I was askedt to write about an imaginary friend. I puzzled long about it. I regale about my daughter’s friend Kemely, who thwarted any effort we could make to get her to try new foods, which she refused because she had tried them at Kemely’s and hated them. I could tell the story of how my daughter and her mysterious friend Kemely, who resided with her mother in the clouds, invented all the lights glistening in the night as we drove into Chicago along Lake Shore Drive and how she kept us enthralled for three-quarters of an hour with this imaginary invention. But she is not my friend, although I got to know her quite well between the ages of two and four, when she seems to have deserted my daughter to the pains of reality. In my despair at trying to find one of my own, I am heartened to know while I remember Kemely vividly, my adult daughter has no recollection whatsoever, except by way of our repeating the stories to our friends and to her everlasting embarrassment.
I, however, draw a blank at such past relationships and thought I might just end this writing foray at this point. But, alas…. It is not that I didn’t have an active imagination. With friends and a weed filled vacant lot I could be a soldier in the trenches crawling with stick rifles to kill the Nazis. I could sit in the special crook of a tree in the park down the street from my house and pilot a plane or submarine or a huge sailboat, with or without a crew of other kids. I could be swept up in floating dreams at night or imagine shrinking myself to the size of a Polly Pocket doll and wandering in and out of the miniature Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute scaring the shit out of museum patrons admiring the miniscule workmanship of artisans. But I can pinpoint no one I carried on long conversations with or ate imaginary dinners at their homes in the sky. Then I realized...
My life is filled with imaginary friends and I interact with them almost daily. There is my friend Owen, who has only briefly been out of prison after so many years wrongly convicted. I see him tall, slender, strongly cut and muscled from decades working out in the yard. He has a son now, newly born, a girlfriend in trouble and he may be left to single parent, unprepared. Long white hair in a ponytail, he writes and paints stark pictures.
He is companioned by a small seven-year-old girl named Penthe living in another world quite dissimilar from ours. Yet, she has boundless energy and prefers to run. She gets into trouble with the clan leader, who has been mistreating her out of his own guilt having left her parents to die. But she in her wild ways has been struck by sky sparks and befriended by Skreecats, who will guard and protect her and may help lead her home.
I have my friends Ben Franklin and Darin Thax. I have families, heroic women, young and old, and children that carry me away with regularity on journeys and slogs. I have a chastened and shamed man thrust from family and friends and made to beg for help from a bureaucrat whose only thoughts are how to use this poor man for his own satisfaction.
These, and so many more, are my imaginary friends. They fill my time. They steal my sleep on occasion. They interrupt me from dinner or an evening of entertainment. They people my time and I know each one, clearly and cannot discard them. I can set them aside for a time, but they rattle back. Sometimes they bring new friends along when they arrive and I open the door to them all.
I met a new one just the other night, a rather non-descript fellow, trussed like a side of beef and hanging from a tree in the desert south of Highway 50; alone and swaying naked in cold desert winds in his stained tighty-whities. A licensed therapist and psychologist, but new writier, sitting around the writing table with me asked from where this poor fellow came. “Inside” I answered. I should have said he is just one of hundreds of my imaginary friends.