Chapter 1

The ‘Public School Journey’ for Roni and Me

6

Being six and the last summer before Roni and me (Benjamin) started school, I was ready for some young child’s fun in the sun. Golly, I loved the summer. It is 1956, and living on a dairy having 100 milk cows and 200 acres gives Roni and me plenty of room to roam and discover our small two-brain worlds. My dad is a research chemist for a chemical company, and Roni’s dad is a pharmacist. Roni is my best friend. We made forts in the seany beans weeds in certain parts of the grazing pastures for the cows, but somehow the wasps seemed to find them, and the next day when we returned, we were at war with yellow jackets and sometimes bumblebees whose painful stings hurt longer. I cannot count the number of times we got stung. We would eventually win, though, because we would attack then retreat to return another time or day.

Puppy died about ten years later of foot root that she got when she cut her right front paw, and I did not notice. Before getting her to the vet, she died of blood poisoning. Still, we always came back because we made the fort.

Losing her was like losing a brother. I had three brothers. The oldest was Danny, then Tony and Ted. Roni and I cried for days with me. The animals were always fun because milk cows are generally docile except when they have a calf. Dad consistently named all the cows, and my older brother, Danny, and I could remember all their names. One of the cows was called ‘Messy Bessie’ because she had cut her udder teat on a barbed-wire fence. That mangled teat in the back had a large opening which caused Mr. Thorten and Mr. Johnson to be careful when milking her.

After you washed her utter, she would immediately start squirting milk. Most of her milk would be lost from that udder’s teat if she did not have the pneumatic milker on her. The milk then traveled through sanitized stainless-steel piping and glass piping that was sterilized after each milking. It was fun watching the milk go through the glass, and it ended up in a stainless-steel vat that had a paddle in it to keep the milk circulating all the time. The vat was refrigerated. Roni and I were always in the pit where Mr. Thorten and Mr. Johnson were and getting in their way, but it was fun and exciting to be down there. Once, I got too close to one of the meaner cows being milked, and she knocked me out from a back leg kick. I woke up in the house with Mom, worried frantically about me. She worried because she had had a half-brother die of ‘lock-jaw’ after being gored by a bull on my grandmothers’ dairy. Roni was there also. Roni smiled when I opened my eyes.

It was raining now, so Roni and I played cards at her house. Mr. Mathews had immigrated to the U.S. in 1950. After all the paperwork had been finished, the family followed from India. They still had to do more stuff, but I did not know what they talked about, so I listened. Roni was born a month after me in July of 1950. This rain was a gully washer. We listened to the thunder and shook when the lightning flashed, and the loud noise shattered the silence. We did not care much be we had plans for when it quit. I spent the night at Roni’s house after Roni had asked the parents if I could stay.

I called and asked if I could. We were rural neighbors, so we all had a party phone line, and I called my parents, and they said it was OK. The following day after eating breakfast, we walked and ran to the gully on my dad’s cow pasture to catch crawfish. These things were funny-looking. They looked like insects but lived in the water and mud.

Sometimes we would catch a mother with many eggs beneath her tail. I had to ask my parents about this. I just did not understand these crawfish. They also had pinchers, like scorpions, but they did not have stingers. The rain brought out all kinds of living things like what is mentioned in the Bible. The ones that bothered Roni were snakes, but spiders bothered me more. I was taller and always seemed to get their webs caught in my hair with those ugly banana spiders crawling around on my head. The snakes were flushed out of their homes because of the rain were copperheads, coral snakes, and cottonmouth water moccasins. We had rattlesnakes too, but they only showed up when it got dry, or we went further inland to desert areas.

This was the last summer we were free to do whatever we wanted until school started. I had to go to vacation Bible school. I never could figure out why they called it a ‘vacation.’ It was studying what was in the Bible. I did not read yet…well, not very good. I did not understand who Jesus was. Jesus’s name was used many times. My mother took my brothers and me to a neighboring town because that was the only Lutheran church in our area. The parents of Roni would not allow Roni to come because they believed in a different religion. This was all very confusing to both of us. We just did not understand. I shared some of what I learned with Roni, but this caused problems with the parents, so I stopped.

a.        Public Education’s Middle School (Pubescent changes to Roni and Benjamin’s bodies)

When Roni and I completed five years in school, we were placed in another school called’ middle school.’ It just meant we were placed in a school with older students. This sometimes caused a problem for Roni. The older students picked on Roni, and I was the one that ended up in the fights because Roni was my ‘best friend,’ and I was a little bigger, so I tried to help Roni’s defense. Well, I got beat up a lot. Most of the bullies had failed one or two grades and were much older and taller than anyone else. So, their behavior taught them how not to be caught, so I got beaten up and got a spanking from my mother or dad when I got home for fighting. I did not care. Roni was my best friend, and I simply would not stand by and do anything. After about a half of a year of being beaten up, I started getting the better of the bullies, and then they got punished. I felt like I had accomplished a lot when they got whacked just like me. Roni tried to get me to leave it alone because, as Roni would say, ‘I can take care of this.’ Roni could not, so I kept fighting and getting spanked twice. Again, I did not care. Roni was my best friend.

Roni and I were good students, and as a result, we were recognized in the school as excellent students and deserved to be listened to by the teachers and adults. We finally had it going our way in the seventh grade. We participated in all the sports, too. Baseball was one with the most fun. I guess learning how to bat served both of us very well. We concluded that if we bent our knees, took the bat back, and laid it flat, we could hit the pitchers’ fast ball’ using their baseball speed and our bat contact with the baseball got us on base. Most of the time, we got on base and scored runs. Soccer was not played in the United States at that time, so we did not play that sport, but if it had been available, we would have played that, too, because we liked to run. So, track season was a good time of the year. It was close to the end of the year, and we got to run a lot. We had our share of winning and losing, gained some friends when we participated in other school-sponsored track meets, and lost some friends because we beat most of the athletes who ran against us. This, I guess, was the ‘whole idea’ about sports: you win some and lose some, so just do your best.

The eighth-grade school was mixed with my and Roni’s home chores. I spent a lot of time working on the dairy and even got kicked and knocked out by one of the cows while using the pneumatic milking hoses. It was a good thing Mr. Johnson (my father’s hired hand) was there because he picked me up, and the milking paused until I gained consciousness again. As a result, I did not want to be in the milking pit anymore, so I was tasked with getting the cows to the milking barn and taking care of the new calves.

Taking care of the calves became depressing after one of the calves died. My ignorance probably caused that calf to die because the calf got the scours. I started diluting the milk with water in the milk bottles, and instead of helping, the calf got so weak it could not walk. I should have spoken with Mr. Johnson or my father first, but I did not, and the calf I named ‘Fella’ died. I told Roni about this, and Roni cried, too.

Some of the pasture’s barbed wire fencing was broken down because of my uncle’s bulls trying to get into where the milk cows were pastured. Those Brahma bulls did not know that the cows were pastured with a ‘big’ dairy Holstein bull, and he knocked them on their behinds as soon as they got through the fence. His name was ‘Bull,’ and he was gentle with Roni and me but not with those other bulls. When Roni and I got older, we learned why he did not like the other bulls.

The fences had to be fixed after the incidents with the bulls, so Mr. Johnson rode in the old Ford pickup truck to Mr. Valselka’s farm because he sold cedar fence posts. Mr. Johnson and Mr. Valeska were speaking about the cost of the posts, so I climbed up on the stacked cedar posts. I no sooner had gotten up there when I yelled that a bee had bitten me. Mr. Johnson ran to me, and Roni was right next to him, looking frightened while holding my stung hand.

Well, Mr. Johnson looked in the stake of posts and saw a ‘rattlesnake’ wiggling away. I guess the snake was warming itself by the sun, and I disturbed him. Mr. Johnson immediately grabbed me, told Roni to get in the truck, and headed toward the only hospital in our area. That was in Alvin. He told Roni to put his belt around my arm above the bicep and ensure it was tight so the poison would not circulate in my bloodstream. Roni did this, but it hurt, and my arm beyond the belt turned blue then white. After driving very fast and picking up some police along the way for speeding, we arrived at the hospital. The police were great and told Mr. Johnson to take care of that boy. The hospital did, and I was in there for one day. Boy, was that a lesson you do not typically get taught.

That incident was followed by Roni stepping on a nail and must get a shot for tetanus. It seems like living on a dairy farm was a whole life learning experience. Roni and I loved it.

b.           Public Education’s High School (Bullies)

Eighth-grade graduation was something that pupils must experience and do not understand why. Young students come to know that graduation is from the twelfth grade but for some reason, the school that Roni and I attended made the pupils attend this “eighth-grade graduation.”

Football, football, and more football were all I could think of because it was not baseball or track season. I got hurt in football when I was punting the football. A heavy tackle from the other team named Pat Maha hit me below the left knee and hyper-extended it badly. It took a long time to get over that injury. So, there was no more football, football, football. There was band, track, and baseball. Besides, Roni was not interested in football, and playing that game took me away from my best friend.

The years came and went, but something was happening to both Roni and I’s bodies. The adults kept giving it a name. It was something like this: ‘puberty.’ Roni and I had funny things happening to our bodies and minds. I did not know why hair was growing in places on me, nor did Roni. My voice changed and sounded deeper, but Roni’s did not change.

The junior/senior prom was coming, and I understood that my best friend would be there with me, but Roni would not go. I did not understand why. We were the same people. We still had pissing contests in the winter snow to see could pee the farthest without even thinking about it. Now, fast-forwarding to my senior year, and this time I knew why Roni did not want to go. For myself, Roni had been my best friend and one of the guys. However, that was not the case now; I wanted my best friend to go to the junior/senior prom because she was a girl and my best friend. Roni or Veronica Mathew was her name, and she never thought of herself as a girl or a woman. She just wanted to be one of the guys. When we were growing up, this was not an option. So, being a pest, I persuaded her to go in a dress. She would only wear pants. She later told me that she would never do that again.

For the rest of that year, Veronica and I remained best friends. The end of my senior year in high school was filled with good times and bad times. I had managed to get a band scholarship and an academic scholarship for good grades, which paid for most of my university costs. At the same time, Veronica landed a ‘Full Scholarship’ for academic excellence to an all-women’s university 500 miles from where I was going to attend university. This presented both of us with a problem. I wanted to be near my best friend, who was fast becoming someone I thought of as a girlfriend. Veronica did not like this idea but played along with it for what she said later was for “appearances sake.”