I wrote this the other night, succinctly hitting the high & low points of my early fundamental influences. There's some more to add to this, but thought I'd post it as is for now.
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When I was a child, like most of my peers, I had a mom & dad & a sibling (a sister, older by 4.5 years). Like many of my peers, we had a cat, the occasional guinea pig, hamster, rabbit, bird, etc., and this whole menagerie all lived together in a house with a basement & a yard; on Sunday mornings, we (the humans that is) went to religious services of the Christian variety. Unlike almost any of my peers, we also went there Tuesdays, Thursdays, and probably Saturday mornings & twice on Wednesday (maybe a little on Sunday afternoon), and studied for these "meetings" (don't call it 'church'!) on the off & on days to prove over & over again to ourselves, and god, and the whole congregation, and the unsuspecting people in the neighborhoods of town that we were good Christians, ready to follow Jesus' directive in the good book @ Matthew 24:14 to "Go..and make disciples..." which they took [& I was taught to take] as a literal, imperative directive to hassle people in the peace of their homes (or bus, supermarket, at work, school, or whatever location you could corner as many people as possible) up until either god said that was enough or a real fire-&-sulfur armageddon rained down from heaven, whichever came first. So if you ever wonder why I go back & forth between hermetically shy & some sort of ballsy extroverted dictator, it's because one is a product of this aggressive version of public speaking training & the other is what's left of an original me colored by internal, suppressed responses to that training. Nothing makes for constant internal psychoanalysis like loss of self while learning study skills.
My sister left all this for the first time when I was 8 & she was 13. One morning, she just wasn't there. (A Saturday in spring, one of the few Saturday mornings we were getting a chance to sleep in & watch cartoons, it's worth mentioning.) & then, like the twisted happy ending to a surreal nightmare, she was back late that very evening - just waltzed in the door [while we were being consolled by a religious elder & otherwise generally dissociating or freaking out]. & then she was gone again, on & off, again & again & again. Eventually we went to visit her on weekends for a while at some group home in Newton or wherever, all her pictures started to disappear from the house, I learned (read: was taught) to distrust the social workers who came to the house [rightfully] distrustful of my parents parenting abilities (yet, somehow, not distrustful enough to remove ME from the house), and became - for all practical purposes - an only child. Years later, we tried family therapy (the final step in a long line of other failed therapy attempts, individual & group), and I even later tried to establish a real familial bond with my sister in lieu of little-to-no cultivated connection to long-distance extended family & otherwise absent parents (when I finally left their religion, began enjoying sex, stopped hating homosexuals/pagans/other social miscreants, and tried to figure out who I was & had once been). But a decade of childhood sisterly bonding can't just be made up, and it's harder to try when our individual actions & perspectives have been so largely colored by our wildly different experiences. She possesses me like an addition to her wardrobe or lifestyle, I judge her for over-indulgence, small-mindedness, & repeating dangerous familial patterns, and we resort to bonding over drinks, etc., but we're still trying. So when I say "sister" I'm either thinking of something drenched in double-entendre, pain, and the worst of family history, or else a romanticisized ideal presented a la Hollywood. There are other complications, but that's the basic version. Maybe it's not so unusual.
One fantastic thing about my childhood is that my parents met, grew up in, and loved New York State. We spent a few weeks every summer on the road from NE Kansas to the great Northeast, usually hitting Mom's family in & around Rome/Auburn, Dad's family in/around Rochester, some time in the big city 'cause it was there (& the religious headquarters was - & still is - there), and my dad's real love - The Adirondacks. There's a cabin on Long Lake I used to call home; no TV, pine needles covering the path down to the water, the fireplace, little birch canoes, real life canoes & canoe trips, floating docks filling in for actual swimming pools, local ice cream stands, old trapping & general stores, woods as dense & dark as night, memories of making awful brown sugar from white sugar & molasses, and one year we finally brought a radio that picked up, I think, 2 stations, sort of. My parents didn't always get along during these trips (especially the 48-hours-straight drive up packed into a station wagon with one or a couple kids), but there was enough beauty & solace & fun that I developed a deep core of naturophilia. When my life is hectic (& just when I want to prevent it from becoming that way), I still rely on an overabiding love for the great & amazing outdoors.
Just a small backtrack so we can wrap up some of the more important points of the childhood chapters. When I say "My parents didn't always get along" I mean they fought like Mike Tyson but uglier, more constantly, and more multi-dimensionally. Mom favored the verbal, Dad the physical - we've all got our weapons of choice, I suppose, when pushed. It's just too bad they didn't feel the one good weapon - divorce - was available to them. My opinion is that people don't really 'stay for the kids,' but instead their own warped needs/wants.
With all this going on in my life, I'll let your imagination fill in how well I did with my peers. There are many, many reasons I love books as much as I do.
