I’ve been listening to kids more lately. Maybe it’s because I’ve been teaching, but I don’t mean just listening to them literally — their higher-pitched voices and inflections of pop culture, which sound like a dead language to me. The content of their speech is what I’m hearing, perhaps for the first time. Have you ever met one of those not-so-rare elementary-aged philosophers? One of my students wrote, “happy is where the sun likes my future.” I do not think I could write a line so poignant if you asked me to. In dark clouds of jealousy, I feel relieved that my extra years have at least gifted me the executive function to weld together a greater number of mediocre sentences, and then I feel embarrassed for competing with an elementary schooler.
Listening to kids comes with the fine print of listening to myself or who I was as a child. The other day I excavated a memory I had forgotten. During long car rides as a child, I recall having one mission besides measuring our travels by counting the milemarkers outside: I had to find something beyond the window along our journey to “own.” But what does that even mean, and more interestingly why as an elementary schooler did I have such a capitalistic and enterprising motor ticking me forward?
I held weird concepts of ownership. On vacation in Texas, I vomited in the Gulf after swallowing too much saltwater playing “surfboard,” a game I invented in which — you guessed it — I pretended to be a stiff surfboard as the waves wrecked me. For years after that vacation, I claimed to others that I “owned” part of the Gulf of Mexico by virtue of my vomit (which I certainly owned) polluting a portion of its surface. But vomit wasn’t always so ready to be summoned, and I yearned to expand my empire beyond the scope of my spray. My new rules of ownership became: If I spied a snapshot that was so unique for no one else to notice it in particular for the rest of the universe’s time, then it became mine.
So, I began owning smaller things. I was very realistic about what I thought could get away without ever being noticed by anyone else for all of time. As environments blurred by my backseat car window, the things I looked for to accrue were mostly single leaves on faraway trees. Sometimes falling branches in crowded bosks, which I reasoned would descend into obscurity soon. If I was greedy, then I could get away with larger branches out in the open but which I figured were commonplace enough to escape the specific attention my rules stipulated.
Is it conceited to treat my life as literature? Just this once, let me — take an IOU in exchange. Readers of this era in my life may equip various lenses. There is, of course, the Marxist lens, which may come to mind first. Look at how far capitalism has extended for a child to be initiated into its grip so early, literally inventing currency with which to buy himself the natural world! That’s one possibility. To any psychologists or literary specialists reading, submit a tip answering what a psychoanalytic lens of this situation may reveal.
This is not a practice I have kept today. None of the fallen leaves or pieces of litter that you don’t see fluttering on Keyser Quad secretly belong to me. I don’t remember when it stopped, either. Did something replace it? I’ve received the advice to never respond to emotional problems with intellectual answers, but I’m going to anyway. I think everyone wants to be different. Or at least I do. Even the people who say they just want to blend right in with everyone else: If you want to be extraordinarily invisible, is that not just another form of superpower, an abject form of difference?
So, perhaps all along this quest for ownership was one to differentiate myself. I alone own these things because I saw them when no one else did. In elementary school, when your parents are still picking the clothes you buy and acting more or less as your managers, then there are few other ways to express yourself as an individual. If the theory is that, with the advent of accessible forms of self-expression as I got older, the need for this game of ownership became obsolete, then that too still isn’t satisfying because of one key issue: I wasn’t very self-expressive even when I had the chance to be. For most of high school I wore sweats and hoodies and had similar interests to enough other people. If I wanted to be an individual then as I do now, then I certainly did a poor job of it.
Do I have parallel practices today? I do keep a running Notes app of observations, mostly with the intent to somehow write about them someday. Of course, that only receives half credit, because while it involves collecting my sights it also often leads to publicizing them via writing, which is anything but secret.
We all receive compliments that stick with us, especially the ones that are repeats, affirming a trait that we ingrain into our self-concepts. For me, I have always loved to be called observant, or a noticer of tiny details, but I can’t tell if this resulted from or sparked my initial searching for hidden things to own. All the good that does me now is cue me in when small decorative or landscaping changes occur each time I return home. That house is a new color. They have a new birdbath in the lawn.
Call it anticlimax, but I myself truly do not have a read that I believe for why I was the way I was. I was not a greedy, possessive or territorial child in any other aspect of my life. I was not food insecure or strapped for belongings in any meaningful way. While I was not thirsty for ownership in action, perhaps I did always have some mental concept of needing something to belong to me: As I’ve written before, my dream job was nothing common like veterinarian, but rather hotel manager. Was this patchwork collection of leaves, branches of different sizes, and a measly puddle of the Gulf of Mexico the beginning of my very own Hilton au naturel?
Some things I think are better left packed. I do not believe any satisfying revelation lies at the bottom of why my childself narrowly escaped a track hurdling toward becoming America’s next scummiest landlord. (Though, maybe there’s still time…) To be honest, I believe that sometimes such exhumations of the past are only defilements of the present. We all have strange anecdotes. Are they better as just that: “anecdotes,“ ones we’re meant to move past? In my hoarder days, I discovered some good things to own, the art of observation among them. But now — sue me for a sappy ending — I’m working on finding better things.
Riley Strait is a sophomore from Olathe, Kan. studying Writing Seminars and English. He is an Arts & Entertainment Editor for The News-Letter. His column, "In Medias Res," translates from Latin to "into the middle of things," shares narratives that bury occasional insights within fluff that often leave the reader wondering, "Did I ask?"
