Wednesday, April 10, 2013

With Friends Like Those...

When I was very young, between the ages of two and three, I kept company with a pair of imaginary friends--Julie and Johnny. Though I was too young at the time to have any reliable memory of the two of them1, my relationship with them was so intense, my mother included them on my "Favorite Things" page in my baby book. Not only that, but I believe Julie and Johnny are the reason Lora, a little girl who people besides me could see, is listed as my first real friend. 

Despite their unwillingness to show themselves to anyone else, Julie and Johnny had no trouble occupying me--I spent whole afternoons playing with them, carrying on long conversations and even demanding that my mother make sandwiches for them at lunch time. The way my mother told it, Julie and Johnny only faded away when we moved to a different town and Lora came into my life.

For most of my life, I've thought of Julie and Johnny as just one more layer of quirk, but recently2, I have started to wonder if Julie and Johnny were more supernatural than imaginary.

Once that possibility crossed my mind, I remembered the months after Son-One learned to crawl and then walk. Very often, he would make his way toward the same corner of our tiny apartment's tiny kitchen. He would sit on the floor, facing the corner, his eyes focused on something none of the rest of us could see. Sometimes he would speak to whatever or whomever it was he saw, stringing baby syllables into sentence-like structures--questions, demands, declarative statements. Mostly though, he sat and watched intently in a way that became eerie over time.

After months of this, when Son-One was not quite two, we moved to another apartment and we never saw him "corner talking" again.

So, what say you, my bloggy friends? Quirk or clairvoyance? Is either of them hereditary? And do you have any experiences with either one that you'd like to share?

I is for Imaginary



1. Memory is a such a strange and slippery thing. For most of my life, when I've thought of these two, I've thought of them as Jean and Johnny. Tonight, when I was double checking my baby book for my mother's notations on the subject, I discovered that my mother had referred to the female counterpart as "Julie." I had absolutely read that note before, but somehow had forgotten the written version in favor of my own recollection of "Jean." Based on the ink color and handwriting and the timing of other entries, my mother's note about Julie and Johnny was written around the time I was eight, about five years after my friendship with Jean/Julie and Johnny had ended. Did she misremember Jean's name as Julie as that point? Did I misremember Julie as Jean all along? Or did my mother at some point begin substituting Jean for Julie in her oral version of the story, which I heard a million times and internalized? Or, perhaps, I remember more about Jean and Johnny than I realize? Wherever it may have come from, Jean is so embedded in my psyche that it was an effort to type Julie throughout this entry.

2. The timing may or may not be related to excessive viewing of Celebrity Ghost Stories, where a surprising number of episodes feature childhood friends of the disembodied spirit variety. Hey! If it's good enough for Daryl Hannah, it's good enough for me.

16 comments:

  1. I totally believe in spirits and our ability to communicate with one another. I also believe that we existed as spirits before we came to earth and that may be the reason why children seem so susceptible to "imaginary" friends. They were most recently spirits themselves :)

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    1. I love that idea, Judy. I definitely feel like when you look in the eyes of a baby or very young child, it often feels as though you are seeing a deep wisdom and knowing that feels otherworldly.

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  2. I would believe on the possibility those friends were not so imaginary.
    Father Dragon Writes

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    1. Now that I've wondered, I'll probably always wonder. :)

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  3. Hmmmmm - I realize it sounds odd, but I have never really given the paranormal much thought or attention of any kind. I am definitely willing to consider that such things as spirits exist. I think there is a huge amount about which we don't know - and I am willing to learn.
    PS: thanks for stopping by the furrowed brow post - some lessons take forever to really learn.

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    1. The paranormal is a weird thing for an atheist who dearly loves to think of herself as pragmatic. I am quite sure my desire for it to be real greatly influences my ability to objectively analyze evidence. I have had a couple of unexplained encounters--aside from Jean & Johnny--myself, but I can't reliably say what was at the root of them. I tend to believe that energy is at the root of it and that we may someday have a logical, scientific explanation for paranormal phenomena, which will totally ruin everything, of course. :)

      (PS--I'm with you 100% on the lessons thing. 100%)

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  4. Oh, perhaps you both remembered, but in a different way. You're right,watching too much paranormal shows can make things confusing :-)

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    1. I'm endlessly fascinated by the way memory works, or doesn't. And yes, watching too many paranormal shows can definitely warp your world view...don't even get me started on things that go bump in the night, which I used to pay no attention to at all.

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  5. Freaky Fuckery is hereditary!

    Happy J Day!

    Just visiting from a fellow A to Z Challenger.

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    1. That's for sure. Thanks for stopping by.

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  6. My grandmother lived in an apartment in my parents house the last decade of her life. She had a couple of experiences where she would come downstairs into her living room to find several children sitting on her couch. This used to give me the creeps. She swore it was her future great-grandchildren, but since one of them had red hair (and we've yet to have any red-heads) I'm not so sure.

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    1. That's very eerie, but I love the idea of her seeing her future great-grandchildren. Maybe she was just off by a generation and the redheads are yet to come? ;)

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  7. I emphatically do not do paranormal-I have enough problems with normal. However...I have been wracking my brain since i first read this post to remember the name of my own imaginary friend, and it finally came to me. Mind you, there was no gender attached to my imaginary friend, but I vividly remember still having "Cindy" as a friend in kindergarten, because I was sent once (or more) to the corner, and "Cindy" accompanied me, and was a solace to my obviously tortured soul.

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    1. I bounce back and forth between thinking the paranormal is silliness with a dash of hysteria and thinking it's not only possible but likely that paranormal phenomena exist. But, most days, like you, it's all I can do to keep a handle on the normal.

      I love that you had a Cindy. I've read that having imaginary friends in childhood is considered a sign of high intelligence so there's that. :)

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  8. I'm all about the wild & weird, so I'm going with total clarivoyance. Cool story!

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    1. Thanks, Marianne. I like the idea of wild and weird, and even better, the idea of never knowing for sure. ;)

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