My Early Childhood as a Vagabond Comes to an EndI have this general impression of my life up until about the middle of 5th grade as sort of a traveling circus. You know…set it all up, do business there for a while, tear it all down, set it all up again somewhere else, etc. I have these ethereal images in my mind of me as insubstantial just floating through everyone else’s solid, everyday lives. I count around 8 different elementary schools between 1st and 5th grades…some of those twice (went there, moved away, moved back). Sometimes I was handed off from one home to the next within our family. Sometimes all of us in the home would move to a new spot. Either way, I was all over the place. I remember my white, canopy twin bed sitting in the corners of lots of different rooms. I had lots of different “brothers and sisters”, too…which were actually cousins or oddly enough aunts/uncles who were my age (I won’t even try to explain). Middle of 5th grade I ended up in the home and with the family that I would pretty much be with for the rest of my school days (other than the brother/uncle and sister/aunts slowly dropped like flies under the pressure and went back to live with their birth mom) and ultimately I went from being 1 child of 4 to being 1 semi-adult child of 1 by the end of middle school. Last man standing. The where and who of this permanent settlement ultimately determined probably 75% of my total psychological development. And 95% of the time I see that as negative. But during the 5% of the time that I see the positives about myself that came from that arrangement, I breathe a big sigh of relief because as crumby as it was, it was still 100% better than other likely alternatives. I’m just pulling those numbers out of my hat. I haven’t really quantified it. And actually, I'm not even wearing a hat.
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