This was an original post for LA Moms Blog on August 24, 2009. SV Moms Blog was acquired by Technorati, so I publish my archives here on Fridays.
I’m in New England at my parents’ home for a 2-week summer vacation, a visit that is meant to give my extended family a lot of face time with my two young boys. They are now four and two, and very willing to explore the the town where I grew up. They stomp through puddles in the woods at the end of the street. They swat mosquitoes from their arms in the very same backyard where we held my high school graduation party. They pick their way through the rocky shallows of low tide at the same beach where I fell between the rocks when I was six, scraping up my leg on the barnacles, not realizing that one day I would use the mishap as a cautionary tale for my overzealous son.
The whole thing weirds me out in concept, and every time I run into someone I knew in the old days when I’m out with my kids I feel like two people: the me that I am in Los Angeles – a working mother who blogs; and at the same time I am the 24-year-old single woman about to leave all this behind and seek out a new life. This morning I discovered that my kids are now at the age at which taking them to my old haunts can also make me feel like I’m five years old again.
It’s one of those muggy days, “hazy, hot, and humid,” that only New England in August can offer. I had to get the boys out of the house so that my parents’ cleaning lady (something that I didn’t even know existed when I was growing up, mind you) could work. The sky threatened rain, and indeed the ground was wet from a night time storm, so park and beach play were out. After treating the children to breakfast at a diner, I brought them to the library.
When I was five years old, we lived around the corner from the library. I spent almost every summer morning on the second story, in the children’s wing. I checked out books that were almost half my size. I listened to records with their state-of-the-art hifi system using headphones bigger than my head. The librarians – who still work there – knew me well.
I can still remember exactly how the children’s room looked, the way the whole building smelled, and how scary the back, unlit staircase was. The branch has been renovated since I was a child, but the bones of the building are the same. When we went there this morning, I looked around all the different rooms as the images from my memory lay over what I saw like a transparent layer.
And then the magic show started, and I was transported into the body and mind of my 5-year-old self, sitting cross-legged on the floor in the sticky summer heat in the 1970’s. The magician, possibly the very same man who performed for my children this morning, was performing something – ventriloquism with paper plate puppets, strumming on a badly tuned banjo, making bad pun jokes for the young audience, doling out the hard sell of his self-published book before the show even started. I, age 5, was rapt. He singled me out to assist him with a trick. He held out his magic wand and asked me to tap it. When I did, it fell to pieces. I was crushed. “That’s okay, little boy,” he said.
And the entire room of children yelled out “She’s not a boy!”
Already crushed that I was not magical, I was also devastated to have been mistaken for a boy. My pixie haircut was supposed to be modelling Dorothy Hamil, not Mark. This two-bit hack magician was obviously not hip to the scene.
I don’t remember what else happened that day, but those few moments were enough to make me, thirty-two years later, hold my boys close as we sat at the very back of the room, far from the reach of a “magician” who was looking for assistants for his “tricks.”
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