One More Glance at Childhood | redclaydiary.com

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One More Glance at Childhood

You can tell that it hurts her to bring me all this beautiful and nostalgic grammar

school stuff now and then.

You can tell that it hurts her because she lingers after I’ve paid her for today’s trove,

she lingers and looks around at my walls and at my floor where the detritus of

humanity’s creative genius lies in stacks and piles and boxes and crates, stacks and

piles and boxes and crates of wonderful colorful playful deadly serious materials

from every generation since before and after the printing press.

She smiles and looks longingly at the school materials she has just sold me: readers

and primers and felt figures and punch-out pieces that have never been punched out,

posters and circus banners and lovely lovely children’s items long disdained by

everybody but overgrown children like you and me.

She no longer has enough room to store these glorious objects, and she wants to get

them into the hands of someone who’s more than a dealer/less than a dealer,

someone who will appreciate them and respect them and try to get them into the

right hands, and she has carefully chosen me as her heir, as her medium for passing

on the joyful notes of childhood.

I pay her what I can afford to pay her, sometimes more than I can afford to pay her,

because I want her to keep coming back, coming back to see and pay respect to me,

coming back to bring me more surprises in the form of first-experience rushes to the

face as I open her treasure chests.

And, too, I can tell that it hurts her to bring me all this beautiful stuff because she

tells me it hurts her, she tells me it hurts her, not in a whining voice, not in a sad

voice, but in a voice full of wisdom she has attained after a certain number of

unnameable years, wisdom she attained by being first stimulated and encouraged by

this vast array of paper ideas and paper feelings and paper joys and paper

ponderings.

Our transactions are sacred and ceremonial.

I never thank her enough, she never stays long enough for one more extended and wistful goodbye to childhood

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