On the Outskirts of Town

As a child of three and four, I climbed the dry wooden attic stairs to the musty antique museum that was my grandparents' unfinished third-floor attic. There were old-fashioned trunks, boxes, chairs, and poles supporting clothes on hangars. The attraction was vested in the windows, one on the north side overlooking the neighborhood rooftops, and one on the front, or west side of the house, overlooking the front walk and the street below. The street was paved with rounded red brick, and cars were parked continuously along both sides. Sunsets filtered through that west window like golden honey. I would climb the stairs and crouch by that window—they were all at floor-level—and observe the comings and goings in the world of my neighborhood from a bird's-eye view. Hats and coated shoulders drifted through gates, cars drove off and parked in. Great old sycamore trees stood behind and overmastered the houses across the street, and squirrels could be seen running the lengths of the long branches. When the sun finally descended toward late afternoon, the amber sunlight streamed into the window lighting with a mellow glow the musty planks of the floor, the red bricks and mortar of the chimney and south wall, and the scuffed gilded picture frames stacked there.

At the age of five, we moved away from that house to one that my parents felt was an improvement, but I had lost my eyrie.

At the age of five I was overcome with nostalgia. In a new house in a new world my view was gone and nothing was familiar. Second story windows faced the second story windows of the houses all around. A view of the thick trunks of elms and maples. A ground-level view, obscured by trees.

These are memories. No part of that was conscious then. Decades later it came clear to me that I hadn't really adapted but had carried with me and often returned to my high eyrie in mind. That world of my early childhood remained my world and paradigm. It was not lost, deleted, washed away by time. It was, however, prevented from evolving. That world stopped growing and became the equivalent of the shoe-box full of sepia-toned photographs in my grandparents' attic. Everything that came after was automatically compared to it and came off badly. At the age of five I had been given what appeared to be a choice of two worlds, but there was no real choice.

Like the child of three and four years old that climbed to perch in a high window in an attic that was as quiet as a church, my feet still move of their own accord toward quiet solitude, and my mind toward its native aerial view.

Much of not only my childhood but my adult life, as well, has been characterized by social persecution as people from teachers to mates assert their instinctual impulse to normalize and punish me for my difference. Blows of rectification rain down when my difference is perceived. My tendency toward detachment has always been read by others as evidence that I consider myself superior, and this invariably invites an attack. The irony is that these attacks only reinforce the propriety of preferring detachment.

When I write something, I write it as if I'm looking down on the world from above. From the attic window, things happening down below have obvious patterns and trajectories that cannot be seen from ground level. It is easy and too easy to overlook the individual reality of the hats and shoulders and tops of cars and subsume them all to paths and lines, to see not the person but the habit. But how people resent, how they hate, to be so described. People would prefer to pull down and destroy such a voice than listen to it.

To speak or write and be accepted, the voice people hear must come from their midst. That voice must speak from a face at ground level. And it must speak in the precise language of the group. If the voice is for any reason perceived to come from outside the group or to be looking down on the group from a higher vantage, punitive reflexes are triggered and the voice is discredited, the message is rejected, the messenger is killed.

I have written some things from the view of my attic window. I strain to imagine how they would be heard by the crowd in the street below and I know from a lifetime that everything I have said down to the words I have chosen to say them is likely to be rejected and could incite a violent backlash. So I delete this part. I delete that part. I change some words. I delete a paragraph and then another. I sleep, wake up, read it again, and delete some more. The original thoughts are dead and gone. I am a taxidermist now, posing the lifeless creature in a stance that I hope will delight the crowd in the street, removing all semblance of threat from the manikin, making it appear as innocuous as can be.

Finally, I wake up and there is nothing left but a few incoherent shreds.

It has never worked. I have never been able at any time in my life to blend into the crowd. As soon as I move a muscle, they know I am a stranger, and they bristle. There have been times that I have been found out by my smell alone, let alone when I open my mouth.

Yet, here I am again studying as if from a treetop how to be a member of the wolf pack. With a strong sense of future history I know that I won't last five minutes down there. I can feel the fangs punching into me already.

I live on the outskirts of town. That is where I belong.