Larry, the Ph.D.’er

I won’t give Larry’s real last name, fearing an underhanded attack more than a law suit, so let’s say I call him Larry the Idiot, very soon to be known as Larry the Idiot, Ph.D., or Dr. Larry the Idiot. He was working hard, but maybe not hard enough, to fulfill the stringent requirements needed to be awarded his Ph.D. His field was experimental psychology.

Here’s how I met Mr. idiot. I was sitting in the wait-your-turn area of the Emergency Room at General Hospital because my primary care doctor wasn’t around. Dr. Tran was at some medical convention, and I don’t care for his partner. I was told by the doctors’ receptionist, “If that’s what’s happened, please hold.” I held a good while. She comes back on the line. “I looked up your file. You need a tetanus shot and you need one right now.”

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American flag photo by jcolman

When my mother, Victoria, felt things, namely America, turn against her, she would sign and with her perfect accent say, “America is beautiful!”

I often wondered what she said the day after President Truman dropped the first atomic bomb, and then the next day after dropping the second. What did Mom say? I don’t know, although now I wish I did. While I grew up, I never questioned her about things like that.

Adolph went back to his village in Poland and brought Victoria home to the U.S. My mother died from a stroke. Years later, 1968 or thereabouts, Pop went back to visit Poland. My brothers and I wondered if he went back for another wife. He did ask Richie to airmail him his divorce papers to where he was staying in Poland. Much later we found out thru Uncle Alex that he almost married again, but lost the woman because of his false teeth. He lost his false teeth while visiting her and his “loved one” found them in the bread box in their kitchen. So the knot wasn’t tied that tight.

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This is my true story about guilt. It was something my father Adolph specialized in and something that, unfortunately, helped shaped my life for ever.

The Gift of Guilt

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“My father hated war, so he fixed me.”

This incident can never be forgotten by me. My father Adolph blinded me in my right eye — the same eye one needs to look down the length of a rifle, over the sights, to kill an enemy soldier … before the enemy kills you.

No doubt about it, Adolph was positive that Nazi Germany would win the war, and for a time, winning they were! My father feared for his family’s lives. After Great Britain, he believed the Nazi would be at our shores next. Don’t laugh because you too, back then, the way the war was going at that time, would have expected the United States to be invaded by the Nazis and soon.

While I was a baby, my father worked in a steel mill in Bridgeville and one day he brought home some of his welding equipment. That late afternoon he bound up a thick blindfold over my left eye, stood in front of me and he did it; he blinded me in my right eye.

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[Among the many quoted thoughts of wisdom that Jack Woodford, a well-known writer’s guru, shared was one that became important to me. It’s where he writes about disappearing, where he says, “Keep it to yourself.” Why oh why, Jack, didn’t I keep it to myself that time?

Read about what happened to me when I should have kept it to myself.]

The Scheme

An incident occurred in Philadelphia when I was first being published as a pro writer, pen names-ish, after I had quit my government job to write full time. Also, about then, I involved myself in trying to invent a system to win at gambling, with horse racing of all things. Harness racing to be exact.

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I remember when I was a little kid that my Dad, along with all the other fathers in the neighborhood, would buy live fowl and would do the slaughtering themselves. Chicken, turkeys, ducks.

There was this one Thanksgiving approaching when one of my Uncle Alex’s sons was bitten by what we would call today, the intrapreneurial spirit. He bought and brought home from a farmer about a hundred live turkeys. He put them in his father’s backyard, and the yard didn’t need to be fence up; it already had a wire mesh fence all around. It really became a big backyard turkey coop. My cousin must have spent his calculated and imagined fortune from the coming sale of those turkeys many times over and over in his head.

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