I woke about 5 a.m. and for the next hour memories seemed to wash over me in the way they envelop Robert DeNiro at the end of Once Upon a Time in America, as he succumbs to an opium haze.
Most of these memories were about my life in Texas. I remembered an act of breathtaking selfishness, one that would be done to me just five years later. I remembered the hometown of the young man who helped me move from Waco to San Antonio (Frost), but I couldn’t remember his name, which is shameful, given the remarkable favor he had done for me. I remembered my first apartment, then my second, and then the fact that I had no air conditioning, which seems unthinkable now. I remembered the bedroom, which had nine windows, covered in rose rice-paper blinds from Pier One, and the strange configuration of the kitchen. I remembered the night my neighbor caught a father and son in my bushes, trying to spy through those pink blinds, which seemed rather sad, given that all I was doing was reading. I remembered my neighbor’s cat, James Russell, who had the disposition of a particularly bitter Vietnam veteran, stalking through the neighborhood looking for a grudge, and finally finding it, with disastrous consequences. I remember how James Russell once came into my house unbidden and, when I asked him to leave — literally, said to this orange-and-white tom, “Would you please leave?” — he reared up on his hind legs and bit my calf, a bite that swelled ominously. I remembered that the receptionist at the vet’s office was insulted by my drop-by, telling me sternly: “We don’t do HUMANS,” but it seemed to me that a vet should know more about cat bites than my doctor. I remember the co-worker who burned a tiny hole in my pink-on-green Laura Ashely dress, in the hem, where it was barely visible.
And so it went, until wakefulness became more stressful than the dreams from which I was trying to esape. Yes, detail unlocked emotion, as I keep contending it will, but these were not emotions I wanted. Because these memories brought with them the realization, far from new, that we may think we are the major characters in our own lives, but we are minor characters in hundreds more, and we probably fare about as well as most minor characters do. I’m not sure I could bear to hear these stories from anyone else’s POV — my neighbors, the boy from Frost, my co-worker, the friend I wronged, even James Russell, who probably had some sort of rationale for biting me in the leg.
Lovely, thought-provoking post, Laura.
I’ve been having vivid dreams of the past recently as well, remembering people I hadn’t thought of in years. This had forced me to recall that I was a strange, awkward boy after about the age of thirteen, moving from school to school, never quite fitting in anywhere. Such a change from an earlier childhood that I remember as being uncomplicatedly happy.
In my minor role in my acquaintances’ stories, I would have been the teenager on the periphery, who always seemed to be yearning for something, but was never important enough to the story for the audience to care.
In college, it was, that this all changed. Sophomore year, when I lived in a cramped off-campus house (The “Journalism House”) with a bunch of smart, neurotic men and women who taught me more than I’d learned my whole life before then. I learned how to have women as friends, true friends. I learned the joys of debate, of reaching down inside to come up with a dumb joke or a real insight. I began to learn what it meant to be comfortable in my own skin.
I was still a minor player in their lives, but they were far more important than they ever guessed in my own story.
J
Joe,
I think we may have shared the same life. My early childhood was good and enjoyable also until about age 13. I did the whole school hopping bit and ended up in five different schools between first and eigth grade (My main sadness from this time in my life is that I never developed that one true best friend. I had a best friend at each school, then I had best friends in high school, then new best friends in college).
Fortunately though, things changed for me in my sophmore year of high school. That’s when I joined choir and drama and began writing for the school paper. In a high school of more than 3000 students, I was popular in my own little world so it didn’t matter what everybody else thought about me.
This whole talk though reminds me of one time my mother tried to make things better for me at my private schools. They didn’t have a lot of money, so most of my clothes weren’t exactly top of the line. All of the other kids dressed almost exactly the same in dockers and brand name oxford or polo shirts. My mom decided I needed some new clothes, but god bless her, she has rotten fashion sense.
We ended up cleaning out the Bugle Boy outlet store in West Branch, Michigan and I just remember this hideous pair of bright blue cargo pants and this Pepto Bismal pink and gray striped shirt. I can’t remember if all of the other selections were as bad as this, but I suspect they were.
By the time high school came around I had discovered Ralph Lauren and the Gap and made my giddy transformation into a fashion icon.
As for being a minor character in other people’s lives, I like to think of myself as the eternal McGuffin. I’m the one who always drops into your life and is responsible for drastically altering the course of your own history. Did I mention during my progression from adolscent geek to my current independant self that I developed quite the eqo?