I recall very clearly the moment I began to realize that things didn’t just “go away” when I wasn’t looking at them. I spent several days afterwards quickly looking back at things I had just looked away from, just to see if they “knew” I wasn’t looking and had faded away. Sure enough, they were still there.
When I was very little (perhaps two or younger), our grandmother came to live with us after grandpa died. In the mornings, my sister and I would get up (pre-dawn hours) and go visit “Grammaw” in her room. We’d climb into her bed and she’d tell us about living in Arkansas. I don’t think she was misleading, but my child’s mind distorted things terribly.
We lived in San Jose, in an area surrounded by hills. From my grandmother’s description of the place, I figured that Arkansas was just on the other side of the hills in the direction of sunrise. I also knew that there were strange birds called whipporwills that, in my mind’s eye, appeared to be something like a pterodactyl with oversized, webbed human hands for wings. Arkansas was a scary place, but safely distant. It was as far away as I could imagine at the time, just the other side of the hills.
There used to be some sort of early warning radar site up on one of the surrounding hills with a rotating radar antenna. I thought it was the angel that watched over San Jose. Rather nice of him to perch up there where everyone could see he was doing his job, eh?
My mother used to boast about how I came into the house, very excited, and told her “I found a dinosaur! Come see it!” She followed me outside and I proudly pointed to the “dinosaur”, a common garden snail. She was proud of me nonetheless, because the pictures of dinosaurs in our family’s (badly-illustrated) children’s encyclopedia looked vaguely snail-like. I think I was three at the time, or perhaps two (I was a very busy child during those years).
The neighborhood kids would occasionally get together and mix water and yellow flower petals together in the hopes of making our own mustard. We knew that the flowers came from mustard plants, but they stubbornly refused to dissolve. I don’t know why we did this, since few of us liked mustard. “White bread and mayonnaise please, no crusts, and use the blandest sort of lunch meat you can find.” At that age I viewed flavor with more thanm a little suspicion, a viewpoint which was strongly reinforced when my dad fixed me some eggs and put a dash of tobasco on them to “give them a little flavor”.
After I learned about the inadvisability of playing “screwdriver holder” with a wall socket (age three), I was convinced there were ghosts in the walls who would “come and get you” if they saw you through the sockets. Until about the age of six, unless I was accompanied by an adult (they seemed to be immune) I would always belly-crawl or otherwise sneak past a wall socket if I had to go past one, just to avoid attracting the attention of whatever it was that bit me the first time.
Until I was about five, I theoretically knew that there was something beyond the horizon, but I couldn’t imagine that it was much. One weekend, after we’d moved to Chico, California, my dad’s buddy flew up to visit us in his Cessna 170 and took us up for a ride. I was astonished to see how MUCH there was on the other side of the hills. That plane ride quite literally expanded my horizons, and I began to understand, perhaps, just how much bigger the world was than I had thought.
At about six I read a pamphlet put out by Pacific Gas and Electricity that cleared up the mystery of the evil spirits in the walls. In reality, there were little guys with globe-shaped heads, construction helmets, lightbulb noses, and jaggedy lightning bolts for bodies, arms, and legs. Reddy Kilowatt (the spokes-thing’s name) didn’t want to hurt anybody, but he/they couldn’t tell if they were running along a wire or someone’s body, so don’t put metal things in sockets! (Something like that, anyhow). The Reddy Kilowatt myth was dispelled more quickly than the exil spirits, but I had a more-than-average respect for electrical things than many of my peers.
At one time (age eight) I thought that a “rubber” was like a cork that a man put into his penis. Just what that was supposed to accomplish I wasn’t certain, but it had something to do with making babies that no-one had briefed me on yet.
I had been given books to read on the subject of sex education by this time, but even though they were purportedly for children, they had been written so poorly, that all I knew was that male animals somehow put something into female animals, which then laid eggs or had babies (depending upon what they were). Just how this “putting something in” was accomplished, or what that “something” was, I had no idea, except that the male animal had to get pretty close to the female animal.
The mechanics of sex were a complete mystery to me until sometime in my early teens, when one of my boyhood chums acquired his dad’s playboy and I was astonished to discover that my theory regarding the location of human female genitalia was quite wrong. Until that time I had thought that a vagina was something like an extra-deep navel, located centrally on the front of the female torso, above the juncture of her legs, but below her hip bones. After all, some women’s clothes had zippers in the front, so I figured that this must be to allow access.
–SSgtBaloo
