Learning What Mean Is

…Suburban Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1976. Now this might conjure-up images and feelings like some scenes from ‘Deliverance’ or might paint imagery of a life revolving around Pontiac Firebirds and Lynard Skynard music, but I see it, and remember it, as a comforting, relaxed, and esoteric place and, for me at least it seemed like a small English town in a lot of ways, I wish I could explain better why, but the layout and the town itself just lent that impression to me, hard to conclude why a child gets an impression like that…

It was a place where the last vestige of the classical North American life that so many insist is all but lost was still in-full-swing… You could still walk the city streets window shopping for Christmas presents and you could trust virtually anyone in common social situations. It is only in retrospect as a cynical adult that I even consider the racial politics of the time, only looking back through a now jaded lens do I think it could have been a redneck haven of ‘Middle America’… It was nothing of the sort at the time, and if my mind were not biased by a judgmental and manipulative society, I would insist that it probably is nothing-of-the-sort today… At the time, for me, it was a place of good conscience, and a place of good people with likewise motivations; as good as anywhere in this world.

I remember the Fireflies, by the millions, filling the twilight sky with clouds of patchy yellow/green light that I have not seen since, and doubt that I ever will. I remember our rented house on the edge of the woods, the last in a row of a standard era suburban residential, but grander than the others, a sort of colonial white thing in my memories, though one wonders if it would be so grand to me today; As a boy of five years, it was only missing Scarlett O’Hara.

The forest provided my young life with more of this amusement than I could possibly remember in its entirety. I remember the groups of rabbits, so many of them, but they only came out in the very early morning, when no one was awake, and you had to silently make your way to a back window or the corner of the house to see them busily foraging about the yard. One brief noise and they were gone in a near instant, and would not be returning for at least a day.

I recall the variety, they looked nothing like the groups of similar wild rabbits that are commonplace in many parts of the world; these were of every color and variety I could think of, but they were all together… Brown, white, black, calico, all sorts of colors and patterns… I remember my favorite; all black but for a short white cotton ball for a tail. I can close my eyes and still see it among it’s friends, looking as if it had just jumped out of the pages of a children’s’ book. As a child who knew no better I recall wishing I could capture it, as if it would have made some great and loyal pet…

Just such a fate briefly befell one Boxing Turtle that strayed out of the woods into our backyard. I named him “Rocky” (a popular figure from a current movie of the time) as he was a boxing turtle after all, and mom said I could keep him. Naturally elated, I proceeded to try and make him the best home I could, which obviously involved blankets and pillows and bowls of nice clean water. All this, while hardly natural I suppose, was a dream come-true for any living creature though, I mean who doesn’t want blankets and pillows and sparkling clean water? Alas Rocky began ailing and just wasn’t the turtle I had once met anymore, so he had to go back to the woods, I morosely wished him goodbye and prayed for him to make a full recovery from the paradise I had imposed upon him, as he sauntered back to the woods from whence he came, I’m just sure he was saying “Thank you …thank you… thank you!” all-the-way (and not addressing the statements to me)…

Those woods were a source of wonder for me; human reality has a way of destroying those illusions though, turning a land of wonder into a hazard or even an eye sore, or a source of frustration and even fear.

I think her name was Tracy, and as well as I can remember she lived in the home behind ours leaving our backyards conjoined and our meetings with her frequent… I was a boy of five; I would guess she was around 10 or so. I grew up moving from place-to-place with my father’s work, he was usually off travelling somewhere for government business of which I had little clue at the time. My mother and my three older sisters were my family, leaving a lone boy and youngest child very much to himself in every-day matters; I don’t think I spent more than thirty seconds in a bathroom until I was twenty-one.

Tracy was a slender, black, pony-tailed girl of my older sisters’ age range. Normal in every way as near as I could figure, but by all accounts rather mean… I suspect she was spoiled, and carried a sizable chip on her shoulder, as I don’t recall a time playing in our yard with my sisters that she didn’t share angry words with them… Somehow a part of me liked her though… Perhaps simply misguided trust from relying so much on my own sisters, I may simply have found it hard not to trust girls older than myself, as I had always sort of blindly trusted my sisters too…

I was alone, in fact that was what I can best be described as throughout my entire childhood life… Mom had three daughters to attend to, and had my parents’ not wanted to have a son, I doubt she’d have ever wanted the four kids she had, The first two were the ones she wanted, the other two were just a symbol of what she felt she had to do, I think, and I think we both knew that most of our lives. So I was let out of the pen to my own devices frequently when Mom was wanting ‘a break’, and that is how I must be today… In charge of the pen, or out of the pen, or I go nuts. Though it is a liberating feeling most of the time, it leaves one exposed and vulnerable to others…

Tracy was just standing out there in the yard, not looking intimidating as far as I can recall, she was just there… Mom let me out and the sisters were away at school, and so it was just she and I really, just going about our own business…

I recall her asking me to follow her, I cannot remember her giving me any incentive to do so, but I think she did, or that her demeanor simply seemed so playful that I assumed that there was fun to be had. She wasn’t mean, and wasn’t in her usual rather angry state it seemed… I guess I took it as a peace offering, as I said, I was a bit blindly trusting of my sisters and tended to transfer that trust to those who reminded me of my sisters.

…And so I followed, and we ran, and it seemed exciting to me, running through the thick Tennessee woods that had been such a source of wonder for me with a newly found friend, what could be better than that? We ran and ran and ran through the dense and barely discernible trails and eventually just off into the forest far from any trails at all. I can tell you I was happy, I felt that this mean and bratty girl who seemed so hostile to our family, now seemed pleasant, befriending, and fun-loving and had let me be a part of it, I remember this feeling very clearly as we ran through undergrowth beyond and places I had ever been before, just happily following and happy to be there, and convinced that we were all wrong about her, that her mean mask had dropped and the kind and fun-loving true self had emerged.

We continued to a large boulder, deep into the woods and downhill considerably. It was a pretty area to me, nothing I had seen before here, and so dense that there were no trails and no visible ways out that even hinted at a direction back… We stopped…

I remember taking-in the whole scene, so beautiful and green and filled with obstacles and cubby holes and just lush greenness everywhere. I was pleased with the chosen location; my exploration needs were fully satisfied. The large rock caught my attention as it rose from the forest floor and so I approached it carefully. So impressed and intrigued was I with it, and what secrets it might have, that I barely noticed Tracy start slowly walking the opposite direction from my back then dart away at full speed once I had strayed a little bit from her side.

It was only at this moment that I realized what was happening, though five years old, the scene was apparent to me, the intent quite clear and obvious, perhaps I knew because of all the somewhat mean pranks my siblings had played on me, as siblings do, though not in a situation like this. And she was gone from all view so fast that there was absolutely no way of catching up with her or even just extrapolating the path in which she left, maybe just a rough direction, maybe indeed, but I hadn’t memorized the path down, as few people following someone at speed really do…

I strained and tried to understand what had just happened… A mild disbelief for a moment or two, then a resignation to my situation…

…Why?

The thing about children left alone is, we don’t quite understand our limits like many others do… I’m not saying we are anything better, or superior, or even calmer, just that we don’t quite ‘get’ how something is as hard as others will tell you it is… This has been a point of frustration in my life, but it has also been a tremendous asset at times, even if I don’t acknowledge it when it is…

So I understand what happened, and have what I assume to be fair assumptions about why, but there I still am, and this person who I briefly chose to trust has tried do something that she must have understood could have easily been the death of me, most of us understand the implications of tricking a 5 year-old child into going into the deep woods then abandoning them there, so I doubt the picture needs any more painting…

But I don’t think she realized that I was a child often left to his own devices, and that if I had the sense to panic and be lost, as any well trained five-year-old might, I might well have just been a lost little boy who never showed up again as it would seem she wished… And so, though distraught, I picked my best guess at the way home, and damn the trails, I just made my own…

Several cuts and bruises later I came out of the forest very near the edge of my home, just in time to see her cleaning the twigs and brush and dirt from her clothes about fifty feet to my right and nonchalantly head towards her house.

She must have heard the rustling and looked back to me, I recall she said “How did you get back so fast?” but I don’t remember my reply, or if I even had one….

I don’t think I even told my mother about the event though I did tell her about it some years later… I think that I feared that I had done something wrong, well stupid anyway, and that I would face consequences that I’d rather avoid…

I never really considered the actual gravity what she tried to do to me that day, though I think the effect has been a permanent one for me, and I hope for her as well… She was a child of some derangement and I guess I pity that more than anything else… There are people in this world, for which trust is something to exploit from a very early age, I am thankful every day of my life that that is not me…

…So what was my point in all of this?

…Well, that is up to you, I suppose