IT’S NOT THERE YET, BUT I CAN SEE IT!

I often think that if I hadn't grown up where I did, and when I did, I would never have entered a creative field. Childhood is a great influence on childhood to adult imagination. Recently, a good man wrote about using your imagination and how priceless it is. http://spaldeendreams.blogspot.com/2013/06/using-your-imagination-priceless.html

60 years ago in the teeming concrete jungle of Brooklyn, there was so much stimulation to drive a child’s creativity, triggers so to speak that it was impossible to be bored. If you could image it yourself, a kid in an uninspiring environment surrounded by family and friends and nothing else, finding himself on the top of Mt. Fujiama, or the 7^th game of the World Series in Ebbets Field in the bottom of the 9^th, and how you win it all with one swing of the bat with the bases loaded.

Most of us were poor, coming from 1^st generation Italian Americans fighting to be accepted in the American fabric. Dad had a hard job in the shipping department of the New York Laboratory and Supply Company, and so I dreamed of having a job where I could wear a tie and white shirt to work everyday.

Growing up on Italian and American meals, I dreamed of someday affording an exotic meal from China or Japan, or maybe even France.

Our playgrounds were made of concrete, and iron, so to be amid the green grass and trees of the country, maybe a lake or beach on a sweltering summer’s day was a dream that only got more embellished as I wilted in the heated streets of Brooklyn.

Toys were almost non-existent, however one thing every kid seemed to have was a pair of roller skates. Those skates were an airplane, a racecar and horse, or any vehicle we so deemed it to be.

One of my favorite things to do is to look at things and study their structure, the space relationships, colors and tones that make the body of the object, so I could mimic it on paper. That came from my childhood of reaching for the details and studying how things were made. Once I remember sitting at the kitchen table, and realizing how I distinguished my Mom from my Dad. They both had the same features; eyes, noses hair and what have you, yet they were different. This came from the lack of cell phones or electronic devices that did the work of self-amusement for me.

When Disneyland first opened its doors in 1955, I was swept away with dreams of being there, where the sun always shone and the weather was perfect, with palm trees that reached right to God himself. It was a perfect world: unencumbered by the screeching halt of the IRT or bus brakes with emissions so strong it could kill you! 

We as a family never went on vacation because we were too poor to afford one, and so I dreamed of going to some exotic place, maybe where Ozzie and Harriet lived, or where the Magic Kingdom existed.  

Once a year Mom and Dad would pack off my older sister Tessie (much older) and me to Patchogue, where we would spend a week of the summer in the joy of playing with cousins and feeling the warm sun at a beach or smell the fresh mown grass on a summer day, or even the lazy toot-toot-tooooooooot of the Long Island Railroad as it pulled out of the train station on a lazy sunny summer morning in Patchogue, and how it made me nuts to start my day, it made me an early riser even  to this day!

I'm On My Way To A Star

Dream along with me, I'm on my way to a star
Come along, come along, leave your worries where they are
Up and beyond the sky, watchin' the world roll by
Sharin' a kiss, a sigh, just use your imagination!

On a cloud of love, we'll hear the music of night
We can wink at the moon as we hold each other tight
And if we go in the right direction, heaven can't be very far
Dream along with me, I'm on my way to a star!

( We can wink at the moon
as we hold each other tight . . . )
And if we go in the right direction, heaven can't be very far
Dream along with me, I'm on my way to a star!