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Covering Distance
By memoirista | June 26, 2007
I’ve been stuck on “There’s no place like home,” particularly as they reflect the words spoken by Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. Certainly the beginning of WOZ is an easy metaphor for catastrophic shifts in one’s life. It’s only in fairy tales that one actually gets to go home; a fairy tale like WOZ offers no metaphor that suits the realization that one’s body will never be the same, one’s home will never be the same, and one may never be at home in the world again.
If you are completely puzzled by this entry, see my memoir-in-progress at (if I only) hadabrain.com
So it’s a difficult task, and a risky one, to pick up and use, thematically, a bunch of familiar tropes that don’t obviously apply, and would need a lot of work to be integrated into a memoir. Do I dare? Are there copyright issues with more than superficial and occasional allusions?
But then, there’s magic. I came back from my daughter’s the week before graduation, and got the shuttle home. The driver, for no apparent reason that I could see or know, got everyone loaded, and took his seat behind the wheel of the supersized van. He began to sing “We’re off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz . . !”
Sometimes there are signs and answers, and do we ever know what to do with them?
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