Trinkets
There’s profound magic in the archaic possibility of missing someone and having to remember them by sending a carefully chosen item, no matter how small.
It shouldn’t surprise me that in the early 1950s you could buy a wooden trinket on the street in New York City and mail it to a gal in St. Benedict, Pennsylvania for three pennies. My dad was probably somewhere near St. Mark’s Place in Manhattan when he found a small wooden dog with a tag attached to it. Because of the way he addressed the trinket, I can conclude that he wasn’t married to this girl, at least not yet; that puts us in late 1951 or early 1952. His brother Stan lived at 101 St. Mark’s Place, in an apartment above a funeral home. I know this because my dad told me, and because we went there together once to see how little the face of St. Mark’s Place had changed in forty-some years.
Young Leo Stanek, visiting his brother and smitten with this girl in Pennsylvania, stopped somewhere on the noisy city street and looked over the tchotchkes displayed for tourists, things which would have been handmade. He reached in his pocket and handed the vendor some coins. He walked off with the trinket in a small brown bag, maybe with a bit of extra spring in his step, and maybe with a smile on his face. Later, in his brother’s tiny apartment, he grabbed a pen and scribbled the girl’s name on a blue tag: Victoria Marana. St. Benedict, Penna. This was a dozen years or so before the US Postal Service started using Zip Codes. At that moment, Leo would have been 21 or 22, and he was probably already in love with Vicky Marana. She was not yet 20 years old. The handmade dog and the blue tag made it safely to Vicky’s house without the help of a Zip Code or box number. I know this because I found it in a drawer last summer, just a month or two after my mom passed away. I’d never seen it before.
This week, I’ve found myself intensely interested in that trinket and intrigued by the moments that marked its journey from Manhattan to St. Benedict. Perhaps I remembered the box I packed in my mom’s apartment last summer because of two impending dates: June 30th would have been their 70th wedding anniversary, and July 7th marks one year since my mom passed away. If you’re over the age of 40, I probably don’t need to remind you of how quickly time passes. In my mind’s eye, my mom might have passed a couple weeks ago. Honestly, I just realized that winter’s over, and it’s time to celebrate the 4th of July. It’s been a year without my mother, and this week I pulled the trinket from a cardboard box.
There is something powerful about young love and the idea that a hopeful and radiant future awaits you when you find the one. I wonder what it did to young Vicky Marana’s heart to get that little dog in the mail, and I wonder if she reveled in Leo Stanek’s penmanship, or in the simple idea that she’d been remembered. There he was, in the greatest city in the world, and what he thought of was her. At a time when we can visit New York and instantaneously share the entire trip with our friends on social media, there’s profound magic in the archaic possibility of missing someone and having to remember them by sending a carefully chosen item, no matter how small—I was on the street, and I thought of you. I thought enough to pick something up, to get a stamp, and to drop it in a mailbox. So many things are implied in that simple act, which is far from instantaneous: I wish you were here. The trip would be so much better if you were next to me. I miss you. I can’t wait to see you.
It’s not easy to think about your parents in that context—young and full of romantic ideas, yearning for nothing more than proximity to the person who sparks intense feelings, and a heart that bursts and quickens because you’ve thought of someone or imagined their face. But it is easy to think that those are the precise reasons for stowing a trinket in a safe place. Life is just one now after another. As soon as we imagine what now might be, we’ve moved on to a present that feels far different. Maybe it’s a now where worry, or fear, or loneliness, or pain make us forget the better moments that have been a part of our experience.
I think what’s most intriguing to me is that my parents would never be so different from the 1951 versions of themselves, even as decades passed by, even as events and people and the moments that they loved or feared helped to shape their perceptions. I couldn’t have imagined it then, but the Leo and Vicky Stanek who walked St. Mark’s Place with me in the mid-90s were a lot like their younger selves. They’d seen a few more things and learned some lessons, but nothing could get at the core—nothing could diminish the elevated ideas they carried, the things that made them tick, the things that made them stick together.
I had a moment this week where, in a flash of severe and unforgiving clarity, a single thought—I’m not an adult at all—almost overwhelmed me. It was a strange and fleeting now, and I wasn’t sure how to consider it. I might be a little more competent at this life thing in 2022, but the Gerry who lives inside of me hasn’t changed much through the decades. That can be either scary or comforting, depending on what I’m doing at any given moment. I carry my own fears and worries, and, hopefully, I carry some elevated ideas, too. And I do keep trinkets in drawers, just like my mother did.
What those trinkets mark are moments in time, each one a piece of a very specific now. Perhaps what’s most interesting is that the trinkets or photographs can conjure emotions connected to those moments, valuable moments that shape you and build a kind of muscle; it might be the same muscle that sustains you on days that aren’t so bright. I would imagine that sometimes my mother looked at that little dog from 1951, and that it wasn’t so hard to feel like she felt when it arrived in the mail. Even if it was bittersweet to consider that moment, it was all hers, completely within her reach, and no one in the world could take it away.
Happy heavenly anniversary to Leo & Vicky. 💜
That is an excellent piece, Gerry. You and I are just old enough to remember the world you describe. For all of the good things that have resulted from the information age and the digital revolution, much has been lost. But not the little wooden doggie. That was very touching.