A Courtly Contrivance

My sister, Alexis Renee, has always enjoyed parties, as is evident from the photograph. When she was just a little tyke, perhaps five years of age or so, I decided to take advantage of the fact that I was four years older than her, and thus equipped with infinitely more cunning. In the same swift blow I would take advantage of Alexis's fondness for parties. I intended do so with a special invitation addressed to her from none other than an allegedly magical queen.

I personally hand delivered this letter, written on plain wide-ruled paper, to my sister. Her face lit up with excitement as she studied the writing. Moments after opening it, when she remembered she didn't know how to read, I was granted the honor of reading it aloud to her.


Dear Alexis,

I would like to extend to you an invitation to join me at my castle for a party!
Please arrive at four o' clock. See you then!

Fondly,

The Queen


Needless to say, Alexis was beyond excited. She was so excited, in fact, that she even neglected to put shoes on before I began leading the way to the "castle", which, much to her surprise, was located but a block away from our house! She asked me what she would find there. I told her the interior was built something like an enchanted playground, with slides and ball pits galore, and that all her friends were also invited.

Before we had gone a mere twenty yards, I could no longer contain myself and erupted in fit of laughter. I will never forget the look on her face as I stopped and turned to face her. She looked utterly dejected as I proclaimed that there was no queen, there was no castle, and there certainly was no party.

I still often tease her about having been so gullible, though she was quite young. Either way, my heart now undergoes a series of hiccups as I ponder the internal goings on of my mind in between the moment that I first crafted such a devious plot and the moment when I revealed the truth to her. I cannot think of many catalysts for such a cruel deed on my part. The only semi logical explanation I can procure is that perhaps I wished to learn something by observing my sister's reaction to the whole thing. It is almost as if during my design of such a ruse, a part of me longed to believe in anything as faithfully as I knew she would believe in this.

Tomfoolery

When I was a child my mother would often take me to spend time with my cousins. One particular occasion comes to mind during which we rebelled against our routine gathering that would normally consist of a mild game of cards or family oriented television programming. On this day we chose to venture out into the world; more specifically, the eleven hundred block of South Western Avenue in Park Ridge, Illinois.

I would estimate that my cousin, Victoria, eleven months my elder, and I were roughly seven or eight years of age on this day. It was an Autumn day- crisp and what not. We were restless and sought any kind of adventure. We found it but a few houses away from Victoria's. The home had an asphalt driveway littered with long pink leaves. These were peculiar looking leaves and I had never seen any that looked quite like that, nor have I since.

In a swift act of impulsion, I made my way up the driveway to the spot right beneath the tree with said pink leaves, scooped up a handful of them, and made my way to the front door. Boldly, I summoned the owners via the bell and waited. Victoria stood back several yards behind me, giggling. I was greeted by a middle aged man. Behind him, a woman who looked like she was dressed for a party strutted down the elegant staircase, hands sweeping along the banister.

"Who is it?" she asked him.

"A girl," he replied.

Turning back to me, he asked me what I wanted. I extended my hands, clenching the pink leaves.

"Would you like to buy some leaves?" I asked.

He chuckled and turned back around to his wife who was now approaching the door.

"She wants to know if we want to buy the leaves," he told her.

As he turned around again to face me, his chuckle morphed into just a smile and then to nothing at all. Straight faced he asked, "But really. What do you want?"

I was baffled by his confusion, to say the least. Had I not made myself perfectly clear? All I wanted to know was whether or not he was interested in buying these strange pink leaves that I had collected off his property. What was so unbelievable about that?

I told him once more. He laughed again, said he was not interested, and closed the door. I turned around to face Victoria and together we walked back to her house. Though I had accomplished nothing at all, I still felt an indescribable sense of pride in myself for having done that. In fact, I felt proud enough that I told my aunt all about it upon returning to the house. I remember her asking me something like,

"Carsten, don't you think doing something like that could get you in trouble?"

But I more clearly remember responding,

"I like getting in trouble."

She later told my mother what I had done, with an emphasis on this declaration I had made about my enjoyment of mischief.

In the end, this "adventure" turned out not to be very adventuresome at all. It was just strange yet curiously gratifying.

Years later, at my own house, my friend Nick from down the street knocked on my door. I listened from the next room as my grandfather asked him what he wanted.

"Just wondering if you wanted to buy these leaves. I got them from your yard."

At the time I thought him foolish, trying to sell us our own leaves and what not. Only now do I smirk to myself as I fondly recall my own leaf selling days. Wonderfully enough, I had never even told Nick my own story.



Those crazy kids.

Nostalgia

An excerpt from the Wikipedia article on "nostalgia":

The term was newly coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer (1669-1752), a Swiss medical student. The word is made up of two Greek roots (νόστος = nostos = returning home, and άλγος = algos = pain/longing), to refer to "the pain a sick person feels because he wishes to return to his native land, and fears never to see it again". This neologism was so successful that people forgot its origin. lost time and place, usually located in the near past. Homesickness is often given as a synonym for nostalgia.

During this period, from the late seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century, that doctors diagnosed and treated nostalgia, it also had other names in various languages — mal du pays (country sickness) in French, Heimweh (home-pain) in German, hiraeth in Welsh, and el mal de corazón (heart-pain) in Spanish.

[end excerpt.]

It is probably since I have so recently moved to a different end of the country that I have been experiencing the most frequent and vivid nostalgic memories of my life up until this point. Being that the adjective "nostalgic" implies a desire to return to the time during which the memories took place, it seems odd that not all of these memories which appear to me so sporadically are necessarily positive. Rather, it is essentially a longing of mine to return to earlier moments for no greater purpose other than to merely exist at that time again. Whether it be a positive or negative experience is virtually irrelevant.

Sometimes the memories are brief flashes, as if straight out of a film. Sometimes they are more elongated and I dwell on them more thoughtfully. There is no real method to the order in which they appear to me. By this I mean to say that they seem to be from no particular era in my life. In fact, there are only a few things I can say about them for certain. I do know that they occur on a daily basis. I also know that I enjoy them a great deal. It is not as if I am displeased with my current affairs, by any means. I do not see my nostalgia as a form of escape from present day reality. It is only that there is a kind of incomparable satisfaction that springs forth from knowing that one of the few things we can know is this:

what is done is done.

Let it be noted that I have taken into account those people who would argue that there is nothing satisfying about such a concept. Those people would ask, "what about everything that is wrong with what has happened?"


I would respond by asking those people what they can do to make it right.