1935

     It was 1982 and I was twelve years old when the year 1935 began to push slowly up, through the floor of our home. It was first felt as a dusty, tired silence. It was the silence, which settles in the corners of the homes of the elderly.

Invisible grey piles of the echoes from ticking clocks.

1935 passed slowly up through the legs of our cheap furniture, leaving clawed feet and ornate scrollwork, easily missed in passing.

It seeped into picture frames, leaching colors and lending a sepia cast to the chemical vibrancy of the computer age.

It left behind dark fedoras and flowered hats. Photos from the beach or that day at the lake became seas of black and white faces, smiling from dance floors long buried and broken.

     Outside our house, 1982 pressed close. Forty-seven years of progress and reality surrounded us.

Solid, shallow and unconcerned about the potential for ages past to reassert themselves.

But once in a while, if the late-day sun was just so, I could see thin lace curtains, like the ones which haunted our windows, being exhaled into the evening air, from the homes of neighbors. Or sometimes, while passing their opens doors, could hear the sound of a record player needle skipping, buried within the audio litter of an Atari game.

The massive console television, which squatted in the corner of our own living room, would often trade its heavy screen for a dimly lit window and an endless array of layered frequencies. Tin colored voices drifted through the air.

Eddie Cantor, The Happiness Boys and the Fleischman’s Yeast Hour were broadcasting, muffled and thin, through the heavy decades.

    Standing by a window, on carpet, which creaked, I often looked out at the houses nearby and wondered what years might be pressing up through their floors. But that wasn’t a question a twelve year old could ask.

Or maybe it was a question only a twelve year old could. Either way, I never did.

We moved and the presence of 1935 was left behind and never mentioned, but not forgotten.

In the many homes that followed I would often stand listening, or watching the picture frames, for any signs that whatever year it was, it was just the surface.