Epilogue

In the days following Billy Sandrow's death we found needed consolation, pals diminished by one, by gathering together often and we talked in softer tones about Billy and about the mysterious impact of death itself upon what hithertofore was unconsciously regarded as our own invincibility against "other plans." More directly we realized without saying it that we were vulnerable creatures now forced to explore the psyche and aware that time was meant for us to put away childish things (but not all at once).

We were to spend a few years being kids of sorts though in a diminishing sense. It's but an illusion to think that Billy's death hastened our evolving away from childhood. It's just that things we thought about privately were now shared with apprehensive openness because of our common grief, our shared loss.

The effect of the incident rippled away with time and all those who pledged themselves to each other to be friends for life would soon find their emotional rhetoric mercifully blown away. The effect of time and space and newer moments tucked away the older ones. Make room for today.

I guess...

WHO HAS LOOKED AFTER US?

The answer, and perhaps the question, is often buried under complicated intrigues. The world is full of people who tell us they will help us to do good things, to give us good things, to save us from something or other, to protect us even from ourselves. We might have to pay for their services. That sounds suspicious. We might be guaranteed that we won't have to pay for their advice, their help, their intervention. That sounds suspicious.

We do have to be looked after by certain people at either end of our lives: in the beginning and perhaps toward the end. Some view this as responsibility, as their natural duty. Others find it an annoyance. And others are bereft of any understanding of it at all.

The question might seem absolutely foreign; Who has looked after us? It's too detatched. It might be accepted that we have to be looked after in the beginning of life — and for a while, maybe. It might be uncomfortable before we grow old to contemplate what positon anyone might face in dealing with debility of age. In the time between the realities around birth and death, it might be met by saying "who cares?," words expected if there are no crises.

We must be led. The elementary proposition is advanced by John Donne. "No man is an island." Donne sees an ethical approach to save us from catastrophe. Who will lead us? And again: Who will look after us? Children aren't capable of asking why this person or that will want to look after our lives. They're immune from questioning their parents (for a while) and that's just as well. After all they are blood of their blood and flesh of their flesh. Questions might be precipitate. In time children will have to bend more and more to other visons, other opportunities, other hearts beyond the confines of their home. They will have to be subject to sources of "great influences that have lived beyond their own physical time." If all of this is not hostile to early life at home, considering their parents did their job, then it acts as an expected supplement to what was first given. Parents must look after us. And they must love us, care for us, worry about us when we are ill or when we are in trouble, defend us against harm, chastise us when we do wrong.

I'll give my parents credit for that. I didn't understand those things when I was a child. "....I thought as a child." Once I could cross the street their hold was slightly diminished. Once I could keep other company, it was eroded a little more. And when I left an empty seat at the table, they might have seen the time when the empty seat would never be occupied again. They might feel the weight of that with greater apprehension than I would when their chair would be removed.

Apprehensions had hard fact to support worries. Before my time Charlie Ross was abducted. A letter came to his parents written by a terrorist, but Charlie was never seen again by those who cared for him. In my time Paul Hart was sent away to war to fight other people's quarrels, and he was killed by someone who didn't know him. A knock on the door brought the hopeless news. Billy Sandrow's parents answered the phone late at night and heard the worst news of their lives. He was an innocent snuffed away by a reckless chance taken by a truck driver. Bad manners and impatience was fatal and unfair.

The possibility of irredeemable acts happening keeps parents nervous. I was too little to share the shock of bad news given to my family when I ran into traffic and mercifully was unconscious during their ordeal. How do they respond to this? "Your kid was hit by a car." In a later time a knock on the door (in the time before we had a <@145>phone) brought news of another accident. I had a severed artery and had been taken to the hospital. They had to weigh the possibility that I might have died.

Kids don't understand the curfews lain on them. When we didn't arrive home at appointed time, at nine, or ten, or eleven, parents looked out the window. They stood on the porch trying to see beyond what they were allowed to see. They sat by the door. They lay awake in their bed. They thought way beyond the rule they dispensed to very fragile children.

Good advice is available. I believe it. Is there a lot of it at hand? Or maybe just a little? It depends. Is it luck that puts us in position to receive it? Or, are we placed at the mercy of our own ken to get on in the world? How good are we? We've always needed life-guards and light-houses. And teachers. When we hear advice, are we capable of understanding it: taking it?

When I read George Eliot's observation that "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not as ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and now rest in unvisited tombs," I paused to assay the peculiar implication of those words. If I accepted the direction as something I would want, then I would be responsible in turn to extend the same kindness. I might be looked after. It doesn't end that I would be looked after. If I could not look after others then it follows that I might wound them merely by my presence. Life's tough if you accept these ideas.

We began life with the magic of guardian angels looking after us. They hired our parents to clean up small messes that we were certain to make.

It's hard to distinguish our fortune from our scars. Each influence, good and bad, cuts it's mark into our lives. I wonder if it's mercy or misfortune to forget the things we did or the things that were done to us or even the greater dramas of the world. Too much of what we observe is the fiction that promotes reputations and success of strangers who entertain for some personal gains. For some it is more importantly a philosophic suzerainty. They'll bend our thoughts to theirs; we'll worship them or depend on them for tomorrow's need. Maybe they'll turn us into beggars.

I like Eliot's advice. (It's free.) It guards the world from throwing infants out on the street. That's done anyway and it becomes the seed of a lot of resentment that has a price to pay later on.