But what they claim is only ever corporeal, ephemeral, at heart physical. The worst of corporations, the worst of anger and hate, the worst of human evil - all will have their fill. As the fires and floods claim our land, however, I am drawn to an undeniable truth. With hindsight, I may never know why I searched. The bubbling cauldron, the fiery furnace, the precarious rope-bridge of human sentiment which was tamped down amongst my human companions but could dance effusively between the pages of a book. Not to the surface - 'never to the surface' is on my family crest - but somewhere close beneath. A quick wit, an innovative outpouring of words and ideas, and emotion arose.

(The stroke of death, says Shakespeare, is as a lover's pinch, which hurts, and is desired.) The feeling came much easier to me then. Looking back, from somewhere further down the mountain, I delude myself into the notion that my search was born of love. I had followed Wally and friends through four weighty tomes what kind of a Sancho Panza would I be to abandon them at this juncture? Loyalty? I had long fancied myself to be noble. For if I could not even find Wally and Wenda and Woof, how was I ever to find a future? The world would always be off-brand Lego and movies taped to VCR from the television and sitting politely on the sofa while adult guests enjoyed pâté and cheese, every so often deigning to ask me a question to which they had no interest in the mumbled answer. She became the latest on the list of rejected specialists, quickly reduced to 'the one with the Miss Piggy garbage bin' in family anecdotes.įor my own diagnosis, perhaps it was fear. Obsessive-compulsiveness, said one therapist - of the newer school - but my lack of interest in cataloguing the exact time on every clock in The Corridors of Time sent that theory spiralling rapidly toward the bin. These were places into which one could comfortably retreat, like well-worn memories from a time one had never lived, like something passed down in the songs of hope and woe sung by the balladeers who kept my ancestors' souls warm throughout those long, medieval winters. Any of my long string of child therapists would have drawn this conclusion from the top of the deck. 'This Where's Wally book belongs to.'.įantasy, sure. Was it ownership? To an intellectual boy in a dusty town, so little is his own. Your ability to disappear so quickly, so guilelessly, was that of my mother in a crowded room.

Or, perhaps, empathy? Your eternal stare reminded me of my father, leaving a handful of notes on the table as my parents went out to dinner. Was it loneliness, then? The summer stillness of my childhood room? A world outside for the children who loved soccer and music and insects a world closed to me by gates invisible yet solid as steel? Your absence echoing your presence back to me, a single chord, sublime in its simplicity, haunting in its resonances.

Where's Waldo? by Martin Handford