The Old House

The house where I grew up was old. From what I heard, it had originally been built around an old log cabin that stood there. It had an upstairs that was almost always filled with shadows, and several different attic spaces. It creaked a lot.

I often got a little creeped out in that house. There was an opening into part of the attic right next to the landing of the stairs. Dad hung a board over the opening and put in a hook to keep it closed. Mom used that space sometimes to store goods she canned, like green beans, corn, beets. But she only used the front of it and I could see it extended pretty far back into the darkness. My brothers told me about the “things” that lived in that attic and how I better hope they never “got me.” I believed them.

We slept upstairs during the winter and I would go up the stairs at night with my back against the outside railing of the stairs so I could stay as far away as possible from the attic. I’d watch the hook on that door like my life depended on it. When I’d come down the stairs I’d often jump over the last few steps so I could get past the attic before anything grabbed me.

One late afternoon, probably when I was about ten or eleven, I was home by myself for a little bit. I’m not sure where mom and dad were. I was sitting in the living room watching TV when I clearly ‘heard’ footsteps coming down the stairs. I bolted, out of the living room, down the short hall and out the front door, never stopping to look behind me to see what shambling horror might lurk there.

When mom and dad got home a short time later, I was sitting near the front porch with our pack of hound dogs around me. They asked me why I was outside and I just told them I’d wanted to play with the dogs. I let them go in first, though. When they didn't scream and come running out, I followed them in.

Years later, I figured that what probably made the sound of footsteps was a squirrel dropping a nut down between the walls and it bouncing off the support boards as it fell. My rational mind tells me this anyway. My imagination is still not quite so sure.

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The Mouse that Got Even

When Josh was little he had quite a few stuffed animals and all of them had names and personalities. Josh generally gave them the names; I typically handled the personalities. We had “Tenny,” a rabbit who had a tennis racket sewn in his hands, “Pinky,” a fluffy pink rabbit, “Baby White Bear,” whose name is self-explanatory, “Bear,” who was a larger white bear, “Bro,” “Bear’s” twin, “Mittens,” a calico tabby, “Dallas,” a bear Josh’s mom picked up for him in Dallas, Texas, “Mickey,” a mouse we got at Disneyworld, and “Baby Yellow Mouse.”

Tenny and Pinky were bought from a Goodwill store and were partners in crime, always on the lookout for the cops. We never found out exactly what they’d done, but it was apparently pretty serious because whenever they were with us in the car they kept a constant eye out for policemen and would immediately hide if any were spotted. Bear and Bro were good companions to Josh, always making sure the other animals behaved and protecting Josh if there was any need of it. They slept on either side of him at night, and they were in charge of our annual Halloween Haunted house, which the stuffed animals put on each year in Josh’s room. Mickey was quite obnoxious, going around constantly saying things like “Everyone loves Mickey” in his high pitched voice. Most of us didn’t really love Mickey because of that.

Mittens, like most cats, simply existed to be petted. He was generally good natured, but we had to keep him and Baby Yellow Mouse separated because they did not like each other. We never traveled with both of them at the same time for fear of an…incident. Baby White Bear was something of an airhead. He could hardly remember anything and would frequently get off topic if you asked him a question. He was good natured, but gullible, and he sometimes fell under the sway of Baby Yellow Mouse, who I will sometimes refer to as BYM. BYM was just flat out a sociopath.

One year when we were going to Arkansas to see my mom and family, I asked Josh whether he wanted to take Mittens or Baby Yellow Mouse with him, and he decided to take Mittens. BYM was quite upset about this and threatened that we “hadn’t seen the last of him.” Josh and I just laughed. But it turned out the joke was on us. The day after we arrived in Arkansas, a small box arrived in the mail at my mom’s house addressed to Josh. Mystified, he tore open the box only to find Baby Yellow Mouse and a note inside. The note read: “You thought you would leave me behind but it didn’t work. You’ll never be able to leave me behind. I have my ways.”

By necessity, Baby Yellow Mouse joined us for that vacation, and on the way home that year, Mittens mysteriously disappeared. We suspect that he fell out at one of our stops and we didn’t see him, but I could never be sure of whether BYM had finally gotten even. He certainly looked smug enough, but that wasn’t proof of any wrongdoing. We bought Josh another stuffed cat, but this one never messed with BYM. I think the word had gone out.

For our trip to Arkansas the next year, we told BYM well in advance that he could not go with us and that we’d make sure of it. As the time for the trip neared, however, BYM suddenly disappeared from Josh’s room. We thought he had run away. We arrived in Arkansas all happy and as we got out of the car we heard a voice, sounding much like my voice except higher pitched, say, “Hey, don’t leave me in here.” A few moments of searching revealed that BYM had stowed away inside one of the hubcaps. Josh was quite impressed with his ingenuity, and from then on we never forbade Baby Yellow Mouse from accompanying us on trips. We were sure it wouldn’t do any good anyway.
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Gifts

“A sunfish, in one spangled moment
Beating with Light the throttling air”
Loren Eiseley

“…man has gotten lost in a desert of terrible freedoms.”
Loren Eiseley.


My cat brought me a gift once. He left a dead sparrow at my doorstep. I understood his act. I even understood why he’d eaten the heart and other tidbits out first. Don’t we humans almost always save the choicest bits for ourselves? How many of us truly offer gifts to others without keeping the heart for our own?

But sometimes I remember my mother, who claimed all through my childhood to love the neck and back of the chicken most. “Those were her favorite pieces,” she said. That’s why she always ate those instead of a breast or a thigh or a drumstick. For years I believed her.

Until I had a child myself.
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Jealousy

Famous Monsters of Filmland. Creepy. Eerie. Vampirella. Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider. Savage Sword of Conan, The Conan comics. Have you heard of them? If you’re a male older than thirty with any interest in pulpy sorts of work you almost certainly have. These are all magazines (or in one case a comic) from the past, although Conan comics are still being published and Vampirella also experienced a resurgence.

If you have heard of them, did they have any influence on you? Your writing? So many of my male friends who are writers tell me how influential these magazines were on their lives. I’m jealous of those friends. Because I never heard of any of these as a kid. I didn’t even hear of most of them or see a copy until I was at least in my twenties.

I’m pretty sure I would have loved ‘em all. But they never made it to Charleston, Arkansas. The library didn’t carry them. They weren’t for sale at the drug store. There were no bookstores in town, and the comic carousal at the quick stop held only a few DC and Marvel comics, Superman, Fantastic Four, Spiderman. Not one of my friends had a subscription to any of them, or even had a copy that they’d gotten from somewhere. I know because any time I was at a friend’s house I looked at their books and comics. I traded some, borrowed others. I was a reading addict and read everything I could find, and was on a constant hunt for more. Had Famous Monsters and the like been available I would have found them.

There is no way to know how differently I might have turned out, or how differently my writing path might have been, had I been exposed to these sources that so many of my writing cohorts enjoyed. Would my imagination have been tuned differently? Or would I have just come upon certain themes in my writing earlier? Or might I have been hamstrung by reading all those magazines? Maybe I would have felt like everything had been done and given up on my own ideas. Maybe it was good that my imagination got to develop in relative isolation. Still, I feel a bit of envy for those who thrilled to such long ago thrillers.

I believe that one’s future reading choices are strongly influenced by the works we discover when we’re between the ages of 8 and 18. That’s why Edgar Rice Burroughs is such an influence on me. That’s why today when I read the exploits of The Shadow or Doc Savage I just don’t find them compelling. I missed the reading window when I would have fallen in love with them.

How about you? What did you miss out on when you were a kid? Is there anything you wish you’d discovered then that you learned of only later? How do you feel about that? The writer in me wants to know.