Living the Dream
“I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them.”
Andy Bernard – The Office
I read once where humans are subjected to over a billion bits of sensory information every waking second. Meaning if we didn’t significantly filter everything coming in, our mainframes would easily be overwhelmed. Which is exactly what happens to a baby. We call that colic. There’s no consoling a colicky baby. One has to hold on tight to the infant and wait it out. I can tell you from personal experience that strong water is needed after the fact. I seem to recall that Malt Whisky over ice was my preferred choice long ago when the two kids were tiny tykes.
Adults generally aren’t allowed the luxury of melting down every day around 5:00 PM. Instead, we develop strategies for dealing with the constant influx of sensory stimuli. There are three primary strategies that we use more than any others: generalization, deletion, and distortion. Some examples:
We tend to generalize things we often do, like opening a door or shaking hands with someone. Otherwise, entering a building—or room, and meeting someone new would always be a new experience. And imagine having to relearn how to open a door every time
We also delete info on the fly, filtering out things we deem unimportant. It’s a good way of staying sane so we’re not overwhelmed. But deletion can be problematic, especially when you leave out details and forget how something works—or how to do something.
Distortion, more often than not, has to do with how we prioritize the relative importance of things. Which someone once told me was a gauge of a person’s emotional intelligence. We distort information by making something far more important—or threatening—than it usually is. Or making everything equally as important or threatening. Es un problema, que no?
The trinity of generalize, delete, and distort brings us to the photo above. From the looks of it, the image would date back to the late 50s or early 60s, which is also my formative time growing up. We’ll call the boy in the photo Junior, because he’s named after his old man. In the photo, Junior is four, about to turn five. It’s summer, so after breakfast mom kicks Junior out of the house with express orders not to come back until lunchtime. The cycle is repeated after lunch and then briefly after dinner, or at least until it gets dark.
Junior spends his days playing with other kids in the neighborhood, who likewise have been banished from their respective homes except at meal times. He and his pals are allowed to roam the neighborhood for hours on end, without supervision. After all, how much trouble can a kid get into? You should never ask that question. But you should know that towing a red wagon behind your tricycle, wearing a straw cowboy hat, and packing plastic heat was the best; the dream of any boy of the time. And that includes Junior.
Many years later, this photo would become one of Junior’s favorites. He doesn’t remember a lot about growing up. But he does remember his trike, red wagon, and cowboy outfit. And spending entire summer days outside with his friends. Especially the times when they went to the park lined with huge palm trees. And how after thunderstorms zillions of enormous black water bugs would appear on the grass and sidewalks. Junior remembers the crunching sound the water bugs made when he and his buddies stomped on them, as the insects scattered across the sidewalk into the gutter.
What’s missing from the photo is practically all the iceberg, so to speak. First, mom and dad, and their worrying about the threat of commies taking over the world, not to mention the Russkies nuking everything to kingdom come. They actually thought about having a bomb shelter built in the back yard. Meanwhile, mom was also worried about dad’s new secretary and how he kept mentioning what a good job she did. But that didn’t stop her from taking diet pills to keep her figure trim and get the house work done, with enough left in the tank to smile at the milkman on the regular. Perish the thought she’d ever tell anyone how handsome she thought the new priest was. Not a scandal, by the way, since he was an Episcopalian priest. They can marry, you know, not unlike the uptight Catholics. Dad, on the other hand, worried about having enough money to pay the mortgage and the bills. He was also angling for a promotion, and concerned about how he was passed over the last time. And he does fancy the new secretary and hope his wife hasn’t noticed. Too late.
Fast forward many years. Junior is now in his late-60s. Mom and dad have both moved on to the great beyond. Long before then, dad moved on with his secretary. Mom was devastated at first, but rebounded by marrying the handsome new priest. She even became a deacon in the church. As for Junior, he turned out to be OK too. He was an only child of the 60s and 70s, meaning he put off adulthood as long as possible, and never really grew up much less figured out what to do for a career. But he did start a comic book shop after dropping out of college. He struggled for years, but eventually managed to build it into a thriving business, partly because he lived in a tiny apartment above the shop so was always there. Junior was also a computer nerd, so started selling through a website before anyone else. These days he’s known throughout the vintage comics world, and makes regular appearances at Comic Cons, always wearing a faded Green Lantern T-shirt.
Junior’s memories of early childhood are spotty at best. But the memories he does have are mostly good ones. Like the rest of us, his brain generalizes, deletes, and distorts what actually happened all those years ago. He remembers mom as the one who broke the marriage up by having a scandalous affair with the new priest. Then dad ran off with the secretary afterwards. Whatever the case, he still remembers his tricycle, red wagon, hat, and six-shooter. But he also wonders what happened to them after his parents split up and sold the house. He guesses he’ll never know. Sometimes, that’s just how it is.
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