Book Excerpt

The Starting Line

From a very early age, I sensed I was different from the rest of the family. It didn’t seem to be a problem. It was just something I knew but couldn’t adequately define or explain. It had little to do with physical appearance or mental perceptions. It went much deeper. It was more like a soul cognition that was ingrained in the marrow, and irrevocable.

Despite my differentness, I was able to develop a sensitive closeness with family members, particularly my mother. It was a relief that no one made an issue of it, at least to my face. In turn, I tried to be cooperative and do what I was told. Mother explained to people that although I may not be the beauty my sister was, I had a “sweet disposition”. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but she smiled when she said it, so it must have been all right.

When my parents referred to other people as odd, different, or eccentric, I didn’t dare let on that I secretly admired such people. They were like storybook characters that profiled against the landscape whether they wanted to or not.

A typical example was Mr.Byington, who lived up over the river in an ivy covered stone house. He had a long flowing beard and would remind you of Moses, only in street clothes, or even a modern day Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings. His prim and proper sister, Martha, was the town librarian and wouldn’t allow us book lovers a hint of a whisper.

Mr.Byington was a mushroom expert, and my friends and I might encounter him in the woods at any time. Although his manner of speech was difficult to understand, he would politely explain about fungi and tell us what mushrooms to avoid. I thought he was intriguing, but some local boys thought he was so weird they threw stones at him and called him names.

Few people realized he was a linguist and biblical scholar of note who had spent decades of his life translating the Bible from the Hebrew and Greek into what he called “Living English”. His everyday job was editor and translator for Ginn and Co. in Boston. When my mother was single, she used to work as a bookkeeper at the Pilgrim Press on Beacon Street. She said Mr.Byington had much of his work published there. The staff stood in awe of him, and gave him great respect.

This provided me the first of many lessons that I couldn’t judge others just by first impression. This also helped me embrace my own unusualness and give it a playful respect.

I was born the summer following the stock market crash and October’s Black Tuesday. I took my first breath in Andover, Massachusetts, in the summer of 1930. The United States was sinking into the ugly depths of the Great Depression. Herbert Hoover was president, and FDR was governor of New York. George Gershwin’s music was all over the radio waves and my mother, after crisis and struggle, finally had her second baby—me.

Something so unheard-of happened in the months following my birth that I have not mentioned it to anyone before the writing of this book. You will soon understand why. In my mid thirties, I relived this experience once again, and now, just thinking about it, I can still feel the sense of panic that came with it.

It occurred as follows: In the many months following my birth, it was as if the whole upper half of my head was wide open to the sky and saturated with light. This bright, effulgent light that surged in and through me wasn’t like sunshine. It seemed to be a non-sentient light that carried with it another kind of comforting warmth. I felt utterly secure. This open window in my head connected me to “others” who seemed close by but in a separate realm of reality.

These “others” communicated personally with me in an easy, fun-loving, confidential way. My ears never picked up words, sounds, or laughter, but I felt the intent of them. Although I was acutely aware of my family’s voices around me, this other connection was different. The interface was more like shared thoughts and intentions intuited on the psyche, forming a level of intimacy I would never again experience.

Unfortunately this bright connection was not intended to last. Each day the light began to dim slightly as if a dark curtain were gradually being drawn over a sunny window. As long as there was even a small area of light, I felt secure, but when it became barely a slit, I began to feel the acute panic of impending loss.

Panic changed eventually to a deeply sad resignation as I mourned my coming exile into the shadowy world around me. Finally, it happened. No more light. No more closeness of connection.

It was an incalculable loss, followed by hurt and a sense of guilt. I thought I must have done something terribly wrong. How could they do this to me? What had I done that was so irreconcilable?

Today I believe that all of us have had, in the first year or two of life, a connection to this numinous light although the memory is rarely if ever retained. The phenomenon may or may not be connected to the soft spot or anterior fontanel on a baby’s head. This diamond-shaped area is where the bones don’t fully connect until the brain has assumed maximum growth. The bones fuse when it’s time, and that usually occurs between nine months and as late as two years.

Only decades later when I relived the whole experience again was I able to find the vocabulary to describe it. Still, I never spoke of it, even to family members, and to this day, I have no provable theory of what it was all about and why it should matter. But it did matter to me. On some fathomless level, it etched into my psyche a need to find and reconnect to that larger life consciousness, that wonder of being.

The cosmic loneliness people feel when they have achieved everything they had ever wanted yet feel flat and empty afterward may be related to this early experience. Although that memory is erased, we humans seem to spend decades of life running after something deeper, something sure, something that satisfies. Although we are not conscious of it, we perhaps search for the connection to God , that universal consciousness of which we are all a part.

Growing up, there were other experiences that seemed natural to me, but when relayed to others, I could see jaws drop and eyes roll upward. When I related something I perceived to be an interesting fact, I was dismissed with a wave of the hand, as if I were kidding or being deliberately misleading. It was only when an adult looked at me with that “poor baby look” in the eyes that I realized I was standing alone in my perceptions.

Fortunately I had a mother who, although kind and caring, was also direct, if not blunt. “Elna, for heaven’s sake, keep such thoughts to yourself. What you’re saying is nonsense and defies logic. People are going to think there’s something wrong with you. Where do you get such ideas? Sometimes, your imagination goes haywire.”

She was so right, except for the imagination part. From my point of view, what happened, happened, and it hurt a bit that my mother thought I conjured it up. My imagination wasn’t all that active.

Later I realized that my sensory equipment was over the top. I was acutely hypersensitive to everything. I listened, saw, absorbed, felt, and sensed things to an inordinate degree. When my observations continually got rejected, I finally learned to go mute with them and simply enjoy them for what they were.

It was for the best that Mother had a down-to-earth “prove it to me” attitude. In my toddler years, she grounded me securely into the strange concrete world of hard surfaces, dense planes, and strange objects called tables and chairs that grown-ups seemed to deem important. Even though this new life was often drab in color and extremely puzzling, my insatiable mind was curious and eager to explore it and form some kind of connection with it.

Finally, when I was allowed to walk outdoors in spring, go barefoot on wet squishy grass, see the water of the brook move, gasp at the wonder of oak, cloud, and sun—only then did I feel I might belong to this world.

I was born in a New England academy town, twenty-three miles north of Boston. It was a warm Thursday on the twenty-fourth of July in 1930. I was born at home as was the custom. Mother gave birth to me when she was in her late thirties, and she said it was a sheer miracle I was born at all. My sister, Muriel, was six years old at the time, and for the past four years, Mother had been trying to have another child, twice failing in the first trimester.

After two miscarriages, my parents felt desperate to have one more child, but when Mother found herself pregnant again, she became panicked when familiar problems resurfaced. Again, she wasn’t able to retain food or liquid, and the dehydration factor lomed. Today, I wonder if she might have had that extreme morning sickness that is called hyperemesis.

My father became worried and finally phoned Dr. Look, the family doctor, who came to the house as soon as he could. Our doctor was a slim, silver-haired distinguished-looking little man who usually wore a Harris Tweed jacket, dark tie, and glasses and had a hurried, quiet urgency about him whenever he came to the house. Dad told us later that the doctor looked stern when he got there, and Mother said he shook his finger at her as he gave the ultimatum. “Mrs. Fone, if you don’t retain food and liquid in the next twenty-four hours, you will lose this baby.”

That did it. Mother said she had no idea where the power and the strength came from, but she was “bound and determined” to have this baby no matter what. She told me countless times in the years that followed that it was sheer grit and tenacity that brought me into the world. “Someday, I’ll be glad I had this baby,” she had said over and over to herself because she felt she almost had to make the birth happen.

When she was ready to deliver, Mother “had a fit” because the doctor had trouble opening the can of ether as she was pleading for it. “He just fumbled around with that darned can, and there I was groaning in pain so loud that Muriel, could hear me all the way from my sister Clara’s house.”

When the new baby was finally delivered, weighing seven pounds, she was so relieved I was alive and healthy, she said she didn’t care about anything else. Just one thing puzzled her, though. After all the toes and fingers were counted, she asked, “Where is the baby’s nose?” There were only two holes in the middle of my face.