“Oh yes, I’m the great pretender.”
I can sing you the tune to that whole Platters/Orbison/Mercury song, but the only lyric I know is that first line. I still hum it when I play with my grandkids. I really am a pretty unfettered pretender. I can easily let go of reality and imagine I’m Rainbow Dash, or any other Pretty Pony. Or I can happily forget I’m an old lady when I’m serving invisible ice cream cones at the playground in Liberty Park, offering playground bark French fries for four-year-old Gracie’s pretend order.
I think that’s why Historic Plymouth Plantation near Boston is one of my favorite places to visit. The whole community of docents who play Pilgrim roles make me feel like I am right there, way back in time when the hillsides all around were lush with deep woody untouched undergrowth, with layer on layer of natural flora under hovering natural arbors. The salty sea air mixes with the scent of wood smoke, and the sounds of my daily life are individual and distinct: I can hear my feet padding along the pathway between our spare thatch roofed houses, the clanging of the blacksmith’s hammer and the belching of his bellows. My linen skirt swishes around my ankles. There are no cars, no televisions, no electricity humming constantly in the background. Just the whisper of the wind and an occasional call of seabirds. Plymouth is made for great pretenders.
When our kids were all in elementary school together, and they were on the year-round school schedule, we took a trip to Boston to visit my sister, Libby in late October. That’s when I found this wonderful replica of a glass barometer in the Plymouth Plantation gift shop. It has a hammered iron hook and drip bowl, and a lovely blown glass bulb.
I mix red food dye with water in a bowl by my kitchen sink, maybe a cup or two. Then, dipping the tip of a platic medical syringe in the water, I suck a few ml. at a time up into the syringe, then gently set the tip of it into the slender spout of the barometer. Slowly the bulb fills with the colored water. When it is an inch or two above the elbow where the spout meets the belly, I stop. I gently wipe the glass dry, then hang it from the hook. It sits here on the wall of our family room, beside my leather easy chair. It speaks to me daily, without words, telling me when the day is destined to be calm, or if a storm is coming, giving justification to my aching bones. It has become as much a part of our daily routine as the tick tock of the swinging pendulum on the grandfather clock in our entry hall, or the melody of the Winchester chime on the clock hanging on the family room wall. Sometimes I get so focused on my indoor tasks I forget to notice what is happening outside. But my barometer knows. I’ll be sitting here peacefully, clicking away on my laptop computer, and I’ll glance up to see the red water clean up to the tippy top of the arm on that glass contraption, and when the storm is imminent, it will sometimes drip right on out and drop down the curve and down into the drip bowl. Then I will get myself up and go to the window, pull up the blind, and sure enough, the sky will be darkening and storm clouds will be rolling in.
I do not know how a barometer works. I will likely Google it in a minute here. I know it has to do with air pressure, and vacuum spaces, but I couldn’t, at this point explain it you anyone. But my not understanding how it works does not keep me from trusting it.
There are many beautiful mysteries in my daily life: my heater almost instinctively knows when to turn itself on and off, I just push a little plastic button when the sun sets and there’s plenty of light in our house. I am daily reminded how blessed we are to have flushing toilets, right in our homes and other buildings. I haven’t studied how it works, but boy am I glad it does.
I also do not know what happens in the human body when cells divide for good or for bad, or how a broken bone heals, or how something that will take the life of one person will pass on through another.
And I do not know the great mysteries of the universe. I have a good guess about where we come from, and where we go after we die, but it’s not something I can scientifically prove to you. All I know is I have a sort of confidence in it, like I have in my barometer. And even though I don’t know how it works, or why it works, it works nonetheless. And I’m glad that Someone, even if it’s not me, has it figured out.
