The Tangerine Star of Tunisia Road

They say that seven is the age of reason –– the age when you're old enough to start truly developing a sense of self. This makes sense to me, as my memories from that age (and just after) are among some of my most poignant and vivid, even if I'm not entirely sure why. 

There was a street lamp on the corner of Tunisia Road where we lived on post after we first moved to California, just a few steps away from our little home. Our house was the kind of house everyone in the military gets when they're lucky –– comfortable but also forgettable enough that you didn't even realize you were supposed to forget it.

But at that age, everything still seemed magical and sacred. My room wasn't just an ordinary room in an ordinary house. It was the hallowed sanctum where I spent hours organizing my toys and brushing my dolls' hair. It was my first little office and creative studio, the place where I first fell in love with drawing with my pencils and typing up stories on the old, secondhand typewriter my parents had given me for the purpose.

I was used to military life, so I technically knew the house and my place in it were temporary. But somehow that didn't matter. When you're only seven or eight, even a summer feels like an eternity, so a change that was still probably years in the future felt like something to worry about in some other lifetime. 

In the meantime, I had living to do, stories to write, and that street lamp to dream underneath.

It was just an ordinary street lamp on an ordinary suburban street corner. But what I remember most is the way it stood tall and strange, like a metal flower that waited all day to bloom at dusk. That's when the soft, orange glow of evening flickered to life, and it always felt like something sacred had been summoned.

Where the World Began: A Reflection

When I was little, yellow school buses simply didn't exist. I'd only ever seen them on TV, full of laughing children who somehow seemed excited about the idea of going to school, and everyone knew the things you saw on TV were just make-believe.

The bus that arrived to pick me up on my very first day as a little student was olive green. 

Like everything on the military base where my family and I lived, it was the drab, sober color of my father's fatigues. The color of creeping lichen on unfriendly trees –– always a sure sign you were straying too far from home. The color of the musty mildew that sometimes grew in the basement when it got damp.

My mother had insisted school was supposed to be fun –– something I should be excited for –– but I knew better. I knew only too well that school was part of the World, and that the bus was the alien chariot that would take me there against my wishes and better judgment. 

From what I could tell, other kids were curious about the World, and they loved to talk about all the things they would one day do, be, and become out there. But I felt differently. I saw the World for what it surely was –– something huge, limitless even, and terrifying. Something unfriendly and cold that would swallow me whole and eventually make it so I'd never have anything to smile about ever again.

I didn't trust it. I didn't want to be part of it, and I didn't understand why my parents would insist on sending me out into a place like that alone, even if it were just for the day.