Wednesday, May 16, 2007

DAY 23- Post for 5/10

Getting caught up…

So due to team finals, senior grades being due, and preparing for North Carolina, I have fallen behind on my posting.

So I will attempt to play catch up. Here we go…



CHASING SILVER

I moved into Uncle Chase’s Washington Hill row home on an unseasonably warm December day the year my father like a deadbeat cliché announced to my mother and brother that he needed a pack of Pall Malls for an after dinner smoke.
Two hours later, my mother phoned the police department and the Thanksgiving pies had cooled too much on the counter. My brother sat asleep in my father’s recliner, as I got the feeling in my stomach that something was wrong. I had had this feeling before, when Jim Smithson took off down Moravia Road and wrecked my bike into Mr. Hathaway’s new Chrysler. Then, the feeling latched onto the back of my head and spread like a dream over my eyes in the familiar déjà vu. This time, the feeling was different and like a cancer, what I would later name abandonment crept across my stomach and hardened.
Uncle Chase, or Caleb as he was born, had a half dozen row homes around Baltimore. One he rented out to a widower on Eutaw Street. The second and third rested a block and a half from Patterson Park. The fourth was on long term lease to a night-shift, emergency room, nurse two blocks from Johns Hopkins. The fifth was the one we moved to in 1967, the same year that Johnny U got his start over Shaw. The sixth sat unfinished in Federal Hill a few blocks away my new home.

My Uncle Francis lived in the large townhouse with the rest of us. Chase had furnished a small basement apartment for Francis when he returned from a spell in Vietnam. I went down to this apartment twice in my entire two years I lived there. Only one of the times was it by invite. That trip ended with Chase telling Dennis and I, “Stay out of Uncle Francis’ room. It is for the best.”
Francis never real left the war. His apartment was immaculately kept. The bed, a military issue twin, could have bounced a quarter. Everything else fell into place…the footlockers filled with Francis’ personal effects. If you didn’t know better, you would have thought yourself in the barricks of some boot camp.

One would think that Uncle Chase would have made his claim to fame as a Realtor, given the sheer amount of property he owned. Yet his true gift, that which would immortalize him was found in his namesake.
He was a silver chaser.
Unlike nowadays when you give silver to the people at the mall and lasers burn away that which is precious, Uncle Chase worked with chisels. The thing about this way of doing it is that there is always something left behind. And in the case of silver, it slides up the chisel and curls around itself until it falls off in discarded metallic ringlets.
Those who were skilled at this type of work looked as though they were chasing the silver clean off of the surface. My Uncle made gardens appear from dull gray, like the flowers were always there just below the surface and he simply cut back the weeds of a monotonous landscape scene to make them show through.
And I wonder if he knew the weeds that grew inside of him, if he would have chosen a different path. Because the only thing worse than realizing that silver was never worth anything is to have it tarnished by something that makes it useless.
But that would not happen for some time. Back to the story at hand.


INSERT REST OF STORY HERE


But as with chasing anything valuable and temporary, the chase leaves something displaced, missing. And when it is finished, and we have obtained what we sought, we are left with another type of longing. We long for the chase.

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