By Peter Anderson
The Free box outgrew itself. Now it’s a shed on the edge of town, roof rimmed with windworn Tibetan prayer flags, old mattress leaning up against front wall spray painted with the words “No dumping.” The cardboard box from our garage contains some lightly used fairy wings – still the rage in preschool fashion – and bench seat covers from Autozone, which won’t add to the clutter for long. But I worry about the mini John Deere tractor/sprinkler taking up shelf space, since it’s November and a big winter front will soon bury the few lawns in town.
Having put my unwanted stuff on display, I scan through pairs of shoes ready to step off their shelves – moccasins, Birkenstocks, three-pin cross-country ski boots; the clothes that mingle in overflowing plywood pins – tie-dyed “Yes We Can” t-shirt, an old raccoon hat, blue gym shorts and shiny Denver Bronco warmup pants; shelves of books, weathered and worn – Mars and Venus Diet and Exercise Book, Winning Sweepstakes: A Proven Guide, Women Coming of Age by Jane Fonda; the weekend warrior handyman’s emporium – an unused tube of caulk, a jar full of 16-penny nails, a hammer head (no handle) and a hacksaw (no blade). I’m looking through the toy box – old slinky, squirt gun, a bald doll missing an eye – when a neo-Rastafarian couple (identical dreadlocks) enters the shed for a quick browse, and the guy walks off with the mini John Deere.
Then I notice an old travel trunk in a corner of the shed. The label on the lid reads, “memory exchange.” Hmmn. I open the trunk and the smells – patchouli, burning sage, reefer smoke, incense-filled memories belonging to my neighbors – pour out. In a quickly deepening delirium, I try to close the lid, but the feedback from a cranked up Stratocaster and the roar of a hundred Harleys blasts it open again. Next Hari Krishna, Hari Rama and an orange-robed baldy with a free dinner invite. And now a drum circle at the 1973 gathering of the Rainbow Tribe in Nevada. And then someone tasting a strawberry with Werner Erhard at an EST seminar in 1978. Whoa. I’m outta here and I slam the lid shut. Exchanging things? No problem. But I’ll pass on the used memories.
That night at the Laughing Buddha Lounge, someone asks me if I believe in past lives. I think of cranky old Henry Thoreau on his deathbed. “One life at a time,” he told a visitor all hepped up on heaven. “One life at a time.”
