CHAPTER 4: WHERE I CAME IN
Nothing takes as long as growing up. An hour is a hundred minutes, a
day is a week, a week a month. And each month, waiting for the seasons
to change, seems like two. A small house is huge, the front lawn a football
field, a damned-up stream an Olympic swimming pool.
Lightning bugs provide eternal fascination. Kick-the-can and hide-and-
seek lasts all evening long. Fun goes on forever, but on our few bad days,
the suffering does, too. And as the clock turns, we want to grow up faster.
The process is far too slow. But the inevitable happens. An hour turns into
thirty minutes. The days and weeks grow shorter. The months and years
flash by. Things get smaller, nature gets overlooked, our calendars get
crowded. Fun comes only in glimpses, no longer a day-long affair. The
things we plan or anticipate too quickly come and go. Time rushes by, and
we realize those long, long days we had growing up were simply not real.
When we are old, the short, short days we know pale in comparison when
we remember, in retrospect, that nothing goes by quicker than growing up.
—Roy H. Park, Jr. (2004)
While all this was going on, this transplanted southern-born kid was
growing up a Yankee in Ithaca, NY. Although I remember aspects of my
early years, they mostly come back as strobe-lighted flashbacks, like
passages in a book highlighted by a magic marker.
At the age of four, I was hyperactive enough to drive my mother crazy.
Maybe all kids are. I know it applies to my grandchildren. Looking back at
the old movies my father took back then, I spent most of my time running
around and making noise. Of course those old projectors did tend to make
movement jerkier and faster than it actually was.
Shortly after we arrived in Ithaca, I am convinced, more to get rid of
me than anything else, my mother enrolled me in an experimental Pre-K
school at Cornell University. Back then the school was essentially
carrying out experiments in educational methods, and we were the guinea
pigs. I learned that they observed us through one-way glass, and they
performed a lot of experiments to study the interaction among us four- and
five-year olds.
While the other kids were scrambling around on the jungle gyms and
swinging on swings, I developed a healthy, or some might call it
unhealthy, interest in animal life. It included col
lecting every bug I could find on the playground. I guess that was
regarded as an indication of a high IQ because they gave me a really fine
score at the school. (Perhaps it is merely a coincidence, but Cornell is
known to this day as the home of renowned entomologists, not to mention
a certain amateur lepidopterist and author of Lolita named Vladimir
Nabokov.)
