If you turned the green horse into a pink and white elephant - and turned the prissy little girl into a headstrong little tomboy - well, you get the picture. Sort of.
There's a family photograph I've seen a hundred times, one taken back in the mid-'70s when we used to visit my great-grandfather in Cuernavaca, Mexico. In this picture I'm blindfolded, I'm wearing a colorful poncho my great-grandfather's Mexican housekeeper knitted for me, and I'm using a very big stick to beat a small elephant to death.
The elephant's name was Horatio, he had been my best friend for almost a week, and I killed him for his candy.
Being a lily-white kid from the East coast, I'd never even seen a pinata before that trip. When I met Horatio I was delighted. He was almost three feet tall, stood on his hind legs, and wore a pink tuxedo. Since I was the only kid on the trip (as an only child with no cousins, things often tended to work out that way), I promptly named my new friend, and we proceeded to have an adventure-filled week. Horatio slept in my room, sat by the pool while I swam, and rode in the back seat with me when we left the villa. I talked to him, I told him stories, and I wished desperately that he would talk back.
I wanted to take him home with me, but my mother made it clear that there was no way a rather large pinata was making the trip back to the United States with us.
Only one fact helped me accept this cruel reality: Horatio had a secret.
He was filled with candy.
My grandmother and great-grandfather had made this very clear from the start, and every time I felt sad about losing him, the thought of all that candy somehow balanced me out.
Finally, Christmas day arrived - the day Horatio would reveal his inner-most secrets to me (provided I attacked him with a stick). I said my final goodbyes, and when the hour arrived, Horatio was strung up on the patio while I was blindfolded and given the stick. With terrible conflict raging inside, I hesitated for several moments before finally giving in to the encouraging cheers of those on hand to watch.
My initial hits did nothing. The crowd yelled for me to hit harder ... harder! Finally, I smashed my pachyderm friend with all my might and heard his poor body crack open. I ripped my blindfold off, anxious to see the candy spill out ...
But he was empty.
Apparently, my grandmother and great-grandfather had failed to realize that Horatio was a "fill-it-yourself" pinata. There he lay, torn and broken, his death completely meaningless. (Question: Did no one notice that I'd been able to carry him around effortlessly for an entire week? Did they think the candy inside was silent and weightless?)
To say that I cried would be an understatement. Even at the age of nine, I knew there was a lesson in what had happened, and I knew it was a terrible lesson, indeed.
The memory of Horatio came flooding back to me earlier today when I was driving home from class and passed a neighborhood birthday party. A small child was gleefully beating a Llama pinata, one that somehow reminded me of Horatio.
I called my mother in hopes of securing the original picture of Horatio and I, but was told that old family photos are currently kept in boxes out in the garage. (The garage? You're killing me here, Mom ...)
Even though I can see the image quite clearly in my mind's eye, I'd give anything to see it for real right now. I'd love to study the little girl for signs that she was feeling mixed emotions; I wish I could see Horatio's happy face and curved trunk again.
Not surprisingly, I've haven't gone near a pinata since that fateful day in Mexico. I've just never had the heart.
3 comments:
Yes, boxes in the garage. We live in the high desert, no storage space, no basement.
You should know that Karen is a packrat -- a packrat self-trained as an archivist. She has saved every letter, every photograph, every diary, every drawing, every note from a teacher, every children's book, every stuffed animal ...
She doesn't have storage space or a basement either. Or even a garage. So her house is a mixed media museum stuffed with, well, stuff.
This is not a recommendation, but what if all that stuff suddenly went up in smoke?
Karen would still be Karen. Not an atom less. Nothing would change, except perhaps the habit of reviewing the past so often that it's hard to live without bumping into it.
I don't think we review the real past anyway. We review the past that the present demands.
Did Karen cry because she murdered Horatio or because there wasn't any candy? She's smart and skeptical, so she poses the question. But did she cry at all?
If she did, I don't remember it. And I was standing right there. But memory and 50 cents will not buy any of us a ticket to the past, let alone the subway.
I say keep the past in the garage. And if you don't have a garage, build one.
--Mom
i don't remember crying at the time. my memory is of later that night - i distinctinctly remember saving a piece of pinata and staring at it and wishing he were still whole.
then again, as rodman philbrick writes in 'freak the mighty,' "Remembering is a great invention of the mind, and if you try hard enough, you can remember anything, whether it really happened or not."
either way, i still say those pictures need to come out of the garage.
k- that must have been a helluva birthday party you saw to bring back that memory - I enjoyed reading it.
Post a Comment