I’m ten years old, sitting in my father’s den with a copy of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead in my lap. I picked it out of the hundreds of books lining the walls in the floor-to-ceiling shelves, because I thought it might be a dirty book. It’s a big disappointment. Not only are there not any “good parts,” I can’t even make any sense out of it. This annoys me enormously, because I really don’t understand why anything in the adult world should be inaccessible to me.
I listen to adult conversations and hang around waiting to chime in. No one seems to take me seriously. I constantly ponder the differences between adults and me. Does merely being alive for a certain number of years automatically make a person wise? Is wise the same as smart? I suspect not. School seems to tell me that I’m fairly smart, but the closest I’ve ever gotten to wise was playing the part of one of the Three Wise Men in the Christmas play. That, however, was quite a profound experience. In the dark of an old stone church, I bent myself into what I felt was the shape of a wise old man, holding his lantern aloft as he searched for the star, the newborn, the truth. Sacred music echoed off the walls, shadows formed themselves into hovering spirits, angels attending this recreated event as if it, too, had a life of its own. For just a moment, my staff in one hand, lantern in the other, stockinged feet rooted to the earth through the cold stone floor, I felt truly ancient, a searcher through eons of darkness, wise enough to recognize the light and move — through obstacles unimaginable even in that illumined moment — relentlessly toward it.
