I just thought of something that happened to me more than sixty years ago, and it sheds light on my present day sensitivity about not having my feelings taken seriously. The lack of empathy shown after this long forgotten incident appears rather subtle, in a way, and petty to remember. Except for the deep impression it seems to have made, as I feel any time my feelings are dismissed by others.

My childhood best friend, Michael Siegel, who lived across the street and was two years older than me, had a vivid imagination and a great sense of adventure. He and I would roam the neighborhood, claiming new forts in the spaces between garages. We would travel surreptitiously from one fort to the next, navigating a dangerous war zone like two well-armed expert spies. Each fort had a name, Green Gate and Bramblebush are the only two I recall. We had to carefully navigate a low, spiky, barbed wire-looking brown coil hedge that looked like the Crown of Thorns, to find safety inside Bramblebush.

We also had the Waterbug Club, whose charter demanded that we jump through any sprinkler we passed on our way from fort to fort, or chasing the ball during our one on one baseball games in the street in front of my house. We did a lot of chasing, because the street sloped down to Union Turnpike, which was behind the home plate he’d painted in the street one day. Where the seven or eight year-old got a can of green pain, or how he painted home plate so perfectly, I never learned. When the sprinklers were running a river ran down our street toward the Turnpike, against whose inexorable flow we always hurried to build a heroic series of dams out of twigs and mud.

We used to regularly patrol the alleys behind the stores on Union Turnpike. These alleys, for some reason, always contained empty deposit bottles. There were the two cent regular Coke bottles and the larger sized ones which fetched a nickel. We were diligent collectors and eventually had over a dollar in our coffers. We decided to go to the candy store and spend the whole bundle on candy. In those days, 1961 or so, you could buy a ton of candy for a dollar. A Milky Way, Mr. Goodbar or bag of M & M’s cost a nickel.

Michael hatched the plan. The candy store opened early. On Saturday we’d get there as soon as the store opened, buy a shit ton of candy and eat it all. At five or six I didn’t have an alarm clock in my room, or even a clock, but Michael figured everything out. He must have known how to tell time and had an alarm clock. We’d tie a long rope to my ankle, I’d go to sleep with the rope hanging out of the window, and in the morning Michael would give the rope a yank, I’d wake up, get dressed and off to the candy store.

The only weak link of this plan was that we didn’t have a long rope. We managed to get a bunch of ropelike material, more like very flexible long plastic straws than rope, but there was no reason it couldn’t work. We tied enough of them together to make a long rope. We made a loop at one end, which I inserted my foot into, and I went to sleep, excited about the brilliant plan we were about to pull off.

I woke up the next day with the loop still around my ankle. Michael had come by early, as he promised, and yanked on the “rope”. The rope came apart in several places, as we confirmed later. Five and seven year-olds are not always intuitively expert knot tiers, it turns out. I was pissed off about the failure of this brilliant plan. I guess I shared my frustration with my parents.

They might have found it mildly funny, how pissed off I was, but what I remember is for years afterwards my father would bring up a similar moment of frustration I’d expressed. “You were inconsolably angry because it RAINED,” he’d say, shaking his head with a dismissive smile. The rain had apparently canceled something I’d been looking forward to. I was upset and frustrated because something I’d been excited to do had been washed out. “You were in a rage because it RAINED,” said my father, many times during my childhood, demonstrating the ridiculousness of my disappointment and the irrational anger it caused.

From my irrational feelings about an act of God it was easy to trace all of my other frustrations and anger to this same need to rage for no reason. As an old man now myself it is easy enough to see that my father had never experienced empathy as a boy. In his mind I was a spoiled middle class kid who expected his excited plans to work out. He’d survived so much worse, that my childish disappointment was something to dismiss, mock. The pain he’d been forced to endure rendered him incapable of ordinary empathy. Profoundly sad thing, that.