I NEVER MET YOU BUT YOU CHANGED MY LIFe.
Long ago I had an affinity for the game Operation. For those unfamiliar, it was a game where you had to remove the vital organs from a fully lucid clown patient. Right around that time I remember my intense concentration being interrupted by my father unearthing a dusty old shoebox from an upstairs closet. I put down the carefully extracted funny bone to watch my Dad reminisce over this mysterious box.
The first item he removed from the box was a wrinkled old pocket square. Blood red. I remember it catching my eye — its odd contrast to my father's dry grey hands. I remember him rolling up his denim sleeves and crunching the fabric down into his closed fist. With a clunky wave of the hand my father opened his closed fist and inside was nothing. The red fabric was now nowhere to be found. Unseen.
This shoebox, unbeknownst to me, was filled with old magic tricks, ephemera and novelties from the 1940's and had belonged to my late grandfather — a man I never got to meet. Vincent DePonto (senior) died long before I was born. Vincent had been interested in theatre — playing lead roles in plays and musicals. He had learned some basic sleight of hand magic to entertain his comrades while stationed in India during the war. He eventually shared these coveted magic secrets with my father — and then him with me.
My father and grandfather 1961
My father's eyes were red and raw from the dust or from the past — but is there a difference? It was then, I think, that I began to feel the magic of loving something that wasn't there. A man, a handkerchief, a feeling. Vincent's spirit remained inside the novel artifacts tucked away in an old shoebox and the minds of those who loved him.
I once told everyone who asked that I wanted to be a surgeon when I grew up. That my steady hands and laser focus during Operation had proved it in my six year old brain. But my life long pursuit had just been discovered in the back of a closet — and I never went back to the operating room again.
I still have my grandfather's tricks (see above image), and will always remember this moment in my life. It's one that has shaped my world. One I will hold inside me forever, one I will share with my own children. I only hope, selfishly, that the things I leave behind will conjuror my spirit in the same way. Instill a sense of wonder in the minds of those who still remember me and ones I will never meet.