Where Did All This Come From?

It will soon be 1 a.m. and my resolve to be in bed by 11:00 p.m. is trespassed once more. How lightly I take the multiple warnings (usually a list of 10) of  lack of sleep. Night brings quiet, solitude and comfort. I get the dishes washed, the carpet vacuumed, t.v. shows watched and would, given a tiny bit less good judgement, stay up until the sun rises. Would I go to bed at that point? Probably not. As a teenager I did sleep deprivation tests on myself. I was a junior in high school and obviously disturbed in a way that it has taken many years to understand. At the time I would put "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay" on my record player and turn the arm of the player so that the "45" would play over and over. I melted crayons over coke bottles making candle holders with each slow drop of liquid color. At some point I would turn off the record player and tune in to "WOWO", a radio station out of Fort Wayne, Indiana if my memory serves me correctly. They played soul music all night. Those were the years when small transistor radios were modern and hip. I dreamed of the city and found myself carried away by songs that pulled at my heart. I wanted to be a blues singer, weary with life, living in an apartment that was over a store where, as night fell, the neon signs from below would blink a cool blue color lighting up my living room in a haze of faded blue. Blink! Blink! I would, of course, be smoking a cigarette and thinking deep, philosophical blues thoughts. No one would know where I moved when I left the last town and I would become absorbed into the city. Just one face in a crowd...invisible...unknown.

Part of this imagining came true when my family moved to Taipei, Taiwan at the end of my junior year in high school. The decision was made quickly, school was out for the summer, our things were packed and we were winging our way to Taiwan without, as I later realized, telling any one of my friends. 40 years later they found me through Classmates.com and invited me to our high school reunion. They said they had been looking for me all those many years. I could not imagine anyone looking for me for so many years. Through a series of unfortunate events and personal choices, my name had changed a number of times. I decided to use my maiden name in classmates. BINGO! They found me. I was in a state of shock. Cullowhee, N.C. had long since become a dream to me rather than a reality. The smell of mountain air, the babbling of the creek near our home in the valley near town and the trauma of young teen years in the late 60's faded into a story I told myself from time to time.

In retrospect I realized that I frequently left people, places, marriages, jobs, sanity, memories, and large piles of emotional detritus behind me. I was not conscious of it. I just left either mentally or physically and mentally. I just left. As time passed each place became a dream to me. Visits to places I left baffled and overwhelmed me. I lived there; that house was on that street, I was that young and I knew those people. How very strange!