The Magic Box

On Facebook yesterday I spewed out pieces of my life.  Four years of high school IDs, an article on my mother’s retirement after years of teaching, some graduation cars and more got captured in images and spread across the web for internet vermin and NSA techs to tease apart to either steal from me who I am or determine if I am a threat.

To accomplish this I spent an hour yesterday looking through a box of old letters.  Well, it was not just a box of old letters it was a box of addresses.  Really my friends it was a just a box of stuff.  

A folded newspaper resided in the box. A poster from the Attic Theatre in downtown Detroit from 1981 is there. A jar with sand and a seashell is in there.  A self-developed photograph of a cat named Mao is in there. The big waxed former produce bulk shipment box probably contains a roach or two.  Most likely the ticket stubs I was looking for are in there too.  I wanted to see if I still had the 1974 CSN&Y ticket stub from the Atlantic City Raceway.  Next time I look maybe I will find them. 

Over the years I have left that box alone.  For one reason or another I didn’t want to open it up.  But when I wrote the piece on stuff I still have to talk about I decided it might be the time.  Within that rectangle well might be some of the aqua vita remaining from the days of yore.  It does and it doesn’t. Yesterday as I went through that box I did it in only in a cursory manner. 

What I found was that I have always wanted to write albeit I foundered about a great deal when I was younger.  Having come through the American system of schooling I knew I was abysmal at grammar. My biggest fear was that what I put down on paper would be ridiculed.  

As years have passed software has helped with some of the issues.  Commas, periods and other faux pas now correct themselves.  Spelling too.  However you have to at least have some sense of the word you are trying to use for that function to work well.

In the quick scan of that box I have one regret.  Oh how I rue that there isn’t more in that box.  So many chances I have wasted it life through trepidation and a timid nature.  I wish there were unused stamps from the orient in there.  God if only I had a visa or two for studies in Australia or England.  Maybe a soundboard tape from some obscure band I was following.  I am not ashamed of what is in that box I am saddened by what is not in the box.

When I first sat down to write this I wanted an idyll away from the house, the TV, the bass practice and the chores.  But what I found was a fountain that needed cleaning.  Now it is gurgling and the birds are singing.  I took a road to get this place and I am not sad to be here.  I am sad I didn’t take a few more hairpin curves.

Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well. –R. Siken

Often I go out to Brainy Quote or Good Reads and look for a quote to match the feeling I am trying to convey.  Most of the time if it isn’t some Buddhist thing I don’t quite find any adroit turn of phrase that fully captures what I am trying to say.  This one about sums it up.

Fireflies flash in the green canopy.  A fountain flows.  Birds call back and forth. The night folds in up the remaining batter of day’s blend. Of all the things that I have and of all the things I have not the thing that I wish I would have spent more wisely was the moment when time was endless and hangovers were cured with aspirin and STDs were cured with penicillin.