(no subject)
I want to write about this, but not publicly; increasingly, this is what I use livejournal for, if anything. Facebook is too public, tumblr is too contentious, and I've never been much good at keeping a journal. I think I process externally a lot, with dear friends, and livejournal isn't a big part of that anymore. It's not just because the population here has thinned down; a lot of it is that my own needs have shifted.
But anyway. The people I might normally talk this through with aren't around, and I want to figure out how I feel, and this is the venue I use for that, right?
I'm visiting my family in Maine right now. It's going beautifully. Yesterday mom drove me through the neighborhood where I grew up, and we pointed out all the houses and talked about the people who had lived there. Now, I grew up in a little corner of a small town in Maine - only, in Maine, it's actually a pretty large town. We had already talked about the violent, overcrowded high school and how much better it is now, and for the first time I talked to my mother about my very real fears about being gay there. That's another post. But that's part of the backdrop for the driving-around-the-neighborhood conversation.
So, right: a small town, large for Maine, small for most of the US, maybe 17k people. A tiny house in a swamp, a small neighborhood of other small houses also in the swamp. It was a great place to be a kid, really; hell, my brother recently bought a bunch of acreage that includes a swamp, because he wants his kids to grow up in one. The role of the swamp in my childhood was one of the few things that was an unalloyed good. Frogs, ducks, mud, salamanders, standing dead trees, pileated woodpeckers, countless hours of running madly about, climbing trees, telling stories, exploring, and learning. Every kid should have something as ecologically rich and imaginatively fertile as a swamp.
In winter we played hockey on the swamp. This is its own kind of difficult. It's not like it froze smooth. There were sticks and submerged logs and rotten ice.
The other kids, though: this wasn't some sort of idyllic neighborhood. I was one of only a few kids my age - there were more of them my brother's age, though not too many. There was one other girl near my age in the neighborhood, and she and I grew apart when we hit school age; she was a grade above me and much more feminine. We didn't share interests. I was friends with a couple of neighborhood boys. My brother had a richer (but more disturbing) local social life...
Mom was driving through the neighborhood, pointing out houses. One house she pointed to got the "they've cleaned that up" comment and I remembered the previous occupants as disordered to a really distressing degree (and this is coming from me). One was "the place that had the mean dogs." Then we got to the place with the people who grew pot in their back yard (I had never known this), and the place with the woman who beat her kids (the oldest kid, my brother's age, flinched when you looked at him and was all over bruises). The place with the kid everyone else beat up but who was also a horrible little jerk when I tried to babysit him. The place with the mean bully who was theoretically my brother's friend, whose mother was disturbingly childlike... and whose father was eventually arrested for dealing heroin. They had a mean rottweiler, chained out all the time; I think they gave it drugs. The place with the super-religious people. The one with the kid I was friends with, whose younger brother was, as my mother put it, "a thug, just a thug." His brother, my friend, is someone I didn't try to stay in touch with; he was sweet and sensitive, and his brother called him gay and beat him up for it. He was always afraid, and I think his stepfather tried to beat the queer out of him too. I asked mom if she knew if he was really gay. She said she thought so... I wonder what happened to him. I just looked for him on facebook and could only find his brother. I wonder if he outgrew the bullying. I hope so. He's got a kid.
I did another quick search and found evidence that the one I hung out with is still alive, at least; apparently he works for a dentist. Or possibly is a dentist. Wonder why he's not searchable on facebook. I don't really wonder that he's not on his brother's friends list on facebook, given what I remember from our childhood. Although someone on asked after him on his brother's facebook and was told to "call the lab." So... alive. That's good news. I could probably track him down if I wanted to.
We saw the house where the really really religious people lived, and the strange people with the poodles. And the mean guy all the kids were afraid of. But most of those were just, you know, people... nothing too awful. I mean, there was the guy who shot our dog with a BB gun, he's still there... the guy who may or may not have tried to run my brother and I down with his truck once. You know, neighbors.
It's the rest of it that blew my mind a bit. As a kid, I was pretty unaware of how much really screwed-up shit was going on around me. There were less than two dozen houses anywhere near us - really about a dozen, maybe 20, with people that we even knew. And now it turns out we had drug dealers and child abusers all over the place. And I thought it was all totally normal. I babysat for some of those families; my brother hung out in their homes. I ran wild in that neighborhood, and I'd probably have a lot of somewhat harrowing stories if I hadn't been essentially a solitary kid, more inclined to wander around in the woods and make friends with trees than to hang out with the local pack of slightly feral children.
If I remember correctly, my brother used to talk about how everyone beat up this other kid, and he didn't want to, but he didn't know what to do. He'd get beat up too if he stood up for the kid, and the kid was kind of awful to people and started a lot of the fights. He just always lost them. So my brother couldn't figure out what the right thing to do was, and he'd just go hide in the swamp when the fights started. My brother has not always had an easy life. I feel like he probably has stories to tell that I don't even know, and a lot of that started when we were kids.
My school was terribly violent and a very scary place to be, let alone to be gay. I thought that was normal too.
No wonder cities don't scare me, huh? I tend to think about my family life when I consider the things I learned in childhood. I tend to remember my neighborhood as basically safe, with a couple of houses you didn't go near; I have a lot of very fond memories of the swamp and the woods. I remember mostly being alone, but rarely lonely, because trees are good company. I honestly like the way I grew up, for the most part; I'm nostalgic for those woods, that water. I didn't think of my neighborhood as dangerous, I just knew to avoid the guy who hated kids and the people with the mean dogs.
I'm just processing, really. Rewriting my childhood a bit, seeing it differently through adult eyes.