The First Decade: 1948-1958

(First in a series of life-reflections in the week before my 60th birthday.)

The place: A small town in north central Pennsylvania. It is a basic middle-class community. In what may be more of an issue than I was ever aware of, the local pharmacist (Christian by background) came home from the war with a Jewish bride he met in Georgia. She was from Brooklyn, but like the pharmacist she had kind of run away from home, too. Oh, she was also eight years younger than he was. And at the end of WW II he was already 40!

I am sure that there was tension. (How's that for understatement.) I never knew it. But that basic rebelliousness they showed may be more important than just about anything else in my story. That and the edge of the wilderness of northern Pennsylvania where my Dad's family (both sides) had lived since the mid 1800s.

So, in 1948, four years into their marriage, he at age 43 and she at 35 had their first child, a boy, and they named him Barry. Why? Who knows. It's what I have been called ever since. So, in the midst of incredibly beautiful country, always a hint of poverty around the community, farming not too far away, "The Old Homestead" just up the road, and a family of Democrats amid strong Republican neighbors, the story began.

Beyond the obvious, you know learning to walk, talk and feed myself (which I don't remember,) there are these:

• A plane trip to New York City on Allegheny Airlines (now US Air), with Mom getting sick. So we took the train home. We went for Passover with my Mom's family in Brooklyn. While in New York on that trip my brother and I were in the Peanut Gallery on the Howdy Doody Show. Every time I would look over at the monitor to see what I looked like I never saw myself- but there was always this one funny-looking, big-eared kid with his head turned.
  
  I do remember the Passover Seder dinner with all the grandkids. My brother was the youngest and I was just three years older. It is one of those primal memories, I think, informed as much by the pictures as anything else. But there is something truly moving, spiritually, about that.


• Vacations as a family to Manhattan, Niagara Falls, Wildwood, NJ. Dad owned his own store and worked long hours. It was an old-fashioned drug store with a soda fountain until I was six or so. Because of his schedule- he was even open on Sunday mornings!- he seemed to value vacations. That's another thing I come by honestly.
  
• My 6th Birthday party- a surprise at the park with the other kids at the summer recreation program followed one week later by...


• Falling from the top of the "big kids" sliding board where I wasn't supposed to be and breaking my arm. I ended up in a body cast for six-weeks. I remember lying on the ground, in pain, and more afraid of what my mother would say. "Don't tell her," I whined. "I wasn't supposed to do that." The result was a week in the hospital. One fun thing was the little radio speaker thing that you could put under your pillow and listen without bothering the other kids. This may have been the beginning of a love affair with radio and music. Oddly, that hospital experience did not cause a fear of hospitals. I actually feel comfortable being in hospitals. Perhaps a precursor to my many years of visiting people in hospitals as a pastor and now working in a hospital environment.


• The 1st hint of death with my Mom's father dying when I was 9. My mom went to the funeral by herself. Dad stayed home with us. We were deemed too young (9 and 6) to make the long trip to Brooklyn and to see death.
  
• The 2nd hint of mortality when Dad had brain surgery in far away Philadelphia on my 10th birthday. They were doing exploratory surgery to see if there was a reason for his headaches, and perhaps other symptoms I never knew about. Mom was there with him. Neil and I were with our aunt and grandfather who lived just up the street. It turned out to be a tumor, non malignant. But the surgery left him partially paralyzed and set the stage for his retirement and disability a year later at age 54.

So it began. I never thought of it as a particularly unusual childhood. Fishing with Dad, vacations together, typical sibling difficulties. But nothing that I felt was out of the ordinary.

One thing about it was the community. Small towns, for better and worse, are interesting places. When they are in the rural areas, it is even more so. We couldn't get TV, for example, until cable TV showed up. That was when I was 6 or 7. But the people all knew about each other and even offered a kind of safe, warm cocoon that you could thrive inside if you wanted to. The extended family being only a few blocks away was also helpful.

It was a far different time. It seemed innocent, though I know now that it wasn't. It was just different. Simpler, perhaps. Fewer choices. But it was what I knew.