Birth & The Connecticut Years (’81-’87)

I was born in Salt Lake City, Utah on Christmas Eve morning 1981–the youngest of seven children born to my mother, Elen, and my father, Frank.

Though I was born in Utah, my first exposure to that beautiful mountain-west state was short lived, as our family moved to Connecticut in January of 1983 when I was barely a year old.
It’s there in Connecticut where my earliest memories were formed and where, at least from my perspective, my story really begins.

I’ve wondered which of my memories of those Connecticut years is the earliest. I remember scaling the walls of my crib on my way to what was probably a middle-of-the-night expedition to… well, probably to the bathroom. 🙃

I think I remember seeing a massively engorged tick on Frosty, our huge Great Pyrenees dog. I remember standing in my parent’s bedroom waiting for my mom to put ointment on my penis after I had to have my circumcision redone (TMI? Get used to it 😅).

I remember the trees, the skunk cabbage, the stream running through the woods by the house, the neighbor’s pond, the mouse in the garage pee bucket during Hurricane Gloria, getting stung by a bumble bee while standing on top of our garden manure pile (likely the event that sparked my fear of bees), emptying out the food storage jars before we left Connecticut.
I remember the cluster of huge boulders on one side of the yard, the snakes, the frogs, the fish, the salamanders…

To a toddler, our 2 ½ wooded acres was a magical wonderland.

I miss that wonderland. 🥺

I think I was a happy child by nature, full of life, and passionate about all sorts of things. I was hungry to learn. I had a thing for numbers. I loved adventures. I loved exploring the unknown, especially outside. The outdoors were my heaven, my favorite place to be in the whole world. I loved to climb trees. I loved to build dams in the stream, and catch minnows and snakes and all sorts of other little critters.

I loved that place.
I was also a gentle, extremely shy, and very sensitive child. I was quick to pick up on how people were feeling, quick to comfort those who were feeling down, quick to tears in difficult situations, and afraid of others thinking badly of me.

I’m still all of those things.
Being as young as I was (ages 1ish to 5ish), my memories of Connecticut consist simply of snapshot images frozen in time but no real stories that can be told. Because of that, I’ll just mention a handful of snapshots that I think might give you a picture of the little boy I was, and to a decent degree, still am. 🙂

Perhaps the most important part of me that was evident as a young child and that inspires the sharing of this first snapshot was my sensitivity to how other people are feeling and my desire to help people through their hard times. As early as I can remember, I’ve wanted people to feel happy and loved, and I’ve done what I could to try to help them feel that way. One example that illustrated this part of me as a little child living in Connecticut was finding my mother crying on the set of stairs that led from the main floor of our home to the second story.

As a little four year old (or whatever I was at the time) seeing her there crying, I went and got my blanket from “the boys’ bedroom,” walked down the stairs, and wrapped it around her, hoping to comfort her. It was a simple thing, nothing spectacular, and probably something that most children have done before, but it illustrates my heart–a part of me that was then and still is now.

Another snapshot that comes to mind is lying on the floor with my brother Richard, both of us just several feet inside the sliding glass door that opened to the backyard. With the door slid open, my older brother Richard and I had placed a trail of bread from outside to inside in the hopes of attracting a squirrel into the house. Motionless, we watched and waited. Memories from that long ago are tricky, but if memory serves, we actually did manage to get one of those little guys to come inside… And I don’t think we did it just once. 😅
I’ve loved animals since those young years, and it’s being outside and surrounded by nature that feels most at home to me. Being surrounded by man-made things is uncomfortable and foreign to my nature.

Another snapshot that comes to mind is of me in the bathroom that was right next to that same sliding glass door where we waited patiently for squirrels. As I stood in the bathroom in front of the toilet, curiosity (scientific inquiry? 😅) overtook me. “I wonder how high I can pee?” I think was the gist of what I wondered (mothers of young little dudes, beware. I think lots of us are like that 😁). With the answer to that absolutely crucial question just waiting to be found, I aimed straight up, turned on the pressure, and gazed upward.
I believe my intended target was the ceiling, and I don’t know how high I actually got, but I do think I remember catching some errant drops in the face as my pee rain fell back to earth from high orbit.
I blame the wind. 🙃
Along with the fun and the adventurous memories, there are also some snapshots of more painful or more personal experiences.

I was a very private child, and for some reason super private about my body.

I still am with the latter of those two things.

Two of the memories that I have burned into my brain that must have been at least a tiny bit traumatic for me as a little boy involved me being seen naked by my family members. One of them was while I was being potty trained. I remember one day, while sitting on the toilet going to the bathroom that whoever was helping me wanted to show off my progress, and they called over some of my family members. I remember seeing their faces in the doorway of the bathroom, and I’m pretty sure I was petrified with embarrassment. I don’t know for sure that it was being naked that was the cause of the embarrassment, but the next experience would seem to support that supposition.

I think the next experience was even more humiliating to me. I remember that during bath time one day my brother plotted a little streaking extravaganza (running around the house totally naked) set to take place after we got out of the tub. As shy as I was and as private as I was about my body, I didn’t want to participate in the adventure myself, but I went downstairs to watch him put on his show. True to his plotting, and with a dash of spontaneity mixed in (stuffing a wad of toilet paper up his little rear end like a rabbit’s tail), he dropped his towel from around his waist, and charged around like a greyhound on a race track in nothing but his birthday suit and his toilet-paper tail. Three of my sisters were reading in the family room at the time, and I was perched on the edge of the family room taking in the spectacle.

And then it happened.

As my brother came flying by for another pass, he reached out and grabbed my towel, yanking it off of me.

I was mortified.
I ran frantically after him trying to get my towel back. Given my nature, I probably cried quite a bit as well, though I don’t remember for sure. What I do remember is being extremely embarrassed–so much so that I went to at least one of my sisters afterward to ask of she’d “[seen] anything.” She told me that she hadn’t, which was probably a very kind lie to comfort a terrified little brother.

I don’t know why I was so shy about my body from the youngest years of my life, but I was. I’m still very shy about my body (though I much better understand the reasons as an adult, which we’ll get to in later autobiographical posts).
It was also around that time that I started wanting to know about female bodies as well. One of my sisters told me that she remembers me, as far back as Connecticut, secretly (or so I must have thought) going through our National Geographic magazines looking for pictures of naked women. I definitely have memories of doing that.

I just don’t have any clear chrono-logical context to officially place them in Connecticut. I bring that up because given the struggles I’ve had with pornography and related addictions for decades now, I’ve wondered if there was something wrong with me way back then, being so private about my own body and being curious about the female body. What I’ve been told to this point, however, is that it’s pretty normal for young boys to be curious and to explore those things, so maybe there are no significant answers for me there; but it’s still a little weird to me that I was so private about my own body at such a young age. I wouldn’t be surprised, though, if a lot of it has to do with what was taught and modeled to us as kids. I want to say that the sexual parts of the human body and related topics were… taboo in our house? My older siblings would probably be able to clarify that for me more.

I mentioned that I was a happy child by nature, but that I was also very sensitive to what was going around me. I grew up in a home with two parents who loved me very much and who loved each other as well but who didn’t know how to be with or communicate with one another. Try as they might, over and over again, they just never could break through. What resulted was a tense home with a cloud of drama that settled over everything. I actually only know that because of the conversations I’ve had with family members later. Somehow, and perhaps it was the only way my extremely sensitive heart could cope, I managed to either not form or to block out every single negative memory that had to do with family drama in Connecticut. I don’t remember a single one. The closest memory I have that’s related to that is the blanket-on-the-stairs story I mentioned above, but even then, there’s no clear memory of a precipitating incident, just the snapshot on the stairs. So, I was happy by nature, but I think that as sensitive as I was, I was also weighed down heavily by what was going on at home. I must have been given what I learned later and given the memories I don’t have.

All in all, at least according to the memories I do have, I loved my time in Connecticut. I have many snapshot memories of those years (not many stories, just snapshots, flashes of images, etc.), mostly of little adventures I had. Perhaps you’ll read more about them in future posts. For now, though, I think this will sum it up nicely:
For perhaps a few years after I moved back to Utah later in life as a baseball-obsessed 10 year old, when people found out that I’d moved a few times while growing up, some would ask me where my favorite place was out of the different places I’d lived. My response would go something like this: “I loved the pool in Ohio, and I love the mountains in Utah, but I left my little-kid heart in Connecticut.”

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P.S. If you’d like to learn a little bit more about me and my life, feel free to read my post about the next stage of my life in Ohio.