I Want to Know Why

I’ve noticed that as I grow older, I grow happier. I’m more comfortable with myself every year, I understand myself and others more completely, and I feel more focused and thoughtful. How could I be anything but progressively happier?

I have also noticed that as I grow older, I grow more disappointed. I am a predominantly optimistic person. I tend to imagine the best in people and situations, which I think is generally a good thing. It can be bad, however, when a person or situation falls short of what I expected. So I say, as I grow older, I also grow more disappointed in the world and in the darker parts of human nature. When I hear of something dishonest or underhanded that’s been done, I feel a hole in the middle of my stomach, a slow ache that’s a blend of discomfort, sadness, and regret. Why would someone do such a thing? And why did I have to find out about it?

I think the slow ache has less to do with my disapproval of someone’s actions and more to do with my mourning the loss of some piece of innocence or optimism within me. I’ve seen something or heard something that I would have rather done without, and I feel a lack because of that knowledge.

I’ve never been sure if others have this reaction, or if they feel it as strongly as I do. (Although I’ve always suspected that there are people who feel it much more strongly than I do.) I do know that I don’t like it but that I find it very interesting.

For years, I’ve wanted to write a story about this feeling—a story about disappointment, about learning things in life that you wish you’d never learned, about the world falling short of expectations.

On a trip to Half Price Books* a few weeks ago, I happened across a Dover Thrift Edition of Sherwood Anderson’s The Egg and Other Stories. I read Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio several years ago and absolutely adored it, so I was quick to pick this up and even quicker to purchase it when I found that the original price was just $1.50 and I’d get it (at half-price) for $.75. A few days later, I read the first story in the collection—“I Want to Know Why”. I was floored—Sherwood Anderson, in stunning prose, had written about the ache in my stomach!

The story is about a young man who goes to see a horse race and, after a series of events, is disillusioned. The experience affects him deeply and he, too, feels a bit of his childhood, and a bit of his enjoyment for life, slip away. To read the full story (because there’s no way I can do it justice), visit this Web site: http://www.readbookonline.net/read/142/4136/ (Warning: The language used in this story is not very PC.)

Unfortunately, the story offers no solution to this problem, no balm to soothe the young man’s wound. And really I don’t think there is one, short of completely shutting out the world. And if a person shuts out the world, he may miss out on the stomachaches, but he also misses out on all of the good knowledge and positive experience. I guess when you open yourself up, a few bad eggs are bound to slip in, and it’s simply part of the human experience to deal with that and keep searching for the good to keep everything in balance.

I’d still like to write a story about this feeling. Anderson’s story didn’t discourage me (as it sometimes would have—ack! my story’s already been written) but instead convinced me that this is something that can be expressed on paper. I hadn’t been so sure before. The story is also reassuring in the sense that now I know others have felt as I sometimes do. It gives that feeling of solidarity that I so love, as only a good story can do.

(*Half Price Books is an excellent used bookstore in Cincinnati—and Dayton and Columbus I think?—that sells many paperbacks at half price and an assortment of trade paperbacks and hardbacks at a great discount. I’ve picked up a number of like-new hardback books for just $2. I love it!)