Collections, Obsessions, Ceilings, Warmth

I was a collector as a kid. I collected baseball cards, then GI Joes, then Transformers, then Voltron, Thundercats and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Writing those things makes me realize how ridiculous they are, but I was a sucker for a colorful story and the opportunity to let my imagination run amok. By nine I was beginning to leave the action figures alone and had started collecting comic books.

I apprenticed myself athletically to baseball. I played two years of soccer and felt it wasn’t for me, partly because my dad was such a huge baseball fan. When the chance came to be a part of the Back Mountain Little League, we jumped at it. Dad was so excited he volunteered to head up a team, and he became my coach. When he was a kid, Dad had been really good at baseball. After things fell apart in his home life, though, he had faded away from baseball altogether by high school. I think it was one of his few regrets.

At nine, I was old enough to be quite proud of my father. We were by no means well-off – I wore hand-me-down clothes from my brother, and we shopped for groceries as cheaply as we could. I knew we weren’t “rich,” but we were provided for and our house was big, old, and fun. We had big rooms, high ceilings, a grand old staircase and a vast scary attic that was a haven for neighborhood bats. Dad was a loving father. His family was without question the most important thing to him, and our happiness was paramount to his own. He worked a little harder than most fathers, I think, because he’d seen a dark alternative and was determined not to have it repeat itself.

Mom helped teach me to read at the age of three. By six, I was ahead of most first-graders, but after talking about it, we decided I would be better suited to not skipping a grade and I stayed with my age-assigned class in school. In retrospect, it might have been better for me to have skipped the grade. I would have been expected to behave like a first grader, which might have led to less kindergarten tomfoolery. Or it might have been worse for all I know.

Barbie (what we called my sister then) and I were Mom’s first English students. She started teaching English soon after graduating college. As she moved along in teaching seniority, Dad went through a series of promotions at work, and eventually we were doing alright, a solid middle class family. Barb (what I still call my sister) and I were voracious readers and music listeners and student visual artists. Matt and I were action figure and cartoon junkies and competitive eaters (I still eat too quickly, a leftover from racing with my brother to clean our plates the fastest). Sports was the one thing I could share with my dad that was just ours.

And I quite stunk at it. Baseball came to me easily in an intellectual sense – the rules, the rhythms, the strategy of the game were clear. The statistics and the mountains of minutiae were great fun to track and follow. Unfortunately, like a great many stat junkies and poets of the game, I could not play it to save myself. I struck out countless times in those childhood years and made more errant throws from second to first than I care to remember. Baseball – playing baseball – brought me positive experiences in the form of being humbled, gave me realistic perspectives on failure and limitations, and (on a brighter note) entry into the worlds of team unity and fair play and sportsmanship.

I knew that I liked rock ‘n roll music. – Matt and I had bonded over Beatles records and Elvis tapes as well as action figures. I was beginning to enjoy Jimi Hendrix, who my dad cautiously introduced me to. “This is the best stuff you’ve ever heard yet, Rob,” he said. He was right.

So at nine, I was a bright, imaginative kid at an eccentric, small Christian school in a rural backwater. I lived in a capacious old country house in a secluded, tree-lined nook. Down the street from our house was a beautiful old reservoir, the Huntsville dam. When I went to work with my Dad I knew he worked in an enchanted old mansion with a bunch of nice people, and that in the summer I went to sports camps and science camps and other camps there. I knew that my parents loved me, and that we were closer than most families. And I knew Matthew was the reason, and I knew that soon I would no longer be the youngest. Someday soon I was going to become Matthew’s older brother. Hearing Hendrix was like the soundtrack to the beginnings of a darker and more complex world that would soon be upon me.