Life in the Middle Lane, The East Peoria Years

I don't know why we moved to East Peoria. I suppose I could ask my father. I'm sure he would remember his reasoning at the time. Probably something on the order of, "Well, there was a house we could afford in a neighborhood that appeared to be nice, and there was a big yard and it was kind of rural yet still suburban . . ." It certainly must have seemed like a great idea at the time. It's a shame that it didn't work out that way.

I think my dad liked it there. He was doing a lot of traveling at that time selling lighting fixtures for a company called Daybright Lighting. He put about 50,000 miles a year on his cars driving all over Central Illinois calling on his customers. He knew people all over and made friends easily. When you have that salesman personality you can get along almost anywhere. You're not afraid of people, instead people are all potential customers or they might know someone who would be a potential customer. When you're a salesman, your life is all about talking to people and shaking hands and having lots of confidence and meeting new people and knowing everybody's name. My dad had all that stuff and I had none of it.

Moving to East Peoria didn't miraculously endow me with the ability to fit in with my new classmates. I didn't, all of a sudden, acquire any social skills. Instead, I went unarmed, awkward, ignorant and alone into the snake pit of elementary school. Elementary school is where cruelty is finally developed into an art form. You gather with your friends and you practice picking people apart until you can do so effortlessly and creatively. You work diligently to develop your ability to spot someone's weaknesses and you hone your verbal weapons to a needle-sharp point. Then, when the new kid comes to school you wait until recess and you attack. But you don't kill him off right away, no, it's more fun to play with your prey day after day after day. Of course, after awhile it gets too easy and you get bored with the torture, but you can't stop now and so it continues, not every day anymore, but often enough to keep your victim at a constant level of misery.

In the fourth grade here were two guys who followed me around nearly every day at recess. They would point at me and laugh continuously until I was cowering and crying in a corner of the playground. I was helpless to stop it. I just wanted to be liked and accepted. I didn't have any fighting spirit, nor any fighting skills. All I had was a dread of going to school each day, knowing that at recess I would end up crying in a corner. My parents were unsympathetic. I was supposed to "stand up the them." With what? Of course, I was a poor student, since I was more worried about what was in store for me at recess than what was going in the classroom. And then there was the bus ride home. I somehow had become a bully-magnet. There was a guy on the bus who threatened to beat me up every day. He would sit near me and describe in great detail what he was going to do to me when I got off the bus. He never actually got off at my stop, but the threat was more than adequate to create the effect on me that this person was after. Yep, that was my life in East Peoria, at least as far as school was concerned.

It wasn't all a horror, of course, but there was just enough horror so that I don't remember very well the non-horror parts. One of the things I do recall is being required to sell cookies to pay part of my way to some sort of summer camp. This involved me going from door to door giving my sales pitch, which went like this: "Hi, I'm trying to earn my way to camp by selling these delicious chocolate-drop cookies." What made this difficult was that I was quite afraid of people by this time, so I was almost completely petrified when someone actually came to the door. If you're going to sell stuff door-to-door, you are better off appearing to be friendly, confident and knowledgeable about your product. I was scared nearly to immobility, desperately wanted to be somewhere else and had never tasted a chocolate-drop cookie in my entire life. What the heck is a chocolate-drop cookie anyway. There was a picture of one on the order form, but I don't think I actually had any cookies for samples, you had to pay for them up front and then later I would have to deliver them when they arrived from the chocolate-drop cookie supplier.

I don't for a minute believe that I earned my way to camp by selling cookies. I'm sure my parents had to foot the bill to send me off to the wilderness for a couple of weeks. At least camp was better than school. There was no recess, for one thing. I swam in the lake and paddled around in a canoe which was fun. There were other sporting-type activities in which I participated, but I've never been very good at team sports and these were no exception. The only thing that marred my summer camp experience was when I dropped my flashlight into the lake. It was later recovered but the water had ruined it. My parents drove up at the end of the camp session, picked me up and took me back to East Peoria. Oh, joy.

Somewhere in this period, my sister was born. Since she was eight years younger than I, we didn't have too much to do with each other early on. Later I would babysit her when my parents went out, but I wasn't yet qualified to take care of babies. That was my mom's job. She took care of my brother and sister and me, plus she answered the phone and ran the home office for my dad's sales business. She also yelled at me a lot and let me know that she was disappointed in me for a variety of reasons.

We had a dog for awhile, another English Setter. My dad loved English Setters. Maybe because his mother had a plate hanging on her wall that was painted with a hunting scene featuring an English Setter with a bird in its mouth. I inherited that plate and it hangs on the wall in the hallway where I live now, but I don't have an English Setter. Instead, I have two cats. I keep them inside so they don't get run over by a car like the dog in East Peoria did. Like the previous English Setter we had, this one liked to run all day. As we found out later, he also liked to chase cars on the county road. This proved to be his undoing. I was charged with feeding him and bringing him in at night. That seems like a simple enough task except for the fact that he didn't want to come in at night. He didn't even want to come home for supper, really. I had to call and call and call to get him to come home, and when he did I had to grab him and drag him into the house for the night.

I saw a picture of myself in a Cub Scout uniform from that time, so I guess I was a Cub Scout. The only thing I remember about being a Cub Scout was that it was getting me ready to be a Boy Scout. That turned out to be a good thing, maybe the best thing that happened to me as a kid, but I didn't realize it then. It was just something else my parents thought I should be involved in. At the end of the Cub Scout experience I started to learned some fairly useful things like how to tie knots and make campfires and that sort of thing. That was good, I figured I might be able to use some of those skills someday.

We went to church in East Peoria, too. Every time we moved into a new neighborhood, my parents had to find the perfect church for the family. In East Peoria it was some sort of Community Church. Reverend Hurst was the Pastor and he had a kid my age names Steven. I liked Steven and on those occasions when my parents would have the Pastor and his wife over for dinner, Steven and I would create some sort of imaginary science-fiction universe to travel to while our parents played cards or something. That was fun and one of the few rare moments when I was rather happy there.

One fine school day, some people brought a bunch of band instruments into the classroom. We all got to try them out to see if we were interested in learning to play one. One of the guys handed me a trombone and showed me how to make it work. I was able to make a sound with it, which surprised everyone. Finally, there was something I might be able to do. I latched onto that trombone like a drowning man grabs a life-jacket. Here was something I could do, someplace I could fit in, a group I could belong to. It wasn't that I was all that interested in playing the trombone, it was a way I could pull myself up out of the abyss of isolation and belong to something. It was good. It was something I chose to do, one of the first very small steps I took to start taking control of my own life. I learned to play that trombone. I even played it in church. I learned a solo that I could play with the piano and I played it several times for the congregation. Life was getting better for me.

I was in a combined fifth and sixth grade class our last year in East Peoria. It was a good thing, too, since I spend a good part of the sixth grade in the hospital. That comes later, though, so you'll have to be patient until we come to that part of the story. I learned a lot of sixth grade stuff when I was supposed to be learning fifth grade stuff. It was pretty interesting getting two years worth of school for the effort of only one. I was a "C" student as a fifth-grader, mostly because I was distracted by all the more interesting stuff being taught on the sixth grade side of the room. I passed, though, and then we moved. We were going back to Peoria. This time we were buying a house in the suburbs. I guess selling lighting fixtures was working out for my dad. Me, I packed up my trombone and my Cub Scout awards and got ready to move on.