Fifty Years On

"Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

Charlie Chaplin

I want to believe this — but I can marshal lots of evidence against it. It isn't true for the woman whose state-sponsored murder was "botched" — if that's comedy, it's comedy noir, but no one should be the least bit amused. It stays tragedy. And maybe it should, lest we become too sanguine with other people's tears.

But for my own tears, yes, it's probably about right. We were known as the kids who lived in the "visqueen shack" down at the bottom of Crooked Mile Court in the foothills of California. My step-dad built an open-frame garage that he wrapped with a thick layer of plastic membrane ("visqueen") to keep out the weather. Before that, and for a time, we lived in a trailer, and before that, and for a time, we lived in Hippie Cove, a community of squatters just outside the town center of Cordova, Alaska.

Living in the trailer was hardest. But the shacks, my mom would insist, were quite nice. And they were: we always had a wood-burning stove; it wasn't like the walls were thick — you could see nature, feel the wind and hear the pattering of rain on the walls. And the door, the one salvaged for Hippie Cove, had a blue smear of paint on it — to my eye, it was the Cookie Monster, my favorite character from Sesame Street. It was as if a little piece of that cheerful, reliable world had escaped and found its way to the place where I lived.

As soon as you stepped out the door, you were free, following the loud, lusty songs of the frogs, a scent of life in the wind; or you'd find the next-door kids whose dad had turned a boat's hull into a camper for their truck. It felt surprising and amazing — an inverted boat, once plying the Prince William Sound, now a space of warmth and meals and family time on solid ground. I marvelled that such a thing could be imagined by mortal men and yet there it was.

Looking back, with the eyes of memory, it was an amazing life, inverted and open, every nook holding a fat, juicy berry of possibility. We were poor, as they say, but mostly happy. But, even then, it wasn't all tragedy-comedy. The family that lived in the inverted hull of a boat had two children; their daughter was my age and the other, her little brother, a toddler. The older kids were a little gang, I suppose, doing our things, while her brother maybe played nearby or came as far with us in our adventures as his mother would allow. I gave him a gift on his birthday, a toy car, of the Hot Rod variety, which were popular back then.

It was a prized possession for me, and I'm surprised that I gave it to him. The only reason I remember it is because of what came next. And that was a cloud.

We got the story the way kids do, in a kind of broken way. Out on the dock, with his family, how it happened, I'm not sure — maybe he got out of sight for a second, and because of carelessness on the part of a worker, a hole was left open where some construction was being done. It happened so quickly. My parents went to the funeral. His mom told me that they placed that toy car in the grave with him.

Fifty years on from that tragedy . . . I'm not sure I see the comedy, or that I even want to. And maybe that's a good thing. But in another key, comedy isn't about laughter at all; instead, it is a teacher, a steady reminder that love still believes, still hopes, still waits for the familiar sound. Maybe that's why his mom told me what she did, the way she did, in the shape she did. I don't know if she believed in resurrection, but she put her faith in the "long-shot" that lives with me today. Despite everything, resurrection peeks at us, daring us to imagine something inverted, an upside-down world.

What are your stories of this "close-up tragedy and comedy in long-shot"? Thanks for sharing and reading.