The winds are blowing the snow sideways across the front of the window, reminding me of Dorothy flying about in her house (well, she wasn’t flying about exactly, the house was) in The Wizard of Oz. I am often captivated by blowing, slanting snow, although if there are patches of tarmac in the picture, not so much, as this reminds me of difficult childhood days and visiting my mother in hospital. Still, I will look no matter which way the wind is blowing, whether the pavement is bare or otherwise. Funny, too, how weather can conjure up all sorts of images. In fact, the sky is my best reminder of times gone past.
Actually, I become emotionally tired and more than a little annoyed when people start harping on people who harp on the past. Don’t these complainers understand that without a past a person has no future? Don’t they get that without looking backward we can’t make our best assessments about moving forward? What is it they’re afraid of? The Boogeyman? Pain? Truth?
If it’s a deeper, darker past you’re wanting to escape, the most efficient way to do that is to look over your shoulder and introduce yourself to your ghosts. “How do you do? My name is Jennifer Coffey, and I would like to say that you look ravishing in white. A little pale, you say? Perhaps I am – but surely not as pale as you.”
Earlier this week, Craig Ferguson interviewed Jeannette Walls, the author of The Glass Castle [ISBN-10: 074324754X ISBN-13: 9780743247542] – a memoir detailing Ms. Walls’ childhood/familial dysfunction, eccentricity, and homelessness. Ferguson, of course, shares his autobiographical experience in American on Purpose [ISBN 13: 9780061719547 ISBN 10: 0061719544]. The two authors commented how readers sometimes associate memoir-writing with a poor-me-pity-me attitude, when nothing could be further from the truth. And I, speaking from the experience of what some might call (albeit occasional) confessional writing, agree with them entirely.
Looking at those difficult times and events is a way of learning, expanding, helping others, and of celebrating the past. What’s the difference between saying, “I grew up in a household where we used coloured markers on our skin to camouflage the holes in our pants” and “I grew up in Liberia where, as children, we were handed guns in order to protect ourselves.” Why is one person’s story more valid than another’s – more palatable, more acceptable, embraced? Why is one kind of looking back commendable and another relegated to self-pitying? I will never understand that. I will never be comfortable in a world where individuals are afraid to be honest about what has been hard for them. I will never figure out how it is that vulnerability somehow becomes equated with weakness when, in fact, the opposite is true.
I wonder, too, if looking into the past weren’t such a useful exercise, why is our children’s literature, and our adult fiction, filled with backward longing? Why did Dorothy, after melting the Wicked Witch of the West and making friends with all of those wonderful creatures, so desperately want to return to the places, and to the memories, that she knew? You might tell me that sepia remembrances of bucolic farms and windy porches are nothing to sneeze at and cannot be compared with family dysfunction and abuse, but I say to you – it’s all the same thing. We all come from somewhere and someone. We all need to go home, at least in our heads, at least sometimes. We all have to root through the attic and unbury the dead.
The Hospital Window by James Dickey
I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.
I drop through six white floors
And then step out onto pavement.
Still feeling my father ascend
I start to cross the firm street,
My shoulder blades shining with all
The glass the huge building can raise.
Now I must turn around and face it,
And know his one pane from the others.
Each window possesses the sun
As though it burned there on a wick.
I wave, like a man catching fire.
All the deep-dyed windowpanes flash,
And, behind them, all the white rooms
They turn to the color of Heaven.
Ceremoniously, gravely, and weakly,
Dozens of pale hands are waving
Back, from inside their flames.
Yet one pure pane among these
Is the bright, erased blankness of nothing.
I know that my father is there,
In the shape of his death still living
The traffic increases around me
Like a madness called down on my head.
The horns blast at me like shotguns,
And drivers lean out, driven crazy --
But now my propped-up father
Lifts his arm out of stillness at last.
The light from the window strikes me
And I turn as blue as a soul,
As the moment when I was born.
I am not afraid for my father --
Look! He is grinning: he is not
Afraid for my life, either,
As the wild engines stand at my knees
Shredding their gears and roaring,
And I hold each car in its place
For miles, inciting its horn
To blow down the walls of the world
That the dying may float without fear
In the bold blue gaze of my father.
Slowly I move to the sidewalk
With my pin-tingling hand half dead
At the end of my bloodless arm.
I carry it off in amazement.
High, still higher, still waving,
My recognized face fully mortal,
Yet not; not at all, in the pale,
Drained, otherworldly, stricken,
Created hue of stained glass.
I have just come down from my father.
1962
