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The Great Secret
I’m driving down the road, sunny day, and there’s this girl running in the bike lane--skimpy shorts,
tank top, bright blonde pigtails--I’m looking at her from behind--except that when I look again in
the rearview mirror--I know I shouldn’t do this, but I do--when I look in the mirror I see she’s
not young at all but a woman about my age. I have this impression of a softening, wrinkling face
and sagging cheeks, and I’m wondering the rest of the day why this should be so shocking and sad.
Memento mori, of course: my own yellowing teeth and flabby throat, the way my mouth turns down
when I’m tired. But it’s more, too. It’s the sadness, say, that parents feel when they think
of a beloved child wrinkled and old one day, bloated or blurred or bent. That sense of inevitability,
of a child’s mortality, built-in, like a secret, fatal disease that’s wiping out a whole generation
all over the world, as it wipes out every generation really, everywhere, and has from the beginning.
But we never talk about it. It’s the Great Secret. We go to school plays and watch soccer
games and put up pictures on our refrigerators and never stop to admit what we know deep
down is true, that this little person we love, with the blonde pigtails and the missing front
teeth--I mean a real child, I mean my daughter Maggie, ten years ago, not this middle-aged
woman who only looks like a girl from behind, in her running shorts and with her thin,
tan legs--that this person we love so much will leave one day and one day soon and never,
never come back. The sadness of it is unbearable. Unendurable.
But I’m thinking this driving along the road on a brilliant, sunny day, the hazelnut orchard
passing by on my right--then the top of the hill--and another part of me is wondering, why should
I be afraid? Why should I fear the grave? There’s a character in this Ursula Le Guinn novel
I’ve been reading. Her name is Takver, or something. She’s a biologist on a desert moon,
married to a physicist, and she loves the soil and the microbes and the processes of nature
so much, she longs one day to become loam herself, to return to where she knows she comes
from, that intricate richness, dark, like coffee grounds. And sometimes I almost feel that way, too.
I do a little now, as I crest the hill and the car drops down and I look out at the city, my city,
laid out so cleanly and neatly, the streets and the trim, little houses and the sun bouncing off
the windshields of a thousand shiny cars. For a moment I don’t fear death at all. I feel light
and well-oiled and my joints feel loose and there’s not a thought in my head but a sense of
well-being and the awareness of how warm the sun is and how bright the day is, and green,
all the leaves everywhere, and how soft, all of it soft, and when I feel that way even for
a second how can I see death as anything but a fuller releasing, a deeper letting go
to what seems so soft and green and in any event inevitable? And not just the loam,
maybe, not just the richness, but who knows even a rising again altogether, in the
body, this body, exactly as promised? I am the Resurrection and the Life. I am the Life.
I am Risen. What if it’s true? What if it’s all true? And if it is--if it is--why
should I worry about the young girl with the tan legs and the blue shorts who is
really an old woman, an old woman in pigtails, running in the bike lane?
Or my own dear Maggie, standing by the nasturtiums, Aberdeen, 1987--she’s three,
and blonde, in a pale yellow dress--another bright, sunny day--flowers in her hand--why
should I care if they will die, the woman and the girl, as they will, they will?
If death is merely a letting go, a surrendering, if maybe we even rise and ascend,
still wholly ourselves, why should I grieve for the death of my daughter,
and her growing old before that, and all of us growing old, all of us?
The other day, channel-surfing, I started watching Leave It to Beaver. Beaver and Wally
were home from school and Mrs. Cleaver had made them a cake, a coconut cake. It was sitting
on the counter of that black and white kitchen, silvery lawn and silvery trees visible through
the screen door, and they were talking about a problem at school, the three of them--Wally was
running for school president and the other kids were making fun of him. Now, I don’t think
this is Freudian, though I was Beaver’s age when the show was first on and my mom was Mrs
. Cleaver’s age and wore dresses a little like hers sometimes. I really don’t think that’s it.
And I don’t think it’s nostalgia either, a longing for a lost time, however simple and clean
that kitchen looked, however I might have felt drawn to it for a minute, as if I could enter
into that scene and that frame of film and disperse into the black and white air of it molecule
by molecule like some strange experiment in my fifth-grade science book. No. It’s just that
suddenly I noticed how trim Mrs. Cleaver looked, the way her crisp gray dress smoothed down
to her waist, I noticed the belt around her waist, and how the fabric flared out beneath
the belt to about midcalf. For the first time I realized how beautiful Mrs. Cleaver was,
really beautiful, the way her soft hair curled around her ears and those plain white
earrings she always wore, and that really caught me by surprise. It stopped me.
Those earrings. Those two perfectly round, white shells.
Chris Anderson is a professor at Oregon State University and also a Catholic Deacon.
He has published a number of books, including a book of poems, My Problem with the Truth,
as well as poems in many journals.
Email: Chris Anderson
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