A few days ago, my mother sent me an email with the description line screaming, “TOP SECRET.” If you know my mother, you know she’s probably got something good.
She cloaked my anticipated reception with about 32 calls warning me to never, ever under any circumstance, vocalize the taboo contents of the message in the house: elevating mum’s the word to law.
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As I shouldn’t be checking personal emails at work, I raced out the office door at 5 p.m., my progress slightly stunted by sore soles and raw heels (thank you modern fashion for positing woman at odds with her physique: shackled, enslaved to the slender leg), I barreled into my apartment, tripped over the cat, flung my MacBook open, and logged into an obsolete AOL mailbox -- only to find that, if anything the email was not top secret. If anything, my mother’s warnings concede conclusive evidence that my family members harbor unnecessary embarrassment for personal, although exemplary work, and are insane.
The email contained a slim anthology of short stories my 14-year-old sister wrote for a creative writing class: beautiful and innocent. Unique in that only an untainted mind, purged of greed, uncluttered by feathered words and shredded factoids, could communicate. If she ever discovered my subterfuge, I’d be dismembered, poisoned, dead. Still, I bravely tip-toed through 20-minutes of nostalgia, warming myself to rekindled memories as one shyly welcomes tepid ocean surf during a young May.
I forget how entwined my sister’s life is with mine. She, the bookworm. While I rode my horse in a sandy square, she -- still too small -- sat beneath sprouting sunflower towers, humming to the creaks of a rusty windmill. Patting Hannah’s ears, that bristly, donkey forehead, and dozing with cat in lap in an ancient, oaky scented tack room. Her summers were my summers. Barefoot on gravel driveways, stumbling to keep up with kin at least half an age older. Black berry juice stained white sneakers to be thrown out, pine needle sap between bit fingernails, baked auburn braids sizzling like embers under a 5 o’clock sun.
I saunter through a hall of mirrors. The door is always unlocked.
She walked the same school halls, donning crazy colored wigs and bows, bottle green eyes flicking from face to face, pleased to incite humor. We shared a muted sadness for our charred, now fallen, home. I can picture 8 Hurd Street groaning amidst smoke, rendered immobile in her stone foundations, while the flames ripped from room to room, scarring her stomach, chasing and poaching our happy childhood away.
I think of William Shakespeare and the famed monologue from "As You Like It" beginning, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages…”
Life as partitioned acts, scored with spaghetti-string motivations and languid movement, guest appearances and volcanic eruptions. Mind herself boasts a Golden Hoard where bittersweet Nostalgia dons Juliet’s cap and cloak, forlornly offing herself for want of Romeo, while desperate Hamlet -- Yorick’s skull on his left, a tall draft in his right -- fumes over a drowned, enfeebled Ophelia in the next room.
The collective mind harbors a chamber of memories specially catalogued by an absent minded bookworm, ranking sense to sensibility. For me: sun soaked flashcards of my grandparents under striped umbrellas on a Florida beach, sucking on lemonade and unwrapping cold cuts. A box of Entenmann’s double chocolate donuts taunts me in my father’s hand as he strides through Central park. My first dog, a shiny, inky bug romping between too-high grass, ears flopping upon n golf ball shaped cranium, tiny yelps disappearing in the framework.
Live theatre is life. Guaranteed admittance. Garish, neon exit signs. Pay as you go. Stage fright. Roses. Peopled and speckled by opulence and squalor. At face value, we are just as faceless as the empty, public stage we assume. We share the exhibition, mark it up with tape and tap shoe.
However, the best seat in the house isn’t in front of that main stage, rather, well within the mind’s eye. Strange and experimental, but valued in at a lovely, self-righteous, robust smear of solipsism better than any soft kiss on a salty cheek.
