Forever kid

After my father died in 1975, my mother, who had never worked in her life but a couple of years as an English teacher before meeting my father found herself alone with three kids. Philippe, the oldest was following medical studies in Nancy a town located at 60 km from Metz, Patrick was in high-school and I was in what we call in France 'college', the first years after the primary school system.

We had to leave the apartment of course (in 1978), but we were not poor, thanks to life insurance my father contracted while he was working. So we found a nice house in a suburb of Metz.

The house on Google maps exactly as I remember it,
behind the tree, just after we sold it in 2005.

Having never done any accounting of management of finances in her life, my mother had to learn everything while still suffering the loss of the love of her life, and she handled that admirably. She had to take a job to have health-insurance coverage for the family. The first job she found was in a private hospital where she was the lady managing the 'little-shop' of the hospital, the place where you find sweets and drinks. 

It lasted for a couple years and then she switched to being a librarian at a privately-own chain of libraries called 'La Bibliothèque pour Tous' (The Library for All). 

While she liked it at first, she soon started to hate this job, mostly due to the fact that the library was managed by old cranky ladies that mistreated her. Being the last kid in the house after my brother Patrick started his medical studies (he wanted to be a dentist), I will always remember her complaining about the 'Les Vieilles Biques' (the Old Goats) that gave her incoherent orders and all the bad tasks. But she had no choice and carried on until she could retire in the 80s. She always preferred the company of men and never got along with women.

Although she hated the job, I was really happy she worked there as I had access to the extensive library of comic books that the library had. Not super heroes but good Belgium and French comic books. I had access to fantastic authors like Franquin (Gaston Lagaffe and Spirou), Hergé (Tintin), Greg (Achile Talon) at absolutely no cost.

All along she managed to keep the family together and did what she could to keep us happy despite the fact that we had no more father. Every school morning, she came to wake us up with a little coffee in bed, and we had massive amounts of chocolate and sweets every week-end (a typical week-end load would be 500 grams of chocolate, one large pack of sweets, the best, Regal'ad from Krema and a few extras like Treets (the name of MnMs at the time) etc. 

The sweets of my childhood.

I was an very average student in school. I never (and still do not) understood anything to mathematics, had no interest in girls, and never was part of the 'hip' groups. I had awful acne during all my adolescence up to my marriage at 27, the kind with green pimples that split out to the mirror when you press them and then last for a full week on your face. I was once year classified by the girls in the class as the 'ugliest' of the whole class. It was OK as I was as well designed as one of the most funny. I always had one or two very good friends, also rejected by the others and we were having fun together. As in the US movies, we were the 'misfits', the weirdos.

I also was known to make loud jokes in the classroom, the kind of jokes that also make the teacher laugh and get you 'popular'.

I got in real trouble one year. One of the girls of the 'hip' group was very nasty to us the misfits. So we decided to have a vengeance. I built a small machine out of cardboard and scotch tape, with a battery, a motor, a needle and a remote control. The 'Stinging Machine'.

The remote control, taken out of a toy, started the motor, and the needle got out of the box violently. After a couple of days of tests and fine tuning, we implemented the plan in history course. Before the course, I drilled a hole in the chair of the girl and glued the infamous machine upside down under the chair, the needle being right in front of the hole.

In the middle of the course, when everyone was sleeping, one of us pressed the remote. The machine worked wonder and the girl on the first raw jumped on her chair with a scream. She of course looked at what was on the chair and saw nothing as the needle had retracted in the machine. We could do that a couple more time until she had the idea to look under the chair and discovered the device. She of course unglued it and put it horrified on her desk, luckily needle down, so we could make the machine jump by repeatedly pressing the remote! No need to say that the four of us in the middle of the class were easily spotted as we were laughing so hard (still laughing while writing this).

I got a warning for misbehavior this trimester and decided to play nice the next one, and did it so well that I got encouragements! Teachers can be so easily manipulated!

Just a kid. I stayed mentally young - actually stuck at 10, but this is another story, Asperger is its name - up to my release at 50. I guess this is the main reason why AMOS was before all a fun program, a toy, made by a forever kid.