Nature vs. Nurture vs. Nutter Butter?
If you were to ask me, I would tell you that I had a great childhood.
I might even go as far to say that despite my non-traditional upbringing, being raised in a lower middle-class household by a single mom and three older sisters, I turned out relatively normal – all things considered. Of course, “relatively normal” and “all things considered” are themselves loaded terms.
First, “normal” is itself a relative concept, that everybody seems to have a different definition/interpretation of.
Do I consider myself normal? Well yes, at least way more normal than that weird kid I had started off as. And even back when I was that weird kid, I didn’t know any different, so to my younger self, I’m sure it seemed like the way I grew up was “normal” too.
And then there’s the whole “all things considered” part. There were certainly many physical, social, emotional and environmental factors that helped to shape those early, formative years of my childhood.
This got me thinking about all of these extraneous variables – the whole “nature vs. nurture” argument – and I began to ponder whether it was my genetics, my environment or something different altogether that had the greatest impact on the person I grew up to be.
These are of course lofty, philosophical subjects for anyone to contemplate, but as a parent of two teenage boys, I now find myself asking these same sorts of questions about them; my own offspring who I have sheltered and nourished and taught, who I have been preparing to eventually go out into the world, equipped with the knowledge, skills and tools they will need to one day become productive members of society.
I say all of this to provide background for a perplexing exchange I recently had with my 13-year-old, Ryan.
Being that it is summer, my boys usually sleep in late, and just hang around the house being lazy most days when my wife is at work. Since I work from home, it is my unofficial duty to periodically nudge them about helping out with basic chores around the house. You know, load the dishwasher, vacuum upstairs and, usually once a week, mow the lawn.
On this particular day, the lawn was in need of mowing. It had been more than a week, and the grass was getting pretty long.
I asked Ryan to mow, and came up with some other chore for his brother Carson to do. Ryan didn’t protest; he simply put on his tennis shoes and walked out to the shed to where we store the mower.
A few minutes later he comes back into the house, and tells me that he can’t mow, because we are out of gas. Without even thinking about it, I ask whether he feels like biking the approximate three miles into town to the “USA To Go” gas station to fill up the gas can, and it was his reaction that made me start wondering where it was that I had failed him as a parent.
His basic argument was that he couldn’t ride his bike into town to fill up the gas can, because doing so would require him to carry the gas can with one hand, leaving him only one functioning hand to steer the handlebars of his bike with.
I was speechless, all I could do was stare back at him in disbelief.
Instinctively, I wanted to explain to him how ridiculous he was being. How, back in my day, all of us kids rode our bikes one-handed, that I could probably count on one hand the times I actually rode my bike with both hands. I resisted the temptation to gloat and brag about how we used to gracefully glide back from 7-Eleven using our free hand to hold giant Slurpees or Mountain Dew Super Big Gulps. I decided against doing any of this as I thought I might sound too much like one of those crotchety old men stereotypes, “When I was a kid, we used to ride our bikes one-handed, uphill both ways to 7-Eleven.”
And yes, we would occasionally even ride our bikes up to the Amoco station to fill up a gas can, or I wouldn’t have bothered suggesting it to Ryan in the first place.
So there we were, generations, and seemingly worlds apart, our differences exposed by a common household chore that I had performed dozens of times before I had reached the age that Ryan is now.
How could this be?
I don’t think our boys live sheltered lives. In a lot of ways, they do a bunch of different stuff that I never got the chance to do when I was a kid, like play in a single-elimination lacrosse tournament in front of a huge crowd, do a plunge cut on a compound sliding miter saw, or dock a pontoon in windy, wavy conditions.
But how did riding a bike one-handed get overlooked in the larger scheme of things?
Our kids don’t want for anything. I don’t think they are spoiled, at least not in the traditional sense. But then again, when I was a kid, I never had a trampoline or a pool table or a smartphone or a cabin on a lake to visit on the weekends.
Between all of our trips and family vacations, all of the sporting events, musicals, amusement parks, museums and concerts, our kids have already seen and done a lot – far more than Teresa and I had seen or done by that point in our lives.
But not having ever ridden a bike one-handed? Really?
I partially blame genetics, mostly. Teresa’s non-one-hand-bike-riding genes that are obviously coursing through my son’s body (I think that’s how genetics work?). But, I will also assume some of the responsibility for helping to cultivate an environment where this sort of inexcusable behavior is, well, excused.
Confused, and feeling a bit demoralized, I did the thing that most parents in my situation would naturally do when confronted with questions they can’t answer. I unnecessarily projected my childhood and my childhood experiences onto my child, thinking that there must have been some sort of X factor that allowed me to turn out the way I did, with, let’s face it, much less than what my kids have going for them. If I could reverse engineer those formative years of my life, maybe there in the blueprint of my childhood I would find my answers, and it could provide clues to these subtle differences between my son and I, between his generation and mine.
The Nutter Butter Effect
You’ve probably heard of the Butterfly Effect, this scientific theory that proposes that the simple flap of a butterfly’s wings on one side of the world, can create a chain reaction to produce some extreme weather phenomenon, like a cyclone or hurricane, on the complete opposite side of the planet.
Well, I have a similarly outrageous theory to explain how a skinny, pigeon-toed kid from relatively meager beginnings defied all odds to grow up and live a normal life, one that is based on the seldom scientifically studied benefits of the Nutter Butter cookie.
Okay, so maybe there’s more to it than that. But Nutter Butters, or Wiffleballs, or (fill-in-the-blank of life’s other simple pleasures) is a metaphor for a different kind of cause-and-effect event, one that I suspect played a big part in helping to make me into the person I am today.
As you read on, you will learn that there were plenty of parts of my childhood that weren’t great. Plenty of things that we didn’t have, plenty of forces working against us, plenty of moments when it was painfully obvious how different my family and home life was from that of my friends. But instead of looking back at my past with contempt, suppressing any feelings of shame or regret, trying my best to put those years behind me, I now understand that period of my life for what it was, a true blessing.
My general working theory is that there isn’t this one big thing that is going to make or break whether you grow up to be successful or a failure, whether you turn out to be a decent human or a total asshole, whether you’re normal or weird as shit. Certainly it’s not completely dictated by whatever specific X and/or Y chromosome pairings make up your particular cell nuclei, or based entirely on the type of home environment and socio-economic class you were brought up in. More likely, it’s a combination of factors, a bunch of little things that all add up, the cumulative effect of winning some and losing some. It’s the lows that come with hurt, experiencing loss, or being made to feel strange or inadequate, contrasted against the highs of all the accomplishments, milestone birthdays and life’s other firsts that stand out as your most cherished moments. It’s about variety and perspective, like the old Michigander adage that you need to experience harsh winters and extreme summer heat to truly enjoy the lush greens and deep blues of the spring awakening, and the vibrant reds, oranges and yellows of the fall colors. In this way, the absence of something, those extra obstacles put in one’s way, prepares them to be a resilient person who has the ability to adapt and overcome, perceived disadvantages can actually have the effect of producing the opposite result, the kid with no other viable means of getting to the gas station figures out how to ride his bike to fill the empty gas can. And someone who doesn’t come from a whole lot of money, doesn’t live in the nicest house or drive around in the fanciest car, they learn to recognize and appreciate the simple pleasures in life – how an occasional package of Nutter Butter cookies can bring happiness, even level the playing field, if only for a moment.
Origin of Species
I had a modest, but happy, lower middle-class upbringing. I lived with my mom and three older sisters in an approximately 1,100 square foot, 3-bedroom, 1-bathroom, ranch-style home. The house, which was already starting to show signs of its age by the time I started registering my earliest memories, was one of the first aluminum-sided, cookie-cutter homes in the new-ish Huntley Square subdivision that had sprung into existence in the late 1960’s when everyone, my parents included, started moving out to the suburbs in search of their piece of the American dream.
While the house was never quite big enough for the five of us, I don’t ever recall it being a huge problem. We always made do. When we were younger, different combinations of us kids would share two of the three available bedrooms, while my mom, of course, occupied the master bedroom, which was only “master” in name, as it was almost the identical 10x10 space as the other two bedrooms.
Most of the time, sharing bedrooms was not that big of a deal for my sisters, although, eventually they would start to get on each other’s nerves, and the room assignments would inevitably get reshuffled. For a while there, I remember even sharing the front bedroom with my sister Marcia, which was only possible because my Uncle Bill and Aunt Jan had given us some hand-me-down bunk beds. In retrospect, I’m guessing that the fact Marcia got dibs on the coveted top bunk, was probably the only reason that an older sister would ever tolerate sharing a bedroom with an annoying little brother. Even the bunk bed experiment wouldn’t last very long, and before I knew it, my sister Marcia must have had enough of my constant kicking and hitting the underside of her bed, and was relocating her belongings to another part of the house.
When my sister Pam, who was the oldest, got to be junior-high-school-aged, my mom let her move her stuff down to the basement, which opened up more of the scarce upstairs real estate for the rest of us. But even then, with us kids getting older, and less likely to be willing to share a bedroom with one another, meant that there were only three available spaces for me, Marcia, Stephanie and my mom. As a result, there were long stretches where I remember my mom sleeping on the couch in the living room, because there simply wasn’t another available bed. This was just a normal occurrence in our house; I don’t recall it seeming weird to any of us at the time – it was just something that we had to do.
Speaking of scarce real estate, it’s the perfect way to describe the one bathroom in a house full of women. Being the gross boy, my solution to never seeming to have access to the bathroom was to just discontinue all personal hygiene there for a while, which as a parent of two teenage boys, I now know is a phase that all boys go through, even in a house with 2 and ½ baths.
Besides being cheaply constructed, with its standard issue faux wood hollow-core doors and aluminum windows, The house itself had good bones. However, the mix of 1960’s and 1970’s era décor left much to be desired.
The living room floor was covered in ugly, brown shag carpeting, which was probably installed around the same time that my parents must have purchased the equally hideous matching brown plaid couch and loveseat from Art Van. Maybe as a way to distract from the fact that most of the room was being taken up by an endless sea of brown shag and plaid, my parents had hung this enormous abstract acrylic painting of this swirl pattern that resembled a giant contorted butthole, the perfect accent piece for a poop-inspired motif.
The kitchen was not much better. At some point the house’s original linoleum flooring had been covered over with more brown carpeting, this time featuring a geometric pattern consisting of interlocking rectangles of varying shades, textures, and sizes. Just as a side note, later on I would discover that, with the right amount of imagination, the kitchen carpet’s repeating grid pattern made an ideal setting for the Star Wars figure football games that I would stage, or the perfect sprawling battlefield for a game of Crossbows and Catapults.
The kitchen’s appliances were an avocado green color, an apparent hold over from the circa 1960’s Fine-Built Homes building materials catalog that my parents must have been consulting when deciding on the finishing touches for their dream home. The entire time I lived in the house, well at least the parts that I have memories of, I never recall the dishwasher or oven ever working. Still, my mom found a way to make due, having us take turns washing dishes by hand in the sink, and cooking meals on our gas stove top, or in the mainframe sized Tappan microwave that took up most of our main countertop space. The refrigerator, the only fully functioning of the three major appliances, was unusual in that the fridge part was on top, and the freezer unit was on the bottom. As a little kid, I would actually grab the top of the fridge door and swing myself around like I was Tarzan, which probably explains why half of the shit in our house was broken.
At some point, around the time I must have been in middle school, our gas dryer went on the fritz. We didn’t have the money to buy a new dryer, or to repair the one that we had, so my mom bought a big spool of clothesline from Meijer and stapled it up to the underside of the floor joists in the basement, so we could use our make-shift indoor clothesline to air dry our laundry, regardless of the weather outside, or the time of year.
While broken appliances and indoor clotheslines were inconvenient, maybe even a tad bit embarrassing, in my opinion, they were nothing in comparison to the one thing that I felt made our house stick out like a sore thumb.
I’m almost one hundred percent sure that ours was the only house in the entire Huntley Square subdivision that didn’t have a garage. If you looked close enough you could find houses that had been built without attached garages, that had detached garages constructed after the fact, but I still stand by my claim. We were certainly the only house on our street without a garage, and I believe that was also true for our extended block comprised of Stonehurst, Doncaster and Grayfriars Avenues along with Pearson Court.
Now normally this wouldn’t have been a big deal, but there was something else that was missing from 4414 Stonehurst. Other than a short period of time immediately following my parents’ divorce, my mom and sisters and I never had our own car.
Looking back at those times now, I find it hard to imagine how we ever managed without a car, but somehow we did. Of course, my dad always had a car, and he only lived twenty minutes away, so if we got in a real pinch, he would be there to drive us to a doctor’s appointment, and on the weekends that he had us, he would come and pick us kids up after school on Friday, and drop us back off on Sunday night before he would head in for his late shift at GM.
Not having a car meant that we had to take the CATA bus anywhere we couldn’t walk or bike to. From several CATA bus stops conveniently positioned around our neighborhood, including one by the Huntley Villa townhomes near the entrance to our subdivision, we could pick up the main Holt/South Lansing bus route that went straight down Aurelius Road to South Cedar Street, and onto a transfer station in downtown Lansing. Sometimes we might only go as far as the Health Central Offices on South Cedar, if my mom was taking me to my annual well-check visit, for instance, and afterwards we might walk to Jon’s Country Burger for a grilled cheese sandwich, or to Jim’s Root Beer Stand before catching the return bus back to Holt. Other times we would get off in downtown Lansing to go to the Peanut Shop, shop at Woolworth’s, or to check out a movie at the historic Michigan Theater when that was still around. Most times though, we would usually just board a connecting bus out to one of the large shopping malls, the Lansing Mall on West Saginaw, or the newer, and slightly nicer Meridian Mall out in Okemos.
Every Friday night my mom would go to dinner with her friend Ella May, before heading over to the South Pennsylvania Meijer to get a week’s supply of groceries. For me, Friday nights were by far the most exciting part of the week. First, it was Friday, which meant you were done with school for the week. And then it also meant back-to-back primetime episodes of the Incredible Hulk and the Dukes of Hazzard. And to top it off, my mom would come home with multiple brown paper grocery sacks full of goodies, including an occasional surprise Matchbox or Hot Wheels car for yours truly!
While it’s true that we had cable TV from the time I was probably in 4th grade on, one of the few real luxuries that I remember, (which was also a curse, since my sisters and I will never be able to get up and walk away from the TV without instinctively wanting to yell “place back with channel selector”)--for a long time we only had a black & white set that could pick up a handful of local analog stations, and there were other times that we didn’t even have a single working TV in the entire house. One of my earliest memories is of me snuggling up in this old leather chair in our sunken family room on a chilly, fall afternoon, munching on some off-brand lemon cream filled cookies while I watched an NFL game on this tiny black & white television that my aunt and uncle had given to us. Several years later, after we had upgraded to a color television (again, as a result of my aunt and uncle’s generosity) I would wake up at the crack of dawn on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons. Most times I would get up way too early, so instead of going back to bed and potentially missing part of the early morning cartoon line-up, I would drape a blanket over myself and sit in front of the heat register, and just blankly watch the color test pattern as I waited for the scheduled programming to begin.
The front exterior of our home was shrouded by several large, overgrown evergreen bushes who’s prickly branches overlapped with one another, giving the illusion that it was all one enormous, Wiffleball and frisbee eating coniferous blob. There was a tall birch tree near the front walk with two trunks that would bend all the way down to the ground during ice storms, only to spring back up once things thawed out. The birch tree was flanked on the right by a small red maple, which once upon a time had a trunk small enough in diameter, that we were able to use my realistic-looking metal handcuffs to temporarily lock one of the younger neighbor kids to the tree while my friend Matt Souza and I ran to 7-Eleven for some refreshments. My sister Marcia, who was babysitting the kid at the time, was not amused, and used a flat screwdriver to break him free from his bonds while we were gone, which meant that it was my turn to not be amused when I returned home to find my handcuffs in pieces.
On the side of the house there was an approximately eight foot long by three feet wide by three-foot-tall bin that my dad had built out of some fence rail to hold our garbage bags in between our regularly scheduled trash days. I would spend hours out in the side yard pretending that the bin was an actual garbage truck. I would take all of the bags out of the bin and set them out next to it. Then I would jump into the front of the bin, pretend to drive to my next stop, jump out and throw one of the bags into the back, before climbing back into the cab of my imaginary garbage truck to repeat the process over and over again.
The backyard was enclosed on three sides by chain link, and separated from the front yard by a dilapidated shadow box and chicken wire fence that I once split my head open on, after losing my footing when trying to scale the slippery chicken wire part, just as I was about to pull my head and torso up over the top. That was my first time seeing my own blood, first time getting stitches, and my first scar, which you can still faintly see if you look close enough at my forehead just below my hairline.
There was a tall poplar in the corner of the backyard that I had fashioned a climbing rope to, and on the ground at the base of the tree we had used miscellaneous pieces of scrap wood we had found in the shed to cobble together a small fort that we accessed through an inconspicuous opening in the lower branches of an adjacent bush. At one point, we had even dug a five-foot-deep fox hole in the backyard which my mom wasn’t super happy about, which I never understood, since we dug our fox hole right in the middle of our old sandbox. I admit it might have been a touch wider and deeper than some of the other holes we had previously excavated, but then again, it may have had more to do with the several yards of topsoil that we deposited on the nearby grass.
On the backside of the house, off the family room and behind the two back bedrooms, was a large covered porch. Using the house’s concrete patio as its foundation, the covered porch had been built by my dad sometime after my mom and him had moved in. It had large, fixed pane, farmhouse windows on the north and east walls, which let in a ton of natural light, but also created some unbearable heat during the hottest parts of the summer. The covered porch made the perfect concert venue for Electric Storm, the air guitar and lip-sync band that me and some of my friends formed during the height of Journey’s, Huey Lewis & the News’, and the J. Geils Band’s MTV popularity. We performed carefully choreographed concerts in front of a crowd of parents and siblings, on a stage made of this giant fake brick and plywood panel that we had sat on top of five upside down turned plastic milk crates. One of the members of the band would be responsible for starting the Montgomery Ward brand record player, for instance, Journey’s 1980’s classic album Escape, and then would hurry to get into position. Then as the music slowly built, we would each take our turns, standing over an old air organ pretending to play Jonathon Caine’s familiar piano chords at the beginning of “Don’t Stop Believing,” mimicking Neil Schoen’s power riffs on our replica cardboard Les Paul Model guitar, using a pair of plastic parakeet cage perches to pretend wale on our charcoal grill, bongo drum, and tent pole/pizza pan drum kit/symbol creation, while skillfully lip syncing along to Steve Perry’s melodic vocals. Our concerts were always performed in two parts, were exactly as long as the LP we were covering, and curiously enough, we never once deviated from our set list, or came back out for an encore performance.
Chris holding the cardboard guitar, surrounded by his sisters.
At some point my friends and I also figured out that we could climb the eight-foot-tall privacy fence in the garden next to the covered porch to gain access to its flat roof, as well as this giant twenty-foot-tall CB radio antenna that had been unfastened from its bracket up at the peak, and carefully laid down on the back slope of the house so that the tip of the antenna nearly reached the roof overhang. Well, one day my friend Matt Rockwood and I were feeling pretty patriotic, and thought the antenna would make the perfect prop for recreating the scene of the Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima. But after we had climbed up onto the roof, placed our American flag into the hollowed pole at the top of the antenna and lifted old glory victoriously into the sky, some twenty-five feet above the peak of our roof, our next-door neighbor, this lady named Barb Robbins, must not have shared our sense of patriotism, because she immediately called my mom at work to tell on us.
Chris dressed in his cowboy hat, Star Wars pillow case cape, and finest Spiderman pajamas standing at attention, pretending to be a marching band drum major.
Our house backed up to the football field of the old Holt High School property on Aurelius Road, which meant the flat roof over the patio also provided a prime vantage point for watching Friday night home games from the comfort of our backyard. Even with our convenient, close proximity to the stadium, we usually still chose to go and enjoy the games as paid spectators. As far back as I can remember, my mom would take me to all of Holt’s home football games. We would arrive a half hour or so before kick-off, just enough time to buy a hot dog and some popcorn from the concession stand, before snagging our favorite seats, positioned at the rail directly above the set of steps that led down under the bleachers, so that I would always have an unobstructed view of the action once the game got underway. I loved every part of the football game experience, including the marching band’s halftime performance, which I would go home and try to recreate, parading back and forth through our living room with my Wiffleball baton like a drum major moving the band through its paces. When I got a little older, I eventually started asking if I could go to the games with my friends, and while I am sure she was probably disappointed to give up our special mom/son Friday night football dates, my mom never let on. In high school, I would host the other members of Da’ Fellas in the Bull’s 5th Leg for some pregame festivities, and then we would all regroup afterwards for a late-night bonfire in “The Circle” (which if you read my March 21, 2020 blog, “The Unstoppable Force Meets the Immovable Object” you know wasn’t actually a circle at all, but more of an elongated cul-de-sac with rounded curbs at either end.)
Having a football field in your own backyard also made for a pretty cool childhood playground. Even though the football field property was surrounded on all sides by 6-foot-tall barbwire fence, my friends and I learned to skillfully scale the barbwire at a very young age, plus our shed only sat about a foot and a half away from the fence, so you could easily climb up onto the roof of our shed, and then launch yourself over the fence and into the football field property.
Where as the fenced-in football field property housed a full-size, usually lined, manicured football field, the main stadium was surrounded by a host of other athletic practice fields that were much more accessible, didn’t require us to trespass, or risk ripping our jeans on some of the aforementioned barbwire. Even then, every so often we still found it cool to sneak over there, to play on the bleachers, or race one another around the track. Depending on the time of year, we might get lucky, and some of the track and field equipment would have been left out, some high hurdles or the big fluffy mats used for the high jump/pole vault, that sort of stuff.
Chris sitting on a blocking sled at the football practice field.
While my friends and I were no strangers to Troost Field (the official name of the football stadium) we tended to play more in the athletic practice fields adjacent to the stadium. Besides there being enough green space to accommodate a couple of practice fields for the varsity and JV football teams, and of course our neighborhood pick-up games of tackle football, there were four softball fields complete with backstops, and on the opposite side of the main football stadium there was Kiwanis Park with multiple tennis courts and another softball field, all within walking distance of our home, all easily accessible to an active kid with a bunch of pent-up energy.
Sycamore Elementary, the grade school that all of my sisters and I attended, was also within walking distance. In fact, with the exception of the old jr. high building on Holt Road (which now serves as the Senior/North Campus for the new high school) if we really wanted to, we could have walked to school throughout the entire time we were in K12, although most of the time we still chose to ride the bus to Hope Middle School, as its location near the intersection of Holt Road and South Cedar Street was a bit of a hike, especially during the winter months when there was inclement weather.
We lived close enough to the town center that we could easily walk or bike to any of the stores our small community had to offer. Over the years, I wore a path to 7-Eleven for Slurpees, and later, Mountain Dew Super Big Gulps. On the weekends my mom would give me a few bucks to ride to Quality Dairy to buy some donuts, and if I had any money left over, she would let me get a couple packs of Fleer baseball cards. Every time our family goes to Buddies Grill, I think back to when I was a kid, and the building used to be Schmidts grocery store, and how I would ride my bike up in the summer, buy a 25-cent glass bottle of Faygo pop, and walk around the houseware aisle thinking up different ways I could use the various contraptions they would have on display. Being a self-described “inventor” of all manner of things, from scrap wood and roller skate wheel go-carts to hinged Folger can and tent pole dunk tanks, this was a favorite activity of mine, and something I would often repeat when visiting the gadget-filled aisles of Browers Hardware, Ace Hardware, or Action Auto, when it was still around. Holt was our oyster, and being a kid living in our small town meant frequenting Sweet Sensations for some soft serve ice cream on your return trip from a midsummer's day swim at Vahalla Park, or stopping off at Hitchen’s Drug Store or DeRosa’s Party Store after school to purchase some packs of Garbage Pail Kids with your leftover lunch money.
Each fall, my mom would scrape up enough money to buy me an assortment of t-shirts, usually something to do with Star Wars or one of my favorite sports teams, a couple pairs of Lee brand jeans from Sagebrush, and a pair of rubber toed, white canvas Nike shoes with either a red or blue swoosh on the side. The jeans and shoes were to last me the entire school year, so by that following spring, after I had gotten my new white sneakers sufficiently dirty, I would usually wake up one morning to find that my mom had used bright white shoe polish to touch up the canvas portions of my shoes. Horrified, I would hurry out to the backyard and locate some dirt to frantically rub over the bright white paint, so as to not tip my classmates off to my mom’s early morning handy-work.
And then there was our diet, which could be split into four main food groups: 1) Frozen, microwavable foods; 2) Pizza delivery; 3)Weekly grocery supply of store-bought junk food; and 4) Cooks choice of Rigatoni, Stew, Chicken & Dumplings, Hamburger, or Steak.
Now the above is not meant to criticize my mom for our lack of culinary variety, I’m sure it didn’t help that I was a picky eater, a bit of a whiner, and super skinny, so she was probably just happy that I ate anything at all.
Ironically, as unremarkable as her home cooked meals were, I still really enjoyed them, and a couple of them are some of my favorite dishes even to this day.
For something quicker, the freezer was always chalked full of frozen Totino-brand microwavable pizzas, fish sticks, corn dogs, or frozen breakfast foods like microwavable pancakes or French toast.
At least once a week we would order pizza, usually from Dominos, Goodtimes Pizza (which is where the current day Fat Boy’s Pizza is now located,) another defunct chain called My Cousins Pizza, and on those special occasions, West Side Deli.
As for the store bought groceries, a typical Friday night haul might consist of the usual stuff, some bread, milk, a few cans of chicken noodle and/or tomato soup, box of saltines, jar of peanut butter, a package of bologna, as well as several Appian Way pizza mixes, two or three different boxes of cereal, some bags of chips, a package of enriched hard rolls from the Meijer bakery, an eight pack of the old glass bottles of Pepsi, Mountain Dew, Coke, or Sprite, and a package or two of some store bought cookies, Chips Ahoy, Oreos, or Neapolitan Wafers. And of course, my personal favorite, Nutter Butters.
Not His Father’s Gazelle
I ended up cutting Ryan some slack for the whole not biking up to fill the gas can thing. I determined that what I had initially perceived as this apparent flaw in the natural selection process didn’t really have to do with anything that I had failed to teach him, or some learned behavior that he had stubbornly refused to acquire, it was just something he hadn’t done before. More specifically, it was something that he hadn’t ever needed to do, which definitely helped to put everything back into perspective.
The species would survive, it’s not like Ryan was in danger of getting mauled at the water hole by a hungry lion because he didn’t know how to ride his bike while carrying a can of gas. And in some ways, I’m sure Ryan and his generation are actually better prepared for life, that they have acquired other evolutionary traits that will allow them to surpass anything that we have ever done, and some day nature will just take over, and us old farts will find that we’ve been pushed out of the herd. It’s inevitable, that’s just how life works.
But for now, I feel I still have things to teach my kids, knowledge to transfer to them, values to instill in them, based on lessons learned through my own experiences. After all, we’ve gotten them this far, so we must have done something right, and we must have been half way normal to begin with.
For sure, those early, formative years of my childhood were different. Not always good, or necessarily bad, mostly just different.
But instead of focusing on all the things I likely missed out on, all the ways that I had been disadvantaged, I like to consider the possibility that my upbringing, as atypical, or abnormal as it may have been, directly influenced the type of person I would grow up to become.
Of course, I prefer this slightly more optimistic outlook because of the positive twist it places on what could easily be viewed as some of the most painful chapters from my childhood. The fact that my parents divorced when I was only five years old, and I grew up in a single-parent household with only marginal supervision from three older sisters, who by default, were in charge of me when our mom was busy working two jobs, meant that I had practically unlimited freedom and independence. Because we didn’t have a lot of money, us kids would find cheap ways to entertain ourselves, and as a result, my imagination, creativity and ingenuity were off the chart. Since we didn’t have a car, we tended to ride our bikes everywhere, or occasionally we would have to take the bus, which helped to instill in me a better than average sense of direction, not to mention resourcefulness, adaptability, and dare I say, perspective and humility?
And if we ran out of gas for the lawn mower, we rode our bike up to the gas station to fill up the gas can, leading to the highly advanced, evolutionary trait of one-handed bike riding.
It’s something that can’t simply be explained by nature or nurture.
Must have been all of those Nutter Butters.
A gas can next to a pack of Nutter Butters.