I was born 14 July 1961, the 172nd anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, celebrated today as French independence day. I have no French ancestry of which I am aware, though my brother did once live in France for a couple of years in the early 2000s and my surname may have Gallic roots.
I was born in a hospital in Miami, Florida. My relatives, as far back as I have been able to trace them, some seven generations, lived in Virginia, West Virginia, and Ohio. I was born far from them because my father found work in Miami, and our nuclear family would live there for the next seventeen years (the longest I would ever live in any one place).
I was born to Carolyn Joan Martin, the first child of three, who married Harvey Lewis Martin, the last child of three. They grew up in neighboring towns along the Kanawha River in a small corner of southern West Virginia. Carolyn was by her own admission raised spoiled, the apple of her father’s eye. I assume Harvey was raised with the disregard common to later children, especially those growing up in rural areas before WWII. He joined the air force, learned to be an electrical mechanic, served in the Korean War (stationed in both Korea and Japan), and came home to marry Carolyn before landing a job with Eastern Airlines, which sent him to work in their Miami hub.
My birth was reportedly traumatic for my mother. I was a large baby and the delivery resulted in copious bloodshed. It was not the last time I would cause distress for my parents.
My full name is Jeffrey Lynn Martin. I do not know what led my parents to choosing my given names. I was not named after grandfathers or other older relatives. Jeffrey is an ancient name (from Middle French, Godfrey, and later anglicized to Geoffrey) that fell out of common use before enjoying a peculiar boom in the US in the 50s and 60s. Today it is rare once more.
I have one brother, born two years after me. His name is Christopher Todd Martin. He is still living but hasn’t figured prominently in my life.
I lived my entire childhood at one address, a one-story, three-bedroom, cookie-cutter house in what was then a new suburb of Miami populated by young, mostly white, working-class families. I grew up with a gaggle of friends of approximately the same age, children of families who had migrated to Miami for work, who bought homes in that neighborhood, and who stayed long enough to see their children through primary and secondary education.
I am a product of American public schooling, early televisual mass media, and (for its time, at least) a progressive strand of American Protestantism.
I do not remember being an outstanding student, though never did I have any serious problems that required consultation with teachers, counselors, or administrators. I learned to read and write and do simple math. I don’t recall being especially curious or having a great drive or desire to be or do anything in particular. Some of my childhood heroes were astronauts, oceanographers, musicians, and athletes, and while I perhaps fantasized doing these things, I was never driven to do the work to make any of those dreams reality. I played youth baseball but would skip practice when possible. I joined a marine biology camp but came away no more committed to studying science than when I started. I took piano and drum lessons but to the dismay of my instructors (and my parents) frequently failed to practice.
This may have simply been my character. I sometimes think it may have been the absence of role models and guidance on how to achieve goals. My parents were simple working-class people who themselves seemed to have had no driving ambitions. They were high school graduates who read newspapers and magazines but didn’t read books. They were not intellectually curious and didn’t lead my brother and I in dinner discussions on the issues of the day. Their goals seem to have been rather pedestrian -- to be financially secure, raise their children, and maybe have some time for themselves to engage in small entertainments such as concerts, theatre, dance, and travel. I recall my father having to attend company-mandated training, but I do not remember my parents doing any formal adult learning or taking on projects such as a small business. They were busy, of course. Working full-time and raising a family is certainly challenge enough for most adults.
By the time I was a teenager, I had more books than anyone in the family, though I can’t say I was any better read on issues of great importance. My tastes ran largely to comic books and pulp fiction. Like many American families of that generation, we had an encyclopedia. Ours was stored in the television cabinet and while my parents may have consulted it from time to time to settle an argument or look up the odd fact, I supplemented my TV consumption of the American space program and Jacque Cousteau documentaries with articles on space and the planets, oceans and sea life. I was also a large consumer of biography, particularly those of athletes, and recall copying into notebooks articles on the lives of baseball players.
I was part of the first generation to grow up with television and near 24-hour programming. I cannot remember a time when we did not have at least one TV in the house, and in later years we had five: one in the living room, one in each of the three bedrooms, and one in the garage (where my father had created a corner workstation festooned with tools). During my early childhood we had only a monochrome screen but around the age of 10, ca1971, we acquired our first color set. From television I learned some of the values of family life as depicted in domestic serial comedies such as Leave it to Beaver, The Partridge Family, and The Brady Bunch, and early political values were derived from Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek and Norman Lear’s All in the Family.
Other values came from the church. While my parents were from rural communities with typically conservative religious traditions, for reasons that remain unclear we ended up members of a Lutheran church with somewhat progressive values. I assume the impetus for church attendance came largely from my mother. This fits with studies showing greater religiosity and performance of religious ritual among women and fits as well with my father’s seeming disinterest in religion and my mother’s continued affiliation with church after the children left home. I attended the church kindergarten, weekly Sunday services, weekly children’s classes, summer camps, and participated in the children’s choir, band, and numerous annual events. My mother worked as the salaried church secretary for a number of years. Church was a regular part of our lives, though there wasn’t much discussion of religion at home. When I came of age, I participated in the Lutheran equivalent of catechism, a series of formal theology lessons for the indoctrination of new members.
In my early teenage years, I was genuinely interested in religion. The hippie era threw up a hippie version of Christian culture that was attractive to a young man enamored with bell-bottomed jeans, long hair, and music, though I don’t remember being especially fervent about prayer or Bible study. Also popular at the time was a new meditation program known as Transcendental Meditation. I remember reading at least one book on the subject and thereafter asking my parents about attending a meeting to learn how to practice. For reasons I no longer recall, or perhaps never knew, they refused and that was the end of my interest in meditation until I reached my 30s.
Family church attendance withered after the married pastor hooked up with one of his married parishioners (who also happened to be one of mother’s closest friends). I did my catechism classes under his replacement, but shortly thereafter we stopped going to church. I don’t recall being put out about it and that may be because I was starting to lose my religion. One clarifying event along that path was the 1977 referendum to repeal a Dade county ordinance preventing discrimination in jobs, housing, and public accommodation based on sexual orientation. The people at church who had once told me god loves everyone and that we should therefore equally love all were now openly committed to discrimination to a distinct class of people. The hypocrisy rankled.
July 1977 marked my 16th birthday. It turned out to be a momentous year – for the wrong reasons. I had a group of friends at high school interested in flouting norms. Perhaps they were an antidote to the disappointment I had experienced with the church and all the “good” people in the neighborhood who had outed themselves as less concerned with (and sometimes antagonistic to) the welfare of certain groups of people. If the authorities were hypocritical about basic human rights, they were probably wrong about other things. Like drugs. I started experimenting without any intention of doing so. Someone at a party had marijuana and everyone was trying it, so I did, too. Fairly shortly thereafter I was smoking regularly as well as experimenting with alcohol, cocaine, Quaaludes, and amphetamines. I never had any trouble with the law, but my school grades plummeted and I was very quickly the consternation of my parents, who -- not knowing how to handle their now out-of-control teenager -- sent me 2500 kms away to live with an uncle.
It was a rather inauspicious way to be setting out and it set in motion a series of relocations that propelled me across the country and then across the world. I returned to Miami once a few months later but never again. All my high school friends graduated the next year and apart from one, a fellow expat I visited some 25 years later in her home in the Netherlands, I never saw any of my childhood friends again.
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