Cape

I did every­thing with a towel safety-pinned around my neck that Super­man ever did. I flew off the roof of the house. I closed my eyes and really really really believed I could. I have mem­ory of few toys. I remem­ber a Tonka Truck I loved, a 3 foot tall Snoopy I loved, green plas­tic army men that I would line up and bowl down with air­borne tragedies of var­i­ous kinds. Lin­coln Logs, Etch a Sketch. Most of the time I played in my head and used what­ever was around to add the last touch of magic to get me trans­ported to Imag­i­nary Land, like the towel. After that all I needed was prox­im­ity to world wide dis­as­ters. Some­times I would make up fun games, like this one…

I was about six. I sat on Con­gres­sional Drive on the curb and col­lected all the lit­tle rocks in the gut­ter. I made a cool lit­tle pile of them, and sat next to them. I would often rum­mage through the curb stock and find lit­tle shards of glass (magic crys­tals) or bot­tle caps (medals or money, depend­ing), etc. It was the typ­i­cal six year old trove. On this par­tic­u­lar day, I went only for lit­tle peb­bles and had a pretty good lit­tle pyra­mid of them going. The game as I imag­ined it, was to destroy one car with each peb­ble bomb. About the 10^th car I plinked a peb­ble off of made the block and eased back around. She, the witch of a dri­ver, caught me off guard, how­ever I did still man­age to run when I saw the win­dow roll down (by hand by the way) and saw her foul gri­mace. Home. What I failed to see was her gen­tly put the Oldsmobuick into reverse and glide into park in front of my house as she saw me make the turbo-charged turn into the dri­ve­way. She and my mom found me in the back of the back yard, hid­ing where Buck the mutt took his dumps. (I knew the area well as it was my work­space for the pick­ing up dog poop chore.) I don‘t remem­ber what hap­pened next. Just the run­ning and the hid­ing and the time spent that night work­ing out how this evil wizard-ess trans­ported her­self to my house and found me. Les­son learned: don‘t run home in a crisis.