Inspired by the poem “On Occasion,” by Grace Paley
On occasion, I wake in the night and wonder if we are living in virtual reality. I read that Elon Musk thinks we are living in the “Matrix.” On occasion, I think I see something out of the corner of my eye — something just out of sight or something at the edge of my vision shifts. Is this a glitch in the software of my virtual reality?
On occasion, I wonder if those who are long gone come back to check on us, to see what we’ve been up to in their absence. Once on my mother’s birthday, a framed photo she gave me fell on the floor. It was on the fireplace mantel and seemed to leap off as if she were demanding I pay attention to the day. Was this a shift in virtual reality or just an old house shifting? I like the idea of her invisibly sweeping the frame off the mantel, stamping her foot and asking, “Where is my birthday cake?” I made a small lemon ricotta cake for her and ate the entire thing myself.
On occasion, I have had an out-of-body experience. So, maybe we are, each of us, living in a virtual reality game that intersects with others’ reality. There is an article in a recent New Yorker about out of body experiences and I am afraid to read it. I don’t want to have another one. Once when I was a teenager, I awoke to find I was floating on the ceiling looking down at myself. “Is that what my hair looks like?” I thought. The last time was a few years ago when I seemed to be floating down the stairs in our house. I kept trying to go down each step but my feet floated in front of me.
On occasion, I make the mistake of sharing these experiences with someone I hardly know — it often ensures that I won’t see them again.
On occasion, I think we are all living in a science fiction novel where the characters have come to life. After all, what do you think about a place called “The Preventorium” — a place I knew well when I was very young — where all the children have the same exact haircut, wear little white bloomers and shirts, march single file everywhere with hands on hips? I know what you’re thinking: “Children of the Corn,” right? Or some other sci-fi movie.
On occasion, I wonder if we humans are the least intelligent species and all the animals understand us and each other, while we can only understand other humans, and often not very well. Crows can recognize faces, chickens plot out their exact territory, dogs learn to guide us to what they need and want but we only guess at what they know. Maybe they are smart enough in science experiments to teach the researchers what they want them to know.
On occasion, I think about what it feels like to be a plant or a flower in the rain. Once I lay on our patio in a rainstorm to see if I could imagine being a plant.
On occasion, I think about the elaborate pastries and cakes made before baking powder and baking soda were discovered — were they discovered or created? Now that is something else to wonder about on some occasion.
On occasion, I like to say some of my favorite words aloud, even when there are other people present: “CAKE” “SATISFACTION” “CHANGE.” If I had done this at work, it would have been a problem, but at the grocery store, for example, people just move away carefully. I like the words with a “ch” sound like sandwich. When I was a teenager, two of my friends came for a visit and wanted to share all the new dirty words they had learned. I made the mistake of telling them some of my favorite words. They just looked at each other. One said to me, “You look normal, but you are weird.” I agreed happily, telling them I was complimented that they thought I looked normal. Then I told them it’s a good thing I do look normal because that way, they never knew what I was thinking. Later, one of these girls told me at school that her mother didn’t want her to come to my house anymore.
On occasion, I think about some of the games I invented as a child, like the time two little girls and I used a combination of airplane glue (my brother’s), a bucket of tar taken from a construction site across the street, and feathers I had collected from the ground outside my grandmother’s hen house, to create “symbols” on every air conditioning unit on the street. The symbols were for safe air to go into the house and it seemed logical that the air conditioning unit was the perfect vehicle.
On occasion at night, I go to a window and look for lighted windows as a sign I am not the only insomniac worrying about virtual reality — well perhaps others are not worrying about that but are simply awake in the night, looking at the moon and stars or clouds or silent snowfall or fireflies in the summer, or simply waiting for dawn to come and take away the unrealities of the dark.
