We used to toss pennies and nickels and the occasional dime in the Park Avenue fountain. Plop! We’d roll up our jeans and dangle our bare feet in the often green water, making swirly twirl currents with our toes. We’d stretch and piddly wink someone else’s wish with a big toe, send it plunking across the dirty fountain floor. There! We wished for you again! Feel the love. Your dime, our time….
Sometimes, if we were really desperate, we’d borrow a wish or two, you know, gathering loose change for a pack of Salems. But we’d always come back. Toss a random penny, a cherished quarter, over the shoulder, kiss the sky, and send a stranger’s secret wish back where it belonged.
Mama’s in velveteen jogging suits pushing velveteen strollers would scurry past. Shielding their velveteen babies from catching a glimpse of the hippies wading in the fountain. Men in three piece suits with James Bond Attaché’ cases would stride by, their long legs skipping steps, (“Don’t want to break my mother’s back”) approaching fast and sprinting out of sight. Their eyes always straight ahead. A beer-riddled bum, hair matted to one side, curled embrio-onically on the bench. Always. His feet pigeoned under him, his spine weeping forward, his smile stuck to his apricot-seed face with kindergarten glue. He watched us. He never borrowed from the wishing pond.
And then we got cars. We rarely traipsed to the haughty-taughty garden anymore. Bothering their world with ours. But we still wished. We wished on one-eyed cars and first stars. Turkey bones. Pennies in the street. Yellow butterflies and ladybugs. Red birds out the kitchen window. Blue skies. Red skies. Hummingbirds. Blooms on the Bird of Paradise. Sunrises. Sunsets. Full Moons, new moons, martini moons…..
I found a driftwood wish bone yesterday. It’s gray barnacle covered skin old, and worn. It weighed nothing. And in a second , between my salty fingers, the knotted driftwood Y was limp, snapped, broken. It’s sandy soul scattered in the wind.
I found this yesterday too. Buried. Deep under the coquina at the waters edge. Deep. Where the sand is cold and the earth is wet. Where pieces of ships and dreams and conch shells and reefs and coral are churned into confetti….
Silly heart shaped rock.
“I wish I may, I wish I might……”
To be continued….
