The Breakables
My grandfather was a pharmacist. He owned his own pharmacy next to Hinshaws, a slightly upscale department store. This explains why while some use a bathroom cabinet, my mom owns a bucket of medicine that cannot not be held down by the confines of a couple shelves in a mirrored door. Everyday he sat behind the window separating pills of assorted colors, filling wide mouthed orange bottles, and running labels. He was a good man who loved his customers. My grandmother was in charge of the toys and extraneous items to fill the store, to make the prescription pickup a more joyful experience.
The back of the pharmacy was our playground. Among the plastic bottles and stacks of label stickers, my cousin and I would run wild, sticking the defunct labels from the trash onto our own fake perscriptions...filling them with Russel Stover jellybeans. Russell Stover candy was everywhere in the back of the pharmacy. There was something vintage about that candy that I liked, but resented at the same time. It lacked gimmick...a child's nightmare. It was candy for the elegant elderly. It foreshadowed a long party involving many older people telling you how old you are.
The best thing about the back of the dimly lit pharmacy was the shelf of broken items...titled, I believe by us, "The Breakables". It was the shelf of temporarily lonely items that took one for the team...became destroyed either by customers or in their travels from the delivery to the glass case. It was on this shelf that my grandmother lay the items with battlescars and wounds for us to play with. I suppose the title "The Breakables" lends itself to the possibility of the items being put back together, for it was clear that they were already broken. A title filled with hope.
Every time we visited, we raced immediately to the shelf. My cousin hand her hands in something...dissecting the broken typewriter or wrist watch with a cracked face, examining the pieces under her telescope. Struck by the porcelain deer missing an ear, the glass skunk without a tail, or white bear with Slurpee spilled on his face, we bartered and debated over who got which item, trading the paraplegic toucan for the deafened rabbit. Their handicaps were all equal in our eyes; it wasn't a matter of which was less broken, but which animal was in question.
I wonder what impact "The Breakables" shelf had on us. Is it possible we became lovers of character over quality? That we learned early to accept faulty items? Or do we ache for new things more now, after we playing with handicap toys for years? "The Breakables" shelf was relished and in it we replaced their broken appendages in our minds and mended their wounds in our imagination.
The Pearl
Flashback tonight...Hawaii trip...198something. My memories of that trip are limited and I believe most of them I have invented from the pictures. Vividly, amongst the fog, I remember visiting an oyster farm-or mock oyster farm, as it were. If it were real, there would be tourists diving in, right and left, trying their luck at nature's lottery ticket.
Though the setup shrieked of tourist trap, a child's mind could overlook the not so convincing underwater environment. The megaphoned guide wrapped his plastic jokes in the shiny ribbon that vacationing families could not resist.
I was fascinated. I couldn't keep my eyes away. I couldn't help but ache of jealousy as the hired diver, headed to the bottom, in search of the shiny opacity, gleaming on the tonguelike mollusk. I was not alone. The envy in the crowd was palpable.
People connect with the pearl. The pearl shares the fate of the princess and the pea. Covered in a shell cloaked to look like everyother oyster. The pearl lives incognito until it is long sought after. It is aching to be discovered, but made mute by it's creator.
It is the beauty of the corprolite.
It is wisdom's unit of measurement.
It requires work like the artichoke and the pomegranate-the first check point for the easily deterred.
I imagine the discovery of a pearl must equal that of an archaeologist sweeping the dust away in the last hour of desert sun, only to find the missing ankle bone of the T-Rex.
Or the tired sculptor's opening of the heavy kiln door, only to find the glazes made sweet love in the heated stone overnight and mixed beyond his wildest dreams.
Like the rainbow and the eclipse, the pearl is a happy accident.....a truly perfect collision of nature.
Man on the Moon
"Lunar dust smelled just like gunpowder." -Edwin E. Aldrin, astronaut
Bees Making Waves
A couple of bees invaded the pool today, diving in for a taste of the blue liquid sweetness, a haven of blue pollen from the gods. But instead the expected euphoria was, in fact, deadly chlorinated water lacking the tiniest of flavor, crippling these curious bees. A bee's tar pit. A bee's quicksand. Stuck in the faux pollen-stuck to contemplate their last hour, with the cement poolside a century of swimming away.
Were these bees, in fact, curious? Were they the gutsy bees that were dared by the other drones, who sat watching with complacency from their petunia? Were they filled with fear and terror as they dove into the luscious and mysterious unknown blue? Were they pioneers? Were they the non-conformists?
Or, were they overcome with greediness, after emptying all the pollen from the largest of flowers-were they falsely boasting to the other bees of their frequent visits to the dangerous liquid? Caught in their own arrogance-did nature once again take redemption for their overconsuption and lies?
Maybe they were claustrophobic and tired of the confines of the Communist hive. Maybe they wanted more for themselves. Maybe they thought they would be a better queen, but lacked the propriety. Maybe they identified with the Amish girl who sat on her well groomed hill, and dreamed of being an obstetrician.
Whatever their character, they were somehow done in. Done in with their own fated duty...to serve and protect. The Queen-the Messiah-who they are forever indebted to, for giving them life. Generation after generation...maintaining order. Keeping them happily enslaved. She gives them life and keeps them from tasting it. She cannot afford unstructured chaos-and so she keeps a secret weapon. The weapon is the secret. The secret: the sting is self destruction. This is the method the elusive queen uses to keep her drones in order, for the bees with lust, aggression, sadness, and joy will inevitably commit an impassioned suicide.
It is the bee that gave lessons to the suicide bomber, the burning monk, the kamikaze pilot.
It must be that Karl Marx was a beekeeper, in constant interview with the queen, invading her privacy as she lay generation after generation.
But it is the bee in the pool who wanted to chat with mystery.
