| They each made one mistake in life and it’s time for the ugly truth to be revealed. |
Take a moment to consider the plight of those who had perfect parents. Most people—by the time they’ve become adults—have developed shortcomings, and they’ve learned to live with them. That is, they’ve learned to blame all their shortcomings on their parents. Many, perhaps most, people have deep scars from the dysfunctional home they were raised in, but can at least bask in the serenity of knowing their own personality defects were not their fault.
Mom was awful. Dad was a tyrant. And don’t get me started on my siblings. It’s amazing I’m still sane, given what I had to put up with, growing up. So don’t be surprised if I’ve still got some issues.
In short, most children receive as a heritage a cold, vicious determination to “never be like my parents”, and this single-mindedness of purpose is so strong it sees them through all challenges in life. My sisters and I had been cheated of this by having had perfect parents.
They’d left us with no emotional scars on which to gnaw. There had been no lack in their care-giving on which we could dwell. They had taught us well, nurtured all our interests, shown compassion and love continuously, filled us with equal doses of self-confidence and humility, and given us nothing to hate. How cruel and heartless is that!
And how many times have Beth, Casi, and I been subjected to that glowing remark: “Oh, I just love your parents. They are the sweetest people on Earth. I just adore them.”
Yeah, yeah, whatever. The phrase “a tough act to follow” comes to mind.
But all that’s about to end. Now that they’ve reached the 100 year mark, it’s time for the real story to be told. I can’t keep it inside any longer. My days of suffering grievously to protect their reputation is over. The bitter truth is that my parents actually are not perfect. They each made one mistake in life.
Before I disclose it, I have to admit that it took me a long time to find one, for each. I had to closely examine my entire childhood, seeking something, anything, that would qualify as a parental error. But my efforts were rewarded. I discovered, gleefully, that in fact I had dirt on each of them.
Let’s start with Connie. (Disclosure: we had relatives living with us, growing up, and somehow out of that I never called my parents “mom” or “dad,” but used instead their actual names as the others did. Weird, in hindsight. But that’s not where my trauma came from.)
I must have been nine or ten years old at the time. It was a weekend, and some neighborhood kids and I had spent the morning creating the largest snowball ever in history. The snow was wet and as you rolled a small ball through the snow, well, it got bigger. We wanted to see how big we could make it. I’m pretty sure John Wood was there, and Terry (Paul) Bender. Possibly one of the Ubans. Maybe Lee Cropper. Anyway, with all these kids working together, we ended up with a gigantic snowball, perhaps five feet in diameter. Amazing!
What does one do with such a thing? Well, obviously, when you live on the Ridge, you push it off the edge and watch it careen down the hill, crashing into trees, exploding, that kind of stuff. How cool, right?
But just as we were to send it off to Snowball Heaven, Connie’s bell rang. That was the signal that it was time for lunch. In fact, we all needed to go home and get lunch. We agreed we’d be back in precisely one hour. I can’t remember if we wore watches back then, but if we did, I’m sure we synchronized them. So at precisely 1:10pm, that snowball was going to be unleashed on the wilderness. And if you were late, you’d miss it.
I downed my soup and sandwich quickly, aching to get back to the Big Snowball Event. But things dragged on and I was worried I might miss it. Then disaster struck! No, said Connie, I couldn’t leave without helping with the dishes first. OMG, nooooo! There wasn’t enough time. I begged and pleaded but there was no swaying her. “They’ll wait until you get there,” she promised—having no idea how irresponsible and selfish ten year old boys can be, when it comes to gigantic snowballs.
So I misbehaved. I did a really bad thing. I pretended to be taking out the trash, but in fact used it as an excuse to escape. At one point I had to crawl past the dining room windows, which I did on my hands and knees. But once out of visual range I took off like…like a snowball rolling down a steep hill.
But I made it…just barely. The other kids were already there, and they were already rolling the giant white object over to the edge of the cliff. I helped, and then…over it went! OMG it was so fantastically awesome!! It picked up speed and actually grew bigger, rolling down the steep hill. Finally, reaching close to the speed of light, it smashed directly into a large tree and literally exploded—into two halves. Those halves then each took on a life of their own as they kept rolling, and knocked into more trees, and split apart again, and I suppose if the hill had been infinitely long it might have started some kind of nuclear-style chain reaction and destroyed the world. But it was enough to put a huge smile on all our faces. I only wish iPhones had existed then, so we could have preserved that moment—one of the high points of my life—for all time.
When I got home, Connie grounded me for a month.
Well, on one level I deserved it. I’d been deliberately dishonest and deceitful, and had, with-malice-aforethought, disobeyed a direct order. Yeah, but…snowball from hell!!!! I had to see it. Decades later, I confronted Connie with this story. She’d forgotten it, but was honest enough to agree that—in hindsight—she’d made a mistake, not letting me off kitchen duty that one time.
OK, now that I’ve proven Connie was actually NOT a perfect parent, let’s talk about Koert. It was years later. I was probably about fifteen, and he decided to teach me how to drive a stick shift car. Now, jump ahead many decades, and I’ve taught several people how to drive stick shift cars: my wife, my three kids, and my nephew Ben. It’s not easy. You find a large open area, like a vast deserted parking lot. And you oh-so-carefully, with plenty of “sea room” and nothing nearby to hit, you explain how the clutch works, try to describe the feel of releasing the clutch pedal while you push harder on the accelerator, and then grit your teeth while the young student screws it up fifty times and you start smelling burnt clutch. But eventually they learn, and with a surprisingly small amount of practice, it becomes second nature.
Here’s how Koert taught me. We had a little MG sedan, with a four-on-the-floor configuration. It was parked in our garage. At 6 Winter Ridge Road, we had a long driveway that—just before reaching the house—sharply curves 90 degrees to the right and lines up with the garage openings. That 90 degree section is large, and on the far side of it—away from the house—was a little six foot drop, down to the Uban’s yard. We had our trash barrels set there, along with an incinerator for burning trash that was burnable. You don’t see that much these days, but we had one.
Koert and I were about to go on some errand, and he asked if I’d like to drive the car out of the garage. Well, sure! What teenager wouldn’t like to do that? It would be my first time behind a wheel. And of course I had no idea how a clutch worked.
No matter. Koert tried to explain it, and said to take it slow. But of course a first-time clutch user has no idea quite what “slow” means. He’d also not told me what to do after the clutch pedal comes out. Like, how do you stop? And I’d be doing this first-ever-driving-attempt not in a vast, empty parking lot, but backing out of a garage, with all kinds of things in the way.
You can probably guess what happened. I let the clutch pedal out slowly, not even realizing I was supposed to have my head turned around staring behind. The car shot out of the garage stall at probably twenty miles an hour, smashed into the incinerator, knocked it down the embankment into the Uban’s yard, where it immediately started a fire in the dry leaves. The MG came to rest at the bottom of the little hill, hood pointing at the sky.
It took an hour, and the help of the neighbors, to get the fire out. And it wasn’t difficult for our other car, a Jeep Wagoneer, to pull the MG back up onto the driveway with a tow rope. I don’t recall Koert being upset with me about any of this. He must have realized he’d chosen a poor environment for teaching his son how to use a clutch. And eventually I must have mastered the skill, but I don’t remember my second lesson. Probably it occurred somewhere other than that 90 degree turn in our driveway. And hopefully involved going forward, not reverse.
The point of this is that Koert had made a mistake, in teaching me how to use a clutch. He’d chosen a terrible location. He wasn’t perfect after all.
So, there it is. Those of you who have limitless adoration for Koert and Connie, and I suspect that includes everyone who knows them, have now been exposed to their Dark Side. Connie should have let me go see the snowball roll down the hill. Koert should have taught me how to use a clutch in an empty parking lot.
And all my deficiencies as a human being, the entire long list, I’m pretty sure can be blamed—ultimately—on this traumatic upbringing I experienced. But I think now, at Koert and Connie’s 100th year, I probably need to just let it go. 🙂
Jacques Voorhees 