The Click Point

Derek settled himself in the chair on the other side of my desk.  This was our second conference about his autobiographical narrative.  At our first meeting he had told me he simply couldn’t think of an event in his life memorable enough, arresting enough, pivotal enough to support a narrative that unspooled toward a moment of  unanticipated meaning or insight.  But if I had listened well, if I had interpreted correctly the shadow language laired beneath Derek’s words, his problem was reticence, a reluctance to reinhabit his past experience.  That past, that experience, was, it seemed, not a burbling stream he wished to go a-fishing in.  To complete the assignment, he needed to be distanced from it.

I had told him that the experience did not necessarily need to be personal; it could be something he had witnessed, something that involved someone else.  The important thing was that it had a “click point,” a small, resonant rupture of emergent meaning; a sudden, perhaps initially inexplicable, sense that what he was seeing, had seen, was somehow revelatory, somehow cargoed with insinuation; that, in some fashion, what he had beheld pointed suggestively beyond its immediate context.  The ladenness of these click points, I explained, their significance, often becomes explicit upon reflection.  I recommended that he trawl his past, recent and distant, for such an experience, consider its potential for containing a click point, and come back to see me in a couple of days.

“Dr. D., I did what you said, and I think I may have something.”

“Terrific; good for you, Derek “

“Yeah, well, I’m not sure though.”

“Okay; tell me about it.”

“Well, I was at this baseball game, watching my little cousin.  He was nine, and it was one of those peewee leagues, you know, before they’re old enough for Little League, the kind where one of the coaches pitches, real slow, so the kids can hit it.  He played shortstop. Well, a batter hits a grounder to him, a pretty hard one, and just before it gets to him it takes a hop and hits him right on the chin.  And he kind of crumples to the ground and curls up and starts to cry.  I mean, really cry.  Sobbing.  His whole body was shaking.

But here’s the thing.  It’s like everything stops; everything comes to a standstill.  It was like one of those things we made back in grade school, a diorama.  The wind stops and the flag in left field stops waving, and the sunlight, it’s like it freezes, and the sounds stop, and nobody moves.  Everybody is just standing there watching him.  The coaches and the other players.  And his mom and dad, they’re in the stands, and they just sit there.  And it dawns on me that they are embarrassed.  They’re embarrassed that their son is laying on the ground crying.

Finally, his dad gets up and walks toward him.  Not fast; just kind of strolls out there.  And he stands over him—doesn’t squat down or touch him or anything.  Just stands there, and says something.  I couldn’t hear what.  Then my cousin stops crying and gets up and follows his dad off the field.  He’s like walking in his dad’s shadow.  And when his dad gets back to the stands, he says something to his mom, and she takes my cousin to the car and they leave.  And his dad goes back to the stands and watches the rest of the game.

What do you think, Dr. D.?  Is this something I could write the essay about?”

What did I think?  I thought it was a cluster bomb of a story, a detonation of horror and cruelty and crushing sadness.  I thought it spoke of an inability to love hard enough, or enough, or even at all.  I thought of a self-regard so hermetic that it induced emotional anesthesia. I thought of America’s storied pastime hidden behind a carapace of mockery, the fabled diamond a broken space, a scoured terrain.  I didn’t say this, though; Derek needed to make his own meaning.

“This is definitely something to write the essay about.  Now, what’s the click point for you?  What’s the big-picture insight it afforded you, the realization you came to because of it?  What’s its emotional temperature, its moreness?  What’s it telling you about?”

“Well, for me it’s saying something about how parents forget kids are kids, even if they are playing a grownup’s game.  About how kids cry when they hurt because they’re not old enough yet to have learned not to.  And how getting all protective about our image doesn’t leave any room for feeling what others feel.  You think that’s kinda getting at it?

“Derek, I think you’ve written the essay.  Go put it on paper.”

Derek gets up, heads to the door, then stops.  With his back to me, he says, “Dr. D., I did fudge that story a little.”

“How so?”

He turns to face me.  “That little boy.  That was me.”

And then he was gone.  I wanted to call him back.  I wanted to run after him.  I wanted more.  But I knew that, for Derek, there is a benediction in the shadowed, a blessing in some things only glanced at.