The Kingdom of Childhood Read Online Free PDF Page A

of mass-produced form would not even enter their consciousness. What my friends found trivial, I embraced. God, or his philosophical equivalent, was in the details.
    Lately, though, I had moved from a touch of malaise to thebrink of a full-fledged burnout. I blamed it on a contagious case of Scott’s senioritis. With my youngest child about to complete his thirteenth year of schooling, I accepted that my personal investment in a philosophy so intense and consuming had just about run its course. But at forty-three I had more experience and commanded more respect than any other teacher at Sylvania, with twenty years of my working life still ahead of me. In the beginning I had fallen profoundly in love with the idea that if I could go back to a past that predated my own, touch the things that had existed since the dawn of time—wood, wool, stone—I could wipe clean the grime that had gathered on me in this corrupted world. And even now, every once in a while when I sat in the rocking chair and took in the cathedral silence of my empty classroom, with the afternoon sun slanting just so on the baskets of knitted elves and folded silk squares and lengths of gnarled wood, from the depths of my heart I thought: I believe.
    Driving home from a long day in that classroom, I let my hands rest lightly on the steering wheel and my thoughts drift to the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was perceptive of Scott’s friend to note the relaxing effect their silhouette has on the mind. A calming vista was something my mind yearned for, and, truthfully, it yearned for many things. I had always been a small person—“an elf of a girl,” my father used to say—but lately I had begun to feel like a collapsing star, as though packed into my little frame was the weight of a full universe of unmet goals, unreconciled mistakes, and all the raw-boned loves of my girlhood. Some days I suspected nothing but a broad spectrum of psychiatric drugs and a skilled and compassionate therapist would help me. Other days, I figured a good orgasm would suffice.
    A dinging noise jarred me from my thoughts. The gas-indicator light had been red since morning, but this happenedoften, and from the odometer I had judged the car had enough gas to run a few nearby errands. I pulled into the right lane warily and kept driving, but soon the car began to sputter and I made a quick right turn into the parking lot of a bank, coasting into a parking space just as the Volvo exhausted the last few drops of gasoline. For a moment I sat, staring at the steering wheel as though the car might take pity on me and change its mind. But it did not and, gathering my purse and handwork bag, I climbed out with a heavy sigh. This was not the first time I had abandoned the car for this reason. Russ would not be pleased.
    My mother is a basket case, Scott sometimes said aloud to an invisible audience.
    But teenagers always do. What child has not, at some point, decided his or her mother is crazy? It’s a staple of American youth, sure as cotton candy and fireworks and that first jingling set of car keys.
    I walked on the shoulder in the uneven wind of the passing cars and mentally reassured myself I was not a basket case.
    I am adaptable.
    Not the type to make a crisis out of a small matter.
    And the house was not far, not so very far, in the scheme of the universe.
     
    It was nearly six before I made it home. My husband, miracle of miracles, was already there. As I walked in the door I caught the stinging smell of burnt toast. In the kitchen he stood before the skillet in a tense posture, spatula poised over a grilled cheese sandwich with its topside nearly black.
    “I have a roast going in the Crock-Pot,” I said.
    “I don’t have time for all that. I’ve got a class in thirty minutes and I had no idea where you were or when you’d be home.”
    I pulled out a chair from the kitchen table and sat. My husband, Russell, who had once been attractive in an edgy and intellectual way, had the