It Is I Who Have Gotten Small

As never fails when I make a push to finish a novel, my younger son brought something weird home. (And recovered from it in 12 hours, the little so and so.) The something weird is making my mouth taste like I swallowed a dragon and it’s burping somewhere at the back of my throat. My head hurts and I just want to sleep.

So, even though I tried to get some work done, the progress yesterday and today wasn’t exactly marked. I took a nap, shoveled the walk (I had to get out of the house or go nuts) and spent a considerable amount of time reading The Horse, The Wheel, and Language. No, I don’t know why. I have a strong feeling it relates, somehow, to this long-shelved project called Mirrorplay.

Also – and this has a tendency to happen whenever I run a mild fever – I found myself in the middle of a weird search. In this case it was for pictures/google Earth, etc. of my place of birth.

First of all, and weirdly, apparently I’m the most famous person to come out of the region in the 21st century. (Poor region.) I.e. if you google the village/ubervillage/city you get… me. This alone almost spooked me into giving the whole thing up.

But of course, I had a fever, so I didn’t. I went on to find a map of the place with pictures people have taken integrated in it. There’s pictures from the place I grew up in and the parish church, and the cemetery which is all white marble, by regulation, and so vast it takes up several blocks on the map. Which was kind of interesting, if a little scary.

And then I got completely lost. I mean, I know the way from the cemetery to my parent’s house on foot. Or I used to. I walked it fairly often. (No, not morbid. The town hall is across from the cemetery.)

So I tried following the roads I would follow and got turned around and completely confused. This in itself is not that strange. I mean, seriously – do you know the name of your childhood streets? Well, maybe you do. And nowadays in Portugal they’re very well marked, but when I was little, I knew streets in other ways “Go by the alley where She of The Little Doggies lives. Turn at the Lighted (private part) ’s house. Then go up to where that pig escaped last year.”

On top of that, in the twenty five years since I’ve been gone, they’ve built countless stack a prole apartment buildings and tore open a lot of new streets. This contributes to my having no clue where I am at any given moment. On top of that, manipulating google-maps with my mouse was… uh… curious. So suddenly I would spin out in an unexpected direction and find myself some place only dimly remembered from adults’ conversations in youth: Paranhos; Sao Mamede Infesta (which I remember because my mom would pronounce it sambamed and my dad would add infesta like it was a joke, which I suppose it can be, because it can mean ‘infestates’);Alfena (from which, for some reason, my younger self was convinced mad people came. No, I have no idea why.)

And in the middle of all this, it hit me. The entire map of my childhood, including the places that sounded distant and far away and that built my concept of “foreign” – as in, they do things differently there – is probably no more than fifty square miles, if that. Put it another way, the place names I associated with wonder and distance; the “foreign parts” I dreamed of seeing (not that type of part. Stop it. Those were lighted.); the things I associate with vaguely strange customs and mysterious ways… that entire area would fit in the space between my home and downtown Denver. Possibly with room to spare.

Oh, and the place I always thought of as a “region” – not the village, which was much smaller, but the bigger entity, with the townhall and the church and the cemetery – is described as a village, relegating my childhood world to a hamlet, I suppose.

Weirder, though, was seeing the woods — called “Lightening Rays”, though, from reading the book I’ve been reading, it could also be a cognate of the word for “things that turn” in proto-Latin. Who knows? — and how small they are in reality. Now, mind you, I’d guess they’ve been halved since I was born, but to me those woods are THE WOODS. I like to think of them as a remnant of some old and primeval forest, but they can’t be because when we trekked in them, dad and I would find ruined homesteads and bits of Roman inscriptions. Still, it backed up almost to my grandmother’s backyard. Okay, there was the backyard wall, about maybe five feet, stone. On the other side was the neighbor’s field, stretching to the line of trees. I know sometimes we went around to the gate up the road and took that route, but most of the time, on Saturday afternoon, when dad needed to get me out of mom’s hair, so she could clean the house without me underfoot, (how’s that for mixed metaphors?) dad and I would just jump the backyard wall, walk across the fields and to the forest.

In the forest there were rabbits and birds, and lizards. And there was some pond where reeds grew. Dad used to make me flutes from them, with his pocket knife. And there were massive dragon flies. And ants. For some reason I was deeply into ants. Down the street to the train stop (it’s now almost a station with coverings, but before it was just a stop. Some trains stopped, some didn’t — and it didn’t always mean they weren’t supposed to) there were three or four anthills (that street was dirty.) We used to take them bread crumbs on Saturday and sit around watching them carry it in…

But now looking at it on the map… I think some of my friends have bigger backyards. My entire world of adventure and wonder, where every day something new happened or something unexpected revealed itself – my world of surprises and enchantment turns out to be just a little corner all too easy to fly over on Google maps.

And yet I’d trade dominium over continents and power over countries for the joy I found in my grandmother’s backyard and for the dreams with which my imagination peopled the narrow band of trees beyond it.