LITMIR.BIZ

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we often visited the Greenleafs in their fancy home in a posh district of Everett. Since I was absolutely adorable in those days, I was always the center of attention during those visits, and I thought that was sort of nice.

      My time in the limelight came to an abrupt halt in 1977 when Inga blossomed and bore fruit—a pair of twin girls, Regina and Renata, who definitely outclassed me on the adorability front. As I remember, I was fairly sullen about the whole thing.

      Regina and Renata were identical twins—so identical that not even Inga could tell them apart—and when they first started talking, it wasn’t English they were speaking. I’m told it’s not uncommon for twins to have a private language, but “twin-speak” is supposed to fade out before the pair get into kindergarten. Regina and Renata kept their private dialect fully operational all the way into high school.

      There was a whacko social theory at that time to the effect that twins would grow up psychotic if they were dressed alike. Inga blithely ignored it and followed the ancient custom of putting the girls in identical dresses every morning, the sole difference being a red hair ribbon for Regina and a blue one for Renata. She carefully checked their little gold name bracelets every morning to be certain she wasn’t getting them mixed up. I think it was those hair ribbons that set the girls off on what the Greenleafs called the twin-game. Regina and Renata swapped ribbons three or four times a day, and as soon as they learned how to undo the clasps on their name bracelets, all hope of certainty went out the window.

      Those two had all sorts of fun with that twin-game, but now when I think back, maybe they were trying to tell us something. The pretty little blond girls had no real sense of individual identity. I don’t think either one ever used the word “I.” It was always “we” with Regina and Renata. They’d even answer to either name.

      That bugged their parents, but it didn’t particularly bother me. My solution to the “identification crisis” was to simply address them indiscriminately as Twinkie and to refer to them collectively as the Twinkie Twins. That made the girls a little grumpy right at first, but after a while it seemed to fit into their conception of themselves, and they stopped using their given names and began to address each other as either Twinkie or Twink—even when they were using their private language.

      In a peculiar way, that got me included in their private group. Our families were close to begin with, and because I was seven years older than they were, the chubby, golden-haired twins looked upon me as a big brother. I had to tie their shoes, wipe their noses, and put the wheels back on their tricycles when they came off. Every time they broke something they’d assure each other that “Markie can fix it.” Every now and then, one of them would slip and say something to me in twin-speak, and they always seemed a little disappointed and even sad when I didn’t understand what they were saying.

      As their official surrogate brother, I spent a lot of my childhood and early adolescence in the company of the Twinkie Twins, and I learned to ignore their cutesy-poo habit of whispering to each other, casting sly looks at me, and giggling. By the time I moved up into high-school—an event most adolescents view as something akin to a religious experience—I was more or less immune to their antics.

      In May of my sophomore year, I turned sixteen and got my driver’s license. My dad firmly advised me that the family car was not available, but he promised to check at the union hall for job opportunities for young fellows in need of a summer job. I wasn’t too hopeful, but he came home with an evil sort of grin on his face. “You’ve got a job at a sawmill, Mark,” he told me.

      “No kidding?” I was a little startled.

      “Nope. You go to work on the Monday after school lets out.”

      “What am I going to be doing?”

      “Pulling chain.”

      “What’s ‘pulling chain’?”

      “You don’t really want to know.”

      I found out why I wouldn’t after I’d joined the union and reported to work. I also found out why there were always job openings in sawmills when the job involves the green chain. Sawmills convert logs from the woods into planks. After a green hemlock log has spent six or eight weeks in the millpond soaking up salt water, it gets very heavy, and it’s so waterlogged that it sends out a spray when it goes through the saw. The planks come slithering out of the mill on a wide bed of rollers called the green chain. They’re rough, covered with splinters, and almost as heavy as iron. “Pulling chain” involves hauling those rough-sawed planks off the rollers and stacking them in piles. It’s a moderately un-fun job. More-modern sawmills have machines that do the sorting, pulling, and stacking, but the sawmill where I worked that summer hadn’t changed very much since the 1920s, so we did things the old-fashioned way. I didn’t like the job very much, but I really, really wanted my own car, so I stuck it out.

      I’d been an indifferent student at best up until then, but after the summer of ‘86, my attitude changed. There might just be a doctoral dissertation in psychology there—The Motivational Impact of the Green Chain maybe. I became a much more serious student after that summer, let me tell you.

      Pulling chain did earn me enough money to buy my own car, of course, and that’s very important to red-blooded sixteen-year-olds, since it’s widely known in that group that “You ain’t nothin’ if you ain’t got wheels.” The Twinkie Twins weren’t very impressed by my not-very-shiny black ‘74 Dodge, but I didn’t buy it to impress them. They were only third graders and by definition unworthy of my attention. They were blond, still chubby with the remnants of baby fat, and they were at the tomboy stage of development.

      Time rushed on in the endless noon of my adolescence, and it seemed that before I’d turned around twice, graduation day was staring me in the face. The gloomy prospect of pulling chain loomed in front of me, but good old Les Greenleaf stepped in at that point. I’m sure there was a certain amount of collusion involved when right after my high-school graduation an opening “just happened” to show up at the door factory, and my dad presented me with my reactivated union card. The Monday after graduation I went to work at Greenleaf Sash and Door. I was now a worker. I even went to union meetings.

      I think the highlight of my first year at the door factory came on the day when all the kids in Everett had to go back to school, but I didn’t. My delight lasted for almost a whole week. Then it gradually dawned on me that I actually missed going to school. That green-chain scare in the summer of my sophomore year had turned me into a semiserious student during my last two years at school, and now I didn’t know what to do with myself. The door factory only filled forty hours a week, and my dad had our television set permanently locked on the sports channels. I’ve always been fairly certain that the world won’t come to an end if the Seattle Seahawks don’t make it into the Super Bowl. I took to reading to fill up the empty hours, and by the summer of 1990, I’d plowed my way through a sizable chunk of the Everett Public Library.

      Just for kicks, I took an evening course at the local community college in the autumn quarter of that year, and I aced it. I was a little surprised at how easy it’d been.

      I took another course during the winter quarter, and that one was even easier.

      I latched on to a steady girlfriend at the community college that winter, and we both skipped the spring quarter. We broke up that summer, though, and I started taking courses as a sort of hobby. I didn’t really have any kind of academic goal; you might just say I was majoring in everything.

      Wouldn’t Everything 101 be an interesting course title?

      That went on for a couple years, and by then I’d racked up a fairly impressive number of credit hours. My dad didn’t say anything about my snooping around the edges of the world of learning, but he was keeping track of my progress.

      There was another strong odor of collusion about what happened in late November of 1992. We’d been invited to the Greenleafs’ for Thanksgiving dinner, and after we’d all eaten too much, my dad and the boss got involved in a probably well-rehearsed discussion of an ongoing problem at the door factory. There were only four saws,

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