This is a gift from my sister and brother-in-law, from Prague, I think. Ornaments are completely extraneous to this post, but I wanted to share them with you.
Lately when I have something to add to a conversation, the words drag themselves slowly to the surface through something like mud. I’m increasingly hopeless at Jeopardy, and increasingly boring. As if I had a chance. We’ve been inside, at home, for months now, not speaking so much. Speaking, apparently, is a skill that needs to be practiced. Also, I’ve been typing on a keyboard so long that I can hardly form decent letters in cursive. (Well, of course there’s also the arthritis in my hand.)
It turns out the brain is as malleable as everything else, changing during our whole lifetime to suit the circumstances. I guess if I had to identify one shift in our collective understanding over the past 30 or 40 years, it’s that everything, even the brain, changes, all the time. That everything is made of change. I say collective, but of course there are people who still think the earth is flat. More or less. It took about a hundred years for Copernicus’s theory that the earth revolved around the sun to take hold. A lot of torture and death in the process.
Modern humans are measurably more visually dexterous than our ancestors were. Our ancestors could probably spot a crow on a pine tree a half mile away. But we can make sense out of images that flash by so fast they’re barely on the screen. There’s a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth over the way video games are changing the brains of young people. But their brains were going to change in some way, because after all, this is a different time, different environment. We may lament what’s been lost, but we can’t make our brains replicate, say, 18th century brains.
We’ve had our tree for 11 years. Every year we lug it on our hand truck into the elevator, up to our condo, and try all over again to figure out how the sections plug into each other.
This Christmas we’ve put up all our usual decorations, but who’ll see them but us? And you. Here’s our tree. There was an ache at Thanksgiving and there’s an ache now, that so much has changed. Most of us hold a “perfect Christmas” in our minds, one from our childhood, with our family all still alive, or the one we wish we’d had. Or a “perfect” something.
Human endeavor is fueled by longing—longing for the past or for what could be. Nothing wrong with longing. In fact, I think when I first was able to acknowledge longing and give it a compassionate, rightful place in me, the pain of it eased up considerably.
What started me thinking about all this is that it’s become kind of a joke among people I know who are also staying home a great deal, that we’re less articulate. We have trouble using our words. I think if I had to, if someone made me give a lecture, I could practice and get better at it again, but it would take my brain a while to re-learn that skill. Practice matters. I can be articulate at the keyboard because I’m practiced at it. Words have found a route upwards and out through my fingers.
I assert that my brain has a lot in it! It’s been collecting for a lifetime. But, as layer after layer, or synapse after synapse, bury the precious nuggets deeper under, so to speak, I fish around for them, I almost catch their tails as they slip away.
This angel was hand made by my uncle Bob’s Character Dolls company. He died this year. The angel is modeled after my mother.
The brain is interesting. My father could recite dozens of poems until he died, at almost 101. Something fastens itself to consciousness in the long ago and doesn’t let go. Rhyme, or trauma, for example. The long-ago holds on.
Or so it seems. This strange Christmas is really not so strange, I think. It’s simply this particular moment of shifting. These old ornaments, the ones I made, the kids made, the ones that were gifts, strike me differently every year. When I look closely, nothing has ever been the same.