Small Things

SMALL THINGS


You take what you can find when you're sixteen
in a small cotton mill town in North Carolina
and there's no one to point the way and there's
an emptiness in you that you can't identify
and a shyness that encompasses the world.
There was a woman named Sue whom I used to visit,
the aunt of a friend of mine, a middleaged woman,
to discuss Literary Guild novels, which was as far
as my excursions into literature
had led me at that time.
This was during World War II.
She had dark hair and eyes,
a lean face and her husband was in the Navy
and overseas and, looking back, I think
there was more on her mind
than Literary Guild novels but that's hindsight-
one of my more highly developed talents.
She lived with her mother,
whom we all called Grandma Cashion,
and she must have known something about Sue
that I didn't because she was always in and out
of the room when I was there-always polite
but never far away.
We discussed James Hilton and John Marquand and
other famous writers and Sue talked a lot about
how the people in town didn't understand anything
and how her life might have been different if
something had happened-
I never quite understood what.
But being there seemed to bring me closer
to the drama and that's what I wanted:
to be closer to the drama.
But I didn't quite know how to be.
I didn't quite know how to be anything.
So I talked to Sue and sometimes her niece,
Lucille, who was older than me
and pretty and worked in Charlotte
would be there and we would listen to pop music
on the record player and this seemed to help
that something very open and longing in me
that I had no name for and no way
of reconciling with anything around me.
Nights in the summer, I would go out
in the front yard and sit on the grass
and look up at the stars,
filled with longing and a terrible sense
of helplessness.
Everything seemed beyond me.
Days when it was worst,
I would go over and talk to Sue
and feel her dark eyes move over me,
signaling that I was something special-
which was perhaps what I needed most to feel:
special.
It was as though I had been set loose
in a strange country
without a map and not knowing the language.
That was growing up.
I didn't think it had ever happened
to anyone before.
And everything I felt intensely seemed to be
something you didn't talk about.
Except to Sue- a little bit. And Sue-
she worked at the mill and waited for her husband
to return, an event, she implied, that she did not
particularly look forward to.
And Grandma Cashion moved in and out of the room
unobtrusively, fixing this, rearranging that,
serving coffee.
Sometimes their eyes would meet and clash but nothing was ever said.
Sometimes Sue's and my eyes would meet and something
else would happen
but I didn't really know what it was and never,
thanks to Grandma Cashion, got a chance to find out.
Well, one day the war was over
and Sue's husband came back
and they moved into their own house
and I never saw her again.
It was that simple.
I would never have imagined it after
so many Literary Guild novels
but it was just as simple as that.
Nothing was ever said. It just happened.
It was only much later, after many heartaches,
that I came to realize
that Life has little respect for form.
Any term paper that Life ever wrote would never rate
more than a C.
Its transitions are bad,
whole paragraphs are often juxtaposed
and more often than not, there is no conclusion.
If I had been writing this,
Grandma Cashion would have gotten sick
one day and been carried off to the hospital
and Sue and I would have been left in the house
by ourselves...
But I didn't write it. Life wrote it.
And high school passed and I went off to college
without, as far as I remember, ever seeing Sue again...
and have not seen her to this day.
She's probably dead.
And still she was there-someone who saw, who sensed
a part of what was going on in me
at a very painful time.
A small thing.
And it was only much later, after many heartaches,
that I came to be grateful for small things.
It's only when you come to know that
you're not going to do or get everything you want
in this world that things come into perspective.
That's called growing up-something that Life,
with its bad transitions and disregard for form,
forces on you eventually.
And that's when you begin to see that small things
sometimes aren't small at all.
Seen from a distance, they can be very large.
It's like looking at a star for a long time
till all your attention is focused on it.
If you do that long enough,
it will start to move closer and get larger
till finally you're inside it and then
there's nothing anywhere but light.


Albert Huffstickler

Posted over on Nerve Cowboy