We are often warned going through life that we shouldn't
attach too much importance to things. Things are inanimate objects, possessions
that for the most part can be replaced and there are other aspects of life far
more important, like children and family and animals and on and on.
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| There is one memory after all, the day we painted the block yellow. |
After going through a bunch of my things the other day and
sorting what was important and what wasn't and writing about it, a friend said the
real sorting was not of the
objects themselves but of the memories they engendered. So true. Or course. A
baseball is just a baseball until I hold it and remember my son's first hit in
Little League. A small jar of sand is just that until I remember it was given
to me by someone I loved and contains sand from the beach where Captain James Cook
was killed in Hawaii. She thought of me in that place and brought me a
souvenir. And the other jar of dust is just that until I recall my daughter
collecting it from a volcano eruption that coated Anchorage. That journey into
things and memories for the most part was pleasant.
Today I saw the last of another thing which was not so
pleasant. A couple of years ago I wrote about the sadness when a junker came
and hauled away the carcass of a Volkswagen Beetle that was supposed to be my
son's first car after we rebuilt it. The project for several reasons never was
completed. I held onto the partially rebuilt engine from that car. I had more
than $2,000 in that engine and I hoped to recover some of that money selling
it. I think maybe I held onto it also because it was a very tangible link to my
son even though it stood as a symbol of a failure. I tried Craigslist several
times with no luck. So, the short block with its new pistons and camshaft and
lifters hung on an engine stand in the spare bedroom gathering dust and getting
in the way for a couple more years.
Last night I was explaining to a friend how I had brought
all the stuff from the cabin and really didn't have much room to put it. She
said get creative and the engine came to mind. Maybe it was time.
Today I loaded it into the back of the Jeep along with several boxes of parts still needing to be attached including some of the
expensive bright chrome go-fasters I had bought to make it fancy. I did that
before I even called around to see who would take it. I wanted to be committed
to the effort, no backing out. Then I called around to salvage yards and no one
wanted it. Finally one guy said he would take it. But no money would be involved.
So I drove about 25 miles to his yard and there a helper and
I put that bright yellow engine block with shiny bright chrome parts attached
onto the pile of discarded short blocks all black and rusted and oily. The
brightness of the VW engine looked like those pictures of single flowers
bursting from a gray concrete world or the first fireweed to sprout in a burned
meadow.
I tried to take a picture, but this stupid cellphone did
something it always does when I am in a hurry and want something photographed.
It stuck on this infernal "voice control" mode that has not logical
way of escaping. Or maybe the fates didn't want me to have a picture of that chunk of metal that had held so much promise but ended in the discard pile.
I turned the phone off,
flung it into the car and drove away. Behind me that yellow flower stood out among the
discards of a motoring civilization, just a thing, held within the memory,
the memory of a plan gone awry, the memory of what could have been a cherished
connection with my son. Then too, it held the unfulfilled memory of him driving down
the street, a big grin on his face, in his first car, one he helped build, with
its multicolored paint job that changed color with the light, fat tires on the
back and as much of a throaty growl as that little four-cylinder horizontally
opposed engine could generate – now a memory with nothing tangible attached to
it.
Hauling off cars and dreams and moments not lived
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