SMALL THINGS

Albert Huffstickler

You take what you can find when you're sixteen

in a small cotton mill town in North Carolina

and there's no one to point the way and there's

an emptiness in you that you can't identify

and a shyness that encompasses the world.

There was a woman named Sue whom I used to visit,

the aunt of a friend of mine, a middleaged woman,

to discuss Literary Guild novels, which was as far

as my excursions into literature had led me at that time.

This was during World War II. She had dark hair and eyes,

a lean face and her husband was in the Navy and overseas

and, looking back, I think there was more on her mind

than Literary Guild novels but that's hindsight-

one of my more highly developed talents. She lived

with her mother, whom we all called Grandma Cashion,

and she must have known something about Sue that I didn't

because she was always in and out of the room

when I was there-always polite but never far away.

We discussed James Hilton and John Marquand and

other famous writers and Sue talked a lot about

how the people in town didn't understand anything

and how her life might have been different if

something had happened-I never quite understood what.

But being there seemed to bring me closer to the drama

and that's what I wanted: to be closer to the drama.

But I didn't quite know how to be. I didn't quite

know how to be anything. So I talked to Sue

and sometimes her niece, Lucille, who was older than me

and pretty and worked in Charlotte would be there

and we would listen to pop music on the record player

and this seemed to help that something very open

and longing in me that I had no name for and no way

of reconciling with anything around me.

Nights in the summer, I would go out in the front yard

and sit on the grass and look up at the stars,

filled with longing and a terrible sense of helplessness.

Everything seemed beyond me. Days when it was worst,

I would go over and talk to Sue and feel her dark eyes

move over me, signaling that I was something special-

which was perhaps what I needed most to feel: special.

It was as though I had been set loose in a strange country

without a map and not knowing the language.

That was growing up.

I didn't think it had ever happened to anyone before.

And everything I felt intensely seemed to be

something you didn't talk about.

Except to Sue- a little bit. And Sue-

she worked at the mill and waited for her husband to return,

an event, she implied, that she did not particularly look forward to.

And Grandma Cashion moved in and out of the room unobtrusively,

fixing this, rearranging that, serving coffee.

Sometimes their eyes would meet and clash but nothing was ever said.

Sometimes Sue's and my eyes would meet and something

else would happen

but I didn't really know what it was and never,

thanks to Grandma Cashion, got a chance to find out.

Well, one day the war was over and Sue's husband came back

and they moved into their own house and I never saw her again.

It was that simple.

I would never have imagined it after so many Literary Guild novels

but it was just as simple as that.

Nothing was ever said. It just happened.

It was only much later, after many heartaches, that I came to realize

that Life has little respect for form.

Any term paper that Life ever wrote would never rate more than a C.

Its transitions are bad, whole paragraphs are often juxtaposed

and more often than not, there is no conclusion.

If I had been writing this, Grandma Cashion would have gotten sick

one day and been carried off to the hospital

and Sue and I would have been left in the house by ourselves...

But I didn't write it. Life wrote it.

And high school passed and I went off to college

without, as far as I remember, ever seeing Sue again...

and have not seen her to this day. She's probably dead.

And still she was there-someone who saw, who sensed

a part of what was going on in me at a very painful time.

A small thing.

And it was only much later, after many heartaches,

that I came to be grateful for small things.

It's only when you come to know that you're not going to do

or get everything you want in this world that things come into perspective.

That's called growing up-something that Life,

with its bad transitions and disregard for form, forces on you eventually.

And that's when you begin to see that small things sometimes

aren't small at all. Seen from a distance, they can be very large.

It's like looking at a star for a long time till all your attention

is focused on it.

If you do that long enough, it will start to move closer and get larger

till finally you're inside it and then

there's nothing anywhere but light.