A Beginning

[Bloomfield, NJ - February 1, 1970]

I was born in a hospital in Montclair, NJ, on February 1st, 1970, to Martha Ware Williams and William John Williams. My father was a telephone repairman for Bell Telephone at the time, and my mother was a busy housewife, having given birth to my brother Chris in 1967.

We lived on Carteret St., in Bloomfield, NJ, back then. I was taken home to a nice room with choo-choo train wallpaper, I've been told. I don't have memories from the first few years of my life, more like recollections of stories told to me by my parents over the years. I liked sucking my thumb. I liked only two types of baby food: meat and bananas. I was a good little monkey. I also had a fascination with blue fuzzies. Yep, blue fuzzies. I had a very soft multicolored blanket that I loved in a similar manner to the way Linus (of Peanuts fame) loved his blanket, only I took it a step further.

You see, the blanket had squares of many different colors, but there was one color, a cerulean blue, that I especially loved. I would pick at that color, pulling the strands and gathering them into soft little balls that can best be described as "blue fuzzies". How I loved those blue fuzzies. I'd hold them next to my face and coo. They were so soft and blue! I think I may have eaten some of them. I'd fall asleep at night nuzzling a collection of soft blue fuzzies against my face. To this day, there is a specific feeling I get if I am extremely peaceful and comfortable as I fall asleep. It is the blue fuzzy feeling, and there may be nothing in the world better than it.

I should mention that my parents became quite perplexed when they found that a perfectly geometric pattern of holes had mysteriously emerged in my blanket. I imagine that it was a similar feeling to what a farmer experiences when he first stumbles upon a series of crop circles in his cornfield. Something was very strange indeed, some alien force was at work. They shrugged and assumed I must be some kind of savant/freak. At least they tried to comfort themselves with the hope that I would have some savant-like qualities, which might counterbalance this particularly freakish one.

I also remember that I had a big head. It's not like I looked in the mirror and exclaimed, "my god, look at the size of that thing!" No, it wasn't like that. It was just that no article of clothing seemed to be able to fit over it. I can still remember my father trying to pull my pajama top off. It would always get stuck on my head, and I'd end up suspended in the air, swinging helplessly as he tugged futilely on the top in exasperation. It was pretty funny to me actually, and I think we ended up making a game out of it.

I also liked to stand on my head when I was a toddler. We had a little jungle-gym in our backyard, and I'd go outside and hang upside-down by my feet, resting the top of my head on the ground. The world was so interesting from that perspective! I remember staring up at the sky, pretending that up was down, and I was hanging SO high up above a peculiar (cerulean) blue void. I spend a lot of time doing that. It's possible that I may have compressed my neck a bit, but more likely that I merely counteracted the stretching it was getting from the nightly pajama-pulling sessions with my dad.

I remember liking my brother a lot. One of my fondest memories from that time in my life is how we would go play in my dad's phone truck when he came home for lunch. He came home for lunch nearly every day…he really liked seeing my mom. She tells me that when they were first married sometimes she would cry in the morning after he left for work. So they'd eat together and we'd go play in the truck. Man that was fun…one of us would sit in the drivers seat and "drive" while the other one would "repair" one little trinket or another with bits of extra wire and tape. I still remember the smell of that van…old vinyl, WD-40, and electrical tape.

The Story of Ken: Part 1 – Prehistory: Give Me my Shoes Back, You Twit!

If you’re going to understand anything about me, it makes sense that you know a little about the people that brought me into this odd world. No, I’m not talking about the pilots of the mother ship that dropped me naked and alone into the Arizona dessert in 1970, with no real instructions other than “try not to upset the locals”. No, not them...I‘m still pissed at them, so they’ll get no more mention from me in this space.

My “earth parents" are actually from a much closer and far more alien origin, also known as New Jersey. My father was born in 1939 in Bloomfield NJ to a mostly German, I-coulda-been-a-contender-boxer turned baker, and a stubborn Dutch girl with a penchant for riding Indian Motorcycles. His paternal grandfather was a marine engineer who changed his last name from Franks to Williams, most likely due to anti-German sentiment arising out of the World Wars.

That’s right, my real name (well, not my REAL name…that’s not pronounceable in any terrestrial tongue…and I told you I didn’t want to talk about that) is Kenneth Allen Franks. In truth, it’s probably not even Franks, because I’m pretty sure that my great grandfather’s family Americanized it when they came here from Germany.

I gather that my father didn’t have an ideal childhood. My grandfather was apparently very fond of hanging out with his friends at the local bars, and had a bad temper. Personally, my only memory of this grandfather was that he liked to give me cheese. I never really knew him, because he died from a stroke when I was like 3 or 4.

My dad had one older brother and one younger sister. Unfortunately, his brother, Charlie, had a massive breakdown when he was a teenager, and was institutionalized, after being diagnosed with schizophrenia. His mother spent a lot of time after that taking long bus rides to go visit Charlie in “Overbrook”, which I gather was not a very nice place, in that they gave Charlie shock treatment countless times in a blunt attempt to “cure” him (it didn't work). I’ve heard my grandmother was tough woman, but I can only really remember how kind she was. From what I’ve been told, she did her best to raise her children in a much less than ideal set of circumstances.

I don’t think my dad was into school much. He had several different jobs from a very early age, and developed a real talent for building and fixing things as a young man. He built his own bikes from junk, developed a great skill for woodworking, and learned a lot about cars, especially Chevys.

My dad joined the Navy right after he graduated high school, spent a year in Charleston, SC, training in the usual military subjects, along with electronics, and was then assigned the position of Radio Man on a destroyer that traveled everywhere from California to Australia to the South Pacific and Asia. He has a lot of stories from his four years in the Navy. I get the feeling there are some he will never tell me.

My mom was born in Elizabeth, NJ, in 1943 to a very English and very talented mechanical engineer and an equally English and similarly talented housewife. Did I mention that they were English? Yes, all sorts of lineages are available: folks who came over on the Mayflower, folks who helped form the Harvard Divinity School and establish Unitarianism in the U.S., folks who had large country estates with servants. Booths, and Wares, and Allens (thus my middle name), and lots of other waspy folks.

My mom was the oldest child. She had a brother for a brief time, but he died very young, and no one ever talks about that much. She did permanently end up with a younger sister, who became quite the hippie chick for awhile, then grew up to become a SAS programmer with two kids, living in a swanky town in northern NJ. My mom was somewhat of a tomboy, and an athlete too, excelling at track and tennis. Not at all surprising pastimes for the daughter of an English son. Her parents were good parents from what I’ve heard, and money wasn’t a problem. I have heard her complain that they were not very affectionate, and that they wouldn’t let her stir her ice cream into mush before eating it, because, well, that’s just not proper!

At some point my mom became friends with a girl from her elementary school. They got along very well. This girl had one brother who was certifiably crazy, and another one who was uncertifiably so, at least in the tendency he had to take my mother’s shoes and throw them in the trees. Ooh, how she hated him! She plotted and waited patiently, like any girl worth her salt can.

Some time later she graduated high school, and had the occasion to go with her old friend to greet that odd shoe-throwing brother of hers, who had just returned from his tour in the Navy. Hmm, he was CUTE now: bright blue eyes with more than a little mischief shining through them. The gears of an ancient plan creaked back into motion. She would invite him on the local Presbyterian church’s hay ride. Revenge would be hers! She would marry him.