The Spoiler Is You, Honey

Some things are worth not knowing until they happen to you

Now, I am going to say something that might sting a little, so you can set down your coffee before I start.

Folks in Harrow Corners have a saying, or at least we did before most of them forgot it: what you rush toward, you ruin. I have watched people tear the paper off a gift before the bow is cut. I have watched them read the last page of a book on the drive to the store where they bought it. And I have watched them aim their glowing little rectangles at something beautiful and miss it entirely, right there in the missing.

The Hendersons' boy came back from the woods after that long night talking about dinner with the trees, and I want to be clear: nobody around here was especially surprised. What struck me was the look on his face. He had been somewhere, had something happen to him, and he had not photographed it or posted it or chopped it into pieces for someone else to chew on. He just had it. That look. You do not see it much anymore.

The fruitcake has been making its rounds since 1954 and it comes back to me every December, reliable as the lake and twice as patient. I am not saying the fruitcake is a lesson. I am saying it keeps coming back because it was made with care and nobody has been foolish enough to rush it. You do not cut into a thing just because you want to see the layers. You let it be what it is.

Now, Aurélia Collins has got the right idea, fighting her computer into minding its own business, keeping her surprises to herself. That is a young woman with sense, and sense at that age is rarer than a dry August in Harrow Corners. She understands what Georgia McAdam apparently does not: that knowing what is coming does not mean you are ready for it. Georgia says she likes to be prepared. Georgia also put plastic sheeting over her windows in July and called it air conditioning. Preparation and wisdom are not always the same animal.

Here is what recording every moment actually does. It turns you into a correspondent for a war you are supposed to be fighting. You are not in the show, you are not in the memory, you are not even in the room. You are crouched behind a screen, dispatching evidence that you were present, which is the saddest way to be present I have ever encountered. The county fair ran nine days longer than it was scheduled that one summer and nobody could leave, and I will tell you this: the people who spent it pointing cameras at the midway have nothing to show for those nine days that the people who just put their hands in their pockets and watched do not also have. Less, maybe.

There is a step on my front porch that is not there on Sundays. I do not document it. I step around it or I step through it, depending on the week, and I keep going. Some things you live with, and living with them is the whole arrangement.

The artists ought to hold the line on this. They make something, they make it with their specific hands and their specific decisions, and then a person in a seat somewhere takes that made thing and reduces it to thirty seconds of shaky footage for people who were not there and now also will not be there, not really, because they already think they have seen it. That is not sharing an experience. That is skinning the experience and nailing the hide to the fence.

You want to keep the magic? Then keep it. Close the screen. Sit in the seat. Let it happen to you without turning yourself into a witness to your own life. Whatever you experience without documentation, without a caption, without a single other person affirming it happened, that thing is yours. Fully, completely, not going anywhere.

The fruitcake returns every Christmas, and I have never once photographed it. It is still here. That ought to mean something.

Live in the moment you are actually standing in. , Aunt Dot
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