Naked as a JayBird #2

I got out of the house as much as possible. I enjoyed long periods of my Summer vacation days playing in the backyard by myself. I climbed the numerous trees and pretended to be an Indian. I even dressed the part of an Indian Chief with headdress and accessories. I was amazed at how Indians looked, dressed, and behaved (at least how Hollywood portrayed them).

I liked to throw rocks, hit rocks with a baseball bat, hit rocks with a tennis racket, or try to break rocks—I even collected rocks for a number of years (my brother got to them and ruined my collection—that really bothered me). I spent time inspecting bugs, especially caterpillars/ants/grasshoppers/and worms. My back yard was full of rose bushes, tulips, and daffodils. My favorite flower was honeysuckle, which was growing all over the front porch of our double-wide trailer. Honeysuckle is my favorite smell on earth.

If I wasn’t being Chief Indian or Nature Boy, I would ride bikes, dirt bikes (Louie would come from Golden Valley on his dirt-bike and we'd go to the Stead Pits), skate-boards, or play tackle football, wrestle, soccer, or basketball with the neighborhood friends. Often my house would have 4 of my friends and we’d spend all day and part of the night playing around. My main group of friends were: Louie, Johnny, Roman, Tim, Chris, and Kenny. Of course there were other boys that I’d see from time-to-time. During our time hanging-out, me and my friends were starting to notice that I was winning/dominating whatever we did.

I started to like the attention of being able to be stronger and faster than my friends—this carried over to the playground during school. I started to get a lot of attention for how fast I could run and this was the beginning of a false identity: I would move away from liking music, art, and poetry to performing sports for the approval of my father and kids around me. What happens to the boy's true identity as false ones are created?