In A Nutshell Journey Magazine October 25 2010

I was the fourth generation male in my father's family on the way loving what we Irish called the "drink." My great grandfather and grandmother emigrated from Ireland early in the 20th century. After numerous children, my great grandmother was committed to an asylum and my great grandfather died at my grandmother's house overlooking the ocean in Atlantic City.

My grandfather died a premature death at forty-two on the porch at that same house.  My father took me to my first AA meeting, but he himself could never grasp recovery and put together any meaningful time. He died the death as many of my father's generation of lung cancer. He died without a program. At the age of 28 when I entered rehab I too had run out of choices. 

I grew up in southern California in the 60s. My mother left her home in Iowa in the 1930's to come to California to pursue her dream of becoming a famous singer. When it didnt pan out she eventually met an married my father, who was traveling through California during World War II. From a very early age I can remember being pushed by my mother to be someone. I was never good enough to just be me.  " you getting a little fat, Walter?" and "Don't hang around those boys, Walter, they aren't going to amount to anything," 

I started out on the right track. I played Little League baseball, was a Boy Scout and never missed a day of school. But as I got older I never remember feeling good enough. The first time I lied, I felt good about myself. Therefore I continued to lie. I learned to change my circumstances to feel good about myself.

From the very beginning it was hard to measure up to my mothers dreams for me.  I really tried to put together a fairly normal childhood, but eventually fell prey to my demons.  In the beginning I played Little League, was a Boy Scout, and made good grades. But something happened when I turned twelve. I quit baseball, bought a surfboard, and became a surfer.

Unfortunately I lived sixty miles from the beach. Still, I peppered my walls with surf posters, bought a 9'6 Dewey Weber surfboard, and paddled around our swimming pool everyday. At the same time, I wanted to become a folk singer.? I bought old work boots, a chambray color workshirt, and a Gibson guitar. So now Im a guitar playin surfer boy with no musical chops and who lives 60 miles from the beach.

One summer I was the home run king and my hero was Willie Mays. The next summer my heroes were 60s blues singer Willie Dixon and a rebellious surfer named Miki Dora. I started drinking at thirteen and by the time I was fifteen I had been busted for pot. 

My parents didnt know what to do so they sent me to a well meaning psychiatrist who started me on a thorazine/stelazine protocol for the next three years. I shuffled from class to class through my freshman year of college.

In August of 1967 I moved up to the Bay Area to go to college. (My high school grades were awful, but the thorazine slowed me down enough so I could think during my SATs. I got into college on the strength of my scores.) I would hitch-hike from Berkeley to the Haight-Ashbury everyday. It was the Summer of Love. The thorazine coupled with the other drugs and booze was the perfect prescription in the change the world, make love not war, better living through pharmaceuticals? hippie movement.

Basically the only time I felt good was when I was drunk or high.  Otherwise I felt horrible. Getting high was the answer like lying was the answer when I was younger. It changed my reality.  During college I started a band, Butch Whacks, that became successful in the Bay Area and eventually we recorded on a small label in Los Angeles. I traveled the US, Canada, and Central America. We headlined Playboy clubs across America, and played concerts with bands like the Doobie Brothers, Boz Scaggs, and Journey. By this time my drinking and drug use was on a daily basis.  

When the band broke up, my fragile world was shattered so I accelerated my drinking and drug use, eventually breaking into homes for liquor, and stealing bottles from bars. I deteriorated so quickly I was waking up with delirium tremors every night.

I ended up in a hospital emergency room in San Pedro, California on December 18, 1978. I entered their treatment program the next day. I was blessed to have around me a very talented group in that hospital program. The treatment field has been better for the likes of Interventionist Ed Storti, Betty Fords Jerry McDonald, Fr. Leo Booth, Dr. William Rader, who started the San Pedro program, and eating disorder specialist Judy Hollis. 

In that hospital I met defeat in all areas of my life and I began to look honestly at who I was.  The recovery community in that area gave me the tools to go onto a life of recovery.  

Once out of the hospital, my life rapidly began to change. I went to work helping produce live television shows like the Academy Awards. I then went to work marketing for the Ice Capades.  Eventually I worked my way back into the music business. I worked for Word Records in the mid-eighties. I married my wife, Lori, and we moved to Nashville where I started a public relations and artist management firm on Music Row.  I was blessed to work with some successful artists including; Hal Ketchum, John Hiatt, even Dion DiMucci and Brooks and Dunn for a short time.

But the music business was beginning to ebb and country music and after Garth Brooks retired, it was really getting to be a grind.  During this period my recovery meetings kept me grounded and sane in an insane business. I decided to retire.

I started with Cumberland Heights treatment center in 1997.  It seemed like any idea at that time was a good idea. It turned out to be a great idea. It was a smaller regional center that seemed primed to expand and grow. I joined and I?ve never looked backed.  I 've been privileged to work with great people at Cumberland Heights and this industry. I helped start the John Hiatt Fund at Cumberland Heights (we have raised almost $2 million dollars for adolescent addiction) and S.H.A.R.E., a private non-profit that has raised awareness of addiction in the Nashville music community and conversely began promoting concerts using professional singers and songwriters who are in recovery.

Today, I take nothing for granted. My life is a gift and I am enjoying the ride

AA birthday. 12/19/1978

Riverside

Today's overpopulated and hair-trigger southern Californians live in a land much different than its counterpart in 1963. It is difficult today to even remember the sweeping beauty of it's Mediterranean landscapes and it's life-charging bursts of yesterday's clean and uncorrupted air. The town I grew up in, Riverside, was built, by and for dreamers. From the turn of the twentieth century on, California drew immigrant midwesterners due to its financial opportunities and ideal weather. But ultimately what really lured them was Riverside's familiar rural landscapes and leisurely pace. Even the names of the towns around Riverside had a "manana" quality to them...San Bernardino, Indio, Colton, and Corona. But ultimately it was the smell that I would never forget. You were overcome with the sweet fragrance of magnolias and orange blossoms. Sometimes, in the spring, the smell of orange and lemon blossoms were so intoxicating that it would startle you out of a deep mid-day nap. Street after street framed by tall, majestic palms and lush Australian eucalyptus. All matter thrived in southern California. It was as if God had prepared a newer, more perfect, Eden.

Most of the neighborhook homes were well-built bungalows. Modest and inviting they were the perfect home for the newly arriving hordes. But by the 1950s so many people were moving to California that the large acreages and citrus groves were being devored up and chopped into small tracts. The subdivision was born.

The Old Movie Star

Her house rose from the firmament. It was built against the side of an almost sheer cliff that rose from the curb on the Pacific Coast Highway at the foot of Sunset Boulevard reaching into the Palisades. From PCH it looked like a series of single garage doors or maybe even a storage building. The garage doors, as uniquely singular as they were, are even more important historically. They are the garages built in the basement of the home of one of the most thoroughly puzzling mysteries in the history of Los Angeles. They are the garages at the base of actress Thelma Todd's home. The last breath that she ever drew was behind the first door on the right. She was murdered at the height of her fame, and the case has never been cracked in eighty years. Really, I believe the house is and was haunted.

When I was young, my mother and father would take me to visit my mother's good friend, Lola Lane. Before Lane came to Hollywood with her two other famous sisters, Rosemary and Priscilla, they grew up with my mother in Indianola, Iowa. I didn't quite understand their fame because I was too young. I did get a sense of entitlement, from listening to my father and Rosemary openly and drunkenly argue. The arguments usually centered around how my parents would never understand how hard it was to grow old and fall from the public eye. Neither would they understand the sin and depravity she engaged in that would never be forgiven by Go. Usually these discussions would happen at Hollywood restaurants like Romanoff's or the Brown Derby. Sometimes people like Clark Gable or Jane Wyman would come to our table to say hello to us. They would leave and the voices would get louder and louder.

We would stay at Lola's Palisades house for the night, the weekend, and sometimes, over a week. I believe my mother was like a tether that secured Lola and Rosemary to a simpler time and place in Iowa. While there I would spend a lot of time by myself at the beach. A concrete WPA built bridge spanned across the highway starting at Lola's private garden path crossing PCH and working its way to the sidewalk at Leo Carrillo State Beach.

Fifty years later, it all becomes a murky dream. Something always smelled old and processed in the house. I could never become comfortable and would occasionally wake up crying for no particular reason. The grounds around the house were overgrown. The actress never went outside so the neglect was inevitable. She employed an old negro gentleman named Esau that I never saw work and I believe was there only to oversee the security and safety of Lola. I would walk around the perimeter of the house only to be impeded by the overgrowth of wide roses and bougainvillea thorns. The exterior plaster walls were constantly wet and the house took a terrific wind beating on the western side that faced the ocean. While it was one of the more expensive neighborhoods in Los Angeles this lot looked neglected and run down. In truth, the home's appearance was a metaphor for the woman who owned it.

The interior of the house was even more disturbing. The home was impeccably furnished with 1930's furniture. The living room was entirely white on white. It looked like Nick and Nora's Manhattan bungalow in The Thin Man. The walls were white with accented grass cloth paper. The rugs were a stark white. A white piano sat in front of a large picture window that overlooked the ocean. Overly large, entirely conspicuous framed portraits of the actress in various stages of her career ringed the walls. But mostly I remember the lingering smell of chemical and mothballs everywhere.

Lola inherited the house from her diseased husband, Roland West. Roland was Thelma Todd's husband when she died. Two of the main suspects in Thelma's death were the LA mobster.... or her husband, Roland West. Later on, after college I visited Lola. She had moved out to a beach house in Santa Barbara and she seemed entirely more upbeat and engaged in life. I thought it might have had to do with living in murdered person's house married to her widower...the murder suspect. I asked her about Roland, and she said that, "Roland was one of my best husbands." I think that says it all.

The Desert

When I was young, the desert outside of Riverside looked beautiful but mysterious and unforgiving. Storms would roar through the basins and clean out the entire landscape. Yellow and red wildflowers in bloom framed by the expansive sand dunes and standing radiant against the majestic and ominous San Gorgonio Mountains. Dirt roads splintered off the highway and headed to nowhere in particular. A lone car became nothing more than a dust trail winding its way towards the sea-like horizon. We worked our way towards the canyons. A small stream fed into a rock-lined pond surrounded by date palms. But it was the air; clean, dry, and hot that stuck with you. It was the air of regeneration and rebirth. The breath of God.

Once a year my family would drive to see my cousins in Tucson. It was a major ordeal. We would usually wait until mid-July, when it was cobalt hot, and then we would make the long one-day drive. The preparation was always the same. My dad would wake up at dawn and yell until we would get out of bed. He always acted like a vacation was the hardest thing to do in the world. He would pack. Repack. And finally let my mom put together our suitcases. He would yell at our mother, my sister, and, of course me. Everybody hated each other before we left the driveway.

Once out the door all was forgiven. Its like it never happened. All was forgiven. We'd start the day off drinking White Rock sodas and stopping for "curios" in Cabezon or Needles. Once on the road again my mother would pull out the songbook and we would sing until we tired.

When you're twelve, thirsty, and overcome by the heat you don't notice the scenery. I would sit in the backseat of the non-air-conditioned car while my parents sat in the front chain smoking Raleighs. By the afternoon the closest thing I could get to comfort was hanging my open mouth out the window. Unfortunately, all I caught was a wicked wind/sun burn. When we arrived in Tucson at 7:00 pm the temperature was still over 100 degrees and there was no air conditioning at my aunt and uncle's house. My mom would draw a freezing bath which would only amplify the pain of the Second degree wind/sun burn.

Why did the first settlers decide to stay here and not keep trekking to LaJolla. Big historical oversight.

Alice Quinn

Eulogy for Alice Blenda Quinn
Prepared by Walter Christian Quinn, Jr.
September 26, 2008

Alice Blenda Thomas was born in Iowa in 1914. There were four children born to David and Leah Thomas; Clover, Helen, Alice, and David. The children lost their mother when they were very young. This hardship at such an early age would shape the woman Alice was to become.

At seventeen, Alice left her home to go to secretarial school in Des Moines, Iowa. While there she worked as the executive secretary for the former Governor of the state. Alice was incredibly ambitious, skilled at her work, and prided herself on being a person people could rely on. She had an infectious smile and a welcoming heart that others were immediately drawn to. She also had a secret ambition of becoming a professional singer.

One day when she was waiting for the elevator in her office building a dashing young man approached her and asked her name. He said that his best friend, who was incredibly shy, wanted to, asked her out. By the way, he said, “my name’s Ron Reagan, but most people call me “Dutch.” I work upstairs at the radio station.” This would be the beginning of a very memorable year in Alice’s life and one that she would hold dear throughout her years. She, “Dutch,” and the shy young man, Ed Reimers – you remember him – “you’re in good hands with All State” became good friends. Mom remained friends with Reagan through the years.

Mom moved on to Chicago to follow her sister Helen and her husband Frank in search of better job opportunities. She went to work in downtown Chicago for an insurance agency. During that time she met her first husband and had her first child, Rosemary. She also was given the opportunity to pursue her dream as a singer, when Jules Stein, the eventual founder of MCA, offered her the chance to go on the road with a big band. But, Alice’s priorities had changed – it was never a consideration. Rosemary’s well-being was her #1 priority.

In 1940 the family moved to Los Angeles where other family members had recently relocated. The pressures of the changing times – the end of the Depression and the Great War on the horizon – lead to the end of the marriage. At that time Alice and Rosemary moved to Riverside, outside Los Angeles, and joined the rest of the Thomas family.

Alice and Walt met one night in Riverside in 1942. She was a secretary to the camp commander at Camp Anza. Walt was a young officer with striking good looks and a funny sense of humor. They met in a club just before Walt was scheduled to leave for duty in the Pacific. The young officer walked across the floor to ask Alice to dance. She said yes.

Walt left for duty, but sent Alice letters day after day. He told her he loved her madly but was afraid he wouldn’t make it back. He told her it was important that she date other men and forget about him. Mom never lost faith or hope that something good was around the corner. Dad was in a lot of brutal battles; Layte and Okinawa, but he survived and came back to Riverside. Alice and Walt got married.

One thing I remember is the tenderness of our mother. She became pregnant and had our sister, Loretta Ann, who died a few days after her birth. Mom was devastated and never forgot her. Even at the end of her life, she would remember Loretta Ann and begin to cry. It was an open wound that would draw tears all her life.

But mom never gave up. She went on to have five miscarriages before she had me in 1949. It’s because of Loretta Ann’s death and the miscarriages that she held the lives of her children as so precious.

Mom was always there for us. I remember when I was 14 or so. I don’t remember why. I guess I was depressed. I wasn’t growing up so easily. I remember her holding me in her arms and letting me cry and cry. Her arms were a safe place for me. They were home.

There are some other things I will never forget about our mother – like the smell of tacos, enchiladas, and chile rellenos that she and my dad prepared for weekend dinners. It seemed like we had them every Saturday when we were growing up. All our neighbors and relatives came by to have the best homemade Mexican food in Riverside. Mom and dad would sometimes cook up to sixty tacos at a time. None were ever left over. And on a lot of Friday nights, because we were good Catholics, mom would make her famous meatless spaghetti. My uncles, Jimmy and Jerry, would drop everything to get to our house for dinner.

The ‘50s were the days of affordable gas and travel and the Quinn’s took advantage of it. I remember driving all over the western United States. Sometimes we’d drive two hours to, say, a small café in Calexico to try out an enchilada sauce that my dad thought he could duplicate.

I also remember driving in the car – singing our lungs out. Alice loved to sing all the time. We had some books of songs in the car that all of us would use to sing. Mom would always harmonize – she always found the right note. Songs like…

“As he sings
Raggedy Music to his cattle
As he swings back and forth in the saddle on his horse
Who is syncopated, gated
And is such a funny meter
To the roar of his repeater…”

I also remember all the early mornings arriving at the dew carpeted grass of another southern California golf course. Mom and dad loved the game and it showed. Dad was a very good golfer and mom was president of the Lady’s club. My sister, Rosemary, thinks mom liked being the president of the club as much as the golf. Maybe even more. But I did find one of her scorecards the other day and she shot a 91. Not bad mom.

When I think of mom I think of bright yellow, a fabulous smile, and a great tan. She was the prettiest mom at my dad’s conventions. She dressed fashionably and she was always the perfect hostess. She could entertain ‘50s style with the best of them. Cocktail parties, golf tournament after-parties, conference parties…just parties in general... Always a Manhattan and a Raleigh cigarette in her hands. Mom loved to entertain.

My dad died fourteen years ago. It was a very difficult time for my mother. She loved my father to the very end. They had a hard time being apart and toward the end of his life you couldn’t separate them. Mom nursed and prayed over him until he drew his last breath.

Mom’s strength came for a strong faith. After she married my father, she read Thomas Merton’s Seventh Story Mountain. Her conversion experience, which led her into the Catholic Church, was directly tied to Merton’s writings. In 1952, mom, my sister, and I drove to Merton’s home at Our Lady of Gethsemane in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Her Christian faith held up through the years and gave her comfort and strength in the hardest of times.

Mom was proud of her friendship with President Reagan and certainly voted for him in all the elections. But Rosemary reminded me the other day that while dad was still alive she was a Republican, but after he passed away she finally had the nerve to register Democrat. She had been secretly talking to Ramee about it for years.

Our mother has left a wonderful legacy in her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. Today there are five grandchildren; Cathy, Carrie, Phillip, Caitlin, and Connor. And three great grandchildren; Merrick, Matthew, and Thomas.

Living in Nashville it was hard to get out to LA to see mom as often as I would have liked. I did manage to see her two or three times a year. I say her three weeks before she passed away in June. I had a felling the time was near and so I spent a little extra time with her. I told her I loved her and that she meant more to me than she would ever understand. I held her tightly before I left. I didn’t want to let go. When we separated I looked her in the eyes and they were as bright as the sun. Her smile was so big and so happy. It was a wonderful image to live with the rest of my life.

Mother joined my father, side by side, at the Riverside National Cemetery. Through the years they moved far away from Riverside but yet they are buried less than two miles from where they first met – on that dance floor in 1941. What a wonderful coincidence. I’m sure she is singing about it in heaven.

(Finally I want to thank my sister, Rosemary, and my niece, Carrie, for everything they did for mom in the final years. You were always there for her.)

St. Catherine's vs. St. Edwards CBBL 1963

By the time I reached the age of reason I knew that Willie Mays was god. By the time I reached twelve years of age I was the CBBL (Catholic Boys Baseball League) home run king. For every home run I hit I would win a haircut at Tony Mazzio's barbershop. The summer of 1962 I had won twelve hair cuts.

By the summer of eighth grade I was 5'11" tall and ten pounds heavier. I knew that this summer I could only get better. Maybe ten additional haircuts by the end of summer. What I failed to understand then was the growth spurt was merely a symptom of much more complicated changes. And there was nothing more complicated and glorious than my new found interest in girls. For the first time I found myself looking down Maureen Tenner's blouse as she bent down at her desk. For the first time I began inviting the girls in my class over to swim in the new pool we built in our backyard. Something was changing in me. My stomach was tied in knots and I was busting out all over, so to speak. It was the summer of 1963.

I would hang out at Shamel Park in the afternoon and go watch or play baseball at Evans Park after dinner. The park was surrounded to the south by pepper trees and to the north by the silhouette of mysterious Mt. Rubidoux. The games would begin at twilight, a magical time in California. As the sun went down the colors swirled and convulsed over the outfield unevenly. The tall palm trees and the light poles in the distance contrasted almost violently with the increasingly dark, cobalt sky. It was so very surreal that it looked like we had touched another dimension. When the warm Santa Anas blew in off the desert it became absolutely frightening. It was the starkest and most eerily beautiful scene I remember in my youth. Later in high school, when I fell into a depression, the most difficult time of the day was during the sunsets when their beauty only heightened my despair. That time still haunts me as I grow older. The very thing that I loved so much, touched my deepest sadness.

###

The shifting of my leg didn't help change the problem. I had been watching American Bandstand waiting to leave for my baseball game. And now there was something wrong. It was swollen and it wouldn't return to normal size. I was twelve years old and I didn't even know why it was happening. But there was even a bigger dilemma. In thirty minutes I would have to leave the house and go play baseball. My team, St. Catherine's, were playing St. Edwards.

I tried thinking about go-cart racing, death on the highway, food. Anything. I even tried praying. But nothing would make it go away. I could be dying but there was no one I could tell about it.

It was almost 4:30 pm and I was supposed to be at the field in ten minutes. I was scared to death. I had a baseball game to play. I wondered, " was I on the verge of some teenage cancer that no one had warned me about. Is this the way I was scheduled to die? Could a cruel God think of a more ridiculous (so to speak) way of killing a kid?"

This probably wasn't the first time I felt confusion about my body but this was the first time it was going to go public. The mental scene continued to play itself out in my mind. All eyes would be riveted towards me as I made a slow, self-conscious stride towards the batter's box. I was sure everyone was whispering, pointing, and laughing out loud uncontrollably at the sight of me bowed over and trying to hide and bat at the same time. What really happened was even worse.

I threw on my scratchy wool uniform that we paradoxically wore in the desert-like climes of summer in Riverside. I ran down the alley, across the playgrounds to the park. The team was waiting for the visiting team to arrive. They began arriving in carloads. But they were missing their starting pitcher, Pinky". St. Edward was concerned because"Pinky" was starting and he was the winningest pitcher in the league. We waited and they stalled. Suddenly a car began to approach and they ran towards it. "Pinky...que pasa?"" Pinky" drove to the game in his  pink, fully lowered, tuck n' rolled 1962 Chevy Impala convertible. By his side, his new wife and his equally new baby. "Pinky" was over six feet tall , fifteen years old, and finally entering the ninth grade the next year. We were mortals among giants.

I would have felt fear if I hadn't been preoccupied with my own PROBLEM. Our team began to organize and warmed up. We then took the field. The PROBLEM is not going away. I took my position at first base. "Play ball". My mind was in overdrive. Strike one, ball one. It's a hit. Instinctively I ran over to cover the bag and take the throw. The runner was safe. He began to measure out a lead as I positioned myself in front of the bag. The pitcher threw his first pitch out of the strike zone and our catcher, Tom Ryan, hoping to catch the runner off first, fired a terrible throw to me. I scooped the horrible throw on a short hop and turned around to tag out the quickly approaching runner. He barreled into me but I managed to hold onto the ball. "YER OUT"

My parents and the crowd cheered but I couldn't hear them. I was a hero but I didn't feel joy or elation. I was standing alone, doubled over, hiding my mid-section as waves of pleasure flushed over me. The spasms continued but I didn't hear anyone. I looked down at my pants. My gawd, what happened to my uniform. Did I pee on myself? Why did it feel so good? I ran past my parents, past our dugout and straight through the alley towards my house.

In retrospect, no two more unlikely events could have come together (so to speak) in such a strange and ill-timed way. To put it in very simple terms, who would have believed that I would have my first sexual experience while tagging out a runner at first?

###

My Father's Drawer

Now that I look back everything was neat and perfectly symmetrical in my parent's house. And nowhere was it more evident than in the top drawer of my father's dresser. The first thing you noticed was the mahogany inlaid jewel box that sat in the center of the drawer. I could never walk past the dresser without looking at the contents of the box. The many gold and silver cuff links. I've never had any use for them but the last time I was at home I asked my father for a pair. They were more talisman than fashion. My father had at least fifty pairs of collar stays. I've never bought one. Today most collar stays are sewn in.

Medals. All colors, shapes, and sizes. All brought back from World War ll. Red and blue sharpshooter medals. Lieutenant bars. Regiment colors. No purple hearts. ( My father was blown off a seawall at the Battle of Okinawa. My war experience was pretty clear cut. Anti-war demonstrations in Berkeley and San Francisco during the '60s.)

There were also photos of my father, young and cocksure; standing on a beach by his home in Atlantic City, shirtless but in uniform standing in the desert holding up a rattlesnake, group shots of his pals overseas during the war. No matter where, what, or when, the pre-war and war pictures made him look stylish and heroic. But I've come to understand that my father's most glorious experiences were during the war. Later he had a hard time understanding why life never measured up to that again. I believe those photos in his drawer were reminders of his youth, when all the world was before him.

To the right of the mahogany box lay his perfectly positioned , perfectly rolled socks. Black or blue dress. That was it. Next to the socks lay the leather and gold perfectly aligned garters. Putting them on was an important part of my father's daily regime. He had three or four to handle a six-day usage. Stacked neatly to the right, ironed and folded into perfect squares were dad's supply of cotton handkerchiefs. I'm not sure I ever saw one soiled. To the left of the box lay his Jockey briefs. My father said once he left the army he would never stand in lines or wear boxer underwear. Civilian freedom meant Jockey briefs, I suppose. The last, and the most provocative item, was his razor-sharp, leather-handled, sheathed hunting knife. Hidden expertly under the stacks of the underwear, it, along with a 22 rifle in the closet, made up Dad's domestic arsenal. He would use them to defend our home in case of an "invasion."

I will never forget my father's ritual of dressing in the morning. A good many of his movements I have somehow picked up. I believe I watched them so often when I was little that they became part of me. Dad never improvised. I believe he thought improvisation was against God's nature and only people that were weak in character surrendered to it. Every morning was the same choreographed dance that never changed or faltered.

First he put on the briefs and the undershirt. He snapped the waistband to make sure it had significant tension and fit snugly. Then, he put on his clean, white undershirt that smelled fresh from hanging on the clothesline the previous afternoon. He then put on his crisp, ironed, white shirt and his regimental stripe tie. Next he stretched his socks up and hooked them to his garters. My father put on his shoes next. He would retrieve them from his closet, buff them, and pull out the shoe trees. They were Florsheim brogues, wingtips of the highest order. My father always told me, " never try and save money on shoes. Buy the best, polish them, and they will last forever." The shoe strings were stiff and waxed so they would hold tightly.

He might walk around the house for a half hour or so only in his underwear, shirt, socks and shoes before he continued. And then, at the last minute, before he left for work, he would slip on his slacks and coat.

At the end of the daily exercise one word emerged: order. All the shoes were polished and treed. All the slacks pressed and hangered. All the shirts hung up and spread symmetrically across the closet bar so no one shirt touched the other, left to right, starting with dress and ending in sport. Order.

Everything filed . In a way, the predictability was comforting. But it also symbolized the parting of our natures. Dad's dedication to order and responsibility and my rebellion against all his order and responsibility.

My unpredictability was at the core of our problems. I don't even think dad was as concerned with the results as with the method. I am the way I am because of some very intense, complex interactions with my father at a very early age. Today I know that my course was being charted before me and I didn't even know how or why.

###