Think the Chain

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me.  But, it is the same with any life.  Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been.  Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day."

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens 

**********

Dear Alex, 

Great expectations lead to great falls.  Fall in love, surrender, loss.  

When we unexpectedly lose something of huge significance, we may uncover the reason why we are dying but it's never me.  We are bound by long chain of thorns or gold to purpose and progress, will and thrill. 

This past weekend I called Mom without great expectation.  I missed her.  The silence between us over many months was strangling me, a chain invisible.

So my fingers fell on the phone keypad.  For the ringing I waited.  A moment of the last link in restraint struck out of course.  A new chain between us was forming.

It's me.  In longing I paused for her voice.

She called my Chinese name, her presence flooding my soul.  Our words bloomed, lacing our strange worlds as one over the next 2 hours of the most tender conversation I could recall with her.

You sound different. Is it allergy?  I asked.  

Time changes our voice, she noted.  Changed expectations have blurred our gaps and kinks in relating to another.  

Dickens' novels call for great expectations.  I expect to topple over his every word in long chains of drama and irony looping through longer pages and passageways to the heart.  He makes me fall in disappointment, presses me still against my thrill in will, deflects my expectation.  

I visited his Victorian home on Doughty Street last August around this time, expecting to gain something of him.  I left with greater loss.  His stories bridging every brick and nick of the house whittled down any pretense, lineage to loss.  

Because Dickens had lost much in order to write in waterfalls of expectation.  His second last novel, "Great Expectations", sprung of elated turmoil towards his final season when much of him had withered to unexpected moments in and out of bondage.  On any memorable day, the voices in his chapters are chained to ours, an expectation for us to feel smaller, weep louder, cower in cobwebs, rise to lose again. 

On the phone with Mom, I lost pride.  To find grace in the first link on one memorable day.

Yours, Kate

**********

Dear Kate,

We were born in chains.  The "memorable" day of the first link forged was a fateful day too.

To say this is a pessimistic view of life is to note how fated we are to view simplistically, which is often, yes, deceived and conceited optimism.

I know a man who knows well if not for a stranger's one casual eavesdropping on his conversation with his wife when they first arrived in Canada and on the bus expressed their minds troubled by unemployment in a dialect that the stranger picked up and followed up to offer her way to ease their trouble, his life and, of course, the life of his wife and children and subsequent generations, would have been in a vastly different stratum of existence.  Yet his recollection of this most fateful day, indeed moment, is as causal as the eavesdropping itself, which is to say he decides he was good enough after all to be fated this most blessedly.

"Pause you who read this, and think," when did we begin to be who we are?  And isn't our "beginning" a continuation of a long chain that has begun its formation way before we were entrusted with the link that is our little, short life?

The story of a self-made man, then, is deceived and conceited optimism.  "In the beginning, I created Me..."  What follows must be a tragic-comedy.

Yours, Alex