For me, humor has long been a tool of survival. I recall a specific moment when I was four years old, standing in our living room on Baker Street in the Marina, looking at my parents and my older sister, and thinking, “These people are crazy, and I do not belong in this house.”
It’s been 69 years since that moment, but it’s as clear in my mind as if it happened this morning. Our house was an IED before anybody knew what that meant (improvised explosive device). It could blow at any time. I was raised by people who should never have formed a couplehood and for whom stable parenthood was an impossibility. They were poster children for the Parental Peter Principle: They rose, or descended, to their proper level of incompetence. I forgave them a long time ago for being humans with flaws. Experience, as they say, comes along shortly after you need it.
The combination of a Jesuit accountant with a rage problem and a beatnik artist with an alcohol problem was never going to work. That they never divorced was more a product of the times, the post-war boom, than any conscious decision they would have made together simply because they wouldn’t have had the skills or courage to discuss it.
The irony of it all is that along with the powder keg waiting to blow was the almost constant presence of real, hard laughter. In observing how my parents interacted with their parents and the whole pack of aunts, uncles and cousins, while it was clear that nobody liked anybody else, all they did when they got together was LAUGH HARD WITH AND AT EACH OTHER. It was actually a pretty good show, and I paid attention to every word and nuance.
It was confusing for a shy and fearful little boy. I can tell you that. So, as a young person, I went looking for sane people who might show me the way, and they ended up being teachers, coaches, cops, priests and the parents of my friends, who knew a troubled child when they saw one.
They all saved me from, if not a life of crime and punishment, a life of unimaginable emotional torment. This is the first step toward a full expression of profound gratitude to those people.
Craig Corsini is a writer in San Rafael.
