If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.
—Goethe

When I was just old enough to know that I should control myself in the company of my elders but young enough to know I could still get away with being obnoxiously rambunctious and what was to my parents embarrassingly honest, I found myself confronted by a crisis of conscience.

At that point in my life, I thought of “department stores” as something like cubby holes, only bigger, where adults walked around like they knew what they were there for, while I hid giggling inside the circular standing racks of women’s blouses just because I knew that somehow it was something I could never get away with someday. My mother and I had gone to one such department store, and there in the midst of an aisle was standing a ridiculously irate toddler. He wanted something, clearly, from his mother; or rather, for her to buy him something—you know, I wasn’t clear on how all those transactions worked at just over half a decade old—and I crept up to investigate. I was an extremely shy child, you understand, but I just had to know what that kid was screaming about—and it ended up being something that I thought was utterly ridiculous. I thought to myself that he ought not to have been screaming about something so stupid, so utterly needless. But then, it hit me: maybe that’s how Mom thought of the stuff I wanted….

That didn’t make me want it less, whatever “it” might have been—and I would whine, beg, flash those doe eyes kids and seductresses share, and tug at her blouse to get it (thereby prophetically setting my path before me as a philosopher who would disprove the Socratic knowledge-as-virtue tenet). But that was only because I knew I could get away with it.

Another time, in a J. C. Penney, around the same age, the horrifying fate that must befall all firstborn sons and their poor distraught mothers occurred to me: I got lost. Here in these suffocating cubby holes, these cold, gridded floors with their fake tile and unyielding, Astroturf-esque carpeting that comprised some system that I just couldn’t grasp, I had gotten distracted by a diamond necklace or some such at the jewelry counter. Obediently not touching the glass, I stared in wide-eyed wonder at this sparkly rainbowmaker; and when my reverie broke, I turned to find—men, women, racks of clothing, an infinite sea of “stuff” and “things”—and precisely zero people who were my mother.

Knowing that this was when the “little kids” always panicked, I gathered myself, determined to outstay the anxiety with faith that Mom would realize where I was and come to rescue me from my present state—uncertain, hands clasped behind my back, rocking from the balls to the heels of my feet across the line between pseudotile flooring and stiff beige carpeting. Finally (probably after all of ninety seconds), my resolve eroded and I wandered at a near-gallop past all the places I thought she had been, only to find myself more lost than before, somewhere between “soft shiny things Dad likes on t.v.” (lingerie) and “things that would make Mom sneeze a lot” (perfume)—my sense of direction has only marginally improved since then. It was somewhere around this time that I passed the escalator, that great unmanned beast of a machine I’d heard of trapping my peers’ feet and ceaselessly moving people to and fro, up and down. Presently, I gave up hope, and began to tremble, then to softly weep; for it had been an eternity, and I had moved from the spot I’d been left besides, against all admonitions I’d ever received to the contrary. Lost to my curiosity, inadvertently abandoned light years from home, at the top of the gaping maw of an unfriendly peoplemover, a bad son for making my mother worry (and God only knew what Dad would say when we got home), I presently gave up hope. I felt more vulnerable standing, so I walked very slowly, sobbing quietly into my sleeve, embarrassed at the looks I got and still anxious about (not) being rediscovered—

But then there was a certain man who greeted me sheepishly. He was an elf to my hobbit, tall and thin and full of years yet still youthful somehow. (Looking back, he couldn’t have been any more than in his late twenties.) Kind but somehow timid eyes regarded me beneath a concerned brow framed by a close-cropped shock of black hair; he was dressed in a suit with shoulder pads the likes of which no one has seen since 1989. A regular joe, just a customer in the store, he had found me and asked me if I was lost. Yes, I replied, but truth be told it was Mom who was lost, or both of us, or—oh, I didn’t know! And he smiled a half-smile that bespoke what I later understood to be amusement and a gentle kindness tempered by the social awareness that he was trying to exude extreme professionalism and yet was talking to a lanky wet-faced six-year-old in the midst of a department store in the middle of the afternoon. Still nearly smiling, he offered to help me find my mother. Having grown up with pure, 1980s archetypes of what good and evil looked like (the former with geekiness, silliness, bombasticism, or at least, self-consciousness, and the latter with cigarette-smoking, sleazy self-assuredness, and sly turns of phrase), I trusted him for his half smile and his youth, which won out over his height and suit-wearing.

Rising in a small elevator with no more than this stranger who wore the look of kindness and pathos, my eyes dried. I steeled myself, drawing up my chest and clenching my fists; and with all the power of every bit of manners that had been drilled into me, I thanked the man straight-faced. But it was the kind of caricature of a straight face that I fancied must have looked like Jean Claude Van Damme in every movie in which I’d ever seen him, so I couldn’t help but smile, then giggle in spite of myself.

In what seemed a miracle tantamount to Philip being translocated by the Spirit, the two invested parties found each other upon the opening of the elevator doors. My mother was, as she tells it, “boo-hooing,” thinking she’d lost me forever, and I thought how interesting, how meaningful it was that she was just as upset as I had been (”—and then some,” I’m sure she’d interject). She thanked the man profusely, but kept crying till we got to the car, and even as we were pulling out of the parking lot. Finally, pitying her and thinking she must be going through the same thing I was going through in the store (only outside the store, that whole adults-thinking-abstractly thing), I patted her leg softly and said, “It’s okay, Mom, I’m right here, now. I love you!”

[1]
Vanitas-Viciosa © 1991 by Elsie Russell

I learned a lot in those department stores, from the ridiculously chainsaw-loud crying toddler who was murderously desperate for something inconsequential, and the half-smile man in a suit who, though a tall stranger, neither offered me candy nor tried to seduce me into his car. I learned that adults have different priorities than I did; and that if I were to earn worth and respect in their eyes—not as a child, not as a human being, but as someone real, someone worth hearing out—then I was going to have to really think about the things I wanted, and the things I did around them. And I learned that not all strangers are evildoers and “bad” to talk to, and purposed thenceforth to be kind to children when I became an adult—because maybe they would feel suspended in eternity, abandoned in deep space, just like me. In short, I began to really ponder how I came across to others, and how important it was to think and be conscious of how I should interact with what, years later, I would learn Sartre and Camus dubbed the Other. Indeed, how important was maturity itself—to act one’s age was not enough, but to act more than the age that one looked! (In my case that was quite a disparity, being very tall for my age.)

Just a couple of years later, this concept was gilded into the floor of my psyche.

As was the custom in earlier times, my father’s side of the family went on a sojourn from the far reaches of South Carolina to a quaint little town near its center, a town famous for slow talkers, the wisdom connoted by grey hairs, and a recently-restored historical Opera House. We all gathered at Thanksgiving and Christmas at the Matriarch’s house—dearly beloved and much-respected mother of my father—a barely-modern one-story embedded like a fine gem in the residential district of what could be called the “downtown” of this minor city. We drove for what seemed like days to reach this little house: all the cousins would be driven by their respective parents, and all would park on the lawn because there was so very much of it. I got in trouble if I parked my bike on the grass at home; so I surmised there was some rule of which adult children were aware, approximately phrased, “You can do whatever you want, within the restraints of your own self-discipline.” (That I would have abused this rule only served as a reminder that I wasn’t “old enough.”)

There was a peculiar, warm mysticism that hung around this abode and the activities to which it was a witness, like a wreath of pipe-smoke might ever ring the smiling avuncular face of an ancestor’s informal portrait. Bounded by a shallow drainage ditch I always thought of as a creek on two sides, and buttressed by a lush and meticulously cared-for, award-winning rose garden on the rear, this was a mysterious little oasis of fellowship with all the cousins born of Grandmama’s seed. Many lessons were learned, many deep thoughts found their birth on the granite steps of that old house. Whenever we would get together, I soaked up the experience with all the voracity a curious youth could muster, and attempted to varying degrees of success to act years ahead of the age I looked. The youngest cousin save for my sister on my father’s side of the family, I knew that the more mature and calm, the more understanding I not only acted but truly was, the more respect I would gain from my cousins, who I knew somehow, someday, I would consider my peers. If we were ever to have a relationship in which I didn’t look like a stupid, whiny, desperate toddler in their minds, it would have to be up to me not to act but to be an adult, with all the pains and responsibilities thereunto pertaining, whatever that meant.

A den view from the kitchen, off of which is also the dining room.

So when one Thanksgiving in my eighth year I sneaked into the dining room to see the usual preliminary spread of homemade rolls and so forth, I was surprised to find a scalloped porcelain dish filled with a grand bundle of small, purplish-black orbs, around which was what looked like an expertly crafted domino-cascade of very expensive-looking seeded crackers. Set aside in the official dining room, whose walls were paneled with a richly-stained wood, it sat on a pristine crimson tablecloth that covered what I knew was an ancient, hand-crafted table whose particular veneer matched the shade of the China cabinet—an inconceivably old set of shelves on which were priceless, sparklingly ornate vessels of lead crystal and Sterling silver that were apparently designed to look practical, but were never in my lifetime touched, let alone used. I lingered over these tiny fishy spheres, segregated to a place of honor amongst these majestic sundries. Something about the whole arrangement seemed perfectly ridiculous, perfectly adult, to me. It wasn’t chip dip—there wasn’t enough of the purple stuff for one to pile it liberally on each cracker and have enough to go around, and I’d never seen the likes of this anywhere in the grocery store. It looked foreign, and smelled fishy; and had it been on the floor with no crackers, even lacking felines at any gathering in this place of gathering, I would have fancied it cat food. But to my young senses, you must understand—this look was the look of very adultness; this smell was the bouquet of sophistication. This wasn’t the usual salsa, and it certainly bore no kinship to sugary, processed “kid-food” I held in such contempt as a child. Growing up, the “kids’ menu” was my enemy, not only because of disappointingly-sized portions and disappointingly-fried selections were frustratingly insufficient to satiate a rapidly-growing preadolescent boy, but because I resented the symbol of a whole “world” that adults had made up for kids, to keep them contained, manageable, and happy only because of an ignorance about what they were missing. If adults could do it, I wanted to do it—including being thoughtful and doing things that made me really uncomfortable without a second thought. To possess the courage not to complain about anything, but to learn from everything—this was the lofty ideal to which I held adulthood, the bedrock criterion of maturity to which I aspired.

The rest of the family was scattered about the kitchen and den in pairs and trios, talking mostly about what I considered mundane mathematical nonsense that adults liked to talk about when they couldn’t find any other creative way to fill the air (the insufferably dry conversation, including words like “debits” and “credits” and “annual withholding” was the only part of adulthood I didn’t idolize). Knowing somehow they thought it rude to stop talking once they’d started, I seized the opportunity to test the waters by first wading out just a bit: I had a fancy cracker. It was brittle, tough, and seedy; and left a taste in my mouth quite different than the Saltines I had known from times of illness. I didn’t like it at first; but this sentiment was crushed with all the swiftness that I realized my own reaction—and in my anger at being a child, schooled myself: “No, this cracker is a symbol of adulthood. Adults eat these thin crackly wafers, you silly child!” I acquired a taste for rye, right then and there, by force of will.

Growing still more brave, I withdrew another from the domino-arrangement and plunged it into the purplish-blackness in the center of the plate; and, with a heap of the slick-looking fishy stuff, crammed the whole thing into my mouth, suddenly afraid I’d be discovered and embarrassed—not for eating prematurely, but by the awareness that I, a then-prepubescent child whose age could be numbered with a single stroke of a pen, was trying so hard to be an adult. But, half-cowering, chewing ferociously, I tried to get a handle on what I was tasting: little bursts of salty fishiness were exploding quietly like muted firecrackers of sophistication in my mouth; crunching on the rye, the crisp taste of grown-up reality! I reveled in the experience as much as in the taste—as when at a stranger’s wedding reception one hears an otherwise intimate toast by a tipsy groomsman transmuted by champagne into a wisecrack about the groom’s lavatory habits and, despite his ignorance, one finds himself laughing.

Before I realized what I’d done and came back to myself, I’d finished off almost the entire bowl of the mystical purple spheres that had hailed anonymously from the Adult Realm. Fulfillment yielded haltingly to the second round of the aforementioned shame as I realized I would be found out. I made peace with my decision to own my gluttonous misdeed when asked, so that I didn’t seem even more the child. Meanwhile, I weaved my way sheepishly through the discussion of insurance policies and football scores into the den, to at least appear as though I was on my way to doing something meaningful. But the only people in the den were staring into the television. Rapt to near-sacrilege at what seemed to me a bunch of bullies in helmets running over each other to the elation of a crowd who apparently felt that a dome was technically no occasion to use “inside voices,” and since to sit still was a punishment mete for breaking vases and not for independent volition, I went off to explore—

—Until I got called with great authority back into the dining room. Demanding an explanation, my aunt and parents had realized that the one who had single-handedly pilfered all the tiny fish marbles and spicy unsalted crackers was none other than I. Blushing, I apologized and attempted to explain away my private ambitions of sophistication by the highly plausible excuse that I had just been hungry and impatient.

My aunt, however, was thoroughly amused and, chuckling earnestly with understanding eyes, bent down conspiratorially to explain that the reason I’d been called in with such gravitas was that I had just eaten caviar with rye crackers. She asked gingerly, tenderly as though somehow seeing yet not laughing at my plight to be an omniscient adult, whether I knew what the word “caviar” meant. Though sorely tempted to lie, my curiosity directed my tongue to the negative. She explained the concept, bracing herself visibly for a starkly and altogether childishly negative reaction, that it was a French word for “fish eggs.”

Having steeled myself against an answer lesser children (and other poor mortals) might have found disgusting, the barest flash of a grimace was replaced with a proud and authentic declaration that I enjoyed it, and to prove it presently took another triumphant bite! Fledgling freedom over arbitrary internal schemas, innovation over familiarity, sophistication over naiivete, adulthood over childishness—this was my victory, an initiation, a step from naiiveté to experience! Everyone laughed; but I felt they were laughing with me, anticipating my future…. Twelve adults—and one child well on his way.

Obviously, I came to realize that adulthood was not nearly so ideal as I’d anticipated, as must be the course of all who live with any awareness of themselves and of others. The point is not, however, that starry-eyed youth inevitably fades, but rather that it makes all the difference how we conduct ourselves in light of our failures—and those of people and the circumstances in which we find ourselves—to meet our expectations. If, knowing that every member of the category of persons broadly called “adults” has any number of unemulable character traits, and that with tragic frequency we show the vestiges of the self-seeking, careless, petulant brats we once were—does that give us license to stagnate, or impetus to change?

Sophistication need not mean jadedness; complexity need not mean waste; and the changing of tunes from “[2] Twinkle, Twinkle” to the Song of Experience need not mean a transition into a minor key. Those who consciously insist on the bliss that is ignorance say so only until they realize that to say so is to minimize the gift of awareness of Himself, of others, and of the universe God gave man. [3] Infants can’t even handle honey, and children find steak [4] hard to swallow, but women and men know that caviar on rye is finer than reconstituted American on Saltines. Indeed, is the gift of marital coitus, that singular instantiation and signification of Christ and the Church, accompanied by the love a couple is commanded and delighted to show one another, for children? Little ones are precious beyond words to God and to Man, and cannot affirm that ignorance is bliss precisely because of the blessedness of their state; but an adult who allows the child within to reign into the ripeness of age is merely pining for the womb, or the grave.

[5]
David J. Grossman, Quaternion Julia Set (7). [[6] Info: Julia set.]

A [7] quaternion [8] fractal that does not morph over many iterations is more than an anomaly; it’s a mathematical impossibility. Even so for humans: to settle instead of striving, to exist instead of thriving, to complain instead of acting, to criticize instead of creating, to remain children instead of maturing, to choose ignorance instead of truth—in so doing, we try to keep the variables of our experience from iterating—i.e., we fight the complexity and dynamism with which we were intended to live. Empower yourself by empowering your brother and sister; encourage your neighbor by being better than you are; and love your family by authentically forgiving more than just their peccadillos—and overcome the temptation to pit one against another by being even-handed through all the vicissitudes that cause you or your brother to stumble into childish ambition and resentment.

Are we content to live slothfully yet miserably within our own narrow parameters we in our frailty have tried to impose upon the world and so [9] bury the talents we’ve been given, or do we push ourselves to learn, to grow, to love, to forgive, and to do all the rest of the things that entropy and [10] flesh would have us neglect? Do we claw in vain at the riverbed of Time to hold on to the familiar and the comfortable, and so spend our lives always on the brink of death by drowning in our own arbitrary rules—[11] sentencing ourselves to suffering that is unique to the self-willful failure to adapt and grow, to forgive and let go, to take on the new and the dangerous if it will mean change? The human—not the spirit, the body, or the mind, but rather all these and the private world of his experience—was meant to adapt, to flourish under pressure, to endure, to grow and move at the same pace as the rock onto which he was born, hurtling through space and time.

It is by the power of God’s grace that we have what we have; and by the very same that we are empowered to grow beyond our natural limits of selfishness and hatred into humility and brotherly sacrifice. May 2007 prove for you a rich glass of edifying challenges: great with grace; abundant in love; full of dynamic lessons and rediscoveries of eternal Truth, a canvas for your creativity and a template for personal growth.

Technorati Tags: [12] challenges, [13] relationships, [14] grace, [15] innocence, [16] ignorance, [17] sophistication, [18] vanitas, [19] Christ, [20] personal growth, [21] archetypes, [22] anecdotes, [23] childhood, [24] experience, [25] aging

If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however, if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.
—Goethe

When I was just old enough to know that I should control myself in the company of my elders but young enough to know I could still get away with being obnoxiously rambunctious and what was to my parents embarrassingly honest, I found myself confronted by a crisis of conscience.

At that point in my life, I thought of “department stores” as something like cubby holes, only bigger, where adults walked around like they knew what they were there for, while I hid giggling inside the circular standing racks of women’s blouses just because I knew that somehow it was something I could never get away with someday. My mother and I had gone to one such department store, and there in the midst of an aisle was standing a ridiculously irate toddler. He wanted something, clearly, from his mother; or rather, for her to buy him something—you know, I wasn’t clear on how all those transactions worked at just over half a decade old—and I crept up to investigate. I was an extremely shy child, you understand, but I just had to know what that kid was screaming about—and it ended up being something that I thought was utterly ridiculous. I thought to myself that he ought not to have been screaming about something so stupid, so utterly needless. But then, it hit me: maybe that’s how Mom thought of the stuff I wanted….

That didn’t make me want it less, whatever “it” might have been—and I would whine, beg, flash those doe eyes kids and seductresses share, and tug at her blouse to get it (thereby prophetically setting my path before me as a philosopher who would disprove the Socratic knowledge-as-virtue tenet). But that was only because I knew I could get away with it.

Another time, in a J. C. Penney, around the same age, the horrifying fate that must befall all firstborn sons and their poor distraught mothers occurred to me: I got lost. Here in these suffocating cubby holes, these cold, gridded floors with their fake tile and unyielding, Astroturf-esque carpeting that comprised some system that I just couldn’t grasp, I had gotten distracted by a diamond necklace or some such at the jewelry counter. Obediently not touching the glass, I stared in wide-eyed wonder at this sparkly rainbowmaker; and when my reverie broke, I turned to find—men, women, racks of clothing, an infinite sea of “stuff” and “things”—and precisely zero people who were my mother.

Knowing that this was when the “little kids” always panicked, I gathered myself, determined to outstay the anxiety with faith that Mom would realize where I was and come to rescue me from my present state—uncertain, hands clasped behind my back, rocking from the balls to the heels of my feet across the line between pseudotile flooring and stiff beige carpeting. Finally (probably after all of ninety seconds), my resolve eroded and I wandered at a near-gallop past all the places I thought she had been, only to find myself more lost than before, somewhere between “soft shiny things Dad likes on t.v.” (lingerie) and “things that would make Mom sneeze a lot” (perfume)—my sense of direction has only marginally improved since then. It was somewhere around this time that I passed the escalator, that great unmanned beast of a machine I’d heard of trapping my peers’ feet and ceaselessly moving people to and fro, up and down. Presently, I gave up hope, and began to tremble, then to softly weep; for it had been an eternity, and I had moved from the spot I’d been left besides, against all admonitions I’d ever received to the contrary. Lost to my curiosity, inadvertently abandoned light years from home, at the top of the gaping maw of an unfriendly peoplemover, a bad son for making my mother worry (and God only knew what Dad would say when we got home), I presently gave up hope. I felt more vulnerable standing, so I walked very slowly, sobbing quietly into my sleeve, embarrassed at the looks I got and still anxious about (not) being rediscovered—

But then there was a certain man who greeted me sheepishly. He was an elf to my hobbit, tall and thin and full of years yet still youthful somehow. (Looking back, he couldn’t have been any more than in his late twenties.) Kind but somehow timid eyes regarded me beneath a concerned brow framed by a close-cropped shock of black hair; he was dressed in a suit with shoulder pads the likes of which no one has seen since 1989. A regular joe, just a customer in the store, he had found me and asked me if I was lost. Yes, I replied, but truth be told it was Mom who was lost, or both of us, or—oh, I didn’t know! And he smiled a half-smile that bespoke what I later understood to be amusement and a gentle kindness tempered by the social awareness that he was trying to exude extreme professionalism and yet was talking to a lanky wet-faced six-year-old in the midst of a department store in the middle of the afternoon. Still nearly smiling, he offered to help me find my mother. Having grown up with pure, 1980s archetypes of what good and evil looked like (the former with geekiness, silliness, bombasticism, or at least, self-consciousness, and the latter with cigarette-smoking, sleazy self-assuredness, and sly turns of phrase), I trusted him for his half smile and his youth, which won out over his height and suit-wearing.

Rising in a small elevator with no more than this stranger who wore the look of kindness and pathos, my eyes dried. I steeled myself, drawing up my chest and clenching my fists; and with all the power of every bit of manners that had been drilled into me, I thanked the man straight-faced. But it was the kind of caricature of a straight face that I fancied must have looked like Jean Claude Van Damme in every movie in which I’d ever seen him, so I couldn’t help but smile, then giggle in spite of myself.

In what seemed a miracle tantamount to Philip being translocated by the Spirit, the two invested parties found each other upon the opening of the elevator doors. My mother was, as she tells it, “boo-hooing,” thinking she’d lost me forever, and I thought how interesting, how meaningful it was that she was just as upset as I had been (”—and then some,” I’m sure she’d interject). She thanked the man profusely, but kept crying till we got to the car, and even as we were pulling out of the parking lot. Finally, pitying her and thinking she must be going through the same thing I was going through in the store (only outside the store, that whole adults-thinking-abstractly thing), I patted her leg softly and said, “It’s okay, Mom, I’m right here, now. I love you!”

[26]
Vanitas-Viciosa © 1991 by Elsie Russell

I learned a lot in those department stores, from the ridiculously chainsaw-loud crying toddler who was murderously desperate for something inconsequential, and the half-smile man in a suit who, though a tall stranger, neither offered me candy nor tried to seduce me into his car. I learned that adults have different priorities than I did; and that if I were to earn worth and respect in their eyes—not as a child, not as a human being, but as someone real, someone worth hearing out—then I was going to have to really think about the things I wanted, and the things I did around them. And I learned that not all strangers are evildoers and “bad” to talk to, and purposed thenceforth to be kind to children when I became an adult—because maybe they would feel suspended in eternity, abandoned in deep space, just like me. In short, I began to really ponder how I came across to others, and how important it was to think and be conscious of how I should interact with what, years later, I would learn Sartre and Camus dubbed the Other. Indeed, how important was maturity itself—to act one’s age was not enough, but to act more than the age that one looked! (In my case that was quite a disparity, being very tall for my age.)

Just a couple of years later, this concept was gilded into the floor of my psyche.

As was the custom in earlier times, my father’s side of the family went on a sojourn from the far reaches of South Carolina to a quaint little town near its center, a town famous for slow talkers, the wisdom connoted by grey hairs, and a recently-restored historical Opera House. We all gathered at Thanksgiving and Christmas at the Matriarch’s house—dearly beloved and much-respected mother of my father—a barely-modern one-story embedded like a fine gem in the residential district of what could be called the “downtown” of this minor city. We drove for what seemed like days to reach this little house: all the cousins would be driven by their respective parents, and all would park on the lawn because there was so very much of it. I got in trouble if I parked my bike on the grass at home; so I surmised there was some rule of which adult children were aware, approximately phrased, “You can do whatever you want, within the restraints of your own self-discipline.” (That I would have abused this rule only served as a reminder that I wasn’t “old enough.”)

There was a peculiar, warm mysticism that hung around this abode and the activities to which it was a witness, like a wreath of pipe-smoke might ever ring the smiling avuncular face of an ancestor’s informal portrait. Bounded by a shallow drainage ditch I always thought of as a creek on two sides, and buttressed by a lush and meticulously cared-for, award-winning rose garden on the rear, this was a mysterious little oasis of fellowship with all the cousins born of Grandmama’s seed. Many lessons were learned, many deep thoughts found their birth on the granite steps of that old house. Whenever we would get together, I soaked up the experience with all the voracity a curious youth could muster, and attempted to varying degrees of success to act years ahead of the age I looked. The youngest cousin save for my sister on my father’s side of the family, I knew that the more mature and calm, the more understanding I not only acted but truly was, the more respect I would gain from my cousins, who I knew somehow, someday, I would consider my peers. If we were ever to have a relationship in which I didn’t look like a stupid, whiny, desperate toddler in their minds, it would have to be up to me not to act but to be an adult, with all the pains and responsibilities thereunto pertaining, whatever that meant.

A den view from the kitchen, off of which is also the dining room.

So when one Thanksgiving in my eighth year I sneaked into the dining room to see the usual preliminary spread of homemade rolls and so forth, I was surprised to find a scalloped porcelain dish filled with a grand bundle of small, purplish-black orbs, around which was what looked like an expertly crafted domino-cascade of very expensive-looking seeded crackers. Set aside in the official dining room, whose walls were paneled with a richly-stained wood, it sat on a pristine crimson tablecloth that covered what I knew was an ancient, hand-crafted table whose particular veneer matched the shade of the China cabinet—an inconceivably old set of shelves on which were priceless, sparklingly ornate vessels of lead crystal and Sterling silver that were apparently designed to look practical, but were never in my lifetime touched, let alone used. I lingered over these tiny fishy spheres, segregated to a place of honor amongst these majestic sundries. Something about the whole arrangement seemed perfectly ridiculous, perfectly adult, to me. It wasn’t chip dip—there wasn’t enough of the purple stuff for one to pile it liberally on each cracker and have enough to go around, and I’d never seen the likes of this anywhere in the grocery store. It looked foreign, and smelled fishy; and had it been on the floor with no crackers, even lacking felines at any gathering in this place of gathering, I would have fancied it cat food. But to my young senses, you must understand—this look was the look of very adultness; this smell was the bouquet of sophistication. This wasn’t the usual salsa, and it certainly bore no kinship to sugary, processed “kid-food” I held in such contempt as a child. Growing up, the “kids’ menu” was my enemy, not only because of disappointingly-sized portions and disappointingly-fried selections were frustratingly insufficient to satiate a rapidly-growing preadolescent boy, but because I resented the symbol of a whole “world” that adults had made up for kids, to keep them contained, manageable, and happy only because of an ignorance about what they were missing. If adults could do it, I wanted to do it—including being thoughtful and doing things that made me really uncomfortable without a second thought. To possess the courage not to complain about anything, but to learn from everything—this was the lofty ideal to which I held adulthood, the bedrock criterion of maturity to which I aspired.

The rest of the family was scattered about the kitchen and den in pairs and trios, talking mostly about what I considered mundane mathematical nonsense that adults liked to talk about when they couldn’t find any other creative way to fill the air (the insufferably dry conversation, including words like “debits” and “credits” and “annual withholding” was the only part of adulthood I didn’t idolize). Knowing somehow they thought it rude to stop talking once they’d started, I seized the opportunity to test the waters by first wading out just a bit: I had a fancy cracker. It was brittle, tough, and seedy; and left a taste in my mouth quite different than the Saltines I had known from times of illness. I didn’t like it at first; but this sentiment was crushed with all the swiftness that I realized my own reaction—and in my anger at being a child, schooled myself: “No, this cracker is a symbol of adulthood. Adults eat these thin crackly wafers, you silly child!” I acquired a taste for rye, right then and there, by force of will.

Growing still more brave, I withdrew another from the domino-arrangement and plunged it into the purplish-blackness in the center of the plate; and, with a heap of the slick-looking fishy stuff, crammed the whole thing into my mouth, suddenly afraid I’d be discovered and embarrassed—not for eating prematurely, but by the awareness that I, a then-prepubescent child whose age could be numbered with a single stroke of a pen, was trying so hard to be an adult. But, half-cowering, chewing ferociously, I tried to get a handle on what I was tasting: little bursts of salty fishiness were exploding quietly like muted firecrackers of sophistication in my mouth; crunching on the rye, the crisp taste of grown-up reality! I reveled in the experience as much as in the taste—as when at a stranger’s wedding reception one hears an otherwise intimate toast by a tipsy groomsman transmuted by champagne into a wisecrack about the groom’s lavatory habits and, despite his ignorance, one finds himself laughing.

Before I realized what I’d done and came back to myself, I’d finished off almost the entire bowl of the mystical purple spheres that had hailed anonymously from the Adult Realm. Fulfillment yielded haltingly to the second round of the aforementioned shame as I realized I would be found out. I made peace with my decision to own my gluttonous misdeed when asked, so that I didn’t seem even more the child. Meanwhile, I weaved my way sheepishly through the discussion of insurance policies and football scores into the den, to at least appear as though I was on my way to doing something meaningful. But the only people in the den were staring into the television. Rapt to near-sacrilege at what seemed to me a bunch of bullies in helmets running over each other to the elation of a crowd who apparently felt that a dome was technically no occasion to use “inside voices,” and since to sit still was a punishment mete for breaking vases and not for independent volition, I went off to explore—

—Until I got called with great authority back into the dining room. Demanding an explanation, my aunt and parents had realized that the one who had single-handedly pilfered all the tiny fish marbles and spicy unsalted crackers was none other than I. Blushing, I apologized and attempted to explain away my private ambitions of sophistication by the highly plausible excuse that I had just been hungry and impatient.

My aunt, however, was thoroughly amused and, chuckling earnestly with understanding eyes, bent down conspiratorially to explain that the reason I’d been called in with such gravitas was that I had just eaten caviar with rye crackers. She asked gingerly, tenderly as though somehow seeing yet not laughing at my plight to be an omniscient adult, whether I knew what the word “caviar” meant. Though sorely tempted to lie, my curiosity directed my tongue to the negative. She explained the concept, bracing herself visibly for a starkly and altogether childishly negative reaction, that it was a French word for “fish eggs.”

Having steeled myself against an answer lesser children (and other poor mortals) might have found disgusting, the barest flash of a grimace was replaced with a proud and authentic declaration that I enjoyed it, and to prove it presently took another triumphant bite! Fledgling freedom over arbitrary internal schemas, innovation over familiarity, sophistication over naiivete, adulthood over childishness—this was my victory, an initiation, a step from naiiveté to experience! Everyone laughed; but I felt they were laughing with me, anticipating my future…. Twelve adults—and one child well on his way.

Obviously, I came to realize that adulthood was not nearly so ideal as I’d anticipated, as must be the course of all who live with any awareness of themselves and of others. The point is not, however, that starry-eyed youth inevitably fades, but rather that it makes all the difference how we conduct ourselves in light of our failures—and those of people and the circumstances in which we find ourselves—to meet our expectations. If, knowing that every member of the category of persons broadly called “adults” has any number of unemulable character traits, and that with tragic frequency we show the vestiges of the self-seeking, careless, petulant brats we once were—does that give us license to stagnate, or impetus to change?

Sophistication need not mean jadedness; complexity need not mean waste; and the changing of tunes from “[27] Twinkle, Twinkle” to the Song of Experience need not mean a transition into a minor key. Those who consciously insist on the bliss that is ignorance say so only until they realize that to say so is to minimize the gift of awareness of Himself, of others, and of the universe God gave man. [28] Infants can’t even handle honey, and children find steak [29] hard to swallow, but women and men know that caviar on rye is finer than reconstituted American on Saltines. Indeed, is the gift of marital coitus, that singular instantiation and signification of Christ and the Church, accompanied by the love a couple is commanded and delighted to show one another, for children? Little ones are precious beyond words to God and to Man, and cannot affirm that ignorance is bliss precisely because of the blessedness of their state; but an adult who allows the child within to reign into the ripeness of age is merely pining for the womb, or the grave.

[30]
David J. Grossman, Quaternion Julia Set (7). [[31] Info: Julia set.]

A [32] quaternion [33] fractal that does not morph over many iterations is more than an anomaly; it’s a mathematical impossibility. Even so for humans: to settle instead of striving, to exist instead of thriving, to complain instead of acting, to criticize instead of creating, to remain children instead of maturing, to choose ignorance instead of truth—in so doing, we try to keep the variables of our experience from iterating—i.e., we fight the complexity and dynamism with which we were intended to live. Empower yourself by empowering your brother and sister; encourage your neighbor by being better than you are; and love your family by authentically forgiving more than just their peccadillos—and overcome the temptation to pit one against another by being even-handed through all the vicissitudes that cause you or your brother to stumble into childish ambition and resentment.

Are we content to live slothfully yet miserably within our own narrow parameters we in our frailty have tried to impose upon the world and so [34] bury the talents we’ve been given, or do we push ourselves to learn, to grow, to love, to forgive, and to do all the rest of the things that entropy and [35] flesh would have us neglect? Do we claw in vain at the riverbed of Time to hold on to the familiar and the comfortable, and so spend our lives always on the brink of death by drowning in our own arbitrary rules—[36] sentencing ourselves to suffering that is unique to the self-willful failure to adapt and grow, to forgive and let go, to take on the new and the dangerous if it will mean change? The human—not the spirit, the body, or the mind, but rather all these and the private world of his experience—was meant to adapt, to flourish under pressure, to endure, to grow and move at the same pace as the rock onto which he was born, hurtling through space and time.

It is by the power of God’s grace that we have what we have; and by the very same that we are empowered to grow beyond our natural limits of selfishness and hatred into humility and brotherly sacrifice. May 2007 prove for you a rich glass of edifying challenges: great with grace; abundant in love; full of dynamic lessons and rediscoveries of eternal Truth, a canvas for your creativity and a template for personal growth.

Technorati Tags: [37] challenges, [38] relationships, [39] grace, [40] innocence, [41] ignorance, [42] sophistication, [43] vanitas, [44] Christ, [45] personal growth, [46] archetypes, [47] anecdotes, [48] childhood, [49] experience, [50] aging