On Childhood

Memories are odd things. Our earliest ones may or not have even happened, but in our mind, they did, so their effect remains.

My earliest memory is being at the pediatrician, as the doctor slid a scalpel beneath a fingernail on my left hand.

I was two(ish). I’d been in daycare, and this is in no way meant to indicate that daycare is the root of all lasting childhood miseries. I aggravated another little girl — or didn’t; both our motivations remain murky — and she bit the tip of my middle finger.

Her name was Rachel.

Human mouths are supposed to be singularly disgusting places, and a toddler’s must rank high on the list. I’m sure I wailed about the injustice of being bitten, but I don’t remember it. I don’t remember how long it took to be taken to the doctor, or what my fingernail must have resembled by then. (I can hazard a guess, based on its permanent state: ‘crumpled’ doesn’t quite cover it. The nail does grow at the bottom, a little. Enough to need occasional clipping, but has no actual cuticle line and seems to fade into skin at the top. I can press on it like skin. It’s a third the size of my other fingernails. Nail salons have no clue what to do with it and inevitably require a hushed group conference amongst the manicurists. No, I no longer get my nails done.)

I do remember the sheer, overwhelming agony of having my own pediatrician slide the scalpel beneath the nail, flip it up backward, and in one swift swipe, scrape out the infection beneath.

Gods, the betrayal. I’d like to think two-year-old me pitched a tantrum channeled direct from the Salem Witch Trials at the sight of that pediatrician again, but I don’t remember anything else. I’ll have faith in myself that I did.

First memory: pain.

Second memory: finally being tall enough to see over the bathroom counter to my own reflection, without being held.

Pain. Vanity. Take from that what you will.

~~~

When I was eighteen months old, I fractured my leg. Nobody knew for almost a week.

Sure, they knew I was crying more than usual, and eventually it grew apparent that it centered around the leg, but when my parents tried to determine for my pediatrician how long ago it may have happened, their best guess was a week.

Somehow, this did not result in a DFCS home visit (to my knowledge).

Nobody could figure out how I’d done it. Finally, they drew the conclusion that it likely happened at daycare (again, I promise I’m not here to turn everybody against the concept of daycare), when a bigger child likely tripped over me and landed on my leg.

The proprietor of the daycare couldn’t remember, or couldn’t be coaxed into remembering, and my parents moved me to a new one, where I promptly had the tip of my middle finger disfigured for life.

~~~

We moved to a new house across town when I was four.

Before that, I had a playground set with a sandbox (once, we found a scorpion in it). The neighbor boy a few years older than me would knock on my parents’ front door every so often to responsibly announce, “Rebecca’s naked in the sandbox, again.”

It’s only just occurring to me now, as I type, that myself-as-the-scorpion is a solid metaphor for a story. Inspiration comes from anywhere — not that this means it’s good inspiration.

~~~

In preschool, I broke a boy’s nose for the first time. At least, they told me I did. I knew it bled a whole lot, an astonishing amount, and I didn’t question the diagnosis.

His name was Kevin.

Outside time focused on a game of tag, that day, and (naturally), the teams segregated themselves by who had the same kind of cooties. The boys were chasing the girls, and this boy caught me. He then proceeded to plant a kiss right on my mouth, and I decked him.

They called my parents and we all had a big conference in the preschool administrator’s office while I sat in a chair to the side, swinging my feet back and forth.

My parents listened politely, before my mother said: “We understand that there’s a rule against hitting, and she broke the rule.”

(My punishment was likely something to the effect of ‘no outside time for a week.’ I was five, after all. I’d suck it up and suffer through.)

“But my daughter is allowed to hit anybody who touches her without her permission.” (I’m not trying to mitigate the importance of that statement in my life, but it is a bit funny coming on the heels of my nightmarish pediatrician memory. Alas, if only I’d decked Rachel before she bit me on the finger. On the other hand, maybe I did.)

“She may be in trouble here, and we understand that. But she will never be in trouble with us for standing up for herself, or for someone else.”

~~~

My bedtime stories at night were usually simplified updates of what my mother had read that evening, which was often a Stephen King novel. She’d pare down the details but I got the gist, quickly enough to know they were excellent stories. I soon devoured them, myself, an elementary-school student reading It, Tommyknockers, Needful Things, and The Stand. Whatever she read next would soon be on my list, too.

With my father, our reading time was spent over anthology books of Calvin & Hobbes. He voiced Calvin, Calvin’s dad, Moe. I voiced Hobbes, Calvin’s mom, Susie, and Mrs. Wormwood. If you’re familiar with C&H, the vocabulary is difficult. Oftentimes, so is the topic — or at least, there’s a secondary layer to it that my father also enjoyed while I couldn’t quite yet. By now, you can guess what kind of reader I was, but I still love the memories of my father and I, side by side on the sofa with the anthology spread across both our laps, as he helped his six-year-old reliably pronounce “Transmogrification.” The illustrations showed me what it meant, of course.

I believe these two formative reading foundations combined into something singularly devious, in my brain. Mischief with malice. Hilarity with the stakes of death.

~~~

My parents got very excited when I was three, because I read a Dr. Seuss book out loud, by myself. Dr. Seuss, for your information, is often classified around a second grade(ish) reading level, because of the difficulty of the vocabulary and the unusual cadence of sentence structure.

Sadly, I’d only memorized it. But it wasn’t all I’d memorized. I could run through quite the gamut on my bookshelf, and by four, I was reading independently. Blazing with pride, my parents sat me on a stool in front of my extended family to show me off, and for whatever reason, this did not translate into future comfort with public speaking.

(To be clear, I believe it should have helped, at the very least. I would encourage my child to do that sort of thing, early and often.)

When I started sixth grade, the middle school began a program called Accelerated Reader. It was on the computer, which was really really cool, and it would log our reading achievements along the school year. We’d have goals to hit and other easy-sounding things I glossed right past — until it became clear that the database offered very few books I wanted to read, and the specific books for my age range were for “babies.”

I protested at once. This eleven-or-twelve-year-old period is the one in which I’d written 80 pages of a girl riding horses in my own Word document at home. Clearly, I was too advanced for this nonsense.

To my relief, the teachers said we’d be tested on reading comprehension and assigned a general skill level to aim for. Books beneath that level would be worth very few points. If we extended ourselves to more difficult material and passed the comprehension quiz at the end, we’d rack up reading points quickly.

Challenge accepted. I cracked my knuckles and cracked on, earning a “College+” designation for my reading level. This delighted me, for obvious reasons. It meant that I annihilated my annual goal by reading and acing Gone with the Wind, thus free to read whatever I liked for the rest of the year. One book (which I wouldn’t have picked up on my own but thoroughly enjoyed, so the program did work), one quiz, and I was done — until seventh grade, anyway.

My best friend asked if I could possibly take the GwtW quiz for her, too. I considered. Being ethically flexible, even at age eleven… well, why not?

More classmates began to ask and I began to charge ice cream money for it. I made a tidy bit of pocket change. This lasted through middle school.

~~~

I was a gullible child. I’m not sure what bearing that has on anything, but when I was seven or eight, my father told me a story.

He hadn’t gone right to college after high school. My grandfather gave each of his children a choice: go right to college and he would pay, or delay college and pay their own way. My dad took the latter, and (I presume) regretted it when the job he took involved unloading merciless numbers of shipping containers off the backs of eighteen-wheelers, in the August summer of Georgia. The heat in the containers was atrocious, and near the very end of one, at the hottest part of the back, he heard a small mewing.

A kitten somehow survived the transport in the heat. My dad took it home, which constituted an apartment with a roommate, and all of this is true.

The poor thing was half-starved and insatiably hungry. Once it regained enough strength to leap onto the table, it would ravage anything left out. On the table, kitchen countertop, whatever. It could never get enough food, and the only way they could keep it off the table was to shut it in a closet for the duration of their meal (prep, consumption, removal).

This is also true.

Eventually, he set it free outside. There was a thick stretch of woods out back, and the swiftly-growing cat scampered off to locate as much natural food as it could kill. It found plenty, as cats are wont to do, and grew into a solid adult still ravenous for more.

As a child, my house also had a thick stretch of woods out back, one I played in every day with neighborhood friends. It went so far back, we couldn’t see our houses. This was, of course, the woods in which my dad set free this rampaging feline.

It grew, and grew, killed everything it could eat, and grew some more. It especially liked to eat little children who wandered too far, little boys and girls who didn’t keep an eye on the time and kept their mother worried at dinnertime — worried that perhaps their little angel had been pounced upon from above (the cat could hang from a tree by its tail, something like a lemur, though I couldn’t quite envision a ‘lemur’ at the time).

I always envisioned this as the striped cat with the malevolent grin from Alice in Wonderland, the Cheshire Cat but larger, with a much more dexterous tail.

It would dangle high up, out of sight. It would wait for the little girl to meander to the right spot, and drop right onto the little girl’s head, delighting itself in catching fresh meat — which it would then tear to pieces and devour.

I believed this story for five or six years, at least. I was a solid early teen before logic caught up to me.

In reality, my father gave the pest of a kitten to my grandmother, who never met a cat she didn’t like.

~~~

My dad’s father lived in this amazing mountain cabin maybe two hours north of where I grew up. The “grandchild toy selection” was slender.

I was seven or eight when one of my uncles found two old squirt guns in a drawer. You know the kind: neon plastic, semi-opaque to see how much water resided in the gun, probably from K-mart or the Dollar General. There was still water in the guns, but that didn’t concern anybody.

He told me I could squirt the water into one ear and it would come out the other. That sounded cool. I tried, and it didn’t work. I tried again. He told me I must need to aim better, and I’m nothing if not persistent.

When I still couldn’t get water to go in one ear and out the other, he said I must have enough brain matter in there to block the way. Congratulations.

Maybe so, but I didn’t have enough brain matter to doubt the original claim. All I got was a wicked ear infection.

~~~

I was one of those unique children who enjoyed being challenged. I suppose those still exist somewhere, but everybody gives me extremely strange looks when I tell them how it was for me, which makes me believe I was something of an oddball.

As a child, I was in a mix of daycare (we’ve covered that), preschool (we’ve covered that, too), and after-school care. While the other children played (not an ace player, me), I asked my teachers for worksheets the older students might do.

Not ‘have to do.’ Just do. Not many older children remained in after-school care, at least not in the one I attended, and the teachers had a difficult time keeping up with my daily demands. I recall one digging through a grey metal filing cabinet for what seemed like ages, retrieving old printouts and holding them up for my approval.

“No,” I’d say. “I’ve done that one.”