On Childhood

If you've never had a person suggest that they'd like to read your writing perhaps this post won't make any sense to you. However, we were all young once upon a time, and perhaps even remember bringing home a picture from school. My pictures were devoid of any artistic talent, and yet, I wanted the same approval that other kids garnered when they skillfully drew with a variety of rulers, and colored pencils that included colors like cobalt blue that I didn't even know existed, or rather, thought of as just blue. Those same children, tongues pressed to their cheek or slightly exposed above the white ridge of their teeth, focused, intent. The light coming through the small rectangular windows in squares. The windows themselves crisscrossed by black lines that to this day remain inexplicable. And even at that age I already knew that I was not gifted. That the pen was not an extension of my mind. That it, the pen, was something that would betray my dreams rather than fulfill them, such that when I drew a small blue river, with blue willows along the side, and blue birds in the sky, and it was not awful, my mother hung it in our kitchen for two years. She perhaps realizing that this was as great as my artistic achievements were to get.

The smell of coffee on my kindergarten teacher's breath overpowering, and the pen not obeying in the sort of fashion that would suggest the beauty of order, linearity. The desks are the type that can be lifted up, so that each child can keep an eraser, and a ruler, and some pieces of paper in it for weeks on end. The other children all have the big pink erasers that they apply liberally and neatly to any error, blowing the bits of lead off onto the great white expanse of floor. Myself, not in possession of the big erase, but constantly losing pencils, and being left with one of those eraser less types that scrape and eventually tear the page when applied with any force. The mistakes themselves occurring at such a frequent rate that the stress of the pencil scraping through the paper is almost too much to stand. And, the paper itself once ripped is replaced by yet another sheet, and we haven't learned yet about the environment and how we should stop wasting things like paper and maybe I was some sort of martyr for holding on to that old pencil.

And at recess the other kids gathering around the large play area, filled with gravel, which at the time, was considered to be the safest thing, little stones that slightly larger children would fling themselves into from black swings with silver chains, when the ladies, mostly Asian, who watched over us would turn their heads, the pebbles getting lodged in the tender skin right in the middle of the hand. And me, knowing that some sort of social hierarchy exists that is related to the scissors and the writing of names in good solid block handwriting, and pink erasers, and cool pencils, of a variety of colors, not just the standard old no. 2 sans eraser that I'm using.

Some of the kids in the class get up often to sharpen their pencil, and you are aware by the stare that the teacher gives them, the herding type motion of her arms as she pushes them back into their seat that it annoys her. And so, you sit, with those windows of light, small rectangles, seeming like miles away. And why were the windows so high in those old classrooms? And even though your pencil has been worn away and you're just writing with the nub, barely able to withstand the shiver that using that small nub on the paper creates in your spine, you don't get up.

This being the first of what's to become a litany of failures, though that particularly verbiage was certainly not available. The teacher's hair, short and severe, her last name Marx, like the German. She drives a small sports car and drinks copious amounts of coffee, and has a son of her own, though it's hard to imagine. Your glasses are affixed firmly to your forehead, the light now creating a slight glare to coming up off them, the glasses, during math time, which really just amounts to kids sitting around with a bunch of beans, practicing taking them away and then putting them back. The math itself, fairly easy, but the act of breaking through that fourth wall, the wall that exists between the inner and the outer self, the public and the private, nearly impossible to break down, so that you sit quietly while other children move beans and gain little pats on the head from various student aids, your hands nearly shaking under the table. And you are happy, in a way, to be viewing the world through those big round lenses, gaining just a little bit of extra space from all that was new.

Fiction (Cont).

We were students at City College, taking a sailing class. I was, in short, not exactly a natural in the sailing department. I proposed to Katie, early on, that we ascended to land from the primordial depths with good reason. She found my nautical ineptitude alluring. The teacher, Mr. Gifford, took to calling me Gilligan. Affectionate, no doubt. Purest of motives. Well, the Skipper, and yes, I realize that I’m calling him that even now as a defense mechanism, gave me the most menial tasks on the boat due to my astounding incompetence. “Help us shove off if you can handle it Gilligan,” he’d yell. You know, the type of psychologically damaging thing that’s said sometimes with the asinine assumption that people have thick skin. I remember everything. I’m like a female elephant.

The morning that we met, and from which I later drew an intense connection, was clear and warm. The sky was cloudless, waves light, and the beach flat and appealing. Unfortunately, I was struck ill due to an excessive bout of under-aged drinking that I’d engaged in the prior evening. Thus, while the Skipper explained the intricacies of tacking to a rapt crowd, I bent at the railing barely holding in my lunch. When he’d concluded his lecture, the Skipper walked past and said, “You look a little green around the gills Gilligan.” Mr. Gifford, the Skipper more properly, had a large white mustache, and the sort of eyebrows that grew eyebrows out of them. You could imagine a whole ecosystem developing in the midst of them, almost tide pool esque. I have no doubt that he singled me out for ridicule because Katie—unquestionably the most attractive girl in the class, stood next to me and was considering my plight with the sort of consternation that seems more readily available to the fairer sex. It’s a proclivity in older men, this compulsory need to diminish the younger men who are all boffing the girls their wives once were.