Looking for Roots

  My little hippie friend and I went down to the East Village which is really just about six square blocks of revitalized buildings renamed as the East Village though we’re preteding that’s what the area surrounding the capitol has been called all along. When I was a young child those streets held small merchants and businesses such as my grandfather’s paper company and the post office on the corner. In my teens, they replaced the quaint brick buildings with newer brighter better brick buildings. By the time I hit my twenties, it wasn’t really a good place to be after dark.

Now it’s filled with trendy little shops and art galleries and thrift stores benefiting the women’s league and other white collar causes. It is clean and well-lit. My little hippie friend and I make our way through a flea mart type building. It was a used furniture shop when I was young; now it contains relics of my own youth, a youth my young hippie friend was not even around for. Much of what I see in the booths as a matter of fact, I once saw in operation. At an old country store where they hadn’t upgraded yet or my great Aunt Mathilda who had no need at her farm for the modern conveniences.

Going through the shops today I wished I had a little cash for a thing here or there, but I have no use for it really. I have nothing left. No possessions really. Not to speak of. It makes me feel amazingly free and incredibly pressed for time at once. Like I have no legacy to pass on, and I need to create one.

I wasn’t worried about it. I had writing. The stories would be my legacy. So I didn’t mind giving the other stuff up a little at a time. Here and there. I come from a line of hoarders after all. 

By age twenty-one I already had a full storage unit of randomness. I watched my grandmother fill her home with margarine dishes and extra boxes of Kleenex. By the time I was ready to move cross country for grad school, I had to pare down quite a bit. By the third apartment in Richmond, I had shed even more superfluous stuff. What I had left would be stolen, apprehended or otherwise unattainable to me for the next several years. My son and I moved back from Virginia in one ten foot truck. And I am now in possession of almost none of even that.

But like I said, the writing, the stories, are supposed to be my collection. My legacy. Proof of me and mine.