It's a long one...but read it
Man, I hit the fucking jackpot. Finally some good has come out of this boring trip home.
I was overcome with serious boredom earlier today (the kind that makes you wish you were already back in a Chinese elementary school dealing with screaming kids who never pay attention or do what you tell them to) when I decided to pick up a book. Homage to Catalonia has been serving me well, as has the bio of KJI that I picked up, but I was really in the mood for something lighter. I don’t know…I love Orwell, but I just didn’t feel like reading him. I picked up Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and opened it to a random essay but was quickly turned off by Chuck Klosterman’s haughty language. So, I set his book back down and sighed forlornly. What to do? Did I have yet another morning/afternoon of beating it to internet porn ahead of me? Rather than fall into that rut I decided that I would go explore the garage. My mom said she’d put some of my DVDs and comics out there and that I should go and pick it all up before I left. I was interested in getting all that stuff back, but didn’t feel like digging through that hot, stuffy garage in search of whatever it is I left home. The choice was between eating, watching TV, digging up some Sora Aoi junk on the web, or the garage. The garage won out.
I used to go dig around in my garage when I was a kid because I wanted to be an archeologist. I knew I wasn’t going to find any Aztec shit buried in all those dirty old boxes, but I’d go out there every Saturday afternoon and dig through that old stuff in search of relics that would peak my 9 year old curiosity. I found old newspapers from the forties, pictures of my parents when they were young, souvenirs from their trip to Graceland (in 1979), and some old books still in their original dust jackets that would probably be worth a fortune today if I could remember where the hell they were. In the aftermath of my parents’ divorce, my dad and mom managed to stop yelling at each other long enough for them to tear open those old boxes and cart away whatever they had decided to cart away. I remember watching my dad come over and load his old books and trinkets into his car so he could drive them to his apartment across town. Digging through those boxes in the garage had become a staple of my life but, like my parents, they were being split up.
Not much has changed, though. The garage is still full of dirty old boxes and power tools. I located the items my mom had mentioned to me and moved them from the oppressive heat of the garage and into the guest room at the end of the hall (which had been my room when I was growing up) where I am temporarily residing. I went back out to see if there was anything I’d missed when I saw it: in one of the dark, dusty corners of our garage I noticed a large square shape that seemed like it wasn’t there before. It was covered with a blanket (which was covered in two inches of dust) and looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in years. I approached it carefully and pulled off the cover. It was an oak bookcase that I thought looked a little familiar. After a few minutes I realized that it was the case that had stood in my room from the time we moved into this house (when I was, probably, 5 or 6) until I was 16 and changed rooms. It was still covered with pictures of Batman and the Ninja Turtles and other weird little scribbles that I drew on it with crayons over ten years ago. I opened the creaking, warped doors and…fuck…it was like a light from heaven. There were all these perfect editions of books that I loved when I was a kid: Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing, The Egypt Game, The Bridge to Terabithia, Where the Red Fern Grows, Who Was that Masked Man, Anyway?, Island of the Blue Dolphins, On My Honor, Summer of My German Soldier, The 4th Grade Wizards, Vampires Don’t Wear Polka Dots, The Dark Thirty, Watership Down, Twenty and Ten, Shiloh, Sing Down the Moon, A Wrinkle in Time, The Invisible Thread, The Indian in the Cupboard and others. I thought I was going to have a heart attack, but instead I grabbed them all in one giant armful and spread them out on my bedroom floor. I spent the rest of the day living in an old episode of Reading Rainbow. The books were so thin and short that I had no trouble reading straight through them, one after another, until I’d finished them all.
In my 21 year old mind, as in my 10 year old mind, Scott O’ Dell sat on the side of my bed and told me about Karana and her solitary life on her island paradise. He rubbed shoulders with Judy Blume, who brought tales of Peter and his brother “fudge.” After they fell into a peaceful slumber on my bed I was visited by Avi (one of my favorite writers when I was a kid) so he could tell me all about Franklin and his love for old radio programs. Avi had a beer and listened quietly while Katherine Paterson told us about Jess and Leslie’s adventures in Terabithia. But these books turned out to have more than just nostalgic value for me. Now that I’m old, on my own, and thinking of starting my own family, I’m mature enough to see things I never saw before in the books I read. Summer of My German Soldier had just been a mellow love story to me, but now I can find disturbing similarities between Anton’s detainment and the plight of many innocent people today. The Bridge to Terabithia had just been a fantasy story of love between two kids to me, but now the depiction of the antagonism between rural and urban classes is plain to see. “The Ginji,” from The Dark Thirty, is now less of a frightening ghost story to me and more of an indictment of how far modern society has removed us from tradition. Still potent after all these years, these tiny pieces of my childhood still have the power to move and haunt me despite the jaded, paranoid adult I’ve become.
I was overcome with serious boredom earlier today (the kind that makes you wish you were already back in a Chinese elementary school dealing with screaming kids who never pay attention or do what you tell them to) when I decided to pick up a book. Homage to Catalonia has been serving me well, as has the bio of KJI that I picked up, but I was really in the mood for something lighter. I don’t know…I love Orwell, but I just didn’t feel like reading him. I picked up Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs and opened it to a random essay but was quickly turned off by Chuck Klosterman’s haughty language. So, I set his book back down and sighed forlornly. What to do? Did I have yet another morning/afternoon of beating it to internet porn ahead of me? Rather than fall into that rut I decided that I would go explore the garage. My mom said she’d put some of my DVDs and comics out there and that I should go and pick it all up before I left. I was interested in getting all that stuff back, but didn’t feel like digging through that hot, stuffy garage in search of whatever it is I left home. The choice was between eating, watching TV, digging up some Sora Aoi junk on the web, or the garage. The garage won out.
I used to go dig around in my garage when I was a kid because I wanted to be an archeologist. I knew I wasn’t going to find any Aztec shit buried in all those dirty old boxes, but I’d go out there every Saturday afternoon and dig through that old stuff in search of relics that would peak my 9 year old curiosity. I found old newspapers from the forties, pictures of my parents when they were young, souvenirs from their trip to Graceland (in 1979), and some old books still in their original dust jackets that would probably be worth a fortune today if I could remember where the hell they were. In the aftermath of my parents’ divorce, my dad and mom managed to stop yelling at each other long enough for them to tear open those old boxes and cart away whatever they had decided to cart away. I remember watching my dad come over and load his old books and trinkets into his car so he could drive them to his apartment across town. Digging through those boxes in the garage had become a staple of my life but, like my parents, they were being split up.
Not much has changed, though. The garage is still full of dirty old boxes and power tools. I located the items my mom had mentioned to me and moved them from the oppressive heat of the garage and into the guest room at the end of the hall (which had been my room when I was growing up) where I am temporarily residing. I went back out to see if there was anything I’d missed when I saw it: in one of the dark, dusty corners of our garage I noticed a large square shape that seemed like it wasn’t there before. It was covered with a blanket (which was covered in two inches of dust) and looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in years. I approached it carefully and pulled off the cover. It was an oak bookcase that I thought looked a little familiar. After a few minutes I realized that it was the case that had stood in my room from the time we moved into this house (when I was, probably, 5 or 6) until I was 16 and changed rooms. It was still covered with pictures of Batman and the Ninja Turtles and other weird little scribbles that I drew on it with crayons over ten years ago. I opened the creaking, warped doors and…fuck…it was like a light from heaven. There were all these perfect editions of books that I loved when I was a kid: Tales of a 4th Grade Nothing, The Egypt Game, The Bridge to Terabithia, Where the Red Fern Grows, Who Was that Masked Man, Anyway?, Island of the Blue Dolphins, On My Honor, Summer of My German Soldier, The 4th Grade Wizards, Vampires Don’t Wear Polka Dots, The Dark Thirty, Watership Down, Twenty and Ten, Shiloh, Sing Down the Moon, A Wrinkle in Time, The Invisible Thread, The Indian in the Cupboard and others. I thought I was going to have a heart attack, but instead I grabbed them all in one giant armful and spread them out on my bedroom floor. I spent the rest of the day living in an old episode of Reading Rainbow. The books were so thin and short that I had no trouble reading straight through them, one after another, until I’d finished them all.
In my 21 year old mind, as in my 10 year old mind, Scott O’ Dell sat on the side of my bed and told me about Karana and her solitary life on her island paradise. He rubbed shoulders with Judy Blume, who brought tales of Peter and his brother “fudge.” After they fell into a peaceful slumber on my bed I was visited by Avi (one of my favorite writers when I was a kid) so he could tell me all about Franklin and his love for old radio programs. Avi had a beer and listened quietly while Katherine Paterson told us about Jess and Leslie’s adventures in Terabithia. But these books turned out to have more than just nostalgic value for me. Now that I’m old, on my own, and thinking of starting my own family, I’m mature enough to see things I never saw before in the books I read. Summer of My German Soldier had just been a mellow love story to me, but now I can find disturbing similarities between Anton’s detainment and the plight of many innocent people today. The Bridge to Terabithia had just been a fantasy story of love between two kids to me, but now the depiction of the antagonism between rural and urban classes is plain to see. “The Ginji,” from The Dark Thirty, is now less of a frightening ghost story to me and more of an indictment of how far modern society has removed us from tradition. Still potent after all these years, these tiny pieces of my childhood still have the power to move and haunt me despite the jaded, paranoid adult I’ve become.