Over the next couple of weeks, I will be offering a taste of my memoir,
The Promise, or the Pros and Cons of Talking with God, published by
TouchPoint Press, here on my blog. It is my true story of first faith and first love and how the two became almost fatally intertwined. Keep checking back for additional chapters.
3 - Childhood
I WAS BORN ON DECEMBER 28, 1960.
I was the second child of Douglas Ernest Murphy, Sr., and Clara Marie Protani. Not only was I their second child, I was their second child born that year.
My older brother Douglas was born in February, and, in a sense, he was very much to blame for my early debut in 1960. I was a little premature. My mother went into labor after Dougie accidentally pulled the Christmas tree down on her.
At the time of my birth, my father was nineteen year old. My mother was seventeen. They were married on August 29, 1959. Dougie appeared six months later. ‘Nuff said?
My two doomed siblings followed. Laura Lee Murphy was born on September 16, 1962, and Mark Brendan Murphy followed her on February 26, 1964. There was no hint in their happy childhood faces of the depression and madness that would later drive them to self- destruction. My sister Jeanne Kathleen Murphy rounded out the original quintet in 1965. My kid brother, John Christian Murphy, was the “oops” child. He would be born nearly a decade later in 1975 after the family moved to the larger house on St. Helens Avenue. He wasn’t part of the raucous chaos that echoed off the walls of that small house on Hamlet Avenue.
My father Douglas attended the University of Baltimore and worked part-time as a clerk for the Social Security Administration at the time of my birth. In 1966, he graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Law degree. He never practiced. He never even attempted to take the bar exam. He had already found his true life’s calling as a computer programmer for the Social Security Administration. I would hear his genius touted by friends, family and total strangers alike over the years. He won many awards and commendations during his long government service, and turned down many lucrative opportunities in the private sector. He loved working for SSA. He shared his passion with three of his brothers, Richard, Brian and Kevin, as well as his brother-in-law, Tony, who all joined him at Social Security as computer programmers or systems analysts of one variety or another. I nearly followed him there myself.
My father was a lifer. Decades later, even after falling into a permanent alcoholic depression following the deaths of two of his children, he remained a valuable resource at work. My uncles said my father operated in such rarified air that even when intoxicated, he was sharper than most programmers at their prime. The difficulty was finding problems that stirred his dormant interest. I remember watching a television documentary about computer languages with him near the end of his life. The narrator said computer languages were developed because people couldn’t read the series of ones and zeros that computers operated on. “Idiots,” my father angrily intoned. I don’t doubt he could read the zeros and ones.
My mother was full-time mom until the nineteen eighties. Having five kids in five years certainly kept her hands full. We had a loud family. Lots of screaming. Lots of yelling. Lots of running around. Lots of activity. The squeaky wheel definitely got the grease. A quiet kid was by definition a good kid. Sometimes the way to get lost was in a crowd.
Our family took weekend road trips to every historical site within a hundred mile radius like Fort McHenry, Harper’s Ferry and various Civil War battlefields. We spent one week every summer at Ocean City, and later went on raucous white water rafting expeditions to the Youghiogheny River accompanied by eighty Social Security workers, family members and, on occasion, crazy outlaw bikers.
I liked being a Murphy kid. We were rambunctious and constantly fighting among ourselves – except when faced with an outside threat. Then we were a team. We were not a touchy-feely family of hugs and kisses. We weren’t always saying “I love you,” but I honestly always felt loved and secure. We were also allowed to be our authentic selves. Our parents did not press upon us rigid patterns to which we were compelled to conform, like it or not.
I was a scrawny little kid. I had thick brown hair, which started out somewhat light but grew darker over the years, and hazel eyes. I was extremely thin. I doubt I was five-foot anything by the time I graduated. I had large ears, accented by the crew cuts inflicted on me in my youth. No hippies in our house! However, my most distinctive feature was my large nose. Dougie, the official dispenser of Murphy nicknames, dubbed me Rubbernose. Fortunately, few followed his lead. Still, it would be years before the rest of my face finally caught up with my notable proboscis.
Life was good. Life was happy. I had lots of friends and enjoyed playing all the traditional outdoor games of the time. But I was equally, if not more comfortable playing all on my own or watching television. Not surprisingly for someone who would become a professional screenwriter, my favorite place was the Arcade Theater near the corner of Harford Road and Hamilton Avenue. I was still very young when my mother, anxious to get any of her children out of her hair for a few hours, started letting me go alone. I loved walking into the theater on a bright afternoon and staying until it was dark outside. That always made it feel like the world changed while I was at the movies. Start times really didn’t matter back then. You came when you came. If you missed the beginning of a film, you just stayed and watched it again. If the movie was good, you could watch it a third time.
Movie going was a perfect hobby for a Rosenberger disposition. It allowed you to sit back and observe in comfortable silence rather than actually participate. The quintessential Rosenberger hobby of the previous generation was fishing. Fishing allowed you to go out and spend time with your buddies in silence. The only things that opened up on those trips were beer cans.
I was very cognizant of my tendency to remain alone. And it scared me.
I clearly remember sitting alone on the landing of the stairs to our dank basement, which served as both bedroom and bathroom to our untrained dog Zeus, thinking I would never get married. I knew I would never be able to express my true feelings to anyone. I couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve years old at the time. Who sits around thinking things like that at that age? Maybe a lot of people. Not that I’d ever have known. I would have never dreamed of discussing it with anyone. Not at home. Not at school either.
My siblings and I attended St. Dominic Elementary School. Although my brother Douglas and I had attended kindergarten together, I was held back a year before entering first grade. The school had a strict policy of not allowing siblings to start school in the same grade unless they were actual twins. “Irish twins” like Dougie and myself were out of luck. Actually, I was the one who was out of luck. I had to repeat kindergarten while he moved over to St. D.
It isn’t particularly surprising my parents decided to send their children to parochial school. Both sides of my mother’s family were Catholic. She, like her mother and grandmother before her, attended St. Wenceslas Elementary School before she eventually jumped ship for the public Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School. Things were a little more complicated on the Murphy side of the family. My paternal grandfather, Paul James Murphy, Sr., was very Catholic but his wife, Margaret Angie Robertson, was extremely Presbyterian. They had to marry in secret to avoid the wrath of Margaret’s parents, but the question remained how to raise the children. The first three boys, Paul, Jr., Douglas and Richard were baptized Catholic, but Margaret balked after her daughter Carol was born.
The pastor of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church often thundered dire warnings at my grandmother Margaret about the eternal fate of her unbaptized daughter whenever he saw her on the streets of their hometown of Dunmore, Pennsylvania. Margaret refused to relent. A compromise was reached. The boys would be baptized and raised Catholic while the girls would be predestined to follow their mother into the Presbyterian Church. Peace was restored, and the deal held as Brian and Sharon were born. Margaret reneged at the birth of her last son Kevin. She wanted her baby to go to church with her, so Kevin was raised Presbyterian like his sisters.
My father Doug wasn’t much of a churchgoer and had very little to say on the subject. Early during my childhood, I remember him going to church on the major holidays like Christmas and Easter, but rarely on any other occasions. Before long, he was generally absent on the holidays. Sunday was reserved for the Murphy Football League – a group of family and friends from Social Security who played touch football on the field at Northern High School. My mother Clara was an avid churchgoer, and managed to get us kids up and dressed to go with her most of the time. I was just grateful she didn’t dress us all up in the same clothes and make us sit in a pew in order of height like Mrs. Mazziott did with her equal-sized brood.
When my mother couldn’t attend church, she would send Dougie and me there on our own. We were instructed to bring home a church bulletin as proof of our attendance. Dougie would sneak into the back of the church, grab a bulletin, and then we would have a free morning. I didn’t feel particularly guilty about skipping church. I was too young to get anything out of the mass. Especially when said in Latin. But I was always a believer.
I always had an innate belief that God existed, and that He heard my prayers. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t believe that. I can’t say I was always completely orthodox in my theology when I was a child and a pre-teen. I had an inquisitive mind, and I wondered frequently about the nature of God. Not His attributes. I had more practical concerns like: What is spirit? What is God made of? How big was God? Was He the same size as the universe or was He larger? Could God possibly be a manifestation of our combined, human consciousness? I contemplated the nature of eternity. The Trinity. And, yes, I must admit I sometimes got caught up in the kooky theories of the day. My mother laughed when I came home and announced that we could throw away the Bible after I saw Chariots of the Gods, a pseudo-documentary about how ancients worshipped aliens, based on the kooky Erich Van Daniken book of the same name. There were, however, a few tenets of faith that I never doubted: God existed, He had a personality, and He took an active and compassionate interest in His children. That was all I needed to know at the time.
In my own childish ways, I was debating and examining the issues that troubled philosophers and theologians for centuries, and I was answering them to my satisfaction without any outside help. I would have never dreamed of discussing these issues with one of the priests or nuns. I was very Rosenbergian about my faith. I found my faith to be too private to discuss with others. Still, I took all of the rituals of the Roman Catholic faith very seriously and very thoughtfully. I never thought of rebelling, and I couldn’t have done so even if I had the desire. I was going to Catholic school. The rituals were part of our curriculum. I was, however, never an altar boy. Why? No one asked me.
I loved going to Saint Dominic Elementary School. There were about 104 children, give or take a few, depending on the year, in the class of 1975. They were neighborhood kids. I’d already been out playing on the streets with many of them before we were old enough for school. Since Hamilton was a working/middle class neighborhood, there were few socio-economic distinctions between us, or even between us and the kids who went to public schools. In other words, we were us.
In the summer of 1973, my family moved about a half a mile away to 21 St. Helens Avenue. The beautiful, five-bedroom Victorian home sat on top of the second highest hill in the city, 360 feet above sea level. Baltimore was spread out before us like a glorious panorama. You could see everything from the skyscrapers downtown in the Inner Harbor to the smokestacks of the steel mills in Sparrows Point. The house was close enough to Morgan State University to hear its marching band practice on a quiet night. Sometimes you could even hear the crowd roar during an exciting Oriole baseball game at old Memorial Stadium on 33rd Street.
The new house was definitely an upgrade over our small, three- bedroom home on Hamlet Avenue. Although my parents initially assigned us three boys to a single large bedroom on the second floor, Dougie and I both staked out separate bedrooms in the comfortable attic. I got the larger room in the back of the house with a fabulous view of Baltimore city. Dougie got the smaller room in the front with an unhindered view across the street into the bedrooms of the nubile Luzerne sisters. That poor family. Seems they could never afford to put curtains on the girls’ windows.
The seventh and eighth grades were the apogee of my childhood. No bullies. No enemies. I liked everybody, and everybody liked me. The move brought a new friend into my inner circle. Jim Jackson was a year ahead of me in school, but we became fast friends. The boys and I had some great summers. If we had a leader, it was Charlie Woods, a handsome, charismatic blond kid with an easy smile and a great sense of humor. Guys liked him. Girls liked him. Parents liked him. He was also trouble. Serious trouble. But not yet, not during those innocent summers.
My new house became the summer daytime hangout. Garrett Heights Elementary School was located only a few houses away. We played baseball on its green fields every afternoon. During our first year of play, we’d count it as a homerun if anyone hit the ball over the fence separating the field from the parking lot. By the second year, we were all bigger and downgraded the feat to a mere double.
The nights our parents would let us camp out in the backyard, we’d devote ourselves to pool hopping. First, we’d record about an hour of conversation on a cassette player. We’d rewind the tape and press play for the benefit of any eavesdropping parent. Then we’d slip out for our nocturnal pursuits. There were plenty of pools, mostly above ground, in Hamilton and we were intent on swimming in them all, uninvited, of course. In one night alone we visited twenty-six of them. The biggest prize was the Mazziott family’s large in-ground pool. Not because it was the best pool in the neighborhood, though it probably was. It was prized because the Mazziotts constantly boasted how no one would dare pool hop them. They had lights, horns and BB guns at the ready.
We did it. Piece of cake. I think we even knocked over some garbage cans on the way out to alert the family of our conquest. Those were great summers. The whole world seemed to smell of mowed grass and honeysuckle.
Around that time I started noticing girls. I developed my first true heart-pounding crush on a girl named Jennifer Poskocil. She was the first girl I felt I could talk to, and I did. It was a great feeling. Still, I never even attempted to ask her out on a date despite the fact that some of our more precocious classmates were already dating. That was beyond the realm of my possibilities. Not that I would have known what to do with her anyway. We did have sex education in the sixth grade. However, Sister Margaret, our instructor, as well versed as she might have been in the subject, didn’t necessarily make it sound like anything in which anyone would want to willingly participate.
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| Curley Freshman |
In 1975, I left the world of girls and started attending the all-male Archbishop Curley High School. Entry into high school broke up my familiar gang on a day-to-day basis. Among my closest friends, only Jim Jackson attended the school with me. Bob Burgess, my best friend since kindergarten, went to our cross-town rival, Calvert Hall, and Charlie Woods attended the co-ed Towson Catholic. Lucky dog!
Jim’s older brothers drove, and I had an open invitation to ride to school with them in their green Volkswagen van every day. I only took them up on the offer a few times. Once again, I don’t know why. Perhaps I didn’t want to feel dependent on anyone else. Perhaps I valued my privacy. Perhaps I was just being a Rosenberger. But instead of comfortably driving in with them every day, I dutifully walked down the hill and threw myself on the mercy of the mass transit system.
I was the second shortest kid at St. D. Fortunately, the same kid who spared me the unhappy distinction of being the shortest also joined me at Curley. However, my diminutive height still made me an immediate target of the seniors. It did no good to point out there was someone even smaller they could pick on. If the seniors caught you near the back parking lot door, and there were no teachers around, you could expect to be thrown into the school dumpster or under the grating where they kept the boilers. If they caught you in the cafeteria with no teachers around, you could expect to be thrown into one of the garbage cans. No big deal. Nothing personal. It was just one of the perks of being a senior, and one of the drawbacks of being a freshman.
They never got me. Never.
Sometimes as many as a half a dozen seniors would try to grab me and throw me into the dumpster. The emphasis was on the word try. I might’ve been little, but once I got both of my arms and legs going, I was impossible to hold – and a clear and present danger to my tormentors’ reproductive organs. There was only one problem. The more you escaped, the greater challenge your eventual capture became. Things finally came to a head one afternoon when a teacher took about ten of my fellow freshmen and myself to the cafeteria for some reason and told us to wait for him. He left with about thirty seniors sitting at the other side of the room.
The seniors gazed at us with the same affection that a pride of lions gazes at a herd of gazelle. Everyone was sweating. Would they come for all of us? Or just one? The herd emitted a sigh of relief when it became clear they were only going to come for one of us. Me.
Five seniors raced toward me to finally put me in my place, which they concluded was one of the large blue plastic garbage cans. They chased me around the tables and through the empty kitchen to the laughter of their colleagues. Twice they got me. Twice I managed to wiggle free before they got me into one of the trashcans. Finally, a big senior came over and ended the game. As my tormentors went back to their table, the big senior put twenty dollars into my hands. He said he and his friends had bet the other seniors that they wouldn’t be able to get me. They won their bet, and he wanted to share some of the winnings with me. I never had a problem with the seniors after that day.
Still, I had problems making real friends at Curley. It wasn’t a lack of good guys. The problem was a lack of transportation. Nobody drove during our freshman and sophomore years, and most of the guys I hung out with at school lived in exotic, faraway neighborhoods like Dundalk and Highlandtown. Call me asocial, but there was no way I was going to take two or three buses to hang out with new friends on a weekend or during the summer when I could hang out with my old neighborhood friends. I only rarely took the bus to Curley itself during off hours for activities like dances, plays or sporting events.
I also despised the immense pressure I felt to join a self-defining clique. Tribalism started raising its ugly head almost immediately. Perhaps I would have been less annoyed if I knew what clique I belonged in. I didn’t. I did, however, know which ones I didn’t belong to. I wasn’t a motorhead or a stoner or an athlete. I wasn’t a musician or a brain or one of the kids aiming for the priesthood. I certainly didn’t consider myself a nerd. In the end, I became a member of the default clique: The Alphabetical One.
We were never permitted to pick our own seats in classes. The instructors always seated us in alphabetical order. As a result, most of my friends had last names with letters starting from L-to-P. There were others, of course, but most of my friendships were born of simple alphabetical proximity. I honestly believe if my last name had been Batemen instead of Murphy, I would have ended up with an entirely different group of friends.
As the years passed, I did find myself gravitating toward the kids with a more literary bent. My natural desire to write was enhanced by the encouragement I received from my English teacher, Mr. Jones. He made us write essays practically every night, and he would call out my name for me to start reading mine before he even sat down behind his desk. My essays were always a hit.
I would write for the literary magazine and the school newspaper and got in a little trouble as a result. Once I wrote an advice column. I supplied both the goofy questions and the sarcastic responses. My trouble began when I gave the phony letter writer’s initials. A guy even nerdier than I, if such a thing were possible, was highly incensed that I used his initials for a sexually embarrassing letter. He wanted to fight me. I had to laugh. I couldn’t fight him. If we were gladiators in the arena in ancient Rome, our battle would simply serve as comic relief before they brought on the real combatants. Instead, I apologized profusely. I may have many faults, but I do possess the ability to admit it when I am wrong.
Despite the many diversions high school offered, I felt increasingly isolated. When I think back on those days, I picture myself as a loner;; completely anonymous, but it wasn’t true at all. I was actually somewhat popular. I was elected freshman class president. I mainly credit that achievement to block voting by my large and loyal St. D. contingent and the fact that I was such a goofball that everyone in the class recognized me. Still, later during my senior year, when the natural leaders of the student body had already emerged, I was elected once again to the student counsel.
I wasn’t a loner. I wasn’t anonymous. Not really. I just felt that way.
Other Chapters:
Chapter 1 - A Photograph
Chapter 2 - My Death
Chapter 3 - Childhood
Chapter 4 - Saved!
Chapter 5 - The Promise
Chapter 6 - The Mission
Chapter 7 - Mission Accomplished
You can get a copy of the whole book here:
