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Benjamin Trayne

The page stares back at me. It’s blank and white and expectant.
There are far too many rules. If I say it doesn’t need a title, then it doesn’t. Okay?

Just moments ago, as I stood outside alone in the cool night air, the breath of another fading summer drifting softly past, I wondered. Just how much does anyone know? About anything?

One year ago on another August night, I was also writing. Then as now, the sounds of thousands of countryside katydids kept me company in the enveloping darkness. Then as now, I sought to make descriptive sense of my surroundings. And since, many people have passed from this world, while many more have arrived.

I’ll never, ever forget the face of my youngest child looking up at me with widened, questioning eyes.

“Daddy? What was before?”

I looked down at him and asked for clarification. “Why, what do you mean? Before?”

“Before I was.”

I paused, stricken. Then I tried to understand further the nature of his query. After a few exchanges, and I wish I could recall exactly what I asked and how he answered, it became clear that he imagined there was no world in existence before he arrived. Yes, he was very young, barely beyond the point of learning to speak. I recall trying to explain to him that it was only he that was not here before, and I’ve often wished I had not. Because for all intents and purposes, there was no world for him, before his moment of arrival. I wish, in a way, he could have kept all of his beautiful innocence.

Many, many summer nights before that moment, my first child had been about the same age when a nineteen-year-old co-worker of mine was killed in an automobile accident. Though my co-worker was younger than I, he was a friend, and I was getting dressed a few days later to attend his funeral. I don’t remember what exactly was said, but for some reason I believed my little daughter was aware. In fact, death was a concept that had never crossed her mind.

“Daddy?” She looked up at me with the same cherubic expression I would eventually see again from my youngest. “I hope your friend gets better.”

I knelt, and I held her close. I wept, for the innocence I knew she would lose, and the one and only time I would do so for my friend.

Now I fold my arms and sit back in my chair, and stare once again at the page. In a way, it’s beginning to look like it has some life. The page is something like a life, too. It may or may not have a great beginning, but one hopes for a purposeful end and coherent existence. It’s like every page that may or may not hit the trash can.

So the question stands, the one I had when I sat down across from the blank page. One can live for a decade, or two, or ten. When it’s all said and done, how much does anyone actually know? In the course of a lifetime, we meet people, we learn to play the game, we parry and thrust and deliver barbs, and receive some. Sometimes we even fall in love, get married, have children. We decide what’s important and we live for it. We learn, and change our minds, and then we live for something else.

At long last, here’s my concern. Walk through a cemetery sometime. There’s where both you and I will be someday, too. I received a child’s question about that, once, as well, and I don’t wish to remember that one, but I do. But all of those people, a la Carl Sagan... “billions and billions” ...all gone. Oh, for certain, some of them left a mark, a few of those, indelible. Some changed the world for the better. But the great bulk of them? Not so much.

And the older I get, the more it becomes plain to me that I actually know very little. Oh, sure, to some extent I’ve learned to play the game. I have my beliefs, and things that I live for.

But what will I die for? And what have I done?

And how much, exactly, do I know? Practical things, useful, as it stands, only to myself.

Tonight I felt a grand hope, hope that the whispering breath of another fading summer would always be renewed by the passage of the other seasons.

Tonight, at least I knew that in this place, all nights in August are truly beautiful. I knew that katydids deserve to exist every summer, everywhere, and forever.

And I knew I was alone.