Daydreamer

The teachers were concerned, leaving notes for Mom and Dad regarding my “staring out the window” during class. Daydreaming they called it, the politically correct term for something more sinister, such as bad parenting or inferior character, their “go-to” conclusions in those days. Social anxiety, depression, the autism spectrum, and other so called mental health conditions were not yet common terminology. This was the seventies.

“He should visit with the school shrink,” they suggested.

“Let’s find out what he daydreams about while staring out the window, so we can address the situation.”

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Please don’t shoot me dad!

Dad, please don’t shoot me in the back, I thought to myself. I’d been retrieving pellets from the wooden board used for our target practice, when the vision of him shooting me from behind appeared. Several times, I turned my head for a sideways glance, making sure the gun was not pointed at me. Dad just looked at me and said nothing, but the Larkin boys laughed heartily at my paranoia. I thought of my ancestors lined up at the edge of mass graves, waiting to be shot in the back, one by one, like a factory line of executions; the soon to be executioners finding humor and a perverse justice in their victims’ predicament.

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Enduring footprints

Imagine suffering a complete memory loss, an existential crisis that resonates with your first days on earth, when your mind was still a blank canvas having no knowledge of the inside and outside. Imagine losing any sense of who you are, who others are, and where you are. How would you move through the world and negotiate for support and protection? You would be like a newborn who knows nothing, being at the mercy of strangers to maintain your well being, but without an inkling as to their intentions. Your fear of the unknown manifested in nightmarish proportions.

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Sleepwalking

I felt “watched” whenever the moonlight streamed into my bedroom window at night, paranoid that God used the moon as his lookout – probing me from there with his powerful flashlight. I didn’t want “him” to see what I daydreamed about in my bedroom. Not that it was anything bad or abnormal for a 12 year old, but I didn’t want my parents finding out and meddling in my private stuff.

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