Once Upon A Time: Origins Blogfest

The brain child of DL Hammons at Cruising Altitude, the co-sponsors include Alex J Cavanaugh, Katie Mills aka Creepy Query Girl and Matthew MacNish at The QQQE.


On Monday, February 13th, post your own origin story. Tell us all where your writing dreams began. It could be anything from how you started making up stories as a child, or writing for the school newspaper, or even what prompted you to start a blog. How about stories about the first time somebody took an interest in your writing, or maybe the singular moment when you first started calling yourself a writer. It all started somewhere and we want you to tell us your own unique beginnings. 




           There were always stories when I was a kid and it seemed like we went to the movies every week.  I became enthralled with the art of the story.  It felt natural to write my first story in the third grade.


           After we had moved to San Diego in the summer of 1959, I started my school season at James Whitcomb Riley Elementary School in Mrs. Stork's class.  The Twilight Zone debuted on television that year and I was an immediate fan.  When Mrs. Stork gave us the assignment to write a short story I  was ready.


         My intent was to write a scary story in a Twilight Zone mode, but what I ended up with was probably a bit too gory to be a Twilight Zone kind of story. The story was about a cross-country truck driver  who is going from Pittsburgh to California.  I don't recall what exactly happened, but I do recall the driver disintegrated into a bloody mess..


        I liked my story and thought I was a pretty good writer.  From that point on I was hooked.  Never afraid to experiment with my writing, I tried my hand at writing poetry, songs, essays, and journalistic style articles.  The short stories were my favorites though.  I liked to let my imagination go wild.


          Third grade.  That's when I decided I wanted to be a writer.  I've often slowed down and taken many a break, but the writing dream has always been there.  And that's the once upon a time when it all began.

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The Wreck in the Canyon

         Imagination always trumps reality when you're a kid.  Why settle for some mundane explanation when the fantastical will surely make far more sense?   That's the way I saw the abandoned car in the canyon behind the school I attended in the early 1960s in San Diego, California.

         San Diego was far less developed at that time and the vast neighborhoods that were growing on Clairemont Mesa were interwoven with a network of canyons that seemed wild and mysterious to us kids.  During recess at Riley Elementary School I would sometimes stand at the chain link fence that separated the playground from the depths of one such canyon and gaze into the wild place.

          Across the canyon I could see what I had been told was Kearney Mesa--another developing area with more houses and businesses.  That might as well had been another far off country separated by the undeveloped canyon.  Kearney Mesa was interesting, but the canyon lured my sense of adventure.

          At the bottom of the canyon was an old car that I had decided had crashed at the foot of a dirt road that pitched steeply from the opposite rim of the canyon down the embankment to the canyon floor where it forked into diverging directions.  I was convinced that the car had lost control many years ago to come to its current resting place.  Undoubtedly the bodies of the occupants were still inside.  At the very least, perhaps the unfortunate victims had managed to get out to safety, having left something of value in the car.  I knew that I must eventually get to this car so that I could make my tremendous discovery and become a hero.

         Unsure as to why no one else seemed to have noticed the wrecked car in the canyon, I would periodically go to the playground fence, my fingers poking through the mesh as I grasped hold and furtively surveyed the expanse of the canyon.  Finally, my gaze would rest upon the old car.  When summer came I was going to go down there to check it out.

          The canyon was like a playground to me.  I never saw any of the other neighborhood kids down there, but I guess it was just so big that we never encountered each other,  Then again maybe it was such a treacherous ordeal getting down there that none of the other kids were brave enough to go.  I was an adventurer and a climb down a brush covered canyon slope was not going to hinder me.

           After summer had arrived, I organized my expedition of fellow explorers.  My younger sister, Joy, and our friend Ross, who lived across the street from us, agreed to accompany me to the site.  On that morning we went to the school, which was closed for the summer, and made our way along the outside of the playground fence until we found what appeared to be a trail down into the canyon.  We wended our way into the canyon, always on the lookout for rattlesnakes.

          My body tingled with anticipation as we neared the old car.  Dust kicked up by our steps quickly settled in the dry stillness of the warm morning.  Crossing the dirt road in the canyon bottom, we found ourselves standing before the rusting hulk of a car of unknown make or date.  There were no bodies--not even skeletal remains.  There was not even a sign of dried blood.   The occupants had apparently escaped with their lives.

           We discussed among ourselves what we might be looking for now in this wreck.  Circling the car and peering inside it was pretty obvious that there was nothing left in the car.  The cracked and torn weathered upholstery smelled musty dusty.  The glove compartment was empty--not even a map.  I would have at least liked to have found an old map.  The gauges were still intact in the dashboard.  If there had been a way to remove them I would have done so.  I would have liked to have had the gauges.

          Looking around the crash site we could see a few old beer bottles and little else other than the brown dry vegetation that blanketed most of the canyon.    I concluded that the car had been there for a very long time--perhaps before I was born, which had been about ten years prior to this day.  There was no cache of gold or stash of cash.  There was not even a bit of loose change on the floorboard.  Our mission here was finished.

          The sun was climbing high.  The midday heat and the dry dusty canyon was making us thirsty.  A cold bottle of Coca-Cola would have been nice right then.  We decided to head back home.  There wasn't any Coke there, but there was sure to be some Kool-Aid and that would be good too--so would some lunch for that matter.

          Before heading back up the canyon trail, I stopped to look up the dirt road that disappeared into the canyon.  That road probably hadn't been travelled since the days of stagecoaches and cowboys on horseback.  I wouldn't go there on this day, but I decided that one day I'd be back to explore where that road went.  I was pretty sure that there was probably a long lost band of Indians living up there somewhere.
       
           What kind of adventures spurred by imagination did you have as a child?   We roamed pretty freely as children never feeling very unsafe:  How do you think today's environment affects the imagination of children? 

            On Saturday I will have my first special post as I play "tag" and acknowledge an award.  I hope you will join my then.

       

Too Cool To Fiddle

          The violin became uncool in 1964 when I was thirteen, or that is as far as I was concerned.  I wasn't looking at the bigger picture.  Who does at that age?  None of the Beatles or any of the other popular rock and rollers played a violin and no girl was going to give a moment of their attention to some sissy that did.  It was somewhere about that time that I decided to hang up the fiddle and start playing guitar.

          I'd been playing violin since the third grade when the school I was attending in San Diego, California offered beginners lessons and an opportunity to play in the school orchestra.  I took to the instrument rather easily and occupied first chair of the Riley Elementary School orchestra for the next three years.  I enjoyed playing violin in the orchestra, but lacked the ambition to practice in order to attain a high enough level of proficiency to be a really good soloist. 

          When I reached seventh grade my family moved to Northern Indiana, where the school I attended did not offer a school orchestra.  I continued to take private lessons from a dwarf who played as a strolling musician at a popular smorgasbord restaurant.  The choir teacher at the middle school discovered that I played violin and built a choral number that featured my violin playing for one of the choir programs.  Later, at a school talent show, my next door neighbor and I played a clever rendition of the song "Alley Cat", which went over quite well.   Those were the last times I played violin for many years.

           I dropped the violin lessons and continued taking guitar lessons under the tutelage of the violin playing dwarf.   My parents never forced me to do things I didn't want to keep doing, they only expected that if I were going to do something I would practice and take it seriously.  I tried for a while.  The dwarf musician taught me to play songs like the one about the dog named Bingo and other corny folk-style tunes which would have not impressed any of the girls I wanted to impress.  My guitar teacher did not look favorably upon rock and roll and had his sights for me set on classical guitar.

          Eventually music became too much of an effort to pursue on my own.  I did not know anyone else who played an instrument for several years and it was no fun playing alone.  Years later I went back to the violin and guitar to a limited degree, but missing out on years of practice meant I was not as good as I could have been. 

           Did you play an instrument when you were younger, but no longer play?  Why did you stop?   How much did you practice?  Was practice as much of a chore for you as it was for me?

           

Dream Imagery: The Baby Skeleton

          On Friday December 18, 2009 I posted an article about dreams .  Dreams have alway held a great fascination for me since childhood and I sometimes have journaled them or at least thought about them. Rohini, who has a blog called MY WEIRDEST DREAMS ,  commented with a request that I post some dreams on my blog.  I have decided to do this on occasional Fridays since I try to post about mysteries and mysterious things.  Dreams certainly fall into the category of the mysterious.  I am hoping that my blog friend Dr. Harris Stern will be there to lend his very astute observations about dreams.  Dr. Stern has also posted some fine articles about dreams.

         As I had mentioned in my December article, dream symbolism is very personal and can vary from one person to the next or even in our own dreaming life from one dream to the next.  Sometimes the meanings can be very concrete and they are exactly what has been envisioned in the dream.  Other times what we see in our dreams symbolizes something else entirely.  I don't think we can read a dream account in most cases and completely understand it because we need to know a lot more background about the dreamer's past and current situations.  But we can dabble and play around with it.

        The dream I am going to present today is one that I call THE BABY SKELETON .  This is a dream that I had when I was between 9 and 12 years old.  It was so vivid that I remembered it to the extent that it became a favorite story that I used to tell my kids when they were growing up.  Now you can enjoy the story and perhaps even play psychoanalyst.

         To begin with I will provide some background information as I recall it.  During the time of this dream it would have been between 1959 and 1963.  My family was living in a sprawling new housing development on Clairmont Mesa in San Diego, CA.  Our home was a block away from the large undeveloped Tecolote Canyon.  As children my sister, my friends, and I would often spend much of our non-school time playing in and "exploring" the canyon.  Bear in mind that this was a time when kids had a much greater reign to roam without some of the fears we have today.  We would often wander the canyon imagining that we were discovering things.  A bird feather was a remnant of a past Indian tribe, an unusual stone was an artifact of some primitive culture, or a dirt road was a pioneer trail.  We were full of imagination and adventure.

        Life seemed pretty simple and unthreatening to us children despite the news reports about possible attack from the Russians and the duck-and-cover air-raid drills that we would sometimes practice at school.  My family led a pretty routine suburbia life, my parents were just normal good parents, my sister Joy was one of my best friends, and my twin brother and sister were still very young.  I enjoyed watching THE TWILIGHT ZONE and scary movies on television and my reading primarily consisted of The Hardy Boys and Tom Swift.  Stamp collecting was my main hobby.  Life was good.

        In my dream I am in the canyon with my sister and perhaps some other friends.  We are exploring like we normally would be doing.  We are in what I would presume to be the western part of the canyon not far from the school where we attend, James Whitcomb Riley Elementary School.  Our group is following a trail on the eastern slope of that part of the canyon.  We come upon some ancient ruins that are much like Greek or Roman ruins.  Stone buildings are crumbling and fluted columns that are broken in pieces lay on the ground.  I am very excited that we have found such an amazing place in the canyon.  As I explore the site looking for artifacts, I find something about 20 inches long that is wrapped in an old blanket.  Unwrapping the parcel I find that it contains the skeleton of a baby.  I am very excited and feel that I have found something that is very special and even powerful. 

        Keeping my find a secret from my companions, I wrap the skeleton back up in the blanket and hurry home where I place the skeleton in one of my dresser drawers.  At this time I awaken, feeling very excited.  The first thing I do after I wake up is jump out of bed and check all of my dresser drawers to find the skeleton.  It's existence is very real to me in my initial wakefulness, but then I come to the realization that I have only been dreaming.   I feel somewhat sad and disappointed.

       Now it's your turn.  What could this dream have meant?   Have you had dreams that you were convinced were real when you woke up?  If you remember your dreams, I'm sure you have had dreams that have had this effect upon you.  How do dreams of childhood compare with those we have as adults?  Are you or were you a fan of TWILIGHT ZONE , The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, or Tom Swift?  Do you think my sister and I should have been using those canyons as a playground and wandering the neighborhoods on our own (everybody did it back then and none of us ever felt unsafe)?