It never really occurred to me when I was very young that my parents may have been wearing armor of one sort or another all along. They both seemed invincible to me,bringing anything about as a simple act of will.My father could get us across the whole province of New Brunswick in a car in just a few hours,and that alone seemed amazing to me,even though I had no real clue as to all of the things that could go wrong. My mother would go out to work, come home and prepare our meals, knowing how to do so in a way that was both pleasing to us,and assured that we got the nourishment we needed to grow,and this was equally amazing,if for no other reason than that it seemed to be working so well. But,by some time in 1967, my fathers armor was showing some telltale cracks.Still,I had to grow some more, then turn and look back on it all to know this.I did have some understanding of it at the time, but the fact was that we lived in a sort of world that was manufactured for us, so it was somewhat more than slightly askew.
Years later,in my thirties most likely,I encountered the rhetorical idea, that we may not be able to determine truth or reality because it was possible that a malevolent deity was deceiving us,contriving what we experience to that sole end.I found that idea troubling,for any number of reasons.But there was a chord of truth in it that seemed to apply to my growing up, and perhaps to the way things were for a great many of the children of the 1960s. Only it didn't involve a malevolent deity at all.In fact, if it involved any sort of Deity, it seemed to do so only in a second hand way,by way of the church,and whatever influence it had on my mother. Or perhaps my father too, but such was not easily seen, as he seldom attended church. My point,though is that we lived in a world where unpleasant things were vanquished as a matter of routine. So, as I'm always quick to argue, if you propose deception, why stop at the idea of malevolence. Couldn't a benevolent god deceive as well? At least in looking back that seems to be exactly what was happening.
Imagine,for instance death. By 1967, I knew that people and animals died,that they would not be with us forever.We had lost a pet to traumatic death after all. And while I knew this, I never really knew anyone who had died, so it was a remote sort of thing to me. I knew that I had grandparents, and that grandparents were older people, and eventually,older people died.That's because I was told this one day when I asked my mother where her grandparents were. Didn't she have any? Well,yes she did,she said, but they died before she ever came to know them. People died because they got old, and when you got old, you got sick, and then you died. Or,you could die if you had an accident and were badly hurt. The kind of accident that most worried my parents was getting hit by a car.That's what happened to our cat,and the thought of it happening to us was likely unimaginably traumatic for my parents. If you did that, you died, or so we were told. And all of that, as true as it may have been didn't mean that as a five year old that I could connect all of these dots in a perfectly logical fashion.And that,from time to time caused me some insecurity. Because the fact was that sometimes I got sick.It never really occurred to me that there were degrees of sickness, so it was easy to reason that if I got sick, I might die.
Then one night around five o'clock we were headed home from the baby sitters, straight down Sumner Street, when my sister got hit by a car.In my mind, it was a taxi, and it had been backing out of a driveway on our right hand side. By this time, we were allowed to walk the short distance home by ourselves, after my mother arrived home and phoned for us to come.So we were walking down the street and this taxi backed into my sister and knocked her over. And she didn't die.In fact, I don't even recall that she was badly hurt.She was just walking, then she got knocked down,and there were a few people around her making a bit of a fuss.I don't even recall that the police ever came, and after just a short time we were home.* So death didn't seem to be a natural product of getting hit by cars.It was good advice on my parents part, but part of the manufactured world.
Then there were people who got sick and did die, and were struck by cars that ended their lives.It was all a matter of degrees, of terrible potential.But how do you explain that to young children? In a sense,you're just better off moving to the natural extreme.It does insure obedience,but it also brings about a kind of psychological tension too. Then,at some point it occurs to me: if my parents really were invincible, then why does the possibility even exist,that I could get sick and die, or get hit by a car? It's kind of like the question of why does a god who loves us allow bad things to happen, only on a much smaller scale. The answer was,of course obvious once we were a bit older.Our parents were not invincible. If they were,then why even bother with church and God? But that's not always clear to five or six year old children.
My father always seemed so upright and sturdy to me.He was not big, but he was strong and well muscled.He walked with good posture and a confident stride,whether he was going into the bank to pay his mortgage or the city hall to pay taxes, or to the ice cream store. He drove a long way to work, put in a full day, then drove home. This was the picture of my father as a young man,a man in the prime of his life.But it started changing,almost imperceptibly at first.
In the first year or two that my mother grew her garden, there were onions planted.Not many, not like the long rows of them in my grandmother's garden.But they were there.Then they disappeared.Usually they had appeared in the Shepherds Pie that my mother made from time to time.Then they just stopped. I never really knew why, or at least never gave a lot of thought to it.Then one day in the spring of 1967,my father was home early in the morning, and he fried some green tomatoes for breakfast.Fried green tomatoes were something my grandfather made, when he had stayed with us the year before.What he would do is dump a whole bunch of butter into a very hot frying pan,then dump in the green tomatoes. These he didn't simply cook, or fry.They were burned until they were blacker than a lump of coal, the house was full of blue haze, and they smelled dreadful.Almost like having that burning pile of coal from Springhill right in the kitchen. My father swore he liked the ghastly things, but on this occasion, they made him sick. And not just like we would get sick on the odd occasion. A few hours later, he was spewing all over the bathroom.By the time my mother was home, it was all over and he was feeling better.But what became of it was that there came to be a growing list of things that he couldn't eat. It wasn't the last time he got sick either, but I was reasonably certain he wasn't about to die. But the thing to remember was, that we were living in a manufactured world.One where sickness wasn't really supposed to come.Only it did, and thus there was the need for propaganda to reasonably explain it's presence.For my mother,the propaganda seemed to be all about denying anything unpleasant. For my father,it was about maintaining a confident facade, so that our world wasn't disrupted.
Up the road, at our babysitters house,things seemed unpleasant too, and we were not shielded it from that at all. Our babysitter was in fact a visibly neurotic chain smoker, often sitting at the kitchen table with more than one cigarette burning away.She seemed on edge all the time, especially when her husband was at home, but also when the older kids came home from school. She would yell and scream a lot,at the top of her voice, then later be apologetic for having done so.And despite seeming a bundle of nerves most of the time, she still loved children, but was having trouble expressing it in a way that was very obvious even to me. One day a girlfriend of hers came over to the house,and we all piled into the car and drove down to the hospital.While we were driving, she complained about her "lungs." The hospital was not far away, and when we got there, my sister and I and her youngest son stayed in the car with her friend while she went inside. It took likely something close to a hour for her to come back, and when she did, she was talking about having a "blood count." I didn't know what a blood count was anymore that I knew what lungs were. Then, a short time later, we went back to the hospital again for another blood count.
Already things had changed noticeably from the year before when her and my father had met at the corner of Crandall and Sumner.Then, they were the picture of health. A year later,she seemed smaller and was irritable and nervy and he was having trouble keeping food down.
* I would like to invite my sister to comment on this situation if she would,as I'm not certain how accurately I'm recalling it.
Years later,in my thirties most likely,I encountered the rhetorical idea, that we may not be able to determine truth or reality because it was possible that a malevolent deity was deceiving us,contriving what we experience to that sole end.I found that idea troubling,for any number of reasons.But there was a chord of truth in it that seemed to apply to my growing up, and perhaps to the way things were for a great many of the children of the 1960s. Only it didn't involve a malevolent deity at all.In fact, if it involved any sort of Deity, it seemed to do so only in a second hand way,by way of the church,and whatever influence it had on my mother. Or perhaps my father too, but such was not easily seen, as he seldom attended church. My point,though is that we lived in a world where unpleasant things were vanquished as a matter of routine. So, as I'm always quick to argue, if you propose deception, why stop at the idea of malevolence. Couldn't a benevolent god deceive as well? At least in looking back that seems to be exactly what was happening.
Imagine,for instance death. By 1967, I knew that people and animals died,that they would not be with us forever.We had lost a pet to traumatic death after all. And while I knew this, I never really knew anyone who had died, so it was a remote sort of thing to me. I knew that I had grandparents, and that grandparents were older people, and eventually,older people died.That's because I was told this one day when I asked my mother where her grandparents were. Didn't she have any? Well,yes she did,she said, but they died before she ever came to know them. People died because they got old, and when you got old, you got sick, and then you died. Or,you could die if you had an accident and were badly hurt. The kind of accident that most worried my parents was getting hit by a car.That's what happened to our cat,and the thought of it happening to us was likely unimaginably traumatic for my parents. If you did that, you died, or so we were told. And all of that, as true as it may have been didn't mean that as a five year old that I could connect all of these dots in a perfectly logical fashion.And that,from time to time caused me some insecurity. Because the fact was that sometimes I got sick.It never really occurred to me that there were degrees of sickness, so it was easy to reason that if I got sick, I might die.
Then one night around five o'clock we were headed home from the baby sitters, straight down Sumner Street, when my sister got hit by a car.In my mind, it was a taxi, and it had been backing out of a driveway on our right hand side. By this time, we were allowed to walk the short distance home by ourselves, after my mother arrived home and phoned for us to come.So we were walking down the street and this taxi backed into my sister and knocked her over. And she didn't die.In fact, I don't even recall that she was badly hurt.She was just walking, then she got knocked down,and there were a few people around her making a bit of a fuss.I don't even recall that the police ever came, and after just a short time we were home.* So death didn't seem to be a natural product of getting hit by cars.It was good advice on my parents part, but part of the manufactured world.
Then there were people who got sick and did die, and were struck by cars that ended their lives.It was all a matter of degrees, of terrible potential.But how do you explain that to young children? In a sense,you're just better off moving to the natural extreme.It does insure obedience,but it also brings about a kind of psychological tension too. Then,at some point it occurs to me: if my parents really were invincible, then why does the possibility even exist,that I could get sick and die, or get hit by a car? It's kind of like the question of why does a god who loves us allow bad things to happen, only on a much smaller scale. The answer was,of course obvious once we were a bit older.Our parents were not invincible. If they were,then why even bother with church and God? But that's not always clear to five or six year old children.
My father always seemed so upright and sturdy to me.He was not big, but he was strong and well muscled.He walked with good posture and a confident stride,whether he was going into the bank to pay his mortgage or the city hall to pay taxes, or to the ice cream store. He drove a long way to work, put in a full day, then drove home. This was the picture of my father as a young man,a man in the prime of his life.But it started changing,almost imperceptibly at first.
In the first year or two that my mother grew her garden, there were onions planted.Not many, not like the long rows of them in my grandmother's garden.But they were there.Then they disappeared.Usually they had appeared in the Shepherds Pie that my mother made from time to time.Then they just stopped. I never really knew why, or at least never gave a lot of thought to it.Then one day in the spring of 1967,my father was home early in the morning, and he fried some green tomatoes for breakfast.Fried green tomatoes were something my grandfather made, when he had stayed with us the year before.What he would do is dump a whole bunch of butter into a very hot frying pan,then dump in the green tomatoes. These he didn't simply cook, or fry.They were burned until they were blacker than a lump of coal, the house was full of blue haze, and they smelled dreadful.Almost like having that burning pile of coal from Springhill right in the kitchen. My father swore he liked the ghastly things, but on this occasion, they made him sick. And not just like we would get sick on the odd occasion. A few hours later, he was spewing all over the bathroom.By the time my mother was home, it was all over and he was feeling better.But what became of it was that there came to be a growing list of things that he couldn't eat. It wasn't the last time he got sick either, but I was reasonably certain he wasn't about to die. But the thing to remember was, that we were living in a manufactured world.One where sickness wasn't really supposed to come.Only it did, and thus there was the need for propaganda to reasonably explain it's presence.For my mother,the propaganda seemed to be all about denying anything unpleasant. For my father,it was about maintaining a confident facade, so that our world wasn't disrupted.
Up the road, at our babysitters house,things seemed unpleasant too, and we were not shielded it from that at all. Our babysitter was in fact a visibly neurotic chain smoker, often sitting at the kitchen table with more than one cigarette burning away.She seemed on edge all the time, especially when her husband was at home, but also when the older kids came home from school. She would yell and scream a lot,at the top of her voice, then later be apologetic for having done so.And despite seeming a bundle of nerves most of the time, she still loved children, but was having trouble expressing it in a way that was very obvious even to me. One day a girlfriend of hers came over to the house,and we all piled into the car and drove down to the hospital.While we were driving, she complained about her "lungs." The hospital was not far away, and when we got there, my sister and I and her youngest son stayed in the car with her friend while she went inside. It took likely something close to a hour for her to come back, and when she did, she was talking about having a "blood count." I didn't know what a blood count was anymore that I knew what lungs were. Then, a short time later, we went back to the hospital again for another blood count.
Already things had changed noticeably from the year before when her and my father had met at the corner of Crandall and Sumner.Then, they were the picture of health. A year later,she seemed smaller and was irritable and nervy and he was having trouble keeping food down.
* I would like to invite my sister to comment on this situation if she would,as I'm not certain how accurately I'm recalling it.
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