Understanding and Apples

As a small child we were, and I am sure this applies to us all, told by our parents that we ‘should understand when we are older’.

Things that were mysterious then should, magically, reveal themselves to us at some key point in our lives.

We wait, apprehensively, for that dazzling moment when all will be revealed.

Nothing.

There was never a moment of radiance in my life when the puzzlement I felt as a small person was erased by some all-embracing burst of knowledge.

In a small lane near our house there lived an elderly lady. She was a delight. One day, as we were coming up from the school, she was leaning on her gate watching us approach.

When we drew level she sighed deeply and, to no specific person, said gently, “Nobody goes scrumping any more. How times have changed.”

She stood up as straight as she could get and went into her house.

I should explain. ‘Scrumping’ is a word that denotes the collecting of apples (specifically wind-blown/fallen) and making off with them under one’s woolly or hat; these apples collected illicitly, of course, from another person’s orchard.

The lady had a few trees in her back garden.

That evening some of us crept through her hedge, I remember lots of Fuschias, and stole a few bags of apples from her trees. From the corner of my eye I thought I saw a face with a smile on it at the kitchen window but that could have been my imagination.

This story is only setting the scene—it has no relevance to the main theme. I thought I should explain that in case you were getting a little mystified by my digression!

Some time later, still a youngster, I asked her if she was an ‘old maid’. At that stage in my life I had no idea what it meant but had heard the term used by senior members of the family.

“No, Dear,” she informed me quite proudly, “I’m a spinster.”

I thanked her for the information and moved on. Physically and in life.

It was many years before I realised what it was that she meant by that. Now I, too, can smile.

The difference between ‘spinster’ and ‘old maid’ is one of those secret things that small people are not to know. It will be revealed to them later.

I am now tottering on the edge of the grave, as they say, with one foot (potentially) in it.

Still there are things that are unknown to me but that were, clearly, understood by those around me when I was small.

No doubt you have the same thoughts. Perhaps it is that you, too, have deep mysteries lurking in the depths of your mind that await the coming of ‘The Light’.

Of course, there are some mysteries that are resolved. But all these answers are found one at a time; little dribbles of information that creep into our heads at some, now forgotten, point in our past.

I don’t want that. I am too old to wait any more.

I want a blinding flash of some non-theological inspiration that tells me everything I ever wanted to know about life and ‘what people meant when they said...’!

I want to know why a dog will stick its head out of a car window at thirty miles and hour and get obvious delight from it but it gets angry when you blow in its face.