Threshold - IV

It was too much to be offered "anything." My parents would have given their children their last breath, but they would not have said "take anything." "Anything" was not in the language of our family.

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While my mother was in the hospital, the family looking after us took my brother and me to a make-it-yourself ceramics store on the airbase. Getting to make something at an arts-and-crafts store would have been an exceptional treat.

There was an entire wall of ceramic molds to choose from. The mother told us we could pick any one we wanted. There were flowers and animals and instruments and people, and the higher you went on the shelves, the larger and more extravagant the choices became.

My brother and I knew we should pick one of the smaller ones towards the bottom, but our host family was deeply generous and must have sensed our reservation. So, they told us to pick whichever one you want. We were polite in these situations, over-trained to be “good” in this regard, admonished to select modestly. There was an element of good breeding in it, but there was also a whiff of the undeserving, of shame — in the same way that my mother sat us in the back row at ch…