Perspective & Imagination

I stopped by my Mom’s house for lunch today and she told me my brother had left something for me. My folk’s house is kind of a way station for the sibs. We all live in different parts of the TampaBay area but usual stop by the folks house every week or so and it makes a kind of mid-way point to leave things. I opened a plastic grocery bag and found a piece of trash from nearly forty years ago.

Well, not quite trash. In early Twenty-First Century speak we’d call it a re-purposed item. As a kid, I’d manage to look at leftovers from a party—a plastic champagne stopper and two plastic drinking cups—and see a spaceship. I have no idea how or why my little brother had this. Somehow this thing was not only saved but packed and moved from Florida to Arizona, put in storage while my parents lived overseas, shipped back to Florida and then ended up at my brother’s house.

I looked at it, shrugged and then dropped it in the trash can. A piece of trash from the past. But I started thinking about it. I remember that I made it but I can’t really remember when. And I thought what kind of kid looks at trash sitting on a table after a party and sees a spaceship?

I used to be that kid. A kid that dreamed of stars. A kid that dreamed of pirates and adventures. I pulled the model made of cups out of the trash and tried to remember what happened to that kid. Didn’t he die?