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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

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Notes from a Boy @ The Window

Tag Archives: Failure

Quitting Before a Fight

13 Monday Feb 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Hebrew-Israelite, Mount Vernon New York, Pop Culture, race, Religion, Youth

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616, 616 East Lincoln Avenue, 7S, A.B. Davis Middle School, Failure, Grades, Humanities, Humiliation, Humility, Isolation, Maturity, Mount Vernon Hospital, Mount Vernon New York, Mount Vernon public schools, Paul Court, Poverty, Quitting, The Crucible


Mike Tyson-Michael Spinks Fight, Convention Hall, Atlantic City, NJ, June 27, 1988. (http://antekprizering.com).

As a writer, I can often see my past as if it happened within the past week. As a forty-two year-old, though, it sometimes seems like my failures and pitfalls are a long-lost memory, one of a very bad dream. To think that it’s been a full thirty years since my preteen struggles with identity, purpose, and the realization that I was in an intense academic competition that I was predestined to lose. It seems like I was playing a role, acting my way through my tweener and teenage years.

But this time thirty years ago, I seriously thought about quitting the Humanities Program. It was the beginning of the third marking period in seventh grade at A.B. Davis Middle School, early February ’82. My grades were unimpressive. I struggled in every subject except social studies, where three years of reading World Book Encyclopedia and forty books of all kinds on World War II made me a nerdy standout among my mostly nerdy peers. My social studies teacher Paul Court was so much fun and so inept that he played games with us to keep our class interesting. Anyone who could find factual errors in his teachings on American history would earn twenty-five cents. I’d already earned more than three dollars by the end of the second marking period.

I barely averaged a C+ in math. My Italian teacher Ms. Fleming told me that my “Italian sounded British.” And I was averaging a C+ in art. In Art! All because Doris Mann, who was about as good an art teacher as I was at making friends, said, “I don’t give A’s for effort. I give out grades based on your ability to create good art.” I couldn’t believe that she gave me C+’s while the art world fifteen miles away cheered folks who smeared blood, paint, and feces on canvasses!

I thought that I was the only one who felt like a failure. I was certain that I was more of a failure than my Holmes School classmates or other, non-Pennington-Grimes students in Humanities, at least. If other students appeared to have problems, especially my classmates who were alumni of the Pennington-Grimes program (Mount Vernon public schools’ K-6 Humanities Program), I believed that they were faking it.

The Crucible (play), date and location unknown. (http://reyvl.com).

I had good reason to. It was around this time that one of my White female classmates from Pennington-Grimes had become anxiety-ridden prior to a test in our English class. She began to sweat, her hands and face turned colors, like one of Arthur Miller’s female characters in The Crucible, his famous Salem-Witch-Trial play.

Within a few seconds, three of her friends joined this tortured soul in this expression of fear. The one girl kept saying, over and over, “I know I’m going to fail!” The other three huddled around her and joined in séance, as if they expected God to witness this physical expression of pressurized fear and take pity on them. That this involved the Pennington-Grimes group of Humanities girls was not lost on me. They loved their grades, almost as much as they loved Jordache Jeans, The Gap or Benetton.

We received our exam grades from Mrs. Sesay a few days later. My grade: a 78. The Fear Bunch’s lowest grade: a 92. Understanding how quickly fear can destroy your confidence: priceless. Their fears had left me thinking more about failure — theirs and mine — than it did about the task at hand.

Then it was my turn to act demon-possessed. I went to the back of the classroom at the end of that day and chanted, “I’m silly, I’m stupid. I’m silly, I’m stupid. I’m silly, I’m stupid.” over and over again while pounding the back of my head into the side wall. But I learned a valuable lesson that day. That doing well required me to ignore the worries and grades of other, to concentrate on me and my own emotions on test days.

So, I spent the first two weeks in February thinking about sliding into the general population of A.B. Davis Middle School. I couldn’t do much else other than think. With the growing problems of lack of food, late rent payments and three siblings at 616, my mother’s tiny Mount Vernon Hospital paycheck, and my idiot and long-term unemployed Hebrew-Israelite of a stepfather, I had no one to talk to about school (see “Humanities: First Contact, Full Circle” from September ’11).

What I didn’t realize was that I hadn’t yet begun to fight. My efforts up to that point in Humanities — from making friends to studying — were all half-hearted at best. I was the emotional equivalent of an eight-year-old in a preteen’s body, one right at the early stages of puberty at that. With life at 616 starting to fall apart and the isolation I felt at school, I was growing up, whether I wanted to or not. All it would take was an immature spark of inspiration to prove it….

Seven Years of Fatherhood

30 Friday Jul 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, Youth

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616 East Lincoln Avenue, Birthday, Failure, Fatherhood, Mount Vernon New York, Noah, Sins


Noah and Daddy, May 29, 2006

Noah’s seven today. Seven! I should be happy. Noah’s healthy, done well in school so far, is curious about himself and his world, and despite it all, has remained sheltered in ways that I never experienced. Even with all of my vivid and weird imaginations I used to protect myself from the world, Noah is much more well-adjusted than I was at any time growing up.

But I’m not happy. It’s not Noah’s fault. I want so much more for him as he begins to form a continual, day-to-day memory cycle. Like not to see his father as a struggling author whose memoir may never be published. It’s a possibility, not one I dwell on too often, but a possibility anyway. Or worse, be seen as a lousy father because Boy @ The Window and my other writings would make it hard for him to have the close relationship we have now. Or worst, he sees me as nothing but a strange and eccentric old fool because of the contents of my second book and because of all the weird things I care about.

I do feel sometimes as though I have failed my son. I haven’t been able to generate as much income for our present and future as I would’ve liked, given my choices for work and career so far. Who was I kidding? A nonprofit manager, a consultant, an adjunct associate professor? Those aren’t jobs that are easy for Noah to explain to his friends. A father who can’t reach into his bank account and pay for a vacation or something like acting classes at the drop of a hat? Really, what good am I?

More than that. I feel like I haven’t completely overcome my past, that the psychological and emotional scars of my growing-up years do manifest themselves in my fathering and in my son. It’s nothing obvious. Subtle reminders, like Noah asking, “When are we going to buy a house?,” a question I used to ask my mother until I turned nine. Or when I see Noah struggling to assert himself in his first friendships, where some of his so-called friends make dumb jokes about his name. Or when Noah waits for others in his cohort to call him into a huddle to play before he’ll actually play with them.

I have to remind myself that shyness isn’t hereditary, nor the signs of sins visited upon anyone from

Noah and Daddy, December 27, 2009

central Georgia with the last name “Collins.” That I can’t try to force him into becoming an uber-extrovert, the way my father, ex-stepfather and mother tried to do with me and my older brother Darren. That worked so well that Darren has never had a meaningful relationship in his adult life, and it took the first five years of my adult life to recover from the damage.

Still, I don’t want to pass on to Noah any of the damage that remains. At the same time, I want him to become the well-rounded person and young man whom I became by my early twenties. I feel the time slipping and ticking away to make the right choices, and to have all the necessary resources to do so.

I know that I’m being way too hard on myself. But I can’t help it. I want my son to have the ability to take on the world, if necessary, in ways that I couldn’t when I was his age, or really any age growing up. I had to leave 616, leave Mount Vernon, to declare the past dead in my mind for fifteen years to do that. I don’t want Noah to need that amount of determination and suffering in order to just make it in this world.

I want him to maintain some sense of innocence and confidence earlier and longer than I did. I want him to find himself and then make sure that I don’t beat it out of him with my emotional and psychological baggage, and keep the world from doing the same. This is my prayer, for today and for the next eleven years. Amen.

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Boy @ The Window: A Memoir

Places to Buy/Download Boy @ The Window

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Barnes & Noble (bn.com) logo, June 26, 2013. (http://www.logotypes101.com).

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