A woman wrote that on any given day she would drink two bottles of her favorite soda, "three when I'm feeling festive."
Both were included in a plump promo I received in the mail the other day -- a compendium of memories of those who had graduated 50 years ago from Colby College, a place I attended but was never graduated from. The class was preparing for a reunion in summer and the compendium had apparently been sent out as a platform or enhancement to the event.
The writers were reduced to skimming the tops of the waves ... marriage, family, employment, travel. How could so much time and living be packaged adequately in such thimble-sized capsules? They couldn't, of course, and yet I read on like a man mainlining salty tidbits.
Would these stories have told more if they had been given more space? On the one hand, yes they would. On the other hand, no they wouldn't. And yet I read on and on, searching for ... searching for ... searching for.
Searching for those little flashes of what felt like humanity ... a daughter who died, a soda-pop pleasure. None of the flashes was ever more than a small flash: There was no room to expand and explain and even if there had been, would that have explained the experience of 50 years? In the space of 500 words, there are a few buds, but there are no full-faced flowers.
Each entry was whole and complete as it came up off the page. It was as seamless and smooth as a satin sheet. It was interesting and yet I read it with a strange sense of loneliness and loss ... perhaps the same loneliness and longing that ripples through the delight when watching sitcoms on TV: It is delightful and compact and complete. Everything turns out OK in the end. And there is some reassurance, however false, that somewhere, somehow, someone's life is actually as smooth and seamless and complete as a satin sheet.
The 'grown-up' intellect knows that this is not so, that experience cannot be bordered and cannot fit perfectly in some sardine tin. But there is some child that wishes insistently to be included in a wondrous group of friends whose lives are seamless and smooth ... and it is lonely not to be included, to be pressing a face against the glass that reveals a TV sitcom whose seamlessness is as inviting as it is ludicrous. The child stamps his insistent foot: "There IS a seamlessness. There IS connection. There IS a happy ending that brooks no doubt or downside. There IS ... and I want it!"
On and on I read, both skimming absent-mindedly and yet focused with a gimlet attention ... where were the bits and pieces of humanity that might credibly assert a sharing of experience or belonging ... an eradication of the understanding that experience cannot be shared and simultaneously the understanding that there really is sharing, even if the smarm-meisters say so.
The kid presses his face to the glass behind which there is a longed-for seamlessness. It is too lonely and hard in this place where just-plain-living, whether for 50 years or five, is rife with seams and bad hair days. The glass is so utterly clean that to see through it is effortless. The kid, like the adult, sees everything perfectly well and yet ... and yet ... the glass remains and the longing not to be lonely persists: If I could just get beyond the glass, then I would belong and be part and could lose this clear understanding that experience cannot be shared ... in 500 words or 500,000.
The adult croons: Life is not like that, honey. There is no seamlessness, no capturing. Life is filled with the greys of mixture and compromise. Everything has cowlicks. The deeply-informed adult is 'adult.'
But in the end, the kid is right. S/he's not right in the way that s/he imagines, but that doesn't mean s/he is not right. It's not something one kid can tell another, whether in 500 words or 500,000. The perfectly-cleaned glass reveals all, and yet it's still glass, still bars the way, still fuels the fires of loneliness and longing.
But there is such a thing as opening the window.
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