sometimes remarkably palpable images from the mind of a five year old: the texture of a tame crow’s claws on my index finger on a hot summer morning, or the scent of death when finding my beloved dog dead in a ditch near a busy roadway.
I continue to walk backwards in time, and then remember a neighbor’s backyard, an abundance of bushes, and the way their branches rose and undulated downward, creating a tunnel through which I, not even three feet tall, could step into a magical parallel universe. How amused and wise I felt when my mother came looking for me, walking my direction and calling me, and how she could not see me even though I was perhaps just six feet away from where her feet had stopped.
I remember crawling out of that bush moments later and walking across the next door neighbor's backyard, and then across the next neighbor's backyard. I had not previously wandered so far from home. I felt emotions that I would today recognize as trepidation and guilt. But I also felt strangely bold. I knew that not responding to my mother's call was "bad." I knew that mom would not like me wandering so far from our house. And yet something compelled me to keep walking.
But then I heard a voice. The voice of a girl, the voice of a girl my age. There followed tentative steps towards each other until we stopped at opposite sides of the fence that separated us. I remember some of the emotions I felt as we spoke to each other in that special language of young children, and her uncertain facial expression as she struggled to voice words she had learned just months prior.
Both incidents ----the one in the bush and the backyard encounter -- really happened, though I am not at all sure they happened on the same day, or even the same year. Childhood memories become personal ancient history. My memories, however, are today iridescently sweet, or at least this one is. Deborah Rosenfield and I became good friends, and it is only in retrospect that I appreciate the role she played in forming my attitudes towards girls and women. She was a dear friend (a querido) though I was too young to appreciate or even understand that. That day marked perhaps my first journey.
A journey is much more than simply traveling. It involves physical movement -- be it two doors or two continents across -- that either by accident or design fundamentally changes you. That first encounter with Deborah changed me. I came back to my house, and my waiting mother, a fundamentally different person. Something had gone into motion. It was the movement of my life. It was one of my first "transformative pushes."
Deborah and did many things together during the years that our friendship flourished: shared the hot chocolate that her mother made when we'd finished playing in the snow; played in her attic on rainy days, and on her swing set and slide during the hot days of summer. Eventually, however, that same movement pushed us apart when my family moved across town when I was nine years old, leaving her, in time, like one lost forever.
I hold no surviving photos of Deborah. In my my mind's eye, however, she looked rather like the child below.
