The Mindstorm Chronicles:
Chapter Two
A work of fiction? A work of nonfiction? The work of insanity?
You decide.
Being like any other childhood memories, these things came back in bit and pieces. And really, bits and pieces is how it all happened from the beginning. Just here and there, these voices that eventually led to longer and longer discussions. Always at my own discretion, but just as often about worrisome things that would very much hold your interest as well your attention. But there was always the self imposed restriction about telling anyone about all of this. How could anyone have explained any of this, let alone a seven year old child in 1962.
It occurred to me sometimes that I could find myself having slipped off some deep end somewhere if I entertained these things too much. But it was also stimulating. Even as a kid. I was learning a lot about the world, and as if to be kind, the voices would begin to speak of more pleasant and wonderful things, would ask me my opinions about things. The conversations would usually begin with something important, something really important like when they began to talk about spies in the US government. And while all of that was deeply disturbing to a 2nd grader, the voices would slowly lead my thoughts towards more pleasant, even wonderful things. We even talked about comic books. Until comic books, I was a big fan of Grimm's Fairy Tales, and Aesop's Fables. When you live in an isolated cabin in the mountains without TV and very little radio, you find yourself reading, and thinking a lot.
Glimpses, really. Sometimes these meetings I had with the voices returned more as if I'd remembered them by topic than in some sequential order. And sometimes they all seemed to come rushing back in bits and pieces, a blend of the highly disturbing and thedownright wonderful. I suppose it helped me to keep my balance about things. But as often as not, it was like one of those web pages where things were linked by some other order of appearance than when they first appeared.
One night, riding in the back of our families Volkswagen, laying down in the back seat on what seemed the long, long drive back to the suburbs, back to Lil' Miss, listening to the radio, I was thinking about Army men. You know what a thing little boys have about Army men, and about real ones. And a war somewhere that I knew absolutely nothing about. And I wanted to speak to an Army man who was actually in the war there, and of course, I wanted to speak to someone I could trust, a good Army man. And one of the best. The next thin I knew I was talking, apparently, to a soldier in Vietnam, a Green Beret. Which to me was most interesting because at that age, most all of my knowledge about Military affairs was about WWII, and had mostly come from old movies. I didn't really know anything about the Green Beret.
Basically I had been asking myself a very simple question. If war wasn't good, why did people fight wars? And here was an opportunity on this long boring drive to ask somebody who was actually fighting in a war. We talked a little bit first about why we were in the war, and he seemed very curious about, and a little disturbed by this telepathic voice exchange. At some point in the conversation he told me that sometimes the military gets sold out for money, the people who handled all the spy stuff were people who couldn't be trusted all of the time. He told me frankly, that some people thought that the war where he was fighting was against a communist threat. But that other people said it was all about the money. He didn't seem to know what to think. But he was still concerned about "spooks".
Now, here I was in the back of the car, and just starting to wonder, so I asked who he was, he told me his name and his rank, and then I began to wonder to myself just how it was that I was speaking to this particular man. Before I could say anything he said "They said that I should talk to you." Now, to be clear, after what had happened before, I began to realize how serious all of this really was, and how far out of my understanding the whole world was. But here was an honest soldier that needed help with a problem. And, well, it only made sense that the problem was too big for a kid, but it seemed like same people who could arrange these sorts of meetings via telepathy could help. And I suppose they volunteered, because the next thing I told the Army man in that was in Vietnam was "The Martians can help you."
It was at this point that an exited voice began to quickly explain that they weren't actually form Mars, they were from some place with some very scientific sounding name... I didn't understand that, it was so much information so fast, and then a picture of stars came into my mind. But I didn't know how anyone could remember such things, how stars looked, so many and all, and I didn't understand why it would be important anyway. I was feeling tired from the trip, I guess, and I just said, "Look. I don't know about all the planets. I know about Mars. So I'll call you Martians. It just means that you're from a different planet than this one, ok?" The voice just went quiet and it was as if I sensed his wonder at this moment. It was as if all three of us went silent, thinking about the prospects of such things, and just what might all this mean.
I didn't know it at the time at all, but I would be talking to the soldier again sometimes throughout the years to come, and little did I know just how much impact that he would have on my life when I would meet him face to face about twenty years later. But at that moment I was feeling positively overwhelmed again. And considering how very real this kind of thing was beginning to seem, I began to feel not a little bit unsafe, remembering that this was a world in which sometimes the Army killed children. Not to mention spies, who I heard were the worst.
So I let my mind sort of drift into the music on the radio, and wished that I felt safe about all of this. The ... not-exactly- a -Martian voice reassured me that all would be well, and we discussed reassurances for a little while, and I thought that I was probably going to need more support this way than the average kid "if they were going to talk about this junk." So listening to the music, and drifting off, I heard a song that always made me feel safer, and wished that I could hear it whenever I was worried and things were going to be alright. And I drifted off to sleep while listening to the song that would always seem to come on the radio when I began to worry about staying in the city for a little while. In my mind I was thinking of the Army man and the grass huts while listening to "In the jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps tonight... In the village, the peaceful village, the lion sleeps tonight... ". And I felt as if everything was going to be ok for me and the Army man on the other side of the world, there someplace whose name I could barely remember. And I took some comfort in the idea that that the Green Beret were, in my child's eyes at least, the best. And they would be on the side of us kids.
The return to Lil' Miss was always wonderful after the isolation of the mountain cabin that once was a fox farm. In our place in the suburbs we lived on a kind of nursery, where there was an enormous variety of plants and trees. There were the beautiful cycads, tree ferns, tupidanthus and sheflerras, azaleas, philodendrons, podocarpis, every type of exotic ornamental I guess, at one time or another. And there were fruit trees, berries, grapes, everything grew like crazy there in the soft downey soil that had formerly belonged to the orange groves. And it helped enormously that I had my tricolor collie with me, dog and boy quickly reclaimed their other stomping grounds. And nobody seemed to mind much except the cat. And even he seemed to have a sense of humor about it, as if he had been bored as well, and had actually missed picking on the dog, who he dared swat from behind at every opportunity.
Most of the time I didn't worry about the voices, I was just too busy being a kid.
End Chapter Two
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