Stories of a life, part four Ron Scollon first draft April 2008
This file continues with more stories. ‘Part four’ doesn’t have any meaning except that it consists of stories 41 through 50.
Attendance
Wherever home has been for most of my life I have preferred to stay there. I’ve never thought of my home as a castle, a domain which I control, a citadel of protection against the world. Nothing as dramatic as that. I suppose I’ve just thought of it as a place where I can take a nap when I want, as a place where I can just sort of opt out without too many others suffering the consequences.
A few years ago – a few? – well, it’s now maybe fifteen years when we first went to Hong Kong Rachel coined the phrase ‘MTR face’. She had seen that people present themselves in the Mass Transit System with a certain kind of face. She’d seen it on us as members of her family and on all the thousands of others on the trains. It’s a neutral face that turns back any kind of approach to social interaction. The face says, ‘Leave me alone and I’ll do the same for you.’ I guess you could say I’ve enjoyed staying home because at home I can leave others alone and they can leave me alone without having to wear that mask of indifference.
Dorothy and I were together somewhere, it must have been in her house, when I was practicing the guitar. After a while she said that she now knew why I couldn’t live at home, at my parents’ house, and study the guitar. My language was too foul. Of course I wasn’t at all aware of how I curse and swear and mutter along as I try to get a particularly difficult passage right in a piece of music I’m learning. Not at all conscious of it, but unconsciously I’m aware that at home I can mutter any number of imprecations against myself and my fingers or the music as I try to get something right and more or less get away with it. The same goes for writing. My fingers work away at the keyboard trying to get the sentences to come out straight, or if not straight, at least to get them out with the same curves, twists, and dead ends as the ideas I’m trying to get down. That takes a lot of guidance, most of which tends to come out in these censorable mutterings.
All the way through school we lived close to the schools I attended – Washington Elementary, Taft Junior High School, and Lincoln High School. They were all in an array within walking distance of our home at 568 LeRoy in Ferndale. I missed no school days except when I was sick with one of those common children’s illnesses. We all had measles, mumps, and chicken pox and for some of them the whole house got quarantined with a big yellow sign attached to the front door allowing only essential people in or out. Also I got to lie abed both times when I had broken a leg.
Those sicknesses and injuries were wonderful. The sick kid was always put into our parents’ bed with the big window at the front of the house for the daytime. Usually I was surrounded by books and magazines, mostly National Geographic. That’s where my fundamentally lazy character developed. I was a real Molloy there though I wasn’t writing yet. Just lie there dozing and looking at pictures and reading. I think then my favorite reading was Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki. I imagined myself floating across the Pacific on a reed raft. So much better than school. So much better. But still I was tardy only once in elementary school.