Sadieandleo

January 11th, 2008

Let’s do… 1981.

First grade.  I was the smallest kid in 1st grade, I think I came in around 45 lbs. wet and I do remember being picked up and carried by swift winds.   I donned a haircut I like to call the Lego-Doo, really severely cut angular hair, bangs completely straight, and super short all around.  I was painfully shy but I had a mature quick wit, I had snappy come-backs when it came to communicating with grown-ups, but when it came to my peers, I clammed right up.  I was really into “quiet time”; I could intrigue myself for hours with cheap watercolor sets, Crayolas dumped out of their pristine boxes and melting on wax paper set on hot plates.  I would discover those little dark and dusty corners of the library and read books I didn’t understand, the ones with botanical drawings in them.  I wore sneakers with velcro and little zippered change pockets, I think they were called Zipps?  I liked watching National Geographic shows about lions in the Serengeti and Nova.  Saturday night was for Solid Gold.  My yard was my heaven and it was the biggest place in my world.  The side of the driveway was the Fort, the back of the driveway was Juneau’s dog house, that Alaskan Malamute never wanted to be domesticated.  Her line ran all the way down deep into the woods.  Next to that the pond, a place for unending discovery, and in the winter, our skating rink.  Horseshoe Drive, that big old house, still my home in my heart so many years later.

In that time I don’t remember thinking that I was a kid, or that I was carefree.  There was anticipation and anxiety even then.  1981, with my metal Hulk lunchbox, the kind with the latch that held down the Thermos inside.  With my little stature, my unassuming presence, my almost forgetful impression on others, I still made it out of that world.   I couldn’t fill my big sister’s shoes even though it was silently expected of me.  I couldn’t mother my younger brother although that was too.  I did the best I could.   I had no model of how it was supposed to happen, you know, life for someone so young and so forced into responsibility and independence.  I loved to play and to pretend but there was always something lurking behind that bliss, something that I had to do, even still.  Was I capable?  Was I prepared?  No, but that may have been the best way.

I think it was the day I rode my bike to the end of the road, we weren’t supposed to ride our bikes off of our road onto Tsienneto Road, off of Horseshoe.  It was a busy road with a wicked blind turn, and cars whipped by at unimaginable speeds, and worse yet, the road dipped severely into what can only be compared to a black diamond ski slope.  That road was forbidden.  And all of these years later I wish I could say that on that day I took my bike and I took that road and I conquered that hill and I survived to tell the tale.  But I didn’t.  I wasn’t that kid then and I’m not sure if I’m that kid today.  What if I had?  Besides being roadkill, what would have come of it?  Would I be afraid to try new things, afraid of challenges, of failure?  Who would be writing this entry today?  Instead I pondered that road, I looked at that road, observing it, but not really understanding what it really meant.  Fear kept me from it, afraid of what might have happened to me, afraid of what was at the bottom of that hill.  So much of me is that way now, the constant observer, listener, thinker, not the risk taker, doer, succeeder.

I think it’s time to take that road.