“Red Rover, Red Rover, let Bobby come over!”
I can feel the wind on my face, the gravel at my feet – oh so minutely, but with enough realness to pull me back seven decades, into one of the earliest moments of my becoming.
For some reason I find myself, at age 77, pondering such moments – not simply random memories from childhood but, as I say, moments of my becoming: openings of awareness that were entirely unexpected and utterly personal and thus, oh so quietly secret. This is me?
I think my sudden fascination with such moments shimmers beyond me. I am continually confronted with the abstract statistics of war dead – in particular, the murder of children, each of whom was in the process of becoming himself or herself until they became the tactical victims of a geopolitical game about which they knew nothing.
“Red Rover, Red Rover . . .”