思いで その壱 -- Omoide, Sono 1

When I was teenager, I was certain I would never see my fortieth birthday. I've beaten that by nineteen, and don't have any good reason to believe I won't beat it by twenty-five or thirty. And?

Some of my earliest memories:

(Why? No good reason. I was trying my hand at being an author of fiction, but life has gotten in the way. Fiction is hard to write well. At least, the stuff I've tried to write is. Personal memoirs should be easier. Much less planning and research, much less need to retain focus.)

-- I remember hearing my name called, running to ask my mom what she wanted, being greeted by a puzzled look. And one time she said, "That must be angels calling you."

(I had mostly forgotten those occasions by the time I was ten. Mom did not forget. She may once have mentioned Samuel, from the book of the Old Covenant. Many things come back to my memory as I get older.)

-- I remember getting a shock from sticking a screwdriver in an extension cord my dad had left out in the front yard so he could work on the car. That may have been one of the times I ignored the angel voices. Call me lucky, say there were angels watching over me. Same thing.

I recovered quickly, didn't tell my parents until much later.

But it left me with a dangerous addiction that I have somehow survived. No, I haven't randomly stuck screwdrivers in sockets since about the time I got baptized. There may be a connection there. Or it may have been my older brother that caught me at it around five and gave me a laconic warning that eventually took. Or both. My older brother baptized me, by the way.

Electronics and electricity have been something of a debilitating passion for me for about as long as girls have.

-- One morning, I woke up from a vivid dream that I had been given a fantastic new toy. I ran out in the front yard looking for it, but it was nowhere to be found. I asked Mom, but she knew nothing of it. I was bitterly disappointed when the reality of her suggestion that it was just a dream took hold. This was about the time I got the shock, I think. Don't remember whether it was before or after, though.

The toy? It was probably inspired in part by one of those all-purpose road-grader/bulldozer/backhoe/cement-mixer/crane toys that some toy companies persecuted parents with back then. I'm sure they are banned for safety reasons now, too many small parts to choke on, etc.

But this toy was a true Goldberg contraption. It had ten times as many gadgets on it, and was made of wood.

The dream was in color, if anyone is curious.

-- It would have been around this time I developed my first crush. (I think it was my first. Maybe not. Maybe my first big crush. Not counting my mother.)

She was the oldest child of a couple from the church branch who were friends of my parents. I got dragged along on the visits, but I don't think I needed much persuasion.

Being shy, I hid underneath my mother's legs and snuck peeks at her. Tried to get up the courage to ask her to share her toys, but couldn't think of how to go about it. (This was a pattern for most of my early years, maybe it has remained a pattern most of my life.)

She was cute in her diaper and no shirt. (Hey, I was the same age.)

For most of my pre-teen years I seemed to have a reputation among the girls my age at church of being something of a pervert. Or something. It did not help me get past my basically shy nature.

(I met this girl again at college. Remembered her name. If she remembered me, she did not admit it. She admitted vaguely remembering her parents talking about having lived in the town. She did not seem happy that I and my neighbor were called as home teachers for her roommate. But she didn't really complain. When she understood we were not using home teaching as an in for asking her or her roommates for dates, she dropped some of the walls she had thrown up. Even joined the conversations sometimes.)

I think the adults at church noticed my interest. Weirdly (but not really surprisingly, now that I understand the psychology of it) my shy interest in girls led to one sister calling me Joella Mary or some such thing when she wanted to tease me.

-- My mother would sometimes recall one occasion she was preparing me and the portable tub, to give me a bath, and when she turned her back I escaped in "nothing flat".

She would tell me of her growing panic as she searched the house, and her relief when several of the neighbor girls brought me back in my au natural state, crying. The neighbor girl had found me sitting on an ant-bed, ants crawling all over me.

I have something of a resistance to insect bites which may derive in part from the experience. But I have no memories of it.

-- My "best buddy" lived close by. He had a sandbox in his back yard, with toy trucks, road-graders, and other cool toys. He also had a tree house, and I think there was even a zip-line from the tree house for a while. (And I think I recall some discussion among the adults about the wisdom of that unsupervized zipline. There were safety issues on the terminating end, as well.)

But the most interesting thing about the guy was his imagination. We spent a lot of time in fantasy worlds.

Lest I give the wrong impresson, the fantasies were not exactly innocent. Rather dark, in fact, if a child's fantasies should be considered dark. They did cause me internal conflicts, even though they were interesting.

I don't think children under six trying to understand the stimulations of thinking about the human body should be considered perverted. Perverse, maybe. Not perverted. And if the sensations induced in the body by such questioning are confused with the pain of being cut, should that cause alarm at that age?

As long as it remains in the imagination.

I vaguely remember seeing "adult" magazines on their coffee table, and wondering about them.

There were aspects of his upbringing that I'm afraid his parents will have to answer before God for, even if he himself was by nature inclined, somewhat more than whatever is "normal" among humans, toward sexual interest.

-- This guy did not remain my best buddy.

Once, he told me to be sure to come over to his back yard. When I rounded the corner, he had one of the neighbor girls our age with him, and her pants were down. I do not remember much after that, but his backyard gate and the latch that took too long to open showed up in my nightmares for several years. In color.

My mother remarked on the sudden cooling of our relationship. She also mentioned once, about the time our friendship cooled, that I came back crying because I had had to beat him up for some reason. I still do not remember telling her that.

If the two incidents are the same, I seem not to have told her the whole reason. And now the memories are blocked.

-- I've had a hard time defending myself in fights since I was four or five. Conflict would tend to stimulate me, and the stimulation would make me uncoordinated. This may be connected with the above incident.

-- We had a dog we called Tuffy. He had to be tough because of the attention he got from some of the friends of my older siblings. When he got caught in the wheels of a car he chased, it broke my mother's heart. She swore off pets for several years.

-- My brother and his buddies dug a fort in the backyard. It wasn't a big fort, but it was big enough to once bury Tuffy up to his neck in.

Okay. It was big enough for a couple of kids a bit older than nine to hide in, if they scrunched down, and if it didn't count that we knew where they were hiding. I was too young to play with them, but I did sneak in a couple of times when they were at school.

After Dad found out Tuffy was getting fed dirt, the fort was filled in.

-- There was a public pool near the house, in a park named for forests that simply never existed in that semi-arid climate. We would go as a family, or as siblings. I learned to swim there, and swimming was my favorite way to exercise until I learned to dance in college.

Underwater is my favorite way to swim, by the way. I don't get enough traction to satisfy me on the surface.

I still remember the summer days in the pool, with the radio playing hit songs on the PA.

-- There was also a decommisioned bomber in the park, where children could play during the day (and teenagers during the evening). It was reasonably safe if you were reasonably intelligent how you played. It was eventually removed, some twenty years later, after it became commonly recognized as a dropoff point for illegal drugs.

It often smelled of urine.

But it was a great place to pretend we could fly, and it stimulated more than one child's interest in history and aviation.