My family took such a long trip across America that I felt as if I had always lived in the back seat of our 1959 Pontiac. My big brother Danny and I kicked, poked, and tickled each other in a blender of games that turned the long minutes into long hours. Once I kicked my brother right in the balls and he tore into me like a tornado. I didn’t really know what was down there. He kicked me too. It hurt, but catching the attention of the front-seat referee was not allowed. If Mom said Danny was too rough he might not play with me, so I had to pretend I was not hurt. We were shaping rules not only for hurting each other, but for whom we might be as adults.
On that magical tour into the U.S.A., we saw stalactites in New Mexico, and in Yellowstone National Park we encountered bears rummaging through the garbage like homeless Russian astronauts in fur coats. They were as alien to me as if they had dropped from the sky. I knew them as the cartoon Yogi (“smarter than the average bear”), but in person they were hungry as hell. They came up to our car and demanded food and suddenly I was terrified. “Hurry, roll up the window,” with Mom and Danny laughing. They were always laughing at danger. I couldn’t understand why they didn’t take these things seriously. Finally, our road trip ended in Pomona on my uncle Bob’s doorstep.
America was succumbing to an expanding postwar pressure of social symmetry: be alike, fall in line. In California my family became the idealized version of itself. We had a collie dog just like Lassie and my brother had a raccoon cap like Davy Crockett. We were Walt Disney’s America. Mother wore gloves and Father had a crew cut.
Trying to fit into the Protestant world around them and win the good graces of my Protestant grandmother, my parents baptized me Presbyterian and we attended Presbyterian services. All the rest of my family remained Catholic. It was a terrible source of friction and in spite of everything we tried, the Joneses remained unwelcome in Grandmother’s Temple City. There was an argument and we hit the road, coming to a stop in our new home in the Arizona desert.
The shy desert, a chalky remainder of countless millions of years of other living things. Animals who raised their young on these unforgiving rocks, only to lay down their burden and wait. The skeletons of their lives are the dirt of our cactus gardens. We too will become fossilized pages in some unimaginable future. Well, maybe imaginable: “Look, can you see my fossilized arm—under the Xazzcandra Prelapse? I think it is turning pink again.”
There is a little girl down there we need to talk to. Can you see her? I wonder, do you think she can hear me singing? What’s she doing with that frog?
THE BACK SEAT
What Were the Skies like When You Were Little?
“Oh the skies were beautiful, pink and yellow and blue . . .”
Three-year-old Rickie and big sister Janet
Down along the end of the street was a well, a concrete circle about five feet in diameter. There you could find all manner of water-loving creatures, drawn from the desert to the shade. Tadpoles swam with tiny mosquito larvae. I was carrying a frog I found in the mud.
In the desert, shade means the difference between life and death. Wherever there is shade there are fairies. I knew this instinctively but my father told me all about fairies: “Watch for them out of the corner of your eye. In the dappled light fairies can be seen as they take form, and if you are very still you may see them darting across the limb of a tree.”
Studying the drop down to the bottom of the well, I saw that it was only about ten feet. I let the frog slip from my hands into the well and said:
“Water there.”
“You can swim down there.”
“Be out of the sun.”
When I returned later and saw the frog dead, I looked up from that well and I was sore inside. I had killed a thing. I was inconsolable. There was nowhere to run away from this feeling.
That experiment was nothing like what I expected. Now I knew. People could cause terrible harm, and even I could hurt an innocent thing. That it was an accident made no difference to me or the frog. “I’m sorry, I wish I had not put you down there. I wish I could take it back.” It was here by the well I made up my first song. The song made its home in me and I kept it there. I sang:
I wish, I wish,
That wishes would come true,
And then, I know,
That it would be alright.
God’s little scientists want to know how things work, and sometimes quite by accident, they find out the hard way. I was forging roads between my imagination and the world before me. The real frog died but I saved it in my first song. Out here, in fairy kingdoms, anything seemed possible.
I wandered the neighborhood with my invisible friends, inspecting everything I came across. I was often frozen in some daydream when an invisible horse galloped down the street in a storm of wild fury, only to find me waiting and fearless. A trembling velvet muzzle pressed against my hand, the horse’s gesture of acceptance and trust. Only I understood and could tame its wild heart.
I hollered out loud to my invisible horse to the consternation of my sister and brother who watched me in bewilderment.
The garbage men often ate their lunch in the shade at the edge of our backyard, parking on the dirt road that ran along the farmer’s field next to our house. One morning my mother sent me out with a pitcher of water for the men. Standing some feet away, I began to sing, pretending not to notice they were watching. A couple of the guys clapped their hands, the oleander bush cheered. I bowed, and Mother called me into the house.
My very first performance I was three years old, a snowflake in a ballet recital of “Bambi.” Bowing low at the end of our dance I heard the audience’s applause and took it personally. I remained bowing long after the other snowflakes had melted and left the stage. The dance teacher had to escort me off but the audience was delighted and the die was cast. I liked it up there.
What I really wanted most was to play the piano. Pidgey Muncie lived three doors down and she had a piano.
Pidgey was my age, shy and sweet, plump like her mother. Pidgey could not have visitors once her father came home from work but I would stay until the very last moment to play that little spinet piano. I sounded out the notes to the Doublemint commercial and Pidgey and her mom taught me “Heart and Soul.” They were terrified that I’d still be there when Mr. Muncie came home so they unceremoniously escorted me out the back door.
Mr. Muncie was the most terrifying man I’d ever met. He was short and stocky with a crew cut. An ex-Marine and currently a very angry man. Then one morning I was playing in the backyard when I saw Mr. Muncie digging a hole in the farmer’s field. He had a bag in his hand that he put into the hole and buried. I ran in and told my mother. “Mr. Muncie buried something in the field!”
She was doubtful of what I had seen, but she called Mrs. Muncie, who said:
“Yes, the dog had puppies today. He just took them out there and buried them alive.”
Buried them? What? Alive?
“We have to go dig them up.”
“They are dead now, Rickie. We cannot go get them.”
I felt panicked. How could we sit there as little innocent babies were dying? We must bring them back to life.
Pidgey’s dog died a few days later. I felt she died of a broken heart from watching her babies taken from her. My mother told me she died because there were no puppies