Out of the Wilderness
By Steve Stroble
Out of the Wilderness ? 2013 by Steve Stroble. All rights reserved.
This book is a work of fiction. All people, places, events, and situations are the product of the writer's imagination. Any resemblance of them to actual persons, living or dead, places, events, and situations is purely coincidental.
1
Sometimes the good Lord decides that parent's lives overshadow those of their children, such as parents who went through the 1930's Great Depression and World War II in the 1940s. Such a child was Sam Smaltz. His dad grew up in a steel mill town of Pennsylvania; his mother in one of the small towns that dot the vast Midwest. Dad overshadowed those to come by going through WW II and the Korean War; Mom by being the unsung, lonely military wife who stayed behind to raise the kids during Dad's wars, TDYs (temporary duties) and training missions.
The life of a military family has few roots, so Sam moved from his Midwest birthplace to the East Coast to Europe to the Midwest to the West Coast to the Deep South to the Far East. Brothers and a sister showed up periodically. This helped him realize that one might resist change but such resistance only seemed to magnify the change's effects.
School did not become interesting until first grade when he learned to read about Dick, Jane and their dog, Spot. Second grade included drills of ducking under the desk in case a big atomic bomb might bring the school down. Knowledge of the Triune God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - began with instruction at Saturday classes and continued full or part time off and on for the next 12 years. Inevitably, curious young minds, fortified after memorizing the Ten Commandments, asked questions that might have flustered a lesser teacher:
"Sister, what is adultery?"
Long pause. "Something that adults do."
A cousin broadened Sam's theology during a fierce thunderstorm. "Lightning comes out of God's fingers!" the cousin explained as they hid under the bedcovers.
Another cousin expanded his vocabulary while rolling a ball of snow meant for a snowman that unexpectedly picked up what Sam knew as dog poop.
"Oh, no. Dog shit!"
Seeing Sam's shocked face, the cousin demanded to know what Sam's family called such frozen remnants of last fall.
"Uhhh?" Thus, Sam learned to dodge embarrassing questions, even if they were asked by someone older.
All in all, Sam's knowledge of life came almost as much from family and friends as from educators and clergy. For instance, teachers emphasized civic duties, such as voting and paying taxes. Sam's parents didn't talk about voting, they just voted. Taxes, however, did bring a response from Dad: "There are only two things certain in life - death and taxes." After hearing this truism enough times, Sam concluded that both experiences were unavoidable.
Death seemed scary, but talk of God being eternal and His accompanying promise of eternal life calmed those fears. Sam's mind could grasp having a beginning and his soul living forever; when it tried to grasp a God with no beginning or end, Sam's brain seemed to overload with that truth as his mind spun out of control.
The music of the day conveyed a strange world of cavemen named Alley Oop, girls wearing itsy bitsy, teeny weenie, yellow polka dot bikinis and girl groups who laid bare their souls about boys and love lost. Sam gravitated to TV. Cheyenne, Bronco, Sugarfoot, Maverick, the Cartwrights of Bonanza, Sky King, Soupy Sales, Howdy Doody, Rin Tin Tin, Lassie, Tarzan and a multitude of animated mice, cats, dogs, ducks, birds, rabbits, a squirrel, moose, roadrunner, coyote, muskrat, gopher, and others named Mighty, Mickie, Minnie, Tom, Jerry, Felix, Sylvester, Top, Deputy, Pluto, Donald, Daffy, Huey, Dewey, Louie, Daisy, Tweety, Heckle, Jeckle, Bugs, Rocky, Bullwinkle, Wiley, Vince and the bumbling humans who appeared with them took turns being good and bad but mostly funny.
The shows with adults talking most of the time that came on in the afternoon were not to be watched by the children, though. Sam began to suspect they featured the adults doing what the Ten Commandments talked about. Another show also was off limits, being deemed too scary for children by Dad: "You are traveling through another dimension?" Sam wasn't sure what a twilight zone was, but he wanted to find out. Once again cousins, this time female, broadened his horizons by dancing to something called American Bandstand and making sure to catch Ricky Nelson's song at the end of each Ozzie and Harriet Show.
Dad's career dictated change. It came like clockwork as he traded teaching ROTC cadets at a college for working with the aerospace industry in Southern California.
Hollywood had been at a low point as its golden age faded, but the 10 plus commercial television stations of Los Angeles broadcast movies from the 1930's, 1940's and 1950's by the dozens. Sam loved science fiction, horror, adventure, and westerns, but couldn't quite grasp the dramas. "Must be that adultery thing Sister told us that adults do," he concluded. On the radio, station KFWB played top 40 singles all the time; the songs now attracted Sam's attention. He didn't understand all the new emphasis on surfing, cars, girls, and being true to your school. But when Brian Wilson spoke of finding a refuge "in my room" a chord resonated in Sam's soul. He wondered how someone so much older could write a song that appealed to even a 10-year-old such as himself.
2
Friends can be helpful or draining, depending on if they prefer giving or taking. Once again, God's providence ensured that the former eventually outnumbered the latter in Sam's life. When someone became too draining, angry words or fists usually ended the relationship. No matter their gender, religion (or lack of), nationality, geographical location, or color, most people come across at least one other who profoundly changes them. For Sam this person was Dave.
The two shared a few things in common - they played on the same Little League team, liked music and needed a refuge from the monotony of life with its routine of homework, chores at home and battles with siblings. The home of each was another world for the other. Food eaten, music listened to, television shows watched, hobbies pursued, topics discussed - everything seemed different. The one common denominator was the Los Angeles Dodgers, who were in the middle of wining four World Series in 10 years.
At times it appeared that the former Brooklyn Bums had brought their losing ways to the Giants and Yankees following their move to the West Coast, especially when the Giants forced a three game playoff at the end of the 1962 season. The play that perhaps ensured the Giants' trip to the Series pitted Willie Mays' arm against baseball's best base runner of the day and Maury Wills' legs. Tagging up from third on a shallow fly ball to center, Wills met the catcher at home holding the ball just delivered by the grinning Mays. However, the following year with players such as Tommy and Willie Davis, Don Drysdale, Ron Fairly, Jim Gilliam, Frank Howard, Sandy Koufax, Ron Perranoski, Johnny Podres, John Roseboro, Bill Skowron, Dick Tracewski, and Wills, the Dodgers took the '63 Series four games to none despite the odds favoring the Yankees at 25 to 1.
One urban legend had it that someone begged and borrowed every dollar he could, made the bet on the Dodgers winning it in four games and walked away with enough to retire on. Sam didn't hear this legend until years later. He was introduced to his first urban legend at school:
"Did you hear about the woman who died from spider bites?"
"No."
"She had one of those big beehive hairdos and never washed her hair."
"Yuck."
"Yeah. Then a spider got into her hair and laid eggs."
"No way."
"Uh huh. When the eggs hatched, all the spiders bit her and the poison went straight to her brain and killed her."
"Wow!"
His second urban legend came courtesy of Dave as Louie Louie by the Kingsmen blared from Sam's transistor radio.
"Hear that?"
; "What?"
"The part where he talks dirty."
"Huh?"
"Right there. Listen"
"Sounds like he forgot the words to me."
"If he forgot the words, they would have recorded it over again."
"But I thought you couldn't say bad words on the radio."
The worst of the bad words supposedly had originated on signs that poor, Medieval English folk had hung on their front doors to inform tax collectors of the inhabitants' lack of marital status: Fornicating Under Command of the King.
It seems that a less burdensome tax rate resulted if a man and woman cohabited without marriage, a practice that continued for years in America.
In any case, that particular four-letter word appeared to be extremely versatile. Sam knew some kids that used it as a noun, pronoun, verb, adjective, adverb, conjunction and preposition.
Similar sounding words even existed in other languages, including Latin, much to Sam's horror. Once during music class, it crept in in abbreviated form in Latin as fuc. The Sister trying to get the correct pronunciation from the struggling Sixth Graders kept shouting the phrase over and over.
"No, no, children. Latin is very precise. It's 'fuc cor nostrum!' Now repeat it after me."
"Fuc cor nostrum."
"That's better. Once again."
All the while, Sam's buddies Tom, Ralph and Mark were doubling over in laughter every time the word with two
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