Early Years

Did I ever tell you about the time I ……….

Yes, you did, now be quiet and eat your prunes.

We are only allotted one childhood and we're too busy living it to take notes. It is a sort of hood as we live those years part in wonder and part in the fog of hurts and bewilderment. All that’s left are a few shards which we spend the rest of our lives polishing and editing till we can’t tell what really happened from what might have happened.

Our story becomes our told narrative, our myth, our truth. We are the star of our movie, alternating between victim and hero, sometimes bystander or witness. I might say everything wrong with me is my older brother’s fault. He got the mumps one Saturday and couldn’t take me to the serial when the Lone Ranger promised to take off his mask.

I never did see the cowboy’s face but had to assume his several orifices were well centered like the rest of us. Otherwise, Tonto would have left many Saturdays ago. I was probably about four or five years old.  However, the disappointment may have seeded my imagination. Some of us wear a mask our whole lives guarding our true selves as if being revealed as vulnerable is too high an emotional price.

Stuff happens early on and we either make something out of it, let it pass or allow it to fester. Growing up is hard enough without feeling deprived. I felt I was deprived of a deprived childhood. My household didn’t align with the sitcoms but there was no murder or mayhem.  I was closer to Tom Sawyer than Huck Finn with no Mississippi to raft down; only some popsicle sticks to watch sailing along to the sewer.

There must have been a moment when my infantile brain had to sort out fantasy from reality. Comic books were not of the same order as Life Magazine. Knowing the difference is the beginning of critical thinking. (I can look back and report I was a multi-millionaire at age six when I owned the first Superman comic book. Clearly I was not a visionary) Ironic how fabulists have captured so many minds in today's American landscape. Lies, maliciously spread, require an audience of stupendous gullibility or arrested development. Clark Kent would never had put up with this.

We got our cues from images issuing out of the radio. Words became pictures. Those visuals were reinforced on the big screen. Early on, I knew the good guys from the bad guys by a mustache alone. Did I appreciate that the barroom brawl in Westerns was a choreographed male ballet? Of course not. But I knew that most men wore tuxedos and sailors were great dancers.  I also knew I could never be Cary Grant, suave and debonair. At best I might get the second banana but more likely a face in the crowd.

Amazing how I reconciled the ways of film with my mostly unremarkable life. One of my earliest movie memories was One Million B.C. (1940). After watching Victor Mature do battle with dinosaurs, it’s a wonder I got home in one piece dodging the saber-tooth tigers in my head. One has to wrestle with one’s demons.

Scared as I was of the unknown, I was drawn to it. The Maltese Falcon turned out to be a hollow piece of bric-a-brac but the hunt was what drove the cast on. Obsession defies logic. Of course, seeking is a noble state but finding is even better, particularly when it is right in front of you all the time.

Hollywood was a dream factory projected largely by a handful of Jewish immigrants. This idealized world of studio heads and directors became the American dream. It fit. Even as a child I soon learned it was aspirational or to put it another way, a sanitized fable. That message came through on a subconscious level. Sorting out the essence from the tale takes a lifetime. There are riches beyond the literal. Everything warrants another look from our album of glories and wounds. And all this time I was becoming whom I would be.

Now let me tell you about the time I…………