As I drift from a state of hazy perception to one of daylight consciousness - perhaps vice versa; I can make no sense of the last several days - I endeavor to piece together my recollections of childhood with my hallucinations (but they seem so real) and those mental distortions with what I know absolutely to be my day-to-day existence.
Yes, I spent most of my childhood at 248 Hernandez Terrace, and Billy Tobias was my best friend in the world. We played kick-the-can and dodge ball on the street from spring through late fall, my erratic health permitting. As a young man I was intent on saving the world, and someone found me, recruited me and assured me that there was only one way to save humanity - the Boss's Way. I believed and, with missionary zeal, sought out willing souls. Some were not so willing. As I think back on my good intentions and the manner in which I persuaded those heathen islanders to accept unreservedly the One True Way, I wonder in these, my autumn years of careful reflection, if those sweet, open-hearted souls would have been better off left in the unadulterated soil of their simple paganism.
Today I occupy a studio in a mountain community called Miners' Point, not far from what is probably the most famous lake in the US of A. Many of my mother's books and possessions are here, in my sight. Not in a giant box. And that manila envelope ... I can't wrap my head around that one ... I don't want to try. Change of subject coming up NOW!
Everyone's life is a jigsaw puzzle. Some puzzles are composed of few and large, easily assembled pieces. No mystery, no hours passed in fervid pursuit of making it all fit. At a glance you size up the pieces, mentally arrange them and, finally, with what would appear to onlookers as well practiced ease, interlock each piece. On the other hand, some individuals become their complex manner of life, totally identifiable with the external trappings of what it is they do, they think, they influence. They and their life are a puzzle of a thousand pieces of inscrutable design that resist proper assemblage by finite humans.
Where, exactly, do my pieces fit in?