When I Was Your Age, Volume Two

by When I Was Your Age, Volume 02 (retail) (epub)

  I wanted to stand in that field and I wanted to cry at least until camp ended, and maybe until summer ended, and maybe until I turned thirteen or nineteen or thirty and this sadness, this overpoweringly sorry feeling — about Sparky, about myself — had run dry like the tears.

  But it didn’t take that long. The bus was waiting back at the stables. “Come on, I’ll help you up,” Mitch said and cupped his hands beside the stirrup as though I’d ever needed a boost from him or anyone else. I took Sparky’s reins and led her across the field and into the woods, retracing a path that my own two feet had never before touched.

  The next week, my last week of camp, Ricki felt well enough to return. Laughing made her chest hurt, and so did talking loud, so she couldn’t do more than sit outside the ring and watch us perform for her final evaluation.

  I packed carrots for Sparky and sugar cubes and every apple we had in our fruit bin. I didn’t know how else to say good-bye. Instead of watching the other campers execute the set routine that Ricki had rehearsed with us, I brushed Sparky until her coat gleamed and Mitch called for the Rs in the alphabet of camper names. And then Sparky and I executed the specified maneuvers because, really, they only required my two eyes and her four legs. She didn’t fidget in place when I lifted each of her hooves, removed the halter and bridled her, mounted, dismounted, and then mounted again. She both walked and trotted in figure eights along the flagged poles, never brushing a single one. Sparky backed up, turned circles, left and right, cantered at the first signal, and stopped exactly alongside Ricki in the bleachers. I didn’t have to ask her twice to do anything. And yet, instead of being pleased or proud, I felt only relief as I dismounted. How could I ride Sparky as though her blindness didn’t matter?

  On Friday, after the awards in boating and camp crafts and nature studies, Ricki presented her awards. The newer kids became Colts; some attained Yearling status; and some of the advanced riders, Thoroughbred. Moving very slowly, Ricki presented each of us a certificate and a card for a wallet, which, of course, none of us had. Maybe because I already had two Thoroughbred cards from previous summers, Ricki left me out of the roll.

  Then Ricki returned to her seat, gathered her backpack, and walked over, maybe to explain. But when she stood in front of me, instead of a whisper she announced, “This year, we have a special achievement honor, The Pegasus Award . . .” My heart beat so loudly I couldn’t hear any of her words, let alone my name. As Ricki pressed a blue-ribboned card and a small trophy of a winged horse into my hands, I heard her say, “Just don’t hug me. Congratulations!” I couldn’t keep my eyes from filling with tears again, the happy kind, at least in part. The clapping grew loud, like the horse hooves echoing from the planks of our ravine bridge.

  “Ricki,” I forced myself to say her name. “Ricki, did you know that Sparky is blind?”

  “Of course, yes.”

  “But — but I didn’t. I cantered all those days in the field, and she could have fallen in the, in the holes, and Gibby —”

  “Any horse can fall. But most always, they don’t. You’re a good rider, a careful one, and Sparky’s eyesight is just about as important as her saddle color when it comes to riding. But . . . well . . . maybe I should have pointed that out.”

  The applause had stopped by now, and Mitch, crouching behind my knees, had pulled me onto his shoulders and stood.

  “Bravo, Pegasus!” he exclaimed, while the other kids in my group leaped up to smack my butt as though I’d scored the final point in some important game.

  Before we left the stables, I went to Sparky’s stall. Under the dim overhead bulb, I waved my hands in front of one eye, then the other. Her ears flickered with attention. Her nostrils flared as they gathered a scent she clearly recognized. What did I expect to see? Each wide-open eye had any other horse’s gaze.

  And that was it. I never saw Sparky again. I never rode another horse. As for Ricki and Mitch, and even some of my friends from that day camp — they, too, remain within that one particular summer.

  Curiously, it’s Gibby I continue to see. Not in person, but when I obsess about the cruel things that seem so natural to us as people — cruelties to animals, including our own kind — it’s Gibby, just a blurry image of him that reappears, shouting the word “stupid,” and firing dirt clods.

  One other thing does reappear every now and then. This image of myself, stunned and weeping in the middle of that meadow. And while that twelve-year-old boy and, no doubt, that mythic horse, are long gone, I now can see — rather than the sun, woods, or other riders — my own reflection in that cloudy, uncomprehending, sparkling eye of my horse. It’s not so different from who I am today.

  “That fall, something else — writing, in fact — took the place of riding (funny, how close the sound of the two words), although it might have been any number of other things, since the vacuum within me had to fill.

  I began to keep a notebook of poems, reveries, impressions of moods and seasons. There were drawings, too, washes with a rapidograph — a very fancy and troublesome pen that I’d seen some of the older kids in the art room using. And because this was the Sixties, my recorded thoughts alluded to the monumental issues of the era: the ongoing war in Vietnam, hunger in Biafra, drug abuse. Not that I had anything to say about those oppressive issues, but I’d found some way to listen to what was being said about them, and that was by putting words on paper. There, I could study, in revision after revision, one lingering image, as if taken by a camera’s flash, of an overwhelming, complicated, faster-than-I-could-process world.

  Perhaps that summer, giving up not only riding but the realm of childhood that accompanied it, is where I might trace not my talent for writing, but my need for it. The very next summer, I began to work at that same camp, as a counselor-in-training for the youngest children, and I remained at the camp, eventually becoming the director for the eleven- and twelve-year-olds, until I was twenty-six.

  For more than twenty years, summer camp provided my happiest times. Yet, somehow, I’ve allowed this story to make me sound friendless and broody. Where is my family, who have been the steadiest, most loving part of my life? I suppose that to tell a story is to create another kind of vacuum, removing so much of the real, taken-for-granted world in order to pull the reader into one that can be knowable, and I hope kindred, in a few thousand words.”

  I was determined to swim at least twenty-five meters in the front crawl. As we did every summer, my mother, younger brother, and I were going to stay with my grandparents, who lived in a small farming village near Himeji, in Japan. From their house, it was a short walk through some rice paddies to the river where my mother had taught me how to swim when I was six. First, she showed me how to float with my face in the water, stretching my arms out in front of me and lying very still so my whole body was like a long plastic raft full of air. If you thought about it that way, my mother said, floating was as easy as just standing around or lying down to sleep. Once I got comfortable with floating, she taught me to kick my legs and paddle my arms so I could move forward, dog-paddling with my face out of the water.

  Now I was too old to dog-paddle like a little kid. My mother had tried to teach me the front crawl the previous summer. I knew what I was supposed to do — flutter kick and push the water from front to back with my arms, while keeping my face in the water and turning sideways to breathe — but somehow there seemed to be too much I had to remember all at once. I forgot to turn my head and found myself dog-paddling again after only a few strokes. This summer, I thought, I would work harder and learn to swim as smoothly and gracefully as my mother. Then I would go back to school in September and surprise my classmates and my teachers. At our monthly swimming test, I would swim the whole length of our pool and prove myself one of the better swimmers in our class.

  At our school, where we had monthly tests to determine how far each of us could swim without stopping, everyone could tell who the best and the worst swimmers were by looking at our white cloth swimming ca
ps. For every five or ten meters we could swim, our mothers sewed a red or black line on the front of the cap. At the last test we had, in late May, I had made it all the way across the width of the pool in an awkward combination of dog paddle and front crawl, earning the three red lines on my cap for fifteen meters. That meant I was an average swimmer, not bad, not great. At the next test, in September, I would have to try the length of the pool, heading toward the deep end. If I made it all the way across, I would earn five red lines for twenty-five meters. There were several kids in our class who had done that, but only one of them had turned around after touching the wall and swum farther, heading back toward the shallow end. He stopped halfway across, where the water was up to our chests. If he had gone all the way back, he would have earned five black lines, meaning “fifty meters and more.” That was the highest mark.

  All the kids who could swim the length of the pool were boys. They were the same boys I competed with every winter during our weekly race from the cemetery on the hill to our schoolyard. They were always in the first pack of runners to come back — as I was. I could beat most of them in the last dash across the schoolyard because I was a good sprinter, but in the pool they easily swam past me and went farther. I was determined to change that. There was no reason that I should spend my summers dog-paddling in the shallow end of the pool while these boys glided toward the deep end, their legs cutting through the water like scissors.

  My brother and I got out of school during the first week of July and were at my grandparents’ house by July 7 — the festival of the stars. On that night if the sky was clear, the Weaver Lady and the Cowherd Boy would be allowed to cross the river of Heaven — the Milky Way — for their once-a-year meeting. The Weaver Lady and the Cowherd Boy were two stars who had been ordered to live on opposite shores of the river of Heaven as punishment for neglecting their work when they were together.

  On the night of the seventh, it was customary to write wishes on pieces of colored paper and tie them to pieces of bamboo. On the night of their happy meeting, the Weaver Lady and the Cowherd Boy would be in a generous mood and grant the wishes. I wished, among other things, that I would be able to swim the length of the pool in September. Of course I knew, as my mother reminded me, that no wish would come true unless I worked hard.

  Every afternoon my mother and I walked down to the river in our matching navy blue swimsuits. We swam near the bend of the river where the current slowed. The water came up to my chest, and I could see schools of minnows swimming past my knees and darting in and out among the rocks on the bottom. First I practiced the front crawl, and then a new stroke my mother was teaching me: the breaststroke.

  “A good thing about this stroke,” she said, “is that you come up for air looking straight ahead, so you can see where you are going.”

  We both laughed. Practicing the front crawl in the river — where there were no black lines at the bottom — I had been weaving wildly from right and left, adding extra distance.

  As we sat together on the riverbank, my mother drew diagrams in the sand, showing me what my arms and legs should be doing. Then we lay down on the warm sand so I could practice the motions.

  “Pretend that you are a frog,” she said. “Bend your knees and then kick back. Flick your ankles. Good.”

  We got into the water, where I tried to make the motions I had practiced on the sand, and my mother swam underwater next to me to see what I was doing. It was always harder to coordinate my legs and arms in the water, but slowly, all the details that seemed so confusing at first came together, so I didn’t have to think about them separately. My mother was a good teacher. Patient and humorous, she talked me out of my frustrations even when I felt sure I would never get better. By mid-August, in both the front crawl and the breaststroke, I could swim easily downstream — all the way to the rock that marked the end of the swimming area. My mother thought that the distance had to be at least fifty meters. When I reached the rock, I would turn around and swim against the current. It was harder going that way. I had to stop several times and rest, panting a little. But swimming in a pool where the water was still, I was sure I could easily go on for twenty-five meters.

  Our grandparents’ house was crowded during the summer because all our uncles and aunts visited, bringing their children. My mother had three brothers and one sister. My brother and I thought of our aunt’s husband and our uncles’ wives as being our uncle and aunts as well — never making a big distinction between who was and wasn’t related to us by blood. Our cousins, though, did not think of our father as their uncle. He had never visited in the country with us, and even when my mother and her brothers or sister got together in town, he was out with his own friends or else he would retire to another room, scarcely acknowledging their presence. My cousins never called him “Uncle Hiroshi,” the way my brother and I called their mothers “Aunt Michiyo” or “Aunt Saeko.” Even to my brother and me, our father seemed less like family than our uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents.

  That summer, during the third week of August, two of my uncles, their wives, and my mother decided to take a trip to the Sea of Japan for the weekend, bringing my brother, our cousins, and me. All of us kids were excited about going to the seacoast. It was on the less populated side of our country, which faced China, Korea, Russia, and other faraway northern places.

  I had never been to that sea, though the river we swam in ended there. When my mother warned me not to swim past the rock that marked off the swimming area — because the current got strong — she said, “We don’t want you carried past Ikaba, all the way to the Sea of Japan.” Ikaba, a village to the north, got its name, which meant “fifty waves,” because the river was so turbulent and wavy there. I imagined the water tumbling down rocky mountains from Ikaba to the faraway sea.

  Our three families took a bus to the seacoast, arriving shortly after dusk. We checked into an old-fashioned inn, where all of us kids were to sleep in one big room. My uncles and aunts — the two couples — had their own rooms, and my mother stayed alone, as she always did on these trips since my father never came along. If she felt lonely or odd, she never said anything — as always, she was cheerful and talkative. At supper, she said that she could hear the sea in the dark, but I thought she was imagining it. Lying down on my futon later I heard only my cousins — younger than I — laughing and screaming as they rolled around on the floor or threw pillows at one another instead of going to sleep the way we were supposed to.

  The next morning after breakfast, we dressed in our swimsuits and walked to the beach, which was just down the road from the inn. On a narrow strip of white sand, a few families were clustered around bright red, blue, and pink beach towels. Some people were already in the water. Even a long way out, the water came only to their waists or chests. Big waves were hitting the rocks on a piece of land that jutted out to the sea to our left. Maybe my mother had heard the waves hitting that desolate, rocky shore the night before, I thought. They pounded and crashed, muffling all the other sounds on the beach.

  While my uncles and aunts and their kids spread out their beach towels on the sand, my mother and I walked to the water’s edge, leaving my brother behind with my cousins. I had never swum in the sea before, but I had seen pictures in my geography book of people floating on the Dead Sea. The writing underneath said that the salt in the water made it easier for people to float.

  The sea was cold as my mother and I walked in — much colder than the pool or the river — but it was a hot sunny morning. I knew I would get used to it soon. We went in and splashed around for a while; then I started practicing my front crawl.

  I couldn’t tell if it really was easier to float. A big wave came and hit my face sideways just as I was turning my head to breathe. I stood up coughing. The water didn’t taste like the salt water that I gargled with when I had a cold. Instead, it had a strong bitter taste that stung my nostrils and my throat. My eyes burned.

  “Try floating on your back,” my mother sugges
ted, flopping back and closing her eyes. “It’s easy.”

  She was right. In the pool, I could float on my stomach, but never on my back. But in the sea, my legs and head didn’t start sinking while my chest and stomach stayed afloat. All of me was floating; I could almost take a nap.

  Once we got tired of floating, my mother and I started jumping the waves. Side by side holding hands, we treaded water, each paddling with one arm instead of two, waiting for the next big wave to come surging our way. If we stopped moving at just the right time, we could crest over the top and glide down to the other side, falling slowly down the gentle slope till another wave came and lifted us up. All around us, other grownups and kids were doing the same thing. There were so many waves coming and going. Sometimes we couldn’t see people who were only a few feet away until a wave lifted us up and dropped us almost on top of them. Laughing, we would apologize before another wave swept us away.

  I don’t know how long we were riding the waves before I noticed that my mother and I hadn’t seen anyone for a long time. I thought of another thing, too. When we first started, my feet had brushed against the sand bottom almost every time we came down. In the lull between the waves, I’d be standing in the water only up to my chest. That hadn’t happened for a while. My feet hadn’t touched bottom for at least twenty waves now. I stretched my body as straight as I could, trying to touch bottom with my toes. Nothing. Just as I opened my mouth to point that out to my mother, a big wave came, my head went under, and my hand was swept loose from hers. When I came up again, I was turned around, facing the shore for the first time. I couldn’t believe what I saw. The people on the beach looked so small that I couldn’t tell our family from anyone else’s.