Lace Lane

"You are the one with whom I sat beneath the oak tree near my house and we pondered many mysteries together."  I wrote those words to Jo, one of my dearest friends from high school.

A few days later, I received an email reply: “This, I do remember, and it is a vivid memory. In fact, I think we must have done it several times because if memories were colors, then this one would be a vibrant yellow, bright as the sun.  Unfortunately for me, I am still pondering the one big Mystery as I approach my 70th birthday.  The more I know, the less I know, and so it goes...”

The more we know, the less we know, and so it goes…and now we’re being grabbed by the collar and shaken to the core, in case we were thinking otherwise, and it’s taking some stamina to stay upright. But I’m following a path of vibrant memories, bright as the sun, that Jo has opened up to me, and it offers a sweet respite.

Jo was forged, in her own words, by “a childhood fraught with misery” but she was irrepressible. In what struck me as an extraordinary act of bravery and rebellion, she left her family home when still in her teens and rented a room––a room of her own—from an elderly lady in town. It was a tiny room in a small house on a lazy street with the charming name of Lace Lane. I went to visit her there once, late in spring, when the air was fragrant with blossoms. (Lilac, azalea, hydrangea, hyacinth...old-fashioned flowers with heady scents.) The still-new leaves of the trees were pale green and lacy, and there were lace-patterned shadows on the walkway.

There was something lonely and cloistered about the room, but the space was to Jo’s liking. She sat on the edge of a narrow bed, and sunlight poured through a window behind her. She held a key, a hard-won key, that could open or lock her door, and in that moment, she seemed almost regal, the Lady of Lace Lane. I don’t recall how long she stayed there, perhaps for a summer, paying a few meager dollars earned babysitting, or working as an usher at the theater. I don’t even know the precise circumstances that prompted her self-imposed exile. But I did instinctively understand the appeal of having such a room, and marveled at how she had leap-frogged into so sophisticated and enviable an arrangement.

For we all wanted freedom…didn’t we? But we were still a little tentative and unprepared. We wanted freedom that was safe, autonomy while nestled snugly, a place enclosed by walls where we could dream, and from which we could come and go without explanation. We wanted to experience life, then go someplace and write about it. Beyond whatever rooms we had, the world was coming apart, but we didn’t know it then. We never do.

And here we are again. Nearly seventy, abruptly reminded how little we know, and so it goes.