Bruce Oliver Scott Paullin —- The Early Years
What is in a name, anyway? I was given a name that had links to family members through both my mother’s and my father’s lineage, thus the two middle names, Oliver and Scott.. The English language name Bruce arrived in Scotland with the Normans, from the place-name Brix, Manche in Normandy, France, meaning “the willowlands”, or “brushwood thicket”. The name Bruce came to mean “from out of the brushwood thicket”, to some. Initially promulgated via the descendants of king Robert the Bruce (1274−1329), it has been a Scottish surname since medieval times. The name Oliver comes from an English origin. In English the meaning of the name Oliver is: the olive tree. The biblical olive tree symbolizes fruitfulness and beauty and dignity. ‘Extending an olive branch’ signifies an offer of peace. The name Scott is from an English and Scottish surname which referred to a person from Scotland or a person who spoke Scottish Gaelic. It also refers to a geographic description designating one from Scotland; The earlier race of 2nd century invaders from Ireland called Scoti; Blue Men B One who colors the body blue with tattoos; Another meaning is “one not from here.”. Paullin in Latin has the meaning: small, and/or also of the lineage of Paul (of the New Testament). “From out of the brushwood thicket, an offering of peace, from a man not from here, tattooed by life, with a small, or humbled status, of the lineage of the mystic, Saint Paul”.
I was born at a northwest Portland hospital in November of 1955. There was nearly two feet of snow on the ground the day of my birth. My mother had to take a taxi to the hospital, because my father was at work at the time of my birth. My father’s employment helped to characterize much of my early years and my relationship with my father. Many of my own earliest needs were trumped by Dad’s compulsion to work often and hard. He carried two jobs for many years, and the affairs of the home were arranged to guarantee that Dad could continue that endeavor. Since I was a crying baby, and my cries kept my dad awake, I was wrapped in a blanket, and stored in the car in our garage at night, until he went to work at 2:15 every morning Mom would retrieve me, and then try to make things OK with me until her own work preparation began, and then Pam and I would be passed on to a baby sitter for the day for our first five years of life.
My sister preceded me into the primary family by sixteen months. I will only make a brief references to my sister Pam, and not because I am trying to be disrespectful or unloving towards her. She was with me through the formative years, and she experienced at a soul level much of the same dysfunctional energies that I did. Yet, my sister became my competitor for the attention from the parents, once my childhood sense of me “figured out” that only limited servings of family love and attention was available.
Before I learned how to talk, my sister thought that I was the best. She seemed to enjoy playing with me until I learned how to talk, then her attachment to me lessened somewhat. I did not develop verbal abilities until relatively late in my childhood My sister reports that she spoke for me until I developed the capacity, or inclination, to speak. Once I started talking (close to age 4) I proved that I had the capacity for speech, and A LOT OF IT. My father wondered, at times, if I would ever shut up.
One of my early memories from age four with Pam is that she would be by my side while I played with my favorite “doll” named Percy. One day I picked up the phone, and started talking to Percy. I swore that Percy talked back to me, while Pam stood next to me. In retrospect, it may well have been the operator, or purely my imagination. Throughout the years, Pam appeared to channel some of my father’s negative energy back to me, becoming the “voice for my father”, especially when she became angry or unhappy with me. Also, the poor girl had to share a bedroom with me for my first two or three years, which I am sure did not go a long way to making her too happy with me.
As a child, it appears that I learned that my personal world could be an unsafe place, especially while I slept. I remember most nights lying awake at least until midnight, fearing sleep and its dreams, until I fell asleep out of exhaustion, even if I was put to bed at 8:00pm. I remember using that extra time to rehash my entire day, and everything that I said and did. I would try to see where I could have behaved better, or differently, for a greater advantage. I intuited that if I were a “better person” by day, my nightmares at night might not be so severe. Yet, my day time behavior rarely improved, for I was fairly spontaneous, and I tended towards impulsive activity.
I had terrifying nightmares almost every night until I was 8 years old. I would be so afraid that I would stay in my bed and pee it quite frequently, which presented some problems over those early years (I was removed from the top bunk of a bunk bed that my sister and I shared for a while, of course, because of a couple of yellow “waterfalls”, leading to us having separate bedrooms at age 4 for me).
Even after I started sleeping by myself, my mother allowed me into her bedroom at night after my typical nightly nightmare terror sessions, as long as dad had already left for work. I remember how protected from my demons I felt, as I lay in bed with her. I also know, now, that I unconsciously sought out women, MUCH MORE THAN MEN, to bond with, with the hopes that the relationship would bring a measure of safety and acknowledgement into my life, which seemed to be quite lacking in too many of my male to male connections. Yes, this was to become an unconscious “center” , yet another locus of energy, in addition to other ‘energy’ centers (such as the fear of being ignored), around which all of my future perceptions were to be influenced by.
My sister and I fought frequently through the childhood years, and more than twenty times we got into wrestling matches and knock-out, drag-out fights. Our last memorable fight gathered attention from the neighbors when we were teenagers, when Pam was fourteen, and me twelve years old at the time. There were lots of screaming, yelling, and cussing, with the occasional body slam and slap to the side of the head. No one was ever injured, other than any onlookers’ sensibilities. She and I were both considered very smart youngsters, yet we were both pretty messed up in the heads, for sure.
Pam and Bruce in front of Grandparents home, 1956
Dad, Pam and Bruce at Rooster Rock Park on the Columbia River in 1957
I have memories of waking up from sleep, and, with my sister, walking over to the garage window, and crawling up onto my rocking horse to look out of the window, to see if our parents’ car was in the garage. Of course, if the car was gone, we were both distressed by the parents’ absence, and, to this day, we both agree that this event did happen, and it happened several times.
My famous rocking horse, which my great-grandfather had given to me
I started 1st grade while I was still 5 years old, having taken an advanced entry exam to qualify me to start earlier. My mother arranged for this because I was so unhappy with the baby sitters that my parents had arranged to care for me (one, who was named Jo Stanley, was an unloving presence who also had an abusive teenage son who terrorized me, and had threatened me with sexual assault on one occasion). I had several other decent baby sitters from age 0-5, but the Stanley’s were my living hell experience. My mother especially wanted to help me, thus advanced entry for me was arranged..
This ended up adding stress to my first grade teacher, Mrs. Tozier, who had a difficult time accepting me and my “immature” behavior. To quote her, from my first grade report card:“Bruce’s main problem is talking to others and to himself. Some of his behavior problems have disappeared, however, and he is working hard”.
One of our first daily activities in grade school was to perform the “show and tell” ritual. Students would bring objects of interest to tell stories about, or would relate their experiences with new or fun activities away from school. Each student would get in front of the class, and have a few minutes to make their presentation. I would go up every day, whether I had anything new to show off or talk about, or not. I so much wanted to be the person who had something to say, and to get positive feedback about it. After a couple of weeks of just standing in front of the class shell-shocked and silent, I was told to weigh and measure my worlds better, which was not part of my tool kit at that age. The need to be recognized and heard, the fear of public speaking and the appearances of suffering and death originated at different points in my life, but became part of one big family in my mind as time went on.
In the third grade, Mrs. Tozier had me again, and her final statement about me was the following:
“Bruce is a careful worker and wants very much to do his work correctly. It has been interesting and rewarding to watch him develop this year. His main problems are social ones”.
I spent a lot of time under the dunce’s cap in the back corner of the room in her class. Mr. Hill, the school principal and Mrs Tozier required that I take medicine for my hyperactivity to continue to be allowed in her class. My mother and my doctor conspired together, and I was prescribed sugar pills, which were placed in a methedrine labeled prescription bottle. The “prescription” was given to Mrs. Tozier, who made sure that I took the fake pills daily. I miraculously improved, though I believe that Mrs Tozier’s behavior also improved through me taking the placebo!
Third grade photograph, Bruce back row, third from right
I had fantasies about friends, of which I had so few (or none) in the early years. One fantasy with remarkable staying power is that the only people who will be attracted to me are those that somehow I miraculously saved their life, otherwise people would be uninterested in befriending or loving me, which led into a few real life disastrous situations in early adulthood, and later on. We lived in an area devoid of children my age and sex prior to 1965, and so I grew up fairly isolated from friendship until we moved to a new neighborhood, where it was a much more mature neighborhood, with more options for childhood friendships located closer to our new home.
There were many moments in the earlier reaches of childhood when I really loved my life. What I really remember well from my childhood memories are:
My love for my mother, my uncle Wayne, and my maternal grandparents (who provided for me a safe, loving home to stay with them at least one weekend a month for most of my childhood),
My conflicted love for my father,
My love for our pets
My love for exploring Nature and the great outdoors,
My love for playing with and studying animals,
My love for running through the forests on trails, or creating my own trails,
My love for building ground forts out of fallen branches,
My love for climbing trees and making tree forts,
My love for exploring islands on the Willamette River near our home, and ,
My love for playing with friends, which were especially hard for me to find, or to make while I was young.
Sometimes, I felt uncomfortable around people my age, especially the boys. I did not always enjoy playing with the boys, who could be too aggressive. In first through fourth grades, I usually hung out with the girls, and I played kick ball and other non-contact or reduced violence games with them. I would become quite attached to one or two girls, and I was already trying to figure out how to incorporate a girl into my life quite prematurely. I preferred girls to boys, becoming overly attached to girls when I was as young as 8 years old. The girls, by and large, totally lost interest in me by 5th grade, so I had to stick solely with the guys for most of my childhood from that point forward until I was fifteen years old.
I usually liked my father, but i was often angry with him. Many times dad was my only friend, and I felt betrayed by him whenever I was over-enthusiastically punished for doing something wrong. I was always guilty of doing something wrong, whether I admitted it or not. If I did not admit it, I was lying, which could lead to yet another swat. As the Course in Miracles has stated, these were unrecognized calls for love, by both of us.
The day after the Columbus Day storm of 1962, when tree branches and fallen trees were everywhere, including our large backyard, my dad was so controlling as to how I was supposed to pick up the branches that I got angry with him, abandoned him, and walked a mile to help Steve Roth (son of owner of Roth BMW) and his family clear the wreckage around their home. I liked Steve’s mom, anyway, as she was always so friendly to me. They were comparatively wealthy, and I remember being told by Steve’s mother that my father was not rich, like they were. This was the first time that I became conscious that families existed who were better off than we were.
I stole from my father’s wallet sometimes, so that I could go to the store and buy candy. I did all sorts of things that I knew to be wrong, yet I took some delight in going against authority, and boy did I pay the price! There were too many beatings with the belt. Most of the behavior that I was accused of I actually committed, so in Dad’s mind I deserved what I got, though mercy sure would have been a nice charitable gesture, had he offered it to me, or my sister. Looking back at my childhood, I was confused as to the best way to attract attention, and it may have been a subconscious desire to be recognized that motivated me to ’go against the grain’.
I was taken to Sunday school at a local church, when I was six years old. I did not like it very much, and I did not nor could not believe that Jesus Christ “died for our sins”. I knew that I was not a “sinner”, at least not the way that they were trying to explain it to me, and that the language of this church was very harsh and confusing. When they tried to tell me that my only hope was to believe all of their vague, boring stories, I balked, and in my own unique passive/aggressive fashion, I just ignored what they tried to teach me. These Sunday School experiences appeared to show me that the church was promoting a bunch of confusing stories with little relevance to my experience. I tried bible study only two more times in our new Milwaukie neighborhood, but stopped when a girl that I was interested in at the time stopped attending. Yes, women were the best reason for going to church. For me, that would prove to be true at least two more times, at times beginning when I was twenty eight years old.
My father loved dogs, and would always try to have a dog available for our friendship. He instilled into me a great love and appreciation for the canine species, which I still hold onto tightly. I loved my first dog Nina, who died while running with me while riding my bicycle along a busy road while I was 7 years old, having been hit by a car (my fault for riding too far from home). I, of course, was devastated, and my dad and mom knew better than making me wrong for her death, but I knew it was my fault anyway. Our “replacement” dog was promptly run over by our next door neighbor when he got into his truck and backed over our sleeping dog. Heidi was our third dog, and she was a beautiful Samoyed. She became, without a doubt, the most wonderful creature that I had ever met up until that era of my life. I began to recognize the miraculous power that the ‘love’ for another being has on me. She became the ultimate canine companion for me, as well as for our entire family.
Heidi as a three year old
My father started disliking cats, even though he had grown up with a house full of cats. He even shot at the occasional stray cats that he encountered on his property to protect his “wildlife”. I remember capturing a cat during that era, and placing it into a burlap sack so that I could terrorize it. For a brief moment, I felt some strange excitement at the potential for abusing this innocent creature. After leaving it hanging on a tree limb in the burlap sack for an hour, I felt really bad, and released it. I wondered then WHY WOULD I EVER WANT TO HURT ANY CREATURE? My experience with a BB gun reaffirmed that understanding, when somehow a shot of mine hit and mortally wounded a bird. I was horrified by the creature’s suffering, and I suffered with it as I tried to put it out of its misery. My dad liked to tell the story of refusing to hunt with his father because he deplored killing, yet here he was, killing ‘innocent’ creatures, so it was certainly a mixed message for me. I was starting to question my behavior and its source, yet was too ignorant to proceed on that line of reasoning too thoroughly.
In the early 1960’s my father felt uncomfortable with how the black race had integrated into the local culture. He would comment on co-workers who exhibited less conscientiousness than he did while at work, and he referred to at least one black person disparagingly. He would also offer pretty judgmental comments against the black race in general, especially when the LA Watts riots of 1964 happened. I could not share in his racism at the time, not knowing any black people, or really understanding what the basis for dad’s prejudice was.
My father had a fixation on people’s appearance. He was SO JUDGEMENTAL of women who were overweight, and he was hard on my mother for any weight gains, almost from the beginning of my awareness of them as my parents. I was confused by this as well. I did not understand why Mom needed to be picked on for this. To this day, I still retain some measure of extra self-consciousness around my own weight, and general appearance. Whenever I stray too far from my “ideal” weight, I begin the process to reestablish an approximation of what is acceptable for me. I remember that Mom and Dad engaged in “Punch and Judy” behavior, where they would trade insults/barbs with each other. I never saw them hug once, and I was to learn later that neither had ever learned to hug, until I showed them what a hug was, and felt like, first in 1988.
I loved listening to music with my father and sister, and he played songs by Roger Miller, Burl Ives, and Johnny Cash quite frequently, so I grew up to love those performers. My parents were members of the Oakey Doaks, a square dancing group of at least 18 married couples, many with young children. This was the group that was to be the source of many of my mother’s and father’s best friends during the period of time from 1958-1973. It was an activity that also took my parents away from our home, and we were left alone several times when they could not arrange baby sitting at the last-minute. I loved the people that they knew, and I formed many short-term friendships with the children while attending out-of-town weekend events with that group.
I loved playing board games with my family, and roughhouse playing with my dad. My sister and I would crawl all over dad while he was on the floor and wrestle with him. Dad really did love his children, and he really spent a lot of his “free” time with us as children. His problem was integrating the children into his busy agenda. He would take us to several of the local creeks so that we could collect rocks for his landscaping projects. Pam and I would earn 25 cents for each filled bucket that we would bring back filled with the smooth rocks of the creek bottom.
I became addicted to fictionalized history books, science fiction books and movies, and I loved the idea of becoming an astronaut, so that I could get off of this fucking rock, and explore the” real” universe. In 1969, my father and I attended the movie, 2001-A Space Odyssey, by Stanley Kubrick, and I was convinced that space traveling was in my future, after watching that groundbreaking movie. When I scored ultra high on my grade school achievement tests, and then virtually aced my PSAT’s and SAT’s in high school, my father finally started believing with me that I had a really good chance at achieving that goal. He never had quite caught fire with my potential prior to that point in life. He had been “saving” money for college for my sister and I, yet in 1969, lost it all in a stock market gamble with his friend, Roland Mill. If my sister and I were to make it to college, we were going to have to do that one on our own.
I loved to climb trees, and the taller that the trees were, the more excited, and fulfilled, I would become. I fell from trees two different times in my life. The first time that I fell, it was from a tree that was leaning over a gravel road near our first home on Steamboat Way. I was eight years old at the time, and when I fell, I landed flat on my back, after a fall of about twenty feet. I got up from the ground, with all of the wind knocked out of me. I feared for my life, because I could not draw my first breath. In a state of panic, I ran for our house several hundred feet before my lungs were to refill again. Another time, in our new neighborhood on Hampshire Lane, I climbed to the top of a big fir-tree, and pretended I was on the mast of a great sailing ship. A big wind did actually come up, and I lost my footing on the narrow top branches, and fell almost eighty feet to the ground. When I awoke on the ground, I had a ten foot length of the top of the tree firmly in the grasp of my hands. I was bruised all over my body, and sore beyond anything I had ever experienced before, but I had no broken bones. The examining physician could not believe me when I told him I had tripped while running in the woods, which was the story I needed to tell to keep from getting banned from tree climbing.
I would like to steer a little different direction for a while, and talk about alcohol. I remember loving beer perhaps a little too much. When I was 5 years old, my father was watching TV with me, and was drinking a beer. He left the room, and I grabbed the beer and drank the whole thing. When dad returned, he wondered where the beer went. Twenty minutes later I fell off of the couch because I had passed out, and then he knew. For the rest of my childhood, dad had to be careful with me to keep me from drinking his beer, of which he usually had 6 or 7 cases stored in the basement. By the time I was 13 years old, I probably had already stolen several cases of beer out of dad’s supply, but I never drank more than one individual beer at a time until I was fifteen years old. I never once saw Dad drunk, at least at home, so he really had it under control by the time I started paying attention. My paternal grandfather’s alcoholism seemed to have had an Impact on the way dad drank as a young man. My father enjoyed drinking, and was quite the social person, as well. But, his memory of his father’s behavior probably served as a good deterrent to abusive drinking, though my father certainly drank heavily after work during his earliest work years.
One revealing memory is from a 4th grade science class, where the teacher placed a metal object on a burner, heated It up, and then placed it into water, where it was distorted by the uneven cooling. We were to describe in written form what we witnessed, and I had no clue how to describe it. I had to look at another person’s paper to see what they were seeing, because I did not have the language to communicate what I witnessed. Well, this aspect of me also can be translated into how I experienced my upbringing while still being raised. I did not have the language to communicate what was wrong, though I knew that I was witnessing something that was not right (I believe this phenomenon is directly related to the inability of many abused children to articulate their experience to others). I asked to see what a fellow student had written, so that I could write my own version of what he observed. What I did in this situation is a microcosm for the process that most of humanity engages itself with in the creation of our shared, or Collective Consciousness–if we don’t directly experience something, we rely on others’ interpretations, and, after awhile, mistake their assumptions and judgments for the “truth”. My ability to bring personal experience and insight into language would continue to prove the greatest challenge to me in high school, and in the years to follow, all the way up to the present.
The childhood feelings of loneliness and abandonment, the frequent whippings with a belt by my father, coupled with whatever fundamental damage that may have been done to my soul through unintentional negligence on the part of my parents during my earliest years, may well have led to the creation (or revelation) of a dramatic story on the dream screen of my mind, which I will now recount.
1964 Dream
At 9 years of age I had a most amazing, realistic dream. This was during a period of time when I slept very little, as I usually got to sleep no earlier than midnight, no matter how early I went to bed. I lay in bed and reviewed the day every night before sleep, and see where I could have done things better, or said something a little differently. My dreams had finally evolved beyond the continuous nightmare phase that I was accustomed to, prior to age 8. But, being so immature, and not too worldly in my knowledge, I did not have the necessary background to know what to think about the dream. I had discussed the dream with my older sister, who seemed to have some partial answers to its mysteries (based on her understanding of reincarnation), but so many mysteries remained to be explained. I waited and watched for further answers, and went on with the all of the important business of being a carefree boy, though at times, I fleetingly experienced “self-awareness”.
Here is the dream:
The priest, having received his directive from “on high”, then returned to his village along the lake in the high mountain region. He gathered all of the villagers together, and informed them that they were to take every golden figurine, every sacred symbol that they owned, and they were to throw them all into the lake, and never to think about them again. Then, he told each villager that they must each go into their own home, and face the “evil one” without any protection or care from any of their gods or their symbols of the sacred.
The priest then returned to his own home, having tossed all of his own idols and treasures into the deep blue lake. He stripped himself bare of all clothing, and then began to summon the forces of the dark. He became surrounded by a fog, and as he lifted his hands, sparks started flying out of his fingertips at the unknown force of darkness that lay just beyond his visual field, still hidden beyond the boundaries of the fog. The priest refocused his energy into his arms, and hands, and the sparks grew into a steady energy field, extending from his body, his heart, and his spirit, towards his unknown adversary. He was determined to overcome this force, this dark energy, and he redoubled his efforts. The priest’s heart began to race out of control, he began to sweat profusely, and a growing sense of fear and dread began to take hold of his entire being, as he finally understood that his energy could not last forever. Yes, for him to continue this battle, he must sacrifice all of his life force. Yet, he felt that he had no choice but to keep engaging the enemy, to finally see the face of the force that had terrorized his village since time began. He desperately strained and stretched to see the object of his fear and disdain, even as the ebbing energy field flowing from his fingertips continued to cut through the fog. Suddenly, a face began materializing before his faltering gaze. As he collapsed to the floor, almost drained of all life, he could no longer fight an undeniable truth– the face of the evil one might be his own!
The dream of the mountain lake community of people, with the priest fighting the force of darkness, is still quite alive in my mind, and remains a major teaching for me as both a child and now, as an adult.
Being so immature, and not too worldly in my knowledge, I did not have the necessary background to know what to think about the dream at the time. I discussed the dream with my older sister, who seemed to have some partial answers to its mysteries (based on her understanding of reincarnation), but so many mysteries remained to be explained. I waited and watched for further answers, and went on with the all of the important business of being a carefree boy, though at times, I fleetingly experienced “self-awareness”.
I was required to take a World Geography class in the 7th grade, Mr. Vaught was the teacher, and also a Milwaukie Elks lodge member, as was my father. Mr. Vaught would report to my father during Elks club meeting about my wayward behavior and attitudes, and of my insufficiency, probably in an attempt to goad my father. Mr. Vaught was very rude to me, and considered me to be obnoxious, and dull, as reported to me by my father. It was through Mr. Vaught’s class that I was introduced to the Incan civilization, though, and Lake Titicaca, which is on the border between Peru and Bolivia. This was, and still is, a very sacred lake, and, according to the lore of the Incan people, it was where the origins of the human race began. I had an eerie sense of familiarity with the lake, and with the people of the area. I actually felt like Lake Titicaca was the lake in my dream from three years earlier. I proceeded to consume every book on the Incan civilization that I could find. I became hooked on the idea of traveling to Peru someday, to seek out some answers, and to experience its culture, perhaps for a second time? I eventually traveled to Peru in 2014, having a remarkable experience that has been documented elsewhere.
As mentioned previously, I was an isolated boy prior to 1965, and I never clicked well with people outside of my family. I was small for my age, plus I had advanced placement early in school, which resulting in the insertion of a relatively immature boy into challenging peer situations. I had a limited number of friends, and I seemed to draw the “outcasts”, be they the eggheads, wimps, crazies, or quiet ones, to my circle of friends. One can see the kind of person that I was, by the people who were drawn to me. I would become intensely loyal to whoever would commit to friendship with me, no matter what their limitations or faults were. Usually, it was the girls of my age group that I more readily befriended, until the age of nine years old, when we moved from West Linn to Milwaukie. Boys were in limited supply in our first neighborhood, and many were prone to be antagonistic towards me.
When I moved to Milwaukie, Oregon in 1965, I met three boys almost immediately. My next door neighbor was Craig Salter, a quiet, introspective, slight build of a boy, who loved technical books and fantasy novels. Tony Mecklem was a small build, private sort of young lad who lived down the road, in a fairly primitive home built by his father out of masonry blocks. But the main friend was Randy Olson, of whom I will speak extensively about later.
Craig Salter 1970 yearbook photo
Randy Olson 1970 yearbook
Tony Mecklem 1970 yearbook photograph
Here is a telling memory about how some members of my family saw me in public, as represented by my older sister in the public school system. I remember being in the 3rd grade, and my sister already having a boyfriend of sorts from her 4th grade class. That “boyfriend” had a younger brother, who was in 1st grade, who accompanied him. The older boy was a bully, but instead of pushing me around, he ordered his younger brother to attack me. I had never been in a fight before, and I was overwhelmed by the bellicose energy shown to me. The boy threw my unsuspecting body onto the ground, and he proceeded to punch me, bite me, pull my ears and hair, and yell little kid obscenities at me. Not knowing what to do (of course, my dad never taught me how to defend myself), but finally angry enough to do something, I began to imitate the lad, and overturned him and pulled his ears, and punched at him, and everything else he did to me, all the while being ridiculed and humiliated by my sister and the older boyfriend. Hmmph, this kind of bullying was to happen in several different forms again over the next several years, as my sister seemed to draw young men into her experience that thought picking on me was the way to her attention and affection.
Another aspect of “family shaming” was evident whenever my father came to sports events that I was involved with from 6th through 8th grade. He never took the time or effort to teach me or coach me on sports, but he was overly critical of me and my level of play on athletic teams. One of his famous public humiliations of me was when I was pitching on the mound one day, and dad yelled out “you couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn!” That is just an extension of the same “blanket party” behavior that he adhered to whenever he felt the need to garage my baby body. I won’t go further into the details of the discipline that was administered to me over the years of my childhood at this time.
School was not a problem for me in the new neighborhood, as the quality of the North Clackamas School District, at least in the grades schools, was substantially lower than that of the West Linn area from which we had moved from, so I was already a bit ahead of my peers, at least in math and English. And, if the truth be known, I was starting to really get a handle as to how to succeed in school, by watching others who were doing well. I noted at the time that I despised, at times, the competition to get good grades at school. Teachers graded on the curve, meaning that a small percentage of the students got A’s, as well as the same percentage got F’s. Part of me had associated getting good grades with getting love and acknowledgement from my parents, and I hated the idea of having to compete with others to get love at home. It was this experience that led me to sometimes feel good about other student’s failures at school, since it might mean that I would thus have a better opportunity to score some attention points. Collaboration was definitely out of the question for me while living in this scarcity consciousness.
A little secret that I carried is that many times, I could “access” certain information that I had never officially learned before, and use it to succeed scholastically. What does this mean? Well, in addition to a nearly photographic memory that I had when I was young, which I lost shortly after I started smoking pot, from time to time, especially during the stress of testing, information would just start appearing in my mind, and I would just fly through whatever academic challenge was presented to me. It felt like I was cheating at times, and I did not understand it, or question it too much. I was probably recalling information that I had already stored, albeit unconsciously, but when I re-read more of my story, I have to wonder if consciousness can be much more shared than we normally experience, at levels both “above and below” verbal levels. After examining my awakening to the “reality” created by words, I could see that embedded into each word that we are able to understand is the whole of human verbal experience. Each word is a hologram of the wholeness of our verbal reality. If we truly understand ONE word, in its wholeness, we can perceive other aspects of the whole, as well. I as to later see that this insight also applies to the human being, as well. If I can truly see the one, I can see the All. I am sure that this will open up or continue some discussion somewhere, if somebody ever reads this obscure document.
I started to become a bully to some girls around the age of 10 years old. If they were not attractive to me, they were susceptible to gentle, and not so gentle, ribbing and ridicule. I found a behavior where I could get support from other boys, but it was damaging behavior on my part, and was to bring shame to me when confronted at a later time by victims of my abhorrent communication style.
A real “marker memory” was when I was in the sixth grade, and playing outdoors during recess. I noticed a group of people surrounding two fifth grades boys. In my curiosity to see what was going on, I walked over to observe the crowd. The boys were in the midst of a fist fight, and there was lots of yelling and screaming. I watched, and moved with the crowd as needed to avoid the fighting boys. I had not ever witnessed such an activity before, and it was mesmerizing. Suddenly, one of the fighting boys, Corey Sears, came over to me, and punched me in the face, and then went back to his fight with the other boy. Not knowing what to do, I went to the Principal’s office, and complained about the fighting boys, and the punch thrown at me. The Principal then scolded me for not intervening in the fight, and trying to break it up. These boys, though in the grade below, were actually as big or bigger than I was, since I was their age, and not the ages of the kids in my grade. I certainly felt no physical superiority or skill, or moral authority, to step in and mediate a dispute such as this. Yet, it left me wondering how I was supposed to behave in relation to the poor behavior of others.
One time when I was 15 years old, and waiting for a bus in downtown Portland, a young woman walked up to me, asked my name, and then asked if I knew who she was. I had no idea. She then told me how I victimized her with my poor humor, and made her pee her pants once. I told her that I was sorry, that was not who I was now, but I felt ashamed. I met another of my victims when I was close to 40 years old in an Oak Grove Fred Meyers store, and I sought her out, introduced myself, and apologized for what I had wrought upon her. She had long ago forgave and forgotten, but I had not. It felt good seeing her living a successful life in adulthood, complete with a happy family. Yes, I was part of the oppression of the feminine spirit, until I became conscious.
One of my childhood friends, Craig Salter was my next door neighbor in our new Milwaukie neighborhood. He was of slight build, and he was a slow talker. He may well have been a creative genius, but his “dreamy” state of existence was indicative of some fundamental issues going on inside of him. I suspected from the beginning that his mother was mentally ill, as she was quite peculiar, and apparently quite a hypochondriac. What concerned me was Craig’s similarity to his mother, as far as his mannerisms. And I also suspected that Craig was bonkers too, but, hey, he was my neighbor, and as far as friends go, I could not be too choosy, eh? I still wondered why I deserved to have such strange friends. He was smarter than most people, yet he did not consistently apply his smarts to school, which was too restrictive for him. On his own, before he was age 15, he had already designed a sophisticated internal combustion engine totally unlike what we use in today’s world. He also designed and built his own models, FROM SCRATCH, of supersonic jet airplanes, complete with spiral staircases made of pins and tiny pieces of paper glued in a spiral fashion. He was also already designing transistor circuits by age 14, which just blew me away at the time. HE WAS AMAZING! I wanted his creativity so bad, as I felt that I had none.
My abilities appeared to be quite mechanical, which left me having the sense that I was just another boring automaton, that I was just parroting/repeating other’s thoughts and behaviors. I enjoyed building model airplanes and ships from the WWI and WWII eras, and building sailing ships from kits that were based on sailing ships of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. I enjoyed building them, but then I would be so critical of my efforts, usually by comparing them to the “perfect” models that Craig could produce. I would become so unhappy with my projects, and an unusual perfectionist phenomenon would occur where I would feel pleasure at destroying my great works because they did not measure up to some (presently) unattainable standard that I had set for myself. This is huge, as it reflects something “fundamental” about an aspect of darkness of my human soul (see “He just wanted to watch the world burn”).
There were many nights when I slept outside and gazed into the night sky with either binoculars or one of many telescopes that I, or my friend Craig, owned over the years, searching for flying saucers, or other interesting otherworldly objects. I needed to know that there were other options for life, life away from the trauma of this planet. Craig and I became obsessed with building rocket ships and developing our own rocket fuel. We were both quite impacted when between 7th and 8th grades, a friend of ours (Charley Davalos) died when his fuel cell exploded, sending shrapnel to cut his jugular vein. Undeterred, I still became an avid rocketeer, building rocket ships and installing manufactured solid fuel booster cells into them, and then launching them thousands of feet into the sky. Craig was stay in my life until 1987, though I only infrequently saw him after my first college years of 1973-1976.
Danny Beauvais was my neighbor from just down the street, who moved there during my seventh grade. I did not hang around him much, because he was quite aggressive, and had a “hair trigger” when it came to his emotions. He behavior frequently got him into trouble, His father was a paratrooper in the war, and had lost a testicle for his efforts during a mishap He had a very attractive mother, who garnered more attention from other men than his father cared to experience. I will just share one story about Danny, which involved a private conversation that my father had with Danny’s father. In that conversation, Danny’s father noted that his marriage was failing, and that his wife was not faithful. One day, in casual conversation, I noted that Danny’s mother had more interests than just his father, and Danny proceeded to get me into a body lock with his legs, and tried to squeeze me to death, until I took back what I said. I kept asking him, in between painful grunts, why he wanted for me to take the truth back. It did not matter to Danny, he just did not want to hear “the truth” from anybody, but himself. I would not take back what I said either, and I paid a very painful price for that “stubbornness”, so what played out here is classic male communication around “painful truths” (I might be interpreted as still practicing that behavior). We did not associate with each other after that He ended up in prison a few short years later for assault, and many other crimes during the intervening period of time.
Danny is on the left
Jeff Tobin was a boy that I had met in the 5th grade. We were not neighbors, but we were friends at school, and we were both quite energetic lads. Both of us had excessive energy, and this did lead to both of us getting into trouble both alone, and together once or twice. I was elected class president in sixth grade, which was not to last long. I walked into the boys restroom, and Jeff and several other boys were flooding the urinals. I did not have the common sense to leave immediately, and in a need to “fit in” I continued to flush one of flooding urinals, just as the principal walked in. Well, I was immediately removed from my symbolic position, and I felt considerable shame.
Jeff Tobin 1970 Yearbook photograph
One time I was beat with a tennis shoe by health teacher John Pavlichek, after being accused of making farting noises in class. It was actually Jeff who made the noises. Jeff was not so significant to me at this level of relationship, where his significance increased was 11 years later when I resumed by friendship with him and worked with him in the PAMS (Portland Area Mailing System-an experimental locally developed electronic mailing system implemented in the Portland Main Post Office). I worked with Jeff in the PAMS unit for about one year. He resigned after his first suicide attempt. I was to meet with Jeff one year prior to his death, when Sharon and I crossed paths with him on the Oak’s bottom hiking trails. He successfully committed suicide when he turned 55 years of age, and the trust that his deceased father had set up for him ran out of money..
I tried out for the cross country team, because I was in great running shape from training throughout my eighth grade with Craig’s older Mark (who ended up designing the sophisticated software for the US Defense Department to use in the computers of their top secret spy planes). Mark was 3 years older than Craig, but he was much more athletic and was incredibly involved in the community. He was an inspiration to me, and I trained with him because he was so smart and motivated, and I wanted to hang with him. I ended up running 3 miles a day for a whole year while in 8th grade, so I thought that I might be a good runner in high school.. Craig and I attempted to run cross country, but I quickly became discouraged by the “faster” runners who were already on the team, so I dropped out. My father certainly was not involved in encouraging me to be a runner, though he did come to one of my freshman football games, which was to be my last game when I finally figured out that I was much too small to endure the pounding from young men almost twice as big as me. I joined the chess club and the golf team my freshman and sophomore years, then dropped both of those options when I started using pot.
A most telling acknowledgement of my social maladjustment and mental state as a youth is when the church that our Boy Scout Troop had its meetings at needed landscaping work. I needed to perform several community service activities to earn a badge to become a “Star Scout”. My attitude was that I wanted to give NOTHING back to the community, or to the church that supported our Scout troop. My father actually understood that attitude, and supported me in my antagonism towards service work for the community. Of course, I never earned the community service merit badge, which meant that I could never earn my Star scout level, or move upward to Eagle Scout.. My antagonism against community support and participation became quite an ingrained part of my personality structure, and was to be the precursor to all future problems..
Bruce Oliver Scott Paullin, was a name cobbled together by my parents, to represent my nature, and indicate the true potential for my life. Yes, there is a huge difference between potential, and actuality, and my life in my later years has become a “miracle experiment” for me in my own attempt to actualize my true nature. The revisiting of my times as a youth gives me a chance to bring compassion and understanding to those parts of my life that did not receive such compassion and understanding when I needed them the most. Revisiting is quite helpful for reintegration, and healing, if done with the right intention. The parts of our lives that we resist the most, are the parts that resist healing, and eventually get repressed, and we end up making them the unconscious influences and manipulators over our behaviors for the rest of our lives.
