Photographs, Potatoes, and Pals

by alan harris

Monday

December 5

I’m trying to study over at Grandpa’s house again.  I have a History quiz in two days.  Since I’ll be at hockey practice tomorrow I figure I had better study tonight.  Grandpa just lives right down the street.  His house is quieter than mine, usually.  I empty my backpack out in front of me. Class notes, broken pencils and Kit Kat wrappers scatter all across the dining room table.  Faces of young sailors in old picture frames seem impressed at how much junk a kid nowadays can carry around in a school backpack.  One or two black and white photographs propped up on the dining room table and a couple more hung on the walls seem to snicker at me.

Grandpa’s back in his bedroom.  His old record player is turned on.  I’ve heard this song before.  It’s a song by some old dude name Simon Garfunkel…I think.   Grandpa plays it every time he looks through his box of old pictures.  He calls it his Memory Box.  Grandpa loves that cardboard box of old memories.  I think it reminds him that he was once more alive than he is now.  It reminds him that he once had two good eyes.  It reminds him of all the people he’s met in this world and hopes to meet again.

Time it was,

and what a time it was,

it was

a time of innocence,

a time of confidences

I don’t know why I can’t sit down and study the stuff I’m supposed to…like my History notes.  I study everything else instead.  I study the sounds in Grandpa’s house…the music…the rustling of pictures in a cardboard box…and the packing of a suitcase.  Then it comes to me.  I get up and look at the calendar on the side of the refrigerator.  It’s December 5th. Grandpa walks out of his bedroom with a suitcase and an envelope.

‘You’re going to have breakfast in Chicago, aren’t you?’ I ask.