WRITING ON THE INSIDE OF MY EYELIDS
Stories
The Gift
This tender story was sent to me as a Christmas gift when Patrick, aged twenty-two, first went to Toronto. He not only wrote the tale but bound it on hand-made paper in a little gold cloth-covered book. I read it aloud at a Mass in memory of him.
The Gift
A long time ago, in ancient Japan, lived a man in a house overlooking the sea. And while he was not famous, he had earned no small reputation for his quiet skill in the fashioning and flying of paper kites. He built them very slowly, with a dogged persistence, and the greatest attention to the smallest detail. He made them in all shapes and all sizes and all colors, and the ones he liked the best were those brightest and most bold.
He could never explain why he worked in this art form for he was often unhappy with what his hands had produced. People called his kites beautiful, which only made him feel hollow, for all he could see when he looked were their flaws. Some kites he sold for money, and felt like a robber, for his heart told him they were better given away. He could never bring to words the feelings that ran through him, but he loved his kites for the laughter they pulled out of children’s cries.
One day a memory jarred him, and left him with a problem, unfortunately one that he could not easily solve. A woman he had known for a very long time, and too short a time, and never long enough, would soon be celebrating the day that she was born. And he tried to decide for a very long time on a gift that he could give her that would be both special and rare. He knew those things she wanted, and he knew those things she liked, but sadly, he was a poor man and could ill afford those things.
As he thought on that awhile, he felt a growing dissatisfaction, because he thought such gifts could never bring meaning to what a birthday is. And when he thought he had an answer to that single simple question, he knelt down at his workbench and began to move his hands.
He took his best rice paper, and his finest bamboo and balsa and slowly and steadily he began to build a bird. He built it large and beautiful, in the shape of a Great Heron, and the wings he stretched wide open as if it reached to climb the skies. Seven days it took to build the kite: a week of long hours and tired morning eyes. When it was finished he sat back and stared at it, then took out his paints and his gift came alive.
On each paper feather, he painted a picture, and each picture was a frozen moment in time. These were all his memories of her, and were things that would not leave him, and each moment spent with her was a memory added more.
Not content to paint mere pictures, he infused each with feeling, and that gave each moment something that was different from the rest. In some pictures reigned confusion, where lacked any understanding, but these scenes were often balanced when minds met close; eye to eye.
The paintings were completed on the morning of her birthday, and he rested his wet brushes after a full night in his hands. Then he ate that morning’s breakfast and he rested for a moment before walking into the village to find the lady on her day.
But he could find her person nowhere, though he asked all of the people. And some claimed they’d seen her walking, though none were sure which way.
He traveled home then sadly, not sorry for wasted labors, but unhappy that he couldn’t pay tribute in the triumph of her day. As he reached his weathered threshold, he saw the front door standing open, and he entered in deep quiet, thinking someone was inside. But nothing much was different, and nothing had been touched, until he entered his workroom and he saw the kite was gone.
Then he heard a happy laughter, and he looked onto his balcony, and there was the lady, playing the kite out on the breeze.
She looked up then and saw him, and she looked at him and smiled, they she looked toward the kite as it struggled toward the sky. And there seemed in her a sadness that a thing of such great beauty should be held by any person, or chained by earth-bound string. So she looked at him in silence and he looked at her and smiled and gently she released it and it waltzed into the sky.
Then he joined her on the balcony and they watched the Heron in silence and it danced above the ocean and disappeared inside the clouds.
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