A Box from Anne

  A Box from Anne. There’s no expecting--and we never know quite what will happen. Our friend, Anne Rice, must have sent these, years ago--Christmas cookies in a handsome metal tin. We enjoyed them, no doubt, but it was the box, later, that seemed to have the real value. I can see that I pulled away at the label, to get it down to the red enamel, but something interrupted--or maybe I didn’t have the patience that day--and parts of the wrapper stayed attached. So that it became a half-way box from Anne…

 It got moved to my office at some point--don’t remember that either--although I always liked to save important papers in boxes like this. The fact that the box came from Anne put an extra spin on the idea--so that they were now the important papers in the box from Anne…

 One of the first things I gave away, actually--as if to recognize the challenge. Dorry was walking by outside the office--a Planning grad who’d done some adventurous photographs in the VS20 class, so we had a connection. She saw me, and stopped to say hello. I told her part of the story (curious about whether Anne Rice would have a place in a young person’s consciousness) and Dorry was immediately enthusiastic. “You know Anne Rice?!!!”

 And why should that be a surprise? But I appreciated Dorry’s excitement--and immediately (well, alright, after a bit of internal hesitation) asked her if she’d like the Anne Rice box. It all seemed very simple--and of course Dorry said yes… So now I get to reflect on this again. Yes, it’s fine the box is gone--especially if it carries with it a smattering of the story (how on earth could I have filled in all the other parts that made a lifelong friendship meaningful? Although I did tell Dorry about the pre-vampire Anne attaching all the hundreds of stock-car photos to the walls of her Bonita Street bedroom…)

 And I think something else that prompted me here was a story Dorry had told me. About the vintage radio I’d put out for give-away the week before (see Radio Story post)--and Dorry knew that another of the Planning grads (she mentioned his name) had liked it, and it was now on his desk in studio. 

The stories had been displaced, of course--Dorry’s studio-mate didn’t know anything about Jesse Taylor and that intense project week back in the 1980s when Jesse and I had listened to the early Tom Waits tapes together--on this same radio--or even why there’d been a Cuco Sanchez tape in there last week when I’d finally decided to part with it…

Not even sure if decided is the right word…

 _____

 Of course every object in the world must carry these kinds of stories--the root of the word haunted, no doubt.

Thinking of what the Czeslaw Milosz once said, about the Sierra Nevada mountains--how they frightened him, just because there were so many places without names.

Where in his own Lithuania, every twist in a stream, every patch of meadow had its own spirit, hidden just behind...


 .