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Jeff Curtis ('69) - Alumni Sandstorm ~ 04/10/05 
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>>From: Jeff Curtis ('69)

(Fast) Forward

Remember when you couldn't wait to grow up? Parents telling you what to do
all the time and bigger kids picking on you all the time and you had to put
up with your annoying, smart-mouthed, sniveling little brother that shared
your room all the time. "Boy, just wait till I'm a grown up", you thought.

To be able to go wherever you wanted, whenever you wanted, buy all the
spudnuts you could eat and scarf Zip's Special Double Cheeseburgers for
breakfast. You could lock your annoying, smart-mouthed, sniveling little
brother out of YOUR house and never have to listen to him lying to Mom about
you picking on him again.

Yeah - that'll be the best, you thought. Funny how that stuff seems just
inevitable when you're a kid. It is assumed to just happen all by itself
with no thought or effort on your part. It's your birthright. And cars and
homes and privileges just bloom around you, unstoppable, like morning
glories in a weed patch. Then you get all grown up and find out that....
well, you all know what you find out, how you find it out and how,
sometimes, it finds you whether you want it to or not.

In short, the fact that you have to actually "earn" those things that you
desired (and felt you lacked to one degree or another) way back when in your
youth, at the cost in many cases, of a great deal of blood, sweat and tears,
doesn't necessarily hit you like a ton of bricks one day. Rather, it sneaks
up on you slowly, like an ice age. One day it's just a per-r-r-fectly sunny
young spring day. The next the air has a bit of a nip in it. And the next
you're wearing a coat all day, you can see your breath and you experience a
few unexpected shivers now and then. Finally you get up one morning, you
find that you are a responsible adult, there is this great big escarpment of
ice looming over your house and your cat is frozen to the welcome mat.
Never really liked that cat anyway.

Yep, life as an adult is full of curve balls, sliders and change ups. You
just get one pitcher figured out and they go to the bullpen. It makes one
yearn for the days of Dad's soft underhand lob right across the middle of
the strike zone. Yes, those were the days after all, weren't they?.... easy
and simple, sunny, full of promise....

But my moderately morbid mixed-metaphoric meanderings (and ironic
alliterations) notwithstanding, life is still pretty good. And even though
the grass may have seemed to have been a bit greener way back when, all it
takes is a little bit of watering now and then to keep it from getting too
brown. Oh, and a good mowing every once in a while as well.

But there I go again. I just can't help it. I blame it on my upbringing.
Mostly, just because I can. You see, I was raised in a very unusual place in
a very unusual time thinking all the while that everything was very, very
usual. It was certainly not a "best of times, worst of times" kind of thing
(and not, as certainly, the quality of the prose), but more aptly just "my"
times. When I stood and assessed the world, my world, and its ins and its
outs, its ups and its downs, from the perspective of youth and its
ever-innocent sense of implicit normalcy.

For example, suppose, just suppose, you could take a look at a fairly
typical day from my past, say when I was around ten years old and a seasoned
fifth-grader approaching the end of the academic year at Jason Lee
Elementary School:


I. As The Day Begins

Slime-dripping tentacles slithered out from under the posts at the foot of
my bed, and while furtive visions of me (as Matt Dillon) facing down a bad
guy at the far end of the street in ol' Dodge City rolled through my
Adventureland dreams, the huge octopus worked its way up onto the bedding
and quietly crawled towards my innocent head, deep in REM sleep, resting
easily on my pillow. Unconscious and unaware of the creeping danger, I stood
in front of the Long Branch Saloon, my dusty cowboy boots (with jingling
spurs) just a bit more than shoulder width apart, square to the outlaw,
trigger finger itching and poised just a split second away from the but of
my trusty 45. I caught a barely noticeable flicker of movement as his eyes
narrowed ever so slightly and I was about to slap leather performing my
world famous, lighting draw when...the amorphic cephalopod seized the
advantage and covered my face with his gooey tentacles as cold as the bottom
of the sea from whence he slithered. I screamed at the top of my lungs and
sat bolt upright in my bed. In an instant the octopus on my face vanished
but the sensation of its clammy skin against mine did not. I looked down and
in my lap, and on top of the blankets, in a small heap; a soaking wet
washrag lay in obvious guilt.

"I told you to get up 15 minutes ago!" piped my mom as she bustled past my
bedroom door, "And I warned you that if you didn't, you'd get the water
torture! Now get UP!"

I assume that the above secured your attention. It most certainly captured
mine. I'd like to say that I popped dutifully out of bed at that point, but,
when I was a child, popping dutifully at any point early in the morning was
never my forte'. It still isn't. I groaned, lay back down and placed my
forearm over my eyes to block out the loathsome and irrepressibly cheerful
sun-washed spring morning that was streaming relentlessly through my window.
I could hear the water running, splashing in the bathroom sink across the
hall. I decided that it would be prudent to assume that this was not my
brother brushing his teeth but more likely, my mom with another washcloth
under the faucet. Pop! (dutifully).

I began to forage the room for the day's attire. Do you remember getting
dressed in the morning when you were, say, ten years old? People say that I
have a good; some say a very good memory. My wife wonders why I can remember
all of the words and lyrics to the Starlit Stairway - Boyle Fuel Co.
commercial jingles from over 40 years ago but I can't remember that we are
supposed to be having dinner with the Murphys this Saturday night. I can't
answer that. So I don't even try. I know that if it is to be, I will end up
dining at the Murphys one way or the other, whether I have a firm grip on
that agenda or not.

But..."If you need coal or oil....call Boyle."
First twin, "Fairfax-eight, onefive, twoone."
Second twin, "Fairfax-eight, onefive, twoone."
Both twins, "For very heating problem be your furnace old or new...." and so
on. Yeah, I remember a lot of stuff from back then but I really can't
remember any routine or method that enabled my getting dressed before
school. As far as I can recall, it just happened.

I know that I must have pulled some of my clothing from a dresser drawer and
some, undoubtedly right off the rug where it fell after being shed the night
before. And that floor might have offered of the fruits of its bosom
anything from a pair of jeans to a pair of jockeys. Yet even though I
probably went through this ritual thousands of times, I just can't remember
much of anything about it.

I presume that this failure of memory is most likely due to the fact that,
at ten years of age, I couldn't have cared less about what I put on or how
it looked. Actually my wife, in her unending and thankless efforts to keep
me presentable - or at very least to minimize the chances of public
humiliation during outings - mentions occasionally that I still, apparently,
feel this way.

Nevertheless somehow, the morning of this tale included, I would always
manage to show up at school fully (if not a bit shabbily) clothed. I did,
however, from time to time, have a reoccurring nightmare in which I got up
to recite the Gettysburg Address in front of the whole class and realized
that I was wearing nothing but my tighy-whiteys. "Four score and seven years
ago, our fathers brought forth...o,our fathers brou.....Oh my GOD!"...sense
of shock...face reddening...sense of panic...face redder yet...sense of
impending and unending humiliation at the hands of my classmates...head
about to explode due to massive increase in blood pressure. These visions
were more terrible by far than the cold-slimy-octopus-on-the-face ones. Woke
up shaking with the sweats from those with an unbelievably welcome wash of
relief that it was only a dream after all. What cruel games the mind
inflicts on slumbering innocents.

So, I (undoubtedly) gathered then donned the necessary teguments and attired
in the bounty of wardrobe to be found growing wild (literally) in my room, I
crossed the hallway into the bathroom where I proceeded to conduct
experiments designed to answer the question that has stumped 10-year old
physicists for centuries: "How fast must the human hand move through a
column of tap water in order for all of it's molecules to pass completely
unmoistened through to the towel rack"? It was a problem I never solved. But
in the act of experimentation I could always count on the resulting
lavatorial, laboratorial failure to produce quite a bit of lateral hydraulic
displacement. Lateral hydraulic displacement that I was fairly adept in
directing with extreme accuracy at my younger brother. Thus I was able to
moisten many billions of his molecules in this manner resulting in a very
negative and very loud oral denouncement of my scientific efforts.  At this
point my mother would usually take up my little brother's cause and chastise
me soundly for creating chaos on an otherwise peaceful morning.

Chaos indeed! Science has always had to endure the torments and encumbrances
inflicted by those of smaller minds in order to prevail. But prevail it does
and if it takes an under-appreciated soaking or two on the part of my
younger siblings and a verbal wallop or three from the domestic
administration, well so be it. It's not like I was being forced to drink
hemlock or anything. And besides, I was able to completely drench my baby
bro in the process - this I was willing to endure for the advancement and
nobility of science!

Having sated the immediate desire for amusement (and not really
accomplishing anything else of positive or hygienic value) in the bathroom,
I headed for the kitchen to satisfy a grumbling in my tummy that awoke only
moments after the octopus slid off my face earlier. As I entered the room I
noticed that there was no hot-sludge curdling in a pot on the stovetop. No
lumpy cream of wheat or glue-like oatmeal would need to be forced down a
resistant alimentary system on this morning.

I breathed a small sigh of relief. I opened the pantry and examined my
choices for the morning feast; Cheerios - hmmmm, edible if buried under
enough of sugar to look like a snow storm hit a used tire dump; Rice
Krispies - always fun till the well-marketed cacophony diminishes (just kind
of snap-crackles and poops out) due to inevitable soggage. One's imagination
might lead one to picture the sodden, lifeless bodies of three
colorfully-striped yet drowned elves floating face down in a bowl of curdled
milk and processed grain - yuck, moving on. Okay - now here's something
different:

Corn-rice-sugar-frosted-shredded-raisin-puffed-wheatie-flakes-puffs-bran-kri
spie-pops-chex. Mom relished innovative and out-of-the-box methods to
economize. When we had gotten down to the last little bit of a box of
cereal, not enough for a bowl and too much to throw out, she would begin to
mix and match whatever was left in the boxes. Mom was the original cereal
tippler. Although her heart was in the right place and it seemed like a
perfectly reasonable idea (to her anyway) I didn't even like the peas
touching the mashed potatoes on my plate and was not ready for my frosted
flakes to be floating in the same bowl with my puffed wheat. Call me narrow.
Call me intolerant. But this was a breakfast amalgam that was not to be.
This was a feeling also shared for the most part by my brothers. Thus the
box of integrated grain-flakes would usually, sooner or later, get tossed
out leaving only cereals of certifiably insular purity and pedigree to be
consumed.

I reached blindly; scrounging around in the back of the pantry with hunger
in my tummy and time tic, tic, ticking away. My fingers closed on a happily
familiar little box-shaped item. I hoped it was one of the good ones. Oh how
I loved the Variety Pak! Mom usually got them for vacation days at Diamond
Lake or Cannon Beach. They were lovely little versions of all our favorite
cereals. While you can still get them, and today they are really no big
deal, back then they were a wonderful novelty that you just didn't have
laying about every day. Or at least my family didn't. We always seemed to
have the gigantic family-sized economy versions that already had you bored
to death with little oatie rings before the box was half gone. With the
Variety Pak you could flit from Sugar Pops to Sugar Smacks to Frosted Flakes
like a honey bee in a hot house.

I held my breath and pulled the little box from the shadows. AHHHHHH!
Paydirt - a perfectly good (little) box of Cocoa Krispies appeared safely in
my grasp. Sugar and chocolate - a perfect breakfast combination to start any
day off right.

I proceeded to grab a steak knife from the kitchen drawer and slice a
near-perfect "H" shape sideways on the front of the box, following the
perforations as closely as possible. That was another totally cool thing
about the little buggers. They came with their OWN BOWL! Just slice up the
box (cutting up things is a ten-year-old boy's specialty) per the
instructions on the back, fold the flaps open, pour in a bit of milk and,"
voila!" a self-contained meal fit for a king; or a small boy in a hurry to
get out the door.

And the perfect beverage to accompany such a feast was of course a tall
icy-cold glass of Tang. Five or six tablespoons of Tang powder in an
eight-ounce glass of water was quite the early morning energy boost. Just
the thing to get you up and running. Actually, Tang in that concentration
would have had the astronauts bounding across the surface of the moon for
hours.

"Eagle, this is Houston. Would somebody throw a rope on Buzz and get him
back in the module...please?" Always wondered how he got that name.
While I sat at the kitchen counter feeling very superior and grown-up due to
the childish lameness of Mr. Greenjeans and Dancing Bear lamely laming out
on the family room TV, I noticed a goodly quantity of milk leaking out all
over the pumpkin-orange Formica. I realized that I must have poked a few
holes in the "bowl" when chopping my way into the box. You'd think that good
old American engineering would have anticipated and overcome such an obvious
design flaw. However, tossing the now limp and empty box into the sink and
tossing the Tri-City Herald sports section over the leakage would solve the
immediate problem. At least until I could get out the door.

I tipped up the drinking glass to capture the last of the Tang from its
depths. Since I frequently added more Tang to a glass of water than was
actually soluble in that volume of liquid, a sedimentary sludge of orange
sugar crystals would usually be in evidence on the bottom of the glass.
Putting the glass to my mouth and raising it high I could watch the sludge
slowly, glacially, ooze down its sides and eventually onto my tongue,
lighting up every taste bud it touched with a tartness of near nuclear
intensity. I pushed away from the counter thinking how really small those
individual cereal packs actually were. I believe they could probably fill me
up if I had five or six of them. Just the one would have to do today however
as it was time to hit the road to school.

To be continued...
-Jeff Curtis ('69) ~ Seattle, WA
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