Clubius Incarnate: Recent Episodes
Cooper Zale
An imagined “memoir”, with fictional details that I believe are consistent with what really happened, of my life as a young child, growing up in the late 1950s in the progressive university town of Ann Arbor Michigan in the U.S. Midwest. My challenge is to try to capture the emerging world of a precocious three to five-year-old kid and his interactions with his peers and the adult world. The story starts just before my third birthday, in April of 1958, when I am just beginning to really talk.
Chapter 26 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. In this chapter, dad has a bad day after having a “fight” with mom about grapefruit juice. But at bedtime he still sings the usual three songs to my brother and I, tonight including “The Whiffenpoof Song”, which brings out the emotions he usually doesn’t share. I ponder the issues between grownup men and women, along with the issues between my dad and mom in particular.
Chapter 25 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. In this chapter, after that bad day at the “nursery school”, mom and dad pony up the precious funds to send me to Towsley Play School, and it works out much better for me. The place is bigger, the other kids are more fun, and their array of toys is spectacular!
Chapter 24 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. In this chapter, it’s my first day in this strange new place called “nursery school”, where my mom hopes I will have a good time playing with the other kids and can prepare for starting kindergarten next fall.
Chapter 23 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. In this chapter, I am impatient and get mad at my mom for not tying my shoe laces, and use a swear word in my frustration. Then my dad “swats” me on my bottom, and I try to process the fact that he “spanked” me, something I cannot recall ever happening to me before, and something with a whole range of problematic implications to my rules of engagement with the grownups in my life, and a lasting remembrance going forward, despite what my dad said.
Chapter 22 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. In this chapter, my mom decides I’m old enough to run free in the park across the street from our house, as long as she is sitting in the middle of the park and can see me off in the distance, the next step in my development as a “free range” kid. I explore every venue of the place and interact with all the other kids who are playing there and report on our main topics of conversation among us kids, including sports, space, war, mysteries, “cooties” and other issues and rules of engagement between girls and boys.
Heads up that I discuss "private parts" and what people do with them!
Chapter 21 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. In this chapter, relieved it’s not a rainy day, we celebrate my 4th birthday in Almendinger Park. Some of my mom’s behavior towards me is beginning to push my buttons. But I have a great day pretending with Molly and the other kids at my party as we journey to the Moon and later Mars, where we must be friendly with ugly Martians to protect the Earth from invasion. Molly has another fall off the merry-go-round but we manage to keep it under wraps.
Chapter 20 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. In this chapter, that magical first day of spring that feels different after a long winter. I feel it, and it energizes me, and my family. I am drawn to the backyard and that special spruce tree and somehow get Molly to join me for a very close encounter of a different sort than we’re used to.
Chapter 19 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. In this chapter, I'm hanging out with other neighborhood kids at my best friend Molly’s 4th birthday party, in her parents’ split level house with all the kids round the table in the dining room and all the grownups up in the living room. Conversation in both circles turns to the news of the day, and this older kid Ricky brings up the issue of “nucular” (nuclear) bombs, “radiation” and “Commies”, and the rest of us kids try to process our fears.
Chapter 18 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. In this chapter, my recollections of the party on Christmas eve with my grandma and grandpa putting on a bit of a show and my dad lending his voice (he always loved to sing). Then Christmas morning with my “Aunt Pat” (I thought that was her name, I didn’t understand the concept of having an “aunt” yet), providing a buffer and running commentary for me vis a vis the “grownups”, which though she sometimes seemed like one of them, I knew she was more like me only older. It all culminates in me opening my presents, my most favorite thing in the world to do.
Chapter 17 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. I am reintroduced to my grandparents, my “Aunt Pat”, and their very interesting house on Westwood Court in Binghamton New York.
Chapter 16 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. My mom and dad take me and my baby brother on an overnight train to visit my grandparents in Binghamton New York, which is my first time ever riding on a train, and doubly exciting because we have a small sleeping compartment.
Chapter 15 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. I discover a show on television that I really like to watch and my mom teaches me how to tell time well enough to figure out when it is on every morning. The show includes my favorite cartoon that features yet another young main character named “Tom”, who in this case has this amazing ability to transform himself into whatever he needs in the moment to solve his problems and continue with his adventures.
Chapter 14 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. On a fall day, I am invited to go with Molly and her parents to the Dexter Cider Mill for wonderful cider and donuts and Molly and I do our imagination play in the car and in the middle of the stream by the Mill. Along the way words kids and adults should and shouldn’t say are discussed and I get a sense of Molly’s dad and mom and their family dynamic.
Chapter 13 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. My dad reads to me every night before bed, and draws from a number of adventure stories featuring adventuresome boys like Treasure Island, and more recently our just finished Tom Sawyer. This brings up the dilemma of what to read next, and Dad remembers the Tom Swift books I got for a birthday present, and he lets me pick out one of them out to read.
Chapter 12 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. My dad manages to get a small used black and white television, and a new form of electronic media, called by some the “boob tube”, enters our household.
Chapter 11 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. My mom and dad take me to a grownup party across the street at Molly’s house one evening, and in that milieu I see my mom in action, mixing it up with a couple of the male friends of my dad’s. Also my various names, proper or nick, become an issue that my mom decides needs to be resolved.
Chapter 10 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. That baby my mom and dad kept talking about finally came out of my mom somehow, but I balk at going to the hospital and instead play at Molly’s house awaiting this event that is way beyond my comprehension. My mom and dad finally return from the hospital bearing that tiny human being that they call “David” who they tell me is my “brother”. His arrival as a new member of our little family causes unexpressed concerns on my part, but also the beginnings of a possible connection as well.
Chapter 9 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. At Molly’s suggestion we hide in the spruce tree in our backyard where we can see out but nobody can see us. It seems like the perfect secret hiding place for us away from all the crazy world of the grownups and the baby in my mom’s tummy that is about to come out.
Chapter 8 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. I join my dad who drives our car on the roads of Ann Arbor to the gravel pit, where he fills two trash cans with dirt for my dirt pile in our backyard. On the way I learn about traffic lights and fences, and after we get home I get to work with my new dirt.
Chapter 6 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. A baseball game on the radio down in the basement between the Detroit Tigers and the New York Yankees draws my mom and dad into conversation about loyalties and what they do and do not have in common, and puts me “at the plate” and on the spot to show off my batting skills with plastic bat and wiffle ball. My mom brags about her baseball prowess and actually shows off some of her alleged skill by snagging a line drive.
Chapter 6 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. Molly and I return from our tricycle adventure with dad and the big storm at the stadium to her very complicated house to have cocoa with her mom and my dad. Becoming bored with the adult conversation, she and I head upstairs to her wonderful attic room to do some “pretend” play, and defend the fort from the approaching enemy cars until calamity strikes us.
Chapter 5 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. Dad takes Molly and me on an adventure on our tricycles to the Michigan Stadium, where we have to shelter from a fast moving thunderstorm.
Chapter 4 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. Mom is relieved that it isn't going to rain so we can have my party in the park. Molly and I have new experiences on the merry-go-round. And finally I open my presents and figure out the mystery of that tricycle in the attic.
Chapter 3 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. Later that rainy day, I do another version of my pirate and goodguy story in the larger pretend geography of the basement, and dad tells me more about what he did in the war.
Chapter 2 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. On a rainy morning, I explore all the different places and spaces inside our house and make a discovery in a place I had never been in before.
Chapter 1 of my autobiographical novel based on my life from age 3 to age 5, beginning just prior to my 3rd birthday in 1958 and continuing to just before going to elementary school in the fall of 1960. In the days before my 3rd birthday I finally decided to start really talking.
The introduction to my autobiographical novel of growing up from ages 3 to 5 in the late 1950s in a Midwest college town, giving you some context of my life and addressing the challenge of telling a story from the point of view of such a young (though precocious) person.