Preface To Haloes: A Childhood Memory

(comic by Easterby)

This is a story I'm sure I've told before but since almost noone reads this blog it's fine if I tell it again. But first I want to tell you that it's been a constant in my life that the things that I have wanted to believe have butted up against the things that are. This is not much of a problem for many people, who are able to contextualize their experiences so reality corresponds with what they believe - whether they've chosen to believe it, or whether it was indoctrinated in them somehow. No judgements - I'm almost certain they're happier than I am.

When I was six, my mother - who was German - took me, my little brother, & I believe one of my older brothers, Ralph, to Germany. It was an experience for which I was wholly unprepared. I mean, I was six. Another country? What the fuck?

For example, I remember being fucking terrified at seeing men walking around with military-grade weapons - I guess whatever the equivalent of AK-47s was at the time - at the airport. It is a memory that came back to me when, just two weeks ago, I arrived at the Berlin airport on my way home to see soldiers patrolling the space with such weaponry just as they did fifty-some-odd years ago.

One thing I was excited about was the flight. If there was one thing I was almost certain I knew, it was that angels lived on top of the clouds. You couldn't see them from down below - of course not! don't be stupid! - they were on top of the clouds. I felt, at age six, I had seen so many pictures of angels on clouds (probably not photos but, again, I was six years old) that they must be there. I pictured not whole cities of angels - although why not? - but rather the occasional angel here & there, plying their wares. I don't know if I imagined harps or other such things, but I knew I would know them by their wings - & white robes - & their haloes.

Because angels had haloes. I am fifty-two years removed from that little dumbass so I can't explain what I might have been thinking but I do have a memory of looking out of the window of the plane - my mother had the window seat, I think, so I had to clamber over her - & saw clouds as far as the eye could see - all strikingly bereft of angels. Did I check now & again to see if maybe angels congregated in other spaces? I don't recall. But it was perhaps one of the first times - if not the first - the world took something I thought was almost certainly true & said back to me, "Nope."

For many people at age six, a question to an adult might have resolved the issue: "No, dear, angels are in heaven not on tops of clouds." But I didn't confide in anyone my disappointment because my family had a way of making me feel stupid when I was wrong ("You thought what? Are you fucking stupid?"). Therefore I kept these observations & revelations to myself. But I'm pretty sure from that point forward I came to think there were no such things as angels.

& maybe haloes too?