Brewster in Three Parts: One (i)
This is the first installment in the short story Brewster in Three Parts. I’ll post the rest of Chapter One in the days ahead.
Preface:
By the time he was sixty, Brewster Lewis could empty the sum of his life onto a small table. He didn’t do it often but he could and if he did one would be looking at three relatively small and rather mundane objects: a pair of vintage Sennheiser headphones, a rusty, square head nail, and a laminated picture of his mother. Three things. The sum of a man.
Brewster carried his three objects with him at all times. The Sennheiser’s were usually wrapped around his neck prepped for action. The rusty nail dangled from a sterling silver necklace he picked up cheap at a Soho shop. His mom, tucked and neatly folded, into any available pocket. Brewster never dressed without having one pocket for his mother. He never left his home without the headphones and he’d been wearing the necklace for twenty straight years.
Other than that Brewster didn’t own much. Not these days anyway. He had a few socks, a bag of clothes somewhere, and a bike he didn’t like. Suppose, he had a dog. It followed him around. Maybe the dog had him.
It hadn’t always been a materially thin life for Brewster. Once upon an economy he had owned plenty of things that define and legitimize an American man: a house, a car, suits, even an electric drill he bought from Sears. But even back in his conventional days, a bit of a misnomer as Brewster’s conventions were always wide right of normal, but even back in his conventional days Brewster bought what was expect of him. What’s expected of us all. He accumulated, discarded, accumulated, and discarded again.
Even so, even back in his thirties during the heyday of his purchasing power, he never felt attached to his things. It would be more accurate to describe his sentiment as being a caretaker to his possessions. What’s more, from Brewster’s point of view, there were potentially millions of possible caretakers for the stuff he had. He never much like his electric drill. He used it once in five years. Surely, there existed someone, somewhere, who’d see the beauty in a Bosch 18-volt Brute Tough Drill. He sure didn’t. He would have traded it for a peach pie in an instant. Stuff never really mattered much to Brewster.
But his three objects were precious. They were his father, son and holy ghost. The trinity of Brewster. The sublime unity of the man. While he’d never part with one at the expense of another, he was especially fond of the picture of his mother. The picture was something of a conduit for Brewster. A portal to the innate, gentle nature of man. The one walled off by chattering ego and naked needs.
Every so often he’d find a quiet spot away from the pull of society and take out his mother’s picture. He’d unfold it gently and hold it between his hands and then, for a few beats of his heart, he’d give thanks. Some might call it praying. Other’s would say it was meditation. In the starkest of terms it was Brewster holding a picture and being silent. Really it all looks the same from a distance.
The curious thing about Brewster’s practice was his utter inability to recall what the photo was of. Truth was he didn’t really know the picture all that well. At least, he wasn’t familiar with its physical details. He had only look at it, three, maybe four, times during his life. He knew it was a picture of his mom and him. He knew it was black and white and was taken by his dad sometime in the Fall of 1977 or 1978. It was one of those. He thought. But after those broad details he wasn’t at all very clear on the picture’s history.
If his memory served him, it often didn’t, the picture was shot from a distance, fifty yards, maybe more, and showed his mom sitting alone on a park bench watching the Fall leaves drop from a nearby maple. He was standing next to her, holding her hand, looking at something else in the other direction. He couldn’t be sure but Brewster recollected being intrigued by a duck nearby. It could have been a stray cat. He wasn’t really sure. He didn’t really care.
Part of the pictures intense meaning was its imprecise and evolving nature. The picture wasn’t a moment in time. The picture was Time. It was the accumulation of a life and it transcended moment and had become eternal. Knowing what the photo looked like felt dishonest to Brewster. He honored the timeless not the corporal.
So every so often he’d hold his laminated mother and give thanks. He’d give thanks to a mother that forgave him his peculiarities and allowed him to grow up as he wished. He gave thanks to a mother who didn’t try to mend the fissures in his thoughts and mold his jagged sensibilities. He gave thanks and praise to his mother and to all mothers but mostly he gave thanks to himself. Each time he took out the photo, closed his eyes, and disappeared, he thank God for being where he was. Wherever that happened to be.
Further Reading
So Sorry
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