Simple Enough

I was quite aghast when I looked at the date of my last posting. Since that post the days have careened along in a way that reminds me of white water rafting when I was working out in Lake Louise.  That was back in 1984 or 1985, so I don’t recall a lot of details, but I do remember sitting in the sturdy rubber raft on a hot summer day, as we shot down the Columbia River near Golden, B.C. I was hanging on intently, with no time to look ahead and anticipate the next set of rapids.  Suddenly we would hit them and hurtle up out of our seats, or even sideways out of the raft as I did at one point, only to have my friend grab onto my life jacket and haul me down to the safety of the raft’s floor. Now I’m not suggesting that the end of the school year was dangerous, but it was one set of rapids after the next, starting with thirty-page creative writing projects, some of which were almost physically painful to read.  Think angels and demons, car wrecks and comas, and you can imagine the worst of them.  Then came exams and report cards, and end of the year speeches and roasts to prepare, and suddenly I found myself in the parking lot on the last day, shuffling to my car with no real sense of ta-da, we made it, though of course there never is that sense, as it is always a let down of sorts.

The thing with rapids is that once you are through them, you need time just to catch your breath and ponder what you’ve been through. Now that I’ve caught my breath, I have no excuse for not writing, except for the fact that like most things, when you stop for a while, stopping becomes easier than starting again. 

But I have been thinking about something for a while, and that is the phenomenon of knowing something or someone, only to be presented with information that contradicts your perception, sometimes entirely.

For example, I was running up Vance Rd. the other day when I heard something crashing through the grass behind me, and turned around to see Miss Deer running to greet me. What surprised me, beyond the rather noisy entrance she made, were the antlers that Miss Deer had grown since I had last seen her.  Well other than reindeer, female deer do not grow antlers, so I had a tough truth to face: Miss Deer was in fact Mr. Deer. I have to be honest, I was a little saddened, as I was quite fond of Miss Deer, or rather of the Miss Deer I had composed in my imagination. I would like to continue to feature her in my blog, and I guess I could have done so, as I don’t imagine there are many of you roaming up and down Vance looking for her (him).  But I feel I owe it to Mr. Deer to present him in an accurate light.  Therefore I reconciled myself to this newly discovered truth, patted his nice, velvety antlers and jogged along beside him for a time until we parted ways at the bridge.

Now this is no Crying Game revelation; Mr. Deer’s identity doesn’t change things for me, but it is a good reminder that the truth can be elusive or complex. I was struck by something my fellow librarian, Doug, wrote the other day in relation to a biography he was reading on Thomas Jefferson. He said that Jefferson was a complicated dude; he believed slavery was morally evil, yet he himself was quite racist. At the time I was just finishing Jane Leavy’s biography on Mickey Mantle and couldn’t help but feel the same thing about Mantle: he was a complicated dude. Leavy, who had idolized Mantle as a child growing up in New York, said in her introduction that she was determined to present Mickey Mantle as he was beyond the carefully constructed myth. The book took her years to write, as she interviewed so many people in an effort to present the truth, or the many truths of Mantle. Turns out he was pretty contradictory in nature. On the one hand he was a tremendously gifted ball player, who hit harder and ran faster than any player had ever done, and who was cast, against his will, as an American hero. On the other hand, he was a boy who never grew up; he was vulgar and crude and had no respect for women, and he struggled with alcohol addiction. In the end, I felt more than a little sad for Mickey Mantle.

By comparison, Mr. Deer is pretty uncomplicated.  He is who he is. At least for now, as I move beyond the school year and its many dramas, I think I want to surround myself with more Mr. Deers, who I can be sure of.  He likes his neck scratched, and his antlers rubbed, and he doesn’t mind when I swat mosquitoes away from his nose and eyes.  Simple enough.