Jim's Worldly Hopes

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. The Early Years.
Chapter 2. The Errors of my Childhood.
Chapter 3. We move. A couple of times.
Chapter 4. Which Exit?
Chapter 5. The college experience.
Chapter 6. The Questionable Year.
to be continued....


Chapter 1. The Early Years.

I was born on September 30, 1960 in Brooklyn, New York. I like that fact about me. When I tell people I was born in New York City, I get instant respect.

When I say that the scar I have on my finger came from lunging for Julio "Little Don" Donatello's switchblade one summer night on a sidewalk in the Bowery in '77, it's like the icing on the cake. I'm James Dean.

Actually, the truth is my family lived out in a Long Island suburb when I was born, and I cut my finger one day in 1966 while playing in my room with my sister's girl scout knife. In 1977 we were nowhere near the Bowery, living outside of Princeton, New Jersey, in a neighborhood that had no sidewalks, gangs or switchblades.

But I was born in Brooklyn. Co-ol.

September 30, 1960. Records of the time indicate that a mysterious meteor shower was seen that afternoon in broad daylight over northern New Jersey and the tip of Manhattan, although I'll admit that any link between this and my personal destiny is purely conjecture.

Why was I born? Some people agonize over that question until they die. For me, it's simple. I've always known: I was conceived and brought into the world to provide a fleshy and resilient target for the aggressions of an older brother. I know this to be true--my parents have long been silent on the subject, but history provides compelling evidence.

It's a fact, for example, that after I was born Chuck demanded fewer toys. And I don't think I was brought on board to belay Chuck's toy requirements, that's not it, I just mention this fact for its cause-and-effect significance. Any good trial attorney asks the question: who benefited from this event? who had the most to gain? The answer here: Chuck. The simple matter of the financial significance of Chuck's decreased toy demands could not alone have been the impetus which brought me being--although I admit the idea had me going for years. No, that couldn't have been it, because after all it wasn't long before my demands in that area single-handedly lifted Mattel revenues by a good fifteen percent--and I have to believe my father, being a trained psychologist, would surely have predicted that sibling dynamic.

No, vulgar financial calculations could not have played a significant role in my physical genesis, I'm convinced of that now. But as far as proposing my existence as a convenient distraction for a behaviorally challenged elder sibling?-- the evidence is too strong to deny. For me, then, it's simply a matter of which parent must have introduced the idea. I suppose it must have been Mom, who had to deal with Chuck for more of the day.

Family calendars which have survived the passage of time reveal notes, in mom's handwriting, describing the nature and frequency of Chuck's outbursts and hyperactivity. These episodes increased to a feverish intensity in the weeks surrounding my conception. There is no doubt in my mind--Chuck willed me to happen. GI Joe was not enough. The inflatable wobbling Bozo was not enough. Jamie was required . Case closed.

To my siblings, then, I became the kid brother, the toy, the moving target. I played with Play-Doh; they played with me. Thoroughly pliable, I was pushed, kneaded, teased, tossed, stepped on, bitten, punched, poked, pinched and rolled into little balls. Like Play-Doh I retained every imprint made upon me, every insult real or imagined, and reproduced them readily to my parents, in the universal method of retaliation reserved exclusively for the youngest and weakest sibling. I got into everything my brother and sister did, irritating them endlessly, in their hair every waking moment. It was my job, and I took it seriously.

I'll end it there. Simply put, the first 11 years of my existence can be summarized by four things: Spaghetti-O's, Hot Dogs, aggravating my older brother and sister, and cultivating a profound insecurity with respect to my place in the world. Except for the Spaghetti-O's, all of these have remained fundamental elements of my life.

Chapter 2. The Errors of my Childhood.

We all look back at our lives with some regret, despite what Frank Sinatra says. At least I hope that's true. If not, this makes me abnormal in yet another way :-)

I've had a few regrets. Personally, for example, I regret not having any idea what the '60's were about when they happened. They seem so interesting today. Back in the '60's I would watch my sister get together every night with her friends to play Monkees and Beatles albums in the living room. Their "who buried Paul" jibber-jabber fascinated me, but that was it. That was the extent of my participation in the Revolution.

I watched them from the dining room or the living room, wherever I happened to be taking the royal supper that evening. Chuck would be out blowing up dead horseshoe crabs with firecrackers, or whatever it was that occupied him and his friend Russell down by the water. I would be sitting there in the house with my Spaghetti-O's, savoring each delicate tomato-and-pasta spoonful, listening and watching with fascination as the drama of the '60's unfolded before my eyes, interpreted for my pre-adolescent benefit by four teenage girls in front of a record player. I absorbed everything. It was jibberish, yes, but it was jibberish in the context of great events. The United Nations itself offers nothing more.

Day after day as the 60's wore on, my sister, five and a half years older than I, grew and changed with the changing times. She was a mirror of the decade. By 1972 she was as close to a "flower child" as our family was ever to produce, and no doubt she knew then, as she must today, that she was "part of things". I was never part of things. My sister was the mirror of the decade. I was the black hole of the decade. I absorbed everything, yet my memory surrenders nothing. I recall my concerns at the time to be fundamentally different than my sister's, limited to (some would say fixated on) such things as improving the right-uppercut on my blue "rock 'em, sock 'em, robot" guy, and finding that perfect mixture of Bosco and milk that would send my taste buds into their highest chocolate ecstacy.

Every time my sister and her friends gathered by the record player to talk, it should have been a lesson for me--a lesson in civics, revolutionary theory, music appreciation, and, most importantly, album cover interpretation. But, failing to place their nightly squeals in the context of world social drama I remained ignorant of great events, and my memories of the '60's are only of jibberish. I witnessed my sister's jibberish, which it truly was, yet failed to see the greater jibberish behind it. The decade passed me by without me being aware of its historical significance. I know I was only ten years old at the end, but this is something I regret. At a minimum, I should have raised my hand in Mrs. Hoffman's class and asked a few questions.

There were one or two bright spots. In 1969, while vacationing with my family in Venice, my brother and I made perhaps our most important contribution to the great events of the day by tossing small chips of hotel plaster out of our 6th floor window onto the heads of passing gondoliers. Afterwards we would duck below the windowsill and laugh till our sides split. Yes, earth-shattering events were unfolding across the continent and the world, making our statement seem small. But as the gondoliers shouted up from the water below, I looked at Chuck, and Chuck at me, and through our giggles and tears we knew, as only true Revolutionaries can, that at that precise moment we were where we were meant to be, doing what we were meant to be doing.

I lived through it all, yet participated in little. This in a nutshell defines my childhood.

The early Christine, ca. 1975 [click for 150K gif]

Chapter 3. We move. A couple of times.

In the summer of 1968 my parents packed up a house, bought a Volkswagen Camper and moved to England for a year. They carted along three kids, ages 8-13, who basically didn't want to go.

Looking back, it seems like such an unbelievable decision for two adults to make. But I also think it was probably our defining experience as a family. For the kids it was such an amazingly different life experience, at such a young age, that it completely altered our view of everything that came after. As for my parents, they pretty much stayed close to home once we got back :-)

Did you say you've never spent a couple of summers traveling through Europe, sleeping in the pop-up roof of a VW Camper? Then you have not lived. Lying back, head on a soft duffle bag, listening lazily through the screen window of a pop-up as an older brother struggles loudly with the camper's tent, trying to put it up in a driving rain....nothing compares to this warm state of well-being.

Days spent exploring old castles and ruins, walking through bogs in our Wellingtons, taking pictures of lizards in Pompeii, fishing in Scandinavia, learning Dad's old songs...and sometimes a few hours of wishing we were anywhere but trapped in a VW bus with each other. Just like home, in fact--if home's the size of a bathroom.

Back in England we settled in a house in Bristol, and I went to a school surrounded by a cement yard and high walls. Years later I visited Trenton State Prison in New Jersey, and felt a haunting familiarity. In Bristol I was led to believe that wearing a uniform, eating custard and bad institutional food, suffering corporal punishment, and doing calisthenics in the open yard was all part of the educational experience. Looking back, I'm not sure it was actually a *school* I was attending. Perhaps my parents were just saving some money.

But I did learn how to tie a tie, the same knot I tie for work even today. Which, as I think of it, may explain a lot of things. And I got my knuckles rapped, and I learned what Guy Fawkes Day was about, and we went to Stonehenge and Ireland, and all kinds of other neat places. And the Goodenough family grew up with the Brits in 1968, far from the upheavals back home.

Dad's sabbatical ended in the summer of '69, and we finished the trip on an ocean liner from Le Havre to New York, the SS United States, which skirted a hurricane and made us all violently ill. We arrived in New York on August 24, 1969, a fact and a date which has occupied an otherwise useful spot in my brain for the past 28 years.

When we got back to Long Island, we all had British accents. These went away gradually, but no doubt their opposing force zeroed out the Long Island accents we should otherwise have carried with us into our adult lives. The whole trip was worth it, if for no other reason than this alone.

In Mrs. Hoffman's fifth grade class back on the south shore of Long Island, I was a curiousity. A bit of an accent, didn't learn how to write cursive in fourth grade, a bit of a loner....I remember a carbon-copy "yearbook" of writings were distributed at the end of the year. A couple of kids wrote a poem about everyone, and mine went something like

"He's been many places on maybe a bus, And now he's come to stay with us."

Within weeks we left our home on Long Island, never to return.

Chapter 4. Which Exit?

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way...."

In the summer of 1971 pater Goodenough and his colleagues moved their research careers away from New York City, down into the Princeton area of New Jersey. That summer five Goodenoughs made their emigrant way across the Hudson River, settling a short distance from the Delaware River in southern New Jersey, deep in the heart of the Garden State.

It was a time of change. Christine's metamorphosis from pre-adolescent sweetheart to winged serpent was largely complete. Charles was into his own things, none of which any of us understood except to agree that it seemed to involve the utter rejection of human speciel interaction in favor of the amphibian and reptile variety. Within a couple of years, both were out of the house and into their own lives.

We spent the last half of 1971 in a rented house in the village of Hopewell, then in January of '72 moved into our newly built place in the farmlands between Pennington and Princeton. Today I'd guess the development's probably reached its saturation point in terms of homes, and our family's long gone, but back then the neighboring fields and woods were empty, and the lake ours alone--at least down at our end.

It was a great place to grow up. The house was amazing, in a gorgeous wooded setting on a lake, and naturally we kids took it completely for granted. For the first few years Chuck had his "zoo" in a small room down in the basement, where, doubtless, the current owners are puzzled even today by strange saurian smells emanating from its grey cinderblock walls on a warm summer night. Chris had her cave above the garage, from which she would emerge periodically in search of food. And I had the place to myself, kid-wise, from the time Chuck left in 1974 until the summer of 1978, when I fell screaming out of the parental nest the day I graduated high school.

For me the '70's were nearly idyllic. School was almost fun, at least when I got into high school. I was a shrimp and was treated like one, up until then. And I was never part of the in crowd (to put it mildly), but by the middle of high school I was at an outskirts level that allowed me to peer in every once in a while. And I did develop a circle of friends among that outskirts/not-quite-in crowd that made the experience a good one. At home I could grab a dog or two when I wanted, go down to the lake, toss them into a boat and go rowing or fishing when I felt like it. Or go mousing in the neighboring fields with Shadow, our golden retriever. Or hop on a bike and ride to Pennington or Princeton with Jack or Warren (still just an e-mail away).

In the summer of '72 I followed in the recent footsteps of my parents, and started playing tennis. That was soon to become my eternal hobby--my mother became a tennis pro, and I spent the greater parts of the summers of '73 through '77 on the courts or with my friends at the clubs where she worked. I was a tennis urchin. A head case, I never had the strength of concentration to win many matches I had a chance of losing. My mind wandered (and wanders) too easily. So my junior summer tournament career would never rise above the level of enjoyable fiasco.

It was a lot of fun traveling to tournaments and doing the tourist thing, though, and Mom and Dad were never "tennis parents"--so it was mostly just a good-natured lark. I seldom won tournament matches, and never developed the day-to-day consistency I needed to threaten the top area kids. I had great training, though, and through no fault of my own generally looked like a tennis player on court, which made me a "good win" for legions of opponents I wished to heck I had beaten.

When I think of Pennington I think of tennis, warm summer nights at the Nassau Racquet Club, playing with the dogs in the fields around the house, some fun high school years, a couple of good pals, a couple of parricidal next-door-neighbors--and a room full of toys, baseball cards and comic books which would certainly bring a fortune today, but for the fact that my parents sold them all at a garage sale for a nickel.

At my high school graduation ceremony my parents had the car all packed. From the ceremony we went straight to New Hampshire, where I would start my summer job and launch an adult life of mystery, drama and questionable achievement.

Chapter 5. The college experience.

The summer of '78 was spent on an island off the coast of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Having escaped from the British prison yard years earlier, I was now on the set of Papillon.

Well, that's not entirely true--actually, it was one of the happiest summers I've had. The island's administration hires about 90 college kids each summer to help run a nonsectarian religious/educational conference center with ties to the Unitarian church. (Hmm...does that make it sectarian?) Anyway, a beautiful little island called Star, gorgeous views, sea air, no TV, spartan amenities, a single island-to-shore phone on the island, a bunch of rickety old buildings surrounding an old hotel out of The Shining, no real reason to leave the island the whole time, a bunch of kids your own age, few demands outside of the daily work routine, and a whole summer to just hang. It was a blast. A small ancient graveyard from when the island was a little village; an outlying area of seagull's nests, tall grass and rocky crags that covered half the island; silent late-night processions up to the little church, everyone carrying lamps; rowing around the little harbor created by nearby islands--just a great, rustic, relaxed, happy experience all around.

From there it was the college life.

Why did I choose the college I did? My father went to grad school there. Why did I really choose the college I did? When I went to visit, it was one of the two party days of the year on campus. I did not know this. Music was blaring across campus, there were balloons, beer trucks, and carnival rides on the quad, there were frisbees being thrown, and everyone was happy and smiling. I said "what a great school", and signed the papers.

I discovered the deception months later when I arrived on campus as an incoming freshman and learned rather quickly that, nothwithstanding the two days per year allocated to reckless abandon, an alarming proportion of students actually took studying seriously--but by this time the school had cashed the deposits, and it was too late to transfer ;-)

All in all the college years were a lot of fun, and I certainly made some great friends I hope to keep for a long time. Would I choose that school again? No. There was a serious, competitive attitude on campus which was so much a part of the undergraduate culture that the experience was, at least for non-Greeks, really somewhat less than it should have been. Among undergrads there was this almost universal undercurrent of tacit guilt associated with any activity which did not involve classwork; and this attitude was perpetuated by little needling remarks and sarcastic comments made by those who had nothing better to do than study, towards those who were doing anything else. Can we see how that would grate on one's nerves after a time? :-)

Mischievous fun to some meant keeping a mental note of their daily library study time so they could compare the statistic with the rest of us at the dining room table towards the end of the day :-/ By doing this they were no doubt attempting to elicit feelings of guilty respect which would elevate their peer status to a level they could not have begun to achieve had they been limited to the normal expedient of agreeable social interaction. Still, can one see how that would, after a period of time, tend to bring down the quality of the overall experience? At any rate, the respectful reactions the rest of us pretended in response hopefully lessened the unease these people had to have felt knowing they were spending so much of what should have been a rich and varied college experience, sitting at a dimly lit carel somewhere in the bowels of the library....of course, today they're probably making far more money than any of us.

So basically it was a lot of fun, although if I had to do it over again I wouldn't do it there ;-) It was four years of little responsibility, punctuated by four summers with less. Who could ask for more? Two summers on a beautiful island, one summer spent, unbelievably at an on-campus job ("yeah", I thought, "there'll be lots to do on campus over the summer...."), and one summer back home, working at a book distribution warehouse. Do real people actually spend their summers doing things like interning at the White House?

Ah well. On to The Questionable Year, and graduate school...

Chapter 6. The Questionable Year.

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Last modified: 4/13/97