(some part of) Why I live with Yanamamo on the Upper Sepik

(with a nod and a wink to Eudora Welty for her wonderful "Why I live at the P.O." - this, other than the somewhat metaphoric title, is all true tho)

One day, living in Bangkok, I helped a guy apply a cement plaster to gaps and holes left when a huge Ganesh statue was cast. We also applied tiny square tiles fronted with gold leaf to the dais edging below the idol. I kept a few of those tiles for almost 30 years.
My father was organizing Thailand’s first department of psychology. Thais find most “psychology” ridiculous, but considered my father’s behaviorism at least scientific. For school science day, I presented a pigeon in a box with a small window in which colored shapes could be made to appear. According to what it saw, the pigeon would turn around clockwise or counter-clockwise, or peck.
We returned via Europe and New York, where I spent several days at the World’s Fair.
Suddenly a world full of discovery was replaced by Indiana suburbia where we had a “split-level” house with white-bread yard in a “sub-division” created from corn fields, with a small woods off to one side. One neighboring house with a flat roof we joked was a helicopter pad, was supposedly designed by Frank Lloyd Wright or someone almost as famous, but it was as dull as all the others. One home-owner sprayed green paint on his grass late at night, when he thought no-one would notice.
Immediately I started school, 7th grade. In gym class, we were lined up in “squads” – a skinny but tall guy who stood in front of me told a short squat guy behind me that he and I were going to have a fight after school, and asked him to be his “second” before telling me to find one too. I simply didn’t show, and never saw the taller guy again, as it was deemed necessary to put us on half days, with high-schoolers whose building hadn’t been completed on schedule used our junior high the other half day. No time for gym. Well OK. The shorter guy I somehow recognized over 20 years later – he was a neighbor in Arizona desert a couple miles from the Rez line. We managed to be friends for over 25 years.
One thing that helped my ability for that friendship was the kid a year older than me who lived in the house behind ours. He had a dog. I got one too, same size, medium. Same short hair, his black with some white, mine all light brown. We had little enough else in common, but few alternative friendships as the other early adolescents in our neighborhood attended ‘parochial’ schools.
My dog got named “Vicky” and she’d bounce and bound with glee as the school bus arrived to drop me off. I’d get my bike and we’d roam the flatland, nowhere particular to go. When rich enough, I’d buy a box of dried apricots for a dollar, to eat while I read, which is mostly what I did. Vicky, seeing my enjoyment, developed longing to participate in the fun and became a huge apricot fan too.
But the wind-up bird or clockwork orange of Skinnerian behaviorism proved anathema to local psychology. We are not stimulus-response organisms of no soul! It was seen as a perversion of reality to even suggest such a thing. Not that my father meant to, not at all. He was a devout Quaker, or Friend, as we called ourselves. He just wanted a scientific approach to teaching, learning and behavior modification for occasionally essential readjustment programs for the maladjusted. That any of his thoughts might be “subversive” he simply compartmentalized. That mark Twain, Will Rogers, Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Humphrey Bogart or Adlai Stevenson could be in any way subversive was meaningless to him, son of a WWI hero who’d become head of the VA for Mexico despite courts-martial for disobeying a direct order from his superior officer to stand fast (a charge also leveled against me, later, over something much more trivial than the “less than half-a-loaf” my grandmother described her husband’s military trial as). As the last officer left alive on his side of a battlefield, he’d called a retreat, and saved many men’s lives. Of course, people have been shot for far less…
My father’d gotten only a one-year contract. It wasn’t renewed. Despite having no decent orchestra to play her harp in, or much in the way of students, my mother wasn’t at all pleased. In 15 years of marriage they’d already moved 8 times. It was no way to live. Her eldest had been packed off to a Quaker boarding school twice already, and packing’s no-one’s favorite hobby. There were unresolved undercurrents of hostility throughout the house that had never become a real home.
Summer heat had come early, the future was uncertain, and despite the Quaker “peace testimony” most local Quakers had proven war-hawks when it came to the area of Asia we’d recently left (with absolutely no feelings of hostility, quite opposite to what we encountered at a Quaker church, where I witnessed folk getting up on their knees backward on pews to confess aloud their sins to all the congregation. This wasn’t what we were used to!). Also, money was tight. Feelings were fraught, frayed, taught and strained.
In the kitchen, a piece of chicken fell to the floor. Vicky grabbed it. My father freaked, called for, demanded, rather, a just purchased, still refrigerated steak. Vicky, loathe to relinquish her bounty, had already growled. My mother scowled. Steak was expensive!
“Chicken bones will stick in the dog’s throat!” my father yelled. He got the steak. Vicky didn’t care. Mom glowered. Dad didn’t know what to do, how to affect a trade. I’d little idea how to help.
My memory becomes indistinct at this point. All could have just gone on as normal, but the dog had growled at my Dad. Next day she was off to the vet, and never came back. “Distemper” Dad said. I was made to burn all her things, including my old, cherished comport blanket she’d been sleeping on, a blanket I’d often longed for on many an air-conditioned Bangkok hot-season night with only a sheet.
Then I was packed off to Mexico, and got kind of lost on the way, after the train broke down and a bus ride to El Paso was offered. At El Paso bus station I had no idea what to do, nor even money to take me anywhere. Called home but they were all out to a movie. Called directory assistance in Mexico but didn’t know enough to reach anyone. The phone operator came to get me and I slept at her house. Later got a dollar for Ma Bell making an ad with the story. On the train in the Mexican desert, between episodes of Archie, Jughead, Betty and Mr. Lodge a girl my age was kind enough to share with me, I stood at the back of the train. The conductor had placed eight silver pesos on the back railing, was teasing a couple of young kids with them. Somehow the two boys were suddenly off the train, running behind, trying to catch up. They never did. Those pesos were an ounce of almost pure silver, larger than a silver dollar but traded at eight cents. USA coins were already made of lesser metals.
Our world doesn’t make sense. I’ve several dogs now and they eat chicken bones most days.
Instead of learning about animal behavior from Konrad Lorenz (who’s “King Solomon’s Ring” I quite enjoyed) or Pavlov, we’d have done better to ask farmers and Bushmen. Instead of trying to boss the world about, we could have tried to lead by presenting a better example. Instead of trying to teach or trade, we should have tried to learn and do. It might have paid, in better than silver coin. But most likely not in ways that would have provided steak dinners in split-level house sub-divisions.
Even my desert-rat from Indiana Bible-thumping without knowing what’s in it ex-friend knows that. Though he finds no use for said information. The next year was 1967 and Dorothy really wasn’t in Kansas anymore. The genie was out of the bottle, Pandora’s box was open and someone left the cake out in the rain. Oh no.