794; Permit me . . .
At Home with the Glynns, the Preface continues
Permit me a brief aside on the subject of composition, recollection, introspection, and the effect of each on the others. One of the hazards—and pleasures—of my backward rambles is the discovery, in my memory, of turnings that I didn’t take when I stumbled along the road of life the first time around. I find, on my revisits, byways and doorways and pathways and alleys that I not only didn’t travel the first time around but hardly noticed at the time. Now, however, these alternative pathways often seem so intriguing that I can’t resist exploring them.
To give you an example, very early in my work on this memoir of my time with the Glynns I closed my eyes, with the Glynns on my mind, intending to recover the memory of that nighttime visit to the Babbington Theater, and the movie that the three of us saw together, a movie that (forgive me, but there’s no other way to put this) changed my life. Walking, in memory, along M ain Street, or along my memory of Main Street, I reached a point just a few doors down from the Babbington Theater, where I expected to be able to read the name of that important movie on the marquee (the overhanging marquee, sheltering the sidewalk in front of the theater, where rain seemed always to be falling, dripping from the edge of the marquee, while people waited beneath it, on line for tickets, with their shoulders hunched and their collars turned up). The fog of forgetfulness still obscured the marquee. I couldn’t see the title of the movie. I tried to get a little closer—
But wait. What did I see? On my right, I discovered, to my surprise, an alleyway.
Here, now, as I write these words, upstairs in Small’s Hotel, in the quiet predawn hours of November 22, 1991 (a damp morning, after a nighttime snowfall, the white margin of my island and its dark fringe of grasses standing out crisp and sharp against the gray sky and gray bay, and Babbington, across the bay, an abstraction, a stack of black and white rectangles), and again on January 16, March 11, March 25, April 15, and November 18, 1992, and on September 30 and October 1, 1993, and on May 13, December 6, and December 12, 1994, when I return to these words to read them and revise them, I recall retracing my steps and seeing, from the corner of my mind’s eye, that formerly unnoticed turning, the alleyway not taken. I didn’t know, not in memory, not even in imagination, where that alley led. I must have seen the entrance to it often, passed it many times when I went to the movies, but I’d barely noticed it, and I’d never explored it. Suddenly, though, I realized where it led. It led to possibilities.
The more often I revisit my past, the more often I take the opportunity to poke around in some of the corners I ignored the first time. This tendency to explore, to divagate, means that I sometimes take a long time to get where I intended to go. Even back then, so early in my work on this book, when I willed myself to pass the alley by and go on to the theater and see the movie that I thought began my dalliance with the Glynn twins, I found that, against my will, I wanted to stop and explore that alleyway, once so peripheral, but suddenly so central, once so unattractive, suddenly such a magnet, once mute, now beckoning and insistent, tugging at my sleeve when I tried to walk by, whispering to me, “Hey, kid. Come here a minute. Come on, take a look down here.”
“Huh?” I said warily. “You mean me?”
“Yes, of course I mean you. Who do you think I mean? Come here. Take a walk down here.”
“You’re an alley.”
“Yeah. Interesting, huh?”
“Well—” I took a cautious peek into the darkness. “Yes,” I admitted. “But why would I want to walk down an alley?”
“Because I’m here. Because you don’t know anything about me. Because you passed me by years ago, walked right by.”
“Sorry, I—I don’t have time. I’ve got an agenda. I’ve got a plan. Look. Look at all these notes, all these papers. I’ve got a lot of stories to tell. So many stories, and—well—so little time. Right now, for example, I’ve got to get to the movies. I can’t take the time to—I can’t—well—maybe—”
Why not?
[to be continued]
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