Where Big, Ugly, Junky Flower boxes Come From

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a picture I took in our yard on Monday.  It's a picture of our Toyota truck's last journey home. 

I've always developed attachments to inanimate objects,  attachments that many people have called unnatural or downright silly.  I don't regret this, although it's often quite painful, because I think this kind of sensitivity lends itself well to being a writer.

It started with toys, I suppose.  I never liked dolls, but had a menagerie of glass and plastic animals and stuffed toys that I would have run through fires for.  I slept with a favorite stuffed tiger until I was eighteen, putting him away only because I married and Allen wouldn't have him in the bed with us.

The king of my toys when I was in grade school was a little plastic mountain goat named Oddie.  My older brother (he was 10 years older than me) had found Oddie on the highway, he said, and brought the toy home to me, thinking I would like it.  The fact Oddie was rescued from a horrible fate--thrown away by some ungrateful, insensitive "other-child," I imagined, made him all the more precious to me. 

One day I took Oddie to school and a girlfriend put him into a pocket in the front of her dress when we went to lunch.  She said it was an "Oddie Dispenser."  Afterwards, she couldn't find him.  I asked my teacher for permission to go to the office to ask about Oddie.  She was a sour old woman, I recall, but she let me go.  I can still remember the secretary's face twisting in amusement (though she tried to hide it) when I asked her if anyone had found a plastic mountain goat and turned itin.  She stifled a grin as she asked me what it looked like.  When I saw that, her amusement, I sensed in my heart of hearts it was hopeless.  She couldn't have cared less:  Oddie was gone forever.

Years after our marriage, long after we had moved to Ohio so I could go to school to become a (famous) writer, I told Allen about Oddie.  I told him one night as we lay in the dark, talking to each other about this and that.  I don't remember how we got on the subject.  But Allen asked me lots of questions about the toy for several months afterwards.  Then one day he surprised me with a mountain goat he had made out of earthenware, a large goat that sat upright like a human but had hooves instead of hands and feet.  He was like Super-Oddie, or he was the image of Oddie's soul.  The earthenware goat was the image of my toy.  I felt that Oddie had transcended his body and become reincarnated.  I was overjoyed.

You begin now to understand my attachment to things.  So therefore you may understand why I feel attached to our 15 year old truck.  It would start in any weather, even if it had been sitting for months.  It was the one vehicle we could always depend on, and it got us through many a jam, traveled many a mile.  Its sides are eaten by rust, its seat ripped.  Its speedometer hasn't worked in years, but no matter--you knew how fast you were going because you knew the truck intimately, every sound and every vibration told you what you needed to know.  Its gaskets have been ready to blow for months and months. 

When I think of the Toyota, I think not of something mechanical that can be replaced, but of an old friend that had a stroke and died.  Understand, not wanting to be a bother, it started one last time and hauled itself onto the trailer, as if taking its last breath.   I couldn't help but recall a heartrending story written by a freshman in one of my classes many years ago.  It was his dog.  The dog had been hit by a car and was in great pain, and dying.  The student, a farmboy, brought his rifle out to the road to kill the dog, to take it out of its misery.  Just before he shot, the dog raised its head, the boy wrote, and licked his hand.  When the old Toyota started up that last time, I felt not relief, but anguish, a similar anguish that farmboy must have felt when his dog licked his hand. 

You will understand, then, why, as we were dragging it home, I began to entertain ways I could keep it.  I suddenly found I couldn't bear the thought of having it hauled away to the junkyard. 

You will understand why I entertained the idea of filling the bed of the truck with rich soil and planting beautiful flowers in it, bright flowers twisting toward the sun, vines trailing down the sides.

I suddenly understood where  some big, ugly, junky flower boxes must come from.