The Tea Table Or The Tea Wagon

I was a passed up child. I had to say that first. I will return to it in a while. As I near my end the past becomes sharper and sharper; or, to say it better, events or mild epiphanies seem clearer now. I just finished a short story tentatively titled “The Tea Table” or “The Tea Wagon.” I wish I were a better writer so that I could do it justice. It is a story taken from memory and elaborated upon. In short I believe around the age of 10 a Holocaust victim had brushed by me experientially; he was a wood refinisher and had stained a tea table we had. His work was impeccable. I recall how he had asked my parents if they would accompany him to the airport. It was an odd request to make. He was leaving to go to Israel, and this was about 1950. He pleaded with them to do so. They reassured him, but they could not comply. I feel my parents were not cruel or insenstive but I feel now that they could have done something more for him, as I was saddened by his plight and shaken by his terror.

I was passed up as a child is a free association that has much substance to it. I imagine it comes to mind with the fearful craftsman because I was not attended to, although my strife was that of a child, not a probable Holocaust victim who had been eviscerated psychologically.  Someone who mentored me as a psychotherapist, who is a very close friend, who has helped my family in several wonderful ways in order to attain our dreams, once said about how you go about understanding Matt Freese: “Matt needs to be felt.” I rubbed that for weeks as if it were a worry bead until I grasped the full intensity and realization behind it. That craftsman needed to be felt and perhaps I was the only one there trying out what it is to feel someone else’s anguish. I may be at times a schmuck, selfish, grandiose — pick your noun, but I feel. And no one taught me that. I was passed by as a child. All learnings were mostly garnered by me — “gather ye rosebuds while ye may, young virgins” comes to mind like a descending butterfly.

So 58 years have streamed by and this victim comes to mind; that is why “rosebud” is such a brilliant ending to “Citizen Kane.” For some reason, I remember well, I remember, very, very well. In a sense I lithograph memories to the cortex. And it is my not very unsurprising contention that my writer’s life has not been to create new but to metabolize and revitalize the ancient into new and sparkling prose creations. Apparently I — or you, if a writer, if not a writer — recycle our lives, trying to wring out of them meaning and much understanding. We squeeze memory like a lemon until the pips squeak, is that not so, reader? And in an ethnic comment, that is why memory is so vital to Jews. In memory we honor and keep alive in the present those who have come before and who have impacted upon us. In memory we reserve the dark halls of horrors of those who would immolate us. Memory is person. Memory is life. Memory is not the past. It is in the now.