Fond recollections of a youthful self infuse the bric-a-brac of
childhood, whether it is a beloved doll, a well–used ball or a coveted
music box.
My daughter recently got married. Weeks after the beautiful wedding ceremony and the rounds of sheva berakhot,
I stood in the doorway of her room, watching as she and her new husband
sat on the floor sorting through belongings collected during childhood.
Dusty
bric-a-brac from a high shelf lay scattered before them. These things,
one by one, were placed in one of three piles: to keep, to discard or
undecided. “How about this?” came the question about a music box
decorated with a glass dome that contained the figure of a white
unicorn lying down on grass. My daughter took it, wound the key and out
danced the notes of “Some Enchanted Evening.”
“Hey,
it still works,” she said. She held it up and then placed it in the
“undecided” pile. I remembered the first commandment of the
father-of-the-bride and new-father-in-law guidebook: Hold thy tongue.
But
I clearly remembered when I bought that music box. It was late
December, and the winters where we lived at the time, in the northern
Midwest of the United States, were dark, bitter, ice-coated and
endless. I was stretched between several part-time jobs, trying to
juggle payments for rent, health insurance, day care and the numerous
maintenance costs of two rusting old cars.
My
daughter’s birthday was in January. So right before New Year’s Day I
brought her on an outing to an immense suburban mall, intent on taking
advantage of the holiday sales. Gaudy and lavish Christmas decorations
engulfed us. The mall was jammed with families escaping the gray,
frozen day. Under an immense domed sunroof were gardens, a small
amphitheater and even an amusement park. Outside it was 10 degrees
below zero, but inside people milled around in light sweaters and
shirtsleeves as if visiting a summer carnival. As we waited in the long
line for the carousel (my daughter had already chosen the horse she
wanted and stared at it each time it appeared), I marveled at the
precise planning, at the absorption and incorporation of technologies
that combined to create this self-enclosed world, all calibrated to
help us buy, buy, buy.
This was 14 years ago,
before Blackberries, iPods, wi-fi and even cell phones. But the code of
our age was fully entrenched; dazzling, cutting-edge, mass-produced
technology that must be bottled, packaged, wrapped and displayed as
quickly as possible. Once on display, it is on the road to
obsolescence, and once purchased, it is already devalued. For while the
customer is still trying to decipher the instructions, a glitzier,
glossier version is being shipped to the warehouse, with an advertising
campaign to follow that highlights the absolute need for its
improvements.
The quantity and variety of
specialty shops in this free-market Taj Mahal were astounding. There
was a shop selling only socks; others specialized only in puzzles,
stuffed animals, computer games, electric trains and accessories with
baseball team logos. In the hologram store, I felt as if I were seeing
an early nickelodeon, where people pressed their eyes to an eye slot
and turned a crank to rotate a series of sequential photographs and
give the illusion of motion. Perhaps a grandchild one day will say to
me, “You mean, in your day, Grandpa, movies were flat!?”
But
as we passed one shop, my daughter’s grip on my hand tightened. She
pulled me in, and we were surrounded by music boxes of every shape,
size and creature: horses, clowns, farm animals, dragons, giraffes and,
of course, unicorns. At age 6, my daughter could sniff out a unicorn
like a bloodhound.
Most of the pieces still ran
mechanically. Here in music-box land there were no technological
advances, no sparks, no exploding heads on digital screens. Most were
modern, mass-produced models made in China. But a special display case
held hand-made music boxes, crafted by someone I pictured squinting
over a workbench like Pinocchio’s father. I imagined these pieces in a
movie of a long-gone era in which the camera panned a child’s room
filled with wooden soldiers, a china ballet dancer, a piggy bank,
rocking horse and music box.
In this eddy of
old-fashionedness, with the mall bustling around us, my daughter
studied the music boxes. She noted the details of horses and
unicorns—the rose garlands, the braided manes, the golden horns. She
gave them names on the spot: A horse mantled in spiked armor became
Army Unicorn.
She methodically moved along the
shelves, asking me to wind up one after another until the tinny tunes
mingled. As I turned the keys I glanced at the price tags. These things
ran 40, 50, up to 100 bucks, and I thought, there is no way I can do
this now. I marshaled the reasons I would give; it is expensive, a
waste, it doesn’t even do anything, and how often can you listen to
“The Impossible Dream” or “The Sound of Music” thrummed out to the
rhythm of a marching band?
But she never asked,
and that more than anything made me wish I could just pick one up,
admire its artistry, check the price only as a curiosity, then hand it
to the sales clerk and casually say, “Wrap it brightly, please, for a
very special little girl.” No, she never asked, but she did take a
lingering look behind as we left.
One
or two mornings later, as she sat drowsily on my lap still smelling of
sleep, she told me she had dreamed of a dragon that chased a unicorn.
But when she confronted the dragon and asked what it wanted, the dragon
answered that it only wanted the unicorn to come live with it. My
intrepid daughter demanded a gift from the dragon, and the dragon gave
her a whole music-box shop.
Wow! I was mush. Had
she worked for the Jewish Federation I would have pledged everything. I
returned to the shop alone, perused the merchandise and chose a box
with a large, milk-white unicorn stretched languidly in the grass that
played the tune of “Some Enchanted Evening.” As I handed over my thinly
stretched plastic, I remembered what I had earlier desired: “Wrap it in
something wild, for a very special girl,” I said.
After
the young couple left to bring a load of boxes to their new home, I
walked into the room, and felt almost embarrassed at my relief on
seeing the music box now sitting in the “to keep” pile. Maybe, I
rationalized to myself, it will be valuable someday, like an early
Mickey Mouse lunchbox.
Or maybe, it will not be
sold, broken or chipped. Maybe someday an old woman will pick it up
with parchment-skinned hands. She will wind it up and that melody will
chime and stir in her images of a dragon chasing a unicorn and a shop
full of music boxes, and she will hand it over to her wide-eyed
granddaughter. I hope so. H
Allan Rabinowitz, an Israeli tour guide and a writer, lives in Jerusalem with his family.
