Reclamation Part 6

This is the sixth installment about my multi-section poem responding to Robert Frost's "The Gift Outright."

Writing about your childhood and teen years is hard, not just because of the natural tendency to make ourselves the heroes of our stories, which can often lead to being really understanding about why you did dumb shit but not so much about the other people who were (or weren’t) there, and not just because nostalgia is a comforting liar. It’s hard because most of us don’t have perspective, especially at the time but often even years later, to…this isn’t the place to start. I don’t even know where I’m going yet but I know this isn’t the place to start. Let me back up.

I’m ten or so. We’ve just moved from Big Branch, which the map calls an unincorporated area but which I call the woods, to Slidell, which feels like the city to me. It’s not. It’s a suburb, and not a particularly big one. It’s maybe 20,000 people at the time, not much bigger now. But we had neighbors who didn’t raise ducks next door and paved streets instead of gravel ones that were occasionally washed out so badly that we’d have to walk half a mile to catch the school bus. My classmates lived a block away and there were convenience stores we could get to with our bikes.

But the woods are right there too.

Past the trailer park, down Possum Hollow Road, about where it turned from paved to gravel, in the days before they built the assisted living community at the bend to the left and paved it all, there were woods. I didn’t go into them often because it would have only been me doing it, and I was worried I’d get lost in there and besides, there were books to read and old cartoons and What’s Happening! reruns and you never knew when they might show the 2-parter with the Doobie Brothers or the one where ReRun joins a cult based around a head of lettuce. But mostly it was because I didn’t explore alone.

The What’s Happening Gang watches The Doobie Brothers do a sound check

I’ve written about this area before, how Pine Street dead-ended into a wall of trees behind which was a canal, then more trees and then more Pine Street beyond it. For a while there was a rope the more adventurous used to swing across the canal, but then the rope broke and most of us wouldn’t swing on it anyway because if you fell in the canal you mostly got muddy and who knew what kind of garbage was lining the bottom of it and that basically ended your day because there was no way you’d be allowed to wreck two sets of clothes in a day, not when someone else was doing the laundry.

Fortunately there were more woods near where we stayed during the summer. There were two Witness families with kids around our ages and one stay-at-home mom and so we all just kind of ran riot from June until late August.

On the other end, Pine Street extended three blocks before it became gravel. About a block down, Billy’s family owned probably 5 acres and lived in an old house they were forever working on set back a couple hundred yards from the street. They had a long driveway and we would build ramps out of whatever scrap plywood and bricks or cinder blocks we could find and jump bikes off of them. Most of the time when we entered the woods, we went from his back yard.

That’s where we went fishing. Back then you could get a cane pole for a buck or two at TG&Y and someone’s dad always had a tackle box and we’d take turns contributing hooks or sinkers or floats we’d bought or lifted to each other’s rigs. We’d dig for earthworms, put them in a coffee can brimming with tetanus and head for Gar Creek or Perch Pond, and we caught the same fish over and over, always too small to keep.

Does that sound romantic? I suppose it does. It’s hard to write about your childhood from this remove without slipping into nostalgia. This is the kind of experience so many people of my generation and the one before it recount almost automatically when they want to rant about how younger people aren’t allowed to take chances or explore on their own and how everything is planned out for them and how we’ve lost something in the process.

And like most nostalgic exaggerations, there’s a bit of truth to it. We learned a lot about ourselves in those moments, that we could dig a fish hook out of our own legs with a pocket knife, that the newsstand just past the Winn Dixie threw porn magazines with the covers torn off into the dumpster every so often and that if you were going to bury them in the woods, you needed to wrap them in plastic against the rain and mark the tree next to the hole clearly or you’d never find them again, that there was one lady at the A&P who would sell you cigarettes if you told her you were buying them for your dad, assuming you had the money to buy them. We taught ourselves how to make flame throwers out of aerosol cans and Bic lighters with the fuel governors torn out of them, and how to hide first and second degree burns from our parents.

We hid stuff and our parents mostly didn’t ask unless we gave them a reason to and I don’t actually know if that was normal or not. Like how Mike sold his mom’s lawnmower to buy muscle relaxers off a guy who’d quit school the year before. She asked about that, naturally.

They mostly didn’t ask because their parents hadn’t asked them about what they’d gotten up to when they were young and also because they were working a lot and had long commutes and culturally we hadn’t internalized that maybe it’s not the safest thing to leave pre-teens in charge of even pre-er-teens for hours and also that maybe we should vet the adults who are really interested in hanging out with all these pre-teens a little more closely. Because there were a lot of things we didn’t talk about publicly, or among our extended families, or even admit to ourselves for a long time.

But we talked to each other. Because what else are you going to do when you’re only with each other all day, no other distractions. We weren’t talking about the big issues of the day or about the meaning of life, but we talked. Shit, mostly.

At the Kingdom Hall, my dad and the others talked a lot about our universal brotherhood, and we heard stories about Witnesses in other parts of the world undergoing incredible persecution for maintaining their faith and upholding their values. We read about how Witnesses tool each other in even when they hadn’t met before. And I’d seen that firsthand too. My parents walked the talk on that, and we’d spent nights in the homes of fellow Witnesses we’d never met before based only on our shared faith.

But even so, when you’re young, it’s hard to internalize that wider sense of belonging other than as an abstraction. Everything else is so immediate. Did I put the last banana on my Cheerios yesterday? Is it beach movie week on Channel 6? Will Job’s big sister be laying out in their back yard again covered in baby oil? Does the 9-volt in my transistor radio have any charge left in it?

If there’s ever anything I’m nostalgic for, it’s that. It’s being able to focus just on what’s around me, not worried about the future or even knowing what the future really is.

I’m making a big assumption here, so please tell me if I’m wrong about this, but I think being a Jehovah’s Witness made this inability to imagine the future worse. Here’s what I mean.

It was a fundamental part of my upbringing that I probably wouldn’t become an adult before Armageddon happened. I heard my parents say more than once that they were surprised my sister and I even started school, much less finished it. The end was always right there. The signs were so clear, and the calculations about when the last days began were right there, and if you’ve never been a person so deeply embedded in a faith that this kind of thing makes sense, then congratulations to you, but there’s a whole bunch of us—I’ve seen the term ex-vangelical used and I think it fits me at least—who recognize the form the language takes, if not the specific details of that doctrine. One of the more surprising things I discovered was how many people from very different faith backgrounds used the same or very similar terms to describe our relationship to both our churches and those not in them. The first time I heard a non-JW use the term “worldly” to describe someone not in their church, I nearly did a spit-take, because the whole deal for being a JW was that we were different from everyone else, and the only ones who had it right, and even though I’d been out of the church for years at that point, I hadn’t internalized that the differences were pretty small.

Sorry for the digression. So why it’s worse for Witnesses, or maybe was for me. One big thing that is different for the Witnesses is the belief that instead of paradise being heaven, it’s on earth. It’s gonna take some work to make it happen, but once Armageddon wipes out all the bad people, the ones who are left, combined with the ones who are resurrected, will be able to transform the earth back into Eden. How? No idea. But questions are for doubters, and doubters are not allowed.

Now if you believe in this but also believe that the end is far off, that it’s something that will never happen in your lifetime, then you still have to think about things like jobs and housing and maybe even retirement, possibly passing something down to your offspring. But if you believe the end is happening any second now, well, no need to think about that stuff. All your energies need to be put toward the preaching and conversion work, toward getting the word out so that everyone at least had a chance to accept the TRUTH about Jehovah and Jesus Christ. All you need are the necessities, and to remember that some of your brothers and sisters don’t even have those. It’s a very “live in the now” faith system.

And when I was a kid, the now not only meant the present day. There was a geographic now. Now was bounded by where I was allowed to go as well as where I was able to go by myself. I couldn’t ride my Huffy to New Orleans. I couldn’t even get it out to the lake shore. I had access to about 20 square blocks and the woods behind it, both around our trailer and on Pine Street. That was my personal universe, where I lived and grew and became.

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It’s been a minute since I posted anything at all here, even longer for this series. Here’s the most recent post on this long poem/response to Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright,“ and you can find the others just by looking for Reclamation. There are 16 sections in total for me to write about. I hope to get back into the groove of writing about them and other poems.

Here’s the sixth section of Reclamation.

Let’s back up a minute, to before          
my teachers did what Larkin said parents
do to their kids even if they don’t mean it,
back to pine woods and Zebco rods and reels
and perch ponds we claimed as public land,
possessing what we were still unpossessed by,
lacking even the language of belonging
to something larger than kin, congregation,
each other. The universe might as well
have fit into where we could walk to
and back in time for the next meal without
getting too thirsty. No time to worry
about what jobs we’d have in this life;
they’d be temporary, since the End Times
were here and we’d be on to reclaiming
Paradise, forever to get it done.

Thanks as always for reading. I’d love to hear your stories about the universes that formed you.