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Cream Sponge Para Lightfoots— Like Menthol on Your Feet The Reverend Dr. Becky Edmiston-Lange, June 5, 2005 Maybe yours weren’t Royal Crown Cream-Sponge Para Lightfoots. Maybe yours were Keds, or P. F. Flyers. Maybe even Adidas. But do you remember the way they felt—those brand new sneakers of summer—those shoes that felt they were made of coiled springs and marshmallows, like a world of infinite possibilities laced on your feet? Do you remember, can you remember? Maybe, if you are lucky, you recapture that feeling even now when you first put on a new pair of athletic shoes—when your ankles first sink down in that cushiony embrace, when you take that first bounce on the yeasty earth around the block. I get it sometimes—a glimpse, a shadow, at least, of that feeling of menthol on my feet. I walk. I walk a lot, and I have a decided tendency to pronate—to roll in as I walk. If I don’t replace my walking shoes every three months or so, I end up with aching knees or inflamed hip joints. And so I go through a lot of athletic footwear. And—yes—that first time I lace up a new pair of athletic shoes can be delightful. But how quickly the feeling fades! How quickly I become inured to their charms! How quickly the magic dies. The story, “Cream Sponge Para Lightfoot Tennis Shoes,” comes from, Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury’s magical, mystical novel about one summer in the life of Douglas Spaulding and his brother Tom. It’s set in 1928 in Waukegan, Illinois where Bradbury grew up. But it could be set in just about anywhere and in any time—any time that is when children still ran free all day long from June to September, left to their own devises, free from the supervision of adults who were glad to have them out from under. The summer of Dandelion Wine could have been a summer in my youth—or maybe one of yours. The summers of my childhood were easy and abundant with magic, or so it seems in recall. I remember hours and hours captured by the simple joy of movement—in running and running, and playing ball and tag and crack the whip, and, later, catching fireflies and playing games of hide and seek that lasted until long after dark. I remember hours horse-back riding through wild-flower strewn meadows and fields golden with hay; hours spent hiking through dappled shade in verdant woods, kicking sticks and turning over stones to peer at the creatures that make their home in the darkness of dewy loam; hours sitting on the banks of a creek, watching dragonflies as they flashed their iridescent wings and the Jesus bugs as they skittered across the surface of the water. I remember the spine-tingling rush that came with the crash of thunder and flash of lightning of sudden summer storms; of watching the rain move across the fields and the marvel that over there it was raining and here, just ten feet away, it was not and then it was. I remember running through the rain my head upturned to catch the silver drops on my tongue and feel its sweet coolness on sun-burnt skin; and the heart-stopping beauty of rainbows shimmering on the near horizon, so near you could believe there were pots of gold to be found. I remember mornings riotous with the twill and twitter of birds and nights cacophonous with the ratcheting of crickets and the rasping of tree frogs. In the summers of my memory there were so many, many things to wonder at, to marvel over. In the childhood of my memory life did feel like “a rising wave too great to be held”, but one which carried me swift and sure on its crest. When I think of my childhood summers now it is as if everyday, like Douglas Spaulding in Dandelion Wine, I discovered anew the fact that I was alive and the world was alive with raw power and everything in motion, that everyday was filled with countless reasons for amazement. Oh, I know, they weren’t really like that, couldn’t possibly have been like that. I’m sure I had days of boredom, of wondering what there was to do. And you have heard enough of my childhood to know that it was not all halcyon. But surely much of it was. Surely enough of it was filled with that feeling of magical awareness, that feeling of wonder that too easily eludes me as an adult. If I could tell you what I most want it would to be fully present to my life, to truly inhabit it, to be mindful that it is a miracle, a wonder-full gift. In my own personal credo, the desire to be fully present to my life has the quality of a moral imperative—that if I fail at that, I have violated a sacred truth. Perhaps I can explain by sharing another story—a true story told to me by one of my therapy clients many years ago. This man was married to a beautiful woman. They had once been madly in love. They had once been so enraptured by one another that the sight of his shadow crossing the walk could set her heart aflutter; the slightest touch of her hand on the back of his neck could electrify him. But now they had been married for some time. They had children; demanding jobs; they had lost sight of one another. Then one Christmas, the man gave the woman a stunning black dress as a gift. When he had first seen it, gracing a mannikin in a store window, he had known that it was perfect for her—elegant, sophisticated, becoming—and he remembered how before they had children, they would get dressed to the nines and go dancing and then come home and make abandoned love till the wee hours of the morning and then cuddle over coffee and the morning paper and tell each other all the fanciful yearnings of their hearts. The dress spoke to him of what they had once possessed and what they might yet possess again. It was expensive, an extravagance; but to him it was more than just a dress, it was alive with possibilities. He could hardly wait to see her face when she opened it on Christmas morning. Christmas morning came and after the kids were occupied with their new treasures, the man and the wife drew their presents out from under the tree. “You first,” he said. She unwrapped the large, oblong package, a look of eager expectancy on her face. But when the box was open and she folded back the tissue paper, her look changed to puzzlement and then as she lifted the dress from the box and held it up to see, her face fell. She tried to hide it—she smiled, said how pretty it was. And he tried to explain its magic, told her how the moment he saw it, he saw her in it. “But we don’t go dancing anymore—where would I wear it?” and she put the dress back in the box. He urged her to try it on. “Maybe later,” she said. The day passed and a few weeks after Christmas, when he asked, she told him that she had taken the dress back and exchanged it for two business suits —“Much more practical,” she said. “I’ll actually wear those.” When the man told me that story, he said he thought that was the beginning of the end of their marriage—that try as he might to see that she was right—the suits were more practical—they didn’t go dancing anymore and it was just a dress, after all—still he couldn’t get past the fact that she had rejected his precious, extravagant gift. To go through life unmindful of its wonder, to live unaware of the miracle and magic of our living—that to me is like returning that beautiful, stunning dress without even trying it on. For isn’t the fact that we exist at all an extravagant gift? And isn’t that primary sense of ontological wonder —that jarring realization that overtakes us from time to time that there is no necessary reason for the existence of the world and anything in it—worth at least one spin across the dance floor? As Paul Tillich said, “Viewed from the standpoint of the possibility of nonbeing, being is a mystery.” And isn’t that sense of ontological wonder at the heart of all great art, philosophy, religion, even science? Ah, yes—but I could be the woman in the story. Maybe you could too. I can get caught up in the practicalities, the business of living—of doing, achieving, planning—always looking forward to the next thing that has to be done, needs to be accomplished. I can be so caught up in the organizing of my life that I miss the fact that my life is already right here. And I am no stranger to the fact that sometimes it seems inanimate objects can conspire to make life daunting—ask me some time about the air conditioning in my car—innumerable days spent in the auto repair shop and lots of dollars later and it still blows warm air—and it can take a real saint to feel the wonder of being alive when driving in Houston’s heat dressed in panty hose! And yes, I know life can be a struggle and full of sorrow, that there are times when the best one can do is to keep putting one foot in front of the other and the suggestion that one is somehow falling short in such circumstances by not feeling the miracle of living can seem inhumanly cruel. But if I am honest, I know there are times when things are going smoothly and I have no cause for sorrow and I still fail to taste and savor the sheer wonder of being alive that I once possessed as a child. Perhaps that’s true for you, too? Why is that? I know the reasons I give to myself. That it was easier as a child because I had fewer responsibilities, because the world and everything in it was brand new, because I didn’t understand then why things were and how things work, and that I was not so aware of the less than wonder-filled lives of so many of the world’s peoples. But are these reasons, or are they excuses? We often assume that an increase in knowledge and understanding of the world is what eclipses a sense of wonder. But if we examine the lives of children, we see that the acquisition of knowledge and mastery over the environment is not necessarily correlated with a demise of wonder and delight—in fact, in many ways, the more kids learn and master the more delight they may experience, the greater the number of things they find to marvel at. And certainly there have been great philosophers and scientists who have retained that sense that life in all its diverse and manifold variations is a wondrous miracle. Even the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose work gave rise to Logical Positivism, said, “Man has to re-awaken to wonder”; “That (the world) exists . . . is mystical.” Albert Einstein wrote: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead; his eyes are closed.” Even things whose causality is well understood can still evoke wonder. The process of human conception and gestation, for example, can be fully explained, but to witness a birth can evoke as great a sense of the miraculous for modern human beings as it did for earlier peoples whose understanding of the process was far from complete. Or sometimes I think we can feel guilty about enjoying our own lives when we know there is so much pain and sorrow in the world—isn’t that somehow to be unfeeling, dispassionate? But maybe we have it backwards—maybe fully experiencing wonder is a prelude to the ability to experience horror at injustice. As Sam Keen has written: “One can be horrified by Auschwitz only if there has been some prior experience which (gives rise to wonder) . . . It is important to insist upon the priority of wonder, because otherwise we lose the basis of ethics. If there is nothing wonder-ful, nothing that is inviolable and sacred in principle, then ethics can be based only upon a balance of terror.” He says that Auschwitz has the stink of sacrilege precisely because it violates the hope and expectation everyone harbors that their life should be full of the goodness and grace of living; that of course we can’t ignore the tragic character of existence but that we cannot defer celebration until we reach Utopia either. To do so would be to minimize injustice. A poem by Jack Gilbert called “A Brief for the Defense” puts it this way: Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. . . . But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the (suffering) in their future. There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, and the women laugh in the cages in Bombay. If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lesson the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight . . . enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. . . We must admit there will be music despite everything . . . If it is not increased knowledge that eclipses a sense of wonder, and if wonder may be a necessary prelude to compassion, then what stands in the way of our being alive to the mystery and miracle that is our life? What keeps us from being spun around on our heels, swept across the floor again and again by the staggering fact of our living? Is it simply habituation, that with time and age we become inured? Is it only the sensational and new that has the power to grab our adult attention? When the first man walked on the moon, we were amazed, glued to our tv sets; when the second and third so walked—yawn, “been there, done that.” We gaze up into the night sky and go “ho- hum”; but if such a display, on any clear night, even in the middle of Houston, happened only once a decade we would sell tickets. Scarlet tanagers, indigo buntings, rediscovered ivory-billed woodpeckers arouse our delight, but house sparrows and grackles? Is it possible to have a mature sense of wonder that finds mystery and magic in such common visitations? We think we’ve seen it all, but have we really seen it—whatever it is—approached it prepared to let it capture us, prepared to rejoice in its presence? We, like old Mr. Sanderson, owe it to ourselves to at least try. Maybe all we need is a little time, time to lace on those paralightfoots, time to try on that beautiful dress, take that first step across the floor. Maybe that’s the ingredient from our childhood that’s missing—just a little time, a little time to wander and savor, a little time to ponder and wonder. “Who made the world?” asks Mary Oliver in the poem “The Summer Day.” “Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean— the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down— who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, which is what I have been doing all day. Tell me what else should I have done? Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” We owe it to ourselves to try. And we don’t have to go to exotic locales, on long vacations; it needn’t be expensive. Maybe all it will take is one grasshopper, or one perfect hibiscus blossom, one 4 am tryst with the Houston night sky, one moonstruck profile of the person we love, one sight of a grandchild running through a sprinkler on the lawn, one rosy fingered dawn, one spin around the block in a new pair of tennis shoes. This summer give yourself the gift of a little time to reawaken your sense of wonder at the miracle and magic of being alive. Tell me—what else should you be doing “with your one wild and precious life?” |
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