Me

The first dream I can remember having is this one, at age 4...

My young parents are fighting in our small house where we live in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. There is a door that becomes known only to me in our hallway. It leads to a basement level; and in order to get to this level, I have to pass through a monster in the dark stairwell, which I do. (The underworld.) At the bottom of the stairs is an apartment with a large bay window, through which soft, blue light bathes the room. It is profoundly quiet and serene and the Light beckons me to come sit in front of the window and allow myself to be held by an all-encompassing Love that I have no name for.

My sister is born during our time in this house, and aside from an awareness of her, I have only two other memories here. One is of splitting my eyebrow open on the metal railing of our pull-out sofa-bed while spinning around in circles in my Wonder Woman Underoos, an incident which sent me to the emergency room. The other memory is of a Jurassic-sized pig that wandered into our front yard one day, causing a strange, suburban drama that seemed to border on terror.

We moved to a townhouse complex nearby called Williamsburg East, somewhere between 5th and 8th avenue South. I was five. The older kids from the complex played kickball and hide-n-go seek outside on the concrete, which was bumpy and uneven and not the best for riding bikes. I remember one husky boy hiding in the dumpster, to my astonishment. That you could even hide in a dumpster had not occurred to me. It was what you might call "playing dirty". Can you imagine the filth he carried home, contaminating everything he touched? I, too, was contaminated, as I had climbed the outside of the dumpster to look in on him.

I followed these boys through fences we weren't supposed to cross, into new construction. We explored the open frames of townhouses yet without drywall; exposed beams, two by fours, a litter of nails around our feet, and the daring to climb stairs that might collapse from being unfinished, in order to see the view from above. I remember the light in there. It beamed in, warm and golden, and fresh like the wood. I was five.

There was an elderly woman who lived in the largest townhouse, which had a tall, white privacy gate that lead into her secret courtyard. When she came home from the grocery store, the kids (including the dumpster kid) would run over to help her unload her bags because she gave out Klondike bars. There was something about her - a magic, a mystery - and I cannot tell you if I knew about her magic before or after the day she let me into her courtyard. But lo and behold, she had a secret garden in there with a Koi pond. And as far as I'm concerned, even to this day, anyone with a Koi pond and secret garden has magical and mystical qualities, and stories to tell.

My mother became friends with our other neighbor, whose townhouse was directly across the parking lot. She and her drummer husband had a parrot, who used to mimic the way my mother called my name out the front door, and so, too, I could hear a parrot calling me by my first name throughout the complex from time to time.

Every weekend, my mother packed up our three-way folding plastic beach chairs, navy blue and red canvas floats, beach toys, coolers, and beach umbrella; and we met our neighbor and her son on the beach. We did not go for a couple hours - that was considered a waste of a trip. We went for the whole day until raft wipe-outs got the best of us, and salt stung our eyes, and our bathing suit bottoms were filled with miniature sandcastles. We were “Coppertone babies”, as the sunscreen brand coined it, "brown as berries" was how my Great Grandfather put it. The beach was our bliss…and coincidently, my father never came with us.

Fast forward several years, because it is closer to the age of 8 that the beginning really seems to begin for me. My parents have bought the house that will host the bulk of my childhood daydreams and adventures. Our two story home is the rust red color of a barn, and though it’s modest, I believe it's a mansion. We are now living in a quintessential middle class 1980’s neighborhood with tree-lined streets, bicycle races and busy cul-de-sacs, ice-cream trucks, gaggles of girls, gangs of irritating, cute boys; a neighborhood pool we walk to barefoot, teenage babysitters, a pond to collect tadpoles in empty cookie tins, stray cats we adopt as our own and carry around like babies to pretend daycares, a Japanese man who yells at us when we steal crabapples from the trees in his yard, a "clubhouse" built in the shed - no boys allowed, a hammock in our backyard where my sister and our friends go sky high and relentlessly flip each other to the ground.

My sister, Katie, 3 years younger than I, shares the upstairs with me, it's a childhood haven we have all to ourselves. At first we sleep in one room and the other acts as our playroom, but then Katie is moved into the playroom and I am given the first room of my own. My parents send me away for a couple weeks one summer, to my Nana’s house (my mom's mom's house) in Tallahassee, and when I come home my bedroom has been made over for me. I have been given my Aunt's dreamy, white canopy bed and the walls are painted mauve pink and the bedding matches. With this bedroom makeover, I really feel like I am someone special.

My sister is my constant playmate. She likes to pretend to be a banker and can count Monopoly money for days. She plays classroom with me, and submits to me being the teacher almost every time. We play dress-up, we sing in rock bands - pretending to be The Bangles, The Jetts, and The Pointer Sisters. We play records all day and my sister carries on a childhood love affair with Michael Jackson that is never-ending. She outplays his Thriller single so hard that I begin to "accidentally" step on it, and toss the remains under the bookshelf in her room. My mother repeatedly replaces the mysteriously missing record and years later, when the bookshelf is moved, we discover a dozen broken halves of Michael Jackson's Thriller single.

My little sister has the purest heart, far more pure, selfless, and innocent than I believe mine to be. I am often called a brat by my mother for picking on my sister, but Katie has the most honest eyes in the world, and a contagious curly-cued laugh; and by birth order, it is my job to protect her...