The problem with childhood is that we only get one and so much of it goes unnoted. We’re too busy living it, as it should be. If we eat our vegetables and avoid having lunch with a suicide bomber, we might keep our child alive till we are ready for that horizontal goodbye. That’s what longevity is for: to rewrite what might have been.
What’s the big idea?
Why, you want to make something
out of it?
Let’s say
I disappeared when I was six at the 1939 World’s Fair in the plaza between the Trylon
and Perisphere. Holding tight onto my father’s overcoat I looked up and saw it
wasn’t my father. So it was, my new family set another chair at their table.
Maybe some other kid claimed my designated piece of overcoat and entered my old
family. A fair exchange.
On an
August Sunday at Rockaway Beach my new parents rented an orange and black
umbrella and we found a patch of sand. After digging halfway to China, I ran
into the ocean heedless of the drift and undertow. I emerged, stumbling over
other’s sandcastles searching futilely for that distinct umbrella among a sea
of orange and black umbrellas. Finally, I found myself at the lifeguard station
in Far Rockaway, only to be returned to my original family.
It's not
a bad thing to vanish every now and then. You get lost, you get found or better
yet you find yourself. The muscle of imagination needs the stretch; it’s all
part of becoming. As far as I can tell I’m still a work-in-progress looking for
both that orange-black umbrella and those threads of a coat.
From my distant perch above I am now my own father wearing a coat of many colors. The umbrellas have dropped me into the commotion of a field wild with poppies. Orange, as autumn leaves yet black containing pianistic colors of eighty-eight hues from havoc to hush.
"It's not a bad thing to vanish every now and then. You get lost, you get found or better yet you find yourself." Amen! Thank you, as always, for this.
ReplyDeleteThanks, David, as always for your comments.
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