Knowing somebody in childhood is such a privilege, a true connection to a person’s real essence. I feel very close to John Chitester because we shared so many silly childhood goings-on, even though we didn’t get to spend much time together once we reached that inferior state of existence we are called upon to duly carry out, called adulthood. John’s and my relationship was deep and real, based on the true being of a person that childhood is.
As children, he was always Johnny. He only became John when, later in adulthood, he grew a gnarly beard. (usually with chewing tobacco spilling onto it with some Jack Daniels stains). He looked more like a ZZ-Top guy than he did anybody’s little cousin Johnny. And I say “little” only because he was the youngest of our bunch of cuzzes, not so many years younger than I, but several heads smaller in stature.
I spent a good bit of my childhood on the Chitester’s Woodlane Road Farm in Mount Holly, and considered Carol Ann to be my first best friend. Jeannie (forever that, not “Jean”) was the middle child but all of us, regardless of age, hung together not so much playing as carousing, exploring, feeding pigs and chickens, swimming in the pond, hide-and-seeking between tall rows of ripe corn, avoiding calls to work whenever we could by being as far away from the never-resting grownups as possible. My favorite chore though, was being in the coolness of the cement basement egg-sorting room, preparing cartons with the different sorted sizes. I learned a lot about life by being so close to those happy free-range chickens, and their stewards, John’s family. My understanding of life began with chickens. One day, my grandmother Antonina, over at her and Grandpa Brun’s miles-away Burlington farm, I vividly remember her showing me the innards of a freshly-killed chicken destined for that night’s cookpot. That’s when I had my first out-of-body experience, seeing the entire universe within the colorful smelly guts of that sacrificed animal before me.
My earliest memories of Johnny are his sweetness, his innocence. Just as powerful as the cosmic experience I had with Grandma’s knowing chickens so intimately. Johnny’s pureness is forever indelible in my memory of who and what he is. Nothing changes from when we are kids, except our bodies explode in all directions; sometimes our minds change as well, becoming either more pliable or concretized.
In my experience, having raising my husband’s two very young children, I truly believe you get to know a person’s real core when you’ve spent time with them when they were a child. I know a few folks as intimately as this: my sister Eve, and my Chitester cousins, along with my other farm cousins, the two Widzenas boys, all of whose essences I know as well as I know myself. Because we spent precious time together when all of us were free and easy kids, before we took on the attributes, however good or bad, that made us what we became as so-called grownups (some of us are challenged by being “grown down” as was my case before sobriety).
Being a kid with Johnny was like knowing an angel. Johnny was in awe of us older kids, followed us around, doing whatever he could to be included, never being a pain, never causing any trouble — just enjoying himself with the simple things of farm life, happy as a lark. And we in turn enjoyed his pleasant, never-trouble-causing company.
When we arrived to adulthood, John and I both became travelers. We went our separate ways, as lots of cousins do. I didn’t see John for many years, maybe decades, only hearing of his South American and Arizona antics through my mother, John’s Aunt Eve, baby sister to his mom, my Aunt Carolyn. I smiled with pride hearing how John returned to the farm and turned the defunct chicken coop into his bachelor pad. I admired his commitment to farming instead of the globe-trotting photojournalist he’d tried out being.
Not until Jeannie’s wedding did I see for myself that “little Johnny” was now a big long-face-haired bear of a happy smiling man, who had the exact same twinkle in his eye from the little kid version I’d known so well. As the years passed, whenever I was in his company, I “saw” the little kid version of this bulky, sometimes gruff-to-others man before me. In Florida where I was visiting my folks at the time, John came with me to an AA meeting when I got sober in the mid-eighties. We shared lots more than wanderlust, it was clear.
Together, we laughed at getting to know each other as adults, giggling in knowing each other’s essence so naturally, as kids do. We never needed to talk out complicated things about life and each other, because we already knew that stuff in our bones.
I love you Johnny. You’ll always be the sweetest blond-haired angel boy of all of us. And now you’re a real angel, so don’t think I won’t give up getting to know you in that disguise, either.
With Love and Respect of a Great Pure Soul, John Chitester,
Your ever-lovin’ cousin teZa
tezalord.com
