Childhood Recollections

Untitled & Unfinished © 2007-2010 by Heather L. Gibson

When pressed, I can still recall the halcyon days prior to the advent of video games and home computers and the Internet, days when children still played outside and exercised not only their physical beings but their imaginations.

Playing a simple game of tag was not enough for the kids in my neighborhood. Oh, no. We had invented (or perhaps it was the generation before us, though I’m certain it was us) several versions of the time-honored children’s game. There was “Freeze Tag,” in which you would be frozen still on the spot where the person who was “It” had touched you, and you could only escape when another player would sneak up to touch you and render you free. This later developed into “TV Freeze Tag,” in which a player being closely pursued by “It” could garner temporary respite by shouting out the random title of a television show and sitting down cross-legged on the ground. The child who was “It” could not break this invisible barrier, and would have to run off and try to catch another player. Looking back, there was no set rule about how long you could sit there—maybe you had to count to ten on the honor system, who knows—but we never quibbled about such details. There were other games we invented by using cast-off two-by-four pieces of plywood, placing them down on the grass one in front of another to get from point A to point B, because in our imaginations, the grass of our backyards was really molten lava and would disintegrate us if we put so much as a toe out there. There was no limit to what we could dream up in those days.

1977 was an extraordinary year—it was the year that I saw the first of the Star Wars films, which opened up the possibility of expanding our imaginations to other worlds we could never have dreamed up by ourselves. It was also the year I was taken to the movie theatre to see a wonderfully underrated feature-length animated cartoon entitled Raggedy Ann and Andy: a Musical Adventure. This was a story in which the two stuffed-and-sewn siblings meet a new addition to their owner Marcella’s playroom—a snobbish French doll named Babette, who had been given as a birthday present to Marcella earlier that day. On a nearby bookshelf in the playroom, the pirate Captain Contagious lived in a snowglobe, where, from this vantage point through his spyglass, he promptly fell in love with the beautiful Continental newcomer with her painted face, her fancy silk petticoats and pantaloons. He and his pirate mates break free of the snowglobe and, in a great flood that could only occur in an animated cartoon and a child’s imagination, the pirates sweep Babette away through the playroom’s open window into the night air and eventually out to sea. It is the job of Raggedy Ann and Andy to rescue Babette before Marcella would discover that her birthday present had been kidnapped.

The animation was wild, and at times almost reminiscent of the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. The argument could easily have been made that the animators were still smoking the same dope that they were back in the Sixties, and the colorful and crazed psychedelic environments on the screen would simply serve to propel the fantasy along. The journey was peppered full of crazy characters along the way, including my favorite, a lonesome and blue flannel stuffed camel with woefully wrinkled knees because he had been played with so much by his former owner, that the sticks in his legs had long-since broken, causing him and his limbs to bag to saggy, lopsided proportions. Raggedy Ann and Andy find him alone in the woods during their quest to rescue Babette, only to discover that he’s been thrown in the trash by his owner’s mother, deeming him now a raggedy patchworked bit of rubbish, an unfit toy for her little boy. He has been wandering aimlessly since being pitched out, hallucinating from time to time that he sees scores of golden dancing camels in the distance, calling him home to some great camel Paradise…

I was so taken this poor lost soul’s seeking love and acceptance, that I played the movie’s soundtrack album over and over and over again, listening to him sing his woeful ballad of trying to find his way home. I read the book that had been scripted from the movie cover to cover and back again, and drew pictures of the camel morning, noon and night. I even went so far as to draw and cut out a paper harness and bridle just like the one that he wore, somehow managed to attach it to my face with Scotch tape, and then ran around the yard pretending to be him, never once thinking that this behavior might be viewed as somewhat bizarre. But that’s how immersed in the fantasy of this other world I became, and how tapped into this character’s plight I was. I was intelligent enough to know that I was not in fact this Camel with the Wrinkled Knees, but that did not stop me from indulging in re-enacting his maudlin experience and lonely quest.

It was not long after this period that I discovered L. Frank Baum had written not just one Oz story, but fourteen of them, during a visit to the local library. I was transported to another world all over again, five years after first seeing that marvelous 1939 film with my now-beloved Judy Garland. The Oz tales were well-crafted and the imagery staggering, full of amazing creatures well beyond the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow, accompanied by astoundingly detailed drawings by illustrator John R. Neill. I loved the freedom that books of this type gave to me. I could literally go anywhere with my imagination, a realization that today I find a rare occasion what with all of the pre-packaged videoscapes available to kids. It would seem as though books simply cannot compete with something that takes no effort whatsoever, but I still prefer to see things within the confines of my own mind’s eye, rather than have it spoon-fed to me as a flurry of man-made images.

Around the age of nine or ten, I can recall finding a paperback book in a Waldenbooks store at the mall entitled The Last Unicorn, by Peter S. Beagle. I remember holding it in my hands, transfixed and utterly fascinated by the artwork on the cover. It depicted a unicorn, presumably the title character, captured while in mid-gallop through a mythical wood of yore. The ground was carpeted with wildly detailed flora, the background a misty, mountainous, alien-like terrain. A small red dot of a sun was suspended against a pink sky, with the overhang of fruit-bearing tree limbs forming the border along the top edge of the book’s cover. When I turned it over to view the spine, I discovered that the lush leafy tree had wound itself around to the back cover, revealing that it harbored a large black serpent. The mossy grasses and continuation of the mountains led my eyes to a cage topped by a wooden slanted roof, which held an odd, menacing-looking creature: it had the body of a large eagle, its talons gripping a wooden perch, its human face expressionless and a sickly pale blue-green, mouth drawn in a downward scowl, eyes black with tiny red irises, its severe features pulled in a sort of mock-Kabuki mask, topped off with a headdress of feathers instead of hair. It was one of the most disturbing and tantalizing images I had ever seen on the cover of a book before, and it desperately made me want to read the story on the pages inside. I didn’t have the two dollars and twenty-five cents to pay for it, so I reluctantly put it back on the shelf, though I remember picking it up and turning it over in my hands several times, almost unable to say goodbye to it. Maybe I would have the money next time.

I recalled going back to that same bookstore a few times more over the months to follow, and the book was still in stock. I was never one to stand and read books in a bookstore and run the risk of being verbally chastised by a clerk—so far away from the bookstore patrons in today’s society who spend most of their time in attached coffee shops boldly leafing through volumes they have picked up off of the shelves as if browsing through their own personal library, then leaving them on the table when they have finished their five-dollar caffeine fix. I did manage to crack the first few pages open at one point, and savored the first line of the story, which I still remember to this day: “The unicorn lived in a lilac wood, and she lived all alone.” The lines just flowed like the intro to some ancient song I was about to hear for the first time. Simple, yet elegant in their simplicity. “She was very old, though she did not know it, and she was no longer the careless color of sea foam, but rather the color of snow falling on a moonlit night. But her eyes were still clear and unwearied, and she still moved like a shadow on the sea.”

How could I not read on?

 

At some point I eventually parted with the two dollars and twenty-five cents earned from odd jobs around the house and in the neighborhood, and claimed the book as my own. Owning and reading this book coincided with a magical time in my childhood when unicorns were becoming quite prevalent in my imagination. I read books about the history and mythology of these magnificent creatures, the countless sightings recorded from as far off as ancient China and Persia, their symbolism of Christ-like purity and virtue, and, ironically, their seemingly unfair exclusion from the Ark by Noah.

The unicorn was fast becoming a hot commodity, at the height of the sticker craze that was engulfing the United States and every little girl between the ages of six and eleven. Unicorn t-shirts, unicorn shoelaces, unicorn black light posters, unicorn calendars.

Even a gentleman by the name of Robert Vavra, a respected photographer of horses, seemed to cash in on the scene with the publication of his gorgeous coffee table book, Unicorns I Have Known. The volume, full of some of the most stunning pseudo-equine photographs the world has ever seen, was marketed as the journal of one man’s odyssey to capture these magical creatures on film during his exhaustive travels across the globe. The book opens with a grainy, swirling picture that was allegedly taken in the jungles of Mexico’s Tamazunchale, the first of the author’s supposed “sightings.” The cynic and realist half of me of course knew that this was all a farce, but there was still the other half of me that held the photo close as I squinted at it hopefully, willing it to be real.

I can only assume that Mr. Vavra affixed fake spiraled protrusions to the foreheads of his future subjects, and they apparently tolerated them quite well. Interspersed with the glossy pictures of unicorns frolicking in sea-green oceans and traipsing across golden deserts and hiding amidst a treasure trove of jewel-colored beetles and fantastical flora in the deepest forests of Europe were these pages of heavy tea-stained paper stock on which was recorded the author’s “notes” taken while on this improbable quest. Filled with unicorn quotes from history and literature (“Unicorns, aren’t they extinct in the modern world? Poor little fellow, he must feel sort of lonesome.” – Tennessee Williams), the book was a precious gift to me by my mother sometime around my thirteenth birthday. I treasure it to this day.

As if Unicorns and Oz weren’t enough, I entered the third magical world of Narnia at that same period in my life. A cartoon version of the first in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, had appeared on evening television when I was nine. I immediately fell in love with the story, with the possibility of traveling to another land where magical mythical creatures lived, talked, and battled for their survival. A place that was as close as behind the door of an upstairs wardrobe… I started looking at the attic door in my own bedroom with great suspicion and burgeoning anticipation from time to time, wondering, what if one day I opened it, only to suddenly learn that it concealed a magical land completely removed from this dull and dreary existence of televised Iran Hostage Crises and post-Vietnam discotheques and designer jeans? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to meet a delicate faun named Mr. Tumnus who strolled through a winter wood with his umbrella, or to bury your face in the golden fur of the mighty king lion Aslan..?

Well, wouldn’t it, then. 

My friends and I never seemed to play conventional games of “house” and its many derivations. Instead, since I had such a menagerie of stuffed animals, we often played “veterinarian” or other such animal-themed make-believe games. I had one friend named Amy, who had embraced a mutual love of the Unicorn and the world of Narnia much as I had. She and I would spend endless hours making up games with our equally impressive collections of plush creatures and Barbie dolls. The game would always play out the same, a direct plot steal from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: a group of young girls would be playing hide-and-seek, much like the four siblings in Wardrobe. One of them would accidentally find herself in this magical otherworld, much as Wardrobe’s Lucy character. Eventually she would find her way back, and excitedly try to explain it to her friends, most of whom would not believe her. Eventually they would all find themselves in this magical land, which was ruled by an evil but lovely-looking witch, and ultimately fighting to rid this wondrous land comprised of talking koala bears and unicorns and pegasi and dogs and cats and dolphins (and whatever else kind of stuffed animals we had in our possessions) of the witch’s tyranny, much like the plotlines of Wardrobe and The Wizard of Oz… and The Lord of the Rings… and other timeless tales of fantasy that I would grow to love in the years to come.

This was our private game that we never spoke of to anyone else, and if Amy’s mother called up the stairs or knocked on the bedroom door to announce that she had milk and cookies ready for us, we would freeze stock-still in mid-sentence, as if we had been caught doing something we shouldn’t have been doing. To this day, I don’t know why we both seemed to guard this fantasy world with such iron-clad secrecy. I guess neither of us wanted to break the magic of the moment by letting others in.

The game continued on until we were in our pre-teens. I guess we were both discovering all the things that girls on the brink of age twelve are discovering at that point—growing somewhat awkwardly into foreign bodies, making new friends, discovering a desire to dance to the new tunes we found on the radio, or dreaming of dancing with the leading men we found in movies and on television, or to furtively spy the random blonde boy with the feathered hair and preppy polo shirt that passed us unawares in the hallways at school. This left little time for games of fantasy and unicorns and little girls who had lost their way into magical lands that really didn’t exist at all. I think we played the game one last time when we were both at that awkward age; I walked to her house since I was too young to drive and too old to have my mother drive me there, carrying a bag of stuffed animals, and hoping not to run into anyone I knew in the neighborhood, when I would have to explain what I was carrying. I felt as if the lid on an ancient toy box was being closed and latched forever once the play had ended that afternoon, and the little girl dolls had bid farewell to that magical nameless land that they had traveled to for so many years. Amy and I never spoke of it again.

Somewhere else around that time, our mothers had taken us both to an arts and crafts fair somewhere in the county, or maybe it was miles further away. To this day I still can’t remember where it had taken place, either in Bucks County, where we lived in Pennsylvania, or else across the Delaware River in neighboring New Jersey. All I remember is the various booths of artisans and craftspeople hawking their wares, the smell of funnel cakes and hot pretzels and other fair-type offerings. I remember it was an open air affair, and it must have been spring or summer, because the memory I am most poignantly left with is green-ness all around. It was near a lighted wood with paths that led close to a body of running water, though I don’t recall seeing the running water, but I do remember hearing it. And somehow the two of us had wandered off, away from the tented kiosks, and there was just… a feeling. Neither of us said a word.

I can liken the experience only to the opening chapters of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The little girl Lucy is playing hide-and-seek one rainy afternoon with her sister and two brothers. She finds a large wardrobe tucked away in an upstairs room within the mansion where they are staying, having been sent there by their parents during the Second World War. She opens the door and climbs inside, reaching forward through a sea of fur and woolen coats, reaching forward to touch the wooden back of the wardrobe. She only feels more fur coats. She continues to walk, carefully looking back over her shoulder to make sure that the door is still open and she has not accidentally locked herself inside. She can see the light and the features of the spare room in which she first entered the wardrobe, and feels that it’s safe to move forward with outstretched hands, fully expecting to reach the back at any moment now. But she doesn’t. She carefully continues to take her tentative steps, when she hears a crunching sound beneath her feet. The further she creeps, she realizes she is stepping on packed snow, dried leaves and twigs, and the coats that had been hanging on either side of her inside the wardrobe have now been replaced by tree trunks and branches. She finds herself in the middle of a snow-covered wood, an iron lamp-post a few paces before her. She nervously looks back over her shoulder again, and in the distance can still make out the tiny light of the spare room she had left behind.

Much like Lucy’s journey, Amy and I wandered further and further from our mothers and the other fair-goers, until the noises and the smells seemed to fade away, and the sunlit glade was bright with promise and buzzing with nature, and I suspect the unspoken sentence that hung between us on that strange afternoon went something like this: Don’t you think this would be the perfect place for us to see a unicorn—an actual, real-life unicorn?

Although Amy and I had been friends since childhood, lived in the same neighborhood, went to the same swim club, took lessons from the same piano teacher, and shared a deep love of all things fantastical, I could never say that we really shared a deep rooted psychic connection. I went on to acquire friends later in life with whom I shared the most phenomenal of bonds that would fill books (and probably make others extremely nervous), but I would be lying if I said that I thought she and I could read one another’s minds. That was the only day that I felt it—the way that we both turned to one another at the exact same moment, and then, without another word, hurriedly found our way back to the craft fair to look at woven potholders and tole painted wall hangings, stenciled sewing baskets and handcrafted dollhouse furniture. We never spoke of that moment. Looking back, I may have imagined the entire thing, but I don’t think so.

Photo © 1992 by Heather L. Gibson

Fast-forward to a beautiful spring afternoon in April 1992. I had the good fortune to spend the day touring the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Medieval collection, The Cloisters, with my best friend from college shortly before my graduation. It took a little doing, as we wound up getting lost in the heart of Harlem of all places (and we were literally the two whitest people for probably a hundred city blocks, compounded by our Gothic makeup and dark clothing), stopping a random passer-by for directions out of the car window. "Da Croystahs? Da CROY-STAHS???" was about all we got in return, so merrily on we went, ignorance our bliss, eventually finding our way to Fort Tryon Park by some small miracle or other. 

Photo © 1992 by Heather L. Gibson

We were met by Gregorian chants that wafted throughout the entire complex. The citrus trees and herb gardens were in fragrant bloom. People stopped and looked at us as if we were a part of the exhibits. And we floated like ghosts in black shrouds, noiselessly from chamber to chamber, staring in silent awe at the hundreds of artifacts, all the while feeling as though we had literally walked into the middle of a Flemish tapestry woven more than 500 years earlier. 

Photo © 1992 by Heather L. Gibson

I stood before the Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries and wept, a childhood dream now realized. It was a truly gorgeous day that I will never forget. So euphoric had the day left me, I vowed that if I ever got married, the auspicious event would indeed happen here. There was no more beautiful place on earth, at that moment.

Sadly, I recently learned that they do not allow weddings to be performed there.

But one can dream, can't they?