A very short story
I was four years old the first time I ran away. My dad helped me go. I had a small round blue vinyl suitcase with two stuffed animals inside. I carried it down the stairs and then my dad offered to help. He took the suitcase from my pudgy little hands. He strolled as I determinedly stomped down the hill behind the house into the woods. It was autumn. My shoes crunched on the thick blanket of crumpled paper like leaves, then slipped occasionally due to the saturated earth underneath. I thought of earthworms and centipedes hidden below. The bare trees and their skeleton fingered branches pointed upwards to the grey sky. The dull timeless light filtered the downtrodden atmosphere into my eyes which also tread downwards because I was running away. We both pretended to be sad.
There was a stump in the woods that I knew well. On many occasions I sat on this stump in the afternoons after my brother, nine years my senior, would get home from school with his best friend, Doug, or after breakfast, in the summertime, when Doug would sleep over. My brother’s name was Doug too. The 2 Dougs had a tree fort that was similar to the structure on the mast of a ship used for a lookout, the crow’s nest, and that is what they called it. They had a bucket tied to a long rope and when they were up there they would lower it down and tell me to go fetch them things. And I would put those things in the bucket and they would shimmy it up to their secret lair in the sky. I would return to the stump and wait for their next order. One time they told me to get in the bucket. I did, they began to pull on the rope, hand over hand. I don’t remember what happened after that. I just remember getting in the bucket.
My dad and I shared the stump, my small body pressed against the side of his. We were quiet. He was ready to let me go or so it seemed. I couldn’t quite know then that there would be many times in the years to come where he seemed ready to let me go. Like when he was on the roof working on the gutters and he told me to come out to talk to him, so I climbed my little body out the third floor window onto the steeply sloped roof. I didn’t realize I was in danger until I saw my mom in the yard down below struck with fear yelling up at us with tears in her eyes. Or when he left me and my little brother and sister in the station wagon with the keys in the ignition and we rolled away down the long driveway into the ditch. Or when he would speed the car on the highway in a rainstorm, passing a semi truck while the headlights of an oncoming car glared into our scared little faces. Or when I was exiled from the private boarding school where he graduated at the top of his class, and he told me I was a disgrace and for the weeks to come he behaved as if I was a ghost in the house.
In some cases, one could say he wanted us to feel independent and capable, but the other side of the coin was his way of handing out shame and disappointment for us to chew with our mouths closed and no elbows on the table. This day though, his presence at the stump felt supportive. I was four years old and about to head off into the world. What would I do with my life? Where would I go? Who would I become?
After a long while sitting on that stump, the sun fading through the trees, I looked up at my dad, who I now recognize as a symbol of that fading patriarchal paradigm, yet he is also not a paradigm; he is my dad. I felt his strong hand soft on my back. He asked me if it was time to go back and I nodded my head. My small hand slipped into that warm powerful nest of a hand and we walked home.
I have always known that I wanted to abandon my captured inheritance of being born into white privilege. I want to take up less space, offer my efforts up to others, learn and grow in older ways, earthly ways. I understand how important it is that I accept and acknowledge where I came from. If I don’t, what I become is an appropriation and perpetuation of what I want to abandon, and I do not want to participate in a system of oppression and inequality. I want it to be different.
There is no way getting around that I am my father’s daughter with slate blue eyes set above high cheekbones, a wide smile, straight teeth and the same lift of the brow. We were cut from the same cloth and I can, no doubt, feel his thoughts in my head and his blood in my veins. Whether I like it or not he is my teacher, he is my lesson.
I call upon my ancestors to assist me. Do ancestors lose their limited views, their mal intent, the karma of their actions when no longer living? Are we liberated when death comes due to the fact that once death does come we are free from the ties that bind us to the body and its particulars and identifications?
When I die and my skin rots, my bones will not reflect the color of my skin or my economic status. They will resonate, in a faint whisper, my actions. They will sing nutrients into the earth, they will drum a memory of the destiny of all beings, they will sleep unbothered, unattached. They will return from where they came and eventually when the last person who remembers me dies, I will disappear without a trace.
I have 128 grandparents if you go five generations back. Six generations jumps to 256. To picture them all together in this room knowing I came from a little bit of all of them makes my skin tingle. And if we go back far enough, I am related to you, dear cousin. We all have a common ancestor. We all share a common destiny that no one can run away from.
