F. Boyle, in his homily during the vigil Mass yesterday, spoke of being haunted by our former selves, of casting a backward glance over our shoulders at our younger selves and feeling shame, feeling disgust, or framed positively, feeling we’d grown. It reminded me of my own past, in more than one way. Just this week I was glancing through old journal entries, thinking to myself, “My my, how could anyone put of with my arrogance?”
It was around that time when I first read Bill Brown’s “Strangers.” I’d worked as an intern at a poetry review just before graduating college, and one snowy afternoon in Poland a couple of years later, I received a package of recent publications from the editors. Among them was The Art of Dying.
Strangers
Seventeen split my tongue
like a pet crow’s, shrill,
mimicking, irreverent,
ignorant, and shamed.My glances were foul
balls, my hopes were
shooting stars, I was
batting zero.I ate spaghetti
with a pitchfork, picked my teeth
with an ax, wrecked more cars
than a test dummy.I measured out love
with tweezers, was as humble
as a chainsaw, and when my sincerity
was challenged,cracked open my heart
like a coconut, the pure
sweet insides for all
to taste and marvel.My hands were foxes,
my thoughts shot blanks,
my smile was as sweet
as plastic grapes. My dreams were strangers
who stood on a dark bridge
hiding their eyes from
the sun.I was angry at my dead
father, I was hunting
Jesus on the cover
of record albums.And one of the strangers
on the bridge? It was just
me three years older, tongue
sewed together,mouth clamped shut,
army-mummed, staring down
on seventeen, wonder where
the hell I’d come from.
So as Fr. Boyle spoke, I thought of that poem, thought of the “I” who first read them, how much more like strangers I was compared to him than Brown’s speaker could ever be as a twenty-year-old looking back at his seventeen-year-old self. So many changes that I’m almost embarrassed to meet myself in my journal entries. So full of myself, so sure I was so painfully intelligent, so superior to so many.
And then, out of the blue, I thought of a band that I’d once had a flickering interest in, a band that I bought one single album by and decided instantly that I didn’t really like them at all, began wondering why I even bought the album as the band — the Sugarcubes — never really received much airplay. A little research and I found the “hit” from the album I bought was a little number called “Regina.”
A few clicks on Spotify and I was listening to it again, wondering why in the world I’d bought an album that, as far as I could tell, didn’t have a single redeeming song on it, an album that is to me today a laughable piece of trash. Undoubtedly one of the worst albums ever recorded. But when it came out in ’88 or ’89, I thought it was decent. I tried to like it. I wanted to like it. Part of that was, I guess, not wanting to have the feeling that I wasted money on a CD that I’d never listen to again.
All these things were tumbling around in my head this afternoon when we went out to the park after essentially an entire weekend in the house. A sick mother, a semi-sick daughter, a recovering father, and a boy with a seemingly endlessly running nose simply need to stay inside and rest, but that is ironically tiring. So off we went this afternoon for a little time in a new park. I found myself wondering how I’d view my forty-year-old self in another twenty-five or so years. Would I see myself as I see my late-teen self? My early-twenties self? It seems both likely and impossible.
