Another Bra in the Wall

I freely admit it. I am not a person known for bravery. I think I have written of the time that our son Michael was down from Denver for a visit with friends for the wine festival in Colorado Springs. His friends got back to the house before Michael, we were asleep and they didn’t have a key. They went around the house and knocked on the door to the deck off our bedroom. Startled awake I bravely cowered behind my wife on my side of the bed and tossed a decorative pillow at the door blinds shakily calling out “Go!” On another talked about occasion, my wife and I had gone down to Lake Pueblo with some friends to spend the weekend on our sailboat. My wife and I were berthed in the main cabin while our friends had the v-birth which had more privacy and offered an accordion door. In the middle of the night, I was awakened by a sound and looked around momentarily forgetting where I was. All of a sudden, a light appeared about the cracks of the accordion door as one of our friends was using the head. Disoriented from waking suddenly, I called out in a falsetto only slightly less shrill than a shriek, “Who’s there?!?”

I like to feel that I learn from experience and have slowly built my courage up to an acceptable level over the years. I am even much better with heights which once terrified me. My mom was found of telling people about going to local high school football games when I was just a wee lad and rooting on the Orangeburg Indians (now the Orangeburg Wilkinson Bruins). We would sit on the first row of the bleachers with me holding on to Daddy’s necktie with a death grip that almost caused my father to pass out because we were up too high for me. But as I said, I am much better now. I can even climb up to the roof of my house and clean the gutters with only minimum butterflies.

However, there is one phobia that I cannot shake which reared its head as I entered adulthood and refuses to back down. Bras. Not bras to be found in the laundry or on my wife, those are perfectly acceptable (and in the case of my wife rowrrrr). No, its when I am out shopping in a department store with or without my wife and I pass the women’s undergarment department with its petrifying WALL OF BRAS.

I cannot say why this disturbs me so. I have never had a problem going to the store on an errand for my wife and filling a makeup, pantyhose, or feminine hygiene request – even when I had to ask for help from a female employee or was singled out at the register for a price check. In these instances, I am both poised and brave. But show me the women’s undergarment department displays and I want to run.

I am unphased by the considerably more handsome young men in much better shape than I modeling men’s briefs or boxers on men's underwear packaging, but there is something just not right about how bras are displayed. On the occasions I must pass by bras in a store, I feel that the array of cups are casting their unnerving glares in my direction, looking through me. And the signs on the displays, have they no shame?!? Padded, strapless, underwire, on-and-on a needless bombardment of information that I don’t want to know. I mean, really, boxers are not offered in underwire or any other options other than plaid or solids, and if men want padding they just use a rolled up pair of socks (I hear).

I suppose even the bravest of men have their kryptonite. And my kryptonite lies in bra displays. The endless colors and designs on hangers, perched on racks drenched in their haughty judgmental disdain for me. There is nothing for it, I can’t seem to conquer this fear. At least each encounter I can keep mercifully brief with my eyes averted, head bowed, and using my power shuffle to race past the department with my shopping cart. But as I close this blog, I can feel the fear creeping back on me. I can picture in my mind's eye those displays. And I can hear department store music that will never be able in this instance to sooth the savage breast.

Moon over Trafalmadore

I have been thinking on time lately. Time is an odd thing. I have blogged on the perception of time moving faster as we get older despite its very nature of being steady (not taking into account relativistic effects which make it both steady and able to dilate based on your reference frame). What I muse on now though, is a recurrent line of thought following the fact that time (unlike the first three dimensions length, breadth, and depth) is a man-made construct. Time was created to accommodate motion and change in our scientific pursuits. Clearly there was a considerable period in our history where it was sufficient to know when was when by simply following the sun through the day and the stars’ or sun’s progress through the course of a year – no clocks necessary.

The introduction of clocks and Gregorian calendars has led to no small problems and confusions socially if not scientifically. Early world explorers who sailed the seas and crossed the international date line were thrown off by a day they were not able to account for. By the time they returned to port they discovered they had somehow (without changing their practices) come to celebrate the Lord’s day on the wrong day and ended up in trouble with the Church. Even today, we wrangle with daylight savings time and time zones. We try to keep up with those who respect the former and those that don’t. And trying to keep up with latter has caused me to miss more than one phone call back South in my life.

This attempt to understand the nature time revolves around my dreams and my childhood. Lately I have been dreaming quite a bit, and I love to dream. I wish that I could remember them, but all that seems to stay are snippets and a flavor of the whole dream. When I pause to examine a snippet in hopes of divining the whole, all I can do is feel the whole around this piece at the same time I am barred from seeing much of it through shadowed walls. It is frustrating at times to feel the dream hanging around, knowing it is there and being unable to touch it.

This is very much what I feel when I explore my memories particularly of childhood. I will recall an event or image from back in my much shorter days such as “slow-motion karate,” and then try to remember when my older brother and I played at it with our friend next door. I can’t put anything concrete together, even though down in the basement there is a video of one our “fights” as a memory aid.

What I am left with is that image, but am also left with the feeling that all of what makes up that memory image exists all around, is in existence all around. Like I feel it, taste it, express it, see it. However, peer as I might I cannot see it beyond the original image.

In other words, though I feel the whole of my life around me, I cannot see it all. It is as if each instance is going on right now and is always going on right now. It is a schizophrenic thought of time as linear within a static view not unlike the description of the Trafalmadorians’ existence in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Slaughter House Five. The Tralfamdorians define a person/object/place/thing by the totality of its existence, seeing its whole life - be it lived in seconds, days, or eons at one time. They can even see the end of the Universe.

This is how I feel about my dreams and my past at times, like I should be able to see all of it in its unchangeable glory. I keep trying to construct a physical analogy of such a view and I keep getting hung up on the one-foot-in-front-of-the-other mentality. As an example, consider life existing like movie. It is complete, start to end, but we must view it the way it was edited – sequentially. And even though we can hop into the movie at any point and jump to any other point, once we arrive we are trapped in the localized linearity of it. Similarly, we can picture life as a record album. Begin-to-end in one object, but even though we can set the needle anywhere we want to on the record we can only experience the music sequentially from whatever point we land in.

Perhaps the Trafalmadorian view is correct and does exist. Sometimes But if so, I am trapped by the sequential nature I have been taught and accepted in my life. Its not that I wish to change anything, even to the Trafalmadorian perspective of life is a whole and immutable glory. I just sometimes feel that’s how things are, and I should be able to experience them like that. But doubt keeps me in a sequential reference frame. Doubt blinds me to the possibility that life can be seen in the whole, and not limited to moving from one present to another with the past left and often lost to memory.

I think of this being trapped by faith similar to the act of being able to fly as described by Douglas Adams in his woefully misidentified books The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy. As Adams describes it, personal flight is possible by the following two steps:

1)     Fall

2)     Forget to hit the ground

It is in the process of having the presence of mind to forget about hitting the ground that allows the body mid-fall to begin flying. And the reason most people can’t fly is because they don’t have the faith to follow the second step. It is why I haven’t been able to fly – yet.