I grew up in Guyana in a little village on the West Coast, and I remember clearly the first time I saw a waxed greenheart floor. It was in one of those beautiful two-storey houses lining Lamaha Street in the big city. I don’t remember how I came to be in that opulent place, but I remember to this day the sight of that gleaming hardwood. I had never seen anything like that. I just stood there staring at it.
It was an image that stayed with me in the time I lived away – reinforced again on my frequent trips to Guyana over the years – and when I moved back to the Caribbean in 1982 and built my dream home in the Cayman Islands, while there was a lot of Guyana in that yard (starapple and breadnut and whitey), the clincher was that I was able to put in greenheart floors in the house. I did it by myself: the cutting, the clamping, the toe-nailing, the sanding, and the polyurethane finish (four coats of that) but it was worth every hour of that long solitary labour. For the rest of my life in Cayman, a day didn’t go by without my noticing or appreciating my shiny greenheart floor, and that’s no exaggeration – every day. Often visitors would marvel over it, which of course only added to my pleasure.
There are scenarios in your life like that, not truly significant overall, and in many cases quite minor, but involving an item that has this continuous meaning for you. Each of them contributes to the particular fabric of your existence; they become personal signposts of comfort or pleasure for you.
Sometimes it’s an item someone gave you – a gift from a dead parent; an antique object from a special friend. Sometimes, it’s a device you used frequently in another time in your life that you have somehow held onto. Sometimes it’s a reminder of a person – a singular individual you interacted with; someone who aided you in distress. It can be a favourite piece of clothing that you once wore, now faded and wrinkled, that you can’t throw away; it stays in your house with every encounter stirring warm memories in you.
There was a little nightclub in downtown Toronto called the Bermuda Tavern where the Tradewinds band first started playing, and next door to it was a clothing store. I walked in there one day and spotted an unusual German winter jacket made of heavy material in dark-coloured fabric with large metal buttons. It was the only one in the store, and unusual for a winter jacket for being short (but I hate bulky garments) and for having no collar (you had to wear a scarf ), but I loved it and bought it on the spot. I wore that jacket for years in the winter. It was snug fitting, the material was thick, and although it was only waist length, it was a warm garment. I loved the dark brown and dark red colours of it, and it became my favourite thing to wear. Unless it was blistering cold, I would wear the German.
In fact I wore it so much, and for so many years, that it got to the point where I would be teased about it, and in time the lining of the coat became worn, but my sister replaced the lining and I kept going. Eventually the jacket truly had passed its time, but I still wore it occasionally. I wouldn’t give it up. I still have it in my sister’s apartment in Toronto, and I get a warm glow whenever I see it, even in the summer. It has become a part of my life. It has become one of those comfort signposts.
When I lived in the Cayman Islands, the Trinidadian painter James Boodhoo came there for a series of workshops. I loved his work and was able to persuade him to do a painting for me based on a photograph of a sugar estate backdam I had pulled out of a magazine somewhere. James, now deceased, was a wonderful man, combining this fierce artistic temperament with a very gentle nature, and the painting reflects that. It hung in my house in Cayman for years, and is now here with me in Guyana. It is a favourite of mine, partly because it’s a good work, but also because it has connections for me with James and with my life in Cayman that had so many good years in it. It gives me pleasure constantly; quiet little nudges of comfort.
Each of us has these little possessions. Often it’s an inconsequential thing of no real financial worth – an invitation to a wedding, perhaps, or a silly item you bought on a particularly enjoyable trip somewhere – but the sight of it is a rewind to a time in your life, or an occasion, that is part of you forever, and therein it does in fact have significant value – personal to you, of course, but significant.
People who tell you that money doesn’t mean a thing are either so rich they can stop working tomorrow, or they are part of some entity that will support them for life. Tell me money isn’t everything, and I would be inclined to agree with that version, and there are definitely some places where money doesn’t take you; you get there perhaps from other circumstances around you, or from particular people who come into your life, or from an achievement, or from a family you built, and these little possessions, born in those special times, become very valuable to you.
In my case, a small well-worn pruning knife from my father’s days as a Pomeroon farmer; a James Boodhoo painting; another glance at a shining greenheart floor somewhere. Little things, in a way, not all that rare, and sometimes not useful any more, perhaps even rusting or faded or beyond repair. To others, these objects are often a source of bemusement, if not humour – I took my share over the German jacket – but to you they constitute connections. They transport you back to some sweet uncomplicated time in your life when love swirled around you like a wind, or you accomplished something significant, or you came upon a spiritual awakening, and your only memory of that time was light.
Perhaps that is the key to these possessions: they take you back to some long distant experience in a way that erases any of the traumas from that time and leaves you only with the comforting memories.
