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Homage to Proust
Time can be a treacherous place, a wonderful place, a mythical
place...And memory its highest peak. Remembrance is the place
where things go to be born, and in the end, the place where all
things go to die.
I've seen its cliffs, glimpsed its gardens, and have been called to
its precipices a thousand times...
Many years ago, my family bought a few acres in the Missouri
wilderness....a wild place, on the banks of the Crystal River. A
day's drive, in 1934...and 20 minutes from anywhere by 1990. I
would go there 3 or 4 times a year, carting along my prepubescent
need for exploration...Hike the trails....wander the caves...climb
the bluffs.
It was a place where I could think...My "Secret Garden". I would
absent-mindedly walk the creek-bed that fed the lake, letting my
head fill with the sounds and smells of nature running her course.
And some ways down the mountainside, I found a cave peaking out from
the bluff below the ridge-line. A cave on the water, perfect for
our rowboat to snug into.
MY cave.
Now the Crystal River is an unusual place. It was here that
archaeologists first discovered evidence that Man and Mammoth
coexisted...about 3 miles beyond the ridge-line, in fact; Clovis-
points embedded in broken mammoth bones detailing some 10,000 year
old struggle for survival.
In my young mind I imagined the Neolithic ancestors of the Shawnee
in this very cave, telling tales, seeking God, and huddling to stay
warm, and in my young mind I saw myself as the rightful inheritor of
this place and protector of its occupants (Scorpions and Copperheads
had made it home....). I would find myself drawn to this place, over
and over through the years. Wrote my journals there...Read my
Keats...
And later still, I found myself trying to share this place with a
string of adolescent paramours, none of whom ever saw it as anything
more than a flat place to lie down and be hidden from prying eyes.
And I brought none of them back, as if such mundane behavior was not
worthy of my "Secret Garden".
I didn't get back to my cave until after college. After Grad School. After
my marriage had come and gone.
And when I did get back, it wasn't there. Not really. It was a shallow hole
in the sandstone. Always had been.
Someone had placed a gas grill on top of it, and stored their
lawnmower in it. It was so shallow that the handle of the mower
hung out over the water. And around it were houses....Dozens of
them. Houses on every parcel of land, and roads. Not the dirt paths
I remember, but hard, unforgiving asphalt..Houses on every lot......except
mine.
Mine was empty, save the broken tree swing and rusting rowboat. The
stone fire pit had filled with the leaves of a dozen autumns. I
realized then...that when I stopped coming..when my adolescent
pilgrimages came to an end...When I had no more room in my busy life
for the contemplation of its wonders...My "Secret Garden" died.
And being human, I cleared away the leaves and lit a fire. Turned
over the rowboat and brushed away its new occupants. Grabbed the
rotted Oar (Singular) and shoved off for the shore of memory
Tom Begley
Associate Member of the Vampire Church
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