A Portrait of an Erika as a Young Erika.

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I am able to count on one hand the number of deviant acts I performed as a child. It is not in my nature to do anything without thinking, so each of these acts were plotted well before committed.

When I was 5 years old, our whole big family on my dad’s side was gathered at my grandparents’ house for spaghetti dinner. My dad was the oldest of seven, so most of my aunts and uncles were still living at home. Everyone was gathered in the great room adjoining the kitchen, my aunts and uncles sprawled on couches, my dad and grandparents at the counter and stove, my mom and I sitting on dining room chairs, viewing the cooking from our side of the breakfast bar as if through observation glass. I don’t know how the thought came to me, but it did so in a very commanding, empowering way.

I will pull the bar stool out from under the next person that tries to sit on it.

As the seat remained open, I weighed the consequences carefully. I imagined the possible punishments in vivid detail. My heart thudded and my excitement mounded. A minute passed, then two, then three. I started to have doubts. I started to think the rush wouldn’t be worth it. And then Janice Quilico, my uncle Pat’s girlfriend who had a pool at her house, approached the vacant bar stool, evenly and unsuspecting. My heart surged with the force of rocket boosters and I started to feel light-headed. Three more steps, two more steps, one more step – swipe! Janice toppled to the floor, pink cashmere and denim piling on the brown and orange berber, arms grabbing for daylight, my uncle’s name filling the room like a New Year’s noisemaker as she fell.

The vacuum of the next two seconds felt endless. My mom grabbed me to her, my dad stopped chopping, and then, much to my surprise, they laughed. The laughter swelled and became collective, gulping down my anticipation of being punished at all and that was the end of it. Spaghetti was served.

I reflect on that story often, as I do on the other few uncharacteristic highlights of my childhood When I was seven, for instance, I vandalized the back door of the apartment building my parents managed. I knew what I was doing and I knew what would come of it. I corralled the other kids from the building and all but narrated my actions as I carved my name with a long, sharp stick near the top of the door, its flaking brown paint delighted to be decorated. I dotted the i and was on to the ka when my brother whizzed around the corner yelling, “Mom’s coming! You’re in trouble!” I rested my weapon on the ground beside me to show that the major threat had passed. When my mom stepped outside, she looked more stunned than angry. I watched the dissonance between the back door scrawl and the girl who scrawled it –the same girl that had just brought home another A spelling test, by the way – spread over her face, her assessment becoming cloudier and cloudier. I was almost in the clear to receive the punishment I had earned when my filter corroded and I blurted, “Well, I guess I should be punished now.”

In an instant I revealed myself not to be the reckless, rapacious child that I had aimed to be, but to be the strategically minded, well-groomed child forecast by my DNA. My mom, still looking confounded but remembering the spotlight that lassoed us on the stoop, hooked my underarm and marched me up the shadowed stairwell through the thickness of cooked onions and melted cheese to our apartment. When we reached my room, I pulled down my pants and bent over in my pink flowered underwear, sure of my victory spanking to come. But nothing happened. I dropped my head to peer at my mom. By this time my dad had joined her in the doorway and together they stood motionless and upside down in the teepee of my legs. They looked at each other, stifling the smiles that this wonderful ride of parenthood had brought to them yet again, and I knew that I could pull my pants back up. I didn’t get my spanking, but I did get to vent my previously unnamed jealousy of my brother and all the attention that he received in our little family world.

Both of these stories from my childhood capture well the lesser seen parts of my personality. I am responsible, cautious, and calculating, true, but within these walls of self also resides an adventurer and a performer. Just as I yearned to rouse two ordinary days in my childhood, I yearn to rapture the routine of my life. I yearn to sell it all and travel the world with wide eyes for the daytime and a tattered paperback for the chillier nights. I yearn to surprise my family and friends by peeling away layer after layer of myself, each deeper tier a landscape to be marveled at through camera lenses and in late night conversations. I yearn to really live this life, but I struggle sometimes to know what that means. Does it mean peeling away the layers in quick, short sections, eating the fruit as I go? Or does it mean peeling away the layer in one long song of skin and flesh and fragrance and then savoring the fruit in one whole piece? I have no doubt that these questions are unanswerable, so the real question becomes how do I feel at peace with who I am? I think that I am answering that question every day that I’m alive.

Twenty plus years separate me from the kid that commandeered the bar stool and tattooed the back door, but still, all the elements of my personality then comprise my personality now. I am still responsible, cautious, and calculating (not to mention reliable and easy to locate at any given time), just as I am still yearning to create my story, some days in bolder strokes than others, as I go along. The way that I feel at peace with who I am is to remember that I am constantly becoming. I attribute this ever-evolving self-concept to my experiences, to the people in my world that have come and gone or stayed, and to the filament of whimsy that squirts through my veins every once in awhile. It’s the latter of these that has kept my old soul vibrant.

My family loves to tell the story of how, for a period when I was 9 or 10, my ritual was to take my bath after dinner, put on my pajamas, and then speed into the kitchen. I would lay down on the floor, kick my nightgown over my head to reveal my “days of the week” underwear, and pedal my legs wildly in the air while yelling in shameless refrain, “No flowers today, no flowers today!”

The moral of the story being, of course, that even though my britches were “organized”, it would have been unfair for me to keep them from the limelight.

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