone in the world was Catholic, but I never knew anyone who wasn't.  And if I did, I wasn't aware that they weren't!  Not in the flesh.  Non-Catholics were like Europeans and Orientals:  People who technically lived on the earth, but who only truly existed on TV and in the newspapers.  I would've stared equally curiously at a Jew or a Baptist as I would've dropped my jaw at a Negro.  (Black people were not black in the '50's, they were Negroes.)  Actually, they were niggers, but you could only call them that in anger or righteous indignation, so mostly we called them Negroes amongst ourselves. (Remember, this was the Midwest, NOT the Deep South...)  Anger and Righteous indignation at another Race didn't come any more naturally to me as a youngster than did the concept of sin.  Those things I needed assistance from school and the rest of the adult world to master and become comfortable with.  I got it, though I admit I was never very good at being prejudiced, face to face.  I don't expect you to believe me, because over the years it's become quite in style to extol one's lack of prejudice.  I would sooner expect the claim that I haven seven toes on my right foot to be accepted merely because I say it.  I'll prove it...

          "I freely admit that I have seven toes on my right foot."

Now, what's your recourse?  You don't know me from Adam.  It's feasible.  Hell, people have been born with two heads!  Seven toes isn't so outrageous.  "Maybe so, maybe not.  What do I truly care, anyway?"

                                                      ~O R~

          "I was never very good at prejudice face to face."

Your response?  "Right!  Sure buddy.  Who's ass are you trying to blow smoke up, anyway?"

See?  Oh well, I'm not trying convince you of anything, I'm just rambling over the early years.  But I can just see the first response I'll get as a result of this:

"Does having seven toes on your right foot throw your balance off when you walk and run, or only when you run?"

I once had the opportunity to get out of trouble by blaming "Niggers".  I'll be dipped in shit, but it worked!  Talk about your magic words.  It is however my belief that had there been Jews or baptists living in near proximity to my neighborhood I could have blamed either of them with almost the same success.  But nigger was trump then.  Segregation was never an issue in my South Omaha, nor was intermingling.  I would have been greatly confused to discover that Catholicism extended to Negroes.  Hell, even the janitor at Sts. Peter & Paul was white.  Catholic too.  Seemed logical to me.

Sts. Peter & Paul (Saint Pete's, as everyone called it) was where I attended school while I lived in South Omaha.  Boy was that an experience?  (Sorry, no sexual drama follows.  I know I was never groped or touched, however, I can only vouch for my own experience, so if THAT'S what you're after, you're gonna have to look elsewhere.)  Here are some of the people I remember from Saint Pete's:

Mrs Cimbar, First grade teacher.
Sister Jose, First grade teacher.
Sister Caroline, Second grade teacher.
(My third grade teacher was not a nun, so I don't remember her name.  Sorry, hon.)
Sister Carla, Fourth grade teacher.
Monsignor Jurich (God's Lieutenant in South Omaha!)
Father Dorsey.
Sister Brenda, (or perhaps Brendan?), the Principle of Saint Pete's.

The discerning reader may have noticed that I failed to remember my third grade teacher who was not a nun, yet I remembered my first grade teacher, Mrs. Cimbar, who was also not a nun?  That's because whoever the third grade teacher was, she was more concerned with actually teaching, so remains fairly nondescript.  Mrs. Cimbar was a Drill Sergeant!  I had somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-plus classmates when the year began.  When the year concluded, I was retained in the first grade, as were at least ten to twenty of my classmates.  I freely admit that the number is an estimate from memory.  The memory of a seven year old no less.  Perhaps the number was much less- perhaps greater.  The point, it seems to me, is that SEVERAL of my classmates FLUNKED, not just one or three.  Keep in mind this was 1958.  Kindergarten was babysitting, finger-painting, cookies, songs and naps.  First grade was learning the alphabet and phonics- numbers and sounds.  "See Spot run.  Run, Spot, run!"  The kindergarten class my first child, Scott, attended put my first grade class curriculum to shame and buried it in its' dust!  And we were flunked!  Unless one is handicapped in some form or another, it seems unrealistic to me that ANYONE can FLUNK "See Spot run?  Run, Spot, run!"  We didn't have the handy popular Societal  "crutches" of Attention Deficit Disorder" or any of it's spin-offs back then. 

Mrs Cimbar made the first indelible impressions on my very delible young psyche.  She was the first "Immovable Object" I ever crashed my little raft upon.  She instituted a kind of caste system on us, and conducted herself and her class accordingly, depending on who she was dealing with at the time.  Further, she saw to it that we adhered to this caste system.  I was not in the "White Collar" section.  I, and a few others were accorded more of an "untouchable" status, as was made popular in India.  Some items:  If one of us untouchables did anything that could be construed as overreaching our defined boundaries, we were punished immediately, generally in some manner meant to underscore our lesser status.  I remember having to sit in the trash can, for whatever infraction, and if someone had something to throw away, why, they were instructed to throw it in the trashcan with the other trash.  If I had to sharpen a pencil, more than once I was told to "chew it".  Whenever something came out of the mouth of an "untouchable", if it was construed as either smart-mouthed, or just not paying attention, we had to go to Mrs. Cimbar's desk, where she kept some type of a concoction which she applied to our tongues, which was very uncomfortable.  Possibly something made of cloves, or pepper or something of the like.  I remember it burned quite distinctly.  One day I was hustling to get into the classroom, get my coat hung and lunch in the closet, where we kept lunches, and to my seat before the last bell rang.  Very strict rule, being in one's seat at the ringing of the last bell!  Well, this particular morning, I missed by no more than a step.  I can remember thinking I was safe when that damned bell went off.  So Mrs. Cimbar made some remark to the effect that, since I was not in my seat when the bell sounded, I must be absent, or else I didn't care to attend class, or something off-handed like that.  So that entire morning, perhaps the entire day, (seems like it was the entire day, but I won't swear it was) I had to stand in the hallway, outside the classroom door.  And when I knocked on the door to let her know I had to use the restroom, she told me to use the girls restroom, as the boys' was on the second floor.  She made one of the other "caste" kids monitor me.  I don't imagine it was a whole lot of fun for that kid either.  There were lots of unexpected lessons in the first grade that i wouldn't have expected.

Perhaps you may think that this is all just a bunch of crap that I'm at best mis-remembering, or just trying to make things sound worse than they really were.  Well I freely admit that these events were fifty-plus years ago, but this shit happened, believable or not.  And back then, you didn't come home bitching about being mistreated in school and expect anyone to become irate on your behalf and go marching into the school office to find out just what the hell was going on and get the problem rectified.  You were just a kid back then, and if you bellyached, then you were also a whiner, and no adult would take up for you then!  Besides, there was no SYSTEM to watch out for abuse back then.  You went to school, and the adults had absolute authority.  ABSOLUTE!  This was normal- none of us "untouchables" found it odd or out of place.  We were just untouchables, that's all.  I just have blue eyes, that's all.