All Downhill from Here

When I was six, Mom and I moved from the townhouse in Fairfax to an apartment in Reston, VA.  We lived in a corner apartment on the bottom floor.  I attended Dogwood Elementary, where I had my first teacher crush on Ms. Henson.  I was what is now called a "latchkey kid."  Each day when I arrived home from school it was to an empty home.  I didn't stay there for long though.  Most of my childhood afternoons consisted of me dropping off whatever I had in my hands and going outside to play.  Although the details are fuzzy, I remember walking in the woods, making a fort, playing football, and playing on a neighborhood playground.  When I went outside to play, it never really mattered what precisely we did, it was still fun.

Then there were the weekends.  Saturdays Mom (Berit) was almost always around.  She didn't really have a social life or any friends.  I don't really ever recall her going anywhere or doing anything.  She was from Finland, and her family apparently fought against Hitler's Germany during World War 2.  I don't really know how that relates, but looking back I have the sense she was emotionally damaged by those childhood memories.  Nevertheless, one pleasant memory from those early Saturdays included her telling me to go out to our tiny garden to get some mint leaves.  That was her way of saying she was going to make tea for us, a special treat.  We sat together on the concrete porch drinking our tea, and for a moment all was well with the world.

Sundays Dad (Ken) would pick me up for the day.  He would usually arrive at about 8:00 am.  I remember I always used to ask him how far it was to get to his house -- seems like it was always either ten minutes or ten miles away.  He lived on Lake Anne on the other side of Reston for a while, and later bought a house.  I don't remember where that house was, but the first time I remember smoking was while I was there.  I was seven or eight years old, smoking stolen cigarettes.  I used an old turtle shell as an ash tray.  Smoking became a regular part of my life.  Before I went to the bus stop each morning, I used to go to the storage room in our apartment building and grab my hidden cigarettes to smoke.

When I was ten, Ken was the one who first realized I needed glasses.  He asked me what a street sign on the road in front of his house said, and I answered, "what sign?"  He was incredulous.  I think he thought I was trying to be cheeky.  I didn't see any sign, a fact which was decisively demonstrated by an eye exam that showed I was blind as a bat.  I'm not sure why this wasn't caught by the routine school exams.  Perhaps because I memorized what direction the other students said the "E's" faced and I just did the same thing they did.  I think I faked a lot of things by just copying other people.

Apparently I learned to use a knife and fork by mirroring my mother.  To this day, I am occasionally asked if I'm lefthanded by those who carefully watch me eat.  Everything is apparently backwards, and yet not quite perfectly so.  It is as though I was a mirror image of someone eating correctly.  Because that's how I picked it up in the first place.  One day as the two of us sat at the dinner table, I looked up and asked Berit, "Am I adopted?"  She couldn't have looked more shocked if I'd drawn a gun and pointed it at her.  After lengthy moments of stunned silence, she said, "Yes, you are adopted.  What made you think so?"  I explained something about looking at her and looking at Ken and just thinking it didn't make sense I was their child.  I was ten.

Also that year, I got my first paper route.  I delivered The Washington Times since it was afternoon delivery except on the weekends.  I was able to get home from school, drop my things off, and go load up my paper cart to deliver the newspapers to make a little money before I started playing.  Every day I would use the stopwatch on my digital watch to time how long it took me to deliver all the papers to all the apartments in my complex.  I tried to find ways to maximize efficiency without compromising accuracy.  I would run down the sidewalks pushing my paper cart to get finished as quickly as possible so I could start playing.  At the end of every month, I would collect the money for the subscriptions, pay the Times for the papers and the leftover money was mine.  Suddenly I had some money, and a couple new friends.

One friend was a young lady named Renee' who lived on the other end of the same apartment building.  She was someone who always seemed like a safe person to talk with when life was hard.  My best friends then were Don and Eddie.  We hung out almost every day after school.  I began smoking marijuana with them when I was ten (it was a big year).  We had a stash in the woods where we kept it and the utensils we used (little pipes, rolling papers, etc).  The afternoon time playing in the woods had taken an interesting turn.  Another interest I had was fire.  We used to start fires in the woods to stay warm, and sometimes just for fun.

Once we went into the local Drug Fair and bought some lantern oil.  We filled a cup with the oil and went to a local playground.  While we were there, a man ran toward us yelling about having a fire on a playground where there were kids playing.  He rushed to the cup with the fire burning on top of the oil and there was a moment in my mind where time stopped and I yelled, "No!"  Nevertheless, he stomped on the cup and the fuel all ignited at some time, creating a ball of fire that scorched everything in a 5-10 foot radius.  He started screaming, and we ran.  As I ran, I noticed that the front of my coat was completely burned off, so I took it off and threw it in the woods.  The front of my jeans was stiff, and my hair was singed.  I ran all the way home, and when I got there I trimmed my hair and cleaned up.  I felt off the hook until the phone ran about a week later.  When I answered, it was the man who had stomped on the fire.  I have no idea how he found out who I was, but he explained that he blamed me for the third degree burns on his body.  I hung up on him in fear, and that was the last I ever heard from him.

In the winter, we used to throw snowballs at cars.  We would time the cars coming around the corner and throw our snowballs to try to hit the windshields.  We got pretty good at launching them from the woods beside Colts Neck Road.  It was great fun . . . until the direct hit on the police car.  We knew we were in trouble when the lights went on and he stopped his car immediately in the road.  He ran straight up the hill toward the woods, and we scattered.  I made it home, but apparently someone else didn't, because some time later he knocked on the door of my apartment and explained to my mother what had taken place.  He required me to write a three page paper on why I shouldn't throw rocks or snowballs at cars.  At the time, three pages seemed like it may as well have been a hundred.  But I guess I did it.

My other brush with the law came when I was teaching a friend how to shoplift from the Drug Fair.  I had just slipped a Chunky bar into my pocket when I noticed a manager had spotted us from the little diner upstairs.  As he ran down the stairs toward us, my friend and I ran out the door.  We cut left and tried to race around the corner where we could hide without being seen.  But just when I thought I'd gotten away, my friend called out "Peter," and I knew there wasn't any point in running.  He had already told them my name.  They dragged us upstairs to the office where they called the police and our mothers.  I don't really remember exactly what they said or did, but I remember thinking I got off the hook.

I was a voracious reader.  I read nearly anything I could get my hands on.  My fascination with dinosaurs soon led me to pursue more knowledge about evolution.  I used to think church kids were rather amusing with their childlike belief in a God who shaped and made the world in a week or so.  I enjoyed getting into conversations with them about evolution because it was so clear to me they didn't have the foggiest idea what they were talking about.  Besides, church kids really didn't seem any better or nicer than anyone else.

But my interest in reading also led me to read works of fiction as well.  My early experiences with Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown quickly gave way to a fascination with fantasy.  I read a lot of fantasy books, but what most captured me were the books by J.R.R. Tolkein.  At first, I loved The Hobbit.  But something about The Lord of the Rings trilogy absolutely enthralled me.  I couldn't get enough of them.

When I was in elementary school, I was often in trouble.  In the classroom, I was ahead of the other kids.  In 6th grade math, they stuck me in a corner with an algebra book and told me to teach myself.  But socially I was retarded.  I did everything I could to get attention and it didn't particularly matter to me what sort of attention I got.  At one point, I remember my Mom started taking me to these group therapy sessions where they stuck me and a bunch of other "troubled" kids in a room with foam bats where we were supposed to beat one another's brains in.  I'm not sure how that was supposed to help me, but it was kind of fun.

Because I had skipped a grade, I finished elementary school early.  My first year of middle school was at Herndon Intermediate.  But I only went there a short time because they had just built a new high school.  They decided to start middle school kids there so we could all grow into the school together.  It was the fall of 1978.  I was twelve years old and in the 8th grade at South Lakes High School.  The school was a change of scenery and everything looked and smelled new.  But Mom was sick.

She had what she thought was the flu.  She couldn't keep anything down, though she tried to keep drinking water and eat toast.  At first, I kept up my usual routine.  She hardly ever got sick and I knew she would recover quickly.  But after several days, I stayed home more.  I began to get concerned because it didn't seem she was getting much better.  She called the doctor who she went to see for her diabetes and he told her to come immediately to the hospital.  She called a cab, and the driver came to the front of our apartment building.  I followed her out and hugged her.  Then I asked her, "Promise me I'll see you again?"  She answered, "I promise."  It was October 14th, 1978, and the last time I saw her.