Friday, April 25, 2003

April 24, 1967 My third

April 24, 1967

My third birthday is the first one I remember. There had been some build-up so I knew it would be something special.  Exactly what it meant, I was not sure, but I knew the date commemorated when I came into the world, a day of fundamental changes.  Birthdays therefore were days of great upheaval; they portended something big. 

I clearly recall that I lay in my bed on the evening before my third birthday.  The bed was in the corner, with a window over my right shoulder. Lights were off.  I thought about the change that was upon me.  I wondered whether I would undergo a sudden evolution. I was thrilled with the anticipation of discovering what happened when a birthday happened to me.  I resolved to stay awake all night and find the answer out. 

In the darkness, almost total when the light was first extinguished, the features of the room crept forward slowly to reveal themselves. Soon I could see most everything despite the darkness.  I felt secure and comfortable and let my thoughts wander. I counted up the years that I had lived: my first year, in which I had lain; the second (after my first birthday), when I crawled; the third, which I had just completed, when I walked; and now on birthday number three I was to enter my fourth year of life.  I expected some great change would come upon me to distinguish this new phase.  I could sense it even then.  I was lying there thinking of numbers of birthdays, the age I was turning, the number of years since I’d started my life. A door to the interior had opened in my thinking.  Things were already getting interesting. 

Light from a passing car leapt up and spilled across the facing wall. It frightened me.  First, it came from outside, from the cold night world, while I was warm and safe in bed. This led me to consider how the inside was distinct from outside, how my bed sat by a wall that was the only thing that separated me from anything that lurked out there. I realized that, right outside, next to my bed, lay dank untended beds of foliage, alive with bugs – a place I didn’t like to go in broadest daylight.  Now it was dark and who knew what was crawling there among those filthy fronds, and here my head was closer to them then I’d ever thought.  Just a wall between my tender self and all the creepy creatures of the night.  I lay awhile pondering the architecture.

Another car went by and once again the light whipped out across the walls, the shadows crazy out of every corner, spinning, growing, disappearing just as quickly.  In that moment chaos erupted in the room, a seething matrix of some alternate environment, an unintelligible flipbook moving faster than I could watch it.  A moment afterwards and everything was back to normal. But for that instant light had ripped away the lid that held this quiet world in place, revealing a disrupted chaos I found disturbing.  I was no longer sure that I was ready to become a three-year-old. Regardless, I had made a vow to stay up late and witness my own transformation, and I knew my birthday was inevitable.  It would happen, even if I tried to hide from it.  So I convinced myself that nothing bad had happened yet, and started waiting for the next phenomenon.

It was a long time coming. But slowly, warm brown light spread through the bedroom.  Too incrementally for me to mark the change, the light developed next a tinge of red.  The air seemed thick.  I saw it fill the space up to the ceiling as I stared above me, saw it occupy what I had always thought was empty.  The room was full of air and the air was full of swirling, coruscating particles, a breatheable liquid.  The air motes scintillated, points of light making lovely patterns.  At first, the points were silver-white, but then I started to distinguish colors: yellow, orange, blue and green, and some still silver scattered in among them.  All the colors now, washing back and forth like respiration, iridescent and electric.  Then I saw a special object floating in the sparkling tide of air.  It was composed of rings of color, orange, yellow, red and blue; a white five-pointed star inside it.  It glowed in a corona, spinning slowly. When it drifted close enough I reached out gently and grabbed it, held it in my fist.  I was careful to make sure it hadn’t slipped away somehow.  But when I slowly, oh so slowly opened up my hand, my eyes unblinkingly attentive, I saw the colors of the spinner I had grabbed had been transferred and stained my very flesh.  Phosphorescent rings of color covered every finger to the very tip, and in the center of my palm a big blue star rotated joyfully, wrapped inside a series of exquisite bright concentric bands.

After several moments, I no longer could maintain my focus.  Tearing eyes demanded that I blink.  The colors instantaneously started fading.  I slowly let my hand relax and close.  The patterns just as slowly were absorbed again into my flesh. But I could see now that there were a lot more spinners floating in the thickly populated air, some with stars like that which I had grabbed, and others that had other patterns.  Some were like the beach, and when I captured them and stared with all my energy while opening my hand as slowly as I could, I saw my hand transformed with rippling dunes, long grass blowing in the wind, waves washing down my fingers and kites flying from their tips to wave in the celestial sea of glittering air particles.  Some with other patterns made my hand appear to wear a lovely dress, each fingertip the face of a poetic girl, golden hair blowing in the wind, a face too vague to recognize when I looked closely.  There were lots of different spinners; each had a different consequence, created different patterns on my hand and in my mind.

Finally, the sky began to lighten.  All the colors that had filled the air grew watery with dawn’s approach.  It was my birthday.  I was three years old, and in the fourth year of my life.  I had evolved. I fell asleep, reverberating with the truths revealed to me.  When I explained it later to my doctor at my annual physical not very much later, he didn’t seem to understand.  It was probably, I thought, because I was not yet communicating clearly.  I supposed that that would have to wait till I was four.