Once upon a time, a baby boy was born to parents who no longer expected to have children. They were an older couple, both established in their professions. Neither knew much about children and so their little boy grew up among adults. He had no playmates and his closest friends were books. It was within this world he escaped and could be a little boy.
The little boy’s father expected more of this son and decided that books were no place for his son to dwell. "It was time for him to become a man." So the young child was sent off to military school to become a man before he knew what it was like to be a little boy.
It was the sixties. Major upheaval in the country produced as many hippies as college graduates, an alarming development for the boy’s father. When his son came home during a college break, the father was waiting for him with a loaded gun. He shot him. The son, startled and in shock, managed with the help of his college roommate to stumble to the Volkswagon in the drive. His friend took him to the hospital but the son decided that he must leave the hospital before his father came to finish the job.
The father fully intended to kill his son. That would have been far better than have a son with long hair and strange ideas about peace and love that were not part of the script the father had written for the son. As the son crept out of the hospital, the bullet still lodged in his gut, he knew he could not return home.
The father was never charged with a crime. He was able to cover it up since he was a well known politician. The "incident" was simply reported as an accident.
The son traveled across the country. It was the beginning of his life in communal living where he learned from strangers what it was like to be loved unconditionally, where he could think and speak and explore human relationships. He protested Vietnam and spent hours with others who believed that if they loved enough, sang enough Peter, Paul and Mary, smoked enough pot, there would be peace.
After several years of wandering and peace had not come, the boy decided to contact his family. "If we all go to counseling, I will come home," he said. The parents agreed. The first meeting was strained. The mother cried. The father coughed. "No, there would be no more shooting," promised the father. However, the son realized that there would be no counseling either. So, the son went alone. Those years of counseling were growing years.
The son, having learned that love was an ultimate goal of every human being found a woman with whom he wanted to share his life. She brought out his artistic, sensitive nature and he grew into a loving father and husband. But, this life was not to be, either. His wife died unexpectedly and he was left with two grown children who were devastated by the loss of their mother. At the same time, his own mother being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s only two weeks previously, disappeared.
The police had no where to turn. The son became the chief suspect. He was stunned. How could the police believe such a horror? The police had no proof. The son had an airtight alibi but this did not stop the harassment from the police. The son turned to the bottle and pills. He became lost in anonymity once more and spiraled into depression.
The girl
Once upon a time, a little girl was born to a man and woman who wanted a baby. Her expected arrival was planned and the nursery was ready. She was born into a loving home with all the advantages of the upper middle class. She had a nanny and a mother who hovered. She was the apple of her father’s eye.
When the little girl was ten, her father, was killed by a drunk driver. Her life was changed forever. Her mother, unable to cope with the loss, placed her daughter in an orphanage. Along with her three siblings, the little girl did not understand the abandonment.
By the time she was twelve, she had a plan. She’d take her siblings and run away from the orphanage. In the middle of the night, she took her brothers and baby sister and head for the woods. The children were 11, 7, 5 and 2. The young girl had thought to bring a little food but no diapers nor water. By the second day the little children wanted to go back to the orphanage. There were tears and the girl knew they were lost. Where had she hoped to go? Any place would have been better than the orphanage. On the third day, the sheriff found the children. At that moment, the girl knew that she could not save her siblings. She’d have to save herself. She did. She worked diligently and won a scholarship to a boarding high school. She was out.
The girl was deeply influenced by the Women Religious who ran the boarding high school. She was at a fork in the road. Should she follow her dreams to dance, or should she enter the convent? The Vietnam War gave her the answer. She would enter the convent and work for peace.
It was not long before the girl realized she made an incredible mistake. She knew that without the convent, she would never have survived. She would not have received the nurture she needed to become a woman. Now that she was a woman, she also knew that she must leave the convent. Hopefully, she would find that one relationship which would become the foundation of a family.
In time, the woman married. She was delirious. She did not know she could be so happy. In rapid succession, she delivered several children. Her life was centered on the children and art. Both sustained her while her husband spent long hours climbing his career ladder to secure their future.
When the children where almost grown, she discovered that the love she believed in was a sham. Her husband did not love her, if he ever was capable of loving anyone, she would be surprised. His abuse was subtle but cruel and deliberately evil. Everyone on the "outside" saw him as the perfect husband and father.
She had fallen herself, many years before. She did not expect perfection but his calculating revenge of her fall had filled his mind for almost twenty years, so it did not surprise her to learn from others that he had been with at least six other women during their marriage. The hypocrisy was tangible. She needed to leave.
However, his revenge was not complete until he managed to poison the minds of their children and she became a mother in exile. They were left to believe his story because she would not destroy him with hers.
She left.
The couple
On a beautiful summer day, many years after the woman left, she was looking for a friend in the ER of a hospital. Construction made a mess of ER and she stumbled, falling through a curtain and landing in the lap of a smiling, albeit surprised man who was sitting on a chair by the bed of their mutual friend. The friend, who was heavily sedated and oblivious, lay sleeping.
Three hours passed in a wink. The woman realized she was already late for an appointment and quickly left with a hasty good-bye. As she sailed down the hall, she realized something had happened. It was a good feeling. A wonderful feeling. Then, she realized, she didn’t get the name of the man with whom she had shared a lifetime. How could that be? Both strangers and their stories came tumbling out like Topsy.
Many days passed and the woman found herself thinking of nothing else. One day she went to her favorite park bench during her lunch hour, sketch book in hand. As she sketched, she felt she was not alone. She looked up into the smiling face of "her" stranger. Could she be dreaming?
"I was wondering," said the man, "Would you like to spend some time getting to know one another?" The woman could hardly speak. "Yes," she said. "I’ll call you," he said and was gone. She called after him, “My phone number?" He smiled from his car window, "555-1234." She was astonished.
What followed was an intense "getting to know you" kind of time. They found they had similar interests, dreams, goals. He was delighted in golden sunsets and e. e. cummings. He could recite Latin poetry. He sang music he wrote. She played the piano for him and he played his guitar. She delighted him with notes hidden in places he was sure to look. They went to free concerts and Shakespeare in the Park. They fed the ducks and did rubbings of old cemetery stones. They walked in the woods and drove to the country.
On one particular Christmas Eve, the man said to the woman, "Do you have a few minutes, I want to show you something?" They took a short drive to the park. They walked for a few minutes and the man said, "Look up." "Ahhhhh!" thought the woman, finally. When she closed her eyes and lifted her head to his face, he said, "No, look up there! LOOK!"
There in the crook of a huge oak tree was a green bush of some sort. "Yes?" she questioned. She had never noticed and didn’t know why he was making such a big deal about a seemingly dirty old bush that had somehow taken root in a tree. "It’s mistletoe!" the man said laughing. "Mistletoe?" the woman questioned. She had never seen it in its natural habitat before. She realized she needed to secretly drop the "bought" mistletoe she had in her pocket.
He took her in his arms and kissed her for the first time.
What followed was a time of knowing and loving and mutuality that neither had experienced before. They had become a "we."
Both believed that many more years stretched before them. Then, on an autumn day, the woman found the man dead. Her life seemed to be frozen in time. How could this be? Her beautiful, wonderful love was gone.
After the numbing weeks of death details that robbed life itself from the woman, she began to rail at God. Her anger was unprecedented. She ended one particular hot session with the words, "Okay God, you do not exist. Do you hear that, YOU DO NOT EXIST."
But, Christmas was coming. People were counting on her to bring them Christmas. How could she? How could she think of birth when she hadn’t really dealt with death? She couldn’t even begin to think of resurrection. So, she turned to art. Feverishly she began to create Pysanky eggs. She usually did this during Lent. It was her Lenten meditation for years. This wax resist drawing process came easily and automatically to her. She did it over and over and over till she was only days from Christmas. All the while she cried silently and embraced the pain. The work had calmed her. The work helped her through the difficult days from Thanksgiving to Christmas. She was working through death. The hole that death had left in her heart was still there, but something was happening.
She took one of her eggs in her hand and crushed it. Brightly colored shells lay in a heap. Death. Or, was it life?
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