Memoir of a Scatter-Brained Four-Year-Old

 

I had a collection of invisible friends. I never told anyone I had them or talked to them out loud. Our conversations went on in my head. 

My mother used to say she wished she knew what was going on in my head. I didn’t tell her since, even at four I knew that only crazy people talked to people who weren’t there, and if you were crazy, men in the white coats would put you in a straitjacket and take you to Byberry. I wasn’t sure where that was, but I knew I didn’t want to go there.

My mother said she didn’t want them to come for her until the azaleas were in bloom. I used to hope they’d never bloom so no one would take her. I never knew why she’d want them to take her. 

Who could understand grownups?

My mother had silly rules, like looking up and down before crossing the street. 

What about cars? 

On our street there were seldom cars except just before dinner when dads came home. No one crossed the street then; you were in the house not spoiling your appetite.

What about the big road? There were always cars on that. Still, I dutifully looked at the sky and then at the ground, peeking out the corners of my eyes for cars.

I never asked why I needed to look up and down for two important reasons: first, my brother would say I was stupid; second, I knew the answer my mother would give. “Because I’m your mother and I said so.” Even at four I knew that was the answer to most questions beginning with why.

It was different in the city. There, when the white rectangle word lit up it meant you could cross the street and cars knew not to hit you. When the orange square word lit up, it meant they didn’t.

I loved going downtown. We took the train. I knew we were almost there when my brothers pointed out the window at the sky and said, “Look, there’s Billy Penn,” but for some reason I thought they said penguin. 

I didn’t know who Billy the Penguin was, but I pointed at the sky and pretended I could see him, too. I thought maybe he was like Bertie the Bunyip and lived in the television.

I knew my address and phone number, even if I didn’t know what addresses and phone numbers were. In case I was ever lost, I could go right up to the nearest policeman – or the lady behind the counter if I were in Wannamaker’s – and tell them my name, address and phone number so my parents could find me.

My parents did so many things I didn’t understand; it’s amazing I ever understood anything. My mother would decide to tell me things I didn’t ask about. 

She didn’t need to tell me about monsters because it never occurred to me that they could live under the bed or in the closet – until she mentioned that they didn’t. 

I knew they lived inside the television, just like Beaver Cleaver, Opie Taylor, Bertie the Bunyip and the cowboys and Indians.

 Too many dead cowboys and Indians was the reason our television would break, according to my dad, and he’d go behind the console and clean them out.

Anyway, when I was four I guess my aunt was having another baby – she did that often – and my mother decided to tell me where babies came from. I hadn’t asked. It didn’t occur to me to wonder. Babies just were, although I didn’t know how grownups actually knew when they were going to get one. I guess my mother knew and had to tell someone, so she told me.

The whole thing didn’t sound right, in my opinion. She started off telling me that the dad had the seeds. Wait, what? 

She lost me right there. 

I knew about seeds. They came in little paper packets that you bought at the store and planted in a garden. Then you’d get flowers or carrots or something. I had been to my aunt’s house. She had flowers in her garden, not babies.

Somehow this had to make sense. Okay, so they buy baby seeds. They plant them in a planter that’s hidden in their room. That’s why we weren’t allowed in my parents’ room without permission: they didn’t want us to know too much about the plants.

Anyway, something grew – probably something yucky, like spinach – the mom would eat it and it made her get fat. I was four, after all, and had observed that only fat ladies had babies. 

When the mother was fat enough she went into the hospital, and they put her on a diet. When she lost enough weight her prize was to go to the nursery and pick out which baby she wanted. It sounded silly to me, but it was a grownup thing.

Where did the babies come from? Well, there were always babies in the hospital nursery, just as there were always groceries in the grocery store. I guess some people need more detail than that, so I thought up the most logical solution (Whatever my mother said certainly made no sense – but again, “because I’m your mother and I said so,” was the reason behind it, so I didn’t ask).

I knew at that time that God made all of us. 

And where are things made? In factories. There were car factories, bicycle factories, refrigerator factories – there must be baby factories, too. 

God would make the babies and send them down the checkout line. 

People would pack them in boxes – the kind with the little holes in the sides and a handle top. The boxes were put in a delivery truck. 

The truck delivered the babies to the hospital according to how many boys and girls and which colors of each they had ordered. 

Then the nurses took them out of the boxes and put them in the plastic bins in the nursery until someone picked them.

I don’t know what my mother may have said about babies. This was what I put together after she mentioned the seeds. It made about as much sense to me as anything else grownups did, and I figured it out by myself, without anyone telling me I was stupid.

If I told Rob about this he’d know I was smart, I thought. I didn’t know if I was as ugly as he said, but I knew I wasn’t stupid. I never did tell him though, because I thought he might not play with me if he knew I wasn’t stupid.

With this knowledge, I was well on my way. Someday I’d know how to read and then maybe I would drive across the bridge over the ocean and see that Iron Curtain the grownups were always talking about, and the little red people in Russia. Who knew? There might be lots of other things to discover.

 

The Invisible Twin

 This is the prologue of the novel I'm currently working on. Let me know what you think.

1983

            The 1980s. It felt like a new beginning to some, coming out of the chaos that the 1970s had felt like. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were the choices of the grownups: The Iron Lady and the Cowboy/Actor.

            But to the youth of the time, music told the tale. Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Phil Collins, Genesis, Wham, Flock of Seagulls, Bryan Ferry, Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark, and the like breathed something different to a new generation. Even older rockers, like The Who appeared to have seen a new day.

            Boys wearing guy-liner, girls in leg warmers and shoulder pads, all of them sporting big hair held in place with hairspray, danced with abandon to a new age of pop music and pop culture.

            The Evans twins, Brynn and Christopher turned 15 at the beginning of the decade. Their older sister, Amanda was months away from entering Uni, and all was right with the world. The fact that they were twins may have had a small bit to do with their popularity – at least Kit believed that about himself. The boys were about to enter sixth form the following school year, and two years of prep for Uni themselves.

            Identical twins, but not identical in personality: Brynn was good at sports and played on the school’s football team – what the Americans called soccer. Kit spent his spare time with his guitar, singing, and learning the songs from the radio.

            While Kit’s friends were mainly from the music and theatre people at school, Brynn’s were more likely to be athletes, although neither was exclusive to those groups, and their closest friends mingled in both. Brynn could usually coax Kit into going to parties or simply hanging about with his set. But Kit never tried to convince himself that he was any sort of athlete.

            Kit saw Brynn as the talented one: the athletic one, who painted amazing watercolors, wrote prolifically – although Kit’s written work, when he got around to it, was far better technically – and made friends as easily as smiling. Kit, on the other hand, tended to be shy around people he didn’t know well, unless he had guitar in hand and a microphone in front of him. He could be found more often engrossed in a book, albeit up in a tree, than getting up to some of the antics of his brother.

            It was surprising that now, two and a half years later, the nearly 18-year-olds were headed to a party given by Kit’s theatre friends on a Friday night in early March, one where Brynn would be the relative stranger.

            Brynn and Kit were in high spirits. The party had been discussed for weeks among their friends in anticipation. As usual, Brynn joked and made witty comments about their friends. He was never mean. The subjects of his comments would laugh at what he had to say as much as Kit did.

            Kit ran a hand through his dark brown hair, and it flopped on his forehead. Brynn didn’t dare touch his own hair. He wore it sprayed as many of the pop stars did. It wasn’t unusual in 1983 for boys to use hairspray. Kit often did the same, but he’d been running late, and didn’t have the time to get it just so. Besides, he’d heard a certain young lady at the party liked the look of his deep blue eyes looking out from under his tousled feathered haircut.

Looking good for the ladies might be the goal of the evening, but both boys had plans for university in another few years.

            “Your turn is two streets up,” Kit said.

            “Great,” Brynn replied, continuing along the main street.

            Oddly, considering Brynn was the more outgoing of the two – the first born – Kit knew more of the people who would be at the party than Brynn did. But Brynn wouldn’t be a stranger by any means.

            All of the side streets had stop signs, so it was a clear run to the street where they needed to turn. As they started across the one before it, another car raced toward the intersection. The lights caught Kit’s attention.

            “Brynn, watch out!”

            Brynn turned his head and slammed on the brakes a second too late. The other car, ignoring the stop sign, slammed into the driver’s side of the car, slamming it into a light pole that hit just forward of Kit’s door.

            “Brynn!” Kit said. He started to reach toward his brother, but pain in his side and his arm made his breath catch.

            He didn’t like the angle of his brother’s head. Something looked off. He waited for Brynn to make noise, shake himself, or groan, at least.

            No sound came. Kit was afraid to move, not wanting the pain, not knowing what else might be wrong.

            “Brynn!”

           

            Brynn!” His shout turned into a howl as he sat bolt upright in bed.

            The bedroom door opened, and his grandfather entered. He grabbed Kit, who stared into the darkness like one blind, and gradually calmed him down. He sat on the side of the bed stroking the boy’s hair.

            “Is he all right?” the boy’s grandmother asked from the doorway.

            “Nightmare again,” her husband replied.

            He knew well the effects of PTSD – battle fatigue they called it when he was in the war.

            “It’s all right, boy,” his grandfather said gently.

            “It was the accident again?” his grandmother asked. Her husband nodded.

            Mr. Evans was good at getting his grandson calmed enough to sleep. His wife left him to it.

 

            “This was the first one in a long while,” Mrs. Evans said when her husband returned to their bedroom.

            “I was hoping it had stopped for good. I can’t imagine how he’ll get on at university with this still lingering. It would drive any roommate mad.”

            “He still has a few months before he has to decide. And another year wouldn’t hurt.”

            “He’s been anxious to go. I think even suggesting he wait another year would hurt him. We’ll have to see what his doctor recommends.”

            The conversation was put to rest for the night. The morning always made things easier to decide.

What Do You Do in Your Spare Time?

 

Not long ago, one of the kids I work with was telling me about something he recently got. I couldn’t make heads or tails of what he was talking about, so I asked what it was.

“It’s for my Nintendo,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t have one of those,” I replied.

“You don’t? What do you do in your spare time?”

What do I do? How long have you got?

He was about eight or nine. I thought about what I did at his age.

Of course, having grown up in the Pleistocene Era, we didn’t have the electronics children have today. (Just the other week I had to explain to another child what that curly cord thing was on a phone in a picture.) “Operation” was about the most electronic game anyone had, and I was pretty sure this boy didn’t have the fine motor coordination to play that. But I didn’t have one of those, either.

Electronics and mechanical devices didn’t interest me. I used to ask for “dolls that didn’t do anything.” The only exception was Chatty Cathy, but my dad said we had one, so I didn’t get that, either.

When I was a child, I spent every available moment outside, as long as it wasn’t raining.

What did I do? I rode my bike, roller skated, ice skated, climbed trees, or played on my swings, sliding board or sandbox; jumped rope, played hopscotch, tag or hide and seek.

In summer, if I wasn’t in someone’s pool, I was probably swimming in the creek (called “the crick” where I grew up), hunting for frogs and tadpoles with my brother, hiking in the woods, picking blackberries, or inventing adventures in our tree fort. If it rained, I read, colored or played with my dolls.

These things are beyond imagining to the sedentary Nintendo generation. Of course, they were raised to fear being taken by a stranger – or even a non-custodial parent – not to mention they often don’t have quiet streets to play on, or woods to wander in. And if they do, they have to worry about predators in those woods. The worst we had to worry about was poison ivy or whether or not that snake was poisonous.

I remember waiting my entire childhood for the much-warned-about stranger in the shiny black car to drive up and ask if I wanted to go for a ride so I could scream, “No!” and run away. I never knew the real predators were likely to be people you knew.

I feel sorry for today’s kids. With all of their technology, they’re often “bored.”

I think their bodies are bored, craving the kind of movement my generation took for granted.

But what do I do in my spare time now? I read, or write stories. In nice weather I ride my bike. On snowy days I shovel a path for the dog to be able to get out of the house. I know, that’s not a fun leisure time activity, but I don’t mind it in small doses. I certainly don’t count doing housework as leisure time.

During pandemic lockdown, many things I once did have been curtailed.

Movie theaters are closed.

A day at the Renaissance Faire isn’t a possibility because it’s closed. Ye Olde Social Distancing isn’t possible in the crowds watching jousts, living chessboards and “Shakespeare, Bloody Shakespeare.”

Steak on a Stake, Nachos of Nottingham, and tiny shops selling everything from swords to hand-made jewelry and leather armour don’t have the capacity for social distancing. Six feet distance would put you in the next shop.

Of course, the pandemic could lead to a new feature at the Renn Faire: the peasant pulling a cart and shouting, “Bring out your dead!” for those who don’t follow distancing and mask requirements.

Having lunch with a friend in a restaurant, or even wandering at will at the local shopping mall is difficult if not impossible – or at least unsafe.

Being a bit of an introvert, I didn’t have much difficulty adjusting to lockdown. I have a pool in my back yard, and spent most of last summer in it.

I also rode my bike both for enjoyment and exercise. I can ride quite alone, without coming into contact with anyone. The greatest trial last year for me was when my bike was in the shop for a month getting the derailleur fixed.

The negative for me is that many things I could do in my spare time that would be enjoyable and good for my health aren’t available to me because of the pandemic.

Gyms and other forms of workout are either closed or have limited access that I still find too risky, even after my second dose of the vaccine.

My favorite activity is traveling. I’ve already had travel plans cancelled with no idea when I might be able to reschedule.

What I do in my spare time, especially in the winter, has become more sedentary. I read. I write stories. I spend less time on Facebook probably because my non-spare-time (work) is spent online. As an OT, I’m very much hands-on, and being forced to proceed virtually is making me look forward to retirement.

Recently, I reconnected my Wii Fit, my most techy “toy,” to try to undo the effects of the forced sedentary lifestyle. It welcomed me back after 1287 days. I was touched. It had not only kept track, it was pining for my return!

Maybe I do understand that student’s excitement over his Nintendo, after all!