Leif's Kindergarten Art - Spring 1981 - Age 6

Leif had a lot of art talent, but he didn't pursue it. As I've written before, as a child he was immensely frustrated when he couldn't make his drawings look like they did in his head, or build models perfectly. He did a lot of drawing in elementary school, but less and less of it as he got into the later years of elementary school and junior high school. He started drawing again when he was in college and after the army while working on developing cyberpunk games with his friend Jason but other than that, he didn't spend time sketching or drawing.

When he was in kindergarten, his teacher and the art teacher thought he had a great deal of ability in art. Not only could he draw much better than most kindergarteners, he could portray motion and action, something extremely rare in young children's art, which is generally quite static. His kindergarten teacher at Sagamihara Elementary School, Mrs. Snell, collected about a dozen of his drawings for a portfolio which was displayed at a school open house. I kept it all these years until we were moving to Florida. It was done on large sheets of coarse manila paper which had begun to oxidize badly. Leif seemed to have no interest in it. I had thought I'd save it for him and for his children, but it wasn't going to last a lot longer and there wasn't anyone to give it to, so I scanned the drawings and very reluctantly discarded them. I'm so glad I have the scans.

In one of my posts in June 2008 I posted one of the drawings, of the Spaceship Enterprise from Star Trek. If you want to see it, look for the "drawings" keyword in the list at the bottom right.

These drawings had captions on them which Leif dictated to Mrs. Snell. I think they are too small to read here, but I'll put a list of them in order below. They are quite sophisticated for a six-year-old.

1. A secret gun I designed. You can click on a part and make it a laser. The view finder is really a finder, but push a button under the trigger and the finder shoots. The locking button is another trigger to shoot. The gun is now being charged with lasers!
2. Colonial Vipers (green) are exploding Cylons (black). Ion cannon shooting.
3. My own designs after the USA Enterprise space shuttles.
4. Some ships are disintegrated. Red lines are explosions.
5. A space cruiser and armed scout ships. The cruiser has a magnetic field.
6. Space cruiser (blue) exploding another space cruiser (red/black) and two asteroids.
7. Space shuttle -- my own ship. Smaller than the Enterprise. The cockpit holds nine people. It has three rockets but the big storage tank for fuel is smaller.
8. UFO

Leif's 8th Birthday - Sagamihara, Japan - January 28, 1983 - Age 8

Leif's eighth birthday was the second one he spent with an injury. His first birthday, he had a burned hand, which I wrote about here long ago, and for his eighth birthday, he sported a cast on his arm. He had broken his arm during recess at school when he fell off the monkey bars.

When we lived in Sachsen bei Ansbach, Germany, before moving to Japan, my friend Bunny had observed that Leif was so able to withstand pain that "you could cut off his arm he and would say, 'that doesn't hurt.'" That was obviously an exaggeration, but there was a very large grain of truth in it. Leif could stand physical pain, though he didn't do as well with the sight of blood. He maintained a bravado that hid his vulnerable feelings, so he seemed very tough, even though his photos betray his innocence and vulnerability.

One day at school, that January 1983, after he fell on the playground, he simply went back to class for the rest of the day. He was supposed to take the bus from the school, where he was a second grader, to the child care center, because at that time I was working full time for the Japan Engineer District and didn't get home until after five.

That day, when school got out, he went to the office and calmly asked to use the phone. He called me at my office and just said, "Mommy, can you come and get me?" I asked him why, whether he had missed the bus. "No," he said, "I think I broke my arm."

Before I could get any more details out of him, he hung up. I didn't even know where he was. He hadn't told his teacher or anyone else that his arm was broken. He had just stayed in class all afternoon and done his work.

I was really worried and didn't know where to find him, but on the chance that he probably had called from school, since that's where he would get the bus, I called the school and asked if they had seen him in the office. They said they had, but they had no idea about any broken arm. They had to go out to the bus stop to find him.

Meanwhile I called Peter W., who rushed over there to get him. And there he is, with his cast on his arm, blowing out his candles.

The second photo shows Peter W. acting silly, like a sci fi monster, and Leif's friend Atul is with him.

Leif is wearing a jacket that Peter got for him in Korea.

Happy Birthday, Leif!

Leif's 7th Birthday - Sagamihara, Japan - January 28, 1982 - Age 7

Here's Leif blowing out the candles on his seventh birthday cake in the middle of our tour in Japan. It was a good time for us, one of the best times in our family life. The boys had good friends and good activities. We got to see a lot of Japan and Japanese culture.

And yet, on base, it was like living in a little 1950s town with Little League baseball and soccer games, programs at the schools, community theater, and our American celebrations like Christmas and Halloween, and birthday parties, right alongside Japanese festivals like the Obon in August.

I'm still amazed and rather amused when I see the birthday cakes. They really do look SO homemade . . . but they tasted great! And the boys always looked forward to them and of course, to the presents. The presents in Japan were the BEST, because of all the cool Japanese toys.

I should have had enough sense to take photos of all of those toys at the time, and failing that, before I gave all of them to Peter A. for Marcus. The were special, mind-stretching, wonderful imagination-building toys, and we were there are the perfet age for the boys to appreciate them. They played an instrumental role in the personalities of both boys, along with Star Wars and Star Trek, in making them devotees of science fiction and futuristic ideas.

This school year, in which Leif turned seven, he was in first grade at Sagamihara Elementary School, where he was not only the tallest child in his class, but taller than his petite teacher. She said he was a "straight arrow" and never gave her any trouble or bullied the other (smaller) kids.

He did, however, attack his brother and a bicycle. In December 1981 I got a job as the public affairs officer of the Japan Engineer District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Initially it was a part time job, so that year, I was usually home when Leif and Peter A. were home. One afternoon, Peter A. had taunted Leif one too many times. I no longer remember just what he had done, but one of this favorite ploys that drove Leif nuts was to just point at him and keep pointing. I think this time it must have been something "worse" because Leif had a chain with a bicycle lock on it and chased Peter out the door and all the way out to the street swinging it. I don't know whether he would really have hit him with it if he had caught up with him, but if he had, he could have done some serious damage. I HOPE he was just threatening him.

I think it was that same year that he got really angry at another boy who lived near us and rather than attack him, he beat on Chad's bicycle with a broom. He really attacked it savagely. At least it was the bike and not Chad he was beating on. We couldn't see any damage to the bike but his family claimed Leif had damaged it. Somehow, it seems comical now to think of a seven-year-old attacking a bicycle with a broom, but at the time, he certainly was serious about it.

None of that mattered on his birthday. He was exuberant and full of fun.

Happy Birthday, Leif.

Boys Fall Clean Up Brigade - Japan 1982

Kids are amazing. If we parents had told them to go out and rake and clean up all the leaves on our end of the housing area, they would have whined and protested, and definitely not wanted to do it.

But something got them started on their own. I don't know which of the boys was the ringleader, or even why they decided to do it, but Peter A., Leif, Anil, Atul and a couple of other neighborhood boys decided to spend an afternoon of hard work in the woodsy area near our townhouses.

We lived at the farthest end of enclosed (fenced) and gated Sagamihara Family Housing Area, a facility for families with a member serving in the military at Camp Zama, which was about two miles away. In addition to housing, which consisted for the most part of row or town houses with some single family houses for upper ranks, the area had a club, child care center, movie theater, swimming pool, elementary school, commissary (grocery store for you civilians), racquet ball courts, Boy Scout hut, and probably more facilities I've forgotten.

Many of the townhouses, at least in our part of the housing area, were arranged around three sides of large grassy areas where kids played, with the fourth side on the street and parking area. Our end only had two sides with townhouses. The third side was a small wooded area that was an even better place to play at times. That's where all the leaves were coming from, and where they had piled up high.

My recollection is that this is the only time in the three years we lived there that the kids showed any interest in cleaning up the leaves or any initiative about doing it, but for some reason, they had a mission that day. Maybe they were going to do something special in that wooded area and needed to have it free of the carpet of leaves. If any of the boys (now all men, of course) who took part remembers whether there was some special reason, maybe if they see this blog they'll let me know.

Anil and Atul lived in the second set of townhouses, the one perpendicular to the street. Ours faced the street. Their delightful Indian family were our neighbors for the three years we were there, and they were good friends of Leif's from the start.

We stayed in contact with them for years after both our families left Japan, but we lost track of each other some years ago. Now we are back in contact, thanks to the internet, but it was with a heavy heart that I had to tell them of Leif's death.

It's hard to hear of the death of a treasured childhood friend, and I thank Anil for permission to post some of his thoughts and memories on this blog. He wrote to me that;

My memory of him remains that of a very unique, creative playmate who had the best Star Wars toys and probably the only Apple computer within a 50-mile radius of the base.

One memory I have was when my parents bought us a set of kites that were strung together in a daisy chain. Leif and I went to fly them on an extremely windy day. We had put together two spools of nylon and watched as we got to the end of the second reel. Leif and I held on to it as tight as possible, and the kite practically dragged us across the lawn before we let go, spool and all. The kite must have been over 500 feet high and drifted off into the horizon. We weren't sure whether we were angry at losing the kite or ecstatic that we'd launched it into the lower atmosphere!

How I wish I had photos of that adventure! I thank Anil for sharing it with me.

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In the fall 1982 photo, left to right: Atul, Peter A. (nearly 14, Anil (behind), Leif (age 7). Sagamihara Housing Area, Japan.

Leif's First Stage Performance - Japan - May 1981 - Age 6

Leif was the tallest kid in his kindergarten class, his first grade class (taller than the teacher), and just about every class until he was a sophomore in high school. Even then he was one of the tallest. So it's hard to realize that even as the tallest, he was once pretty small.

We moved to Japan in the summer of 1980 and he started American kindergarten at the Sagamihara Elementary School. (In Germany, he had attended a German Kindergarten, where he was the only American child, but a German Kindergarten is a preschool.)

His beloved kindergarten teacher in Japan was Mrs. Snell. She was an amazing, enthusiastic woman with an infectious smile and a ready laugh. She recognized Leif's outstanding art talent and intelligence.

Not long after the start of the school year, Leif got frustrated about something that happened in the class and threw something at another child. Before she could even scold him, he apparently felt so bad about his lack of self control and the possibility of hurting the other child that he crawled far back under a table and wouldn't come out.

This wonderful teacher, instead of cajoling him, threatening him, or trying to drag him out, called me and asked what might have precipitated this behavior and what she should do about it.

It happened that he had had a similar outburst of temper in the German Kindergarten, and had hurt another boy (minimally), and had been thoroughly chastised for it. He definitely deserved discipline and he needed to learn self control, but Leif was mortified at the public humiliation.

At the American kindergarten, he not only felt ashamed of himself but was scared of the consequences. Mrs. Snell got down under the table with him and told him that she understood why he was there, and that he was right to be ashamed of his behavior, but that he was forgiven and he could stay there until he was ready to come out. This was only one reason he loved her, but that kind of understanding is a rare gift.

Leif apparently made up his mind, under that table, that if he was going to lose his temper, he had better not take it out on human beings. From that time, when he lost his temper (which was rare, but dramatic), he would take out his anger on inanimate objects and did not throw them at others or hit them.

One of the highlights of his kindergarten year was the big stage play they put on, a very funny and rather sophisticated version of "The Three Bears." Here is Leif on stage with his sign saying, "Papa Bears Need Liberating." The sign on the scenery in the background read, "Liberation, not confrontation." I wish we had a video of the production.

Oddly enough, Leif didn't show any interest in acting, singing, or being on stage again until he was a sophomore in high school and tried out for a part in "Guys and Dolls."