My first act as a writer!

For years I felt guilty about breaking the heirloom toys my stepfather’s mother had preserved, relics of another era. I can still remember the excitement of lifting each object out of the boxes where they had been stored and bringing them to life again: tiny china dishes with hand-painted flowers; a miniature stagecoach carrying riders and pulled by horses; dolls with porcelain faces and hands, features frozen in smiles, dressed in stylish Victorian gowns; a doll house with elegant furniture and a family.

I played with these treasures for hours, intrigued with the delicate precision it took to make them. The gold-plated stagecoach with ornate trim had figures riding inside, women wearing long silk dresses over layers of petticoats, real human hair twisted into coiffures under hats that bobbed like ships on the waves beneath. The men wore tight-fitting, long-tailed black suits, collars and cuffs shockingly white in the stagecoach’s dark interior.

Gradually I dismantled or broke the stagecoach and other objects. First I pulled out the riders one by one so I could examine them minutely. However, I wasn’t satisfied only to look; I had to inspect each seam, which meant I ended up with raw material that was unrelated to anything else—bits of cloth; arms; legs; strands of hair; tiny shoes. Lives stripped of society, reduced to their individual parts, were scattered into the four corners of my room, along with the dust balls.

While my behavior could be interpreted as destructive, “acting out” whatever deeper needs weren’t being met by my family life, I believe curiosity motivated me more than a desire to demolish. If hostility was involved, it served an instinctual need to examine closely objects that reflected a world that no longer existed, or if it did, it was only in my imagination. It may have been my first act as a writer.

Unfortunately, what I destroyed so methodically I could not reconstruct. This was the tragic lesson I learned at four. I was not yet capable of seeing the underlying patterns that would have helped me reassemble the toys. So I was left with the ruins.

But as an adult I can enter those rooms I played in as a child and rescue all the discarded parts of those magnificent heirlooms. They have resided in me over the years, the tiny stagecoach door with glass windows, the spokes from the wheel reduced to useless sticks—these remnants from my past and that of my stepfather’s mother merge in my memory.

Now I pick up each object and study it with care. But as a child, I didn’t know that life could be stripped down, reduced to its parts in much the same way as the toys I destroyed. They were models for such a process. I didn’t realize that tearing down was important, that I was acting out of a natural instinct—to live is to destroy. Cells are destroyed constantly in order to create new ones. Love, which unites, also destroys: illusions, former loves, the image of a perfect love. Nor had I discovered yet the god-like creative ability we possess that enables us to pick up the pieces of our fragmented lives and re-form them.

Thanks to Helena R for posting this review of my memoir Dreaming Myself into Old Age: One Woman’s Search for Meaning:

Reviewed in the United States on November 15, 2023