When people ask me where I’m from I tell them Defuniak Springs, Florida. I wasn’t born there, but my maternal Grandmother’s family (the Alford’s) are generations deep in Walton County. Defuniak is where I became the person I am today; genius loci of place. I was also shaped by my childhood home; for the first twelve years of my life we lived in Fort Walton.
FWB in the late 1970’s had just under 20,000 residents. It was very much a beach town populated with Air Force base personnel, civil service employees, contractors and long time locals. At the time, Our neighborhood near Cinco Bayou had several undeveloped lots – fully wooded with oak, pine and patches of palmetto – my brother and I called “the woods.” We lived on Alabama Avenue and down the street, the paved road turned to dirt and curved toward a main highway. At the curve was another set of woods we called “the swamp” because it usually had standing water with frogs and turtles. If the water was low enough, you could navigate your way across fallen logs to get to the neighborhood on the other side. Getting across the swamp was when you proved yourself.
When I was about 10, I started having trouble staying asleep. I’d go to bed about 9:30 but would wake up about 2. It lasted until we moved to Defuniak when I was 12. I suspect it was anxiety. I grew not be comfortable in a city or around crowds of people. At the junior high I went to I had a knive pulled on me in an attempt to extort my winter vest. I guess this incident helped when we moved as the usual “new kid” hazing was quite pedestrian when you’ve had a knife pulled on you. Thinking back, this was when the sleeplessness really deepened. Lurching into puperty, I was a shy kid and it didn’t help going to an agoge with nearly a thousand potentially armed and harmonally challenged kids.
When I’d wake up, and if I stayed awake, I’d read or draw. My drawings were usually of airplanes or D&D wizards on green-bar paper my Dad brought home from work. I still have a few of the D&D drawings. Early one spring, a Mockingbird started chattering and singing around 3 AM. Good, I wasn’t the only one wide awake. He did this for several weeks; 3 AM like clockwork. I’d peak thru the curtains to see where he was in the small oak tree then we’d survey the neighborhood; he from his tree and me from my window.
Not a lot went on, but he’d report the news. He’d tell me about the tomcat slinking along the azalea bushes. The guy walking down the street trying to stay just out of reach of the street light. Mr. Fife loading up his van for another day at his heating and cooling business. This was a good indication that any minute now the newspapers would be delivered on our street. Like I said, not a lot went on, but it picked up toward daylight.
I’ve done a couple of Mockingbird pieces that reference this time in my life. The mythology is fitting. The Mockingbird is linked to innocence. On the road to adulthood you lose bits and pieces of your innocence, but that’s the cost of the ride we are on. If you’re lucky, you can maintain some of it and a little bit of that sense of wonder. The Mockingbird, being a mimic, is a collector of songs adding to its own unique repertoire. Isn’t that what life is about – the dents and scratches in our armor are traveloque postcard memories and bumper stickers becoming new additions to our own songbooks?
This piece is called All the News. It’s for that Mockingbird on Alabama Avenue reporting All the News at 3 AM. It’s a companion piece to Map Coordinates.
