Pumpkins, Ogres and Napalm

Dear Boodles.

I realized today that sometimes,  as people speak to me, certain words, maybe sounds, trigger memories that I relive, fully visualized inside my head, in real time, while my face makes all appropriate gestures as though still completely interested in whatever inane prattle the speaker is yanging on about. And this can happen several times within one conversation – words sparking memories,  causing polite facial gestures to kick in.

Like last month, I was in the car with my brother, half listening while we drove through a sometimes pretty countryside, as he told me about a farm woman and her half-wit son, both mouths of which comprised only a half set of rotten teeth. Last year my brother, his wife and step-daughter stopped at the farm to buy a pumpkin for Halloween. The old woman insisted that my brother’s wife and step-daughter go into the cellar of the old farmhouse with her son, a six foot tall, unkempt, hunch-shouldered ogre, where they could choose from a plethora of pumpkins, she promised. 

 Pumpkins in the cellar...

They gave my brother a beseeching look and mouthed “help” as they descended the cellar stairs in absolute terror – like Persephone and Demeter – sure that they would never again see spring. But as he told me this story, laughing so hard he could barely finish, and as my face made convincingly engaged movements, and as I laughed with him, I thought about another pumpkin, another ogre and another mother.  

The memory of, Christian, a mildly retarded boy in my youth whose family lived a few blocks from ours and whose innate and unfortunate effeminacy made him the target of ceaseless taunts and unimaginable cruelty. One fall day, around Halloween, he sat on the front lawn, poured gasoline over himself and lit a match. Unfortunately, he survived and last I heard, had been housed in a sanatorium and cared for by better angels. For years I saw my destiny tied in to his and wondered how I would survive a similar fate. My father encouraged us to take “the road not taken”  but I saw that road as the road of double page photos in Life Magazine where screaming, naked Vietnamese children – their bodies blistered from the liquid chemical flames of napalm – rushed toward me, arms outstretched in panic and fear. Christian was one of those kids. I was him. This is how children think. This is how I thought.