Today it dawned on me the huge advantage I have had all my life by having hope. At least, I always thought I had cause for hope.

This world always has that element of “very strange”, in interesting variety.

How frightened I once was of the darkness! After having been sent to bed in the most distant room in the house and having had it made abundantly clear that I was not to be seen or heard till morning I was left to deal with it alone.

The confluence of fate and opportunity brought this fear. Fate because of the arrival of my uncle, a newly orphaned twelve year old who then lived with us until the Army took over (I think I was six). Word is that he did well in life, but I haven’t seen him since he returned on leave the first time. Opportunity, because he realized that my brothers and I were expected not to create trouble after being sent to bed and we were very young, tender, and impressionable. We were vulnerable to his pranks because we couldn’t complain to anyone who cared to listen. He and his buddy Eddie Haskel (I remember this because the name and personality matched a TV character) thought it fun to scare us speechless. Of course they never confessed.

He would tuck us in our beds then save us the dangerous walk by turning out the light before  “leaving” the room. Without him, one of us would have to risk running from the switch to bed in the dark.  We’d already been primed by talk of a creature called the “wagbag” that came out by night. It was never described exactly except to convey that it was an awful thing and could get us if we got out of bed. Apparently the sheets and blankets had special repellent powers when on a mattress atop a child.

Our imaginations filled in the gaps.

After turning out the light and pretending to leave, he’d stealthily position himself under one of the beds and start pushing up and down on the mattress, scaring us speechless. Literally. I was paralized more than once with stark terror that the wagbag had actually gotten into our room. My brother later claimed to have seen the beast, which he described as a flying moose head.

An adult can sort through nonsense like that, but kids don’t know.

It’s Never Nice to Scare a Child

I’m against frightening people and all cruel pranks and maybe it started there.

How I got through the scary nights was the hope and belief that daylight would come.

Eventually I erased the fear with a combination of believing that if the sun had ever shone where I lay, then it still did in that prior time and space which still existed as a layer of eternity which I I imagined myself at. My first success was when I imagined the workers who built our house all having lunch in the sun while sitting on the new foundation. Their imagined presence calmed away my fear of the imagined night beasts. I was thus protected.

I also pictured myself in a large wooden canoe paddled by indigeonous American dudes with an older chieftain.  Calm, safe, comforting.

Each scenario I conjoured was built on the belief and hope that my dreary situation would pass with the advent of daylight. So if I had to remain awake and vigilant all night, still  relief was on the horizen.

Later, I passed through the choppy waters of life that sometimes looked dire but in every case I had the hope of a better day. I can not imagine living happily without that expectation. I feel much empathy for people whose situation is awful with no obvious way out.

Life is interleaved with the mysteries of ignorance and the discoveries that put them to rest. So I have often gone after the answers to solve or resolve mysterious parts of life. Like when I started trying to draw faces and found a preference for pretty ones. Since I could recognize pretty from ugly then there must be a formula I could learn to know how to make attractive pictures. I wanted to know what beauty was. It wasn’t what I expected when the answer came, but sure enough I eventually got that matter cleared up. By eventually, I figure more than forty years of puzzleing over it passed before the answer finally arrived.

For the life of me I couldn’t concoct or learn a useable cypher to write my thoughts, while preserving both the vitality of the ideas and the privacy I craved. Searches through thick code books from the library just brought frustration but I knew there was an answer just as surely as I had known that day follows night. After five years the germ that became my present personal writing system came to mind in a flash. It was perfect!

During the darkest days, I still believed better times would come. I was always grateful for the things that did go right and the beautiful positives despite the ugly distractions.

I remember reading about a prophet in ancient days who communed with God and afterward was approached by the devil who tried to pull rank and make his usual rediculous demands. The prophet responded with inciteful observations, noteing the ease with which he could speak with the devil compared to the changes that had to be wrought upon him in order to commune with a Holy Being, which he had just experienced. Then, he told satan that he had other questions to ask of God.

This, I can relate to.

Having hope of a better day, or a better way, or a better say has been immeasurably valuable to me.  Without it, I don’t think I’d ever have asked the many questions that I’ve had answered. There wouldn’t be a reason.

I had hope. I asked questions. I still have hope, and still have many questions. Answers keep coming.

Maybe the best thing I can do for others is to bolster the hopes already in their heart. It’s impossible to imagine stealing goodly hope from anyone and still have peace.

Before now I hadn’t considered how telling it was that I asked so many questions of life and held on for answers even when they didn’t materialize sometimes for decades. It was driven by hope, one of the most precious parts of life. Now that hope is  driven by faith in still better scenarios with an even  broader horizon.