October 14th, 2007
Tiny Dancer
[originally recorded September 24th, 2007]
And I think about what it must have been like in 1981. The sky grey, a slight blue tint to the buildings and people’s skin. Cars made less of plastic and more of metal. Cigarettes, numbers, The Wall Street Journal. My grandparents brought me a BOSCH-labelled racing car from Denmark.
and a camera that has seen the world
The smooth, black metal. The serial number engraved into the back of the body, painted white letters bright as the day they were pressed.
I breathe on the stock 50mm f/1.8, and the fog recedes slowly across the iridescent glass. I think about late model automobiles and the leather seats in “The Grey Ghost”, my grandparents’ digitally-augmented Chrysler New Yorker. Donuts from Paul’s Bakery under the train tracks and the weathered Ralston-Purina check on top a red smokestack.
I go to the iPod with a burning thrust of nostalgia to listen to “Tiny Dancer”, but not finding it settle for “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and jump forward a couple years, falling into a drowning tide of medical complexes, dental offices and dry, latex gloves. Mom, Tony, and I at Chuck E. Cheese where I witnessed the horror of seeing The Beagles in a storeroom closet, wires hanging in silent death. The clown ball game we made a mockery of and eventually buying the motorized Tryptacon I pined over for so long.
Somewhere, twenty years ago, this moment was born in wool.
