The Journey Begins…
January 21, 2014 3 Comments
“Grandma, when you die, will they bury you?”
“Yes.”
“Very deep.”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll just dig you up again!” —–Kornei Chukovskij From Two To Five
The journey, which would eventually lead to The Magicians Of Form, started in childhood. For the book represents a synthesis of the many conversations I had with my Dad and Grandma Lillian about forms that I encountered throughout my life. In retrospect, I believe there was an unseen path that was guiding me to complete that book. Little did I know it, but these apparently innocuous discussions held the seeds of a definite future purpose.
To understand the determination and courage needed to finish the volume, I have to look back to a now distant world: a world before abstract reasoning had taken firm hold, and banished me from an all-inclusive world. A world in which sensations, colors, sounds, and forms enticed with a vividness, excitement, and spontaneous directness that become dulled in adulthood.
To go to that special place, I need to summon memory as my guide. Fragments of thoughts and images fly into my mind: pine cones scattered along a path, a night sky covered with sparkling stars, the rough red of jasper, sand painting, sticker albums, wooden puzzles of a bus, and Old King Cole, a record player on the ground spinning music, farm lotto, water-colored flowers, The Golden Book of Children’s Verse, and, one verse in particular: “When I grow up, I will carry a stick, and be very dignified. I will have a watch that will really tick. I will have a tall house that is built of brick. And no one will guess that it’s just a trick, and I’m really myself inside.”, The Big Ball Of String, The Big Jump And Other Stories, and Gillespie And The Guards( in which a child outwits adults in power), The Five Chinese Brothers(in which every brother has a special skill to keep him from harm), arithmetic problems with shiny colored dots, glasses of lemonade, scoops of chocolate ice cream, dragging a watering can to create my own river in the sandy beach, Grandma’s Archie the Chipmunk bednight stories, making a miniature golf course out of my parents’ lawn, climbing walnut trees, listening to Walt Disney’s The Grasshopper and the Ants, dancing to Tchaikovsky’s Overture Miniature from the Nutcracker Suite and watching the falls of Lone Pine Creek…
“How high is high?”
Grandma said I asked this question when I was four-years-old. It was the start of many questions I had about the surrounding world. My special path was unraveling before me. The hour glass of time was running. The journey begins…
About Robert M. Weiss
Site of Discovery and Wonder 
How delight- and thoughtful. Your memories seem to be much more colourful than mine. Mine are more monochrome, people seem to be two-dimensional. Sometimes dreams, films and memories are the same black and white. When my Granddad died, in 1940, I was two weeks short of being five. He was my first dead person I saw. I can’t remember having had any conversation with him. Still, I remember him being quiet and comfortable to be with.
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Thanks for your comments, Berlioz. My Grandma Lena was the first person I knew that died. I remember staying in Grandma Lillian’s bedroom to receive the news. That was in 1962. She was 73, and I was nine-years-old. I recall that she was in a wheelchair, and liked to visit other old ladies at Roxbury Park in Beverly Hills. My Grandpa David used to take a “magic” chocolate Hershey bar from the closet when I came to visit them.
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It shows how wonderful it is when young children are allowed to ask questions. At a certain age kids seem to be full of questions. Some adults are very good at finding some stimulating answers.
It is enormously interesting what sort of answers and pictures stay in our memories for ever and ever.
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