Growing up, one of the most convenient pranks for me to pull on people was pretending that Chris Van Allsburg (the famous author and illustrator of picture books like Jumanji) was my father. It’s a plausible set-up: he’s from the area, we have the same last name, and I even look a little bit like the kid from the animated movie. It wasn’t a very funny joke on its own, but it could sometimes lead to humor.
When I actually met Chris during my sophomore year at Calvin, it was a rather surreal experience. My interim class was on a trip around New England, and we had been invited to his home for dinner. After explaining my go-to prank and apologizing for claiming he was my dad all these years, I talked with him about his career in sculpture before he got into picture books.
Among the sculptures he’d made and displayed throughout his home, I noticed he had a bell hanging from his mantle, just like the bell in his book The Polar Express. In the book, if you have not read it, the character receives a bell from Santa’s sleigh, the ringing of which can only be heard by those “who believe.” I didn’t ask him about it, because it seemed like a cute reference that would be ruined by mentioning.
I’ll come back to this image, because for some reason it stuck with me.
Six months before I saw the bell, I had noticed my ears were ringing.
I say that I “noticed” it, but that moment was really just the culmination of a slowly dawning awareness. There were days the ringing seemed more present, and days it hardly crossed my mind. On the good days, I started to believe it was some auditory hallucination, or somehow I had been making it up.
At first I wrote it off as some odd quirk of that particular day or maybe some water in my ears from swimming. But it kept getting louder. To the point where it was distracting me at work, where sitting in silence became unbearable.
Through some research of my own, I discovered that the ringing was an uncommon side effect of a medication I was taking. Although I stopped taking it within days, my doctor informed me that the ringing would not go away. The damage was permanent.
Every day since then, when I wake, the first thing I experience is that ringing.
When I’m at work, I have to listen to music in order to write efficiently, because if I try to write in silence, the ringing just starts bouncing within my head. It’s relentless and torturous, like an itch that I cannot scratch or a speck scraping inside my eyelid.
And as I looked at that bell, about a half year after the ringing had started, the irony of the image stuck in my mind. In The Polar Express, the ability to hear the bell ringing was about still believing in the magic of Christmas.
In some ways it feels like the ringing in my ears has had a similarly symbolic meaning—like a physical manifestation of the doubt, unease, and depression that has marked the last few years for me.
I’m not sure what to make of this all. The two things—the bell and the ringing—don’t really connect, but for whatever reason, they’re linked in my head.
On one hand, I’ve got this childish, naive concept of “believing in Christmas” and on the other, I’ve got this emblematic expression of my doubt.
I think that I connect them because the holidays always bring both these feelings out in me. Hope and uncertainty. Feeling completely at home and yet somehow out of place. Like listening for the bell and trying to block out the ringing of my ears..
Being around family seems to bring up the unanswered questions I have about my life, about what I believe, and about who I really am. And it never really resolves them.
A song I like includes the line: “when people change… they gain a peace, but they lose one too.” Deep down I hope this tension I feel between belief and doubt is just some price I’m paying to move to some new peace, but for now, I will wake and give thanks for the small peace I have found within it.
Studied psychology and writing. Film junkie, amateur photographer. (’16)
