Here’s the thing. I spent the majority of my childhood as an out and out recluse. I’m not kidding. And in some ways I still am, except I’m living in a normalized setting. A complete oddball. I'll bet you know the type. The reason I demand the title of "recluse" is because I literally spent time in hiding -- in closets, under tables, outside stores, and even in my head. The list goes on and on.
I am forever thankful that my mother spared me the embarrassment of letting me know that she could hear me talking to myself on the walk home from school, even though I tirelessly remonstrated her: “Walk ahead and don't look back." Or when she turned a blind eye when I barricaded the slide-in door of the apartment’s front closet--a slightly darkened, woodsy swathe of coat tails, inanimate rectangular objects I knew to be shoes through a wafting pungent, leather scent. This where I stole and warehoused, vole-like, tiny preciouses from around the house. My father would be rummaging around the three bedrooms, seeking say, a dashing, raven blue tie, but my mother knew exactly where to locate it. Silly adults. Children are the original hoarders.
In Matthew 19:14, Jesus cries out, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” Innocence is forced into hermitage, when the only other option is the relinquishment of such original freedom, the forced "growing up." But why?
Childhood yields a sort of certainty that woefully, most adults have lost. Children create imaginary friends, make up fantastic games, and are true thinkers dwelling outside the box. It's almost like adulthood has evolved all wrong. We need to pack up and head back across the desert, Israelite-fashion, perhaps pursuing Peter Pan and the Lost Boys.
The innocence of childhood is a gift, a free form of warmed, molding dough that slips in and out of one’s hands, breathing sweet puppy breath all over. Easily expressed sans outside inclination, yet, exceedingly responsive to that same stimuli.
It's the little things in life that form us. Sticky tape and gorilla glue.
Thinking back, I’m trying to remember if I ever felt endangered. Classic fight or flight. Was the subconscious bent on hard-wiring me against the big bad wolf in a big bad world? I don't think so. In any event, I've never been much of a "flight" person. It seems the Irish "fight" has corrupted my nature: I graduated infancy and immediately lurched in the world of adults. My father says, tall tale style, that I came out of the womb screaming, kicking, fighting. I was the plucky first born to a mother who willingly transplanted her roots into the soil of a grand city, whisked away by passion and dreams, which my grandfather so lovingly referred to as "that downstate sinkhole," or what many know as the Big Apple. I was a trusted confidant and loyal successor at age three and a half.
Apparently, on one rather late, snowy December 12, I asked my red headed dam,
“What’s today?”
“It’s December 12.”
“What! December 12? And we still don’t have a Christmas tree?”
My indignant outrage must have had such pull that we found ourselves on our apartment street corner within the half hour purchasing a sappily fragrant spruce from Mr. Zingone on Columbus Avenue. I just Yelped the old store, and I am pleased to announce that, yes, Zingone Brothers still stands, recognizable via storefront peeking out like a little old lady under a patchwork quilt, imported apples and oranges and ripe broccoli sprouting at her elbows. A NYC original robed in the finest of all plastic, durable blue awnings there ever was, beneath a blocky, abrasively white message -- -although sexy in a way only a New Yorker can appreciate -- “WE DELIVER” inscribed fringe.
Needless to say they did not deliver up the street, and if you were around that day, perhaps walking a dog or falling and dropping all your groceries as you slipped on sleet, you may have seen a wild Celt hauling a Christmas tree on her back storming up 83rd towards Central Park West, her offspring trailing behind, as duty called. So, yes, a fighter I was made to be.
The mind is a portable pot with which to store many a mindful, proclivitous, kleptical idea one may want to lug about, you know, for safe keeping. A brain-bound journal, your intellect treats an idea like a cellar threats docile wine, coddling, coxing--with the ability to hasten ripening, the attractiveness of age.
We harken the very artificiality we decry in phraseology, “I am an original,” we cry, like the young singer Simon Cowell heralded as the "next Taylor Swift." The fight for origin is within everyone, yet retained by the few.
When I think on what in the hell I am going to do, or places I will go when I relinquish the lovely title “student,” I think I'll plan on having fun. Fun with others, ideas, places. The exploration of back pocketed ideas bottled up in the recesses of the mind, formerly, adoringly labeled, "save for later," in the recesses. An improvised marriage by cultivated by a similarly improvised mind-space we mould into reality. A child-like appreciation of the globe's cornucopia.
Like the apartment coat closet, where I used to disappear for what seemed like days. Like Indiana Jones and his caverns. Give me back my childhood mind, so that I may journey, not retreat, into the unknown. Reclusiveness is not all semantics dresses it up to be.
