My mother told me that when I was a preschooler I would hop out of bed as soon as it was light, throw on a pair of shorts and a shirt and head out into the back yard by myself to play. I could play for hours in the dirt. I loved my Tonka trucks. I loved the grass, the bugs, the leaves, the garden snails. I remember enjoying the taste and texture of dry mud chips dissolving in my mouth. I knew what everything tasted like: the metal railing on the steps, red bricks, sticks, dried snail trails. I played with the garden hose, being fascinated with water and its effects. I threw rocks, climbed trees, built roads with my Tonka bulldozer for my Matchbox cars. I remember stuffing dried weeds down the front of my shorts to see what that felt like. We had fruit trees: plum, orange, olive, pecan, walnut. If it had rained, there were earthworms and snails to play with. Reading over this I see that I have mentioned snails three times. Seems about right: they were fascinating friends. I just could never seem to get enough sensory input. It fed my mind.

My mind was the other source of fascination. What went on in my head was every bit as rich and colorful as what came in from the outside. In fact, everything had two forms. The physical form and qualities, associated processes and phases, the functional context of the thing: we’ll call that its physical reality. And within me, whether as a pattern of understanding in my mind, or in a spatial sense felt throughout my whole body, the multidimensional representation of the thing was every bit as real to me. And my imagination was so vivid I was prone to nightmares. The earliest memory I have of waking up screaming from a nightmare left a permanent imprint. I can still picture it perfectly. It was a still image, as if in a book. Imagine one of those pictures of a fetus, clearly viewed within its amniotic sack. Also, imagine a picture of the Virgin Mary, where she is framed in curved layers of color that bend around her shape. OK, but the fetus being viewed from the side has its head turned toward the viewer, staring at you with piercing eyes and a large-toothed sinister grin, as if to say, “I’ve got you now, haven’t I?” I am still horrified picturing it. But I also remember my mother coming into the room, holding me, saying, “It was only a nightmare.” In a future post I will tell the story of the Mummy Box, but it will have to wait.

When weather made the outdoors less hospitable, I would play with blocks, Legos, Barbie dolls, crayons, etc. I also spent hours browsing the encyclopedia volumes. I would get so absorbed in whatever I was doing I wouldn’t hear my name being called. I would be forcibly yanked out of my trance and hauled off to the back porch for a “pants-down spanking.” I’m sure all of my siblings experienced the ritual, but I couldn’t make it a week without getting one. My mom said that afterwards I would behave better for a while, but with each passing day I would drift more and more into my private world until they felt no choice but to give me another one. Of course sometimes it was for outright misbehavior. I remember being four years old sitting out on the front steps eating an orange. Suddenly the need to pee became urgent, and rather than going all the way into the house to the bathroom, I decided to drop my pants to my knees (there was no button or zipper) and relieve myself in the front hedge. Midway through I heard my dad’s car drive up. He must have been surprised to see my bare butt facing straight out at the street. I was just finishing as he walked up behind me. I turned to look at him as I reached for my pants but he said, “Leave ’em down.” I waddled like a penguin all the way around the side of the house to the back porch to get my spanking.

I am some kind of neuro-divergent. I found the spankings traumatic, especially for the way I never seemed to see them coming. I truly was absorbed in a private world that others couldn’t understand. For my part, I could never seem to grasp the social world that everyone else lived in, where they just seemed to know automatically what was going on, when dinner time was or what they were supposed to be doing. I was confused much of the time by all the goings on. I think I must have retreated to my own spaces as a way of coping. As I said in the previous post, it was a large and noisy family. I cherished my private time. I didn’t know until much later in life that my dad’s upbringing included regular beatings from his adoptive father. You know: slapping, punching, kicking, all that. In administering corporal punishments to me he was very methodical and self-controlled. Once my pants were down around my knees and the green switch was in his hand he would always say with sadness, “Now son, this is going to hurt me a lot more than it’s going to hurt you.” That never made any sense to me, given that I was the one screaming and crying, but I now understand it to mean that he was trying to do better than his own father, who simply lashed out in uncontrolled rage.

We lived a mere half a block from the elementary school, which had once been the high school before the town grew. It had an old wing, which was a classic multi-story brick building with white-framed windows like you see in all the movies. There was also a newer wing where all the classes were held, as the old wing was condemned and was eventually torn down after I had moved on to junior high school. But I do remember the summer I turned five my mother took me to the old wing for some kind of testing. My memory is not super-detailed, but I remember it was fun. They showed me shapes and had me solve some puzzles. Many years later my mom told me that some time after the tests she got a call from the school district office. They said something like, “We’re sorry, but we are a small town school system and therefore we don’t have any special programs to offer your son, but his IQ is unusually high, and you’re going to have to do the best you can to provide for his needs yourselves.” So my parents began buying educational games and resources. I remember going to hear the orchestra and watch ballet. There were lots of museums, day trips to San Francisco, art galleries. I think all of us kids really enjoyed it, but I was surprised to learn that it was a concerted effort on my behalf. It didn’t work. I struggled in school anyway. It turns out I was dyslexic, but I didn’t figure it out until I was nearly fifty.

I remember loving school from kindergarten through second grade. I was definitely the smartest kid in the class. I could be disruptive, because I had trouble staying with the program. My mind would be racing because, of course, my rich and colorful inner world went with me to class. Sometimes I would just keep talking when I was supposed to be reading or doing class work. I would disrupt the class by interrupting the teacher with a comment that would have the whole class bursting with laughter, including the teacher. My teachers loved me but I was also very frustrating to work with. Everything changed in third grade, but that story will have to wait until the next post.