This Month's Story
THE ONE PENNY CHIP
Perhaps there is a game-piece sorter within us that marks with superior wisdom what is truly important in our everyday existence and what is not. We all seem to have that sorter.
Last night just as the sun was setting in the east, the sky, the beach, the house; all were suddenly bathed in a rich rose hue. Everything and everywhere the color touched was transformed into something different, something magical, something that had not been there moments before. Then, in just a few moments, it was all gone. Twilight slipped into night and the rose red light of those few moments was gone as if it had never been.
This is the joy of living on the beach and watching it and the water beyond. It is a show with a variety of colors and temporal scales. Sometimes you become entranced by an egret dancing in the tidal shallows. Its apparently drunken dance is actually designed to scare up small fauna burrowed in the mud of the receding tide. But it’s a joy to watch. Sometimes it’s a flight of pelicans fishing a color line in the water just a few hundred yards out from the beach. Sometimes it’s the silhouette of barges and shrimpers or low muttering storm clouds on the horizon.
Sometimes all of these can be found collectively in a single scene, sometimes in parts of many scenes spread over days. Sometimes, like today, whatever it is takes moments of your time to see and then is gone. Sometimes it all blends to become merely the background vistas of a summer afternoon that seems to last forever.
Although the broad view of the sky, water and beach is always there, the passage of time constantly renews this view with grand, fresh variations. Wait a moment, a day, a month, then look again and all will be different to see. I have a photograph of my daughter walking up the beach from Carrere’s pier. Loaming behind her is the great dark mass of a summer thunderstorm moving in from the west. In the photograph, Cathy is a small object overwhelmed by the overall menacing grandeur of the approaching storm, the broad waters of the Sound, and the long stretch of bright sand. The whole scene is a study of blue and gray contrasting with white and yellow, and the small object which is Cathy giving it an added vibrancy. I really don’t need the photograph; I can remember it in my mind’s eye which is softer and, in many ways, better. All of these views, these scenes; whether morning, evening, summer, fall, sit in my mind like little color chips for me to call up when needed, to look at, to turn over, to rub with my mind’s memory till they glisten in the soft light of thought. I remember, I remember is a game old people play, but it is good to be able to play the game at any age. Even now, when I walk along the beach and either stare down at the foamy, tea-colored water washed by a wave at my feet, or watch a gull slipping along a layer of air over the water, I feel I’m building up my chips, my game-pieces for the time when I can do nothing else but play the game.
We all do that as we move along from day-to-day; build up our game chips. But truthfully, the game-pieces don’t collect the way we think they should. We see something we think is important and try to freeze that something in our mind to remember later. We tell ourselves that what we are seeing, doing, feeling, is important, that we have to remember a first kiss, a graduation, a new job. Later, long later, we find that what we tried so hard to remember is not there, it’s all vague and replaced by things that at the time didn’t seem important. Perhaps there is a game-piece sorter within us that marks with superior wisdom what is truly important in our everyday existence and what is not. We all seem to have that sorter. I remember vividly something from when I was very young that seemed as nothing then. I was at a candy counter. An old woman sat on a stool behind the counter. I remember that her hair was mostly gray and tied in a bun. She had on a blue loose-fitting dress and wore no make up as old people did then and her eyes were bright with a cataract in one. But at the time, my mind was not set on her but on deciding which of the candy in the counter shelves to buy. “How much is that?” I pointed to some chocolate candies in a tray. The woman got up from the stool and looked over the candy counter at me and then down to where I pointed. “Three for a penny.” She had an Italian accent. I took no notice. Most of the people in my neighborhood had accents from the old country. My concentrations were on my fingers moving slowly to where some mints lay heaped behind the counter’s glass also in a cardboard box.
“They’re a penny apiece.” She watched me for a moment longer then returned to her seat and continued her looking out a window in the rear of the store. I remember it being spring and that the back yard she looked out on was filled with damp dirt and had a wooden fence around it.
I was too young to know, but I am sure she was seeing something that was not the yard with its dirt and wooden fence; something I would never know, that only she could see. My thoughts were on the candies and making a choice. “I’ll take one of them.” The old woman turned and looked at me as if seeing me for the first time. I pushed the penny toward her across the glass top of the counter and she rose and looked down to where I pointed. Beside the chocolates there was another cardboard box. It held long limp whips of licorice. It was these long whips of licorice that I was pointing at. The old women opened the case and gave me a single black whip. She took my penny and, dropping it into a cigar box, sat back down and renewed her staring at some old memories out the rear window of her mind. Without looking back at the other candy or the woman, I walked out into the bright street and I went toward the curbing. In the gutter, a small clear stream of water, a residue of the recent rain, floated a cigarette wrapper to the storm grating at the distant corner. I began walking carefully along the curb’s jutting edge; a slip now became a thousand-foot fall into the river raging below me.
I bit my lip in concentration and watched as I carefully placed my feet along the thin stone, the licorice waving from one of my outstretched arms. I didn’t think anymore of the old woman -- only of the blue- gray granite curbing, of my balanced, swaying body, and the sun sweet smell of the late shower in the bright spring air.
This was long ago, but I can still smell that tangy air and see the blue-gray granite curbing. Like my daughter walking on the beach, like the momentary red hue of the sunset last night, that view, that long ago chip will always be with me.
