The Weekly Croissant: I Am Learning

To Keep a Firm Hold on My Own Wagon

Photo by Gary Sandoz on Unsplash

I Am Learning to Keep a Firm Hold on My Own Wagon

Sometimes a wagon comes by, looking polished and fabulous, full of nice food and booze and attractive strangers, and sometimes the driver stops and offers me a ride. Hey, you'd do great in this wagon! he says. We'd love to have you! It’s always a He, and I think that is important. I mean, it’s not always a He who is driving a nice wagon, but it’s always a He who offers me a ride. The Shes merely pass by and wish me luck, hey, nice wagon, the Shes say. Anyway, there I am standing with my wagon. And my wagon, well, it doesn’t have horses, or even a singular donkey pulling it. My wagon is one of those plastic red wagons for children. The back left corner is melted because I failed to predict the path of the sun on an unfortunate, blazing morning, and one of the wheels keeps falling off, so every two or three miles I have to pull out a screwdriver and get it back into place. So, when I’m looking up at this glamorous, un-meltable, highly functional offer, I think, hey, I could belong in one of those seats. Why am I wasting my time struggling with a child’s toy?

And now and then, I do accept a ride. Just to feel what it's like. Oh, the He will say, There’s just one thing. You can’t bring that stuff along with you, we don’t have room. By that stuff, he means the contents of my wagon: A perfect and unused metaphor, An almost entirely original melody, The best sunsets I’ve ever seen, A surprising kindness from a stranger, and the memory of my guts felt when I had my heart broken.

I can’t leave my wagon behind. It’s full of all my best ideas. And these ideas are what will help me one day build my plastic shitbox into a delightful wooden vehicle of my own, such as the one I’m about to jump into. So, as a compromise with myself, I go ahead and hitch my ideas to the back of this fancy wagon, assuring that I won’t lose track of them and have to start over. It feels like a shortcut, and what’s the harm? Sometimes you have to take the win. But inevitably, we end up hitting a rough patch in the road, and I get that awful feeling in my stomach, and I turn back and see my best-laid plans have come detached, and are quickly rolling backward, away from me.