Last week at the afternoon coffee break for all library scholars, I fell into conversation with a few colleagues. The topic at hand included some recent statistics that had been publicized, which demonstrated that this winter has been the darkest winter in over forty years. Germany as a whole, it seems, had only seen some 100 hours of sunlight since early December. If the next few days continued on in cloudy grayness, we would soon be breaking a 70-year record. My colleagues and I felt torn: do we hope for some sun, for which all our vitamin-D deprived bodies are ceaselessly yearning, or do we root for Mother Nature in hopes to be a part of record breaking history? Alas, little did we know, that only hours later the sun would penetrate our cloudy fortification for several days before retreating back into its snowy cave, where it has resided for the last few days. But as we debated the topic, my mind wandered to an experience I had in elementary school I hadn't thought of in years. I suddenly launched into story-telling mode, after which the colleagues were adamant I write the same tale down. So, here goes. Enjoy.
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| I recently took a winter hiking trip to Goslar, on the edge of the Harz mountains. |
It was late winter. I was in the fifth grade. Earlier in the same season, the Packers had played in the Super bowl. Later that year, the summer
Olympics would take place in Atlanta .
But between the former and the latter, my small little life would temporarily spiral
into a season of existential turmoil the likes of which I had never
experienced, at least not since the previous year, when I’d learned firsthand
that the word “unit” was not spelled with two t’s—loosing the class spelling
bee in the final round to Maria F. Or the year before that, when—by displaying
some very complicated hand movements as evidence of his superpowers—Curtis S.
convinced me he was not a just a boy from the learning disabled class, he was
also a messenger from outer space and desperately needed my help to save the
world, if I would help him persuade the rest of the playground of his true
identity. Or the year before that when…
I digress. Back to the existential crisis at hand. Now this
particular state of philosophical and emotional quagmire in which I found
myself as a fifth grader came about at a very specific moment in time. To set
the stage for this moment, let me take us back to that winter of 1996. This was
a time before Global Warming or climate change was widespread. And for whatever
reasons, it had been a particularly long and dismal Wisconsin
winter that year. I can’t name specific statistics, but I remember there being
snow days, I remember the recesses being endlessly cold, and the time I had to
spend in the morning as crossing guard made me feel impossibly cool—not just in
the sense of popularity but also in the sense of real, physical cold. January came
and went, and then February, and then March came. But before March had quite
left, my teacher wanted to talk about the word “acclimate.” To acclimate was to
get used to something, Mr. Wilson explained to us. He told us to look
outside—it was gray and dreary, beneath the sparse blanket of dusty snow was
the evidence of frozen clumps of black, wintry earth.
“Look,
right now the temperature is ten degrees, see?” he pointed to the class
thermometer we had clipped on the outside of the window during science one
week. “In a few weeks, the temperature will hopefully be more like thirty
degrees—which is still pretty cold, but not as cold as the weather we’ve been
having lately. So it will feel very warm to you—some of you may even take your
coats off at recess and get in trouble with Mrs. Andre.”
A few of the boys chuckled, likely
recalling a notorious scene that replayed itself every recess: Mrs. Andre barreling
across the schoolyard while waving her clipboard and casting incomprehensible
spells at the top of her lungs upon all manner of hooligans that dared cross
her path. Mr. Wilson went on to tell us, though, that last autumn when the
temperature dropped to thirty degrees
we all probably felt very cold, because we had been used to the warmer
temperatures of summer.
“But over
the winter, your bodies have become acclimated
to the cold. The cold starts to feel normal,
so that when it gets a little warmer, it suddenly feels very warm,” he went on. “After a week or
so of warm weather, you will be readjusted to the relative warmth and start to
be glad for your jackets again!”
I continued
to stare out the window as the snow softly fell. We were on the top floor of Smith Elementary
School Lake Winnebago three blocks away
unfrozen and teeming with walleyes and lakeflies. I tried to imagine all these
things—but suddenly, I realized with something like terror, I couldn’t. Gazing out over the snow
covered roofs at the endless, sallow snow clouds a prodding question rose up
through the hazy depths of my mind.
I raised my
hand.
“Nicole, do
you have a question?” He asked. At that age, I tended to keep my questions to
myself, the exception to my shyness being the all to often occasion of an
existential meltdown.
“Yes. How
do we really know that the winter
will end?” I asked him. He smiled.
“Because if
winter didn’t end, then how would we have spring?”
My heart
sank at the sheer pettiness of that answer. Given the simplicity of his thought,
it felt as though my question exploded into a deep cavernous void within me, a
void in which the world threatened to remain in a perpetual state of cold,
frost-covered wintry death. He didn’t understand I wasn’t after pithy proverbs,
I was after the truth.
“That’s not
what I mean,” I stammered, thinking how I could be clear. “I mean, how do we
know that spring will come again as it has before? How do we know spring even…”
The word I was looking for was on
the tip of my tongue. I had never used it in common speech before, only
recently learning it on the discovery channel. Now what was that darn word? Oh
yeah.
“How do we know spring even exists?” I asked him. And I knew, with
the unveiling of a glorious word like “exist,” that I was playing in the big
leagues. Such a word, I expected, would be a shibboleth between me and Mr. Wilson
and he would know--we were now speaking a secret, age-old language of depth and
philosophical truth, the likes of which would remain incomprehensible by my
classmates, and realize my question was worthy of a better response than some
rosy maxim.
Instead of an answer satisfying in philosophical breadth, a
few of the students laughed, and Mr. W’s smile became slightly more
condescending.
“Why,
Nicole, of course spring ‘exists’’” he winked dismissively at me. “Now let’s
move on to--”
“Wait. So,
kind of like Santa really exists?” I pulled out the big guns, with a tone of
defiant persistence I rarely utilized at that age except when my mom told me to
do something foolish, like clean my room.
“What do
you mean?” Mr. Wilson’s eyebrows raised.
“Well,
every Christmas, Santa comes to bring presents to my cousins, even though my
parents told me that Santa doesn’t actually exist, and we just have to pretend
he does because my cousins believe in him and we don’t want to make them upset.
For my cousins, there is a Santa—but only because my aunt and uncle said there
is. In reality, Santa doesn’t exist, you know, for real.”
Now my
classmates were no longer laughing. They all stared at Mr. Wilson with rapt
attention, and their expressions indicated that there were basically two types
of people in my class: the Santa believers (whose faces were clouded with utter
fear and shock), and the Santa unbelievers (whose eyes bore the hallmarks of
smug amusement).
“So,” I
continued on with my seamless argument. “Maybe you’re just saying there really
is a Spring, when really there isn’t.”
Mr. Wilson
just stared at me for a few moments, and then sat in his chair with a grave
expression, likely imagining the throngs of parents who would be calling him
later that night wondering why he had taken the liberty to dispel the entire
class’s faith in Santa Clause. I made a mental note to keep the whole Santa
debate in my arsenal when I needed an adult to really answer a question. Unfortunately, I had discovered this a
little late, since I was less than a year from starting middle school, and no
one believes in Santa in middle school anyway.
“Spring is
different than Santa,” he started with some uncertainty.
“Mr. Wilson?” Michelle in the front
row started asking, her eyes filling with tears. “Is there really a Santa?”
A general hubbub spread throughout
the class.
“Children, okay! I want everyone to
take a deep breath and just calm down. Whatever your parents have told you
about Santa is true. I just want to
be clear on that!”
Then he sighed and stared at me.
“Now then… Spring is a different
kind of true than Santa. Santa is just a person that not many of us get to see
in real life. But Spring you can feel with all your senses, and you know it’s
really there. With Santa… Well, even if he exists, it’s a little different
because that’s more of a faith we have.”
But once
the seed of doubt was planted in my mind, it only germinated and sprouted and
grew with the rapidity of each millisecond.
“No, it’s
the same thing. I can taste and touch and smell the presents my cousins get
from Santa, and read his name on the tag,” I reminded Mr. Wilson. “I really
don’t see a difference.”
He sighed
and rolled his eyes.
“Nicole, we
need to move on. I think you should save this question for a while,” he said.
“How long?” I asked him.
“Oh…” He trailed off and a smile
lit up his face as he stared out the window. “Maybe in a month or so we can
revisit the question. For today, we are talking today about Meteorology. Does
any one know what that word means?”
Denied.
What am I supposed to do for a whole month? I wondered. Couldn’t he see
this question was tearing me apart? My face burned with shame, confusion and
fear. At that age, when I was averaging 1.5 harrowing existential crises per
year, there was only one thing more tempestuous to the small seas of my
childhood heart and mind than the unplumbed depths of epistemological
questions, and that was to have such questions ignored by the only people in
this world who hold the keys to limitless and perfect knowledge: the Adults.
An hour or two later, after the meteorology lesson had
ended, I decided to spend some of my recess time in spiritual solitude, so as
to better reflect upon the world and the dubiousness of so-called reality. As
my friends played tag on the monkey bars, I retreated from the midst of the restless
worldliness of common recess endeavors and fled for refuge to the desert—in
this case, the furthest corner of the playground, across the playing field,
where there was a small mound of sandy soil (covered, of course, in several
layers of ice and snow). Like a statue, I stood upon this island of desert and
stared at the heavens as the snow came down. I tried to believe in Spring, I tried
to believe in some form of warmth beyond the stark cold I was experiencing, but
that belief escaped me.
And it’s
funny, these types of questions. It’s not that I had ever had a distinct belief
in spring before—in fact I’d never questioned it at all. I had more or less
lived my life in blessed ignorance, and the changing of the seasons simply
formed part of that constellation of assumptions that make it possible to live
daily life with any degree of sanity. But now that that assumption was called
into question, it felt like a crisis.
Sort of
like we have perfectly meaningful lives until we stop and start wondering what
the meaning of life is.
How
can winter ever turn into spring?
I wondered. It just did not seem
possible that anything could come of the future but the same bitter winds I knew
in the present. My gaze turned from
the vast expanse of the skies to gaze upon the mortals that surrounded me,
specifically the boys from my class and the other fifth grade class who were tossing
a football across the field. Laughing, one boy swerved in to tackle another and
pull him down to the snow. With the speed of a vampire and the size of
something, Mrs. Andre’s serpent-like eyes narrowed in on them as she yelled at
them through the snow and pulled out the ominous rule-review clipboard (this
was the Smith School Elementary School
“Are you
okay?” My friend Cassie ran up to me from behind.
“It’s all a
conspiracy theory,” I spun around, glaring at her through my snow-covered
glasses. Evidently, the term “conspiracy theory” was familiar enough to use it
in every day speech, but not familiar enough to know that in this case—since I
was the one theorizing conspiracy—it was more so just a plain conspiracy and
not a conspiracy theory.
“What is?”
She asked. It seemed my best friend in all the world, at least at that time,
had forgotten the earth shattering enlightenment that had broken into my
peaceful world not one hour previously in science class. Can you not stand watch one hour without falling asleep? Jesus
asked his disciples in the garden
of Gethsemane
“The seasons, Cassie! The seasons!” I ranted,
forcing my voice not to waver. “Every single one of them! Well, all except
winter. The other ones were just a… A lie!”
“Oh, that,” she replied. Cassie was a great friend and all, but she
didn’t share my proclivity for epistemological doubt. Then again, few of my
peers did.
“Don’t you see?!” I asked her,
flinging my hands into the air. “Spring is never going to come! It’s gone! It
was all a lie! We’re going to be stuck with this frickin’ snow forever!”
Frickin’ being about the worst word
in my vocabulary that I could safely use without incurring the wrath of Mrs.
Andre who had the entire playground bugged and may have been a Soviet spy.
Cassie only stared at me, then.
“But spring comes every year,” she
said matter-of-factly, as though talking to one of her many younger sisters.
“It’s a known fact.”
“Facts?” I asked her. “But what’s a
fact? There are no facts!”
“Yes there are, Mr. Wilson even said
so! A fact is what happens after you go through all the steps of the scientific
method!”
A bitter chuckle escaped the hollows
of my throat.
“Yeah, well how do we know that? What if the adults made up
the scientific method, too? What if everything’s
a conspiracy theory! How can we know spring
comes every year? How can we know anything
at all?”
The alacrity with which my dull
skepticism grew more focused only increased with each rhetorical flourish. The
cave of hazy disbelief, once only big enough for the questionable existence of
spring, was quickly expanding to encompass in its treacherous shadows anything
I ever thought I knew with any degree of certainty at all.
“Oh my Lord, are you crazy or
something? I know spring will come because I remember it. Duh!”
“So what? That doesn’t mean
anything!” I informed her. “I remember a doll I had. My mom threw it away, I
don’t have it anymore. And I really liked that doll. But no matter how much I
remember it, I can’t get it back again.”
“Come on, this is stupid. Guess
what. When I was on the monkey bars, Kyle was chasing me. Wanna go see if he’s
still there?” She ran away before I could ask her if she would desert her best
friend in a time of desperate need for a boy,
much less Kyle Thomas who was the biggest jerk in the fifth grade.
As her outline became a smaller and
smaller blot of ink set against the field of snow, I felt myself grow more and
more alienated from the ignorant world around me. This alienation momentarily
subdued my thirst for truth into a dull listlessness. For the rest of the
afternoon, I remained silent in class. We had a spelling test, and I wrote the
words Mr. W said dutifully onto my paper with little emotion: “science,”
“scenic,” and of course the token trick word of the unit: “sensible.” We took a
math test and I barely heard Chris Minglis, the boy in back of me, teasing me
for getting ten wrong. In a daze after school, I donned my orange safety jacket
and stood on the corner of Oregon
and 17th Street ,
helping younger students cross the road. And then, after my crossing guard
duties were finished for the day, I walked the four blocks to my babysitter’s
house. From the outside, no one would have suspected anything was wrong, but on the inside I knew I was just going
through the motions. Life as I had known it
had lost all meaning and promise. As the four blocks passed slowly, I
stared ahead and barely noticed the snow, cars or pedestrians that swirled
around me.
“Maybe when it gets warmer out, your
mom will let you guys walk to the park on your own. I think you’re old enough,”
said Wendy, our babysitter, later that afternoon to me and Matt, my oldest
brother. But her empty promises came at
the worst possible time in my childhood career. As soon as the words were out
of her mouth, I burst into tears.
“Yeah right!” I screamed at her, running
out of the room. Matt followed.
“Nicky, are you okay?” He asked,
afraid by my sudden maniacal outburst. I wanted to tell him my struggle,
because I wanted some solace in my newfound agony of stark reality.
“I just…” I hiccupped and stared at
him. But I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t ruin his childlike belief before I had
to. He would find out about the truth of the world soon enough.
“I just don’t think Mom will let us
go to the park like Wendy said,” I lied, zipping my secret struggle within me
like a stifling corset. The future stretched out before me in my mind like an
endlessly dark tunnel to be travailed only in silent solitude.
“Oh. Well… Want some of my snack?”
He handed me part of his apple, which I accepted even though apples made me
kind of sick to my stomach.
The heavy burden of reality followed
me for a few days or so, during which time it was hard to get out of bed in the
morning and I found myself weeping over things that never used to cause me
duress: the sight of slush puddles on my way to school, our backyard sandbox
covered in a fresh blanket of snow for example. All these tearful sights only
offered more proof of the reality of winter and the likely unreality of Spring or any other season.
The child’s heart, however, is
strangely resilient and recovers daily from a great many tiny injustices. This
was the case with the existential crisis of 1996, as it soon happened that all
of my questions and doubts concerning spring (not to mention all of reality)
began to fade slowly into something else, something new. I cannot say what it
was that buoyed my doubt with fresh hope, for I never did manage to prove the
reality of spring. The process of healing, in this case, happened almost
imperceptibly, just as the most beautiful things in this life often do unfold
without our notice: the rising of the sun over an endless lake’s horizon, for
example, or the slow and steady blooming of a rose. And perhaps it was simply time
itself that healed my harrowing questions with its soothing balm of
forgetfulness.
By pure coincidence, this mysterious
healing process coincided at the same time the stiff winter winds were slowly
converting to the warm rains and sunshine of Spring. It is, after all, hard to
despair of anything when there are early daffodils poking up through the
near-frozen earth. This, too, was a slow and imperceptible process. It seemed
one day I was positively in anguish as I tried to face the fact that winter
would last forever, and the next day through no conscious effort, was persuaded
to leave my playground monastery, and take off my hat at, which then entreated
me to run around with my peers which quickly offered enough distraction from my
existential quandary. Of course several
weeks later, I forgot to take my coat outside for recess, and discovered it was
not nearly as cold as it had been on my walk to school, and by this time, well,
there was quite enough to think about than proving the existence of Spring—what
with the end of my last year of elementary school approaching and such. And as
is so miraculously the case, not only did I recover from my once debilitating
angst over the question of spring, I forgot all about the question itself and
went on to lead a fairly normal, existential-crisis-free, ten-year old life for
about two months or so.
By which time it was late May, during
which month there happened to be an unseasonable heat wave for two days. I don’t
recall what unit we were on in science, but Mr. Wilson took the opportunity of
the heat wave to review with us why there are different seasons. In summer, he
said, the earth is turned more directly towards the sun, which makes the air
feel warmer. He was holding a globe, and had placed a basketball on the table,
and was walking around in circles to demonstrate.
“And then, see, when the earth is
here, the axis is tilted away from
the sun, and we have colder
temperatures, and snow, and that’s winter,”
he informed us.
As often happened while Mr. Wilson
talked about science, I grew distracted and began staring out the window. Once
again, I could see the rooftops glistening in the glare of the sun’s light,
beyond them I could just see some sunlight reflecting off Lake
Winnebago . Dressed in the lightest sun dress that was suitable to
wear to school, I was still sweating. As I gazed out across the housetops, I
tried to imagine what they would be like covered in snow, with smoke rising out
of the chimneys. I tried to imagine being too cold instead of too hot. I even
closed my eyes and tried to convince myself I was cold, fake shivering to see
if it worked. And it didn’t. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t imagine winter ever coming. What if winter doesn’t really exist? I asked myself.
My mind settling into an ominous dread,
I foresaw spending the rest of my life sweating and being told to drink water
all the time.
I raised my hand.
“Nicole? Do you have a question?” Mr.
Wilson looked up from his impromptu demonstration. I trembled slightly in
trepidation.
“How do we know that Winter really exists?"
Mr. Wilson slapped his forehead, dropping the basketball. Before he could deign to condescend and come to the rescue of his existentially challenged student, the bell rang. Recess!
