In Spite of Everything (eBook)

LOUDER THAN BOMBS: CHILDHOOD

When I was about four, my parents decided to make several home improvements. Back then, it seemed that every Berkeley family we knew had a deck on which the grown-ups--the mothers in their seventies wrap dresses and the dads in their weekend jeans--would sit drinking sangria and discussing Nixon, Bob Dylan, and public education while the kids mucked around in the playroom or tiny backyard in their school-made tie-dyes and Sears Toughskins. My mother had particular ideas about adding our own deck and playroom, ideas that involved French doors, window seats with giant stor- age drawers, and textured linoleum flooring. Although she was an academic--at the time, in graduate school at U.C. Berkeley, furiously at work on her dissertation--my mother nonetheless loved to work with professionals to help her make the right decisions about interior design and clothes.

My dad, for his part, had definite ideas about the second-floor room that was to be added: my room. Or, rather, he had one definite idea. My room had to have a skylight, and my bed was to be positioned directly beneath it. 'Suze, as the official Little Dipper and Pleiades finder, you need the right tools,' said my dad, who had conferred on me a special status for my knack for spotting these constellations in the night sky. 'Furthermore, you may find, as I do, old pal, that you do your best star contemplation alone.'

I remember two things vividly from that time. The first is that on the opening day of the renovation job, the construction guys left the French doors open while they were digging up the backyard to build the deck. I forgot that the ground outside was gone and walked right out into the pit, gashing open the bottom of my jaw on rocky debris. I had to go to the emergency room for stitches, and the remain- ing nettlefish-like scars still undergird the dimple on my chin. My mother was distraught and flailing, cracking her knuckles antsily and spraying me with Bactine. My dad, an ice climber by avocation, was a little more laid-back. He crouched down and took a look at the jagged green threads knitting my skin together. 'You're tough as nails, Suze-o,' he grinned.

The second thing I remember is lying in bed beneath the skylight. It was long and rectangular, and I would align my body with it at bedtime. My mother usually came in first, to read me poetry, often 'The Highwayman' by Alfred Noyes. She would lean over my bed, throatily whispering, eyes wide with menace. After my mother had read this or another poem selected for stimulating a sense of cadence, Dad would come in. We would look up at the night sky and think. It occurs to me now that I never thought about what he was think- ing, I guess I was too little to think that we were separate. What I thought was: Here are the stars, they are beautiful and strange, Dad is with me.

There is also something that I do not remember, but that I remember my parents worrying about at the time: As a young child, I was a chronic sleepwalker. I would not just roam into my parents' room or into the kitchen but actually walk out of the house and down the street to our family friends' house, ring the doorbell until one of the groggy adults answered, toddle into their living room, curl up on a sofa, and go back to sleep. The bewildered parent would call our house, and Dad would come scoop me up and take me back home.

The conflation of these events has always struck a primal chord in my sense of my own beginnings. Everyone has his own Genesis, the creation myth that allegorizes the idiom of his early childhood. But children, like all orthodox adherents, are literal thinkers, and, like native peoples,...