Childhood memories are hooks in our imaginations that, if understood, can sometimes drag out seminal moments from our past and unlock hidden mysteries of how our personalities were formed. Often, these memories only offer a fleeting motion in a complex dance. I have a small store of such memories that pop into my mind at very odd moments, leaving me wondering: why did I think of that?
Two such memories recently had their mysteries solved for me. It may be because of a fast I undertook for deliverance form self-loathing a couple of weeks prior. It may be because the Healer determined it was time to deal with the issues that drove those memories.
One of the memories involves my father in his Greyhound Bus driver’s uniform driving his car. My mother was in the passenger seat. I was in the back seat. I had a brand new pair of shoes, suitable for church or other dress events. I lifted them up so he could glance at them in the rear view mirror. He was not angry that Mom had spent money. He seemed to appreciate them. He said, “They look good. When we got home we’ll put a good Kiwi shine on them.” I was, maybe eleven. That’s it. That was the whole memory. One short scene. It has flashed through my mind countless times. What triggers this thought? This little scene seems as dull and boring as it is insignificant. Yet, it visited me frequently, and remained an itch I could not reach.
The other memory involves a visit to a colleague of my father’s whose family lived in a trailer in a wooded, rural lot in Callahan about 25 miles from our house in Jacksonville. I was probably nine. The other driver had just asked the question, “What’s on next?” His daughter consulted the TV Guide in her hand and answered. My dad and the other father then remarked how smart young people are these days.
That was it. Another inconsequential moment in my life that has repeatedly visited my imagination. However, by the prayer and fasting and a recent visit with my daughter, Spring, both memories recently unveiled their stories and meanings. I’ll tell the Kiwi story first.
My growing feet had been demanding new shoes for a while. At my Dad’s suggestion I had cut a slit in the leather top to make from for my big toe in order to, as Dad put it, get another month or so out of the shoes. My mother finally harangued my father into relaxing his grip on some cash to accommodate me. She got use of the vehicle usually only when Dad was home, between trips. She never knew when he would be home or for how long. She had to take advantage of the car when it was available so she crammed in shoe shopping with several other chores into that short window of time. She drove him to work one evening, and the next day she picked me up from school, drove to Sears for a new pair of shoes and then to the bus station where we found Dad in front of the bus station.
She must not have made him wait too long because he was in a good mood. She scooted over to the passenger side while he got behind the steering wheel. Once he was into his second beer I lifted my shoes up so he could see them in the rear view mirror. Immediately, he asked Mom how much they cost. She told him. He shook his head and after a little mental calculation told us he has to drive a busload of Marines to Paris Island to pay for those shoes. Nevertheless, he bragged on them. Told me how good I’d look in them. Told me what a sharp dresser he used to be. He was once, he said, briefly taken into custody in Cincinnati on suspicion of being “Dapper Dan” the sharp dressed cat burglar, famous in that city. The point of pride for him fell not on the suspicion of burglary, of course, but that it affirmed how dapper, how good looking and what a sharp dresser he was. He said he always, “Looked like a million bucks.” So when he said, “We’ll put a good Kiwi shine on them when we get home,” my hopes soared that I would be like my Dad, a sharp dressed man. And, Dad would be my mentor. He cared. He would show me how stuff is done. Unfortunately, I tainted the moment by bugging him. “Why do you call it a Kiwi shine?””
“Because that’s a good shine.”
“How come it’s called Kiwi?”
“Kiwi’s a good shine.”
“So, if someone has a good shine it’s a Kiwi shine?”
“No, son!” I was irritating him. As the second beer can clattered on the road behind us, he opened a third with the church key on his key ring and answered, “If it’s a Kiwi shine, it’s a Kiwi shine. It’s got to be a Kiwi shine to be a Kiwi shine.”
“But, how come it’s called a Kiwi shine?”
“Because it’s a damn Kiwi shine, son. That’s why. You got a case of the stupid’s? Damn Pat these kids don’t know shit?”
I was feeling the heat prickles of shame and exasperation running up and down my head and neck. I cried easily and often back then and was struggling to maintain my emotional balance. I was also stubborn. I kept asking, “But, why is it called Kiwi?”
My father laughed at my retarded ignorance.
Sheesh, Pat,” he said, “Now he’s gonna cry.” He cut a scornful glance in the rearview mirror and then at my mother.
“All he wants to know, Sam, is why does it have the name Kiwi?” Turning towards me, coming to my rescue she continued, “Kiwi is the brand name . . ..”
And, so she elaborated and satisfied my curiosity. It comforted me in my humiliation. She confirmed what I thought was obvious, that my question had merit. Nevertheless, I still felt like an idiot.
By the time we got home I had recovered. I still craved the special moment with my father. I waited for him to eat the meal my mother had prepared for him. Once he relaxed in front of the TV I began to bug him. I still believed he would fulfill his promise. There were several rebuffs of “Later, boy. Let me unwind a minute.” He did not say no. I stayed hopeful the promise would not be denied. At last I came to him with his shoe shine kit and my shoes. I placed them by his chair, careful not to stand between him and the TV. I held up the shoe polish. It had a picture of a wingless bird and in bold letters, KIWI. I’d never noticed that before. I smiled and said in an attempt to get his attention, “Kiwi. A good Kiwi shine.”
He responded, “Hell, son, who ever heard of polishing brand new shoes? Wear them a while and then it’ll be time to polish them.” He dismissed me with a derisive laugh and, “Sheesh!” Thus ends the memory.
It was while I was talking to my daughter, Spring about memories that this memory unfolded. For many years all I remembered was the three seconds it took him to smile in the rear view mirror and promise a shoe shine. When I commented to her, “. . . but I don’t understand the significance of the thing. Why it keeps coming back to my mind,” then quick as a camera flash, I knew. I felt a slow bubble of emotion as I recalled how all my teenage years I never polished a shoe. When I started making my own money and buying my own clothes at 15 I began to buy moccasins or boots that I would treat with Neatsfoot or mink oil Somehow, I determined polished shoes were not for me. I chose the rugged mountain look, the natural look of unshined leather. I suppressed the memory of the good Kiwi shine and never connected the incident to my long time aversion to shined shoes.
The memory represents a time when I became vulnerable to a spirit of self-loathing. And, my disregard to my appearance became an emblem for the lack of confidence I felt as to my worth. If I was not worth a good Kiwi shine then I wouldn’t care if my clothes ere ironed, mismatched or if I got a regular haircut. I began to take pride in looking disheveled. A few years later when I began to write poetry it all sort of fit into an image.
The evening after Spring’s visit the short scene of the second memory popped into my head. As soon as I wondered, “Why did I think of that?” the whole story unfolded, unwound like a movie reel. The second memory involved a family trip from Jacksonville to Callahan. I was nine. A bus driver friend of Dad’s wanted him to come out for a visit to check out what he felt was a good investment and a shot at a better quality of life. Dad had just bought a house in the suburbs on the G. I. bill. He was very proud. Moving to the country and living, even temporarily, in a trailer while a house was being built seemed a step down to him. All the way to Callahan he griped about how ugly it all looked. About how stupid and hicky I and my two brothers would sound because, we would surely pick up hick, red-neck accents if we followed the advice of Dad’s friend. As we pulled up in front of the friend’s trailer Dad snickered at what pitiful sight the little homestead was, “Looks like white trash in a Tennessee trailer. If we move here we’ll have to change the kids’ names to Homer, Jethro, and Clem.” He laughed. My brothers and I made sport of that. We each chose a name. Jethro fell to me.
I sensed a conflict because I immediately felt an attraction for the rural setting. Lots of woods, creeks, cows, dogs, trees and dirt roads. It looked like paradise to me. Once again I found my affection falling opposite that of my father’s. Somewhere, somehow I would be fitted with a hood of embarrassment and shame. I felt it. It had become a pattern.
The host family fed us. The adults sat at the table in the cramped kitchen/dining area. The rest of us, my two brothers, the host couple’s son and daughter and I found space on the couch and chair or the floor in front of the fourteen inch black and white television. We soon made our way outside to explore and get to know our new friends, while Dad endured the persistent persuasion of his fellow driver all the while extracting compensation in a flow of free beer.
When the sun started going down we left off our walking about the dirt roads and wooded lots and returned to the aluminum home perched on concrete blocks.
As we entered I wanted to express just how neat, how cool his situation was out here in the country and that our move out here had my vote if Dad was counting. I was too young to realize that any exuberance on my part would add weight to the argument that we should move to the country which would irritate my father. Being clumsy and unsophisticated I began by look at Dad’s friend and blurting out, “What’s it like living in a trailer?”
Dad had a beer tipped to his lips when I said this. The shocking faux pas caused a snort mid-swallow followed by a cough and a burst of beer foam through his nose. This unexpected reaction from him set me back, singled me out, made me feel foolish. Dad said, “Damn son. It’s called a mobile home. They’re not called trailers anymore.! Hicks live in trailers. This is a mobile home.”
“That’s alright Sam. The boy didn’t know.” He looked at me and said, “What we’re doing is living here temporary until we get our house built.” He mentioned the construction site with pink ribbons on stakes which his son pointed out to us earlier, as he stopped us from pulling them up.
Even though the man protested Dad made me apologize for calling the mobile home a trailer. What I wanted to say but did not was that I had never heard the term trailer before our trip out to Callahan. But, I apologized as my brothers called me, “Jethro,” to my father’s amusement. I then tried to change the subject and recover my dignity and the joy of discovery by saying to the man, “We found some bobcat poop on the trail.”
“Scat,” said the man.
This confused me. To me “scat” meant to go away. I looked around. The trailer was so crowded with two families stuffed into it that I did not know where to go. I was feeling stupid over the trailer remark and now, it seemed, my attempt to change the subject was being rebuffed. I stared at the man. He repeated himself, “Scat.” I backed up out of reflex and bumped into a coffee table, nearly upsetting a lamp. My dad wondered out loud why my mother could not teach me how to walk.
The man realized what I was doing and laughed. He pointed out my confusion and explained that scat is a term for wild animal feces. He continued to chuckle and used it as leverage to continue his persuasion for my dad to move out near him and set up a country homestead. “Look at this, Sam,” pointing to me, “every kid should know what scat is. You ought to move out here. There’s so much for them to learn.”
Dad made an exaggerated motion placing his hand over his face in mock embarrassment and groaned that I didn’t even know what scat was. I couldn’t tell if this was true shame or his game. Either way I was the butt of it. “Everyone knows what scat is,” said my brother Sammy, “when you see it you scat because you know a bobcat is around.” This was met with the laughter of approval. “Yeah, Jethro,” said the other brother. My brothers’ successful jokes brought relief to my father.
I was the only one standing which highlighted my isolation as the dunce, so I looked for a space on the floor where I could sit, disappear and stare at the TV. Just then came a scream in the woods. A wild animal of some sort. It seized all our attention. I’d never heard such a noise. It was primal, territorial and exotic. “Was that a bobcat?” I asked.
“Nah,” said the man’s son nonchalantly, “that’s just a pileated woodpecker.”
I was familiar with a Woody Woodpecker but had never heard of a pileated woodpecker. The man said to Dad, “See Sam. So much for your boys to learn.” This meant to Sam that his boys, and at that moment mainly me, could learn so much if he moved to the country. But all of Dad’s people came from the sticks. They were country bumpkins. He was ashamed of his Kentucky hillbilly heritage and would have no return to the country. So, he did not appreciate me giving this man fuel for his fire.
In tones that connoted secrecy and shame which everyone heard because it was meant for their amusement Dad said, “Gees boy, sometimes you sound smarter when you just keep your mouth shut.”
“Jethro,” taunted my brother.
I finally found a place on the floor. Rawhide was going off the air. The man asked, “What’s on next?” The daughter was near the TV with the TV Guide in her hand. She looked down, found the listings and told him it was, “Hotel de Paree.” Her father looked at Sam and said, “Ain’t she smart! These kids today. They’re something else, ain’t they?” My Dad agreed that kids today sure are smart but my brothers and I knew that Dad’s sentence ended with a comma, not a period. The whole, though largely unspoken sentence was, “Kids sure are smart today unless their names are Homer, Jethro and Clem.”
Through our father’s influence stupid became our shtick. A quick sure way to family laughter, especially if Dad was holding court was to prove you were stupid, act stupid or mimic stupidity. Our fraternal bond and competition was to put on the clown act. To go for the laugh by trying to out-stupid the other. My older brother was infected so deeply with this abuse by innuendo and derision that when my Dad would occasionally call out (in jest, of course, and with a wink giving a heads-up to his company), “Hey stupid! Come here!” almost without fail Sammy, in his best Jerry Lewis imitation would amble in calling out, “Coming Father.”
It all seemed so funny at the time. The humor told us it was alright when, in fact, the humor was a survival mechanism to make us feel alright in spite of the regular painful injections of shame. I was amazed at how these scenes in my memory unfolded, unearthing the whole of this story. Neither is really dramatic. And, neither very exciting. They are worthy of not only because they were bookmarks that opened pages in my personal history. However, I could not turn the page until the Holy Spirit began to work in a healing in an old personality wound called self-loathing.
These instances which reveal how I was injected with self-loathing may be what some ministers call a generational curse. They are representative of a thousand scenes from three brothers’ lives. It was part of our lifestyle. My theory is these short flashes of memory come to me periodically on a subliminal level to remind me that I am truly not worthy of good stuff, good friends, kindness, or any of God’s graces. I am sure my subconscious understood the impact of those scenes.
Whenever I had a great conversation and felt I really was able to share my heart, get something off my chest, or give a testimony for Christ I would be inwardly heckled by negative self-talk: “You talked too much. Those people will avoid you next time they see you. Who told you that you were so smart?” I would be tempted to such depression whenever I had a good time.
It was almost as if I had an evil angel hanging around and monitoring my happiness level and when it got too high he would growl, “You’re not supposed to feel this good. You know you’re a creep. Quit pretending you are not.”
My father would not have for the life of him purposely brought harm into my life. He was acting out of the behavior patterns he was raised with. He thought such as that was normal child rearing. He was convinced and very proud that his children had it much better than he did as a child.
When I was in my thirties, my dad and I visited his mother. I was taught to call her, “Mom.” My mother was Pat, until I was four and I decided against it and changed her name to “Mother.” At my grandmother’s I witnessed my father bristling under his mother’s incessant bragging on her son-in-law. She had many jobs around the house to do and Johnnie would do them all because Johnnie was so smart. I saw the contrast. So stark. Dad’s sister chose a mate who was brilliant. Dad chose a mate that did not even merit the title Mother. And Dad? He couldn’t even be trusted to hang a picture on a wall.
When his mother mentioned she had an azalea to plant Dad, who was always proud of his yard and flower gardens, offered to dig the hole and plant it. I walked out to watch him and keep him company. Before he had a few spadesful of earth dug up, Mom walked up and took the spade out of his hands, saying, “Oh Junior (his lifelong family name, even used by his niece) let me do that. I know how I want it.” She didn’t even think he could dig a hole. Dad kept his cool, laughed briefly played the clown and went back into the house. I followed and watched him get a beer and find a comfortable seat in front of the television.
In that one instance I caught a snapshot of his childhood. I saw the virus that drives the spiritual scoliosis of self-loathing. Dad unconsciously passed on what was fed to him. Even though God plans beauty and brilliance for our lives sin left unchecked puts a twist to that image.
What do you do when such a revelatory insight presents itself? Mine came on the heels of two spiritual exercises: prayer and Christian fellowship. First of all, I was inspired to fast six meals in faith that God would heal me of self-loathing. Two weeks later, having already felt a lifting of this demonic fog, I enjoyed conversation and spiritual fellowship with my adult daughter.
Therefore, I think it was a God appointment. It assures me that no matter what I have gone through in my life, even the prison sentence I am now serving, God has been with me through it all. I am now 56 years old. These two incidents occurred 45 and 47 years ago. That’s a lifetime. Not John Lennon, not William Tyndale, Martin Luther nor Hank Williams ever lived so long. Even though it seemed insignificant to me it was not unimportant to God.
I may walk through valleys as dark as death but I won’t be afraid. You are with me . . . You make me feel safe . . . Your kindness and love will always be with me each day . . .. Psalms 23, CEV.
We traveled through fire and through floods . . . He listened when I prayed and he is always kind. Psalms 66, CEV.
Our past imbues our present. Sometimes unearthing pieces of our forgotten lives is part of God’s healing process. I certainly don’t encourage anyone to dwell on the past or to drown oneself in introspection. Instead, concentrate on loving God. Study to pray well and often. Practice acts of kindness and mercy. God is our healer. He certainly wants to restore his image in us. Self-loathing or any other negativity is not part of his plan for us. His purpose for our lives is wholeness, healing, peace.
I am most often found these days in a Department of Corrections Class-A prison uniform, which includes some ugly black brogans. And, for the past couple of years I’ve tried to maintain a good shoe shine. As I was writing this article I decided to pull out my shoe polish to see what brand it is. I never really paid any attention. Sure enough it is Kiwi. How ironic, I finally got a good Kiwi shine.
