GOLDSBORO NC & CHILDHOOD

I’ve just now finished watching The Secret Garden for the first time in over a decade and a half, and you know what? I love it as much now as I did then, there in my back row seat in Mrs. Brewington's dark and silent classroom. I remember glancing at the teacher at the end of the film, and though I couldn’t see the eyes behind her glasses in the murk, I knew that she was thinking the same thing I was.

She’d loved it, that movie. She was It. She…all of us, there in the small, fourth grade classroom, had loved reading the novel. The movie had simply shown us all just how brilliant writing could be. It had shown us how exquisite the written word is, how a word or two can show what lies within. The story had shown us kids that each of us supports within the possibility to be extraordinary, to overcome odds in life.

To be.

Mrs. Brewington’s glasses flashed in the darkness as I stared at her, and in my soul, I knew that she was as in love as I was. She was an English teacher, after all.

I was a skinny fourth grader with low self esteem and mismatched teeth, but even still, by this time, I'd known for years how fond of classic literature I was. Over the years, this feeling has grown exponentially. It cannot be measured in any way, this growth.

It is, as they say, Beyond.

D****t.

I miss my childhood.

I miss digging up orange earth in my Gran's backyard with my brothers, in search of buried treasure, which Uncle Tom had assured us was there, once upon a lie, beneath Time and sod. I miss falling to sleep out of sheer, hot boredom in church, my Gran and Mama staring at my brothers, sister, and me with thinly veiled disgust. I miss having far more lively children’s church sessions in Jimmy and Jonathan’s backyard.

You know, just us kids.

Mud pies, (yep, boys make mud pies too, ladies) bike races up and down the alleys and steep streets of Goldsboro, NC, radio controlled car treks, fishing in The Ditch, which was really just a low canal, the twelve of us Devereaux Street Cougars up to our necks in the grime of it…cooking minnows on poor fires, snapping turtles and deformed fish captured in crude nets where they were eventually released or teased to death...

Water moccasins that for some reason didn’t quite dare the approach of any of us; adventurous kids swimming in filthy runoff, eighteen-wheeler inner tubes, filled with sour smelling air at Donnell’s air rusted pumps.

Collecting strewn tin cans to recycle for candy money, football in The Field, baseball (BASEBALL, goddammit!) in The Field…hours and hours and hours of hellacious fun, ignoring the setting of the sun, the rising of the moon. Talks of girls and boys by boys who really didn’t know a goddamn thing about girls, although some of us bragged awareness.

The lot of us, sitting on Horse Lee’s bleached front porch in the sun, cutting each another to ribbons with silver tongues and quick wits. Horse Lee laughing like a maniac. When I look back on those times, I am inclined to think that Horse was laughing at the blunt and reckless cruelty that kids can so effortlessly conjure out of nowhere. I can still see the tears running down his plump, hairy face. We kids did that to him. We made him laugh until he was forced to cry.

Birthday parties. Relay races down one-way streets while cars beeped and swore and smoked at our backsides.

Cookouts on an eternally unfinished cement porch in the dead of Winter.

Fallen food picked up and gobbled up in under three seconds.

Video games until dawn, video games until dusk.

It didn’t matter.

We kids genuinely loved each other's company. We loved our lives and our families too, however financially deprived they may’ve been.

At that time in life, money, status, and social standing mean less than nothing.

At around 15, the Magic of Childhood started to fade. Bikes became cars. Girls became women. Day long romps in ditches suddenly seemed foolish to some of us.

All of a sudden, there was 18, and over my shoulder, my Childhood waved goodbye to me.

For good.

Seeing movies like The Secret Garden, and Pan’s Labyrinth, The Never-Ending Story, The Dark Crystal, The Sandlot, Stand By Me…seeing things like this further illustrates just how sadly distant my Childhood is.

Kids today don’t seem to know how to appreciate it, that thing called Growing Up, but when they get a bit older, when they reach my age, or your age (though we can hardly be called old, can we?) they’ll see the madness in not embracing the charm of it while the opportunity is fresh and unkempt and scabbed-knee bold.

For those of you who haven't seen this movie, (The Secret Garden) or for that matter, any of the rest I’ve mentioned, please…see them all. Better yet, (as incredulous as you nonreaders out there may find this advice) read the novel, and then see the movie. It'll make you wish you'd cherished your childhood more in the living of it.

See also...Pan's Labyrinth.

F****N AWESOME FLICK!!!

Trust me.

It's Beautiful.


Soak it up, folks, because you’ve never met a man who misses his past-self, and his past experiences, so f*****g much.

Reviews

[Hedra Helix]

This s**t was the bomb. Take this bit someday and put it in the middle of a novel, yeah?



"...fishing in The Ditch, which was really just a low canal, the twelve of us Devereaux Street Cougars up to our necks in the grime of it�cooking minnows on poor fires, snapping turtles and deformed fish captured in crude nets where they were eventually released or teased to death...

Water moccasins that for some reason didn't quite dare the approach of any of us; adventurous kids swimming in filthy runoff, eighteen-wheeler inner tubes, filled with sour smelling air at Donnell's air rusted pumps.

Collecting strewn tin cans to recycle for candy money, football in The Field, baseball (BASEBALL, goddammit!) in The Field�hours and hours and hours of hellacious fun, ignoring the setting of the sun, the rising of the moon. Talks of girls and boys by boys who really didn't know a goddamn thing about girls, although some of us bragged awareness.

The lot of us, sitting on Horse Lee's bleached front porch in the sun, cutting each another to ribbons with silver tongues and quick wits. Horse Lee laughing like a maniac. When I look back on those times, I am inclined to think that Horse was laughing at the blunt and reckless cruelty that kids can so effortlessly conjure out of nowhere."


Damn, good run Broadie...Damn good run there...

Also! Enjoy your age now too, homie.
It's all good. Breathing ;)