My Bohemian Life

"A man does not set out saying, 'I am going to be a Bohemian,'" Arthur Ransome said, "he trudges along, whispering to himself, 'I am going to be a poet, or an artist, or some other kind of great man,' and finds Bohemia like a tavern by the wayside."

From a quite young age to the present day, I have enjoyed walking in solitude.
I recall rather distinctly an episode from my fairly early youth. It involved my decision to skip the predictable activities of the group of boys my age whom I usually played with, and to go off on a walk by myself. I was already something of an outsider from the common experience of these boys, because every school day I walked the half-mile to my Catholic school. I usually walked alone or with kids my age since my two older brothers had no patience for walking with a younger kid. It was a great walk with a splendid comic book selection and a pinball machine in a corner store, two parks with baseball diamonds (empty on school days), and a row Dickensian tenement buildings looming over the final stretch, all along the way.
I had followed those brothers to the park in our neighborhood as well, again without encouragement from them and their age group friends but tacit protection nevertheless as I was quickly labeled the "wise punk." My mother was also a walker and never acquired a driver's license. We would take cabs and buses, and also walk home from downtown, or from her old neighborhood church and its great park, with a bandstand and a pavilion to bay views, and fireworks on Independence Day. So I was used to walking from a young age.
There is a natural joy in walking. We see it in the toddler struggling to remain erect, and in the child that begins purposeful walking toward a destination. The joy of walking deepens when we begin to walk for edification or for recreation. It is an emotion that I have tried to retain throughout my life. I remember for example the enjoyment in taking a walk with my mother after dinner, bundled up on a cold December night, to walk a few blocks and survey the neighborhood Christmas displays.
My mother was middle-aged when I was born and she was the memory babe and the reader of her family of seven kids, and she passed immeasurable knowledge onto me as well as ineffable, intuitive qualities, and always had an abundance of time and attention for us. Kerouac was known as "Memory Babe" in his French-Canadian American youth, and was called "Ti Jean" at home in not too distant Lowell. My mother's name at home was "Ti Noire."

The great story of my right of passage into the age of reason, as always precociously, involved me getting separated from my mother and brothers in the crowd one day in front of Ste Anne. It's an admirable neo-gothic church built by the French-Canadians who came to South-eastern New England. There had been a parade that day and in the hurry afterward I found myself alone. Resourceful and prematurely mature, I never did panic, though I was very young at the time. Neither did I ask for help--I had walked the route before with my mother and I started up it again. I climbed precipitous Middle street to Second street with its view all the way to Swansea, then past the ceremonial great rock and down wide Plymouth avenue
Almost home, I was walking alongside it when Mrs. Wolstencroft, the lady who lived next door, drove past and spotted me. Naturally there was rejoicing upon the arrival of the remaining family unit. They were of course much more frightened than I think I had been.

A few years after this, I was sent off in a cab with a large bill to stop at an art supply store then continue on to a Saturday art school at a local college next. The building was next door to the crenelated granite armory and stately "People's University" Library downtown. I seem to remember the pleased amusement of the art supply store proprietor to serve such a self-possessed young kid. The downtown was fully operational in those days with a towering City hall and Granite Block of stores all fashioned out of local stone. This was before the sixties came along and a huge interstate highway was plowed through the middle of the city. I remember it then, looking from the art class window out over the landscape falling toward the bay. I remember a nightclub visible from there, maybe called the Americana Lounge, with paintings of silhouettes dining and dancing, a puzzling and sophisticated veneer, a world long-since disappeared.

I return to the day I ditched stick ball or some such pursuit to go on that walk by myself. My thoughts and my direction was entirely my own, and they were comprised a great new state of being. Freedom is second only to the love of God as the experience that brings the greatest feeling of growth to an individual. And I can still revisit the freedom and joy I felt that day as I toured familiar streets under my own steam. In my mind's eye, I can see the "Little Woods" I walked past that day, a place of minor intrigues and much Tarzan or Tonto impersonation. It was at this precise point, as I reached the wood side and was out of sight of my immediate neighborhood, that I place the beginning of my Bohemian life.

The old guys who worked at the local magazine, candy and tobacco shops would comment that I was a man about town when I showed up solo to score licorice babies and flying saucers.* It helped matters that my mother trusted her children. By no means did she bind us to the immediate vicinity of her kitchen window as many of our mates' mothers did.
Although the myriad of crime, confession, scandal, and girly magazines suggested a world of transgression just beyond my reach, I gravitated to more intellectual and more humorous rebellion. The comic books gave way to Famous Monsters of Filmland, then to Mad magazine, then to Beatle books, Bob Dylan, Howl, Kerouac, Kesey, Evergreen Review, Ramparts, Tim Leary and so forth. It represented a progression from images disapproved of by the authority figures in my life, to underground expressions proposing a whole forbidden way of life, not necessarily sinful but certainly more outlaw and erotic and so even more threatening to repression and status quo morbidity.

I became so independent that one evening toward the end of summer a small delegation of my old chums from the backyard gang came and knocked at our door looking for me. They missed me and wanted me to come outside and regale them with my ostensible new hipness.




* Flying saucers was a type of candy with sugary pellets inside two "saucers" of starch dyed pastel-colors. They had a texture like the little unleavened bread rounds used for the Holy Eucharist which we received at Mass. they were not good to eat but they were sputnik weird. Thirty years later, I bought one in a tiny shop in Westport, Massachusetts and kept it until it collapsed.
Memories of the world of penny candy stores deserve their own journal entry. As an example of how different that world was, those little doll-shaped licorice candies were called "nigger babies." For similar candies in printed boxes, the name read "black babies". The penny-candy style were much better.

I will resume this thread concerning my early Bohemian formation before long...