542 Part 2 PREQUEL TO HIGH SCHOOL ...

Whenever a family moves into unexplored territory, changes occur, which are often too subtle for most to notice—at first.  As subconscious changes take place beneath the surface of conscious awareness, they may go unnoticed for decades.  However, as years pass, emotional wounds—left unhealed—unfailingly grow into complex problems, which, eventually, shape up into patterns that ensnare everyone we love—as well as everyone we are destined to love in the future.

As long as everyone remains blind to the classic nature of slow growing changes that filter into the evolution of each family's life,  none has a clue as to what may have catalyzed a caring group of people to veer off track and wander into a tunnel where a dark hazy maze waits to swallow them up, one by one.  As one change develops into another, sight unseen, thus is family life bound to become more confusing until, one day in the far distant future, the pall of darkness is glaring to all.  In lieu of insight into the evolution of change, misunderstandings based in tunnel vision darken each person's view of the others.  Sadly, if no one thinks to look into a mirror to see both sides of human nature staring back, the lily white innocence of love's purity muddies up.  Once love's purity muddies up, negatively focused, defensive thought processes must grow objective on all sides or the muddiness wins and any thought of positively focused win-win is lost in that tunnel where the co-chairs of confusion and misunderstanding reign supreme.

When unhealed wounds, hide inside pockets of the subconscious, an invisible wall of denial shapes up.  With the passage of time, no one realizes that something ‘dark’ continues to grow behind that wall, which serves as a mental block against revealing unresolved pain.  And thus is true that a person’s most serious problem may go unrecognized until the weight of this invisible problem consumes so much mind space that the darkness crashes through the defense system’s wall, knocking down a person’s high flying spirit in an utterly unexpected, self-destructive way.  

Though my mother and father remember my dancing, they could not share my earliest memory, which Dad did not film, because visiting hours had ended, so at the time when this memory occurred, my parents had already kissed me goodbye and gone home.  No one was there to see two year old me, crouching down, burying my face in the corner of a darkened hospital room, while hugging a brand new baby doll as close to my heart as possible. (Or—being less than two … had I huddled in the corner of a hospital crib rather than crouching in the corner of the room—can’t be certain about less memorable details like that, because minutiae grows fuzzy over time.)  I named the doll, Mugguns, after myself.  For some strange reason, I didn’t name her Annie.  Instead I named her after my last name.  And at two, Mugguns was the way I’d pronounced Goodman.

         It’s our most poignant memories that imprint with photographic clarity, like my memory of crying in fear at having been left alone at night in a strange place for the first time in my life, and since I don’t remember if hospital staff came in to soothe me, I imagine crying myself, quietly, to sleep—Just as I would at every stage of life when I’d felt abandoned. (Feeling abandoned and being abandoned being two different things.)  At any rate, my two earliest memories (dancing joyfully with abandon and crying in fear of having been abandoned) suggest that a ribbon of continuity connects the masks of comedy and tragedy throughout all four stages of each person’s life—for sound reason.  The earlier the sense of loss of self, the greater the fear of abandonment, again.)

         Dad’s camera lens shows my spirit to have been as high-flying as a bright, shining star until I was close to three.  Then, quite shockingly, laughing eyes, clapping hands, and dancing feet were replaced on all sides by fearful glances, sorrowful cries, and a deeply pained, disconcerting state of disorder and guilt.  Though we don’t know exactly how much the minds of three-year-olds absorb, I have a strong feeling that the fact that lightening struck my family—twice—Grandpa and Janet—within the space of four months—influenced the dichotomy that caused my high-spirited, bright shining star to fall as fearfully fast as the quick change artistry whereby sun beams are replaced by storm skies, which thunder down upon our lives, mercilessly, for what must have felt like an endless length of time ...