November 25, 2009
Dear Clusterflock – What revelation from your childhood changed everything?
I have two but will start with this. I must have been younger than 11 because of where I was living at the time and being so young girls were just, well, girls. Anyway, the younger brother of a friend one day laid at my feet the revelation that girls had more holes than guys! I remember looking at this boy and asking “What!” He then explained how other than the holes we pee and shit out of there was another one. I asked him where it was and he explained it was down there with the other two. I then asked him what it was for to which he answered “I have no idea.”
As far as I remember that was all that was said – I was confused and had no-one to ask for fear of being thought stupid. Jump forward a few years, I think I was about 12 – I was friendly with a girl at school who seemed a little more worldly wise than I – we were on a school trip, caving! We were several hundred feet below ground when I decided that I would run this theory past this girl – I have no idea why I hadn’t explored the notion further in the years before, probably too busy kicking a ball or poking things with a stick. Anyway, she answered to the affirmative, it was indeed true and did I want to touch it? Naturally I said yes to which she said it would cost me 50p! I obviously coughed up the money and slid my hand down there and all I could find to say was “It’s very wet and warm!”
Thank you, Marion.
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“50p!” That news alone could have given you all kinds of ideas.
Oh, Phil, I love this story! I didn’t even realize I had an extra hole until about that age.
I had a number of revelatory experiences as a child. The earliest, and most profound, was at the age of 3. I was standing on the front porch and saw my reflection in the window, and I suddenly realized that I was alive. What happened next was the remarkable part, though–I looked around, and everything around me took on a kind of glow. I knew that the bushes were alive, the birds were alive, the sky was alive. I felt that I was the same as they were, that we were all part of one living thing. I felt a rising in my stomach, almost as if I were floating. I tried for days to speak to my mother about this, but she never understood what I was talking about.
The general feeling of oneness has stayed with me, and many times in my life I have re-experienced the inner floating, the glow of all around me, the almost transcendent sense of being in the world.
I remember the day when I discovered that I could say Goddamnit aloud and the universe didn’t tremble.
I also remember the precise moment at which I fully understood that nobody can help you all the time.
Daryl, I can safely say that was the only time I ever paid for any sexual favours – well, with cash!
Cindy, that story is so beautiful, really, so damn beautiful.
Several hundred feet below ground. Caving. That is so much better than out behind a shed, say, or off in the bushes.
Sheila, I guess in a hole looking for a hole!
Or in a storm drain.
I thought I did remarkably well in the pitch black seeing as I had never done it before!
I recall gazing at the embalmed corpse of my grandmother (the one I never much liked). I was nine, and it was My First Corpse. My aunt (the one I never much liked) asked, “Doesn’t Grandma look just as though she’s sleeping?”
“No,” I thought. “Grandma looks dead.”
Phil, you must have the knack.
I’m sitting at the bar of the kitchen in Danny’s sister’s house. Danny’s niece is sitting next to me. Danny is on the other side of the bar. He’s just starting the stock pot with the makings for Turkey stock. I just read Cindy’s comment above and nearly busted out bawlin’.
I’m thankful that I can still be brought to tears by honest, heart-felt statements. They come out of thin air and whollop me up side the head and remind me I’m not the cynical old shit I sometimes think I’ve become.
Sheila, I love that – that is very young to be dealing with death. Not sure how old I was.
Rick, you are so right – I think I must have read Cindy’s several times. I cry so easily – watched my first Christmas movie this morning, god knows why, it was terrible and I cried! It wasn’t even one of the classics – it had Jenny McCarthy in it!
You boys are just the sweetest things. Although I’m a mite concerned about the Jenny McCarthy business.
I have a very similar story to yours, Phil. I was in 3rd grade, so around 8 or 9 years old. I met this girl, Esther, a year older than I was, at the little playground inside our apartment complex. We hung out every day after school, and one night, we were in my room and we started talking about making out with each other. I really didn’t know what that meant, so I said OK. She then asked me if I wanted to be on top or on the bottom, and I said on top. So we hopped up onto my bed, went underneath the covers, and started making out.
I remember thinking the kisses were wet, but I didn’t want to stop. She then pulled down her pants, and I looked down there and started thinking it looks strange. She then asked me to take down my pants, and I did, and we just started making out some more. We had no idea what we were supposed to do with our private parts, so we just let them be.
A few weeks later she moved out and I never saw her again.
Not half as concerned as I was, Cindy – the only thing I could think of to help me feel clean again was to out myself.
Sheila, you just make me happy. I know your parents were from Connecticut, but you’re a full-blown Texan, whether you like it or not.
I can never conjure up my childhood when I want. Occasionally, I’ll be sitting at the computer or drinking coffee and I’ll have a vivid recollection that seems to fall from nowhere but most often when I think about my youth it’s all broad strokes.
When I was older, a junior in high school, I’d spent a lot of time trying to be friends with a group of guys I’d viewed as cool. They weren’t very nice guys and I was working hard to be as much like them as I could. We got into trouble. I’m not proud of the things we did (and maybe someday I’ll tell you all about them) and I did them all with the goal of being accepted.
That year I went to D.C. on a school trip. We were small school and only a small handful of kids went on the trip, I was the only guy. The girls who went were girls that I’d never talk to on campus for fear of being ostracized. Needless to say, I was looking forward to the trip but I was a little disappointed about my tripmates.
The trip was great. My classmates were great (one of my roommates, from Atlanta, was a little frightening, but we survived). When I got back home I realized that I didn’t even like my “friends” and it didn’t matter to me if they liked me.
As it turned out, something had happened while I was gone. My “friend” Alex had been playing some game, betting on how far he could get with a girl. The girl’s dad had found out and there was a big deal involving parents and deans. Alex and his friends hypothesized I was responsible for the leak (at the time I was seeing the girl’s friend).
The first time I saw them after returning from D.C. was at our weekly confirmation class. During the break, I stood in front of the multipurpose room, determined not to spend anymore time on the guys I realized I didn’t like, and Alex came up to me, “I know what you did.”
“What?”
“You’re idiot and an asshole.”
“Whatever.”
I’ll never forget the look on his face when he realized I didn’t care what he thought or what he thought I did. He didn’t say anything else and just walked away. It was like I’d discovered some secret to life.
A few weeks later Alex and a friend of his waited for me after class. They jumped out from behind a pillar and stared shoving me. They wanted me to fight. I shrugged at them and kept walking. Alex’s friend left, he was late for class. Alex followed me across the quad pushing me, trying to get a response and I ignored him. When one of our teachers saw us he grabbed Alex, “what’s going on.”
“Nothing,” I said, “I’m late for class.”
I left Alex and in the grasp of the teacher and headed off to the gym.
Cindy, I’ll never look at my reflection again without thinking, “I’m alive.” Which is much better than, “jesus! how’d my nose get so damn big.”
Hey, Michael. I loved that, thank you. The politics of school can be quite distressing at the time!
Mario, I think that you did the right thing. In my limited experience, private parts usually know the score and if something needs to happen they make it happen.
Phil! Growing up without brothers, I guess I was lucky to have a close cousin explain the differences between us when we were about 7 or 8. It was harmless show-and-tell, and I came away from the experience mesmerized by the fact that boys have a sack of balls hanging between their legs more than anything else. I remember wondering how that could possibly be comfortable.
Cindy, your imagination at that age reminds me of the Celestine Prophesy. Which probably sounds like an insult but isn’t meant to be! I read that book while on a family vacation in a rented house, with a bookshelf of supermarket romance novels and worse. I was similarly impressed by the notion that we might be able to see living “auras” or “love” — or whatever the book’s terminology was. That trip I tried to see what you saw as a child …but I didn’t succeed, really. Instead, I guess I see sunlight as alive, and whatever it touches [ leaves, sidewalks, hands, etc.] is charged with life.
When it comes to my childhood, it’s just one stereotype after another. When I’d just turned 12, my mother started sleeping in my bedroom. A few months later, she announced that she was leaving my father. Once she moved out, it became very clear that she’d cheated with the man who later became my stepdad. And my father’s reaction to all these events was to vilify me for spending any time with her. So what I’m saying is, I vividly remember the night I realized I’d lost respect for my mother. And the conversation that led me to distrust my father. My parents’ — and, by extension, adulthood’s — fall from grace, as it were.
Kelsey, I’m not sure whether what I saw that day (and continue to see, at times) signifies Truth or mental illness. I think it’s both.
I was most definitely an odd child.
But I’m not going to read The Celestine Prophesy.
Oh no, you shouldn’t. It’s awful.
Oh, Kelsey. That’s such a profound experience–a parent’s fall from grace. I remember that day in my life as if it were yesterday. I was 9 years old, with my mother at my grandparents’ house, watching the funeral of Martin Luther King on television. And my mother stood there with a disgusted look on her face as she watched people marching, crying, and singing “We Shall Overcome.” My mother said, “Listen to that–we shall overcome“!
She very likely doesn’t remember that day. But it was one of the most important days of my life.
Phil, it was that realization that I couldn’t control what others thought of me but I could control what I thought of myself that set me free. I always think about that time as the time I became me.
Phil, you ask the best damned questions. I love this string.
The circumstances are irrelevant, but I remember when I changed from being a shy, meek kid to a fellow who doesn’t take guff. After months and months of torture from some fellow freshmen, I looked their leader dead in the eye and asked him if he wanted to step-outside. He just gawked at me and backed away. I’ve never had a problem standing up for something since.
Kelsey, you are right in wondering how balls could ever be comfortable – they are not!
Thank you though for your words, they were terribly moving. I don’t really have a loving relationship with my parents – there are elements of my upbringing that I resent. I have never troubled them with it as I think they were just doing the best they could. Still it causes me a lot of upset. It’s odd, I only started seeing my parents in a different light relatively recently – I remeber vividly one day a few years ago when my mother proclaimed it was my duty to come see her – she lost me that day.
Cindy – shit! Twice in one day – Than you for sharing that, it moved me to tears – I fucking adore it here.
Michael, that moment of feeling in control is a wonderful one and what a wonderful post that would be – “when did you finally feel that you became you?”
Cindy, I have been pondering this one for some time – it has a sister question that I was going to post at the same time, but, I think I shall give it its own space.
You guys are wonderful, it is the openness and honesty here that kills me. It’s good to feel.
“when did you finally feel that you became you?”
25 years ago. We are somewhere near the exact anniversary. I’ve been out of the closet a quarter-century y’all. It was hardly a childhood event, but I can’t tell you what that apocalypse meant to me. I’m grateful I was able to navigate my through it. I honestly don’t believe I would have survived any other way. How lucky I was to have had some friends to help me with the rudder.
Rick, I’m glad people have not seen it as solely childhood stuff. Thank you for this and for the Garrison Keillor post over at yours, beautiful. Happy anniversary my friend.
Not Mario’s Esther
Phil, that is a splendid question– “when did you finally feel that you became you?” It calls to my mind a kind of furtiveness that seems always to have been there–a scrabbling about in opposition, in bobbing and weaving and dodging. And in trying to live up to bizarre expectations or rejecting them in ferocious ways. Where was I in all of that? I know I have said it so many times as to make eyes roll to my mention of it, but it was really only when I met Cindy, almost lost her out of fear, and then coaxed her back, that I.knew for the first time who I wanted to be and had to be. Something broke in me then, and it was all that had always stood in my way–a habit of self preservation that never really asked Now why is it that that life is what you wanted to save? It was then that I let go of everything and found what mattered. Early and abundant punishments shaped in me a a constant vigilance against vulnerability, but I always knew what love could be. I always had faith that it could be what I thought it could be. And I was right.
Amen, Daryl. It was much the same for me in finding the love of my life.
Phil, my recollection of looking at the embalmed corpse of the grandmother I never much liked called to mind a second revelation concerning her. It too changed my life, though in subtle ways I continue to ponder.
That grandmother, Rose Ryan — and her male appendage, Mike Ryan, my paternal grandfather — had followed my parents to Texas in the early 1950s, but most of the extended family lived in Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Maine (and still do). Each and every summer while my dad was alive, my parents and I made a pilgrimage to New England, and the year I was thirteen my dad packed a Wollensak table-top reel-to-reel in the car and recorded some conversations with aged family friends.
We were on some turnpike or other, headed back toward Texas, and I was in the back seat listening to one of the recordings. My dad had asked one of the old folks whether he had any words for his friend Mike Ryan down in Texas.
“Mike, I remember the good times we used to have with you and Agnes.”
Press PAUSE.
Pause.
“Daddy,” I asked, “who’s Agnes?”
Pause.
“Well, honey, Agnes was my mother.
“Your Grandma Ryan didn’t want me to tell you that she was my stepmother; she thought you might not like her.”
(I didn’t like her, I thought.)
“Agnes — my mother — died when I was a baby and your Aunt Bernice was a little girl. After a couple of years, your Grandpa Ryan remarried and we went to live with Rose and her daughter Phyllis.”
Additional revelations followed: Agnes had come to the United States from Denmark, her maiden name was Jacobsen . . . but I am now going to reveal to you an odd fact to know and tell about myself.
Agnes Jacobsen Ryan, my paternal grandmother, died in the influenza pandemic of 1918.
Not my great-great-grandmother. Not my great-grandmother. My grandmother. (I am not ninety-five years old. I was born in the mid-1950s to parents in their late thirties, so if you do a little arithmetic, you will see that it all works.)
My childhood discovery of that one fact — that my father’s mother died in 1918 — did not change everything, but it did contribute to my perception of time and its passing and of the presence of the past. Truth to tell, I think that I was born out of time, metaphorically speaking, but my slightly odd genealogy reinforces the sense I have that . . . well, World War I, for instance, was really not all that long ago.
Wonderful story, Sheila. I guess she died young which is why the timeline seems all distorted. My Grandmother was born in 1900 but didn’t die until the late 80s. It has the feeling of time playing tricks.
I’m also assuming that this means you are a Viking?!
FAB!
I love this. This morning I am sitting in the living room of Danny’s sister’s and Brother-in-law’s (way too many possessives) condo. Lunch is being prepped. 14 are coming. Tomato soup with pesto. Danish open-face sandwiches–egg-salad, havarti, cheddar, ham. 20-some coming for Turkey dinner this afternoon at 5:30. It will be noisy as all get out. Happy Thanksgiving, y’all.
There is that sense of a timeline that is not exactly the norm. My other grandparents died in the 1960s, which is a little odd for someone my age but makes sense when you think that my mother was 38 and my father 37 when I was born. But it is not nearly so odd as a grandmother who died in 1918.
Agnes Jacobsen Ryan was 28 when she was hit by the second fierce wave of influenza that hit the East Coast of the US in October 1918. She is buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery near Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. For years I have contemplated buying a simple stone for her grave. I think that now maybe I will.
Phil, I may or may not be a Viking, but I seem to recall Lucy telling me that the region from which my grandmother haled (northwestern Jutland) is the redneck region of Denmark.
Have a wonderful day, Rick – I’m sure after a couple of Martinis all those possessives will become one!
Sheila, you should get that stone – I hate the thought of unmarked graves, my great grandmother is in one. Many years ago I tracked down its location – then I was too young to do the deed, now, I have to start again.
Surely you can be a red-neck and a Viking? Red hair cascading down over a intensely red neck!
I think that Vikings may be rednecks by definition.
Yeah, and they get to wear hats with horns!
That does it. I’m a Viking, whether I am or not.
And let us not forget the SPAM®.
The SPAM®! Yes, how could I forget. Can you hear me singing it?
All the way across the damn Atlantic Ocean.
Sheila, have you seen the film 1918? It’s a film of a Horton Foote play–part of a trilogy of plays called The Story of a Marriage, which is part of a longer cycle of plays. It really shows what it must have felt like to live in a small TX town and see people on all sides falling away. The Katherine Anne Porter story “Pale Horse, Pale Rider” is good in a similar way, as I’m sure you know. Your stories here–particularly with reference to a sense of time–have brought KAP’s whole sensibility and life to mind.
Daryl, I have not seen 1918, but I will track it down.
Yes. Katherine Anne Porter. “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”, for sure, but now that I come to think of it, the sense of loss and exile that I find in Porter’s work and life is a familiar companion.
I was 10 years old when Nixon resigned. I was only dimly aware of the whole Watergate affair, but I knew my parents were strong supporters of Nixon, and didn’t believe he’d had anything to do with the crime or cover-up.
I remember asking my parents, “does that mean he did it?” and them answering, well, yes it looks like he did.
So on the same day I learned the president of the United States could be a bad guy, I learned my parents could be just plain dead wrong.
Nothing in the universe seemed quite the same after that.
Excellent thread.
Revelatory moments:
circa 12, under my mother’s christian influence – I found my subconscious digesting the week old reading of ‘The Screwtape Letters’ (C.S. Lewis, dialogs between demon and devil regarding their efforts at corruption). I finally snapped somewhere inside, and cast off my constant guilt, self-doubt, perpetual seeking for some other being’s influence inside my mind.
In a split second, I had come to the conclusion that I wasn’t prepared to believe that a deity would demand that vigilance against one-self, that I’d rather believe that beauty was truth, truth beauty – and damn the consequences if it wasn’t. By faith I’d make it so.
–
and similar to Cindy’s tale – except I realised that this consciousness thing existed – that I was a sentient being staring out at the world through a pair of eyes, not just some biological machine. That threw me.
Sex. Consciousness. Belief. Trust. Self. Others.
This is great stuff.