Short-Initiations

Initiations              by Michael Dodd

                        As a snow globe can localize and bring to attention its particular charms, so in life filled with movement, particular events can make still and vivid, as on a frieze, small moments which nevertheless contain in them the seeds of future contemplation.  Three singular events are thus emblazoned in my memory.

I was eleven years old, had only just fallen in love for the first time in my life.  I loved scary movies.  Vincent Price’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” weighed upon my nighttime daydreams:  I would lie in a casket together with the object of my affection; we would go to sleep together.  Thus I would be secure.  One night I looked up at a lamp-post:  I could throw a rope over a topmost place where it could be hitched.  And someone could be hung from the neck until dead.  A gang and I could do that.  Why wouldn’t we do that?  We could.  This is too scary.  I ought not to think about things like this.

I also sneaked a few cigarettes from my parents.  I smoked them outside, near that same lamppost.  One Christmas Eve my mother decided to teach me a lesson.  She had drunk too much, her words slurred and her breath stunk.  My father just hit me for the hell of it, which I could live with.

“So you want to smoke?” she said, and lit a cigarette for me to puff.  “Make sure you inhale it and blow the smoke out through your nose.   She never did things like this unless she had drunk too much.  She had already given me the lecture on sex.  “Sex is where a man puts his penis into a woman’s vagina.  Those are the real words.”  Her words slurred:  “It is either the most beautiful thing in the world or the ugliest.”  She said this several times.  I told her I already knew this, which was a lie, but the whole thing was embarrassing and a lie, too; as if a drunk would know what beauty was?  What did she mean by beauty anyway?

There was the night we went to bed on Christmas Eve, and woke, long before the sun was up, to snow falling softly and heavily and quietly on our little world.  I looked out of our window on the second floor.  There was the sweet surprise of the whiteness, the beauty of which my mother spoke.

            We children all got dressed in warm clothes, went out and played in it, caught snowflakes on our tongues, finally froze our hands and had to come in.  It was still Christmas morning, that magical time when we got presents for no reason at all so far as I knew.  Life was good with unexplained and unexpected delights.  The two of them, my loving and sweet Mother, and the Grace which I didn’t know but which Dickens did and helped revive, lived together with their Nemesis, in the same years, in the same lives, always known and sometimes acknowledged.