Ben was watching the Wizard of Oz ten feet away from where I was sewing. Having watched it umpteen times over my lifetime I could listen over my shoulder and picture the images easily.
The bumblebee music.... Miss Gulch on her bicycle.
Squeaky voices... Munchkin land.
Thundering threats... Toto is pulling back the curtain.
What surprised me though was how quickly everything whizzed by. My memory was much more e-l-o-n-g-a-t-e-d. The days Dorothy spent wistfully singing about a rainbow wishing someone would listen to her clicked by in a trice. The whirling tornado was gone before I could finish two seams. The flying monkey scene lasted eighty seconds.
It smacked up against my sense of time. When I am slogging through a painful ordeal, it feels like six o'clock traffic in Manhattan. Nothing could be slower. If I dredge up the excruciating events in my memory banks, I can with effort remember that they felt strung out. But looking back they are diluted by other emotions. At the risk of minimizing my own suffering I hear myself mollifying an earlier me.
"Three kids in cloth diapers? Meh."
"Twelve hospitals for Benjamin before he was three? Not so bad."
"Driving with six kids across the country in a decrepit car? We made it."
Yet the frightening parts are crucial to the story. If Dorothy's house had not begun to pitch, the Wicked Witch of the West hadn't written her name in the sky, and the poppies had not lulled them to sleep she would never have discovered her own resilience. Frank Baum could have saved a lot of ink by having Dorothy realize in the opening scene that there's no place like home.
I guess God could save a heap of trouble too by informing me on my second birthday what it is taking me a lifetime to figure out. But the Dorothy who clicked her heels three times was a different girl than the one who fell into the pig pen. And I hope that the wife and mother I am becoming looks like a color version of the sepia me.
Love,
Lori
