In the first summer we moved in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack, not only did we need to get signed up for school, we also joined their church – Zion Lutheran Church. With my parents, we went to church and Sunday School every week. In fact, my parents were the custodians so it would not be unusual to be at Messiah Lutheran 2 or 3 times a week. Our church life was woven into our family life.

Like my parents, Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s family went to church and Sunday School. But besides being signed up for Sunday School, John and I were also enrolled for confirmation class. For Lutherans, confirmation was a right of passage. It was to ‘confirm’ your beliefs in God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. It is you, as an individual, now confirming your faith that previously your parents and your godparents did on your behalf when you were baptized. Confirmation classes were additional classes during the week for 7th and 8th graders. At the end of your 8th-grade year, you would be confirmed and considered to be a full member of The Church. For most kids, this was just another thing your parents signed you up for that you did not have a choice in.

At twelve years old, the kids in confirmation class were just doing what they were told. At this age, many of us were trying to see what we could get away with. We viewed this as an additional 2 hours a week of school. How was I supposed to understand religion? How were we going to understand the complexities of faith? On top of that, I was learning how to live without my parents – and with a new family. At this point in my life, when it came to religion, I wasn’t even sure if there was a god. And if God was there, I wasn’t going to ask him how to pass a class, I was going to ask him why he took my parents away.

At twelve years old, I was a good kid. For the most part, I was obedient to what adults asked of me. School? of course. Confirmation class? ok – whatever. Mow the grass? shovel snow? yep. Paper route? if you say so. I didn’t want to make any trouble. I felt incredibly grateful to be taken care of at this point. As awkward as junior high can be for kids, I was just trying to figure out how to live because I didn’t know anymore.

I don’t remember who said it or where I heard it, but there was a family rumor that grandma Zilligen had wanted us Zilligen kids to be put in an orphanage. Thankfully due to the love the Beckman family showed Dave and me, we never felt like orphans. So there was a shock value when the word ‘orphan’ was associated with us.

So after a year of losing my parents, I was going to try to understand what it meant to be a Lutheran? Well, I would at least learn enough to pass this class – so I could be confirmed. Like I said, I was basically a good kid. Later I would tackle the bigger questions – like what being a Lutheran, or a Christian, really meant.

One aspect about kids in Sunday School that non-church goers may not realize is that because churches draw people from outside their school districts, ‘church kids’ don’t necessarily know the other kids in their church, even if they are in the same grade. So the 7th Grade Confirmation class – would not be just kids from your school. Deerfield had two junior high schools – Wilmot and Sheppard. But our church also had kids from Highland Park or Northbrook. I don’t remember where the kids in my Confirmation class were from but outside of Jim Reuter and Jeff Parker and a couple of girls who went to Wilmot Junior High. We would only see each other once a week, actually twice a week – once for Sunday School and again for Confirmation Class.

Like most youth organizations, churches understand this new cross-section of kids and the need for activities so they can get to know each other. Lock-Ins are classic church Youth Events. Again, for the non-church goers, Lock-ins are events that adult church leaders would plan. They consist of an evening of games and lessons for the kids and end with everyone staying overnight in the basement of the church. No one could leave – thus we were ‘locked-in’. Our church Zion Lutheran only had one Lock-In that I can remember. But we did a number of other activities outside of the church so we could get to know each other.

It was during one of these ‘other activities’ that I first heard “Blinded By The Light”. The 8th-grade confirmation class going to a roller skating rink. During the mid-seventies, Roller Skating rinks were experiencing a resurgence with the help of Disco and renewed interest in the 50’s. This was thanks to the tv show ‘Happy Days‘. Transportation was typically provided by volunteer parents. The class was split over 2 or 3 cars. I piled in the way-back of a station wagon with, thinking I was with the ‘cool Confirmation kids’. One could argue there were no ‘cool kids’ in Confirmation class – but everything is just a matter of degrees, right?

As we piled into the way-back of a station wagon (seatbelts be damned!) the vehicle filled with the buzz of adolescent dialogue and hyperactivity. Whoever’s parent was driving had the radio tuned to a pop music station, most likely WLS. Conversations droned on from homework to teachers, to tv shows, movies and music.

It was during this adolescent buzz that that radio played “Blinded By The Light.” Us kids in the ‘way back’ discussing the off-color lyrics of the song – “wrapped up like a douche when you’re roller’ in the night.”

“A what?” I asked.

“A douche,” one of the kids said.

“Oh, yea,” I said.

I didn’t know what a douche was. I had heard of a ‘douche bag’ and ‘being a douche’ but I didn’t know exactly what a douche was – just that they were bad. The conversations were punctuated with giggles and laughter. But one of the kids caught on to my ignorance.

“You know what a douche is, right?” he asked.

“Sure,” I lied.

“What is it?”

“It’s like a douchebag.” I said, “Like being a dick.”

“So you’re saying a douche is a penis?”

“Kinda,” I said.

Kinda – this is a word that starts the beginning of losing an argument. It is a foretelling of failure; a predictor of implosion; a first-person adjective for wishy-washy. ‘Kinda’ meant you were straddling two sides – the correct side and the wrong side. You were thinking you were on the wrong side but trying not to give that fact away. With experience and grace, the Receiver of a ‘Kinda’ would give try more leeway to the Initiator of a ‘Kinda’. To allow the Initiator a gracious departure of their failing argument; a retreat. This is not true for junior high kids. This was a signal to attack.

“Dude!” the ‘Kinda Receiver’ said. Then he leans over to me and says “A douche is how girls clean their private parts.”

Apparently, this was not covered in any of the three sex ed classes I had so far. I was beginning to learn I still had a lot more to learn about sex, even after 3 days of sex ed classes over the last three years. Apparently my shocked looked betrayed my ignorance because the ‘Kinda Receiver’ announced to the whole way-back of the station wagon, “He doesn’t know what a douche is!” Even the kids in the back seat heard this announcement.

For the rest of the ride to the rolling skating rink, I was quiet. Besides the embarrassment being called out for not knowing what a douche was, I was trying to figure out why this would be in a song in the first place. Surely the singer knew what a douche was. Maybe it was put in by accident. Last year we all heard the scream on “Love Rollercoaster” when that girl was killed in the studio next store when they were recording, so who knows what happens in those recording studios.

Besides moving in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack and changing schools, I was also starting Junior High – that magical time in any child’s life where a child find themselves and their spiritual well being.

OK, none of that is true. Most kids are trying to find friends and where they fit in. I was no different. So this confirmation class was just another set of kids that I had to figure things out where I fit in. Jim Rueter and Jeff Parker went to my school, but no one else did. The girls didn’t count because I was too afraid to talk to them. And there also was my cousin John.

At this point, the natural pairing of John and I was getting old. When Dave and I first moved in and John & I were paired off it was great. We were both into plants and fishing. Prior to us moving in, John and Jim had hatched chicks – which resulted in their pet rooster Fluffy. Because of this, I remember John and I designed an egg enterprise we were going to call BZ Eggs (get it – Beckman & Zilligen?). We would wander greenhouses together looking at different plants. We would spend hours together fishing Lake Eleanor behind the house.

But after a while, I didn’t want to always be connected with John. I’m guessing this is how twins feel sometimes. In hindsight, this was us becoming more siblings than just cousins or friends. Each time we were forced together, I was getting the feeling I didn’t always want to be ‘stuck’ with him. It was bad enough I was stuck with Dave but age provided a natural borderline. John and I were only two months apart in age.

This led to some unsavory social behavior on my part. Well, not really THAT unsavory – more like stupid kid stuff. Nothing to do with John, just part of my efforts to try to fit in with the cool kids, the cool kids in confirmation class, and typically centered around our extracurricular activities.

My Confirmation class was a cross-section of church kids. Which meant – there were no burnouts or surfer dudes in this class, or studly jocks or blonde bombshell, just your normal nerdy middle-of-the-road kids here. There were 12 kids in our class and we met once a week. And we did our obligatory ‘extracurricular’ church activities. This filled our Wednesday evenings with lessons about our Lutheran belief: Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Lord’s Supper/Communion, Baptism, the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostle’s Creed, the Ten Commandments, etc. Our lessons were based on Luther’s Small Catechism.

On the surface, this was basic religious stuff. But digging into some of these topics were pretty tough for adolescents to really understand. Some were ‘no-brainers’, for example, there wasn’t much discussion about the commandment ‘You shall not Kill’ – well, duh! Really hard to argue against this. On the other side, we were also going into some already confusing concepts like The Trinity. So there’s only one God but he’s three different people: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit is a person too? but its all around us? I thought that was God? Yes, the Trinity – wait, what?

One tradition of Confirmation class was the 8th-graders would go on a weekend retreat to focus on our studies. I was actually looking forward to this trip. The retreats were held at Lutherdale in Elkhorn, WI. This was the same bible camp my family used to spend a week at once a year under beautiful summer Wisconsin skies.

Lutherdale held some of my favorite memories growing up. We could swim in a lake, canoe, do crafts, read, hike, sing and have campfires. With my family, the boys stayed in the cabins to the north and the girls stay in ‘cabins’ by the main building with my mom. They weren’t really cabins like the boys’ cabins. They were more modern and seemed more like apartments. But we were boys and we were ‘roughing it’. Dad never came on these week vacations.

To this day, when I smell breakfast food outside it takes me back to those summer weeks at Lutherdale. All meals were served family-style. And it was not unusual for me to be up before 7:00 am and wandering around outside. And a few of us lucky early risers would be able to ring the big red bell that stood in a 10-foot wooden tower. The bell was used to announce to the camp that breakfast, or whatever meal was being served, was now ready.

Everyone would gather in the dining hall and the camp pastor would lead us in prayer and give instructions on who was getting the food for the table, who was getting the drinks, who was cleaning up the table and when we were dismissed. I remember the camp pastor, particularly because his left arm was shriveled – I think was his left arm. It was very distracting as a kid and we were instructed not to stare at it.

During family camp, we spend time in the Craft Hut where camp counselors passed along their creativity. I remember making sand candles (wax poured into sand), masked tape bottles and my first forages into macrame and sand art. The Craft Hut counselors taught me about the wonders of Mod Podge. Meanwhile, at the camp’s chapel, Mr. Owl would play piano starting 1/2 hour before the morning’s lesson. She was willing to play any requested hymn. Inevitably someone would call out a Christmas Carol. Mrs. Owl would happily play the requested hymn even though it was July. We were amazed at how she knew the page numbers of the called out hymns in the Lutheran hymnal. Our voices would fill the chapel as others would file in for the morning or evening lessons.

I especially remember the long sunny summer afternoons swimming in the lake in a section designated as the swimming area on Lauderdale Lake. The camp used the ‘Buddy System’ so if you wanted to swim, you would need to find someone to swim with. To track this, each swimmer would put their numbered tags on a single hook on a board together. Occasionally the lifeguards on duty would yell, “Buddy Up!” and you would have to find your ‘buddy’ and grab their hand so the lifeguards could see you were not swimming alone. Of course, this wouldn’t prevent a double drowning but it would certainly cut down the odds. My brother Dave was typically my buddy.

Dave and I also learned to canoe on Lauderdale Lake. The Buddy System was also used for canoers. This allowed us to check out the needed paddles and life preservers as well. Dave and I would explore the coastline on either side of the camp. One of my greatest discoveries was finding out some of the seaweed in the lake was actually bladderworts. I would pull out this ‘seaweed’ and examine the ‘bladders’ and imagine how their little traps would work in the water. Bladderworts are an aquatic carnivorous plant I learned about after receiving a Venus Fly-Trap bulb from Dad. This likely fueled my recurring dreams of finding Venus Fly-Traps, Pitcher Plants and Sundews while wandering around in a field.

I also remember long lazy summer afternoons hanging out with Mom as she would spread out a blanket on the hill that led to the lake. I would bring my books to read next to her. Back then these were typically books about ants, carnivorous plants or cactus. With a cooling breeze coming off the lake, Mom would work on her needlepoint of the Last Supper or read. It seemed like she had been working on this needlepoint forever. She would eventually give her masterpiece to Pastor Keyes, our pastor at Messiah Lutheran in Park Ridge, IL. It really was a masterpiece, I was very impressed when it was finished. Other campers would occasionally stop by us and were equally impressed.

Mom was a meeting place for my siblings while we were at camp. I must admit, another reason I would hang out with Mom on those afternoons was to be around when the canteen would open. The ‘canteen’ was a little room with a window that opened to outside so counselors sell candy and ice creams to the campers. Ice cream on a hot afternoon as a rare treat at home would be an almost daily treat at Family Camp.

After supper, there would be an evening service followed by a bible study for adults and younger lessons for kids. Typically the kids gathered with the camp counselors down by a fire next to the lake.

I do remember occasionally accompanying Mom to the Adult Bible study. I’d like to think I was curious about one particular adult bible study on Esther. More likely I had done something to Dave. So my punishment was not being allowed to go to the campfire and forced to accompany Mom as she attended the Bible study. It turned out I found this Bible study to be very interesting and I returned the following evening to learn more about Esther and Mordecai. I don’t know if it was the reaction of the adults surprised I was not with the younger kids or if I actually outgrowing the ‘kid stuff’. I actually read Esther from Mom’s Living Bible, which I still have to this day. I think I was taking advantage of showing off my maturity and getting a chance to use Mom’s leather-bound bible. Nothing like sucking up to the locals at bible camp by reading a fancy bible on a sunny afternoon. That was the first ‘free reading’ of the bible I ever did until I attempted to read the Bible in its entirety after my parents died.

More typical was me going with my brother and sisters, and the Hippie youth leaders, sitting around a campfire and singing Kumbaya. This is when I learned this song. This was years before ‘Kumbaya’ became a sarcastic insincere moment of bonding. Once we were taught Kumbaya, we would sing it at church, at home or while we were riding our bikes. The counselors taught us many songs but Kumbaya was the song that would universally represent Bible Hippies singing around campfires at Bible Camps across the US.

The other song I remember learning at Lutherdale was “Pass It On”. This was years later during a different Family Camp but this time without my family. It was the summer after Dave and I had moved in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack, and John and Jim. It was a great, awkward and very different week.

That week we were joined by our cousins John and Jim. Later Dave and I would learn this was the first time they had spent time away from their parents. While it was great to be back at Lutherdale it was also weird sharing our family camp with our ‘new brothers’. Dave connected with one particular counselor who was in a singing group called Brethren. I believe his name was John and his group Brethren actually recorded a real album! At the end of the week, the counselor gave Dave an autographed copy of his album. I’ll admit I was a little jealous of the attention Dave was receiving. I also believe he inspired Dave to sing which led Dave to join Chorus in Wilmot Junior High, Deerfield High School, Valparaiso University and professionally (singing at weddings, etc.).

That week at Lutherdale, Dave’s new friend John and the rest of Brethren would sing ‘Pass It On’ after an evening meal. It would be a favorite request around the campfire that week as well. And it remains a favorite hymn for me to this day. It always brings me back to the warm glow of a Lutherdale campfire against the dark water background.

Another very strong memory from that week was when John and Jim called home because they were homesick. They were allowed to use the phone in the dining hall. Dave and I hung out on the screened porch just off the dining hall. There were many tears and alot of yelling about wanting to come home. They didn’t like Lutherdale. I couldn’t help choking up myself. At first, I didn’t understand how they could not enjoy being at camp, the lake, the Craft Hut, the campfires, the Canteen, etc. But then I realized my own homesickness – and mine was permanent. It was not lost on me, even while it was happening. Hearing Jim yell at his mom, literally screaming at times, to come to pick him and John up was heartwrenching. It also caused Dave and I to realize we had no one we could call. Despite our week of paradise, that phone call shook us back to our reality of life without our parents.

Besides being accompanied by John and Jim that week, there were a couple of additional guests at Lutherdale that week., Mr. and Mrs. Johnson. Mr. and Mrs. Johnson were friends of my parents from our old church Messiah Lutheran. I’m sure this was no coincidence. I don’t remember my sister Hope being there. I mention this because their daughter Becky and Hope were very good friends and that seems strange she would not be with them.

One sunny afternoon I remember being in the cabin by myself. I was crying over the loss of my parents as I would occasionally do. Mr. Johnson came in and despite my best efforts, I could not hide the fact that I had been crying. Mr. Johnson sat down on the bunk across from me. After a few quiet moments, he told me how he was a soldier in World War II.

He told me, “One day my commander gathered us together. He told us we were going to take this hill from the enemy the next day. ‘There were going to be a high casualty rate, many of you will not make it,’ he said. All night I thought about that next day. I was so angry at God. The next day, the day we were going to take that hill, was my mom’s birthday. All I could think about was my mom hearing that I had died on her birthday. I couldn’t understand why God would do this to my mom.

“The next morning we took the hill. I cursed God as I charged up that hill with my buddies. Some of my friends were shot and some of them were killed but I kept fighting up that hill. After hours of fighting, I finally got to the top. I had made it, I was still alive. And I realized I had been cursing God the whole way up thinking about my mom and dying. But though I said some of the worse things I’ve ever said, God still protected me.

“John, I know losing your parents doesn’t make any sense but trust in God. As I stood on that hill I was so ashamed about what I said and I didn’t put my trust in God. No matter how bad things get, trust that God is always watching over you.”

It was the first time I had heard an actual war story from someone that was there. I knew he was sharing a very personal story because he took off his glasses to wipe his own tears. We sat on that bottom bunk not talking – just looking out the cabin’s dirty window.  Eventually, Mr. Johnson patted my leg, said he was going to find Mrs. Johnson and left.

I didn’t know how to respond. I was still very angry with God over the loss of my parents. It wasn’t fair. Contrary to Mr. Johnson, I thought, I had always trusted God so I didn’t understand why he took them away from us. The difference between Mr. Johnson and my story was he survived that day, my parents did not. If he hadn’t perhaps his mother and I could have cursed God together. But that obviously was not His plan. While I wasn’t sure how to take Mr. Johnson’s story, I understood it was a very personal moment he did not share with many people.

In the coming years, I would remember Mr. Johnson’s story. While my faith would eventually break, I learned that sharing your tragedy with others was very powerful. Like Love, when you open yourself up to your ’emotional core’ and allow that reopened wound to heal, it heals stronger then it was before. That afternoon I realized I was just beginning to charge up my own hill. And like Mr. Johnson, I would survive. And, again like Mr. Johnson, I would share my story with others. And while my telling would sometimes be painful, I knew I would be stronger for it. I would use my story to lend perspective to others. That week would be the last time I remember seeing Mr. and Mrs. Johnson.

Over the years, I have shared my story about how my parents died, in fact, many many times. People who know me, particularly those who know Dave and my other brothers and sisters, would often remark on how ‘normal’ we appeared. I always found this comforting. Because ‘normal’ was all I ever wanted to be. While our past threatened to overwhelm us, while it deformed, skewed, misshapen and warped us – we were all made stronger and weaker.  Normal? yea – for me, that would perfect.

So if we appeared ‘normal’ it meant our upheaval in the last two years did not perspectively seep into our everyday lives. This is given to the fact that today we live in an age where kids get special attention for anything that isn’t viewed as ‘normal’, Dave and I, nor Hope, Lee or Dawn as far as I know, ever saw a psychiatrist or social worker or spent extra time with clergy. We found our own answers and kept any deformity at bay.

I take particular pride in navigating the moral and philosophical issues of my parents’ deaths presented to me while I was growing up. That isn’t to say I didn’t make alot of wrong turns and mistakes. One of my first wrong turns was blaming God. This particular mistake would not be corrected for twenty years. But by blaming God I began to move on with my life. That isn’t to say I stopped questioning ‘Why?’ but I stopped waiting for an answer to my situation. This led to the following conclusions, what I would later refer to as  my mantra:

1. I became Agnostic. I liked to think there was a higher power but God did not play a part in my daily life. I found it ironic wanting a higher power but something had to have kicked off the Big Bang, right?
2. Religion was a crutch. A strong person didn’t need religion but there are times and points in your life when you are hurt and need to heal – at those moments religion can be a refuge. The problem is some people would lean on their religion too much and never truly take responsibility for their own lives.
3. People are basically good. In high school, I would argue that people were 51% good and 49% bad and individuals would run between those ratios as well. It was this basic belief that would keep me from wanting to condemn the entire human race and keep some hope.
4. Life was a series of random acts, most are without intent. We should appreciate the statistical anomalies that affect us in both good and bad ways.

With this ‘mantra’ I started my life. I knew I had a unique perspective. I would test these core beliefs with discussions with my friends and a lot of thinking. I felt empowered by these conclusions but I also knew some were contrary to my family’s beliefs. So this led me to hide my true feelings and thoughts on religion. It also was the beginning of my multiple personality disorder.

OK, so I don’t really have a multiple personality disorder, but by the time I had figured out my way around high school, it felt like it. While my birth name is John, in Junior High I was given a nickname of ‘Waba’. At the same time, to avoid confusion at home with my cousin John and my Uncle Jack, whose real name is John, I received another nickname – Trike. On my path to figuring out my past and my life I wrote this poem:

People say I’m so different,
they say sometimes I’m someone else
Only my best friends know me all,
we all have our characteristics

First, there’s John, he’s rather depressed,
he’s always live in the past
His mind is just a one-way road,
it always seems to be death, death, death

Then there’s Trike, he’s rather quiet,
he always does what he is told
If you want to find him there’s two places to go,
he’s either at church or he’s sitting at home

Then there’s Waba, he’s rather strange
he goes out to drink and smoke
He’s rather crazy and he’s never alone,
I’m afraid someday, he will go too far

Well, that’s me, that all of us,
we get along most of the time
When I grow up I don’t know who I’ll be,
somedays I wish I could just be me

The poem spoke to the various roles I thought I played. In hindsight, it was easier to ‘go with the flow’ when playing these roles. In high school, I was not very active in the church. While John and I volunteered to take care of the plants in the atrium, this was really about our interests in plants rather than to serve the church in the form of stewardship. But by the time we got to high school, we all had part times jobs on the weekends and occasionally this included working Sunday morning. And while we still went to church services but we didn’t always stay for Sunday School. Trike was the more demure character that would take care of the plants at church. Or play guitar for the summer services. And he was always polite and respectful of his elders.

John represented my past which I was trying to put behind me. As I would learn, this was not always possible. He still loved ants, cactus and carnivorous plants. He would fly model rockets, look for mushrooms in the Olson’s woods and look for, and some times transplant, wildflowers (Soloman Seals, Prairie Trillium, Jack-In-Pulpits, Mayapples and White Trillium) into our backyard. And it was John that would learn to play Dungeons and Dragons. He would always have a book he was reading, which included Stephen King novels and later fantasy and science fiction. He also collected pop cans and monster magazines.

Waba became my extroverted self – my carefree, talkative, confident character. It was Waba that first smoked pot at a party senior year. And Waba that would have an assistant manager at Franks Nursery where he worked fill the trunk of his car with bottles of Jack Daniels and beer (and Southern Comfort for Jeff). But Waba was still shy around girls but he would be the only one of the three to make any progress. And Waba loved his music.

It was easier to act a certain way in certain situations. It was these roles and these characters that I began to use in school and confirmation classes. Trike would really try to understand what Luther was trying to tell us about the foundations of our Lutheran beliefs. John would play ‘doubting Thomas’ asking unanswerable questions and blaming God for the pain in his heart. Waba would sit in class and look at the girls. And try to find ways to connect with the guys that could talk to the girls.

So eighteen months after Mr. Johnson share his story with me, John and I, and our confirmation class, found ourselves at Lutherdale. But on a cold dark January weekend, Lutherdale was a strange place. It was not the warm family playground I had spent 3 or 4 summer weeks with my family. But my family had now changed drastically as well. That January night as my confirmation class got out of the cars that night, I stood in that cold parking lot next to the silent dark buildings as the adults figured out where we should go. I surveyed the snowy landscape that was both familiar and strange. The dormant slope that played host to so many fond memories which I knew laid below the light of the parking lot.

Like all confirmation retreats, the boys went to one cabin and the girls to another. Once we were inside the boys’ cabins, the sense of familiarity became stronger despite how cold it was. The boys claimed their bunks and were told to stay together on one side of the cabin. Each side of the cabin was capable of sleeping 12 people so almost everyone could have a top bunk. We were to unpack and then meet the girls in a room in the main building for our first lesson.

The weekend was a chance to focus on our lessons. We had 4 months before our confirmation. Besides diving deep into our studies on what it meant to be a Lutheran, the class had one more chance to bond together. But also keeping in mind we were all 13 and 14 years old. Even if we viewed Confirmation class as one more thing we had to get through, this retreat brought us closer to being done. I was doing what my aunt and uncle wanted me to do. But beneath that veneer, I was looking for an answer – why did God take my parents away.

My religious beliefs prior to their deaths were childlike. God was just part of who I was. In the years that followed I would try to understand what my brothers and my sisters and I did to deserve this.  Why had God turned against us? Confirmation class was not prepared to deal with my situation. And I did not use these classes to test Pastor Trendel. Like the social circles in junior high, I was learning what role I should play. I would not be the center of attention. I would act normal, or like the other kids, ignoring my questions and doing what was expected of me. If I was called on, I would give the right answers – or what I thought was the right answer. I would search for my own answers by reading the Bible or the Small Catechism.  But I did not find my answers there. And like the other kids in class, some of this stuff just didn’t make sense to me.

For the most part, our class was pretty well behaved – for the most part. Pastor Trendel would occasionally need to deal with the boys trying to show off in front of the girls. Maybe it was boredom, maybe it was reacting to some of the topics we discuss. There were some heavier questions. For example, while I knew I wasn’t perfect, it didn’t make sense to me that babies that were not baptized were still sinners. Logically, they couldn’t do anything yet so why would they not go to heaven? Also, I found the ‘Three-in-One’ confusing. Yes, One God, but there were three of them. I found a better explanation later as the states of elements – like ice, water and steam. The lessons were more about giving the right answers described by Martin Luther in his Small Catechism. This was not a philosophy class after all. Many of my questions were much deeper, more complex, more on an adult level. But trying to find my answers in the Bible was like a schizophrenic trying to find out what is wrong with themselves by reading an intro to psychology book. It was not going to happen in Confirmation class

So depending on the setting and other things going in class, I would slip in and out of my various characters. This led me to do some stupid things. For example, on our retreat at Lutherdale after dinner but before resuming our studies, two of the girls, two of the guys, and I went to explore the frozen lake. We were really just trying to get away from the chaperones. Being winter, the only places we could go to were the boys’ cabin, the girls’ cabin and the main building. So walking around on a frozen lake seemed like a perfectly logical place to hang out. And besides getting out from being ‘supervised, the cold dark lake hike seemed like the ‘cool’ thing to do. And who knows, maybe I could actually talk to the girls Jim and Jeff were hitting on.

While we were on the lake, someone realized the time. We were supposed to be meet back with the group at 7:00 to continue our lessons. So someone came up with the brilliant idea that if we all set our watches back by 10 minutes, we could just play dumb and we wouldn’t get in any trouble.

Not a brilliant idea but I was pleased just to be in on the scheme. All I had to do is figure out how to change the time on my digital watch. When we all strolled into the room at 10 minutes after 7:00, the assistant minister Giesela’s frustration with our tardiness was apparent. We all gave the best looks of astonishment we could mustard. We quickly conversed with each other – “What does your watch say?” “I’ve got seven.” “Yea, me too!” “So do I,” I announced, probably too loudly. I was happy to be on the bad boys & girls team.

Pastor Trendal or his assistant Giesela didn’t buy our story. We were told to sit down and to open our books to the continued the lesson they had already started. Jim, Jeff and the girls exchanged silent giggles. And while I was on the lake as well and turned my watch to the agreed synchronized time, I was really not part of that team. But I would keep trying.

Part of my problem was I still interested in geeky stuff. That’s why 2 hours later when one of the kids convinced the Pastor we could play a new game he was playing called Dungeons and Dragons, I stood with Jim and Jeff and quietly scoffed at the kid and Pastor as they tried to get 15 of us to roll up characters to play this new game – that frankly, no one understood. After an hour, Pastor finally decided that Dungeons and Dragons was not the group game he was told it could be. He reorganized the chaos that had evolved and we settled down for the night. But when we left the next morning, I make sure I was in the Dungeon and Dragon kid’s car. You see, his car was stopping at the Dungeon Shop in Lake Geneva on the way back.

It turned out The Dungeon Shop was the hobby store that Gary Gygax, the inventor of Dungeons & Dragons, first distributed the game. I don’t know why I wanted to go to the Dungeon Shop, I didn’t have any money. What I really wanted was to learn more about this Dungeon and Dragons game. It turned out, according to the man behind the counter, that next year they were releasing their new version of the rules in the Players Handbook. So I gawked at the original box of 3 books. A year later I purchased the Player’s Handbook at Waldenbooks. This led to forming a group of 4-5 friends that would play Dungeons & Dragons on weekends and school days off. These sessions were typically held in Steve Olson’s basement. The group would consist of me, Steve Olson, his brother Mark, Jeff Riviera and Todd Combs with Steve or I playing the Dungeon Master. Those were good times.

While the trip back home allowed me to learn more about this Dungeon and Dragons game, actually playing the game was still over a year or two away. John and I were picked up in the church parking lot that Sunday. We still had to pass our confirmation class and get confirmed. Honestly, I never thought what would have happened if someone didn’t pass. Waba would not be the right character to use to finish up the few classes we had left. I suppose a kid that couldn’t pass confirmation would likely have other issues beyond passing a class for church.

By ’77 what I was really doing was finding my way in life. This included defining who I was and what I was expecting out of life. My various nicknames were convenient ways to split up the different backdrops I was playing against and dependant on who I was interacting with. It was the beginning of me looking at myself objectively. ‘John’ was decidedly part of the past and had the burden of understanding death. ‘Trike’ was the demure side of me that didn’t have the weight of death around him. ‘Waba’ was the reckless, carefree side of me that struggled to fit in with others. He was furthest from my past and would carry, sometimes crying, into the future.

Part of my solution was to tell the adults what they wanted to hear. They wanted me to be ok – so I was always ok. I would struggle with the senselessness of life when weighed with the death of my parents. This brought my first thoughts of suicide but with it, the tension of further pain to my brothers and sisters. It was a line I would not cross but dance back and forth over for relief to my pain.

It would be years before I would understand religion in any substantial way. In Eighth Grade, it was another class I needed to get through. Another backdrop for one of my characters to play in front of. Trike did a fine job giving the adults the answers they wanted to hear. He would keep John quiet with all his questions about hypocrisy and double standards. Because of this, it would be years before he would understand forgiveness and grace. Trike could be very practical and patience to a fault.

It would be Waba that would learn what a douche was from a bunch of kids in the back of station wagon on the way to a roller skating rink. And when I would hear ‘Blinded By The Light’ again on my new boombox I would learn it was a song by Manfred Mann. Occasional the radio station would play the album version which was about 2 minutes longer if you were lucky enough to catch it. And the kid that told me he was singing about a douche? He was the ‘douchebag’ – Manfred was singing about a deuce. The lyric went “wrapped up like a deuce when you’re roller’ in the night.”

I never felt like I was blinded by ‘the light’. Even when my faith grew stronger, there was never an epiphany or an awaking. In fact, I was just beginning to feel I was understanding ‘The Light’ – The Light of understanding this life. It was a feeling that I was understanding. In my ego, I thought I understood Life better than most of the people around me. It was this faith in my own understanding, not my religious faith, is what would anchor me in the coming years. And while this Light would guide me in the years and decades to come I would constantly lose my way and make mistakes – just like any other kid. I would continue to learn about Life and Death. How these two things would balancing me and my beliefs. And how The Light shined and brightened my living and my loving of the people in my life.

In the first summer Dave and I moved in with The Beckmans, Aunt Joyce signed me up to go to Wilmot Junior High School. Although my cousin John and I were the same age, he was not going to Wilmot. John struggled with reading so he was going to Deerpath Junior High School in Lake Forest. This meant I would be starting a new school this Fall by myself. Dave and Jim were going to Woodland Elementary. Dave would not have to endure a bunch of new kids by himself – he would have Jim to break the ice. On the other side, all the 7th-graders were new to Wilmot Junior High so I would not have to explain why I was living with The Beckmans. 

This was the second time in two years I would be starting a new school. When my family moved from the ‘Red House’ to the ‘Gray House’ we all had new schools – Hope went to Maine West High School, Lee went to Algonquin Junior High and Dave, Dawn and I went to West Elementary. We stayed until the end of the school year because there had been a discussion that if we moved mid-year Lee would have to go back to grade school because his junior high at the time went from 6th to 8th grade and Algonquin Junior High was only 7th to 8th grade. So Mom and Dad waited until the end of the school year.

The move to West Elementary would be the first time the teachers didn’t know who I was. Before we this, all my teachers knew ‘the Zilligens’ having had Hope and/or Lee before. At West Elementary none of the teachers would know who Dave, Dawn or I were, but they would learn in the next couple of years – until we moved away after my parents died.

One Summer morning Aunt Joyce and I went to Wilmot to get my class assignments and to pick up my gym uniform. Apparently, now that I was in Junior High, kids would be required to change our clothes for gym. That was worrisome. Being almost 200 pounds in 7th grade I was a little concerned about undressing in front of a bunch of kids I didn’t know. It was actually much worse than that.

The woman getting my gym uniform showed us the shirt with Wilmot Blue Jay on it. It was alright, maybe even cool. The shorts were fine – again with the Blue Jay logo but much smaller, even if the size was an adult large. And then there was this other thing that was in a plastic container she kind of mumbled through. It was something about supporting, what I assumed was the Wilmot sports teams. Everything was swept into a plastic bag and the woman said she would see me in a few weeks. Aunt Joyce grabbed the bag, said goodbye and out of the school we went.

When I got home and started inspecting my gym clothes. I wanted a closer look at that weird thing with the shirt and shorts. That turned out to be a ‘jockstrap’ – or as I figured out later – an Athletic Supporter. I opened up the package and dangled the elastic between my hands. “No, no, no, no, no” – How in the hell was I going to wear that? I had a few weeks to figure it out so I buried it in my dresser drawer. Or so I had thought.

Later that afternoon, I had come back from fishing and stepped into the porch to find Dave and Jim there. Dave was wearing my gym shirt which was probably four sizes too big for him. Jim was laughing so hard he could barely get out – “nice underwear!”

At this point, Dave lifted my shirt to reveal he was wearing my jockstrap. I was mortified. They knew! Dave knew what was going to happen so he took off through the kitchen to the front door. I was too shocked to realize what I was supposed to do. As he started running through the kitchen the shock wore off and that familiar wave came over me – I needed to punch him. As I had done so many times before. But this time he had too much of a head start for me to catch him. He was outside the front door by the time I had rounded the counter in the kitchen. From the front lawn, Dave taunted me dancing in my new Wilmot Junior High shirt. I continued to chase him around the house. Jim was barely able to stumble out of the front door to watch, he was laughing uncontrollably.

I was so ashamed that about the jock strap – they knew. As much as I tried to shame him back that they would have to wear them next year, clearly Dave wasn’t as embarrassed as I was about this new underwear. Wilmot Junior High was not starting off well.

Wilmot was a little over a mile away so I could ride my bike when the weather was good and walked if it wasn’t. When Lake Eleanor was frozen, I could shave a little time off my walk by cutting across the frozen lake.

But before I had to figure out my winter commute, I had to get through my first day at my new school. It did not start as inconspicuously as I wanted it to. That morning the plan was that Aunt Joyce would drop me off and I would walk home. I had to wait for the bell to ring to enter the school. So with all the other kids, I waited outside for the morning bell. This would be our routine for the next two years.

Wilmot combined three elementary schools: Dave and Jim’s school – Woodland Elementary, Wilmot Elementary and South Park (yes, just like the cartoon). That September morning, most of the kids were in groups of friends from these schools. Since I did not know anyone, I stood off to the side by myself waiting for the bell to ring to let us in.

It turned out I made the unfortunate choice of wearing one of my favorite t-shirts. It said ‘I’m with Stupid’ with a hand pointed to the position that was permanently reserved for Dave. But as one kid pointed out that morning, I was only with myself – so I must have been ‘stupid’. And so began my junior high career.

Not knowing anyone, I really just wanted to melt away, to pass through the hallways unnoticed. But at 200 pounds it was hard to not to be noticed. So I tried my best to fit in – so to speak. I remember the ‘first friend’ I made – Peter Vassiliades. He was the first kid to invite me over to his house. He lived on the other side of Deerfield Road, in a subdivision called Castlewood. That was the first kid’s house I went to since moving to Deerfield. Next was Mark Reisman’s house. Mark had just had his bar mitzvah and had gotten a pinball machine – a pinball machine in his house? So I went overthinking it would be a crappy tabletop version of pinball machine but it was a full size, plug-in, steel legged pinball machine called ‘Fireball!’ Holy crap!

Wait a minute – what’s a bar mitzvah? Apparently, it was like Confirmation for Jewish kids. Jewish kids? I thought Jews were the people in the bible. I didn’t know they were still around. I didn’t know very much about religion or the world. My world was very focused on dinosaurs, plants, animals, stamps and ghost stories. I knew I was Lutheran because that the way they talked about ‘our religion’ at church. I knew there were Catholics, they were the non-Lutherans (which, it turned out, was really the other way around). At this point in my life, I thought Christians and Lutherans were interchangeable. Mark was not the first Jewish kid I met when I moved to Deerfield. On the other side, junior high kids didn’t get into a lot of religious conversations – except when it came to the gifts.

Wilmot Junior High School was split into two grades, 7th and 8th. Each grade was split into two Teams – 1 and 2. The layout of the school was pretty basic: two east/west halls, the south hallway had two sets of four rooms to the south for each of the 7th-grade teams. The north hallway had two sets of four rooms to the north for 8th-grade teams. Both hallways were lined with lockers. On the west end was the open area for the gym with the boys’ locker room to the south and the girls’ locker room to the north. The gym also doubled as the lunch room. The library was in between the two main hallways with music, art and science lab near the gym. The faculty and main offices were in the main entrance on the east side. Wilmot had outgrown the original building so in the summer of ’76 there was construction to build a new gym and auditorium off the main entrance hallway to the north. Our graduating class of ’77 would be the first class to use this new addition,

My 7th-grade homeroom was in Mrs. Boruszak room who taught English. I tried to keep my head down but its hard for a fat kid not to be noticed. Junior high kids are very suspicious animals. They tend to sniff around at things that were bigger then they are. A few would come in for a closer look. Some will come closet for a nudge or a push. I had learned at my old school West, how you reacted to these initial pokes and prods would set the tone for how all other animals would react in the future.

A few months into the school year, Wilmot the junior high pack thought I needed a nickname. Some were forms of Zilligen but they apparently didn’t get much of a reaction from me – I had already heard most of them before. Some were cruel, some were just dumb. Then one morning during homeroom, Dean Smith came in and “I”ve got it! We’ll call him ‘Waba’ – Water Buffalo Association.” It was pointed out that actually, that was WBA which really wasn’t pronounceable.  Dean decided to put another ‘a’ in it so you could. It definitely wasn’t anything I had heard before. Dean’s nickname seemed to satisfy the rest of the pack. So over the next couple of weeks, then months – and then years. Waba became my nickname.

How many of you know anyone who has a nickname, that is not some form of their name, that is still used into their 50’s? I am still surprised by how long ‘Waba’ has actually stuck around. So here’s how a 50-year-old man got to be called ‘Waba’:

The teams in junior high were pretty isolated but apparently, ‘Waba’ had crossed over to Team 2. Over the summer I lost 50 pounds so that Fall I was under 150 pounds. Showing up at school that Fall some said I wasn’t Waba anymore but the name continued to stick. The Wilmot kids brought it to Deerfield High School. By the time I graduated that’s all anyone called me. In fact, many people didn’t know my real name. I think in high school kids would test me to see if I would answer to Waba – kids I didn’t know would say ‘Hi, Waba’. I always said ‘Hi’ back.

But Waba wasn’t my only nickname. When I had moved in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack I learned that Uncle Jack’s first name was actually John also. So my cousin John was a junior. Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack were also my Godparents. In the Brumm family, it was traditional that Godparents would get their Godchildren a gift for Christmas. Aunt Joyce would always sign my gift “To – Johnny Mike”. I believe it was my cousin Fred Turner that coined the phrase ‘Johnny Mike ride his trike’ which led to my other nickname – Trike. This name was pretty much just used in the family. But my aunts and uncles on my mom’s side would call me Trike. To this day, Aunt Joyce will refer to me as John Mike or Trike.

At my Aunt Betty’s wake in 2016, I saw my cousin Jeff and as I reached out to shake his hand he said, “How’s it going there Trike? Does anyone call you that anymore?”

“Just the aunts” I replied. And apparently a few cousins.

Waba actually transitioned over to Carthage College thanks to a couple of softball shirts that had ‘Waba’ displayed on the back. When asked about the ‘Waba’, I said it was a nickname. And so it spread at Carthage as well. At the time, Carthage was smaller than my high school it so the nickname actually spread even faster there. Just like in high school, by my senior year, no one knew my real name.

In the mid-80’s, before cell phones, Carthage dorms had one payphone per floor. Everyone took turns answering the payphone if it was ringing. One evening my senior year, Uncle Jack called me on the Don’s floor (South Hall, 4th Floor, South wing) where I lived. Back then Carthage had ‘fun names’ for their dorm floors.

Uncle Jack asked, “Is John Zilligen there?”

“We don’t have anyone by that name on this floor”

“Well, he’d better goddamned be there, he’s expecting my call!” Uncle Jack huffed.

The phone answerer asked another kid walking down the hall, “Do you know a John Zilligen?”

“Yea, that’s Waba”

Waba worked for me as a DJ name and was soon adopted by my brothers and sisters and at home for a while. My nieces and nephews called Uncle Waba – until they got older and thought they were too old to call me ‘Uncle Waba’ anymore. My wife Desi, continues to call me Waba to this day.

When you leave college, that typically is where your nickname ends. There’s a time to put childhood names aside but ‘Waba’ kept popping up. For example,  in the late 80’s we were invited to a watch a Bears-Packers game at my co-worker Mike Mecenas’ house with his wife and some other couples. During halftime, the nerdy guys got up to check out Mike’s latest computers games leaving the wives to talk. We finished the game together, made small talk and then our goodbyes. As we were getting our coats on and thanking our hosts, Desi, without thinking about it, referred to me as Waba.

Mike’s wife exclaimed, “Your Waba!? While we were talking during halftime you kept referring to ‘Waba’ and I didn’t know who that was! I was wondering if you were having an affair!”

We all laughed but I told Desi it was important that you have to be aware of how you refer to me. Now that I was out of college, and no longer DJing, Waba was starting to lose its recognition. I was an adult after all.

Fast forward ten years. I’m coaching Nate’s floor hockey. We had just ended a line during an exciting game. I was bringing the kids to huddle and discuss the next line’s strategy. Suddenly over the crowd noise, I heard…

“Waba!”

I looked up to Desi in the stands pointing to the floor. One of our kids had been hurt during the last play. It turns out Desi was yelling ‘John’ 3 or 4 times but not getting my attention. It was when she reverted to “Waba” that I finally looked up. Apparently, I was no longer responding to my own name.

So in 7th grade at Wilmot Junior High, Waba was born. But Waba was just a fat kid who lost weight and learned to fit in like everyone else. I was in Team I so Mr. Keasling was the science teacher. He was one of my favorite teachers that year. Probably because I loved science. I remember him talking about his thesis paper on paddlefish. I had never heard of paddlefish before. They were weird and decidedly cool.

Mrs. Novey was my math teacher, who happened to be pregnant that year. I remember that first day of class she was taking roll call. When she got to Tejinder Singh’s name she had some trouble pronouncing it. After a couple of false starts, Dean Smith blurted out, “Gesundheit!” Mrs. Novey and the class erupted. It’s a line I still use today when someone stumbles over how to pronounce a word.

Dean Smith was the class clown, at least in 7th grade. One morning, to everyone’s horror, Dean asked Mrs. Novey if she wanted to hear a Dead Baby joke. I don’t think the guys understood how inappropriate it was but there was almost a gasp from girls. Mrs. Novey didn’t skip a beat and told Dean to go ahead.

“What’s easier to load into a truck, a pile of bowling balls or a pile of dead babies?” Dean asked.

“I don’t know, ” said Mrs. Novey.

“A pile of dead babies because you can use a pitchfork”

The boys laughed and the girls groaned but most importantly Mrs. Novey was laughing, in fact, she was face down on her desk laughing. This just prompted another joke from Dean.

“What’s worst than a pile of dead babies?” Dean asked.

“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Novey.

“One in the middle eating its way out”

That got universal groans followed by adolescent male titters. Mrs. Novey groaned with a smile and got up to pass out her math assignments for us. We learned that Dean had dozens of Dead Baby jokes at lunch. More were passed along in the coming weeks and the rest of the year.

Another series of jokes going around that year was ‘Mommy, Mommy‘ jokes, which had nothing to do with Dead Baby jokes. They typically went like this:

Mommy, Mommy! I don’t want to play with grandma!
Shut up and keep digging!

Mommy, Mommy! I don’t wanna go to Europe!
Shut up and keep swimming!

After the first few days of Dead Baby and Mommy Mommy jokes, the goal was to find new ones. My kids were shocked to learn how old Dead Baby jokes were when Dead Baby jokes started circulating around in their school. One of my favorites of theirs…

How do you get 100 dead babies in a bathtub?
A blender
How do you get them out?
a straw

I will give my kids’ generation credit for Chuck Norris jokes. These basically place Chuck Norris in a god-like reverence. A couple of my favorites were…

Chuck Norris doesn’t cut his grass, he sits on his porch and dares it to grow.

Chuck Norris doesn’t wear Superman pajamas. Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas.

Chuck Norris was once bitten by a poisonous snake. And after many days of agony, the snake finally died.

In a cosmic full circle, Naomi had a pregnant teacher in grade school, around the time that Dead Baby and Chuck Norris jokes were going around in her school. All the kids in this teacher’s class referred to her baby as Chuck.

I remember one specific joke in 8th grade told by Todd Combs. Todd was just a 7th grader who lived down the street from me. We met fishing on Lake Eleanor, despite the fact that his family didn’t live on the lake. Technically that was against the Lake rules. But he was a nice kid and liked fishing. Talking his way into fishing on the Lake was telling of Todd’s personality. So despite being Dave and Jim’s age, Todd and I became friends. Eventually, he would join Dave, Jim and I as we went to school – riding our bikes as weather permitted and walking in the winter. In the middle of the winter, we would cut across the lake. It wasn’t unusual for us to walk to school together but we didn’t always walk back together.

At the end of the day one winter, Todd showed up at my locker to walk home. As I got my jacket on for the walk home he asked me if I wanted to hear the Purple Gorilla joke. Sure – Todd was good with jokes. He starts telling the joke, or rather the story, as I’m putting on my hat and gloves. 25 minutes later we are standing on the bay of Lake Eleanor where we split to go to our homes – and he is still telling this story! When it finally finished all I could do is groan. You can read a shorter version here.

Junior high wasn’t all just jokes. One of the worse moments was having to strip naked and take a shower with 30 other guys. Everyone was embarrassed and yet Mr. Laarveld shooed all of us into the showers. Fat kids hate being naked in general. At 12 years old no one saw me naked anymore except my doctor – and apparently 30 other naked boys and 30-year-old gym teacher. And there was that one jerky Life Guard at Mitchell pool that insisted we take a ‘nude soapy’ shower before letting us through the locker room to the pool area.

Looking back I guess the naked shower in Junior High is a rite of passage in Junior Highs across the country. In high school, it was less traumatic because the ground had been broken in junior high. By then the levels of puberty were more consistent among us. Years later I was never worried walking around the health club naked. As I got older, I really didn’t care what people thought – I just wanted a shower to get the stink off.

The absolute worst moment was throwing up in Mr. Frazin’s 8th-grade math class. It was right after lunch and everything was fine – then suddenly it wasn’t. I wasn’t the type of kid that would have to leave to go to the bathroom. I could hold it. Heaven forbid if you actually took a crap at school. I had no stomach issues, except when I had the flu.

But this particular afternoon, as I sat in Mr. Frazin’s class right after lunch, my stomach started somersaulting.  As I do with any illness, I willed it to pass. I focused on keeping my stomach from its gymnastic tricks. Steady, steady, and then nope – suddenly vomit raged up. Despite my efforts to hold it in with my hands, it gushed out between my fingers and onto my desk, and my notebook, and my lap.

I don’t remember the kids’ reaction. Just the unreality of what had just happened. But I did hear Mr. Frazin say, “Go to the nurse’s office.”

And then he added, “and tell them to send the janitor here.”

Dripping and smelling like vomit, I went for the first time to see the nurse in the front office. She called Aunt Joyce. I was picked up and brought home. The stupid part was I felt fine after that. Clearly, something wasn’t right with my lunch. I always blamed the cantaloupe, but no one else in the family seemed to have a problem with it.

The next day was the real challenge. How would kids react to the new kid throwing up in class? There were a few ‘Puke boy’s and ‘What’s Up Chuck’s but honestly, it could have been much worse. After a few weeks, my ‘puking’ episode had all but faded, it seemed a little too convenient. It could have been that junior high kids have short attention spans but I always suspected a conversation was had with the class for my benefit.

Junior High kids are known for doing stupid things. I remember at the end of one day in 7th grade, Jon Sabath was trying to hit the tips of his fingers with his comb. He had heard that if you prick the ends of your fingers and swing your arm around, blood would spray out the ends. Unfortunately, Jon’s comb was not very sharp.

But fortunately for Jon, Dean Smith offered to help. All Jon really needed was a little more force. So Dean took Jon’s comb and as hard as he could, he wailed on Jon’s fingers tips like the comb was a 6-inch machete. We all saw Jon’s pain through his reaction. But as he tried to smother the pain in his mouth Dean shouted, “Now swing your arms around!” After all, that was the point of all this.

Sure enough, little droplets of blood speckled the ceiling tiles above us. All the gathered 7th-grade boys congratulated Jon on his successful blood splatter as he wrapped his fingers in tissue to stop the bleeding.

The lunchroom was always a hive of energy. The loud buzz of adolescent conversation with accents of laughter, screams and howls. The overall buzz would grow in volume after the food was consumed, which was a clear sign to release the animals into the yard. The first step was to stifle the din so the release could be coordinated; and any necessary announcements that needed to be made.

I remember one afternoon in 8th grade when they announced we could no longer have chicken fights during recess or risk detention. Obviously, someone forgot the first rule of Chicken Fights – you don’t talk about Chicken Fights. OK, maybe some of the teachers saw us holding one another on their backs trying to push each other over. We weren’t exactly hiding what we were doing. We were just having fun. And, of course, it’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt.

Junior high school kids aren’t always the best behaved. And unfortunately, substitute teachers bore the brunt of this. Something about that temporary teacher brought out the worse in some of us. Kids, in general, like to see what they can get away with. So one day in Mrs. Ivy’s homework and we had a sub. The sub had just finished taking attendance when Tracy Calderie walked in.

“And you are…?” she asked.

“Bob Yancy,” Tracy said. The whole class snickered but the sub did not let on that anything was wrong. “Bob” took his seat on the opposite end of the room from the door as the sub dutifully check his name off the attendance list.

A few minutes later Bob walks in.

“And you are…?” she asks again.

“Tracy Calderie,” Bob says.

Again, the whole class snickered while ‘Tracy’ took his seat right by the door.  But the sub had her attendance list all checked off so everything was fine. This was until someone from the front office knocked on the wall and said, “Excuse me, I need Tracy Calderie to come with me. ”

Now the class cracked up as the sub pointed toward the door while “Bob” stood up in the opposite corner. Best prank bust I had ever seen.

On another Fall afternoon, a month or so after school started in 8th Grade, I was in Mrs. Ivy’s homeroom waiting for the final bell. Earlier that summer I had started collecting Famous Monster magazines. So far I had accumulated 4 magazines. This particular afternoon I had brought them to school so my friends could check them out. A group of us were in the back of the room getting our fill of “Food of the Gods”, “Futureland” and “Space 1999”.

Mr. Camporeale, our Social Studies teacher, would occasionally cut through Mrs. Ivy’s room to get to his room next door. He looked a lot like Mr. Kotter from “Welcome Back, Kotter.”

As he walked passed one of my friends looking at my magazine, he stopped. Grabbed the magazine and flipped it to look at the cover.

“This yours?” he asked.

“No, its Zilligen’s,” he said. Thanks, I couldn’t have been sold out faster if I were a free umbrella in a downpour.

“You got more of these?” he asked.

“Just these four,” I answered. Crap, I had just started collecting these and now they were going to be taken away.

“You know,” Mr. Camporeale said as he grabbed the magazine from my friend casually flipping through it. “I used to buy these when I was a kid. In fact, I have #1”

He had #1? That was worth $500! They didn’t even sell that one in the magazine anymore.

“Where do you get these?”

“In the magazine store in the Commons.” The Commons was a strip mall in downtown Deerfield.

“Can you get me the next issue when you pick one up.”

“Sure,” I said.

So the following month when the new issue arrived I picked up two. The next morning I delivered it to Mr. Camporeale’s room.

“You know,” he said. “Every Halloween I bring my monster magazines in. You can look at them when I do.”

“Including #1?”

“Yep”

Halloween was only a couple of weeks away. And true to his word, when we had Social Studies on Halloween, Mr. Camporeale’s desk was piled with Famous Monster magazines.

From behind his desk, Mr. Camporeale started his class by saying, “When I was a kid, I used to buy Monster magazines. My mom said they would rot my brain but I bought them anyway. So – every year for Halloween, I bring them in to show you kids, that what you read will not rot your brains.”

“OK Zilligen, come up here.”

Uh oh, as much as I wanted to see #1, I didn’t want to be called out in front of everyone. On the other side, it was now no secret that I was now Mr. Camporeale’s supplier, of Famous Monster magazines. I was feeling a bit dirty; dirty about being a teacher’s pet.

“Come on, you know you want to see these.”

Slowly I got up and made my way to his desk.

“That, my friend, is the first issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland.”

Sure enough, on the top of the furthest pile was the first issue – worth a cool $500! The most expensive magazine ever! As I was looking at the 40 or 50 magazines, Mr. Camperelli said, “Go ahead, Zilligen. You can touch it.”

I reached out for the magazine but instead I grabbed it and ran back to my desk.

“Hey, Zilligen! Put that back!” Mr. Camperelli yelled. The class laughed their support of my theft.

So I got up and started to put it back.

“Nah, you can go ahead and look it,” he said. “In fact, each of you can come up and take a look at them as I go through today’s lesson. And this WILL be on Friday’s quiz!” he warned.

During his lesson, I flipped through Mr. Camporeale’s #1. I was horrified to see there were pieces of the magazine cut out. It certainly wasn’t worth $500, in fact, the cover was coming off. I bet it was only worth $450, maybe $475.

For the rest of that year, each month I dropped off his copy. He was definitely my favorite teacher that year, despite the fact that I didn’t really care for social studies.

Another Mr. Camporeale story: Unsurprisingly, it turned out Mr. Camporeale was also a movie buff. So it was not unusual for him to supplement his lessons with movies. For kids, this will typically get you on the favorite teacher list.

Now – in 1977 we were told that Drugs were bad. In fact, It turned out drugs were so bad, the teachers in Wilmot Junior High spent an entire week telling us how bad drugs were for us. Having to fill up an entire week it seemed like they found were starting to run out of ways to tell us that drugs were bad for you. This is before Ronald Reagan declared war on Drugs.

The message accumulated in an anti-drug movie shown to us in the lunchroom on a Friday afternoon. It was announced that this movie was rated ‘R’ but we were supposed to pay attention to the message being sent. Once again, for those of us not paying attention earlier in the week – Drugs Are BAD!

For the movie, I was sitting at a table behind the movie projector. Mr. Roeing, my Science teacher, was sitting next to the projector and Mr. Camporeale was next to him. The movie was about a nice girl who turned to drugs and went bad. Toward the end of the movie the now ‘bad girl’ was living with her drug-selling boyfriend. When her dad confronts them in their apartment, the boyfriend gets out of bed, he’s naked. So is the girl.

Suddenly, the film went out of focus. I looked at the project saw Mr. Roeing’s hand on the lens of the projector. I saw Mr. Camporeale look over and hit Mr. Roeing as the two of them animated their best Abbott and Costello routine. His body language said, “What are you doing?”

The movie came back into focus just as the girl got out of bed. Mr. Camporeale made alot of Junior High boys very happy that day.

While Mr. Roeing may have been a bit prudish, he was a fun science teacher. He would encourage students to try things on their own. I remember me and my lab partner were making up a lab – it was either during lunch or after school. Dean Smith had taken Mr. Roeing up on some extracurricular lab work so he was in the lab as well – working on his side project: ‘Contact Fly Paper’.

The concept had a great ‘wow’ factor. Earlier Dean had mixed the chemicals and passed the mixture through a filter. The filter had been drying. Dean was walking passed us gingerly carrying a brownish yellow circle of paper when I asked him what he was working on. Dean explained that the ‘Contact Fly Paper’ would explode when the fly landed on it. He sounded like Peter Brady describing his volcano project. I thought the fact that he was carrying it already proved it wasn’t going work. But just as we got back to our lab we heard a loud “Pop!”

Dean was just at the door a part of the brown paper was floating to the ground. Dean’s hand was now the same color as the filter had been. Son of a bitch – I guess it did work!

In Junior High, us kids were all trying to find our social circles. Mayim Bialik from Big Bang Theory described the difference between Nerds and Geeks – Nerds maintained an interest regardless of the social implications, while the Geeks maintain an interest because of the social group. In Junior High, these social circles were in constant rotation and development. And as we got older these social groups would be increasingly more important to us. The older the ‘social circle’ was, the less ‘geeky’ it was. Also, the more overall acceptance of the ‘social circle’ by society at large, then it was viewed as less ‘geeky’.

The largest and oldest of these circles were Boys and Girls/Dating. As much as I wanted to play in that game, it would still be years for me, I was much too shy. Sports was another group I was not involved with. While Dating andSports were well beyond the ‘Geeky’ label – as described by Mayim – this is because it is so universally accepted. ‘Geeky’ is used for less mainstream interests.

Music, on the other hand, had a wide range of ‘Geekiness’. It was typically based on bands you wanted to follow. The Beach Boys definitely leaned on the nerdy side, while Peter Frampton was the mainstream side. For me, Monster Magazines put me on the ‘nerd’ chart. While there were other kids interested in monsters, we were mostly on the nerdy side. Pop-can collecting – nerdville. My plants, still nerdville – though cactus helped a little. Unfortunately as basic as stamp collecting was, for most Junior High kids, that started me running for various offices in nerdville.

Fads are quick popular things and activities that attracted alot of people. These would also fuel more socials circles. Some of the fads we experienced back then were mood rings, more in 7th grade. Back then everyone had to have a mood ring on display so we could tell if you were ‘calm’ or ‘angry’ or ‘catatonic’.

Bubble Yum and Pop Rocks became a crazy in 8th grade. Anyone that had connections to someone on the East Coast that could send packages of Bubble Yum was a King/Queen at Wilmot for 24-48 hours. Kiss also came on strong in 8th grade. While I was no artist, I was able to draw the faces of Ace, Gene, Paul and Peter – the members of Kiss. I did a good enough job to get a couple of commission pieces (which I think amounted to a couple of ‘Thank you’s). My cousin John had the Destroyer and Rock’n’Roll Over albums which I borrowed as I tried to work my way into that cool music scene. My obsession with Kiss lasted about two weeks. It basically ended when John and I got into an argument and John wouldn’t let me listen to his Kiss albums anymore (and he had just gotten The Originals collection – their first 3 albums). After another week of grumbling, I simply went back to my Beach Boys – which was #1 on the radio in nerdville.

As I said, I would never consider myself artistic, but I would rate my Kiss portraits above average. On the other end of the spectrum, I also tried to introduce 8th grade’s Team I to Beatleman. Beatleman was a drawing I learned from one of two guys who started a cactus store in the Deerfield Commons the summer of ’76. The two owners named their store Quetzalcoatl, after the Aztec Sun God – that turned out to be wrong. All they sold were cactus – that also turned out to be wrong. By the Fall they started selling regular house plants too because they found out the Deerfield market for cactus was already saturated by the colored Moon Cactus that Jewel was selling in their florist department.

The store was an odd building in the northeast corner of the Commons’ parking lot. In the summer they would put cactus outside to attract customers. Instead, they attracted two nerdy Junior High boys – John and I. The inside was white stucco with a brick floor. It smelled like dried potting soil. I was in heaven.

Any time Aunt Joyce or Uncle Jack would go to the Commons we would visit their store. After mowing Grandma’s lawn, we would stop by their store. John and I so became friends with the owners. We rarely bought anything because they never carried smaller plants. The owners put up with me and John.  I would dare say we may have been friends.

I don’t remember their names but during one of our visits, the clean-shaven owner drew me a Beatleman. It was something he had made up when he was a kid (probably 5 or 6 years ago). He had specific rules on drawing Beatleman – the smile was uneven, one tooth was always bigger and he had 3 hairs on the top of his head. After he taught me, he had me practice it. It felt very important. I decided this was the image I was going to plant at Wilmot Jr. High. Whenever I could, I would draw one on the chalkboard or leave a scrap paper with a Beatleman in one of the classrooms or in the hallway. I imagined everybody going “who is the Beatleman?” “Here’s another one!” “Who keeps drawing this?” Soon there would be other people doing it. It would be the strange little face that would get swept up like the Bicentennial fervor we were already going through.

The results were predictable. Outside of one or two “what is this?”s Beatleman was unceremoniously erased or throw away. Outside of a few friends, he was gone in 3 or 4 weeks. He never reached the level of ‘Kilroy‘ or the Smiley Face. And after a year, the same fate followed the Quetzalcoatl cactus store. The owners sold what plants they could and closed up shop the following summer. Only Beatleman survived with his trusty sidekick Waba.

But before my Jr. High career ended, the Eagles would release “New Kid in Town,” just in time for Christmas in 1976. By that time my new kid smell was pretty much worn off. I still related to being the new kid despite the fact that I was beginning to find my way through the social circles and their traps that we were all maneuvering through. No, I wasn’t hanging out at kids houses regularly. In fact, I would say I had only 2 or 3 kids I would call a good friend. Back then I was just trying to get through school so I could get back home. Back to fishing, my plants, my pop cans, and my stamps.  The song spoke of romance but at that age, the closest I was getting was the occasional glance at a pretty girl.

Don Henley and Glenn Frey’s lyrics captured our need to belong which seemed so important in Junior High. “There’s a new kid in town, Everybody’s talking, There’s a new kid in town, People started walking.” In the song the ‘New Kid’ took the singer’s girlfriend. The singer said everybody wanted to be like him. While the ‘New Kid’ was romantic – I was anything but. I was hoping someday to have a girlfriend but that was still years away. For now, I was happy having a few friends and finding my way as a new teenager. Losing 50 pounds lessened the teasing. Gaining my nickname ‘Waba’ would benefit me for many years to come, and in ways I could never anticipate. But no one was doing what I was doing.

Finding my way through the social labyrinths of Wilmot made moving to Deerfield more comfortable and made leaving my past behind easier. There were good times. Those I would like to repeat. But there were many turns and traps back then that left many bruises and heartaches. Being 12 and 13 years old was a tough age but it was survivable. I will just cherish the memories I have, that now have been time has polished them to reflect the sparkle of memories. I will leave this to remind myself what it was like to be the new kid at Wilmot Jr. High.

Dave and I met Grandma after we moved in with the Beckmans. Obviously not our grandma but nor was she John and Jim’s grandma on Uncle Jack’s side. Mary Welch was a friend of Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s after they got married. They lived in an apartment next door to John and Mary Welch. The four became good friends despite their age difference. John Welch was postmaster of Deerfield and Mary Welch worked at Lighting Products, a company on the outskirts of Waukegan that made lighting fixtures. They did not have children of their own. After John Welch passed away from a heart attack, Mary Welch adopted John and Jim as her grandchildren. The Beckmans, in return, adopted her as Grandma.

When I first met Grandma she reminded me of Etta, a great aunt that lived with Grandma & Grandpa on my Dad’s side. But this Grandma was actually the complete opposite. Etta was a sister of my grandma or grandpa. She lived with them but we never actually interacted with her. She was an older and scarier version of my Grandma. John and Jim’s Grandma was very nice, wonderful, lovely, beautiful. I don’t remember exactly when I met her but she would occasionally come over for dinner, especially holidays. She was also John and Jim’s babysitter. Dave and I no longer needed a babysitter. She wasn’t so much a babysitter for John and Jim as she would play a referee.

Within the first week, Dave and I learned that besides cutting the lawn at Aunt Joyce and Uncle’s house, we also would cut Grandma’s lawn. The real trick was getting the Beckman’s lawnmower over to Grandma’s – she didn’t own one. Since they only had one car, one of us would go with Uncle Jack the evening before and drop the lawnmower off in her garage. There was plenty of room in the garage. Grandma didn’t own a car either.

John, Jim and Aunt Joyce showed Dave and I the path to take as we rode our bikes to Grandma’s. It was a zig-zaggy path that we would pick-up at Wilmot Road. From there we would cut through Woodland Elementary, Dave and Jim’s school, turn left onto Greenwood, a right on Broadway, left onto Somerset, a right onto Prairie, which was just fields at the time, left onto Hazel for a bit before taking a right onto Forest which sloped downward, to our left to Walnut finally taking a right onto Chestnut. We would cross at the light on Deerfield Road to Grandma’s house which was on the southeast corner of the intersection. There were other ways to get there but they would be the wrong way. We would try these ‘other ways’ as the four of us would sometimes race to get there.

The general rule with mowing was everyone did a bag. Mowing a lawn without collecting the grass was considered uncouth. My Dad never collected the grass. This same process was followed both at home and at Grandma’s. The process of cutting the lawn at Grandma’s was pretty much the same – we would park our bikes on her driveway and knock on her backdoor to say we were there to cut her lawn. One of us would start, by the time we had each done a bag full, Grandma would have come out with a soda for each of us. Many times her lawn would only take a bag each. Aunt Joyce would weed or plant flowers depending on the season, or talk with Grandma about Lighting Products. Aunt Joyce used to work there with Grandma.

I loved talking Grandma about plants and she was a great listener. She had a flower garden on the east part of her property that we would walk through together pointing out how the various plants were doing. Plants were something Grandma and I could bond over. Every holiday she would send the most beautiful flower arrangements from the Deerfield Blossom Shop. We would be eager to show her interesting flowers the Blossom Shop would use in her arrangements when she would come over for the holiday meal.

One of my worse memory after moving in the Beckmans occurred during one of our lawn cutting sessions. There were two parkways we would need to cut, one on Chestnut and one on Deerfield Road. The one on Deerfield Road was tricky. Besides the big oak or walnut there, Deerfield was a busy road and it was a little nerve racking cutting that first strip right next to the road. The other issue with that the parkway was the water pipe that stuck up by the sidewalk near the driveway and the tree. You had to be careful mowing around it because it stuck up pretty high but not as high as the picture to the right. Unfortunately, during one of my turns mowing at Grandma’s around the water pipe, there was a loud thud. The lawnmower, while still running, rattled like crazy and sounded terrible. I had hit the water pipe with the lawnmower. So I turned it off and got Aunt Joyce. Aunt Joyce went inside and called Uncle Jack at work to let him know what happened. Waiting for Uncle Jack was like waiting for the Hangman.

Uncle Jack arrived at Grandma’s to check out the lawnmower. I started it up and as soon as he heard the engine’s mangled growl and saw it vibrate. “Turn it off!” he yelled. He was pissed.

“Didn’t you see that pipe there?” he yelled.

“Ye-yes,” I stammered. ” I was trying to get close.”

“God Dammit,” he said – one of his favorite curses I would learn.

It was the first time I saw Uncle Jack get angry at me. Needless to say, it would not be the last. Grandma knew I was scared. She could have predicted Uncle Jack’s reaction. Apparently, I had broken a ‘Lawn Boy’, which was a very expensive lawn mower. I didn’t know there were even different types of lawn mowers at the time.

The Lawn Boy was brought into the shop but there was no fixing it. I had broken the drive shaft. The whole lawnmower would have to be replaced. A few weeks later when Grandma was ‘babysitting’ us, she talked to me about the Uncle Jack and the Lawn Boy. She told me to give Uncle Jack time. Everyone knows it was an accident. Once there was a new lawnmower everything will be in the past. Just be careful around that water pipe she warned. I was pretty sure there wouldn’t be a ‘next time’.

Within a few weeks with the new lawnmower, we were cutting the grass at Grandma’s again. With the bag rotations, I ended up doing the parkway with the water pipe. Everyone knew the care I had taken around the water pipe by the long grass I left around the pipe. In the months and years later. There would be comments about being careful and not to break the lawnmower. The sting of the comments faded and eventually turned into jokes. Which I would eventually accept. Cutting the grass at Grandma’s once again became a family activity. And we would take our turns cutting the grass and sitting with Grandma on the stoop, drinking our sodas.

In the winter after a snow storm, we would be driven over to shovel her driveway and sidewalks, mainly so Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack could pull their car into her driveway. Grandma very generous, slipping each of us a few dollars that we would refuse. Then she would force the money into our hands with instructions not to tell Aunt Joyce or Uncle Jack.

That Christmas Dave and I learned just how generous Grandma could be. Underneath the tree that morning were two stereos, one for each bedroom. We were excited to receive such extravagant gifts. These were clearly marked ‘from Grandma’. Each stereo came with 8-track player – the latest in audio quality. So each of us received an 8-track tape. When I was writing this story I ask Dave, Jim and John if they remember what 8-tape they received. None of them could remember. I could never forget, I received The Beach Boy’s ‘Endless Summer’.

As excited as we were to receive the stereos, we were not allowed to start the process of setting up them up since church was merely three hours away and we had to get ready. So Dave and I explored all the contents of the box the stereo came in. On the way to and from church, I read the pamphlet that accompanied our stereo so I would be prepared to set it up when we got home.

We picked up Grandma from her church, she was a devout Catholic and went to Holy Cross in Deerfield off Waukegan Road. We were Lutheran and went to Zion Lutheran Church on Deerfield Road. Holy Cross was on the way home for us. This was a pretty normal routine for the holidays – picking Grandma up on the way home to spend time and share a holiday meal. This year, we boys, thanked her profusely for the new stereos. And when we got home, we piled out of the car, we ran to our bedrooms to change and began setting up our stereos to show them off to her. Dave and I needed shelves to put our speakers on since there was nowhere else in our room to put them. For the time being, we propped them up on each of our beds. Grandma came to each room and properly admired the gifts she had given us. So John and Jim had the radio playing our of theirs. It would be a number of months before I realized Dave and I needed to connect the power cord to the radio antenna ground post to get FM stations so Dave and I did could not get the FM radio to work that morning. So instead of the radio, we soon had ‘Surfin’ Safari’ playing from the speakers. Soon a ‘stereo war’ broke out as Dave and I challenged Jim and John. Grandma stood in the hallway cringing and Aunt Joyce came down laughing as we tried to outdo each other. Uncle Jack yelled at us to turn them down and warned that future infractions would have appropriate punishments.

Later that afternoon after Christmas dinner, Grandma’s generosity continued as she presented us with another gift, a gift certificate for Deerfield Record Shop so we could get another 8-track, an album or more 45’s. Unfortunately, Grandma, with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack did not know what they had released in me with this introduction to the world of music. It would turn out to be a lifetime interest, collecting albums, making social connections and, for a little while, a career that revolved around music. While we were already buying 45’s, 8-tracks brought me closer to my future obsession.

At the time, 8-track tapes offered a higher quality for music and the convenience to allow people to bring their music with them for the first time. 8-Tracks were originally developed Ampex Magnetic Tape Company, Lear Jet Company and RCA Records but embraced by Ford Motors in the Fall of 1965. Ford started offering 8-track stereo in all their cars. It knocked out the original 4-track tape but those were only available in California. By the time we had received our stereos from Grandma, 8-Tracks were at their peak. While cassette tapes were already available for recording purposes, they were deemed inferior to 8-tapes due to their low fidelity.

The technology of 8-tracks was great. OK, not really. First, there was the annoying ‘click-CLUNK’ when the player switched from one program to the next. A program was a collection of songs on the album. There were 4 programs per 8-track and two tracks for each song (left and right track) which is why they were called ‘8-tracks’. Typically two programs would make up one side of an album. As we got more 8-tracks, we would learn that sometimes to avoid long periods of silence at the end of a program, the record company would split the song over two programs. So in the middle of the song, it would fade out, click to the next program and fade back in. That was annoying.

‘Endless Summer’ introduced me to not only The Beach Boys but to fandom. A few weeks later I would declare myself a Beach Boys fan. Endless Summer was originally released June of ’74. It was a brilliant move on Micheal Love’s part, the current leader of the Beach Boys. ‘Endless Summer’ spent almost 3 years on the Billboard Top 200 Albums chart. But it was not only MY introduction to The Beach Boys but also for millions of young people who had not heard of them since their fade from the music scene which began in 1967. In 1967, they rivaled The Beatles for the top of the music scene. The ‘Endless Summer’ double album greatest hits was a perfect 8-track that hid the fading problems of 8-track tapes during the height of their popularity. It was a perfect album to take advantage of 8-track’s portability.

‘Endless Summer’ set a pattern on how I would listen to music in the coming years. My sister Hope taught me how to shuffle and bridge cards. So I would perfect my shuffling technique while playing solitaire. So as our 8-track collect would grow or the occasional stack of 45’s, I would listen to music while playing solitaire on my bed. Eventually, vinyl records become my primary media format for my listening/solitaire sessions.

The Beach Boys were my first band – Alan Jardine, Brian Wilson, Carl Wilson, Dennis Wilson and Micheal Love. For a young boy, they were like my first girlfriend. I loved anything they did. They opened my eyes to the world around me. They changed how I looked at myself and others. And yes, they would eventually disappoint me. But that was years away and I had a lot to learn. I was an eager student.

‘Endless Summer’ was soon joined with another Beach Boys collection – ‘Spirit of America‘, another double album greatest hits, though more secondary hits. It was from their illustrated portraits on ‘Endless Summer’ that I decided I wanted to grow a beard. They were my first representation of ‘cool’ in band form. The Beatles were right there too but their Red and Blue Greatest Hits were still another year away for Dave and me.

I remember watching an award show one evening and the nominees were ‘The Beatles’, ‘The Rolling Stones’, ‘The Beach Boys’ and ‘The Kinks’. I was actually surprised that The Beach Boys didn’t win – surely The Beatles were not better than The Beach Boys! It showed how biased and how nieve I was about music. I would learn a lot in the years to come. But at the beginning of 1976, The Beach Boys ruled my ears.

Even as I became a Beach Boys fan it was always about their music. I didn’t read much about them. I didn’t really care what they looked like (except most of them had beards). I didn’t know their historical place as a Rock ‘n’ Roll archetype. I enjoyed their music. The more I heard – the more I wanted to hear. I learned their names and understood Brian Wilson was the band’s leader and the true creative force behind The Beach Boys’ success. That summer they released ’15 Big Ones’ and the Chuck Berry cover ‘Rock and Roll Music’ was a huge hit for them.

In 1976 ‘Happy Days‘ was near the top ten for TV shows, making it to #1 the following year. Their theme song,  “Happy Days” written by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox, was released as a single that year peaking at #5. Another notable oldie released that year was The Beatles’ “Got To Get You Into My Life.” This was The Beatles first single since they broke up 6 years earlier. It was released to promote their ‘Rock and Roll Music‘ compilation. So The Beach Boys were not the only ones riding a wave of nostalgia that year. There was a lot of nostalgia that year as we celebrated America’s Bicentennial.

Today when you think about ‘comeback bands’ – bands that had drifted into obscurity only to reclaim their relevancy – people typically think of Aerosmith and Heart. While The Beach Boys didn’t reclaim their full relevancy, they did become standard fare for the next 20 years for the Summer Concert scene. While this would be a huge success for any band, you have to know that The Beach Boys were once as popular as The Beatles – until the ‘Smile’ album.

While The Beach Boys started out as Brian Wilson’s vocal instruments for surf music, it was soon apparent he wasn’t just any songwriter. Brian Wilson was gifted. Sure he cranked out songs about something The Beach Boys never did – surf (with the exception of Dennis Wilson) and the California culture – at a three album a year pace! But by their ninth album, ‘Summer Days (And Summer Nights!!)‘ (which spawned ‘Help Me, Rhonda‘ and ‘California Girls‘) the music industry was well aware of Brian’s talent. So when he wanted to do something ‘different’ the studio gave him their full support.

The album was ‘Pet Sounds‘. It was a complete departure for The Beach Boys. It was Brian Wilson exploring his ‘In-My-Room’ type of music which he developed while the rest of the band was on tour in Japan. Brian was no longer touring with the band so he could focus on songwriting.  The new album was recorded mostly with studio musicians (know as The Wrecking Crew) with The Beach Boys filling in their vocals when they returned. The album wasn’t well received by the critics or the public. It was a songwriter’s album. In England, however, it was in the top ten for six months. The Beatles and The Who were blown away by what Brian had done. Now ‘Pet Sounds’ is legendary. Some say it inspired The Beatles to make Sgt. Peppers. What it did do is change how artists and the public look at the album format.

Sadly Brian Wilson’s accomplishments would also become The Beach Boys’ albatross. With the late success of ‘Pet Sounds’, Brian would begin their next project – ‘Smile‘. Brian ‘locked’ himself in the studio for over a year (02/17/66 – 05/18/67) working on ‘Smile’; missing the original January release date. One single was released as a teaser – ‘Good Vibrations‘. It was The Beach Boys’ first single to sell a million copies. Anticipation for ‘Smile’ was huge. But the pressure proved to be too much for Brian. The project was eventually scrapped. And when The Beatles released Sgt. Peppers, it would be the nail in ‘Smiles’ coffin – almost. ‘Smile’ was officially released 44 years later. The stories of Brian’s depression and instability in though following years would be on par with Bill Murray but without any of Bill Murray’s charm and playfulness.

With the failure to release ‘Smile’ The Beach Boys would begin to fail. ‘Smile’ was turned into ‘Smiley Smile‘. For four years The Beach Boys albums would fail to chart better than their predecessor, each album peaking lower and lower. Their comeback album ‘Surf’s Up‘ stopped the descent but barely cracked the top 30. But The Beach Boys would return. And while that request would not come from their wives (an ode to the ‘Odd Couple’ sitcom), it did come from Jerry Garcia.

After a classic 3-hour Grateful Dead concert at the Fillmore East in April 1971, The Beach Boys joined The Dead on stage for 7 songs. This was an awkward transition from The Dead to the washed-up Beach Boys but by the end of their set, the crowd was going wild for their familiar California sound. After this impromptu performance, The Beach Boys go off to Holland to record ‘Holland‘ – which doesn’t do well on the charts – but ‘the cool kids’ (ie – Dead Heads) begin to think The Beach Boys are cool again. A few years of VW buses crisscrossing the American concert scenes and The Dead Heads giving high praise to The Beach Boys, and I’m sure a few other things,  a buzz begins -as one would expect.

So sometimes a band has a member that plays the villain. With The Beach Boys, this was Micheal Love, Brian Wilson’s cousin. Michael did not like the direction Brian had taken the band with ‘Pet Sounds’. While Michael Love was a key contributor to The Beach Boys’ lyrics, he was not the creative genius Brian was. Michael was more like his Uncle Murray, the Wilson brother’s dad when it came to business. Michael smelled the buzz during the tour for ‘Holland’ and recorded ‘The Beach Boys In Concert‘ which actually charted better than ‘Surf’s Up’. And it was Micheal Love that put together the ‘Endless Summer’ collection. I thank him for that business intuition. ‘Endless Summer’ introduced me and millions of others to more than just The Beach Boys, for me, ‘Endless Summer’ introduced me to music at a different level.

‘Endless Summer’ was a great collection of Beach Boys hits. Michael Love had alternated between upbeats songs with slow songs on each side or program in 8-track tape terms. All those great Summer songs made me long to see the West Coast. But it was ‘In My Room’ that captured my new sanctuary, a 10 x 10 room that Dave and I shared. With Brian Wilson’s vocal arrangements, ‘In My Room’ it would transport me to another quiet room where palm trees stood outside instead a Russian Olive. A room that was just outside sunshine, the beach and the possibilities of love.

I bought “The Smile Session” in 2011 to see what Brian was actually planning with ‘Smile’. (Brian Wilson actually release his version of ‘Smile’ as “Brian Wilson Presents Smile“, which I also bought.) For Christmas in 2015, I had “The Pet Sounds Sessions” on my Christmas List which Josh got me. It was great insight to those recording sessions.

Let me pause to explain how I listen to my music now since I no longer have an 8-track stereo next to me in my bedroom. Over the years of constantly buying new albums, currently in the compact disc format, I have developed a process on how I listen to my new music. In full disclosure, checking my Amazon account, I purchase about 20-25 albums a year. Until my kids came along I would first listen to a new album when I had time to sit down and focus on the album. I would follow along with anything that came with the album – liner notes, lyrics, etc. I used to say I would get over 50% of my enjoyment from that first listening session.

Until one evening in the basement our home I was in the middle of one of my ‘listening sessions’ – with headphones so I did not disturb my newborn son or my wife, who was working the next morning. Suddenly the overhead light started flashing causing me to take my headphones off. I could now hear Desi informing/yelling at me that our infant son Nate was crying. He had woken Desi up while I was ear-deep into one of my cd’s. I was on dad duty and had failed miserably! So I lost my ‘listening sessions’. I would have to skip directly listening to the album in the car, typically on the way to work. I would record the new CD on to a cassette and listen to the cassette for a week on my commute to work. Once I got a CD player for the car I would not need that extra step of transferring them to cassette. After that week, the album would be moved to be rotated into the CD player in our stereo system that I would typically have played over the weekend. From there they get incorporated into my entire cd collection. I went through this process because to get an intimate appreciation of the music.

So dear reader, call it coincidence, cosmic energy, destiny or the hand of God, I thought I would share this bit of serendipity with you. The year I wrote this story, for my birthday, Desi gave me ‘Made In California‘ a 6-disc Beach Boys box set. When I started writing this story in the beginning of April, there 6 discs were waiting their turn for my daily commute.  As I finish this story the last discs are now playing on the home stereo system.

So to finish this story, 12 year old me, soon to be 13, did not know who The Beach Boys were when I began listening to ‘Endless Summer’. Thus began this journey of musical knowledge. Not just on discovering The Beach Boys but how music would soon encompass my life. But in the early moments, as I sat on my bed playing solitaire, the ‘Endless Summer’ 8-track would click along next to me allowing me to follow Brian Wilson’s muse through his music. Contrary to the lyrics of ‘In My Room’, I did not “lock out all my worries and my fears”, I was actually locking them in. I was working through my real worries and fears, and I had a lot of them. In the darkness ‘My Room’ (actually ‘our room’),  I would ‘lie awake’ and cry and sigh and pray. And despite my brother being 3 feet away, I was alone in these thoughts. And I was afraid. My yesterday was not a laughing matter. But with Brian Wilson’s help, the Beckmans and Mary Welch – Grandma – I learned not to be afraid – ‘In My Room’ or anywhere else.

There’s a world where I can go and tell my secrets to
In my room, in my room
In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears
In my room, in my room

Do my dreaming and my scheming
Lie awake and pray
Do my crying and my sighing
Laugh at yesterday

Now it’s dark and I’m alone
But I won’t be afraid
In my room, in my room
In my room, in my room
In my room, in my room

The song “Rocky” caught me quite unexpectedly. I remember all of us – and ‘all of us’ now consisted of Aunt Joyce, Uncle Jack, my cousins John and Jim, and my brother Dave – were on our way home from somewhere in the middle of the Fall of ’75. For this particular ride home I had luckily drawn a window seat. However, since it was dark out, I couldn’t read, which was how I normally spent my time in the car. I leaned my head against the cool glass listening to the radio.

The bouncy melody caught my ear and the lyrics caught my attention:

Alone until my eighteenth year
We met four springs ago
She was shy and had a fear
Of things she did not know
But we got it on together
In such a super way
We held each other close at night
And traded dreams each day

And she said, “Rocky, I’ve never been in love before
Don’t know if I can do it
But if you let me lean on you
Take my hand, I might get through it” (through it)
I said, “Baby, oh sweet baby
It’s love that sets us free
And God knows if the world should end
Your love is safe with me”

It was a love song. At the time I wasn’t aware of how cheesy the lyrics really were but I was interested in how they ‘got it on together in such a super way’ – well, after all, I was now in 7th grade:

We found an old gray house
And you would not believe the way
We worked at night to fix it up
Took classes in the day
Paintin’ walls and sippin’ wine
Sleepin’ on the floor
With so much love for just two
Soon we found there’d be one more

And she said, “Rocky, I’ve never had a baby before
Don’t know if I can do it
But if you let me lean on you
Take my hand, I might get through it” (through it)
I said, “Baby, oh sweet baby
it’s love that sets us free
And God knows if the world should end
Your love is safe with me”

At this point, this was sounding like a typical love song. The fact that they had a Gray House like Dave and I did was interesting but my attention was beginning to wane:

We had lots of problems then but
We had lots of fun
Like the crazy party
When our baby girl turned one
I was proud and satisfied
Life had so much to give
‘Till the day they told me
That she didn’t have long to live

She said, “Rocky, I’ve never had to die before
Don’t know if I can do it…”

That hit me. I had just been introduced to my first tragedy song. OK, not my first tragedy song – there was Terry Jack’s “Seasons In The Sun”  but this one caught me by surprise. I couldn’t cry because everyone was in the car, but a tear escaped anyways as the lyrics finished:

Now it’s back to two again
The little girl and I
Who looks so much like her sweet mother
Sometimes it makes me cry
I sleep alone at nights again
I walk alone each day
And sometimes when I’m about to give in
I hear her sweet voice say, to me

“Rocky, you know you’ve been alone before
You know that you can do it
But if you’d like to lean on me
Take my hand, I’ll help you through it” (through it)
I said, “Baby, oh sweet baby
It’s love that sets us free
And I told you when the world would end
Your love was safe with me”

She said, “Rocky, you know you’ve been alone before
You know that you can do it
But if you’d like to lean on me…

This story/this song – haunted me for days.  While I still remembered the tragic song ‘Seasons In The Sun’, now I was on the other side of my own tragedy. Everything hit so much closer to home. These characters were now much more believable than they would have been a year ago.

After moving in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack, one part of the grieving process I would struggle with forgetting what had happened. There would be mornings I would wake up, realize I was in our new bedroom at Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s house. Dave’s bed would be three feet from mine. And that comprehension of being in a new bedroom would fade into that realization that my parents were dead. My grief would reset and the pain of this new reality would dig new footholds.

Prior to this, my only experience with death had been when Skipper, our family collie, had to be put down. Skipper was laid in the outside stairwell after he broke his leg. I remember spending the morning with him crying knowing my Dad would come home and take him away. And when Dad came home, he loaded Skipper into the station wagon. Dad left and came home without Skipper. Skipper was dead, I don’t remember burying him – he just wasn’t home anymore.

When my parents died, I realized I didn’t know how death worked. Mom and Dad were in heaven, right? That’s what everyone said. I would see them again when I went to heaven – when I died. We were to take comfort in that. Wait, that we all die? Everyone dies. No one lives forever. Someday – I would die. When would that be? How would I die? Would it hurt? I didn’t want it to hurt? How long did I have? My brothers and sisters could die. I did not know if I could go through the pain I had been going through these last 9 months again. I did not want to experience that pain again. I couldn’t. I wouldn’t.

Before my parents died I had been reading read ghost stories, and I still did. I ached to see my parents again, especially my mom – even as spirits. For months and years, I would lie in bed in the dark. Dave and I would spend some nights talking – until Aunt Joyce would open the door and tell us, “no more talking, it was time for bed”. It was in this dark quiet I would explore what death was to me.

My thoughts would chase me into the darkest corners of my mind. These nights I would reach out to Mom – mentally, or maybe it spiritually – it was all just in my head. I would lie in bed and think – thinking, stretching with my mind, reaching out – for some kind of sensation, anything, something – trying for some response that wasn’t my own making. I would concentrate harder and harder until my head would ache; reaching further and further. Screaming in my head – “Mom!” My tears would stream down the corners of my eyes onto my pillow as I waited for a response, something — anything. And as my overtures drifted away unanswered into those dark corners, I would fill in what I wanted to hear…

“I will always be with you, Johnny.”

But even as I invoked those words I knew it was a lie I used to fill in the void, the lack of response. I would lie to myself because I could no longer stand the emptiness. I didn’t understand. Why didn’t she respond? What stronger bond was there than a mother and her child? But she didn’t answer. Was there no spiritual world? Did she really no longer exist – even on the spiritual level? Was I really never going to see her again? The questions would start there, run to the empty edges of my mind, spilling into my emptiness. I questioned everything. The world I thought I knew was now gone. I was now testing the spiritual world I was trying to understand and realizing I knew even less about that. After these nights, the next day I would go through life  – day by day – as a kid growing up. But in the darkness of my room, where I could hide my tears, where I would continue to ‘reach out’ I would find nothing – only isolation in a vast void – as my brother slept 3 feet away. As this void gained substance I realized it would hold the weight of my questions. I realized I was not going to hear from Mom, or Dad, and further questions would drift unanswered. And I stopped reaching out.

From this void, this blankness, I built a foundation. I separated life from living. Over time I found that I was going through Life. And in going through Life, I was, in fact, living but Life had lost a lot of its warmth. Grief’s oldest cliche’s turned out to be true – ‘Time heals all wounds’ and ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’.

By the time I had gotten to High School, I had again caught up to my peers – focused on normal things teenagers focused on – girls, music, cars and work. But I knew what most adults didn’t get It, that is – Life, but I also included my peers. It seemed no one understood that Life was a facade. That there was nothing lied beyond what we saw – we are alive and then we died. Heaven was a story you told children and scared adults to ease the pain of those who were left behind. But now I knew, there was nothing after you died.

My questioning of everything allowed me to stand on this void with what I believed was ‘true knowledge’. While my peers who fought the status quo of living, I thought had unlocked what Life really was. I would live in the moment. I removed my future expectations. The problem was if you ran this thought process to the logical conclusion, life had no meaning – you lived and you died. Death was final, no spirit, no afterlife – just the void. One thing that was true was the pain, it was very real. So if the pain was so much then the answer was to end the charade of living. The longing for my brothers and sisters was still very strong. But in that same conclusion, I could never knowingly cause them much pain. And I know too well how much pain death could cause. My suicidal thoughts would echo for years. But slowly they would get trampled to murmurs by the constant stepping through of Life and relearning how to live in this new world.

And while this new enlightenment seemed bleak, there was comfort in understanding. I had matured well beyond my years. This knowledge gave me confidence. In this understanding, I saw things differently, better than most adults – again, so I thought. And while these questions built me up, I shriveled from death and its ultimate coming. I knew how far death could change one’s life without actually ending it. I understood it was just the beginning of a long and possibly overwhelming process. Death would forever have my respect and, unfortunately, my heart.

In this new “living” I learned to ‘play the game’. I did not cause problems. I would not be a burden to others. Knowing there was nothing while others believed there was something (void vs. heaven) allowed me to patience with others. And in this patience I allowed my grief to subside, and I would learn to be comfortable with my new being. But despite going to church, and even starting confirmation classes at Zion Lutheran Church, it would be many years before I understood how Faith worked despite John and I would take confirmation classes together at their church – I mean our church.

When Dave and I moved in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack, it was natural that Dave and I paired off with John and Jim since we each had a cousin that was the same age. However, while John and I went to the same confirmation class, I was signed up to attend Wilmot Jr. High that Fall while John was going to Deer Path Middle School in Lake Forest. John had trouble with reading and math and Deer Path could help him get the classes that Wilmot Jr. High did not provide. So we went to separate schools. Dave and Jim, however, went to Woodland Elementary just a few blocks away.

As in any family siblings fight. As Dave and I were integrated into the Beckman family we did more things together. It was great when we played tag or ‘Ghost in the Graveyard. John and Jim taught us ‘Kick the Can’, or we would fish down by the lake, or ride our bikes around the neighborhood. But like any other family, there would be times we did not get along.

One of my first fights with John turned into a real fight with punching and wrestling – just like Dave and I used to do. Strangely, but understandably, Dave and I no longer fought anymore. We no longer had our big punching and wrestling fights anymore as we did before. Regarding this particular fight with John, I don’t remember how it got started or what it was about. I do know it started inside the house and continued as I chased him out to the front yard.

I knew John and Jim had fought because I had seen them. I chased John through the front door and pushed him down as he gained speed across the yard. I had learned from my fights with Dave that if I didn’t get them down early I would never be able to catch them because of my weight. Down he went and I was on top of him punching him in the arms. As with Dave it never seemed right to punch someone in the face.

John was a lot stronger than Dave so he was able to throw me off at first. And in the midst of our tears and punches, John yelled at me, “You’re lucky you have somewhere to live.”

Which I responded with “Yea? well, at least I go to a normal school.”

We had both shocked each other in what we had said. Later that afternoon Aunt Joyce reprimanded me for calling John out on for going to a different school. I complained he started it – which I knew was typically not a good response since adults don’t really care who starts a fight.  I had apparently undone a lot of work Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack had done to get John the help he needed in school. By pointing out the stigma that came with going to a different school from the other kids in the neighborhood I had undermined their efforts.

The bottom line was – it was a crappy thing I did. Yes, so was what he had said. Yes – two wrongs don’t make a right – and you can’t take back what is said. Two years later it was a moot point as John and I both going to Deerfield High School together. But what really happened that day was John and I became brothers. We learned our boundaries and what we were each capable of and how we could hurt each other. Were we inseparable? no. But we both enjoyed going to the Chicago Plant Show as a family in the spring, going to the Botanical Gardens together or that new cactus shop that had opened up in the Commons in downtown Deerfield that next summer. And we always had, and still have, fishing.

We – Dave, Jim, John and I – became ‘The Boys’. While we were introduced as individuals but we were collectively referred to as ‘The Boys’.  John and I tended to be more interested in plants and animals. And John was more into animals, while I more into plants. Dave and Jim tended to be more on the mechanical side with cars and snowmobiles. And we all shared stamp collecting, beer can (or pop can) collecting, swimming, family vacations and watching our favorite TV shows, or listening to our favorite 45’s.

We did a lot of living together. And while I would lie in the dark contemplating Life with its dark edges and its various drop-offs – I was still living. Each day, despite my dark thoughts, I was living a little more. And as I continued to try figure out what this Life – my life – meant,  the Past was being put into the void. Never being forgotten but supporting the weight of my being – and my understanding who I was.

Later I realized this was a good thing. I was beginning to forget; so I guess that’s also a bad thing. Life was moving on. The tidal waves that had swept away my previous life were now just memories; strong and life-changing but becoming only memories. My dead parents were being left to the darkness of my late night thoughts and wet pillows. All the lives touched by that tidal February night had changed. The Zilligen children tumbled behind in it’s wake. Sometimes we couldn’t breathe. Sometimes we were dead weight. But we learned to keep up with the lives that surrounded us.

We fought the weight of pain that pushed us underneath a life we used to know, threating to bury us with grief. I did lose part of a brother and some of my sisters. But within one of my efforts back to the surface of the living, I would find four more sets of arms pulling me along. Only in looking back would I learn that I had gained two more brothers and new parents. The tidal waves of life are always destructive. Up close death was way more devastating than anything I could have imagined. But I learned it was not insurmountable. Only time could calculate the loss and the lessons learned. ‘Rocky’ pushed me down the real path of death, not the flowery archangels of death, but its cold reality. Now I understood “Now it’s back to two again.” Dave and I against this new life. Thank God we had to a Life to live through. The pain did subside. And when we awoke, it was in the arms of a new family.

Moving in with Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack was horrible – which had nothing to do with them. It was the circumstances of WHY we had to move. In fact, with the hindsight of forty years, it was probably the best thing that could have happened to eleven and twelve-year-old orphaned boys.

That weekend Uncle Jack had borrowed a pickup truck to move all Dave and mine’s worldly possessions to their house. The truck rolled passed Deerfield’s Mitchell Pool that Friday evening with John, Jim, Dave and I hanging our elbows out the back gate. John and Jim point out the pool and how much fun it was. I did not realize how much of a role that community pool would play two or three summers and how it would help in my healing process.

John & Jim are my cousins so it wasn’t like I didn’t know them. But living with someone is very different than just seeing them at family get-togethers two or three times a year. Our move had caused a kink in John and Jim’s living arrangements – they had just gotten their own rooms and now they had to go back to being in the same room. The furniture arrangements in Dave and my bedroom was tight. There wereabout two feet between our beds, four feet from the foot of the beds to the closets and just a foot between our dresser and my bed. Needless to say, we didn’t spend a lot of time in our bedroom.

One of the first things we did as new members of the Beckman family was to get our pool passes. Because Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack lived outside of the Village of Deerfield, the pool passes were more expensive. Dave and I never had a pool pass before. I remember once going to the Des Plaines Public pool. It was a little unnerving seeing so many people piled into the water. I wasn’t sure how this whole Pool Pass thing was going to work out. John and Jim told me their pool was great and they loved hanging out there. So we were hauled off to the community center in downtown Deerfield, each dutifully sitting for our picture which would eventually end up in a hard plastic laminated card that we would pin to our beach towels.

The next thing we needed were goggles. Lee had a face mask, that I rarely got to use. These were not allowed in Deerfield’s community swimming pool – goggles, however, were. I had never seen googles before. They were a pair of small plastic lens that were strung together with a flat piece of rubber that was adjustable.

The few times I had been in a pool, opening your eyes underwater was a challenge we would issue to each other. The downside of winning that challenge was that the chlorine would turn your eyes redder and redder with each glimpse. Goggles solved this problem and, as it turned out, were pretty normal at public pools.  In fact, tinted and colored lens turned them into fashion statements.

Once we were properly equipped, John, Jim and Aunt Joyce took Dave and I for our first swim. We dutifully showed our new pool passes to the high school or college girl behind the open window. She returned the favor by counting us with her clicker. John and Jim took us through the mens locker room. Despite the signs, we didn’t take a ‘nude soapy shower’ but the life guard manning the locker room made sure we showered enough to get our hair wet before we met Aunt Joyce outside by the pool.

It was a bright warm June day as Dave and I were led to the lounge chairs in the northwest corner of the fenced in pool area. We each picked a lounger with our towels while Jim threw his towel on one and ran to the pool – only to be called back by Aunt Joyce.

“Suntan lotion?” she questioned already knowing the answer. Dutifully we all formed a line behind John, applying what we could to ourselves and helping each other. Once we were properly covered we were allowed to escape into the pool.

In June of 1975, I was close to 200 pounds. I was never comfortable in a swimming suit  but once I got in the water I was part fish. As a dinosaur enthusiast, I thought, like a brontosaurus, spending a lot of time in the water would help support my weight, and it did. I felt much more comfortable hiding in the water so others could not see my flabby body.

Mitchell Pool became a sanctuary for me. Once I was in the water I was very comfortable – swimming anywhere and everywhere. Dave, Jim, John and I would goof around playing Marco Polo, diving for things on the bottom of the pool and spend the entire afternoon swimming and playing around in the water – you know, being kids. Sometimes we would even go back after supper and stay until closing. By August it would start to get dark by 8:30 and the pool was lit with plate sized lights that we could explore with our goggles.

There was one thing the kids at Mitchel Pool had to deal with, as did most kids of public pools – the Adult Swim. Every hour, for 10 minutes, they would have Adult Swim. This meant the life guards would blow their whistles and anyone 17 or younger would have to leave. This left the entire pool to the two or three adults who, I always thought, felt obligated to swim a lap or two to justify kicking all the kids out. We would wander back to our saved loungers, dry off and wait out the 10 minutes. I always had a book I was reading so I would pick that up and read through Adult Swim. That summer I was beginning to shift from my ghost stories to science fiction, specifically Ray Bradbury’s short story books. Sometimes when the life guards would whistle that Adult Swim was over, I would be too engrossed in a story to leave it and sometimes read straight through to the next swimming session.

That summer I learned that I loved the water. But not just the water, but the entire atmosphere at Mitchel Pool. When I wasn’t swimming along the bottom looking for things with the clarity my new goggles offered me; I would be reading one of my books on the yellow loungers; or maybe just hanging on the side of the pool – taking in the great sunshine like one of my cactuses – except without all the water. I remember the warm afternoon summer sun heating the concrete to near sometimes painful levels.

Most days Aunt Joyce would drop us off after lunch and then pick us up sometime after the pool closed for an hour for dinner; or Uncle Jack would pick us up on his way home from work. We’d come home, eat and sometimes go right back to the pool. I remember a number of times after the pool would close for dinner we would start walking home barefooted trying to avoid rocks and pebbles on the sidewalk. And there was that occasion when we would see the family station wagon coming down Wilmot road from the house. Aunt Joyce or Uncle Jack would wave to their barefooted gang and turn around to pick us up. And as they pulled up over to the curb, we would never miss the chance to put our thumbs out like we were hitchhiking – because we were cool that way.

Mitchell was my home away from home – which was a home away from my last home with my parents. It became a comfortable place to me myself – like trying to get through the shower area without taking the nude shower. The protective 8 foot fenced in yard that herded us along with the yellow plastic webbed loungers that were scattered on that concrete; many claimed with towels, bags and mothers. I would spend carefree days swimming, reading and just hanging out, trying to sneak glimpses at the pretty girls in their bathing suits, or watching the lifeguards in their chairs who were watching me. I would watch the bravado play out with the kids in line for the high dive. And most of all, I spent a lot of time listening to radio they played in the pool area.

The radio at the pool was rigged to play through probably the worse set of speakers I ever heard. While I was only 12 even I knew they sounded horrible. Back when WLS was king of the AM station in Chicago. The lifeguards would tune in WLS on their radio in their office. While the signal may have come in crystal clear in the office, by the time it got to the megaphone speakers placed around the pool area, it sounded more like it had been funneled through a kazoo rather than the current electronic wizardry available in 1975. But after a few hours, you got used to the wax paper rattle and you could actually make out the music that was being played.

This was way before walkmans and VCR’s. This was the land of Hi-Fi and Polaroids. This is looking from an old man remembering his carefree childhood days – before his responsibilities, before jobs, before girls, before commitments and obligations. As a kid, I was at a point I just wanted to ‘be’, to exist – to be happy – and to forget. That summer, the past winter seemed like a lifetime away but the reality was as bright as that summer’s sun. During my time at the pool my mind would wander, it would many times wander to the darker corners of my mind and I didn’t like that. There was a twisting and trapped feeling that I was trying to avoid. The Summer of ’75 at Mitchel Pool offered me the brightness, the sunshine, a childhood and, dare I say – the happiness – I was so desperate to find.

With my original family, we listened to music sporadically – in the car, the occasional ’45 sessions’ or through the clock radio. But for the first time, I experienced being someplace where the radio played continuously for 6 hours or more. I would hear songs over and over. And I would get happy when a favorite song would come on. And I found out I had a lot of favorite songs.

I would be hanging on the side of the pool listening to the DJ’s on WLS as they introduced the next summer hit. I would sing along to the sad story of the girl and her dead pony when Michael Murphy sang “Wildfire”; or fantasize about being in love with Pilot’s “Magic”; or try to imagine what it would be like to have a girl fighting for my attention like the guy in Captain and Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together”, or the heartbreaking loss if someone played B-17 during Olivia Newton John’s “Please, Mr. Please” hit; or the strength I felt from Glen Campbell as he taught me to smile through the pain in “Rhinestone Cowboy.” And whenever I heard “The Hustle,” I always wondered how the hell K-Tel could sell one album with 20 hits for only $4.99! and that included shipping and handling.

One of those stand out songs for me was Wings, “Listen To What The Man Said”.” I didn’t know who Wings were but I might have been able to pick Paul McCartney out of a lineup if I was forced to back then. From the lively guitar strumming and the alto sax solo that would cut through even those horrible pool speakers the intro would start my foot tapping. If it was the sax solo that told me the song was coming, the lyrics “Soldier boy kisses his girl, leaves behind a tragic world” locked me into the next three minutes. It was a great song but not only because it was part of those great summer memories at Mitchel Pool. Dave, Jim, John and I spent hundreds of hours over the next couple of summers there.

Dave and I got a big upgrade in our lifestyle moving in with The Beckmans. The Beckmans had a lake right behind them, a big backyard and a chicken. It turned out Jim and John had hatched chicks and Fluffy was the result of one of those chicks. Fluffy was kept away from the house with a small pen by the garden. Dave and I soon learned how to feed and water Fluffy. How to let him out in the morning (which would be mostly me – when I remembered) and we would also lock him up at night or an animal would eat him.

We soon learned it was a test of manhood to have Fluffy chase you but that took time for me. Only Jim was master of that chase. So when Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack had guests over there would be an eventual race between Jim and Fluffy with Jim always winning. The race was always offered to the guest or their children but very few accepted the challenge. And after the race, John would pick Fluffy up and drop him back into his pen.

The lake was another rest spot for my bruised soul. After moving in, Dave and I were soon equipped with our own fishing poles and tackle boxes. John and Jim showed us how to dig for worms in the garden and fish in the small bay behind the house. I have spent weeks, if not months, sitting on those railroad ties, legs dangling over the water and pole out laying next to me. Uncle Ray would come over and give a few fishing lessons – and lures. He taught me how to fish with plastic worms for bass. Uncle Jack taught us how to filet but Uncle Ray taught us how to skin bullhead for our very rare fish fries. John and I fished the most – passing summer mornings quietly together down by the lake.

The first summer we were there the Lake Eleanor Association was having the lake dredged. A dredger was a floating crane type of machinery that dug out the bottom of the lake to make it deeper. It wasn’t long before the bulky derelict floating platform made its way into our small little bay. We would wave to the dirty hairy guy working the dredger. He would wave back and slowly work his way toward our bay swinging his extension out in front of his rig. It was like watching floating construction with only one truck. After a while we got bored and just started fishing but fishing wasn’t any good when the dredger was nearby. When he was deep into our bay, we wouldn’t even bother to fish. And within a couple of days, he would be gone and in another part of the lake so we could fish again.

Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack also had a canoe. John and I would go canoeing and find our friend The Dredger. We would wave ‘Hello’ and we would paddle around him. We would head out to the island in the middle of the lake to explore. But since the island was only 30 or so foot circle, there wasn’t much to explore once you looked behind the few trees and bushes there.

I remember one time fishing on the island by myself. I was using a plastic worm setup just as Uncle Ray had taught me. Off in the distance was a Mallard duck. As he swam toward me I practiced my casting by seeing how close I could get to the duck. A few weeks earlier I had actually hit the duck freaking it out and sent it swimming, then flying, away. So this time I was more careful.

I was actually impressing myself on my casts with my Zebco spincast. In another year or so I would graduate to a spinning reel. I found if I cast in front of the duck he would come towards my worm. So I tried to see how close I could lead the duck towards me. That was a mistake. At one point I cast too close and Mr. Mallard swam toward my worm and dove for it! Well, he got it – or rather I got him. In my fear of hooking him, I jerked the worm away only to hook him in the chest. He started squawking and quacking with fear. Worse he was trying to swim away from me. I started reeling him in so I could unhook him. On the other side, I wasn’t sure how I was going to deal with a flapping duck when I finally got him in. And he was strong.

The harder I tried to reel him the stronger he seemed to get. For every yard I would reel him in my drag would peel out two more yards. I realized I wouldn’t be able to deal with Mr. Mallard – if I actually got him to shore. I was also afraid he might pull all my line out and then what? And that awful noise he was making…

So I grabbed my 8-pound line and snapped it. Squawking and thrashing he swam a good distance but he was too tired to fly. He floated for a bit and then took off flying a short distance only to land near the far shore. Crap. In our struggle, I could see my worm firmly planted in his chest. I felt terrible. And I certainly didn’t feel like fishing anymore. So I packed up my stuff back into the canoe and paddled back to the house. The one that got away.

John and I would also canoe around the lake but it wasn’t a ‘swimming’ lake. Dave and I were told it was too dirty to swim in so John and I were surprised on one of our canoeing trips on the far end of the lake when we found some kids swimming in the lake – they must not have gotten the memo. As we paddled pass them, one of them swam over and tipped us over! We got a little freaked. It was one thing to get wet in your swimming suits but quite another to be tipped over fully dressed – well, shorts and t-shirts. After that, we kept our canoe trips away from the far side of the lake, away from people who were actually swim in the lake. The lake water must cause mental lapses. We kept our swimming at Mitchel Pool.

I continued my stamp collecting which was going full tilt with the Bicentennial coming the following year. We got swept up in the beer can collecting craze that was going on in the seventies. Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack indulged us taking us to dumps (literally), Beer Can Conventions in local hotels, strangers houses and a liquor store in Lakehurst that stocked beer to take advantage of this fad. We would get full cans from the liquor store. So whenever guests arrived to the house, we would offer them a beer so the emptied can could be added to one of the three collections. We each had a collection – except me – I had to be different so I collected pop cans. Maybe not as cool but it was the beginning of me rebelling – at little of a rebellion as it was.

I would also start collecting records. I know Hope and Lee had gotten 45’s before, at least I think they did, but I had never actually owned any myself. This was how I was introduced to Lenny’s shop – the Deerfield Record Store. Record collecting would prove to be a life long passion.

Many Sundays after church we would stop at Deerbrook Mall, an indoor/outdoor mall on the corner of Waukegan and Lake-Cook Roads. Back then the mall was anchored by Turn Style and Montgomery Ward department stores. We almost never ventured into the outdoor part to the north. Aunt Joyce would typically show at Turn Style so we would go to the indoor mall through Turn Style entrance.

The mall was decorated with dark brown stone with various copper statues in fountain areas. Someone in the late sixties must have decided copper was the newest medium for sculptures – all the malls were using it. The mall had maybe thirty stores including Baskin Robbins, Musicland and Waldenbooks. I would begin my record collecting with purchases from Musicland and my friend Jeff Raveria would eventually work at Waldenbooks where I would officially buy my first hardcover copy of a Stephen King book.

Being in 7th grade I had been getting pretty good at the impulse begging for trinkets when at the store. So that late morning as we wandered around Turn Style waiting for Aunt Joyce to get her purchases together. We learned John and Jim begged liked any kid their age. Dave and I, however, stood around like friends accompanying their friend’s family on a shopping trip. These were not our parents so we have no legitimate reason to beg for gifts or trinkets. Yet we stood on the sidelines hoping that maybe we could be included since we now lived with them. So it was ‘wishes come true’ when Aunt Joyce relented and said we could get something as long as it was under a dollar – and Dave and I were included.

I went back to the music department and got Wing’s “Listen to What the Man Said.” It would be my first 45. Now I could listen to Paul McCartney and drift back to those afternoons at Mitchell Pool any time I wanted. Back to the pool where I felt comfortable; where I could play with my brother and my cousins; spend time reading my books and enjoying those bright summer days.

I thought it would be great to collect all these songs and be able to play them whenever I wanted. And I did. In the years that followed, we would have a stereo in our room and there would be many trips to Deerfield Record Shop. We would purchase the top 45 – based on the WLS survey chart Lenny made available at his store.

Dave and I marked all our 45’s with Aunt Joyce’s Dymo labeler. We used three-lettertter initials – ‘DBZ’ or ‘JMZ’. John and Jim couldn’t because theirs initials were both the same – ‘JLB’. At one point Dave and I went in together, 50¢ each and bought was ever was number one that week. Those 45’s were marked with ‘DJ’ (yea, we thought it was cool but it was actually only cute – then realized it was dorky). I still have most of those 45’s and most of their labels are still attached.

So when school started that Fall, I was the new kid. Something I slowly got over – among other things. But in that process not being ‘the new kid’, I would go downstairs to Aunt Joyce and Uncle Jack’s basement , which was now our basement, and setup the portable record player we had. Using the record player’s 45 adapter, I could play “Listen To What The Man Said” and be transported to a summer afternoon a few months earlier. The single speaker on the record player reminded me of the terrible poolside speakers at Mitchell. And as the soldier boy kissed his girl, I left behind my tragic world and found myself once again in the warm sun at Mitchell pool. I would be years before I would fall in love, or what I thought was love but that alto sax spun me back to those carefree days of my first summer in my new home with my new family.

It was a beautiful afternoon day in the middle of May 1975. The sun was stretching the days as long as it could for us, shining brilliantly onto our house as it settled to the West of our neighborhood. The Elms were drinking up as much as of that afternoon sun as they could. So were the Maples but they were constantly throwing their helicopters down for us to play with. It was the last thing the trees had to do to get our street ready for the summer.

At this time of year the sun was high enough to trick you into being late for supper. I was riding around the neighbor on my green 3-speed Huffy bike. I was taking this long afternoon to enjoy this explosion of spring. I was also testing the highest speed of my Huffy and my cornering ability. As I came up to an intersection, I would extend my foot just like a motorcyclist, to keep the bike from grounding onto the pavement. OK, it wasn’t really that close; and it was much more impressive in my own mind. After a number of these challenging corners around our neighborhood, I began meandered my way back toward our house.

From 3rd Avenue to Prairie Avenue, which paralleled Rose where we lived, I was almost home – scrapping my shoe again on the pavement as I made the turn onto Prairie. As I pedaled down Prairie, I looked to my left to a driveway because of a song I recognized. Someone was working on their car and had put a radio out on the driveway. A young man laid on his back reaching underneath the car. The singer on the radio was just getting to my favorite part of the song:

Drop of a hat she’s a Zilligen
Playful as a pussy cat

And that was what drew me to the song. I thought it was so cool that a band would use our last name in a song. I had pointed this out to my friends, they said the singer wasn’t saying ‘Zilligen‘ – that wouldn’t even make sense. But they couldn’t come up with a better answer so I insisted he was singing ‘Zilligen‘.

This wasn’t the first time I misheard the lyrics of a song. When I was a kid, as opposed to being a full twelve years old at this time, I remember a hymn my friends and I sang as “Bringing in the cheese” – instead of “bringing in the sheaves. I didn’t know it was actually wrong for months.

I’m sure mishearing song lyrics go back to ministerial times. As a kid, when you sang with all your favorite songs, it was easy to make that fateful slip into the ‘mis-heard’ lyric. And once there it was only a matter of time until your best friend or sibling caught you and humiliated you.

Sometimes you could convert your friends. My brother-in-law Phil substitutes ‘squirrels’ for ‘girls’ – and it works with many songs. The Motley Crue song – “Squirrels, Squirrels, Squirrel” started it and, for Phil impromptu karaoke sessions, the girls have been squirrels ever since. Phil has also been caught “Running With A Level” (with apologies to David Lee Roth and the Devil). Now I can’t help picturing three squirrels rocking out as Vince Neil ushers them in.

Of course there are other classic  misheard lyrics. I remember in High School when AC/DC, in an effort to buy time as they replaced for the dead lead singer Bon Scott, they released an old import “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”. While everyone knew the name of the song for some reason everyone was singing “dirty deed, thunder chief”.

Though my favorite misheard lyric was in college with my friends Laura and Rusty. During an evening of drinking in Rusty and Stu’s room,  Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Purple Haze’ came on the radio. And while most of us were talking, apparently Laura was getting into the song and singing along when Rusty yelled, “What did you say?”

Now with all our attention on her, Laura repeated the lyrics she was singing – “Scuse me while I kiss this guy!” which drew a roar of laughter. First –  it was funny, second, we were drinking. It took Laura a long time to live that down. Then again, she’s blonde so ~ you know…

Turns out, Laura’s not alone. ‘Purple Haze’ holds the distinction of being the most mis-heard lyric – according for various website I found. So why do we think Jimi Hendrix would ‘kiss a guy’? Do we think Jimi was years ahead of his times and saw the gay movement before all of us? His guitar playing was certainly years – decades – ahead.

Do those of us who hear ‘kiss this guy’ have gay tendencies? Or do we just hear what we hear without thinking what the meaning of the lyrics are? nothing more, nothing less. When others repeat them it just reinforces what we hear – whether it just simple misunderstanding or done for humor.

With the internet now lyrics are just a ‘Google-away’ for any phone; or for an app for that matter. The question is if we want to ask. Are we confident in our listening ablities? Do we really care? Does it matter? I guess it goes back to motivation. My case the misheard lyric of Queen’s ‘Killer Queen’ reinforced my love for my family’s name and how it represented me socially – from a 12 year old’s perspective.

So riding my bike down Prairie Avenue I felt re-energized from my ‘celebrity song’, I took a slight detour home by continuing down Prairie Avenue to see if my friend Jon was home or if anyone was hanging out at the West Elementary School playground. Jon wasn’t out and no one was at West playground that I could hang with so I continued home so I wouldn’t be late for Aunt Bernice’s supper.

Ah – the celebrity of being a ‘Zilligen’. I always enjoyed our last name. Visually the rhythmic mirroring of the ‘I’ double ‘L’ ‘I’ makes it appealing and fun to spell although the ‘E’ would always throw people off, particularly on the pronunciation. People would use a soft ‘G’ instead of the hard ‘G’.

And then there’s the ‘Z’ – there aren’t many cooler letters then a ‘Z’. It ways made it easier in gym class to figure out where you were supposed to line up – I was always at the end line. Rarely did I ever have to go into the second letter to see which ‘Z’ came next. But there were those rare occasions that I would run into a Zimmerman and they would claim the last spot – dammit. I always took a little pride in being last.

I remember seeing my Grandpa Zilligen’s stationary when he worked at a construction company. Seeing ‘George Zilligen’ across the top was impressive. I thought he was famous. I felt a connection to him, and to all of us, just by seeing our name on the stationary. It was very official looking and I was filled with pride. I was a Zilligen.

There was one draw back, mainly because of growing up in the late sixties/early seventies – ‘Gilligan’s Island‘. The spellings are very similar. Outside the ‘G’ and ‘A’ it was great to see on TV while I was learning to write my own name. While it was a fun show and we watch it all the time after school, it was easy for kids to mock you. That being said, it didn’t take too long to get used to it.

I’m sure all my brothers and sisters got the same treatment as me – the  “hey Gilligan!” from their friends. One problem I had that they didn’t, because of my weight, was being called ‘Skipper’. Fat jokes were always harder to ‘let go’ but like anything else – over time – you did.

Another cool association we had was Godzilla. We used to go to all the Godzilla movies at the drive-in down the road. Planet of the Apes movies were also included in our SciFi movie adventures. For the record, my parents weren’t completely warped. They also took us to all the classic Disney cartoons and the Dean Jones, Fred MacMurray Disney movies, as well as Jerry Lewis. But Godzilla was ours.

More than a couple of friends would call me ‘Godzillagen’. And when they teased me about my weight as Godzilla, it didn’t seem as bad. There was nothing wrong being associated with a 400 foot monster that breathed fire and destroyed entire cities. Thus began a lifelong love of Godzilla and all giant monsters – probably most inspired by “Destroy All Monsters“. This was Jurassic Park years before it was a gleam in Spielberg’s eye.

Zilligen was a cool name but we really didn’t know much about where it came from. As kids all we really knew was that we were German. And since Mom was also German, that pretty much made us 100% German, except that some great aunt or someone was supposed to have been Irish or Scottish, which would have come from Grandma Zilligen’s side – or so I remembered.

A quick check on some ancestry websites shows that Zilligen is not a popular name. According to a number of websites we are ranked 119,644th for most popular surname. I guess that comes with the territory when you start with a ‘Z’. Most website have nothing about ‘Zilligen’. Ancestry.com has a little over 200 records on us – which isn’t much.

Dave did purchase the Zilligen Coat of Arms which came with a history of our family name. Below is a scan of what he got, interesting but a bit non-descript. Maybe someday we can do a Google search on images and see where this actually comes from:

This is what he got on the history of our family name:

The German surname Zilligen is patronymic origin, being one of those names based on the first name of the father. In this instance, the name can be traced to the popular medieval Christian name Zyriak, and the surname came to denote ‘a son of Zyriak’. Zyriak was a very popular choice amongst parents for their children in medieval times, in the days before the spread of Christianity and saints’ names began to enjoy considerable vogue. Zyriak was an Old Germanic patronym and it evoked images of the military battles and victories in the Crusades. The Crusades were a series of wars organized by European Christians from the eleventh to the fourteenth centuries, in order to rid the Holy Land from Islam. Many renowned Crusaders named Zyriak distinguished themselves in battle and were awarded for their military prowess. Thus in order to keep the spirit of the Crusades alive, parents named their sons after these famous warriors. In the rural parts of Germany this personal name took the form of Zyriakus and the surname which evolved from it was Zillacker. Surnames were becoming commonplace in medieval Germany as documents were being charted to chronicle the growth and decline of populations. The modern structured system of hereditary surnames had not yet evolved, therefore people adapted their surnames from the first name of their fathers. The first recorded instance of the name occurs in the ‘Freiburger Urkundenbuch’; one Conrad dictus Zillige is registered as living in Freiburg in 1284.

BLAZON OF ARMS: Quarterly, first and fourth argent a chevron gules between three escallops of the same; second and third argent a horse salient sable, bridled and saddled gules, the third reversed

CREST: The bust of a man vested argent with a headband twisted gules and argent.

ORIGIN: Germany

 I’m not sure how accurate this is but it does sound plausible. ‘Conrad dictus Zillige’ sounds like something from a Monty Python movie:

Despite ‘Conrad dictus’, growing up with ‘Zilligen’ as a last name was great. But clearly Freddie Mercury from Queen was not singing about us in their first hit ‘Killer Queen’. The correct lyric was:

Drop of a hat she’s as willing as
Playful as a pussy cat
Then momentarily out of action
Temporarily out of gas
To absolutely drive you wild, wild..

The ‘she’s as willing as’ sounded an awful lot like Zilligen. But I’m sure I’m not the only who misheard those lyrics though I am probably the only one that put as ‘Zilligen’.

Riding my bike around that beautiful spring afternoon allowed me to forget a bit of my recent past. I wasn’t as proud of my name these days. In fact, I didn’t like how it stood out either. I was feeling it was a bit tainted now. But time would heal the pain and pride would return. Because one thing about us Zilligens, we are more than just survivors, we would go beyond – beyond just living, beyond just surviving. We are strong and we are bound – to our families, to our loves and to our futures. And THAT is something to be proud of.

I just didn’t know this as I rode my bike home. And that brilliant sun was still shining on me. And as the shadows threatened to cover the rest of the asphalt of West Elementary’s play area, I steered my bike onto Rose Avenue, now only a couple of houses from home. Just in time for supper.

When I was in fourth grade, I met a couple of my friends in the library. Walking up to the table, they were quietly giggling like something funny had just happened.

Steve tapped Rod on the arm, looked at me and said, “Hey Zilligen, put your stuff down.” Rod and Steve were old friends of my mine all the way back to kindergarten.

“Go to the dictionary and look up ‘intercourse'”, he said. And they both giggled again.

I was a little skeptical but looking at the dictionary displayed in the center of the library I think I was safe from them pulling anything on me. I dropped my books on the table and made my way to dictionary’s podium. Rod and Steve leaned over the backs of their chairs as they watched me flipped the massive book’s pages.

I always hated the idea of using the dictionary to spell words. If you don’t know how to spell the word, how were you supposed to look it up?

‘Intercourse’ was pretty straight forward but I didn’t understand why Rod and Steve were so interested in this word. As I flipped through the ‘I’s – careful not to rip the dictionary’s thin paper – I found inch worm, “those are cool”, I thought. Instructible appeared, still carefully turning the large pages. Interject – oops, too far… Intercentral and the facing page read intercrystalline.

Running my finger down the page, intercompare, intercomparison, intercondenser, interconfessional, interconnect, darn, bottom of the page. Next column  – intercounty, intercouple, ah – ‘intercourse’. My finger followed to the definition:

“the sexual activity in which the male’s penis enters the female’s vagina.”

My eyes got big and then I heard the snickers and muffled laughs from Rod and Steve. They knew I had found the definition from my expression. The librarian at her desk shot Rod and Steve a pair of knitted eyebrows to ‘hush’ them – so she didn’t see my round cheeks turning red with embarrassment. I quickly flipped a hundred pages on top of the dirty word (that would be ‘penis’. I wasn’t sure about ‘vagina’ but I had a pretty good idea that was a dirty word too.) Then I joined the librarian in keeping Rod and Steve quiet.

And that is how I found out about sex. Well, as much as I would get until my education continued our first sex ed class in 5th grade. That was not including the dirty pictures Randy Paluca showed me one day in his basement.

A couple of years later, as a sixth grader, I was in the back seat of my Aunt Elaine’s car when she stopped at her Arlington Heights apartment on a cold March day. She had forgotten something and just needed to run in to get it. She left Dave and me, and possibly Lee – I don’t remember – in her car with the radio on. And that is when I first heard “Chevy Van”.

With the rhythmic strumming of a twelve-string acoustic guitar and fuzzy Hammond keyboard  I remember Sammy Johns singing:

‘Cause like a princess she was layin’ there
Moonlight dancin’ off her hair
She woke up and took me by the hand
We made love in my Chevy van
And that’s all right with me

It was the first time I remember hearing ‘made love’ and understanding it as sex in a song. It was such a sexual song with “like a princess she was layin’ there”, “the moonlight dancin’ off her hair” and the Chevy Van driver ‘being taken by the hand’.

Our family had the first minivan ever made, a VW bus. It was a practical vehicle to haul 5 growing kids. Our Aunt Bernice and Uncle Ray had a VW Camper which was similar but the back of the bus had a stove, table and cabinets. Volkswagen made practical vehicles.

The Chevy Van in this song wasn’t practical. It was bigger than our VW Bus. A VW Bus was built for passengers. A Chevy Van was for the driver. There were no windows in a Chevy Van because a Chevy Van was about privacy (outside of a small circular tinted window in the back). No one knew what happened in the back of a Chevy Van – but now Sammy Johns had given me some new ideas.

If the Volkswagen Bus was practical, the Chevy Van or the conversion van was any but. As the muscle cars got tamed via the EPA’s horsepower-robbing emission standards, gearheads turned to customizing their vans to show off their creativity. In the early seventies, it was about adding wall to ceiling carpeting in your van. But as the seventies continue the vans continued to convert to more outlandish customizations – and conversion vans were born.

But before the craziness of the conversion vans, just the wall-to-wall carpeting and privacy was enough for a young man. Add a young princess you have hip sex pit that awakened urges in millions of young men – which is what Chevy Van did, and I was one of them. OK, I was a little ahead of myself – without a driver’s license or a girl but the pieces were starting to fall into place.

‘Chevy Van’ had the perfect balance of erotica and wholesomeness. While it was years before I would have sex, the open carefree encounter offered in ‘Chevy Van’ was quite alluring to a boy walking the bridge to manhood.

It also had the ‘cool’ that I was just beginning to understand. Cool is an attribute that both sexes wanted. Mostly masculine, Cool embodies independence and leadership with a hint of narcissism. Cool is social, popular, wanted. Sex is cool. The Chevy Van driver was cool. I pictured him with long hair and a beard, a guitar leaning against the front seat. It was my first encounter on how a guy would “get a girl”.

Obviously cool is a matter of perspective. In sixth grade, I was just forming that perspective. This was years before Fonzy’s thumbs up and his drawn-out “Aaaaa!” Cool was not yet in my daily vocabulary. While Fonzy defined Cool for late 70’s tv audiences on ‘Happy Days’, everyone has their own definition of what cool is. As ‘Happy Days’ popularity waned, ‘The Fonz’ became a parody of cool. Of course, shark jumping stripped away Fonz’s coolest, but his sex appeal kept him in the game. From the view of the loser in the eternal battle to procreate, sex would always make the winner in that primal evolutionary struggle – cool.

I’d like to say I was above the hormonal trappings of the typical teenage boy but I wasn’t. I pictured the girl in Chevy Van with long blonde hair. Her face was probably a face I had seen in one of my dad’s Playboy or OUI magazines I found in the garage at our gray house. She had a light colored, low cut, thin shirt with a narrow vest over it. Her well-worn cutoffs had the pockets hanging out front atop her long tan legs. Her thin leather bandanna did a poor job keeping her long blonde hair out of her face. And that’s when the moonlight dances off her hair.

As a blooming adolescent, I had no idea how complicated sex was. The first step was making sure everything work. Erections were no problem – except the lack of control.  That would get fixed in time but with age then the opposite problem. Masturbation, though a few years away, was a no-brainer. The real problem was finding the girl.

I was always very shy and being fat did not help my self-esteem. When I lost the weight in eighth grade you would think it would have boosted my confidence with girls but it didn’t. In high school, I only had one girlfriend but in college, I learned girls were not another species and made my first girl friends (as opposed to girlfriends).

I had friends that were girls in high school but I was never at the same level as they were in college. I always put them above me. If a girl was nice to me, I’d start thinking she ‘liked’ liked me.  I remember when I worked at Frank’s Nursery and Crafts, there was an attractive woman (‘woman’ because she must have been at least 21 years old) named Sharon that ran the Crafts Department.

I had come into work after purchasing Bob Seger’s album “Against the Wind”. I was always very proud of my album purchases and I would show them off to anyone that would listen. That particular evening, she was one of the managers scheduled to close the store. Sharon came into the office and saw the Bob Seger album and in her best Marilyn Monroe, she said, “boy, I’d sure love to listen to this.”

I turned red and replied, “Sure.”

And in the following weeks, whenever I asked her if she was done with the album, she would thank me again for letting her listen to it and flashed her eyelashes to me. The album loan turned permanent when I re-bought Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” a few weeks so I could avoid confronting her.

I had learned a couple valuable lessons. Beautiful people live by different rules than us – ‘us’ being the non-beautiful people. Years later a friend of mine from work, Glenn Becker, and I, would come up with the “Beautiful People Theory”. The basic premise was that Attractive People had an easier life. They were more popular, more desirable, and didn’t have to try as hard to get the things they wanted in life – like Bob Seger albums.

Glenn and I realized The Beautiful People Theory worked on many levels. Some people took full advantage of their looks. Some people let other people’s looks take control of them – as in my case. Some people would have to fight against their advantage. ‘The smart beautiful women’, or guy, that would have fight not to be dismissed because of their attractiveness. This was more of a problem for women than men. We realized the most dangerous women were the smart attractive ones that would take advantage of their sexual wiles. And of course, it was a two-way street – the stupid guys that would let them.

Sex is a huge motivator in life. Such a motivator can be a beast that challenges who we really are. Philosophers struggle with the nature of sex – is it the animal instincts of mating or the highest level of bonding. I believe the answer is it is both. Which led me to the conclusion that sex is about compromise.

Sex is what separates friendship from marriage – emotionally, not legally. It is what separates and yet binds the sexes. It is what transverses the gulf between the sexes. How many comedians do their entire show on the differences between men and women? Yet it is often the beginning core of marriage.

There are two sides to sex – the instinctual/animalistic side and the love/bonding side. I believe these two sides are inseparable. The first side is about pleasure, gratification, release, dominance, submission and compatibility. The second side is about intimacy, giving, comfort, equality, exploration, satisfaction and love. One is short-term, the other is long term – I’m talking about the relationship, not the actual act.

As we begin to turn into young adults and our hormones are kicking in, our interest in sex increases. We start looking at people we want to have sex with – based on just their looks. This is the beginning of the Beautiful People Theory. Boys start doing stupid things for attractive girls. Girls return the favor for attractive boys but they have to be more subdued because, due to social protocols, they are not supposed to take the initiative. (I’m glad to see this trend changing in our culture.)

But as animal instincts grow the sex drive becomes more hyper. Boy and girls do more stupid things and take bigger risks. At the same time, the mind continues to expand and mature and the other side of sex begins to push back. For me, it was about bonding, a long-term relationship, a marriage. So when that view of the relationship faded so did that side of sex – leaving just the animal instincts. So for me, without the lure of a long-term relationship, the picture would continue to fade further and a breakup would ensue.

My specific girlfriends have their own songs and Desi her own. While sex was always a ‘goal’ it was also a test of compatibility. I would like to said I had ‘matured’ beyond my animal instincts but that was certainly not true. I think Desi would agree it was a source of our worse fights and I would take the blame for those. On the other side, it a binding part of our marriage.

But forty years earlier sex was just a concept for a twelve-year-old thinking dirty thoughts to a lusty song. This twelve-year-old was riding shotgun with Sammy John as we drove down through town until we found her. I stood behind them as they continued down the road. After the first chorus, Sammy pulled the van under a tree and it was instantly night time. I moved so Sammy and the hitchhiker could spread out in the back of his Chevy Van. I watched as they laid down and started kissing. And just as Sammy made his move to second base…

“Sorry about that.”

Aunt Elaine announced as she opened the door to the car. She snapped me out of the van and away from Sammy and his princess getting busy. Aunt Elaine never saw the red face of this twelve-year-old in her backseat. And if she did catch some of that tint, she certainly would never know why.

And in the weeks, months and years that followed, it would be me taking the princess to the back of my Chevy Van. And I would let the song finish with just me and my princess – as the moonlight danced til it faded to sleep.