# Memoir - Intro

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Posted by Pete on December 14, 2020 at 04:38:20

A few months ago I posted about wanting to write a bit of a "memoir" about some of my stories form growing up. My family is dealing with some issues right now, COVID is making everything a million times worse, but its given me the time to reflect on some of the things I've experienced. I actually started to write a bunch of stuff down... then, keeping with the luck we're all having in 2020, my computer crashed and I lost everything. So I'm going to start over, and just kind of write about the things I want to say. Its all going to be G rated and I don't want it to be weird. Maybe if its any good I'll go back and put everything together in a nice way, but for now I'm just going to tell the stories that I want to tell, and I might fill in some of the gaps and details later.

I'm just going to start with an introduction. My family lived in a rural part of West Virginia, in an extremely poor area. My family did OK financially, we we're poor, but my parents made sure we lived "simply." Compared to some of my friends, we would have been as rich as royalty, but my parents made sure that we never showed that too much. My mom worked as an accountant, and worked for the schools, county and hospitals. My dad was an engineer for the power company. His family came from that area - my parents actually met in Chicago, and decided to move to West Virginia when I was a baby. I think my dad liked it much more than my mom. My dad can kind of be an absent-minded professor type of personality - he liked the peace and quiet, the scenery, the small town feel. My mom is more practical, she was well aware that me and my brother didn't have much future in that area, and I think it was always weighing on her mind that we might be better off moving somewhere with better schools and more opportunity. But, they stayed, and I'm not sure I'm glad that they did, but it is what it is.

My brother's name is Cole. Its actually "Adam Colton" (after my two grandfathers.) When I was little and learning to talk, I decided I'd rather call him "Colton" instead of "Adam", but I couldn't pronounce the hard T in Colton, so I'd call him Colon. My parents wisely noticed that I probably shouldn't be calling my brother the medical term for one's large intestine, so they suggested I call him "Cole" instead, which apparently I agreed to. And the nickname stuck - and Cole became part of a common tradition in the area that your given name was hardly ever used. My best friend's first and middle name was "Trevor Lincoln." He hated being called Trevor, and Lincoln wasn't exactly a popular name in the American south, so he went by Link. (We also had a Bugsy, a Cookie and a Sandy, and a kid we called Eddie even though his name was not Edward.) I never got a nickname. My name actually is Peter, and I went by Petey as a kid, and Pete when I got too old for that.

We lived on a small farm, but my parents didn't farm. We had a 2 story house, and me and Cole had our own bedrooms. We had a furnace and air conditioning. Most houses near us were lucky to have a furnace (wood burning stoves were super common - and dangerous!) Air conditioning was a luxury, and my parents hardly ever used it. For comparison, my friend Link lived with his dad, and they were fairly well off for the area. His dad worked as a mechanic and owned a ramshackle "garage" with a few rooms over the top of it - they had a small kitchen, a bathroom, his dad had a bedroom, and Link slept on the couch in the living room, which was actually just one side of the kitchen. Most houses didn't have TVs, and no one (including us) had cable. Even electricity wasn't taken for granted - while the power company ran lines to every house, people would get cut off if they didn't pay their power bill. Or, if the lines got damaged in a storm or something, people couldn't afford to have them repaired. My dad sometimes caught some grief from people when they'd get their power cut off, since he worked for the power company. He was an engineer and had nothing to do with the billing, but he'd at least try to help people fill out the paperwork and make the phone calls to force the power company to re-connect them (since it wasn't always legal to cut off people's power if they had an emergency need for it.)

Growing up in the middle of it, I kind of didn't realize just how impoverished the area was. And I didn't realize soon enough how much better off my family was. Things like, the room at the back of our church that served as a food bank. And how, each week, my parents would quietly stop by when the church was empty, and drop off a supply of canned goods. I never made the connection that my friend's family would quietly take items from the food bank. Or the cabinet in the school office that was filled with coats, shoes and other clothes. Every August my parents would take me and Cole to a department store in the nearest city for a new pair of school shoes. Each Christmas we'd each get a new pair of dress shoes for church and special occasions. Me and Cole each got a new (rather than a used or donated) winter coat when we started high school.

My parents always made sure we lived below our means, though. Which I'm grateful for. I made some really incredible friends, there was no bullying to speak of, and that's in part because my parents didn't let us be "spoiled rich kids." We shopped for clothes at the thrift shop the church ran. My parents would buy us new socks and underwear from a department store, but literally every other piece of clothing we owned was 2nd-hand. My dad had to do a lot of driving for work, all around the area. When Cole and I each got "new" bikes, they were used ones my dad spotted for sale at a garage sale or something while he was driving through some other small town. My parents both shared a single used car. When me and Cole would outgrow our clothes or use, my parents made sure they got donated to someone who needed them. All of our silverware and cooking stuff was purchased 2nd hand. My parents had some furniture from when they got married and me and Cole each had a new bed, but everything else was 2nd hand. My dad is pretty handy, and whenever something broke, he'd fix it. If he couldn't fix it and we didn't need it, then we just didn't have it anymore.

That said, we still lived better than a lot of families in the area. Me and Cole always got to see the doctor and the dentist whenever we needed it. A lot of activities at church, boy scouts, clubs at school, and stuff were offered on a charity basis, but my parents always quietly paid full price for anything me and Cole wanted to do. In the summer me and Cole would run around barefoot because we wanted to - some of my friends legitimately did not have shoes to wear, and would get a "new" pair when school started up and donated shoes were made available through the school. We'd even take a "vacation" once a year. It was usually a long weekend where we'd drive to a beach town - and stay in a hotel! Which, I ended up not really enjoying, since all four of us would share a room with 2 beds. I quickly grew out of wanting a share a bed with my brother - and since Cole was the oldest, it fell on me to sleep on the floor if I didn't want to share a bed with him. And while I liked the beach, and getting to eat in a restaurant for a few meals, sleeping on the hotel room floor kind of got old.

Like I said, I don't think my mom was ever fully sold on us living where we did. She was born and raised in a big city, and was used to having access to museums, good schools, restaurants, job opportunities... and all kinds of things we didn't have living in rural Appalachia. She's always been much more practical and down to earth than my dad, and seemed like she'd come to accept that me and Cole would grow up where we did, but she wasn't going to have us get stuck there for our adult lives. She correctly recognized that there weren't too many job options available. And me and Cole weren't really helping ourselves, to be honest. Honestly, we were both lazy. We didn't have the perspective my mom did, we never saw the purpose to work hard at anything. We were both average in school, average in sports, and didn't seem to pick up on any kind of trade work like lots of my friends did (I can change the oil in my car and replace a lightbulb, but that's about as mechanically inclined as I ever got.) When we were in high school, my mom sat us both down individually and said, "Look, you don't have to go to college. I'm not going to bother getting on your case anymore about your grades, I know you're not dumb. But you have to learn how to DO SOMETHING. ANYTHING. Your dad and I will pay for it, if you're serious about it. But you have to learn how to DO SOMETHING because in another couple years, you're going to need to get a job, and in case you haven't noticed, you're not qualified to do anything, and its not like anyone around here is hiring anyway." It was probably the toughest of the "tough love" talks I ever got from my mom... but she was right.

So anyway, that's pretty much the environment I grew up in. So where does the wackywet come in? Well, poor people didn't really waste money on swim trunks when shorts or jeans worked just as well. And, in a very conservative Christian atmosphere, even boys going shirtless was kind of unusual. And, in an area where most people didn't have air conditioning and summers could be super hot and humid, splashing around the numerous streams, creeks and lakes in our area was the primary way we stayed cool. I don't think I even owned a swimsuit after I turned 6 or 7 years old. Just as a quick story... my mom thought me and Cole should get swimming lessons when we were about 6 or 7. She called around and found out a few towns over they had a public pool that did swimming lessons. So my mom did what she was used to from growing up in a city - she got us both bright colored swim suits, towels and goggles. And for a few weeks that summer, me and Cole would have to get up at 7am, put our swimsuits on, and my mom would drive us over to the pool, where the water temperature seems to be set at a fraction of a degree above the freezing point. Then we'd jump in, while some high school kid who was equally unhappy about being there would purport to teach us how to not drown. My mom was telling one of our neighbors about this - a nice enough lady who was often amused by us "northerners" or "outsiders," but was usually kind enough to set my mom straight on how the world worked in our little redneck town. I remember sitting at the kitchen table when my mom was explaining this, and our neighbor, Mrs. Jameson, gave her an exaggerated "when are you ever going to learn, yankee?" look, and explained, "Beth... your boys don't need swimming lessons. They're going to start tagging along with the older boys around here. They're gonna go over to the lake and down to the river and the older boys are going to make sure they're OK. Lordy ["Lordy" was a polite Christian expletive that was used to express any number of emotions] your boys are training to be olympic swimmers! They just need to keep their heads above water when they're swinging into the lake and playing around in the creek. Don't waste your money on those lessons. Lordy!" Well, my mom took that advice, and that was the end of waking up at the crack of dawn on summer break and jumping into freezing water! It was also the last time I wore a swimsuit until at least high school!

My mom made me and Cole spend as much time outside as possible during the summer and weekends during the school year. We pretty much could only stay inside if the weather was particularly bad, or if we were working on homework. During the summer we both spent plenty of time hanging out at the nearby lake or rivers. Jumping off the bridge into the deep part of the river was a favorite pass time, as was the rope swing into the lake. (And, like Mrs. Jameson said, when we were young, our older friends at least made sure we didn't drown - though we did have a few close calls I didn't tell my parents about until years later.) By dinner time, we'd tramp home through our back yard, often covered from head to toe in dirt or mud. Our mom had a hose by the back door - our job was to rinse off enough that we wouldn't track dirt through the house, then go inside and take a proper shower, then put on clean clothes for dinner. Then in the summer when the days were long, we'd usually go back out and do the whole thing again in a few hours. I discovered that I enjoyed rinsing off thoroughly with the hose - even if I wasn't particularly dirty. Then, since my clothes were already wet, when it was my turn to shower (Cole got to go first since he was the oldest), I'd start just wearing them in the shower off and on. My parents never suspected anything, since my clothes were wet anyway. So I took full advantage of opportunities like that.

So I know I put a lot of words to this story, and most of it had nothing to do with wackywet. Sorry about that, I've got a bunch more that I'm going to work on that I think will make it worth it. So stay tuned.

Follow Ups:

- Re: Memoir - Intro Ry 04:28:28 12/15/2020 (2)
  - Re: Memoir - Intro Pete 22:10:30 12/15/2020 (0)
  - Re: Memoir - Intro Matt 10:36:24 12/15/2020 (0)
- Re: Memoir - Intro Jpeter007 22:57:00 12/14/2020 (0)
- Re: Memoir - Intro wetnboy 16:52:22 12/14/2020 (1)
  - Re: Memoir - Intro Pete 01:51:22 12/15/2020 (0)
- Re: Memoir - Intro Jpeter007 16:40:36 12/14/2020 (0)
- Re: Memoir - Intro blueandwet 14:42:08 12/14/2020 (0)

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