This is one of my very early memories. We were living in Derry, New Hampshire; my younger sister was old enough to talk, and the third child either hadn't been born yet or couldn't talk, so it must have been late 1981 or early 1982. The family was in the car -- a burnt-orange Toyota Tercel -- with my father driving and my sister and me in the back.
Suddenly my sister and I both started shouting "Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!"
My mother turned around in the passenger seat. "Are you two okay?"
"Yes, we're fine."
Then we started again: "Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!"
My father, understandably annoyed, said, "Stop shouting 'Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!'"
"But we're calling our ow!" I said. I couldn't pronounce owl properly.
I haven't the slightest idea why we decided to "call our ow" at that particular time in that particular way, but the memory has always stuck with me.
⁂
Decades later, I read Molière's Le Médecin malgré lui in an English translation. Sganarelle beats Martine, and Martine shouts, "Ow! Ow! Ow!" Then he beats Géronte, and Géronte shouts, "Ow! Ow! Ow!" Finally, Valère and Lucas beat Sganarelle, and he -- you'll never guess what he does -- yes, he, too, shouts, "Ow! Ow! Ow!" To this day, if you mention Molière to me, the first thing that comes to mind is "Ow! Ow! Ow!" and then I think of my sister and me "calling our ow" in the back seat of the burnt-orange Tercel.
Imagine, at the age of two or three I was speaking prose without realizing it!
⁂
As I've mentioned before, I've been reading Mike Clelland's book about owls and aliens. Today it occurred to me to search The Higherside Chats archives for his name, since basically anyone who has written anything weird enough has been on that show. Sure enough, he has been. In his interview with Greg Carlwood, he tells this story:
This woman, she's a young woman at the time, she's in her forties now, at the time she was 19 years old, and she was working at a summer camp for girls. So she is walking between two parts of the camp, so she's on a path, and she can hear girls in the background, and she's just walking along, and she comes around a corner, full daylight, full sunshine, bright meadow, she's on this little path. Standing next to the path is a gray alien, like full daylight. And she had only at that point, she had recognized that she had had these contact experiences and felt that they were related to aliens, but here it was full daylight, and up until then every experience she'd ever had had happened at night, so she just like is shocked, and she's so shocked that she doesn't stop walking. Her feet are on like autopilot, just walk walk walk walk.
So she sees this alien, the alien sees her, and then there's this telepathy that takes place, one hundred percent of the accounts, and so she has this telepathic kind of like reverberation, this echo chamber, and she hears this being go, "Owl! Owl! Owl! Owl! Owl!" and she watches -- boom! -- it morph into a four-foot-tall owl. This four-foot-tall gray being with a bald head and the big black eyes, skinny body, suddenly turns into a four-foot-tall owl. And then she watches this owl turn around and run awkwardly into the woods.
