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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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