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.