Archive for April 2013 | Monthly archive page
Summer, 1988 / Nine years old
Dipping my paddle into the dark water, I guide the canoe toward the widest part of the lake, just the way my grandfather has taught me. The night air reverberates with the steady hum of cricket song punctuated here and there by throaty bullfrog calls.
Despite the drought, humidity burdens the air with a heaviness that makes daytime scarcely bearable. But some nights a relative coolness ascends, as if the ground itself takes enough pity on us to offer up some small measure of its dank freshness.
Reaching the center of the lake, I stop and let my eyes sweep over my surroundings. The water’s edge is fringed so heavily with trees that the lights from the houses ringing the lake barely penetrate. Laying the paddle flat across the boat’s metal rim, my mind turns to my grandfather’s stories of anchoring his canoe out here and sleeping in it for the night. I consider lying down in the boat’s bottom, but remembering how dusty it is I instead tilt my head and lean back to observe more of the sky.
Taking in the full expanse overhead, my breath is at once shocked from my body. All the velvety space I’m accustomed to seeing in brighter suburban skies is now speckled, splashed, scattered with innumerable luminous pinpricks. I inhale deeply, letting the wet, earthy scents of the lake and its surroundings fill me up as my eyes consume this unfamiliar expanse of sky.
An image springs to mind of my dad before me, of his parents before him—of each of us having come out onto this little lake alone, each of us surely having had nearly this same experience. Who am I in relation to all of that, to the family name I carry? I say my full name to myself, repeating it over and over again, its sounds filling my head until it dissolves into mere syllables—empty, meaningless, ridiculous.
Suddenly it’s almost as if I’m suspended, my own identity a separate and scarcely recognizable thing. I’m a human animal sitting in a metal vessel, surrounded by water and the fathomless spread of a summer night sky. All of it matters and none of it matters. Unmoored, I float in this place of knowing and not-knowing. It seems my own name is not who I am. This is a wholly new idea, and utterly terrifying. If I’m not my name, my identity, then who am I? It’s as if I’m untethered, drifting solitary in an unknown world.
I pull my attention to the boat again, to the night breeze grazing my skin, to the smell of seaweed and the rustle of trees. Turning the canoe, I point its bow toward my grandparents’ dock, and within minutes I’m once again binding the rope to its friendly wooden sturdiness.
From up the slope, the warm lights of the house beckon me back to the familiar, to the familial, to all I already know
He walks toward me across the park, feet dragging and head bowed. Flopping into my lap, he folds himself in sideways and lays his ear against my heart.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
He sighs heavily. “Nobody loves me.”
I’m glad he can’t see the surprise my face undoubtedly betrays, but he can surely feel it in the sudden rigidity of my body. This day was coming, I knew, but I didn’t think it would come before he’d even turned five.
I pause, resting my cheek on his head as I dig within myself for a response. “Is that really true?” I say after a moment.
He nods his head, certain.
“Let me ask you something,” I say, feeling around for the tools that have helped me and trying to formulate a way to share them with him. “Do you notice how when you think that thought, it’s sort of like a voice in your head saying something to you?”
He waits for a moment, maybe testing it out. “Yeah,” he says finally.
“And you see how you can notice that voice?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says shakily.
“Well, that part of you that notices is the real you. The voice isn’t the real you. I know it feels like it is, but it’s not. It says things like that sometimes, because it gets confused and because it wants to protect you. But it doesn’t always know the truth.”
He thinks for a minute. “How do I know the truth, then?”
“You feel that part of you that notices? The part that hears the voice?” I ask. He nods. “That’s really you. Does that part of you feel that no one loves you?”
He pauses. “No,” he says after a moment. “You love me.”
“I really do,” I say. “And can you also feel that in your body?”
He takes a hand, still fleshed out with a slightly baby-ish chubbiness, and places it on his chest, fingers splayed wide. “Yeah,” he says. “Here.”
I smile and let my nose find his hair, inhaling its scent of sunshine and boy sweat. He sighs and settles into me more closely. “So, when you hear a thought from that voice and then you feel tight and sad, now you know that it’s not true. What do you think you could do at a time like that?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
“Maybe you could notice it, and ask yourself if it’s true?”
“Yeah,” he says. “And I could feel in my heart that it’s not true.”
“You could, yeah. It will probably say things like that again, and other things too. If you need help, you can always come to me and we’ll look at it together, okay?” I say, squeezing him tightly.
“Okay, yeah,” he says, his attention turning away from me now. He stands and wraps his little arms around my neck, swiftly kissing my forehead before he runs off to whatever’s next, feet kicking up tufts of dirt in his wake.
