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Making Things Disappear More Slowly

Making Things Disappear More Slowly

What started me writing was watching things disappear. The flowers on the dining table disappeared fast; the rubber plant on the radiator cover, more slowly. The gaunt woman in the black bonnet and black dress down to her ankles who came every Wednesday, ate one boiled egg, one boiled potato and washed our laundry on the scrubbing board in the laundry sink next to the kitchen sink disappeared.

My grandmother and my grandfather disappeared. So did one of my aunts. The curly-haired teen-ager who taught me to throw a spiral and who joined the Army Air Force the day after Pearl Harbor, my baseball bat, my skates, my baseball cards, my marbles and my cousin who flew the Hump to Burma. My father disappeared and then my mother–everything I’ve ever owned, everyone I’ve ever known—even my children. The babies turned into toddlers, the toddlers into teenagers trying to prove they didn’t need me. They then disappeared and turned into adults who truly don’t need me and now it’s happening even to them.

We try to stop things from disappearing. We keep rings, bracelets, articles of clothing. We preserve old letters written in ink that slowly fades until you can barely make out the characters. The paper turns yellow, then brown. Then it cracks at the folds and crumbles into a powder. Then the powder disappears. We mount photographs in albums using glue that dries and cracks. The photographs fall out and, in time, they too disappear.

My father made black and white films of my brother and me taking tobacco out of his humidor, dunking for apples at our Halloween party, me squirting my brother with water from the concrete drinking fountain in Riverside Park. It was back before the WPA built the concourse to hide the railroad tracks down there. I even remember a little zoo with sheep and goats and a pony you could ride. Not only are they all now gone, but people try to tell me they were never there.

When the images on my father’s black and white films began to fade, my brother converted them to videotape. After my brother was gone, I put the videotapes on the shelf next to my VCR. But the images on the videotapes have begun to fade. Soon they too will disappear.

How shall summer’s honey breath hold out against the wrackful siege of batt’ring days when rocks impregnable are not so stout, nor gates of steel so strong but time decays? Unless this miracle have might, says Shakespeare, that in black ink my love may still shine bright.

That power of black ink, not to stop things from disappearing, but to make them disappear more slowly is what attracts me to writing about the way things used to be. A man in Succession, my new book, tries to use that power to prevent his dead grandfather and dying father from disappearing. He fails, but all the same, that will be the purpose of my next book and it will be the purpose of this blog.

I grew up in New York City in the 1930s and 40s and will write about the way things used to be back there, the way we lived, things we owned, games we played, the schools, the movies and stores, the neighbors and the neighborhoods. Occasionally, I’ll offer an opinion about whether things have improved. (Garrison, the protagonist of Succession, thinks not.)

There is room in my blog on oldtimewriter.com for contributions, so if you have things, places, people you’d like to make disappear more slowly, you’re welcome to contribute. I look forward to reading what you write. Perhaps we can even collect some of what we say and turn it into a book some day. If reading doesn’t disappear.
Submitted by:
Old Time Writer

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