Wings:

   1. Unlimited Intellectual curiosity

   2.  Unconstrained imagination &        
        uninhibited creativity. 

   3. Few human-created prejudices 

Anchors:
1. Knowledge base: Yet to gain broad & deep knowledge & skills

2. Experience base: limited, but rapidly growing, learning & comparing.  Family / friends / school / church impacts: may be good or bad.

3. Destructive school system: the unrecognized threat of public education’s memorization/testing damage, which: 
   1) crushes intellectual curiosity, 
   2) stifles imagination,
   3) suppresses initiative & creativity,
   4) wastes true potential of many youths
   5) undermines confidence & self-worth
   6) foolishly isolates each subject’s content from all others, destroying their natural interconnectedness
   7) Often wastes years of student’s time better spent actually learning useful knowledge & gaining useful skills & experience.

1. Family

It all started innocently enough,             but then ...  

I was raised in a middle-class family of a college-educated father and high school-educated mother who apparently always resented my father's education, his industry's high regard, his warmly engaging personality, and his major corporate management success. 

Anecdote: In our last Father/son chat: He told me that my mother often ridiculed his failure to have achieved even more.  

Ironically, IMO, I believe her phony personality was the reason he had not.

My Mother: Early on I was aware that she had little regard for me, yet great protective affection for my younger brother. Her maligned efforts destroyed him and our family.

Anecdote: My ‘neighborhood’ friends: At 6, while my parents moved our family belongings into our 1st ‘owned’ home, I remember taking my sister for a walk down our block and being chased by those who later would become my supposed ‘friends.’  My tenuous relationship with my reluctant ‘friends' persisted until I made good friends later in high school.

 Looking back at that very decent middle-class neighborhood of Eastman Kodak middle-management families, I never understood why I was so instantly disliked by them.   Still can't even guess!

Anecdote: Ostracized, but why?:  I remember having to look out the window early Saturday afternoons to see ' my gang' sneaking together to avoid taking me to the movies with them. Then, I racing after them to catch up. 

 One time at the movies, I was apparently so deeply engrossed in a movie, I didn't notice that they had, en masse, quietly got up and moved to other seats. 

Funny, in some sense, but emotionally cruel & crushing in another, particularly when coupled with my antagonistic mother-brother cabal.

Even now, I remain mystified, yet on reflection, I see the roots of my prized solitude's solace, my self-reliance, and self-isolation. Nevertheless, pathetically sad as I recall it now after almost 80 years.  

Anecdote: my solo time: In my pre-teen & years, I frequently solo-roamed a huge wooded area & cemetery alongside Rochester, NY's  Genesee River adjacent to my neighborhood. I knew all its trails intimately and the steep, hillside trails down to ‘my refuge caves' where I spent time thinking.’ I was comfortable by & with myself in this wooded refuge. 

At night sometimes for the challenge, I would creep undetected within feet of Boy Scouts at their nighttime fireside gathering deep in this wood. I prized my stealth & secrecy. Years later in in the deep woods of Teton National Park near my home, I would do the same with small elk herds, spending hours tracking & getting so close I scared myself and backed off.

Shipped alone by train to Manitoba, Canada's Plains: At 10 & 12, my father shipped me alone for summers to my mother’s parents on Manitoba, Canada’s plains, as my Grandma quipped, “…to get me away from my mother for at least the summers.

Most wonderful period of my early life. Loving, warm huge grandmother, taciturn Scotch (Edinburg direct ) grandfather & wonderful manly role model, Uncle Bill. 

Grandma's ginger snap cookies were cooked on her giant cast iron cook stove. Grandpa in his ubiquitous 3-piece wool suits,  vest n'all, smoking his deeply curved 'bent' style pipe with a shot of whisky every morning. And... Uncle Bill, tall, slim Abe Lincoln-like; fisherman, hunter, local hockey legend and his lovely much younger girlfriend, soon-to-be wife, Ellie. 

Wonderful boyhood adventures: sleeping in a tent with Uncle Bill’s dog, Pete, fishing, shooting rifles, big County Fair, boating & fishing; constantly in boyish trouble working in my grandfather’s store then, 70 years ago.

Even then it was almost an antique small downtown grocery store now displayed in the local Brandon, Manitoba museum.

1. Could I, a Pre-teen, have understood my mother’s dislike of me? ..or why? 

I recognized her dislike of me by 5 or 6 and that she & my brother were a cabal of my enemies, but I never understood ‘Why.’ 

Did my mother /brother cabal teach me t such relationships? Looking back, I suspect so, but not that I could articulate then.

It did make me reach out to my friend, Eddie's dying mother, as a trusted mentor & confidant through long conversations. In my teens, it pushed me to rebellious friends. Her tyrannical control distanced my father from me, sadly.

Lack of mother, family and true neighborhood friends made nature's outdoors a welcome refuge.

Did my family estrangement make me isolate myself? Yes, but, at school, church & elsewhere, I had what I believe were good normal relations and friends.

Was she the cause of my academic failures?  Did her ridicule & lack of support leave me blind to other opportunities like singing, acting, sports, etc.?      I didn’t think so then, but now, ... maybe.

I never guessed that her negativity undermined my confidence & self worth because I always seemed to excel outside school. 

Only as an adult did I look back and presume to guess at her low self-worth & its source; perhaps when she compared herself to my gentle father's high professional status & respect. 

     Anecdote:  6 decades later, I asked her 95 year old sister, why my mother was as I described her. My aunt looked at me in disbelief —-  she had no idea what I was talking about.

Anecdote: Summers in Canada:  At 10 & 12, my father shipped me for summers to my mother’s parents on Manitoba, Canada’s plains to, as Grandma quipped, “…to get me away from my mother for at least the summers.” 

Yet, in spite of the solo 3 day railroad trip to Grandma’s … no specific desire to travel for travel’s sake.

Why did my 10 year old's 3 day solo train ride across Canada  to Grandma’s NOT generate a desire to travel?

Too young to 'see' that far afield. It was a grand adventure in itself. Why would Ihave wanted more?

2. School

Even in kindergarten I was often expelled from class for disruptive behavior. I hated school’s boring regimentation. 

      Anecdote 1: In kindergarten,
             1) I was 86’d from the playhouse, [God only knows what I did in there.]
             2) Scolded for blocking Office Clerk’s entry with large (2' x2') play blocks: [I organized my little buddies to pile these large wooden blocks against the door so the Office Clerk could not make her daily delivery.] [Why didn't the teacher recognize my imagination and leadership skills? LOL],
             3) I would not sleep quietly on my blanket during ‘milk’ break. [Youthful energy suppression???]

      Anecdote 2: In 2rd Grade, I had my own chair in the hallway outside our classroom. Later, In 3rd grade, my very old teacher threw an eraser at me which missed slidding harmless with a bang under my chair. Eventually, for her sanity, I guess, I was moved to much younger Mrs Block's class, but while entranced & staring at her beautiful breasts which she called me on once, I still had a worn path 😃 to the Principal who once flicked my ear with his finger & told my mother, "Scott is just not very intelligent.”      By 3rd grade I had been taught I was a failure - a bad kid. 

    Anecdote 3: In 3^th grade, my Math teacher threw chalk at me, hitting me just below the left eye?  Today's lawsuit lottery. 🥲 

     Anecdote 4: Later, in 4^th grade, my father, before I was expelled, placed me in private catholic Nazareth Elementary boys school, to hopefully re-direct my path. My bad behavior briefly continued until school’s Principal, Sister Mary Patrice, whacked me over the knuckles with a wooden ruler & advised that I had 2 weeks to ‘shape up’ or I was expelled.    I shaped up.

After two years of adequate performance, I and my parents had high hopes for my return to public school system. But alas, ' hope' is neither a strategy for investing nor my return to public school.

1. Could I have ‘understood’ my father’s counsel to ‘get good grades’ if I wanted to succeed? 

What did that even mean?

My father had been a successful major American corporation executive who drummed college into my brain. It was the only path to mythological ‘success”, he argued.

Ironically, such counsel may have even less relevance in today’s merging of cellphone Internet access, games-based learning-software & AI as that combo hopefully replaces destructive public education.

2. Did I consciously recognize my classroom boredom, disruptions, and my academic & familial as my defects; my failings?

No, I simply accepted them as ‘me’ without assigning direct blame to anyone, including myself.

My solution was my imagination’s day-dreams — my ‘secret’ refuge … besides, of course,   distracting others & generally screwing around.

My self-worth was probably shaky, although I probably could not have defined the concept.

3. Who did I blame for my academic failures & apparent behavioral issues?

No one. I simply accepted them as ‘me’ without assigning blame to anyone including my mother & brother. 

As a child, I simply presumed that parents & school was ‘my world’, and never thought to question it. I knew I liked Eddy Wagner’s mom a lot before she, unfortunately, died early. She and I could talk for hours.

I never liked my mother or brother. Always suspect. Always my danger zone; enimies.

4. Should/could I have contemplated my future & self corrected? 

Perhaps, but as a fledgling human, I was not coping well with the present, so how could I imagine the future let alone how to prepare, plan, or alter it.

The future was , I suspect, simply the next required thing: 

 “Up in the mornin' and out to school
  The teacher is teachin' the golden rule
  American history and practical math
   You studyin' hard and hopin' to pass.  
                 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
   Soon as three o'clock rolls around
   You finally lay your burden down
   Close up your books, get outta ya seat
    Down the halls and into the street”
               From Chuck Berry’s 1957 hit, “School Days.
   Lyrics:    https://tinyurl.com/49hu3zhd

Track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHG5-GxI_Es

3. Travel

In my earliest years, my dislocated parents would drive from New York to Manitoba Canada or Nova Scotia, Canada to visit their parents. A long boring, non-stop slog of picnic lunches & cheap hotels in a cauldron of explosive family tensions in an old car left no travel memories: foreign or domestic. 

Anecdote: on one trip to Manitoba, I recall two incidents first my brother's constant snoring, preventing me from sleeping during the night and me mouthing some swear words that I had to pretend in the morning I had no recollection of and two when we had a flat tire in the rain my mother mostly stood with my father in the rain as he changed the tire. A rare applause to her.

At 10 & 12, my father shipped me alone for 3-4 days on the Canadian National Railroad for summers at my mother’s parents' home on Manitoba, Canada’s plains and a small town of Bandon to, as Grandma quipped, “… get me away from my mother for at least the summers.” 

Anecdote: Boiston creme pie: At 10, in the evenings when the restaurant car was closed, the chef or conductor would invite me back to the restaurant car and surprise me with the chef & dining staff's single setting of a large piece of Boston cream pie, and a glass of milk. We chatted until I was done, and they led me back to my sleeper bed, and the rhythmic 'clicking' of the rails lulled me asleep. An adventure that led me to the most wonderful period of my early life. I've always loved train travel.

Note: Recently, a friend asked me if I had not been afraid to travel for 3 or 4 days by myself. I have no recollection of any fear, only the quiet curiosity of the passing landscapes and ever-increasing anticipation of Brandon's arrival to be met at the station by Grandma, Grandpa's and Uncle Bill's. I don't recall, but perhaps the escape from my mother and brother underlay the overall excitement. 

Grandma was lovingly warm & huge … towering over her diminutive, taciturn Scotch (Edinburg, Scotland direct) grandpa. Grandma’s ginger snap cookies baked in her giant cast-iron cook stove. Grandpa in his ubiquitous 3-piece wool suit with vest, smoking his deeply curved pipe with a shot of whisky evry morning. 

And ..Uncle Bill, tall, slim Abe Lincoln-like; fisherman, hunter, local hockey legend and his lovely much younger girlfriend, soon-to-be wife, Ellie. Uncle Bill has always been my wonderful manly role model.

Wonderful boyhood summer adventures: tent sleeping with Uncle Bill’s dog, Pete, (see PIK of Uncle Bill & Pete above) fishing, shooting rifles, big County Fair, boating & constantly in boyish trouble working in my grandfather’s store which even then, 70 years ago, was itself an antique small downtown grocery store now reassembled in the local Brandon, Manitoba museum.

I spent days on end roaming the streets of small Brandon, Manitoba on bike with Pete, Uncle Bill’s Springer Spaniel dog. Care-free days of solo adventure. 

Yet, despite my solo 3-day railroad trips to wonderful Grandma’s AND bus trips to Boy Scout summer camp, they spawned NO specific desire to travel for travel’s sake.… Perhaps, not a surprise really.

1. Does a child have an inherent desire for foreign travel?   Doubtful,

A child’s almost mental clean slate is frantically, with great wonder, trying to build its knowledge base, skills & experiences to match her growing awareness of the world she has been plopped into.

2. Can a child even grasp the concept of foreign travel? Certainly, based on knowledge & experiences they are exposed to

Perhaps in the same way 'tolerance' can be taught by erasing the significance of differences. EX: Americans eat hamburgers while Mexicans eat tacos; not good nor bad, just simply different.

3. Can parents facilitate travel desire? Perhaps

Exposing a child to travel-related media that compares/ displays foreign cultures with our own e.g.: National Geographic Magazine's, Curiosity Stream’s documentaries, History Channel etc.

Critical to expose, not force or indoctrinate, a child to everything letting them become naturally interested, or NOT. 

Public education’s forced memorization & destructive testing system destroys intellectual curiosity, imagination & creativity.