In 1980 there was a peanut shortage. Now, I can’t really recall why there was a shortage, but I think it was due to bad weather that hurt the previous year’s peanut crop. I remember a lot of jokes made that the reason for the shortage was that President Carter (an ex-peanut farmer) was leaving office and he was upset that he didn’t get reelected in the previous year’s election.

In any case, the shortage of peanuts caused a huge increase in the price of peanut butter. We’re talking a MAJOR increase. Some budding entrepreneur, taking advantage of the consumer’s desire for a replacement product, started producing sunflower seed butter and offering it for a price well below that of peanut butter. My mom, being a single mother trying to feed 3 kids (I think my brothers had moved out of the house by this time) was finding it difficult to justify paying so much for a jar of peanut butter while trying to make ends meet. When she ran across this much less expensive sunflower butter, she snapped it up and brought it home.

I’ve always loved peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and my mom would often make them for me for lunch. I guess she made me a SB&J sandwich (Sunflower Butter & Jelly) and I ate it. I remember it tasting not at all like peanut butter, but the consistency was the same – and that counts for a lot of our enjoyemnt of food. In any case, I must have eaten a sandwich or two. A day or so later, I woke up on a Sunday morning and rubbed my eyes. I noticed that when I rubbed my eyes, they were a little sore and it felt like I couldn’t open my eyelids all the way. I got out of bed, looked in the mirror and saw that my eyes were red and swollen! It was difficult for me to even keep them open for very long because I had to force my eyelids to stay up.

Long story short, my mom figured that I had suffered an allergic reaction to the sunflower butter. I had eaten sunflower seeds before, but perhaps the sheer volume of concentrated oil had affected me differently. Later in the day, I started to break out in itchy red hives on my stomach and arms as well as my face while my eyes continued to swell. I stayed home from school for a day or two and when the reaction hadn’t started to fade, my mom finally took me to the doctor (we didn’t have health insurance, so we avoided the doctor unless we had some kind of emergency). He diagnosed me with a food allergy and gave me some antibiotics saying that the reaction would clear up in a day or two. On a side note, these were the first non-chewable tablets I was ever able to take. Up to that point, I had only ever had chewable or liquid medicines because I didn’t think I could swallow tablets. Of course, my mom got me to swallow the tablets by inserting them into a tasty chocolate devil’s food cake!

My sister really got a kick out of how I looked over those few days. Somewhere, we have a snapshot of me looking very “stoned”. Since I was only about 9 years old, I didn’t really even comprehend what that word meant, but she certainly found it hilarious! Anyway, within a few days, the swelling and itchiness went away, just like the doctor had said they would and I was back in school. I know I didn’t eat any more sunflower butter after that. In fact, I think that jar of generic PB replacement sat in our cupboard for several years! I don’t think I’ve had a sunflower seed since that time either although I do eat foods that contain sunflower oil and I’ve never had a problem.

Back in the old days before funding cuts for public schools, the school system of which I was part had a school-day program called Oxford Project Talent or OPT for short. Essentially, OPT was a program designed to give above average kids a chance to further their interests in topics related to math, science, art, history and technology. One day, near the end of my year in 3rd grade, the teacher distributed handouts to be taken home and given to our parents. As it turns out, these sheets were permission slips to allow us to be taken out of our regular classrooms and to attend the OPT meetings. I don’t remember how I felt about this opportunity at first. I tend to think I wasn’t very enthusiastic about getting involved in the program. After all, OPT was also affectionately known as “Oxford Potty Training” among the kids who weren’t involved in it. However, once I learned that my buddy Christian, who lived down the street from me and was a year older than I, was going, I think my feelings changed a little. So, my mom signed the permission slip and we attended a meeting with the program coordinator, Mr. Decesa (or something like that!) at the middle school to give the students and parents an idea of what was expected of us and what to expect.

It sounded like fun to me. Twice a week, we would leave our regular classrooms at the first bell and meet in the library where we would work on our research and projects and their associated reports. We would be expected to keep a journal and notes on all of our research. We would have full access to all of the books and materials in the library as well as access to the one computer that we had in the school. I thought this was a great opportunity! Being in 3rd grade, there were some books that we weren’t allowed to check out from the library until we were in 5th grade. These books for the “older kids” were tantalizing. In particular, there was a series of hardcover books related to World War II that I was dying to get my hands on! I’d have to come up with some project that would allow me to use them as resources!

When the first day of OPT in 4th grade finally came, I was excited. I talked with Mr. Decesa about what my first project would be. What was I interested in? During our summer vacation, I had seen Raiders of the Lost Ark and archaeology sure did look like an exciting field, so I decided that that would be my first area of research. I proceeded to check out a bunch of library books related to archaeology. I saw a lot of Egyptian, Aztec, Babalonian and Chinese artifacts and I was intrigued. At our next meeting, Mr. Decesa handed me a mimeographed page laying out topics that I should touch on and research that I should do. At the bottom of the page were several questions that I should answer about my topic of study. These questions weren’t the typical types of questions that I had encountered in my previous years of school. I couldn’t just answer these with a yes or no. Mr. Decesa was asking me to draw conclusions based on my research and to make statements about things I had never considered before.

Although my heart sank at the thought of real research, I got to work looking up the definitions of the twenty or so words that Mr. Decesa had typed at the top of the page. I remember the first few were “pot shard”, “midden heap” and “stratification”. Pretty big words for a 10 year old to deal with! Over the next several weeks, I learned a lot about the science and art of archaeology. I learned about the Greek and Roman empires, about some of the civilizations that came long before the Greeks and Romans, about medieval archaeology. I learned that Indiana Jones was probably not your typical archaeologist, but I learned about the tools of modern scientist and how they could be used to help date finds. It was an interesting time. I think that was also when I decided that I didn’t really want to be an archaeologist.

For the most part, I enjoyed OPT. I didn’t get picked on much. If someone told me I was in Oxford Potty Training, I told them that they were just jealous because I was smarter than they were – yeah I was a geek!

I moved on to other projects. I did research on computers and how they work (the first part of that project was learning binary math – that’s how I found out I didn’t want to be a mathematician!) and I learned that not everythinb about computers was as fun as playing with our Atari 2600. I read about astronomy and black holes. I did chemistry experiments with Christian and we made our own orange soda and played with little drops of mercury (before it was considered highly dangerous!). I learned about airplanes and aerodynamics.

I stayed in OPT the following year. My friend Stephen Robert joined us in 5th grade, so I did a couple of projects with him as well, although I can’t seem to remember much. I think we may have done a project on birds – he had a weird fascination with birds – especially the Scarlet tanager. Upon moving to 6th grade, which also meant moving to the middle school, Stephen and I were joined by my buddy Allen. Mr. Decesa left the program to start his own school for gifted children several towns away and Mrs. Ellia became the new director.

Funny story about Mrs. Ellia: She was a very large woman. One day we were sitting around in the OPT room doing whatever it was that we were supposed to be doing, when we heard a loud crash. Upon looking up, I was greeted with the shocking site of Mrs. Ellia sitting on the floor on top of her splintered and broken wooden chair. Apparently, there was some weakness in the chair that her weight had exploited and down she went. I remember laughing out loud as it happened. I felt just a little ashamed of myself after we learned that she had hurt her back in the fall.

Now fully entrenched in geekdom (I had begun playing D&D with my cousin and reading comic books over the summer), we worked on creating our own computer based Dungeons & Dragons role playing game. I had learned to write simeple programs in BASIC at computer camp over the summer, so I used my limited knowledge to write a game that let the user choose from a series of options, roll dice and fight monsters. There were A LOT of IF statements! We never really finished the game before Oxford Project Talent was cancelled. I don’t remember if it was discontinued due to a lack of interest by students or a lack of funding. So, it was back to regular classes for me. That was probably a good thing because it was about this time that school work was becoming a little more difficult. On top of that, our teenage minds were starting to wander to thoughts of the opposite sex leaving little room for further academic studies.

To the left of the short driveway that lead to the garage was a huge oak tree. I loved that monster of a tree with it’s huge, wide trunk and tall limbs. In the fall, thousands of acorns would drop to cover the driveway and the road – leaving a an area of acorn powder ground up by passing cars. I started many a small oak from those acorns – planting them in a small pot and nurturing them in the spring. None lasted more than a few months, but it was great to watch them sprout and grow from nothing.

Moving up the hill towards the house was a second driveway – this one unpaved. My mother usually parked her car in the old garage (at least until it became too unstable to park under it any longer), and the second driveway was for the other family members’ cars. This driveway sat at the bottom of a steep embankment that lead from the front yard of our house down to the driveway, ending in an often repaired stone wall. That “bankin'” as we used to call it, was a great source of entertainment during most of the year. On snowy winter days, we would drag our sleds to the top of the hill and fly down it only to wince in pain as we flew over the stone wall and crashed to earth in the driveway. Sometimes, we would build a packed snow ramp at the end to give us more height. With just the right conditions, we could ride our sleds down the hill, across the first driveway and down into the neighbor’s yard! In the fall, the crackly leaves made another great medium for sliding down the hill – this time on our butts!

Climbing to the top of the “bankin'” and looking down towards the garage, revealed another area that provided hours of fun for me as a kid. To the left, against the side of our house was a long set of poured concrete stairs. These stairs weren’t always there. In fact, for many years, we had a back door of sorts that opened into nothing but empty space. Built by my uncle and cousins with some help from my brothers, the stairs were another natural playground. It was fun to slide down the long metal handrails and jump off the top step. I also learned just how hard concrete can be from banging my shins on the edges of those steps. In the shadow of the stairway was the part of the embankment that we would walk down to get to the driveways. No grass grew in this path and the worn gulley provided an easy path for rain to run down the hill. Therefore, in dry weather this part of the hill was a great place to play. I would spend hours there with my Star Wars figures. The powdery soil made a natural miniature Tattooine while the gray color of the stairs reminded me of the rebel hideout on the fourth moon of Yavin!

From April, 1971 to July, 1990 I lived in a house on Holbrook Road in Oxford, Massachusetts. Of course, I lived there with the other members of my family – various parents, brothers and sisters left the home and returned over the years to eventually leave for good and get on with their lives.

The house was not particularly small, but it wasn’t big. Holbrook Road began at Main Street and slowly climbed one of the largest hills in the town. The house was at a point about two thirds of the way to the top of the hill – exactly one mile from Main Street. You could go higher – all the way to the top – but you would need to take Fort Hill Road (so named for the Huguenot fort built atop the hill overlooking the town in the late 1600’s) to do so.

Starting at the bottom of Holbrook Road, one would pass Manny’s Disco – a boring looking square structure with a huge peaked roof. Manny’s was a very popular place in it’s day. Friday and Saturday nights were so popular at Manny’s that cars, trucks and motorcycles would overflow onto Main Street or into the neighbors’ yards. Continuing up the street and over the railroad tracks, the road begins it’s uphill grade, and one entered the shady, pine grove and the turn off for George Street on the left. The next landmark was [url=http://don.oninohana.com/bios/donhoule_22.php3]the bridge over Interstate 395[/url] followed by the mysterious Mount Pleasant street on the right. Holbrook Road crests at the bridge and then continues downhill for a bit, flanked on either side by fields filled with corn stalks or long green grass in the summer and left empty and brown in the winter. Starting uphill again, Chris Road branches off to the left. As a kid, I loved Chris road. First, I had a lot of friends who lived on that road – my friend Christian, the Costellos, Jason Visbeck and my sister’s friend Cindy all lived on that road. Second, the street was mostly unpaved, which made a great quater mile long place to do powerslides on our bikes!

Across from Chris Road lived the Dorans and their annoying barking dogs. Next to them, lived our neighbors, the Coffmans with their annoying yapping beagles and across the street from them, the Petersons who’s yard next to their house was dominated by a fenced area used to house their horse. There were a lot of animals in our area!

Approaching our house, one first encountered the slightly leaning, well rusted garage structure. At one time, the garage was probably well built, but I don’t remember those days. As I remember it, the garage was a rickety metal and wooden frame covered with some kind of white aluminum siding. There was no door – at least not one that closed, so leaves and sticks and animals would find their way inside. Like every other family with a garage, we used the space to store stuff. Since the corrugated aluminum roof was far from weatherproof, anything stored there eventually became garbage. Over the years, some of the siding on the building had come loose and fallen, lying unkept on the ground beside the structure. As a child, I discovered an interesting property of the white paint that coated these metal panels. If I licked my fingers and then ran them across the surface of the painted siding, I could use the old powdery coating to paint on the wooden framework of the building as well as the door of my mom’s car!

For quite some time, the family car (we had a series of station wagons over the years) shared it’s berth in the garage with our old tractor. I don’t know where that thing came from or what it’s original purpose was, but the tractor made a great toy for us kids whether it was running or not. The tractor was not a riding lawnmower or John Deere – it was a real tractor meant for working small fields and hauling loads of wood, dirt or a group of laughing children in the open trailer hitched to the back. I have some great memories of sitting atop the unpadded metal seat of that vehicle and making my way around our back yard with my siblings riding in the trailer. I can remember the sounds and smells and most vividly, the feeling of the black steering wheel in my hands. At some point, one of my brothers painted the tractor a deep, shiny blue. I imagine that he used cans of auto spray paint to cover the whole body and motor with color, leaving only the wheels and tires their original hue. Eventually, the tractor quit working and none of us had the know-how or the interest to get it running agiain. For many years, the tractor sat in the garage and made a great place to sit out of the rain and cold and talk with our friends.

When I was about 13 or 14 years old, my friend Christian and I planned a “secret mission” to infiltrate the Burger King warehouse that was located at the end of my street. Since we were into the whole ninja thing at the time, we thought the best way to test our “skills” would be to sneak into the place and come out with some sort of Burger King memorabelia. I don’t remember the details really well, but I know it involved going along the railroad tracks that ran behind the huge building, climbing over the fence and sneaking past the security guards at the gate! I think we planned a date for the whole operation and everything, but we never carried out our plan.

Our days of planning “ninja missions” began after we read Ninja Secrets of Invisibility by Ashida Kim. This supposed authentic work explained the methods of distracting sentries, avoiding detection and what to do if you were discovered. Basically, that book was a piece of crap that has probably gotten a lot of people arrested for trying the things this supposed authority writes about – luckily, we were able to eventually determine that Ashida Kim had nothing to do with true ninjutsu!. Anyway, we read this book and others and started practicing how to move quietly.

There was one mission where we donned out tabi and black military fatigues (“SWAT pants”, as we called them!) and walked down to a house that was rather isolated in the woods near our house. The cool thing about this house is that it has a nice pond right next to it. Draining into the pond is a little brook. And what made getting to this house so intriguing? The owners had 3 dobermans who were always outside! We had no plans to break in or anything (we never did have any interest in doing that), we just wanted to see how close we could get before we caught the attention of the dogs. We thought that by walking into the area via the brook, the water would cover our scent. After we arrived at the area, the full moon was just rising in to the early summer sky to help light our path along the stream. We made it to within a hundred feet of the house which wasn’t bad considering the distance to the house from the street. The dogs began barking after they heard a splash or the cracking of a twig. The two of us crouched down into the shadows, waiting for the dogs to quiet down before we continued on towards the house. Within a couple of minutes, we were on our way again. Those damn dogs began barking right away, so we huddled down in the cool, muddy water to wait it out. This time they continued to bark and a light came on outside the house! Now, we began to worry! We sat in that spot for about 2 hours, afraid to move, before we finally had the balls to turn around and head out the way we came.

When we got back to my house, we were muddy, wet and cold. Cloth tabi do not provide any insulation from the cold water – I think mine were numb!

There were a lot more missions carried out by Christian and I or my cousin Scott and I or the three of us. But the Holy Grail of them all – the Burger King Warehouse operation – never took place. I guess the threat of getting caught in a place like that was too much for us – after all, we were basically good kids!

Check back soon for a continuation of this story – “On Belay!”

A couple of weeks ago, I was in my apartment being bombarded by the loud walking of my neighbors who live upstairs from me. There are 4 people living in a one bedroom apartment right above mine. They walk from 7am to about 10pm everyday. I don’t know what they are doing, but I know that they really make me wish for some peace and quiet!

Anyway, I was just about ready to fly completely off the edge of sanity, when I thought back to a very peaceful moment in my life. I don’t remember the exact day, as there was nothing particularly memorable about the day. I recall it was a cool, breezy day, probably mid-Spring. Maybe early April. I was young. Not more than 14 years old. I had no cares. It must have been a Saturday or Sunday or we had the day off from school for some reason. The sky was that perfect blue that you see only when the air is very dry and the breeze whips away any hint of haze.

I am sure it was about noon, as the sun was high in the sky and shining brightly down through the needles of the tall pine tree that towered above me. I lay on my back, head resting on a perfectly tilted stone, staring up at nothing. The wind carried the strong perfume of pine sap and old, brown, fallen needles to my nose only to be gone a second later as the breeze picked up. The sun was at once blinding and soothing through the natural needle-blinds. It shone on my face as the wind tousled my hair and brought goose-bumps up on my arms even through my spring coat.

A few puffy clouds hastened across the sky from right to left. Their dark undersides casting shadows on the ground like so many ghostly cattle. Off to my left, the tall grass in the uncut field whistled with each breath of wind.

I could have lain there all day long. Thinking of nothing, just enjoying the sounds, smells and feelings of nature on that day. I felt privileged to be witness to something so beautiful. Something that was separate from our daily lives and yet always there.