I should warn you first that this post is heavy and personal. Proceed at your own risk.
I can never resist a chance to visit the ghosts of my past. Whenever I am near someplace I used to live, I have to visit to retrieve the memories I left there. Tonight I hopped in the car after the show and drove to Spanish Fort, Alabama. When I last left Spanish Fort, I was nine years old.
The October sun blazed in my face as I drove westward along I-10, to a place that until tonight I barely remembered. It has steadily moved up my list of “old haunts” after chances to see it slipped through my hands time and time again. Spanish Fort was the farthest point west my family ever lived. Its distance made it challenging to revisit. I was determined not to let another chance slip by.
The sun in my face seemed to warn me away, the secrets of my nine year old self hidden in its glare. There are things there I do not want to see, things which left deep scars in my psyche. The purpose of my trip was to make peace with the child I once was.
I began to race the sun as its rays filtered through the thick forest surrounding the highway. It would be dark soon. If I didn’t hurry I would miss my chance at redemption. My foot pressed harder on the accelerator as I focused on the road ahead.
As familiar placenames appeared on passing signs, memories of family car trips began to bubble up. We would pack the car and leave before dawn, my parents hauling four sleeping kids down into Florida to see my grandparents. Yellow streetlights rose above our I-10 interchange like palm trees rising above an oasis. They marked the beginning of our journey, and its completion. My mind is littered with little meaningless details like that.
Those same streetlights reappeared in front of me sooner than I expected. I had twenty-five years to prepare for them and they still surprised me. I tried to see things through nine year old’s eyes, pulling details out of foggy recollections.
The overlook park at the top of the ramp was there as it had been, though by now the world had grown up around it. Its once glorious views of the bay below are now blocked by the relentless growth of pine forest. A pointless coin-operated telescope emphasized how much the place had changed.
I ducked into a drug store to buy a disposable camera before I ventured into my old neighborhoods. I needed something to keep those memories alive. Armed with my camera, I turned into the neighborhood and held my breath.
Having never driven through my neighborhood, I found it tough finding my way. My Mapquest directions had been left behind. I picked my way around the streets, passing playing children after nearly every turn. That’s a sign of a healthy neighborhood, I thought as I passed, but I was still lost. Finally, with the sun slipping deeper in the sky, I found someone who could help.
“Take a right back onto Spanish Main,” she told me, never stopping her yard work. “You won’t see it until you come back up a hill.”
Ah, yes. The hill. A memory flickered back into view. We’re on our way somewhere, my brothers and sister and I with my dad. Dad has put the car in neutral and is wowing us with the concept of “coasting.” We giggle with delight as the little car glides down the hill and back up the other side. I smiled at the memory.
In my rush to beat the fading daylight, I take a left instead. A familiar street whizzes by on the right. It’s Cavalry Charge, our second address in Spanish Fort. I circle around a side street and drive up the end. Nineteen Cavalry Charge comes into view on the right. I take another breath and park the car in front of our old home.
Surprisingly, beyond the clump of scrub pines that have morphed into giants, not much has changed. Signs of growth surrounded it, but the house had held its ground. A back fence was lined with houses, occupying what was once a seemingly-forbidden woods. Drainage work had been done on the side yard. The rest was unchanged. It even had its original roof.
Seeing it brought back another memory, one from before it was built. We were living nearby in a rental house (our first Alabama home and also a target of my trip) while this house was being built. We were giving family friends a tour of the still-wooded lot: six kids and four adults crawling around the bushes and briars, playing hide and seek. Another smile from twenty-five years ago.
A teenage girl loitered in the yard of the home across the street, going inside before I stopped. I was alone with my memories. I hopped out of the car and gave the house a long look.
Its funny how a place collects memories. I never appreciated how I grew there until years later. There is the storm drain we used to crawl into. There’s the front porch where the mouth of the neighor’s dog got hooked with a fishing hook. And where Paul McCartney and Wings’ “With A Little Luck” played on my transistor radio one happy weekend afternoon.
I saw Libby, our dog, whose rough play with us earned her a trip to the doggie gas chamber. I saw the spot I smoked my first and only cigarettes, thankfully getting caught before I made them a habit. And there was the spot in the street where I watched a kitten get hit by a car.
I thought about the time I sat in the backyard grass, just soaking up the early spring sunshine. I had not noticed the bed of fire ants under me and soon I was covered with stinging ants. I ran inside wailing, where my mom got me cleaned up and consoled me.
It still brought tears to my eyes. I felt that pain again and its intensity surprised me. “There are hurts that I’ve been keeping hidden,” that dark corner of my mind told me. Was I ready to revisit them?
I pulled myself back to the present and whipped out my camera, documenting everything I could see. The standard snaps wouldn’t do, so I opted to take some panoramic shots instead. I swung my camera around street to street, capturing as much as I could. There was no time to linger, so I raced to find my first home.
I found it with only a sliver of sunlight remaining. It was an eclectic house, modern in its time but old by the time we lived there. A shiny pitched roof took the place of its once flat roof, a roof which led to funny stories.
One night Mom and Dad were awakened by rustling on the roof above their heads. It sounded like footsteps in the gravel above them. The sheriff was called and Dad went out to meet a deputy more frightened than he was. They stood in the dark quibbling over who would go up for a look, the deputy’s gun shaking so much it would put Barney Fife to shame. The culprit, a squirrel, got away.
Other memories came to mind. A fireplace: the first we’ve ever had. Intercom systems. A grease fire when cooking Sunday breakfast. Banana trees in the back yard. My three year old little brother tattling on me for lighting a lighter out there. Cannonball and bullet fragments in the dirt. Skylights above the hallways. Nights spent riding Big Wheels in circles on the back patio. The wet bar in the basement and the evil sump pump in the next room. Gathering round the TV to watch an Elvis concert.
The time I got a hellish fever, tripping and babbling incoherently for days. The times I got spanked by frustrated teachers in school, which I later blamed for my later lack of respect for the classroom.
The time I won my father’s approval by helping him fix his car. The time I felt I lost it by my refusal to learn baseball.
There was the house two doors down where our dog got killed in a fight. I had gone with Dad to go get him after the neighbor alerted us. I watched the life bleed out of Auggie as my Dad tried to console me. I remember feeling proud for some reason that I didn’t cry that day, while my mother and sister wailed around me. Why did I choose to hold that inside?
As I snapped pictures of the house in the gathering darkness, I felt all that pain adding up to one conclusion; one in later years I had conveniently forgotten: as a kid, I hated myself.
I hated myself. Its why I rarely smiled in pictures. I just wasn’t happy.
A number of factors came into play. One big factor is that as a boy I had extemely dry skin, making me feel like an outcast. I felt trapped by it, dragged down by something I could not control. Not wanting to get hurt emotionally, I became an introvert. I see only now how long I’ve had to go to turn myself around. I am still getting over it.
With darkness all around me, I got back in my car and headed back to Pensacola, the thoughts gained from reviewing my past bouncing wildly in my head. With Spanish Fort again in my rear-view mirror, I wondered when I would travel down that road again. Maybe a part
of my soul will remain there, forever anchored to those feelings of self-pity. Though the scars will remain, I feel that my journey to free those demons was successful. I have finally provided the little boy I once was the love and acceptance he so desperately needed.
And now he and I can move on.
[Update: 4 Jan 2003]
I wrote this entry awash in a sea of emotion, coming home to a place I hadn’t been in a quarter century. If it hadn’t been 1 AM when I finished it, I may have taken some time to finesse the wording a little better. Maybe give it a better ending or something. I don’t know.
Looking back on my visit, I think the emotional wave I felt hitting me was the result of my having repressed those emotions as a kid. It’s certainly not because anything tragic happened to me. In fact, I had a great childhood. It just took me a while to learn how to trust strong emotions.
Back then when something would cause me to feel sorrow or anger, I would simply lock up that feeling somewhere in my head and pretend it didn’t exist. There it stayed for 25 years, until returning to my old home finally freed it. My parents can tell you of my habit of rolling up my eyes and pretending the world didn’t exist! I could be a weird kid sometimes. Guess I still am. 🙂
Thankfully, I learned to handle emotions. I paint my life with them like an artist. It seems silly now for me to have once feared them.
Don’t get the wrong idea from the post. I had lots of great times there, and my writing mentions a few. My parents worked amazingly hard to give my siblings and me the best we could get. Now that I have become a parent, I am in even greater awe of what they accomplished.
My family is very important to me. I am proud of my peeps. They helped make me who I am.
