This week I spent two days talking about Darkwood at a book fair on the Peninsula. The book fair was terrific: great parents, great school, great bookstore, and, most of all, great kids. I’m routinely surprised by how much I like kids, and routinely surprised by my surprise. I mean, of course I like kids — why would I write a book for people I didn’t admire?
I think what strikes me anew each time I hang out with a group of children is how intense they are, and how charming that intensity is. I remember the intensity I felt as a kid, and the risk, always, that you had committed your feelings to the wrong thing, that you had mixed things up, that awful moment when all the adults at a gathering laugh at something you’ve said, and whatever it was falls so far outside every category you have for funny that you feel not just misunderstood but totally defeated.
I don’t remember having a sense of a public self versus a private self as a ten year old. Certainly I had a sense of public and private. I knew there were impulses one shouldn’t indulge in front of other people. But I experienced myself as a single entity who might or might not act in certain ways but who was always fundamentally the same. However people responded to me, they were responding to me, to Molly, not to Office Molly or Dog-person Molly or Jock Molly or Writer Molly or Night on the Town Molly.
I just read that last line over and realize it sounds like the worst-selling line of knock-off Barbie dolls ever. Anyway, I don’t mean to suggest that as an adult I have some sort of radically split personality, but I’m usually aware of myself as a public actor. Night on the Town Molly has reached a different set of agreements with the world than Office Molly. She wears different shoes; she speaks at a different volume; and, oh, please, let her converse on different topics than Dog-owner Molly. Writer Molly, who spends all her time inside alone, goes through her day with a different set of expectations than Jock Molly, who lives outside and, even when she is alone, likes to pretend a coach is studying her form. Neighbor Molly knows that her popularity has to do with the volume at which she plays her music and the regularity with which she rolls out the trash cans, not how she wears her hair or her feelings about Robert Frost.
As a kid, though, I invested my entire self in everything I did, so everything felt to some degree life or death. Whether or not someone had time for me had only to do with my worthiness as an object of attention, and nothing to do with how busy or distracted or sad or tired they were. This is why kids amaze me. They get their little hearts broken over and over because the people whose attention they require are always going to be unequal to the task, but they soldier on. Their desire to connect outweighs their terror of rejection, and remember the rejection they anticipate is total. And they are so ardent, and so sincere, and fearless, and full of fear.
Here is the point where I confess I have become a fan of Green Lantern comics. I realize that some (most? all?) of the people who read comics these days are adults, but the part of me that likes Green Lantern is not far evolved from my ten year old self. In the Green Lantern universe, green is the color of will power and yellow is the color of fear.* Green power rings don’t always work against yellow rings, go figure. I wasn’t what most people would describe as a fearful child. I liked rats and spiders and swimming and the concocting of potions. But I was afraid, a lot, and nine times out of ten, when you are afraid as a kid, you have to do the thing that scares you anyway, because you are not the boss of yourself. Like poor Hal Jordan, you are always being conscripted by a higher power into perilous battles with freak aliens who threaten to overwhelm you. But, like Hal, you do your duty. Because even rookies know a Green Lantern isn’t without fear. A Green Lantern overcomes fear.
*If you’re interested, the full emotional color spectrum is green (will power), yellow (fear), violet (love), red (hate), indigo (compassion), orange (avarice), and blue (hope). Green Lantern Sinestro Corps War! Check it out!
