When You Reach Me

Things You Push Away

“Ready?” Richard asks Mom. We are practicing even more now. He sits in a chair opposite her. I’m the timekeeper. Mom closes her eyes, and I know that she is lifting a corner of her veil. She nods, and we begin.

Mom says each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world, like a bride wears on her wedding day, except this kind of veil is invisible. We walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. The world is kind of blurry, and we like it that way.

But sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments, like there’s a wind blowing it from our faces. And when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. We see all the beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love. But mostly we are happy not to. Some people learn to lift the veil themselves. Then they don’t have to depend on the wind anymore.

She doesn’t mean that it’s a real veil. And it isn’t about magic, or some idea that maybe God is looking right at you, or an angel is sitting next to you, or anything like that. Mom doesn’t think in those ways. It’s just her way of saying that most of the time, people get distracted by little stuff and ignore the big stuff. To play in the Winner’s Circle, Mom has to get herself in a certain frame of mind. She says it’s sort of like lifting one little corner of her veil, enough to see more than usual but not so much that she gets totally distracted by life, death, and the beauty of it all. She has to open her mind, she says, so that when the clues start coming, she can see the thread that joins them. Of course, if her celebrity is as dumb as a bag of hair, it’s hopeless.

I’ve thought a lot about those veils. I wonder if, every once in a while, someone is born without one. Someone who sees the big stuff all the time. Like maybe you.