My Struggle: Time and Gummi Bears

The dusty path where I’d walked as a child in a camp for children. The dusty path where my mother says I fell in love with a college aged camp counselor on my first day, though I was just scared. The dusty path that lead away from Caper Acres, the park where I’d been going since I was a child, with the slide so high that it was reminiscent of a high dive at the pool. The humpty dumpty who sits on the wall at Caper Acres, watching over the kid’s in the sand box, perched precariously as humpty always is. The row of interlocking tunnels where you’d crawl into strange kids, laughing, feeling claustrophobic, reaching and hoping to get back to the light, the tunnels which smelled musty and maybe of urine; the caverns where everyone in our city must have crawled as children.

Just off the dusty path, lined by live oaks, an understory of vines that stretch almost as high as the trees themselves. The light spills through the trees, flickering on the water like flecks of gold, like minnows, like dimes spun out across the water. Along the stream, where, as a child, I’d skipped rocks from the small sandy berms towards beer cans and soda cans, trapped in the underbrush across the water, near the water where my sister and I, or a friend and I, would run during baseball games, or after school, to skip stones, to slip our toes in the water, to peer at small fish, to pass the time of our childhood. Down beyond the rope swing hung from an old snag tree, where older kids would sometimes gather to fling themselves out across the water from the street level and drop into the creek. 

The light that dances on the leaves of the trees that confers on this alcove, on this small glade, on this patch of earth, a kind of transcendent beauty. 

She and I were in Bidwell Park, a 2,250 acre piece of land, deeded to the city in 1905, by amateur botanist and wife of the cities founder, Annie Bidwell. Like much of the useful and interesting public land in this country the decision to keep it as public use was made more than a century ago. The land has been carved up now, moved into private hands or as part of the Bureau of Land Management or settled by cattle ranchers in the west. It’s hard to imagine walking anywhere without encountering a sign that tells you where you should and shouldn’t be. It’s hard to imagine this country as it must have been before the native peoples were systematically disenfranchised and shipped off to reservations, but here we are. 

The summer heat in Chico is scorching and so we’ve come here down by the water and near the shade of the trees that thank God were left up in this strip of valley where the heat collects in summer like cans on a river bank, like flies on refuse, like anything. She and I have known each other for almost two years now. I met her one afternoon during my sophomore year while walking past the large, quasi-native American inspired structure, though inverted, with solid stone on the outside, and a long row of windows on both levels, such that you could look out over the campus, that was a central meeting place for students in Clark Hall, where I lived the first two years. The couches inside the lower level were a forest green, interspersed with white dots that line the buttons used to secure down the covers. 

There was a television on the lower level, the only place where you could watch things in the year 1998, before computers and Netflix and internet streaming or pirating had become a part of the college experience. In short, there was only one place you could go to watch a Michigan football game, and you had to stake out your place early, hope no one else was in there watching something inane, though watching anything during your college years is inane as it’s the one and only time you’ll be surrounded by your best friends with only a modicum of responsibility, academically, financially, and socially, which makes it a kind of utopia though most people don’t realize it at the time, worrying as they are about that next test or paper or quiz or speech that’s due, treating the time as if it were a slog. Though in that way it can’t be much different than an old folk’s home, or an office where everyone is going through a mid-life crisis and getting a divorce, you talk about the things you have in common and everyone is taking tests, writing papers, and passing the time in a way that is similar to yours. 

The lower level of the building was smaller than the top, which hung over top like a Japanese pagoda, which meant that not only were you exiling yourself to the television, you were also doing it in a perpetual kind of darkness that seems almost unattainable in a place like Santa Barbara, CA, a Mediterranean climate reminiscent of Paradise where the sun shines for roughly 11 months out of the year. A small college town, tucked between the mountains and the ocean. 

The gist of the thing was, or at least the gist for me was that while I was sitting in the lounge, watching a Michigan football game or some other sporting event I was also acutely aware of the life I was missing outside. A fact made more obvious by the long pane of windows that stretched around the entire structure, reminding you that out there people were probably surfing, or laughing, or going to play volleyball, while you were sitting on a couch in the dark by yourself watching a football game involving a bunch of people you didn’t know. But you could also look out the window, and see if the people passing by were the sort of people that you’d want to run out and catch, and by this I mean either my friends or some attractive girl. However, you couldn’t always see in the lower level of the lounge, which meant that you were walking in to the room blind. It was never fun to walk blind into the room and sometimes I’d try to peer in, to see who was sitting in there though it was almost always a vague shape rather than a person, which meant all that I could determine is that an amorphous blob had decided to watch television on the couch. 

I walked up the four stone steps and into the lounge. I walked into the lounge that Tuesday afternoon to see if anything was on. She was sitting on the couch opposite me, seven or so feet away. The television was hanging off the wall at a forty five degree angle, and the couches were positioned beneath it horizontally, which meant that you could never really get a proper look at the screen. Outside, insects were thrumming and the early morning fog had burned off into a glorious afternoon. Pine trees and spruce with interlocking limbs lined the dark paved paths that wound through the campus. 

She was, rather obscurely, watching Gummi Bears. I’d grown up watching Gummi Bears almost every afternoon of my childhood, which may have only been two to three years, since time is distended in childhood and summers can seem to last forever. Starting in fourth grade I attended a new school, often walking home by myself, retrieving the key from under the mat and spending the next hour or so waiting for one of my older siblings to get home. I almost always waited on the floor, pushing one of our large rectangular brown pillows in front of the television, lying down with my head resting comfortably against the pillow and watching television. 

The Disney afternoon was then at its zenith in 1990, starting with Gummi Bears and then leading straight in to Duck Tales. I remember an afternoon after I’d come home and eaten some graham crackers and poured cinnamon sugar onto my tongue, which was how I started every afternoon that I came home. The sun was shining in the triptych of windows in the kitchen, and I was sitting at the kitchen table, waiting to see if I needed anything else to eat, and I started wondering about adductions, about the people who might come in to the house and take me away. I didn’t get any further than the abduction itself, but I was starting to get worried about the front door, wondering if the sound I was hearing was someone trying to get into our house. Logically, it couldn’t be, but why was I hearing the slight sound of something tapping? 

I rushed towards the door with my heart beating in my chest. Though maybe the noise had been coming from the garage door, and where were the cats? Where had they gotten off to? Thank God for the cats. I went back into the living room and peered into my brother’s room around a corner, hoping that if I saw someone I’d have time to run out the front door. But the door was locked and while I was fumbling with the lock the person would have time to snatch me up. So after I’d checked the room from around the corner I quickly unlocked the front door hoping that they didn’t come around the other side of the hallway in the meantime, sprinting past the photographs that lined the wall, rounding the kitchen floor, skirting round on the linoleum and turning the corner into the living room. No one was there. 

I remembered then that my brother had a baseball bat, and so I went into his room, sneaked behind the treasure chest and grabbed the wooden bat. I was a very good pitcher and a passable hitter, largely because I was afraid that I’d be hit by the ball when I was hitting, and so I swung at everything late because my first determination was always whether I was going to get hit or not, followed by the second determination, which was supposed to be your first in baseball, which was a decision about whether the pitch was a strike and what exactly you were going to do about that. I had one very good year at the plate where I constantly laced things into right field, but it was short-lived, and I quit baseball soon thereafter. 

I moved into our living room and sat in one of the two large chairs, a sort of brownish black, covered in a faux leather, chairs in which the arms and back fused into one large piece with a slight curvature such that it was like being cupped in the hand of some very benevolent being. To my left was the hearth and the fire place. I’d thought about getting some of the tools from the fireplace to fend of the attackers. The television was sitting on a large black chest, with a tan covering lying on top of the chest and beneath the television. To my right was the couch, and beyond it the loom, which I never saw my mother use, but which was always strung out, looking vaguely reminiscent of a harp and which conjured a sort of aesthetic feeling that I can’t exactly place. In short, I liked the loom and felt that it conveyed something mysterious that made its presence worthwhile. Beyond that was a heavy wooden book shelf, with a record player set in the middle and a series of very small houses of the sort that you could get and paint, set upon it, and a few small wooden lambs, and the wooden hull and slight riggings of what was to be Noah’s ark. 

Often, when people recall childhood it is with a sense of wonder and nostalgia for something lost. What they forget, or at least what I remember, is the occasional terror, the strangeness of having boundaries that are circumscribed for you. Suddenly, you become a teenager, at what moment exactly, who knows? But the boundaries begin to dissolve one by one, but when you are a child imagining yourself beyond the boundaries is terrifying. And the imagination is so active because the boundaries presence means the rest of the world could be anything. Certainly one of the things we are saying as an adult when we reflect back on childhood is that so many things are new and exciting, that we had something to look forward to, a trip to the zoo, a baseball game, a candy at the end of the day, the long mornings of waiting until a friend came by our house. Our lives had a kind of meaning and happiness that begins to dissolve as we age, come to understand routines, responsibilities, the lines that demarcate the lives that we are living from the ones that we might have live or could possibly be living, lines that have always existed, but which only come into greater and greater detail, we can only have been exactly who we are. 

I sat in the chair with the front door open, convinced that if someone came in the house it was going to be from the back, and so I’d have time to run out the front door. The white enamel door was open, and I could see just outside, the warm afternoon sun, lying on bits of sun, shaded by the rhododendron in the corner, held off by the pillars and roof over the small and non-descript porch. The afternoon was filled with light, and I’d always been terrified of the dark, from a very young age. And yet there I was, trying to watch another episode of Gummi Bears, baseball bat held in hand, waiting for someone to come.