At
a local trash dump when I was ten years old I frequently found used household
objects that to me were treasures.
Visitors to the dump regularly pulled wonderful things from the trunks
of their cars and threw them onto piles I would walk through on my way home
from school in the late afternoon.
Broken mechanisms and industrial baubles sat there in all kinds of
weather waiting to be rescued. I never
met a piece of trash I couldn’t imagine in some other use.
When
I found a toilet seat on my wandering path through the piles one day, I
separated the top lid and discarded the seat.
The oval shaped lid made an excellent shield, like a Knight of the Round
Table might carry. Later, searching for
anything resembling a sword, I came across a piece of angle iron that was a few
inches longer than my height. It had no
cross piece to serve as the hilt, but a scrap of wood and some stiff wire found
elsewhere in the dump soon remedied that problem. I now had an almost complete Knight's
outfit, but I needed a handle on the toilet lid to hold it in front of me for
protection against enemy arrows and lances.
No problem, I thought, a solution would eventually materialize from
somewhere in this limitless sea of gadgets and trash that filled the dump.
Meanwhile, in order to array myself in my new Knight's outfit, I tucked the lid
under my left arm and wrapped my right arm around the angle iron under the hilt
and dragged it along the ground, the tip bumping and scraping along behind me.
As
far as I was concerned, my toilet lid and angle iron were reasonable facsimiles
of a sword and shield. It’s always hard
to explain the psychology of an imaginative mental improvisation. Intellectually I knew my treasures were scrap
iron and a toilet lid. But I could bring
my mind to temporarily see them as a sword and shield. I didn’t really believe
it … I was not hallucinating … but I sort of believed it. I had the ability to let a piece of trash act
as a surrogate for the real thing, as long as its shape or color or surface
texture realistically mimicked what I wanted.
If there was some similarity I could imagine almost anything I desired.
Without
realizing it, as I advanced in years, I caught myself practicing the same kind
of alchemy on people. I don't
necessarily mean I imagined a person to be who he was not, but on occasion I’d combine
a friend into a mixture of his true self and
other traits I borrowed from elsewhere to paste onto his personality.
Imagining
a person as slightly different is not always a bad thing, by the way. For example, I once found it difficult to be
outgoing and friendly at a job I held as a young man. I was just too young and
too shy. An older, wiser fellow insisted
on treating me as if I were the friendliest person in the office. He often told me I was an amicable companion
and he mentioned my congeniality to others in my presence in a perfectly
believable manner. In a short time I
began to believe him. Soon I fulfilled
the role and went out of my way to be nice to people. They in turn began to think of me as friendly
and treated me quite cordially.
Wittingly or not, my older co-worker transformed me by first imagining a
better part of my personality that was covered by a blanket of shyness. I'm pretty sure he knew what he was
doing. And his method was much more
effective than had he taken me aside for a talk and explained how to converse
with adults, a new challenge for me at that age.
And
yet the transformative effort wasn’t all his doing. On my own I began to adopt new parts to my
personality. They may have been natural
for me and latent, but I had not practiced them before. The openness and trust I began to exhibit to
people seemingly came from nowhere. In
actuality, I began to imitate others.
Just as I had used stiff wire to tie a wooden hilt to my sword back at
the dump, I somehow tied a personality trait I wanted to my behavior in the
office. It would bump along with me just as my sword did years before. And as it began to work for me, it became a part
of me.
The
development of a personality as one matures … one might call it a persona … is
really a complicated process where we borrow pieces from others to use as our
own, and where we are imagined by others to fulfill some need they want to find
in us. In the case of my older coworker,
he was imagining me as someone better than I’d been acting. But I was also imitating and playacting the
person I wanted to be. Together we all
formed a process by which my public persona was built.
For
those who consider me a friend, I hope this disclosure won’t make you feel
unappreciated. I don’t have many real
friends and so I would hate to lose you.
Still, you may wonder why I need to change you into someone
different. I don’t. I really don’t change you into anything. As friends, we morph for each other.
Each
of us has the opinion … and rightly so … that we should remain who we believe
ourselves to be. And yet our association
will change us, if only in small ways.
It will depend upon how close we are.
The closest person to me on earth, my wife, has changed me in a
multitude of ways and I have probably done the same to her.
When
you like me as a friend, your brain fills in my missing parts. And if all the stars line up and your vision
roughly fits who I am, I might even begin to act like you’re treating me.
We
may live in a dream world, but how well we live will be as good as the dreams
we have for each other.
copyright 2016, David Griffin
The Windswept Press
Murrells Inlet, South Carolina
