One of the odd parts of growing older is noticing how stupid and embarassing habits you had when you were younger turn around and become full blown character traits by the time you hit adulthood. You hope that these things will get cut like tree limbs from memory, but they only grow in some other part of the psyche. My childhood habit of packing my coat with ²useful² tools became the adult¹s toolkit in the back of the car and my a fondness for typewriters became a computer ability. Even an attraction to comic books became a passion for reading. However, the darkest corner of middle school mind belongs to fantasy. Role playing is a quaint and curious name for a practice of mine whose recollection reddens me to this day. I used to pretende I was various fictional heros. At one point, I went to a church social with a plastic water gun in the breast pocket of my suitjacket a la James Bond. I had a great big metal sliding disk in the back yard which served as a slide in the summer, but as a shield (a la Captain America) in the summer. I fashioned unworkable web shooters for my wrists, drew holes in my shoes for jets, and could cross swords like D¹artagnan. In a defining moment, I shared my telepathic ability with my sister and we both at on a stone in the back yard, trying to beam thoughts at each other. For many, many years, I pruned the stumps of these memories. I didn¹t want to see my twelve year old self bouncing around the backyard with a shield strapped to my left arm, occaisionally letting it fly at the odd tree. I searched for my Quixote and slaughtered him mercilessly. But now, in these older days, I find that like Darth Vader, I find that I never really killed my old tutor. Rather, he reformed in my consciousness and became that itch that makes me write novels. The boy with the water gun and the shield has become the man on the computer. When I sit down at eleven o¹clock each night to write, I slip out of my old husk and become my narrator. Instead of outwitting Blofeld and the Red Skull, I now wander about as the overweight, charming, heartless lawyer Paul Brody, doing good by cheating the rich. In fiction, however, I can sharpen the story, I make myself do the perfect thing, each and every time. When I was a boy, the shield often fell short of the tree, but as a man, I can rewrite it so that it hits that oak each and every time. So, my Quixote came back, as Quixotes often do, and he has been put to work. I am more no more a novelist, than I was Captain America or Spiderman. But I am no less a man for it. Indeed, if being a man means being true to yourself, then perhaps I have become something greater.
Back to the Beach
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