Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life

11. sticks of wonder

By the time I was ten months old, I was both walking and talking. Scarcely taller than a bowling pin, as fair of hair as one of those Aryan tots with whom Hitler and his henchmen loved to pose, clad only in diapers or rompers, I must have cut quite a figure toddling down Blowing Rock’s main street beside my mother. Looks, however, weren’t the whole of it. Shopkeepers, amused loafers, and other citizens would often fork over pieces of penny candy or even an occasional Popsicle to hear this ambulatory baby speak in complete, if short, sentences. Apparently, it never occurred to anyone that Mother might have been a ventriloquist.

If I was performing like a trained seal, it didn’t bother Mother (blinded, perhaps, by her pride in my precocity), and if it twisted my psyche in some lasting way, I’ve managed to mostly compensate. What it did do was to instill in me at a very early age the knowledge that words have worth, have power; that language can command rewards. And Freud might argue that that was enough to set my course as a writer.

Not so fast, Uncle Sigmund. While the favorable response to my surprisingly articulate jabber could very well have planted the seed from which whole narratives would in a few short years be sprouting — verbal displays that may indeed have leaned toward attention and approval the way a potted geranium leans toward the sun — there are also completely private acts of literary creation that seek no audience, deny appreciation, are meant never to be read or heard; and these are not so handily explained. Consider, for example, my “talking stick.”

Although this activity began sporadically a year or two earlier, and continued in an abbreviated, more surreptitious fashion for a year or two thereafter, its golden age was my time in Warsaw, roughly between the ages of eleven and sixteen. It involved me making up stories and telling them to myself while I beat the ground with a long stick.

I’d pace, sometimes back and forth, sometimes in circles, speaking all the while in a low voice, or more usually only mouthing the words, but “writing” scenes in my head and tapping them into being. There was nothing especially outlandish about the stories themselves: tales set in jungles and circuses, foreign spy adventures, sports stories (I created a baseball hero named Tex Halo, a quarterback called Skyrocket McNocket), the kind of fantasizing or daydreaming one might expect from a small-town boy. The oddity was in the execution and its persistence — although it did occur somewhat less frequently after I began dating and playing basketball.

What must poor Mother and Daddy have thought?! Due to the location of our house, it was fairly easy to conceal my stick sessions from neighbors and the street, but from the kitchen window or the back porch my parents had a clear view of their only son talking to himself for hours on end while attacking the earth with a rough length of sapling. Moreover, there were large patches of bare ground here and there where enthusiastic literary composition had annihilated the grass. I was hell on lawns.

I’ve no idea with what concern, consternation, or wringing of hands they might have discussed my behavior when alone, but to their credit (or was it?) my folks never once ridiculed me, tried to dissuade me, or (to the best of my knowledge) consulted a child psychologist. Neither, however, did they blindly ignore the activity or try to pretend it didn’t exist. Rather, they spoke openly about it, casually referring to it from time to time, calling it “Tommy’s talking stick” — their term, not mine — as if it were a quirk they found interesting, perhaps peculiar, but not disturbing.

Imagine my surprise when, some fifty years later, as I was inattentively listening to a program on the Canadian Broadcasting Company (my focus was on dinner), I overheard the words “talking stick.” Startled, I cranked up the sound on the radio. Among certain native tribes in Canada, I soon learned, the tribal storyteller traditionally carried a rod called a “talking stick” with which he beat out cadence as he recited his yarns.

Aha! That was it! What I had been doing as a boy was drumming, creating a rhythm for my interior monologues. That could explain why, in my adult writing, in my novels and essays, I’ve always paid special attention to the rhythm of my sentences, realizing instinctively that people read with their ears as well as their eyes. And now I could at last speak openly, even with a modicum of shy pride, about my eccentric past.

What remains unexplained is why I was moved to intentionally, consistently, secretly (God help me if my peers had found me out!) create those insubstantial narratives in the first place. Putting pencil to paper can be tedious, especially for a youngster, so I may have just hit upon a more active, energetic way to escape boredom while satisfying the commands of an excessive imagination. No matter how drab everyday existence, the talking stick allowed me to actively participate in another, more exciting, reality. In a sense, the talking stick was a joy stick; I had invented my own video game, played according to my own rules, decades before the interactive pixel was as much as a twinkle in some nerd’s eye.

In the late 1960s, my girlfriend and I watched a Fellini movie in which the phrase “a life of enchantment” appeared in the English subtitles. Afterward, over beers, Eileen announced that her intention henceforth was to live just such a life, whatever that meant exactly: in the whimsical sixties, goals of that sort were generally taken in stride. In any case, it occurs to me now that “a life of enchantment” was pretty much the very life I, stick in hand, had begun to make for myself as a boy.

Incidentally, you may be relieved to know, when I went away to college I left sticks behind. That era of my life was over. Well, almost. Certainly not a single blade of grass on the campus of Washington and Lee University ever lost its life in the service of my creative imagination. However, there were more than a few times when writing a term paper or an article for the W&L newspaper that I would become so excited in the throes of composition that I’d pace my dorm room while beating on the mattress with a coat hanger. Fortunately, I roomed alone.