1985

I was born in 1979.  Though I was hardly reared on television, Sesame Street had a tremendous impact upon my sensibilities.  I longed for the urban landscape from a young age; I liked the idea of proximity, apartment living, a deli on the corner.  My early years were, in fact, rather suburban.  We lived with my grandparents on Clearview Road.  There were houses with yards lining both sides of the street.  It wasn't the cul de sac'ed utopia that one imagines, it was still wild around the edges.  


Our house was at the end of the row, and abutted wooded acreage that I thought of as a Sendackian landscape, with wild osage orange trees and weeds as tall as me.  This lot, where I imagined the wild things to be, was a never ending source of fear, apprehension and illicit excitement.  I loved exploring it but never alone; though, in truth, the older neighborhood boys who I would tag along with should have been more feared than the limpid creek and mud, the trees and brush.  


My spacial sensitivity probably had something to do with what I picked up on in those woods.  I, at a tender age, sensed that this parcel of land was a place that people came to escape into, to hide themselves or their activities.  I found relics of this, and these artifacts seemed at once wrong and enthralling.  A woman's bra, that I wouldn't dare touch with my hands but would place on the surface of the water with a stick, and swirl around in the water, watching the lace float.  I found the bra, and when I was done playing with it, I hid it by flinging it as far into the trees as I could with my stick.  I didn't want the boys to find it.  It was private, belonging first to the woman who lost it and then to me.  When I was done playing, it was mine to discard this time.


As were the packs of cigarettes that I would find, or, my big one-time score- a cassette tape of Rush.  This was Rush circa their synth period, it's 1985, not the prog rock Rush.  I knew, from experience, that if you found something really good, it was best to keep it to yourself.  I didn't like to share my bounty so I slipped the tape into my pocket and made an excuse to run home.  I had a cassette deck.  It had come as a gift for Christmas one year, including several books and corresponding tapes, a sort of reading practice.  I quickly figured out how to manipulate the sounds on the tapes by pressing two buttons at once or by crimping the tape.  This is how my mother happened to come upon her six year old listening to Rush, backwards.  Least of all did I want to share my treasure with her, she had the power of seizure.  I begged her to let me keep it and eventually she relented.    


Danger was something that I was fortunate enough to be able to court on my own at a young age.  Of course, this didn't always work out well for me...I can tell you some other time about playing hide and go seek in an abandoned factory, and all of the stitches that I didn't get.  But knowing that something was dangerous, poisonous, or somehow sinister was a gateway for my curiosity, imagination and courage.  


The largest osage tree grew right next to the fence in my back yard, so large and heavy with fruit that the branches would bow low, over the fence and into my grasp.  This is how I leaned a few things; osage oranges are not in fact, real oranges hiding inside of ugly green skins.  The trees have long, spiky thorns that are coated in a powder that makes them sting extra bad if you get one under your skin.  The white juice that looks like milk does not taste like milk and if you ingest it, adults will give you ipecac syrup and tell you to go outside and throw up in the lawn until you can't throw up anymore.  But long after I leaned these things, the osage oranges still had allure to me.  Just as picking the thorns off of my grandmother's rose bushes did, or attempting to run my small fingers in between row of thorns on my mother's cactus plants.  I would bleed and learn the lesson, but in time, find myself tempting fate once again.