1. My first memory is of the pied piper, or more exactly, an image of him: a painted engraving that hung over my cradle. Knowing now the story of the magic pipe and the lost children, I find it remarkable that an image of that sort should have ever hung over a cradle, especially mine. An unhappy omen.
2. When I was in a crib, I remember calling for my parents. I would call and call and call. I would cry and weep and wail. “Mommy, Daddy,” I would shout ad nauseam. I wanted them, or at least one of them, to be by me. Without such a thing I knew I could not rest. It seemed impossible that I could be at peace without my parents by my side. A story. A lullaby. Anything. Often, I cried myself to sleep.
They came on some occasions. However, I do not remember them. Rather, I remember the crying. In fact, I remember crying in such a way even when I was older, perhaps as late as six years old.
Later, I reflected on these memories with a shudder. Why didn’t they come? I thought to myself. Of course, as I said, they did every now and then and, in any case, they were human and tired and overworked. Perhaps they thought it would be healthy. After all, what was it that I was crying for? What was the point of it all? Nevertheless, for a long while, I shuddered at these memories and in my weaker moments wondered how such a thing could be allowed.
But one day I realized – my crying was a sort of practice. It was very necessary. I was very fortunate for it. I knew exactly how to pray.
3. My first crush was in nursery. One day, after all my classmates had been dropped off, but before the teachers arrived, it happened that we were all dancing in a sort of ersatz approximation of a ball. I have no idea why we were doing this. I am almost certain none of us had ever been to a ball. The only places I can think of where we might have seen anything like one is in movies or picture books. Nonetheless boys and girls were spinning around with one another.
There was a girl in the class I quite liked. I forget her name and for the most part, what she looked like. All the same, I remember being very infatuated. As the dancing went on, figuring it would not go on forever, I asked her to dance with me and she accepted.
So, this girl and I spun around. I forget if there was music playing. Perhaps we were all play-singing or humming or both. Though I don’t remember how her face looked, I remember the way her eyes looked at me.
In a moment of exhilaration, I asked her to marry me. I put the question as simply as that. I don’t know why I asked. She said no.
That was the moment I became a romantic.
4. There were two peculiar instances where I got into trouble in kindergarten that for a long time puzzled my parents and me. In the first instance, I told my classmates and teachers about a wedding I had been to over the weekend: that of an uncle and new aunt. In the second instance, I told them about how my parents had brought home a dog at the start of the weekend, but at the end decided to take it back to the kennel. In both instances, my teachers admonished me for lying. They said I was terribly naughty for making up such silly things that obviously did not happen.
However, both of these things did happen. Indeed, I told my classmates and teachers exactly how they happened. Regarding the wedding, I told them about how pretty my new aunt was, how extravagant the reception was, how many guests there were, and how partway through the dancing I got a hold of a little clown costume and did a jig to the delight of the new couple and guests. Regarding the dog, I told them about how nice he was, how he zoomed around the neighborhood, how he vomited in absolutely every corner of the house, how I put on my plastic Viking helmet and attempted to ride him around like a little horse, and how very sad I was when my father returned him to the kennel. Indeed, not only did I tell them these things, I drew pictures and showed them to my classmates and teachers so they would understand.
In both instances, when I told my parents I had gotten into trouble and why, they were as confused as I was.
That this should have happened once was strange enough, but that it should have happened twice, seemed extraordinary to me for many years. Later, however, I realized when a poet describes something as true and verifiable as a sunrise or a mountain, everyone acts the same way.
5. When I was six, I would go through the woods behind my house with my father. We never went the same way twice. We couldn’t if we tried and we often did. This, it seemed to me at the time, was the charm of nature.
6. In the spring before I turned twelve, there was a sabbath afternoon when I went to visit a friend and in going to visit him, took a path that went by a duck pond between our houses. As I crossed a little bridge, the sight of a young girl, about my age on a bench by the pond caught my attention. Of course, I knew it was rude to stare, so I continued over the bridge and on the path until I came to a point about opposite the girl. There a thick patch of shrubbery stood between the path and the pond and I stopped to look through a small opening in-between the leaves.
The girl was crying pathetically. Obviously, something horrible had happened. I was too far away to see if she was pretty, but I imagined her to be. I thought if I were someone else, I might go over and say something comforting. I say this because I had a stutter at the time. I knew it would be quite impossible for me to say anything. So, after taking my fill of the scene, I went on my way.
Later, in the very late afternoon, when I was returning home, I passed through the same path by the same pond. At the thick patch of shrubbery, I looked through the small opening, half-hoping to see the girl again. Of course, she was gone.
I went to the bench where she had sat, took a seat, and thought: what could I have said if I were someone else? Indeed, we lived in a small town where it was not strange for young people to talk to each other. People did such things. But after a while, after considering various different scenarios, different variations of words and statements and cliches, I realized I could not figure out anything to say that might be of comfort. I had no words in me adequate to the situation.
This was funny, I thought. My stutter wasn’t the problem at all.
7. When I was in junior high, I would go with a carpool to school every morning and some mornings, to accommodate the schedule of the parent driving us, we were dropped off an hour before school began. So, during these early hours, I would practice piano. I was still taking lessons then. Once, another classmate of mine heard me. I did not know him well. At his own instigation, he organized a sort of lunchtime performance. A teacher heard it and encouraged me to play a piece in an upcoming Mozart concert. I agreed.
I remember being terrifically nervous and giving a very mediocre performance. It did not help that my name was misspelled on the program. People clapped.
I had never realized praise could be so meaningless. I never gave another such performance.
8. When I was in eighth grade my parents sent me on tours of various high schools. One of them had fantastical towers, domes, balconies, and a library with a good deal of stained glass and a winding staircase. The others were either in New Jersey or generally unremarkable. My choice was obvious.
To my great disappointment, however, I learnt upon starting that school that, for the most part, the towers and domes and balconies were inaccessible. In fact, I was told they were mostly ornamental and that I had an exaggerated notion of their size due to the forced perspective design of the building. Nonetheless, I maintained an interest in them.
Toward the end of my time at that school, I found a like-mindedly romantic classmate. We quoted Wittgenstein and Nietzsche at each other. We skipped class to play Liszt’s etudes. At one point, I brought up the towers to him. He also had an interest. Later, we both brought up the matter to a few mutual friends, and upon investigation learnt that the towers were actually accessible from the roof, but that the roof was locked with a combination lock. So, we tried a few combinations and when they didn’t work, we despaired.
Then, one of us hit upon the idea of calculating just how long it would take for us to crack the code manually: how long it would take for us to find the right combination if each of us were to spend an hour a day testing various sequences. Whatever length of time we hit upon seemed reasonable and we set to work. Within a month and a half, we succeeded.
After that, my friends and I spent many a free period on the roof. We were never bothered or found out. When I first climbed inside one of the little towers that had so impressed me from the street level, I had thought I might be disappointed. It was constructed to about the standard of an amusement park attraction.
That an institution of learning the likes of which people spent exorbitant amounts of money on could cultivate its allure by such means was a fascinating revelation. In a way, it was my introduction to the concrete significance of pomp and pageantry: the power of beauty.
For well over a year, I resolved to be some sort of designer or artist.
9. On the Friday afternoon before my nineteenth birthday, my dog died. My family and I knew he was going to die, but did not know he would just then. I had gotten him the weekend I turned nine. I buried him in the rain. There was no time to wait. The sabbath was starting soon and it is forbidden to bury a body on the sabbath. It is a day of rest.
10. In college, I had a friend: a fellow poet. Once, he told me that he had taken liberties with a girl he did not actually care for. I found myself admonishing him. We were on a rooftop. I bellowed and made a real spectacle of myself. The next morning, I took him to a church. I was not Christian at the time. I think I was more surprised at myself than he was.
11. During a winter break, I took all my savings and went to Europe. I went to Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Italy. I was part of a tour group. To economize, whenever the group went out to eat, I only had dessert. This amused them. One of my tourmates, a very sturdy, tall fellow, remarked, “You can’t go on only eating dessert. It’ll catch up with you, you know.”
12. One very early morning in my senior year, I was at an equestrian team practice. We did not have stables for the team on campus and had to carpool out about forty minutes. It was fall. My teammates and I had just finished tacking up the horses and were warming them up in the paddock. While I was taking the horse I’d been assigned from a trot to a canter, I turned to face the tree line of the field beside us. The sun was beginning to rise
As I turned, a strong wind came through the trees. I smelled the warming dew on the ground and the horse’s sweat. The wind picked up a great deal of leaves that had not yet fallen and carried them into the open air over the field. The leaves caught the light from the rising sun.
I remember at this moment, watching the leaves glimmering. It was as if the sky were spangled with flecks of gold. It seemed like they were floating: the wind was no longer carrying them anywhere, up or down or to the side. I noticed I wasn’t breathing. For that moment there was only the glimmering of the leaves in the sun over the field. The world burned with beauty. I had the distinct feeling it couldn’t last: that the world could not sustain itself in the face of such glimmering, that everything dull in the world would peel away. I was at a loss.
So, this was rapture, I thought: the wonder of the world. And I loved it. I did not need to breathe. The horse did not need to keep trotting. All I needed was this brilliance of morning light at the tree line in the wind. Nothing in the world was so plain to me as the loveliness of that light. And then I was in time again. A hoof hit the soil. I felt the jolt of my body against the saddle. The leaves were dispersing. The sun was rising higher.
I suspect this was a taste of what it is to be beyond time: that it is for this burning beauty that God so loves the world.
— Michael Shindler is a writer living in Washington, DC. His work has been published in outlets including The American Conservative, Church Life, University Bookman, American Spectator, and New English Review. Follow him on Twitter: @MichaelShindler.