[This is a result of reading the Crane biography: Burning Boy. ]

Where did my relationship with grlls start. I had a sister — but never really thought of her as a girl. She was a sister first, sometimes co-conspirator, more often the agent who set me up for the fall — I lived in an age of “snips and snails, and puppy dogs tails” for boys and “sugar and spice and everything nice” for girls. A foul smelling fart in a closed car in winter, of course, had to have been me, while she smugly smiled and punched my arm with glee. 

There was often a little sexual overtone to our play – that I was either totally ignorant of or only aware at a deep subconscious level but now believe she knew all along. Although, we were only five and seven, so what could we know about the ways of men with women? 

One game, we called “The Great Wall of China” had me sneaking across the floor from my room to hers. Our rooms were on opposite sides of our parents bedroom, at the farther end of the house from the dining room and kitchen. Her room was the sun porch that led off my parent’s room; my room was across the hall, separated by the bathroom. I would crawl on my belly across the hallway, across the carpet at the end of my parent’s bed, sneak open the glass paned door to her room, and leap at her bed, with my pillow as both a shield and protection while she would lie back with her legs coiled against her chest to repel me in my advance. Our aim was to do this as silently a possible so as not to alert my parents. If they came, it was up to me to scurry as quickly and furtively as possible through my parent’s bedroom, across the hall, and beneath my sheets feigning sleep. On a successful night there would be two or three raids and [repel/repulsion]. More than once, her legs thrusting to keep me from leaping with my pillow atop her would catch my jaw, or the top of my head and snap me back at the neck. The game stopped – I am not sure why. But stopped before we moved out of the house. In my memory, stopped after she had her first birthday party with friends and I walked into her room as I always had, but the room was full of girls making me aware I did not belong in this world. 

School had always been a little difficult growing up. I don’t know – I often felt misunderstood and guess I was really bad at reading the room. I know I was precocious. I just always felt older than I was and behind a screen, I could have likely carried it off, but face-to-face, I was too easily revealed as a fraud. We carried a towel to grade school. Not sure why, maybe because if was before the days of paper towels. I often forgot, lost, or had captured from me my towel. My mother despaired, both at the loss of the towel, and at my inadequate explanations. I guess I was always a little odd — I was left handed, which made me stand out, especially in the penmanship lessons. I couldn’t wait to use the ink pen – like an early child’s fountain pen, although our desks still had well for a ink-dipper. Ballpoints had become the rage, but even those, I would smudge dragging the fat part of my palm against the page. I was also a voracious and fast reader. At one time, there my school participated in a experiment where three grades were taught in the same classroom. A central feature was the SRA reading modules — reading assignments with quizzes each module identified by a different and bright color. Our progress was self-determined. I raced through the readings. Sometime so fast, I was challenged by the teacher that I had not completed them. Furious that my integrity had been questioned about something that I truly enjoyed, in a rather rigid school despite the experiment, I ran afoul of the teacher and classroom authority. 

While not weak, or enfeeble, but maybe lacking in the best of hand-eye-coordination, sports held little interest. I sometimes played cricket but being both young, and rarely assertive about any athletic skill I might have had, when picked close to last, the captains, such as they were, always allotted me the position in the farthest outfield. I didn’t mind being there. The solitude was nice. A ball never came my way. I could search the slight hill that bounded the pitch for four leaf clover. I’d be startled back to the game at the end of the over when I would have to run the diagonal of the pitch to take my position for the change of bat’s man. Not much of a problem. My passage never held up game play. Occasionally a passing shadow startled me into action and I chased it — until I realized the shadow was not from a ball flying overhead but from a bird, much higher than any ball could fly. I’d stop. Turn sheepishly to the field. Nobody noticed – my run had been my private play with nature. If a ball ever came my way, in truth, I was a hapless fielder, usually trapping the ball but with no where near the strength to throw it the distance it had been hit and back to the wicket keeper for the easy out. 

Given my choice, I’d rather played “Mother May I”. This was a decidedly girl’s game – played on the back side of the school were two wings jutted from the central core. It made a protected space that you could only see into when directly looking at the area. Mother always stood close to the terminating wall of the U and the children lined up in line with the end of the wings. In our version, Mother always held a handkerchief behind her back – grabbing the handkerchief assured the win. I think I liked this game because it wasn’t competitive in terms of strength, agility, or coordination between a ball and it took no external apparatus or designated court. I was our game. We found the place. We made the rules. We could play and abandon play as we liked. It also meant that I made friends, not deliberately, with a group of girls. I may have been called a sissy for liking the game; I don’t ever remember telling my parents or anyone else that this was my choice for recess of afternoon sports period. 

I was indifferent to being a boy among girls. I have no idea where my sister may have been. I have no memory of her attending the same school as we had together in elementary school close by the first house we had lived in. There we walked to school together and I hated the short cut my parent’s had arranged through our neighbor’s back yard. They kept fowl. Chickens and geese, maybe even ducks. I hated the geese. In memory they were as big as I was, plump, likely weighing as much me, with large webbed feet. They were the day time embodiment of nightmare creatures. 

As a group, the girls and I didn’t alway play the same game, despite my eagerness to play it day after day. I guess there were times when we just sat around an chatted — or more likely the girls chatted among themselves and I had to decide to stay or go. One day the discussion turned to brothers. None of the girls I played with had brothers – or decided they had them, or they were much older. Curiosity turned to how boys and girls were different — besides the fact that we wore very different clothes, boys always in shorts and in the early autumn and late spring short sleeved shirts with a sweater through the winter. Girls always wore dresses. Usually a tight bodice with a slightly flared skirt, often with a floral pattern, usually without sleeves. In winter, they wore cardigans. Even I knew, boys would not wear cardigans to school. Together, me and a cluster of girls were trying to figure out the difference between boys and girls. Of course, it came down to show me.  We headed off to behind the wing where the boys room was. On the back side, I opened my fly for the girls to examine what made boys different. That was it. If there were ramifications, I have blotted them out of memory. Either way, my family left soon after that — not just the school, the neighborhood or the city, but the country for a place far away none had heard of, at the top of the Persian Gulf. That ended my  initial forays into the exploration of the differences between boys and girls.