Making Movies
by Ferida Wolff
My first memory is of being lost. It was the summer of 1949 and I was three years old. I wanted to play with my sister and her friends who were double my age. They didn't want me around but I kept following them. They ran away, down the block. I hurried as fast as I could after them. They ran down the street. I was there, a step or two or three behind. Okay, they said at last. You can play. They led me around the corner into a courtyard between buildings that was typical of the houses in my Brooklyn, NY, neighborhood. My sister and her friends told me we were going to play Hide and Seek. I was It. I had to close my eyes and count to ten – verrry slowly. I was proud of my newly learned counting skills, so I began. One. Two. Three ...
When I opened my eyes, they were gone. I looked around the courtyard. The apartment houses loomed like towers even though they were only two stories high. I knew I would never find my sister and her friends but I wasn't concerned with that any more. How would I ever get home? My mother didn't know where I was.
I had the image of night coming and there I would be, wandering in the dark, cold and hungry. It did not matter that it was mid-morning and summer. I felt the chill.
The brown buildings seemed to turn gray. The chirping birds faded from hearing. The flowers in the flowerpots and the bright laundry dancing on thick clotheslines from kitchen windows became colorless. I no longer felt part of the world. My surroundings closed in on me and I cried with the certainty that I was as alone as if I was the last person on earth.
A gentle hand reached out with a handkerchief. I had not seen the old man approach. He was familiar yet in my distressed state I couldn't quite remember who he was.
"Are you lost," he asked.
I nodded.
"Aren't you Sam and Shirley's daughter?"
Another soggy nod.
"I'll take you home."
He put out his hand and I took it, a lifeline to physical reality. As we walked slowly out of the courtyard, colors returned. We turned left at the corner and I recognized the big street I wasn't allowed to cross by myself. Another left and the block, my block, hummed with life. I felt reborn. The feet in the tiny white and brown saddle shoes were my feet. The hand holding tightly to Grandpa Garelick's hand (I suddenly remembered, he was one of my parent's friends) was my hand. This was my house we were going into, my stairs, my door, my life.
My parents laughed in surprise when Grandpa Garelick showed up with me clinging to him.
"You were only around the corner," they said.
But I didn't know it.
"What a baby," my sister whispered in my ear.
Well, I was. Chronologically. But I grew up that day in a way I did not grasp. I learned how perception creates reality, how our inner understanding programs what is seen in the outer world much as a movie reel projects pictures on a screen. And just now, as I write this, an adult far from babyhood chronologically, do I accept that I am the producer of my own movies.
Ferida Wolff from her book, Listening Outside Listening Inside available through her website, http://www.feridawolff.com/
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