Mothers of Sparta by Dawn Davies

Author:Dawn Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

TWO VIEWS OF A SECRET

Some people believe there are two kinds of people: those who believe in God and those who don’t, those who eat animal flesh and those who don’t, those who burn the midnight oil and those who get up with the sun, those who fantasize about space and time travel and those who don’t read sci-fi, those who pick their scabs and those who don’t. Or as Tom Robbins said, “Those who believe there are two kinds of people in this world and those who are smart enough to know better.” I’m not smart enough to know better, because I believe there truly are two kinds of jazz music lovers: those who think that Jaco Pastorius was the best bass player who ever lived, and those who are misinformed.

Because I live with a scattered mind, and because my prefrontal cortex could probably use a hoarder intervention, it helps me to think this way. I envy clean thinkers who can follow a logical map in their mind to a thought they have stored there, who can make sense of the volumes of information that are thrown at them every day, those who are not daunted by caretaking their memories and knowledge. But that’s not how I roll.

Classifying things into sets of two is not sophisticated. My life is structured around things of two: two piles on my desk—things to do right away so I don’t lose my job or house, and things that can wait. Two orders of kids—the ones on autopilot who have left home, and the ones I still have to remember to feed. My old marriage and my current one. The sheets that are on the bed, and the set that is hanging on the line out back. I am willing to consider that my simplistic view might be a sign of inferior processing, as I recognize that I am unable to categorize things logically without blending in unscientific pieces of information, such as feelings and memories, and for me, even colors.

* * *

I am a lifelong music lover. One of my earliest memories is of lying in my crib with my favorite stuffed elephant, who had a windup music box where his heart should have been. At night, when I couldn’t sleep and the darkness lay ahead of me like a long road, I would wind the key in the elephant’s back and listen to “Brahms’ Lullaby,” manipulating the sound by pushing it into my ear, or pressing it against the mattress to make the notes bounce off the springs and create an echo that felt like an empty room. Sometimes I would hold the key to slow the song down, or speed it up. When I did these things, the sound manifested as colors in the dark, either behind my eyelids, or in the space before me when my eyes were open. I could see the music. And for many years, I assumed this was what all people experienced.

When I was six or seven, my parents bought me a portable white plastic record player.

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