Tag Archives: human development

Coop’s Childhood Part 5 – Burns Park & Divorce

1139-martin-plWhile the events of the U.S. civil rights movement and the Vietnam War were roiling the larger society, the first big event that I was privy to in our little family’s cataclysm was in early April of 1964 around my ninth birthday, bearing helpless witness to my mom having what later I would learn was a panic attack. I recall that I was in my room and heard her out in the living room pacing the floor and crying haltingly punctuated by gasps for air. When I came into the living room to see what was going on she looked at me with absolute terror in her eyes, “Cooper… I can’t breathe!”, as if somehow she was hoping I could do something about it.

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Coop’s Childhood Part 4 – Boys, Bushes, Baseball & Beyond

Lilac bushes in Almendinger Park
Lilac bushes in Almendinger Park
The brooding and mostly repressed sexuality of America in the 1950s that I was born into, was being transformed by a sexual revolution that was taking form in the early 1960s. The seeds of this insurrection included Zoologist Alfred Kinsey’s reports on his research on human sexuality in males (1948) and females (1953), along with French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir’s book, The Second Sex (1949), starting to rekindle the feminist movement including the right of women to have the same freedom to express and act on their sexual desires as men.

Many of my huge Baby-Boom generation born starting in 1946 into a burgeoning middle class after World War II were beginning to come of age in a relatively prosperous America. We had better access to education, and through the growing electronic media of radio and television, access to a popular culture that included championing the expression of sexuality and other forms of human liberation. Facilitated by the development of a reliable birth control pill in 1960, elements of American culture were moving away from traditional values and social strictures towards more permissive and informalized attitudes. Rock-and-roll music, emerging in the 1950s borrowing from black R&B roots and becoming mainstream in the 60s was a huge cultural aphrodisiac, urging its listeners to “rock”, its thinly-veiled code word for sexual activity.

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Coop Goes to High School Part 9 – On My Own Terms

Me bottom row 2nd from the left and some of my JLO comrades
Me bottom row 2nd from the left and some of my JLO comrades
Living life on my own terms, at my own cadence, surrounded by those with whom I could share a sense of real collaboration and community, that’s what I wanted. Not some day in the future after I’d jumped through all society’s hoops and proven my worthiness to be a full-fledged adult, but now, January 1972, as I pondered what classes I would sign up for for my last semester of high school. There was so much going on, as George Harrison so elegantly called out in his song “Within You Without You”…

And the time will come when you see
we’re all one, and life flows on
within you and without you.

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Coop Goes to High School Part 8 – Starting Senior Year

JLO's 1972 production of Oliver! on the set I designed
JLO’s 1972 production of Oliver! on the set I designed
For the past eleven years, as my summer vacation waned each August, I would avoid for as long as possible thinking about having to go back to school. When that moment finally came and I had to focus on getting ready, I would prepare my tender psyche as best I could for all the new situations I would be thrown into and all the new people I would encounter who I did not know, and did not know me. The latter had always been particularly problematic for me, because I was shy and I hated being judged by other people, particularly people who I had not had the long time I typically needed to establish “diplomatic relations” with them. Those “diplomatic relations” involved the other person accepting and respecting me for all the aspects of myself that I had revealed and my doing the same for them. The more I could reveal over time the stronger the relationship became and the more I could relax and be myself. Any person I could not establish this sort of pact with I would avoid as best I could. School seemed always to be a problematic venue for my sort of interpersonal “diplomacy”.

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Coop Goes to High School Part 7 – Song & Dance

Me and my Ado Annie in Oklahoma
Me and my Ado Annie in Oklahoma
They say that the only two things you can be sure of in life are death and taxes.  But for most every kid, the one thing you can be sure of is going to school, which for me was a taxing and at times felt like a near-death experience.  For twelve straight years (I skipped kindergarten) , whether I liked it or not, whether it was the right place for me to develop myself or not, I reported dutifully in the fall and served until the next summer.  At this point I had spent the last eleven straight years dutifully reporting to my designated school facility each September and dreading it each and every time.

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Coop Goes to High School Part 5 – Behind the Lights

Stage LightsThe story picks up in November 1970 almost halfway through three years of high school, still recovering from having jilted my first girlfriend (and being too shy to even face her after that), and Smokey Robinson part of my current Greek chorus on the AM radio with his “Tears of a Clown”…

Now if there’s a smile on my face
It’s only there trying to fool the public
But when it comes down to fooling you
Now honey that’s quite a different subject
But don’t let my glad expression
Give you the wrong impression

It reminded me that the persona I was putting out in the world was still mostly smoke and mirrors as well. That admitted, my Junior Light Opera youth theater group was opening up a new world of possibilities for me to define myself as a talented technician rather than just a lovelorn loser.

Just a quick note before we get into this segment… I’ve changed all the names of my friends to protect their privacy.

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Coop Goes to High School Part 4 – The Play’s the Thing

hairI returned from my summer in England just a week before school was to start for my junior year of high school, having missed my normal summer activities and been disconnected from my neighborhood friends for those ten weeks I had been gone, but also having undergone a personal transformation from my summer odyssey. I was still a shy kid, but I had a heightened sense of agency from partnering with my mom on our summer adventure in England. I was ready in this school year ahead to play a more active role charting my own course rather than just going with the flow of my school classes and current neighborhood social circle.

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Coop Goes to High School Part 3 – Summer Swap to England

My passport picture around my 15th birthday in 1970
My passport picture around my 15th birthday in 1970
My mom was always a smart creative person with tremendous ingenuity and a strong sense that life at its best should be an adventure. She had never been to Europe herself, but she had grown up around more economically privileged kids whose families had, and she felt this sort of an experience was an important part of a young person’s full education and development. Despite her financial limitations, she was determined to find a way to make such travel happen for her two sons.

An opportunity presented itself in the spring of 1970 when my mom heard from an acquaintance that they had traded houses with a family in Oxford England for the summer, both being big college towns with people always looking to take classes at the other university. So my mom placed an ad in the Oxford University paper and got a reply from a graduate student who was looking to come to the University of Michigan with his wife to attend a special summer program. My mom worked it out with them that we would exchange both our houses and our cars for ten weeks, from the last week of June until late August. We got our passports and my mom managed to find a cheap charter flight for herself, my brother and I from the nearby Detroit airport to Amsterdam in late June returning from London Gatwick airport in late August. She made hotel reservations for our first few days in Amsterdam, until such time as the house was vacant in Oxford.

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Coop Goes to High School Part 1 – Good Riddance to Junior High

A junior high yearbook picture
A junior high yearbook picture
In the summer of 1969, at age 14, it was a still recovering soul that did his best to psych up for yet another year of going to school after barely surviving the last three very difficult years at Tappan Junior High. Zager and Evans’ dystopian classic “In the Year 2525”, about a doomed world, was the big summer hit on CKLW AM radio.  Perhaps more hopeful were all the songs on the radio from the provocative rock musical Hair about hippies and human liberation, as expressed by the reality and underlying metaphor of “letting your hair down”.

Oh say can you see
My eyes if you can
Then my hair’s too short

The iconic Woodstock music festival, which I knew nothing about at the time, was happening in upstate New York that August, the climactic event in what some would later call the “summer of love”.  But the musical Hair at least made me familiar with that counterculture that was emerging with its “flower children” driven by a mantra of “peace, love, joy” facilitated by “sex, drugs and rock-n-roll” which allowed you to “tune in, turn on and drop out”.

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Unschooling in the Art of LIfe

northern-ireland-muralAs much as formal standardized education tries to turn it into a science, life, and the continuing human development which in my opinion is one of life’s most compelling narratives, is really more of an artistic endeavor. It is at its best the creation of a compelling narrative based on the uniqueness of a person’s soul and the life’s context that soul is unfolding and evolving in. It is not so much about following a procedure developed and “perfected” by others, or emulating another’s life successfully lived. It is more like a mural, ballad, novel, television series or other story told, reflecting the unique voice of the artist and their unique playing of the hand they are dealt.

According to Wikipedia, “science” is…

A systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.

Whereas “art” is defined as…

A diverse range of human activities and the products of those activities.

Modern society has been all about science and its organization of knowledge in the form of technology, industrial practice and social engineering. We identify experts who develop the best practice and then we create an institution to share that expertly designed practice with others. If the governing bodies of a society think a best practice is particularly compelling and effective, we may attempt to apply it universally, even possibly mandating that everyone follow it for their own good, or at least for the common good.

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