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.

 

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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.

 

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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.

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