Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Clutter
I wonder often about memory. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I have a collection of bits and pieces from my past which surface at odd times for no apparent reason. It’s not like dream imagery, which often has a clever if not vicious logic. It’s random. It’s the crap that falls out when you open an overstuffed desk drawer.
There’s the old geezer in Bandon, I think it was, who had the big model train collection. He would show it (reluctantly) to children. I suspect he preferred other adult hobbyists.
The hotel in Newport, Oregon, with beachfront rooms, and a large moon jelly tank in the lobby.
A drugstore near the Alamo. Jake’s teething, so everyone’s miserable; one of us gets the bright idea for me to run into the drugstore for Q-tips and Orajel. Put the Orajel on the Q-tip and let him chew on the cotton nub. Works like a charm.
Garner Ted Armstrong on our old black-and-white TV . . . I’d watch him while eating lunch, macaroni and cheese from the tinfoil pot pie cup, listened to him weave Mae Brussel-style daisy chains leading from the Soviet Union’s latest acts of aggression straight back to Revelations. (Oy, vey: a Mae Brussel website with TRANSCRIPTS. MP3s with 700 hours of audio. A man could get lost for days, mummified remains fixed in front of his laptop, the Wiki entry for the Zodiac killer, the browser history leading back to Charles Watson, Lee Harvey Oswald, the SLA . . .) No, I didn’t believe in the End Times, but it fascinated me that I lived in a culture where apparently most people DID believe.
My garden, a narrow rectangular plot of soil between the driveway and Sadie’s fence. Good for corn, radishes, tomatoes. Corn cobs would grow to three or four inches then peter out. Red ants loved that soil, too. Summers, the ants would swarm, queens and winged drones would come out to play, and my father was there waiting for them with lighter fluid and a match.
I could go on.
Video of my infant son sleeping. Beethoven’s Seventh playing as a sort of soundtrack. I hold the video camera on him for a long, long time because I know I’m seeing something that is priceless. The same video camera is stolen when our house (vacant for remodeling) is burgled. They take the contractor’s tools, our generator, our tools, the camera, our telescope.
Driving north on the 101 through one windy coastal Oregon city after another, we find an anomaly, a non sequitur: a store that sells nothing but telescopes. Do we buy one? Hell yeah. We get spectacular views of the moon from our pollution-free oceanfront vista. Yeah, this telescope will get a lot of use.
Texas, 1997, late at night, I take my 18-month-old son outside to see comet Hale-Bopp. Hold him high above my head, as if that way he might see it better.
Sometimes I think I’m Billy Pilgrim.
D.
So it goes.