As I look at your school photo
probably from 1955, I know exactly the bewilderment and confusion you felt. I
see the sorrow and disappointment in your eyes, and the grimness through which
you try to smile for the photographer, who tells you to “say cheese,” but you
cannot; you can only move your lips into a line of resignation. You are
wondering, I know, “Where is the hope I’m supposed to have? Where is Jesus who
is supposed to love me, to take care of me?” I know that these were your
prayers, which are not supposed to be the prayers of a child. I know that you
had already had experiences and memories that let you see through and even
beyond time and space and form, but that you did not understand them and found
yourself even more confused and disappointed and alone. I know that you lived
in fear, both at home and at school, and that only when you were alone in
nature, away from home and school, did you feel any peace. I know that you
lived very much in your own world, which became too large to bear at times but
never too small. I know that you did not understand the world very much, even
feeling that you did not belong in this world, even in the body you possessed.
And that you could not understand any of these things to the point that you
were almost constantly overwhelmed by it all, bewildered by life itself,
especially by people, and particularly by people who came too close to you, and
that you either became paralyzed or like a wounded animal when they tried to
touch you or hold you. You had been like this from a very young age. I will
tell you more.
I know that you sensed and had
learned from your own experiences, even at a very young age, that you were
neither locked in to time or space, and so you were aware of yourself in many
times and many spaces. In your despair, you called out to your future self, me,
to come and help you, for it seemed that you would be trapped in this existence
as a child forever. You knew you could not comprehend or help yourself, but
that perhaps I, the future you, might be at least able to explain to you what
was happening and how you would finally be able to get through it all and
survive as yourself. Well, Joe, I have finally come, finally arrived, to help
you. I know you are still trapped as that bewildered little boy and I have come
to free you after sixty-two years. It has taken me this long to find you and to
understand exactly how you feel. It has been too long but I am here now for
you. And I love you very much. It has taken me this long to even realize how
fettered I was in the same chains that have imprisoned you for so long. I am
with you now, Joe.
When I tell you things about your
life and about you, you may remember them well or not. Sometimes there is too
much pain in remembering, so we choose not to, and try our best to get on with
living our lives. I did this, but eventually we have to return and unravel and
unlearn all that became twisted and consequently learned in the wrong way. I
have tried to do this.
You were born six weeks before your
nine-month birth date. You realized that you had to free yourself then or that
you would die before you could be born. Your mother had to inhale your father’s
cloud of constant cigarette smoke and it was filling your little lungs and
choking you, smothering you. So you kicked hard and she fell on the ice and
down some stairs, breaking her water. You were born in the taxi on the way to
the hospital and were so small and frail that the doctors had you put in an
incubator, a little box with a lamp inside it to keep you warm, just like the
kind that was used to hatch motherless chickens. You were fed with a bottle and
were so small and frail that you were not held much in the two months that you
were there before you were allowed to go home. You did not learn to “bond”
through human touch and had become solitary and alone in your existence. When
your mother tried to pick you up, you squirmed, fought, and screamed; human
touch was overwhelmingly intense, even painful to you. It felt as if you were
being shocked with electricity. Even when people looked directly at you into
your eyes, that too was overwhelmingly intense and painful; you could feel the
energy from their eyes going into you through your eyes and it was so powerful
that you felt as if it would literally cause you to explode, as if you were
being electrocuted. You could only bear to look at people peripherally and
could not bear being touched or even having people in your close proximity.
Your mother would bring you in your carriage to the park and place you under
the trees blowing the wind, where you would watch for hours on end. I am still
mesmerized by trees blowing in the wind and still could watch for hours.
You were not a “normal” child. I
know you really did try to “fit in,” but even your parents couldn’t understand
the topics that you brought up at the dinner table. Once you got over the shock
of transferring from a small, “country” public school, Roosevelt School, in
Colonie, New York, to a large city, Catholic school in Albany, you did “take”
to the whole concept of “Jesus, my friend” thoroughly, and would talk about
concepts from the Baltimore Catechism such as the “nature of God as Supreme
Being,” the “nature of the essence of love,” and other such topics with your
parents. They had no idea what you were talking about whatsoever, and could
only shake their heads and make fun of you by calling you, “Pope Joseph”; “The
Pope speaks,” they would say in their inability to understand the
philosophical, theological, ethical and moral issues that you were trying to
convey. It had taken you much longer than normal to learn to talk; your parents
thought you were “retarded,” though were too embarrassed to seek medical
attention for you. And then when you did start talking, you immediately started
asking philosophical, existential questions that were beyond their level of
superficial conversation. You were serious and wanted to understand what life
was about, but your father could only ridicule you. This is when you developed
a level of stuttering equivalent to a speech impediment. You could barely get a
sentence out without severe stuttering and having to stop speaking. Within a
year you became a child who hardly ever spoke, and so your teachers thought you
were “retarded” (which was the word commonly used at that time) as well. You
were anxious and distracted. Perhaps it was that you had to be “somewhere else”
in your mind because the invasiveness and demand of your environment and the world
itself was just too unbearable, too difficult to satisfy. I know that at school
you would look out the window at the trees blowing in the wind and lose
yourself in that movement and beauty, only to be sharply interrupted by the
nun’s shrill demanding voice: “Joseph, pay attention. Answer my question.” You
would look up, now afraid, licking your lips, and suddenly would feel sharp
pain on the knuckles of your right hand as she hit you hard with a ruler. You
would cry out but more inside than out, and then become very quiet and afraid.
You felt so forsaken you could not even cry; but tears flowed inside your
being. You would stammer something in response to her question that you could
not even recall hearing. In disgust, she would then call on someone else, and
you would go back into your sad, lonely dream. The other children did not
laugh; they too were afraid. Going to this school with its demanding, harsh
nuns all dressed in black, with clicking rosary beads around their waist,
clicking as they rushed down the aisle with a ruler in their hand to smack your
knuckles or to hit you upside the head with their open hand, made living into a
constant hell for you.
I suppose it is
a bit unfair to say that you were not “a normal child.” Are there actually any
“normal” children at all? There are definitely “normal” adults. They are the
ones who carry on their lives without ever questioning who or what they are or
what they are doing. They go through their lives as they believe they’re
supposed to and then they die as they’re supposed to. This is not a bad thing
at all; in fact it may be quite fortunate for those who are not “normal.” You
were normal enough to pass for normal to a certain extent. In today’s world you
might have been diagnosed in one way or another and even placed in “special
ed,” but now is now and then was then.
You did eventually adapt yourself
to the social world of your peers and the adults, perhaps by the time you
reached puberty. But prior to that you were very solitary, not so antisocial as
aloof and unsocial. At age ten, a boy, Frankie Drislane, who lived three houses
down the street, who was sickly and frail, perhaps having been affected with
polio at a certain point earlier in his life, and who the kids on the block
called “Drizzlepus” because he looked so sad as if he were going to cry,
invited you to his house. In truth his mother invited me in as I was walking by
to have tea and cookies with Frankie, who was a bit younger than me, whom I
didn’t know well and wondered why he moved so slowly and stiffly like an old
man, but I never thought any less of him. All I remember is that he brought me
to his room and proudly showed me his stamp collection, with the stamps mounted
in books with pictures of stamps. The moment I saw the collection and how
dignified and cool he felt about it, I was hooked on stamp collecting. He had
been able to create a whole world for himself that he could call his own. For
the next five years or so I would spend every dime and all my time on creating
a most incredible stamp collection, alone, sequestered in my bedroom. I would
relish and cherish every single moment of it. I would be able to shut out the
whole world and live in one of my own making in which I was the master. I
absolutely loved it. And I became quite knowledgeable in the hobby in its
myriad and esoteric details. In this time I somehow found a Russian penpal,
probably through Cub Scouts, who sent me letters with Russian stamps on them,
which I soaked off for my collection, and found a message scribbled underneath
the stamps, that said “Please help me.” I put a dollar, earned from collecting
bottles and hauling them a mile away to the closest store to collect deposits,
in the next letter I sent and never heard back from my friend again. But the
stamp collecting saved my poor little psyche from having to deal with an insane
world. I still had to go to school but I played sick as often as possible by
pressing my forehead up against the warm radiator, sprinkling some water on my
face, and going into my sleeping parents’ room and telling my mother, “Mom, I
don’t feel so good.” She would put her hand up to feel my forehead, and would
say, “My God, Joseph, you have a fever. Go to bed.” She would call the school
and I would be home free. I was able to miss many days of school this way,
which was wonderful. As time went on, she paid me fifty cents an hour to
collate her many Chamber of Commerce mailings consisting of so many pages that
I lined them up from the dining room into the kitchen which included the dining
room table, the buffet, and the kitchen table. One these days she would tell my
father I was sick and call the school. I would collate while watching Truth or Consequences and I Love Lucy, and get paid for this. It
was like heaven.
No comments:
Post a Comment