A touch of unhappy childhood

First posted 7-27-04

"Let's see, a touch of unhappy childhood, a dash of teenage rebellion, and last but not least, a tragic death in the family."
- Dark City

The Chicago Diaries, Part IV

Written Monday, July 19, 2004

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Last Thursday I drove to my Mothers house to watch the Cubs game. I come up 22nd to the 4-way with Briarcliffe Blvd and I see the thick stand of trees on the corner of the park. Only 100 yards wide and twice as long and as open between them as a church. And began to laugh, and it grew to hysterical levels. I remember those trees as a child. Used to walk home that way from Briar Glen, my grade school. We would challenge each other to walk through them. We would find paths and trod them in the early winter when the ground was cotton-covered with frozen snow. And those trees were as dark and mysterious and ill-boding as Mirkwood, enough to put the fear of God in you. Older students would tell younger ones that a crazy old man lived in those woods and he set traps for children so he could kill them. And any bit of string or tangled fishing line or old Coke can blown into the branches became a booby trap of such complexity to give Rube Goldberg a migraine. Such as it was for a similar strand of trees, perhaps 30 feet wide and just enough to fit one trail, behind the school. The atmosphere was thicker in that moths used to build nests in those trees and we would break off the branches and carry them home, silken nests bigger than our heads, crawling with innocent caterpillars. Keep them in a shoebox and the caterpillars turned into ugly moths. These nests high in trees out of reach of childrens hand gave the trees a ghoulish air.

To enter these trees almost became an act of bravery, and often times I would come home chilled to the bone not from the cold, but from fright. How easy and innocent those trees seem now. How harmless. And my how I had forgotten that. I used to drive by those trees all the time, even until just before I left for college. But it was not until I had left for extended time and came back that these mysteries and memories returned to me. Time and distance do this to us and it is a good thing. It gives us a new perspective on old sights, and makes what was lost just a little more dear. Now my childhood, a veritable bloodbath, is just a little more...happy. Or if not that, then unusual. And fine in a mystical sort of way.