On Imagination

Imagination. I don't know that I have it. At least sometimes I'm not sure if I do, and I go into a crises and wonder what went wrong in my life to make me such a monotony. Perhaps the mere fact that I worry about this means that I'm just fine with an overly healthy imagination, and here is some evidence of that.

I'm the eldest child, and there is a good gap of time before I ever had someone to play with. My brother wasn't interesting until I was about seven, and so I spent most of my afternoons alone. I didn't live in a neighborhood with kids my own age. I remember complaining to my parents about how we always moved somewhere where the only other kids were toddlers and not my own age. We'd go to company Christmas parties, and I was the only six year old in the room. No five year olds, four year olds, seven, eight, or nine. I was a lone ranger in a baby corral watching stupid movies like Space Jam and wondering why I couldn't be at home reading.  It didn't help that my earliest years worthy of mention were spent in Germany where cable was really expensive and I missed out on television.

Actually Germany was awesome, but I was a lonely kid. As soon as I knew how to read, I was reading everything. I stopped to read signs that my small mind couldn't comprehend, but my brain could nevertheless compute. My mom had to have me on a leash. Not because I ran away, but because I got distracted by words. Otherwise I was a very mindful child. You can easily get lost in castles and forests, and I wasn't in the habit of carrying pebbles or breadcrumbs with me on Volksmarsches or palace tours.

In my loneliness, I reached out to myself. I remember sitting for hours as a kid, staring at myself in the mirror of my bureau and talking about heaven knows what. I can't recall anything of what I talked about, but I'm pretty sure this is how I developed my talent for accents. My favorite films always had accented characters, and since that made up the majority of my socialization at such a impressionable age, it's no wonder I talk in accents easily. I remember having trouble saying certain words with an American accent and my parents would correct me. "It's 'baaaaahld' not 'bulld'," they would would say. So while most kids have to go to speech classes to get rid of a lisp, I was being conditioned to not use an English accent. Anyway, so I would talk to myself in the mirror. My mom would come in and scowl, warning me that if I continued talking to myself she would take me to an asylum for the mentally deranged because only crazy people talk to themselves. I wouldn't stop, and she threw a sheet over the mirror. That was okay. I had a brass lamp that my dad brought me from Saudi Arabia, and I just talked to the genie inside instead.

I didn't have many toys either. I remember my favorite toys were Lincoln Logs, but they only had those at school, and all I got were Barbies. Not just any Barbies either. I had to play with my mom's old Barbies, and they didn't come with a Barbie Dream House with elevator and swimming pool. I had a camper and some camp furniture and the midsection of an airplane. Whatever. I made furniture out of paper, and Barbie lived in a post-apocalyptic era where abandoned airplanes made perfect houses. This period of turmoil was completed by frequent earthquakes in which everything had to be upside down, and depending on how my tossing of furniture around the room went, Barbie sustained injuries based on how the furniture landed on her. Of course she never died.

Barbie was boring though. What's the fun in making a little person live a regular person sort of life, when I'm the one who wants the adventure? When my brother got old enough, my dad built him a big wooden bunk bed. Thinking back, I have no idea why he did that because it was just the two of us for a long time, and I had my own room. By the time my youngest brother came along, the bunk bed was gone. It was a fantastic ship though. I would pack my brass tea set in my favorite little red suitcase with my baby blanket, and together my brother and I would sneak up onto the top bunk, 'stowing away' for adventure on a ship. We sat. And sat. Sometimes I would have cigars for us to smoke because that's what ragamuffin orphans do on long voyages, and then I would prepare dinner out of the sorriest scraps of nothing you'd never seen. Then we sat some more and I would relate what was happening to my habitually quiet brother until I got the idea that we should play with his car carpet instead.

Car carpets were the best. Every car had a 'house' or a parking spot, and they would zoom around the twisted roads until one day the semi truck elders (elders because they were big and therefore were the most grown up) said that the time had come to leave because the world was ending or something. What a harrowing journey! Our apartment in Kaiserslautern was based off a central hallway, and it was down this hallway that our pilgrimage took place. Inch by inch, we would push our little cars along. Some wouldn't make it. These were more often than not our least favorite cars, and they would flip over dead, abandoned by the others. We each had about fifty cars to line up single file and it took hours to get from my room to the living room. I remember the cars with doors that opened had the ability to fly, and with this super power they would scout the area. Yes, this somehow kept me entertained, and my quiet brother went along with it. I can't imagine now, having had the experience of driving, that anyone would actually be able to survive a traffic jam of that magnitude if it were scaled up. It would most definitely result in countless suicides.

When we moved from Washington state to California, I fell asleep somewhere between Medford Oregon and Mt. Shasta. I was probably eleven, and the first thing I remember when I woke up was a cartoon. I was literally in a cartoon. The cows were a stark black and white, grazing on neon green hills under a cloudless electric blue sky. I was freaking out, rubbing my eyes in disbelief. Little did I know that I would be venturing out through those hills quite a bit over the next few years, and whenever we did cross over Vasco Road between home and civilization, I would get excited at the prospects of certain death. "LOOK!" I'd shriek at my brother, "DINOSAURS! We're going to be eaten! DRIVE FASTER, DAD!" I was like this into my teens. Only by the time I actually was a teenager, I had a better mind to keep my mouth shut, and I would rather imagine roaming those hills with a pack and a trusty sword. I wasn't ever in the car. I was walking out in that wind blowing ferociously through the grass, a most important quest at hand. Secrecy was of the utmost importance, and I had to fight off many foes.

To be perfectly honest? I'm in my mid twenties, and that's still what I'm doing. I try to hide it, I guess, when I'm trying to be an adult. I'm never actually here though. If you ever catch my eyes glazing over as I talk and should my sentences start slowing down and make no sense, I'm gone. I feel bad for the customers who catch me in these moments. I'm not slow or stupid, I'm just living a parallel life on another plane of existence.