all the fun of the fair...

Friday, June 20, 2003

One Word - Paper

Here's a prime example of the types of pieces I put together for my writing group, inspired by one word:

The paper was gaily festooned with hand-drawn balloons and streamers and wrapped packages, which also depicted gaily festooned hand-drawn wrapping paper with balloon and streamers and wrapped packages. The paper took on an Escher quality in its colorful simplicity. No, not Escher. More like one of those infinity mirrors that seemed so cool back in the Eighties. Now many folks considered those mirrors outdated, but I still found them kind of cool. Maybe I was stuck in the Eighties. Maybe I was just easily fascinated. Who knows?

I looked at the wrapping paper, so carefully drawn by my friend, and tried to follow the little drawings on the little packages as far as I could. I think I counted four distinct patterns until the drawings ran together enough to look like solid colors. So very pretty. I was touched that my friend would take the time to fashion the festive pattern on the fragile pearlescent tissue paper that wrapped the small box.

“Open it!” she demanded, amused at my fascination with her handiwork. I did as she commanded, gently prying the taped ends so as not to disturb the artistic paper. She blew a sigh through her teeth, impatient with my ministrations, but she knew better than to urge me to hurry up. I was a careful un-wrapper even with commercial paper. There was no way I was going to destroy something she had taken so much care to create.

Finally the last of the tape was lifted and the paper fell away from the plain brown box. I removed the top carefully and pulled aside the translucent tissue to reveal a delicate wire picture frame. Glass beads in blue and green and purple adorned the wire frame, which turned this way and that in a maze of copper, looping back to its point of beginning before taking off in a new direction. It was both simple and complicated, like the wrapping paper, like my friend, and I loved it.

Surrounded by the copper wire was a picture of my friend and me from happier times, before her marriage problems and my family problems, when we were both much younger and life seemed so much simpler. As I looked at the younger us, our smiles as big as our futures, tears formed in the corners of my eyes. I knew what she was trying to say with this gift. That life was both as simple and as complicated as the wire frame, but that, no matter what happened, we would still, at heart, be those same girls that looked at the future with such optimism and that we would always be those girls together.

I looked up at her. “Thank you,” I said, nearly breathless. Her knowing eyes smiled back at me.

I should clarify, the above story is completely fictional. My writing group paid me the compliment of thinking it was a true story. Such sweet women!

Labels: story time