My first trip to a consignment shop and the only thing I bought was a little glass dish. It’s small, obviously round, with high sides. No bigger than a saucer. The bottom is webbed and spiked with a sunburst of cracks that I can’t touch but I stare at through the bottom. There’s nothing special about the dish, save for its repetitive design of Technicolor fruits—watermelons, grapes, oranges, lemons, and strawberries all pressed together in one graphic still-life and then stamped repeatedly on the signs.
When I picked it up, held it in the air to inspect the price scribbled at the bottom in black Sharpie—15 cents, my mother laughed at me. “Of course my child would pick that up. I guess you could use it as a candy dish.”
A candy dish. It was just what I needed. It was just what this bowl needed—definition. What sort of aimless life does a fruited bowl lead—a bowl, too small for any type of substantial breakfast and certainly not big enough for fruit—less it be a couple small handfuls of grapes. This tiny bowl, before its brief stint of insignificance, had meant something. It was loved until it was worn—its purpose built cracks into its glass that I picked at, but could only be surveyed like pretty rays. I wanted so desperately to understand what it meant to be this bowl before, to be it now—a utensil without a purpose. To sit and wait in dust until someone found you again, gave you purpose—to be a candy bowl, in a new apartment, sitting on the countertop, full of foiled chocolates. Is that why the fruit never faded, though the glass faltered? Perhaps the fruit knew this day would come—another sweet moment, a moment of importance, filled up with someone else’s expectations—what a simple but mundane existence.
Flipping love this, Diamond. Great start, great idea, wonderful attempt at reflection.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all, where are you going to go from here? I think this needs to be near the end of your piece--I think it needs to lead to this moment of finding the fifteen cent bowl and wanting it, defining it. A walk through this kind of store is gold. I'm not a frequenter, so I can only imagine the awesome description of the random items there, imagining Z for--maybe defining those shoppers around you, too--as single mothers, as grandmothers without family, as kids looking for costumes for a murder mystery. That sort of thing. Making it all about definition is...cool.
" I wanted so desperately to understand what it meant to be this bowl before, to be it now—a utensil without a purpose. " From this point forward in your post, it gets to be a little too much for me. I don't know if I buy that you desperately want to be this bowl--that's a little hyperbolic, I think, and not in a way that's helping you. Still, what you've got in terms of reflection is a great start. Work more with the definition and, even, with the idea of switching places with the bowl--just make it more metaphorical, looser, to allow you to talk about defining yourself. We need a little bit of you in this, too. You have a good start, with the information that your mom finds it fitting that you want a fifteen cent bowl with fruit on it.
First of all, your first sentence reminds me of a T-shirt one would get at small attraction: "I went to Ruby Falls and all I got was this shirt." Immediately caught my attention. Secondly, I agree with Jenna that the journey, or walking through the thrift store, would add a great amount of detail and "meaning" to your essay. Show us how your child-like mind came to pick up this particular item. What did you bypass to get to this bowl? Third, I find the price written in sharpie to be interesting. If you are attempting to apply definition to this "candy dish," what does "15 cents" marked in Sharpie do to this? I'd like to see you juggle this idea in as well. Fourth, you start to flesh out your reflection extremely well, but then I become lost in the idea that you want to become this bowl. Like Jenna, I'm not completely convinced that you "desperately" want to understand its history. Maybe flesh this out a little more to convey the desperation of your speaker and lose "desperately." Fifth, when your mother makes that blanketed statement, who is she talking to? Does this play any importance? If she is talking to another mother, does this reinforce your want to understand how the bowl came to collect so much dust?
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