The Storm King and Don Quixote

During my junior year in high school I owned what would now be considered a vintage lighter, the kind that featured a striking wheel, a wick, and a wind hood and that required periodically soaking cotton packing with lighter fluid and replacing the flint. The name “Storm King” was etched on its brass casing. That lighter lit many a cigarette when I hung out with my best friends Jim and Mark at Barney’s DX station, back when cigarette smoking was still considered cool and the Surgeon General’s warning a mere surmise. It also illuminated late-night keyholes, discovered keys or coins dropped on darkened car floors, and fired up the charcoal at grill-outs. An all-purpose tool, indeed, and I seldom left home without it.

In my late adolescent desire to appear the embodiment of sophistication, I perfected a technique of snapping the Storm King open by squeezing it between my thumb and index and middle fingers. Despite diligent practice, however, I was unable to combine that dexterous move with hitting the striking wheel to cause an igniting spark—a feat that would no doubt have had the editors of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not hustling to my door. During the summer between my junior and senior years I somehow lost the Storm King and, strangely, through the time from then to now, have sometimes recalled it and wished I still possessed it. Undoubtedly, I could find a Storm King somewhere online. But I’ve never really looked. I wouldn’t buy it. I want the one I had back then.

* * *

In the winter of 1979, while visiting my folks over the Christmas holidays, I announced that, after eight years of small-town Wisconsin high-school teaching, I had resigned, effective at year’s end, to enter the Ph. D. program at the University of Minnesota. The graduate coursework I had done during the previous summers to move up and across the pay scale had awaked in me an eager desire to know more, to know better. I wanted to become a college professor. The University of Minnesota had not only accepted me, but also offered a teaching associate position.

Dad was pleased. He understood the urgent tug of aspiration and the seizing need for intellectual plenitude and self-betterment. His life embodied it. Mom, too, but she worried about my leaving a secure job in the present for an uncertain job in the future. It was not an idle worry. The graduate school application materials I had received included a cautionary statement describing the precarious market for tenure-line positions in higher education. I was effectually readying myself on a high board for a half gainer into the unpredictable. Still, like Dad, she supported my decision.

A week later I received a small package in the mail from Mom and Dad. It contained a small, hand-carved, wooden figurine of Don Quixote, mounted on Rocinante, shield in one hand, lance in the other. A note was included: “We know that for you, no dream is impossible—except for that one about playing middle linebacker for the Green Bay Packers.” Beneath my words, they had heard, as they always did, my own anxiety about the wisdom of my action.

That figurine occupied a prominent place on my bookshelf for many years until, somehow, amid the confusion of a move, it inexplicably disappeared. I have, ever since, mourned its loss.

* * *

A cigarette lighter; a figurine. Two small objects whose loss I lament. Elizabeth Bishop says in her poem “One Art,” that “so many things seem filled with the intent/ to be lost that their loss is no disaster,” but I do not find the implied indifference to be the case Perhaps I am afflicted by a Freudian melancholy, induced by an attempt to reclaim the libidinal investment of a lost object. Could that be why the songs of that troubadour of nostalgia and loss, John Mellencamp, dominate my iPod’s playlist? “Hold on to sixteen as long as you can,” he sings in “Jack and Diane,” because “Change come around real soon/Make us women and men.” And yet, I do not believe that we lose sixteen in the process of becoming adults. We carry it with us, as we carry all pieces of ourselves, into the present, if not as parts of who we currently are, then as points from which the who we are evolved. We gestate long in the womb of experience. Amid the jostling push and pull of the events that mark our lives, we carry those pieces forward to retrieve and stabilize ourselves, to calm the often turbulent churn that threatens to rend our I’s from our Me’s. We poach in the preserve of memory and carry our trophies forward to selve ourselves, to stitch a coherent sense of who it is that we have become.

Some say the past is inaccessible, a country whose borders, once crossed, permit no reentry. I think the readmission policy is considerably less implacable. Perhaps Walt Whitman says it best: “It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not.” We enter the past often to repopulate and recontextualize ourselves. Indeed, I sometimes find the same memory requires several visits: they are too ponderous for just one, too rich in their thereness; too complex, too densely layered to be taken in whole at once; too value-tinseled to be cursorily released in deference to an impetuous present; too filled with micro-revelations and small but fully visceral epiphanies.

Nor is the past a silent country. It calls. It hails. It speaks, continually, sometimes with the buttery drawl of pride or the trilled dialect of joy, sometimes with the moonlight inflection of nostalgia, sometimes with the clipped accent of regret, sometimes with a blowtorching howl. Always it speaks, a persistent soundtrack, and always we hear it, even if we are not listening.

A cigarette lighter and a wooden figurine. Two artefacts, cupped in remembrance, unduplicatable, absent but ever-present, objects that mean, still, and whose value lies in that recession-proof market of people and places and events connected to them, and to me.