My Imagination (Part 1 of 2)

Like most boys I loved to make up stories. Most of the time I lived in an imaginary world, made up of real things around me. The furniture in the living room became the large buildings of a city created in my mind. Cars became spaceships. The lawnmower became a giant harvesting machine. And our cement patio became a great plain on which battles were fought.
Once when I was imagining I was in another dimension, I walked up the basement stairs of my house, although for some reason I didn’t recognize it as my house. I came into a strange room (the kitchen) and I saw a pot of macaroni and stewed tomatoes my mom was fixing. I put a spoon in and tasted the strange food from another dimension. I was instantly hungry and ate several more bites. (Imagination does weird things to you. Up until that time, I hated stewed tomatoes, but after that I loved them.)
Before I could read or write, I started recording these stories and products of my imagination. I drew pictures of them on paper, and well, on anything. One time, while my parents were gone for a whole Saturday, I was left with a large amount of chalk. I detailed a large mural on our sidewalk and driveway. All I was doing was drawing some of my stories, but the babysitter didn’t think that way. She spent the rest of the day scrubbing the chalk off the cement, cursing me with her every stroke.
One story that was central to most of my imaginations was about a planet called Dong Ding. On this planet the race of the Judakatrupians lived and accomplished many things, like building structures so large that each level of each building had a city built on it. I drew pictures about these stories, with the same desire of the ancient Egyptians to leave behind hieroglyphic writings. I carefully chronicled my stories on the unfinished cement floor of our basement. Even today, if you were to tear up the carpet in my parent’s basement, you would find my crayon-on-cement drawings, still un dulled by time.