Growing Up Miles, Part 3a: The Espionage Days

In fifth grade I wanted to be the Miles version of Harriet the Spy. (If you haven't read the book, I highly recommend it.) Despite my nearly boundless imagination, I almost slavishly tried to copy Harriet. This led to difficulties.

For reasons I can't recall, I wanted a spy outfit identical to Harriet's. This would have required:

• a flashlight I could hook onto a belt,
• wearing a sweatshirt year round in El Paso, Texas,
• convincing my mom to never wash a certain pair of jeans,
• using my allowance for notebooks instead of comics, and
• trying to sneak around a completely flat neighborhood consisting of wide open front yards and completely fenced in back yards, with no other cover at all.

I solved the flashlight problem by making a hook from a piece of wire. Of course, I then had the problem of sneaking my Dad's flashlight out and looking like a goofus because I pretty much couldn't' go anywhere at night. A flashlight is somewhat conspicuous at 4 in the afternoon in broad daylight. Even if I could have snuck around at night with a flashlight this was extremely west Texas in the 60s. I'd probably have been shot or eaten by dogs.

I also gave up on the sweatshirt, deciding that tee shirts were anonymous enough and would attract less attention than passing out from heat stroke. (West Texas, remember?)

I also decided that dirty, smelly jeans might not be required spy gear. Spies in the movies seldom wore dirty jeans in the suburbs, so I might just get away with it.

We had no alleyways to skulk through. Peeking in windows or going over walls in plain view of an entire neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else seemed like a good way to get my backside tanned. Once per neighbor who caught me and a second time at home when they called my folks.

This left only the problem of... The Notebook. If you have read the story, you know that notebooks are the heart and soul of a spy's life. Poking around the house I realized that while we didn't have a surfeit of notebooks (I wasn't willing to touch my comic book money) we did have lots of 3x5 index cards. I found some wax paper envelopes just the right size to hold several 3x5 cards, which would make organization easy-- at least until I had a lot of notes on a subject. This was probably when I started writing in very small letters.

Every spy has to start somewhere. I started by taking notes on my family, neighbors, school mates, and teachers-- just like Harriet did. Faithfully following my hero's example, my notes were generally derogatory. I might, for example, have written that "Fred Mickle is mean and ugly. If I were that mean and ugly I'd have myself hung as a horse thief." (That name is completely fictitious.) I'd like to hope that I hadn't yet finished the book and seen where this would get Harriet, but I probably just thought I was safe since I could put my cards in my pocket.

I'd been a spy for a couple of weeks when Mom ran across my notes while I was out playing. After I explained what they were she read some of them out loud.

"How would these make you feel if your family and friends had writing these about you?", she asked.

"But Mom, they aren't about me!"

Eventually I got her point, and it all hit home.

This left me out of a job. I had no idea what else a spy might write about other than communists (this was, after all, 1965 or 1966). I was pretty sure I didn't know any commies because they all looked evil and foreign in the comic books. I didn't know anybody like that. I destroyed the cards and hung up my spy gear, a has been at 10 or 11, a forlorn, minuscule footnote in the annals of spydom. I hoped I'd never meet Harriet, or that if I did my failed career wouldn't come up. Thankfully, we never met outside her book.

I still reread her book about once a year.