Imagining the Past

By Philip Lear

 

I hadn't seen it in over 50 years.  But as I passed this second hand shop window on East Street, there it was.  The blue fruit bowl had a picture of a Cossack on it. When I was a kid that bowl had sat on the dining room table of my mothers house.

 

As a young child I remember taking the apple from the bowl and biting it not realizing it was wax. How tasteless it was and how disappointed I was. But after that I can remember sitting there many times marveling at how beautiful the fruit looked and imagining how delicious those apples and bananas would taste if they were real.

 

In the shop was an old man with a pointy gray beard.

 

"I saw the dish with a horseman on it, " I said.

 

He walked to the window and took the dish out. Then he turned and put it on the counter in front of me. I turned it over. It had the initials LL engraved in gold on the back. I knew for sure it was my mother's dish.

 

“How much do you want for it?” I asked.

 

“Forty dollars,” he said.

 

On the bowl the Cossack was still fixed in time trying to control his bucking horse. I looked closer. I had forgotten the brown jacket he wore with the course fur collar. I could remember as a kid imagining how warm that jacket must have felt in the cold Russian winter.

 

I hadn't seen the bowl since our house burned down in 1950. I was serving in Korea when it happened.  My mother had written me a teary letter telling me of the fire and how everything in the house had been lost. She and Melissa, my kid sister had moved in with my aunt Jean. 

 

"Do you remember where this came from?  "I asked.

 

"Not off hand,” he said. “Probably from an estate sale."

 

"Did you buy anything else in that sale? "

 

He moistened the tips of his fingers and turned pages of his tattered notebook.

 

"Hmm, it looks like this came in back in November.  There were some other items with it -an armchair, a globe, a table.  "

 

"The globe, do you still have it? " I said trying not to seem excited.

 

"Let me see, "he said raising his head.  "It might be in the back room.  "

 

"What about the table?" 

 

"That might be back there too, "he said.

 

He motioned for me to follow him and we walked through the beaded curtains that separated the front room from the back. As we passed through them the beads made a clicking sound. 

 

On the other side of the curtain was another room cluttered with even more old furniture.  We had to squeeze between the chairs, bookcases, tables, old pictures, statues, vases, dressers and headboards.  And there in the back corner was the old chair upholstered in cracked red leather, the inlaid table and the globe.

 

I remembered as a kid sitting in that chair spinning the globe.  Looking at the different countries.  Russia was pink and covered half the map.  Mongolia was green and China blue. How many hours I had spent sitting like that imagining what these countries were like. I’d run my hand over the Himalayan Mountains and try to imagine how they looked.

 

"How much do want for the four items?”  I asked.

 

He put his bony fingers to his beard and stroked it. I could see he was figuring.  "Two hundred fifty dollars."

 

"That’s too steep for me,” I said. “I'll give you one-fifty. " I said.

 

He wiped the corners of his mouth and stared into space. I held my breath waiting for what seemed like an eternity for his response.

 

"Two hundred, " he said.

 

“I’ll take it.”

 

I loaded the items into my car and took them home. The bowl went on the dining room table. Tomorrow I would look for some wax fruit for it.  I placed the table, chair and globe in the corner of my den.

 

Though my mother and sister are long gone now, some how, in some miraculous way all had not been lost. I sat in the chair, spinning the globe thinking back to how I imagined things were in the old days.