Delusions: Memories of Tomorrow

By Robert Wayne Layton

If you remember Leave It To Beaver or The Wonder Years, you'll remember this book.

From the first time you were sent home to "...tell your mother what you did..." to the earliest schoolyard crush and beyond, this family-oriented collection of stories, told through the eyes of a young boy, rediscovers a time when life revolved around parents and grandparents, neighborhood, school and church.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Apr 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781543931891

Book preview

HANSEL

Mom read the story to me so many times that my mouth anticipated the words even as her voice trailed off between pages. It was my favorite, one where I visualized myself the hero, where it was me saving the sister. And in my first playmates, I saw Hansel and Gretel trapped in the house of a witch.

David and Linda and Charlotte were those kids. Fuzzy images frequenting my earliest memories. They lived with Granny and Gramps in the house next door. No gingerbread house, the weather-blackened wood and asphalt of its exterior spoke to me of poverty. Gramps drove a dark old car like ours. Their driveway was unpaved with weeds sprouting in the middle untouched by tires, just like ours. Their lawn was weed-infested and mostly dry, like ours. And yet I perceived them as poor. Maybe because the kids were orphans.

Why were they living with their grandparents?

Where were their mom and dad? Had they died?

Shouldn’t they be in an orphanage? Orphans are poor, right?

Sometimes, children are simply questions waiting to be asked. The danger lies in not answering, in forcing them to decide, based on their own vast accumulated experience, the answers on their own.

The picture of them remains with me. The girls with rubber bathing caps hiding their long hair, David and I in bathing suits. I remember the day it was taken as though it were now, the heat of the summer afternoon when we were allowed to run through the little red sprinkler while it watered a small patch of grass. When Mom decided that the lawn didn’t need any more water, the spigot was turned off. And when I wanted to come back into the house, she fussed about the wet grass blades still clinging to my legs and feet.

Linda was the older one, always the boss. My folks paid her to babysit one Saturday night. I see her sitting cross-legged on the bare wood floor of my room, trying to find something in the toy box with which to entertain me. I see her without recognizing her face or hair, reminded only of her features by that lone picture.

David was the next one, a boy heavy for his age. There wasn’t much he had in common with me, the age difference being what it was. In the picture, his hair is darker rather than lighter, but it’s just an old black-and-white snapshot where the difference between red and brown, blond and white is mere interpretation of shades of gray. Like Linda, he went to school. As tall as they seemed, I figured they went to high school. They were, after all, much higher than I.

Charlotte was my favorite, perhaps because she was closer to my age. Her long dark brown hair was always in a single tight braid. Even today, any girl with a braid is a charlotte before knowledge and reason overwhelm instinct. I don’t recall it being a crush, but she was certainly the first girl I liked.

Granny was ancient, her gray hair held in a bun, her dress so long that it dusted the floor. Even today, the sound of the word granny evokes the squeaking of an unoiled hinge. Maybe granny is supposed to sound old and rusty, a reminder of what a grand-parent is. Gramps was older still, frail and stooped with sparse pale hair. A spent old man whose suspenders and faded long-sleeved shirt was like those seen on workers at the nearby lumber mill.

I don’t remember ever playing indoors with any of the three. In fact, I only remember being inside their house once. It was somebody’s birthday party. Not a real party. Just me, the three kids, Granny and Gramps. I assume I was sent over with a birthday gift or card or something, though Mom always insisted that birthday parties were just crude requests for presents.

The interior of their little house was dim despite the afternoon light that poured through the front windows. We were all seated at an old round wooden table in a large room that served as front room, dining room and kitchen. My back was to the front door, an outside wall without windows on my right. The ancient, dingy ivory-colored kitchen stove against the back wall. A dark couch, threadbare in spots, to the left reminded me of the worn grandfather. Beyond the sofa were three doors, one of which led to the back porch. The door of another was partially open, revealing a toilet. The third, probably to a bedroom.

Only one bedroom?

Where did the kids sleep?

I had a room of my own. Didn’t they have rooms too? They really were poor!

The party did not start well. Instead of familiar orange or red-flavored Kool Aid, there was something brown in my glass. I’d never drank anything brown. Brown was the color of toilet water. I was repulsed, but I tried it anyway. The taste was foreign and not unexpectedly nasty. The glass went back on the table and I asked David what it was.

Tea, somebody answered.

I’d never had tea. I didn’t like it, not then, not twenty years later when my young bride guided me to the Japanese Tea Garden at Golden Gate Park. Not ever.

Nor was cake to be seen. While the first birthday party I’d attended, I somehow knew that it’s no party without cake.

The cake was still in the oven. It should be ready about now.

Granny, in her full-length granny’s apron, walked over to the ancient electric Westinghouse. As she retrieved a potholder from a hook on the wall, my world dissolved into fog. I became Grimm’s little boy left with his sister to perish in the woods. I was Hansel, the stepson of an evil stepmother, captured by a wicked old witch. Fed candy and cake, fattened for the hag’s table. And as she bent over to check the cooking fire, Hansel crept up behind her and kicked her into the oven and closed the oven door. And they lived happily ever after.

I was outside my body, watching as Granny bent down to see if the cake was fully baked. I saw myself running up and kicking just as Hansel had. But it wasn’t a fairy tale and I was just a little boy whose foot couldn’t reach the old woman’s behind. She did not fly into the oven and I did not live happily ever after.

I still hear loud words, some of which I probably didn’t understand then, none of which I remember now. I do, however, recall being escorted out the door and explaining what I’d done to my mother.

That was the first time.

There would be others. Plenty of other opportunities when I would become obliged to go home and tell my parents what I had done.

But you do, always, remember your first.

SEA IN THE SKY

The sky had threatened rain throughout the afternoon, but threaten as it may, only a handful of drops plopped from the heavens. Just enough to smear the bug splatters across the windshield of the two-door sedan when the wipers were turned on. Near sunset, the clouds to the west broke, and from the brow of the hill, I was hypnotized by the golden horizon that silhouetted the unfulfilled remnants of that promised storm. The light of the late afternoon sun reflected off the tranquil waters of an island-cluttered bay at the foot of our mountain-top vista.

#

As reliably as Old Faithful, my grandparents took countryside drives every Sunday afternoon. Grandma at the wheel of the ‘52 Chevy. Grandpa regally opposite her on the passenger side, his left arm resting across the back of the bench seat, his right hand holding a smoldering Lucky Strike, his elbow supported by the window, open when the weather permitted.

Sometimes, when young, I accompanied them on those Sunday afternoon road trips, seated on the gray woolen herringbone upholstery of the back seat. I peered at the world around us through the side windows. Through them, the images of old decaying farms etched a mostly empty memory. And I saw the mixed second-growth forests of fir, cedar, and alder that healed the scars of a century of logging.

When tired of the side views, I scooted forward to the very front edge of that back seat, my feet on the hump that bisected the back. There, in the very center of the car, I could peer over Grandpa’s arm, to anticipate whatever lay beyond before it passed. But to little avail, as I was five or six years short and all I could usually see was the wedge of sky that hovered above the dashboard, suspended over the long curved beige hood no matter which direction we traveled.

#

That Sunday had promised just another drizzly afternoon. We had driven past the farmhouse, now sliding into disrepair, where Grandma had been born, past the wooded acreage now owned by her brother, and passed other places of her younger times. It was, perhaps, half an hour before sunset. We drove west, crossing the cultivated crest of a hill that had a name meaningless to me at that age and quickly forgotten. And then, above my grandfather’s arm, I saw an expansive ocean, a sparkling golden sea stretching away as far as I could see. The near shore was jagged, the near water a collage of large islands and bays, of points and peninsulas begging for exploration. I’d not realized we were so close to the ocean. I’d thought it far away, but here it was, I could almost touch it. In the sunset, its golden waters and dark, mysterious islands beckoned. A whole new world was calling. If we kept driving, we might reach the water’s edge before dark. It was just down the hill.

When I was five or six or seven, the distant ocean was seldom visited and memories of its sandy border frayed. I thrilled at the prospect of its rollers, of digging in its sand at the water’s edge, hearing the screaming gulls and channel marker clangs, seeing bobbing boats and tasting salt when I breathed through my mouth. Always present, the hope of catching a fish, trapped in a tidal pool, with my bare hands. Prying colorful starfish from mussel-encrusted boulders at low tide, poking sea anemones with a driftwood stick until they puckered, finding tiny crabs with smaller pinchers and empty clam shells.

I pointed excitedly and begged Grandma to go faster, to drive down the hill to the sea so we could see it up close, play in its waters. To touch the ocean and wet my feet in its foam. She responded that it was too far away.

It’s not. It’s right down there, down at the bottom of the hill.

She glanced at me over her shoulder, as though to understand where my eyes were looking, so she could see what I thought I saw.

Grandpa glanced back at me then forward and after a few moments chuckled, Yeah, it does look like the ocean, doesn’t it? Can you see the little cloud that looks like a ship between two of the big islands. He shared my vision. If only for a moment he saw what I saw. Yet I realized, even before he spoke, that there was no ocean, there were no islands, only breaking clouds in the glow of sunset.

The road took us away from the scenic overlook of the phantom sea down a tunnel of tall, dark evergreens that closed off the sky. And when we emerged from that tunnel, the fantasy had dissolved into the darker sky of early evening. The sea was gone like Brigadoon.

The rational man within the boy knew that only the clouds were real, all else imaginary, and the little boy without resented him for it. I’d known it was an illusion, but as with Santa Claus, I wanted to believe it was real. I needed to think that I had seen the ocean and that I would see that ocean again some other early evening when I looked to the west as the clouds parted in promise of a better tomorrow.

#

When the sea in the sky beckons during the sunset, I still smell the gray herringbone upholstery of the Chevy, I see the shadows of abandoned homesteads and dark forests by the side of childhood’s winding country road. Even now, I am drawn to the promised shore, thrill at the anticipation of exploring its ever-changing coves, cliffs, and tidal pools and immerse myself in the all too brief illusion of youthful perspective.

JUICY FRUIT

In that time, at that place, life was a continuum of dull, overcast days that spanned life itself. When a second was a minute, a minute was an hour, an hour was a day. To the five-year-old boy, time was arbitrary, its passage measured only by events remembered, not black hash marks on his mother’s kitchen wall clock. Time stood still between events recalled. Each memory was the only milepost, the only testament to time’s passage. The more memories, the shorter the emptiness in between. The fewer the recollections, the longer the distance between each. Time begins with the first memory of our existence and ends not with our passing but with the passing of our final memory. Primitive peoples have always measured time by counting events past. The number of moons, the number of winters, of harvests. So it was with him.

You’re messing the house up faster than I can clean it.

I’m baking, and your jumping will make the cake fall.

I’m on the phone, and you’re too noisy. Go outside and play. Now!

For those lucky enough to live in a house with a garage, there was a second home. An alternative escape when the mothers commanded that they play outside.

It never really rained in that place, not the wind-driven thunderstorm torrent or hurricane that soaked to the bone, but the dank, drizzle slightly heavier than a fog in which one never really got wet unless rolling on the wet grass.

He was tired of coloring. He’d been doing that since breakfast, and besides, his favorite red crayon had broken, only a tiny ruby nub remained, and he’d lost the black one.

The five-year-old looked out through the front room window and saw friends on the walk in front of their house. Little Davey was on his scooter. He was always on his scooter. The two boys were the same age, Davey was just small for his years. Maryann and Deedee were jumping rope in front of their house next door.

The five-year-old started for the garage. That’s where his shoes were. His shoes were always in the garage.

Put your coat on. You’ll get your death of pneumonia if you don’t!

He went back to the bedroom and retrieved his winter coat, a beige cloth coat. That coat spoke to him, but he didn’t know why. Who can say why a favorite is a favorite? Sometimes, what is just is. Maybe it was the brown faux fur collar. Perhaps the half-belt that met with silvery metal clasp at the waist. There was not another garment for which he cared more. And, in a future time and place, he experienced jealousy and anger when seeing it on the back of a stranger after his mother gave it away for the church rummage sale. He had, after all, grown out of it and maybe some poor people somewhere could use it.

He’d didn’t know there were any poor people around them. They were all in China, right?

As he went back into the hallway between his room and the kitchen, the boy remembered the yellow pack of Juicy Fruit. Grandpa gave it to him the day before. He’d put it in his pants pocket and forgotten about it. Grandpa always brought something for him. Of gums, the boy liked Juicy Fruit best. That and Double Bubble, though he’d not yet learned to blow bubbles. He liked Grandma and Grandpa, too.

Zip it up!

He did so but didn’t understand the need. It wasn’t that cold outside. The others were only wearing sweatshirts. Why did he have to wear a coat?

Because I said so, that’s why.

He closed the kitchen door, then sat on the wooden step to put his shoes on. He didn’t know how to tie the laces yet, so he didn’t. Content just to have them on his feet so he could join his friends. The overhead garage door had been open all morning. Good thing as he was much too small to open it himself. Davey saw movement in the garage’s shadowy maw and aimed his scooter up the driveway’s gentle slope to meet him.

We were wondering if you were going to come out or if you were sick again or something.

No. I’m not sick. What’re you doing?

Nothin’. Wanna do somethin’?

Sure. What?

Little Davey looked back down the drive to the sidewalk and the others. We can ride down the street. Bet I can beat you.

He followed Davey’s gaze to the walk, then up and down the street. To Big Mike’s driveway and back?

Okay. Then pointing to the seam where the garage floor met the concrete driveway, That’s the starting line and the end line.

Sure. He retrieved his hard-wheeled tricycle from the back of the garage and pushed it to the starting line. At first, he sat on its cold metal seat, his shoe-clad feet on the pedal’s rubber, shoelaces dangling on both sides. Then, he got off and, still grasping the handlebars with both hands, placed one foot on the running board that spanned the two rear wheels. The other foot remained on the floor’s oil-stained concrete He knew that nobody could pedal to victory against a scooter. The last time he tried, he’d fallen over at the turn where the driveway and sidewalk met. But using the trike like a scooter was another matter. Maybe he could win that way.

What are you doing? Davey apparently didn’t quite understand that today was to be different.

Nothing.

That’s cheating.

Never said I had to use the pedals.

That’s cheating, Davey repeated as he took his riding foot off the scooter.

No, it’s not.

Yes, it is. I’m not going to race if you’re going to cheat!

The boy in the beige coat shrugged. That was fine with him. He didn’t want to race anyway. Besides, it seemed to be raining harder, and the other kids were drifting toward the shelter of his garage.

Now a congregation of half a dozen, the children milled about the garage, brought together for the moment by a heavier shower. What were they going to do now?

Did you see the new kid at the end of the street?

We could play hopscotch. Have any chalk?

No. Well maybe inside with my blackboard but I have to stay outside.

Davey laid his scooter down and began inspecting the boxes and shelves lining the walls of his parents’ garage. Of his friends, Davey was the nosiest. Always looking into the parents’ stuff whenever an opportunity presented.

Jimmy was telling Deedee about the frog he’d found in his yard. The story sounded like the same frog he’d be talking about since before the season changed and his mother made him wear a coat to play outside.

Have candy? Maryann asked.

Why yes he did. He had some gum that his grandpa gave him just yesterday. It hadn’t even been opened yet.

The boy fished the yellow package from the front pocket of his denims and carefully pulled the tab that unlocked the flat, dusty sticks. He was immediately rewarded with the sweet aroma of fresh Wrigley Juicy Fruit gum, not hard and brittle like the stick he once left on his windowsill, but soft and pliable a bit like the dough from which his mother made Bisquick biscuits. The ones she punched into perfect circles with an down-turned water glass. He gave a stick to Maryann and then around the garage, next to Davey and Jimmy and Big Linda and Deedee. He was proud of his generosity. He’d never gotten to do that before. It made him feel good. Everybody got a stick.

Everybody except him. He eyed the empty wrapper then his friends. Well now, that hadn’t been such a good idea. There was something to be said for planning ahead, wasn’t there?

All except Davey had already removed the final foil layer and commenced chewing. Davey had hesitated. Maybe he didn’t like Juicy Fruit. Maybe he’d give it back.

Nope.

Ok. How about…can I have just half?

Jimmy removed the yellow paper wrapper and shiny foil