Between them both, my parents had never read an entire book. My grandmother was different; she’d read hundreds. Not a night passed that she didn’t read to me, mostly stories tailored to my age, illustrated books, the classics like Where the Wild Things Are, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Dr. Seuss. My absolute favorite was Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, a book about the friendship of a little boy and a tree. The tree provides the boy with everything he needs throughout the course of his life, even at a great cost to herself—a shade to sit in, apples to eat, branches to build a house with, and finally, the tree allows the boy to cut her down to build a canoe, leaving her as nothing more than a stump. And when the boy returns years later as an old man, the tree tells him she has nothing left to give, and the old man says all he wants is a quiet place to sit and rest while he waits for death. I bawled every time, could never understand the sacrifice, why the tree would continually give herself to the boy when the boy used her for his own selfish means.
“She loved the boy,” my grandmother said. “So much that she was willing to give herself almost entirely to please him.”
I sat Indian style at her feet, looking up through tearful eyes. “But why would the boy do that to the tree, Grandma?”
She sighed. “Sometimes people do things that are harmful to others without meaning to. And sometimes people are so blinded by love or loneliness that they don’t realize how much of themselves they’re losing in the process, like the tree.”
I didn’t find that a satisfactory answer. I was too young to see the correlation she was making with my mother’s marriage to my father, or perhaps even her own relationship with them.
“And besides,” she went on, “it has a happy ending, right? After all, they do end up together.”
“But that tree must have been so lonely her whole life.”
“She probably was,” she said with sadness.
The story has always stuck with me. Is loneliness the worst thing in the world? When I was most alone, I thought I enjoyed the solitude. But when I look back at those times now, it’s hard to see past the intense feelings of isolation and sadness. Is it possible they existed then without my realizing it, or has the passing of time added sentiments of sorrow during an otherwise happy time? Are our memories sometimes altered without our knowing it? Or do they instead tell the truth about a time we lied so adamantly to ourselves that we then believed it?