2/17/99
Bright sunlight pours through the glass sliding doors that lead from the living room out onto the patio. The sunshine warms the rocking chair, the red bricks and long, rough walnut boards that make up the late-70's-post-hippie bookcase, the potted cacti, the numerous hanging ferns and spider plants, and the chocolate-brown carpeting where a six-year-old boy lies prone, basking in the sun's glorious rays. Tiny spots of light dance disco-like about the ceiling and walls, then dissolve into bright colors like a light show at a rock-concert--he has discovered the fun of playing with a pair of hand-held mirrors from his mother's bathroom. Held so that they catch the rays of the sun he can reflect the light onto the ceiling in small dots, and by moving the mirrors the dots become birds, airplanes, spaceships to fly at the little boy's command. Positioned just right, the glass acts as a prism, painting a rainbow across the room.
Later, he plays with wooden building blocks. Still enjoying the sun's warmth, the boy creates houses, towers, and pyramids. Right now his favorite cartoon is "Transformers," and he occupies himself for hours building robots to take over the world.
On a different day, the boy's mother helps him pour water into a shallow saucer. He isn't old enough to use a knife, either, so mom cuts the tops off a few carrots and chops the rest into sticks. The boy places the carrot-tops in the water and moves the saucer over to a sunny spot on the bookshelf. Munching on the carrot sticks, he lies down on the warm carpet and reads the science-activity book his parents gave him for Christmas many months ago. He likes carrot sticks. The science book says that the carrot-tops will sprout green, leafy fronds when placed in the water and sunlight. But the boy already knows this. He has read through this book many, many times. Indeed, he has done this activity several times before, but this redundancy has never bothered him. Now the boy amuses himself by looking at an illustration of a cartoon butterfly fluttering around among the carrot leaves. He wonders how he could get a butterfly inside the house. Maybe if he just left the patio door open for a while...
That boy is I. Obviously, I know this because the images I've just described are reconstructions of my own memories, but there's more to it than that. That boy is I, because if I saw him in any living room in any town in Midwestern America, or read a description of him in any piece of writing by any author, I would recognize his actions as my own. I believe there is something in all of us that defines who we are. Call it the spirit, soul, subconscious, or whatever; there is a certain essence that stays with you throughout your life. The person I was twelve years ago is the person I am now, and I know I'll still be that person twenty years from now.
Now, this may seem like a very trite observation but it's important for me, because it's helping me realize who I am. The boy who unknowingly discovered for himself what he would identify years later, in his high school physics class, as some of the fundamental properties of light now tears through scientific works by Robert Ornstein and Ray Kurzweil. The boy who read for hours, lying in the sun and chomping on carrot sticks, now devours novels by Orwell, Coupland, Knowles, Fitzgerald. The boy who liked to watch carrot-tops grow now finds himself involved in such activities as the Science Olympiad and Academic Challenge. The boy who figured out how to line the wooden blocks up just right to make a perfect rectangular pyramid has decided to study computer science in college.
Of course, the carrot tops never attracted butterflies. The water would grow rancid after a few days, the carrots would begin to rot, and my mom would throw the whole mess out in the compost pile to make fertilizer for our garden. But that never really bothered me. The next chapter of the science-activity book showed how to make a hat out of a single sheet of newspaper!