Books that changed my life: 04 – Childhood’s End

Note: This blog originally appeared on tobinelliott.com.

This is the fourth in a series of blogs where I go back and examine the books that deeply affected me and became part of the foundation of the person I am now.

Click on the titles to read the others

01 – Chariots of the Gods?
02 – Rocket Ship Galileo / Space Cadet
03 – The Illustrated Man

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After discovering both Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury, it felt like someone had applied the jaws of life to my brain, cracking it open and filling it with all sorts of science fictiony goodness. It didn’t take long to start discovering other SF geniuses.

2001: A Space Odyssey

And the next one was a doozy. Arthur C. Clarke. Though I hadn’t realized it, I was already slightly aware of Clarke’s works, through the 2001: A Space Odyssey movie, that infamous Kubrick/Clarke collaboration. My father had taken me to see it at the Regent Theatre in Oshawa on one of our weekend visits. I would have been a hair over five years old at the time…which shows you how much my father’s decision-making skills were impaired by that time. Who the hell takes a five-year-old to 2001?

Still, he did. I kinda didn’t get the whole monkeys part at the time, and the ending completely eluded me (still does). But that middle hour? Hell, that was cool. Spaceships!

Childhood’s End

So, now, about six years after that, I stumbled on a battered paperback copy of Childhood’s End and, I looked through the first few pages to see if he’d written anything else–the best resource a pre-teen had to look for additional works, because I always hated those funky little library drawers filled with books all catalogued by the Dewey Decimal System. Back then, I counted myself lucky if I found the SF section. The Dewey Decimal System was as much a mystery as…well, as the ending to 2001.

Glancing through the list of the author’s other works, I saw 2001. Well, that was enough for me. This would be my next brain-blaster.

Childhood’s End had all the earmarks of what I would consider a classic story at the time: Aliens (and, though they were somewhat menacing, overall, they were here to help us. And that was cool in its own right), and kids who changed, who evolved, who became greater than their parents and greater than the sum of their parts. Oh, and the end of the human race as we knew it.

Now, I’ll admit that my first reading of the novel left me more than a little confused. It had some racially-charged moments when the Overlords stepped in to stop the reverse Apartheid in South Africa. And there was the whole Ouija board thing that signaled the change of the children was coming. As well, the entire end where the children transformed and left the earth on a burning column to join the Overmind confused the hell out of me.

Still, I knew I was reading something important. Something fantastic.

How did this book change my life?

Unlike Bradbury, Clarke dealt a little less with the people and a lot more with the big concepts Extraterrestrial beings that oversaw the evolution of entire planets’ civilizations. Travel not to the Moon or Mars, but to planets 40 light-years away.

Hell, this was when I figured out what a light-year was (the distance one travels over the course of a year while traveling at the speed of light. It works out to about 6 trillion miles or a hair under 10 trillion kilometers).

He also dealt with the end of the world. The end of mankind and its ascension to the stars. This was big stuff.
So, for those keeping score, Erich Von Däniken gave me a good bullshit radar, more of a life skill than anything, but still… Then Robert A. Heinlein gave me adventure. Ray Bradbury helped me understand the deeper emotions and the human condition. Each one gave me a sense of wonder, but each one kept it mostly relegated to our solar system.

But Clarke gave me the universe. He gave me aliens that were actually alien, not human-like people that came from another planet. Later on, he fired my mind again when I read one of his many famous quotes: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

He stretched my mind. He actually stretched it more than it could actually go, because, as I said, I simply didn’t get all of what he was saying. But it didn’t stop me from trying, and it just made me go to other areas of the library to look some of the stuff up. Like what a light year was. But he’d stretched my mind, my imagination so wide that it never came back to its original shape. I was now open to a hell of a lot more and wanted to learn more so I could understand more.

So, he also gave me a real thirst for knowledge. Knowledge of any sort.

Thank you, Arthur.

 

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Did you ever read something that changed your life?

Did you ever wonder what your life would have been like if you hadn’t been able to read those words?

What if you couldn’t read? How different would your life be?

What if you couldn’t read Facebook status updates? What if you couldn’t read well enough to Google whatever you need to know? What if you couldn’t read to your kids? What if you couldn’t read a street sign? What if you couldn’t read the instructions on the pill bottle? What if you couldn’t fill out that job application?

What if you couldn’t read?

I’m the person I am now because I can read. I couldn’t imagine a life without a constant influx of words to entertain me, to irritate me, to make me laugh and make me cry.

But I know there’s many out there, and I’m trying to help them. Please, if you read and enjoyed this blog, or if it made you think back to a book that changed your life, please consider helping me help those who are trying to read.

I’m participating in the Muskoka Novel Marathon, a 72-hour event where 40 writers try and write as much as they can, while raising money to fund Literacy and Numeracy programs for adults in the Simcoe/Muskoka area. And the program works. One of the lucky people who went through their literacy program has now joined our group as a writer. How often can you donate money and look at the walking, talking, reading and writing result?

Any amount is sincerely appreciated.

To find out more about the Muskoka Novel Marathon, click here.
To donate, click here.

Please. Help me change someone’s life through reading.

Dad

Yesterday and tomorrow are my father’s 87th birthday.  Turns out he always celebrated his birthday on Feb 8th, but in his later years, found out he was (at least on paper) born two days earlier.

He’s been gone since 1983.

Bill Higgins was never really much of a father.  I came along nine years after my brother and sister.  And no, I wasn’t a mistake.  Apparently my siblings really wanted a younger brother or sister, and my mother wanted one more child.  From what I know, my father seemed to express some interest as well.

And yet, not long after I was born, my father left his wife and kids with a newborn baby and went on a job to a remote corner of the world for the better part of a year.

That was his job.  I don’t know all the ins and outs of it, but he worked for a company that flew to various areas of the globe, such as Africa, the Arctic, Greenland, Trinidad, etc and found areas to mine resources.  His job was to make sure the aircraft they used stayed in top running form.  From what I can tell of his old Super-8 movies, he had a lot of downtime.

Left him a lot of time to feed the alcoholic monkey on his back.

And yet, the things he saw.  The people he met.

I still have a book, From My African Notebook, by Albert Schweitzer that has, on the title page, an inscription:

“a Mr Higgins avec mes bonnes pensez, Albert Schweitzer, Lambarene, 4 juillet 1962”

Just one of the amazing people he met.

My father was one of the smartest men I ever knew.  Some of the stories my mother tells me I know are misremembered.  For instance, she told me he drew up plans for a plane with wings that could be folded.  She’s told me on many occasions that if he’d had the confidence, he could have had that patented and made millions.  But when I look it up, the first folding wing design was patented in 1913 and has been in regular use since the late 1930s, when my father would have been less than fifteen years old.  My guess is, he likely saw the planes and figured out on his own exactly how that would work and designed it straight out of his head.  That I could believe.

Why do I think he was capable of that?  Because he created a one-man hovercraft all on his own.  He took a starter motor from, I believe, an old Lancaster plane and used it to drive a fan inside a large inner tube also taken from a plane’s landing gear.

He also built many doodads and geegaws at home that entertained me endlessly.

I remember some great times with dad.  I remember him sitting me in our La-Z-Boy, manipulating the various vibration motor speeds in the back, seat and footstool to take me on a plane ride.  My favourite part was always when all engines were pushed to full and he angled the seat back as we left the runway.  I remember trying to replicate that experience on my own, later, and never ever being able to duplicate it.

I remember how he used to call me “Tobe”.  I remember his smile.  His laugh.  I remember his handsome face, the swoop of his hair.  I wish I had even one picture of the man.

I remember a time, just shortly before he and my mother split when, for no reason that I know of, he took an afternoon off, drove me out to a park or field and we just walked and talked.  It seemed like hours, but it seemed like seconds.  I can’t remember anything we talked about, only sunshine, green grass and a feeling of absolute contentment, a rarity with my father.

Most of the time, I remember him with a glass in his hand, filled with a golden liquid.

After my mother divorced him, I remember all the weekend visits, which always seemed to go the same.  He’d pick me up from mom, buy me a model car or plane, we’d go to a movie that he’d always fall asleep in, then, when it was done, we’d head back to his sister’s, my Aunt Ev, where he lived.

Typically, he’d fall asleep there as well, and Aunt Ev would feed me, clear a space for me to assemble that model, and get me to bed.  Then the next day I’d be back home with another model for my collection.

Then there was the time he took me out and he scared the shit out of me.  I wrote about it briefly here.  After that, I stopped seeing my dad.  It was my choice.  I was likely no more than six or seven, so not even two years since the split.  I never knew how dad felt about it.  He never called, he never wrote.  He dropped off the planet.

Mom remarried when I was ten and the man she married, Bob Elliott, legally adopted me.  I had to meet my dad in court, as he had to give his consent for my name to be changed.  I remember being shocked at how grey his hair had become.  When he leaned down to talk to me, I saw how his nose had become swollen and lumpy, like a red golf ball, from all the drinking.

“You sure you wanna do this, Tobe?” he said.

I can’t remember my response, but I know I told him I did.

“Okay,” he said.  He didn’t fight me.  He didn’t hug me.  He didn’t even put a hand on my shoulder.  He just gave me away.  He would have been 47 then.

Again, I never heard from him for a few years.  About two or three years later, I’m now collecting comics on a regular basis, and I used to head to downtown Oshawa for some of them.  I remember parking my bike, and walking past a billiard hall.  A man came out, staggering drunk and bumped into me, hard.  He turned to look at me.  Then he sneered and kept walking.  My father had not even recognized me.

It wasn’t until five years later.  I’m now about eighteen and I’m hearing that my father’s doing better.  He’s finally gotten the drinking under control, has found a job and moved to Calgary.  He asked my mother if he could write me and we started up a brief correspondence.  I remember his chickenscratch handwriting and his poor spelling.  He always apologized for both in every letter.  The thing I remember most from any of those letters?

“If you decided to do a bit of body building you wouldn’t have to take nothing from no one, but I’ve learned being rough gets you no where.  Only if it’s really necessary.  A smile is more intelligent than snarling.”

I don’t know if it’s apparent to you as someone who didn’t know him, but all I can see is two sides of a man warring with himself there.  Trying to give me words of wisdom, but still bumping up against his ingrained nature to fight, to lash out.

I went and visited him that summer.  I’d planned to try and stay for the summer, but I fled back home a week later.  What I’d seen was a man who needed to down half a bottle of booze to quell the shakes enough to get him going first thing in the morning.  I saw someone I couldn’t recognize as the once-brilliant man that could take me on plane rides in our living room.

I kept up a half-hearted correspondence for a while after that, but it fell off.  I guess that was me giving him away.

In September 1983, we got a call.  My father had collapsed in the streets of Calgary.  Someone stole his wallet, so by the time he got to the hospital, he was a John Doe.  And his organs were shutting down, his body had had enough.  He slid into a coma.  Somewhere along the way, a nurse managed to get a name out of him.  I don’t know if he mumbled it, or came out of the coma.  I don’t know.  But they were able to trace that name back to Oshawa.  His sister, my Aunt Ev.  We got the first call that he was dying.

Shortly later, we got the call.  He was gone.  He was 58.  He died on my brother’s 30th birthday, Sept 20.

Because he’d left no will and his family refused to do anything about it, my mother, now divorced from him for 16 years, went out with my brother and cleaned up his estate and arranged for his ashes to come back to Oshawa to be buried with his mother.

He was buried on my 21st birthday, Oct 6.

I never faced up to my complicated feelings toward my father for years.  Then, I was driving from Port Hope to Oshawa with my then-girlfriend, now wife, when a song came on the radio.  Mike + the Mechanics’ The Living Years.  It’s a bit of a syrupy song, but certain words cut through me.

I wasn’t there that morning
When my father passed away
I didn’t get to tell him
All the things I had to say

And there, on the 401, it all broke inside me.  I pulled off and basically lost it for quite a while.

I’ve since dealt with it.  I’m still pissed with him.  I’m angry that he gave up.  On me.  On his marriage.  On his future.  On his life.

I’m angry for all those conversations we missed.  Deep conversations, stupid conversations, disagreements in the way we see things.

I’m pissed that he checked out before he could see my kids, his grandkids.  I think he would have adored them.

But mostly, I just wish he was around so I could tell him all this.

And I wish I could know what he thought of the choices I made, the life I’ve made for myself.  I wish I could show him that, despite all the stupid choices he made, all the mistakes he made, that he did end up teaching me, even if it was learning what I didn’t want to do with my life.  But he still taught me.  And in the end, isn’t that the job of a father to his kids?

He wasn’t much of a father, but he did give me life.

Happy birthday, Dad.  I wish you were here to enjoy it.

What would you change?

I’m reading Stephen King’s 11/22/63 which, in case you’re living under a rock and haven’t heard, is about a guy who goes back in time and attempts to prevent the assassination of JFK.

King presents Kennedy’s assassination as a watershed moment in history, and I don’t disagree with that argument.  I’d say 9/11 would be another one.

So, my question is, if you could somehow go back and prevent anything, what would it be?

For me, there’s the big ones, JFK and 9/11 of course.

I don’t know how Stephen King has plotted it out, but for JFK, I’d point out that I saw some suspicious-looking dude go into the library with a big gun.  Oh, and you may wanna check that grassy knoll over there while you’re at it.

As for 9/11, I’d probably just call in a whack of bomb threats.  One to each of the Trade Center buildings and the specific flights as well.  Though I think it would likely just delay the event, not kill it.

I’d like to go back and fix the voting debacle of 2000 that led to George W getting into office.  Don’t know how I’d fix that one…maybe take some of his future speeches on video…no…on second thought, Americans voted him in a second time, so that wouldn’t work.

Try and save those people on the Shuttle disasters.

I’d stop the Martin Luther King assassination.

Could I do something about Korea and Vietnam?  I’d try.

I’d try and take out Hitler before he became powerful.  Maybe get him into art college and let him spout his crap to fellow students, instead of the world.

I’d go back and kick Mark David Chapman right in the balls a few minutes before John Lennon came home.  Really hard.  That one I’d truly enjoy.

I don’t know how much I could change, but there’s a few people I’d really like to have some conversations with them.  And there’s some people I’d talk to a lot less.  And others I’d have stronger conversations much sooner.

For example, I’d go back and try and talk to my father before he gave up on life.  Hell, I’d probably go back at several points in his life and ask him what the hell he was thinking.  Then again, I could do that with quite a few people.

I’d probably do the same with my sister.  Or maybe I’d just find the guy who would eventually ask her out, then marry her and, before he could cause all that damage, I’d kick him in the balls too.  Even harder than Chapman.  And I’d enjoy that one too.  Hell, if I see Brian today, I’d probably do that.

I’d have a long talk with my step-father a few days before Christmas 1980 about the massive mistake he was going to make on Christmas day.  I’d try and fix that whole thing.  Maybe my mom’s marriage wouldn’t have gone so spectacularly off the rails in the span of a few hours.

There’s likely a few more things that I’m just too tired to think of, but there’s one more that I’d do.  This one would, pardon the pun, take some time, but it would be worth it.

I’d write up a list of people and timeframes.  I’d hand-write it so it would be recognizable as me.  And I’d document who to listen to, who to stay away from, and why.  Who to trust, who not to, and why.  But mostly, I’d explain to the skinny, shy, lonely, insecure kid that things would work out.  That, as shitty as life sometimes got, as hard as many situations seemed to be to deal with, as cruel as some people could be, that it would be okay.  I’d explain to that kid that things would get better and that, even though he would always take the long way around to finding his path, and would second-guess himself a lot along the way, that things would work out.  That life, while not perfect, would be pretty damn good.

And then I’d go give that written document to myself when I was about seven years old.

And one last thing…I’d tell him  to never play baseball with Jimmy Baldwin on a Sunday.  Especially when he was ten years old.

That’s gonna save him a whole lotta dentist trips.

My Aunt Betty

I didn’t think I’d be writing another one of these so soon.

My Aunt Betty, first wife of my Uncle Merle, passed away last Sunday.  I can’t imagine the pain of their six daughters with the loss of both father and mother within ten days of each other.

Again, this will be more of a remembrance of Betty than anything, and again, I start this more than a little ashamed that I have so few recent memories of her.  Of the three women that initially married into the Clarke clan, she’s the one I got to know the best.  My Aunt Grace lived so far away in California with my Uncle Ron that I never really knew her (and that’s a shame as I’ve never heard a negative comment whatsoever about her), and Aunt Joan always seemed overshadowed by the larger than life personality of my Uncle Floyd (Hell, Floyd outshone virtually everyone around him, so that’s no slight to Joan).  Betty, on the other hand, seemed a little different…

What I’ll always remember the most about Aunt Betty are two qualities…

The first is, I don’t think I ever saw the woman without a smile on her face.  I know we frequently hear about those people who just light up when they smile, but Betty really did.  There’s a quote that really applies to my Aunt Betty: “I’ve never seen a smiling face that was not beautiful.”  That was Betty.  I remember her smiling face when I was that little kid coming over to visit my cousins (and grudgingly eat a bowl of that soup that I claimed I never wanted, but really did).  And I remember her smiling face at my wedding.  And I remember later, even when she was pretty much tied to a chair with an oxygen tank beside her, her seeing me and smiling.

I’m sure there were many times when she wasn’t smiling, when she wasn’t happy.  But I can’t remember a single time.

The second thing I remember is, her calmness.  Weird thing to remember, huh?  I guess, but it’s true.  Here was a woman that had six daughters in a modest-sized house, and, at least to my very young (at the time) eyes, lots of house guests.  Now, I gotta say, Aunt Betty was not the best in the world when it came to having a spotless house.  God no.  So, in this whirlwind of kids, guests, and all the normal chaos of a large family in the 1960s and 70s, I have a picture of Aunt Betty forever etched in my head, sitting in a chair, cigarette inevitably in hand, just as calm and content as can be.

Some may look at that as lazing, or disengaged or whatever.  But, to me, it was someone comfortable with who they were and if you didn’t like it, well, tough shit for you!  I talked about what I’ve taken from my memories of my Uncle Merle.  This is one of the things I took from Aunt Betty…people need to love you for who you are, not who they want or expect you to be.  My Aunt Betty wasn’t perfect.  I don’t think any of us can claim that title.  But she was someone I simply loved.  I loved her for who she was.

When I found out, I got a message back from one of Merle and Betty’s daughters.  She said, “The suffering for both has ended.  I am sure they are both dancing and singing with all the family that has gone before.”  I’ve said before that I’m not one for religion, but when I read this, I found myself not only hoping, but praying it was true.

I can see it quite clearly.  Uncle Ron and Aunt Grace, likely holding hands, Ron likely still telling people he suffers from CRS (Can’t Remember Shit), Aunt Joan likely frowning, yet still laughing at some outrageously dirty joke that Uncle Floyd has told (and likely laughed at harder than anyone), and Uncle Al probably egging him on. My Uncle Charlie laughing and calling everyone “buddy” and my father, with his distinctive laugh, his eyes squinted, sharing in the good times with my Uncle Beans.  My cousins there, laughing at the jokes, dancing to the music that Uncle Merle’s playing.

And then, just maybe, he puts on Daniel Boone’s Beautiful Sunday in tribute to the family member that joined them at the party this past Sunday.

Goodbye Aunt Betty.  You made me smile.  And I loved you for who you were.  Always will.