Life of Mine

I should have expected my life to turn out this way, full of import. There were always the odds and ends that came to me from friends of my father, books, maps and old diaries of strangers. And he himself gave me such odd artifacts of his life, trusting me to examine them slowly and keep silent. I never remember long discussions with him. He would make simple statements, or ask which way to turn the car. We could end up in a swamp or a museum, it didn’t matter, it was what needed to happen, and we would get out, look around, and make of it what we could. I never felt failure or censure, it was our way, he told me about the fish, he told me how to read the sky, he told me what it was like here forty years ago. My mother never asked me, where did you go, what did you do? It was a quiet place, the place my father took me, and we never told and never would.

In later years there was the amazement of discovering that my father and I were unusual. I had of course assumed that all fathers and daughters shared these intimate, miraculous secrets, until the one time I asked a friend about such things and was met with suspicious stares. And I wondered why my oldest sister resented me. Imagine the horror: the eldest princess of the fairy tale, the beauty, the golden one, being supplanted by a tiny gnome in pigtails. No wonder she hated me. I would hide from shyness, people would beg me to talk while I sat sullen, eyes down, and remained mute while she shone and glittered, smile radiating. Yet, the handsome prince, the prize, the valiant knight, preferred the goose girl in overalls. How maddening.

Even my brother was smitten with me, God knows why. I was terrified of strangers, quiet and trembling. I spent most of my early childhood in closets and behind books I could not yet read. Yet, I was the diminutive mascot of his life, he watched me with interest but did not interfere in what made me so different, accepting it quietly. Here had settled this rara avis in the midst of his prosaic family, and he was content to appreciate me.

    Once I learned to read it was all I ever did, and the fantasies trailed from those glorious pages into my life and started moving through the house.

   I was blessed to live in a family teeming with gigantic personalities, addictions and drama. I was very boring by comparison. The incredible battles of wills I witnessed drew silent, passionate responses from within me. I was a voyeur and a critic, weighing the respective merits of the combatants, dismissing drunkenness and fistfights as passing dreams. The mornings would bring a fresh, washed day; life swirled about me.

 I was the collector of stories, the one who listened and absorbed the family secrets and tales. Uncles, aunts, grandparents, the cousins who were so shuttered, not open and clean like those of my friends, all the myriad of characters who made up my world were the archetypal shadow puppets of my fantasies. I created the worlds they had inhabited in the old country, I imagined them as mythic metaphors, icons of vast proportions. They were grand and simple but they had corners and mists. Their lives were epic. And now, I am becoming the creature of legend for the young ones swimming in the shallows of warm seas.