I often wish I could remember more of my childhood. Most of my memories fade away and get stored in massive containers of time on shelves high-up in the closets of my mind. You know the dusty vaults to which I am referring. Perhaps one labeled “fourth grade” or “middle school” and maybe a box marked “Yellowstone vacation.” I imagine, as I get older, my mind will even clean up those and throw them all in a small carton called “childhood.”
Sad I can’t remember all those exciting, magical things I did as a child.
It was decades ago when I was last an energetic, free-spirited child playing with Matchbox cars, little green plastic Army soldiers and making machine guns out of sticks. I was a constant daydreamer; climbing walls like Spiderman and flying like Superman in my mind. I flew everywhere I went. I never had many friends and the idea of peer pressure was the silliest notion a boy like me could contemplate. I fancied myself as one of the smart fish living at the bottom of a muddy lake, one that was never tempted to nibble at the delicious shiny objects that occasionally dangled in the water.
I was safe but lonely on the bottom.
Born during the last few days of the space race, I was on my way home from the hospital when Apollo 11 was on its way to the moon. Maybe that’s why I turned out to be a lifelong dreamer. I was more comfortable in my thoughts and fantasies than interacting with actual humans. My mom and dad named me William Donald Randolf, but they just called me Willy. Everybody called me Willy when I was a little boy and I hated it. I hated my name because kids at school seemed to tease me about it nearly every day. Some of the main taunts I endured were Silly Willy or Little Willy. Even worse, when they called me Little Willy they were referring to one specific part of my anatomy. Willy the Hillbilly was another hurtful sneer kids labeled me with because I hardly ever wore shoes during the summer. Hearing those kids laughing at me while they heckled their perversions of my name made me so angry and so embarrassed.
Thankfully, people stopped calling me Willy when I was seven or eight after I campaigned relentlessly to be called Bill or Billy. Billy wasn’t that great of a name either, but I survived on that name for the rest of my childhood. I was always paranoid that someone would figure out my middle name and start calling me Donald Duck, but no one ever did.
I had a lot of distress around my name growing up.
I go by Liam now, but my dad still calls me Bill most of the time.
My first home was small, as young families homes usually are I would think. I don’t remember the house itself much. My mom told me our first home happened to be painted a dull yellow and had a nice little white fence that bordered the front yard while tall, wild bushes and pine trees formed a barrier around the backyard. What I do remember is that our home sat across the street from a giant blue water tower bearing our city name: Des Moines.
I was fascinated and intrigued by that old tower. I used to stare up at it through my bedroom window while I was lying in bed. I would imagine that I was one of the city workers who needed to go all the way to the top to make some vital repair and save the city’s water supply. The tower had me mesmerized! I wished that someday I would sneak over and climb up those steel baby-blue painted rungs that clung to the side of the high tower.
I would close my eyes and imagine how powerful the wind would be from way up there, even when the wind was calm back down on the ground. I knew it was windy up there because my dad told me higher places are always windier.
I dreamed about how magnificent the view would be from on top of that blue bulb. That tower called out to me night and day. Of course, I never did climb up that water tower nor did I even try before we moved away. I’ve found that is how most things turned out for me: I want to do something but instead of acting, I fantasized about it.
Scaling the water tower was just another one of those wild wishes of childhood.
For me, if someone asks what my earliest memory from childhood is I would shutter as discretely as possible; but I would say something about sitting on mats in kindergarten or racing Matchbox cars up the sidewalk. Some stock memory that was safe and pleasant. In other words, I would lie.
I still lie, at least to most people.
My earliest childhood memory is something much worse. My earliest childhood memory happened to be the worst day of my life and occurred when I was six years old.
That’s the day I met the black dragon for the first time.
When you are six and you see a dragon you don’t doubt what you see. Believe me a six year old is in no way prepared to go up against a real fire-breathing dragon. Back in 1975, I was still Willy, a skinny blond-haired, blue-eyed boy who liked running through backyards playing Army.
I had no awareness of being alive before the tragedy that unfolded that terrible night. I can still recount the events as if they had just happened. A therapist once told me that type of memory is what is known as a flashbulb memory. She went on to explain that flashbulb memories are usually very vivid but not always accurate in every detail.
This is my well-hidden, rarely discussed flashbulb memory.
That evening, I remember the sun was sleeping somewhere out of sight, draining the sky into the dark purples of dusk; just before most of the stars reveal themselves. I was in my room but I don’t remember what I was doing. I must have gotten bored. Out in the living room, I could hear my parents laughing and singing along to a Rolling Stones album. Mostly my dad sang and my mom laughed. I was drawn by the laughter and started roaming the house. I think I stood in the doorway at the end hallway watching them sing for a few minutes. I couldn’t linger long or my mom would start singing my name and make me dance with her. I wasn’t that bored.
“Mom I’m going out to play!” I shouted above the music.
My mom raised her hand in acknowledgment but never looked away from my dad who was making a fool of himself singing like he was Mick Jagger.
My dad, singing like a mad man along to the album, pointed at me and shouted “You can’t always get what you want…”
His screaming impression of Mick Jagger continued as I laughed and fled through the kitchen.
I could still smell the hamburgers we ate that night for dinner. There was a white-painted wooden door out the back with a large knob that was painted to match the door. I turned that knob and opened the door then I shoved the flimsy screen door and it rattled open.
“…ya get what ya need!!!” I heard my dad howl as I stepped outside. I remember not being able to hear the old door close behind me that night. Instead I heard crickets singing in front of me and my dad singing behind me.
The inside of my home fell off behind me and the expanse of the backyard unfolded before me.
I paused on the wooden deck and stood next to a green metal lawn chair while I scanned the yard. When I did that, I always noticed two things pretty fast. The first was that our backyard was always disappointingly empty. We didn’t have a cool shed that some of my friends had; sheds that could double as a cowboy fort or a space ship or a secret hideout. We didn’t own a swing set or a sandbox. We didn’t even have a doghouse or a sleepy hound to look up at me as he napped in said doghouse for that matter. Our backyard usually only had a black Weber grill and a dusty, faded-red lawnmower in it. The other thing I always noticed was that, despite the yards’ emptiness, this backyard was always somehow an amazing place to play.
To my creative little mind, my unfilled yard was a fortress surrounded by walls of evergreens pointing skyward, thick trunks of maple trees and spindly bushes hunched around the boundaries on all three sides. The closely spaced trunks, hanging branches and undergrowth all snuggled together to form hidden pathways that I crawled through and hid in. The rows of woody stemmed shrubs made small spaces and cubbyholes to play in and around.
These green walls were always there protecting our yard from any number of invaders- medieval, Native Americans, Confederat
e soldiers, World War Two Germans, the Vietcong, or even aliens.
I remember there were two mulberry trees way in the back that we loved to munch from all summer. I also remember the purple stains on the bottoms of my feet for most of the summer from squishing those delicious treats.
But tonight there was something more.
Fall was smothering the lust from summer, so by then dry leaves of all colors covered the ground. Only a few solitary leaves clung to the branches and bushes, making them look like thin, spiked hair. The wind had blown the leaves around the yard but the majority had clumped up against the trees making deep, crunchy drifts. The backyard itself had a few un-raked patches of leaves that looked like small brown islands in a sea of green grass. I always wished my dad would rake those leaves into a pile for me to jump in but the truth is I don’t remember playing in the leaves. My therapist has told me that not being able to remember something doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
Maybe I jumped and rolled in the raked leaves with my dad maybe I didn’t.
Just about a minute after I went outside, a small boy ducked out from between two bushes along the side yard. It was Rich Cooper. Rich was a real good friend and my next-door neighbor. He had messy black hair and was always grinning. He was holding an orange bucket I knew was stuffed full