Life Happens

I was born an INTJ June 5, 1947 in Syracuse NY.
Syracuse was presumably because Mom's family lived there; my family lived
over an hour away in Sherrill at the time; Oneida and Rome were closer.
The I stands for introverted.  I can probably thank my Mom for that, along with the sarcasm.
The N stands for intuitive, which facilitates making mountains of mole hills.
In 1947, I suppose there were many doctors, recently military officers,
who had probably been more focused on body counts and blood loss than sanitation
and even more likely to ignore suggestions from female nurses.  Whatever, I ended up
sick with the same thing that brain-damaged my cousin (born exactly a year prior).
and was sickly until we moved to Florida when I was 10.  We moved after Dad's heart attack,
reportedly because a doctor told my Mom that Upstate New York winters would kill him.
I don't think Florida helped Dad, but I avoided my annual penicillin illnesses after we returned to CNY.
Dad never taught school after that, which motivated Mom to become a professor at Auburn Community College.

Being a sickly baby, not expected to live, might help explain my lack of fine motor control.
I can imagine Mom would have been reluctant to bond, so I probably spend a lot of time in a crib.
On the other hand,  Mom was not one to get blamed for failing, so she got me through it, reportedly
on Pablum, bananas and goat milk, much as she later kept Dad going by restricting his diet.

Mahlian says that I have Asperger's, because her sister suggested that.  Somehow, having a word for it
seemingly allowed her to accept that at least some of my weirdness is not deliberately to spite her.
Mahlian is by far better at hearing what she wants than anyone in my prior experience,
not that I have paid enough attention to enough people to have a significant sample size.
Like my siblings, I was relatively large for my age.  This allowed older kids to evidently feel comfortable
beating me up on the playground at Moravia Elementary School.  Despite having younger and older brothers,
I had little practice fighting, perhaps because of age differences but more likely Dad would beat the crap
out of us for such misbehavior.  Of course, I probably acted weirdly (hard to have perspective) and more likely
was dressed weirdly.  Mom could not have cared less about how other kids were dressed and went for whatever was
cheap, durable and relatively easily maintained, considering that we had only a wringer washer and clotheslines
until moving to Stewarts Corners.  Anyway, I had figured out by first grade that going directly from the bus
to the classroom would avoid getting beaten until lunch time.

Long before I knew about philosophy, I had figured out that things which made no sense (to me) were likely trouble
and best avoided.  Of course, this also motivated trying to make sense of so much as possible.  Somewhere along the
line, I also got into the habit of not asking questions.  That may have been because of the generally poor quality of
answers or just aversion to dealing with others or both.  I did notice that many people decide to fill silences,
where they presumably expected me to ask questions, with more and different disclosures than I had silently pondered.

The Finger Lakes region of CNY has what were river valleys cut by Ice Age drainage in what had been a plateau.
New Hope is on the plateau remnant near Skaneateles Lake, Moravia is west, in the Owasco Lake river valley.
Genoa is further west in the Salmon Creek valley, most of an hour from New Hope.  Grandpa Latta had been a silent partner
in New Hope Mills, run by Dad and his brother, Lee.  By the time Grandpa died, it was evidently clear to
adults that the mills did not generate enough income to support both Weed families.  I can remember Mom
and Dad studying to get their teaching certificates.  They started teaching in Genoa after I started school,
with younger brother Carl being baby-sat by Ruth Williams.  On-line cemetery records for New Hope, NY
have not been updated since 2004;  neither my parents nor Ruth are listed there, although Ruth's husband is.

Getting kids ready for the school bus, then driving to Genoa in their crappy old car in time to teach school
in Genoa must have been stressful.  Parents took Carl with them to Genoa for kindergarten,
then we all commuted to Genoa when I started third grade (Carol and Grayden were in 8th and 7th).
Parents bought a house near Stewarts Corners, which like the New Hope house came with a shallow dirt basement.
That first winter, the single stove heating the Stewarts Corner house conked out because the heating oil
in a tank outside gelled in the cold.  The New Hope cellar had been dug down and a concrete floor poured.
I don't know whether Graydon had been drafted for that chore, but he and I were certainly implicated in the
Stewarts Corners basement excavation.  The worst part was using a star drill and hammer to make a hole in
the basement rock wall for the chimney flue.  I got stuck excavating much of the root (potato) cellar,
but suppose that Graydon had equivalently onerous tasks.

The Stewarts Corners place included 2 acres, one of which, after a few years of alfalfa, was dedicated to vegetables,
teaching me to loathe anything agricultural.  Despite moving from Genoa to Weedsport for junior year,
I did well enough in high school and on tests to be offered a working fellowship to MIT.
The alumnus who visited/interviewed pointed out that other candidates had perfect scores,
as if I would not know about statistically (in)significant differences.
Serving other students in MIT's cafeteria did not appeal,
so instead accepted a National Merit Scholarship to Clarkson (then) College.
That covered tuition while my older siblings were also in college, but not after.   

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