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What the Light Would Do, Part II
Bedroom, Evening
As the sun would fade from the sky at the end of the day, I would sometimes look out my upstairs bedroom windows to the east. Our street and the several parallel streets adjacent to it ended in a big woods with a deep ravine and stream running through it. Looking out that east window in the evening, I could see past the woods, some half mile down the street, to the lights of the greater metropolitan area beyond. They sparkled in the distance. I knew, of course, what lay in the immediate vicinity in our suburb and our part of the county. I knew also what lay beyond: the big cosmopolitan cities of the east, foremost among them New York, and beyond that, the ocean and Europe. (They danced in my imagination like the magical city of F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise.) I would feel so small and inadequate looking out that window, so unequal to the task of meeting head on what lay out there to the east, my future. I somehow knew or felt in my bones that those big cities out there along the Atlantic coast were the places where futures were regularly made or broken. How did Dickens put it? “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life…” That’s what I wondered as I looked to the east. Would I ever win the riches and glory that I knew could be had out there? Was I up to the task? How was one to begin trying? Would I even know what the real rewards of a life well lived were when I saw them? Looking back, I seemed convinced that these wonderful things lay to the east, but now I wonder if I only felt that way because that happened to be the view on which my windows opened. Would I have invested Canada with the keys to the mystery of my future had my windows faced north?

Through happenstance, I came to live in Washington DC, the capital of the free world, and live there now. I have spent a respectable amount of time in New York, and have successfully conducted business there. I am at an age where in any generation prior to my own, my best years would be said to be behind me. While I know that this magical place where the riches of life can be mine is within me, yet somehow I feel I never made it to that east of my childhood. Maybe that’s because by the time I got to where I thought I wanted to go, I had changed so completely that the me who wanted to go there no longer existed to realize she had arrived. Or maybe the end point keeps moving. Or maybe because that magical place is inside, those things I hoped to achieve there, and the recognition I hoped to gain, are not and cannot be bestowed or claimed in any externally visible or measurable way.

It would be nice to be able to stand over the shoulder of that girl looking out that window and tell her simply to enjoy the journey, that there’s nothing to fear and nothing to “achieve” that she did not already possess. I wonder if she would have done anything differently. I doubt it.