According to the official document, it all began in a small town in eastern New Mexico but of course I have no real recollection of the event, only a well-preserved piece of paper, a duplicate of the original birth certificate, that describes the where, the when, and the parties involved.
As for anything I can actually remember, that would have taken place a few years later, about a hundred miles and a couple of travel hours to the east, in the Texas panhandle.
There is this small, tattered, scrap of a black and white photograph featuring a young, slender man leaning against the corner of a building, almost certainly a house but not really much more than a shack resting on cement blocks. The man is looking down at a smallish black dog and a curly-haired toddler in miniature overalls.
My first cognizant memory is about being told to pick up the empty dog food cans that littered the bare earth just outside what turned out to be the front door of our home, and to deposit them in a trash container.
From there my next clear mental image is one of a steel Tonka dump truck, red and green, as I recall, that would serve as the primary vehicle of my imagination as it transported, perhaps at most, a modest shovelful of dirt from one location to another along the miniature developments that meandered through a U-shaped pile of excavation spoils. They had resulted from the preparation of a basement that was being constructed beneath an upcoming addition to the frame structure in the old photo, and the “dirt piles,” as I came to refer to them, could have easily been a major mountain range in my limited experience.
The two or three acres of dusty ground and weeds I knew as my playground seemed immense at the time but of course everything is relative and when I was old enough, though still a preschooler, to cross the country road that ran past the front of the house, where I was able to roam a wheat field that knew no limits or boundaries, I intuitively understood that there was a lot more out there beyond my known universe.
Later still, I would explore in the opposite direction to where the flat earth sloped ever so gently into a slight depression that would fill with seasonal rain water and miraculously burst overnight into a boy’s fantasy ocean of grassy shallows, none more than a foot or so deep, but suddenly full of frogs, garter snakes, dragonflies and, as if by magic, the occasional turtle.
Our nearest neighbors had a small poultry operation from which they sold eggs and fryers. They also raised a pretty big vegetable garden and a decent-sized field of corn every year. After preparing his own fields in the spring, the man would come over with his tractor and plow a few rows for us too. A good deal of my youthful summertime energy was appropriated for watering and weeding followed by helping to harvest corn, beans, tomatoes, onions, squash, okra, and black-eyed peas when each was ready.
There was a small out building that housed the pump and pressure tank for the well and provided a cool, dark storage place stacked with shelves of jars filled with the colorful backyard bounty, carefully canned and sealed. On the rear porch of the house a wringer-type clothes washer stood as testimony to the hard work low-income families simply accepted as a way of life.
Often, I was required to carry the laundry basket along the four strands of clothesline where wet pants and shirts would regularly freeze whenever a cold wind kicked up, something that happened with some frequency in the cooler months.
The small house was heated by means of a free-standing butane space heater in the front room joined later on by a little white enamel stove in the bathroom. When we were finally able to eliminate the ancient galvanized metal wash tub, that doubled for soaking laundry, and installed a real bathtub with hot and cold running water, freeing us from heating water on the cookstove to bathe in, there was big excitement in the house. I didn’t realize we were poor. We were relatively warm, we had enough food to eat, and we were clean.
The house always remained a work in progress, a chaotic blend of demolition and construction. Once, I foolishly jumped from the roof onto a jumble of the ubiquitous debris, a leap that resulted in driving a nail all the way through my foot, only to have it soaked in Epsom salt and dressed with stinging Mercurochrome as my reward. Yet most of my adventures were far less traumatic, and the bulk of my waking hours were spent pretending to build “forts” and later on entire “towns” in the stacks of salvaged building materials and surplus mounds of excavated soil that always seemed to be increasing in volume.
Years later, the long since unoccupied house reportedly burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances late one night, leaving only charred remains and truckloads of assorted junk joined by my grand but abandoned developments as evidence that there had ever been anyone in residence there. But that was long after the memories of pretend road graders and red wagon loads of treasure had faded away. By then the homes of various aunts and grandparents had replaced most references to that location anyway.
What I do clearly remember is the ever-present wind that ranged there. There wasn’t much standing in its way across that flat table of earth. Once, we launched a large homemade kite that stayed aloft continuously for three days and nights, tethered to a fence post. Even now, we have an uneasy relationship, the wind and I, and I generally seek refuge from it whenever possible.
But at the time, most of my attention focused on creating my imaginary towns, roads and houses between those dirt piles that bracketed my innocence. Nothing else really seemed to matter as long as I could build things. The first house is not much more than a vague memory but it marked the origin of the path I seemed destined to follow.