A Different World Behind the Same Eyes... and Others'

I was blessed, yesterday, to slip into a much-needed reminder of the human reality in which disagreements must be resolved. The experience through which it came is probably one that many people will find familiar, but for all I know, it'll represent one more reason for readers to think me odd. (Truth often merits a bit of both reactions, anyway.)

As part of the process of liquidating my CD collection, I was listening to Billy Joel's "An Innocent Man," and I recalled that it had been my favorite song during my fifteenth summer (when I was fourteen years old). Those were tumultuous times for me, and I had come to see a piano camp in Bennington, Vermont, at which I was currently spending my fourth summer, as a place of refuge from the increasingly confusing and, well, disappointing months passing in New Jersey. That year, 1989, I spent eight weeks at the camp — the entirety of its season — and when my parents came to pick me up, the owners' eldest daughter informed us that I was forbidden to return.

Mostly because the rejection fell as the first major crack in an avalanche that would sweep me through the rest of my teens and beyond, the sting lingered for several years, and the reasons given, I continue to believe, were unjustly construed. Still, I have to confess that there were multiple reasons of which the counselors were not aware that would have amply justified the same decision. Perhaps my secret behavior lingered in an aura around me that my judges sensed and on which basis they ruled.

Rather than doling out details, many of which remain solely in my possession, it will suffice for me to suggest that, while perhaps not ironic, it is telling that "An Innocent Man" resonated with me in a personal way. Although that autumn found me still "innocent" (in the innuendoed sense), I had pursued my original birthright of sin that summer as if chasing an early inheritance.

The charm of that Old Bennington mansion had partly been that, within its walls, I had managed to define myself as I wanted to be — as I thought I really was, truly — and at fourteen years old, I stained that vision by behaving in the addled fashion of a young man who believes his better days to be a dream at constant risk of being whisked away. Prophecy self fulfilled. The boy I could be found himself tripped and beaten and rolled into the bushes by the boy I actually really was, truly.

So, fifteen years later, perhaps to the day of my last day, listening to my favorite song from that time, I suddenly could remember the feel of that life. By that, I don't mean some analytical synopsis of my frame of mind, but rather the underlying hue of my emotions, the aggregate effect of the unstated assumptions behind various reactions, thoughts, and beliefs. Have you had this experience? It's not unlike managing to bring to mind a smell that isn't actually there and finding that with it has come the hint of flavor that leaks through to the taste buds and the associations that the odor once had, as if you could close your eyes and reopen them to find not only that the source was there before you, but that you were again the person that you had once been.

Not surprisingly, the feel of being that well-tanned and grasping kid, the shapes of things as he saw them, is quite starkly different from my experience of now. This, I submit, approaches the empathy with which we ought to attempt to engage those with whom we disagree. The world feels differently to them. That grasping and fleetingly cocksure kid watching the familiar silo near Albany (with giant, winking, female eyes painted on it) slide by the car window during the Eighties' final June would not have listened to me had I advised him. Had I told him that treating others as more than passing characters in life's drama would enable him to be who he wanted to be, my words would have been nearly unintelligible to him — scarcely sounds with substance.

Maybe, though, if we can find a way to feel the worlds of those with whom we disagree, we can find our way back to the world as we believe it to be — with company.