Garrett’s Childhood

March 1972
Waldron Siegfried Valdison and Helga Ingram, now married, buy a nice old farmhouse in the Massachusetts Berkshires. Wallie converts the barn to an antique shop. Most of the business comes in Summer and Fall, leaving them free for skiing and travel in Winter and Spring.

February 12, 1973
Helga gives birth to Garrett Phelan Valdison This seems like a miracle, because Helga is sixty-nine years old, although she looks and feels thirty-nine. It’s probably one result from the great variety of nutritional supplements she has taken since youth.

Garrett has blonde hair and blue eyes like his father. Although his parents are old, they look young and are vigorous in demeanor, so Garrett’s childhood is normal in this respect. He happily embraces their good health habits and evolutionary spiritual values. The family has a pack of three frisky wolf dogs: one German Shepherd, one Malamute, one Samoyed.

By the time he is six, Garrett, through his own observations, feels a general distain for the visible world of human affairs presented by everyday experience via the controlled media. He notices the vast institutionalized difference between what is practiced and what is preached, and the terrible human losses sustained because of it.

He shows an early tendency to keep his own council, and to validate his perceptions only with facts connected by logic, rather than by consensus with others. He keeps his thoughts about human affairs mostly to himself, but resolves to help change the world the best he can when he is grown up.

Garrett attends good schools and displays great interest in natural science, including the anatomy of neighborhood girls, with whom by age seven, he plays “doctor” outdoors on many occasions.

Garrett has a friend named Bickford Raitz, who expresses vocal disapproval of Garrett’s explorations, but who is seen by others spying on these activities from behind trees, usually with pork in hand. In this town, a young man becomes a laughing stock if he has not had his first assignation by age fourteen, so later in high school, Raitz is jokingly called “Le Voyeur” by many of his classmates

Garrett collects minerals, seashells, and dinosaur bones. The minute he learns to read and write, it is apparent to all his teachers that he has a natural talent for essays and stories. At his request, they help him to enter national writing contests. He wins several of these, and ultimately gains himself a college writing scholarship.

October 30, 1981
Wallie and Helga visit Salem Massachusetts, They bring Garrett, and as a family, attend the preliminary founding, and are imitated into, an Evolutionary Libertarian organization, known as the Order of the Ten Rayed Star..