A Sketch of a Different Past

Virginia Woolf, in her “A Sketch of the Past,” states, incorrectly, I believe, “Yet to describe oneself truly one must have some standard of comparison.” Woolf laments such a standard against which to assess herself, since she was “never at school, never competed in any way with children [her] own age, [she had] never been able to compare [her] gifts and defects with other people’s.” 

Lucky her.  Never having had to belie herself with false compare, to paraphrase Shakespeare’s Sonnet  130 (My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”).

It seems to me I’ve lived my whole life flailing against or taking comfort from some standard of comparison or other. Not often was it comfort. 

It began with always being compared by my parents to other people’s kids. Usually negatively, to motivate me to try harder.  Or by teachers, coaches, friends, girlfriends, spouses (the first mostly frequently and inconsistently. I was better than her previous boyfriend, but in the end less than her father). Co-workers (again unevenly). Other students, as a student. Students, as an educator.

Most damagingly, because I learned the habit early, by myself, always trying to find that one key skill, that one slightly better grade, that one higher degree, that would make me acceptable, maybe even successful by comparison. Not outstanding. That was for other people’s kids. And for cousins. Except those cousins who were “bad blood,” and to be avoided (this rather depended on which parent was doing the comparing, and to which set of cousins).

What’s so necessary about other people’s achievements and failings as a measure of who we are and what we have achieved, or even found worthwhile? Nothing. Sorry Virginia. It does not matter one minor bit of body lint what anyone else is doing or has, or had, done. You are (well, in your case, were) what you are (were), and what you fashion(ed) yourself into. If that happens to be a copycat existence, that, I know, is truly a path to all manner of dissatisfaction. Unless one can lie to oneself outrageously. 

Someone else’s achievements are someone else’s.  They do not make me a lesser person, by comparison.  Someone else’s defects are someone else’s. They do not make me a better person, by comparison. 

And if I write that often enough, maybe I can make myself begin to believe it. 

I am what I have done and left undone, for whatever reasons I did the done and didn't the undone.

I am the frightened two-year old in his crib, with a nurse helping my mother take the stitches out of my fat little left hand, and sometime later out of my chin, and sometime later still out of the back of my head. I am, and always seem to have been, accident prone.

I am the three-or-so year-old climbing the latticework fence my dad had just built, and told me not to climb. I didn’t know why not, because it wasn't that hard. Then I broke several of the lathes. The warning wasn’t for my safety; it was for the safety of the fence. 

I am the four-year-old building a snowman in the few inches of winter slush on Avebury, in Victoria.

I am the same four-year-old with my little brother, in a do-it-yourself recording booth (probably in Eaton’s in Victoria) telling our dad, away down east somewhere, getting reattached to the RCAF as a peacetime flight instructor,“Hi, Daddy,” and “Wish you were here” to the whispered promptings of our mother. Then explaining with an indignant sob, how I had just had a needle that day, “and it hurted.” And wondering aloud, with no prompt. “Daddy doesn’t speak?...”

And the six-year-old, going again with my little brother, hand in hand and list in pocket,  through the gathering dusk of winter Claresholm, to the meat market and the drug store on errands for our parents and for comic books for ourselves. I assumed at the time that they just let us go, having taught us the route, and introduced us to all the shopkeepers of a small town. We felt very responsible. Either they followed us, out of sight, to make sure we didn’t get lost or confused, or just go our own way for our own childish reasons. Or they took advantage of a little privacy in the light housekeeping motel unit that was our home for four that winter. I was older before I suspected they might have followed us, and a lot older before I realized they might have needed some privacy, let alone what they might have needed it for. The comic books were probably the bribe in the chore, and the price of privacy. 

And the nine-year-old scared at going to a new school in a new city, hiding in snowbanks trying to play hookey, rather than face the new and uncertain.

I am the eleven year-old school safety patroller with my white belt and big stop sign. And later the twelve-year-old with my Captain’s badge and record book, having my recommendation for patroller of the year ignored by the local police constable who oversaw the safety patrol program. He’d picked the winner, the son of a friend, months earlier.

And the fourteen-year-old, in my Boy Scout uniform, standing on shaky knees not very well hidden in navy-blue shorts, part of an Honour Guard saluting our friend Brian, from his graveside in early June 1963. He had been complaining of a sore knee the previous August, on a three-day camp-out in the Saint Mary’s River valley, south of Lethbridge. Bone cancer, as it turned out.

GROWING PAINS

A friend dead at fifteen

one quarter of the age

I remember him from

later in a life

time he never lived.

Chewed up

by bones that grew

too long too fast,

    metastasizing

into a short story or

a lyric of a life learning

of eternity too soon.

Was he the stuff of Chums

and Boy’s Own?

The hero of Scouting for Boys?

Not really.  But

who ever was?

Schooled as we were in the

thousand instinctively nasty ways

boys will be boys.

What did we learn from his death,

the first of our crowd

to have his own funeral?

Boy Scouts in shorts,

saluting at his grave side:

we would not cry

after all. We were becoming

Men. Grim-faced,

prepared

 

And a whole assortment of other younger me’s, doing things as only I could, within the limits and out to the extent, of my own abilities and understanding, at the time: shagging foul balls and selling pop and peanuts at the local ball diamond on Sunday afternoons; snaring gophers in the vacant lots; ending up in Emergency with sprained ankles needing wrapping, and gopher bites needing tetanus shots. The usual.

Compared to nobody. Gifts my own. Defects my own.