Some I willingly released. Others I lost… or they simply disappeared. And time and circumstance ripped away a significant few by force. But here's the commonality: I wish I still had them all.
Consider my first car, a 1964 Impala Super Sport we called Red Dragon. On the serpentine Pig Trail between Ozark and Fayetteville, I could ease Red Dragon's 4-speed down into second and let her 327 with 4-barrel flatten any hill. Immediately and without hesitation, unlike the environmentally friendly lightweights I've driven since.
Mary and I kept Red Dragon until our first "real" jobs after college–and then unceremoniously traded her in on a new vehicle.
When I pointed out a Dragon look-alike to our 19-year-old a few years ago, his response was teenage predictable. "Sweet! You really had one of those? Do you know how much it would be worth today if you had kept it?" I wish he hadn't told me.
But I also regret giving up Bluie, our venerable 1983 Toyota Tercel wagon. My occasional forays up into the Buffalo River or Ozark National Forest areas remind me that faithful little Bluie's four-wheel drive and dependable footing would be worth more to me now than the pittance I swapped her for.
I'd like to browse my Boy Scout Handbook from the late 1950s, now swallowed up by the dark chasm separating adolescence and adulthood. Neither can I fathom the whereabouts of my copy of a biography of missionary Adoniram Judson written by his son. I wish both were still on the shelf.
On the other hand, I'm confident I simply gave away two other books in one of my periodic spasms to streamline and downsize. Complete opposites in nature, size and purpose, each–Wildflowers of Arkansas (replete with pictures) and Combustion (more than you'd want to know about fuels, steam and power plants)–filled its own particular niche. I'd like to have them back.
Other types of losses bring a more desperate void than do material "things" gone but not forgotten.
After a slow recovery from surgery in 1999, a freak knee injury the next year forced me back onto the operating table. Thus combined, these two intruders robbed me of physical ability I'd come to enjoy. Though mighty grateful to be able putter city streets on a bicycle, I miss both the thrill and challenge of strenuous wilderness hiking, especially in the fall.
But there's a lost ability I miss even more–and even dream will one day return.
Our daughter's death in October 1995 unexpectedly plunged me into writing poetry. This persisted for about five years before mysteriously vanishing virtually overnight. Weaving feathery threads of thought into particular patterns of structure, rhyme and meter comprised a kind of catharsis, a means and mode of expression peculiarly satisfying to my logical mindset.
Conway poetess Betty Fraser assures me that the poetry is merely dormant within and will eventually revive–given enough quiet and solitude. But how to lay firm hands on those slippery commodities long enough to facilitate the resuscitation seems a farfetched dream in itself.
Loss often brings the realization that I've been too easily dissatisfied with God's provision for the day and have flippantly squandered it for what would never last.
Copyright 2005 James McAlister
Recent Comments