The flickering black and white television screen cast an eerie light on the face of my childhood. In the late 1960s, the exaggerated gymnastics of Jack Gilford’s eyes and mouth, his mug an animated mask in that grainy film world, held an unsettling allure. The recurring Cracker Jack commercial, a sugary children’s jingle punctuated by the relentless brand name, burrowed into my young psyche with a persistence of a repetitive hypnogogic dream. A prize, promised, surely awaited at the bottom of a wax-lined rectangular box. What captivated me wasn't the prospect of a plastic trinket, but the dancing shadows in a face, a premonition of the lyrical mysteries that would forever beckon.
That initial thrill of the unknown bloomed into a lifelong pursuit of buried truths. Mental Health Counseling & Psychotherapy, a path paved with the detritus of fragmented memories and unconscious desires, became my chosen field. Each clinical hour, an expedition into labyrinthine inner worlds offered the tantalizing possibility of unearthing hidden veins of gold, like weekly episodes of The Twilight Zone, or The Outer Limits. Yet, the weight of missed opportunities with former clients, like stones cast into a well, still echoes in the cavernous silence of my introspection.
One echo, faint but distinct, brought a particularly poignant memory. A teenage client, grappling with the painful divorce of his mother and father, sat across from me, the hidden pain an unarticulated presence in my temporary office. Years later, a disembodied voice on a forgotten voicemail – the same client, their voice now a different cadence, revealed a truth long concealed. They were trans, and we both completely missed that. The revelation, a sharp pang of regret, settled in my gut – a puzzle piece that remained unseen. An unexplored trail in a forest of the mind, one that could have offered solace and understanding. And then, amidst the cobwebs of what ifs, a flicker of comfort: the trust we built, a fragile thread reconnecting us after so many years. A testament to the precarious sanctuary we once shared, a space where vulnerability and deeper exploration coexist.
Truth, a double-edged sword, can unearth buried riches, or as in my own life, an odd plot twist. A late-life DNA discovery of my own crystallized a long-held muted sense of despondency, revealing an unknown biological father and my deceased mother shrouded in layers of secrets. The revelation, a weight lifted, left me strangely buoyant – a bumblebee finally freed, lifting itself from the perch of a backyard clover blossom.
The insatiable curiosity that fueled my fascination with Cracker Jack and other TV commercials of my childhood is now expressed in the pursuit of other hidden narratives. Stories, like storage boxes abandoned in an attic or basement, hold the promise of buried treasure, narratives waiting to be unlocked and beheld like pirate doubloons dug up on an uncharted island. Unlike childhood treats, however, some unmapped stories reveal no prize at the bottom, only the unsettling but beautiful truth of a sacred pilgrimage into the soul.
My childhood struggle with reading, a bitter irony for an aging writer, now fuels a desperate scramble to find meaning in words. Perhaps, it's a final archeological excavation, a search for connection beyond the confines of therapy sessions, stories still waiting to be written. Even in the face of disappointment and discouragement, the promise of discovery lingers like a carrot just out of reach. There is the lure of that prize at the bottom of the box. It might take a lifetime to dig out, and another lifetime to understand its true value…
*
You might also enjoy reading my memoir called My Mother’s Ghosts.
The older I get, the more I look back and wonder, "what if?" What if I would have taken a sharp turn there, or then? I've also become aware that healing can take a lifetime, and in my case, it definitely is. I thought, when I became a psychotherapist, that I was completely healed. I have found instead, that I continue to process and re-process and grow and change, and that's a good thing.
I was thinking that I should put a link to the tv commercial for those who don’t remember it or have never seen it: https://youtu.be/xXDC7ZJLEWE?si=h3k3lz2AtwgH57f2