I remember
a few things from my earliest years when we all lived in a second-floor walk-up
apartment on a huge street across from a huge post office with an incredible length of steps up to the front doors that shined a gold patina. I remember being small, sitting in a big rocking
chair in my parent’s room at the back of the house, warm from the heat of the air
coming through the open window that looked out on what I thought was the biggest
and most beautiful tree in the world. Even as a small girl, I just couldn’t reconcile
looking out the front windows of the house and seeing a busy street with cars
and a constant barrage of students walking from the subway station to the high
school where they were students and the view from the back of the house of the
biggest and most beautiful tree. I liked
the back of the house better.
On that day, as I
remember, I watched dust particles float in a stream of sunshine that cascaded
through the leaves of my tree. I was convinced that those floaters were angels coming
to talk with me about the adventures I’d take and the places I’d go. My sisters
and brothers were older than me so I spent a lot of time alone while my
mother worked, napped, read, or did
anything that would have meant not being involved with me right then and there
but that’s how mothers were in those days they say. My imagination became my
best friend, and I conjured Susan, my imaginary friend. All the adults would say I had a great
imagination, but no one really wanted me to imagine. I found that out later when, for the mere attention of family, I stuffed that imagination right down my
throat. I would start all my sentences with ‘imagine if’ until one day, while
walking down the street to buy some penny candies at Minnie’s, my sister told
me to stop saying that ‘cause what you imagine can’t come true and I couldn’t
hang around her and her friends if I was always imagining ‘cause I was
embarrassing her. So I stopped. I
stopped sharing my imagination and I started living for others, and sometimes I
got angry at my sister for handing me the tool that I used to start construction
on my own personal mini prison where I
kept my ideas and my dreams and my visions all to myself.
Eventually, I built
the walls and stairwells that led to several floors of extra rooms, hidden
rooms, and, yeah, shameful rooms of my prison. It no longer just contained my
secret imagination, my creativity, my desire to envision the story. It eventually
had every imperfection of my life. Thus was my world of many years. There was the
settling for a career that suited my family, followed by many
unfulfilled jobs, failed relationships, failed marriages, an inability to
settle myself, and all of those imperfections finding a special place in the
many rooms in my prison.
I heard it said life is a circle; we just keep running
around that quarter mile, and it ends up being that everything you start out being is everything you will eventually be. The imperfections are only pretty little gems that give you a good shine, like the gold patina on the doors to the huge post office across from my
childhood home. It’s even okay to build prisons. We all do in one way or
another ‘cause truly we all become imperfect once we forget who we were meant
to be, but we can remember again, we can put the for sale sign on that prison real
estate and just keep the shine.
Then, I imagined being imperfect was perfectly acceptable, so I was.
