(I’ve been gradually trying to force myself to get some of my project into a space where it can hold me accountable to doing something with it. I finished what I would call a rough draft of “my story” last year. So now I’ve been putting the very rough version in pieces in this space where it can continue to wrestle with it. This is another excerpt).
Glimpses of the invisible world. Seeing through the frosted window
This is how I describe attempts to recover the selective nature of my earliest memories. It is peer into the increasinbly distanced, unfamiliar world that remains ever so evasive even as it remains somehow intimately familiar. Like crossing into that liminal space where the faintness of these memories becomes embodied by a narrative that appeasr to have been writing itself this whole time and which I am only now becoming aware. To tell ones story demands stepping into this space and not just treading carefully, but learning how to trust it.
The most fleeting of these memories remain the ones hardest to give myself over to completely, and yet to question their validity is to also recognize their prevalance. I am reminded of a commentary on C.S. Lewis (Between Interpretation and Imagintion: C.S. Lewis and the Bible by Leslie Baynes) where Lewis’ obsession with the idea of Joy reveals that it is not the static details of our memory that matter, but the retaining of our experience of this moment that rings most true.
So perhaps this exercise of remembering the past is more a permission. A permission to trust that these memories which seem to hold my life in it’s ever so allusive hands do have the power to say something true about what reality is, about who I am, about my story and how it connects to the larger story of this world.
A particularly poignant and vivid memory that remains ingrained in my mind, perhaps the first that I can genuinely recall in such a form, evoking a world of 70’s era vinyl floors, floral wallpaper, and sitting around the old style kitchen booth with my bothers in our matching onesies with the then ukrainian north end neighborhood in the just beginning to blossom city of Winnipeg our outdoor playground.
It was a notable cloudy morning in a city known for its sun, and my younger brother and I were heading to school, my older brother already two steps removed from the equation having disappeared to that strange, bigger than life and somewhat haunting school down the road. This was a time when riding in the back of the station wagon without seat belts was normalized practice. My brother in pre-school, myself in grade 1, he was especially proud to be bringing his brand new hoola hoop to show off to the rest of the class. Nestled in the backwards back seat watching the world pass us by in reverse, this was an age of innocence and anticipation.
And of course the hoola hoop needed its own seat when the wagon has 2 more to spare.
As we both hopped out of the back and gave the obligatory wave goodbye to that old wagon, standing at the edge of the schoolyard as it turned back on to the main road, I can remember hearing the beginnings of the initially quiet and gradually elevating sobbing before I saw it. I turned around to see him looking back at that wagon as it started to pull off, tears filling his eyes- he had forgotten his hoola hoop in the middle seat.
Yes, I can still visualize this moment as though I’m standing there. I can feel the slight coolness of the early morning, the grey notes the clouds were casting on the grounds, the red brick of the old school walls. I can also say with a fair degree of confidence that this is the first time I remember feeling this kind of pain. That old familiar emotion- heartbreak. A moment that one might call a loss of innocence.
The only thing I could think of in this moment was to try and chase down that old wagon and somehow get it back. I tried, but this would prove to be of no avail. It was already gone. I was not fast enough. So I grabbed my sobbing brother and we walked towards the school. Perhaps a bit unbeknowst to me at the time, the feelings of this moment became rooted in this singular revelation that has seemed to stick with me ever since: reality had failed him. I wanted- check that, I wanted to be able to fix things in this moment. And I couldn’t. I felt, in a phrase, betrayed along with him, uncertain of how to reconcile this with the world which, up until then, had felt ordered and right.
If this seems a bit much to accept from a 7 year old kid, as though I’m overplaying a moment all these years later with unnecessary drama, it nevertheless is something that would come to define me. Or at least my awarness of how my brain works. For as small and ordinary as this experience was, it was equally a moment that set in play a lifelong wrestling with such tensions. How do I make sense of this world? How do I make sense of our place in it? How do I reconcile these seeming restless desires for rightness in a world that consistantly casts things into disarray?
How do I find my story within that.
All these years later and I’m not sure I’m any closer to an answer. I do, however, have perhaps a bit more clarity on what that struggle is and why it matters.
The Stories of my Life 