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spqrbluesCurrent inexplicable dream: Dr. Quinn from 7th-12th grade English and English History and History of Theatre class in a mysterious not-there-in-real-life office at the end of a not-quite-there-in-real-life hallway in my old school building, gathered with other teachers end-of-Titanic-like, thanking me for lending him a book, and handing it back to me, with an inscription in his fine, precise script, that I can't quite read. Of course. Why do dreams do that?
When I was around the ages of two and three, along with snippets of of poetry and One Misty Moisty Morning and the story of Rebecca at the well my mother read a lot of Hans Christian Andersen to me. My favourite story was The Little Mermaid. The real one, not the HappyDisney version. The pain of sacrifice, the sense of gain and loss and individuality were so sharp, it induced me 1) to have her read it again and again until I learned to read the words on the page; and, 2) to begin to ask her to let me read the story, so that I could give it a new ending, one that did not make my heart hurt so for the heroine. I learned a lot about empathy, about the meaning of the self, about the power of stories. Ideas sank in even if I could not parse them until much later when I realised all that had been stripped from the bowdlerised version. All that power lost, lost, when HappyDisney-fied.
Then one evening my father brought home a copy of Alice In Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, and writing and illustration became forever entwined and forever important to me. Looking Glass was by far my favourite of the two. Weirder. Darker. Wilder.
Flip ahead through the pages to second grade, where I made friends with an "odd" (weird, wild) girl named Darnell Martin, who showed me how the most ordinary of objects in the world around us are suffused with magic, if only you just look hard enough and long enough and open your mind. We used to wait in the library together; I was very young and small for my grade and I think she may have been a little older than her grade—which was third or perhaps fourth. So on this little girl fell the task of watching out for a tinier little girl, and she seemed quite grown-up and important to me.
It was a small private girls' school. We wore uniforms evolved from the Victorian originals, starched white shortsleeved blouses with seersucker skirts for spring term and starched white longsleeved blouses and heavy wool navy blue jumpers (in the American sense) for fall term, with crested blue blazers if you wished, and, until they broke down and allowed us t-shirts and shorts, weird greyish blue cotton jumpers over weirder greyish blue bloomers for phys ed, exact replicas of their ancient original except for length. The library... picture a Victorian—for the building was Victorian—wood-panelled den crowded with tall shelves and lifesize oil portraits of ancestral headmasters and headmistresses gazing down from above. Massive wooden tables surrounded by maroon studded-leather chairs. Atlases at the bottom of the stack that fell off the map into a blank unknown in Central Africa. The accepted leatherbound classics and Tolkien and A. E. Van Vogt paperbacks and 1920s National Geographics given equal space.
Darnell wove all sorts of stories while we waited for parents to collect us or whatever reason we were so often there together. The oil paintings, she said one afternoon, were alive. If you watched long enough, you could see their eyes move. Really? I would respond, watching eagerly. Yes, and if you watched even longer, they would begin to move their arms, and shake their heads, and eventually, would step entirely out of the frames. For the first time, it occurs to me someone might think this was meant as a spooky story, or simply meant to make me sit quietly and leave her alone to read, but I, little second-grader, never had that impression from Darnell. The greybearded headmaster and primly buxom Edwardian headmistresses were scary, she said, only because they were so old and different and, of course, were dead people impressed into oil. But if you were patient and kind, eventually they revealed sage counsel and could become good, wise friends.
Darnell was on Candid Camera as a small child. We had all been forewarned and I watched it sitting close-up to my grandmother's tiny b&w television while on winter vacation in Florida, the worlds of my maternal family and my far-off school swirling suddenly and giddily together. It was one of those "gee, aren't kids wise" segments. Now and then I see Darnell's name as a director on a Law & Order episode. Periodically I think I should send her a letter and tell her know how important she was to me becoming a writer, or, more to the point, how vital she was in encouraging my imagination to grow, in opening my eyes to all the possibilities, in sensitising the back of my neck to feel when an idea is breathing over my shoulder.
Then, of course, the unhappy person inside me notes that another birthday has just passed (rather, that I sit in between birthday, actual and birthday, celebrated, which reminds me that today is my friend JamesAKASebastian's birthday and I must contact him, and I digress) and points out to me that if I do write Darnell a thank-you note for providing sustenance and direction when I was heading out along that inexorable writer's path years and years ago... then I'd have to admit that my road has deltaed into a marsh and all the signposts sank long since. Not much of a compliment, this: Thank you for helping me cultivate my creativity, and, by the way, nothing much has come of it.
When I was around the ages of two and three, along with snippets of of poetry and One Misty Moisty Morning and the story of Rebecca at the well my mother read a lot of Hans Christian Andersen to me. My favourite story was The Little Mermaid. The real one, not the HappyDisney version. The pain of sacrifice, the sense of gain and loss and individuality were so sharp, it induced me 1) to have her read it again and again until I learned to read the words on the page; and, 2) to begin to ask her to let me read the story, so that I could give it a new ending, one that did not make my heart hurt so for the heroine. I learned a lot about empathy, about the meaning of the self, about the power of stories. Ideas sank in even if I could not parse them until much later when I realised all that had been stripped from the bowdlerised version. All that power lost, lost, when HappyDisney-fied.
Then one evening my father brought home a copy of Alice In Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass, and writing and illustration became forever entwined and forever important to me. Looking Glass was by far my favourite of the two. Weirder. Darker. Wilder.
Flip ahead through the pages to second grade, where I made friends with an "odd" (weird, wild) girl named Darnell Martin, who showed me how the most ordinary of objects in the world around us are suffused with magic, if only you just look hard enough and long enough and open your mind. We used to wait in the library together; I was very young and small for my grade and I think she may have been a little older than her grade—which was third or perhaps fourth. So on this little girl fell the task of watching out for a tinier little girl, and she seemed quite grown-up and important to me.
It was a small private girls' school. We wore uniforms evolved from the Victorian originals, starched white shortsleeved blouses with seersucker skirts for spring term and starched white longsleeved blouses and heavy wool navy blue jumpers (in the American sense) for fall term, with crested blue blazers if you wished, and, until they broke down and allowed us t-shirts and shorts, weird greyish blue cotton jumpers over weirder greyish blue bloomers for phys ed, exact replicas of their ancient original except for length. The library... picture a Victorian—for the building was Victorian—wood-panelled den crowded with tall shelves and lifesize oil portraits of ancestral headmasters and headmistresses gazing down from above. Massive wooden tables surrounded by maroon studded-leather chairs. Atlases at the bottom of the stack that fell off the map into a blank unknown in Central Africa. The accepted leatherbound classics and Tolkien and A. E. Van Vogt paperbacks and 1920s National Geographics given equal space.
Darnell wove all sorts of stories while we waited for parents to collect us or whatever reason we were so often there together. The oil paintings, she said one afternoon, were alive. If you watched long enough, you could see their eyes move. Really? I would respond, watching eagerly. Yes, and if you watched even longer, they would begin to move their arms, and shake their heads, and eventually, would step entirely out of the frames. For the first time, it occurs to me someone might think this was meant as a spooky story, or simply meant to make me sit quietly and leave her alone to read, but I, little second-grader, never had that impression from Darnell. The greybearded headmaster and primly buxom Edwardian headmistresses were scary, she said, only because they were so old and different and, of course, were dead people impressed into oil. But if you were patient and kind, eventually they revealed sage counsel and could become good, wise friends.
Darnell was on Candid Camera as a small child. We had all been forewarned and I watched it sitting close-up to my grandmother's tiny b&w television while on winter vacation in Florida, the worlds of my maternal family and my far-off school swirling suddenly and giddily together. It was one of those "gee, aren't kids wise" segments. Now and then I see Darnell's name as a director on a Law & Order episode. Periodically I think I should send her a letter and tell her know how important she was to me becoming a writer, or, more to the point, how vital she was in encouraging my imagination to grow, in opening my eyes to all the possibilities, in sensitising the back of my neck to feel when an idea is breathing over my shoulder.
Then, of course, the unhappy person inside me notes that another birthday has just passed (rather, that I sit in between birthday, actual and birthday, celebrated, which reminds me that today is my friend JamesAKASebastian's birthday and I must contact him, and I digress) and points out to me that if I do write Darnell a thank-you note for providing sustenance and direction when I was heading out along that inexorable writer's path years and years ago... then I'd have to admit that my road has deltaed into a marsh and all the signposts sank long since. Not much of a compliment, this: Thank you for helping me cultivate my creativity, and, by the way, nothing much has come of it.
