Michael Pulley: Dumpy cars, politicians and other shameful things
Being reared as a 1950s evangelical (tamer than today's version: we weren't taught to hate or walk away from people not like us) I was acquainted with shame, brought on by coloring outside prescribed lines. "You should be ashamed of yourself," I sometimes heard — but probably only once or twice. Childhood angst may have accounted for my shame.
Appearing with my parents in public made me cower in shame. I was certain people laughed at them and, by extension, me, making me imagine a bleak future. I might exist like a waif in a Dickens’ novel where I’d be taken to a sooty orphanage, forced to eat moldy bread and thin gruel. I’d live on the fringes of decency, facing insurmountably cruel circumstances, later to be dragged into dank cells, where rich children wearing silken clothes would taunt me. My shame. Removing myself from my parents might have helped.
But things looked up when my father told me we would become a two-car family. I was sure the car would match the opulence of our Ford Crestline. But it was an old gray Studebaker, resembling the offspring of a giant rat that’d mated with a lame possum, all hunched over and lurching down the street.
I always walked to school, but on cold days my father insisted on driving me in that animal-like thing. I’d tell him to drop me off a block away, but he always deposited me in front of the playground. When the car stopped, it teetered on its front feet then bucked back on its haunches just as I opened the door, which squeaked, alerting the school yard I was there.
“Where’d you get that thing, Pulley?”
“Nice car!”
My father might honk, letting me know I’d left something in the car, whereupon I’d retrieve it then march toward the school amid the barbs and jeers of wizened sixth-graders. The shame.
Then there were the caps. Giant furry ones my parents bought by the boxcar to cover my head, lest the Midwest winter snap off my brain pan. Some fit tightly, wrapping around my ears, buckling under my chin; others perched atop my head, making me look like a Cossack child being tossed into the steppes.
I ditched the caps as soon as I left the house, planting them here and there to pick up on the way home. The ploy usually worked, but other times the caps were gone.
“Who keeps taking them?” my father asked, bewildered.
“I didn’t see who they were.”
But my parents’ cap stash was limitless.
In the fifth grade came the reading glasses. No other boy in my class wore glasses, so I carried them to school safely hidden all day. I wore them at home, though, a ruse foisted upon my unsuspecting parents.
I wonder why such vanity seized me then.
Today I drive a two-door Honda, carrying me shamelessly about town even though huge SUVs and mighty pickups nearly run me into guardrails and block my view when backing out of parking spaces. But my tiny car never shames me.
Feelings of inherent shame have mostly flown. So now I look around and wonder why certain people (read: politicians) don't feel shame for their words and actions. Don't they see they're making silly fools of themselves? Am I projecting my once-childhood shame onto others?
Fortunately, in years ahead all my past shames will be long gone, as someone kindly feeds me my morning oatmeal — in what I hope is a commodious surrounding. The shame of that Studebaker long gone. And those damned caps.
Michael Pulley lives in Springfield. He can be reached at mpulley634@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on Springfield News-Leader: Michael Pulley: Childhood shame — and a future without it
