'The Broken Stuff We Can’t Get Rid Of'

Eric Ormsby (b. 1941) has learned the lessons of memory, age and loss, as the rest of us must. His poems often visit the past. With Donald Justice he shares a Florida childhood recalled with gratitude and sadness, as most childhoods eventually are. His reactions can’t be dismissed by chalking them up to mere nostalgia. Ormsby’s “Cellar” (Coastlines, 1992; Time’s Covenant, 2007) opens with these lines: 

“This is where we keep them: toy trucks

with busted wheels, the broken stuff

we can’t get rid of, our old books,

the splintered chair, the fractured tabouret.”

 

As a parent, I understand how difficult it can be to throw out such things, each accompanied by an aura of memory. Children, in my experience, are less sentimental, more ruthless.  Next, Ormsby dispenses with the cheaper varieties of nostalgia:

 

“There’s something stagey in our garbage.

The furniture is theatrical and grim.

Our repudiated gestures still live there,

six feet under the kitchen. They wear

the vague insulted look of slighted relatives,

belonging, but pushed aside.”

 

Six feet – the depth at which the dead are traditionally buried: “belonging, but pushed aside.” Another anatomist of childhood, adolescence and their props is Steven Millhauser. His second novel, Portrait of a Romantic (1977), contains detailed catalogues of toys and other childhood relicts. The title character, Arthur Grumm, and a friend visit a department store (a preview of Millhauser’s 1996 novel Martin Dressler). There, in the toy department, they survey the board games and puzzles:

 

“. . . a word-game consisting of  lettered dice that you shook in a cup, a question-and-answer game in the shape of a bowling ball with a little window where the answer appeared, a game of three-dimensional tic-tac-toe, an electrical football game with a metal playing field that vibrated when you plugged it in, causing the little players to move.”

 

Arthur decides it’s “all boring, so boring” and joins his friend to look at other games. “I wanted a complex game with long difficult rules and as many accessories as possible—metal pieces, wooden pieces, scorepads, penalty cards, play money, spinners, dice-boxes, red dice with white spots, white dice with black spots, hourglasses with white sand.” But the friend settles on a “newspaper game.” They hurry home and play it four times, and inevitably it’s a disappointment. Arthur says: “. . . I suddenly remembered a domed game of my childhood with three steel balls and a clown’s red-and-blue face, and with a feeling of panic I wondered what had happened to all those vanished games.”