Now that I have turned eighteen and am about to start driving at last, I think the time has come to take a comprehensive look at my childhood. While I really am half joking, it proves interesting to ponder how I have changed—if I actually have!—over these years. In David Copperfield Dickens grasps the mystery of growing up. Indeed, the people in David’s childhood hold such vibrant and firm images in his mind that he can hardly believe they have changed since then. At a glance, my days as a ten-year-old blend into a hazy mist; yet, when I really dig deeper, the memories do indeed seem too immediate to represent things ten years old. Memories from our comparatively short years as a child somehow hold an inestimable importance and brillance.
When I glance over the years, their themes easily separate them. And it seems natural to me to start near the beginning with my days as a baseball star. I even feel somewhat impressed with myself when I think of the hours I spent tossing up tennis ball after tennis ball, hitting each with all my strength, retrieving every iridescent yellow ball from the neighbor’s yard, and tirelessly starting the weary process over. Partly I took baseball on so vigorously as a way to put my many worries aside, but it certainly became more than something I did on the side: it became my identity. Next in time I think of the move from Ohio to Boston and the agonizing first year in a new land. I feel assured that if I could go back to those days as the person I am now, they would become considerably less bumpy, but life, I suppose, overflows with those kinds of “tragedies.” Finally, against my will, I come to the brief yet notable period in my life when I toyed around with becoming a “real teenager.” Maybe most people would laugh at the shame I feel for the petty things I did during that period, but I cannot help but see even my obviously minor mistakes with great disgust.
From the ages of eight or nine to twelve or thirteen I played baseball constantly and thus often freed myself of anxiety. During those years anxiety acted in the same manner as an allergic reaction: it came in brief, violent visitations. Worries from that period come to my mind with little effort, and indeed I think they reside inside my head somewhere packed in little rows. One, for instance, labeled “fear of dying” another “fear of dogs” and so on and so on. No matrix of events led logically to the birth of any of them. Instead they came from existential moments of realization. It might suddenly strike me, more than strike me, that life could end at any moment. At the same time, my love of baseball began with a similar sort of moment, a realization that this was my sport, and rather than any real logical sequence of events. On the other hand, my interest in Major League baseball began, I believe, when I saw my friend’s baseball cards. That caused me to recognize that those players enjoyed the best kind of life. Not only did they have a degree of celebrity but they also got to do what they loved all day and, to me, thus stayed eternally young by doing something seemingly invented for children—not big, mysterious, and seemingly unentertaining like most work. While I decided that I would make baseball my career, I decided to achieve this goal through a non-standard route. Instead of signing up to play baseball on a team, I organized my own homeschool, baseball league. Among the many advantages I saw in going this route, the substitution of tennis balls for hardballs was definitely high on the list for both myself and my friends.
Because of my deep roots in Ohio, our move from “Ohio to Boston”—Boston sounded much more exciting to us than Massachusetts thus we said “Boston”—devastated me. Nearly all my life I had lived in Medina Ohio, and its constancy held my life in balance. Not only did I feel I could depend on seeing the same sights and faces day after day but they, of course, were what I had always known. However, it was not as if I thought life would never change. Rather I think I felt that I controlled the rate of change somewhat. Moving to Boston felt similar to being pulled out of my universe and transplanted into another. I had learned how the old universe worked, yet in this new universe I did not even know whether my new earth would move about the sun. At the same time I had sort of established myself as a sort of king of the other. Among my friends I privately called myself the best at baseball (though, I don't know if I really was), and, as foolish as it sounds, the best in everything. I think possibly this attitude was “popping” slowly and painfully as I grew older and realized more about the world. That move “popped” these theories all at once somehow.
During the first years in the new house I became traumatized by the fear of protracting lyme disease from a tick. Actually I only laugh a little at myself for this because I think any one moving into the New England area must have a hard time waking up to the reality of ticks. During the spring our dog picks up at least one a walk. Generally this tick resurfaces from a curly mass of hair as a peanut sized bubble, or, for some mysterious reason, it decides to “jump” off our dog and climb up the wall. Moreover I have to give some blame to my mother for acting pretty concerned about the whole business initially. As a child nothing scared me more than my parents’, especially my mother’s, fear for my safety. I do not exacerbate when I say that for days even months I lived constantly feeling tiny little legs crawling up me....to be continued..probably.