Home	Caged Bird Sings	The Mall and the Void	Splinters	The City on Fire	Beware of Abstractions

You have asked, more pointedly each time, what is wrong with me--divorce? Depression? Some news I've kept secret? Well, now you have your story; you may laugh or frown blankly or decide, with the assurance of someone who knows no reality beyond her own, that I am writing about something else in disguise--;an unfortunate teenage romance, maybe. In your place I would do the same. And, while we're talking about love, tell me: do you have an answer for that age-old lovers' question? Is it better to see, for one shining moment, Paradise rolling out before you, only to have the gates slam in your face, or never to know? Sometimes I still pretend it never happened; other times I feel it would have been worth a thousand times the pain I have suffered, before and since.      I was thirteen, I think-stupid as any teenager, more so than some--petty, insecure, glitteringly social, almost certainly depressed, suffering all the usual infirmities of that age and, quite typically, certain that they were mine alone. Look in the album beneath my bed, though, and that is not the Kate you will see; oh, no, the personage beaming out at you from parties, concerts, basketball games, could be nothing less than a movie star. Look at her leaning against that flowering crabapple in Gibson Park, surrounded by pink petals, decked out in her sea-green bridesmaid's dress, shiny blonde hair pinned up and curled, ready for a fairy knight or a famous actor to sweep her off to marry him.      I was so proud of that pose. I was desperately proud of everything about me at that reception--how funny I was, how glowing, how special. A wonder, really, that everyone I spoke to didn't fall over with admiration. I laughed with my friends, and I charmed their parents. I latched onto my older brother's best friend and gabbled about his basketball team without any idea what I was talking about; the greatest good I could imagine was that he might think I was cute. Then--      I was staring him full in the face. "Listen!"      "What?"      "Do you hear it--the Music--some sort of flute--" (The thing that has set poets scribbling and mystics singing for centuries)      "The community band's practicing, but we've had Sousa all night--"      "A band?" I laughed, poised, giddy tightness in my innards. Then picnickers turned to stare as I tore past them, ripping my rented dress. I had reached the duck pond when I realized that I didn't even know the direction the sound had come from. There I collapsed onto the railing; the grimy, foamy green water wavered beneath me as I panted. I despaired (fool, I tell that little girl: you knew nothing of despair then, or of hope), and when I dramatically told myself I could live no more, the sound came again.      Mind you, it was faint. It could have been the wind, the fountain in the duck pond. Yet I ran again, following the path around the pond past begging geese, shivering at the cold, wet air on my arms. Soon the sound led me off the path into willows and aspen and scratchy marsh bushes, and the Music changed from a call to a jig. I laughed and leaped over the deadfall, and thistles' thorns did not touch me. I danced toward the source; with every leap the sound grew sweeter and clearer.      The bushes parted and I reached a field of grass sloping down to the river, and I saw the others, the children, dancing like me, following like me over the soft green-gold. Then I caught sight of the one we followed, and all left me except his shape (a silhouette of liquid sun amid shadows, dancing like we who followed, but so fleet and light of foot that we seemed giants by comparison) and his Music until we came to the river's edge. He waited barefoot in the mud, woven red and yellow coat trailing into the water, fingers dancing over his little pipe, and when we caught up he stopped playing and looked round at us with rainbow eyes and laughed and laughed with delight, and of course we laughed with him.      "Welcome, all. Sarah, Corey, Cheyenne, Matt--and ah, why, Miss Jordan, you too!" he said to the small children, bowing. He spoke to all of us, and even if he only said a name, the lucky one glowed--her name on his lips--the best gift of her life-- To me, he said (I remember it like yesterday), "Don't tell me--Katherine Hale, a whole thirteen years. Thirteen! Why, Miss Katy, truly I am honored."      "I'm--I can't--" But I didn't know what I was or what I couldn't. All I knew was that I had no place with these children, following that creature of marvel and sunlight to--to--what?      "Don't worry--but a breath where I'm taking you will cure that, my Katy."      When he finished, he faced all of us and clapped his hands. "Now!" he called.      He raised his flute to his lips, and the dance began. I'm only half a mystic and certainly no poet; I cannot tell you the least scrap of what I heard and saw and felt as we flitted over the reeds and mud and hills, through the afternoon and into the sunset; but at some point other thoughts intruded--who can blame me? what did I know of him then?--thoughts of food and my cousin's wedding and my shredded dress and the trouble I'd be in. When I looked up from those thoughts, I saw the others leaving me in the distance, the Piper already out of sight. I tripped, and that trip was the end.      As my aloneness washed over me with all the cold of the river to my right, I stood, and though I stared madly into the sky I saw only what had already passed beyond that bloody horizon. By the time I began to find the way back, up weedy dirt slopes, over marshy grass into which I sank up to my ankles, through briars that left me scratched and bleeding, dusk had come. Finally I came to the Rivers' Edge Trail, which I knew led back to the park.      All light but the moon's had gone when I found the park again. My family converged on me, frantic, and I could answer none of their questions. My memory blurs, fast-forwards; I know that they took me to the hospital and then home and then to doctors, but those first days I paid no attention to anything. Everything I touched or saw by its earthliness reminded me of the thing I had lost, and sound reminded me that the Music was gone.       Several times I barked out my story--or what sense I could make of it--to my parents and my doctors, but they offered only brief statements of sympathy followed by pointed questions, until finally one of the doctors told me, "Sometimes, if you go through something very difficult, your mind will create--another story--to protect you--"      But I would have none of that, however they prodded. What a martyr I felt as my parents sidestepped and my friends laughed behind my back, and--much as I would like to say that I was faithful, that the loss left a hole that never closed--the glory of my martyrdom soon eclipsed the grief, and within two weeks I was only sulking. Two weeks more, and I was back to my brittle, shiny little self.      Meanwhile, eighth grade wrapped up; my classmates, many of whom had, a month before, regarded anything other than movies, sick jokes, and gossip with contempt, developed passionate Interests in drama, music, art, biology. My own Interest happened to be singing, and the effort of reinventing myself for high school meant far more to me than one impossible afternoon. Not to say that I forgot it entirely--oh, no. In between tests and boyfriends, I would think back on it over the next few years--sometimes with the regret I have now, but more often with a high, thin, terribly beautiful longing that dissolved into rapturous fantasies and abysmal free verse. I was ever so proud that it was written about him--not some pimpled boy who sat next to me in math class or a creature of my own invention. He came in my mind to represent longing, ideal, inspiration, the beauty of nature--all the usual. By the time I left for college, my attitudes had crystallized into a philosophy that thirteen-year-old Kate would never have recognized. It went something like this:       In our lives there are the homely things and the indefinable sublime. You must live your ordinary life to the fullest yet still find time to appreciate the sublime (the latter being, more or less, a conviction that views are pretty and concerts moving). If you fail at the first, you are effete and silly; if you fail at the second, you are heartless and mundane. Subhuman, possibly--at least, I remember rhapsodizing in an A paper for some class or other that a sense of the sublime was what made us human. My arty college friends quite liked the idea, and, as I remember it better, I feel it might have been halfway right, for all the good it did me. I was wrong as could be in what I really thought, or wanted to think--that he and I had struck a bargain.       I met my husband sophomore year in an art class; our relationship had no storybook passion, but we talked a great deal--even had Romantic Moments stargazing--and my friends thought we were the perfect couple. I agreed whenever little things hadn't thrown me into some funk or other, and as we drifted uneventfully toward commitment, we made declarations of exclusive and undying love that weren't particularly sincere on either side. A month after graduation we had a casual little wedding and moved into an apartment; he started studying business, and I went to work. Of course, I discovered quickly and rather to my surprise that married life involved more than feeling picturesque at art openings, and I had become exhausted and disillusioned long before the real problems started. Real problems, like--but no. You know well enough the facts of my marriage; I have no reason to rehash them here. It is enough to say that after twelve years of that hell, I found myself evicted from my own home, all nonsense about sublime and mundane--in fact, most every sort of artistic nonsense--long since chased out of me; I boarded an airplane back to my hometown, where my parents had agreed to let me stay until I'd found work and saved enough to get my own apartment.       I had been job-hunting for a month when my parents and I were invited to a church barbecue in Gibson Park; I accepted dutifully, though terrified of trying to explain my situation to old friends. Yet I was glad I had come: it was a beautiful spring day, sunny and fresh. Everyone was happy to see me, and the nosy ones I told enough that they asked no more. I enjoyed learning about the lives of which I'd gathered only the barest outline from holiday cards, though, as I'm sure you can imagine, it was bittersweet--that feeling of life lost, opportunities lost... But I'd known enough shades and colors of unhappiness that I no longer tried to sort them out; if this one touched something deeper, more innocent, more savage than usual, that was all the more reason to leave it alone.      Alex, the twelve-year-old daughter of a high school friend, was telling me about her classmates with a rather nasty wit, when she clawed my wrist.       "What's the matter?" I said.       "Do you hear it, Ms. Hale? A flute--" She let go of me.      "Hear what?" I asked as equably as I could. "The community band's playing," I heard myself say as I thought, Self-deception, Kate, you're going crazy, Please? --I can't, I'm a grown woman, there are more important things in life than chasing after phantoms Please? Anything--You're just mocking me, you think I'll fall for it again--"but we've been hearing Sousa all night. Come here," I said, pulling her away. "Have you ever tried my mother's brownies? They're like something out of Paradise." I can't, I can't, I can't, I can't Please?       Alex ate a brownie, although from her look it might as well have been dirt, and then I brought her to her parents, who I presumed would keep her with them. Then I walked away as fast as I could, the three staring after me; once I was too far to hear even the thundering marches of the band, I had the presence of mind to catch a bus back to my parents' house.       The next week or two I navigated calmly enough. Perhaps I did not care so much about every job interview, and perhaps I could be caught staring into space more often than usual. But every day I chatted with my parents and went to Morning Light for coffee with a friend. It was when one of these friends had gotten around to tactfully asking me about some of the specifics of the divorce that the dam inside me burst:       "--so I packed up all my earthy belongings, and that's pretty much nothing--" I said. And I realized that they did add up to nothing. What did I have that I could not abandon? The ashes of a marriage. A few hundred dollars. A pile of magazines with names like Home Living. Unemployment. A business suit, sweaters, a pile of pajamas. A photo album. Thirty-seven years' scars. A suitcase with a broken zipper.       Tears ran and ran; memory ate my mind, my love such as it was, my cares such as they were. Louise watched me, terrified, and murmured sorry. I told her I had to be alone and walked away. Locked myself in my bedroom. Couldn't seem to stop sobbing for more than fifteen minutes, that first day, and I wouldn't tell any of you why. What could you have done? (Really, what can you do?)       Yes, it's not as bad now, you think. I have my job; I have my apartment; I can even have a normal conversation. Time, you say, for me to make friends. Volunteer. Date. I need to forget, you say, my marriage. Because you will not believe that I am honestly miserable over what you thought was a story I invented to get attention during middle school. Yet not an hour goes by that it is not shoved in my face that I have been offered Paradise twice and twice turned it down.       Absurd, you say. You're right. It's more than absurd; it's unseemly (no, let's be frank: ridiculous, disgusting, hopelessly self-indulgent) to make a tragedy of something that might not have happened. Something childish, unreal, nothing to do with a truly meaningful life--something so childish, so crude, that it could only be embraced by someone with nothing else. You people who love your lives, whatever they bring you, you who keep on trying--you have the strength of titans. I was one of you once, almost. Twenty years ago, ten years ago, five years ago, I was one of you. Now I am faithful again, broken again, hopeful again--here I wait.       The greatest art is the art of sorrow--small sorrow, great sorrow--and the people who know it. The deepest truth is sorrow and the greatest heroes those who plumb sorrow to its depth yet stand strong against it. Say what you will, but the poor in spirit outnumber the rich tenfold, and joy is a stranger to this world. He smiles on us, laughs at us, yes; sometimes he'll even stay a week, a month, a year, a decade; but always, in the end, he returns home to that place, golden in the sunset, where the not only the brightest but the deepest truth is the truth of joy.       I have skills; I have family and friends who need me. Call me selfish--I am selfish--but grant me a third chance, and I will follow. I will not falter; I will not look back. Grant me but a third chance...