The Suspension of Disbelief
The Suspension of Disbelief
The summer I was ten, my parents rented a house on Cape Cod for two weeks. For the first week of our stay, my two older cousins, whom I never saw because they lived in Colorado, stayed with us. I spent the week enjoying their company, and as an only child, it was a rare glimpse into what life with a sibling might be like. Having the two of them to myself rather than having to share them with the rest of our extended family was a treat, and because they were older, I felt older myself when I was around them. My parents were more fun and less strict than usual about issues like bedtime and eating a perfectly well-balanced meal. The Cape brought out the best in my parents and my cousins brought out the best in me. I enjoyed every minute of their company, whether it was on a whale watch boat or around the kitchen table watching them beat me at Pictionary.
When the week ended and they had to leave, I was as devastated as a ten-year-old can be about such things. I walked around the rental house with my camera, taking pictures of the spaces my cousins had inhabited for the past week. I planned to caption them with lines such as “This looks like a normal chair, right? Wrong! Molly’s not sitting in it!” and “This is the room I used to share with Norah, but now I have to sleep alone.” (I didn’t know it then, but I would never actually caption those pictures. As it turned out, I took a whole roll of pictures with no film in the camera.) I cried the day after they left and moped around the house, not wanting to do anything. It didn’t feel like a vacation anymore, even though we were in someone else’s house that happened to be a ten-minute drive from the ocean.
My mother’s friend, Jeanette, came to visit us for two days after Molly and Norah’s departure. One afternoon, the three of us went for a walk on the beach. I’ve never particularly enjoyed walking without a destination, so I don’t know how they got me to go along with them, but I’m pretty sure it was something along the lines of my mother saying, “You’ve got to get out of the house and start enjoying yourself. Come on, we’re going for a walk on the beach.” I was still at the delicate age at which my mother could actually make me do things - a few years later and she would have been powerless against my will.
“Hey, look! A penny!” I spotted it lying in the sand, under about half an inch of water.
“It’s a lucky penny,” Jeanette said. “It’s heads-up. If you make a wish on it, it’ll come true.”
I grabbed for it, instantly knowing what I would wish for. It didn’t even occur to me to be skeptical; I wanted this wish to come true so bad that I couldn’t afford to waste any time debating the merits of superstition. As soon as my mother and Jeanette were out of earshot, I cupped the penny in my hands and whispered to it, “I wish Norah and Molly could come back.”
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew the chances of this wish coming true were slim to none. On the other hand, this was also the summer that I tried my hand at praying every night before I went to sleep. There was a constellation of glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling above my bed in the rental house, and at night, when all of the lights were off, I could imagine that I was staring up at the sky and that God was up there somewhere. My “prayers,” always murmured with my hands held together the way I’d seen people praying in movies, usually went something like, “God, I know you’re up there and I love you. Please let [insert whimsical ten-year-old wish here] happen. You’re wonderful, God. I know you’re there. I know you can see me…can you see me? I think about you all the time. I really, really hope [insert either wish from earlier on or a new wish] happens. Amen.”
I waited the rest of the week, but Norah and Molly never magically appeared. I couldn’t help feeling that I’d been cheated somehow or that Jeanette had lied to me. I held onto the penny, but as far as I was concerned it was useless.
That was twelve years ago, and even though I know that no penny-wish will ever come true, I still make a wish every time I find one. I only wish on the heads-up ones, though. I have to draw the line somewhere. But still, I wish on eyelashes. I wish on stars if I remember. I wish on birthday candles and I wish on wishbones. I’ve even forwarded a few chain letters that have promised me that my greatest wish will come true if I send the letter to fifteen people. Not only that, but I always make a conscious effort to say “rabbit rabbit” on the first day of a new month and I know better than to say “Macbeth” in a theater unless I’m portraying the likeness of the Lady herself.
I’m not superstitious. I know that none of that stuff ever works. And even if a wish does happen to come true, I know it can most likely be attributed to other factors. I know there’s no such thing as curses and I know that pennies and eyelashes are not supernatural beacons of magic. I even know now that there isn’t a God. So if I know all of those things, why am I still so adamant about making wishes? Why do I still sometimes get the urge to forward chain letters? What is that inclination all of us have to do things that the logical side of us knows don’t have any bearing on what happens in our lives?
Everyone needs to believe in something. We all need something to hang onto, something that makes sense. If we admitted that we were in control of everything, we’d constantly blame ourselves for everything that went wrong. If, on the other hand, we said there was never any reason for anything to happen, we wouldn’t know what to think. It’s human nature to need to make sense of things. Some people decide that things happen because God made them happen: God had a greater plan for the people of New Orleans when He sent Hurricane Katrina; when a loved one dies, he or she goes to God because He needs that person in heaven.
Others decide that things happen for a reason, but not because God said so. It may not have seemed like it at the time, but it was a good thing the relationship between me and the girl I thought would be my girlfriend didn’t work out, because now I can meet someone even better. No matter what we believe, no matter what we don’t believe, we all have that anchor somewhere, or else life is absolute, intolerable chaos.
I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in fate or destiny, not really. I don’t believe wholeheartedly in magic and in wishes coming true. But what fun would life be if I couldn’t find that mystery somewhere? What if, one day, all those wishes do come true? Maybe one day, I’ll find myself back in Cape Cod with Norah and Molly. Maybe, when I wished on that penny all those years ago, I just wasn’t specific enough. After all, I didn’t say, “I wish Norah and Molly could come back to this house in Cape Cod tomorrow, July 22, 1998.”
When we believe in something, whether it’s as huge as believing that you’ll overcome your stage-three cancer or as mundane as believing that you have to throw salt over your shoulder every time you spill some, we have hope. Even when you’re throwing that salt over your shoulder, you’re hoping that you’ll have good luck and that this act you’ve performed will help it come about. Hope is one of the only things that all people, regardless of all other circumstances, can agree on: when we don’t have hope, there’s no point in living. When we’re hopeless, we’re barely recognizable.
I know that blowing an eyelash off of my fingertip won’t help me get into graduate school or find a girlfriend any faster. But every time I do it, I feel a little more hopeful. It helps me sustain the belief that what I want will happen eventually, and that hope - that momentary suspension of disbelief - makes me smile even on the gloomiest of days.
--October 2010
The summer I was ten, my parents rented a house on Cape Cod for two weeks. For the first week of our stay, my two older cousins, whom I never saw because they lived in Colorado, stayed with us. I spent the week enjoying their company, and as an only child, it was a rare glimpse into what life with a sibling might be like. Having the two of them to myself rather than having to share them with the rest of our extended family was a treat, and because they were older, I felt older myself when I was around them. My parents were more fun and less strict than usual about issues like bedtime and eating a perfectly well-balanced meal. The Cape brought out the best in my parents and my cousins brought out the best in me. I enjoyed every minute of their company, whether it was on a whale watch boat or around the kitchen table watching them beat me at Pictionary.
When the week ended and they had to leave, I was as devastated as a ten-year-old can be about such things. I walked around the rental house with my camera, taking pictures of the spaces my cousins had inhabited for the past week. I planned to caption them with lines such as “This looks like a normal chair, right? Wrong! Molly’s not sitting in it!” and “This is the room I used to share with Norah, but now I have to sleep alone.” (I didn’t know it then, but I would never actually caption those pictures. As it turned out, I took a whole roll of pictures with no film in the camera.) I cried the day after they left and moped around the house, not wanting to do anything. It didn’t feel like a vacation anymore, even though we were in someone else’s house that happened to be a ten-minute drive from the ocean.
My mother’s friend, Jeanette, came to visit us for two days after Molly and Norah’s departure. One afternoon, the three of us went for a walk on the beach. I’ve never particularly enjoyed walking without a destination, so I don’t know how they got me to go along with them, but I’m pretty sure it was something along the lines of my mother saying, “You’ve got to get out of the house and start enjoying yourself. Come on, we’re going for a walk on the beach.” I was still at the delicate age at which my mother could actually make me do things - a few years later and she would have been powerless against my will.
“Hey, look! A penny!” I spotted it lying in the sand, under about half an inch of water.
“It’s a lucky penny,” Jeanette said. “It’s heads-up. If you make a wish on it, it’ll come true.”
I grabbed for it, instantly knowing what I would wish for. It didn’t even occur to me to be skeptical; I wanted this wish to come true so bad that I couldn’t afford to waste any time debating the merits of superstition. As soon as my mother and Jeanette were out of earshot, I cupped the penny in my hands and whispered to it, “I wish Norah and Molly could come back.”
Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew the chances of this wish coming true were slim to none. On the other hand, this was also the summer that I tried my hand at praying every night before I went to sleep. There was a constellation of glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to the ceiling above my bed in the rental house, and at night, when all of the lights were off, I could imagine that I was staring up at the sky and that God was up there somewhere. My “prayers,” always murmured with my hands held together the way I’d seen people praying in movies, usually went something like, “God, I know you’re up there and I love you. Please let [insert whimsical ten-year-old wish here] happen. You’re wonderful, God. I know you’re there. I know you can see me…can you see me? I think about you all the time. I really, really hope [insert either wish from earlier on or a new wish] happens. Amen.”
I waited the rest of the week, but Norah and Molly never magically appeared. I couldn’t help feeling that I’d been cheated somehow or that Jeanette had lied to me. I held onto the penny, but as far as I was concerned it was useless.
That was twelve years ago, and even though I know that no penny-wish will ever come true, I still make a wish every time I find one. I only wish on the heads-up ones, though. I have to draw the line somewhere. But still, I wish on eyelashes. I wish on stars if I remember. I wish on birthday candles and I wish on wishbones. I’ve even forwarded a few chain letters that have promised me that my greatest wish will come true if I send the letter to fifteen people. Not only that, but I always make a conscious effort to say “rabbit rabbit” on the first day of a new month and I know better than to say “Macbeth” in a theater unless I’m portraying the likeness of the Lady herself.
I’m not superstitious. I know that none of that stuff ever works. And even if a wish does happen to come true, I know it can most likely be attributed to other factors. I know there’s no such thing as curses and I know that pennies and eyelashes are not supernatural beacons of magic. I even know now that there isn’t a God. So if I know all of those things, why am I still so adamant about making wishes? Why do I still sometimes get the urge to forward chain letters? What is that inclination all of us have to do things that the logical side of us knows don’t have any bearing on what happens in our lives?
Everyone needs to believe in something. We all need something to hang onto, something that makes sense. If we admitted that we were in control of everything, we’d constantly blame ourselves for everything that went wrong. If, on the other hand, we said there was never any reason for anything to happen, we wouldn’t know what to think. It’s human nature to need to make sense of things. Some people decide that things happen because God made them happen: God had a greater plan for the people of New Orleans when He sent Hurricane Katrina; when a loved one dies, he or she goes to God because He needs that person in heaven.
Others decide that things happen for a reason, but not because God said so. It may not have seemed like it at the time, but it was a good thing the relationship between me and the girl I thought would be my girlfriend didn’t work out, because now I can meet someone even better. No matter what we believe, no matter what we don’t believe, we all have that anchor somewhere, or else life is absolute, intolerable chaos.
I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in fate or destiny, not really. I don’t believe wholeheartedly in magic and in wishes coming true. But what fun would life be if I couldn’t find that mystery somewhere? What if, one day, all those wishes do come true? Maybe one day, I’ll find myself back in Cape Cod with Norah and Molly. Maybe, when I wished on that penny all those years ago, I just wasn’t specific enough. After all, I didn’t say, “I wish Norah and Molly could come back to this house in Cape Cod tomorrow, July 22, 1998.”
When we believe in something, whether it’s as huge as believing that you’ll overcome your stage-three cancer or as mundane as believing that you have to throw salt over your shoulder every time you spill some, we have hope. Even when you’re throwing that salt over your shoulder, you’re hoping that you’ll have good luck and that this act you’ve performed will help it come about. Hope is one of the only things that all people, regardless of all other circumstances, can agree on: when we don’t have hope, there’s no point in living. When we’re hopeless, we’re barely recognizable.
I know that blowing an eyelash off of my fingertip won’t help me get into graduate school or find a girlfriend any faster. But every time I do it, I feel a little more hopeful. It helps me sustain the belief that what I want will happen eventually, and that hope - that momentary suspension of disbelief - makes me smile even on the gloomiest of days.
--October 2010