My McGuffin

A journey in three parts

We are born not knowing we are about to embark on a big journey. Every journey has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That’s what the writer John Rechy taught me. Like life. Like a book. We begin alive and wailing. Held and nourished. Hopefully cared for. Like all good stories our lives also have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Old, identity evolving once more, as if for the first time, but this last time, if we are able we look back with greater perspective. Able at last to recognize and name the burdens we all carry. Curiosity, too, for what sustained.

Time spent daydreaming. A child who liked to imagine, to observe and to arrange things. Hours spent on the cold concrete porch, in late afternoon sunlight, with my moody sister who would drag out all her dolls for us to play. Begging me to get off my bike and play dolls with her, become the builder of miniature worlds, a sister turned architect willing to put Barbie’s house together for her. Connect walls to floor, snap in doors, the roof on. Become a creator of dolly neighborhoods, with boundaries and driveways, placing the toy car alongside the toy house. Moody sister would watch me put the last piece in place eyeing for any sign of leaving. As she knew well, as soon as the stage was set I would bolt. “Promise. Promise you won’t leave when it’s done,” she would say wanting me to stay and play. Watching me once again swept up by the challenge of assembling, knowing I would leave once it was done, in place, finished. “I will,” I would promise, legs twitching, no longer interested. Done. “I want to play. Promise. I will.” I believed I would stay every time I said I would. But as soon as I settled those strange dolls into their little fake world a confusing fatigue would set in, and I didn’t know what to do next. What to do with what I had made. I never have.

In the beginning of my story, I didn’t know how to play; nearing the end I wonder if I ever learned. Athletic but not strategic, I was never able to play games, especially board games. Competition triggered something in me which I didn’t like feeling. Bodily. I had to run for my life and that changed the trajectory of my story. Sometimes journeys are terrible, frightening, running for your life kind of stories. Not in charge, having to trust where you will end up. Preparations scattershot, needed items forgotten in the rush, senseless junk packed in precious cargo space.

After a childhood of betrayals, I ran wild into the big middle of my life and kept going, hoping I could leave it all behind. Driven ahead towards a too young marriage, childbirth and motherhood, the sweetness of loving and the difficulty of old fears brewing, which brought break ups, leaving, always leaving, ricochets into wild mad relationships, moving across country for ambitions never fulfilled, bottoming out body and soul. Attending anonymous meetings, in church basements, men and their rehabs, too many late-night restaurants, all of it jammed into the early 1990’s. Art shows and AIDS. Friends dying long before their own stories had begun. In the big middle I married again, this time for the last time, got a dog, a sweet beast of a friend, mourned a mother’s death, and wrote my first unpublished book. Other people’s stories in stacks by the side of my bed, read late at night beside my love, still wondering where I belonged.

A big part of the story the longing to belong. Perhaps the McGuffin of my life: the quest to belong. A plot device in my journey which has been motivating but ultimately insignificant.

The desire to belong had defined me. Baby to crone, an outsider looking in, a skittish wreck, arms crossed in protection, head cocked to the side to see better. A character wild with desire for connection. Wary too, afraid of connection vowing even as I fell in love again for the last time to never belong to anyone. A narrative tension only eased by frequent rest stops along the way. Misunderstood and misunderstanding. I thought other people knew everything I knew about betrayal. The harm done. That all of us came into this world, this long shared story, preloaded with the necessary information, or at least the desire to know, to see, to understand what was happening as it happened.

But no, each of us has something particular to say, to share.

A bit of nourishment to aid us all on this journey.

So here I am in the last part of my story, the place where we all arrive sooner or later, whether our story is long or short. As the poets say, in their roundelays, we arrive back to where we began, all seeing and interdependent, and know the place for perhaps the first time. As for me, I know this sounds strange, but here’s what I’ve discovered: nothing ever goes away, the feelings, the longing to belong, the desire to understand what happened, the urge to keep loving and living despite not knowing if we will ever know who we are and where we belong. In the end we might never know who those people were who brought us here, or how to make up for our own failure to love.

Importantly, I’m still stitching together community, while still living within a fragmented story. A perpetual outsider. On the edge of every family system, a part of and yet apart from. The first of nine and yet an only child. Nearer the end of my own journey and still daydreaming on the page. Born as we all are into an ongoing busy life and at the same time, dying as life continues on and on and on.

What a trip.