Five







Five

 cowering in the dark
at the end of the hall
behind closed doors
thin bones clacking.
Waiting for Kronos
Red streaked yellow teeth
whiskery gaping jaw
hungry for his children

This is a game we played at Grandma's house, it used to quite frighten me. We would close all of the doors into the hallway, on hot summer afternoons, and make a fort with pillows that we could crouch behind. Then all five of us would get in there and tell each other terrifying stories. We could stay there for hours.

Later, when we were teenagers, we looked back on that game and in our adolescent sophistication, endowed with sure and certain knowledge of the world, we condemned our game as sick a symptom of a dysfunctional family. Because we were afraid, not without reason, of adults and the world.

But it wasn't as bad as all that. What we really had was much more vivid and gruesome imaginations than were strictly good for us. I used to read fairy tales, the real ones not the Disney ones, and turn them into plays for the others. Which is probably why we were crouched behind the wall. I also told the others that we were the real people enslaved by the giants. That the giants were treating us like guests now, giving us food and shelter, but you must never forget they are giants and giants eat people.

That is a cautionary tale. You can see the poetry of it. Grownups were a little dicey. You could go along for days and weeks with nothing but their love and attention, then suddenly, for no reason that you could tell, they turned dangerous. And what child has any control over their lives. It is a very hazardous position.

I thought when my children were little that I would now have a whole new group of kids to play with and to terrify with stories. But it didn't work out that way. The way it worked out was they didn't like my stories, they didn't want to play make believe, and anyway being the Mom was sort of time consuming, we didn't play as much as I wanted. I can't imagine why they were such literal little boys.

I was really close to my brothers and sisters until I moved to Northern California. They went on being close and taking care of each other. But I went further and further away from them. And I liked it. I liked not being tied up by doing things and being things for people that I didn't want to be. I really got tired of being asked to believe the lies and plausible excuses of the two that ended up doing drugs and drinking too much.

I used to kind of believe that having drama and tragedy in your life made things more interesting, made you a more interesting person. But I slowly found, while studying math, that there was a lot to be said for boredom. It wasn't nearly as wearing as tragedy.

I used to tell my Sister that my husband and I were the Blands. No we didn't want to do drugs, no we didn't want to screw around with other people, we didn't want to go to parties. We liked to stay home. Reading, studying, talking together, maybe taking a walk or eating out. We spent all of our time outside of work with each other or our children. Not that we had to be together. Each of us had our own interests and hobbies. We spent time apart, but usually together and because we wanted to. We did most things because we wanted to. Not that we only wanted to do fun things. Sometimes we wanted to do something difficult or unpleasant, because it was the right thing to do.

It wasn't always great. Sometimes I could glimpse that we were missing some things. Missing some of the excitement and glory of life. I guess we traded them for peace and security. I guess both of us had spent too much time crouching at the end of some giants hallway, bones clanking together in fear because some giant was hungry. 

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Reposted by dovie devine to Feeding the Baby at 4/01/2006 08:04:00 AM

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