November 2, 2014
Sunday

“It’s queer,” she said; “I see the light
As plain as I beheld it then,
All silver-like and calm and bright-
We’ve not had stars like that again!”
— Dorothy Parker, 1893-1967, American writer and critic
from “The Maid-Servant at the Inn”

Dramatic irony is a plot device in literature in which the reader of a text or the audience of a play knows more about the unfolding situation than the characters do. Dorothy Parker’s poem uses the word “inn” and the first stanza’s reference to remarkable silver starlight to give an inkling that this is an inn known for its lack of hospitality. If you’ve never read the poem, go, click on the highlighted title above, and read it.

See? The baby boy born in the dark and the cold to a very young mother, the speaker a figure you’ve never encountered in traditional tellings of this tale — you know before you get to the name of the town where we are.

“It’s queer that I should see them so-
The time they came to Bethlehem
Was more than thirty years ago;
I’ve prayed that all is well with them.”

You know, whether you believe the story or not, what the maid-servant cannot. You know what happened a little more than thirty years from that night in the barn.  The first time I read this poem (more than thirty years ago, I’m certain), I felt a chill. I let out a sigh for the maid-servant who never forgot the nameless family she tended to one night.

A few months ago I had a dream: I had written a novel called Help Me Remember Everyone Who’s Dead. Rainbow Rowell blurbed it. It was selling well. I woke from the dream not knowing what my book was about, nor even what Ms. Rowell, whom I do not know, had said about it. Who is the “me” in the title, I wondered. Is it a YA novel, the kind Rainbow Rowell would be drawn to endorse? Who is the speaker asking for the help? What had the dream come to tell me? I made some notes about an adolescent character who wants to remember people who have died.

In recent weeks, the refrain from the dream, Help me remember everyone who’s dead, has changed to Help me remember everyone. Random names and images began floating into my awareness. Gosh, I haven’t seen X in so long, or Whatever happened to ____? I could fill a month of NaBloPoMo pieces with just that.

So today I am remembering an encounter I had not unlike the one the maid-servant at the inn had. In 1999, or maybe it was 2002, or 2003 even — I have forgotten which trip it was —at a rest stop on the Massachusetts Turnpike, in August, I came upon the occupants of a van with New Hampshire license plates. The driver was a woman, very likely the mother of the 6-year-old boy, the 5-year-old girl, and the under-2 toddler strapped into a baby seat. (Ages approximate.) She was clearly harried, unhappy, full of anguish.

She barked at the children as she herded them out of the car. The two older ones could undo their seat belts themselves while she tended to the baby. She seemed to be most unhappy with the girl, whom she chided for inattentiveness and lollygagging as they hurried across the parking lot.

All the way into the facility, across the food court, back to where the bathrooms were, she yelled at the children. I followed them, because that was why I, too, had stopped there. Just being within earshot of her was painful and anxiety-producing for me, and I wasn’t even the target.

We finished in the bathroom at the same time. Back out in the food court, the mother and the two children met up with the boy. I don’t remember now if we both bought things at the snack shop, if we sat down for a bit. What I do remember is that we happened to get to our cars at the same time.

I had noticed that the boy was as critical and brusque toward the little girl as the mother was. He ridiculed her, teased her, belittled her. While the mother was busy buckling the baby back into the car seat, the boy made it difficult for the girl to climb into the back seat. At one point, he shoved at the sliding door of the van, and I was certain that the girl was going to lose a finger or two.

All of her life, I thought, All of her life, someone has been yelling at her, finding fault with her, failing to love her and accept her for who she is. And all of the rest of her life, perhaps.

I have thought of her from time to time, and if I looked, I could probably find “New Hampshire family” written on some prayer list or mandala I’ve used and not parted with. They continue to float in and out of my consciousness, although knowing what I do about how prayer works, I know that they are in my thoughts, invoked or not.

That little girl would be late teens or early twenties now. I hope that all is well with her.