2nd Cup of Coffee Archives: ROMANCE IN THE OLD PARK
2nd Cup Archives: Romance In The Old Park
Originally posted by 2nd Cup of Coffee on February 10, 2014
Author’s Note ~ my present posting format doesn’t allow me to include pictures, which I have joyfully included across the years this 2nd Cup of Coffee blog has been extant. Most of you who’ve hung with me across those years know: I spent considerable time locating just the right pics to fit that day’s/week’s story. Hence, I’m going to begin describing some of the pictures that first adorned these posts. Perhaps you’ll see why…
Two white coffee mugs crowded each other on a shelf. The one setting upright was shiny red inside with a green handle. The other cup leaned against the first one as if cuddling, and was shiny blue inside with a green handle. The first one had “i love you” in black letters on it. On the other one was “i know”.
The little girl played in the park whenever she could.
As parks go, this one wasn’t a standout. The swing set only had one canvas seat still attached to the chains. The others hung limp as though having long-since forgotten the joyful giggling and screams they once helped create. Once in a great while a boy or two would stare at them, jog over and play Tarzan on them for a few minutes; otherwise, they only swung in the breeze.
The undulating long slide was rusty in places.
The merry-go-round squeaked as it turned, complaining like an old man being forced to get up to refill his coffee.
The pea gravel that once covered the ground of the park had long since been stolen or swept or kicked until hard-packed dirt was all that remained, decorated by whatever garbage the wind blew across it. The only thing that came close to qualifying as having any beauty there was a hardy shrub, a bush of indeterminate origin.
None of that mattered to the little girl.
Usually wearing ‘Early Goodwill’ clothes often frayed, worn and mismatched, she was most always there. In nice weather she often was barefoot. Yet every night after school, every Saturday – and in Summer almost daily – she was at the old park, usually sitting and playing in the shadow of the bush, lost in her protective world of make-believe. It was as if she and that tough old bush were friends that knew each other. Whether modeling its few remaining green shoots or stubbornly raising bare Fall and Winter branches, the little girl rarely strayed far from ‘her’ bush.
The owner of Hoarse Feathers, a natural food store across the street, tried to keep an eye on her. He never remembered seeing her walking with a parent or older sibling. She showed up on her own and quietly left the same way. Sometimes he wasn’t even aware when she was gone.
One day as she played, she noticed a picture stuck in an inner branch of the bush. It looked to her like a picture of a 2nd- or 3rd- grade school boy. Pausing to study it and then glancing carefully around, she turned back to it, eyeing its cracked surface and the little boy’s face. She looked around again, then gently slid it into a pocket of her dusty, soiled shorts and went on playing.
As it always does, Time slid quietly past.
She grew, and as she did, her trips to the park became less frequent, but the son of the shop owner had grown up watching her, begging his dad to let him go over to play with her and occasionally taking her some candy. Other little treasures and trinkets found their way across the street, too; for, as sometimes happens, he was smitten with her.
At first the little girl was timid, cautiously appraising the boy as he’d offer her that day’s gift. She slowly warmed to his kindness, though, and began receiving them all, sometimes with polite appreciation and others with wide-eyed interest. When she’d go home they all joined the picture in a scuffed little box she’d found somewhere and kept.
One day after they'd spent some time together on the swings his dad had fixed, he asked if he could walk her home. She leveled a frank look at him, then nodded. Reaching her modest house, she stopped and said, "This is our house."
He thanked her for letting him walk her home, then asked, "You know where our store is. May I leave my phone number with you?" Once again her eyes met his and she nodded. He pulled the little pad he kept for work, wrote his name and phone number on it, then carefully tore it off and handed it to her. As she took it, their fingertips brushed and they both sensed an immediate connection.
As time passed she grew in uncommon beauty, and the young man’s interest flowered into powerful, unrelenting love.
Inheriting the store after his father’s retirement, he asked her to marry him.
She said yes.
After their wedding, she and her husband were sorting through things both had collected when young, deciding what to keep and what to toss or give away.
She grinned and said, “You’re the guy. You first!”
He self-consciously began showing her his boyhood ‘treasures’. . .
The antique Coats & Clarks buttonhook once belonging to his grandmother… When she looked up at him with a raised eyebrow, he raised both his eyebrows: “Hey, no bad-mouthin’ Gram’s old buttonhook. I once dug a whole quarter out of a crack in a floor with that.” The silver volume knob off the radio in his dad’s ’52 Chevy pickup they'd had so much fun driving around… A funny-looking metal thing he told her was an old skate key… The leather necklace with the miniature kaleidoscope on it… Then it was her turn.
She hesitantly opened the little box that held each of those cherished possessions from her lonely childhood. An agate she’d found once when in the mountains for a picnic… A hairless Barbie she loved since one of her 2nd grade best friends had lost her hair to cancer treatments… A pair of little dogs, one white and one black, with magnets stuck on them…The most prized was a necklace with a broken clasp her mother had given her just before she died. It had colored-glass ‘jewels’ on it she tried to carefully polish, especially since the small ruby had gone missing since before her 11th birthday. One by one, she took her ‘treasures’ from the box, laying them out to look at them. Finally, they uncovered down in the box’s bottom an old creased, scratched picture of a little bo----
Suddenly she realized her husband had stopped smiling and was staring intently at the picture with a strange look on his face.
“Where’d you find this?”
She huffed and ruefully answered, “It was stuck down under an old bush on the playground.”
She blushed. “I--I imagined him as my first love. I never had much when I was little so when I found this, I made up a story about it. About him. It’s nothing. Kind of stupid, really.”
She started to toss it into the discard sack when she noticed her husband having a hard time breathing, biting his lip with tears in his eyes.
Alarmed, she said, “What? What’s the matter?”
“This is an old school picture of mine I lost when I was eight.”
Now you know why I had that picture of coffee cups at the top. Comments are always welcome.
© D. Dean Boone, February 2014
