BusterStronghart@Gmail.com
November 25, 2004
The first time I saw waxed fruit I knew it was wrong. -- Fake fruit? Who, I thought, did Mrs. Craven think she was fooling? I was six, maybe seven, but I knew instinctively that I would never have fake fruit in my house.It was off. Its ugliness began to dominate the kitchen. From that very moment I knew that I was better than Brian and his mother. My innocence had been lost and I knew that I could never again trust appearances.That didn't, however, stop me from lusting after Brian's redheaded, slim and smiling mother. I didn't yet know why, but I wanted her. (A precursor, perhaps, of my future, far ahead, when I would lust after a nurse or maid hired by my children to look after me, but will have forgotten why, or what to do with them.)I would have regained that precious innocence, undeserved of course, because between that morning of the waxed fruit and my future years of decrepitude much will have happened.
But padding around the apartment or house in my robe and deerskin, fur-lined slippers (fake fur, now that I think of it) an harmless old man, grey headed, already partly ghost or spirit, I will be glad to pass through the warm dust-mote laden sunbeams that will float through the windows, and stripe the wall and carpet. I know that I will engage a faulty memory, confusing a nephew with a child, a teen-age romance with a French film seen in middle age, or perhaps a business failure with some one else's successful invasion of the perfume import market
