DAVE'S ORIGIN STORY -- Episode 4

Dave and John — Dave and Jane

Dave and John

The only photos I have of John and me from childhood.

Is it possible we were playing marbles together?

John came home from Red Devils football practice and Dad came out with his camera and said to me, “Get in there with him.” I wanted to disappear. Or make them disappear.

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After school one late winter afternoon when I was in second grade and John in sixth, the Saint Cecilia Parochial School kids were walking home down the hill. Light had almost gone from the sky and the sounds of laughter and after-school talk carried on the crisp clear air. When John called “Hey, Dave!” from behind me and up the hill, I turned around with some hope and the snowball he threw hit me square in the face. He and his friends laughed.

When he was an adult, Mom asked him why he had been “such a hateful kid” and he said that when he was little, Dad had grabbed him by the arm and forced him to kneel on kernels of hard harvest corn and “You didn’t save me.”

In a heated moment, she once said to him, “I prayed to God every night for three years to give me a child and he gave me you, you rotten son of a bitch.”

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Dave and Jane

I’ll let my sophomore autobiography help.

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I was five and Jane was nearly four when we slipped out of the yard and went down the alley to the garbage dump next to the coal mine. We found two teddy bears, eyeless and rancid, and we brought them home. Mom said we couldn’t keep them. We pleaded. She said no way in hell. We begged. She said who knows what kind of disease they might be carrying. We cried. And at last she said oh boy and she soaked the teddy bears in Lysol and Clorox and let them dry all afternoon on the roof of one of the shanties in the back yard.

They were ours for a long time.

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