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CIRQUE
*** Such, the old man realizes, is the power of denial, “vanishing cream for the mind,” as English writer Jeremiah Creedon calls it, a comforting ally in our struggles for survival, a fierce foe in the quest for ourselves. He understands finally that much of what he disavowed in himself before recognizing its irretrievable value, most of the heartache he caused himself and those who chose to love him, came out of that repudiation of his true self. And he learns this about regrets: they don’t go away. Most things distance themselves with time and space, to eventually slide off the edge of our consciousness and disappear forever, but not regrets. You can shove them aside, disavow them for a lifetime, but they always return. And the longer you deny them, the more they punish you when they can no longer be held at bay. Regrets, he has found, are particularly poignant for the old and the dying, those who have used up most of the chances they’ll ever get and are left to make peace with their failed choices. We are the sum of our choices, he now knows. The right choices result in our goodness and character. The wrong choices harden into bitterness and despair. And if we don’t have the wisdom to make good choices when we’re young, we need the grace to make peace with the bad ones when we’re old. Luckiest of all are those who still have the time to replace their bad choices with good ones. Good choices in the nick of time can banish regrets. Regrets are a constant visitor to the old man at the beach. They come and they go at all hours of the day and night. He lets them in, barring none their entry, allowing all their full measure of blame so that when they return the next time, and the next, they will be a little less hurtful. By remembering, he thinks, he will understand. By understanding, he will be able to forgive -- himself above all. And through forgiveness, the regrets will begin to resemble hope.
Kelsea Habecker
Excerpted from
I Watch the Snow Cry
(a memoir-in-progress)
Break and Entry The air was so hot, so muggy, I thought I’d die. I do much better in cold than in heat, which is why I liked living in the Arctic. I’d picked a bad day to barbeque an enormous pan of shrimp we’d gotten earlier at the fish mongers around the corner from the French Market. On summer break from our teaching jobs in small village on the North Slope, my husband Huck and I were living in a Creole cottage in the French Quarter of New Orleans, on Governor Nichols street. While I was in the cottage’s kitchen, cutting thick slices of a fresh baguette to sop up the peppery butter the shrimp was basting in, Huck was in the living room on the phone with Pal, the school’s principal. “Oh god,” I heard him say. Shit. We were due to return to the village in a week, at summer’s end. When Pal called, I presumed he was just looking for a quick strategy session with Huck about the upcoming start to the school year. But Huck was mostly listening on his end of the conversation, not saying much more than “oh god.” I poured myself a glass of wine and walked out the door from the kitchen to the ivy-covered brick courtyard at the back of the cottage. The shrimp still had ten more minutes in the oven. I sat at a black wrought iron table. The air felt thick like a heavy, damp sponge, like I could squeeze it and it would cry. Huck soon sat down heavily in the chair next to me, pulling his hands through his sand-colored hair. “Tawni and Esther broke into our house,” he said. Tawni and Esther were in high school. Both girls had been in Huck’s middle school class the first year he taught. Tawni wanted to be a poet. I’d been working with her after school on her poetry, when she’d show up. She often didn’t show up. She was a drunk. She was also the village’s prostitute, more or less. I was a brick wall, darkness crawling over me like thick ivy. “They used an axe to get in the door,” Huck said.