The Vest

I was reflecting back over a lifetime of hits and misses (very few hits, by the way) and one memory kept coming back. It is of a little boy, sitting on the backdoor steps of his aunt and uncle's house. The house sits on the edge of an enormously flat expanse of jet-black dirt, a tild field somehwhere in the middle of our nation's cornbelt. He is about 4 or 5 years old and he's trying to play a toy guitar that he had just dug up in his cousin's basement. His hair is reddish and curly, he probably needs a haircut - but you can bet he doesn't want one. He just wants to play guitar and make music like that Elvis guy his aunt loves so much.

But why does he want to play so badly? The small collection of 45's he listens to on his record player are all hits from this old crooner (the Elvis guy is like, 40 years old), but they make him feel good. He wants to dance and sing and play when he listens to the music on those little, round, peices of wax with the hole in the middle. No one has told him that it's not okay to do any of those things - in fact, most of the grown-up people in his life find it rather endearing, cute. His great-grandmother, who is a wonderful, wise, kind, deeply religious woman, has even made him a little vest to wear when he pretends that he is Elvis. The vest is white and trimmed in sparkly colored beads. It feels like silk, or at least how he imagines silk would feel. It's beautiful, just like the music he hears. When he wears it, he imagines it is he that makes those wonderful sounds. The beats are his creation, and he proudly sings out loud, "Baby let me be...your, teddy bear! Put a chain around my neck, and lead me anywhere!" Oh to make music! That is what this child thinks, perhaps too young to truly understand what it all means, and certainly too young to see where it would lead. But, oh boy, it feels good to imagine!

My mom dug out the old vest a few weeks ago and gave it to my little nephew, who's only about 5 years old. It's has a rust stain on the front, probably from decades of living in a box, resting up against an old metal Tonka truck. But the beads still sparkle, and it fits him perfectly. If he wants, maybe it will help him to sing and dance and play - and maybe even magically inbue him with a little courage to be whatever he wants to be.