Literally Blogging

While I was growing up, one of my favorite authors was the wonderful Mark Twain, his writing full of wit I was too young to appreciate, and full of adventure I always longed for.

Tom and Huck, those classic icons of boyhood, still color my perception today of what childhood should be like: sunrises and fishing trips, wholesome packed lunches and adventures with schoolyard chums.

Sometimes I longed to be Becky, receiving a first kiss of such awkward sweetness. But mostly, I wanted to be Tom, and Huck. I wanted to whitewash fences and flee down the Mississippi on a makeshift raft. I wanted dangerous caves and hidden treasure and running barefoot. In short, I wanted to be an adventure novel boy.

During my tenth summer, I refused to wear anything except my red-and-white Little League baseball uniform, long hair tucked under a red cap, black cleats kicking up dust as I roamed the broken countryside, looking for buried treasure.

Whenever anyone mistook me for a boy, my heart would give a wild leap of triumph. Being a boy meant spirit and independence. Being a boy meant fun.

The ‘girl’ stories I loved then and still cherish, did not offer these adventures. Their triumphs were found not in outsmarting villains, but in pleasing society.

Even the spirited ones never ventured far from home, mixing delightful bouts of tomboy-hood with sewing patchwork squares. Even the wildest, the Jo Marches and Caddie Woodlawns, ended up corseted and hairpinned, usually on the arm of some handsome suitor.

Years later, I gained a new appreciation for both my girlness and those girl characters I spent so many happy hours with. Theirs weren’t adventures of body perhaps, but they did share adventures of mind and spirit.

The tomboys, especially, those who fought against society’s limits, even if only for a few years, were heroes in their own way.

One of my favorite paintings is a portrait of Alice Liddell, the little girl who inspired Lewis Carroll. Carroll made his storybook Alice much more subdued and feminine, with her long wavy hair and starched dress and pinafore. But in the portrait, the real Alice’s spirit blazes through, with her challenging stare and ripped clothes, a wild, unbroken, spirited tomboy.

I hope she never outgrew that.

5 Comments