The Sand Pits of My Mind

When I was young, we lived in North Carolina. I loved it there. Chasing lizards, beach combing, digging up whatever I could find in the sand dunes on the beach were heavenly to me. I could watch the beach oats ripple in the wind for hours on end and never get bored. Even though we left when I was still fairly young, North Carolina has always been home to me.

I used to build sandcastles right at the water’s edge and dig a deep moat that would fill up with water in the wet sand. Then, I would dig up sand shrimp in the surf and rehome them to my moat, where they would stay wet and bury themselves, but remain close for me to dig back up and play with again. Unlike regular shrimp, sand shrimp look like big rolly-pollies with brown and pink or grey and pink shells. They don’t hurt anybody. They come up looking for food when the waves lap in, and slip back in the sand when the waves go back out. Most people don’t even know they are there unless they like to dig in the surf like 5-year-olds do. They tickle your palm when you hold them. The sandcastle would disappear with the tide, and with it, the sand shrimp would find their way home.

My favorite memories are of waking up early in the morning to look for shells before the beach was picked-over of the best ones that washed ashore overnight. We usually found broken sand-dollars. Sometimes we were lucky enough to find a whole one, or a nice pretty snail shell that twisted long and pointy like a unicorn’s horn. But, the best thing of all was seeing that giant red sun floating on the ocean like a beach ball. The sunrise on the ocean is glory incarnate: a marvel to behold.

One week to the day after we moved, Hurricane Hugo hit North Carolina. The word was that it ripped up the beach. I worried about that for years: What happened to my sand shrimp? Did they survive? Were they still there? I always wanted to go home and look, but kids aren’t in charge of their own destinies, and certainly not where they can go.

We moved to Virginia. It was an ok place. It would never be home to me like the sand dunes where I saw my first pair of scorpions. There are lots of things to do in Washington, DC, so that kept me occupied for better or worse. My parents gave me a diary for my birthday. Diaries are supposed to be private. I didn’t write much in it, mainly because I had a lot of siblings and I knew they would snoop. But looking out the window one morning shortly before another move, I saw a sight that reminded me of home – a deep orange surrounded by a halo of pink and purple, waking up the indigo sky. I knew I would never be able to picture it in my minds eye, so I wrote down a description, to remember the glory and the peace that God gave me one that tumultuous morning just before I would pack my bags once more.

You see, there are no pictures in my head. I can’t draw something unless I look at it, and I can’t ‘envision,’ well… anything. If I saw my mother every single day, and then I didn’t see here for a week and came back, I would be shocked at how old and short and grey she’s gotten. All I can remember is the description that I made of her when I was little, when to me she was tall and her hair was red and she had no wrinkles. That is the mother I know, because all I have are words. I think in words, in complete sentences, with punctuation. I don’t see the punctuation. I don’t see the words. I hear them.  There are no pictures in my head. All I have are words.

It’s funny, that when I was in elementary and middle school, teachers would have these exercises where you had to close your eyes and try to ‘picture’ whatever it was they wanted you to contemplate. These exercises were rather boring to me, because all I saw was the red of the inside of my eyelids. If it was a bright room, maybe I’d see residual blobs and streaks of red and green from whatever imprinted itself on my retinas before I closed my eyes. I would think the thoughts popped into my head, while vainly trying to stay focused on whatever scenario we were supposed to be thinking about. I assumed that this ‘envisioning’ was a figure of speech. You always assume that everyone is like you, experiencing the world the same way you do. I didn’t learn until I was an adult that most people really do think in pictures.  Boy, was I shocked to find out that meditation was supposed to be a visual experience, and that the ‘mind’s eye’ is not a metaphor. I had a good laugh when I finally figured that out. All these years I had been writing down what things looked like so I would remember, because I was never going to see them, when everyone else just plays back a mini-movie in their heads. Weird.

I took my son to a psychologist once for his intake appointment to see a behavioral specialist about his ADHD. I told the psychologist that I had autism – or at least I assumed I have autism, because three of my four siblings have it, and I have more symptoms than they do. Autism was rarely diagnosed when I was a kid. Teachers and doctors didn’t know about Asperger’s Syndrome, which has subsequently been rolled into a general diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. I only heard about it after I finished college, when my youngest brother called me to tell me about his diagnosis. My son’s psychologist was briefly intrigued and asked me what my symptoms were. I rattled off the list from my discomfort with looking people in the eye to my difficulty ‘filtering internal dialogue,’ which is a fancy way of saying that when I am hungry or cold or experiencing an emotion, you’re going to hear about it. And two minutes later when a new wave of the same sensation hits me, you’re going to hear about it again, like it was new and novel. If it pops into my brain, there’s a good chance it’s going to pop out of my mouth. “Ok, I get what you’re talking about,” shaking his head to agree that my symptoms fit my self-diagnosis. When I told him that there were no pictures in my head, though, he told me that that doesn’t fit with anything he’s heard of, and said it was “probably a personal deficit.” Deficit. That’s a harsh word. I don’t really feel like I’m missing out. That was off-putting, so I changed the subject back to my son.

Later, I told my youngest sister what the psychologist said about my lack of mental pictures. She, being the only one of us kids who probably doesn’t have ASD, said that she has been diagnosed with Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder, otherwise known as ADHD. She said her specialist told her that her lack of mental pictures is part of her ADHD – that the brain says, oh, pictures are too easy and boring, so it dumps them. This implies that the pictures are there somewhere.

Intrigued, I set out to see if I could focus hard enough to conjure a picture. Maybe I could retrain my brain. Lying in bed at night with my eyes closed, I tried to conjure an elephant, or a cat… my husband even.  I think it hurts my husband’s feelings a little that I can’t remember what he looks like when I’m not looking at him, because I can’t see him in my head.  It would be nice to be able to remember my son as he is now when he gets older. Nothing. I’d lay there for hours, trying to will something to appear. Anything! Nothing... The best I could do was materialize a green blob that resembled nothing on the back of my eyelids. If I was lucky, I could make the green blob move. 

Years later, I took my family down to Columbia, South Carolina to watch the solar eclipse. Then we rented a hotel room on Myrtle Beach to see the ocean. Neither my son nor my husband had ever swum in the ocean before. They had fun until my son got a mouthful of saltwater when a wave took him by surprise. It tasted so bad that he gagged and threw up his retain in the ocean. He’d already lost and broken so many retainers that his orthodontist had threatened to cut him off. That killed the fun, as we had to scour the beach to try to find it. It did not turn up. But, I did dig up a sand shrimp – proof that the little critters that gave me so much joy in my youth survived the hurricane and global warming, and all that humanity had to throw at them. I wasn’t home, but it was close enough to give me the peace of mind that I had been missing for decades.

And then, I did it! Just briefly, for a millisecond, something popped into my mind’s eye. It took me by surprise. My sunrise! And then it was gone. I tried to bring it back, but it was no use. I haven’t had any more pictures, but I don’t think it’s a ‘deficit’ that needs to be addressed. Maybe when I’m old and nostalgia takes over, I will search for them once again. But for now, I am content to know that they are there, buried somewhere in the sand pits of my mind.