O P I N I O N
By Keith Howard
Publisher’s Note: This is the first in a new series of columns by Keith Howard – you know him from his Tiny White Box series, and as former Executive Director of The Liberty House and Hope for NH Recovery.
Kitty Carlisle, Barbara Walters, and the Boy Nobody Loved Back
Nobody asked for this column. Nobody. You don’t roll over in bed thinking, “God, I hope Keith Howard tells me about his childhood crushes today.” And yet here I am, kicking down the door anyway. I wrote a memoir, Unclaimed, But Loud. Four hundred pages of memory, confession, and polite detonations. Some readers say it’s good. I say it’s cheaper than therapy and with fewer co-pays, though with slightly more swearing.
But four hundred pages wasn’t enough. Too many misfit stories got left on the cutting-room floor. So, under the banner Pompous Jackassery and Mortal Concerns (half self-mockery, half dead serious), I’ll be dropping the bonus tracks here in the InkLink. Think of them as the weird songs too unruly for the album but too good to throw away.
Crushes Like Dandruff
Crushes came easy to me as a kid. Like dandruff. Or measles. They spread across my body without permission. The problem was they never spread back. I was a generator only—crank the handle, light the bulb, but the juice never flowed in return.
Maybe it was because I was always the shortest boy in class. The kind of short where teachers jammed you into the front row on picture day so you’d show up, a misplaced lawn gnome among the regular kids. I tried to compensate by being loud. Disruptive. Every thought that stumbled through my brain shot straight out of my mouth. Imagine a fire hose with no nozzle. Now imagine it spraying jokes nobody laughed at but me.
Still, I would’ve traded my comic timing—such as it was—for one girl, just one, who liked me back.
Kitty Carlisle and the Block of Wood
So I went sideways. I fixated on celebrities. Not the usual ceiling-poster icons. No Brigitte Bardot. No Raquel Welch. My heart latched onto women decades too old, smiling through static in pearls.
The first was Kitty Carlisle. Panelist. On a game show. Which already sounds like the punch line to a joke about childhood gone wrong. To Tell the Truth was basically a parade of liars trying to convince Kitty they were someone else. And there she sat: pearls, posture, elegance sharpened into cheekbones.
I was six. She was in her fifties.
I loved her so much I carried a block of wood around the yard, pretending it was a walkie-talkie so I could talk to her. That’s not sweet. That’s psychotic. Picture a tiny boy whispering “I love you” into lumber while sparrows tilt their heads on the power lines. Somewhere in heaven, Freud lights a cigar and says, Yep, that tracks.
Hard to believe no little girl crushed on the boy who was already in love with her grandmother’s idol.
Barbara Walters and the Cheerios
Then I lowered the age bracket. Barbara Walters. The Today Show goddess.
Every morning before school, I sat with a bowl of Cheerios bleeding into lukewarm milk. Hugh Downs sat there. Joe Garagiola too. But they might as well have been corpses in suits compared to Barbara.
She looked through the camera and right at me. Smart. Sharp. Newsprint with a heartbeat.
Other boys defended the Monkees. I dreamed of Barbara Walters, born the same year as my father. Later, when Saturday Night Live mocked her voice. I would’ve written NBC a protest letter if I thought it might help. Loyalty like that should’ve earned me something—at least a kiss, or maybe acknowledgment I wasn’t invisible.
Instead, I got soggy cereal and Barbara’s smile.
Hard to believe no little girl wanted the boy already in love with her mother’s newscaster.
No TV Girls
If this were a sitcom, here’s where I’d claim I normalized. That I fell for Marcia Brady or Sally Field.
But honesty ruins tidy endings. The truth is: no TV girls for me. My real classmates rejected me just fine without celebrity backup. Besides, TV in the sixties didn’t cast eleven-year-olds with cowlicks and nervous laughs.
So I kept aiming high. Old. Older. Always out of reach.
The Joke of Time
And now?
I’m older than Kitty Carlisle was when I confessed my love through a block of wood. Not older than dirt. But older than plenty of trees. Older than Kitty’s pearls.
And somewhere inside me, the little boy is still pressing a block of pine to his mouth, whispering I love you into the splinters, waiting for a woman fifty years too old to whisper back.
Memoirs are, at best, unfinished business disguised as books. Unclaimed, But Loud got me close, but not all the way there. This column is where the leftovers come to make noise.
So pull up a chair. If you like your stories dark, funny, and cracked down the middle, you’ll feel right at home. If not, well, the obituaries are always cleaner.
Author Keith Howard wants to buy you coffee on Aug. 22 at Aroma Joe’s on South Beech Street in Manchester. Click below for all the details.
