I vividly remember when I was around eight years old. I was riding on a school bus and revising the words to a song about an old woman swallowing a spider in my head.
Our school busses played a local radio station over the speakers, always top forty rock. I had to drown out whatever was playing to focus on the lyrics I was mentally rearranging. At that time, we lived five miles outside Bishop in a small community called Laws. I would daydream and create songs and stories on the rides to and from school. I started school at age four, and until I became enamored with popular music at around eleven, I was left with plenty of time to kill. In my memory, as we drove past the school I would be attending a few years down the line, I stared at the chain link fence surrounding the playground, with twisted vines growing green and fresh up the staggered poles and across the links.
I switched from the boring, repetitive chorus about “Old Miss Mider” to a running narrative about myself. A small girl on a big bus, dreaming. I have a copy of a poem I wrote at age ten, for class, and if it’s any indication of my writing skills as a child, my eight-year-old self had to have been concocting stories in the basic line of “Fun with Dick and Jane.” The poem was, and still is, cringe-worthy. It rhymed, for God’s sake.
I rarely wrote down everything I made up; it was an exercise entertaining my ADHD brain. It was just for me. I didn’t tell anyone I was doing it, almost constantly, by the time I was entering puberty, not because I was afraid of being teased. Because I was doing it for myself, and it never occurred to me that anyone would be interested.
I think some memories are crystal clear in our minds because our childhood self is trying desperately to reach our current selves, reminding us of the joy of stringing words together in such a sweet, simple way, unaffected by readers or critics or our own self-loathing.
“Creativity is seeing what others see and thinking what no one else ever thought.”
Albert Einstein
I am discovering different writers and photographers online, and incredibly creative people, like Jane Lurie, see her photos here. My home state of California, places I’ve actually stood, cities, and landscapes I’ve seen catch my breath with a melancholy ache.
Don’t forget your memories. Don’t let them wither and fade. Revisit your childhood in all the ways we can in this beautiful hell we call life.
They remember you.