Elephant's Memory

When I was a kid I had a neighbor who shared a lot of interests with me, except for one quirk.  He was more interested in aeronautics than I was.  It's funny how physical proximity had zero to do with our personal interests in common, but chronological proximity did.  We were five days shy of a year apart in age.

So, without fail, he was always a little more into things than I was, ahead of me.  Our toy collections, and predisposition for treating them like collector's items were things we had in common, but I was more into GI Joe back then, and he was more into Star Wars, but we were into each of them. Ironically, though it didn't register then, his dad worked for Mcdonnell Douglas & mine was an Army Reservist.  I think Decepticons put me off planes mostly.  Had it registered then, our preferences would have made more sense.  At least it seems so when I think about it in retrospect.

I'm thinking of my old neighbor because Radiohead comes to town around his birthday.  A few years back it dawned on me that back in 1986 when we had competing ideas for Transformers the Movie sequels his character Shockspearimus Prime's name might have been a play on Shakespeare.  Pretty heady for an 11 year old, and obviously over my head.  Maybe it wasn't?  I haven't asked.  I remember thinking my Titanus Prime (in retrospect that is an unfortunate name) was better cause Titan becoming Titanus Prime was superior to Hot Rod becoming Rodimus Prime or Shocker become Shockspearimus Prime.  But I was an Ego-maniacal prick as a child anyways.  I just thought Shockspearimus was an odd mouthful.  That was enough to sour me on the whole thing.  When your name is Willie, you tend to take nomenclature seriously.  I spent a lot of my life coming up with better names for myself than the one I was given at birth.

Now, I remember reading the dossier on the back of a GI Joe's package (I'm pretty sure it was Bazooka's), and knew to ask his mom how to pronounce the character's name.  She was an educator, but, I never remember being formally told so, I just sort of knew???  It was confirmed a decade later when in college my sophomore year RA mentioned having her for English class in High School.  If I had the combination of exposure to more information about my neighbor and contextual awareness, I would have figured out that Shockspearimus might have equaled a Shakespeare reference, and makes me wish I remembered more of his actual story to pick up on any other allusions or homages to the bard.  But I was a pretty unrefined kid at that point, and didn't really explore anything beyond contemporary comic books until I moved from good old Cool Valley and started thinking I was an Immortal and sparing with the neighborhood tough kid where I moved.