So in one of the comments to that woeful empty nest piece I did the other day, a young friend of mine (as long as you haven’t gotten married or had kids, I would consider you young if you were ninety – which has something to do with the concept of freedom) said, “Time keeps on going for all of us, doesn’t it?” And as I read that, I felt like I was standing in the midst of a constant wind, blowing against my face.
Once, I was a child. A kind of difficult-to-deal-with child, I think: too smart, too mouthy, too worried about being left behind. Never sure of my place.
Our first house: Kansas City. There was snow. TV had just been invented. (We had one. With a two inch square screen. I wanted to be Spin and Marty. Yeah – and how many of you have a clue what I’m talking about?). Before I was four, the second house: Los Angeles. No snow. A completely different planet.
Then school, where I was lost. All those strangers. Different teachers every year. (Mr. Koenershield in 5th grade, a navy man; the class was orderly and creative. He was a tough guy – you didn’t want to disappoint him. I did a couple of times. And cried afterwards. He’s the one I remember.)
Third house: back to the Kansas City planet again, rented. It had stairs. A new school. SO not L.A.
Fourth house, about a year later. Still in Kansas City. We built this one. I loved it. Almost had my own room. Another new school, or maybe two. 6th (grammar school) and 7th grade (junior high).
About a year later: the fifth house—totally different solar system (why did they bother to build the last one if they were just going to leave it?): New York. Junior High again, but worlds different—worlds. Two years later, high school – which was fed by three junior highs.
I was blundering through all of this – the classes, the social stuff.
Four years later: turning left at Alpha Centauri: the sixth house. In Texas, where they were still doing ratted hair. My senior year. Oy.
Less than a year later: I left for University. To Utah, where I’d never been. There were mountains. Really, really big ones. I had turned 17 the May before I left. I thought I was old enough to go. Now I think about it, I was only three and a half months past being 16 years old.
The dorms. Then home for the summer and my first job: Six Flags Over Texas.
Back to school. An apartment
Home to work for the summer.
Back to school. A rented house. No more summers at home. Shakespeare in the Park (I was Puck). A different rented house. Graduation. A job at the mall. A job with my dentist. Graduate school. A different house. Teaching. Two years later, a house bought and a different school. Then marriage. A house built.
Over the following thirty years: 4 kids. My real life. Same house.
( And thank you very much for your patient attention through all of this.)
The only unchanging elements of this me-child’s life were my immediate family and my grandmother Jeanne’s house—and Jeanne herself. Like rocks in a stream.
My parents were eternal. My sibs were in flux. My father—a smart, hard working, creative guy with tons of drive—had high expectations of me; I let him down a lot. That was part of the unchanging truth. My mother was actually the structure of the universe – the ground under our feet, the color of the sky, gravity—always working in the background, steady, willing, kind and again, very, very smart. So we were our own planet, every so often shooting off across the universe.
Till I left home. Out on my own. Floating in space.
The point of this story is—did I ever really have a solid idea of who I was through all of this? Or was I just all along a morphing ME, while the world changed around us? Who was I, then? And what does the word “was” mean?
Ice changes its shape constantly and in response to the air and water around it. But ice has an absolute nature that makes it predictable. These shapes, I pulled out of the watering trough over a couple of mornings. I was taken with that round, knobby thing and wondered how the devil it came to be shaped that way.
Let’s say you have a piece of fabric, and you can’t really tell what color it is. Is it blue or green? Is it black or dark blue? Red or more magenta? So you start holding it up to other things – against this, the fabric is really pretty blue. But up to that, it’s more green.
Where is the truth?
Can the fabric be absolutely defined? Is there some universal law by which its color can be measured? Or is its color actually only established in relationship to the surroundings? Or maybe just functionally established. Maybe a true green wouldn’t be as green against that background as this not really quite green color?
An interesting pattern of wind-blown snow and frost. It was so real when I shot this with my phone (I’m learning to remember that the phone can record images). But the pattern was gone by afternoon. Again, it’s very existence is determined by temporary conditions of air and water.
That, my dears, is my thesis for the day. Who are any of us? And how do we recognize ourselves? And maybe – how do we legitimately define ourselves?
to be continued again, next time with fancy charts . . .
Stopping by the barn on a snowing morning. Dreary, huh? But wait – do you see the surprises in all that gray?
You can see them better now.
Ah – there they are. Out of nowhere – a flock of, something. I don’t think they’re swallows. We see them in spring.
But joyful anyway. You say, “An exaltation of larks.” An ascension of skylarks. A flight of sparrows. But I will call this a dance of winged things. Or a celebration, or a rejoicing or a bravery – of whatever hunting, dancing, swooping kind of feathered creature this might be.
OOOOO – more of them. But – then –
Ahhhhhh – glorious.
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