In the summer of 1988 I spent a long weekend in the place where I grew up, a tiny town in southern Indiana. As this is not a place I return to often or eagerly, you would be safe in assuming there was a specific reason for the pilgrimage: in this instance, a reception in honor of my aunt and uncle’s golden wedding anniversary. As a rule, I’m not a person upon whom familial obligations exert much influence; but this aunt is the older sister of my father, whom I lost when I was very young. She has my father’s face. I had to go.
The reception was held in the community room of a small country church, and around mid-afternoon–just about the time I had reached my absolute peak of boredom (yes, I have a Gemini moon: to paraphrase Descartes, “I am bored, therefore I am”)–a man who was a life-long, close friend of my parents sat me down and gave me one of the greatest gifts of my life: for an hour or so, he told me stories about my father, sketches of a real, live, breathing man who had actually existed, who had friends and adventures and (joy of joys!) even a nickname! (I’m crazy about nicknames–kind of a Gemini shortcut, I think.) You know, no one in my life had ever really talked to me that way about my father; it’s always been “the husband,” “the brother,” and of course, the mythical absent father. In fact, most of the family never talks about dad at all, I think because it hurts too much, even after all these years. They remember him not necessarily with words, but in the way a Virgo moon remembers, or a Pisces moon, or a Taurus moon. I have a Gemini moon: I need stories.
Later, a childhood friend of mine showed up and pulled me outside for a visit. We leaned against her car, sheltered from the miserable summer heat by a grove of shade trees, and she talked to me at length about her recently failed marriage. She was beginning to ramble, and I was growing fidgety, until I was distracted by the sound of the wind rustling through the trees, that beautiful whispery sound…and then, from that small but crucial distance, I could hear the quavering emotion beneath my friend’s droning litany: she really was about to splinter into pieces. I stood there for awhile, perfectly balanced between two voices I dearly loved, the familiar voice of my childhood friend and the voice of the wind in the trees. Had I focused on either voice to the exclusion of the other, I couldn’t have heard either of them so well.
