Back home, I opened the boxes marked Christmas ornaments. We had a half-dozen stored in the basement, three of which I'd never seen before. It seemed surprising that there were actually boxes I'd never seen, dating from Mark and Wally's years in Vermont. For fifteen years they'd been in an inaccessible part of the Provincetown attic. For four more years they'd been in an inaccessible part of a storage unit in North Truro, which we'd emptied this summer.
I pulled open the boxes. A stuffed bear, a windup cat and butterfly, a mechanical dog, a monkey on a swing... Wally's Christmas vision intact after twenty years. A sliding down into multiple levels of time: my partner's late partner's love of ritual, collecting; the idiosyncratic ornaments of the 60s, 50s, 40s. The grit came off on my fingers. Once again the dead were on my mind.
I don't know what possessed me to put the cellphone shots below on Facebook. Some spasm of joy, unguardedness? Some refusal to be done in? After fifteen minutes, though, the shots looked increasingly vulnerable up there: a boy standing on a stage without his clothes. They didn't look like refusal. Who could even look at Christmas imagery right now without thinking war, joblessness, commercialism, disappointment--any of it? And I hadn't given anybody any written context. The quickness of Facebook suddenly struck me as hopeless. What I really wanted was for the dead to come back. And I took the pictures down.
18 comments:
The monkey is the one of all these images that jumps out.
Is this your home? Or from your neighborhood. It's cheering to me, however kitsch it might seem. there's something about our rituals that keep us going.
Here we have daylight savings in place and it never gets dark till 9 pm. Then the lights begin to shine. The mock winter scenes in the front yards of houses even when the temperatures are those of summer. It's quaint but ever so familiar and joyful.
i know that wish---that the dead should come back.
every so often, i believe i can think the dead back, if i only can turn my thoughts some particular way, in some odd direction.
Elisabeth, we can actually see the sun lowering a little past 2:30 out here on the East End of Long Island. To be honest, I miss 9:00 PM sundowns!
Thank you, Nancy. That's a lovely thought.
paul, i think that in spite of everything going on right now, the best thing we can do for each other is look to ritual and remembrance. the comfort of something expected in a time of upheaval shouldn't be neglected!
where did the stuffed toys come from? were they of someone's childhood or something found elsewhere?
Jayme, those childhood toys were collected by Wally. I don't know if they were from his childhood-- I'm not sure Mark even knows. They actually look like they're from an earlier time. Probably from several childhoods, from people now gone.
I love this sweet, melancholy post.
Though I think that there's some way that, with the remembrance, the unpacking the old things, placing them out on the stage again, the dead are back.
Wally loved Christmas stuff unreservedly, and we had a huge stash of old toys that came from barn sales and auctions and the like, many of them props he'd use in store windows at Christmas time. So I don't think any of those were survivors of his own childhood; it was more like he collected childhoods.
Afterthought: your post makes me think about how the blog space is more intimate than the Facebook stage; the light is softer and in sharper focus. You have to choose to visit here -- like walking into a particular room, whereas FB is like strolling through, um, Penn Station? This is a better place to be vulnerable.
Yes, Facebook: more like Penn Station all the time, though it operates on the metaphors of friendship and intimacy. Of course I know that, but occasionally one *wants* to forget.
"He collected childhoods"--that's a beautiful phrase.
xxx
i love the idea of wally having "collected" childhoods. it seems as if he rescued them, too. those well-loved creatures got a new home to be appreciated in. what a beautiful idea.
I keep thinking of the LIRR level of Penn Station, where we're all in motion, rather than the Amtrak/NJ Transit level where most of us are at least looking up at the board for arrivals and departures. (This metaphor is fun.)
And if the dead won't come back, not like they used to, we will bring these little trees into our living rooms, and hug them safe. Maybe sing a little.
When I was a little girl I would spend a long time with my fingers curled around a branch, "holding hands with the Christmas tree," and I wonder if there's another connection there, about helping the passage of our trees from one world to the next, with all our dreamy baubles and lights?
Merry Christmas.
The finger curled around the branch: I love that image. And the passage of the trees. Thank you, Laura.
I still put up the cheapest crappy ornaments I bought when I first set up housekeeping with my ex-husband. So in a way they are bringing back a not-quite-dead relationship (we'll always be connected through the kids).
I also put up a few of the incredibly cheap and somewhat disturbing tiny plastic baby angels (are they cherubs?) that Frank's mom gave us before she died. To me, they look like the angels have hung themselves. But, she meant well in sending them to us and in a way I feel that it represents her watching over us and wishing us well from beyond.
I love this comment, Gwynne, in all its emotional complexity. And I want to see these incredibly cheap and somewhat disturbing tiny plastic baby angels.
I'll post them on Facebook...I neglected to mention that they also glow in the dark.
Yippee! (On posting them AND on glowing in the dark.)
(just standing here, being a witness, singing "River" quietly, now that it's in my head.)
Thank you. Your posts so often make me feel more at home in being human.
Sophie. (A witness, at home.) Happy holidays to you.
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