Barefoot in the Garden of Good and Evil

It's Thelma, y'all.

Difficult childhoods are often the point of departure (to god only knows where) for creative writers. I have a friend, for example, a prize-winning author of literary fiction, whom I've known since high school. Aside from being a bright, friendly, genuine guy learning his chops in AP English, he also possessed a wildly unfortunate home life. Not until years later, at a class reunion, did I learn that his mother had been married eleven times -- twice to the same man, his biological father. There were other classmates among us, now gone on to their own careers as musicians, songwriters or whatever, who won leadership awards at school and ran interference between their philandering parents at home. You might conclude that a crummy home life is actually a great training ground for creativity and fantasy. While all those other kids are happily eating their after-school snacks and consulting Dad on their science projects, the not-so-happy kids are in their rooms, or up a tree in the back yard, maybe, waiting for the domestic dust to settle and praying somebody might drop by to break up the tension. Those kids are wishing really hard they were someplace else, and they're highly motivated to imagine it in delicious detail. All that vigilance and detail-noticing pays off, too, because it sticks around as potent memory. You can conjure up a scene like it happened yesterday, if you want to. Or make it up entirely and still make it convincingly real.

Then there were the kinds of difficulties, the Level II Problems, let's call them, that arose from inhabiting that fantasy world without the proper gear. Like shoes.

My brother and sister and I were feral kids. We lived in a house too small to stay cooped up in, so we spent most of our leisure time outside in the yard, or in someone else's yard. Every yard was a different fantasy zone, and our own morphed daily into whatever vessel it needed to be. It had a ditch near the street which doubled as a castle moat, the Mississippi, and a frog kingdom. The back yard frequently had sheets hanging on the line, which divided it into a place where, as the John Prine song goes, we had "the key to escape reality." We lost complete track of time running those creative scams on ourselves. If it rained, we played in it. If it got dark it was time to go home, and if we were late my dad whistled for us like you'd summon livestock. Mostly we ran around barefooted because nobody bugged us to put on shoes. We'd start out every spring hopping around gingerly until we finally had our feet broken in in time for summer -- tough leathery soles like little dog paws. Then there was no stopping us.

But the difficulty with running around barefooted is the inevitable trauma to the feet. Stepping on thumbtacks and jacks around the house seemed like an everyday occurrence, at least until my mom finally stepped on a jack and took them all away from us. The outdoor injuries, though, were more epic and memorable. My sister, for one, suffered chronically from a parasite called pinworm. We were told they were caused by running around barefooted, or by playing with diseased cats, or by sloshing around in ditch water, all three of which we did regularly. They'd give her this bubblegum-pink medicine to take and the worms would clear up, but the following summer they'd be back. Strangely my little brother and I never caught them.

But we got our share of the pestilence. My brother's constant plague were these ingrown toenails. When he was still little enough to get his feet into his mouth, he developed a nervous habit of biting his toenails. He spent at least a third of his childhood in front of the TV with an ingrown big toenail and a basin of epsom salts. Mom would get the water screaming-like-Aerosmith hot and try to soak the infection out. Me:"Hey, what are you doing?" Him: "Soaking my toe and watching Electric Company." I'm not sure how old he was when the problem finally went away, but it persisted well beyond the point where he quit going barefoot. I think he finally had outpatient surgery during his freshman year of college. Maybe that cleared it up.

As for me, I'm convinced I nearly lost my leg one summer, in a freak barefoot incident that somehow went unnoticed by my parents. I was playing a hide-and-seek game, trying not to get caught, hauling ass through the back yard. It was a blazing hot day, and the grass was up over my ankles since it hadn't been mowed in a couple of weeks. Suddenly I felt something go "pop" under my foot. I stopped and looked back, and to my staggering horror it was a jar. One of those little jelly jars that pimiento cheese (my favorite) used to come in. Thick glass that a 45-pound slip of a girl couldn't break, but my guts told me it had probably shattered because of the heat. I guess it cut my foot a little, right in the center of the instep, but it didn't seem bad enough to take me out for the day so I'm sure I stuck a Band-aid on it and went about my business.

The problem was that it wouldn't heal. I complained about it some but kept thinking it was just a dumb little cut, and I'd seen way worse. Later, maybe a couple of weeks later, my dad noticed a red streak running up the back of my leg. At that point the Band-aid was stripped off and the wound examined. It looked like a red star, with rays heading out in every direction from an angry little pock in the center. Hot water was drawn. Epsom salt was applied. Drugs were probably ordered. It got better, but there's still a tiny star-shaped scar on the sole of my right foot. It's a little medal, you might say, from a leathery, scrappy childhood full of worthwhile difficulties.