Day 274

The boardwalk to my beach.

Kazuo Ishiguro is a brilliant writer.  Matthew is reading A Pale View of Hills for his English class, and I took the book from his sleeping form last night and stayed up until 2 am to finish it.  I can't put it better than this sentence from Wikipedia, of all places, "The story is a suggestive and disturbing one, dwelling on themes of loss, guilt and responsibility. It examines what we know, what we tell, and what we deny about the truth of our own history."  It is one of those books where you can argue about interpretations, certain you are right, but thinking, thinking all the time about the other possibilities.

What we deny about the truth of our own history is sometimes not consciously done.  Occasionally our minds do it for us, they block out certain details that are too painful.  Someone reminded me of an event which happened when I was newly pregnant with Jess, and I actually wracked my brains to find it, but had no recollection of it whatsoever.  Although I was very happy to be pregnant with another baby, it was one of the saddest times of my life, a long drawn-out sadness, but that is it, there are certain things which I can see with the utmost clarity, but others have vanished into the mists of my mind.

My mother, when I reminded her once of what a difficult teenager I had been, and how I had worried her so much, said with sincerity, "Oh go on, you weren't that bad."  And when I looked at her to see if she was being serious, she was.  I asked her to remember certain times, and she honestly couldn't, was quite perplexed.  Our wonderful mother/child relationship, and then our amazing adult relationship, had taken precedence.  She just chose to forget that I had ever hurt her.  Or her mind chose for itself.

Every story we tell is completely subjective, what we remember depends on the kind of people we are, what we notice, even what sex we are.  I will say to Tim, "Amazing what striking green eyes she had," and he will respond, "Her eyes were green?"  (Although we all know the reason he didn't notice her eyes was probably because he was looking elsewhere.)

Siblings, telling of a family event where they were all present, sometimes have such widely differing accounts that you can barely believe it is the same story they are supposedly telling.  Husbands and wives can become quite heated with one another because their remembered versions of the same occasion differ so much.

I had such a lovely teaching day.  My delightful seventh grade classes are beginning to design a repeat pattern, or tessellation, which they will do as a block print.  It is quite a difficult concept, to realise that everything you put on your rectangular design must correspond with the four blocks around it, and there were several of those moments, those wonderful moments, when suddenly a child understands completely how it is supposed to work.  The light in the eyes! 

One particularly sparkly girl dropped her ruler, and as I was passing, asked me to pick it up for her.  I said, "How old are you?  And how old am I?  Who do you think should pick up the ruler?"  While she was reaching to pick it up she said, "I am 12, and you are about 35?"  So I laughed as I replied, "Oh no, I'm older than that!"  To which she responded, "Oh, do you have kids already?  Well, then maybe you're 42?"  So I said, "Well, my oldest daughter is 31."  At which she looked utterly shocked and said, "Well, you don't look your age at all!"  Which all warmed the cockles of my heart, even though 12 year old children are remarkably useless at guessing adults' ages, we are all just "old" to them.

Tim took this as a long exposure but I blinked, so the eye has a creepy appearance.