When Words Fail
By Charles E. Kraus
c 2013
This
is the time of year when we gather indoors.
It’s a ‘story’ time of year. Families
and friends swap tales and share aspirations.
I
can still hear the voices of my children, back when they were little-- Tell the one where the car broke down. Say the one when you found the book with the
money in it! These stories have
become routines repeated annually, and endlessly.
I’m
getting along in years and would like my kids to learn more about their
father. To hear my other stories, the ones
about the life I’ve experienced deep within.
But I find that words are not particularly useful tools for expressing
the tone and impact of events that have transfixed and altered my journey
through time. Some situations are so vivid
that it seems impossible to limit their retells to language.
I
want my kids to know about, to somehow pass along to them, the electricity in
the air, the anticipation, the heat, the sounds, of an armory packed to the
bursting point with excited, enthralled, shrieking supporters, the night, three
hours late, John Kennedy arrived for a brief campaign appearance.
I want my kids to understand and appreciate what it was like,
what it felt like, to experience the shock and sorrow and jolting sobriety of the
President’s assassination. To know as we
did, with certainty that everyone, everywhere, absolutely everyone, absolutely
everywhere, wept uncontrollably. That
our anguish was magnified by its universal pervasiveness.
Is there any way I can share the things that occurred inside my
head, and then in every aspect of my perception, on that autumn day when, as I was seated next to my girlfriend in a college
auditorium, the lecturer posed a complex math problem, one far beyond my skill
level, perhaps beyond those of any of us?
Yet somehow, influenced by a desire to impress, by an excitement that
filled my mind, wheels and gears whizzed round within my head. In mere seconds, almost screaming, more than
declaring, I performed the uncharacteristic act of rising from my chair and
shouting out with an unexplainable confidence, an answer so correct and
complete that a silence composed entirely of amazement filled the lecture hall?
Can I really use words to describe what it was like identifying
with millions of kids, my generation, my peers?
How we were possessed by delusions of invincibility and altruism? How, guided by a sense righteousness and moral
smugness, propelled by hallucinogens and misconceptions, we abandoned our homes,
heading for places such as Haight Ashbury?
Or a kingdom called “on the road”? Can I ever explain how my generation created a
genuine, if impermanent, festival of the ‘alternative path’? And later, what it was like as blood and
chaos claimed the streets obscuring our trail and altering our objectives?
I have tried unsuccessfully to describe how I felt on a certain
extremely dark, fierce Rhode Island evening.
This was after stowing my gear and cleaning up, when I set out through
the numbing night, hearing the sounds made as boots sink slightly into the
crust of ice that forms on New England snow.
Alone, quietly heading for the bus stop, thinking that just a plane ride
ago, I’d been experiencing the monsoon season and a military exercise called Nam. Realizing how in the span of two days, the war
had become part of my past. The walk had
a feeling. Actually, the feeling returns
whenever I recall my steps through the snow, the quietest, calmest, most serene
journey I believe I have ever made.
Words cannot capture these sensations.
Such
moments are extraordinary. We all have
them. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if our
kids could catch a glimpse of the peaks and vistas that defined our journeys? They, of course, will have their own unique,
remarkably vivid and meaningful moments.
If we cannot share the specifics, at least we accept the concept that our
lives are lived beyond words. Perhaps
some aspects can by transmitted by the intensity of the telling.
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