I’ve been walking quite a bit and running some in the last two weeks. I’m trying to get into a workout routine just like I’m always trying to get into a writing routine. So I’m pounding the pavement while it is dry and at the same time soaking up as much strong sun as possible before the white stuff comes. I like to collect things, as you know, and some of those things wind up being random pictures of random things in my photo reels.
This leaf across the crack in the new sidewalk caught my eye. Its rounder leaves and non-symmetrical sides reminded me of childhood leaf piles of white oak and burr oak trees. Walking through town, I imagined the crunch of fallen leaves under my younger feet, the strange way your muscles used to ache from the unusual motion of raking leaves, and most of all the huge piles of dried brown leaves I remember piling, that included Illinois elm, aspen, and smaller walnut leaves.
Climbing a tree and jumping off into the pile, stacking them against the chicken shed and my rabbit’s hutch and jumping off its roof into huge piles - that’s the giant white rabbit named Scooter that my Grandpa brought home to me rescued or re-homed from underneath a cabin at Silver Rapids Lodge where they had basically invaded and multiplied like rabbits will.
I’ve been thinking a lot about riding my childhood bike lately, up and down my gravel driveway through pot holes filled with rainwater and building little ramps from scrap wood and jumping into those piles of leaves. This was only natural after watching Dukes of Hazard. When I wasn’t riding the bike pretending to be driving my own version of the General Lee, I was playing with my Matchbox cars outside in the dirt and water or inside with my better running cars on my orange plastic tracks. I’d set those up in my bedroom, running the start off the end of my bed to get more downhill speed before the cars hit the huge loops.
One of my favorite toys of all time was a TYCO electric slot car track that was set up in the corner of my old room between the ages of six and 10 until we moved. It was hard to keep the cars on the track because I drove them with the trigger pulled tight on the controllers and I most often raced them by myself, left and right handed simultaneously. The cars were able to be worked on a bit and I remember the wheels collected cat hair. I was always taking things apart because I was so curious about how they worked and how they were made. It was almost an unavoidable fact that the death of many of my toys, including some bikes, was due to my wrenching on them. I couldn’t stop myself from deconstructing things at some point, even though I knew that I wouldn’t have the skills to rebuild it so it could go around the track again. There are a few childhood toys, or perhaps many, who really knows, that I wish I could replace and replay with today. That TYCO track with some new cars would be one of them.
Ultimately, I stopped playing with it, not because the cars didn’t run, but because of its proximity to my closet door, and then simply the fact that it became necessary to store it inside said closet. From the time of my earliest memories in that house as a toddler until we moved when I was 10 and then even on into young adulthood and my college years, I had a recurring dream. I remember that the track and cars got boxed up so I could have space to play with something else and went into the closet.
There were months on end that included nightly dreams of a big bad wolf that lived in that closet. At night he’d come out of the closet and come over and talk to me, first through the wooden slat bars of my crib and then sitting or standing up like a man on his hind feet, tall and imposing. He was threatening and he was very real. I don’t remember any specifics of the conversations, except that they included a promised future doom. When I had forgotten him (as if he somehow thought that was possible) and when I was most comfortable, he’d come for me and when he finally did, there wouldn’t be just talking involved. He was hungry, but he was willing to wait.
There probably wasn’t a day or night in that bedroom or any other that I didn’t check the closet door, didn’t think about the heat of his breath when he pulled close to my face to whisper into my ear. It’s a terrible truth, I suppose, but once something went into that closet, it rarely came out. Towards the end of my time at college in St. Louis, I began to dream about sorting through all of my favorite old toys and lost memories that were piled in that closet. Night after night I’d get them out and play with them. I’d keep the closet door open though, and even as I worked through my fears in those early adult dreams, I’d make sure that I wasn’t too comfortable with the whole thing.
Continuing on my walk I glance behind me. Nothing there. Nothing but the kernel of this story kicking down the street behind me like the wind blowing dried brown leaves. For some years now I’ve been working on turning my childhood nightmare into a children’s story that I’ve begun to write and illustrate. It would make a good novel for adults too. And this is what I do. Suddenly, it strikes me that the walking/exercise routine can double as a writing exercise if I concentrate enough with each step.
