Reflections on Childhood

I think I forgot how I loved to write. How the events of my childhood can be woven together by ore than 30 journals arranged on a shelf in the back of my closet. How I used to write endless stories in elementary school, how I used to say I wanted to be a writer. I forgot. I somehow wove my way into music on the oboe, never something I felt from the depths of my soul but always something I liked. And my parents liked. I forgot, somehow, about other story telling. There was swimming, there was oboe and campfire and an endless stream of pets. There was AMIGOS and traveling and a deep interest in biology stunted by the fact I thought I was stupid because in sixth grade I was not put in honors math, which somehow affected where I was placed in ninth and tenth grade. Not even behind, just average. I could not deal with average, did not want to excell as “jut average.” I discovered image making. I became engrossed. I tossed out science because I was not good at math and pretended not to like camping because my parents forced it on me. They wanted me so badly to like gardening and camping. Not mom really, just dad. And then I discovered AMIGOS…

But writing. I remember writing in fifth grade, stories about children with disabilities and stories about animals I rescued. How I loved rescuing animals. Feeding milk through eye drops to newborn mice and rats my snaked did not eat, new borns I carried around in soap containers, hiding them in school. Caring for injured wildlife and playing hide and go seek with Emi, the springer spaniel I begged for for years.

She was my best friend growing up, that pup. Today she is old, decrepid, tired. But loving, still loving, and somehow still living. She and I would go out into the mustard feilds, and the flowers were taller than I. Me, Emi, and my journal, we would go play in the mustard feilds between the fence and the canal. We would build houses and lay for hours, she always by my side, and me writing up a storm in my journal. Sometimes Calin would come, and we would play hide and go seek. Emi would lose track of us from time to time, in the flowers taller than us all, and would begin to cry. And we would find her, in the tall mustard flowers, and then she would stay with us, on our heels always. What a beautiful dog she was, she who taught us to care.

Once, I took her on a walk up the court. I had her on a red leash. I was angry at someone, at something. I yanked her and she lept through the air, suprised and probably hurt. Yet back she came to me, loving me, assuring me, kissing at my heels. And I yanked her. How I remember that moment, that feeling that I could pull this lovely creature, hurt her, and she could so selflessly forgive me, continue to love me, sense somehow that in my own pain I hurt her, and somehow decide that meant I simply needed more love. I learned more from that old dog, that old dog who is only allowed up on her couch now in the tiled areas of my moms home because she is incontinent, pees when she sleeps. When I go home, she cries and cries. And truth me told, her cries convince me to either go sleep on the couch with her or sneak her into my bedroom, and lift her to my bed, to sleep with me as she did while I was growing. She cries and cries, and for a creature who taught me so much about loving, what can I do but go to her cries, hold her, sleep near her? At sixteen, does she not deserve this kind of love? I revere her.

I used to read so much. My mom would take the books away, hide them until my room was clean. Who does that? Everyone else would tell me how they were required to read 3o minutes a day, and I would reply, “Me too,” yet know that my mother would rejoice if I only read 30 minutes a day. On the contrary, she would kick me out of the house, and I would sneak books under my shirt to read in the hammock or in the tree house my brother and I built. Rickety as it was, it provided shelter for me to read while my mother thought I was outside. I kept a flashlight under my mattress, to read in bed after my parents tucked me in. After a while they caught on, and my mother would creep in a fling back the cover, finding me stunned and reading by flashlight. She would take the book and the flashlight. But they only ever checked once. I had another stash under the matress, near the bottom by my feet.

And summer camp. How I loved summer camp, a time to be looked forward to. New years was a good time, because it meant that year I would go to summer camp. A place where I was free. My counselors let me read during rest hour. I got to make hot candle wax hands and candles, and tye dye my white, yellow- hell, anything light clothing. I wore dirty socks and sang at the top of my lungs. There was no one watching, no parent. No cool children. No children to laugh at the books I read at recess. No swimmers to beat me. No pressure, just songs and nature and counselors who were in their twenties, who knew how to make the best camping cook-out food. The best meal I have ever had- and my best friend from childhood would agree- consisted of pasta we cooked on an open fire. We remember well the counselors convincing us to make Thai food. We found Thailand on a map and looked at books with animals of Thailand. We were convinced. Our thai meal consisted of- as far as the two of us can remember- spaghetti noodles and scoops of peanut butter in a sauce pan. There must have been something else in the sauce we poured over the noodles. But since, we have tried all kinds of peanut butter sauces and spaghettie noodles and Thai noodles, but have never recaptured the delicousness of the Thai noodles over the campfire. We cooked them in Luami even though we lived in Harmony, and both of us agree- the memory of that meal is something to capture, because we cannot remember a meal since that was so delightful. And we can’t even remember the recipe! Hell, it might have been noodles and peanut butter. But it was good.

We used to play cops and robbers, me and my brothers and my cousins and the neigboors. There were only two girls, me and Liza. Once I lept over a fence and tore my black stirrup leggins. Liza and I had to act like siamese twins then, and we both fit into her skirt. Its amazing how differently we turned out. Sometimes my cousins would come over, or we would all go to the neigboors when it rained because my auntie’s house would flood. The water would go in the front door, out the back. Once or twice, the neighboors gave us their old snow sleds, and we would float down the court in the pouring rain on the snow sleds, and sometimes we would float through the house. My auntie would always cry and send us back out to the mustard feilds. And then my auntie moved, but the house belonged to my grandfather and he sold it to my parents. I guess my dad somehow fixed the flooding with the grater, because he always spoke of grating and the grater, and it does not flood now. But for a while there, walls would be knocked out of bedrooms and blue tarps would cover them.

We spent a christmas cooking in a microwave- the first time my parents allows us to have a microwave was when my dad knocked out the kitchen and it was not ready for christmas. I think they also cooked on hot plates and in the wood stove which heated the place. I’m not sure if they did not beleive in convential heating or did not have the money to install it. That was the time in my life when we had plywood floors int eh whole house, even my bedroom. I drew all over the floors with my friend Carrie, the only one who I would allow over to the house in such a dissaray.

You see, my parents had transferred me from the school where everyone’s parents were teachers, plumbers, nurses, cars salesmen, soccer coaches, and other normal jobs to a school where everyone’s parents drove BMWs  and wore suits (my dad did not own one, and still doesn’t) and bought their children clothes from GAP and Abercrombie. Michelle was allowed to come over, and my friends from my old school. But everyone else, I told them my pop was a wealthy cardiologist and invented extravagant stories about a family that was not mine. I was horrified to say my father was a teacher. And not a wealthy one at that. Though neither was he poor, but at the time it was all about comparisons.

And boy did I compare myself.

10-8-08

I remembered tonight how Liza and I used to sit on the floor of what was hers- and now is Calin’s- room, when we were little girls, in leotards. We used to lay our legs out, queitly, oh so gently, on the brown long carpet. We would kind of settle in, our legs getting a little lost in the long brown yarn loops. The sun would shine in from her window, making a dappled shadow on our legs, because the giant mulberry tree that is now uprooting the court would hang above us. And in total silence, we would wait. The carpet was scratchy, and we would wait. Until little black flees hopped onto our skinny legs. Thats when our hands would spring into action- and oh the satisfaction we felt when we squashed the little bugs who so bit up our arms and legs. Little flees who lived on our beloved cats. And in our rugs.

Though speaking of leotards, those pink, stretch kind. Someone- Mom? Auntie?- was brillaint enough to buy us leotards that were longer than our torsos. And we had rats. Tons of pet rats, not even sure if they were mine or hers. But there must have been many, and they must have been the ones we had before we were ten, though exactly how old we were I have no idea. All I know is we must have been small, because the pink leotards were big, and perhaps around ten or eleven we would have outgrown outlandish ideas like this.

Liza and I would dress in stretch pink leotards that would have fit someone a few years older than us. They were different shades of pink, not matching. And we would take out the rats, the pet rats we dearly loved. They were clean rats, childrens rats. They were not dirty in the attick we should poison them rats. They were pets.

Anyways, once in the pink leotards not of matching pink shades, the really long ones that would hang in our crotches because they were too big. Not the blue ones with tu-toos we wore to ballet and tap class, but the ones that we playes in, the too-big, hang in the crotch, pink ones (Why we never got to wear pink to ballet is another topic for another time). We would take out the rats, and the memory is clear: snuggling the pink rats into the too-big hang low-crotch part, we would play games, hang around, chill out. With rats in our crotches. What the hell? Rats in our crotches???? But it was with such glee that we played the rats-in-the-crotches-of-the-too-big-pink-leotard game. It was a blast, rats in our crotches of the pink leotards in the tree house, playing the flea-on-the-leg-catching-game, doing each others nails. Surely, we would never now do our nails with rats in our crotches. We would not have rats in our crotches at all. But oh, how we loved to play with the rats hanging near our knees with weight, in the crotches of our pink leotards.

How I wish I could return to those careless moments. Instead I am laying here on my bed wondering how to pay the bills and what to do about grad school and trying to figure out if applying to a doctoral program is the best financial choice I can make. Because I’m not sure it is. And finances, sadly, seem to be the driving force.