Making it up

It's fall, and I think back to a seminal moment in my childhood.  I sat in the small makeshift sandbox in our backyard, and traced roads on the mounds I'd made.  I was having conversations with myself in an improvised language I was working on.  To be fair, it was really just a pile of sand that conveniently sat over the cesspool cover.  I suppose it was easier to leave the sand there than destroy grass every time we had to pump out the leeching pool (From a family with 7 children, this seemed as common an experience as the change in seasons).

I seemed to have lumped every experience in my memory to this seminal moment.  Layers upon layers of childhood times, that only peeled off on occasions when the winds blew just right.  As I walked to my car in the late afternoon, I felt the chill and the fading light was just as it had been every year at this time.   Someone had lit their fireplace and the north wind was just turning toward us, pushing the skittering leaves across the street.  The scene came to me from somewhere within, bursting into my senses.   I rolled it around in my mind, letting the flavor of the memory reveal itself to me as a vaguely familiar meal will.  Certainty comes first, followed by a sort of reaching or grasping to try to take it all in before the experience fades away.

I heard my own voice in my ears the way I did in that backyard,  felt my mouth shaping out different combinations of sounds.  It was the feature of language creation I was playing with.  I remember trying to vary up the sounds so that it didn't sound like a fake language, and then I tried to keep track of each sound so that if I was having a conversation with myself, I wouldn't refer to the same sound combinations too much, but enough to make it sound as if I was talking about something (whatever that sound would signify).  In these conversations with myself, I would practice all the elements of expression I could think of, such as surprise, curiosity, anger, impatience, disagreement, joking, relief, etc.  I remember watching Andy Kaufman's character "Latka" on the TV series "Taxi" and thinking, that seems familiar.  I knew he was probably wrestling with the same problems I had in making it sound like a real language without actually speaking one.  

I wonder who might be amazed 

at my Sandbox Language skills?  

Hmmm?  

I don't know how old I was exactly, because I believe that seminal moment is actually an amalgam of a few years of my life, and the only sign posts of the memory are the changes of the features in the back yard in my mind.  My parents renovations to the back yard are recorded with the memory, and so I can tell from the position of the garbage pails, or the height of a certain tree roughly when it might have occurred, with the help of the family album. 

I seemed to have been obsessed with the nature of conversation, at least that's the way my memory reports it to me.  My entire family would squeeze around this tiny table with benches, 9 of us, most nights for dinner.  During the meal, I remember battling for butt cheek space with one or another of my siblings on one of the end benches, but that ended when most of them cleared out after dinner.  My parents were both smokers when I was young, which certainly wasn't uncommon in the late 60s.  

After dinners was for smokers a wonderful time to light up, and for my parents to talk without the kids hovering over them.  My parents would sit across from one another, elbows on the table, the smoke drifting lazily from the cigarettes that never left their fingertips.  They would talk to each other about many things, I think.  I don't remember the subject of the conversation, and I seem to remember not listening to what they were saying.  

I was more interested in how they behaved during the conversation.  I pretended to be an involved listener, too.  I would turn my head toward the speaker, leaning on my elbow also, and switching my hands when the other would speak.  I watched their mouths, and the movement of their hands.  My father didn't move much, seeming to me to conserve energy on every flick of the cigarette or sip of his coffee.  My mother exclaimed with her hands, brushing aside subjects with the flick of her wrist.  She would point at the thing she was talking about, and ask a question with her opened palm, pausing to drink from the end of the cigarette now and again.  The smoke swirled with emphasis.  Special effects, I think now.

Doctors depriving their children 

of a delicious second hand smoke snack. 

For Shame!

So this is what grown ups did!  I would memorize this and pass as one of them very soon indeed. I tried to study as long as I could, until the clouds of smoke pushed me from the room, covered my mouth and nose until I had to flee into another room.  I suppose that was a good enough reason to smoke if you were an adult in a bunkhouse of children.  I don't think a child safety gate would have worked better to keep the room clear of us.

I took the conversation practice in the sandbox with me to school, and I remember adding accents to the sounds, particularly British accents.  I told my mates in third grade that I was born in London, and though they didn't really believe me, or know what England was, they weren't sure if maybe I was telling the truth.  I remember that my teacher Miss Destephano, sitting at her desk behind my buddies,  seemed to be very thoughtful as I spoke.  I thought she was interested in my story, but I believe now that she was trying not to laugh.  She is out of focus in the memory, my two friends friend named John are close and in focus, trying to disprove my English birth.  I am grateful now to Miss Destephano for her restraint in not ratting me out.  I kept the ruse going for a few months, or so I remember.  I would forget myself on occasion and drop the accent, but would explain this slip by mourning the loss of the accent the longer I lived in America.   Part of me would love to coach that younger me in making a more convincing story, as I feel I had the accent down then, probably better than I can do it now.  Righto.  I would pretend to have broken limbs and forget leg to limp on as well.  It all seems like quite a lot of work as I write about it now.

My Humble Birthplace

A very rural part of London

As a study aid I would watch a British television program called "The Galloping Gourmet."  I would mimic the host Graham Kerr (I needed to google this information to get his name, I never knew it).  I believe whatever accent I had at the time was his.   I would run around the The St. Joseph the Worker blacktop in a kind of gallop, and the kids would laugh at this, but I believe this was moving into a kind of satire rather than an imitation.    The accent they seemed not to notice, the cretins.  

Kerr-Unlikely Hero.  Did he really gallop?  

Why didn't he answer my fan mail?

As I said earlier, the north wind blew in for the first time last night, and the reminiscence of m old  verbal gymnastics tumbled back into my mind.  I imagine myself in this photo of my younger son Kieran,  bundled a bit in a pile of leaves, listening and creating sounds and practicing the verbal rhythm of relationship.  

Time to head home, to my wife and my two sons, two with very different ideas on conversation and making things up.  Evan speaks only when he has to, or mouths the same tones and syllables like candy that never loses it's flavor.  When we are in the car he will sometimes catch on some sound and insist on it to the window,  and I wonder if this conversation is meant for another, or simply for his own ears or mouth to feel.  But often we are silent, and I will reach back and place my hand on his shin to communicate my awareness of him.  

Kieran will bring me upstairs to his room where all his toy trains are, and want me only nominally involved.  It is okay with him that I bring a book for the times he doesn't need me.  It's during these moments that I hear him having the same kind of conversations I had as a boy, with all the different tones and melodies of what I believed was the point of conversation. The trains will talk with one another, and warn each other, and scold each other, or congratulate one another for escaping one close call or another.   Sometimes we will just crash the trains off the table, and we will make a host of different sounds of exclamation.  He is a big fan of the reaction as well.

Kieran last fall

These days, I work late more than I would prefer, and my family has not established a pattern of dinner that was so much a part of the childhoods of my wife and I.   I wonder if it is the fond memory for both of us it is supposed to be, at least for myself.   It certainly could be a bit heated and overcrowded, but not always,  I remember.  Perhaps my difficulties with it are in the more recent past, with the early issues with Evan and food.  He is fantastic of late, experimenting with all sorts of food, and sitting there eating with devotion and relish.   I am out of sorts here, perhaps.  The early dinner has vanished from my repertoire, and it was a standard for almost my whole life.  Hard to know how that shifted so much.

But now the weather has given its cue, and everyone is now in from the yard a bit earlier. The clothing is just starting to stay on our Evan, who rejoices in nudity at every opportunity.  I wonder how this will all work. When do the conversations start to have thread?  When will we stay on a topic at dinner, or even have one?  With no cigarettes between us, will the adults get a word in edgewise?