Self Examination – Page 116

What the heck is a writer’s soul?

Just my way of trying to describe the creative place where ideas and passion are first conceived.

Lately, I’ve been hooked on country music, the kind of stuff where lost love and dreams of the past, tear away at the walls that keep the forgotten 16-year-old locked away from our conscious minds. Remember your 1st love? Your 1st fight? Your 1st best friend? The troubled, idealistic Holden Caulfield trying to make the world a more honest place?

Back then we didn’t know or care about Republicans and Democrats, gun control or Gay Rights. We cared about love, friendship, and finding a way to make sense out of this huge, crazy world. We dreamed of a vague future, of glory on the ball field, of getting Betty or Robert to notice us and to reciprocate our love.

The pathway into the past, hidden by the layers of logic that come with adulthood, can be breached by just letting our mind wander to wherever it wants to go. That’s not so easy when the realities of making ends meet, raising kids, a job and working out marital issues are so right in our faces.

One way to start the journey inward is to really listen to music — country, jazz, oldies, classical, whatever — to allow it to carry you into the past or present or future — the same way just a tiny glance from the girl of your dreams would send you spinning for days at a time.

Another access to the past is through the sense of smell, the most primitive part of our brain. The scents of Thanksgiving with grandma, baking chocolate brownies with mom, even an odor that makes you cringe with disgust can send you spinning to a long forgotten place.

All our senses — sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste can do it. Leave the world of paying bills and fighting traffic and take a trip back to your past. That’s where the writer’s soul exists.

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A patient told me a haunting story.

Forty years ago, a young man from New York had occasion to order a piece of machinery for his boss from a company in Virginia. The young woman he spoke to was engaging and very helpful. One thing led to another and they started chatting on the phone as the piece of machinery was being built.

When the job was done and ready for shipment, the young man prevailed on his boss to allow him to go in person to make sure that the machinery was up to the expected standards. When he told the young woman the plan, she was delighted and offered to meet him at the train station. She would then personally escort him to the plant.

“How will I know you?” The young man asked.

“I’ll be wearing a red dress.”

When the train arrived, just as promised, a pretty, dark-haired woman wearing a red dress was waiting for the young man. As he descended from the train, she smiled and waved from her wheelchair. The young man, who had no idea that she had suffered from polio and had been wheelchair-bound from the time she was a child, fell instantly and irrevocably in love.

They married, raised a family, and had a wonderful relationship.

My patient, who just recently met the now 62-year-old lady with the red dress and her husband for the first time, said with a sigh, “They were in love.” He sighed again. “Most of us married people love our spouses, but this was different. They were obviously still as madly in love as when they first met on that railroad station forty years ago.”

So why do I, a person who has never seen or met this lady-in-red, also love her?

I love her positive attitude and her ability to accept what she couldn’t change and still make the most of her opportunity to have a good life. It is what I want for myself, my wife and children, my friends and my patients. The woman-in-the-red-dress never defined herself as a woman in a wheelchair with polio, but only as an attractive, intelligent, exciting person who never bothered mentioning the fact that she was impaired because in so many ways she wasn’t.

The story is for me what love stories are all about. Love, mystery, spirituality and the magic of the human condition. It is what I believe in, what I write about, and what I dream about.

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