Misperceptions

One of the joys and pains of life is looking back on our perceptions--those views we once thought infallible. When 13-year old Briony, the child prodigy poet, in Ian McEwan's novel, Atonement, bursts into the library to find her sister, Cecilia and Robbie, locked in what Briony assumes as assault--a "true" act of violence, her young mind cannot register the event, the act of love.  She immediately assumes the worst.  It confirms a letter Robbie has sent Cecelia, a torrid letter marked with a word Briony doesn't even know, let alone understand.

The letter moves through the outraged Tallis [tentacles, trellis-like?] family. The police arrive and take Robbie away to prison for assault.  Cecelia remains frozen--whispering only, "I will wait for you. Come home to me." Robbie spends three years in prison and then heads off to Dunkirk and the Somme.

What of our own youthful misperceptions?  Like Briony, we had only the language of our surroundings.  We defined events with the limited words and experiences of youth.  When Buzzy Koonz, baseball cap backwards on his head, an oily hank of hair blowing in the Mojave wind, screeched his Western Flyer around the Stover twins, my heart leaped.  Now there is a cool guy with a cool bike and as a 6th grader, "going out" with twins!  Twins who were 7th graders!

A few months later we moved to our new home in town.  I left Buzzy and his strange swearing habits and the Stover twins whose parents were proud owners of a collection of books, hidden under their bed. Then one Saturday afternoon I "read" the secret books with Buzzy and the Stover redheads.  I waded through plots and descriptions of hot-breathed encounters in woods and in the backseats of cars, parked like trout, tail to head in what they called The Drive-In Theater.  But my attention wandered over to Tommy Weaver's, who had the most exquisite collection of matchbooks in town.  We made our last foray to Bishop Creek to the dreaded Seven Foot, the infamous "deep" pool and waterfall that cooled our desert-baked bodies that last summer on Emory Lane.

I believe that the people in our lives are "messengers"--of light and truth--and darkness.  Yet a darkness that could contain later light. Our conversations, our musings and imaginations are forms of prayer and bring insight and "light" [but often conflicting opinions]. One scholar calls conversation a "sifting of opinions." Could his mean that a conversation, a kind of sharing of light and darkness becomes something else when it morphs into a debate, an argument, a contentious parallel battle with words?  Wendy Ulrich contends that lasting marriages are built on the foundation of "settling critical issues."  Even these differences often transform us and the marriage.

Is there room, then, for those apparently dark messengers who pass into and out of our lives?  Do I yet have space for Buzzy and the dreaded Stover girls?

We are sent here to learn the right words, light that secures [but not always and forever sometimes] our encounters with other humans.  What could I bring as an 8th grader to my relationship with R. Tomayo?  He could throw a tight spiral 30 yards [usually on the money], he knew all about Tijuana Bibles, and much about female topography.  His carnal knowledge stretched far beyond my own. I would catch some of those spirals and read a couple of his cartoon-like illustrated Bibles, but I remained too light to follow him into the trenches of tackle football.  It took two weeks and several scrimmages to realize that even in the days of leather helmets and no face masks that 125 lbs. was not enough weight for a middle linebacker.

RT and I met daily in band.  I couldn't bulldoze a running back like Dale Denton but I excelled at the trumpet---First Trumpet.  Under RT's  tutelage, however, my sophomore year the trumpet sounded less clear.  I answered instead the Siren whisper of girls. Yet I treasure the "youthful follies" of which Joseph Smith speaks [But I'm certain his "follies were not mine]. 

With darkness or folly came experience and eventually resolution about the kind of truth I wanted that would outlast a Saturday night.