Founder of the Broadneck Writers’ Workshop in Annapolis, Maryland (www.broadneckwritersworkshop.
Visit Jane's webpage at:
http://www.
Encore
Luigi Zamboni is still
dashing, like Robert De Niro with a goatee, only he wears a poet’s shirt and
ruffled doublet. A trapeze artist, he performs his old routine daily on a stage
with a Jackson Pollock backdrop, his torso as rigid as cardboard even after
forty years. The tiny box theater where he performs is just that –a decorative
box with a window. For my first crush is a paper doll.
Hands grasping a
bar that juts from the wall, he flips round and round: arms pivoting, feet
scissoring, legs swinging –in tandem, in splits –his strength coming in fits,
like my chuckles, as he cranks out each flagging somersault.
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"LUIGI ZAMBONI" |
Decades in a
closet may have dimmed his youth, but he outlived the spectator who retired him.
When I turn the box to wind his motor, it groans with shifting sands and rubber
bands I fear are on the verge of breaking. Luigi’s not as fast as he used to
be, but then neither am I. Preservation be damned, though; when he flies, we
are both young again.
Today he flies in my bag
on a plane bound far from home. I’m bursting to share him with someone, my
seatmate perhaps –a woman my age –yet I hold back until we land, frozen with the
childish fear of judgment from a total stranger. She has more important things
to do. She will feign interest at best. Or will she? Maybe I’m the judgmental
one.
“Would you like to
see something special?” I ask, wincing at my own awkward words.
She surprises me
with a Yes, and I show off my share
of the inheritance.
Luigi
does a half dozen dizzying flips, pauses, and with superhuman effort pulls off
one more.
My
companion, spellbound, smiles. She says she owned the same toy and muses where
it could be now. She exits the plane shopping eBay on her phone. I don’t know
her name, but I think of her now as my friend. Maybe friendship was always that
easy, but I just didn’t know it.
Luigi and I, being
past our prime, appreciate the time left to us all the more for it. Our
shifting sands and rubber bands aren’t what they used to be, but we still have
a few tricks up our ruffled sleeves. People need us.
~ J. C. Elkin