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Chapter 4
The Family Settles in the South

When it was time for me to enter the 8th grade my dad retired from the Air Force as a Master Sergeant. We decided to move back to Louisiana where our relatives lived. The United States was finally pulling out of Vietnam and it looked as though the war would end soon. We moved in with my dad's parents while his Brother Ury, who was a general contractor, built our home. Though I can honestly say I’m now long over it, for many years I held a grudge against My Uncle Ury for an event that happened while building our home. Jay and I and my cousin Dickey were most of the manual labor Ury used on a day to day basis. He'd show us how to do something, and we'd go off and do it. When the day came to install the fiberglass wall insulation, he showed us how to staple it in, but, for some reason, decided NOT to tell us about comfort precautions we should take. It was the middle of a hot summer, and we were all shirtless, and in shorts. We didn't know any better. We unrolled the fiberglass insulation over our heads and down our backs as we stapled it in place. Uncle Ury supervised, but never cautioned us. About 3 hours into this job, we suddenly began feeling the discomfort as the fiberglass shards began to work their way into our skin. Within another hour the three of us were all in such pain that we wanted to stop working, Dickey was so mad that he walked off the worksite and walked the two miles back to my grandparent’s home. We soon followed. Nothing would make it go away. When we got home, we took turns soaking in grandma's huge claw-footed bathtub, in cold water, trying to float in the water because every time we touched the sides of the tub the pain increased. Uncle Ury laughed. He knew it wasn’t permanent, he thought it was funny. I still vividly remember that.

My first day at school in Louisiana was a memorable experience. I'd never participated in organized sports before and it seemed to be a popular thing here in my new school. My first friend that I met there was named Eraste. He tossed me a football and told me to "pass" it back to him. I had no idea how to do this, but I threw it all the same. Eraste dove for the ball and in the process got a compound fracture on his left arm. My stomach still lurches when I remember the sound his arm made as he hit the ground. We had to support his broken arm flat on a school book because the bones had been broken in 2 places. Somehow, through all of this, we still remained friends. This was my great introduction to life in Louisiana.

I’m very proud to be able to say that I’ve always told the truth; to this day I find it better to own up and tell the truth than to fabricate a lie. You ALWAYS know what you've said this way. If you lie, you have to remember what story you fabricated, and you could get caught in that lie.

A few days into the school year, my cousin Gus picked a fight with me. I had always been shy and submissive enough to avoid fights whenever possible, with the one exception being the clover patch incident in Arkansas. Gus was relentlessly teasing me about something. I think it was the way I walked, or my glasses, and finally, deciding that he was higher in the pecking order than I was, pushed me. I don't usually get mad, but when I do, I go ballistic. I wrestled Gus to the ground and briefly immobilized him there face down in the gravel, long enough to make it clear that I wasn’t that submissive. I let him up, after a bit, without serious injury to either of us, and I hurried to my science class for which I was now late. The teacher asked me to explain my tardiness:

" I got into a fight with my cousin Gus"
" Do you realize you can be suspended for fighting in school Mr. Braquet?"
" Yes sir"
" So, what were you doing again, that made you late for class?"
" I was fighting with my cousin, Sir."

He slowly shook his head in disbelief, and asked me to sit down. Choosing to ignore my apparent lack of common sense, he continued with our Science lesson.

I was a bright and likeable student, though I wasn't among the most popular in school. My parents still sheltered us from the world. My teachers all liked me and I was known for getting good grades, and usually knowing the correct answers when finally picked because no one else would raise their hands. I also discovered the school library at that time and became a voracious reader; Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C Clarke, Phillip K Dick, Robert Heinlein, Zenna Henderson, Frank Herbert, Anne McCaffrey, Larry Niven, Frederik Pohl, and to me the greatest of them all, J.R.R. Tolkien. I read mostly to escape, and mostly science fiction, but also biographies of historically famous people. The covers of these biographies had black silhouettes on them. I started taking stacks of books home from the library and I loved the escape I found in them. I could be sitting in the same house with a young pioneer, reading by dim candlelight, or a friend of Eli Whitney, helping him invent the Cotton Gin, or on a space ship on its long journey to Jupiter, or Venus. In 1973 I read Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. Over the next eight years I would reread that trilogy every summer, somehow hoping that this time the harsh world of Middle Earth would be a bit fairer to Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee. That this time maybe Gandalf wouldn’t plummet off the stone bridge fighting the Balrog. The story never seemed to get old to me. I still escaped from the doldrums of my family life and into the much more interesting world of magic and mayhem, and adventures begun by seemingly ordinary boys like me.

Few of my classmates seemed to like reading as much as I did. In English class the teacher would have us read out loud, going up and down the rows, each student reading a page. We were reading Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. It was hard for me to follow the story when they would pause stumbling over words they couldn't pronounce. When it came to be my turn, I would read the story with the excitement and energy that Dickens must have intended, giving a slight lightening to my voice when I read Miss Haversham's and Estella's parts, and a deeper quality as I read Pip's. When I reached the end of the page, I stopped. No one started the next page. Everyone was just sitting there with a far away look in their eyes. The teacher asked if anyone would mind if I kept reading. No one objected, and read and created page after page until possibly for the first time, the bell rang without everyone watching the second hand. This time they seemed to drift out slowly, as though they might have enjoyed the time they spent in the English countryside. I realized then, that I could have influence over people, that perhaps I wasn’t just another of that vast hillside of sheep, that perhaps, just maybe, I was a shepherd.

I was elected class president for three of my four high school years. The only reason I didn't get all four years was because they thought that would be too unusual an honor to bestow. So they elected someone else for my sophomore year, even though I ended up still doing most of the work.

I took an interest in leadership associations at the school, and became active in the "Future Farmers of America." I found, again that I was good at public speaking, and did quite well in the organization, gaining self confidence all the while. I credit FFA with teaching me to be more outgoing in public. I decided that it was a disservice being so overly sensitive to the world around me. My feelings were hurt too easily, I cried a lot, and got teased by others because of it. I was told that I waddled like a duck when I walked, and was still regularly called “four eyes”. I stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom and did a harsh overall appraisal, and found myself lacking. I decided then to make changes. I began holding my head up higher when I walked, and practiced a stride that was more of a rooster strut, then a duck waddle. I held back on my emotions, and learned to bottle them up. This confidence, or at least outward seeming confidence, did the trick. I began to feel better about myself and I was teased a lot less as a result.

Despite my dalliances in Victorian England and Middle Earth, planet earth was still moving along at breakneck speeds. Beckoning to us all was the beginning of the age of electronics. The engineer’s manual slide rule was banished to the dustbin of history. In came the dawn of the electronic scientific calculator complete with leatherette case which niftily slid onto our belt to leave our hands free to rearrange the pencils and pens in our vinyl pocket protector. Larry Roberts created a commercially available network that would link computers together. He called the company, and the network TELENET, and it linked customers in seven US cities. As the commercial need for computers escalated, Tandem Computers created the first fault-tolerant computer and the business world began to take notice. Banks flocked to purchase Tandem systems, and the dawn of computers became visible to the average person.

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