Cooked Goose

I don’t remember how I ended up sitting there crying, outside that room. I was about four or five years old. I know because it was in the first home of my memory, that place I now see in “black and white”, fuzzy fragments. Sitting outside the room, drawn shut by sliding paper doors, I was approached by our Nanny. After consoling me, she ushered me to the door and slid it open. The room was dark. From his lying position on the floor, my Dad lifted to look out at us. Our Nanny explained to him how she found me sitting outside, crying. “He is sad because he thinks you’re still upset,” she explained. “I told him that you are not angry anymore, but he won’t believe me.” After mediating, she left me there staring into the room darkened by the lengthening shadows of the afternoon. He called me in, motioned for me to lay next to him, and then drew the covers over me. And I fell asleep in the warmth of his closeness.

Even as I write it, I wonder if it really happened. “It must have been a dream,” I tell myself. Spun in the heart of a child that beats for things as they ought to be. But I feel that warmth … the uncomfortably unfamiliar comfort of his closeness. Can’t feel pain in dreams. Can you feel warmth?

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