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On the living room shelf of my childhood home was a book. In fact, there were countless books on our living room shelves, so many stories, voyages, words that saved and transported. But the one book I most remember, the book I am destined to inherit (my mom tells me) is the book of British bedtime stories.
Now, I believe the name of the anthology is not quite that, but it was something similar, and we always knew which book it was, with its thin pages and countless tales. I have googled the real name, looked in all sorts of ancient booksellers as I am tempted so often to search for my past now, but the copy that my mom has remains the only one I know of. The treasury was my introduction to so many writers: Forster, Joyce, even Wodehouse.
To put this book in its proper context, you must know that my mother is an Anglophile. She has never traveled to Britain, regrettably, and it seems at this point that she probably never will. Her England is one of dreams, Monty Python, Bleak House, murder mysteries, Spode china, Christopher Robin, the Lavender Hill Mob, tartans, Glyndebourne, Shakespeare recalled in senior learning series classes… England would indeed suit her, I am sure, if she found any bit at all like the stories we knew so well.
I may have been around thirteen when I first took down the book. The story that then struck me the most was one by John Galsworthy, “The Apple Tree.” It was a story of a grave at a crossroads, love forgotten, then remembered, lovers from vastly different worlds coming together, impossibly. It made my teenage heart dream, planting all sorts of bucolic fantasies of splendid love and possibility and rapture and heartbreak.
I find a sort of safety in these recollections, a delving into origins, language slightly altered by the crossing of an ocean, humour defining the way that we can speak the same language and still look at the world so differently.
Primary shades, plus white and green, in the simplest shapes. Equilateral triangles of a skirt, part of a pine tree, or something more abstract. These were the forms that made stained glass of our front windows, names written to read from the street. “HI MOM!” a great welcome home.
I played with Colorforms when I was little, though I do not remember actually owning them. They were not the same forms that now are scenes from television shows (though I am sure it would be easy enough to craft a SpongeBob). I am not sure they even made that kind back then. The pliable, indestructible shapes were fun, inexplicably, and became so once more later, on a mirror during my younger son’s occupational therapy session. He liked yellow–still does–and would stand and reach to peel them from the glass, hard as that was for him. I searched for those old toys then, when my own children were young, and found them in the strangely anachronistic world made possible by the internet. There, with so many other treasures, were the cherished playthings, and I bought them.
For all the toys that made their way into our lives over the years, it is the simple ones that remain now that even the youngest has nearly outgrown most things. What is still here? Legos are ubiquitous in this world, with their many functions. Blocks, too, in similar fashion. Paper, to fold, to draw on, to tear, and all sorts of things that decorate it. Scissors. For all the flashing lights and brand-consciousness, even way back when, we quickly noticed that a tickled Elmo–the narcissist–continued to laugh long after we did. We play to explore, not simply to watch. We play to define our own selves, and not to be defined. And if we are lucky, or wise, we may be distracted, but we always return to those things that allow us our own creativity. In that, we show the world who we really are, somehow… maybe a red circle with a yellow triangle, arranged just so.
I am amazed still, everyday, at the full and utter abandonment our society encourages for those who find their lives altered in a single moment. Illness strikes, an accident, and life somehow becomes smaller in some ways. Alone, some face a future that treats them differently, as less human, simply because they need help. Indeed, this need is what defines us perhaps most as human.
Surprisingly, cynicism has not yet caught me. I see a rainbow of sorts, black and white and all shades of gray, a light however dim at the end of the tunnel. I remain astounded by hope and adaptation, and by the goodness of those who do care. I remain shocked by impatient staff who snap at people who have done no wrong, as much as I may see the plight of the underpaid worker. I remain shocked at the efforts of the kindest workers, underpaid, undervalued for the work they do in these most human moments.
We may find our humanity in our own moment of crisis, but perhaps a better measure is in our response to the crises of others. Can we forgive helplessness, or does it push us away at its demands for our assistance? Can we simply stop, listen, or are we ever distracted by the noise of a world that ignores all but the strong?
Listen. The voices are quiet sometimes, impatient themselves at other times. They tell stories, grand stories, of times not so distant, of people and faces that look different now, but still are a part of our own conscience, and of ourselves. Help. A small gesture, perhaps. A knock on the door, an errand run. It is the stuff that makes us alive and beyond appearances richer.
People age, more and more. People live through illnesses that would have killed them in the past. In this we may expect eternal youth and wellness, but in this life, extended, we are challenged, redefined. Challenge our humanity; let us meet the challenge. Forget no one, fear not, do not look away. Remember, this is us. It is our humanity, and it is the best thing we have.
“Open your present when you are alone,” my sister-in-law warned. When the box arrived on my fortieth birthday, I sat at the end of our very long driveway, and peeled off the tape. From inside, it stared back at me: a voodoo doll.
The doll was dressed in fabric woven with gold threads, beaded. She had traveled from New Orleans, before the flood, New Orleans full of dark old mysteries and black magic and sin. The package included pins and instructions. This, my brother and his wife laughed, was the answer to my woes.
Woeful I was at that time, as I pondered the pain, the shambles of a life that in part must have only existed in my own mind. Revenge is sweet, so they say. So they said, as they urged me to throw his clothes to the curb. And yet I could not.
“Wreak vengeance on the person who has wronged you, allowing them little sleep, implanting fear of you in their mind, bringing peace and respect back into your life.”
It was a joke, I knew, as tears streamed down my face. Funny, yes, but oh so sad. The little doll inside terrified me.
Friends suggested that using the pins might alleviate the distress. I hoped, I hope still, for humanity to reign. I waited, in anxious moments that he stormed around the house. I hid, waiting for him finally to leave. I hid the doll, powerful as she seemed.
What if it worked? What if I stabbed the doll, like darts at a picture, and the symbolic sadness materialized into his pain and suffering? I never could. My doubt, or belief, was enough to keep the doll packed away.
What is to be gained in revenge, in destroying another person by whatever means? Over subsequent months, years, it seems he suffers sufficiently in his simple pursuit of “payback time”, as he sees it. A new method of terror crops up every so often, a different object that he uses to maintain control over me, and he knows me well. Perhaps his methods works. Perhaps he has his own brand of voodoo. Perhaps he gains the upper hand, gauntlet ready. Perhaps he keeps his gates and fences up to enclose us in impossibility, and then pretends that he does nothing.
Revenge is sweet? I think not, as I see a monster emerge beneath the smile. Power, manipulation, and even voodoo may destroy indeed. But the victim, at least, remains human.
The candy hearts urge us on. “Luv Ya,” they say, so we do. Still, for all the enthusiasm, the day comes and goes with a few scraps of paper, ephemeral flowers, chocolates too good to sit uneaten for too long. These are fleeting signs of something… affection, perhaps. Perhaps guilt, if love is not true. Better not to receive them, then.
Love cannot be summed up in a dinner, or a day. Love is the simple meals, the ordinary days, the passing time and the gestures that link that time. It is the moment, repeated, that we care. Valentine’s Day is over, but true love, for those who have it, will remain.
