July 9, 2021
There is a danger as I get close to my place of origin that these writes could slip out of control. I suppose there are at least two ways to view the past. One—and this is my natural instinct—is to look at it like this swirling black hole with tentacles that can grab and pull me down. Just from a writing standpoint there is a lot of material there. I’m talking about the past that comes before me—those pieces that fused together to make me—the sperm and egg and everything that led to that which now seems small simply because of distance.
When I was a child visiting Winchester, my grandmother would take me into Hammer’s Five and Dime on the town square. The place smelled like an old wooden building—because that’s what it was. Indeed it had thousands of feet of wood floor that creaked just like an old house. This was the precursor to the modern department store—the evolutionary link between frontier trading post and hardware store.
At the back of Hammer’s were some dressing rooms and one of those alcoves of mirrors where you could see all sides of yourself and where the mirrors that faced each other made an infinite hallway that it seemed possible to walk down. Standing there felt like being in a frozen snapshot of traveling at light speed. If the camera backed out far enough I knew I was just a spec in a vast hole of darkness.
The other way to view the past—and this is just a notion I’m having now—is that it is the seeds in the center of a flower and that we are the petals spinning forward. I’m not sure I can elaborate much more except to say this vision has a more upbeat kind of feel than my natural inclination which is to sink inward. I’m thinking of my self sitting on one of those flower petals with my toes dipping in the center where the seeds are. The seeds are black but they are covered in water and the water is moving. The movement is part of what keeps my reflection from just being a hall of mirrors. If I turn my body to the outside of the flower I’m still sitting on the petal but now my feet hang into air. The sun is shining. There are infinite unknown possibilities.
Spotty West Goes East 