Hobnobbing with Peter Pan

by Maddy

I don’t have any calamity or catastrophe or any life changing moment that has altered my personality. I just have my little moments. For instance, today it is finally raining. Numerous flecks of clear water cascading from the sky making that wonderful pitter patter against the windows and bringing that amazing smell of damp earth, or growing things, of sky, of lovely lovely rain. Rain and I have always been pally. Our personalities suit each other. When I’m inside, it talks to me through the window. I curl up in blankets and I am glad I am warm. I like to be outside with it, too. With gentle fingers it touches m face and arms, soaking my clothes. It curls my hair and trickles down the waves. I even like the damp cold feeling when all my clothes have been plastered to my body. Today I am equipped. I have boots, so I can splash through puddles, a raincoat and an umbrella. The umbrella is unusual for me, but rain doesn’t mind. It plays songs on my plastic ceiling and still brings me that heavenly rain smell. I spot out other umbrella carriers. They walk slower through the rain than other people. They are enclosed in their own umbrella worlds, seeing nothing but the few feet of ground not obscured by bright plastic or blurred by rain. As I walk home, I watch the rain wash the street in great rivers and play with leaves. I listen to the stories it tells me of all the things it’s seen since last we met. Unfortunately we are joined by a third. Wind can be quite sweet when it’s playing with skirts and long hair, but it is also a trickster. It brings out the worst in my friend rain, and I hate to see it. Rain and wind like nothing better than to twist about and spit in faces. They together are the ultimate downfall of umbrellas. The wind makes rain fall sideways. As soon as you have your umbrella angled so as to keep off most of the water, the wind changes direction so that it’s coming at your unprotected back. The wind tries purposely to destroy the umbrella. It sneaks up under the mushroom shape, then pulls as hard as it can, trying to break the metal branches and turn them inside out, rendering it useless. If it fails to accomplish this, wind will at least pull the umbrella out of your hands and send it sailing and skating over puddles and though the air, far away from you. The wind loves to see us chasing frantically after captured umbrellas. But even tricky wind cannot break the bond between rain and me. Whenever it comes, I always have a moment to spare for a warm, welcoming smile and a hand out the window to feel it on my skin. Nothing can cheer me like its sound on the roof and the smell it brings for me.

I was born in Alta Bates hospital on February 16, 1992 at 4:00 on a rainy Saturday morning. I was two weeks late, and my mother was worried I would never be born, but I was, eventually. I have an older sister, Nora, who is two years older than me, and my grandmother had come out to California to take care of her when my parents went to the hospital. When my grandmother and my sister came to pick me up the next morning, my sister wanted to take my clothes off and on. She thought I was a doll.

My mother and my father are both from the east coast, and met at college in Rhode Island. They moved to California to go to graduate school. While my mother has never really liked California due to its sad lack of seasons, somehow they got stuck out here, and this is where my sister and I have grown up. My first home was married student housing in Albany, but before I was one we moved to a small house in Richmond. I remember the staircase, which was covered in a lovely dark green carpet, and the big front windows.

Not long after, we moved to another Richmond house. This one was on was on a tree lined street called Humboldt. One morning when we were moving in I slipped on the big red front steps. My mother dropped me off at preschool, but she was called back when the teachers found that I couldn’t stand up. We lived in that house for a long time and I have many memories from it.

There are things about my character that have led me to believe that a portion of my brain has taken up residence in Never Never Land. For one thing, I ride horses. This is generally recognized to be every little girls dream, and I, a young woman, so to speak, of seventeen, am still completely in love with them. I am not only delighted to ride and mess about with them whenever possible, but I own an exceptional number of toy horses which I have collected over my career. This toy collection is another piece of proof that part of my soul is hobnobbing with Peter Pan and the Lost Boys. It consists not only of horses, but of all manner of toys. The vast majority of these are animals: cats, dogs, farm animals, bears, wolves, birds, dragons, horses and even animals that don’t yet have names, among others. I also have a cherry tree fort complete with moss and small gnomes. All f these toys are attached to many stories in my mind, woven with meticulous detail. Even my imagination is as overactive as a child’s. Sometimes when I get bored or stressed I use these animals to go in to story mode. I can make a long, dramatic fairy tale, a biography of a 1930s London orphan, or an in depth description of an animal that doesn’t exist. These stories can be quite helpful when I’m feeling I might die of boredom, but when three essays, two tests and college applications have me stymied, it would be handy to have a quicker way to reverse the paralysis.

All these toys had their places in the Humboldt St.house. This is also where we got our cat, Lucy, a fluffy calico, and her son Jimmy, a big tabby. My sister was best friends with the girl across the street. And I tagged along. We played long intricate games with our dolls, Star Baby and Rainbow Baby, and went on jungle adventures in the back yard. My best friend from preschool and I made little houses for our birthstone bears. I liked school, first preschool and then kindergarten, where my friend Kyla and I perfected the art of making mudpies. I loved my first grade teacher, Chris. She was patient and fun. I also loved building fairy houses with my friends in the chain link fence that surrounded my school. We got to build an enormous rainforest in the hallway with the whole school, which was lovely. The school was in a building that seemed like an old mansion with huge classrooms and enormous windows and cracking ceilings.

My dad was concerned that the building was built right on top of the Hayward Fault, which might split, depositing us into the lava below. I changed schools for second grade. If Chris was a gifted and caring teacher, my new teacher, Bharati, was a demon sent from hell. She was a teacher straight out of David Copperfield. Because I am dyslexic, I was slow to learn how to read. This made everything difficult, because even science, which I had loved in Chris’s classroom, required my being able to read Bharati’s poorly written flash cards. Her assistant, Crystal, told gleeful tales about her old school, where children who had not memorized the multiplication tables were made to stand on chairs, so that everyone would know that they were stupid. Bharati made me cry on a regular basis. She grew so tired of my tears that I was often sent our of the room to cry in the breezeway. My friend in the classroom next door later told me that when anyone from her class went out to use the bathroom they would often see some small child weeping on the bench. My mother complained, but the head of the school saw nothing wrong with these methods, and continued to explain to her that many children loved Bharati. That may be the case, but I did not. She made me cry so much that I really could not learn. Eventually, with the help of a kind tutor, I learned to read, and I love to read to this day. I can’t look back on second and third grade, however, as anything but a dark pit of misery – although I did like my classmates.

Perhaps here I should confess that I have a crippling disadvantage. It is a disability that most people call a character flaw. I’m shy, nervous, scared, painfuly self-conscious and it impedes my life. I am getting over it, but I have struggled with it for years. Shyness really does make life much harder than you might imagine. I have to second and third guess every decision which takes most people only a second of thought. First meetings are also a danger zone. Where most people are slightly different than they are with close friends, I have an inability to be anyone at all. It takes a long time for me to say more than my name. That is, unless I am able to put on my façade, a fake shiny face that is more outgoing, but only shows a small and slightly distorted fraction of who I am. Thought the façade is slightly new, the shyness has always been there. One of my earliest memories is of my daycare. I was on the teeter totter with my friend when the teacher announced that there would be game of Ring Around the Rosie. I had not been at the daycare long, and I would never have dreamed of joining in. My friend felt differently. She left to play Ring Around the Rosie, and I remained on the teeter totter.

After Bharati’s class, I moved up to Upper Elementary, where the teachers were kind and patient. I enjoyed my time in that classroom. I made good friends and I learned a lot. Looking back, the work was not all that hard, but at the time it could seem overwhelming. I did my final report on Hawaii and I sang Aloha in Hawaiian in front of the class. I would never have sung the song if it had not been for my teacher asking me to. I was very glad I did.

When I graduated from elementary school, I went to the middle school that my sister had gone to ahead of me. I was very jealous, because whereas her class was friendly and interesting, mine was consumed by cliques. In her class, there were loose groups of friends, but everyone hung out with everyone else. In my class, we were friendly with each other, but would never dream of spending time outside our designated clique. Most groups were divided entirely by race, and my group was the only exception. We were white, black and latina. One of my friends was a chronic liar, who told us stories of his four older sisters, none of whom existed. He was flamboyantly gay, but went to a Catholic high school, and the last I heard was planning to become a priest. I liked most of my teachers, and I did make some very good friends, some of whom I still see today even though we are at different schools. I liked my English teacher. I remember reading My Antonia, which I loved. I liked my science teacher, except when he flipped out. One time the class before ours had made him angry. When we were a bit too loud, he flung his wheeley chair against the wall and stormed out, slamming the door behind him. The English teacher came running in to see where he had gone and calm him down again. The bane of my existence was PE, and the boys who loved it, but I liked my art class.

After 8^th grade, we moved again, to Berkeley, and I attended Berkeley High School. It was really scary on the first day. It was such a big campus, and I was worried I would get lost, but I didn’t get lost. I memorized the map on the organizer, and my routes from class to class, and I did not get lost. Berkeley High and I have a love/hate relationship. Some of my classes have been amazing. Others have been like spending an hour a day in a morgue surrounded by lifeless bodies staring at the board, or else like being trapped with a troupe of rabid chimpanzees screaming and swinging about on the furniture. For three consecutive years, I did not have a science teacher who lasted more than half the year. Most of them fled Berkeley High and never looked back. One of them left and did not tell anyone where he had gone. Another went into intensive therapy, and two others simply vanished.

Now I am preparing to go off to college. I’m in the midst of writing college essays. Even after the short answers have all been completed and the forms filled out, the big essay stands before me like a huge mocking figure holding me from my future. A notebook is filled with a hundred failed starts, restarted and rejected. I sort through my life hoping to find an anecdote or experience that holds some shred of meaning. Whole sections of my existence are tossed aside as hours wasted when I could have been volunteering to save children in Africa or winning awards. But when I’m done with this, I believe I’ll still be pleased with my life and the path it has led me on. I may not be a jet flyer or have lost all my family in a catastrophe, but I can still find my way to being interesting and happy and leading a full life.