From There To Here

While groping in the dark, you think of yourself as an extra or maybe a second banana. You don't know this is your movie.

There’s a war going on. There are blackouts and your father is an air-raid warden. Whispers behind closed doors. Meetings every other Tuesday in the next room with vehemence leaking through the wall. Morris, the tailor, is cursing. Tomorrow, he will return to silence with pins in his mouth. Pamphlets are left. Next year you will be running from building to building, slipping those truths under doors.

Money is hardly spent. Your mother has street-smarts; she knows the price of cottage cheese. She walks half a mile to get a bargain of calf's liver from the butcher. You remember the sawdust on the floor and fly paper hanging with a rose blooming in blood on his apron. She's elated when the grocer forgets to charge her for the lemons. 

Suddenly there’s a new radio-phonograph console. It has speakers with an Art-Deco design you memorize listening to Roosevelt’s Fireside chats and Glen Miller's orchestra.

Your family, so you think, is like no other. Father works very long hours, nights and weekends. He is largely absent yet always present as the man you would be. Your mother has a mouth not like yours. She yells a lot, curses the gods for God knows what. You grow as silent as Gary Cooper. You gulp, ill-equipped for the combat needed to survive this world. You orphan yourself as you must. 

You are Clark Kent growing another self. You could leap tall tales in a single bound. You have a secret life as the Green Hornet or that masked man on a white horse. Aw shucks. You know what evil lurked.

You scour apartment house basements. It is your time for small anarchies. You steal broomsticks for stickball bats. You collect baseball drawings by an illustrator named Pap. His caricatures are only in the New York Sun, a dying rag. You make your way into stacks of discarded newspapers looking for his sketches. You knew the smell of cellars. You study college football teams. Every week, you pick the winners. You don’t know what is important from what is more important.

You send your predictions to a paper and become their headline on the back page. But you tell no one. It is the Daily Worker and that earns you a file with the F.B.I.  Is it your breadcrumbs that lead two agents to our door? You see your father block their way. When they want names, his silence is his spine.

The chalked sidewalk is teeming with life, and the street is your Mississippi, rafting between cars and manhole covers, rounding the bases. You are a member of the tribe called Children. Rules are passed along by the big kids and suddenly you are one of them. 

How did get from there to here? One day you are Mickey Rooney and the next, Gregory Peck. Now you are an aged Jeremy Irons.

The camera is still running. Credits are not rolling quite yet. You are the star of your own movie, yet just part of a multiplex. 

You look back at fragments that stuck, the same way we used to enter the movie house in the middle, heedless of beginnings, and later say, this is where we came in.