As our yoga class reflects this week on satya, truth, I've been reflecting on my kidhood. The playing outdoors dimension was so great. Earliest memories are of the farm outside Chandler, Arizona, where my dad grew cotton and milo on ground leased from my grandpa: kid paradise.
My brother and I played in the irrigation ditch -- the dry ditch, that is -- where we dug little caves and landscaped an entire world for our imaginary characters, Mousie and Rattie. (Rattie as his name suggested was the less principled of the two. Mousie was kind, with dependable integrity.) We crawled through the growing milo, making complex tunneled labyrinths where we sometimes got lost. (It was against the rules to stand up to get bearings.) And we spent hours climbing the huge-to-us cottonwood tree which grew right next to the ditch. I was sincerely infuriated that my younger brother climbed higher because he was more daring than I was. (That seemed to go against the natural order of things and my supposed superiority as two years elder.)
The being indoors dimension had its fun as well. We played library, checking books out to each other. We pored over the exciting new set of encyclopedias which our parents, like many conscientious moms and dads of the 1950s, had bought from a traveling salesman. I still remember the feel of the cool linoleum floor against my cheek as I lay resting from a warm afternoon outdoor adventure, listening with Daddy to the Sunday baseball game.
So, the kid world was pretty much non-stop fun. The adult world, however, was complicated. Things didn't always add up. Sometimes Mommy was crying -- a puzzling occurrence with no explanations offered. Sometimes Daddy was talking on the phone in a strange way -- I didn't know the word furtive in those days. But we kids didn't pause too much on these things which we didn't understand. We just carried on with our gloriously fun world of play.
From the present point of view I look back and put together the evidence, add up the clues, construct the jigsaw puzzle. Dang, it turns out that we had the proverbial elephant in the room. Elephants, actually. In all the rooms of the farmhouse.
But watch any nature show and you'll find out how kind and resourceful elephants are, and such bulwarks of protection toward their young. Hence, I can't say that we had elephants at home. They were more like hyenas -- whose reputations include selfishness and sneakiness and slyness.
Aw, my dear parents, I'm not saying that they were hyenas. Far from it. They were absolutely loving and they treasured us kids. And we -- me, my brother, and my little sister, who came along in the post-farm era -- loved them back.
The hyenas were the big, big problems that our folks carried with them. Our dear Daddy, I figured out years later, was ensnared in alcohol. And sweet Mommy, we deduced many more years later, was struggling hard with chronic anxiety.
But alcohol and anxiety, especially given the conventions of the time, could not be named. Could not be admitted. Could not be revealed. Could not be discussed.
Truth-telling. We kids learned to do that in the small, nameable things. We couldn't learn to do that in a larger sense because within the atmosphere of home, because truth-telling was compromised, incomplete. We did get by okay, though. We took the goodness of the kid years and the love of our parents, added onto it, and eventually grew up to be pretty good people.
Satya. That is something I continue to figure out, to this day. All of us kids have journeyed, making our way into the deeper reaches of truth-telling.
Now, if I just could have figured out how to climb higher in the old cottonwood!
