Boy Wonders

In this intimate and humorous memoir about how childhood passions shape our adult selves, Cathal Kelly probes his youthful obsessions--from Star Wars to the Blue Jays, The Lord of the Rings to The Smiths.

Vividly recalling a time when wearing a zippered, chainmail-laden Michael Jackson jacket seemed like a good idea, and The Beachcombers --"an adventure show about logging"--seemed to make sense, Kelly recounts growing up in the 1980s in a working-class Irish household as the son of a tough Catholic mother and a largely absent and abusive alcoholic father. Navigating an often fraught and always bewildering youth, Kelly sought refuge in comics, books, bands, games, movies and TV. But looking back, he realizes that his obsession with Dungeons and Dragons or Who Framed Roger Rabbit was never just about the game or movie, but about the joy in discovery and the creation of an identity.

I was almost nine years old when I began digging the hole. I picked a spot near the rear of our backyard. How far will the hole go, people asked. I wasn't sure. Once you've gone through the trouble of starting a hole, you don't want to limit yourself.

From then on I would think of everything I did, every exploration, every falling down the wormhole of a new obsession, every occasion that seemed a portent of something as more important than itself in the terms of digging that hole. That's what we do in life--we dig. Occasionally, we get somewhere, discover some small treasure. More often, the hole collapses in on us. Or we fill it in. And then we dig again.

As life goes on, digging seems less momentous because it has become a habit. Somewhere between 10 and 20, you stop digging for its own sake, and begin digging for something specific--a job, a relationship, money, admiration, an escape.

Like your perception of time, once you cross over from one to the other, there is no going back. All that remains is the echo of how it once felt, and a nostalgia for those careless times.