A writing prompt, during last week’s Friday Free Fall, was a tarot card with the word “possibilities.”
“The possibilities,” said Uncle Henry, “are limitless. But not my space and time location.” His location was a part of a former barn, well insulated because it had been turned into a large garage, many years ago, and now it was being made much smaller still.
“Colleen gets the bulk of this barn,” he said, “I will only have a small part. With enough light and my own door. But my stuff! Oh, my stuff!”
“I know, Uncle, I love your stuff.” My boyhood had been, and still was, enthralled by his collections: Railway magazines and posters, old war posters and webbing, trade journals, how-2 handouts from so many weekend seminars at Olds College. I especially loved his books. Oh, don’t get me started.
He said, “Colleen will be happy with her possibilities, but me? A shrinking shelf space means I have to part with so much.”
“I’ll take it Uncle!”
He smiled, a wise and weary and well intentioned smile, saying, “Ya but…ya, but will you ever use it?
“I’ve used all the pirate stuff—that was glorious!”
“I know. And me, what about those papers for a correspondence course never attempted? Or those seminars I never followed up on? The perfectly good stuff that might come in handy someday, might be pursued someday, the 3-D art that might be uncrated and displayed some day? If I never displayed it before, I won’t display it now.”
“Can I have it?”
“Sure. This one is Andorra, a Jedi princess.”
“Thank you.”
He bent over to rummage through an old ammo box. “Did you hear my spine crack? As my space is decreasing, so is my time. Those charts of the South Pacific, those dictionaries for in case I went to French Polynesia—I have to be honest: I will never find the time.
“That book to teach myself about the old Indigenous, some day? I won’t get to it. You know something? Some of my books were because I wanted to be a better, smarter person, a person who would need those dictionaries.
“I should have only bought stuff for the person I am, not who I hoped to be.”
… …
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Sean Crawford
“All is vanity” Ecclesiastes 1:2
At the Sheraton Cavalier Hotel,
Attending When Words Collide,
A convention for readers, writers and publishers
August, 2025 (No Free Fall Friday today; everybody’s at the convention!)
