by Neil Robert Miller
neil@imaginenine.com
neilrm@slip.net

written - January 31st, 2001
privately posted - February 6th, 2001
prelude - August 24th, 2001
posted at this web-site - December 5th, 2001

Prelude:

Personal

The letter that follows, "Liking and Weeping", is a personal document, and I don't know of how much interest it would be to a general audience.

It was not originally written for this web-site, but was, rather, written for posting to persons who'd gone to my high school, circa 40 years ago.

Precursor

I've decided to include it here, as a kind of 'footnote' to the regular autobiography, as it was this experience that, at least in part, allowed me to, twenty years later, walk into a San Francisco public school, entirely untrained, uncredentialed, mostly unpaid, and unexperienced, and seamlessly set up and run for six years, a large, public high school program, as if I'd been doing it all my life. I guess in my own high school years, I'd gotten, sort of, an inkling of what I wanted, and even more, of what the possibilities are . . .

Memory

I'm not sure exactly what prompted me to think of this, and write it down in the last days of January, 2001 . . . I haven't seen these people in 40 years, and, except for a small flutter of e-mails in the last year or two, I have had almost no contact with any of them in decades, to this day, actually. No writings, no conversation, no pictures . . . I don't know quite what got into me . . . it spilled, seemingly almost just out of the blue . . . Maybe it was a sort of 'separation anxiety' regarding the Clintons leaving the White House, but with an odd, forty year skip, back in time . . .

The United Nations

I suppose I should mention that this was a small, liberal private boarding school, co-ed, which was uncommon at that time, and expensive, but with half the students there on scholarship (never mentioned, but an outstanding feature of the place), all nestled in New England's Berkshire mountains.

The school flew the UN flag, had been duly investigated by The McCarthy Committee in the Red Scare days, and the Director, Hans Maeder, had had a colorful history as a social-democrat, and an anti-Nazi student protester in the Germany of the 1930's, and later as a wartime refugee, fleeing through Holland, France, Sweden, and later Africa and the Pacific, writing articles as he went, about child development world-wide.

He'd maintained his old wartime friendships with persons who had later become high level northern European political leaders and diplomats, and was often scurrying down to New York to attend this or that UN function.

When he took us to West Berlin to stay with families for a month or so, we were given the key to the city by an old comrade of his, who was then the Berlin Mayor. And I remember the very tense, sealed bus rides through East Germany when the wall was still fresh; it seemed like some might have been gunning for some sort of politically useful 'incident', but it seemed that Hans was a past master at smoothly talking his way through heavily armed checkpoints.

At one point, we were told that all vehicular traffic through "the corridor" was being halted, and we'd have to return to West Germany. But when Hans emerged from the East German checkpoint shack, he very quietly mentioned to us that the soldier had said that it was orders, and that there was nothing he could do. The way Hans told it, he, the naturalized American, said to the soldier in their mutual German dialect, ' . . . you have more power than you know . . .' In the climate that seemed to be obtaining at that time, we didn't know if a wrong word could get someone shot, but the way Hans told it, his reply is what got us through.

Of Mice and Men

Anyway, for the previous ten years before I'd entered Han's school, all through the 1950s, I'd been the school creep, or at least felt that way, was always the littlest guy in the class, and so skinny I could scare people half to death, just by pulling in my stomach and lifting my shirt. I'd been left back twice, this was my fourth high school, and the previous one was an all boys prep school where I'd been extremely miserable.

At that earlier, all boys school, musta been around 1958 or '59, it had taken me about three quarters of a day, my first day there, to realize I needed, and was promptly transferred to, the only single person room in the dormitory.

I don't remember that much about it, but there was this one odd phenomenon that I do recollect . . .

. . . although I myself was, after that first day, basically left alone, 'no touch, no such', maybe I scared people a little bit, I don't know,

but anyway, it seemed that almost every day between classes, there was a parade of one or two or three hapless souls, who'd had a torn sheet of paper surreptitiously taped to their back with the words "I'm a moe", or just "moe" scrawled on it. I mean, every day . . . like a ritual . . . I couldn't figure out if it was a parade, or a charade, or what it was, but I do remember not knowing quite what to make of it; like so many things at that place, it just seemed entirely bizarre . . .

. . . and talk about bizarro, for some reason I'd gotten signed up with the school wrestling team (this should be rich, someone might've thought), and, being one of only two featherweights (the 120 lb class) on the team, I had to wrestle junior varsity, and my waif-like eighty-seven pound bruising hulk had to go toe to toe with the likes of Andover, and Exeter, and the other upstate prep schools. I did try to develop some ability to break, or slide, out of powerful holds, but really, the betting was basically how many seconds it would take to pin me flat, sometimes counted in just one digit . . . to the ridiculing shrieks of the girls in the stands . . .

I remember one time, a teacher stopped me in the hall, dismally noticed my shirttail hanging out, my longish disheveled hair, my perhaps vaguely defiant demeanor, and, clucking his tounge, sadly told me I'd never make a prep school boy. I thought to myself ' . . . does anyone give you an 'A' for that . . . ?'

As it turned out, the squirrels were my best friends. They made their way from the beautiful forest just beyond, up the fire escape to my windowsill and desk every day as I studied (I was supposed to be reading Milton and Shakespere, but I was actually reading The National Guardian, Bill Buckley, and I.F. Stone). The squirrels would come through the magic window, right there in front of me, retrieving the nuts that I always left out for them.

Sometimes, if I kept very very very still, they would crack them open and chomp them down right there on my desk; staring at me intensly, while sitting up and turning the nuts around with their little paws, they were so cute I could hardly believe it . . .

And I loved seeing them again on the long sojourns alone through the woods that I often took, during my ever so frequent, and very much welcome suspensions . . . and to this day, when I see squirrels close up, I sometimes get confused, and could swear they remember me . . .

When I was down in the city, people used to marvel that I was Holden Caulfield in the flesh, but I felt more like "The Loneliness of The Long Distance Runner".

From Holden Caulfield to James Bond . . . well, sort of . . .

But everything changed on day one of the tenth grade, as just below.

I mean, to be frank, it didn't really become all roses . . . there were a lot of difficult things, and not everyone had the sort of cherished experience that I had . . . I mean, it was, high school, and this is, America . . .

But for one of the very very few times in my life, well, I guess, I got lucky . . .

. . . well, maybe it wasn't entirely luck. My dad had, for the coming year, registered me in a Connecticut military academy, oh boy! in his latest attempt to finally make a man out of me, but after having already spent a year and a half at prep school, I had decided that I would never again voluntarily put myself in an all male situation.

I did have to go on a 'sit down' strike at home for days, before my dad finally relented, and drove us, just the two of us, like in a Pete Seeger song, past Tarrytown, past Connecticut, along the Housatanic River, and on up to Massachusetts, for an interview . . . he noticed the UN flag waving in the breeze high on the flagpole, got a sense of the Director's background, and a glance at some of the, um, students, and, um . . . smiled, and well, it was a done deal . . .

Diamonds and Pearls

Well, for me, up in Massachusettes in those next few years, well, being respected for my political awareness, being liked by girls . . . oh god . . . rubbing shoulders day and night with known people who I liked, and more than liked, who I liked a lot lot . . . and who even, well, sometimes anyway, who even liked me back . . . well, I guess it was what I'd always dreamed of . . . to this day, really . . . and finally got then, for just a brief, magical, three year moment . . .

And in the world at large, as well as in my mind's eye . . . China! was triumphant and Martin King was marching in the hills . . . McCarthyism was fading fast . . . CNVA was camping out on our school soccer field, on their way to being arrested for boarding nuclear submarines in protest . . . The Soviet Union was Rocketing into Orbit, and Africa was on the Rise . . . and, perhaps most of all . . . Fidel, and Che, and Sukarno, and Lumumba, and Nkrumah, and even little Anam (Vietnam), the mouse that roared, were all, seemingly in unison, facing down the big banks, and their heavy artillery, and on the grand scale, no less . . . all well known to me at the time . . . and Malcolm was explaining just like ringing a bell . . . the whole world seemed to be waking up, and at the highest level, finally . . .

. . . It was 1960, and my eyes were wide open in wonder . . .

. . . oh yes . . . and it probably didn't hurt that John Kennedy was elected president just six weeks into my first year.

"Give a young man a chance," my Florida aunt Freida had said . . .

I was fifteen years old.