Shilo  — you can guess that’s not her real name, but it’s the one I’ll call her by this time — was the granddaughter of a close neighbor, and she visited for one wild week each summer.  Her story has gone through multiple tellings, and so, oddly, has the song that forms the backdrop of memory.  It’s the third and final version of Shilo that contains the stanza: Young girl with fire/ Something said she understood/ I wanted to fly/ She made me feel like I could.

My brother was surprised when I told him I considered her the real friend of my childhood, the one I wished I hadn’t lost touch with. Now hardly was he blameless when it came to their annual king of the hill battles, but, oh, the things that girl did!  She locked him out of the patio the day we were both invited over for luncheon.   Then there was the time she chased him through my parent’s bedroom, and, yes, across their bed threatening to claw him with her fingernail-claws.

When I recount the story, people’s first thought is that a part of me wanted to be that kind of girl.  When I mention that I was draw to more than one girl of the sort who hung Barbies from the bedpost by shoelace nooses… well, they figure I’d secretly wanted to retire the patent leather shoes and go hang my own Barbie dolls.  But there was never the least impulse.

I know Shilo’s temper extended to more than just my brother.  I know also that there were times she bullied someone smaller than herself.  Yet she was also the first to approach me as a friend and not just a playmate.  (“You can tell me,” she said.  “I want you to…”) What can I say?  There was a generally heightened level of intensity and emotion that, for some odd reason, often correlates negatively with proper appreciation for the finer qualities of Baby Alive.

It was unspoken understanding that dolls stayed home on Shilo weeks. Over the course of those summers that she played my pet dragon and dolphin and I rode on her back at the community pool… well, we ever quarreled once.  The first version of the Shilo story ended on the line, “Oddly some of my safest moments have been spent playing with fire.”

There is something curious, I think, about the images in the Shilo song:  Fire.  Flight.  Those images are used in literature about bipolar disorder.  As I grew older, I was irrestibly drawn to those who were bipolar or dissociative.  I’d wonder if it was some baby duck imprint, annd I’d think back to a girl who I think did have depressions…  Later still, I had reason to believe it was neurological, the part of my brain that responded with delight to abormally heightened energy.

Shilo, when I was young, I used to call your name…

Shilo, when I was young and not so young, and those years in between.

The original is coffee-stained, but it’s been scanned and copied, and committed to my heart: “Never had a friend like you/ Shove you in a hole, and you bury me/ So what’s it going to take, come break me…”

I had been proud, since my church nursery days, of having a brother who was Superman — even though his super powers diminished the further he got from the home base of my room. He didn’t have x-ray vision, he had lazy eye, and he struggled to learn to read.  In fact, he ran and hid from the other children on his seventh birthday, but he was Superman that day on the playground…

It happened when the shah got deposed, or rather afterward.  My mother said that the shah was one of the things they weren’t prepared for, she and Daddy.  He was one of the reasons things went awry in the family businesses.  Before that, evidently, we had been well on our way to being rich, though I hadn’t known because all the money was being pumped back into the business and because I wore my brother’s hand me down undershirts that appallingly had sleeves.

Once upon a time, Daddy had two restaurants.  There was a point where the one in Front Royal saw a lot of tourist business, people from all over who stopped in for dinner on their way to cruise the Skyline Drive.  Then gas prices went up, the tourists stayed home, the restaurant in Front Royal floundered, and the one in New Market saw scarcely any business at all.

It all came home, every bit of it it. My parents fought — I would drift to sleep to the sound of cussing and slamming doors — but later my mother would say proudly how Daddy refused to go bankrupt.  He worked a low wage job for a year and sold the house he had designed and built for what it would fetch. The house resold for five times as much just a few years later, but what it fetched was enough to have us free and clear and on our way to Arizona.

I of course knew the historical context of my parents’ fights or my lack of proper underclothing. Still, I was interested in events in far-off Iran.  For some reason, as a child, I would see a random person on the news and then fixate on them, terrified they would die.  I don’t know how or why my fears came to focus on the Ayatolla Khomeini — perhaps because his beard was gray, and he looked old. I know it all sounds strange, but somehow  our lots were cast in the Middle East. The shah was deposed, and this set off a chain of events in Appalachian Virginia.  Soon my father was worrying how to get out of debt and out to Phoenix: land of milk and honey, of Mel’s Diner, of jobs.  Meanwhile I worried that the Ayatolla would die in his sleep.

My first Christmas memory is of shrieking and running across the room to my new walking doll.  The grownups told me to stand back to back with her, and declared that she was taller.  I am not sure if it was that year or the one after that I asked, “If Christmas is Jesus’ birthday, why do the chidren get the presents and not him?” The question was born not so much out of generosity as logic.  I thought one might visit Jesus, if not by station wagon by airplane, carrying packages wrapped in Rudolph paper.  It didn’t make sense that we would sit around and play with his toys.

In four-year-old kindergarten, the girls were supposed to wear white dresses and be angels.  My mother said I had a light blue dress — could I wear that? I stood out, a tiny blue angel in a sea of white ones.  We sang our carols, and Santa gave me an orange before I took the slow two-feet-to-a-step climb off the stage. By five-year-old kindergarten, I had grown into a mostly white hand-me-down dress with a sash that I thought should be tied in front where I could see it.  The climb down off a stage was still slow, and the days of Advent interminable…

And then how the years sped. I’m not sure at what point, my thirteen-year-old year, that my mother said she couldn’t manage Christmas or my aunt said she would do it.  My aunt mailed the packages before Christmas, but they arrived a week late, all wrapped up and carefully selected for the little girl I still was: a dress, girls’ size 12, a small satin jewelry box, a Monopoly set like I liked playing when I stayed at her house, a jigsaw puzzle of Kentucky.  I thought it would be fun that year if I filled a stocking for my brother and he filled one for me.  It was something I did diligently and he did not.  After that year, I never again hung a stocking — or filled one.

My brother learned how to fill one, though, down the line.  He learned a number of things he hadn’t been taught: He learned to be a hands on dad. He learned that if you’re going to go in business, it’s best not to borrow everything you have and some you borrow, that it’s better to put the children in daycare than in the back booth of a restaurant. (And he learned to be Catholic, which might have been a condition for getting married and becoming a dad in the first place.)

There are little girl Christmases now in Arizona:  The elder is seven, the younger, three.  They’re both autumn babies, so Chelsea is in first grade and Callee won’t start kindergarten for another three years.  I’ll send my brother an email and tell him that the  small packages will probably arrive late, but on Squidoo I have recordings of “The Velveteen Rabbit”, “The Birds’ Christmas Carol” and “Twas the Night Before Christmas”.  I will tell him there are Christmas paper dolls, too, to print for Chelsea.   A girly girl, she sleeps in a sleigh bed in a pink room lined with stuffed animals. Her sister has probably graduated from her crib but is not so much bigger than a walking doll, and just old enough to think you get to Jesus by Alaska Air.

This is an actual quote retrieved from Wikipedia this evening, and it brings back memories: “Front Royal, settled by whites as early as 1738, was originally known as Lehewtown, and was also known as ‘Helltown’, due to the abundance of rough and wild mountaineers and river travelers in the area who came into town looking for alcohol and women.”

Wow. Before I only suspected it, now I know:  I was born in Helltown.

In Helltown, ironically, are many apple trees: Jonathon, Winesap, Red Delicious, and Yellow Delicious.  In the woods outside town is something better: blackberries.  Here’s something Wikipedia won’t tell you, but I remember: To lean even a little ways into the woods and retrieve them, you have to wear your cousin’s big old long sleeve shirt and britches. (That’s on account of the briers, and the copperheads that might be there.) Afterwards, it takes about forever to get your hair checked for ticks.  It is worth it, though, because the berries go plunk plunk in your pail like in Blueberries for Sal, and woods blackberries are not like supermarket blackberries — they’re tangier.

Plus, if you have an aunt who comes to visit from Perry Point, she’ll boil them up on the stovetop with water, sugar, and lumps of Bisquick dough that turn into dumplings as the soup thickens. You can pop some in the freezer and warm them up again months later.  They still taste perfect.  You can enjoy them year round, even when hell freezes over.

My brother had a party for his seventh birthday.  His idea of celebration was to run and hide.  I joined forces with his classmates , two years my senior, to try and chase him down. With my own classmates, I would not have been so bold.  Newly five, I had already experienced a year of bullying.  I had wanted to go to the Presbyterian kindergarten at four and had spent the previous summer drawing pages and pages of little girls holding hands.  There were no children on the mountain, but in kindergarten, I believed, there would be more friends than I could count on my two hands.

My teachers and family were aware the day I was bitten for refusing to surrender my crayons.  I’m not sure they knew, though, that I had been yielding those crayons every day for months.  I started first grade at a different school, five and unready.  I couldn’t come near keeping up with the other children, particularly in matters that involved staircases or mysterious articles of clothing that had holes that were always intended for either head or arms — and often one particular arm as opposed to uni-limb.  Because I pleaded, and because I wet my pants on a daily basis,  I was eventually allowed to go back to kindergarten.

Years later I was told that I read to the other children that second year of kindergarten.  Funny —  I have memories stretching back to toddler days, but this had slipped my mind. I think it’s there now:  sitting on the rug with a book of Richard Scarry perhaps, and a child on either side.  It didn’t help my social standing.  I was simultaneously far ahead and far behind.  In first grade the second time, at six, I was a fluent reader, but chipped away at my pencil lead with my fingernail because the pencil sharpener confounded me.   I knew the pencil went into one of the holes, but not which one,  or what to do with the handle.

At twelve — far later than ideal —  I moved from semi-rural Virginia to the Phoenix.  It was a different world: worldlier and more accepting.  People talk about the friendliness of small towns, but they forget who it is they’re friendly to.  Are children naturally accepting or naturally harsh toward difference?  It’s a difficult question to answer.  What four-year-old even is natural?  What four-year-old hasn’t learned so many lessons — most of them hidden away, and not penciled in the boxes of a lesson planner?

I am six, and I have failed swimming twice — or at least failed to progress from beginning beginners to intermediate beginners.  I swim in a styrofoam floatie, or, hanging on the edge of the pool, or in class, when the teacher supports my tummy and lets me  move both my arms and legs at the same time.  My father hires someone to give me private lessons.  She is a waitress at his restaurant, and one of my favorite people in the world (right up there with the guy on TV with the truck and the chimpanzee!) but swimming is something she can’t teach me.

Time can… sort of. By eight or so, I can dog paddle, and swim a little underwater.  At maybe ten, I learn to float on my back, and forever after, it’s my favorite way to swim. At twelve, though, we move to Arizona, where there’s a pool at the junior high and (confounded) swim lessons.  The breaststroke is something I cannot learn.  There’s an extra thing to coordinate to swim ‘the regular way’.  You have to breathe when your face is out of the water, and not breathe when it’s in. I never get it right — there’s no rhyme or reason to when I breathe — or turn my face — and I swallow so much water.  After a while, I try to look like I’m doing the breaststroke; meanwhile I hold my breath til I get to the other side… except that I can’t hold my breath that far.  Two thirds of the way across, I always take a gasping breath, usually underwater, and then I press forward, choking and coughing.  It’s that way for the two years of “swimming unit”.

Fridays are different because we have free swim.  A few girls dive and swim like porpoises.  The rest of us dangle our feet in the water while the radio blares Top 40.  There must be many songs that play, but only one lodges in my memory.  Eighth grade swimming distills to a few memories of choking and shivering but dressing out, anyway… of one Friday, when the radio blasted, “Ooo, you’re an angel… in disguise,” and I thought of my then favorite person, suspended that morning for something I knew wasn’t her fault. (I could see it in her ey-e-es.)

Long later… My brother was shy, my father would say, speaking of a time before that, a time before time.  I, meanwhile, had acted like I would “take the world by storm”.  Ah, now who could imagine that?  And yet… I do remember some impossible things.

I am three, sitting on the steps of the big pool, watching my brother have his swimming lesson.  I am not tall enough to stand up in the big pool, but I want to.  I am waiting, impatiently for the time when I will be allowed to swim — like my brother, like Aquaman, like the dolphins.

I missed half of my 4th grade year. I think the adventure might have begun with the school portrait I brought home that year, the one that caused my mother to say over and over, “Something is the matter with Karen,” and my aunt to respond soothingly, on the weekends she came over, “Don’t make so much of it, Joyce. All children go through stages.”

I developed what I could’ve sworn was a matching set of lymph node lumps. In retrospect, I think it must have been more akin to a hernia. I couldn’t do anything strenuous because — I was told — something might rupture. I still went to school, but did miss PE… in one sense of the word. In another sense, I didn’t miss PE one iota, being already on my 4th year of, “Ha! You’ve got her on your team!” There was a boy who towered above us in height and below us in intellect, who I don’t recall ever doing anything cruel himself but was a pawn in the hands of other children. The children would tell him I loved him, motivating him to scoot closer and closer, and me to scoot further and further away. The game culminated when I fell with a plop off the cafeteria bench. (Score one point for the other side.)

I developed a minor stomach ailment, and long past the time my stomach had recovered, I faked it: a tactic that strangely worked, where none had before. Now I did stay home. Sometimes my mother worked at the house entering figures in ledgers at the dinette table. “Let’s pretend,” I coaxed her. I pretended we were friendly monsters who lived in the center of the earth: I, Fluffyascarya, she, my brother, Terrory. The ledger was her math book (Terrory being a veritable whiz at mathematics). Left alone days, I wrote a “book” in the style of Dodie Smith’s The Hundred and One Dalmations, with proper British phrasing.

in a sense, I missed half of fourth grade. In a sense, I might have missed less than I found. Just before Christmas, a packet of cards came from school, with a note from the teacher that she hadn’t made the children write them, they’d wanted to. A little before I resumed attendance, in February, at a small parochial school, I began having play dates with a child I had gone to school with in the primary grades. We would go to the library on Saturday, then to my father’s restaurant. There in the booth, we drew pictures of our dolls and wrote each other poems and cheers and notes that bordered on love letters.

Somewhere along the line, my mother found those letters and photocopied them. On one, that nine-year-old friend had enscribed in fresh cursive, “To be kept for at least 20 years.” I held it in my hand the other day. I realized it had been nearly thirty years.

“This way, Karen,” Mother calls to me from across the Safeway parking lot.

I walk straight ahead.

“Over here.”

The line of my mouth matches the straight line I walk. I am angry at her for not listening to what I know she can hear. So many times I have tried to explain: In voice, I find no clue whether the speaker is left, right, in front of me, behind me, or suspended seven feet in the air.

If their voice provides no clue… why won’t they turn it off?

If they want me, they can come and get me.

* * * *

Yet it takes me, also, years to make the needed adjustments to my own behavior.

Listening to the poller, I hold the phone a comfortable two inches from my right ear. On a lark, I switch it my left ear. Yep, now I am pressing the phone right into my ear, straining to catch the thread of conversation.

By now it has been imprinted in my brain:

When I can’t hear what someone is saying, I don’t have to ask them to repeat themselves (again), don’t have to say “Uh huh… uh huh…” like I am following along.

No, I can switch ears. When I switch from my left ear to my right, the volume may go up not one but four of five notches.

And now the volume inside my head is set too loud.

* * * *

So often people do not believe what they don’t yet have an explanation for. If I could go back in time I would explain what a kid can’t explain: that the ability to localize sound is dependent on analyzing volume differences between the left and right ears… a process that can be thrown awry by bilateral hearing impairment…

My left ear tries it’s durndest, bless its heart, but sometimes I suspect it was included primarily for decorative purposes.

Or as a backup, perhaps.

She clicks submit, and immediately she’s followed by some-bot-y new. No, two!

She doubts those two are people, but they are followers.

And she’s pulled even again!

She can follow who she wants without the stats growing lopsided. In a world that… would’ve sounded like sci-fi ten years earlier, who to follow today?

Dalai Lama?

She called when she went home that first Christmas.

His almost ex-girlfriend kicked the door in.

He had a new door by the following Christmas, and regrets that went back years. He’d gotten scared, he explained.

“Why?” she asked. “I meant everything I told you.”

“Well, I knew that,” he said. “It’s what scared me.”