The low spark of a high-heeled boy
Every day at preschool, my son dresses up in costume. It might be as basic as a police officer hat. Sometimes he adds bat wings or an elephant nose. At home he puts on his batboy costume and flaps his wings as he takes flight in the living room. Playing with the concept of name and identity, he uses aliases at our Music Together classes. The alias used to change weekly depending on his book-obsession of the moment -- Art Dog, Mrs. Grizzle, etc. -- but now his chosen identity lasts for months. After weeks of singing "Hello to Chipmunk" one of the summer session parents had assumed that was his name. "You know, Berkeley," she said with a shrug after I set her straight. "You never can tell here." Last week he went to class in full pirate regalia, from scarlett hat to skull-and-crossbones vest to sword. "Nobody will know who I am," he told me with a sly smile.
Part of his dressing up and taking on identities, his love of costume, has something to do with shyness. These are ways to be in public with being totally seen. But I also think he has a bit of the dramatic in him. Like all children, he has a rich imaginative life. He makes a set of bike wrenches into a train, builds a boat out of a pile of sticks, creates robots out of spare toys and junk. My son truly believes that if he runs and jumps fast enough, he can fly. I remember flying, too, that heady moment of lift as I raced across my grandparents' family room and landed in the dark green chair in the corner. It happened. I can't deny it.
I worry about the future of his imagination, about the coming imposition of what it means to be a boy. When he goes to school full-time next year he will be immersed in the culture of the group, where rule-happy children and adults start forcing kids into slots. I remember school as a place where creativity isn't valued and anything different is quashed. I want to protect him, to take his imagination and cover it in gleaming armor, to let him know that flying will always be possible.
The change will happen. It is inevitable. But I hope that he will hold tight to his creativity, protect himself when he needs to without smothering his imagination. The further he gets out in the world, the less control I will have. All I can offer is my love and support.
Image: The high-heeled boy at home, October 2009. Photo by Mr. Trinkle.
New selections from the back catalog of the blog in Best and Rarest!
'Cos I'm a liar
Fact is fiction, fiction is fact. They intermesh. One informs the other until the words themselves become the truth of the writer’s experience, more real than reality.
When I started my
stillbirth
story, I
was hemmed in by fact. I’d show it to my mother
and she would offer corrections to misplaced
fictions, give me her version of events. Some
facts are important. It is not acceptable to
totally make things up, to frame the innocent, or
create character flaws or strengths where none
exist. I wanted to be fair to my parents, which is
a strange impulse when documenting an unfair
situation, but why give fuel to the threatened?
Then I read poet and essayist Mark
Doty’s
piece on memoir, in which he describes his
sister’s wedding dress. It was practical, a
two-piece beige suit with matching pillbox hat.
Did she choose beige as a rebellious stand against
traditional white? Was the choice a result of
parental pressure, the (barely) pregnant bride
denied? Was it a beige suit after all? Why is his
45-year-old vision of the dress so strong? Memory
is elusive, impressionistic, sometimes dead wrong.
Facts are slippery. Doty questions whether these
facts always matter in the telling of one's life
story. Aren’t the impressions real in their own
sense, the memoir a murky middle ground, a product
of the "juncture
of memory and imagination"? In the end, imagination wins
out.
Or it does most of the time. When I found out that my
mother's Aunt Ruth had a spinal condition and
couldn't wear high heels − one of her legs was
shorter than the other − I had to rewrite a scene
(since totally excised) from the Florence Crittenton
Home portion of my stillbirth story. The sound of her
heels clicking against the linoleum floor, keeping
time with my infant mother's screams was almost
irresistible to me, a summing up of institutional
efficiency and a baby's wordless pain. But I had to
change it, especially once I discovered that my
mother was a generally silent baby, calm, and
apparently tearless. The soundtrack of nothing, no
tears, no outward display of emotion, the image of
Aunt Ruth limping as she exited the building with my
stony-faced mother, was much more compelling than a
newborn wailing against metronomic heel taps. Here
was an infant who was already accustomed to being
ignored, a child who grew up under a heavy coat of
suppressed and private pain. This presentation of the
silent child − from my mother's memory of stories her
adoptive mother told her − deepened my understanding,
explained the emotion underlying her explosive
temper, the avoidance adapted early in life. Though,
of course, this is all my interpretation informed by
imagination and experience.
I’ve started to let go of the hard truth. I can’t
recreate the world of my childhood, but can remember
the feel of it. Does it matter if the house was truly
cavernous, whether the bathroom had mint-green tile,
whether it was Johnny Walker Red or tequila? It does
not, but the story doesn’t develop without
description, without a sense of the reality of place
and time. Many facts don’t change, of course, and
those facts are the bones of our life stories,
fleshed out with language, given new life with words.
The events I write about here (outside of my
fictional pieces, and even then the lines are
blurred) happened. When I can't remember something, I
take my impression and create a reasonable facsimile
of reality.
And that’s the truth, Ruth.
***For thought-provoking writing on writing and a
great Julian Barnes quote on creating fact out of
fiction, please check out this
post from
Scottish writer Jim Murdoch's fine blog,
The Truth About
Lies.***