Scholastic Scope, Spring 1975
03/20/2007 12:35 a.m.
"Yesterday I gave my cat a bath. He sat there and enjoyed it. Oh, the hair stuck to my tongue a little..." This still makes me laugh like a sixth grader cutting up in study hall.


I smilingly remember study hall and the faces yet unmarked by time, success and failure, and war; faces that knew about a place called Viet Nam and an unpopular presidential pardon. I remember giggling at the explosions of Pop Rocks and Fresca in our mouths and believing that too much at a time could blow off one's head. I remember punctuating home made brown bag book covers with the logos of music groups now only heard of on FM classic rock stations.

I hail the memories of harvest gold, poppy red, and avocado green and reject the pale pastels of the eighties and the neon-on-black combinations of the nineties. I am glad to have worn straight leg Levi 505 jeans and too much Faberge Brut to church with my polyester floral disco shirt.

I remember my grandfather and the smell of the lineament he had me rub on the stump of his left wrist previously occupied by his strong hand until a winter accident in the late fifties left him with a long road to recovery, and a prosthetic hook with which my brother and I delighted ourselves by imprinting our fingers with the waffle design intended to improve the grip of the opposable sides. Mine was the job of relieving the phantom pains of the missing appendage by rubbing plain horse lineament on his stump while he told me the goings on of one particular December day pertaining to WWII in a far away harbor named for a mollusk treasure...

I go there time and again in my memory and would live it all once more, but in time past I already have.
I am listening to antiques roadshow