The Closed Captioned Preschooler

[Reminder: Some of my posts, including this one, are memoirs of my abusive childhood. Today I'm relating events that happened the week following my fourth birthday in 1953. The links to the right can be used to follow backward through the memoirs, or to restrict viewing to other kinds of posts.]

The name/word problem was frightening. I was isolated as it was. The thought that I wouldn't be able to learn new words as needed was unbearable.

I consider my solution my greatest achievement. It came in three steps.

The first step came to me when I remembered having seen a crude picture of a cat. I drew a copy of it in sand outside, with a stick. Looking at it, I suddenly realized that the picture was standing for cats in general to me. The word "cat" still could not be anything but the name of one cat, but the picture could do the work of a general word.

The second step, and to me the one that was brilliant -- I'll never be this smart again, ever -- was to think, "Why don't I let the word 'cat' be the name of the picture?"

It was a little awkward. When hearing the word "cat" I would have to recognize it as the name of a picture in my memory, and then that picture would refer to the general class of animals being referred to, and I could proceed to use the picture to organize my thinking about what was being said, and when it came time to say something about the creatures referenced by the picture, I could just use the name ("cat") for the picture, and no one would need to know the extra steps involved.

I would seem slow, because the process would take longer than normal speech processes, but it was better than not being able to learn new vocabulary, and being totally cut off from social intercourse.

The third step came when I encountered a relatively abstract word I didn't recall knowing before, and I realized it would be very difficult to assign a picture to it that wouldn't be arbitrary. I don't remember the word now, but suppose it was "arbitrary". What would you picture to represent the concept "arbitrary?" Pretty much anything I can think of would be easily mistaken for something else.

What I needed was what we call in the math biz a canonical method for generating new pictures. I wanted a machine, in effect, that I could use to crank out pictures without having to go to all the trouble of inventing new pictures out of thin air for each new word.

It happens my parents were both readers. I hadn't started to learn to read yet. My mother had tried to get me interested by reading children's books to me, but I was into memorizing them and reciting them along with her reading. My memory had always been too good to need to learn to decipher the chicken scratches on the page.

But as I was pondering the problem of coming up with new pictures I had a flash of insight. I ran to my Mother to test the idea I was having. I said, "Mommy! Is there writing for every word you can say?" "Of course, silly." "Every word? Even words I don't know yet?" "If it's a word you can say, you can write it down."

That was the final step then. I could get my parents to show me the writing for each new word. That would be the picture that would constitute the actual word for me. The written form would represent the concept that ordinary people used the sound to signify. For me, the sound of the word would be the name of the written form, by which I could reference the concept.

In speaking and listening I taught myself to imagine English written subtitles under every scene -- and I'd never seen a subtitled film! We didn't have a television, and I'd never been to a movie of any kind.

It wasn't hard to learn. I had it down in a few days. At first, it was painfully slow, and people began to say I spoke to slowly, and get impatient with me. I had to do it consciously. The process was similar to speaking in English through translation back and forth from another language without other people knowing.

Damage Assessment

The GP didn't find anything wrong because he was looking for the wrong things. He was seeing if I knew my name, or if I knew it had been Thursday, 1953. He wasn't looking for my other personality.

Alaka'i was still MIA the second day and Kona was scared and lost. It felt like, well, loneliness. I felt loneliness.

But it wasn't until the second day after my birthday that the most serious symptom of brain-damage revealed itself. It was something that the GP was unlikely to have noticed.

A cat appeared from the woods. That was a common occurrence at the House in Shirley. Our neighbors were half a mile or more away, but that was nothing to their rat-catchers. The cats roamed far and wide looking for rodents and other cats.

I called Mother out of the house and asked her what it was. She said, "You know what it is, honey, it's a cat."

I didn't remember knowing that it was called "cat". But that wasn't the serious symptom. OK, so I "forgot" the word for cat. Not a biggy. Relearn it, move on.

But an hour or so later another cat came by. I said to my Mother, "What's that?"

"I just told you when the last one came by. It's a cat."

"The other one was cat. What's this one?"

My Mother just shook her head and returned inside. But I was shaken up by the whole incident. I knew that something was wrong, but I couldn't figure out what it was right away. It took another week and more incidents of the same nature for me to work out what had happened.

It was only a couple of years ago that I read about research that proved that the human brain processes names and words differently. That's what I discovered for myself, the hard way. My ability to absorb words was affected but I could still learn names. New words could only be understood as names.

What was really weird about it was that I could remember what it was like before. I could remember being able to use a word like "cat" to stand for cats in general. I knew that the sound that you make when you say "cat" is meant to be a general term for all creatures of a certain class. But I couldn't use the sound that way. I could only use it to stand for one particular cat. I could only use it as a name.

The Walks

Here's a recent satellite image of the area of Schofield Barracks where I would find Lani and Lono. North is up. It doesn't look like much has changed.


I met up with Lono the first day at Canby Field to the west. This image shows about two-thirds of the field, which is altogether almost twice as long and twice as wide as a football field. We met at a point beyond the edge of this image. Later I would learn to look for them at the northern end of Morris Road, or a little further northwest from there along Leilehua Road, somewhere between the points marked with the Xs on the map. Leilehua was the avenue my Mother taught me not to cross. We lived a few houses off it on a side road about five or six blocks southwest of the meeting point, about a third of a mile distance.

Much later I learned that with my little legs that third of a mile took me around twenty minutes when I hurried. I'm sure I didn't hurry much on the way home though.

As green and pretty as the neighborhood was with all its plantings and fields, the walk was not always a pleasure because there were mean older children who would push me around and threaten me. Also many people at Schofield let their dogs run free and a few of them were threatening.

As I learned Hawaiian the walk transformed. The world changed for me. Hawaiian is very different from English in many ways. For one, words are run together. In English, words are clearly separate in speech. In Hawaiian, it can be hard to tell where one word ends and the next begins. It creates a feeling of all things being connected.

Adding to the sense of connectedness is the fact that so many words have multiple meanings, making it a more context dependent language than English..

Also, there's no verb "to be". "Is" is understood. A thing is, if we're talking about it. This means it is less natural to imagine emptiness. The world is full everywhere you look. It also helps prevent mistaking predicates for identities. Qualities of things don't become the things and take them over, so there is more room for more qualities. In English, once you say the barn is red, you can easily be fooled into thinking you're done. That's what it is, right?

As I started thinking in Hawaiian, colors became brighter for me, and things around me swirled and tangled with one another. In English, there were things and not-things, good and bad. In Hawaiian there were things and more things, good and different good, and the boundaries were not straight lines.

Gradually, those times when I was alone and not being threatened, my walks became richer. I noticed, and I was grateful.

My Muse

I've always been a creative problem solver. This is a picture of me, at an age of roughly between 2 & 1/2 to 3, creatively solving the "How do I secure my next block?" problem.

I like creativity. I like seduction. I like the strange. I like the strange seduction of creativity, and the seductive creativity strangeness can induce. Speaking of seductive strangeness, my Muse Cindy Holly (not her eternal name) is the Muse of Other and the Muse of Few Words. When I first started my Real Change Column under the title Adventures in Poetry I was only allowed 350 words each. It was feared that my strange thoughts and modes of expression, if multiplied beyond that limit, might run amok and negatively impact unsuspecting innocent readers. Lawsuits could ensue.

Now, as Adventures in Irony, I manage to get away with 666 words per column. Still not much. So I am grateful to have Cindy peering over my shoulder all the time, suggesting words to cut. "Don't write words," she says. So I say, "What should I do then?" So she says, "Write." So I say, "Oh."