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“We all know that something
is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it
ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is
eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest
people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet
you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something
way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”
Stage Manager, Our Town
Thornton Wilder
I am eternal – so are you. I don’t mean eternal in God’s way – no beginning and no end. We’re just creatures and we had a
beginning.
I began in the hallway of the Catholic hospital in Norfolk,
Nebraska. That’s where my soul met up with my body. My father was still in the
Philippines – it was 1945 – and the nuns thought my mother was bringing a
bastard into the world and treated her accordingly. She was still angry when
she filled out the birth certificate – mad at being left in the breezeway to
give birth, and mad because she had just received a letter from my dad
demanding that she name me Deanna – no explanation. She had planned on Karin
after my Danish great grandmother, so she took the anger out on my name,
misspelling it on purpose. I’ve been correcting people about it for over 60
years --- 67 years, to be exact and the older I get the surer I am that the
real me will always exist. I have evidence:
Some days my right hip feels like a gravel-filled mortar and
pestle. My face leaks – eyes water, nose runs. I’m well aware that my occasional
efforts with a box of Nice n’ Easy
only covers the grey, not the wrinkles.
But, I don’t feel old. Wise, sometimes cranky, but not old. I
loved teaching in a high school because it never occurred to me that I wasn’t
17. It seemed perfectly natural that I’d never left 11th grade. Some
part of me hadn’t.
