You've got your secrets, I've got mine

  • By Mike Dewey
  • July 17, 2011
  • 301
                        
Summary: Human nature is complicated and, as much as Mike Dewey would like to simplify the whole thing, it's beyond his reach. "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain." From "The Wizard of Oz" (1939) If you know someone's secrets, that gives you power. And, as human beings, we all have secrets. Pop culture is filled with references to that reality. "Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead." I think Benjamin Franklin wrote that. Maybe dubbed it from Shakespeare. "I've Got a Secret" and "To Tell the Truth" were popular on TV when I was a kid, as was "The Secret Storm," which was what was known as a soap opera, before the more politically correct aphorism "daytime drama" became de rigueur. The Beatles had a hit with "Do You Want to Know a Secret," which might have been their first smash with George Harrison singing lead. Secret became the brand name of a type of women's deodorant -- "Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman" -- and back in the early '90s, when "Twin Peaks" was all the rage, everyone knew that Laura Palmer had secrets. Nixon had them, too ... as does President Obama. As do you. And I. The word originally meant "apart" or "separate," and then came to mean something hidden. Which makes sense. It used to be a verb, too, as in to "secret" a person or thing of value; that is, to hide it from view. Or to protect. I suppose we've all had a Secret Santa, whose identity is hidden at the company party. And speaking of Christmas in July, its finally gotten cooler down here. For a while -- well, from about Easter -- every day was a new exercise in 90-plus and I think just about everyone lost weight. All you had to do was, say, water the flowers or walk to the mailbox or remove the groceries from the trunk and you'd be pouring sweat. The temptation was to crank the air-conditioning, but the secret was (and is) to throw open the windows and deal with it. AC is like crack cocaine. Addictive as all get out. And once you start getting used to it, that's the ball game. You don't even care what the bill looks like when it arrives like a hand grenade, sitting there all nice and gentle in the womb of the mailbox. Three hundred bucks, you think ... well, it could have been worse. And you wear a sweater around the house. Not natural. Not by a long shot. Perspiration is nature's way of cooling you down and, trust me, you'll get used to seeing the thermostat tell you that it's 86 degrees inside the house. That's when 81 starts to feel real cool, especially when the full moon's rising and you know it's going to be great outside, with the cooler on one side of your lawn chair, an ashtray on the other and the XM radio is delivering the last baseball game being played, well past midnight, when secrets are afoot. In my religion, they have something called Confession and it's meant to cleanse you of all your sins, if only temporarily. Truth be told, I haven't been inside a confessional since my freshman year at Notre Dame, nearly 40 years ago. I imagine that if I decided to revive the tradition, I'd be in that little curtained-off cubicle for a month, maybe more, since my memory is impeccable, especially when it concerns the mistakes I've made. I suppose it's the same way that even though ball teams I played on won way more often than we lost, it's those losses that stay with me, irrevocably branded on my brain, or what's left of it. Consider my second year of Pony League, the summer of '69, for example, the time of the moon landing and Teddy Kennedy's plunge off that bridge and Woodstock, the combustible time when Manson unleashed Helter Skelter and the Beatles, really, ceased to exist, though that was still a secret. My team won 18 straight, losing only the first and last games ... and yet, when pressed, all I can recall is details from those two failures. Sure, we won the title, but it's kind of like the way a broken tooth draws your tongue. You can't help but go there, probing and prying and worrying about what's been lost. Secrets. What's hidden and protected. What's apart and separate. What's all too human. "Bless me, Father," we were taught to say back there in elementary school, "for I have sinned." And then we'd have to confess our secrets. I remember talking with a friend of mine, maybe around the time of Kent State, and asking him, "Did you tell the priest everything?" He just laughed. "Of course not," he said. "I'll just add it to the list of lies next time we have to go there." But I think he missed the point. Secrets are not necessarily lies. Consider the Wizard of Oz. After Dorothy and her misfits go all ballistic and accuse him of being a humbug and a very bad man ... he says, simply and truthfully, "No, my dear, I'm a very good man ... I'm just a very bad wizard." He has, to quote Carly Simon in the title track from her 1972 album, no secrets. And, of course, you might remember that the mega-hit from that LP was a track called "You're So Vain" and that, for decades, listeners wondered and asked and begged for the identity of the man who, in the lyric, walked into the party like he was walking onto a yacht. What a great lyrical image that is. Is it Mick Jagger? Warren Beatty? Kris Kristofferson? Cat Stevens? James Taylor? But, like a good secret-keeper, Carly's never told. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I suppose that depends on whether or not you consider secrets to be public property. Would you want yours revealed, analyzed, destroyed? I thought not. Mike Dewey can be emailed at CarolinamikeD@aol.com or snail-mailed at 6211 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560.


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