Snapshots

I thought Stephen King might lead me along some passageway that would strengthen my desire to write.  And yet I find my mind flooding with childhood memories as he meanders through his....

1) Playing in the creek behind our house with my brother, five years wiser, who is intent on a game that takes two people see sawing on a inner tube.  Each time, yes, more than once, he times his exit just right--when I rise in the air he slips off and leaves me to flip off the tube sputtering and bawling to dad.  I believe this is the first memory of a chance to say no not taken.  Wasn't dad, even at my tender age of three, from his vantage point encouraging me to just say no and stop? 

2) I lay in bed at night waiting for the trains whistle to vanish in the distance.  This signaled that my friends, led by a tiger that, mysteriously, resembles Tigger from Winnie-the-Pooh, could gallop up the hill into my room.

These imaginings continue throughout my childhood.  Morphing through the years, but always including a different, hidden world that only I was privy to--an insignificant sink hole at the edge of the creed leads to an underground cavern containing an entire mansion and adventures.  This same creek had an above ground mansion further downstream. I often walked alone there in my daydreams. The owner's butler would meet me and the kind owner would provide me with a menu of my desires: paints, horses, lessons, strawberries, my own room.  All the desires of my ten-year-old heart.  (It is funny, now with my teaching certification, possibility of employment, and children nearing the time of departure, and therefore "independence" for me, I become the mysterious man who continued to arrive in my daydreams into high school.  And maybe, unrealistically, it is what my subconscious continued to look for until this above realization...I can be the prince of my dreams.)

A little later in life, I simply had a secret world at the foot of my bed under the covers.  I merely waited for the matron of the girl’s school or orphanage, although my parents were alive and well and present just down the hall, for me to crawl to the spot where my imagination slipped away into another world of adventure.  (Adventure being another imagined theme in my life.)

3) There was the playing outside in the woods and on old cars looking out over the Summer Lake vista...one I understand the water is returning to.

4) Watching the Monkies on TV and becoming positively out of control as I mimicked the physical comedy of bouncing off the couch and tumbling on the floor, spinning around and bumping off each other--until we collapsed or are mother yelled for some civility or to take it outside.

5) This followed closely by the manic craziness of Get Smart, which I would run from the bus to watch.  PBS had nothing on afterschool TV in the early 70's if my memory serves...

6) I started writing early on also.  I wrote silly stories.  One of which was about a hamburger.  My teacher, Mr. Cushman, encouraged me to continue writing and I did, to a point. It is odd to think this banjo playing, thick mustached, hippy is now living somewhere at sixty-eight or seventy-five.  Bless him wherever he is.  He only encourage me, reigning me in only in consideration to allow other people to shine (as I did have a tendency of hogging the stage once I had it.)

7) I, too, had my tonsils out.  At seven.  I was the only child on the floor and used it to its fullest extent--visiting nurses at their station in the middle of the night, demanding crayons and eating my fill of ice cream.  My only grievance was the nurse that came in a shot me in the butt as I talked to my brother on the phone.  I didn't let off screaming at the top of my lungs until I felt both my brother and the nurse knew exactly how I felt.

8) I shared my childhood illnesses with my older brother.  We timed it well enough to spend several days together in our bunk bed making twisted landscaped of sudden ending roads and deep caves for his Mattel cars out of our bed blankets, playing an endless amount of card games and eating popsicles.

9) Steve's mother's matter of fact horrific story of the man falling to his death reminds me of my father's explanation of the grate in the fireplace of our home.  He did not tell it in a nonchalant manner.  His story included flames, Beelzebub and the depths of hell just through the grate where we sent the ashes back as a gift for his allowing us the use of fire and to keep him at bay.  (The details of this story may have suffered from poetic license over the years.  Suffice it to say he scared the hell out of me and at seven I vowed to be obedient in every way.)

It is interesting to revisit your childhood.  As I read Steve’s line that he is, "when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group.  The final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit," (On Writing, 34).  I realize, although I am not a novelist, I am one of those lucky "last few" who grew up outside on a bike, climbing trees, and, as my sister says, "with a book permanently attached to my hand." 

I look forward to visiting it more as I wonder about.