When I Was Your Age, Volume One Read online

  Introduction

  by Amy Ehrlich

  ALL-BALL

  by Mary Pope Osborne

  EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY

  by James Howe

  WHY I NEVER RAN AWAY FROM HOME

  by Katherine Paterson

  REVEREND ABBOTT AND THOSE BLOODSHOT EYES

  by Walter Dean Myers

  MUFFIN

  by Susan Cooper

  TAKING A DARE

  by Nicholasa Mohr

  FLYING

  by Reeve Lindbergh

  SCOUT’S HONOR

  by Avi

  BLUE

  by Francesca Lia Block

  Author Biographies

  “Tell me a story of when you were a little boy,” I used to ask my father, when I was a little girl. Because he happened to be a writer, the stories he told were more romantic than fairy tales, more exciting than TV adventure dramas. Maybe they were even true!

  That’s what we did when we put together this collection: We sent letters to all of the writers, asking them for stories. “If you are interested in this project (we said) the story you might choose to tell doesn’t have to be literally true in every detail but should be located in time and space in your own childhood. It can be dramatic or serious or funny — whatever tone is right for the characters and plot.”

  Each story that came back amazed us. Each was completely different from the others and yet they had so much in common. Perhaps this is because all these writers (and the rest of us too) share childhood itself — a rich and important time in a human life.

  Time moves more slowly in childhood. That’s probably hard to realize when you are living through it, but think for example how long a summer seems between one school year and the next. The quality of what you see and feel is more vivid too in childhood. When you are very happy or very sad, those emotions color everything. Some of the experiences you are having, even right now, may remain with you always as memories.

  Several of the stories in this collection take place more than half a century ago. Television had not yet been invented, and radios and phonographs were the only entertainment in people’s homes. There was no MTV, no video arcades, no malls. World War II was going on, yet children played without fear on city streets. Life was very different, but through the lens of the storyteller, you can see what it felt like to be a child in this vanished world.

  Walter Dean Myers’s “Reverend Abbott and Those Bloodshot Eyes” will take you to Harlem in New York in the late 1940s, when every mother on the block would keep an eye on all the children and holler if anyone misbehaved. And with the boys in Avi’s story “Scout’s Honor,” you can take the subway all the way from Brooklyn to Manhattan and walk across the George Washington Bridge, afraid not of muggers but only of dishonoring yourself in front of your friends.

  For all the writers in this collection, the places they describe so vividly are the places where they grew up. These are special places yet ordinary; taken for granted at the time but etched and glowing in memory. Quite simply, they are home.

  Listen to Mary Pope Osborne in her story “All-Ball” describe the army posts of the 1950s: “I loved the neat lawns, clean streets, trim houses, and starched uniforms. I loved parade bands, marching troops, green jeeps, tanks, and transport trucks. . . . Living on an army post in those days was so safe that in all the early summers of our lives the children of our family were let out each morning like dandelions to the wind.”

  Just as home is the place known best, so are children’s families the center of the world in these stories. In fact, more than half of them are about a child’s intense love for another family member , especially a parent. Most often, this beloved person understands the child’s longings and responds in a full and loving way.

  In Reeve Lindbergh’s “Flying,” another kind of understanding is involved. When her aviator father tries to teach his children about airplanes by taking them up in a small plane on Saturday afternoons, the lesson instead is about what flying means to him.

  Brothers and sisters too — particularly older ones — can be a powerful influence on children. In Katherine Paterson’s “Why I Never Ran Away from Home,” set in wartime China, it is her bullying big sister Lizzie — prettier and more talented (or so the narrator thinks) — who stops her from doing something disastrous.

  But a family’s love can also be destructive. In some of the stories, children are very needy and vulnerable, and the writers show that if parents or brothers or sisters ignore this, the child can be badly hurt.

  In Francesca Lia Block’s “Blue,” a girl’s father, sad and distant since his wife deserted them, does not see his daughter’s despair until it is almost too late. And in James Howe’s “Everything Will Be Okay,” a boy’s longing for a stray kitten collides hard with his brother’s code about toughness.

  In fact, the need to be tough is a strong undercurrent to many of the stories in this collection. Despite environments that are often safe and welcoming, the cruelty of other people — particularly people their own age — exposes children to danger and sometimes makes toughness the only possible response.

  Taunts like “Crybaby,” “Stupid,” “Wacko,” and “Sissy”; and phrases like “I felt lonely,” “I was scared,” “I couldn’t stop crying” come up in these stories repeatedly. Childhood can be a harsh and friendless time.

  In Susan Cooper’s wartime story “Muffin,” a schoolyard bully called Fat Alice scares Daisy, the heroine, far more than the bombs falling in England during the Blitz. Fat Alice is truly evil; her meanness has no apparent motive or cause. She kicks, trips, shoves, and pinches while the adults are busy elsewhere.

  What is a child to do against such terrorism? Resourcefulness is certainly required. But so too is real certainty and self-confidence. Throughout this collection, the question of identity — what it is and how you get it — comes up over and over again.

  In the stories, children define themselves by their similarities and differences to their siblings and parents. In Nicholasa Mohr’s “Taking a Dare,” for example, it takes real nerve for the narrator to find her own path between her mother’s intense and unquestioning Catholicism and the atheism of her socialist father.

  But there are times when children, for their survival, must move away from their families and carve out new identities all their own, and this is a process that does not seem to come easily.

  In fact, most of the stories in When I Was Your Age have some emotional pain in them. Their child heroes are self-conscious or ill at ease in the world. Some suffer at unfair circumstances (such as the death or disappearance of a parent), while others are just simply filled with pain — crying and miserable and alone. Different.

  What is the answer? What can children do aside from learning to be tough, which is only a temporary or at best a partial answer? I believe that an uncanny number of the stories in this collection show another more creative path — the transformation of suffering through art.

  Clues to it are everywhere in the stories. But perhaps the clearest comes from Francesca Lia Block’s “Blue.” In the end, it is only when the heroine, La, writes about her vanished mother that her terrible pain stops. The words she writes also have the effect of connecting other people to her:

  “Daddy,” La said.

  When she handed him the story, his eyes changed.

  “It’s about Mom,” La said, but she knew he knew. . . .

  “Thank you, honey.” He looked as though he hadn’t slept or eaten for days. But he took off his glasses then, and La saw two small images of herself swimming in the tears in his eyes.

  Where does writing begin? What is it that s
hapes writers? If we want to look for the seeds of it in childhood, I think this collection makes it clear that they have probably been there for a very long time.

  Isolation and separation can be bridged by language. Words can cross time and distance, connecting people of different generations and ages and experience. As you read the stories in When I Was Your Age, think of the grown-up writers who were once children. Here they are; this is what they saw and felt and remembered.

  Listen carefully. They are telling you their stories.

  — AMY EHRLICH

  I remember the first time I got really bad news.

  I was eight years old, and my family was living in white wooden army quarters at the edge of a thick pine forest in Fort Eustis, Virginia. All my life we had lived on military posts, and I loved them. I loved the neat lawns, clean streets, trim houses, and starched uniforms. I loved parade bands, marching troops, green jeeps, tanks, and transport trucks. I loved having military police at the entrance gate. When I was four, I dreamed that the M.P.’s guarding the gate chased away a couple of ghosts that tried to come onto our post. It is one of the most vivid dreams I’ve ever had, and to this day, it makes me feel good to remember it.

  Living on an army post in those days was so safe that in all the early summers of our lives the children of our family were let out each morning like dandelions to the wind. My teenage sister went off with her friends while my brothers and I filled our time playing with our toy soldiers, including my favorite — a small silver statue of General Omar Bradley. We played “maneuvers” by carrying large cardboard boxes around the parade field, stopping every hundred yards to “bivouac” by making grass beds and napping inside our boxes.

  At five o’clock, when the bugle played and the flag was lowered, we went home. Our return was often punctuated by the joyous sight of our dad stepping out of a chauffeured military car, his arms raised to embrace us.

  But one spring night when I was eight, bad news changed everything. I remember my dad was helping me prepare my bath. I was sitting on the edge of the tub while the water ran, and Dad was standing in the doorway, wearing his summer khaki uniform. “Sis —” he always called me Sis or Little Bits —“in six weeks, Daddy is going to Korea.”

  I looked at him and burst into tears. I knew we wouldn’t be going with him. Though the Korean War had ended eight years earlier, U.S. soldiers were still sent there for tours of duty — without their families.

  “Don’t cry,” he said. “I’ll only be gone for a year.”

  Only a year?

  “While I’m gone, you’ll live in Florida, in Daytona Beach, near the ocean.”

  Daytona Beach? Away from an army post?

  “You’ll have a wonderful time.”

  “No I won’t!” I hated this news. And to prove it, I pushed him out of the bathroom.

  Of course, I was right and he was wrong. A few weeks later, when Dad drove our family to Daytona Beach to get us settled, I didn’t find our new life wonderful at all.

  Our house was low to the ground, flamingo-pink, and made of stucco. There were no kids in the whole neighborhood. There were no real trees in our small yard — just a few scrubby ones. There was no wide open parade field to play on.

  I recoiled from this new life — especially when I discovered lizards scampering across our cement driveway, a huge water bug scuttling across the floor of the TV room, and a gigantic black spider hovering in the corner of the garage. Such monsters didn’t exist on army posts — neither did the crazy variety of houses, the litter, the tawdry seaside billboards.

  Adding to the trauma of adjusting to life off a military post was the awareness that my dad was leaving in just three weeks. At first, I tried to manage my grief by taking a little time out of every day to cry. In those days, I was very organized. I kept a daily list of things to do like:

  Wash hands

  Play with dolls

  Practice writing

  Practice running

  I added “Cry for Daddy” to the list. But as I counted down the days till his departure, I began to cry even when it wasn’t scheduled. Worse, I abandoned the other things on my list to keep a watch on my dad. I studied everything he did — from buying a vanilla ice-cream cone at the Dairy Queen to playing catch with my brothers — because I felt I had to store up enough memories of him to last through the coming year.

  The pressure became unbearable and soon forced me into the strangest relationship of my life. Just thinking about this relationship now can bring tears to my eyes. Was it with a wonderful girl? Boy? Grown-up? Dog, cat, parakeet?

  No. It was with a ball.

  About two weeks before Dad left, he took my brothers and me to a Rose’s Five & Dime store. He gave us fifty cents each to buy whatever we wanted.

  This is the most precious fifty cents I will ever spend, I thought. Slowly, I wandered the rows of comics, coloring books, plastic dolls, and bags of candy, looking for an object worthy of the last-fifty-cents-my-father-gave-me-before-he-went-to-Korea.

  When I came to the ball section, I saw, amidst a variety of balls, a truly unique specimen: a nubby rubber ball, bigger than a softball and smaller than a kickball. It was made up of swirling pastel colors — pink, blue, green.

  I picked up the ball and bounced it.

  It was the best bouncing ball I’d ever encountered. Barely did it touch the wooden floor before it sprang back into my hands. The ball felt friendly, spunky, and vibrant. It had such a positive and strong personality that I named it before we even got home: All-Ball.

  For the next twelve days, All-Ball and I were inseparable. I bounced him on the driveway and on the sidewalk. Standing apart from everyone, deep in my own world, I bounced him for hours. And while I bounced, I talked to myself. I invented stories. Not dramatic stories of high-adventure. But stories about ordinary families — families in which everyone stayed together and everyone was safe and secure.

  In these families, there was perfect order. The children all had names that began with the same letter — David, Danny, and Doris; Paul, Peter, and Patsy; Anne, Alice, Adam, and Ace.

  I gave the children ages, personalities, and dialogue. I played all the parts. I was John joking with Jane; Jane laughing with Jack; Adam telling a story to Ace; Alice describing her school outfits to Anne.

  I lived in different families morning, afternoon, and twilight. I could only create these worlds with All-Ball’s help. His sprightly, joyous attitude gave me confidence. The sound of his rhythmic bounce banished my fears. His constant presence eased the sorrow of Dad’s leaving. In fact, whenever Dad tried to engage me in conversation or play, I turned away from him. I stopped paying attention to him altogether.

  I had fallen in love with a ball.

  Though everyone in my family must have thought my behavior odd, they adjusted quickly. Within a day or two, they were treating “Sis’s ball” sort of like a family pet.

  No one, however, was fully aware of the depth of my attachment until the morning All-Ball was destroyed.

  It was a hot, bright July morning — just two days before Dad was to leave for Korea. I was outside before everyone else, bouncing All-Ball on the sidewalk, inventing a family with a neat number of years between each child. I liked the children to be ten, eight, six, four. Boy, girl, boy, girl. John, Jane, Jed, Joy.

  While I was bouncing All-Ball in the early warm air, a small black dog wandered down the sidewalk to see what was up, a little dog I paid no attention to — until it was too late. And then everything happened so fast, I couldn’t stop it.

  I fumbled a bounce. The black dog charged and grabbed All-Ball in his mouth. He punctured the rubber skin with his teeth, then shook the deflated ball with glee, tearing it to pieces. I started to scream. I screamed and screamed.

  Everyone rushed out to their yards — old people from all the quiet, lonely houses. My parents, brothers, sister. I couldn’t stop screaming as I ran around, picking up all the torn patches of All-Ball. I clutched them to my chest and howled
at the top of my lungs.

  My mother explained to the neighbors that my ball had popped. My brothers and sister watched me in horror — my father in confusion. “We’ll get you another ball,” he said.

  He couldn’t have uttered crueler words. There was no other ball like All-Ball. Not in the whole world. Not with his spirit, his bounce, his steadfastness. I screamed “No!” with such rage that everyone retreated.

  I ran inside, and, clutching the pieces of All-Ball, I went to bed, yelling at everyone to leave us alone. I kissed the pastel-colored nubby skin and sobbed and sobbed.

  I did not get up all day. I grieved for the death of All-Ball with all the grief my eight years could muster. I was brought lunch, cool drinks, newspaper comics, wet washcloths for my head, children’s aspirin. But nothing worked. I would not get up. I would not let go of the torn pieces of the ball.

  At twilight, I could hear the family having dinner in the dining room. My mother had the decency to allow me to work out my sorrow on my own. I don’t think she even allowed anyone to laugh.

  As light faded across my room, I could hear sprinklers spritzing outside, and an old woman calling to her cats. By now, my eyes stung and were nearly swollen shut. My throat burned. My heart had not stopped hurting all day.

  “Little Bits?” My father stood in my doorway. He was holding a ball. It was mostly white with a little bit of blue.

  I moaned and turned my face to the wall as he walked toward the bed.

  “You won’t let me give you this new ball?” he said.

  “No!” I said, gasping with another wave of grief. “Go away!”

  “This ball’s pretty nice,” he said.

  Closing my eyes, I shook my head emphatically, furious he did not understand the difference between the ball he held and All-Ball. “I hate it! Go away!”

  He didn’t. He sat on the edge of the bed.

  But I would not look at him. My burning eyes stared at the wall. My body was stiff with anger.

  “I like your barrette,” he said softly.

  He was referring to a pink Scottie dog barrette locked onto my tangled hair.