BCM’s family consisted of four kids: two brothers, a sister, and himself. That is not unusual, but the age range made things difficult. The oldest brother was significantly older than BCM, so he was graduating high school by the time BCM started school. Similarly, BCM was in third grade when his sister was graduating high school. The age difference meant he didn’t know his siblings, and they didn’t know him. In many respects, BCM felt like an only child, with only a peripheral awareness of his siblings. From his siblings’ perspective, BCM was a major league annoyance since he took the lion’s share of their mother’s attention. For Mom and Dad, BCM was clear evidence of the need for a better method of birth control.

BCM’s oldest brother was tall, good-looking looking, and athletic – in other words, the opposite of BCM. His next oldest brother was a bit shorter, more intelligent, and fairly athletic. Being close in age, the brothers shared a bedroom and often operated as a team. The oldest brother, who wasn’t necessarily academically gifted, had more than his share of rat-like cunning and would dream up things that would, without fail, horrify Mom and convince the other brother to do them. BCM’s sister was tall, intelligent, and prone to snap at people. Part of that was due to being the only girl and also because the brothers like to pick her up and bounce her headfirst on the furniture.

Anyway, Mom worked hard to make ends meet and was quite the bargain shopper in the stores. She spent hours at the old Sears store downtown, looking for clothes at least two sizes too big for BCM to grow into. The boy didn’t wear anything that fit until he was a teenager. But oversized store-bought clothes at least didn’t smell like urine-soaked hand-me-downs. BCM remembers the shopping trips very well. It was like going with Marco Polo to China, except you had monotony and excruciating boredom instead of adventure and intrigue. He eventually took to sleeping under the clothing racks and, to this day, has a morbid fear of shopping for clothes.

The “haves” in town (mostly the doctors and lawyers) lived in lovely old homes and went to exclusive locations at the lakes nearby. However, the lakes around town were all artificial, created by the railroads for steam locomotives or by strip mining of coal, wherein the mining company comes in, digs up the coal, dumps the topsoil in a giant mound, then absconds with the coal and leaves behind a giant pit of exposed soil filled with toxic chemicals. Throw some water in the pit, and you have a lakeside resort! The rest of town (the “have nots”) mostly loitered next to the railroad tracks, their rusty cars sat in the front yard, and their dirty, half-naked children played in front of rundown duplexes, tenements, and other places that had fractions in the street address.

BCM’s house was squarely in a lower-middle-class part of town, next to a brick-paved street. The house was a two-story wood frame structure with an unfinished basement. The basement scared the bejesus out of the boy. It was dark and dirty and reminded him of a graveyard. Many nights, he almost peed the bed, imagining skeletons coming out of the basement and creeping into his room. As it turned out, he was hearing the dog’s claws on the wood floor of the hallway at night. The house had the most oversized bathroom he’d ever seen, with two sinks, a double-wide mirror, a bathtub, and a stand-alone shower. Also included was a laundry chute that led to a gigantic washbasin in the basement. It could handle the enormous loads of laundry, but – thankfully for him – it wasn’t very wide—more than once, his sister threatened to shove him into it.

The backyard wasn’t large, but it had everything a rotten child could want — a tree house, a tire swing, a gigantic sandbox, a huge bush to run around and hide in, and a set of monkey bars. Of course, there are two sides to everything, and what BCM failed – or didn’t care to consider – was that the tree house had virtually no railings and a bunch of rickety wooden rungs nailed to the tree trunk provided the only access to it. The tire swing was usually full of water and mosquito larvae, and fingers could easily get caught in the chains connecting it to the tree. The sandbox, which turned into a mud pit every time it rained, was also the communal litter box for the neighborhood cats. The colossal bush had long branches that neighborhood hooligans liked to pull back and let fly into each other’s faces. A quack optometrist got to pull a splinter out of BCM’s eye courtesy of one such incident. The monkey bars sat on a bare patch of grass, with nothing under it to cushion your fall, and had cheap plywood sheets sitting on it, ready to insert splinters into fingers the second they were touched. It was Darwin’s playground – you either adapted to the lack of safeguards or went to the hospital. Nevertheless, BCM spent many hours playing there and made several trips to the doctor courtesy of it.