Into Magic (8)

Six cousins. On the left: Margaret, John, and Frank.

On the right, Anne Marie, Francis and Charles Reilly.

We need to look back to my childhood, which was dominated by asthma, and by the woods behind the house and across the street, and, after age 11, by books and by a good deal of daydreaming, Also there was farm work, and the other-worldly result of reading so many stories of all kinds and there was the security of family, often disregarded and overlooked until well after the support had been taken away by time and life.

 Asthma comes in several forms. You may experience wheezing, or coughing, of moment-by-month inability to draw in breath, or a combination of two or more symptoms. None of it is conducive to your getting a night’s sleep, or even rest. Lying down makes everything worse. You can’t rest while sitting up unless you have adequate support for your head. It occurs to me now, my parents probably didn’t realize the mechanics of the situation. All they could see (and initially it must have been terrifying) was that I could not breathe, and it would go on by the hour, frequently all night. What could they do but sit by the bed (mom, mostly) and wish they could help? This continual background presence shaped my life in various subtle ways, as will become clear as we go along. They were long nights.

The woods. As with so many things in my life, the environment I grew up in didn’t easily fit into any one category, being neither urban nor rural nor suburban. Our house was on two and a half acres of land, far enough out of the center of town to have tracts still covered in trees. Behind the house, and across the street, were patches of woods. It was a jolt, late in life, to realize that before I had books, I had the woods. I spent a lot of time playing in those woods, probably enacting cowboy daydreams. I learned very early that wooded land is not the same, energetically, as land without trees. I wished I was living in Daniel Boone’s Kentucky. I thought: What was I doing growing up in Southern New Jersey?

Farm work. Dad was working the farm that belonged to his parents, about four miles away from our house, so I didn’t exactly grow up on a farm, but I did grow up with farmwork, and it was interesting, except that it always went on too long. Picking daffodils in early Spring for the cut-flower market wasn’t exactly fun (the knees of your corduroy pants wet and muddy, hands cold and stiff) except when we did it along with our Reilly cousins, but we got paid a little for each dozen picked, and that was useful. Picking strawberries, the same. Later in the year, when the weather was more pleasant, there would come time to pick peonies, and tomatoes, and other things. And the older we got, the more we were allowed to do. At age 10, I got to drive the tractor, steering it down the row while my father and my 16-year-old brother rode the planter attachment, putting in tomato transplants. At the end of the row, my brother would climb up onto the tractor, turn it around, and then I’d drive it down that row. At the end of the day I knew I had actually been useful, surely a good experience for any child. And of course as the years went on, I did more and more tractor work, cultivating, plowing, discing. I always liked doing it, but I always knew it could not be my life. My life was going to be books.

Books. My Aunt Nonnie (Donata) gave me a Tom Swift Jr. books for my 11^th birthday, and that opened the world of books for me. It led me naturally to the books my father had had as a child, “series” books like The X-Bar-X boys, the Radio Boys, the original Tom Swift series, the Hardy Boys, Ralph of the Roundhouse, etc., etc. I can’t say they were a good influence. I was isolated enough and innocent enough to take these formulaic books as realistic portraits of the world, even if a world already long passed away. It didn’t help me deal with the world I actually lived in.

Family. When I came to study astrology, years alter, I realized that no two of the eight of us had the same sun sign. My brothers and sisters were earth or water signs (my father, air; my mother, fire.). I was the only fire sign among the kids. Is this why, whenever there was a squabble, I was always half of it? (That’s what my father said once, and I have reason to believe it.) I was a stormy petrel, but not by inclination. I think it must have had to do mostly with my lack of self-awareness.

Difference. A happy childhood? Yes, I suppose. But even then, a different childhood. Was it that asthma periodically removed me from the daily routine world? Was it that the habit of daydreaming enhanced my ability to see things differently? looking back, it seems to me it was never in the cards for me to have a normal life (not that I wanted one). It’s like the tag line to old joke: “Just lucky, I guess.”