Do you remember that room with the fairy sprite who wrote at the table with the candle and quill pen and the pages that flew out the window? And the Angel so huge we could only see its feet, in its arms a baby, and the Green Woman with her arm round the girl in jeans called Rosie who pointed and said you, and the Griffin with blue blood dripping from its beak click-clacking, its tail slap-slapping on the steps? How they were gathered in that sunken room that was lowered from the rest of a house beige in its unlovedness, but this room was filled, it had a chaise long, it had a huge ornate door that was open a bit, not much, enough to show occasionally a view of open road. I went there yesterday to see how they were doing and the door was open, they’d left the room, they had set off. They were heading away, happy, this band of friends, these parts of me collected, they said come on, let’s go. The fairy sprite with her table and pen and candle floating touched her toes to the shoulder of the Green Woman. Rosie straddled the back of the Griffin. The Angel, big feet plodding, walked beside. The sun was shining, it was light and full of beginnings. The road led straight on, not a bend or turn, into the distance. Seeing it reminded me of a book I was obsessed with when I was little that I’ve searched for ever since and never found. It was pictures, perhaps there was writing but I remember this: a child in the foreground facing away standing at the beginning of a long straight brick avenue, perhaps there were trees, perhaps there were houses, perhaps it even became a railway but it was straight and it narrowed as perspective dictates. The child stood at the mouth, small to the big path. And as it walked, I turned the pages. Then something happened with size. Instead of the child remaining small and houses and trees growing larger as they were neared, the landscape and road itself remained the exact diminishing size of the first page so that it was the child who grew as it travelled the landscape. By the end the child was huge, a giant on a tiny road with tiny houses and trees. It fascinated me. I turned the pages back and forth trying to work out what was going on. And so we set off. And we shall see.
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The book that you remember so vividly, but can't find again... So many versions of that in childhood. But it also reminds me of a line attributed to Mark Twain -- something about how he'd reached the age where the things he remembered best never happened at all.
Do you know Teresa Jordan's memoir Riding the White Horse Home? Rather an old book at this point. But she has a lovely essay about her father that begins with a vivid memory of him being trampled by a bull. Only, after describing it vividly, she lets us know that she wasn't even alive when it happened. She'd just heard the story so often from relatives that she had begun to picture herself there at the edge of the corral. Kind of off your original topic, but maybe at least adjacent.
Here we see the horrible effects of crack cocaine working away at my poor mum - get well soon ❤️