Shadow

My older brother used to call me "shadow."  It wasn't really a term of endearment, it was given because of the way that I used to follow him around incessantly when he was playing with his friends.

I grew up in fairly normal circumstances for an American, though my surroundings were perhaps a shade more rural than the suburban norm.  Growing up in a small neighborhood surrounded by farms meant that your selection of friends was quite limited.  You tended to make do with who you had.

It also happens that any given neighborhood tends to be settled in waves.  The first wave builds the houses, and they all come around the same couple of years.  Their children play together, become lifelong friends, and probably leave the neighborhood.  As those of the first wave start to retire to Florida or die of heart attacks, the second wave moves in.  Their children will subsequently play together, and the cycle goes on.

This is all well and good, unless you happen to be in between several of these waves.  My brother, five years older than me, happened to be right in the middle of one, and had a number of friends to choose from within shouting distance.  All I had were a couple of girls, and during much of the formative time frame of childhood, girls just aren't going to cut it for an adventuresome boy.

So my brother would play his his friends - basketball at the house across the street, capture the flag games on Saturday nights, exploring the woods that could be found in almost any direction, or simply wasting the time away in someone's backyard throwing a ball around.  And me?  I would follow them.

When my brother had a fight in the woods with a friend of his, I was there.  When they accidentally hit the neighbor's house with a golf ball, I was 15 feet up in a nearby tree.  For whatever reason, my brother didn't like to take me around with him.  Maybe it was my parents making him do it sometimes that made him resentful.  Whatever the reason was, I learned to follow them around anyway.

At first, I wasn't very good at it.  Half hidden behind a tree, my brother would loudly sigh and yell at me to leave them alone.  I'd run off, only to circle back on the other side.  After enough of this, I learned the fine art of spying on one's older brother.  Laying in some tall grass was a great option.  Also, climbing the broad pine trees that soared in the neighbor's yard allowed me to observe events from high above the ground, complete with pine fresh fragrance.

There is a thrill to operating without being seen.  Knowing things that others don't want you to know, doing things that others don't want you to do.  But after a while, the thrill wears off.  At that point, I had to figure out how to entertain myself.

It was this dependence on no one but myself that eventually led me to branch out.  Sometimes, what my brother and his friends were doing was just plain boring.  It was time to make my own fun.  I'd dam up small streams and watch the water flow a different route, or catch crawfish in styrofoam cups and see how hard they pinched with their little pincers.  I built a place to sit in one of those tall pine trees, and took books up there to read.  Through the stories I'd read, or the ones I'd concoct on my own solitary adventures, I imagined my own world.

Most importantly for the rest of my life, I learned independence - the ability to make my own way, and have my own fun.  I have kept a bit of that watching, wary boy with me throughout the years.  More importantly, though, that first taste of independence became the beginnings of who I am today, no longer a shadow.