The Back

I was driving my van the other day, through worries and back alleys-which is quite frequent nowadays-when I took a wrong turn. And while this is generally an annoyance to me, the extent of which results in the shaking of my fist or a few choice words escaping my lips, this incidence was quite different. For I ended up behind a strip mall, or I should say the back of each store front. The empty vacuous rear of dumpsters, chipped paint and merchants' secrets spilled over onto the narrow road chiefly frequented by semis and solitude. I spotted two or three employees of some establishment huddled together like an embarrassment, smoking their sticks and chattering. All the while I thought to myself how potent a contrast that exists between the delightfully decorative store fronts, with their inviting charm and welcoming décor, and their back doors. For I thought why not create an attractive presence throughout? Why must the unseen, save those unimportant to the mousetrap businesses, be ignored?

But perhaps I was too hard on the commercial real estate and its blatant superficiality. For anyone who has moved furniture will tell you what lies behind couches, entertainment centers and underneath beds. And it’s certainly not something one would be prepared to accentuate with vases or domestic accouterments. The fact is, we rarely sweep under our rugs or behind dressers. Guests who come to our homes never see what looks perfectly good from the front.

And aren't we glad our spouses or boyfriends and girlfriends were not introduced to our backsides. I mean to say barring other physical considerations, it is our smiles, our general countenances, our faces which drew them to us in the first place. Author G. K. Chesterton once commented that much of the grotesque ugliness we see in the world is merely what we see of its hindmost and not its van ward; where the product of a tidied front is evident. For there can not be clean laundry without dirty water poured out. Nor can there be cut diamonds without messy diamond dust spread somewhere. Our fronts, which we spend so much time polishing and refining, always produce dingy backsides. The secret is in knowing which, and appropriately associating with, what we cherish as our own front and what we throw away in the back.