When I first started doing that thing I do, and why and where

I realized or remembered, while looking at living Sequoia bark, when I started retreating into small, perfect-seeming worlds.
When my mother was trying to leave my father, she would take me to motels or on day trips sometimes.
We went to Squantz pond in the Danbury, Connecticut area one time - more than one time.
We would have a determinedly pleasant picnic lunch (but a quiet one) at lakeside. Then she'd stay on the picnic blanket and read afterwards, while I arranged pebbles and twigs by the lake.
While mostly pleasant and often amusing, these trips and motel stays perturbed me, because they deviated from my regular schedule, and so did the feeling or mood.
The acting was different. Subtly, I thought. Our behavior seemed too nice. There were good snacks and the occasional fast food meal, too.
Why was mom being so pleasant and upbeat? At home she usually seemed crabby and short-tempered, always rushing me.
(Why was I being ginger and tentative back?)
[Hi Ginger, I love you. Hi Scott.]
I mentally escaped into the small world of grasses and rocks and twigs I was manipulating. I let that lilliputian creation become all-absorbing. For up to one hour, possibly, it was at the forefront of my mind, so it became "large" to me.
I liked thinking about the imaginary twig and pebble savannah and cliff dwellers going about their daily pretend chores under my direction and choreography. They were creatures for My amusement (here I remember also Arnie's World of Westport Connecticut, though my mother wouldn't let me go there).
I didn't have to try to make sense of a larger world when I was visiting my tiny pretend microcosm.
© February 28, 2008 90hazelnut All Rights Reserved.