The Trunk

In the corner of my study is an old steamer trunk covered with wood-grained adhesive paper...and it's very precious to me because it goes back as far as I can remember...linking my infancy and early childhood in Philadelphia with my life in New Orleans..the city that crowds my sensory memory with its earthiness, its funk.
I arrived in New Orleans by plane when I was seven to stay with my grandmother Emma. Where my mother ever got the money for that ticket...and why she felt so motivated to get me out of Philidelphia, I will never know.
The trunk that had moved with us from apartment to apartment in Philly came to New Orleans a year later than me...along with my mother, Martha, and Eugene, my father. It arrived, along with everything we had ever owned, but I didn't see any of it for months and months.
With no employment waiting in New Orleans, no place to live, and no cash to speak of, Eugene had the trunk and everything else we owned shipped south. He and Mom rode the Grayhound.
We wound up in a tiny, furnished apartment on Magazine Street. All our stuff, including the trunk, went into storage. The shipping company wanted the freight charges before releasing anything...and the company also planned to charge us storage fees on everything that had been shipped. And we really didn't have room for the stuff anyway.
Rolling around in my kid's brain were visions of all the wonderful things that were waiting for me...toys I had left behind when I left Philadelphia...including my very first bicycle...clothes...stuff.... And the longer I waited, the more glorious the dream of being reunited with all of it became. I think this was true for my mother too.
I remember that apartment on Magazine very well...it's where I came down with the chicken pox...it's where I learned my states and capitals...and it's where I saw more roaches than at any other time in my life. The cans of roach spray my mother bought did very little good.
With a broom stick and a spring clothes pin, I made a rubber band gun...and with it, I had a lot of fun picking roaches off the walls.
My mother cried in anger and frustration at all of it...especially the roaches, I think.
My mother and father both managed to find jobs...Eugene even kept his for a while before my mother wound up supporting us all...again.
It took a very long time...maybe a year or so, but my parents made payments to the freight company...and finally we got another apartment near Louisiana Avenue...and we got our stuff, including the trunk.
My heart broke.
It all looked like junk. Many of my mother's things had been broken in shipping, I had outgrown the clothes..my bike was too small for me, and I was too old for most of the toys. Our dreams had been handled too roughly and they had been in storage too long.
Out of all it, the steamer trunk still survives...
Years later, my mother bought some contact paper with a wood grain and spent hours applying it to the trunk. But it wound up looking exactly like an old trunk covered with contact paper.
Of all the things from my childhood, this trunk is the only thing that has always been there. It's ugly and grungy...tacky as the contact paper that covers it...but it's tough...and it survived.
It's my link...