After walking a long, circuitous route around Prospect Park today, Tessa took off on a run, and I found myself at the little flea market that springs up every Saturday on 7th Avenue around Carroll Street. On one of the tables I found a notebook full of stamped, used postcards from about 1898 to 1919. One such postcard from 1909 had a woman sitting on a man's lap, neither of them up to much good, and underneath it said, "Just a spoon, my dear! A spoon is no overdose!" Superimposed above them was a silver spoon hanging in the ether.
I'd love to know what the hell they were abusing, perhaps one of Freud's seven-per-cent solutions, or some kind of absinthe drip, or even the still-used version of cooking heroin. Fuck, it might even be molasses for all I know. On the back of the card was written (with the florid fountain penmanship of the time): "Dearest Ernest: Is this how you did it back in the old days?"
The "old days" to the writer of this card probably meant the 1870s. Other ancient artifacts were on the next table, an entire box brimming with pictures of the now-dead, expensive collars on fresh laundered shirts in 1921, babies born in 1897, a team of some indeterminate sport in 1918. The sheer volume of these pictures is staggering, each of them so long gone, even the person remembering them dead for years. I imagined a line stretching along 7th Avenue for miles, all the people who were in the pictures, or those who knew of them, in their uniforms and hats and hoop skirts, all there to explain each picture to me, who they were, and why it was important to them.
I think about my own box of pictures in Columbia County and understand that the same fate may befall all of them. I think about this paragraph I write, stuck on a server somewhere in a distant place where I do not live. I'm overwhelmed by the impermanence of it all, and yet I keep typing.
The Celextant, May 4, 2002
I just took my pill. Is it obvious?
Posted by at May 5, 2002 12:43 AM