In my little town
I never meant nothin’
I was just my father’s son
Saving my money
Dreaming of glory
Twitching like a finger
On the trigger of a gun
Leaving nothing but the dead and dying
Back in my little town
Paul Simon, My Little Town
As imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poetโs pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act V, Scene 1
Facebook is not a tool of my generation’s creation, but I have learned to enjoy its benefits. It is a wonderful tool for keeping up with family scattered to the winds and reacquainting yourself with seemingly lost friends and colleagues. I came to it at my youngest son’s urging and for that I thank him.
I have several “friends” on Facebook, most of whom are people I have known in my adult life. I do have Facebook friends from my childhood days in Eastern Washington, but they number in the minority. I suspect this is because my memories of growing up in an isolated valley are not the kindest I possess, for while the countryside was beautiful and the sky a thing of magnificence, the culture of my small hometown was materialistic and treated those of us of lesser means with a kind of swaggering contempt. Since I possessed a decent mind, however, this treatment gave me the necessary escape velocity to find my way to success elsewhere.
Consequently, I haven’t focused my Facebook efforts at finding too many friends from childhood. Given the extreme isolation of those long ago days, we were little more than fellow travelers on a small boat not of our own choosing, but that of our parents. We didn’t have the means of getting to know anyone beyond those who started kindergarten together at approximately the same time. The town’s physical isolation kept our circle of acquaintances small, and as I grew into adolescence that circle came to seem one of Dante’s seven circles of Hell – perhaps Gluttony or Greed. Whichever it was, I decided at an early age that I needed to escape and move on to some place where I could be who I wanted to be rather than having to remain fixed in a role others had assigned to me.
This is probably a common reaction to high school by those who were unpopular but possessed of a working mind, and I claim no special status because of it. It has, however, colored my actions on Facebook in finding friends from that time of life. Even those few friends from that era that I have are mostly those I have come to know as an adult, and I have shied away from those whom I don’t know or care to know on the principal that childhood was a dark time and they would remember me only in the role they had assigned to me so long ago – a role I no longer can or care to play.
So, imagine my surprise when I finally sent a friend request to the younger sister (Margaret) of one of my few childhood Facebook friends, and received, in return, a tongue-in-cheek message accusing me of having ruined her life through a childhood prank I once played upon her (one which I remember being played upon me first by my older siblings). Margaret’s tone was light and I could well imagine the twinkle in her eye as she wrote her message, even though we haven’t seen or spoken to one another for at least 50 years.
Margaret’s message brought back a flood of pleasant memories, not the least of which was playing hide and seek in her parents’ and their neighbors’ back yards in a Summer when daylight lingered long onto the evening and twilight seemed endless. Our group consisted of Margaret, her two older brothers (one of whom was my best friend and classmate), and a neighboring, fellow classmate. There might have been other participants as well for all I can recall, since most details of those evenings have long faded. I can only clearly recall the wonder and delight a childhood Summer evening of deepening shadows can convey: the mysteries of deepening shadows forming under trees and shrubbery well-known to us in daylight; a disembodied voice shouting “ally, ally in free” as someone found his or her way to safety without having been discovered. These were the Summer nights of Titania, Oberon, Puck and Nick Bottom. Magic was afoot.
Since these were pre-adolescent Summer nights, Margaret, who is several years younger, would have been a participant for only the earliest of these hours so endless in memory due to the requirements of an earlier bedtime. These evenings happened during a time when I felt accepted for who I was, especially by her family. Her father was my family’s doctor, and when their family first came to town he and my father conspired to bring her oldest brother and me together at the beginning of our first grade year. We quickly became fast friends and companions, sharing a camaraderie of the sort enjoyed by our folk heroes of choice, King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table. We fought many a mythic battle together, using wooden swords and trash-can shields to ward off dragons and evil knights.
Adolescence, with its endless hormonal churnings, put an end to those adventures, our Summer evenings, and our special closeness, and put its permanent stamp upon my memories of my home town. Another layer of magical memories lies hidden underneath those of adolescence, and it took Margaret’s message to quicken them to life. I have always known those memories existed and have spoken of them fondly, but I had forgotten the compelling force that innocence and simplicity play in a child’s life. It took Margaret’s complaint that I had damaged her sense of self-worth after she subsequently recited to her mother the “Siamese” phrase I taught her (“O-wa ta-goo si-am”) and her mother laughed aloud.
That Margaret can recall such a thing these many years is suggestive of the power of simple things. As much as I enjoy Facebook, I prefer to recall the days when it was non-existent. Imagination ruled those days and we were the better for it. We were taught to dream for ourselves, rather than to seek the written approval of others.
It was only after reading Margaret’s message that I realized that somewhere along the line I became transformed from John Darling to George, his father, and that the keys to Neverland, at least within my family, have been passed through my oldest son to my granddaughters. For when I have the luxury of visiting my granddaughters, I am always struck by their power to imagine entire worlds. Sometimes those worlds exclude the adults around them and sometimes we become folded into their embrace – all at the whim of a child. For Chloe and Emma, Peter Pan is real and not a character in novels and a play written by an adult. For Chloe and Emma, Tinker Bell is a force to be reckoned with.
And I must pause here to note that in An Afterthought, a scene written for Peter and Wendy after the play’s first production, J. M. Barrie suggests that with Wendy’s death and the death of her daughter Jane, Wendy’s granddaughter Margaret took Jane’s place, in turn, as a resident with Peter in Neverland. Could this be coincidence? I wonder.
I hope that my granddaughters will continue their shared imaginings, incomprehensible to me, an adult, as they sometimes are. For in their innocence lies the possibility of magic, in the resulting magic lies the power of dreams, and in dreams lie the means for them to transform themselves into who they want themselves to be.
And so it seems to me that the password to Neverland and innocence is “O-wa ta-goo si-am.” Thanks, Margaret, whichever one you may be.
