Chapter 1, Early in Life
My first encounter with a church was the Congregational Church in Boston, Massachusetts. It was a few blocks away from the apartment that my mother and I shared in that city. It was the fall of 1954. I was nine years old and had just come to live with her full-time. Prior to then, she had boarded me out with families in the Boston area and would come to get me to spend weekends with her. They didn't have day-care centers in those days, and all her relatives lived in towns outside Boston that required a subway and train ride to get to. She never drove or owned a car.
My mother had divorced my dad when I was around two. This action that no doubt saved her sanity also got her excommunicated from the Catholic Church that she had been raised in. It was ironic. Here she was a single mom in a day and time when society in general frowned upon single moms and her church disowned her, too. She didn't go to the church she sent me to. I suppose she felt alienated from organized religion, but apparently felt that I should attend Sunday school. I went there for a couple of months, and then, without any warning, she had a massive stroke and died the week before Christmas.
I went to Denver to live with my mom's sister and her husband when tragedy struck again. My father, who had been living in Florida, found out that my mother had died and petitioned the Massachusetts courts for custody of me. He won. My father, and his new wife, a food server, were both alcoholics and bragged to their friends about the Social Security survivor's check that came with me that paid their rent each month. My stepmother died about eight years later in her late thirties of cirrhosis of the liver. They moved frequently, and I often attended three or four schools in a year. I endured a considerable amount of physical and mental abuse from the two of them, but I was never in one school long enough for teachers to notice. During the years I lived with them, neither ever expressed the slightest interest in any religion or spirituality.
I mention all of this not to elicit sympathy, but to give you, the reader, some idea of what may or may not have influenced my thinking on the subject of spirituality early in life when I was, like all of us, more impressionable. I believe that nothing in our lives of any significance takes place by chance. My challenging childhood gave me a lot of strength that I've been able to tap into whenever I've needed to do so in life. I've also come to realize that I was no doubt balancing some Karma too. Nothing of any real significance happens in this world by accident, as Einstein and many other great minds have noted.
"God does not play dice with the universe." Albert Einstein (Bite-Size Einstein: Quotations on Just About Everything From the Greatest Mind of the Twentieth Century, compiled by Jerry Maher and Dan P. Holms, St. Martin's Press, 1996, P.56)
As a young child, the value systems I received were all instilled in me by my mother and her relatives. My mom was very close to her Swedish aunt, and she and I spent many weekends with her and her family. Were they churchgoers? No, actually very few of them were. They were, however, a fairly close family, that to this day, care about and for the most part, know how to love one another. They imparted the values to me that were commonly passed on to children of my day by the many different ethnic cultures that came to America from Europe at the turn of the last century.
To escape the clutches of my abusive parents I joined the Air Force at seventeen, which was very good for me. I served four years, worked on jet fighters, got a high school equivalency diploma and was honorably discharged as a sergeant during the Vietnam War. After leaving the Air Force in the mid 60s, I came back to the West Coast area of Florida, my favorite part of Florida.
My first job after the Air Force was with Dictaphone Corporation as a service representative. With that job came a priceless education on how society really functions in the workplace. In those days, Dictaphone had a corner on the dictation market, and I went into hospitals, police stations, insurance companies, courts and multitudes of other businesses daily, for a half-a-dozen years. I witnessed things such as one doctor chewing out another for misdiagnosing a patient, who as a result of the misdiagnosis was now lying on an autopsy table. I saw a seemingly mild-mannered psychiatrist have a temper tantrum when the patients had left his office. I saw an insurance company scurry to have its agents cancel property insurance as fast as its people could dial the phone when riots enveloped after the death of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.. I saw that same insurance company pay its insurance adjusters bonuses for paying out the least in claims, and then overheard the conversations as the adjusters made "deals" that short-changed the insured. That job showed me the good and the bad about how people really acted in their workplaces.
I next worked twelve years at a job that showed me how people acted and treated each other in their homes. I worked for Sears selling installed home-improvement products and went into thousands of homes. The homes I visited made up a cross-section of society. I remember one Saturday morning giving a fence estimate to a millionaire who owned a TV and several radio stations. He was friendly and unpretentious, but seemed lonely and unhappy. His home was huge and musty-smelling, and felt as though there wasn't any love in it. I went from his mansion, only a few miles away, to a happy home filled with love. It was an African-American family that were so poor that as I was sitting on their couch, I could literally see the ground through the large cracks in their floor. I learned countless lessons about life, people, and society in general in those two jobs that spanned twenty years.
Later in life, by attending college evenings, I eventually earned a bachelor's degree and spent many years assisting people with behavioral disabilities.
During those first two jobs after leaving the air force, I was married and divorced. My dysfunctional childhood from the age of ten on left me clueless about how to give or receive love, or how relationships were supposed to work. To say I lacked role models is a huge understatement.
Because of the nature of many things I have discovered about spirituality, that I will be talking about in the rest of the book, I anticipated that you would want to know about my background. I've kept it brief and think you will realize that I did not come from a religious or spiritual background.