I was thinking the other day about a childhood experience I had heard about recently when I realized that the childhood belonged to a fictional character we have been reading about. Tenzing Norbu is a Tibetan. His father was an official of a monastery and his mother got pregnant accidentally in a short relationship with his father. He spent his childhood growing up with his mother in Paris but when she died, he went to the Tibetan monastery to live with his father. Tenzing is called “Ten” and is the hero of The First Rule of Ten by the well-known psychologist Gay Hendericks and Tinker Lindsay. They have followed up with The Second Rule, The Broken Rule and The Third Rule. As an adult, Ten was a member of the LAPD but is now a private detective working in the Los Angeles area.
I realize that I have many fictional characters living in my head, people about whom I may know more than I do about my relatives and friends. After all, part of the job of a fictional character is to let me know plenty about him or her, things that a real person might keep private.
For more than a decade, Mma Romatswe, owner and operator of the No.1 Ladies’ Detective Agency of Botswana, and her family and friends have been a part of my life. (“Mma” is pronounced “ma” and is a title of respect for a woman, evidently.) Thinking back, I remember the hero of “To Catch a Thief”, the inspiration for the Pink Panther thief. I think of Merlin and Arthur in “The Sword in the Stone”, who only became available during my adulthood but who definitely captured my attention and admiration. As a kid, dashing males such as Robin Hood and Zorro had me thinking and fantasizing.
As a child, we did not have well developed television, which tended to start late in the day and was only broadcasting something for a few hours. And of course, we never heard of streaming. It was trips to the movie theater that gave me my sketchy and slanted knowledge of the life of cowboys. Actors such as Hopalong Cassidy (we did not consider the name ridiculous, Podner), Tim Holt, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Whip Wilson and Lash Larue acted out bravery and assisting those in trouble. For a while, a weekly streetcar ride was the ticket to next week’s installment of continuous stories.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
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