Even as a prisoner in a house of strangers, there were always grandmother’s quiet, soul-enlivening rooms, with no television or radio to disturb my reveries. But the secretary, my personal holy place, was where I most enjoyed being. On any given day of the week, at any time of that day, I might be found scribbling away on pieces of paper— composing stories that fluttered in my mind like the wings of birds. I wanted to let the birds out, so that they could fly, and most of all so that they could sing.
As an adult, when I lived in the Mojave Desert in California for a time and kept an aviary, I learned that canaries sing so beautifully in cages because they are males and they are trying to attract a mate. I got so disturbed by this and the ferocity of the male love birds who attacked and killed other birds in the aviary then cannibalized them, I couldn’t stand it. I brought most of the birds back to the farm where I had purchased them. I only kept the doves. But before long a seven-year old boy with a BB gun shot and killed them.
Fortunately, in the beginning of my days I could not have known why birds sing, or why love birds tear apart their potential rivals, or that there would ever be a small boy so full of hate that he would have to kill a helpless bird in a cage, just to get some relief from the pain of his life. I would have to wait a long, long time to find out the dual nature of reality. But I was getting off to a good start. My stories were helping me examine myself very closely. I was not like a young Leonardo Da Vinci collecting specimens and taking them apart to see how they worked. I was the specimen, and I wanted to understand who it was that was picking me apart.
Attached to the desk’s writing surface were overhead, glass-door-front book shelves. My mother used these shelves to store her fancy drinking goblets, those that were taken out for very special occasions. And the three drawers under the pull-down writing surface contained table linens—again, used only for holidays or events so rare that they marked life changes.
Bronislawa Leowkadia Szyzko, my American-born mother, daughter of Victoria Konezko and Sigismund Szysko, never minded when I sat at the desk writing my stories, nor did she even ask what I was doing. She was far too busy. She worked two jobs—as a hotel maid and a sewing machine operator at a garment factory— to pay off my convalescing father’s hospital bills. Mothers are supposed to be our first gurus. That’s what the saints and sages say. But at 7 Church Place, in the shadow of Fall Mountain, this was not the case.
At home my mother appeared to carry out her many chores with great attention, but I could see her mind was in another place. On some level, she must have noticed that I was at the desk regularly, using up plenty of scraps of paper. In fact, she must have been the supplier of the pages of my first manuscripts. But she never spoke to me about my magical writing. And I never told her. That’s the way things were between Blanche—her USA name—and me. They never changed.
I was three years old when I first climbed up onto the desk stool and knelt there to do my writing. The stories that I transcribed were illegible because, though I could already read children’s books and knew the alphabet, I had not yet learned how to form the Big Words pouring out of my head, through the pencil, and onto the paper. I simply heard the stories coming from within myself and I scribbled them down as fast as I could to keep up with the flow. But had anyone asked me to, I could have recited them. I was eager to share them. No one, except my cat Midnight, was interested.
I also remember the ecstasy of sitting in Blanche’s lap as she read to me from the many children’s books that she took out of the Rockingham Free Public Library at 65 Westminster Street. I memorized the words as she read them and followed her beautiful finger as she pointed out the syllables. Sitting in her lap to be read to was the only time Blanche allowed me to be close to her. I didn’t move a bit, for fear that she might remember I was near her and then suddenly put me down to go back to doing her chores or to get ready for one of her jobs. I sometimes got the feeling that she was reading all those children’s books to herself— as if I wasn’t really there.
When I was almost four she bought me a little upholstered chair of my very own, and that was the end of our physical intimacy. Of course, there had been breast feeding. But I don’t remember that. Blanche did read to me sometimes after she gave me my own chair, but it was not the same. She was in her chair. I was in mine. And when she discovered that I could read the words on my own, she gave up reading to me entirely. But one of the last childhood things we did together—before I was put in school—was go to the library where she got me my own card and she introduced me to the children’s librarian. From that time onwards I loved books and writing almost as much as I loved Blanche.
Maybe all the stories I was writing from three onwards were for her. Perhaps they still are. Nearly all the stories I wrote between the ages of three and five were about a Snow Queen who lived in a snow-covered forest, far, far away from civilization and on top of a huge mountain. The Snow Queen in my stories was gorgeous—with gold-flecked, light-brown hair and sad brown eyes. She was a woman always waiting to be saved, taken out of the ice world and delivered to the warmth of love, no doubt. I, the witness to the Snow Queen’s life, was the only one who knew her whereabouts. And story after story I, the Invisible One, was trying to get to where she was so that I could rescue her. But I could never do it. Just when I got close to her, she disappeared. Not surprisingly, perhaps, my Snow Queen looked just like my mother.
To be continued…..
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