Campfyre Stories

School only took up 6 hours of my days.  The rest of the time was spent having all kinds of adventures.  My parents were very vocal and active in various causes, so we spent many weekends protesting, attending events and festivals with some social import to them (many where my parents were performing) and hitting every free event that my mother could find.

My parents would take us to many of their shows, as they had done even when we were little.  We were expected to sleep at the shows if we could, and sleep in the next morning if we couldn’t.  For band practices and shows we couldn’t go to, we often had a babysitter, otherwise Mom would arrange overnights with friends.

We lived in an apartment and my brother and I were latch-key kids.  I never minded, except having to try to make my little brother listen.  In fact, I kind of enjoyed having the place to ourselves, since when our parents weren’t home, they also weren’t fighting.

My parents fought all the time.  They screamed and ranted and raved and said nasty things to each other.  They only ever did it at home, so their public personas were of a pretty perfect couple.  The problem for me, though, was that all bets were off at home, even if I had friends over.  It got to the point where no one wanted to come over to spend the night at my house because of how intense the fighting got.

For as long as I can remember, I always related better to kids who were older than me than to younger kids or even kids my own age.  I was lucky in that I was able to make friends with several of the older girls in the neighborhood.  It meant that I had a solid social outlet outside of school where, even once I became mostly accepted, I still struggled.

Most of the time, though, I was pretty solitary.  I wrote a lot and read a lot of books.  Even in school, my preference was to find a quiet corner and work in solitude.

And so it went.  Dealing with problems at home, dealing with problems at school, having adventures on weekends and living the life of a somewhat normal child.

When I was 9 my grandmother died.  It was a very confusing time for me because I wasn’t especially sad about it.  My grandmother was a drunk and I always had a really hard time when she came to visit.  Sloppy drunks were never my thing.  My brother thought that she was funny and that her stumbling around was a performance for him.  I knew better and was neither amused nor impressed.  I had to force myself to cry by playing a sad song over and over until I allowed myself to let go.

The funeral was like a family reunion.  My parents started early and, though my father was the youngest of 4, our only cousins are significantly younger than both me and my brother.  I was old enough that I was already babysitting back home, so herding the little ones was something that naturally fell on me while the adults argued and fought about who got what and funeral arrangements and such.

We kids were mostly oblivious to those goings-on.  We were too young to really understand and too busy spinning in the chairs and making a playground of Dama’s former condo.

My father was fond of saying that our family put the "fun" back in funeral, and in a lot of ways that’s true.  The funeral, for me, wasn’t a very solemn affair, nor were the arrangements, as dad and the aunts and uncle made jokes and poked fun at the entire thing.  They were all able to reconnect with their cousins, aunts, uncles and other extended family.  What I remember most is that it was filled with laughter and that it runs seamlessly in my memory into the several family reunions that we had.

My father came into some money.  We bought the newest used car that I can ever remember our family having and we decided to take the summer to drive cross-country and back and catch up with all the people we had left behind 3 years ago.  We also visited roadside attractions and classic American monuments.  We took our time both there and back and, mostly, it was a lot of fun.

Except for the fighting.

I only really remember one fight, but it was horrible.  No matter how bad a fight is, when you’re trapped in a confined space, it’s even worse.  There’s no escape at all and having to sit in the backseat, pulled over on the side of the highway, dealing with my brother going catatonic, I wasn’t particularly equipped to deal with it.  At 9 years old, the only way I knew to deal with it was to scream "Stop it!  Stop it!  Can’t you see what you’re doing to him?!?"

It stopped, but the rest of the ride was made in uncomfortable silence.  As intense as it was, it was pretty much par for the course.

But when the fighting wasn’t happening, we were a pretty happy family.  We would go to the movies, often the drive-in, go out to dinner (always at Ponderosa Steak House with their Create Your Own Sundae bar), amusement parks and, of course, to all my parents shows that were family-friendly and all the free festivals and events in the area.

Another thing that my parents did with my father’s inheritance was to buy land out in the boondocks.  It was 7.5 acres really in the middle of nowhere with a rundown trailer on it.  It was a half hour from the city we were living in, and therefore my friends, my school, and everything we knew and enjoyed.  There was NOTHING there, but all I knew was that in buying this, my parents were making a promise to stop moving us around.  It was a promise I had wanted…  until I actually got it.

But I’m getting slightly ahead of myself.  Another big ticket item that my parents bought was a plane ticket, for me, by myself, to go visit my favorite aunt out in Arizona.  I would fly alone, with a stewardess checking up on me, to Tucson, where I would spend a week.

It was one of the best vacations of my life.  We went to Mexico and visited street fairs, we spent time together getting to know each other.  At the time, I loved to run and had her clock me with her truck.  Unfortunately, I made a terrible mistake when I reached out to a very OLD picnic table to stop myself and slid my hands across the rough surface.  One night in Tucson was spent with me alternatively soaking my hands and Sage picking all the splinters out.  It’s something I’ll never forget, no matter how hard I try.

I think that was around the time I lost interest in running.

But I had a blast out there, visiting her and traveling on my own.  Coming back was harder, only because of the timing.  My parents picked me up at the airport and took me…  to our new home.  They had moved while I was gone.  I knew it was going to happen, but it was still a disconcerting experience.

And we moved to a dump.  I was never an outdoorsy person, being as I hate bugs and am highly susceptible (I rapidly learned) to poison ivy.  We weren’t walking distance to anywhere, I didn’t know anyone, and I hated pretty much everything about where we lived.

When I started school in the new district, I made a couple of new friends, but none of them lived near enough to me for us to visit without parental involvement.  Even then, I was considered extremely weird by kids who had never experienced much of the world outside their town.  For many of them, their family had been in the area for generations, their parents and grandparents had gone to school together.  There wasn’t a whole lot of room for a hippie kid from an alternative school who had already, at 11, traveled most of the country.

It was shortly after we moved that my parents’ fighting hit its peak and they decided to separate.  Mom would stay in the trailer with my brother and me, and my father would move back into the city, where he lived with a friend.  We didn’t see him often, and when we did, it wasn’t pleasant.  He was drinking away his sorrows and it wasn’t much fun to be around.

Meanwhile, at school, I had joined a support group for kids whose parents were divorced or separated.  Most of them were not people who would have given me the time of day otherwise, but with our shared bond, I was accepted and really became a part of the group.  I had support and friends who understood what I was going through…  at least for a while.  Because my parents got back together.

I probably should have been happy.  Some of the girls in the support group were jealous, but I was more apprehensive than anything else.  I’ve always felt that "staying together for the kids" was a bullshit concept.  When parents who are fundamentally incompatible, for whatever reason, stay together "for the kids", all it does is teach kids what an UNhealthy relationship looks like.  One of the reasons things ended with the Dragonmaker when they did was so that Spawn would have the opportunity to grow up seeing healthy relationships instead of an unhealthy one.

So my parents were back together and the fundamental effect on my life was that I was no longer welcome in the divorce/separation support group, and those girls were no longer interested in having much of anything to do with me.  All of the scorn, ostracizing and teasing came back with a vengeance and it became unbearable to stay in that school situation.

 I decided to go back to my previous school and, since my mother worked there, it wasn’t difficult for me to ride in with her every day to go back to that school.

This posts ends, as the other one did, with traveling with my school, only to meet my future (ex-) husband and the father of my son.  But that’s a story unto itself, and the one that I’ll tell next.

I volunteered to be a member of the board of directors for the National Coalition of Alternative Community Schools (NCACS) and what a year I chose to do it.  There was a major issue of a long-standing and beloved member of the NCACS having done…  something…  and people were debating whether or not to throw him out of the coalition.  Part of me wants to say that if I had known how much of my time would be spent in board meetings, I might not have done it, but the reality is that I had a personal relationship with this person and had known him since I was 8.  He visited our school regularly, had taught and many schools and had been influential on more kids than I could possibly count.  I would have still done it, even if I had known in advance.

Thirteen of us went to Oregon from my school, including teachers/chaperones.  We took the train from upstate New York to Portland, Oregon, taking the northern route there and the southern route back.  On the way, in Chicago, we met up with some kids we knew from The Farm and traveled together.  We slept in the observation car, having convinced the conductors that we were well behaved enough for them to allow us to set up our sleeping bags along the sides and to keep out of trouble.

We arrived in Oregon after 3 days on the train.  I always have memories of just how green it is out there and I wasn’t let down by the reality of it.  We had dinner in a restaurant and, while the adults were paying the bill, I went outside and just lay down in the grass.  My friends were horrified that I would be lying barefoot in the yard of a restaurant, but none of the passers by seemed to mind, just as I knew they woudln’t.  This was the mindset where my fundamental personality had formed.  If I couldn’t do it here, I couldn’t do it anywhere.  It didn’t take long before I was joined by some of my friends, teachers and chaperones.

I felt completely at home there.  Something I hadn’t felt in a really long time.  Something I actually struggle with quite often, even now.

So on we went, to the conference itself.  Since it was a Girl Scout camp, we were all able to stay in cabins located various places around the woods.

There were events and workshops constantly, but I wasn’t able to attend much, if any of them because of my duties on the board.  We were in meetings most of the time we were there, with a few breaks.  My school often used those breaks to head offsite to do things like visit the hot springs (with other schools/students/teachers).  It was a lot of meetings, and heated meetings, so my opportunities to meet new people were few and far between.

One group of students had caught my eye, though.  They were surly and seemed to resent everyone else there.  They were all metal heads in their jean or leather jackets and band tees.  I was fascinated and wanted to reach out to them, but I found that I never had the chance…  at least not right away.

One evening, after an especially trying day of highly emotional meetings, I found myself wandering through the large bowl field in the center of the camp.  I heard the strains of Guns N’ Roses Appetite for Destruction playing and saw a group of kids sitting around a boom box.  Being a budding young metalhead myself, I headed over toward them, only to find the intimidating kids that  had been wanting to meet for days.

They introduced themselves to me by the names they had adopted for the conference - Buddy Weiser, Jack Daniels, Kahlua, and Scotty (who had wanted to be Mr. Brownstone until he learned that it meant herion, and wasn’t actually some kind of alcohol.)  We hit it off right away, having music and alternative education in common, and they became my new friends.  I spent as much time at the conference as I could with them and we were fast friends by the end.  I can safely admit to having formed quite a large crush on "Jack Daniels" right from the start and even made a point to stand next to him in the grand circle the entire attendance of the conference put together while we sang farewell songs, and *sigh* held hands.

We all exchanged addresses before we left, with them whispering their real names to me, since thier parents wouldn’t know who in the world letters addressed to "Jack Daniels", "Buddy Weiser", Kahlua" and "Scotty" were addressed to.

I was so infatuated, I wrote my first letter to "Jack" on the train home.  It wasn’t for nothing, either, since he and "Scotty" had both written to me on their way home, too.  Scotty had written me a long letter professing his deep love for me.  He had also sent me all of the words to Sweet Child O’ Mine, including all the "oh oh oh oh"s and every inflection that Axl sang.  He had also changed all the "she"s to "you"s and "her"s to "your"s.  It was…  disturbing, to say the least…  and I?  Wasn’t interested.  AT.  ALL.

And they had warned him.  It was a terrible letter.  I couldn’t listen to that song for many, many years because of just how bad that was.

The letter from "Jack" was much more mundane.  Sweet, but nothing to indicate that there was anything more than a good friendship starting, but it was happy-making that his letter came so very quickly…  and wasn’t desperate and creepy.  That was a big plus in his favor.

Scotty got written off pretty quickly, which didn’t really surprise most of that crew, who didn’t particularly like him anyway.  The rest of them got written TO.  Often and for pages at a time.  By far, though, the one I wrote to most often, and whose replies I anticipated the most were Jack’s.  We wrote for the better part of a year, but once the next conference started approaching, I realized that if I was ever going to express to him the feelings that were budding, it would have to be before that conference, and probably would determine whether or not I even went.  I was in public high school by that point and didn’t have any real *need* to attend.

So I wrote a heartfelt, empassioned letter, baring my soul.  "I don’t really know what love is, but I think this might be it."  Yeah, well, what do you want, I was 13 and thought of myself as a writer.  I mailed the letter and proceeded to spend the longest week of my life living in the mailbox.  Heh.

Of course, this wouldn’t be much of a story if he didn’t return the feelings, so it’s a little anti-climactic to say that he did, and in a lovely letter.  We made plans to meet up at the next conference.

All I really remember about that conference is making out.

And then we went back to letters.  Lots of letters, sporadic phone calls (since this was before cell phones and long-distance was expensive) and periodic visits.  We were as much in love as teenagers could be, and because we were so far apart, I don’t think that either one of us learned how to date or much about boy-girl interaction until much, MUCH later on.

We saw each other as often as we could, spending weeks at a time during the summers and a week or long weekend during school breaks.  We saw each other through tough times in both of our families and, essentially, grew up together.  I was madly in love and, as a romantic teenager could see myself spending the rest of my life with him.

We broke up for less than 24 hours, in a cliche, immediately after my junior prom, but he changed his mind, or I changed his mind, I’m really not sure what happened.  We discussed it, I was heartbroken and the next morning we reconciled.

When, eventually, I had finished as much high school as I could bear in New York (more on that later), I decided to leave everything behind to be with my True Love.  In November of 1992, I packed all my things into the back of their family’s minivan and moved out to Ann Arbor.  Once again, to a complete change of life.

I haven’t been entirely fair to my old school or the people of that community and I need to go into some further details to clear up the misconceptions and assumptions that are easy to make.

I had a hard time of it in school, no doubt.  Some of that has to do with my personality and the experiences I had both before I got there and after I started attending, but some of it certainly has to do with the culture there as well.  As an adult, I have some serious problems with the way things were, and sometimes still are run.

However, what you have to understand, and I don’t know if you will, is that the community there was more than just a school, it was truly a community.  The people I attended school with may not have been my friends, but most of them, the ones who were there for a long time or who I spent significant time with, they are my family.  And that won’t ever go away.

Over the weekend, I ran into some of my former schoolmates and teachers.  I see them rarely, but when I do there’s always catching up and hugs and a deep caring and wondering about how the other person’s life is going.  All my peers and their siblings and the younger kids and the older kids, they’re like cousins, and, honestly, though I have 6 blood cousins, I’m probably closer to tens of them than any one of the cousins I’m actually related to.

We’ve been through trauma together, we’ve been through bliss, we’ve been through adventures and experiences that few people outside of that community can really understand.  I was somewhat removed from the community, at least in comparison to many of the people to whom I refer, but I was still a part of it, and those people were still my family.  Consider that maybe they are all siblings and I’m the cousin.  It doesn’t matter, though, our ties are strong.

Of those girls I mentioned a few days back who held the power when I first attended, only one lasted until 8th grade.  She and I eventually formed a strong bond.  Again, it wasn’t friendship, it was something more.  I first babysat for the children born in the community and, several years ago, when one of them broke down during a moving emotional scene in a movie about the school, I happened to be physically closest to him and wound up being the one to hold him while he cried.  He was surrounded by people comforting him and plenty of hugs once the movie was over, and I slipped away knowing that he was in good hands, but in that earlier moment, all I knew was that someone I loved deeply was hurting and I needed to be there for him.

We never had to LIKE each other, but we had to deal with each other, we had to get along to whatever extent we could, and I think that in those circumstances, that unconditional, familial love just kind of happens.

Even that teacher…  she was my teacher for a very long time, in many different subjects, and is someone I’ll come back to in the next post.  She did terrible things to, not just me, but to my mother later on.  Eventually she was ejected from the community and shunned for many years.  As many resentments as I may have toward her, though, she’s still part of that family, and she still did give me certain emotional tools that stay with me.

They’re my family, too.  They’re my other family.  They can’t be anything else, and even though most of the things that I have to say right now put some of those people, and much of the overall experience in a less-than-positive light, I can’t let it stand that way.  For good or bad, they shaped me.  For that, I have to love them.

After we left my grandparents’ house and moved to a small city, my mother was concerned that the school system wasn’t up to par, so she looked into other options.  The winning candidate was an alternative school in the area and at the tail end of 2nd grade, I tried it out and finished the school year.

The philosophy was simple, children should be encouraged, not forced, to learn.  This was intriguing to me, someone who had never been *forced*, per se, and always enjoyed learning.  But it was explained to me that we would be encouraged to learn what we wanted, when we wanted, how we wanted.  Sure, I thought, I’ll give it a try.

Almost immediately I had my reservations.  I was shunned by my peers for not wearing the right clothes.  At SEVEN fashion was an issue there.  There was a clique of 3 girls my age who had known each other practically since birth, two of their mothers worked at the school and they were accustomed to power.  They didn’t like me.  I wasn’t from anywhere they knew, I was from the other side of the country and that was weird enough for me to be shunned.

In most situations, this wouldn’t be a terrible thing, but in my age-range there were fewer than 10 kids.  It wasn’t even that I was losing the "popular" or powerful ones, it was that, without having done anything at all, I had lost a third or more.  After having already withdrawn into myself, after years of losing everyone I forged a friendship with and became close to, it was going to be even more difficult for me to find my place in this new town.  To this day, I’m not sure that I ever really did.

So, yeah, the start of it all was less than positive, not just socially, but in terms of my getting to know the culture and operation of this very different schooling situation..  The most important rule in the school was the "Stop" rule, meaning that if someone said "STOP", you had to stop.  If you didn’t, then a council meeting could be called, halting all activities and bringing the school together in a problem solving council.  I had become meek, though, and after the months of bullying that I had just come out of, was resigned to just take it rather than set myself up for confrontation.

This was unacceptable to my teacher, who was also the founder of the school.  I don’t even remember what prompted the overall incident, but next thing I knew this old woman had thrown me to the floor and was sitting on me, with my arms pinned over my head - in front of my whole class.  I think it lasted an hour before she got (apparently) bored and decided to have every kid in my class take a turn sitting on me until I would say stop.  The problem was, I didn’t know what she wanted from me and I didn’t understand why I was being singled out like this.  The first of my peers to sit on me leaned in and said "All you have to do is to say ’stop’ and we’ll stop."  He took pity on me, which was something I needed.  Through my tears, I stammered "W-w-will you p-p-please s-ss-stop?"

I think our teacher hadn’t heard me and probably would have found that way of asking to be unacceptable.  She was looking for a forceful STOP, not a simpering, crying, polite request, which was really all I was capable of.  At that point, it was lunchtime, so she sent everyone upstairs to eat.

But I wasn’t hungry.  In fact, I felt very, very sick.  I dry-heaved in the bathroom for a while, then decided to sit in the library and find comfort in books.  This, it turned out, was a big mistake.  My teacher came looking for me and was livid when she found that I had defied her orders to go upstairs and have lunch.  She pulled me off the couch, threw me to the ground and sat on me again.  "I told you to go have lunch!"  I tried to explain that I was feeling sick and wasn’t hungry and her response to that was to use my own hands to hit me while she sat on me, all the while shouting "STOP HITTING YOURSELF!  STOP HITTING YOURSELF!"

Eventually she lost interest and went away.  I don’t really remember what happened afterward, but I was mortified.  THIS was what my schooling was going to be about?

It wasn’t all bad, though.  I did learn a lot and I had many experiences that I never would have had in a more mainstream school.  We visited the farm in Massachusetts, we saw numerous plays and attended events.  To learn math, we learned cooking and undertook carpentry projects.  To learn geography we made maps and studied other countries.  The opportunities were endless and fascinating, but the problem solving, when it came to things that took place outside of the school, rarely worked well for me.

My brother and I would walk home from school together.  It wasn’t a very long walk, but we had to cross several busy streets and my brother was not the most mindful of children, often running from me and unsafely running into the street.  The school’s plan for dealing with this problem was to put my brother on a leash.  I still think that this is one of the worst ideas to come out of that school that I have ever personally experienced.  My brother prided himself on being weird.  To be put on a leash simply gave him an opportunity to show that weirdness to the world at large.  He got down on all fours and pretended he was a dog.  We made it about halfway home before running into a friend of our parents’ who drove us home.

It wasn’t easy for me.  I never really got to a point where I felt that I actually fit in.  Eventually two of the core group of three girls left the school, leaving the one alpha female on her own, but while we were able to form something of a friendship, I never really felt that I had made it there.  Even when a new girl came to the school, and she was considered quite desirable as a friend, the final decision of the council meeting was that she was only allowed to play with me - the one person who hadn’t been vying for her affections.  All that did, from my perspective, was to further ostracize me.  I had been put in a position where I had "won" what all the other girls were fighting for, simply by not fighting, and it made me the bad guy.  I was, by decree, the new girl’s only friend, so even the invitations to play with the other girls meant that I would be leaving the new girl alone and with no one to play with.  I often felt set up.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade the education that I got for a different one.  All the negatives that I went through served to make me a stronger person, but they also made me more confrontational and a lot more cold and closed off than I might have otherwise become.  In addition to becoming outspoken and, yes, abrasive, I had to put up walls to stop people from hurting me.

When I was 10, my family moved to the country.  My mother was working at the school at the time, so I was given a choice.  I could go to the public school in the area (a very *good* school district) or I could stay at my current school.  I chose to switch to the public middle school, loathed the experience and went back after a year and a half of being mostly a social pariah. 

Going back to my school at 12 and 13 proved to be a very good decision.  The older kids in the school would take a huge trip near the end of the year for the National Coalition of Alternative Community Schools conference.  The first one we went to was at The Farm in Summertown, TN.  The second was held at a Girl Scout camp out in Oregon.  The latter is notable because it was the conference where I met my future (ex-) husband and the father of my child.

And that’s as good a place as any to stop this post.  That alternative school only went up to 8th grade, so I would be heading to public school for high school.  But this is only about the school aspect of those years.  There was a lot more that went on that had nothing to do with my schooling…

We were living in my grandparents’ basement.  My brother and I were the first grandchildren, but my brother was the one who was favored.  Being 3, he was a whole lot cuter than I was, a sassy 7 year old.  It didn’t help that my aunt was only 6 years older than me and resented me to no end, the fact that I was there.  She tormented me and, since my grandparents didn’t know me and had coddled her her whole life, whenever anything happened between the two of us, she immediately ran into the house with a story about how I had wronged her.

The well-known family story example:

We had gone sledding.  I must have done *something* to piss her off (knowing me, probably it was something mouthy) and she got angry and shoved me down into the snow.  We were both already covered in snow from having gone sledding.  She then ran into the house and told my grandparents that I had shoved HER into the snow.  By the time I got inside, cold and now sore from having been pushed to the ground, I was in trouble and made to apologize by all the adults.

To this day, I cannot understand how anyone would believe that a slight 7 year old could push a much larger 13 year old down in the snow, but so it goes, and I was in trouble.  Being the wronged party, and with a keen sense of justice, I didn’t apologize right away and tried to make my case that she was lying and that *I* had been shoved and was in need of comfort.  I was sent downstairs until I was willing to suck it up and apologize, which eventually I did.  The next morning, my aunt came clean, admitted that she had, in fact, pushed me down and apologized to me in front of everyone.

Keep in mind that this is a single example of something that happened on a regular basis.  There would be a physical scuffle that was blamed on me.  I was forced to apologize and the next morning she would tell the truth.

To this day, 25+ years later, my aunt tells that story with glee.  To be honest, I’m still not particularly amused.  On any level.

I think that this was probably right around the time that I started to resent my brother.  He was little, he was cute, and he was no threat to the existing status quo.  Apparently, I was.

I had a few friends in the neighborhood, but not close friends.  My aunt was pretty possessive of the neighborhood kids, so I didn’t want to do much that might make her more bullying/resentful of me.  I had a few friends in the public school where I went to second grade, but I don’t really remember them very much.  I remember a deaf boy named Jerry who was the reason that our class learned very basic sign language, another boy I would encounter later in life when my brother became friends with his younger brother and a friend whose name was Marc - he made the "c" in his name into a PacMan shape.  In 1983, in second grade, that was pretty cool.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t all bad.  I remember a place in the woods where we would play and the backyard jungle gym.  I remember my grandmother standing under a pine tree conducting singing worms that lived there.  I got the chicken pox that winter for Christmas, and also a pair of roller skates, so I was allowed to skate in the house, so I could try out my present.

But everything had changed.  I became more reserved and a lot more shy.  Instead of talking to strangers wherever I went and encouraging my mother to make new friends on the bus, I turned inward.  I started to write poetry and lost myself in books.  This was a new world, and I wasn’t entirely sure where I fit into it.

You have to understand, I was blessed with a most excellent mother.  My mother is one of those people who does motherhood fully.  I asked her once about how she resolved her feminist tendencies with her stay-at-home motherhood and she told me that feminism is supposed to mean that women can do WHATEVER they want, including the traditional stay-at-home life raising children.

She’s really good at it.

My mother made sure that my young life and that of my brother was filled with magic and wonderment.  I didn’t just believe, but I knew of the existence of fairies and unicorns and real magic and "mythical" creatures.  I saw them with my own eyes.  I watched a unicorn prance around at a traveling sideshow.  I caught glimpses of fairyland creatures in wooded nooks and reflections of dew drops.  We saw old men in the knots of trees.

My mother taught us to bake, she made us play-dough, she took old crayons and shaved them down into pieces that we could melt between sheets of waxed paper.  We always had crafts around, we always had other kids around, we always had something to do.  We played in the rain and the mud, in the sand on the beach, in the woods, in the sunshine, everywhere.  We visited places that I often think must have existed only in my mind, but then I read something in a book or online, or I see a television show and the memories RUSH back and I realize that it was a real place, and, according to whoever’s stories I’m listening to, generally a place with some magic in it as well.

I don’t remember my early life before my brother was born.  He’s only 3 1/2 years younger than me, so that’s not really surprising.  I remember that once my brother was born, my mom didn’t have enough time to read to me as often as I wanted, so I went ahead and taught myself.  I remember thinking that my brother was really cute and that babies were fun…  until they weren’t anymore.

As a result, I don’t really remember anything until we moved to Portland, OR, though we had moved quite a bit even before then.

I know that some children have an imaginary friend, but I actually had an imaginary entourage.  I can vaguely remember 3 of them, but I’m pretty sure there were more.

My memories from that time are fragmented.  I’m sure that everyone’s are.

I remember my friends.  There were always friends, but most of them didn’t last very long.  We moved a lot, so I never got that security of knowing people for longer than a year or so, except for my parent’s friends.

There were always animals.  There was the cat, Leon, who came with a house we lived in.  There was the horse that scared me as badly as I scared him when he flicked me with his tail, making me scream, making him run off down the road.  There was the gaggle of geese that attacked me and my brother, but since my mom could only rescue one of us, she had to rescue the one who could barely toddle.  There were the empty half-pints of milk left strewn about the playground that my friend Melinda and I shook and heard rocks inside of….  but when I opened one, a slew of crickets came pouring out into my face.

To this day I still have problems with farm animals and bugs.

But what I remember most clearly is a rainy day.  My parents were busking at Saturday Market in Portland.  My mother’s best friend Amber had brought me with her to pick them up.  My mother had her coat  pulled tight around her neck and a wee kitten head poked up out of it.  That was Autumn, and she was my cat.

For every person we left behind every time we moved, new people came into our lives.  One who came in and out of our lives was a juggler and magician named Clinton who could juggle ANYTHING, and told me to bring any three toys and he would juggle them.  I was a smartass even then, and brought the Fisher Price house, Fisher Price castle and Fisher Price garage.  My mother was not amused and made me go get different toys.  I came back with a strangely weighted ball, a train (chugga chugga toot toot ding ding choo choo) and something else.  I can’t remember if he actually juggled them, but I like to think he did.

Some of these people were west coast icons.  I saw the bubble man on an episode of "On the Road" and videotaped it.  The song Spoonman was written about the man who taught me to play the spoons when I was 4 or 5.  There were teachers and musicians, travelers and buskers.  All of these people that affected my young life were fleeting, but most of them made an impact.

Those who didn’t make as much of an impact were my peers.  With a few exceptions, mainly the children of my parents’ friends, I don’t really remember them.  I don’t remember very many names or faces or even contexts.  Without listing them, I can think of 3 kids around my age, 4-5 kids older than me and 4 kids yonger than me.  Most of them I remember from the same place.  All those other early childhood friends are lost to me and, I’m sure, I am lost to them as well.

You may have noticed that my dad hasn’t really been mentioned in this part.  The problem is that I don’t really remember my dad from when I was that young.  He was there…  sort of.  He worked a lot.  When I remember my dad, it’s from when he was busking.  Either that or he’s in the background of a party or a dinner that we attended.  I really don’t remember him being especially involved back then, but it might just be that the times when he was there weren’t particularly memorable until we moved cross-country.

I was 6 or 7 when we moved from Oregon to New York.  Both sides of my family were on the East Coast at the time and my folks wanted to go back.  We packed everything we owned into our VW bus and the five of us (Mom, Dad, me, my brother and Autumn) were on our way.  Again, it’s fragmented.  I remember that my imaginary friends ran along outside of the car.  I would watch out the window as they tried to keep up.  Some of them were faster than the others, but by the time we reached New York, they had all fallen by the wayside.

I haven’t thought about this in a really long time.

I think that, on some level, I knew that I was leaving a large part of my childhood behind, and they were part of that.  One by one I let them go, not really realizing that they may have represented a lot of the magic and belief that I had become accustomed to.  I was leaving them behind, and with them, parts of my imagination, parts of my carefree freedom and credulity.  I remember it happening, but I didn’t realize what it meant until now.

I remember driving backwards down the highway because we had left Autumn at a rest stop.  She was waiting for us in the very spot where we had been parked.

I remember when the bus lost its lights and we had one cop car in front of us, one behind us and my dad holding a flashlight out the window.  I remember that the cops bought us breakfast at an all night diner and my dad pushing us on the swings that had great puddles underneath in the middle of the night.

I remember singing lots of songs while we drove for miles, for days, forever.

I remember a table, in detail.  They fed us chicken and dumplings.  It was the only time I ever had chicken and dumplings and kept thinking about "She’ll be coming ’round the mountain".  It was one of the songs we sang.  A lot.

I remember being excited to arrive at Grandma and Grandpa’s house, and to finally be done travelling for a while.

I remember that I didn’t know how much everything was going to change.

When its 3am and you haven’t been able to sleep.  When you’re stuck in your head and your thoughts are racing, and you keep coming back to the past…  specific things in the past, things that maybe you haven’t really talked about to very many people.  Maybe that means it’s time to get it all out.

It’s not all bad stuff, but those are the things that keep surfacing.

I think it’s time for me to write this stuff down and try to make sense of it.  I can’t promise full disclosure, because there are some things that I’m just not going to talk about and some things that aren’t mine to tell, but if it’s keeping me up and threatening to keep me from functioning properly, then maybe there’s a message in that.  A message that it all needs to be let out.

It all started out with so much promise.  All the makings of an exceptional story were in place.  I had the opening line and the events that would lead me to a story unlike anything that had been told before, but somewhere along the way I got lost.

I can pinpoint certain adventures that I could have had, but missed out on, for whatever reason, but those specific moments can’t explain how I got where I am today.  Everything in my life, until recently, were the stuff that grand adventures are made of.  Those missed opportunities can’t account for the life I lead now – mostly solitary, rather lonely, unremarkable.

I’ve made no lasting mark on the world.  I’ve had my moments of internet infamy and possibly, in dribs and drabs, my 15 minutes of so-called fame, but, at 33 years old, I can’t help but feel that I should have done more by now…  that I should have done something noteworthy.

I never wanted to be famous.  Fame is a sucker’s game and, for most, just leads to hardship.  Not that I’m afraid of hardship, I can’t be, having experienced so much so far.

My mother always told me that I could do anything I wanted with my life.  I believed her and my childhood dreams of the future were grandiose.  I would be the first female president of the United States; I would be an attorney trying cases before the supreme court; I would be an actress, making movies of great social and political import; I would be an activist.  I am none of those things today and I don’t think I would want any of them.

My early life was rich with adventures and characters, the like of which I will never experience again.  No, that’s not right.  My entire life until recently has been rich with adventures and characters.  Even a simple bus ride would lead me to an exceptional story, prompting cries of “Oh, come on, I don’t believe that.”  The better people get to know me, the less likely they are to disbelieve, since most of them have experienced some of the bizarre stories that accumulate in my life.

Recently, though, all that changed.  No matter where I went or what I did, nothing happened.  I know, for most people, this would be no big deal, no change to their daily routine, but for me, it’s disturbing.  Simple things like the erratic behavior of mostly even-tempered cats keeps me hopeful that maybe, just maybe, I haven’t lost my life in interesting times, but the longer I go without a good story, the more I worry about it.

I used to write all the time.  If it wasn’t the blog it was stories or poetry or songs or letters or something.  I don’t do that anymore.  I don’t have much to say.  I used to have adventures, but now I go to the same familiar places and do the same familiar things.  Almost to the point where I’m no longer interested in many of them.

It doesn’t feel like depression.  I’ve been there before and this isn’t the same thing.  I think that, somewhere along the line, I’ve become unremarkable.

To me, that’s the worst thing that could happen.  The idea that “you are unique, just like everyone else” is one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard.  Some people are amazing and create or explain or impart or somehow stand out in a crowd.  I know I used to be one of those people, but I don’t know if I am anymore.

Maybe it’s just a hiatus, but I work my job, day in and day out.  I do as much as I can, but there’s never enough work to really keep me busy.  I cook dinner for my teenage son when he’s home and we fight about stupid things that teenagers and their parents fight about.  I see movies with friends, I play poker from time to time, I visit my family, I take pills to manage my medical condition and visit doctors as needed.  That’s it.  That’s my life right there.

Now I know that I pledged to focus on my health this year, but somehow that’s come to mean that there’s nothing else going on.  My adventures are gone…  I don’t meet new people except those at medical facilities, which doesn’t count.

Something is missing.  The element of the unknown, perhaps, or maybe it’s something I’m doing wrong, or not doing anymore, or…  I don’t know.  I think, if I knew, it wouldn’t be missing anymore.

I spent most of last year and some of the previous years feeling broken, and I was.  I don’t feel like I can use that word anymore to describe how I feel.  That broken feeling is gone and this is something different.

I feel unremarkable.  And I don’t think I’ve ever felt this way before.  I’ve always felt like I was someone exceptional, someone who was a good person to know.  I was the person who almost always had a joke, who always had “a story to tell you”, who could find an adventure in anything at all.

I don’t know where all of that went, but right now it’s lost.

I wish I knew how to get it back.