Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness

You learn not to mourn every little thing out here, or you’d never, ever stop grieving.

Surely until all of us own and honor one another's dead, until we have admitted to our murders and forgiven one another and ourselves for what we have done, there can be no truce, no dignity and no peace.

....The mind I love must have wild places: a tangled orchard where damsons drop in heavy grass, an overgrown little wood, a chance of a snake or two, a pool that nobody has fathomed the depths of and paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind.

...but the pathos and the gift of life is that we cannot know which will be our defining heartbreak, or our most victorious joy.

She treated Vanessa and me as if we were visiting budgerigars that needed to be fed and then put somewhere dark for the night.

Waternish Estate was sold to a Dutchman in the 1960s when Bad-tempered Donald died. In turn, the Dutchman sold a part of the estate to the Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan. Donovan was the first of the British musicians to adopt the flower-power image. He is most famous for the psychedelically fabulous smash hits “Sunshine Superman,” “Season of the Witch” and “The Fat Angel,” and for being the first high-profile British pop star to be arrested for the possession of marijuana. Donovan has a history of being deeply groovy and of being most often confused with Bob Dylan, which reportedly annoys Donovan quite a lot. “Sometime in the early seventies, Bob Dylan bought part of the estate,” Mum tells me. “But he put a water bed on the second floor of the house for whatever it is these hippies get up to, and it came crashing through the ceiling.” “Not Bob Dylan,” I say. “Donovan.” “Who?” Mum says.

Wisely, Vanessa has grown up to be an inscrutable artist—fabric, graphics and exuberant, tropical canvases all expressed with a kind of noncommittal chaos—so no one can really pin anything on her.

If she had known then the score and depth of the tragedy that was to come, Mum might have borne the insults of her childhood with more fortitude, but the pathos and the gift of life is that we cannot know which will be our defining heartbreak, or our most victorious joy. And so for a few years from around the time Mum turned three, an accumulation of what she considered truly dreadful events occurred. And because they were the first real insults of her so-far small life, they remain vivid and searing for her even now.

In retrospect, of course, everyone should have expected this outcome. We should have seen that a story begun with such one-sided, unconscious joviality - jewel-colored liqueurs and Portuguese wine on a rain-washed Rhodesian October morning - would end less than a decade later in defeat and heartbreak. But in the glow of love, in the heat of battle, in the cushioned denial of the present, how few have the wisdom to look forward with unclouded hindsight. Not my parents, certainly. Not most of us. But most of us also don't pay so dearly for our prejudices, our passions, our mistakes. Lots of places, you can harbor the most ridiculous, the most ruining, the most intolerant beliefs and be hurt by nothing more than your own thoughts.

And for the majority of the country, Freedom did not include access to the sidewalks, the best schools and hospitals, decent farming land or the right to vote. It now seems completely clear to me, looking back, that when a government talks about “fighting for Freedom” almost every Freedom you can imagine disappears for ordinary people and expands limitlessly for a handful of people in power.