There again

I was in Portsmouth again, awash again.  I think I figured out where the chapters are.

Awash

When I visited Portsmouth last week I was strangely awash in nostalgia. There was no reason, I guess it was just the vaguely familiar scene and my recent focus internally. I saw the towers of the draw bridge and was taken back 40 years when I saw them from her house.

Her house. A place of refuge for the unhappy little existence that was childhood.

I went there

Last weekend I went to the town where it happened. Determined this time to see where Nana lived, we took some time in the car to search. Turns out the road she lived on was only cut in one small spot, which was about 500 yards that included her driveway entrance. I stood at a fence that keeps walkers from wandering up to the highway, the ones the chapters are under, and there it was...

I could almost sense the view of where I had been so long ago Of course, the landscape was completely changed, reshaped to move out the sweetness of my youth and replace it with the proper drainage a highway needs....but still, I was washed over byt he nostalgia that here, before the terrible night of 1966, I had spent my little bit of summer freedom with Dolly and grasshoppers, among Gar's old cement blocks and my own imagination...

Now I want to go there again and go through the fence to walk around. Maybe there is a little piece of blue stucco they forgot to destroy...

A leader?

I remember in 5th grade a teacher named Mr. Haskins. Mr. Haskins was a former US Marine, and seemed the coolest and most generous person I ever knew. Once, on a day he was in uniform for some reason and he introduced me to someone (can’t remember).

He said “This is Jimmy – Jimmy is going to be a leader someday”.

Me. A leader someday.

Could he tell my mother?

I told her that he had said that. She said “Sure, he doesn’t know you like I do. If he knew you like I do he wouldn’t say that. He’s just being nice.”
Yes, there was a sudden burst of air leaving the balloon.

Mr. Daulberg

One that treated me different was Mr Dahlberg. For the entirety of 6th grade biology he treated me like I was the best kid he ever met. He let me be his “lab assistant”, which meant the the domain of the lab animals was mine to rule. I got to feed and care for the animals, and for once in my life, make decisions that were virtually always accepted as good. Seemed like he genuinely liked me.

No one

What was always saddest to me is that there was no one to talk to. I was convinced that I was the worst kid there ever was, mostly because I was told daily that it was so. I never could talk about it, because the only people in my world seemed to have bought into it as my mother put it out – my dad, my sisters and brothers – all seemed part of it – they never really stood up against it.

Maybe it was true – she was right.

That’s how I entered adolescence – convinced that I was the only one who ever thought about me as other than good-for-nothing-bawn-liah-who-will-turn-out-just-like-my-fathah-and-brothah.