Essay

The Kaleidoscope

Don’t Miss a Moment of Your Life

When I was a wee girl, my grandfather, we called him Poppy, had the most beautiful library. What happened in that room would shape my life forever.

The library was lined with shelves on all four walls. From floor to ceiling, every shelf was packed with books. Since books were my refuge, this room seemed to me to be heaven on earth.

The library doubled as a theater. Poppy had built his own viewing room, where he could show video, which in the 1960s was limited to tape reels, and also slide shows, which would be narrated, usually by him, unless there was a special guest. There was a retractable screen at the one end of the room and all the chairs were aligned casually, but with the organization of movie theater seating, though at the time, I didn’t know what a movie theater was.

At the far back side of the room, behind a wall, Poppy would stand in his “projection room”. We could just barely see him through the window that the projector peeked through, and he had a speaker system such that through a microphone in the projection room he could narrate any slides or films that were being shown, and we could hear him just fine through the overhead speakers. I loved all the mechanics that went into the raising and lowering of the screen, seemingly by magic, because we couldn’t see the man behind the curtain! But I equally loved to dart outside the library and duck into the tiny projection room where he stood, thoroughly and utterly engaged and engrossed in the production of the show.

That library was my first experience with group viewings and discussions. I can remember that room as clear as day, and for as far back as my childhood memories will allow. I wouldn’t experience an actual movie theater until my grandmother took me to see my first ever movie, with popcorn — Mary Poppins — also an experience that influenced me the rest of my life.

As an aside, if you loved Mary Poppins as much as I did, and have not seen this movie about the making of it, “Saving Mr. Banks”, I highly recommend it. My grandmother would have loved it, if she were still alive.

The library had the most comfy leather chairs and couches. I could, and would, sit in that room by myself for hours — just me in a chair with a giant book.

I remember the bindings of the dictionaries — Thorndike-Barnhart — and thinking, wow, with a name like that, two names and hyphenated — there must be authority behind that dictionary. I would sit for hours and just read the dictionary. Words fascinated me. I could not have known then, that much later in life, I would actually become good friends with David Barnhart, the lexicographer whose father’s name was on that very dictionary.

Like all things in my life, I never could have predicted the chain of events that would lead to my meeting him and having the pleasure of hosting him regularly for dinner in my home. I’m always amazed by how one thing leads to another. I have lived my own version of Alice in Wonderland. And it’s not over yet, though I am feeling very much like I’ve been sitting in the garden.

My amazement of how things are broken, yet connected, came out of my constant and insatiable curiosity, which I believe is the secret sauce of life. There’s a saying that “curiosity killed the cat”, but it’s just a silly sing-song of a child’s ditty, and the history of the saying seems to have absolutely nothing to do with how the phrase gets used today. There are several responses to the question of the phrase’s origin in this inquiry on quora, some of them more relevant and satisfying than others.

I maintain that curiosity has always served me well, and though, like some cats who find themselves in seemingly incredulous and impossible situations…

…just the experience alone is enough to provide great opportunities for personal growth. After all, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Perhaps the stoicism of my farm family heritage about the “what doesn’t kill you” part is what troubles people most— because in truth, the attitude that in resignation rationalizes, “oh well, Maude, looks like we lost another one under the tractor”, is the same attitude that keeps people safely in their comfort zone, never venturing out into the next big adventure that leads to constant growth and reward in life.

Along with the books on the shelves of the library were some few little tchotchkes from my grandparents’ travels around the world. But the one thing that got my most eager attention, beyond even the books, was Poppy’s kaleidoscope.

I would pick up the kaleidoscope and hold it up to the ceiling lights, to brighten the glow. At the end of that long cylindrical tube was a collection of brilliantly colored cut glass chips, that rolled around and around as I turned the movable tube at the end. The patterns that these simple elements created were the most beautiful things I had ever seen in my life. I was mesmerized. I would turn the tube SO slowly, because I recognized that every pattern was different. As the glass stacked and tumbled owing to gravity, the image before me would change. I wanted to savor each one, and felt that each was so precious. It made me a little sad that once one image was gone and replaced with the next, I would never see that one again. I wanted to stay with each image as long as possible before moving on to the next.

When I was finished with my viewing for the day, I would very gently set the kaleidoscope down on the shelf, taking extraordinarily great care to not disturb the glass elements or let them move, believing that if I was not looking at them while they shifted, who would ever see them? A beautiful vision would go unseen, and that made me sad. The idea of a unique visage of beauty, going unseen, seemed to me to be one of the most sad things imaginable. I just wasn’t going to have that happen on my watch.

Looking back at those moments in the library, I realize that the way I have approached all my life experiences is very much a mirror image of how I spent my time in that space — reading to expand my imagination, allowing me to escape as far down the rabbit hole as I dare go, and watching for each special and unique moment in life, in a way such that I would never miss a single second.

© Susan Brearley, 2019 All Rights Reserved

Susan Brearley is a published book author, writer, editor, essayist and accidental poet. She is currently working on her second book, a murder mystery about an OCD detective, who’s been called a “young version of Monk”. She’s a retired systems engineer and salesperson from IBM, a serial entrepreneur, and a survivor of a stage 4 inflammatory breast cancer since 1995. She’s also working on her US Coast Guard Captain’s license, has her US Sailing keelboat certification, and is the creator and elder teacher of a new program, “VisionQuest” that mentors and teaches adults of all ages how to create the life they were born to live. She is currently based in the mid-Hudson Valley, New York.