A distorted lens | Part 2 — John Boy

“John Boy” is what Rose Nell used to call me but my entire family called me John, even though my name is actually Terrence, Terrence John Kelleman. I didn’t find out my name was Terrence until I was 16 and applying for my drivers license — I saw it on my birth certificate and was shocked, and I had no idea that my real name was actually Terrence. So why was everyone calling me John then!?
According to my father who told the story at a Christmas dinner he had been drinking after I was born and when he filled out the hospital paperwork he accidentally wrote his own name down twice and it was left like that. So I’m not a “Junior” or a “II” (i.e. second) although I have the exact same name as my Dad. So to avoid confusion I was called “John”. It was a stunning realization that left me suspicious of what else my family had been keeping from me.
But to hear Rose Nell call me “John Boy” with her endearing Kentucky accent made this new home of mine feel comforting in the way that only a grandma can make it. Rose Nell was accommodating to my every need, constantly offering me something to eat or some of her famous sweet iced tea that I drank by the gallon. Living at Nell & Chopper’s house was a treasure of wholesome experiences and memories that I would take refuge in then and throughout my life.
Rose Nell was in her 40s when she got remarried to Chopper who was then in his mid-twenties but to me, a 3 year old, this didn’t matter one bit, for me I was just so glad to have someone who was my Dads age and who would spend time playing with me and reading me stories. There was so much to discover and delight in in my new home and Chopper and Nell let me know I was welcome there.
My grandparents didn’t have much living off a single income from Chopper working at the steel mill but in the 70’s it was enough to provide for a very small house on Bell Avenue in Elyria Ohio with modest accommodations and tiny rooms. It was large enough me as a toddler who would find equal fascination in the wonders of the gently misshapen sidewalk out front that formed shallow puddles providing hours of play imagining adventures on little floating leaves and sticks. I was “home” and I was happy.
A few years later we moved from our little house to a bigger country home that had a huge back yard with soaring trees and a shallow creek that replaced the small puddles of Bell Avenue. There were no sidewalks on this rural road to visit neighbor kids so the universe of my childhood shifted to the backyard, the creek and beyond it which was a long vista of soybean crops lined by forests. It was magical.
We had a swing at the end of the lot which was where I would spend hours upon hours each day playing at the edge of the creek with the sandy grey mud constructing small streets and towns for my miniature cars to drive along. I loved unearthing crawdads (or Crayfish which are like miniature lobsters) hiding under the rocks in the creek bed or digging for pirate treasures along the edges of the creek. I was in awe of that place and I played long into the day by myself engulfed in my imagination.
From my bedroom window in the attic you could see the giant cotton wood tree at the end of the lot that would blanket our lawn with these soft fluffy seedlings in the summers and in the twilight hours of Summer I would toss little apples from the trees towards the bats silently sweeping through the dusk sky that would chase them down in ever tightening circles funneling down before swooping away from the ground at the very last second.
All of this wonder and fascination was cultivated by Chopper who would read me sci-fi short stories fostering an imagination beyond the bounds of Cleveland or even time and space. From my bed I would gaze through the box fan propped in the window and imagine all of the wonder of the backyard while drifting off to sleep with the fan gently pulling at my hair and dreaming of the days adventures.
Being there was a solace and a refuge for me growing up that gave me a reprieve from the times I would sit at the window of our kitchen peering out at the driveway in anticipation of my Mom or Dad’s arrival to pick me up for a Saturday visit. Often these sessions of waiting would turn into card games with Rose Nell who was doing her best to distract my gaze at the gravel driveway which intensified with every approaching car coming down the road. Nell would eventually convince me to go to watch the TV while she prepared something for me to eat as I gradually gave in to the idea that no one was coming to pick me up that day.
We are not blank slates, we all have our own voids that were filled with negative images that we carry around and so too was this true for my parents. They had their own issues and negative perceptions of self that alcohol and drugs would temporarily relieve like my Mom’s own abandonment when her Dad left her as a child on Christmas Eve “going out to get a pack of cigarettes” and never coming home.
We are all helpless to change the events of our life but we are all within our power to claim a different outcome. We spend our lives striving to avoid the hurt and repercussions of our past, swearing to never repeat them or inflict them upon others, only to be illusively drawn back to relive them. It’s a natural instinct to try to escaping the hurt that was caused to us but we cannot go around these barriers we have to learn the lessons that they are trying to teach us.
It’s natural to want to become the opposite of what was inflicted upon us, but that is only going sideways from the problem and strangely we will find that we only continue to repeat the same problem in our lives over and over, and even over generations. That is because when we were hurt our lens to the world was distorted and we filled the void and confusion of the pain inflicted upon us with a distorted meaning that made it impossible for us to see clearly anymore. It’s natural that we try to distance ourselves from that pain or go in the opposite direction of the pain but we are still acting within the field of distortion created by the pain and we are completely unaware of this.
We must confront the pain, confront the cause and have a reckoning with it — there is no way around the pain, there is no path wide enough to go around the pain, no distraction long enough, no addiction deep enough to get around it, we must go through the pain. That’s why we are brought back to these feelings, we can’t escape them until we go through them.
During times that I would get picked up by my Mom I would cherish them. We would spend the day doing simple things but most importantly being together and I savored every minute of the times we would make salads together or take walks in the park system which was an expansive network of woods and streams spun throughout Cleveland along it’s many rivers and off shoots of the Cuyahoga river.
My Dad was less concerned with having me over for visits which may have been for the better as it was often sparked with rage and awkward times of being alone in his apartment afraid to make a misstep which would draw out his anger. I was scared of getting hurt and learned to radically change my behavior to be an “ideal child”, at least the image of what I thought my parents or others wanted from me. This practice of anticipating and molding myself to conform to the image of what others wanted from me would become my best defense as a child but later prove to be my greatest Achilles heel.
“John Boy” was learning that it did not suffice to just be yourself in order to get love and affection, it seemed that I needed to adapt to the needs of the adults around me so that I could be accepted and in turn feel “love” but I was confusing that acceptance as a substitute for the unconditional love that I sought from my parents.
This distorted perception of love became my secret practice of anticipating and deciphering what it was that I thought others wanted of me and I would become hyper fine tuned to the expectations of others when my life was turned upside down after an unannounced visit of my Mom at Rose Nell’s house.
