Circa ~April first nineteen hundred and seventy seven

a hybridization of mostly fiction with fact sprinkled in for good measure, and by the way the concluding poem true courtesy this egg man.

I will invite those who chance upon this itty bitty teensy weensy byte size morsel to deduce whether the confession fiction or nonfiction.

NO April first joke

which learned tidbit immediately found me woke.

The scene - The family room at 324 Level Road
Collegeville, Pennsylvania, 19473.

Participants: 1. Yours truly - a senior at Methacton High School, who possibly dreamt up the following vignette while nestling, and settling, and vetting anxiety with his Tuxedo cat named Corbin (who graduated first in class), and 2. a quadragenarian, that my enemies, friend(s) and frenemies (plus friends, Romans, and countrymen) would immediately understand to be the father and around Halloween time the holy ghost.

While sitting in his easy chair watching television and completing a crossword puzzle, quite possibly the New York Times - easy as Chevrolet and apple pie, he verbally ejaculated as if we shared intimate talks on a regular basis that a baby might be on the way without elaborating on this non-sequitur blurted out of the blue as if we happened to be within the thick of a confidential conversation.

I uttered "ten years to late" after father rather casually informed me that mother got diagnosed with an ectopic pregnancy, thus my wish for a little brother aborted. When as a snotty nosed little kid of approximately eight years old, the fantastical thought of being an older "big" brother found me closest to seventh heaven as an atheist boy could approach versus (then present tense of this account) being a straight A honor student ready to graduate and exit abysmal household from chronic cynicism courtesy father, and mother relentlessly yapping away or "Hock me a chainik" (or more commonly used in the negative, "hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik") constitutes a Yiddish idiom that literally means "don't knock/bang on my teakettle" cause NOT getting a haircut nor combing prized brunette dreaded locks of mine not part and parcel of my hygiene, but more apropos for a foo fighting beastie boy, or the Cultural Misnomer when In the 1930s, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus exhibited women from the Sara tribe in the Central African Republic as "Ubangi Savages," which name created by a press agent for its "exotic" sound rather than representing a specific ethnic group's self-identifier, and derogatory sounding name wantonly hurled in my direction, when her mood foul as a rotten egg, cuz when a third grader I kept a spoiled egg in my desk all year, and that would be another story.

Anyway, truth be told the revelation that mother became pregnant at the then advanced age of about forty two found me envious of an unborn fourth Harris heir or heiress because after child number three, she seemed quite nonchalant and indifferent about carrying the unspoken duties of women tending to children nearly fifty years ago, although father did help her overcome weakness with mathematics, but boy oh boy, she sure did how to multiply! ha!

The last fantasy incorporated playing by decree the role of pseudo father, when shutter-flying out the family nest tantalized me about the master of my domain. True college/university campus life not quite fending for myself, but the sheer excitement of co-existing outside the confines of a stodgy father and mother, who never really seemed the least bit interested in their then sole son reciprocating, whereby very little inquiries made about the life and hard times of either parent. Snippets of their earlier life, liberty and questionable happiness voluntarily dribbled out of their mouths, but very little feedback got buzzed, generated, nor queried from yours truly, who usually yawned hoping that non-verbal cue would change the topic.

Fortunate for me, a small number of classmates and/or under class students took a liking to this contemplative, furtive, and intuitive introverted lad, whose boyish good lucks and shy demeanor belied his actual chronological orbitz around mister sun. Though not necessarily the leader of the pack unconditional acceptable of being a grammarian, latitudinarian, non-establishmentarian Unitarian boosted my ego, and encouraged me (an undersized skinny youth) to kibitz with a madding crowd of similarly minded young adults.

Unlike the majority of teens eager to light up and down a shot of drink, I followed the quirky motto the smoker I am, the drinker I get (which makes much more sense when being analogous to a stoned temple pilot or drunk as a black and white strunk (a German noun meaning a stalk, stem, or stump often referring to the woody base of plants like cabbage, or a tree stump, and can be used as a surname, likely describing a short/stout person or a person living near a stump, and also acts as the past participle of "stink" in English (e.g., "it stunk") skunk.

As iterated earlier, the absence of an organized religion oddly enough both parents got reared within a liberal Jewish household, and ofttimes lapsed into Yiddish words, which above phrase utilized a string of alien sounding utterances that sounded to me like hock me a Chinook, a puzzlement indeed to no end until just recently I sought out Google to clarify my gross pronunciation and spelling, absolute zero tolerance to steep energy and time learning Hebrew and the sheer expenditure of mental effort to the main Jewish scripture regarding the Tanakh (or Hebrew Bible), an acronym for its three sections: Torah (Law/Instruction), Nevi'im (Prophets), and Ketuvim (Writings) consisting of 24 books containing foundational religious, historical, and ethical texts, including the Five Books of Moses, often referred to simply as the Torah.

Instead, I attended Young Life (a Christian based national organization) that seemed tolerable and accommodating to a person of my ilk, and even spent a week at Camp Saranac after graduating high school as a getaway from a stagnant home-life, but of course the core essence opposed about becoming reborn would earn me a stigma biased against any secular humanist like myself, whose quite liberal opinions generally explained why yours truly kept his thoughts to himself, and only sought inclusion in an effort to socialize, cause being hashtagged, named, and voted as the quietest kid only triggered bottled up anger clamoring to experience freedom (analogous to a genie in a bottle itching to be liberated) at sometime in the future and would burst forth rivaling the force of Mount Krakatoa.

As fate decreed, mother expelled the inchoate clump of tissue, which necessitated a visit to the gynecologist mainly to monitor the swollen fallopian tube (in a female mammal) either of a pair of tubes along which eggs travel from the ovaries to the uterus. All kidding aside an evolving embryo then fetus other then within the uterus could be deadly if left unattended, thus a quiet riot of utter delight exhaling a sigh of relief, that no quasi role of tending to a baby anywhere near in sight, but decades into the future would witness the voluntary procreative powers of being fruitful and multiplying.

Spoiler alert finally revealed. The above rambling Mishegas (or mishegoss, mishugas) is a Yiddish word meaning craziness, senseless behavior, insanity, or nonsense actually a hybrid of both truth and falsehood.

Finis

Post script: Now that fetid odor emanating from a rotten egg kept in my roll-top desk composted into a poem.

rotten egg kept in desk

grade school Henry Kline Boyer

feared the bagged pestilence

scary, maggoty

fourth grade

Mister Stout

Missus Wells

or Missus Shaner

Missus Rittenhouse

Miss Rinderle after marriage
took the name Missus Gay

teachers pet

I haint never a teacher's pet

master procrastinator

almost the entire school year

sulfurous smell

clouds of noxious odor clod

buried deep within bowel of desk

outlier always felt like a fifth wheel

stranded from classmates estranged

a walker from Lantern Lane

apple crisp school lunch fetid egg

elementary school flash back

highlights from grade school

passed = got promoted
by the skin of my teeth

nearly flunked

held back loomed large behind bars

never opened desk all the way

prefigured yucky egg would swallow me

an egg goo eyes zing debacle

graduation - sixth grade

took classmates by storm =
played piano like a maestro

then Miss Santillo - chorus

Mister Curly grades

putrid all the while away from desk

sinister glob that happened
to egg be former albumin

yolk and albumin bled
into one moldy mass eggs.