A few weeks ago, I was holding up the bar at the Charles Village Pub with a couple of friends. I was in a pretty foul mood because I'd just lost a very close friend.
I don't mention these sorts of things to everyone, because, well, everyone doesn't need to know. I'd known the gentleman in question for nearly fifteen years and his death by autobahn--ironically, in a place where I'd like very much to live--was a very poor form of a gift coming as it did three days before my own birthday, particularly as he'd planned to be back Stateside within a couple of weeks.
Anyway, that night at the Pub, our group was doing some free-writes. (This is one thing that English teachers do when they drink together. Don't try it at home.) Friend and colleague Derrick assigned me the topic of "loss," knowing that it was particularly applicable. I came up with this:
When I was eight years old I got a little wind-up toy frog as a stocking stuffer on Christmas morning. A week later, I lost it because I insisted upon taking it with me when we went to lunch in the tearoom at Hutzler's.
When the Hutzler's building was redeveloped, I became briefly obsessed--a quarter-century later--with the idea that my little toy frog might still be inside the cavernous and now ruined store.
That frog has turned into the "beau ideal," the beautiful ideal. Its cheap tin works--probably the least materially impressive present I'd received that or any other Christmas--have turned into a totem. Do they still live on, somewhere in that huge Art Deco palace of commerce? The small thing about which I'd never begun to care--yet it turns into a keystone of memory.
The loss of a living being--my beloved old cat, the handsome ex-beau--is easily put away. The cat's ashes sit in a little cherrywood box on my mantel and the beau rests forever somewhere in Seattle, a city which I am annoyed that I will now, for decency's sake, have to visit.
The toy frog, though probably rusted and dented, may still live on in a forgotten corner of a forgotten department store in an all-but-forgottten city--in the still-gleaming empire of my memory.
I don't mention these sorts of things to everyone, because, well, everyone doesn't need to know. I'd known the gentleman in question for nearly fifteen years and his death by autobahn--ironically, in a place where I'd like very much to live--was a very poor form of a gift coming as it did three days before my own birthday, particularly as he'd planned to be back Stateside within a couple of weeks.
Anyway, that night at the Pub, our group was doing some free-writes. (This is one thing that English teachers do when they drink together. Don't try it at home.) Friend and colleague Derrick assigned me the topic of "loss," knowing that it was particularly applicable. I came up with this:
When I was eight years old I got a little wind-up toy frog as a stocking stuffer on Christmas morning. A week later, I lost it because I insisted upon taking it with me when we went to lunch in the tearoom at Hutzler's.
When the Hutzler's building was redeveloped, I became briefly obsessed--a quarter-century later--with the idea that my little toy frog might still be inside the cavernous and now ruined store.
That frog has turned into the "beau ideal," the beautiful ideal. Its cheap tin works--probably the least materially impressive present I'd received that or any other Christmas--have turned into a totem. Do they still live on, somewhere in that huge Art Deco palace of commerce? The small thing about which I'd never begun to care--yet it turns into a keystone of memory.
The loss of a living being--my beloved old cat, the handsome ex-beau--is easily put away. The cat's ashes sit in a little cherrywood box on my mantel and the beau rests forever somewhere in Seattle, a city which I am annoyed that I will now, for decency's sake, have to visit.
The toy frog, though probably rusted and dented, may still live on in a forgotten corner of a forgotten department store in an all-but-forgottten city--in the still-gleaming empire of my memory.
posted by Daniel | 1:19 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home