The Best of Pickering

Selecting a Past

Selecting a Past my right arm has become weak, and recently I have spent many hours in Boston undergoing tests at Massachusetts General Hospital . As I sat in waiting rooms, the names of diseases spinning through my mind, I realized that I had little control over my future. What choices I might once have made would now be made for me by luck or illness. The realization depressed me, but not for long. If I couldn’t control the future, I decided riding the bus back to Willimantic one afternoon , so be it; I would select a past. Besides I was middle-aged, and behind me lay almost ‹fty years of experiences—experiences like a mountain of marble, not Carrara or Pentelic, but marble seamed by veins of lively imperfection, green, pink, and yellow. From Providence to Danielson I imagined myself a master stonecutter, and the landscape which rolled past my window was not that of Rhode Island and eastern Connecticut but that of Attica and the Apuan Alps. No man, alas, with a bad arm could ever be a stonecutter, and after arriving in Willimantic and eating a pizza, I stopped considering my past as raw material for a St. Peter’s or a Parthenon. I did not, however, stop thinking about selecting a past. In fact I pushed ahead. The sense of a past, I decided, banished insigni‹cance from life, creating the ‹ction that one was more than just a minute part of long biological and geological processes. A past provided identity and I began to shape mine, not in Greece or Italy but at home in Storrs. The past one left behind, I soon realized, was more often than not a matter of chance. In the attic, I knew, were boxes stuffed with old clothes, toys, papers, the detritus ‹rst of childhood and then more recently, of happy married life. Initially I considered pruning the attic, stripping away branches I did not want to be part of my past and then grafting something green into a trunk to be discovered in the future. Unfortunately I got no closer to the attic than my study. Opening boxes in the attic, I suspected, would upset Vicki and so I kept putting off the chore. Then on the day I ‹nally decided to climb 208
to the attic, the children asked me to help them explore the woods behind Horsebarn Hill. In walking through the lowlands toward the Fenton River, I recognized ›owers: purple trillium, marsh marigold, bluets, wood anemone, Solomon’s seal. Later that night I realized that for me the landscape was a ›ower garden. Because I have never been able to associate names with leaves and barks, I hardly noticed the trees, the most conspicuous part of the woods. Another person would have recognized trees and not ›owers. Going to the attic, I suddenly concluded, would probably resemble the day’s walk. I would see a few ›owers, but no trees, and what pruning I did would be arbitrary. Far better was it to concentrate my energies on things more limited and less strenuous. Because I knew biographers usually described what their subjects read, I decided people curious about my past would examine my reading. Moreover if the attic was beyond my energies and control, bookshelves in the study were not. By the quick and simple process of shifting books, I could in›uence how people would read my reading, thereby sketching in part of a past. Most books in my study were ordinary: paperbacks of the happier Victorian novelists, Dickens and Trollope, and then leather-bound sets of Charles Lever and Bulwer-Lytton, gifts from friends. Two shelves contained studies of natural history, mostly beginner’s guides to birds, ›owers, insects, and rocks. Books by essayists ‹lled other shelves: Montaigne, then from the nineteenth century Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, and from the twentieth century E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, John McPhee, Joseph Epstein, and Edwin Way Teale. Books so conventional would, I decided, have little effect upon a past, and I couldn’t imagine drawing conclusions from them. Perhaps someone bent upon interpretation might note the essayists and then searching for frustration speculate about the difference in quality between my reading and writing. But that I decided was pushing conclusion too far. What would in›uence a past would not be the ordinary books I owned, stretching in long lines around the room, but the few oddities, scattered and dusty at the ends...