The truth is I was not a brave child. One summer evening when the sun eventually set near ten o’clock and an unfamiliar darkness filled the corners of Uncle Philip and Aunt Mildred’s old farmhouse, when the gray tree trunks behind the house melted into the thickening moonless black, and when the walls creaked or a barn door banged in startlingly strange ways, I sobbed uncontrollably for home.
I’d never slept anywhere but in my own bed, the one I shared with one of my younger brothers in the large upstairs bedroom. There the light from the yard light on the pole between our house and the barn shined through our window and left a comforting rectangular glow on the wall beyond the foot of the bed, there where the stove pipe from the oil burner downstairs rose through the floor and into the ceiling and during cold winter nights warmed the big room.
But that summer afternoon I had told Mom I wanted to spend the night at my uncle and aunt’s house. I was sure it would be fun and that this would prove I was a big boy like my older brother. Later I cried, of course, forlorn and homesick because the place where I knew the darkness and recognized the noises was now several miles of gravel roads away, an impossible distance for a six-year-old faced with the trauma of his own choice.
Uncle Philip—a tall, gentle man with a broad oval face, glasses, and a patch of thin hair above his pale forehead — tried to console me, first by plucking a mouth harp and then promising me that in the morning we’d go bird-watching. And I still wonder, why, of all things, bird-watching? Even now I’m unsure which is closer to the truth: Was this something he loved and wanted to share with me? Or did he somehow know it’s what I liked to do — even when I was six and didn’t know myself — and that the promise of doing this would make me happy and look forward to morning even though I wasn’t home?
His mouth harp twanged as he sat in front of me and then he smiled, trying to coax a grin through my tears. And eventually I calmed down, still uneasy about sleeping in a strange room, but gradually, I suppose, I gave in to exhaustion and let Uncle Philip guide me upstairs and into bed and turn out the light.
When I woke up, sunlight filled the bedroom window. As I trudged sleepily down the stairs, I heard a chair stutter across the floor. In the kitchen, Aunt Mildred moved toward the sink with two plates in her hands. I looked up at her. “He’s outside,” she said. “By the barn.” She smiled her tilted smile, went to the screen door, and pushed it open for me.
Eventually, even though Uncle Philip undoubtedly had work to do, he and I walked into the grove west of the house, stepping quietly over dry twigs and around clumps of brittle leaves, and looked up into the trees. We may have heard the drum of a red-headed woodpecker on a hollow trunk or the racket of crows above the canopy of leaves or the baleful coo of a mourning dove. I really don’t remember. What I do remember is the lengths to which Uncle Philip went to comfort me the night before and to keep his promise the next morning.
But here’s the thing: I’m not sure why I remember this, especially the details of homesickness and Uncle Philip’s mouth harp and his promise to go bird-watching. Was it because the fear I felt and the ordeal of that evening left their indelible print on me or because it’s another piece of evidence of what I know about myself but may not have always been willing to admit — that I am, in truth, less brave than I aspire to be? Do our memories make us who we are and determine what is true about ourselves? Or do our truths — even if we’re not conscious of them — determine what we remember?
While I usually associate truth with the verifiable and factual, true originally referred only to being faithful as in “be true to yourself” or as the Beach Boys sang, “Be true to your school.” And maybe it’s no coincidence that the words true and tree are etymologically related, being true meaning to be stalwart, faithful, and sturdy like an oak. And there I was — standing next to Uncle Philip and staring up into the limbs of ash trees and elms and cottonwoods. And all these years since, it seems I’ve been waiting for myself to look into those same trees for a truth about that boy and who he’s become.
Maybe, I’ve finally gotten past those fears and the humiliation of tears and weakness. Just maybe.
Knock on wood.
