Weblog
05/27/01 05:46 PM: Grandpa
I went to my grandpa’s house today. I hadn’t been there since last fall. I was quite surprised by how different the whole area looks now. Then I got to thinking about how it used to look years ago, when I was a little kid. I must say, I’m rather offended. There used to be two big hazelnut trees on the border between that and the neighbors’ yard. There was another small tree next to those, and some wild brush stuff. There was an old rusty swing between the hazelnut trees. I used to go over there and we’d have these big family picnics under the trees, next to the swing. There was another tree at one corner of the house. It was a weird tree that had sort of multiple branches coming out of the ground, for lack of a clearer way of explaining it. It seemed like a jungle to me when I was little. There was a lilac bush/tree at the corner of the garden. There was a blackberry bush next to that. At the other end of the garden, there was a rusty old fence with compost heaped against it, forming another neighborly border.
Today, the swing and the lilac bush remain. And the swing isn’t even the original one. It’s a replacement (exactly the same, though, minus most of the rust) that my uncle found at a garage sale. I went there today and the trees, probably 40 feet tall, were gone. The neighbors are building a garage in the middle of what used to be their yard. And there the swing stands, with only some weeds and a massive wall of unpainted wood as a backdrop. To swing on it seems to admit defeat. The old rusty fence, by no means picturesque, had character. It is gone, replaced by a white picket fence that screams Park Avenue, not Cottage Street. It wants nothing to do with any compost heap. It is a good ten feet removed from the garden. There is no longer a view of the next street over, that being blocked by another newly constructed garage, matching the white picket fence.
I never know quite what to do when faced with the end of an era. I guess the only thing to do is to move on. The trees may no longer be there, but they will continue to exist in my memory, and the picnics will go on in reruns. (Damn, that would be some nice imagery if it didn’t involve television.) It’s like the destruction of the two giant statues of Buddha by the Taliban in Afghanistan. The people most worried about it were outsiders, Westerners. Committed Buddhists understood that smashing two giant pieces of stone should (and would) have no effect on their faith. This is not an endorsement of Buddhism. I say only that of those with firm beliefs, their convictions are so strong because they are rooted in the ideas (or memories, to relate this to my story) themselves, not in some physical symbol.
music: Switchfoot – Concrete Girl
