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I may not talk about the baby and our lives in terms of merchandise, so much, but Shasta and I are alike in that we both daydream about things related to the baby. I have a list of things I am looking forward to giving our child:
1) Someday I will give him or her the Cross fountain pen my friends in Paris gave me. I was thirty-three years old, adrift and divorced and a failure at work, but I felt, suddenly, very loved. I was sitting at a bar called the Klein Holland, and I opened the box and realized my friends thought of me as a writer and they missed me a little already.
2) I’m going to pass on two arrowheads my grandfather Clayton gave me when I was little. I believe my grandfather found them in the just-plowed fields near Flatrock River, where the Wendel property used to be. They are beautiful: hand-chipped from stone, perfectly edged, with unbroken points. Children today will never find Indian arrowheads on the ground. Not like these.
3) The brass compass my parents gave me one year when I went to summer camp. I remember my parents explaining that if I got lost, I should hold it still and flat and the needle would point to the North. I said, “I need one that points HOME.”
4) My little shelf of favorite books. My friend Jim once gave me a signed copy of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (when I was little, my father told me how much he liked this book and I remember looking forward to being old enough to read it). I’ve also got my signed Maxine Hong Kingston and Jim Harrison.
And maybe someday I’ll have my own books on this shelf, and I’ll be able to pass these on too.
5) I have a signed Frank Frazetta portrait of Kubla Khan. To me, it represents China and fearlessness and also my youth and my friend Mike, who kept this in his secret room for years, then suddenly gave it to me.
6) I have a picture of Shasta frowning at the camera when she was five years old. She gave it to me a few years ago and I love it very much.
7) I have a box of old journals and drawings, a hard drive full of old photos. My mother, so tiny, unable to speak English yet, in an ancient Dallas full of sunlight. My father dressed like the tiny cowboy he hoped to be. My Uncle Thom standing with a basket of fresh tomatoes in an open doorway. My Aunt Sara with her feet up in a little red wagon. I hope that someday our child will open these things and study them. I hope he or she will see my young self –five years old and happy, reading Babar for the first time, or later, so happy in Africa and France, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with people our child has never met—I hope our child recognizes me.
I know my handwriting is illegible, but I hope the pages are fragrant with my life, with all those feelings, and that those moments are somehow loved again.
One piece of merchandise that I am currently mourning is my iPod. An iPod isn’t the kind of thing that has any value five years after you get it, but they are weirdly personal in a way. My last iPod had these words etched on the back: “Africa, America, China/My lonely, lovely head.” This iPod and my dog Tristan have been my constant companions as I walked in the sunrise and sunset this long, daylight savings winter. Tristan is still here, but I, through sheer dumbassery, dropped my iPod from the pocket of my fleece right into a $##$@ TOILET BOWL last night. Shasta is off in New Jersey with her friend Chloe, so now my world is silent.
This post has really gone on too long –but I’m curious: what are some things other people are waiting to give away?
