Ours was the third house to be built in the ‘new’ neighborhood. A subdivision of homes was being built in the woods. THE WOODS. We moved into the house in the fall, and I played in the woods around the house beginning then and through the winter. When I turned seven in April my mother sent me outside to play.
“No really, you have to go outside… and play… Go…”
So I went. Outside. Into THE WOODS.
via In a Man’s Voice: Outside by Brent Aikman | Esse Diem.
Middle school started to show me that football could put a boy at the top of the popularity totem pole. The players always seemed to have the prettiest girls talking to them and they got the most attention around school. That was especially true when game day arrived. The team members always had a tradition of wearing their jerseys at school all throughout that day. The school would be dotted with light blue jerseys bouncing around campus. Everybody got excited for the games, especially if they were playing at home. Those days we didn’t have to ride the school bus home. We could stay after school, watch the game, and have our parents pick us up after the game was over. But when you saw those blue jerseys around campus, they were not being worn by the players.
In a lot of cases, those jerseys were being worn by girls.
via In a Man’s Voice: The Jersey by Vernon Wildy, Jr. | Esse Diem.
Filed under Essays on Childhood: In a Man's Voice, Writing
After a life spent wandering from place to place in service of the church, my wife, kids, and I now live an hour from Cane Ridge, the very spot where our movement began. For four years we’ve called Kentucky home. I’ll always long for the Caribbean, always feel like moving after a year or two, always think the only real mountains in this world are the Sangre de Cristos.
via This World Is Not My Home by Jeremy Paden (part 8) | Esse Diem.
Filed under Essays on Childhood: In a Man's Voice, Writing
Mom taught me to love saffron, cilantro, bread fruit. Taught me to cook, taught me only to barely ever follow a recipe, should instinct or lack of ingredients dictate otherwise. And she has passed on to me this love of food and cooking, this adventure into the world of the senses.
via This World Is Not My Home by Jeremy Paden (part 7) | Esse Diem.
Filed under Essays on Childhood: In a Man's Voice, Writing
That summer I read Whitman, played bocce and drank beer with my grandfather, sat on the front porch and had conversations with my grandmother, dug fence posts, watered his pear trees, built a retaining wall, linseed oiled the wood on the adobe house, drove up to Chaco canyon to tour the ruins. I worked the land every day: hoeing, weeding, watering the trees. Both my grandfather and I ignored the hard fact that his pear orchard was a chimera. They never produced fruit; and, now, they are not there. But it was a lesson in tending a plot of land, in living in a place with a contentious history, in learning how to be both of these United States and something other.
via This World Is Not My Home by Jeremy Paden (part 6) | Esse Diem.
Filed under Essays on Childhood: In a Man's Voice, Writing
If Dad longed for anything, though, it was Italy. He didn’t share much with us, however. His mother died of cancer while he was in college. Childhood memories were hard. And, though his dad remarried, his mother wasn’t there to pass-on family history, to tell us stories of his childhood. When the family gathered, however, siblings would reminisce. Most had to do with “the family mission,” like how he, his siblings, and his cousins torched a roadside shrine in some northern Italian village, thinking they were advancing the cause of Christ.
via This World Is Not My Home by Jeremy Paden (part 5) | Esse Diem.
Filed under Essays on Childhood: In a Man's Voice, Writing
The world you know as a child is the one given you. You move because your parents move. You are from here or from there because your parents tell you so. You grow up in a religious group and are told it began on Pentecost Sunday and you believe this to the point of arguing in fifth grade with Catholics about primacy of origin, utterly ignorant that Campbell and Stone were 19th century Americans and that your particular religious group was born in the hills of Kentucky. Children live and move about in a world presided over by adults. The lucky ones never have to call into question that world, get to bounce about enveloped in love, oblivious to most anything but their wants. We were lucky and parental love covered over many sins.
via This World Is Not My Home by Jeremy Paden (part 4) | Esse Diem.
Filed under Essays on Childhood: In a Man's Voice, Writing
I don’t fault Pat her love of country. We’ve all been taught to love our homeland. And, when asked, “Where are you from?,” most of us answer without hesitation. Some of us, though, simply don’t know how to respond because we are truly from nowhere.
via This World Is Not My Home by Jeremy Paden (part 3) | Esse Diem.
Filed under Essays on Childhood: In a Man's Voice, Writing
My high school years were a procession of medical mission and Habitat for Humanity work groups. Two, three, even more, a year would come down. When I wasn’t working the makeshift pharmacy, stuffing bags full of medicine, giving children swigs of mebendezole, explaining the doctor’s instructions to patients and having them recite them back to me, I was translating for doctors, dentists, nurses, or house building crews. People came and went. A week of work, a day at the beach, and they were gone.
via This World Is Not My Home by Jeremy Paden (part 2) | Esse Diem.
Filed under Essays on Childhood: In a Man's Voice, Writing
Like my father, I am an American citizen born abroad and declared at a consulate soon after my birth. By the time I left for college, I’d lived on three continents, one isthmus, and one archipelago. Another way of adding this up is six countries, four U.S. states, ten cities, and around 18 discreet residences, not counting the bed under my aunt and uncle’s stairs in Goleta, California, where I worked as a security guard for an RV camp and at a roadside organic food stand the eight months before heading off to college.
via This World Is Not My Home by Jeremy Paden (part 1) | Esse Diem.
Filed under Essays on Childhood: In a Man's Voice, Writing
