Monday, September 10, 2007
Scoping Things Out
Jules, bless your soul; of course you get your kaleidoscope story, with a big new year’s hug. It’ll be rosh hashona before I get a chance to update here again; I’ve got to do some travel for work and then will go straight from a site visit in Sacto to new year’s services in Berkeley. That said, Jules has exhibited her typical wisdom in requesting a story about hidden delights and revived wonderment; these are excellent new year’s themes. So let’s have at it, shall we?
I suppose there’s nothing that everybody likes, without reservation, no matter how benign and delightful. Balloons, flowers, merry-go-rounds – whatever you’ve got, there’s somebody somewhere who’d be much happier if it just did not exist. Some people get creeped out by butterflies; some find music depressing. Nothing’s good for everybody. However, I bet kaleidoscopes come close.
Because, really, what’s not to like about a kaleidoscope? They’re quiet, odorless, discretely proportioned. You don’t want to take a peek at’em, you don’t have to. They just patiently sit and wait to pour a riot of fractured colors into your eyeballs, on command, free of charge. Non-toxic. Renewably-powered. Dolphin-safe. I mean, really, what’s not to like?
It was just this line of thinking, or one very much like it, that led K and me to choose to collect kaleidoscopes way back in our respective halcyon days. We were engaged to be married and doing it on what we thought were our own damn terms. I’m not sure anymore exactly what that meant, but I do recall that we chose not to register. Don’t make us tell you what to give us, we simpered superciliously – you don’t have to give us anything if you can’t come up with a single idea yourself.
But we did wonder what we should say to some of our nice friends who did want to give us something we wanted, but didn’t know what that was. We were ruminating over this question one day at a mall when we found, at a tchochketorium, an elegant stained pine box propped open to display a gorgeous kaleidoscope of highly varnished inlaid honey wood. The glistening shaft was substantial in length as well as girth, though not unwieldy; packed along with it were six interchangeable disks, some transparent, some translucent, each offering a different target for the kaleidoscope’s mirrors of mystery. There were seashells and rhinestones, sparkly stars, multicolored slow-dripping oils… a whole half-dozen universes of optical amazement. Boxed multileidoscope kicked ass.
It was expensive, but we coveted it so we made it ours with mutual simultaneous feelings of freedom and guilt. And as we broke it open in the car to play with it in the parking lot before even coming back home, we’d already decided: if people didn’t know what to give us and they asked for a suggestion, we’d suggest kaleidoscopes. We’d collect them. We had decided to be kaleidoscope collectors, and damn but it felt right.
So from that day forward we bought kaleidoscopes, nigh unto about eighteen months later, at which point we regrouped.
We already, by that time, had acquired a solid half-dozen various kaleidoscopes and prismascopes, wood and metal and leather, simple and sophisticated, none of them particularly miniaturized but none garish or overblown, a friendly, homey nucleus of a collection… that sort of felt played out already. It wasn’t that we didn’t like the scopes we’d gotten so far – the were each beloved and cherished in their own right – but when we considered getting another one from time to time we were already having trouble justifying expanding the collection. There were way too many other cool things in the world to get to restrict ourselves to yet another preciously handcrafted diffracting rod. Kaleidoscopes and us decided to start seeing other tchochkies.
The collection was never broken up, but we had to get rid of a few pieces that just fell apart. The remaining exemplars wound up in different places in our household – some of them out on display, some in a drawer somewhere, and some all put away in their fancy-ass boxes. Anyway, we kept our scopes, but we gradually found ourselves paying less and less attention to them.
Later, it became now, or anyway the very recent past. I was tidying up a little in a room where guests would soon be sleeping on the floorspace that the Sesame Street RC Construction Site Truck Set theretofore had occupied. And in that room, there on a shelf, under the chess set with the cool Korean chess dudes: the original pine kaleidoscope box. I broke it out.
It opened, as ever, easily. The thick foam padding, true to form, had defied aging and still tightly embraced its several contents: a gleaming inlaid cylinder and its six interchangeable screw-on caps. They stood, stacked in a row below the shaft, like medical specimens on archaic slides, each a riotous fistful of color held in suspension for all those years.
I pulled out the old original kaleidoscope and screwed on the seashells-and-beads lens, raised it to the light, gave it a spin with the still-familiar brass spinning-knob. It was all still there; though it had been left to its own devices for how many years, the colors leapt out into my eyes as if I were the first ever to pick it up. I didn’t put it down for quite a while.
I may have aged some in the interim – I’m not saying one way or the other. The kaleidoscope collection as a whole is certainly a little worse for wear. But the primary kaleidoscope that lives in its wooden box, is still firing strong on all six cylinders. I’m not a kaleidoscope collector anymore – that is to say, I’m no longer actively collecting kaleidoscopes.
This one seems to be all the collection I actually need, and it’s obviously got a lot more colors left to show me.
