Realities Taken to be True

Tina French’s new book The Witch Elm’s main character Toby Hennessy leads a happy-go-lucky charmed life of cheerful oblivion. He was born with the proverbial silver spoon. He was born into a stable family,  loved and supported from the get-go. Now he has a PR job that he loves, a great girlfriend and lots of good friends.

Will the Real Self Please Stand!

In an interview with the New York Times Book Review blog, French says that her life was also blessed. When she was a teenager if somebody told her about their abusive childhood, she could not believe it was true. “They must be exaggerating, mustn’t they?” Not that she thought that they were lying, but how could it possibly be real? She never had to think about this or consider the possibility of childhoods so different than hers.

So in “The Witch Elm,” one night a burglar enters Toby Hennessy’s apartment, beat him half to death and left him there for dead. When he comes to, he no longer is the physically and mentally sound healthy man. Now he suffers from traumatic brain injury and trouble with speech, memory, executive organizational skills, a limp, and PTSD. His body and his mind have turned into tricky untrustworthy places for him to be. With no escape, licking his wounds, he retreats to his family house.

His reality caved into a new and frightening place, a world he had never dealt with or had to consider. He was jolted out of the good life into a brutal world of struggles unknown to him.

I come from a world much closer to his new reality. I did not experience loving parents and a stable home. I could not relate to someone like the original Hennessey,  but there was someone very much like him from my school days.

Bob (fictitious name) was a football star. He had a warm smile for everyone, even for me. But he was alien. I would not know how to speak to him. What would I have to say to someone so different? Someone who did not know anything of the world I inhabited from day one on.

Just recently I met up with a friend who is a friend of Bob’s. Bob had a fantastic career. But my friend told me Bob lost everything and was driving for Uber.  No less at the age of eighty. It turns out that his life was far from the charmed life I had imagined. He was abandoned as a child. He had been through multiple divorces. His life savings were depleted. He had gone from top in his career to a    driver and it all happened suddenly.

So he was not born with a silver spoon. His mother had deserted the family early on. He had to live with his grandmother. During high school, he got in lots of trouble, but I assumed he was a spoiled kid whose parents were there to bail him out time after time. But no, he rebelled against authority as I had done.

Illusion

Checker Shadow Illusion

We just don’t know. We have no way of knowing. We look out through a pinhole at the world. Yet we think we have everyone pegged. We know who they are so we never give them a chance. But I know now that I don’t know my wife after 43 years together or my daughter 39.

I am a slow learner. It took me to eighty to see this far and I’ve got so much further to go. We all have our unique realities to sort out, bit by bit, like a hundred thousand tiny piece puzzle.

Now I need another life to build out the bits and pieces of realities that fit together.

So let’s use the above checkerboard as a metaphor.  Would you believe it if I tell you that all the squares on the board are exactly alike in color, hue, brightness, shading, everything?  Hard to believe, but it is true! Print and cut out the squares and place them side by side. Test this any way you like!