My Trip To JJ’s (a childhood memory)

 

This was written as part of an experiential writing class at UMass. I really liked it and wanted to share it here.

My Trip to JJ’s

There is a story from my childhood that my family often shares. My mother used this story before as a creative writing exercise. To help recall this memory and put it in my own perspective, I first sought out my mother’s version of events.

Currently my mother is in the hospital with post stroke dementia and we haven’t found a long term facility for her yet. Naturally, I fell into a rabbit hole as I picked up this box of notebooks and papers that I have. I found the folder containing my mother’s writing which included stories from a correspondence course she took with the Institute of Children’s Literature. I found her teacher’s comments to be critical in a way which I disagree with and not constructive and encouraging. The letters and typed assignments were dated 1985. The story I was looking for was written years later after that correspondence class (I was born in 86).

I found it, after combing through some very interesting pieces. It was handwritten on white stationary in blue pen ink. The first lines were, “On a windy day in March, I found myself paralyzed with fear. The fear of losing my five year old son.”

To put you into my head space, I was playing outside in the front yard. My sister Sarah, had let me go outside and although, I’m sure she said to me to not leave the front yard, I have a mind of my own. My sense of independence and ability to think and act on my own was clear at that moment.

I suppose I was feeling bored. Both siblings were inside. I enjoyed playing outside and usually I would play pretend. I often acted out movies and TV shows. I don’t recall what I was doing or playing, but at some point the interest in that activity stopped.

I knew where my parents were—or I thought I did. On Saturday mornings they went to the high school, which was just down the road from us. They went for weekly exercise, either walking, running or jogging. I had been there before and I knew how to get there. If I had wanted to join them or see what they were up to all I had to do was go for a walk.

There was no sense of danger at the sight of cars, probably because it was easy to just avoid them and not get hit by one. There was a song we learned in pre-school. “You’ve gotta look both ways before you cross the street…left…right…” I remembered the song and I looked both ways. There were no cars when I crossed the street to get to the high school. I walked around the parking lot and couldn’t find my parents. I didn’t see them in the field.

I crossed the street again. I looked both ways. Left…right… no cars were coming. I was on the sidewalk and I kept walking. I might have been confused about which direction to take to get back to Furrowtown Road and Garden Ave. where my house was. Probably not though. I probably wanted to go to the convenience store JJ’s. They had candy there.

When I got to JJs, a woman spotted me and asked if I was lost. I said “yes” and told them my phone number. The woman took me inside and I called and talked to my sister. My sister, when she recalls the story, has told me that the woman who found me was the parent of one of her friends. 

My mom wrote in her version of the story, “Gary [my father] got in the family van and took off to ride around the block searching for our small child. I cryed [sic] out in vain.” The story continued and she wrote, “as we both pulled into the driveway, my daughter came running out of the house. She said that Bryan is at J.J.’s store.”

My dad showed up at JJ’s to take me home. My parents told me they were worried and I didn’t understand. Worrying meant they were afraid something could have happened to me, like maybe I would be hit by a car. I knew to look both ways though and they should have known that too. It didn’t make sense to me that anybody would be worried.

I knew to give my telephone number to the person that found me. According to my mother’s story, “Bryan had just learned his phone # 3 days prior to his adventure.” She then concludes the story by bringing religion and prayer into the conversation, which is where she loses me as a reader. She says, “I knew the lord was watching over my son that day. I knew my prayers found him safe.” As a writer myself, I would not have taken this particular angle, regardless of my own personal beliefs.

What seems to be at play here is that I had a developed sense of self and independence, making a conscious decision to leave the house of my own free will. Then you have the memory recall that allowed me to cross the street. Formal education does come in here as I remember the song from pre-school and the activity along with it. This singalong activity contributing to my knowledge is an example of learning occurring in a complex social environment—in a classroom with other children. I had been to the high school with my parents before, which means that active learning was at play before in the times when I had followed my parents on their walks to the high school. Building on prior knowledge of the space around me—the familiar streets, familiar buildings—I was able to navigate through the situation.

They used to sell “grab bags” of candy at JJ’s that also sometimes included a small gumball machine style toy like an army man. I hope I got a grab bag that day.

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Friendships and Fog (an excerpt from my unpublished memoir)

January 2026

Back in November, I started writing a memoir. I was bored because I wasn’t being challenged in school at HCC and the teachers weren’t assigning me enough homework. In 4 weeks, I had 18 chapters reflecting on my life from childhood up until now. I have yet to publish this manuscript. When consulting with my teachers they suggested that I self-publish and self market it. That’s what I did before. I had little success with that. There are reasons why my indie career didn’t take off. There are things I can do differently now with better technology. I now have better cameras and a better computer to edit on, for starters—which means I can create better video content.

The question is, what sort of content should I produce, now? Before I come up with that answer, I’m going to start with publishing a few excerpts from the above mentioned unpublished memoir titled ‘Arrogant Brat Child’. The 18 chapters I wrote can be read as stand alone essays and all together the manuscript is one long essay. The best parts of the memoir, to me are the parts that describe my artistic process and how certain pieces were created. So, a good place to start, to give readers a taste is with this chapter (chapter six) that leads into the creation of the Orien books:

Friendships and Fog

Of the friends I’ve made over the years, Dan stands out because he was my high school best friend and my first roommate. We kept in touch even when we were no longer living together and still get together on occasion. I attended his wedding a few years ago and can call him up any time for a hike in Stanley park. It’s actually easier now because he ended up moving to my hometown in Westfield and that’s where he lives with his wife. Our friendship stands out because it lasted the longest—but there’s one small difference between Dan and my other close friends, especially the ones I made when he moved out. Dan is my only close male friend. All of my other close friendships have been with females.

The other most prominent friendship in my mind, the one that I always thought of as Dan’s successor, was my friend Devon. She was female and yet what we had was always just a friendship and it worked so well because of it. We were both cis/hetero and of the opposite gender, yet despite what Billy Crystal said in the movie When Harry Met Sally about sexual desire getting in the way of hetero male/female friendships, it doesn’t have to be a problem, if you don’t let it. It is only a problem to people with very narrow and stereotypical views on love and gender roles—but it’s a generational thing and a lot of it has to do with how culture used to be and how the older generation was brought up. 

    Rather than go on a rant about baby boomers and their heteronormative views, let’s just stick to that facts, which are that the best friendships I’ve had over the years have been with the opposite gender. So, let’s start with Devon. In order to do that we need to backtrack a little. Devon started out as my co-worker at Friendly’s in South Hadley, right at the time I moved there. I was on a fixed schedule for Mon-Fri from 11am-4pm. I worked alone and my job consisted of rotating and cleaning the syrup pumps, in addition to the usual soda fountain duties of making sundaes and handling takeout orders. Many of the employees at night were not aware of my actual job of cleaning and maintenance. It was assumed that I stood around all day, since I worked the slow shift. 

Devon and I met in my first week when I was told about the Friday-after-school rush. When the middle school in South Hadley would get out, the kids walked over to Friendly’s and filled up the whole restaurant. Devon’s shift started at 2, but I had been working alone the past week and was a little unenthused about working with someone else. We didn’t hit things off from the start. These things develop over time. We really started talking and getting along more once Devon started serving and would serve during the day while I worked the sundae counter.

Devon defended me when the night crew would throw out nasty comments about me. There seemed to be some day crew/night crew feuding going on at that restaurant and they were under the impression that I did not work as hard as they did. Devon fixed that. Devon knew I walked back and forth two miles from my apartment every day and she had seen me clean the soft serve machine and disassemble and clean the syrup pumps. I kept our work station clean and sanitary. The other crew members didn’t even wear gloves. 

One day Devon gave me her old MP3 player so that I could play music on my walks to work. This began a sort of tradition that would continue of Devon gifting me her old tech (she would later give me my first iPhone). 

    My new appreciation of music led to the end of my second room-mate situation. I would come in to Friendly’s and complain to Devon and another server whom I had made close friends with about roommate number two. The key complaint: I was rediscovering music now that I had an MP3 player and yet my room-mate didn’t share that interest. When I tried talking about music with him, he had not heard of The Doors or the Who or Led Zeppelin. I had mentioned one time (with beer in hand) that I used to, on occasion, but rarely, smoke weed. My room-mate’s response was: “Oh, you used to do drugs…”

I wasn’t what you would consider the coolest kid around. To a true punk rock kid I would have been considered a poser—and yet compared to my room-mate, I was Sid Vicious. I had to shake him loose, so I could reevaluate myself and consider my identity as an artist. This had a lot to do with adopting the punk persona, although my style wasn’t necessarily punk if you really want to get specific. I was a nineties grunge kid. So, I got back in touch with that. Over time.

I had come up with an idea of how my dream girl might look. She would be a punk rock girl. My high school crush from Northampton had a punk vibe. I came across a picture of a girl who fit the exact description I had in my head and it was in a flyer for Kohls that we were looking at during a break at Friendly’s.

“Devon, I found a picture of my dream girl,” I told her.

“Avril Lavigne?” She said.

I looked at the picture and I looked at Devon and said, “Oh…yeah. I like Avril Lavigne.”

I ended up downloading Avril Lavigne music onto my MP3 player and decided I was going to start seeking out female rockers. Alanis Morissette and Sheryl Crowe became part of my playlist along with music from Hole, Blondie, Madonna and lots of one hit wonders from the 80s and 90s. The character of Holli Belle was starting to form in my mind.

Holli Belle is the manic pixie dream girl that I invented for the novel Orien and the League of Artists—but before Orien and the League of Artists came Orien Battles the Fog-devils. So, let’s talk about the fog and the fog-devils, by talking about what they represent in reality. The fog is depression. We all go through it. For some it’s severe enough to be a clinical problem. My mother is an example of someone who struggles with clinical depression as a result of bipolar disorder.

It was a topic that came up frequently with myself and Devon. Devon became someone to whom I could talk openly with about my own struggles with loneliness and depression.

I wrote a poem titled “balloon” that was inspired by a conversation I had with Devon. It started when I messaged Devon that I was upset with how a cook (who was a bit of a bully) was making fun of his girlfriend who had buzzed her hair. The girl that had done this, had just lost her father and was going through grief. Her boyfriend was mocking her and telling everybody to check out her hair.

The shaving of the hair to deal with depression and grief to me I thought was similar to self-harm. I had known a girl, an online friend, who used to e-mail me back and forth who confessed to me about cutting. I didn’t know this girl very well. I didn’t know her at all. I only knew her online through a poetry website. That girl was also going through a loss. The loss of her mom. 

In the poem, “balloon”, I used the visual of a person with balloons attached to their head as a metaphor for grief and depression and the emotions felt when a person is so hurt that they seek some type of release is symbolized in the poem as severing the ropes to these balloons.

The girl with the buzzed haircut, we later found out turned to heroin. Before I knew that though (and even after and for a good many years) my heart went out to her. I connected with her on a deep level and wanted to do something. It bothered me that her boyfriend was treating her the way he was. It bothered me that boyfriends, all of them, seemed to never understand and never do the right thing. It didn’t seem fair that someone like her wasn’t with someone like me, who would actually care about her and love her.

All of these emotions that I was feeling were, for me, released and took on the form of a book titled Orien Battles The Fog-devils.

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Balloon is one of my favorite poems that I’ve written. It’s usually the first video I show people when I tell them about my old YouTube videos. Now, you, my reader, whoever you are, know why.

Watch the video for Balloon here.

Context is important to understanding the Orien books. It’s one of the reasons why I never knew how to market them. To understand me personally and know the events that inspire my books is key to understanding and enjoying them.

Orien Battles the Fog-Devils is available to buy on Amazon here

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Thanks for reading!

Bry