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Pre-Internet Innocence

8/26/2011

Poor luck for the optimist/schmuck who one day called the phone booth that usually sat silent in our high school hallway. A survey about our cafeteria food, you say? Boy, bub, good thing for you that I answered . . .

Leading with the fact that I never actually ate the cafeteria food, I kept that schmo on the phone for at least 45 minutes, ranting away on such urgent topics as the horrors of Beef Pinwheel -- a cafeteria standard about which, fortunately for him, I had a whole theory.

But why stop there? I had opinions for days in those days, and he -- the dope -- sat through them all. A partial list of my usual complaints back then involved enforced pep rallies, enforced typing class, enforcement in general, and the dearth of vegetarian options.

And did you know they keep us trapped in here ALL DAY?

Eventually Mr. Lucky interrupted with a sigh. “Don’t you have any goodie-goodies I can talk to?”

What?

“You know, good girls.”

Oh man, I assured him, there are tons of ’em in here.

“Let me talk to one,” he said.

The halls were filling as classes changed. I stretched the phone receiver temptingly outside the booth, pointing at random girls I didn’t know. “Some guy wants to talk to you.” They veered away from me as they passed.

I went back to the phone. “They don’t want to talk to you.”

Deciding finally to make do with what he had, he let loose with something smutty.

More surprised than I cared to let on, I screamed a laugh into the phone just to split his ears a little and hung up. Then I went looking for another audience, possibly even to class.

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Tooth Fairy Princess

8/15/2011

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And so (continuing from my previous post) I went to bed that night with a record cache of baby teeth under my pillow and accordingly high expectations for the Tooth Fairy. You’ll think I only dreamt what happened next, but I know better.

I was asleep, when suddenly my father appeared at the foot of my bed. He was somehow a smaller version of himself by at least a foot; he was also uncharacteristically . . . happy. Tweaking my big toe through the blanket, he whispered urgently, “Wake up, wake up! There’s someone here to see you.”

And I woke up right then, no question.

I turned my head toward the hallway and into the doorway slowly stepped a glowing fairy princess of full, adult height. She was dressed very much like Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz, with a smaller crown. She held a wand that went all the way to the floor. She seemed to be made of light and sparkled from head to foot, and I could see through her.

As my father smiled and retreated, I lay there gaping at -- well, who else could it be but the Tooth Fairy? Apparently she’d make herself known for a high roller like me, when it was a matter of multiples under the pillow.

She turned to face me, and spoke, directly to me. But something was wrong. Just as with the schoolboy’s scribbling, I couldn’t understand what she was saying. She continued on, talking rapidly in some kind of language, or level of my language, that was completely beyond me. I lay perfectly still for some minutes, trying and failing to grasp even a word.

It pains me still to recall what happened next.

I (ouch) spoke.

“What did you bring me?”

Instant regret.

The presumed Tooth Fairy startled, looking at me as if seeing me for the first time. Without another word, she turned into the hallway and floated out of sight.

I was mortified. Selfish, selfish!

And when -- after a rough night of self-recrimination -- I found two dollars (a veritable fortune then) under my pillow, it might as well have been blood money to me.

I’d have given anything, for many years, to have been able to take those child’s words back. People have suggested since that she might have been some kind of well-dressed spirit guide, there by coincidence, communicating with my “higher self,” some part of me that would have understood had I been, as she may have assumed, asleep. Maybe so. All I know is that I understand why people talk about their inner child, or used to. Sometimes it’s the only way to contemplate forgiveness for yourself. Because how many chances are you going to get to say “sorry” to somebody like that?

Yet there was more that night: whoever she was, seconds after she disappeared, a beautiful ball of gentle white light floated in from the hallway, crossing slowly in front of me and out through the wall. I knew it was her.

It's possible she wasn't even angry with me at all.

Of course, being six or so, I immediately jumped out of bed and ran to my parents’ room, shouting for my father. “She was here! She was here! The Tooth Fairy was here!” But my father, not happy to see let alone hear me, had somehow contracted amnesia. His brief happy-go-lucky personality had disappeared, and he had the crazy idea I’d just had a dream.

“But you were there -- you woke me up! You saw her before I did!” I insisted.

I’m pretty sure we both shook our heads over each other for a few days after that. If not a few years.

I was conscious that time, I swear.

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First Love

8/15/2011

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Sometimes I try to imagine what my parents must have thought about everything they had to put up with. Especially when I remember -- and get a chance to regale some sweet-hearted, fairy-princess-loving little girl with -- this tale. And I swear every word of it is, to my best ability, true.

The story of this day ends with a fairy princess alright, but it starts with a baboon. The kind with the bright red behind that is just too much for some kids to take -- a primate who would have had a very hard time of it in grade school, let’s just say.

Well, I’d hopped in the car for a very special, unexpected, get-out-of-school, go-out-with-Mom-and-her-best-friend trip to the ZOO.

Yay!

Of course, I wound up at the dentist. Curses, foiled again.

And what a trip it was. Apparently I was a bad little brusher, as the dentist and his minion came at me with that smelly mask and -- continuing our developing theme -- knocked me out cold.

Ha. That’s what they thought.

Alone, I wandered in a technicolor nightmare, walking amid weird horizontal lines like an old television on the fritz. Lost, terrified, trying to think what to do. Finally, the only answer came.

I took a big breath and screamed with everything I had.

Cleared the waiting room, they said.

That was nothing compared to what I dished out to the “big liar,” my mom, once I escaped. Don’t know if they really had planned on a zoo outing after all that, but boy, we went.

How anyone touring a 1960s zoo -- and seeing what passed for “creature comforts” back then -- could have stayed in a funk of self-pity, I now wonder.

Then I saw, sitting inside the bars of a sorry cement pen, a baboon, who clearly had more to complain about than I. I had run ahead, and so the baboon and I were alone. We regarded each other awhile, and then somehow he (or she, I never knew) let me know we could play. I’d do something silly and she (or he) would copy me. Wiggly, waving little girl hands, wiggly, waving baboon hands. Jumping little girl, jumping baboon. Astounding! Joy! Connection. Heart.

Sudden, completely new understanding of a fellow creature, and through him or her, all of them, all of us. If my mother hadn’t finally dragged me away I never would have left that baboon, my new friend, on my own.

As you likely know, when you pay attention, animals show you how deep your heart is, how deep love goes, until you realize it’s bottomless.

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Back to School

8/4/2011

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One advantage of a wandering mind is its availability for less-conventional input. Such as the time I sat in high-school English class and found myself slipped into a rushing recollection, accidentally recapturing another “iconic” moment.

I had just died. Seconds before, I had been in the midst of some passionate struggle, my heart given over in a fevered intensity. Something really mattered ...

But as I entered a peaceful, enveloping mist, I suddenly remembered an entirely different reality. All at once, something else really mattered ...

“I can explain everything!” I shouted at whoever would hear. But I knew it was hopeless -- I had already had the lesson of the mist, in some other in-between, and I’d gone down there and forgotten. Again.

I had killed, again. Wrong.

But it was really important, I argued feebly. We were fighting for our freedom. I tried to convey the hell down there, of not living free.

It could not have mattered less to those in charge. There were no excuses, no arguments, no exonerating clauses.

It was back to Mist-ery School for me, before yet another try.

Years later, a psychic told me that in a recent life, I’d lived in Haiti, where I and others had stormed a government building, fighting for our freedom. I’d killed, she said, and was killed in return.

I’m sure you’re right, I told her.

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Pre-Internet Innocence

Tooth Fairy Princess

First Love

Back to School

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