Lessons From A Failed Childhood-With Childhood Friend Ralph Morse In Mind  

By Sam Lowell

Who knew where it all went wrong for Ralph Morse, went wrong right from childhood it seemed. Now after three score and ten, seventy for those unfamiliar with a score’s value he finally realized that it had not been having been the middle child, the middle boy of three that had undone him. He had previously thought that because his almost always enflamed mother, enflamed to nervous exhaustion by her inability to cope with three boys close together having been a teenage bride as well, that her and her mother’s total attention to his older first born brother Zachary and his father and his mother’s father’s total attention to his younger brother Kenneth that the sentiment deprivation which led him to draw away from the family at an early age had accounted for all the mistakes and errors that he had made in his life. Now he was just beginning to realize, remember he is three score and ten, sorry seventy years old, so a little late in his recognitions, that there were deeper reasons than the relatively simple one of being left out of the family emotional mix.          

One night Ralph bared his soul to his oldest friend Bart Webber, a friend he had known since about fourth grade at Riverdale Elementary and so one who knew first-hand many of the events that he went on to describe, while they were sitting on their favorite barstools at Jazzy’s Grille in Gloversville a few towns over from growing up Riverdale and a town where Ralph had lived for a number of years. The direct cause for that breast-baring had been his recent discovery after several tests that he had cancer and while it was not a terminal kind he had been taken aback by the news. Taken aback as well as he started the procedures to try to get rid of the cancerous growths making him suddenly wonder about his ability to come to grips with his mortality. Funny, but indicative of his sensibilities Ralph had denied his condition to himself using the term cancer in some third person hideaway and had not told others except his wife that he had cancer. Had not told Bart until this night. But since he had been in treatment the previous several week he had tried to sum up his life, tried to see what had gone wrong. Hence this look back at childhood.

No one should short-change that demonic mother of his, not for the statutory neglect of her middle child that was kids’ stuff in the pysch books but of her overweening capacity to make hell for Ralph at every opportunity. A few years back shortly after her passing he and Zachary had talked the situation over and agreed that no way should his mother who had a girlhood dream of being a Roman Catholic nun have married, certainly not as a teenager desperate to get out from under that overbearing Irish-bred father who subsequently seemingly as an act of contrition doted on young Kenneth. They had agreed that the combination of a young ill-prepared teenage mother, an honorably but work unskilled father who could not adequately provide from his family as much as he tried, and three close in age boys was fatal to any possibility that she would calmly and rationally cope with her predicament.             

Here is where it all came down as Ralph remembered several decisive events along this line but gave Bart one that he might not have remembered. Ralph had been maybe six and had a craving, a normal childhood craving, for a candy bar. He had asked his mother, let’s give her a name now in any case, Delores, if he could have the money, maybe a nickel but no more than a dime to go to Vinny’s Variety Store down the street and make the purchase. She said no. He accepted that decision not with good grace but he accepted the decision. Later that day she called out his name to come down stairs she had something to discuss with him. She flatly accused him of stealing money, that was the word she used, a dollar from her pocketbook to buy who knows what. . Ralph rightly denied doing the deed. He was not believed and punished with a few straps of the belt and no television for a week. You might not think that would trigger an everlasting childhood habit of grabbing money from her pocketbook and as he got older to do so with friends and others (not Bart as far as he remembered by he told Bart he would gladly make reparations now if that was the case). Things like that make a huge impression on him, if he was going to be cast as the family criminal then he would act that way and for a long time well beyond young adulthood, and couple of times when he was significantly older, he acted on the principle that if life, his life, was to be nasty, short and brutish as the old time philosopher had it then he was going to take whatever he needed when he needed it. Never enough to be caught criminally but that was a close call of a few occasions too. (By the way in that conversation with Zachary when he mentioned the episode to him which Zack remembered well he told Ralph that he had been the one to take the dollar-make of that what you will.)   

Another time a couple of years later something happened that only solidified what he had come to believe about the world- that it was basically him against the rest and that he was on his own. He had had another noteworthy run-in that proved decisive as well in making him think for a long time, for years after he had gotten back from his tour of duty in hell-hole Vietnam. He had been playing with another youngster in a creek near his growing up house and after a while came home all muddied, shoes and pants all caked as he recalled. His mother took a nutty both because the shoes and pants were probably damaged beyond repair but that his father was just then in one of periodic unemployed that would plague his whole life and so replacement would be problematic. Moreover Delores had repeatedly warned him off playing in that creek since a couple of years before a neighborhood boy had drowned when high tide had coming rushing in on him and he  could not swim as he was stuck in a mudflat. Punishment: remember this is an eight year old- banishment from the house. He was forced to go out on his own with essentially nothing to go with. That time he was out of the house for that day and the next before he came home all contrite after not being able to find any food or shelter. Nowadays, and rightly so, his mother would be before some child welfare board. But the net effect on Ralph was to get more inside himself and lose his moral compass for a long time. (He did make Bart laugh that night when he describe how he had spent a great deal of time that first day trying to make a raft and float out into the bay. Needless to say he did not get very far in the construction or in the escape plan.)      

Yeah, Ralph say all of that was pretty hairy stuff, distorted his whole small life for a long time but as he faced his own morality pretty squarely he knew that in his heart his own children would think more kindly of him for his very different way of helping to raise them. Bart laughed and agreed.