A Big J Story

There was the time when Big J suggested I join a Service Club, and suggested Apex.  I had heard of it but knew nothing of Service Clubs.  I agreed, with some enthusiasm.  And went to my first meeting, one early evening, I think from memory.

As soon as I walked in, someone recognised me and called everyone's attention to who my Father was.  He praised Big J for a long time, listing  a few of the many things he had done for the Community in his three decades as a Civic Councillor, and Olympic Sportsman and a Captain of Industry.

Then, he turned to me and said something like, 'Welcome! We're expecting a lot from you.'

I heard calls from a few of the faces that were all turned towards me of, 'Have a drink,' but all I could do was depart immediately and silently, never to return.

I wasn't me, whoever I was.  Instead I was the son of Big J.  I don't know how other people cope.  Well, some live up to expectations, but then, they weren't dropped on their heads by their Big Whatevers when they were three, and blamed for being a malingerer for suffering because everyone was in denial that there had been an accident or I had been hurt at all.  

Now I think about it.  I don't think he told my mother what had happened, but instead carried my unconscious body to my bed and said I had a chill, or something.  My Grandfather had died of Pneumonia a year before I was born, so it was a genuine concern.

I woke up and didn't know/remember anything.  I had retrograde amnesia, but three year-olds aren't expected to remember much anyway.  I know I had forgotten, because I remember three years later going with my Brother to the Kindergarten that I had attended myself and not remembering anything about it at all.   

After that, I was genuinely sick, with every cold and flu that came our way, and measles and chicken pox.  It was nearly always in mid-summer when everyone else was playing on the beach.

Even when I was well, I was confined to bed in a room without ventilation and overheated.  I was over-fed starchy food.  The best thing would have been for me to lie in the sun and bathe in the sea, but even when we rented a house by the beach near where cousins had also rented, and where my cousins, of whom there were many, played together, I was prevented from going out, and no one would visit me because they all thought I was a malingerer who was too timid to play sports.  

I recall lying in bed at another time in the new house, and hearing children playing outside.  I think I went once to meet up with them, on a rare occasion when I was deemed 'well', the weather was warm and dry, and I had all the right clothes on.  They were going down the hill on a billy cart.  I may have had the opportunity to try it, but declined, because I was timid.  I often fell over because I was clumsy, having grown up sick in bed, and I usually hurt myself.  I still wonder how sportspeople can dive for balls or tackle each other without injury.  

A couple of times I was invited to a neighbor's party.  One time, being in the early fifties when they were still playing war music and movies, and the lady of the house, the mother of the child I barely knew, who lived at the end of my street, asked me what my Father did in the war.  I was totally confused, as I didn't know what anyone did in the War.  My Mother's young brother was killed in the RAAF just before the end of the war, after seeing me once just after I was born, but of course that memory was wiped by the bump on the head.

A lot of it came back to me when I was knocked unconscious in a Motor Bike Accident. (Instead of going where the sign pointed, I rode into the sign, something a lot of people do metaphorically according to the Buddhist analogy, but I did literally.)  I had retrograde amnesia, and completely lost the preceding six weeks.  It was very strange as I had not long before moved into a bramble-covered cottage in the Adelaide Hills on the edge of the forest and had met lots of wonderful people.  Later I kept running into people I didn't know who claimed they knew me.  Eventually I started asking when I had met them, and it was always within that six weeks, so I could apologise and explain.  Even my earlier life was initially forgotten, but gradually came back to me, as if drifting in from a distance, but included with the returning memories were some from the first time I was knocked unconscious.  I have seen this in a couple of movies, films and videos where it can be used to comic effect or to propel the story with something remembered, but it is based on fact, because I have experienced it.

Those Apex people might have had high expectations, but none more so than my own dear Father.  Big J had made it on his own, despite great adversity, or perhaps because of it. He expected me to do the same, without his help.  Unless, you call throwing me into the lion's den like that Apex meeting 'help'.  He was forever criticising me for not doing things that I hadn't known he expected.  If he told me in advance I might have tried, but when I complained he said I had no initiative. 

The more I think about it, the more I am sure he kept it a secret that he had dropped me on my head doing gymnastics in the bathroom.  I must have heard some people talking about it, perhaps him and a Medico, because years later, when I was in my twenties, I asked him about it.  He was a bit surprised I knew and remembered, but agreed that it had happened, but quickly added, 'It was lucky nothing permanent happened.'  He was in total denial.  We never spoke of it again, as we continued to have too much else to argue about.  We used to shout at each other all the time.  Perhaps he thought it was like verbal fencing, because I had been too feeble to learn to fence so we couldn't actually face up to each other.  Pity!  The arguing was very destructive and made me very depressed.  If he did it deliberately, he did me a great wrong, because it totally destroyed any belief that anything I did or said could be right or worthwhile, as he argued against everything.  Often he would say, 'Don't be stupid!' so I grew up thinking I was stupid, and was surprised when I was about forty to discover that I was actually vastly more intelligent than most other people and the reason I couldn't understand other people was not because I was stupid but because they all were - by comparison.  I was a fool to not know, but what hope did I have? 

After I did some Psychodramas I was able to stop him calling me 'Stupid!' and we became good friends for the last few years of his life till he very suddenly got sick and died.  But that is a different story.