In the summer of my 13th year, the Nozière "family"--all, strictly speaking, genetically related to one another, but in fact, in the way that American "families" so often are, a totally fragmented, heterogeneous collection of utterly disparate individuals--along with our four cats, moved from middle-class rural Eastern Washington to rural-suburban Western Oregon, just south of Portland, and I, a couple of weeks before my 14th birthday entered high school as a freshman.

In most ways, our new situation quite suited me.  Our new house--adequate in size for the three or four of us (Father being gone, most of the time, on the road, as a traveling farm equipment salesman), and all our cats, who mostly lived in it--was a then fairly recent construction, a plain exercise in the Pacific Northwest Wood-framed Modernist Style, which had been built as a foreman's house, situated, with garage and yard, just inside a thirty acre strawberry field, on a berry and grass-seed farm twenty miles or so south of Oregon City.  The only neighbors were Richard and Gladys Polehn, a sixties-something couple, whom I grew to know and love (there's no other word for it) over the next two or three years, technically our landlords, who lived in the lovely old, Queen Anne style "main house," up the hill and up the lane from us.  We became patrons of both the Clackamas (Oregon City) and the Multnomah (Portland) County Libraries, and I was enrolled as a freshman in the high school at Estacada--a forty or fifty minute bus ride in the morning and in afternoon--the largest institution, with more than 500 students in four grades, that I had ever attended. 

I was petrified.  Many were the ways that led down to exposure of my Dark and Horrible Secret (being gay), with attendant, certain, eternal, Disgrace and Death.  Almost as threatening were the countless indignities, disgusts and dismaying absurdities that dogged and bedeviled me simply for being one among many high school students, clamoring like the Progeny of Sin for my full compliance, allegiance and enthusiastic participation:  (1) popular music, then at its absolute cultural nadir; (2) athletic activities and team sports; (3) social activities; (4) social activities involving girls.  Reading, from the moment I got on the bus till the moment I got off, and never, that I recall, speaking to anyone, got me through those dangerous forty to fifty minutes on the bus, before and after school; while sitting next to a window in the course of the bus's several crossings of the Clackamas River,  which flows through the center of Estacada, and whose beauty I worshipped with a mad, druidic devotion, did much to alleviate the black, toxic mass which lay on my soul in the presence of my school-mates.

But one final thing, a couple of days before school started, I withdrew the money that had been lying in the bank since the sale of my 4-H steer the year before, and bought a pretty much state of the art stereophonic record player (for the year 1956), which I placed on the dresser next to my bed with the speakers right against my left ear.  And, thanks to records (vinyl, as all records were then) lent me by the Multnomah and Clackamas County Libraries--of the music of Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky--I survived, even flourished, like a watered plant.  I had a brother, two years younger (what was our mother thinking of in putting us into the same room together?), who, from time to time, because he was there, I would try to get him to appreciate this or that pretty, accessible piece of music--I tried really hard, that I recall, with Mozart's Symphony No. 29 in A Major.  But I had always to give it up, and usually wound up saying something like, "Not to hurt your feelings or anything, but part of your soul seems to be missing, or dead."