Inside Out –
Talking to My Kids
By Charles E. Kraus
I’m
getting along in years and would like my kids 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. Some situations are so vivid 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, candidate John Kennedy arrived for a brief campaign
appearance. And a few years later, 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’?
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 alone 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 indescribable peaks and vistas that defined
our journeys? Sons and daughters 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 be transmitted by
the intensity of the telling.
