ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties

Last night, as I was having trouble falling asleep, I thought about how I have always, for as long as I can remember, had trouble falling asleep.  As a child, however, the unquietness of my mind stemmed from far more fanciful, yet strikingly more fearful subjects.  I was, in general, a bold kid.  I’d touch any bug, perform any daring stunt, tackle any social situation (shyness came along with bad skin and unfortunate fashion decisions in junior high), but I was cripplingly frightened of the shadow-world of possible evil I imagined when alone in the dark.

Ritual kept me safe.  Every night, after my parents read to me and tucked me in, I would say, “I love you I love you, goodnight goodnight” and they would answer with the same redundant phrase, as I had instructed them to do.  You had to say it twice, you see, to make absolutely certain it was heard and understood.  Then they would leave the door open a crack with the hall light on, so a narrow beam of gold fell comfortingly across my bed.  Sometimes, when Daddy was in a silly mood, he would leave the door open a “butt crack,” measuring the width of the opening with his posterior.  I would laugh, but when he had gone I would get up and close it to its normal two inches…he didn’t know (how could he!) that skeletons could creep in through a larger opening.  With the skeletons safely shut out, I only had to worry about the witches in the closet, the mummy in the niche over my closet, and whatever-it-was lurking under my bed.  “Everybody and everything, I love you I love you, goodnight goodnight,” I would whisper out loud, to ensure that the ghoulies, ghosties, and beasties of every sort didn’t feel offended or left-out and creep in to take their revenge.  I pulled the covers up to my chin–to protect my neck from vampires–and lay on my side–to protect my heart from the stabbing blades of “murderers.”  I lay in the dark, frightened, and thought about things that troubled me.  About the witches, skeletons, vampires, mummies, and murderers, yes, but also about nothingness and nonexistence.  Someone must have explained to me what death was around the age of five or six, and the concept of non-being gave me a chilling sense of vertigo.  Actually, it still does.

I no longer lie in bed hearing the creaks of the sleeping house as monstrous footsteps of innumerable nightmares.  Contemplations of what it must feel like not to exist are rarely allowed to trouble my mind.  My worries now, however irrational, are far more likely to come to pass than any of my childhood fears.  And yet, while I still have trouble falling asleep, these “realistic” fears are warm and welcoming compared to the perilous nightmare-world I invented as a child, in which safety was secured by a delicate web of precautions and rituals that, if disturbed even a little, might bring disaster.

A rich imagination is a child’s greatest asset by day, and her darkest curse by night.

Fear of the void

Of the several complaints I have about my disability studies course, one is that it makes me feel so damn fragile.  I lay there reading about perfectly average people whose able-bodiedness was snatched away in an instant by a car accident, a sports injury, or a sudden medical condition like stroke or hemorrhage, and as I read I can feel my heartbeat in the hand against my temple.  The layers of skin and bone, the delicate connections of nervous tissue, the harmonious functioning of the complex whole–it all seems so vulnerable and breakable, like an antique china vase in a children’s playroom.

Death terrifies me.  When I was a very little girl, I used to get out of bed and sit at the top of the stairs while my parents read and talked in the living room.  When they noticed me, I would come down, climb into my mother’s lap, and tell her, in tears, that I didn’t want to die.  I remember being told that most people die when they are very old and that little girls like me had nothing to worry about.  But, you see, I remember that like it was yesterday when truly it was fifteen years ago.  In another fifteen years I’ll be in my mid thirties, and in another fifteen and another, it won’t be such a comfort that death is for the old.

Some people say it is illogical to be afraid of death.  When you die, they reason, you won’t even know you’re dead, so what is there to be frightened of?  But non-being is like a void; when I think of it, it swallows me up and paralyzes me with the claustrophobia of the immense.  I always picture being dead as floating in an outerspace devoid of stars: cold, dark, silent, alone.  The fact that I won’t be alive to experience it doesn’t make death less frightening…it is what makes it frightening in the first place.  The absence of everything is a vacuum, is space, is cold, dark, silent, and alone.

So, much as it scares me that I could slip on some ice, fall wrong, and break my spine, ending up paralyzed and unable to communicate, it scares me more that I could fall really wrong and end up nowhere at all.  While I like a class that makes me think, I don’t so much like a class that spirals me down the path of vertigo and terror that is contemplation of my own fragile mortality.  There are some things that don’t bear thinking on when you’re still too young to die.

A moment of pre-holiday nostalgia

I was going through old pictures for a class project today and I found this one and it got me thinking.  It’s November now, which means I am avidly looking forward to the Christmas holidays.  I love Christmas, not because of the time off school or the presents, but because of the togetherness, the songs, the food, and this unquantifiable warm, glowy essence that makes the commonplace seem magical.

The physical expression of this ephemeral quality is what struck me about the picture.  I was, I think, three or four years old and definitely hadn’t figured out the source of the things that appeared under the tree on Christmas morning.  When I look at my face in this picture, I doubt I was thinking about anything.  I was just experiencing the pure glee of riding this giant, shiny, magnificent horse that had been plopped down in the middle of my grandparents’ living room by a beneficent spirit.  That whole-body, whole-mind, whole-heart-consuming joy is, I think, the source of my excessive excitement about the Holidays.

But, to some extent, I’ve lost it.  Christmas still glows, but its light is more subdued, like a candle flame instead of a blazing fire.  Wisps of that old feeling curl in the turky-scented air and hide among the needles scattered over the packages and the carpet.  There is still the comfort of my cousins’ laughter in the next room and the warm contrast of gold-lit interior against the snowy night sky.  But Christmas is like a play that, when I was young, I experienced in all its mystery and light from a cushy front row seat.  Now I’m an actor–I’ve seen the dressing rooms, the wings, the backstage mechanics that make the whole production possible, and so I understand too much to see it again with a spectator’s eye.  To thank my parents for the gifts “Santa” left, to read the road-signs marking the distance to Grandma’s house, to help plan and cook the Christmas meal–such understanding weakens the magic.  It’s all a part of growing up, but looking at this silly old picture makes me realize that my seasonal excitement is built on a memory, stemming from nothing more than the ghosts of Christmases past.

Boundary Waters

Heading back up to the Boundary Waters with my dad, Kathleeny, and her dad has a nostalgic sense of deja vous about it.  Our last trip, just before freshman year of college, was the paradoxical combination of a jolt of pure energy and a blanket of perfect peace.  My nerves were taut and humming with worry and excitement about the changes coming up in my life, but all that nervous energy was sucking dry my deeper reserves of strength.  Those few days of water and sky and pine needles–when worry was clouds building in the distance and perfection was stretching on a rock next to my daddy watching the sky for shooting stars–loosened the bowstring of my emotions and left me with the sense that things would be ok.  Well, not so much that things related to the upcoming transition to college would be ok–that, after all, would have made north woods a false prophet and cheapened the feeling of tranquility into a shabby lie.  It was the feeling that things would be ok–that all of my worries might come to pass and still, the world and my life would endure.  Ultimately, the world is so much bigger than our biggest, most life-altering moments that to lose yourself in it is to lose the pressing urgency of your fears.  I came home from that trip at peace with whatever happened, with reservoirs of vitality deep enough to see me through its happening.

Of course, hell happened.  The worst year of my life.  There’s nothing that can mitigate the awfulness of that experience, the unhappiness I brought on my family, or the way I shut down and let it happen.  However, it did prove to me the truth in two old sayings: “adversity builds character” and “this, too, shall pass”.  I did what I had to do to survive that year, and I made it.  I didn’t collapse at the finish line gasping “never again” with my last breath, either.  I came back, I improved, and I made it to the point at which I can’t wait to get back to my independent life in Morris.

I’m a senior now, and I need that peace and deep inner energy to plan another set of life changes for the years ahead.  I need to remember that the world is bigger than my struggles.  I need to remember how far I’ve come since last time.  I need to remember that when I’m crying over my life’s imperfections, the loons are still laughing on their silver moonpaths in the quiet of our north woods.

Talking Eggs

As a child, one of my favorite bedtime stories was a picture book called The Talking Eggs.  In the story, a young, sweet girl named Blanch lives with her unkind stepmother and bratty stepsister in a poor cottage in the woods.  One day, Blanch goes into the forest for some reason or another (no doubt related to her stepmother’s unkindness) and comes across a cabin in which dwells an old woman.  The woman asks Blanch to do several strange things, including grinding a single grain of rice with a mortar and pestle, and before bed she removes her head in order to brush and braid her long grey hair.  In the morning, because Blanch has (of course) been such a good, obedient girl, the old woman tells her to go to the henhouse and fill a basket with eggs, taking only those that cry “take me”.  On her way home, she is to throw them one by one over her shoulder.  In the henhouse there are gold and jeweled eggs crying “don’t take me” and normal (well…apart from their unusual verbal capabilities) eggs crying “take me”.  Blanch, of course, does as she is told and takes the plain eggs and throws them over her shoulder, and pretty dresses, jewels, carriages, ponies, etc. spill out into the path behind her.  Seeing Blanch come home in such style, the stepsister gets jealous and sets off to get herself some miraculous eggs, but of course she is rude, mean, and disobedient to the old woman, and takes the jeweled eggs even though they say “don’t take me”.  When she tosses them over her shoulder, wasps and wolves and serpents burst out and chase her all the way back to the cottage, where she and her mother live in poverty for the rest of their lives while Blanch lives as a fine woman in the city.

I was reminded of this fine story (which isn’t half as fine without its magnificent illustrations) by what I am assuming is the parent tale, The Three Little Men in the Wood by the Brothers Grimm.  In the original, the old woman is replaced by (what else?) three little men, and there are no eggs but rather blessings or curses, but the major parallels are too obvious to be mistaken.  It made me wonder what there was in this old story that made it worth re-fashioning all these years later into the story of The Talking Eggs?  The moral, I suppose, is to respect strangers and the aged and be helpful to them as much as possible, which is a pretty solid message (although, personally, I think it’s rational to be a bit leery of an old woman who can remove her own head…).  Folk tales are so interesting because their roots are so obscure and their branches so far-reaching.  The Grimm Brothers were, I’m guessing, primarily compilers, copying down tales that were already a staple of the oral tradition.  It’d be cool to see how far back one could trace a story recognizable as the seed that sprouted into The Talking Eggs of my childhood.

Sitting quietly

Some people never master the art of silence.  People at work are always bugging me about my propensity to listen rather than speak, and my tendency to go about my work quietly (and, may I add, rather more efficiently than if I were a chatty cathy).  It’s not that I have nothing to say; rather, it either comes of my belief that nothing I have to say will interest the present company, or from the fact that the things going on outside my head are fairly dull compared to those going on within.  At work it tends to be a combination of both of these things.

I’ve been good at sitting quietly since I was a very little girl.  As long ago as I can remember, I would tell what I called “sneak stories” (a.k.a. daydreams) with which I could occupy myself for hours.  Unless tormenting my brother became more interesting than the internal narrative, car trips tended to go fairly smoothly as a result.  Now, I spend as much time worrying, planning, pondering, and fretting as I do narrating, but there is still always that mental world into which I can sink when the physical world grows too difficult, dull, or obnoxious.  It seems to me that people who have to be talking all the time are perhaps just afraid of silence because it forces them to start thinking.