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It was the patterns that drew me. Once when I was a child, I was playing with a new puppy in our backyard
in St. Louis. It was a morning in June, fair and sunshiny, but still cool.
And the puppy and I were playing hide-and-seek in the dappled shade, which
fell from the old oak tree onto the grass and my father's rock garden. We
were in a delirium of delight with everything - the blue sky, the rippling
leaf shadows and splattered sunlight, the dew on the grass, our game - everything,
when my mother called me to help her with the family washing. Slowly, I
got up and, dragging my feet, hating it, went down into the dark, damp basement
of our house full of old jelly jars, coal, gardening tools, and water-bugs,
and saw my mother's beloved harried face outlined against the gloom of the
basement. I wondered then, and have wondered ever since, even as I worked on this
writing, why, in a world of such easy splendor, adults seem always harried.
I know now, of course, that that day in June had come in the middle of the
great Depression, and that my mother, gently reared in affluent circumstances,
was living through a terrifying time with enormous courage. Day by day she
breasted the waves of heretofore unknown financial hardship, fighting always
to let my father know that he and his love were far more important to her
than the material comfort her parents set such store by. She was proud of
learning to do things her mother had never done, proud of not complaining,
and immensely proud of the very slightly bohemian life she and my father
and their writing and artist friends led. We were not really poor, but my
father was a salaried man and an aspiring author, while my grandfather and
uncles were successful businessmen. The Depression widened the chasm between
them and him. Ironically, the Depression eventually ruined them and left my father's
disdained salary the financial mainstay of the whole family. But that had
not happened yet, and on that eternal summer day, I knew that my mother
felt poor, and coped; as I felt endlessly rich, and wondered. My next clear memory of thought regarding the human condition is of myself
sitting on the edge of my bed, cigarette in one hand, knitting in the other
(the object in high school was to have as many crew-neck sweaters as possible),
suddenly transfixed with the idea that for all the adult and religious talk
about it, there was no clear determination of what good and evil might be.
This was an idle and vagrant thought, but it pulled me to it, forcing me
to think and analyze until I came to the conclusion that the words "good"
and "evil" were a kind of shorthand used to indicate which thoughts,
activities, and behaviors were thought valuable and which were not.
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