My first superhero identity

Yes, when I say first, it does indeed mean that I have had several superhero identities over the past. None of them involved any real world crime-fighting, and most of them never even got written out, but they were there. As my recent reading and writing has been bringing back memories, I notice some interesting trends and things about them. The problem with any of these retrospectives that I do is that there tends to be a lot of lameness involved, but hey, I am who I am.

This first memory, is something that I had gone for years without thinking about it until December 2008, when I was on my way to a memorial service for one friend with another friend. We were talking about Josh, as it would have been impossible not to. Although we had both been close to him, it was at completely different times, so we didn’t really have shared memories of him, and we had seen completely different sides.

I first met Josh in first grade, and I can’t honestly swear to you whether this memory happened in first or second grade, but it wasn’t any later than that. Anyway, on the playground one day we were deciding what kind of superheroes we would be, and working out the details of our costumes, and the next day Josh came with drawings of them. I was telling Karen that and she said “That’s so adorable,” and I really could not feel that. She was looking at it as an adult looking at two young kids, and so for her it was, but somehow even though I could understand that perspective, my emotional memory is so strong that no, that’s not adorable, it’s awesome. He was being really cool!

Where I can have a different perspective now is to see how incredibly lame my concept was. I think I just need to shudder, cringe, and get it out. “Fantasia” wore an outfit that was remarkably similar to Wonder Woman’s, in that basically it was a bodysuit and boots, but instead of the red, blue, and gold with those patriotic stars and eagles, it was just all pink. Well, maybe the boots were red. Her superpower was that she rode a flying horse.

I don’t even remember being into pink as a color then. I know I could not pick a favorite color, but pink was not in the running. (Eventually, because people are always asking kids for their favorite color, I started saying orange because no one ever picked orange, and I felt sorry for it.)

Basically, with the questionable taste and judgment shown by the name, outfit, and lack of any actual powers, I am mainly grateful that somehow I did not grow up to be a stripper. I had not realized how close I had come to that path.

Having safely dodged that bullet, I still think Josh coming back with the drawings was really cool. By the way, Josh’s costume was somewhat similar to Superman’s, mainly blue with some red, but he also had a red mask that I think had three red points sticking up. Obviously our concepts of how superheroes dressed came from the existing dominant constructs, which could lead to a discussion on gender bias and objectification of women in the media, but I am not going there, at least not yet.

I do not remember us working out any superhero adventures at that time. A few years later recess consisted of playing Graveyard Airlines, which basically meant heading to the tire trees (upright logs with two clusters of four tires grouped around them, meant for climbing, I guess) and imagining that we were on an airplane that was always running into trouble, possibly due to the sometimes poor judgment of the deranged pilot (me). Josh was my navigator, though, so technically if I was flying into trouble he was charting the course.

(My friend Jennie was co-pilot, and Jonathan was usually with us. Jason and Lara and some of the younger kids would sometimes join us as crew or passengers. I mention this because obviously we sound weird, but we weren’t shunned for this and clearly some people enjoyed it.)

Eventually, that started getting repetitive, and Jennie and I got really into Dungeons & Dragons (not with dice and a board, just going around and imagining stuff), but we didn’t do that at school. We both went through a jump rope phase, and then I started playing basketball a lot. Josh and I would still hang out at times, but usually with Stephen too, whom I liked. (What they did not know is I wrote out one Dungeons & Dragons story for an English assignment where our characters met up with Stephen and Josh.)

After that, I went to Five Oaks with the three other sixth graders who were affected by the boundary changes, and everyone else went to Mountain View, and I only kept in touch with Jennie. When we all ended up back at Aloha High School, Josh was in Drama, and he was great at it, and I was doing more sports and speech. Karen and I had become good friends at Five Oaks, and she did both speech and drama, so that was where their bonding started. Actually, most of my junior high friends got into Drama, but I’ve already written about that.

Josh and I never ended up hanging out much after that. There were no bad feelings or anything. I got to see him in plays, and I have seen clips of his role as Gilbert, sidekick shared by the Amazing Men, but that was more his adult life, and for me it always goes back to being kids. It is having superhero dreams and flying around disaster but having worked it all out by the time recess was over. It was Josh and I comforting Stephen after Lora had dumped him (even though I was secretly thinking he was an idiot for going out with her instead of me). It is Josh briefly removing the hat he always wore so I could sell it to him in a skit we did for English class, where I owned the hat and shoe store, “It’s Raining Hats and Clogs”. It is working on our short animated film, “The Garden Tragedy”, where long before anyone had heard of South Park we had construction paper vegetables succumbing to a crow, drought, and car exhaust from the new freeway.

I can look back and see how innocent that was. Other than the Stephen/Lora thing, and some other stuff that started happening towards the end of sixth grade as I was contemplating being separated from my friends for three years, and starting to like other boys just before Stephen got the message, making me dump him even worse than Lora did, but he didn’t even remember it happened in high school, you know, other than that, it was kind of angst-free.  I guess we just start getting stupider in sixth grade. Maybe that’s why most schools run K-5 now.

The song that keeps coming to mind as I remember is “Kids in the Street”, by the All-American Rejects. Looking at the lyrics, it does not match at all, but emotionally it fits. There is something bittersweet, with knowing that it is gone but that it still happened, and a little bit of awe at the velocity with which it fades away and new things come head on.

That being said, I still don’t look back and think it was cute, because we were fully invested in those moments, and we were very serious about it. We were not cute; we were amazing. And odd. I can look back and see that we were pretty odd, and perhaps a little morbid, though it didn’t feel like we were. Still awesome!