"PLAYING DANGEROUS GAMES" (...and other real-life stories from my book, "12 Dead Frogs-A Filmmaker's Memoir"): <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0777FHXX2>.

<https://www.amazon.com/TWELVE-STORIES-FILMMAKERS-MEMOIR-Printing/dp/1388690225/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=>

STORIES FOR THIS POSTING:

DEAD RATTLER, SENTENCES, RED DEATH, A LITTLE INDIAN, PLAYING DANGEROUS GAMES, TRAINING WHEELS, and SILVER PITCHFORK.——————-

DEAD RATTLER (1945)

When I was a year and a half old we moved to a small house just outside of Phoenix, Arizona for the winter, sparing my father the harsh Chicago weather that exacerbated his pulmonary problems (symptoms of emphysema were forthcoming). My mother said that when I saw some kids my size approaching I became scared, wondering what they were. I thought the entire world was made up of just one small person (me), the rest parent-size.

Sand storms more than once gave our house a thorough dusting – fun cleanup for a housewife, mom told me. And we were plagued with typical desert dwellers. To protect me from an infestation of scorpions, my father placed each foot of my crib into a bucket of water, but my mother said she did find one on the wall next to where I was sleeping.

One morning I was sitting alone in my sandbox in our desert backyard when a six-foot rattlesnake headed over. When it was a few feet from where I was playing, within striking distance, our trusty German Shepherd pounced on it and tore it apart. This was before TV, where every parent learns to be overly cautious from talk shows.

SENTENCES (1946)

I do think I remember saying my first word, “screwdriver,” at about age two-and-a-half, when outside the front gate of my great-grandmother’s Victorian house in the Midwest. Of course I can’t be sure. But my mind still holds an image of talking to some workman near the entrance to the property. It’s hard to determine if the stories we recount from our childhood are real, but I do seem to remember everyone being tremendously excited when I finally talked. Given my poor reaction to the pressures and expectations of my father later in adolescence, it’s not surprising that I just stayed clammed up until I could spout complete sentences, perform like the other big people around me.

RED DEATH (1946)

My mother said that one of the biggest scares she had during my infancy was when I was around two-and-a-half years old. She found me vomiting red liquid, sitting there on the floor of the pantry. But I had discovered a jar of maraschino cherries stored in a low cabinet and had eaten half of the contents. It took awhile, she said, to recover from finding her baby in a pool of blood.

A LITTLE INDIAN (1948)

It’s ironic that I could never ’sit like a little Indian’ at play-school, kindergarten or later (still can’t). Given my breech birth, it seems that my joints were too traumatized during my difficult ordeal to allow the flexibility needed to sit cross-legged. I have a breech baby friend who has this same problem, so it’s probably not uncommon. At any rate, from the very first moments of school, I felt like an outsider.

And it didn’t help that my eyes were crossed until the age of two, inadvertently giving me additional problems with school. While I believe that this disability helped me develop a high-level of visual perception and memory (as a filmmaker and editor I’ve come to understand and appreciate this about myself), problems with focusing on words in books made reading a horrible and frustrating chore. This learning disability (not diagnosed as “dyslexia until much later) was probably responsible for my years of disappointing grades in school, and dislike for text books in general. It’s taken writing books to rewire that part of my brain that deals with such cognitive learning.

PLAYING DANGEROUS GAMES (1949)

At some point during pre-kindergarten play school, my parents were brought in for a special meeting. The teachers had complained that I made up dangerous games in which all the other kids participated. My parents were asked if they could please talk to me about stopping this bad behavior. I guess they did, because I certainly didn’t try to exercise any form of leadership qualities for the next twenty years, until I began convincing people to jump off bridges to help me make movies.

TRAINING WHEELS (1951)

When I was seven my family temporarily moved from Chicago, hoping a winter in Sarasota, Florida would help relieve my father’s developing emphysema. I initially enjoyed the beach weather and spent a lot of time just roaming around, fishing and adding beautiful and unusual shells to my collection. It was fun living there, but there were also some hidden dangers.

I clearly remember being placed on the seat of a bicycle by my new (older) Floridian “friends,” and getting my first two-wheeler bike riding lesson, right into ongoing traffic. They gave me a running push into a large circular intersection, where cars merge and exit around a small central island (complete with palm trees of course). It became immediately clear to me that I would die if I didn’t keep pedaling while maintaining balance. And somehow I did rise to the occasion, steering my bike shakily between speeding cars and parked ones, until I could maneuver it off into a driveway where I fell over. I looked for new friends after that.

My Floridian grammar school, located in raised quonset huts that closely resembled WWII prison camps that I’d seen on TV, also supplied challenges. To qualify for receiving dessert (the only edible part of the lunch meal as far as I was concerned), I surreptitiously spooned my macaroni and cheese servings under my chair each day to clear my plate. I wonder what the janitor thought, finding that regularly-occurring pile of noodles on the floor each day.

The one thing I did enjoy, though, were the art projects, which I continued back home after school let out. I remember being very proud of a watercolor painting I did of our house, spending mornings and afternoons for three days straight, sitting out on the front lawn, meticulously coloring everything in. I did my best to render the small bungalow, green lawn and plants, accompanying palm trees in the wind and blue sky. Already, I was earnest about the work.

SILVER PITCHFORK (1952)

Back home in Chicago––I’m about eight years old now––I settled back into making wood sculptures out of orange crates in the basement, and playing with my Lionel train. I thrived on the time spent alone, and was always less than enthusiastic when I had to break for meals or other activities. It was clear that my emotional wellbeing depended on solitude. My mother had to call out repeatedly from the first floor basement doorway before I would reluctantly trudge up the stairs to join the family for dinner.

Around this time, I walked to a nearby hardware store about seven or eight blocks away (are eight-year-olds allowed walk anywhere by themselves in cities like Chicago?) and spent all of my savings – around $6 – on a beautiful, silver-and- blue-painted ‘spade garden fork,’ which looks like a pitchfork, but with just four thicker tines. I have no idea why I bought it, or what I thought I’d do with it once I got it home (we had no garden). But I do remember loving it, and being extremely proud of my purchase. Maybe it’s a clue to my past life as a farmer in Illinois or somewhere. That’s the only explanation I can offer.