1980 - 1986: The Judy Years

1980 - Third Grade, The Second Pivotal Year

In 1980, I turned seven years old and made the transition from second to third grade.

My third grade teeacher was a man named Carl. who was Andy's dad, and who was also one of my godfathers. Carl had been in the Vietname war, I think in the army. If I remember correctly, he had a very blurred small tatoo of something like demon with a parachute on one of his arms. The quality of this tatoo at his age is probably one of the reasons that I've never had a tatoo.

I really liked Carl. He was a carpenter that worked with Terry, who had made my bunk bed. At some point during the year, I think he took the entire class to his shop to make things from wood, likely as gifts for Father's Day. At this point, my father was a landscape architec, which meant that he spent a significant amount of his time drafting plans for landscapes. I remember he had some electric razors that looked like the small guns in the original Star Trek. I made a large block of wood with slots fpr triangls and tubes for pencils and pens. The wood had a flaw that required some wood putty, which always bothered me a little. He seemed to like it and kept it on his desk for years. Though I wanted it back, I never found it after his death. I assume that he broke or discarded it at some time, maybe when he stopped drafting plans frequently.

Our classroom was at the Sonoma Mountain property. Our playground had a swingset, but if I remember correctly, we shared it with some pigs, which really can be filthy animals. I remember we once covered one of the pigs with mud, likely without good intentions. Anne told us that we had done a favor for the pig by helping it to cool down. I remember running a "store" with Anne, the girl with whom I had had some sexual experiences in the bushes in kindergarden. We sold pig terds tied with yarn that I believe I extracted from the pom pom at the top of one of my winter hats. I don't think anyone ever bot a pom pom.

One day the class tormented Toby so badly that he climbed up a play structure in a rage yelling, "I'm going to kill you! I'm going to kill you!". I remember another incident where he, possibly along with other boys that my even have included me, used his glasses to burn worms in the sun on a windowsill in the classroom. I remember that Carl thought that this was extremely cruel, but beyond talking, I don't remember the punishment.

On December 8, 1980, someone shot John Lennon outside the Dakota building where he lived in New York City. The Beatles had had a significant impact on my father, who had always shared their music with us children. In fact, by this time, we had a portable record player and at least the Seargeant Pepper album. I remember my dad seriously and cautiously explaining to us what had happened. I am not sure what we really understood, but I don't think any of us were traumatized by the news. We obviously knew what death was and that it could happen to anyone at any time.

I don't remember what our class Christmas play was about that year or any other year besides kindergarten, really. I think this was the year that Andy and I played a giant. There was some kind of fighting scene and I accidentally fell down. Somehow I was strong enough to stand back up with Andy on my back, which seemed like a miraculous feat at the time.

I am not sure exactly when, but by this time I had my first experience with pornography. The neighbor that lived on the other side of the trees at the back of our property in Sonoma showed me a pornographic magazine. I don't remember much of the detail, but there was one segment with pictures of a couple in some kind of Egyptian pharaoh theme. The woman was called Queen Tit. I remember being very excited by all of this. The neighbor introduced it without any shame, and I didn't seem to have any shame.

Around or before this time, there was another semi-sexual experience for which I did have some shame. I'm not ready to describe that one.

My dad had been dating a woman named Tracey. I remember being really upset when Tracey gave me Playmobil for my birthday. Anyone that knew anything about me would know that I liked Lego, and Playmobil was for little kids.

Tracy had a dog that was half-wolf. Somehow, Tim ended up with one of her puppies. After my dad broke up with Tracey, remember her coming to the house one night acting almost like a heroin addict or something, very distraught. Apparently, Anne had told my father to marry Judy, and so he had broken up with Tracey.

When I was maybe eight years old I could use the electrical typewriter at the office of my dad's landscaping company, which almost felt too sensitive at first. I think this device also had hammers. Note that the layout of the QWERTY keyboard is based on the mechanics of original typewriter designs, which placed the hammers in alphabetical order without consideration for the user. Later, the DVORAK format emerged for better ergonomics, with key layout based on something like English letter use frequency, but DVORAK keyboards aren't common and I've never learned that layout.

We had to switch from the school carpool that went to Sonoma to the carpool that went to Petaluma. This move was part of the reason that my friendships with Sonoma friends diminished, although I never really developed friendships with the Petaluma people. A girl named Deborah in the Petaluma carpool told me that I would not be accepted because I was not like the other kids because my mom was dead.

I saw Deborah decades later at Sierra's wedding. She acted flirty but looked sickly. Her mother had always seemed somewhat anxious to me and by this time Deborah seemed the same or worse. A few years later, she was dead, apparently from drug and alcohol abuse, and I think I heard that she had also been in some abusive relationships.

My dad married Judy at the Episcopal church where my mother's funeral. I think they also either chose my mother's birthday or the day of the accident or the day of her death as their wedding day. This may seem disrespectful, but I think he meant it respecfully, as he was probably trying to replace my mother or to provide a mother for her children or to restore his own life somehow. As Anne Haas had demanded the marriage, it could have been her idea. I remember my maternal grandfather, Ben Gardiner driving me to the church in a beat up economy car of some sort. Or maybe that memory is of him driving me to my mom's funeral.

//TODO: ben gardiner link

Star Wars was a big deal for me throughout my childhood. The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980. At this point in my life, this is really the only Star Wars movie that is still watchable. I remember that I told a long series of lies, I think primarily to a kid named Jimmy, about how there was a store in Sonoma that sold basically every Star Wars product that ever existed. Jimmy's dad took him to the store, and Jimmy called me out for being a liar. The truth was that the store was some kind of mini market that probably sold star wars cards but nothing else.

I think that this was also the time that the Star Wars cards collection that my brothers and I had built disappeared. I think the story was that our nanny Kim threw discarded it, but I think she actually stole it when she realized that her job would be ending.

I think that at first I was happy that I would have a mother again. We boys were supposed to call her Mommy Judy as part of the transition. I don't remember calling her that, but I think I did call her mom for a while, but in the end just called her Judy (maybe not to her face).

Judy had three children. My new step-sister Sierra was in my grade. I think her older brother Ulysses was too old to have every gone to Great Oak and another daughter Kirsten was even older.

Ulysses had some issues. Sierra told me that on at least one occasion he grabbed her by the feet and forced his foot into her crotch in an effort to create pain. He gave my brothers and I pocket knives. He had a blue bike that was like a BMX. I loved that bike and eventually inherited it to replace the Schwin I had received from my grandmother at age five or six.

My family moved from Sonoma to a really nice house at 999 Jacobsen Lane in Petaluma architected by the Bob that had introduced my real parents to the group. At the time, this was a 33-acre property mostly used as a hayfarm (I think the farmer paid us to use the land). It was a nice area to grow up. We used to build forts out of the haybales, but this probably upset the farmer. Looking back and thinking about how the haybales could have fallen on us, it was also rather dangerous.

In the years that the fields were fallow, we would make forts in the weeds, which were taller than I was. One year, Tim got sprayed by a skunk. I remember that when he stepped on it, he thought it was a turtle. I saw some scary snakes on this property. There was also a creek with a little swimming hole. In many ways, it was an idilic place to grow up, at least from my perspective. One problem was that it was in Penngrove (close enough to Petaluma and small enough to be considered Petaluma by most people). The nearest store was about 1.5 miles away from our house, and Penngrove itself wasn't much of a town. At the time, Petaluma wasn't much either, but at least there were other kids around. The only kids near us were older, and they were really hicks. We never spent any time together except for one time that they shot an air rifle to show off. I remember one of them saying in a really country voice afterwards, "Satisfied?". I think Andy was at my house that day.

I remember my parents and at least one of my brothers and possibly Sierra all taking a shower together in the bathroom of the master bedroom, possibly after using the pool. I remember that Judy's tits were shrivelled and hanging, not like in the porn magazine I had seen at all. This probably sounds very strange to modern readers, but the concept of childhood innocence was certainly different in the 1970s and early 1980s, at least in the group or my particular family.

I think they must have gotten pregnant before or immediately after getting married. Judy was immediately pregnant. I remember that she would suntan while her belly was big. My half-brother James was born in 1982.

Sierra lived with us and but I think visited her father every second weekend. Judy required that the children do all sorts of chores such as weeding, sweeping the decks, chopping kindling, hauling firewood, and gardening. Somehow, Sierra was often responsible for "watching the phone" while we boys seemed to do most of this work.

While we still lived in Sonoma, I received two chickens from my school, a Rode Island Red and one of the black and white checkered breed. I named them Kirsten and Scott Joplin. I can't remember which was which. Tim's dog killed one of them, but I don't remember which one. I don't remember what happened to the other, but they didn't last long. What kind of school thinks that suburban children can care for chickens effectively?

I could be off by some years, but I seem to remember this being the year that Tony castrated lambs in front of the children.

Definitely in third grade, I had another sexual experience. My friend Andy had younger twin sisters, Deborah and Charlotte, who were in Adrian's grade. They were at our house for something like a party. I remember it being completely consensual and experimental. I tried having sex with one of the sisters. I think I was able to get an erection, but I don't think I took her virginity, and I didn't have an orgasm. I think my younger brother Adrian tried to have sex with her after me.

I know it was third grade because I remember being on the swingset with Andy and he told me that he knew that something had happened because the girl had told her parents that she had left her underwear at our house. He wasn't angry or upset, but more seemed to be making fun of me. We were at an age where boys would still make fun of each other for liking girls. I think that one of Andy's sisters - I don't know which one - got leg cancer several years later and ended up dying.

After the wedding, there was a party at the new house. I liked getting a bit dizzy from my first alcohol, which was champagne at a big table with lots of people on the back deck. Supposedly, my dad had given Tim a taste of gin when he was about two, which sent him scurrying around the room for a while. There are other stories about Tim, such as that in his sleep he once peed on a chair and once in my dad's shoes.

My dad was an alcoholic, but Judy was worse. My dad would generally keep to himself watching TV while drinking gin. Sometimes he would stay in bed for at least a day saying that he had thrown his back out, but maybe these were hangover events.

Judy was much worse. She would get crazy and stop making sense when she drank. One year, my dad had a mini tape recorder, and we recorded one of her nonsensical rambling events. She seemed unphased when we played it back to her. There were rumors that her dad had sexually abused her, and her first husband got her pregnant with Kirsten when she was seventeen.

Judy also liked to drive drunk, which caused some damage to a burgundy Mercedes that she owned. I can't remember if she ended up totaling that car or if it was the Pinto that she totaled.

At some point, Judy shot Tim's dog, which was often causing problems with the neighbors.

//TODO: pinto //TODO: mercedes

//TODO: Judy shoots the dog

//TODO: Jacobsen //TODO: chores, alcoholism todo; then didn't like her, and found out she was trying to adopt us

1981 - Fourth Grade

In 1981, I turned eight years old and made the transition from third to fourth grade.

That year, my classroom was literally in an old chicken coop that had been partially converted to livable space. My teacher was a grouper woman named Mary that had two children: Kathleen, who was in my grade, and Michael, who was younger.

The property belonged to the parents of a kid named Joe from my grade. This property was the carpool depot for Petaluma. I think in second grade, Joe had made up rhymes about almost every other kid in the class. I think that mine was probably something like "John West, is a pest", but I don't remember for sure. Kathleen's was certainly "Kathaleener, weener cleaner."

One of the great things about this property was a row of evergreen trees at the back that were arranged in such a way that there was basically a long fort in the branches. I think we weren't allowed to go back there often. There was also a persimmom tree, but that was not for climbing.

But Joe and Kathleen wasn't in my class that year. For some reason - maybe because my class size was proving too large for most people to manage - Ann split the older kids from the younger kids. I was in a class with about eight other kids. The only ones I really remember were Dave and Elibeth.

I had a crush on Elizabeth. I don't remember the details or exactly when, but I think she had come to live with my family for some time previously. Anne was always direecting things like this, generally marketed as efforts to assist famililies struggling to stay together. I think I got caught writing fake "I love you" notes or letters from Elizabeth to myself.

I also got caught for something else that didn't involve anyone else or anything sexual but is too embarassing for me to write about at the moment. If someone asks me directly, I might tell that story. It's about a habit that I apparently had from fourth to seventh grade, when Anne's youngest child (I think) Matt, who was a few years older than me, caught me again doing the same thing.

I don't have a lot of memories of fourth grade. One is that I had a self-paced math workbook that I absolutely loved relative to classtime with the teacher. I think I'm generally best with things that I teach myself through reading and tactile (writing/typing) channels.

Somehow, Mary would fit all of the students into her Datsun B210, which is a tiny car, for trips to the Petaluma public library.

//TODO: image

I don't remember the exact context, but I remember that Mary taught us about female anatomy. I honestly remember me and at least one other boy putting our hands inside her genitalia.

Mary had issues. I think my brother Tim had her the next year, but she had some kind of mental breakdown and couldn't complete the year.

I have a few memories that involved Dave that year. Dave also had issues, the kind of kid that would play with matches. Joe also played with matches, specifically burning model glue. I remember Joe's dad, who was a carpenter and kept his bare left foot out the driver's window when driving carpool in his gigantic station wagon, once killed a black widow on the property using spraypaint as a flamethrower.

I liked Dave's older sister and his younger sister and eventually saved his youngest sister from drowning a few years later. I tried to like Dave, but one day he just randomly punched me out of the blue. I had no idea how to respond, so I didn't, and it didn't go anywhere. He was kindof a little guy, and I'm pretty sure I could have beat him up, but that's just not something I do.

Dave got me to try cigarettes that year. I didn't really start smoking until seventh or eight grade. I think I ran into Dave a few years after that and I specifically remember him using the phrase, "still got that nasty habit?"

As usual for this period, I don't know the precise years, but by this time I had a few memories at home.

One is of my dad doing push-ups with at least one and possibly all three of us boys on his back.

Another is that we all used to watch CHiPs together in his bedroom. We didn't watch a lot of TV. He would leave the TV outside of his room on Sunday mornings sometimes so we could watch cartoons while he slept in.

parents married, first alcohol

1982 - Fifth Grade

In 1982, I turned nine years old and made the transition from fourth to fifth grade.

The first computer I ever saw was a Commodore VIC-20, which was a relatively early personal computer with 5K of RAM (Random Access Memory), of which 3.5KB was available for use by programs written in the BASIC language. By today's standards, 3.5KB is almost nothing. If I remember correctly, my fifth grade teacher had borrowed this machine from the older brother Phil of my friend Andy, who I think was still a student in my class. This teacher programmed it to play tic tac toe and bet the class five dollars that nobody could beat it.

One girl played so poorly that she created a condition for which the teacher had never accounted and actually beat the game. The teacher literally went outside and pretended to go through his wallet and come back with several "doll hairs" that he had clearly plucked from his own head.

I don't know why this interested me so much, but I think that winter my brothers and I pooled money that we received from our grandparents at Christmas and bought a Commodore64, which had 64KB of RAM, most of which was available for programming, but still isn't much.

gardens west

Early personal computers did not always require monitors. The Commodore machines could connect to televisions, so we also bought a used black and white television. Used televisions of that vintage didn't always last long, so we replaced it a few times before my dad eventually gave me an old 13-inch Sony Trinitron, and I could finally visually differentiate all 16 available colors. If I remember crrectly, in BASIC you would "poke" one memory address to set the screen background color and another address to set the character foreground color. We also had paddles, a joystick, and a couple of game cartridges. We also got a tape drive and eventually a disk drive, and we also had some kind of RAM expansion cartridge that allowed for programming larger games.

My brothers were mostly interested in games, but I read the BASIC programming manual and reference manuals that came with the machine. I never learned machine language on this device, but my brother and I would enter numerical codes to input more complex games than could be programmed in BASIC in available memory. This was a real process - you bought a magazine and had one person read the numbers while the other (me) typed and then checked the a checksum for each line to reduce typos, one of which could destroy the entire project. Each game could take hours for a team to enter, the tape drive was not always reliable, and we were always overwriting the same tapes because we wanted to try new games. Listening to the tapes as audio was something like hearing an old modem connect over a dialup network at very low speed.

Jane - wife of a guy that had done landscaping with my father; they eventually left the group, groin clan of the cave bear dyncan/dexter pantsing zorba, truth or dare stealing legos Chuck - father of bree computers, doll hairs

1983 - Sixth Grade

In April of 1982, I turned ten years old. After the summer, I made the transition from fifth to sixth grade.

Class was in Petaluma at the same place that I attended second grade. The teacher was Delin, I think short for something like Delinque. She was the mother of Rachel in my grade. I don't remember much of sixth grade for some reason - I think it was somewhat boring. There was an African feast where we ate raw beef cooked by spices somehow. Delin read the book Changeling to us, which I think had some impact on my perspectives about the potential negative impacts of technology and the need for something more like magical thinking. I also remember banging my head hard on the concrete floor in an attempt at some kind of breakdancing move. This was the last year that most of the kids in my class were relatively well-behaved.

I don't know if it was that year or before or after that I had an accident while staying a night at that teacher's house. I was jumping from the top of a bunkbed to another bed and didn't realize that there was a footboard under the blankets where I intended to land. I somehow hit that face-first, losing one baby tooth and breaking my right-front adult tooth approximately in half.

The dentist said that it would be best to fix it with the piece of the tooth, which might appear in my crap. My dad was not happy to search through that with a stick, and we never found it anyway. I got a root canal, a post, and a temporary crown, which I later replaced in college as directed. I've only had to replace it once since then after it broke off when I bit into a baguette. I think the back of that tooth is still black. When I was a kid, the dentist didn't have a shade white enough to match my teeth, but smoking and coffee have certainly changed things since then. I also chipped one of my front teeth taking a hit out of a glass bong once.

1984 - Seventh Grade

At the end of April in 1983, I turned eleven years old. After the summer, I made the transition from sixth to seventh grade.

At first, my classroom was in a new barn that the group had constructed on Anne Haas' property on Sonoma Mountain. I remember that one of wooden tables was hollow and had a crack in the top. We used the plastic containers for pieces that had come with a Risk board game to catch flies and trap them inside the table.

This year, a kid named Cas joined our class. I don't think his parents knew about the group. He was somewhat nerdy and straight-edge. I tried to make friends with him, but he never really fit in, partly because most of the class was getting rather rebellios. I really enjoyed watching him draw.

Our teacher was a groupwer woman named Pat, who was the mother of Elizabeth in my grade, who had lived with my family for a short time when I was very young and on whom I had had a non-so-scret crush in fourth grade. Pat was married to Rick, but I think she might actually have been a lesbian. One day she told that class that, due to sperm banks and artificial insemination, the world no longer needed men. This seems like a strange thing to tell a bunch of pubescent kids.

This was the year that I started drinking alcohol and taking drugs. It might have started with playing the passout game, where you do something like choke yourself while leaning on a table, causing temporary unconsciousness. We also took NoDoze - caffeine pills - for fun. Sierra apparently even tried snorting NoDoze once.

Eventually, Anne Haas split the class in two, separating the girls from the boys and we moved into two classrooms in the other barn on the property. I don't remember if this was before or after Sierra and a bunch of other kids left school one day, walking down Sonoma Mountain almost to Petaluma. I didn't watch, but I think Judy beat the crap out of Sierra after that.

The teacher for the guys was Armond, who had taught us in second grade. Armond was old, but I really liked him. He taught us about how internal combustion engines and cars work. I was frustrated by children in the class that didn't seem to want to learn about cool things like this.

I don't know why he didn't have to go to school, but Anne's youngest son (although I think she has adopted some children since then) Ben was always on the property. He built a skateboard ramp, which was pretty cool. He also practiced martial arts on us and introduced us to marijuana. The first time I smoked weed was one of the best. I loved the flavor and being stoned. I don't know if it was a hallucination, but the group of kids saw a fighter jet fly low above our heads that day.

Dave in my class was a discipline problem, as were Joe and Jake. Our play area was around the upper pond on the property, which was full of pollywogs, crayfish, frogs, and goat turds. We played on rafts, but it was really disgusting to fall into the water. There were also good trees to climb in that area.

One day, a teacher from a lower grade beat dave with a belt. I have no idea what he had done.

For each kid's birthday, a couple of kids would use Anne's kitchen to bake a cake. When it was Jake's turn, he made some kind of art project or experiment that included things lie soap, salt rocks, and who knows what.

One time, we stole a gallon of burgundy wine from somehwere on the property. I think I drank about a third of it. I spent the afternoon puking "grape juice" in a portable toilet, with Armond monitoring me. I guess that was punishment enough because I never got in trouble and I don't think he told my parents.

1985 - Eigth Grade

In April of 1985, I turned 12 years old. Shortly afterwards, I finished seventh grade. According to the Chinese calendar, 1985 was an ox year. As a Taurus by the Western horoscope, I consider this to be my first tripple ox year. If this gave me any special powers, I don't think I took advantage of them.

I believe that I worked for a dollar an hour on the maintenance crew for my dad's landscaping company that summer. The maintenance crew was mainly white guys, but there was a separate crew that did demolition and construction, and many of those guys were Mexican.

Jacob from my grade at Great Oak also worked for Gardens West for some time, I think as a laborer for the construction crew. He had some discipline issues and I think Anne thought that this would be a good experience for him. I think Jacob was the son of the woman that Bob calagy had adopted after the war. Now that I think about it, maybe she was actually Vietnamese and maybe Bob had actually been in Vietnam rather than Korea. Her name was Odette, which has French origin, where France was more involved with Vietnam than Korea. Odette married Jim, and Jacob's sister was named Lilly, which is a flower associated with Buddhism, which seems more Vietnamese than Korean.

My brother's grade at Great Oak school had been somewhat rebelious. My seventh grade had been extremely rebelious. I think that Anne Haas realized that the school could not control the children at this age. Additionally, it's possible that high school admissions processes were questioning or even rejecting things like Great Oak school transcripts. Great Oak shut down these grades: my brother Tim was part of the last eigth grade at Great Oak school and I was part of the last seventh.

I attended eight grade at Sonoma Country Day School (SCDS), which was a private school in Santa Rosa, not far from the Cardinal Newman Catholic high school that was apparently Anne's preference for groupers and where my brother and several other groupers enrolled. The carpool system transitioned to Newman, and I think picked me up from SCDS sometimes, but I also seem to remember my dad doing much of the driving for me that year.

This was a strange transition for me. I had always gone to school with the same group of kids including some that had become very good friends. I think there might have been one or two other groupers (or maybe former groupers - those that had rejected the group but wanted their kids to stay in private schools). I may be wrong, but seem to remember Craig being there. Craig was the brother of Anne (the Scotch Tape heiress) in my class and a grade below me.

While almost everyone in the group was poor - partially because they gave money and working time to Anne Haas - almost everyone at SCDS came from rich families. There were at least two girls whose family owned one of the major wineries.

I had a crush on a blond girl named Sarah, but I never pursued it.

There were two boys that were bigger nerds than me. They sometimes made jokes trying to communicate using only letters, such as saying "FUNEX?" to mean "have you any eggs?" One was named Nathaniel, AKA nat, but he called himself G-Nat. I can't remember the other kid's name, but he had glasses and was an even bigger nerd. I could get along with these kids, but they made it more apparent that I didn't want to be like them.

My best friend was a Korean kid named Kevin, who was quiet and a bit nerdy. He seemed to think I was really cool and to very much want me as a friend.

I think that almost everyone else was white. I certainly don't remember any black kids. There was one female teacher - I think for physical education - that was probably either black or hispanic. I wore red Converse high tops at the time and I remember her saying to me, "I like your cons." I think she didn't last the whole year.

SCDS was just one business at the Luther Burbank Center in Santa Rosa. It did not require a uniform, but like Great Oak, there was an expectation that clothes would match a color scheme, in this case something like khaki pants with a white or blue shirt.

I was not very rebelious at SCDS, but I was probably one of the worse kids. I would typically get dropped off at school very early and developed some expertise at pilfering the vending machines. There was another guy named Colin that had some similarities to me. We were sort of friends and rivals at the same time.

Academically, SCDS was way better than great oak. For one thing, there were different teachers for different subjects, and they were something like experts in those fields. There were subjects like science. The French teacher was actually French. I still remember part of a0 French poem that I learned that year: on frappe, by Jacques Prévert. The poem doesn't actually start with on frappe, but that's how I hear it in my head.

on frappe
Qui est là
Personne
C'est simplement mon cour qui bat
Qui bat très fort
A cause de toi

Approximate English:

There's a knock
Who's there?
No one
It's just my heart beating
Beating very fast
Because of you

The science teacher had an ecosphere, which is a glass object with life forms in it that are supposed to achieve equilibrium. For my science fair project, I decided to measure the temperature of rotting garbage. I don't think I ever did any work; I just made up the numbers. The teacher undoubtedly knew that I had cheated, but I think I got away with at least a C. Colin's project was about what percentages of cars driving by his house were various colors. He claimed there was one rainbow car.

In front of the entire class, the PE teacher once got upset at me for picking my toenails. He seemed absolutely disgusted with my hygeine. The fact that I remember this seems to indicate that it was something like a learning experience for me, maybe even a little traumatic.

The school had Tandy computers, I think TRS-80s with great monitors. I played with these a bit but never really learned details about the BASIC interpreter that they used or anything much deeper than that.

At some point, my dad's company got a computer, but I rarely used it, and then mostly to experiment with games. It was some kind of proprietary system with a monochrome monitor. I remember liking the green characters and the font.

Due to its much greater capabilities, I wanted an Amiga (a newer system from Commodore), but could never afford one. In eighth grade, my school had some TRS-80s with monitors, which seemed much more advanced than the Commodore. I think I basically stopped using the Commodore at that point, except possibly to play games on cartridges, and mostly programmed in TRS-80's BASIC.

Bry's rainbow bug, no seatbelts, so mom had us attach ropes.