Future Ship

Who Knows Where

23 Who KnowsWhere Christmas, 1948, our tree stood preening in a corner, decked out likeAunt Rose. Tinsel shimmered, aping icicles that clutched our eaves, while a necklace of electric lights in various colors bubbled from the boughs. Here and there a frosted figure hung, composed of dough, some house of gingerbread or leaping deer. Atop the very tip, nearly scraping the ceiling, a toxic cloud of fiberglass white as Santa’s beard on which a paper angel rode, her skirt a cone of cardboard gold. Below, a cairn of presents, bound in ribbon or scintillant thread. But the thing that caught our eye, the center of our wonder, was a bulb that gleamed like polished lapis, bigger than the rest, a blue so intense it smoldered, as if it hid a depth, some mysterious distance in which all light was turned back, leaving its core impenetrable, black. family legend had it some ancestor, generations back, had blown that ornament himself and brought it to these shores. Passed down, it was unpacked year after year then placed into its box again, like the baby Jesus in his manger, and stowed in the attic.We approached it with a mixture of detachment and awe, gazed into its surface to see ourselves reflected there, distorted faces flattened out and curved, as in a funhouse mirror. But always at its center that mystery. We squinted, gawked, screwed our faces up to read some meaning, some hint of where it came from, but it preserved its equanimity, its rooted calm. No crystal ball, no lucid window to the future, but a blazing opacity—the round, blown, frail enigma of the past. ...