The Kindness of Strangers

At five years old, I already understood the fundamentals of method acting: total immersion, psychological transformation, and the sacred obligation to remain in character no matter how inconvenient it became for nearby adults. I learned these principles not in drama school but at the swimming pool of the Royal Lanai apartments in San Jose, California, where I regularly transformed myself into my favorite aquatic superhero, Namor the Sub-Mariner.

Once I entered the kidney-shaped pool’s shallow end, ordinary reality ceased to exist.

I was no longer a skinny little boy with chlorine-reddened eyes and cheap swim trunks.

I was Prince Namor: mutant monarch of Atlantis, enemy of surface corruption, and scourge of all underwater tyrants.

Most notably, I was frequently locked in mortal combat with Attuma the Barbarian, the savage warlord whose destruction of civilization depended almost entirely on my failure to remain submerged long enough to stop him.

This created enormous tension with my parents.

After several hours in the water, they would stand poolside pleading for me to come inside for lunch while I ignored them with the grave seriousness of a man defending the planet from annihilation.

But clearly they did not understand the acting process.

Once fully inside the psychological architecture of Namor, I could not simply snap back into suburban childhood because someone had prepared a peanut butter sandwich. Transformation of this magnitude required commitment. The role consumed me completely.

My toes had shriveled into pale wrinkled prunes.
My lungs burned with chlorine fatigue.
My fingers looked partially embalmed.

None of this mattered.

I was Prince Namor.

And what kind of superhero abandons a life-or-death struggle against mutant warlords merely to eat lunch beside the pool?

The fate of humanity demanded sacrifice.

Besides, peanut butter sandwiches seemed embarrassingly trivial when Atlantis itself hung in the balance.

On dry land, I transformed into Captain America, flexing imaginary super-soldier muscles while battling the evil Red Skull in defense of freedom and civilization. Like Captain America, I too fought Nazis.

The difference was that Captain America fought fictional Nazis.

I encountered what appeared to be real ones.

Their son was a boy in my kindergarten class named Teddy Heinrich, who lived nearby at the Royal Lanai Apartments in San Jose, California. Teddy possessed the smug confidence of a child who had absorbed adult ideology without remotely understanding its implications. At five years old, he spoke about Nazis the way other children spoke about baseball teams or superheroes.

“My grandfather was SS,” he once bragged proudly. “My dad says the Germans were the bravest soldiers in the war.”

At the time, I barely understood what the word “Nazi” meant. I was too young even to understand that on my mother’s side I was Jewish. My entire understanding of Nazis came primarily from watching The Sound of Music, where it was fairly obvious that the men wearing swastikas were “the bad guys” threatening the escape of the singing Austrian family.

So hearing Teddy praise Nazis with cheerful admiration bewildered me.

After school I sometimes visited Teddy’s apartment, where we watched Superman and The Three Stooges reruns in the living room. We could not watch those programs at my apartment because our television lacked a UHF antenna, a technological deficiency that in 1960s childhood carried the emotional weight of economic sanctions.

Teddy’s parents struck me immediately as strange.

They rarely emerged from their bedroom and seemed oddly ancient compared to the other adults at the Royal Lanai. Most of the time they remained secluded in the master bedroom like gloomy aristocrats hiding from daylight after some unspecified European scandal.

Teddy’s father unnerved me the most.

He wore black suits constantly—even while lounging at home—and possessed a large severe face that looked carved from exhausted stone. I never once saw him smile. Not a grin. Not a smirk. Not even the brief involuntary twitch of amusement normal human beings occasionally produce.

He looked like a man perpetually preparing to deliver grim military news.

Teddy’s mother was equally unsettling in a quieter way. She wore bifocals low across her pale nose, gingham dresses buttoned high at the collar, and kept her dark hair wound tightly into a bun that seemed designed less for fashion than emotional containment. She carried herself with chronic nervousness, as though awaiting the arrival of some invisible catastrophe only she could perceive.

What struck me even then was how little Teddy resembled them.

They both had dark hair.
Teddy was blond.

At five years old, however, I lacked the sophistication to pursue the discrepancy very far. Perhaps, I reasoned, they were simply old enough to dye gray hair darker. Childhood logic is remarkably accommodating when television is available nearby.

And honestly, once Superman appeared on the screen and the Three Stooges started poking each other in the eyes, I found myself sufficiently distracted not to dwell too deeply on the unsettling atmosphere hanging over Teddy Heinrich’s apartment like stale cigarette smoke and unresolved history.

One afternoon while Teddy and I sat watching Superman reruns in his apartment, he suddenly informed me in a hushed, excited voice that his father possessed an authentic Nazi SS uniform.

The announcement thrilled him.

He practically vibrated with anticipation as he led me toward the hallway closet like a child preparing to unveil hidden treasure. Throwing open the closet door, he revealed a black military tunic hanging carefully inside beside the unmistakable red armband emblazoned with a black swastika.

The thing radiated menace. The black fabric looked both severe and theatrical, like a costume designed for authoritarian nightmares. I stared at it with the cautious fascination children reserve for objects they know are somehow dangerous but do not yet fully understand.

Teddy, meanwhile, beamed with pride.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” he said. 

At that precise moment, Teddy’s father suddenly opened the bedroom door.

He glanced first at us, then at the SS uniform hanging exposed in the closet. His expression tightened instantly. Without stepping fully into the hallway, he spoke in a low, muffled voice heavy with irritation and unease.

“Teddy,” he said sharply. “Put that back and don’t take it out again.”

Then he retreated into the bedroom and slammed the door shut.

The entire exchange lasted perhaps ten seconds, but even as a child I sensed something strange moving beneath the surface of that household—some mixture of shame, secrecy, nostalgia, and unresolved darkness that none of us possessed the vocabulary to articulate.

A few days later Teddy and I lay sprawled across a large grassy area beside the white cement walkway connecting the Royal Lanai apartments to the swimming pool. It was one of those bright California afternoons where the sunlight felt so intense it seemed capable of bleaching reality itself.

Teddy carried a large magnifying glass.

Nearby, a slow-moving Jerusalem cricket crawled through the grass. The creature looked grotesque and vaguely artificial, less like a living insect than some oversized rubber prop abandoned by a low-budget science-fiction film.

Teddy crouched eagerly over it.

Using the magnifying glass, he concentrated the sunlight into a tiny burning beam and began trying to roast the insect alive.

I kicked near the cricket to make it scurry away. Whatever else I was at five years old, I apparently drew the moral line at insect torture.

Undeterred, Teddy redirected his attention toward a nearby block of wood. Squatting over it with intense concentration, he demonstrated how the magnifying glass could be used to burn shapes into the surface. Soon he was carefully scorching swastikas and the word “Nazi” into the wood with all the absorbed seriousness of a miniature artisan practicing calligraphy.

He took obvious pride in this ability.

And before long, I learned how to draw the symbols too.

At home, I began sketching swastikas on scraps of paper simply because the design fascinated me visually. The shape possessed a harsh geometric boldness that appealed to my young mind in the same way superhero emblems and comic-book insignias did.

Eventually my mother discovered my drawings.

“Who taught you this?” she demanded.

“Teddy,” I answered innocently.

Her reaction was immediate.

“Don’t draw those anymore,” she said firmly. “Those symbols are terrible.”

So I stopped drawing them at home.

But at school I still doodled them occasionally, not out of ideology or hatred—concepts far beyond my comprehension—but because at five years old I was attracted to dramatic symbols without understanding the monstrous histories attached to them.

Children often imitate power long before they understand evil.

One afternoon Teddy and I were again sprawled across the broad grassy area near the Royal Lanai swimming pool while he crouched over a wooden block with his magnifying glass, carefully burning swastikas into the surface with the concentration of a medieval monk illuminating sacred text.

The California sun blazed overhead with enough force to make the scorched symbols smoke faintly.

“My mom says those are bad,” I told him.

“They’re not bad,” Teddy replied immediately.

“I’m not allowed to draw them anymore.”

He looked at me with sudden contempt and sneered:

“What are you? A dumb Jew?”

At five years old, I did not fully understand what a Jew was. I certainly did not yet understand that on my mother’s side, I was Jewish myself. Nor do I know whether Teddy even understood the full implications of what he was saying. My last name sounded aggressively Irish, and I doubt either of us possessed much grasp of theology, ethnicity, or twentieth-century genocide.

But something primal inside me reacted instantly.

Some instinct deeper than comprehension suddenly informed me that a line had been crossed.

Before I consciously processed what was happening, I attacked him.

I launched myself at Teddy with astonishing ferocity, drove him backward into the grass, straddled his chest, and began punching him repeatedly in the face while clawing and pinching at his cheeks with the blind fury of a tiny berserk animal.

Blood appeared almost immediately.

What remains strangest to me all these years later is not merely the violence itself but the sensation accompanying it. I experienced the attack almost as an out-of-body event, as though I were hovering several feet away watching another version of myself carry out the assault.

I was too young to grasp the historical weight behind Teddy’s insult.
Too young to understand antisemitism.
Too young to comprehend inherited hatred.

Yet somehow my body understood before my intellect did.

Oddly, Teddy barely fought back.

He seemed frozen beneath me, almost passive, absorbing the beating with stunned helplessness while I continued raining blows onto his face.

Eventually I stopped, stood up, and walked home without telling my mother what had happened.

About an hour later there was a knock at the front door.

Teddy stood outside beside his mother.

Even from across the room I could see she was furious. Her lips were pursed tightly, and her pale face looked pinched with outrage and humiliation. Teddy’s face was swollen, scratched, and mottled with cuts and welts.

My mother instructed me to wait silently in the kitchen while she spoke with them at the front door.

From the next room I could hear Teddy’s mother listing the injuries one by one in her heavy German accent while insisting my mother examine the damage carefully.

At one point my mother interrupted in disbelief.

“Did my son really do all this?”

“Yes,” Teddy’s mother replied sharply. “He did. I was afraid Teddy might need stitches. I do not think your son should play with him anymore.”

My mother agreed.

Then Teddy and his mother left.

A few moments later my mother entered the kitchen and asked calmly why I had attacked him.

I explained that Teddy had been burning swastikas into wood and had called me “a dumb Jew.”

What struck me even then was that my mother seemed far more disturbed by Teddy’s remark than by the actual beating.

She never punished me.

And in the strange moral logic of childhood, this made perfect sense to me. In my five-year-old imagination, I had defended my mother—a Jew—against a Nazi boy and his Nazi family.

I was not a violent child.

I was a superhero protecting civilization from evil.

***

My superhero powers had limits. This became painfully clear shortly after my younger brother was born and my mother descended into what I would later understand to be severe post-partum depression, followed by a cascade of other mental illnesses that gradually transformed our household into an emotional triage unit disguised as suburban family life.

I remember the day with grotesque clarity.

I was six years old, walking to Katherine R. Smith Elementary School with three neighborhood boys while trying desperately to convince myself that everything in my life remained normal.

Normally, the promise of a Hostess Fruit Pie or pink Sno Ball created the kind of lunchtime anticipation usually reserved for carnival rides and Christmas morning. But not that day.

That morning my Captain Kangaroo lunchbox emitted such a catastrophic odor that the boys walking beside me kept demanding to know what had died inside it.

The smell was indescribable.

Not merely unpleasant.

Apocalyptic.

It rolled out of the lunchbox in hot invisible waves like a chemical weapon drifting across the sidewalks of suburban San Jose.

Finally, unable to endure the interrogation any longer, I stopped near the open field separating the Stop & Go Market from the school grounds and reluctantly opened the metal lunch pail.

What we discovered inside looked less like spoiled food than evidence recovered from a maritime disaster.

The tuna sandwich had escaped its plastic baggie and detonated throughout the interior of the lunchbox. Blackened tuna sludge mixed with rancid mayonnaise coated every surface. Oily dark streaks smeared across the tin lining like exploded brain matter from a low-budget horror film. Rotten juices had soaked everything: the apple, the orange, the Hostess pie, the napkins, the entire ecosystem of my lunch.

The stench was so violent all four of us recoiled simultaneously.

One boy stared into the lunchbox with horrified fascination.

“How could you eat that?”

I shrugged weakly.

Another kid asked:

“Did your mom actually pack this?”

Again I shrugged.

What could I say?

At six years old, I lacked both the vocabulary and emotional sophistication to explain maternal psychological collapse through the medium of contaminated tuna.

So I simply closed the lunchbox, and we continued toward school while carrying what now amounted to a portable biohazard device.

Once inside the classroom, I placed the offending lunchbox alongside the others in the designated coat closet.

This proved disastrous.

Shortly before lunch, the school conducted one of its regular Cold War “Duck-and-Cover” drills in preparation for inevitable nuclear annihilation. When the alarm sounded, we all crawled beneath our desks waiting for instructions over the PA system while imagining Soviet missiles streaking toward California.

Then the smell began spreading.

Even beneath our desks, Mrs. Corey suddenly wrinkled her forehead and began sniffing the air with mounting alarm. Around the room, students pinched their noses and made exaggerated gagging noises while trying to identify the source of what now smelled like a corpse liquefying inside a fishing boat.

Mrs. Corey looked genuinely distressed.

“Did someone soil themselves?” she demanded.

Then, after another cautious sniff:

“Or did someone bring a dead animal into this classroom?”

The room erupted into nervous laughter and theatrical choking sounds.

At this point, the boys who had walked to school with me betrayed my secret instantly by pointing toward my lunchbox in the coat closet.

Mrs. Corey approached it slowly and cautiously, like a bomb technician nearing unstable explosives.

She opened the lid.

Then froze.

The expression on her face suggested she had just peered directly into the sulfurous mouth of hell itself.

Finally she looked up at me.

“Did your mother pack this?”

I nodded.

Mrs. Corey winced in a way that seemed not merely judgmental but generational, as though she were silently condemning my parents, grandparents, and entire ancestral bloodline stretching backward through history.

Without another word, she snapped the lunchbox shut and handed it to the teacher’s aide with instructions to remove it from the classroom immediately.

Then, turning toward the class, she announced solemnly that my food was “unfit for human consumption” and requested volunteers to donate individual items from their lunches so I would have something to eat later.

The humiliation was total.

By lunchtime I had no appetite whatsoever.

While the other children ate and chatted around me, I sat alone on my blanket avoiding their curious glances and trying not to think about the rotten tuna, my mother’s unraveling mind, or the possibility that something inside our family had already begun quietly collapsing long before anyone knew how to name it.

The rotten tuna turned out to be more than a humiliating school incident. It was an omen, a foul-smelling prophecy leaking from a child’s lunchbox before the full catastrophe revealed itself.

That afternoon when I walked home from Katherine R. Smith Elementary School and entered our bottom-floor apartment at the Royal Lanai, I expected the usual tableau of suburban motherhood: my mother folding laundry while watching Let’s Make a Deal, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich waiting for me on a square of paper towel beside the wrinkled San Jose Mercury News, and the reassuring drone of daytime television floating through the apartment like background oxygen.

Instead, the apartment was silent.

Not calm.
Not peaceful.

Silent in the wrong way.

The television was off.
My sandwich was missing.
Even the air itself seemed motionless.

My baby brother slept quietly in his crib while the stillness pressed against the walls with unnatural weight.

I called out for my mother.

No answer.

I called again, louder this time.

Still nothing.

Finally I entered her bedroom and found her lying motionless in bed.

At first I assumed she was simply taking a nap, but something about the depth of her sleep frightened me immediately. Her breathing was loud, heavy, and mechanical, as though her body had detached itself from ordinary consciousness and sunk into some unreachable underwater chamber.

I shook her shoulder gently.

Nothing.

I shook harder.

Still nothing.

I kept telling her to wake up, but she remained utterly inert.

A few minutes later Nina arrived.

Nina was the housekeeper my father had hired after my mother’s post-partum depression began unraveling her life. Normally Nina radiated warmth and gentleness. She possessed the soft patience of someone who had spent years caring for troubled people without demanding much in return.

But the moment I told her I could not wake my mother, her entire demeanor changed.

She rushed into the bedroom, bent over the bed, and began shaking my mother violently while calling her name with rising panic in her voice.

Then suddenly Nina started slapping her.

Hard.

The sound shocked me.

I began crying instantly.

At six years old, I did not understand emergency response. I thought Nina was angry at my mother for refusing to get up. Seeing sweet, maternal Nina striking my mother across the face shattered something inside me.

Nina then called our neighbor Holly, who rushed into the apartment moments later. Together they struggled to pull my mother upright while shouting directly into her face with escalating desperation.

Nothing worked.

At Nina’s suggestion, Holly fetched ammonia and began splashing it beneath my mother’s nose. The chemical smell filled the room so aggressively it burned my eyes and forced me backward several feet.

I could not understand how anyone could remain unconscious through that kind of assault.

Even then, part of me sensed that something terrible had happened, though I lacked the emotional vocabulary to identify it.

Eventually Holly decided I should not remain inside the apartment.

She instructed her two sons—Ricky, a third grader, and Greg, who was in my first-grade class—to take me outside to the apartment playground.

So the three of us walked slowly toward the sandboxes.

As we crossed the apartment grounds, I turned around for one quick glance at our building.

That was when I saw the ambulance.

Neighbors had gathered nearby in small anxious clusters, their faces tight with curiosity and concern. Adults stood whispering to one another while staring toward our apartment entrance.

I still did not fully understand what was happening.

I did not know the ambulance was for my mother.
I did not know she had overdosed on sleeping pills.
I did not know she had attempted to end her life.

And most tragically of all, I had no idea this would not be the last time.

I was in a state of shock so severe that my senses became grotesquely amplified. Smells, especially, attacked me with unbearable intensity. The moment Ricky and Greg deposited me into the apartment playground sandbox, the odor of damp sand rose into my nostrils with such force I thought I might vomit on the spot. My body felt weak and gelatinous. Every movement required effort. All I wanted was to lie down somewhere cool and still and disappear into unconsciousness.

It was not until many years later that I understood what had happened physiologically. Shock lowers blood pressure. It drains the body of energy. It creates nausea, dizziness, and a heavy floating lethargy that makes the world feel unreal. At six years old, however, I simply believed something inside me had broken.

I begged Ricky and Greg to help me out of the sandbox.

Instead of finding me a bench or someplace to rest, they insisted we wander aimlessly around the apartment complex. The walk became one of the longest ordeals of my childhood, though in reality it probably lasted no more than thirty minutes. Every smell felt magnified. Every footstep exhausted me. The sunlight itself seemed oppressive.

Still desperate to collapse somewhere safe, I then learned from Holly that I would nevertheless be attending the first-grade Christmas pageant that evening.

The sheer cruelty of childhood logistics astonishes me in retrospect.

So there I sat inside the school auditorium while my nervous system continued quietly imploding. I told Mrs. Corey I was too tired to sing, and to her credit, she allowed me to remain seated among the parents instead of standing with the other children on stage.

At least now I could sit down.

But I still felt close to vomiting.

The singing only intensified my nausea. There was one song in particular—“The Twelve Days of Christmas”—that became almost hallucinatorily unbearable. It is a song apparently designed by sadists, a musical accumulation of escalating repetition in which each verse piles upon the previous one like psychological water torture. First turtle doves. Then drummers. Then maids. Then lords. Then pipers. The thing expands endlessly until it feels less like a Christmas carol than an administrative inventory recited by an emotionally unstable accountant.

Midway through the performance, Mrs. Corey noticed my deteriorating condition. She quietly led me beneath her desk, wrapped me in a blanket, and allowed me to curl into myself while the song continued lumbering onward through what felt like geological time.

That night I did not sleep in my own bed.

Someone—presumably my father—arranged for me to stay with our elderly neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Whirey, who lived next door to us at the Royal Lanai apartments. They appeared to be in their seventies, ancient by childhood standards. Mrs. Whirey possessed precisely the sort of anxious, fluttering voice one would expect from a woman perpetually worried about overcooked pot roast, neighborhood emergencies, and the collapse of civilization itself.

Unlike me, she understood far more about what had happened to my mother.

She kept asking whether I was all right, whether I needed food, water, blankets, company, reassurance—anything.

But I needed only one thing.

An oval rug.

In front of Mr. Whirey’s recliner sat a large oval area rug patterned with concentric rings of gray, blue, and burnt orange. The moment I settled onto that rug with my red Tonka truck, I refused to leave it.

I drove the truck endlessly over the colored ovals in hypnotic repetition.

Back and forth.
Back and forth.

The rug became my psychological fortress. The boundaries of those woven ovals felt safer than the rest of reality. I studied the fibers with desperate concentration, as though shifting my attention elsewhere might cause my entire mind to splinter apart.

Mrs. Whirey repeatedly encouraged me to move around the house.

I refused.

The rug was now my nation-state.

The only interruption came when Mr. Whirey settled into his recliner to watch his favorite television program, Gunsmoke. Before reclining backward, he smiled warmly at me and asked:

“Do you like Gunsmoke?”

I nodded politely.

“Everyone likes Gunsmoke,” he said with the confidence of a man making a theological declaration rather than discussing television programming.

The next morning Mrs. Whirey entrusted me with an important task.

She handed me a dollar and instructed me to walk to the nearby convenience store and buy a loaf of Roman Meal bread because, as she stressed repeatedly, Mr. Whirey ate only Roman Meal. She made me repeat the name several times to ensure I understood the gravity of the assignment. Then she carefully reminded me to obey the traffic lights and look both ways before crossing the street.

When I returned successfully carrying the correct loaf and the proper change, she reacted with enormous delight.

And suddenly I felt useful again.

Like Namor the Sub-Mariner completing a vital mission for humanity.

In my fragile six-year-old logic, I drew immense comfort from the idea that as long as I continued purchasing Roman Meal bread correctly and returning exact change, I would remain worthy of shelter and protection. Whether I ever saw my mother again almost seemed secondary to proving I could “earn my keep.”

After about a week at the Whirey residence, my mother was transferred from the hospital to a mental institution for chronic depression, while my father struggled to care for my infant brother alone. It was decided I could no longer remain at the Royal Lanai apartments.

So I moved to my grandparents’ house in Long Beach and attended first grade at Lowell Elementary School from January through June of 1968.

Nearly a year passed before my mother was released from the institution and I lived with my parents again.

But nothing ever truly returned to normal afterward.

From that point on, I lived with the constant expectation that catastrophe was waiting just beyond the horizon. I became fretful, hypervigilant, and anxious in ways that would follow me deep into adulthood.

Yet whenever I revisit those memories, one figure rises above the darkness with astonishing clarity:

Mrs. Whirey.

A stranger who opened her home to a frightened little boy and tried, in all the modest ways available to her, to make him feel safe.

Years later, thinking often of her kindness, I composed a piano piece in her honor titled “The Kindness of Strangers.” It is a phrase so overused it has nearly collapsed into cliché. But Mrs. Whirey restored meaning to it for me.

And for that, I will remain grateful for the rest of my life.