What Happened (Part 8)

 

     I don’t want to give the impression that all my early life was nocturnal wanderings.  But those times stand out because they were some of the few when I was on my own.  Usually I was living the closely knit daily communal life of the Babel Boys, the situation that binds and connects us so closely that we have come to jokingly refer to it as “the hive mind,” so that with miles between us we still find ourselves experiencing the same moods and thoughts, and even craving the same foods. It has been said you are who you really are when you’re alone in the dark.  When I was alone in the dark I found myself to be mystical, with a sense of the secret life of things, possessed by dramatic narrative imperatives, and experiencing dreadful awe before the unknown and its possible revelations (you know--“skeered”).  A heady brew when you’re five or six.

     But daily life was naturally predicated and tempered by moving in a unit with my brothers; we moved like a herd or a flock, veering in the same direction as our moods infected one another, casting our plays and playings with each other’s characters, never feeling quite easy if one was temporarily displaced from the band. My ordinary life before I started to go to school could be divided into two modes of existence, each perceived as radically different from the other: Weekdays, and the Week-End. The Weekdays were analogous to the commonplace business of life; but the Week-End was equivalent to the holidays, when fun was in the air and anything was more than likely to happen.  This weekly cycle was our basic measure of time; the thought of waiting for anything for a month was hard to endure, and a year unthinkable.