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Interview Part 1: The Basics
Image by Chris Fritz
My full name is Melanie Avery Clampett. My show name is Melissa Avery. I’m 12 years old. I was born on a Saturday morning in early December. Dad and some friends were doing shows in Vegas, so that’s where I was born. North Vista Hospital, Las Vegas, Nevada, on the morning of December 5th.
My parents are Robert and Elizabeth Clampett. Their stage names are Bob and Isabel Avery. Dad’s a great guy with good business sense, and Mom is a very caring person. They were in show business since before they met. After I was born, they gathered a lot of their show business friends and re-started the family’s old traveling circus that had been closed down when my grandparents were too old to run it anymore. My parents renamed it the Avery Traveling Circus. (They named it after my middle name!) A lot of the people who were part of the circus before it closed were very glad to be a part of it again!
I’m an only child, so I don’t have any siblings. I don’t mind, because everyone in the circus is like my family. Now that I’m staying with Daniel, Clara and Jennifer visit a lot, and they’re all like siblings to me. I also spend time with my friend I met at the park, Alyss, and with everyone on Pinky Street. I’m friends with Officer Doby, too. (He’s a puppy dog who works for the police!)
Living with a detective is a lot different from living with a circus. The apartment is small, and it’s also the office. It’s all one room! (Except the bathroom.) There isn’t even a bed. Daniel sleeps on the sofa, and I sleep on a mat that has to be put in the closet with my blankets and Daniel’s blankets every morning. We each have our own dresser. (Mine is half the size of his, but I have a lot more clothes than he does!) The dinning table where we have all our indoor meals has four chairs, in case Clara and Jennifer visit for a meal.
The apartment has to be kept very clean, because you never know when a client will visit. If I leave things a mess, Daniel treats me like I’m a little child about it. I have to be prompt in putting my bed away and clearing my place at the table after a meal, every day. It isn’t always bad, though. If I keep things neat and tidy, and I’m on time, he’ll let me join in with him on some of his detective cases. He teaches me how to be a detective. Clara and Jennifer spend time with me, too, so they’re almost like family. Clara plays games and reads comics with me, and Jennifer takes me shopping for new clothes and stuff.
Right now, I’m home schooled. My parents send work packets that I fill out and send back, and I have Daniel, Clara, and Jennifer to help me go over my work material. Daniel is always telling me which things I will and won’t need to know in life. I wonder what kind of job I’ll have when I grow up, though. I like being a detective, but I don’t know if I can be a great detective like Daniel is. Maybe…
My height is 5 feet and 1 1/2 inches. I weigh 97.75 pounds. I’m Caucasian and I have red-orange hair. My eyes are brown. I usually dress in anything I can climb a tree in. Sometimes I’ll wear a skirt (if I can still play in it), but I don’t like to wear dresses. I like pants just fine. I don’t like my stomach to be showing, either, so I don’t wear short shirts, and I wear a one-piece swimsuit.
I don’t know anything about social classes, but I hang out with circus folk, a detective, and homeless kids. Does this fit any social class? I guess I’m in a social class where I have lots of friends who are different ages, and who can teach me different things. I think it’s the best social class there is!
As far as I know, I’m not allergic to anything. When I was really little, I pretended I was allergic to fruits and vegetables. I like a lot of fruits now, and Daniel makes me eat my vegetables, hrmph. My only physical weakness is that my arms and legs get tired after about six hours of climbing trees and climbing hills and running around and playing sports.
I’m right-handed, although it doesn’t make a difference much when climbing trees or playing soccer. I can throw a frisbee or a baseball fine with either hand, I guess.
How should I put my voice into words? It’s not too rough, but it’s not "girly" at all. I mean, if you only hear my voice, you’ll know I’m a girl, but you’ll also know I’m not a girly-girl. Does that make sense? I think if you only hear my voice, you’ll know I’m the kind of girl who’ll play soccer with the boys out in the muddy grass on a rainy day.
Do I say words or phrases frequently? Hm, maybe I do. I guess I say "oh!" a lot, and I know I go "hrmph" at Daniel all the time. Sometimes I’ll say "look, look!", but I don’t think I say it very often. Oh, and I say "hey!" all the time whenever Daniel makes a remark about me or tricks me.
My pockets? Hm, what does I have in my pockets. Let’s see… I have some change in case I’m out somewhere and I need to use a pay phone. That’s all. I usually forget about it, too, so whenever I take my clothes to the laundromat downstairs, I have to check the washer and drier for any change. Daniel says I should check my pockets when I change my clothes and check them again when I put my clothes in the washer, but I always forget!
My defining characteristics are… Um, I think maybe it’s my fun personality. I’m game for anything not boring, and I like adding my comments about things. I know Daniel always has a different experience when I’m on a case, but I hope I’m not bothering him too much… I’m always asking about everything he does when we’re on a case, but he always answers my questions with a lot of detail, so maybe he doesn’t mind?
Window on his world
Image by Vengeance of Lego
Note from me:
Some of may or may not know, but my oldest brother is a Sophomore at The University of Notre Dame. I read their quarterly magazine and one of the articles is on on millions of possibility of Lego. Enjoy.
My son, Bennett, has a fever today and can’t go to school. So I’m staying home with him. As I write this — on my laptop in the family room — he is playing on the floor at my feet.
My work is all false starts and detours. I tighten and loosen and adjust dozens of words, but can’t get the tension right. Soon it all feels as hopeless as the red plastic truck Bennett brought me last week. He broke off its wheels while “driving” (bouncing) it down the stairs and then left it on my work bench in the basement along with his Mr. Potato Head (which was not broken, just missing its ears and eyes). My kids have often brought me broken toys, expecting miracles. I fix what I can, recycle what I can and discard the rest.
The red truck was a lost cause. Or maybe not. “That’s okay. I’ll keep it, Daddy,” Bennett had said and carried it back upstairs to the playroom. I see it now hitched up to a three-legged horse with a Star Wars character in the flatbed. Luke Skywalker seems to be lashing the horse with his light saber. I’m still not sure why the horse is standing upright, or how Bennett knew that it would. I just don’t see that way.
This morning, in spite of his illness, Bennett is happily lost amid two gallons of LEGO toys. He has no sense of time. We just found the toys at a garage sale, and their newness, the infinite possibilities, enthrall him. He sits rapt on the carpet inventing and quietly talking to himself — as if conferring with another 6-year-old inventor.
Every 15 minutes or so, after he has clicked a few more of the red, blue and green plastic pieces together, he shows me something. “Look Daddy. See this guy? He’s driving the ship.” Then a bit later: “Look Daddy I put a coffee maker on the main ship. But I put a lemonade maker on the shuttle.” “Which is the shuttle?” I ask, now understanding it was a rocket ship, rather than a sailing ship. “Here. Look!” he says, unhitching a red, match-box sized-platform from the main ship. A driver sits in a little chair, and I assume a green thimble-sized cylinder attached to the back is the lemonade maker. He flies the shuttle completely around the sofa, making a whooshing noise all the while and pausing twice to fire imaginary machine guns at a couple of Hot Wheels cars below him. Then he lands it on my thigh. There he takes the driver out, straightens his legs, and walks him to my knee, which is now clearly a precipice looking out on an alternate universe. An inch tall, the plastic, square-headed man surveys the messy terrain of the family room.
“He’s an explorer,” Bennett said. “What kind of explorer?” I asked. “I don’t know. Like a Power Ranger or maybe an Indian,” he said.
Well, I wasn’t expecting Meriwether Lewis, but the odd contrast of cultures fascinated me, as did the power of Bennett’s raw imagination — all that he saw and discovered in a pile of discarded plastic LEGOs. He was the explorer who most impressed me. I love how he gives himself over to his imagination.
Maybe I need a box of LEGOs — to remember how to explore, how to see.
This feeling, this inability to see, is not new. I used to get it a few years ago when I dropped Bennett off at the preschool at the college where I teach. Because it was a lab school there was a long one-way teaching mirror in the front hallway. Students and parents could look in at the kids without them seeing us — our window was their mirror. But it took me several days to even notice this. I was often in a hurry. After the sign-in sheet, the hug, the nod to his teacher, I usually bolted off to my office with my briefcase to do important things.
Yet one day, on the way out, I paused for a moment and caught a glimpse of my distracted self in the window. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. The kids are supposed to see themselves on the other side. But when I took two steps toward my faint, self-absorbed reflection, it disappeared. My “I” yielded to my eye, which suddenly saw through to the world on the other side, the world I so often just walked by: children sprawled everywhere on the carpet in a kind of wild and holy innocence — working wooden puzzles, reading board books, rocking dolls, singing silly songs. My God, they were delirious with curiosity, and I was thrown into their childhood, and my own, so abruptly that I found myself in tears.
What was it about this window?
I could see the kids, but they couldn’t see me. If they tried to look back at me all they saw was themselves and their own world: Four-year-old Maggie, in pink, glittery slippers and a baggy, green velvet dress and two strings of white, plastic pearls, stirred a pan of air on a little wooden stove with a rubber spatula and intently adjusted the dials until the temperature was just right. Then James came running over with a little snake he had rolled from a ball of electric blue Play-Doh and popped it in Maggie’s pan. This perturbed her at first, but soon she began to stir it in and to readjust the dials. Bennett, who wore a black-and-silver stethoscope, sat cross-legged on the carpet next to Maggie and diligently checked the heart rate of the stuffed green dinosaur he was cradling. Then he tucked it into a wooden crib and whispered something to it — perhaps a bedtime prayer.
How odd it was to see Bennett but not be seen by him, to be in the same room with him, yet not. When I got up to leave for the office, and was several feet away from the window, I again turned it into a mirror, again caught my dim likeness in the glass. It was then that I finally saw the obvious: I was watching Bennett through the dim reflection of myself, weighing my own childhood against his, the known against the unknown. That’s a hard thing for parents — to stop seeing ourselves in our children — our gifts and flaws. As they get older it’s hard not to wonder if they will be blessed with your athletic or musical prowess, or damned by your impatience or depression.
But thankfully, the dimming mirror is also a sparkling clear window.
And I think that was the source of my tears that day — of my confusion and gratitude. I saw myself in the presence of those little kids and wanted to crawl on all fours back into their world, to dress myself up in their total surrender to the now, and in a kind of vision that could turn Legos into spaceships and Play-Doh snakes into food. When, I wonder, did I first begin to lose my sight, and my faith in the moment I was living in? When did my life first start to feel like a sprawling “to do” list?
Like me, my own dad sometimes struggled to see life’s blessings amid its burdens, and to shift from the I to the eye, from self to world. He too could get overwhelmed by work and the future, and struggle to get back to the present. Or at least that’s how it seems now, in the shadows of memory. But that was all a long time ago. He and Mom are close to 90 now. And though they have sharp minds and still swim most days, their bodies are wearing down as they approach the deepest mystery of all.
It was just the blink of an eye though –– just 40 years ago — that Dad was my age. And he sometimes picked me up at the lab preschool in Ames, Iowa, where he was a young pastor with a large church and four sons. I can see him leaning on the chain-link fence on the edge of the preschool playground, watching me play freeze tag on the blacktop with my 4-year-old friends. And there, in his sport coat and slacks, I imagine him waiting and watching us for just a few minutes before calling my name, before waving me in — before hugging me, zipping up my open coat, adjusting my hat and taking me home. Just a minute or two of pause, of revision, before returning to real time.
Maybe it’s because I’m now almost exactly in-between my son and father — 40 years older than Bennett and 40 years younger than my dad — that these small moments seem sacred. This morning I’m wondering about how my dad found such moments along the way — amid the chaos of family and church, amid all those sermons and meetings and potlucks. But I’m hoping he did on the edge of that playground — that my little friends and I, in our crazy games of tag and kickball, could, like Bennett did for me, somehow loosen the grip of time — giving him a moment of presence, of prayer.
By midmorning Bennett is still lost in his LEGOs. I tell him I’m going into the kitchen to clean the floor. He says “Okay,” but after about 10 minutes he calls in to me, “Where are you, Daddy?” “I’m in the kitchen,” I say. “Okay,” he says, again seemingly satisfied. A few minutes later he carries in an armload of LEGO spaceships and shuttles, and sets up shop on the kitchen table. Soon he is sailing off to other galaxies and planets while I scrub the floor on all fours. It is not long before he flies one of his LEGO ships over my head and dramatically ejects the pilot into my pail with a soapy kurplunk! and a squeal of laughter. “He can’t swim! He can’t swim!” I say. Bennett laughs.
The rest of the morning seems to pass quickly, or I barely notice that it’s passing. Bennett keeps drawing me back into his play, and then I return back to cleaning. I know this is “parallel play,” and that I should be fully engaged with him rather than trying to finish my work projects. But this is the best I can do today. And he seems pretty happy. Later, when I get out a sleeve of Ritz crackers and a bottle of 7-Up, he looks both excited and thankful for the simple snack. “I like staying home with you, Daddy,” he says, as he starts to make lean-tos and little towers out of the crackers. “Yeah, I like it too,” I say. His gratitude startles me and awakens my own. And again, for a brief moment, I can see just beyond my own reflection into a greater presence.
Source: magazine.nd.edu/news/16737-window-on-his-world/
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