YESTERDAY LYRICS

The Big Picture Chapter 4

A special thanks to Ed for editing this chapter.

And to William F. Laegler for Content Editing.

1968

In everyone's life a little rain must fall. 1968 is a rainy year for me. My grades at school have been poor all year. Now that I'm 8 years old I can join Cub Scouts. My dad says that I can't join Cub Scouts unless I get my school grades up. I'm really starting to like all the attention I'm getting from my dad over school.

The teachers gave us a test at school. They are real strict about how we take the test. We can only use a #2 pencil and have to keep the test book closed until the teacher tells us to open it. We answer the test by filling in the little dots on the test sheet. It takes all day to take the test.

Some new neighbors move in across the street from us. Their name is the Silva's and they have a big family. My mom is teaching school again and so every day after school I go across the street to their house until my mom comes home. They have a son my age called Martin. We seem to get along together very well. Mrs. Silva is a big Mexican lady. She was born in the United States but raised in Mexico City so she has a heavy accent. Her husband Tony was born in Mexico and raised in the USA so he has no accent at all. None of my games to get attention seem to work with her.

Scott and his family are moving away. They say that they are afraid that with some Mexicans living in the neighborhood that the property values are going to go down. Their dad says that he doesn't mind working with Mexicans but he doesn't want to live with them. I really don't understand. They're people just like us. I hope that someone my own age moves in there.

The principal from school has called my father and said that I have copied off someone's test. She says there is no way my score could be as high as it is. Dad got upset with her and tells her to retest me. So I take the test again with this school social worker there with me. The school social worker calls my dad and he's real upset. He says that my IQ score is 139 and I am not doing my best. My dad has a long talk with me and tell me that I can do anything I put my mind to. I just have to try. I don't see the point. School is so boring.

My sister is playing a musical instrument. It is a violin. She practices all the time. I want to play a musical instrument too. My mom says I can when I get older.

We have a school play and I get a part. My line is only six words but at least I have some speaking lines. We perform the play for our parents and I get the weirdest feeling. I remember dreaming the whole thing. It is weird.

I fell like I needed some more attention. So at school I zip down my fly and dance around the room. When I get home my dad has another long talk with me. He says that only little kids do stuff like that. I think it's funny that the only way I can get him to pay attention to me is by doing bad stuff.

The kids at school and church are always teasing me because I'm so short. My mom says it not likely that I'm going to grow very tall. My dad is only 5' 3" and my mom is 5' 1" tall. Even the girls pick on me. At school three of them started beating me up every day. I finally have to tell my parents to call the school in order to get them to stop. Iv been skinny but I have been gaining weight. Now when I get pants I have to get the husky ones. I think husky is just another way of saying fat boy clothes. Anyway this just gets me teased even more.

My dad has talked to my teacher about my grades. He's told her that he's kept me out of Cub Scouts because of my bad grades. After talking to her he decided to let me join Cub Scouts. My parents can be so inconsistent sometimes. I join Cub Scouts and my Cub Scout leader is Mr. Day. He has us do fun stuff once a month. My den mother is Mrs. Vallier. She has four sons, one my sister's age, named Steve, and one a year younger, named Mike. Then there is Dave who is a year younger than me and then Danny, a year younger than Dave. Dave and I have become pretty good friends.

A new family has moved in where Scott used to live. They have a son my age called Tom Passariello. We got in a fistfight when we first met that neither of us won but then we became friends. I have lots of friends now. There is Mike Herney - my best friend, Dave Vallier, Tom Passariello, and Martin Silva.

We got the biggest snowstorm I have ever seen. We got about two feet of snow all at once and with the wind blowing we have drifts of snow around our house that were even taller than me. We were off of school for almost a week.

There is this kid at school and he is called Scott too. He is a rich kid and lives in Golf Side where all the rich kids live. He says this word 'fuck' to me but would not tell me what it means. I went home I repeated the word to my parents. They told me that is a bad word and I am not to say it. I tell them I'm going to say it until someone tells me what it means. Mom talked to me and told me what it means. It has to do with making babies and stuff. It is all very confusing.

Summer is almost here and my dad had a long talk with me. The school wants me to repeat the 3rd grade. I'm not real happy about it but what can I do.

Three days before the end of third grade I went to bed early. I woke up about 1:00 AM in the morning. I had very bad pains in my stomach. I woke my parents up and tell them it feels like I had bombs going off in my stomach. Dad took me to the emergency room. The Doctor poked around my stomach and asked what hurt. When he touched me at one place I feel great pain. He feels that I have appendicitis and need my appendix removed.

The Doctor calls in a Surgeon called Doctor Kuelski. They gave me a shot and said that it would relax me. The nurse took me into the operating room and gave me another shot and tells me to count down from 100. I didn't make it past 96 and I fell asleep. When I woke up in a hospital bed, I felt really tired. I have a bandage on my stomach. There is another kid from my class in school, called Allen Miller. He had an accident with a riding lawn mower and needed 300 stitches on his legs. Half his body was in a cast. He is laughing at me because he says that my butt was sticking out. I'm in this hospital PJ's and they are open at the back. I try to cover myself but am very tired and fell back to sleep.

I woke up later and the nurses had me get up and walk around some. I went back to sleep after that. I woke up again and I felt better. I got something to eat. The Doctor came to visit me and he says that I need to walk around as much as I could. He says that he has removed my appendix and that they got to it in time. My parents and even my teacher came to see me. I got cards and gifts and stuff. The Doctor says that I could go home the next day. That's good because the head nurse is real strict and keeps yelling at me.

I went home and I'm so happy that I missed the last three days of school. A few days after I got home the Doctor took out the stitches. I had four of them. It doesn't hurt at all.

This summer we went on vacation again. We go to California to visit my Auntie Alma and Uncle Arnold. He works at an Air Force base in the valley. We went out there on Interstate 80. It takes us forever to get there. Glenn and I have lots of fun together. I got to see the inside of a B-52 bomber and a KC-135 refueler. Their next door neighbor has a pool and we got to go swimming there. We go with them to San Francisco. We go on the Oakland Bay Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge. Then we go to Fisherman's Wharf. The food is really good there. It's a cold day and only about 50 degrees. Then we rode on a cable car and go to Chinatown and ate dinner.

The next day we went to Monterey and they were having some kind of rock festival there. There're hippies everywhere. I had seen hippies on TV but never in person. There're so many of them. There's mama hippies, papa hippies, and little kid hippies. We went back to my aunt's and uncle's house and they showed us a new store. It is called 7-11 and it is open from 7 in the morning to 11 at night. That is why they call it 7-11. I can't understand why anyone would want to go grocery shopping at 9 o'clock at night. It must be a California thing. We stayed there a couple more days.

We go home a different way. We go south and picked up Route 66. There is a bunch of construction and interstate highways have replaced much of it since the last time we came this way. It's very hot in the southern California desert and we stop at a motel in Needles, California, which is at the border to Nevada. The motel has a swimming pool there but it's not much relief. The water temperature in the pool is like 85 degrees.

The next day my ear starts to hurt really bad. My dad finds a Doctor and he says that I have an ear infection. I had probably got it swimming the day before. He gave me a shot but I'm sick the rest of the way home. We also have car problems and Dad needs to get a new alternator.

Dad has started remodeling the basement. He is going to put a bedroom, recreation room, and a bathroom down there. Our next door neighbor is a plumber and he busted up the basement floor and put in the plumbing for the toilet and for a shower. Dad brought home a bunch of stuff from the lumberyard and started putting up walls and paneling. An electrician then wired everything. Dad took the bedroom downstairs and now my mom has her own room. He says she snores too much.

My principal has called from school and she wants me to start the 4th grade instead of repeating the 3rd grade. Then if I need to be held back I can repeat the 4th grade. I wish that they would make up their minds.

We go to visit my grandparents. There is a presidential election and my grandfather says that 'Nixon's the one.' My dad likes Hubert Humphrey. He is the Vice President. There is also this other guy called George Wallace. No one likes him. My dad likes Hubert Humphrey so I guess I like him too. Bobby Kennedy was running but someone killed him in California.

We got a call from my Uncle Grant. My Aunt Marilyn was pregnant. They got a surprise. Instead of me having a new cousin I have two new cousins - twin boys. Their names are Peter and Paul. Now there are 13 of us. There is me and my sister Mary Jane, my Uncle John's family - Johnny, Nancy, and Steve, my Uncle Grant's family - Lyle, Kevin, Marshall, Leigh Ann, Peter, and Paul, my Auntie Alma's family - Glenn, and Amy who is three years younger then me. She was the baby of the family but not any more.

I start the 4th grade and things go from bad to worse. I make it three days when my 4th grade teacher goes to the principal and tells her I have no business in the 4th grade. So after three days of 4th grade I'm put back into the third grade. It's real embarrassing. All my classmates laugh at me. My new third grade teacher, Mrs. Zellar, is the most upset. She tells the principal that I'm a little boy and not a pingpong ball.

Dave Vallier is in my class now and he is already my friend. Mrs. Zellar is more strict than Mrs. Warnock was. The principal's name is Mrs. Barnhart but we all call her Mrs. Barnfart. I don't like her at all. Mrs. Zellar plays the piano and I get to sing. I love to sing. But I still hate school far more now than before.

My Dad celebrated his 40th birthday and we have a big party for him. His best friend from his hometown also came to visit.

My 9th birthday has come and gone. I'm a year older but I don't feel any older than I did last year. I haven't grown any! I'm still in the 3rd grade.

I was really rooting for Hubert Humphrey in the election but he lost. I've had Mrs. Silva across the street help me with a letter to him to say how sorry I am that he lost. About a month later I'm very surprised to get a signed reply from him. He says that 'although I was too young to vote, he is glad to see me taking an interest in politics.' It is really exciting to get a letter from the Vice-President of the United States.

I think everyone is glad to see 1968 come to an end. It has been a very rough year for me and for the country. The war in Vietnam is going bad. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King are killed. There're riots in Detroit and around the country. The country is divided more that it has been since the Civil War. I hope that the new President, Richard Nixon, can reunite our country.

For Christmas we went to the moon for the first time. We didn't land there but the Astronauts did orbit the moon.

1969

I have to do a book report for school. It's called Tom Sawyer. I really liked it. I never thought I would like reading a book. I still hate school but I think reading is fun.

Our teacher, Mrs. Zeller, brought in her TV so we could see President Nixon sworn into office. She says that it's something we would remember all our lives. I just knew that I got to see TV in class and that's all right with me.

Dave Vallier and I played next door. We jumped off a picnic table and grabbed a branch on this tree. I misjudged on one of my jumps and missed the branch. I land on my back with my right arm behind my back. I feel a bad pain in my arm. We made another trip to the emergency room. I have another hairline fracture, of my right arm this time. The doctor looked at my dad and then asked me how I managed to break my arm. So I told him about the picnic table.

At least I'm in school this time. The only problem is I'm right handed and I have to learn to write with my left hand. Now I have broken both arms.

School seems to take forever. In the spring I went out for Little League Baseball. My dad tried to talk me out of it. Our Little League team is called the Yankees. We won every game. I only played a couple of innings each game. I almost always walked. They just can't pitch to me. I have a really small strike zone. I played in the outfield and no one ever hit a ball to me. Overall I had fun.

The same school social worker that had tested me came to talk to our class. He said that our class has been using bad language and hand gestures. He said that if we are caught doing stuff like that our parents would be called. Then our parents would have to come to school. Then we would have to repeat our actions for our parents.

Several weeks later, just before school got out for the summer, I have to have recess away from the other kids because I'm in trouble for talking back to a teacher. I have a ball to play with and the Principal, Mrs. Barnhart, comes out and says that she wants the ball. I'm being punished and don't deserve a ball to play with. After she went back inside the glass doors I flipped her off. She turned around and caught me.

She brought me into her office and tried to call my dad. Every time she called the phone was busy. She called like 15 times and it was busy each time. She says that she is going to call until she got a hold of my dad. When I got home that night, Dad didn't say anything. I waited all summer for that hammer to come down but it never did.

We go out west again and when we got back we stopped at Dad's hometown at his best friend's house. While we were there Apollo 11 landed on the moon and we got to see them walk on the moon. It's not a very good quality broadcast and it's hard to follow what is happening. It is also real late at night.

I walked out the back door barefooted and stepped on this metal toy truck. I badly cut open my big toe. This causes another trip to the emergency room. I ended up getting 4 stitches. It is very painful getting the shot that killed the pain so the Doctor could stitch it up. After that it's not so bad. The Doctor gave me a tetanus shot. The next day where they gave me the shot hurt more that my toe.

We also have a family reunion. My grandparents celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary. Everyone is there, all my aunts and uncles and cousins. It's lots of fun.

My friend Martin across the street from me is not my friend any more. We were playing ball and he threw the ball and it broke the basement window. When my parents found out they asked me who broke the window. My mom is always saying that the truth will set you free so I told her the truth. Martin got in trouble and now he does not want to play with me any more. I wonder if my mom was wrong?

I'm spending more and more time playing with Tom instead of Mike. Mike is still my best friend but now that we're not in the same grade we don't spend as much time together.

I've found out that my sister is allergic to dogs and cats and so we won't be having any more pets. She also has asthma and sometime has a hard time breathing.

I start the 4th grade again and there are about 5 others from my old class that were held back too. It least I'm not alone now.

I turned 10 years old and my mom had a surprise birthday party for me. It was a disaster. She had nothing planned for us to do so we just went to my room. I hope she never does that again.

We celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas. For New Year's my parents even let me stay up until midnight. It's the end of the 60's and the start of the 70's. I have seen my first decade.

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