She also imparted knowledge garnered from her school classes. She tried to explain the Geneva Protocol to me but I couldn’t grasp a war having rules—it didn’t make sense to me that there were rules about how to kill people much less it being OK to kill people. This was my first introduction to the insanity of being human.
She worked hard trying to teach me the correct enunciation of words like living room which stayed stubbornly the “lemon room” until I learned the alphabet and started to hear the missing letters in my vocabulary. As an adult, I look back and am sorry I lost the magical room that “lemon room” evoked.
And though she stayed compassionately silent on whom Santa Claus really was, Susan revealed that we spoke not American but English. I was already reeling from learning that other languages like French were spoken. I pleaded uselessly that, at the very least, Americans spoke the “right” language and the others were wrong.
My childhood was full of such pitfalls and disillusionment. The tree I thought was hundreds of feet tall turned out to be a mere 30. Dogs were not just boys and cats weren’t only girls. It was endless, this peeling back of my world, until sometimes it seemed that only the monsters were real, kept alive by forays into the butcher’s end of the market where strange and vaguely recognizable body parts, like giant tongues and glassy-eyed fish that stared through me, were material proof of their existence.
Happily I learned of new marvels at the same rate my illusions were debunked: crystal palaces of frost rising from the mud, floating creatures of color called butterflies, the saltiness of the ocean, the way light bends and ripples underwater. I saw life true and beautiful and raw until I accumulated the barnacles of growing up. Now I’ve ripened to the sweetness of being in my mid-fifties with decades of working at stripping away the things I once thought were more important than seeing life with fresh eyes--child’s eyes.
Today I watched the rippling walk of a gold and black fuzzy caterpillar and confirmed, once again, that grace is in the details.