Blog on the Lillypad
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
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Innocence I was thinking about innocence yesterday. There were long summer days a lot of years ago when Bruce and I were still kids. For being 13 and 12, he and I got into some pretty weighty discussions. My life was bordered by the dark edge, where my father was loud, angry, and brutal, and my mother was gone to mysterious places and never came home. But adultery was just a word to me. In spite of that one dark horizon that I did not comprehend (and so never thought about unless it directly confronted me), all my other horizons were bright and broad. |
I was fortunate. I had the kind of best friend that people write books about. He and I did innocent things: played chess at first, but I decided I didn't like chess when he beat me 40 times out of 40 games or something like that. But he was agreeable (as well as brilliant), so we used to play the board game, CAREERS, and LIFE. And he introduced me to Mel Brooks type comedy (before the Mel Brooks movies came out). HOW TO BE A JEWISH MOTHER, and the long playing record, WHEN YOU'RE IN LOVE, THE WHOLE WORLD IS JEWISH.
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For my part, DOCTOR WHO was a vivid new vista for me---cliff hangers, when my stomach would knot up because the horrible creature from outer space had Jo backed into a corner, and the Doctor was wrestling for his life elsewhere, and the song would come on, and as it was Friday I had to wait until *MONDAY* to see what would happen. I would spend the entire weekend making up Doctor Who stories, and I had never done anything like that before either. So to keep up with all my own story ideas, I would write them down to remember them. And that was how I started writing. Neither parent cared in the slightest, but Bruce was always keenly interested. I still write Doctor Who stories. I would rather write them than anything else. |
Last night I wondered if anybody else ever had days like those. And I wished I had them again, but one reason the foundational days like those are so vital to a person's heart and mind is that they come only once, and you don't get them again. And the older you get, the more you realize some people never get them at all. Kids trade off the things that really make them happy to get the things they think will make them happy. Few of them every wise up, and they go into adulthood convinced that they have to play the game---and then they wonder why life turned out so meaningless! Or worse, they blame God. I've never done anything to destroy my own innocence, yet I am not innocent any more. Or maybe I am, and like all innocent people, I am not self aware enough to realize how innocent I truly am. But even I sometimes feel like it's all been burned away, and the sweet, guileless wonder at the "glory of everything" as EB White called it, cannot be experienced at second time.
