Creativity & Laughter

Creativity is the buoy that keeps my head 

above water when life has me sputtering

through a surfeit of stuttering waves that

drag me down into a deepening despair.


Laughter is the sun that dries my wet

bones and the wind that deposits me

on the white sands of self-acceptance

even when I am my own worst enemy.

***

Introduction to “Flowers from the Dirt”

 

Introduction (55yo and counting)

 

Most memories I have of the small town I grew up in are drenched in melancholy.  I don't know how else to describe it - it was the seventies after all.  The Soviet Union continued to expand by invading other countries, pollution was pervasive, the Sexual Revolution was destroying families by way of “liberating” people, and in my insular faith community the Second Coming of Christ could happen at any moment with cataclysmic results.  What could a kid do with such heaviness?

From a relatively young age I had full run of this town with the help of a bicycle and the desire to experience something new or different.  To my diminutive self it was like a huge and elaborate labyrinth in Dungeons & Dragons that I could explore at my leisure as long as I was home by supper.  I traveled the main roads, side streets, and alleyways imagining any number of scenarios and embodying a variety of characters.  I was a little Walter Mitty before I'd ever read the short story by James Thurber.  But it shrunk year by year until at the age of sixteen we moved to a different town and my childhood memories began receding down the corridor of time.

 

***

Speaking of short stories, reading was another avenue of escape from a mundane small town existence that was available to me.  Reading books in secret places opened internal doors and helped temper the sadness, or at least distracted me from it.  They were portals to other worlds and my first forays were with books from my elementary school’s library like Rivets and Sprockets by Alexander Key about two little adventurous robots and The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron which involved kids building a rocket ship with the help of a peculiar inventor.

In junior high I was able to work for my dad in the summers which allowed me to come by some cash to start my own collection of Science Fiction and Fantasy books and bypass the library to some extent.  There were the Scholastic Book Club flyers in elementary school, of course, but things really opened up when I discovered an advertisement for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Club in one of my comic books sometime around the sixth grade. 

Here's how it worked – You got five books for one dollar (!) and then over the next year you were obligated to buy four at the regular price.  I would buy those four books as quick as my cash flow would allow, end my membership, and then rejoin to get the same deal and repeat. In this way I built up a sizable collection of hardback books which were my prized possessions that I proudly displayed on bookshelves in my bedroom.

I still have some of those early titles buried in boxes in my attic: The Dragon Riders of Pern, Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Dune and The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.  I loved their uniformity on the shelf and colorful spines.  They had such heft in the hand and a peculiar smell I loved. They made me feel smart and grownup somehow. Paperbacks were less desirable but had the advantage of being more portable and came by way of used bookstores that began doubling as VHS movie rental shops in the early eighties.

 

***

So, these were ways for my mind to escape the limitations of a small town by using my imagination while at the same time avoiding real world terrors that might prove too overwhelming.

In retrospect, the journey from then until now does seem rather epic in the literary sense, ie, full of unexpected plot twists, cliff hangers, and turnabouts.  This is all the more so when I look into the faces of my children.  They have brought me full circle as a father trying to help guide them through their early developmental stages.  They are creative and athletic in ways that resemble my own experiences as a kid, but neither of them particularly like to read.  This specific difference between us is a secret source of sadness in my heart.  It is a sadness that I have channeled into writing and reminiscing in my middle years to include self-publishing a fantastical collection of short stories - Tales of the Strange & Wondrous - which are stories that hearken back to my love of Science Fiction and Fantasy.

But in this collection I pivot to snippets of true tales written down in a ten year time span from my mid-forties to my mid-fifties which I guess is apropos considering we lived in that small town for a ten year period from the mid-seventies to the mid-eighties.  For full disclosure there are elements of fiction conservatively sprinkled in for coherence but always in service to the truth.  In various and sundry ways these stories from my childhood can be encapsulated in metaphor as Flowers from the Dirt.  And here is where you, the reader, start digging.

***

Arctic Station Mars (ASM)

 

The tree stands sentinel in Arctic Station Mars (ASM).

But it is not really a tree, is it?

It is an approximation of sorts to remind us of what we have left behind.

A soldier to stand watch over our memories as it were

for those who come and go even as I have remained.

***

It has been helpful to think of ASM as an extension of myself,

a burgeoning reality after a stationer created me

as a facsimile of himself in this desolate place.

***

He was one of the more introspective ones 

finding sustenance in silence and solitude

until the memory of trees drove him mad and he opened the locks.

***

They are buried in a pattern that resembles the Jerusalem Cross

for no other reason than I find symmetry appealing 

(and sense there is power beyond my understanding in symbols).

The tree stands sentinel in Arctic Station Mars (ASM).

But it is not really a tree, is it?

“Spiderman, Spiderman…”

Of all the superheroes for a kid to become obsessed with in the 70’s it is no surprise that Spiderman would be the one for me.  He was just a kid after all, and I was just a kid.

I remember being sick on a couch at my aunt’s house in Anderson, Indiana when my mom was in the hospital giving birth to my younger sister.  I was six years old and in this town and on this particular TV set I could watch reruns of a Spiderman cartoon series that wasn’t available in my hometown.  Anderson was much closer to Indianapolis with its TV stations sending out radio waves.  This was a time before cable, before satellite TV, and before the internet when small towns far from big cities were at a disadvantage even with antennas secured to chimneys hungry for signal.  I enjoyed these cartoons, yet there was an aspect of it that was like the proverbial fly in the ointment.  The detail of drawing was not equivalent to the comic books such that Spidey’s chest did not have webbing drawn on it.  This gave him an unfinished look that bugged me.  It was as if Superman was missing his cape or Batman his pointy ears.

Christmas a few years later was connected to this phenomenon in an oblique way.  Each year we spent Christmas Eve and Christmas morning at my paternal grandparent’s farmhouse in northern Indiana because we lived the farthest away in southern Indiana.  My dad had three brothers and a sister who would all come with their kids filling the house with cousins, some of whom crashed out over night with us on couches and on the floor.  All the presents that were brought to bear for the celebration were stacked along the back wall of the guest bedroom to the point they nearly reached the ceiling!  I would steal glimpses into that room just to take in that glorious sight even though  kids were instructed to stay out of there and the door was to remain closed.  

I must have been at least seven or eight that year and when the time came to open presents I unwrapped a pair of Spiderman Underoos.  These were new on the market and advertised as “underwear that’s fun to wear”.  I was so excited about having a shirt and matching underwear that included the full chest emblem of the Spidey suit, webs and all.  In my mind it was a kind of a mini-costume and because it would take so long to get back around to opening my next present I exited the room to try it on.  The mirror confirmed that I looked very cool and I returned to the living room wading through the crowd of relatives back to my spot to sit down amongst the other kids.  But as I did so it got kind of quiet and I noticed I was getting odd looks from the adults in the room which made for a very awkward situation as something was definitely wrong but I didn’t know what.  Finally my mom came over and bent down to tell me I needed to go put on some pants.  In retrospect, I was at an age where wearing underwear in public as it were had become problematic.  A year or two prior to that no one would have probably batted an eye at a cute little guy sporting his Underoos.  A year or two later than that and I would have known better.  As it stood, it was a very embarrassing moment that switched from being very cool to being very uncool very quickly.

But that shirt became the central piece around which I was able to build my Spiderman suit that coming summer.  I had a knit Spiderman ski mask for my head but that left having to cover my arms, legs, and hands in order to have a full suit.  I use a long-sleeved blue shirt under the Underoos t-shirt and blue pants that weren’t jeans but also not slacks per se (fashion for young and old during the 70’s had a wide latitude for out-there clothes).   I tucked the two shirts snuggly into the pants and had some thin gloves likely borrowed from my parents.  The last bit was some black knee high rubber rain boots that were my older sister’s and completed the “suit”.  The boots were more like something you’d see with a Batman-type suit, but I couldn’t just wear tennis shoes.  It was the best I could do with what I had.  It was a ridiculous getup by any measure with a mismatch of elements needed to cover me from head to toe, but it was “complete” and that was important to create the illusion in my young mind even if I was burning hot in it.

From there I climbed up onto our barn by balancing on the second level balcony bannister with one leg and throwing the other leg around the edge of the roof.  It was a potentially dangerous maneuver but necessary to fulfill my role as Spiderman.  Once I got onto the roof I scampered around on all fours like I’d seen Spidey do in my comics and act like I was shooting webs.  While I was up there I came up with a backstory that my real name was Peter Parker but I’d been adopted by my current family who changed my name.  I half-convinced a younger neighbor boy of this story and “proved it” by climbing up onto the roof of his elevated playhouse in his back yard in convincing fashion (the same boy who later became my ticket to Karate classes).

Truth-be-told I was just a natural climber and loved climbing trees mostly, but also large rocks or whatever was available to scale for that matter and I had no fear in doing so.  An example of this would be when I was four years old and our church had just let out.  I somehow got out ahead of the crowd and made my way to the telephone pole that sat at the corner of an intersection in front of the church entrance.  It had metal L-shaped footholds that alternated up the pole for maintenance use.  I was able to get ahold of the lowest one and pull myself up to grab the second one.  Then it was off to the races.  I was about halfway up when someone found my mom and she ran out to coax me down.  She appeared concerned and her words were so kind as she tried to convince me to come down slowly and assured me I was not in trouble.  Looking down on her from that great height I took pity on her, but I should have known it was a ploy because she was routinely irritated with me and my day to day hijinks.  When I was safely back down we went home and I am sure she “tanned my hide” as spankings were sometimes called back then.  

And speaking of being four years old, my son had a Spiderman costume at that age but geez-o-pete it looked so much better than mine!  It was comic book-accurate and had stitched-in padded muscles for goodness’ sake!  He would jump from the couch to the coffee table and then onto the floor straight into a forward roll popping up to shoot his imaginary webs making what he imagined were web-shooting sounds.  I was into photography at the time and using Photoshop to create fantastical images, though the process could take hours back then when now they only take a minute or two with an iPhone.  I had him get into a Spidey crouch on the back corner of the couch while I laid behind it on the floor below him to take the picture and then put in a cityscape around him on my computer.  We would make videos as well and come up with scenes to include one where I was the villain “Robot Arm” running after him with a toy robot arm that would clack open and shut repeatedly to try and snag him.  From the camera’s perspective all you could see was the plastic arm chasing him until finally snatching off his mask at which time he would turn and exclaim, “Oh no!  You see my face!”

As a kind of epilogue to these experiences I must add an account of that fateful day when my tree climbing days came to a close.  I was probably in my mid-twenties and helping my parents around their house.  They had a large tree in their backyard that has since been cut down.  I got it into my head that I would climb it for old time’s sake when nobody else was around.  In my younger years I was short and skinny which made it ideal to maneuver up and through trees like a gibbon.  In my mind I was still that light and agile climber who was unafraid to scale the tallest trees and sway back and forth twenty to thirty feet above the ground.  I got up to about twelve feet off the ground when the branch I stepped on snapped clean from the tree.  I had nothing to hold onto in that moment and so I pushed away from the tree as I fell backwards and found myself in space looking at the clear blue sky above.  My feet hit first but at an angle so that I twisted my ankle and then my back slammed into the grass.  I laid there stunned trying to understand what had just happened.  I had never in my whole life fallen out of a tree as I was a supremely confident climber.  Yet, there I lay humbled by life and the fleeting dream of being a secret Peter Parker who “does whatever a spider can”.

***