I wish he'd had his uniform.
Saturday night I was still hanging around in Boardman, watching Chris Marker's documentary Sans Soleil at the end of a night with the family. Sandwiched around the primitive video games, Hitchcock-obsessed San Francisco travelogue, footage of the horrors of African guerilla war, dreamlike visits to Icelandic children, and a portrait of Japan where department stores display treasures of the Vatican and full-scale replicas of animals having sex is a meditation on memory and experience. Marker's idea is that nothing in history is ever accurate for memory, the foundation of history, is a creation of our minds...do we really impartially judge how thirsty we were (his example) or how much our eyes bugged out at a sight of awe, or how many beats our hearts skipped in acceptance or break? We consider all of our feelings and sentiments and retroactively devise what we should have felt. This means nothing in the past can ever be objective. We are in control of what we once did not control.
Sunday night Mom lit a fire in the backyard. I joined Mom and Dad with wine and (for Dad) cigars and we sat in companionable silence and laughter-filled conversation, depending on the moment, when Marc came out clutching a mass of papers full of informative references for the Debate Team. One by one, he dropped them into the fire, sending a coffin in Germany spinning and probably giving Ray Bradbury a twinge of heartburn over his dinner. The flames rose higher. Then, as we talked about some of the less-than-perfect days of his Boardman High term, Marc thought about the endless hours of drudgery under Mr. Ruggeri in the marching band. His uniform was gone, but he still had the plastic shoes he had worn all four years.
Marc dug the shoes out of wherever they were and dropped them into the pit. Dad thought they would create a smokescreen. Instead, a slow encroaching blackness overtook the white bucks (now Pat Boone was suffering chest pains), and the toes, once perfect ebony had been achieved, rose first erect, then curving back towards the tongue and laces, into a grotesque elfin sight.
Curiously, that day we had gone to a memorial service for Coy Cornelius, the Youngstown artist and patron who just happened to be the greatest barber I may ever let lower my ears. He had just opened a new, even more impressive salon-gallery...his first burned down itself a few years before...and was planning an open house when his medical problems overtook him. He kept a giant car hood in his lobby and a clock where the color wheel took the form of a metamorphosing primary shape, circle to triangle to square and back. We were there for an hour and people kept coming, all ages, all walks of life, and as I raised my glass of Moscato to the blue, puffy-cloud sky...a sky from a painter's dream...I wished I'd been there when he died. He was part of my growing up, and he cared about me and my family.
Marc has now passed his first phase of growing up. I've mentioned before how he had experiences I never did, and these benefited him not just for themselves and the knowledge they gave, but by how much more pain, disappointment, bitterness he felt and how much resolve surged within him. I don't know how much his memories were re-created in his id, or what he wishes he could forget, but as the shoes blazed into the Boardman night I knew he was conducting some kind of funeral of his own, a cleansing away of the facets of youth he no longer had use for, no longer cared to be burdened by, and wanted to let go so he could take another step towards manhood. I have come to understand a little better the way he thinks, how he differs from our parents and I and the rest of the world, and I shall never say any certainties about him...but he knows more about life at 18 than I did, and he knows what is worth remembering and what is only meant for consignation to the flames of time.
I am still figuring it out myself at 24, but like him, I know I'm on my way. I was shown the way partly by my parents, whom I can now have serious talks with over drinks stronger than beer, and partly through what I figured out in the Netherlands and Boston and California. I am finally becoming less narcisstic, less destructively emotional, more open and willing to learn from the amazing people out there in this world. And with Chicago now finally here, I am as joyous to begin as Marc is.
And in typical Rostan fashion, while Mom rolled her eyes, her three men sang in dysfunctional harmony as the embers flickered Bowie's profane version of the rites of the dead.
"Ashes to ashes, funk to funky..."
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