Introduction: The Wave of Change

When I looked at the old photograph of my “happy family,” buried for years in a forgotten album (see illustration), I immediately recognized my father, mother, and sister, but the other person in the photo—Georgie—was a stranger. I seldom saw myself in a mirror, and years later, I had no memory of what I looked like when I was ten years old (I am guessing my age). More unsettling, I had no memory of what it felt like to inhabit the body of a pre-adolescent boy. That part of my life was irrecoverable and gone forever. I could remember in an abstract, diminished way learning to play the clarinet, but not the physical struggle to form the correct embouchure or the proper breathing to play syncopated rhythms.

Meditating upon the family photograph, I recalled Plato’s insight that the common assumption that a man is the “same person in his dotage as in his infancy” could not be further from the truth. “Every bit of him is different . . . every day he is becoming a new man, while the old man ceases to exist.”[1]

When I compared the picture of me in the family photograph with one taken for my high school graduation, I could see in both photos large Romanian noses and tons of black hair, but I doubted if any other viewer would take the two photos to be of the same person.

More importantly, Plato points out that for any person, “neither his manners, nor his disposition, nor his thoughts, nor his desires, nor his pleasures, nor his sufferings, nor his fears are the same throughout his life, for some of them grow, while others disappear.”[2]

Everything is constantly changing in the world, including us, which is frightening, so we take photographs to fix certain people and events in our lives permanently, we may keep a journal for the same reason, and we repeatedly tell our personal narrative to solidify who we think we are, but looked at honestly not one of these tactics works.

It seems like all my life, I rode the wave of change, heading I knew not where. Although clueless about my destination, I did have a modest control over the wave I rode. By working out and hiking in the high altitudes of New Mexico, I could somewhat direct the development of my body. I knew from the death of my two substitute parents—Grandma Rice and Murphey—that the wave, mostly chaotic then, was carrying me to my ultimate destiny—death.

Plato claimed the old man was not worth saving and that the new man was freed from culture to join the gods, although few of us become the new man intended for us.

I should add that this memoir is not written to continue my existence, at least on pages and thus potentially, if only briefly, in other people’s memories. I write not for profit, fame, or legacy; through writing, I hope to understand my zigzags through life and free myself from the demons that have haunted me since childhood. Perhaps readers will find a few maneuvers to help them ride their own wave of change.

The Evil Eye

Car lights flashed through the window into the pitch-black room.

“What about Georgie?” a strange voice asked.

“He’ll be okay,” Mother replied. “He won’t know we’re gone.”

The sound of tires on gravel. The lights receded across the ceiling. The room was pitch-black again, and my little heart froze with fear.

I must have been two-and-a-half years old at the time. We lived next door to the grocery store my father and mother owned and operated. I don’t know what time of year it was. I think it was late summer and the window through which the car lights had shone was open; years later, I found out that the store often closed late at the end of summer because of the tourist business. When this happened, my parents and their employees went to Cooper’s to drink away what remained of the night.

As I grew older, I became more and more of a hindrance to the smooth operation of the store. Mother would leave me by myself with instructions not to get into trouble, and she would tell me if I did, she would whale the daylights out of me. And she could whale like no person I was ever to meet.

I hid under the bed with my back pressed against the wall. Shouts and screams. I couldn’t understand a word of what Mother was screaming. But I didn’t have to. The rage in her voice pressed me flatter against the wall. The small shovel Mother used to empty ashes from the coal stove that heated our house made a sweeping arc under the bed. It missed me. More shouts and screams. The shovel made several passes in front of me. As each one missed me, I felt safer and safer. But a two-and-a-half-year-old mind is limited. The bed moved away from the wall, and the reign of terror commenced.

Mother saw it was hopeless to leave me by myself. She disapproved of the games I invented to amuse myself. My most inventive game brought on the shovel attack. For reasons only a young mind can understand, I decided to redecorate the house, and I began with the furniture. I used the coal shovel to cover the living room furniture with a thin layer of coal ash. When I ran out of ashes, I used hot coals from the stove. I worked hard to ensure that no furniture was left undecorated. When Mother walked in to check on me, the upholstered furniture had begun to smolder. One look at her face, and I was under the bed waiting for an armed attack.

Three weeks after the shovel attack, Patrick O’Neill, the older of the two brothers who lived next door, and I wandered away from O’Neill’s backyard. When Mother found out I was missing, she became hysterical. She was sure I had gone to the lake and drowned. Patrick’s father found us not far away from their yard. Mother took me into the house, pushed me into a closet, and beat me with anything she could find: suspenders, coat hangers, and her fists. “On my birthday!” she shouted, “How could you do this to me!”

I did not have a mom; I had a Mother, the Capitan of the ship Good Hope, sailing for prosperity in America, where Tocqueville’s observation that the New World “opened a thousand new roads to fortune and gave any obscure adventurer the chance of wealth and power,”^[3] a widespread belief after World War I and embraced by my illiterate, peasant Mother in the Carpathian Mountains in Romania. The Captain feigned love for the crew while abandoning her son to the care of others. 

Mother hired a full-time, live-in babysitter to take care of me. Grandma Rice was a godsend. She hugged me to her full bosom and told me I was her wonderful little boy. She sheltered me from a threatening world.

Grandma Rice bathed me in a large washtub in the kitchen. When Mother was present, I would taunt her. “You’re not my boss,” I would scream. That was my way of telling Mother that I didn’t have to obey her and only listened to Grandma Rice.

Murphy showed up shortly after Grandma Rice. He lived in a small room in the basement, took his meals with the rest of us, and worked as an all-around handyman. His job was to keep the dilapidated grocery store building from falling apart.

I liked Murphy; he was my friend. He played games with me and let me help him. When Murphy dug up the septic system, he fashioned a small shovel—not like Mother’s coal shovel—so I could work with him. I didn’t know Murphy liked his whiskey and was half in the bag most of the time. I just knew he sang songs, joked about everything, and was fun to be around. When I wasn’t with Grandma Rice, I was with Murphy.

One day, Grandma Rice was crying. She picked me up and held me tighter than usual. She told me she had to leave for a while but would return to take care of me. Two weeks later, Mother told me Grandma Rice would never be back. She died of a sudden heart attack while attending her mother’s funeral in Missouri. I didn’t understand any of this. I didn’t know what dying meant, except it took a person away forever. I was sunk.

Six months later, I could not get Murphy up for breakfast. We always played the same game in the morning. He pretended to be asleep in bed. I tickled his feet until he sat up in bed and roared like a lion. But this time, it was different. I ran upstairs and tried my best in my baby talk to tell Mother and Father something was wrong with Murphy.

Later, men dressed in black came and carried Murphy out of the house. He was wrapped in a blanket and laid out on a stretcher. The men put him in the back of a big black truck and drove off. From then on, I feared and hated death, a pest that clung to my right shoulder, overlooking everything I did.

Ten years before her death, Mother told me that when I was one day old, a toothless Gypsy hag—who was thought to be a witch—came to visit me, the new baby. After the old woman left, I cried for three days, Mother’s milk turned sour, and I was bottle-fed by whom I don’t know. Mother said the old Gypsy woman had given me the Evil Eye. The hag invoked dark supernatural powers to cause terrible things to me and anyone who loved me. When Mother’s milk dried up, she abandoned me before more bad things happened to her. Grandma Rice, my true mother, died after loving me unconditionally for three years, and Murphey followed shortly thereafter. I had been dragged over to the dark side; death would proceed or follow me wherever I went.

Mother believed I would bring about one calamity after another upon her and the entire family unless I were isolated and disowned. Perhaps to assuage her conscience, Mother, in her elliptical way, felt compelled to tell me why she abandoned me and never held or hugged me, for underneath, she hated and feared me; I was cursed from day one.

Unless I somehow shook off the Gypsy curse, I would be condemned to be an outsider, an unlovable stranger, bringing misfortune to anyone who loved me or even cared for my well-being. Little did I know that the Gypsy curse set me on a dark, perilous journey that would challenge conventional beliefs and what was taken as the fabric of reality.

My memoir, A New Life: An Outsider’s Search for Meaning, is available as a Kindle book at Amazon and is free for five days beginning today, 1 May 2024.

Endnotes

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[1] Plato, Symposium, trans. Michael Joyce, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 207e.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row, 1966 [1835, 1840]), p. 11.