Doubt&Curiosity

It’s four in the morning, and of course it’s raining again, I’m too tired to listen to the radio or feed the dogs or boil water for my coffee, and I’m too tired to bang out a single sentence, even if I could think of one. I need to make room for a new obsession. It’s been curiosity and doubt, and the tie between them, for weeks. I tried to pry their lids off so I could look at their inner workings, but rehashing that would take forever and isn’t necessary. (Actually, I just wanted to use the phrase “pry their lids off,” because I love the word pry, and the image it conjures of those primitive can openers my mother had to use until they invented something better. I just bought the last one from Etsy. I will take a picture of it.)

I looked up “doubt” in my faithful American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, which doubles as an ersatz history of English speaking peoples. That would be us. The way some words have changed tell a story about who we are becoming. Our word “happy “used to mean chance, luck, neither good nor bad. Look at us now! In hot pursuit! Good god, What were our founding fathers thinking? You can pursue a good time, but you can’t pursue happiness. If you’re lucky, happiness might drift in through an open window, settle around your shoulders, then drift away again, and you’re left wondering what was that and which way did it go? I looked up doubt. The ancient meaning for Doubt was “Two.” Perfect. It implied a choice. Curiosity meant, “perceive, observe, with derivatives referring to the acts of valuing and honoring.”

It all started with the young woman sitting by my chair. I saw her out the corner of my eye. She was leaning over an infant. I could sense grace about her, the protective affection of her posture. I tried not to look directly at her, but turned my head a little, and she evaporated into the inanimate, the arm of my chair, the white table, light and shadow. But she had been there. There are some things visible only out the corner of an eye.

And there was my dog, Dave, God,how I loved him. He used to slide out of bed in the middle of the night and take a walk through the house. I used to think of it as an abbreviated version of the journey taken by the earliest peoples here, heading toward something they didn’t know yet, but would when they found it. I forget the name. I forget everything. I even forgot the name of one of my husbands but then I remembered it. The only name I haven‘t forgotten is the color newly painted on my living room walls. It’s called 007Pinata, Benjamin Moore paint. A friend came from the city to visit and I dragged her immediately into my living room, pointed at the wonderful deep red, “Look! It’s new! I like it so much,” I exclaimed, to which she replied, “ I hope you like it tomorrow,” which made me laugh, and it’s why I love her.

Oh. It’s called Vision Quest. I don’t think that was what Dave was doing. His was more of a midnight ramble for purposes that remained his own. But from time to time he would stand stock still, staring transfixed at a corner of the room, sometimes growling, sometimes not. Different rooms, different parts of different rooms, for minutes at a time. I don’t think he even blinked. And of course I stared where Dave stared and never saw a thing. But it’s funny, the longer we looked, and the longer I saw nothing, the more convinced l became that something was there.

I think there is another world around us all the time that we humans are not privy to, perhaps because we are unpredictable, but probably because it’s none of our business. Not yet, anyway. Let’s hope it’s something to look forward to. I don’t know. There’s nothing in my dictionary between hop and hora. Oh god, I forgot an ending.

Is there a tie between curiosity and doubt?

Guess what the answer is. DUH!

The answer is duh.