The Little View Master

 I honestly had no idea I was about to dig up Auntie Bea. Or my mother.

My shovel was aiming for farm stories, and they were no more than five years deep!  Apparently, I hit some sort of worm hole and was transported, as it were, to 1985. I didn’t know my everyday garden-variety worms had such capabilities, but I’m also not as surprised as I should be.

For real, I didn’t intend to mess with the dead. I didn’t even know they were in there. I was just gathering the courage to shine a little light on my unspeakable fear – my big frog-  so I could beat it with a stick in broad daylight in the company of friends. I’m kidding of course. I didn’t really want to beat it with a stick. But how interesting I would envision  that – a sort of public shaming ritual for my fear.

Although self-deprecating humour can sometimes disquise self-loathing and shame, I’m actually preparing to be gentler with myself. I don’t need to beat it into some sort of submission to prove I’m boss.

I just need to eat it. Taste it. Swallow it. Digest it. So as to free all the little frogs bottlenecked behind it.

So, lets just start by taking a sideways glance at the thing and naming it plainly: a couple years ago, I was swimming in fear.

I didn’t look like I was swimming in fear. I didn’t talk like I was swimming in fear. I wasn’t seeking therapy for my fear. There was no intervention being planned, that I am aware of, although had this rumination persisted, I wouldn’t have been critical of loved ones had they arranged one.

Do you remember the 1970’s toy, Viewmaster?  There’s some theme-steam arising from the pile right in this moment and I’m just going to follow it and see what happens. I think it has to do with my relationship to surprise. And reality. And Truth. And perception. 

 For those not familiar, the view-master is a simple, battery free, fully analogue little box that uses ambient light on transparent slides to show images to the view. The slides in the reels were in pairs, and each eye took in one part, and together formed a 3 D image. Your brain did that part, without telling you HOW. And I was a kid that needed to know the hows of things.

I was about 8. We had about 20 reels we could put into the Viewmaster. It was born from someone’s imagination in an era when movies and TV shows were just beginning to dominate our awareness, and had started selling to children. There were no shortage of reels promoting Disney movies, or Marvel characters. I had little interest in the characters or the movies, however.

I was fascinated by the mechanism of seeing.

I can imagine  Little Me , following around a variety of adults trying to get them to experience what I saw.

 It’s like an actual EYEBALL…. I would have said, holding the Viewmaster up for them to see ……AND IT BLINKS when I press this button down… and every time it opens it’s eye it sees something DIFFERENT. Open, close, open close. Nothing. Something. Nothing. Something.

It also opened a million doors to questions no one seemed to even recognize as legitimate questions.  Were the worlds on the Viewmaster reels … real? What is a hero? Are they real? Where did the stories come from? But then where  does imagination come from? Where were the stories before people told them? Was Herbie the Love Bug a real car? 

Where do I go, when I close my eyes?

Because I would close my eyes, and spin slowly in the centre of the room and try to guess what I would see when I opened my eyes. Could I predict it? How did my body know what was in front of it, if it couldn’t see it?

I vividly remember becoming the Viewmaster.

And where did the stories go when no one was looking at them?

Ah, there it is. The reason for the theme-steam.

Where do mothers go when you aren’t looking at them any more?