The first time I understood that a door could be both an invitation and a warning, I was old enough to reach the knob and young enough to believe every room held a secret. Most of the rooms held laundry. I remained hopeful anyway. Hope, I would later learn, is my most durable and least supervised quality.
At home, doors had meanings. The front door welcomed company, provided someone had straightened the cushions first. The kitchen door admitted muddy shoes only in the event of fire or flood. A closed bedroom door meant privacy, unless privacy was a privilege currently under review by the governing authorities. It usually was. I respected these distinctions approximately.
Beyond our house lay a neighborhood full of other lives. Teenagers disappeared into cars with radios loud enough to announce their ambitions to the county. I wondered whether every family had the same rules, or whether ours had received the deluxe edition with footnotes.
There was comfort in belonging. I knew the voices, the road to church, the sound of supper being made. I knew which jokes earned a smile and which subjects turned a conversation cold enough to store meat in. A child learns the weather inside a house long before he understands the weather outside it. But comfort can start to feel like confinement when the world past the porch looks that big.
The radio was my first passport. At night I turned the dial and listened to stations fade in and out like distant relatives at a reunion. Sometimes a voice came through the static from a city I had never seen. Sometimes a guitar burst into the room with such confidence that I sat perfectly still, as if it might leave if I moved. Somebody out there had figured out how to turn private feelings into public sound. I wanted to learn that trick. I am still working on the private feelings part.
Around this time I launched my first rebellion. It was not impressive. Nobody called the police. That would come much later and with considerably more paperwork. No windows were broken. I simply discovered that an instruction, however reasonable, became less attractive the moment somebody gave it to me.
This was not a philosophy. It was a reflex, like a knee under a rubber hammer, only louder and with worse posture.
I was reaching the age when a boy discovers that adults can be wrong and immediately concludes that he must therefore be right. It is a thrilling discovery. It lasts right up until experience begins filing its objections, which in my case took several decades, as experience was apparently backlogged.
I wanted reasons. Sometimes I got them. Sometimes I got the ancient answer that has survived empires, wars, and every kitchen table in recorded history: because I said so. I found this legally insufficient. I was, in my own mind, a constitutional scholar of the household. Nobody else had read my constitution, mostly because I had not written it down.
Music offered an alternative form of government. A drummer set the tempo, but everybody still had a voice. A guitarist could wander off the melody and come back carrying something beautiful. Even silence had a job. I was beginning to think freedom might work like that. Naturally, I overlooked the thousands of hours of practice it takes to make a band sound free. I always skip the boring chapters and then act surprised by the ending.
The decisive battle took place on an ordinary evening. I had a record playing louder than anyone in the house had requested. A voice called from another room: turn it down. I lowered the volume just enough to claim compliance and not one notch more. This is a technique I would later refine into an entire personality.
The voice returned. This time I turned the knob all the way until the music disappeared. The sudden quiet did not feel like obedience. It felt like surrender at Appomattox, minus the dignity.
I remember the heat of embarrassment better than the words. I had wanted to be treated like someone capable of making decisions. Instead I had made one small decision badly and insisted it was a matter of principle. The irony escaped me entirely. It would wait for me, patiently, for years, like a process server.
Later I sat alone and listened to the house. Footsteps. Water running. A chair scraping the floor. I could have walked to the kitchen and apologized. Nothing terrible had happened. The distance was maybe twenty feet. But pride has a remarkable ability to turn a hallway into a continent. I stayed put. I have crossed actual continents with less effort than it takes me to cross a hallway and say I was wrong.
For years I replayed variations of that evening. The subjects got bigger. The arguments got more sophisticated. I learned to speak with confidence, defend a position, and locate the weak spot in another person’s reasoning. I was slower to learn when a discussion had stopped being useful. There is a particular loneliness in winning an argument nobody wanted to have. I have won a great many of them. My trophy room is very quiet.
I do not mean obedience is always wisdom. Some rules deserve examination. Some authorities are wrong. Peace bought with silence can become its own kind of prison, and I have done some research in the field of prisons. Still, not every instruction is oppression. Sometimes a person asks you to turn the music down because they are tired. It took me an astonishing amount of time to consider that possibility.
At church I kept hearing about the narrow gate. I pictured an actual gate, possibly with a squeaky hinge and a man in a folding chair checking names. I wondered how anyone could pick the right road without walking a little way down a few wrong ones. My questions were sincere. My timing was frequently disastrous. I wanted both worlds, the porch light and the road past it.
Morning came, as it does. Breakfast appeared. Nobody declared victory and nobody issued a pardon. I had learned almost nothing, which did not stop me from feeling older. One question did stick around. What if freedom meant more than refusing to be told what to do? What if it meant choosing the right thing when nobody could make you?
I could not answer it yet. I put the record back in its sleeve, set it on the shelf, and for once, left the volume alone.
“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”
Proverbs 16:18 (KJV)
— JC
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