My field was next door, just to the south of our motel, and I spent my summers and after-school hours there, making pathways through the grass, creating tiny directional signs that I posted at the intersection of each matted grass trail. I had the time when I was a kid to lie out in my field and gaze at the clouds on a mostly sunny, always windy Oregon coast day. At night, I'd lie out and look at the stars and imagine that I could re-arrange them into brand new constellations.
I had my field, and my paths, and my brambly den that I had burrowed into the blackberry bushes clustered near our property line. I dug a pit and stored all sorts of treasures in a wooden box in that burrow. Bottle caps with guaranteed prizes etched inside, multicolored Necco candy rolls partially eaten, spicy cinnamon flavored suckers wrapped in wax paper (there were no plastic sandwich bags yet that I can recall), pads of paper from the motel stationery and pens with the words "LaKris Motel, Bandon-by-the-Sea" etched on the side -these were stolen from my mother's motel inventory.
Sometimes I'd make quick friends with kids from the families who stayed in our motel. I would allow them onto my field and we'd play combat soldier crawling on our bellies through the grass like snakes, or we would be hoboes with sticks that had handkerchief sacks attached. The sacks would usually contain little packaged soaps from the motel, maybe a Gideon's bible filched from their room, or animal cookie boxes if we were really lucky. These fast and transient friends taught me that it's possible to design big adventures with people you might know for only a moment.
When the grass got too high towards mid-September, and after school had started, my father would go over and mow it down for the winter. I never minded, as long as I was able to retrieve my treasures. I knew the grass would grow again.
Hours could pass, days could pass, and for a few years it seemed like I never got any older. I remember wanting to grow older, as I lay on my back to watch the clouds. I thought getting older meant that one would gain respect from others. I felt like I was never being listened to. That happens when you are the child of older parents and you spend your time around only adults. You develop speech patterns and vocabulary unsuited for use around peers of your own age. I did, and I know other kids thought I was a bit off because of it. I always seemed to say the right thing to adults (though I believed I wasn't actually listened to, just "heard") but I was overly polite, which is suspect behavior to another, less polite, more normal child.
I remember wearing polyester clothes made by my mother in the sixties, when other kids were wearing cotton jeans and shirts. To my mother, polyester was the miracle fabric - and it was, in the 1960's to a parent whose first children were born during the Depression. But to the kids of my generation, alternative and rebellious ways of dressing - wearing natural clothes, eating vegetarian, not wearing a bra, even wearing pants to school as a girl - were the marks displayed by those just slightly too young to be hippies in the 1960's and early, early 1970's. I was jealous. I wanted to be older.
I wore glasses, too, four-eyes - the hated harlequin type - now so much in fashion. It was a big step up to my second pair of glasses, which I secretly plotted for by losing my original ugly ones. These new ones were so much more in vogue because they were hexagonal in shape, though in reality, little different from the cat's-eyes tortoise shell frames I despised.
I was a bit of an outcast, in a homely way.
I had a few fine friends then. It wasn't easy for a kid who lived in what was a commercial district in the middle of a small town, when everyone else lived more or less in a neighborhood or on a farm in the country. There was Linda or "Winnie" as I called her though I don't remember why I had a different name for her than everyone else did. She was the first friend I had sleepovers with and we played Monopoly with her younger sisters and ate potato chips until we got sick.
There was Billy, a younger man (he was 7 when I was 8) and he was the son of the principal of the elementary school. We rode bikes with banana seats and high bars all afternoon long for many days one summer. We used to pretend there was lava flowing all over the playground and we would try to jump from swing set to merry-go-round to slide without falling in the lava. I look back now, so many years, and realize how very little it took to make me think I was scared or frightened and how exciting that fear could be.
There was Doris, my friend from fifth grade through about seventh grade, whose dad was a school bus driver and a dairy farmer. As a bus driver, he was hated by all the kids. As a dairy farmer and just when he was Doris' father only, he was a nice man. Doris introduced me to Jethro Tull, boys, makeup, and sleazy books. We were friends until the year I lost my dad when he drowned in the course of his job, and Doris lost her brother a few months later when he drowned in Woahink Lake in the Suislaw National Forest.
Somehow you'd think a common experience would have bound us together, but for reasons I'm not certain of, we grew apart. The fabric of their family life changed - more in an atmospheric way, and I think, profoundly affected by unacknowledged grief. My family dynamic shifted as well. I was in a single parent family now and this fact made others uncomfortable, in a small town where most kids lived with both parents, dysfunctional though some of these families may have been.
I have children beyond the age I was when I owned my field. My children are either almost at or around the age of children who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, perhaps Iran. Those are our children fighting in a war, like the war that raged when I was that child. That war that went on too long and claimed too many; the casualties still mount.
This war. Almost 50 of our children have died this month in Iraq; this month is April, it is only the 17th of April. We are barely over the halfway point in this dreadful month. In March, there were 30 "counted" deaths of American troops - for the entire month. Too many, I think, to have to count for any reason, too many deaths in a desert far away, where we have no business fighting. But this month, the deaths are averaging almost three a day. When I read the papers, watch the blogs, check the cable news sites, casualty counts are mostly sidebar articles, if the call-out is visible at all.
My daughter's Marine is home from Iraq now, just last night, Easter night, back at Camp Pendleton. If they get married, if they have kids (ohmigod), I want my grandchild to own a field. To have a father who is home to mow the field every once in awhile, but only when the grass grows too high and it's late September.
My field is now a parking lot for a bakery and some kind of novelty store. My field wasn't paradise, but it is still mine.
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