A New Shared Economy for Appalachia: An Economy Built Upon Environmental Restoration, Carbon Sequestration, Renewable Energy and Ecological Design by John Todd at the University of Vermont. Todd has been thinking about and inventing new systems for many years, notably through Ocean Arks, http://www.oceanarks.org/–ecological resources for the 21st century. For example, natural water treatment ought to be primary consideration in dealing with the Great Bay’s pollution problem. Projects in the Northeast that use plants and landscapes to purity water can be done, and have been done, by John Todd and associates.

It seems something like sex, this question of history. I elect to wait until he asks me something about it.

Some weeks after that train ride, I find Art Spiegelman’s book Maus at the library and bring it home. Spiegelman’s artistry is not lost on my son. He grabs it eagerly and begins to read.

Not ten panels into the book, Spiegelman has raised the issue of French anti-Semitism, the Dreyfus affair, the Nazi collaborationists. Gabe skips those hard words, and I offer no explanation. After dinner, he urges me to read Maus to him—I’m so much faster a reader. “It’s a very sad story,” I warn him, “it’s awful.”

The beginning is bucolic, funny. Spiegelman’s father Vladek is so cheap is rations wooden matches, but leaves the gas burner on all day, because someone else pays for it. He has the dogged, powerful self-interest of the survivor. His scrimping old man ways are laughable. Soon, however, the story shifts back to Poland, 1944, to Vladek’s capture and arrival at Auschwitz.

“Does this frighten you?” I ask Gabe.

“No. Keep reading.”

The cartoon figures are naked now, with the face of mice and the bodies of men, and the camp guards, German cats and Polish pigs, are yelling the mice, who shiver, barefoot and shirtless, in the snow.

“Is this going to give you nightmares?”

“No.”

I read on. Spiegelman’s gritty black and white cartoons now include smokestacks which Vladek grimly acknowledges.

I  ask, “Do you know that this is about?” We have only recently, the past Veteran’s Day, discussed the two world wars. I have probably even mentioned Hitler as the ruler of Germany, but have never spoken of his treatment of the Jews.

“Yes,” Gabe says. “The Germans killed the Jews.” He is matter of fact.

It is like sex, revealed to him some years ago by an older girl. Someone else has already told him about this history. Colin, a nine-year-old neighbor child whose favorite games involve lining the younger children up in order to shout orders and blow his whistle at them, has broken to Gabe the truth that seemed too dangerous for me to tell him.

Gabe has wept for hours about the injustice of Colin’s grandmother putting an inconvenient cat to sleep, and he has, as a younger boy, poured cup after cup of water down an anthill for the sheer thrill of the pandemonium it creates, but he has just begun, barely, to put the two together, the pity of an individual’s death and wholesale, unthinkable terror of mass murder.

He is too young to know he has lost his innocence about history. No longer a technical virgin in the human story, he has still has plenty more to learn. A more serious parent than I could start in: Hiroshima. Stalin. Pol Pot. Where would they end?

Some days after our reading of Maus, I hear him ordering his younger brother around in the language of a camp guard.

I keep writing history as though somehow this may be a story that goes somewhere, that shows some progress.

I wanted, like mothers before me, to protect my child from something unpleasant, in this case, one particular nightmare of twentieth century history. But history, like sex, will break through.

Dilemma. Reach in and save the slug amid the lemon rinds and eggshells? Kill it quickly? I turned away, haunted by my reluctance to rescue it as I knew I should. Once things fall into the disposal they seem lost in a dark wet underground misted over with decaying soap bubbles. What would it do there? Could it slip somehow through the teeth and wash into the river?

I was wrong to leave it there, but I did, neither killing it promptly nor padding around amid the blades for it. I left for work. I told no one.  That evening, as we were preparing dinner, Ellen threw a squeezed-out lemon into the disposal and flipped the switch on. Murderess.

I was sensitive to the issue because earlier this summer I had, hastily and thoughtlessly, given away a huge antique dresser that had belonged to my father. The dresser was too big for me and seriously in the way, and I offered it to a young man who does fix-it-up work for us and had just gotten divorced, leaving all his furniture behind. Foolishly, I revealed to one of my sisters that I had given the dresser away, with the result that she became very angry with me and after a few testy emails, cut off our relationship.Then my other sister wrote to ask, did I still have my father’s bicycle, which I had given away years before because it was too big for me. I had the sense that my sisters were trying to stay in contact with our father through things he had owned and if so, I knew where they were coming from.

It’s hard to want things you can no longer have. My brother, for example, owns a large house on Nantucket which, when I was married, I was invited to regularly, for weeks at a time. Thirteen years have passed since I have been there. I have never been invited back, although my sons are, regularly. I broke something in them in breaking my own life, I guess. So here we are, my sisters wanting scraps of my father that I no longer possess and me wanting to be restored to a space I once loved.

Friends, someone once said, are God’s apology for families.

After a while, I set some rules for myself. Nature started to emerge as a theme.

China, elephants, ducks, fire. I never figured out what was bothering me.

The image is by Wolfgangbeyer, wikimedia commons