THE SHADOW OF THE OBJECT

That night in Trinity College, when I dreamed about my mother, I saw her looking as she did when I was a child of two or three. In the intensity of my anxiety and love, I called her Mommy, a name I had not used since childhood. When, later, I saw her lying dead in the hospital bed, I saw, too, the many times that I had seen her lying asleep at home, in just that position, with just that lace collar around her neck. And even as my dream of her contained a desperate wish for her life and health, it also contained an anguished wish that I might give her some special happiness (in the dream, by saying something to please her that no one else had thought to say) – perhaps because that memory of her youthful face lay very close to two other memories, my earliest persisting memories from childhood.

In one, I am playing with some older children, who are experimenting by poking a stick into a hole in the ground into which some insects have been flying. Suddenly a fierce cloud of wasps swarms up out of the ground. The older children vanish. Terrified and totally bewildered, too small to run, I wail as loudly as I can, as the wasps sting me again and again.