Soon after Mom died, me, Dad and Brother moved from our house in [REDACTED], Tennessee to a much larger house in [REDACTED], Tennessee. It was pretty sizable, with three bedrooms, an upstairs floor that was separated into two big rooms, and a cavernous cellar with a menacing looking fuel-oil furnace that looked like some kind of ferocious beast lurking in the dark, extending tendrils of pipes all throughout the house. I didn’t like going down there, for obvious reasons.
I think we used the fuel-oil furnace for a little while, but the expenditure just became too great for Dad’s limited budget. From what I understand, most of our family’s income came from Mom’s schoolteacher salary. Once we moved, Dad lost his music students, thus getting rid of the only remaining income. We had to subsist on Social Security payments from Mom’s death. So after a few weeks Dad had a wood burning stove installed in the living room. We would get shipments of wood every winter and I would absolutely hate unloading them from the truck and putting them on the back porch.
Dad still tells stories about that stove. To be more specific, he tells stories of the wounds he used to get from it. Dad would always load the stove with his bare hands, and if the fire died down, he would try to arrange the logs inside the same way. He would frequently accidentally touch the sides of the stove with his bare flesh as a result. Many a time was I awakened by the sounds of Dad howling in pain as he burned himself. His arms were continually covered with burn marks and scars. When Uncle witnessed this, he merely asked, “My Brother in Christ, have you never heard of a poker?” Dad looked shocked and hurt at the same time, but he immediately bought one. Needless to say, things were a lot easier after that.
On cold winter days, Me and Brother used to wake up first thing in the morning and rush to the stove Dad had stoked just before we got up. (Of course, it would only be warm in the immediate vicinity of the stove for a few hours.) We would stand in front of it in our pajamas and hold our hands over it, spitting on top of it, watching the spittle bubble away due to the heat. That stove was almost like another family member. I wonder if it’s still there.
Our entertainment options weren’t severely limited, but they weren’t exactly plentiful either. We didn’t have Cable, nor did we get many channels over Broadcast, but we had the Nintendo Entertainment System that Dad bought us with Mom’s Life Insurance money, and a few games. I remember Dad got us the package that came with Duck Hunt, Gyromite, the Zapper, and R.O.B. the Robotic Operating Buddy. We got several other games later, including Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda.
The Legend of Zelda was of special note. When I first saw the commercial on television with the guy running around screaming “Tektites! Oktoroks! Zelda!” interspersed with footage of the game, I knew I had to have it. It was a game where you could wield a sword and explore a fantasy realm! I begged Dad for months to get it for us, and finally one Christmas he did.
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That brings me to our family’s concept of Swear Words. The severity of Swear Words was a little different for a heavily Christian family. The ultimate curse word was not “fuck” but “goddamn,” because it swore, took the Lord’s name in vain, and condemned something to Hell all at the same time. It was the worst of the worst. I remember my Dad almost made us shut off The Flight of the Navigator because the scientist guy said “Get this goddamn door open” just as Davey was about to fly off in the saucer. Fortunately that was the only instance of the word in the movie.
Another source of entertainment that we had was our Commodore 64 that Dad had bought us long before the Nintendo. We didn’t have a whole lot of games for it. A couple of them were Elite! and Richard Petty’s Talledega. (Dad almost wouldn’t let us play Elite! because the manual referred to hyperspace as “Witch Space.”) I remember one year Dad bought us copies of Zaxxon and Ms. Pac-Man for the Commodore for Christmas.
I had an obsession with making sure all of the games were available and ready to play. I even programmed a catalog of the games with a selectable menu list so you could just punch a key for the one you wanted to play. The obsession has remained into my adult years; I like to install almost every Steam game I own so I can have access to them at all times, in case I get a wild hair and want to play an obscure one. I even have a spreadsheet with all of the games listed next to random numbers, so I can shuffle them and play one randomly if so desired.
I remember Dad had a music studio in one of the bedrooms, with a standing piano, multiple synthesizers, guitars, and other instruments. Dad’s primary music preference was for “Christian rock,” with bands like PETRA and White Heart. Once again, we were forbidden to listen to secular music. I used to joke back then that it was always us telling Dad to turn the music down, rather than the other way around. And Dad really did blast it sometimes.
We had homeschool at this House as well as Church. The classes were held downstairs at the various tables (mostly just kids individually working on PACEs), and the Church Services were held in the large upstairs rooms. I shall have to expand on these in later entries, however.