While I love all things sparkly
and colorful, there is a mysterious magic in the invisible that somehow makes
me feel powerful. Not in any superhero sort of way, though that might be kind
of fun to have the power to disappear on demand. In fact, come to think of it,
it could be a form of grace to find that, at certain awkward moments in my
social life, I could just instantly vanish without having to make any apologies
or excuses.
The kind of invisible I am
thinking of involves inanimate objects.
When I was eight or nine years
old we had the great joy of being given free reign of the basement while mom
was cooking dinner or preparing a church lesson. There was an accommodating set
of banisters on the basement stairs, which became horses when needed. The
stairs became covered wagons. And we had a chalkboard down there at one point,
and our Barbie houses. And, kudos to Mom for this, she would let us keep large
boxes, like appliance size, which were thoughtfully re purposed into massive
word processor computers or seaworthy boats, depending on our mood and
supplies. Also in our basement was a dry bar, which I suspect my non-churchy
father would have liked to have stocked, but which our found-her-long-lost-faith
mother filled with other stuff, like canning supplies and office supplies and
sewing stuff. Once, when I was coloring on the Formica bar top, I noticed a few
drops of Elmer’s glue, which had dried. I scraped them off with my fingernail
and noticed they were hard; nice little dots of clear plastic. Wow! I decided
to try an experiment. I sketched a little picture with colored pencil and laid
it in the center of a canning lid. Then I poured Elmer’s Glue on top of it till
it reached the little lip on the edge of the lid. Each day, for I don’t
remember how many days, I checked on the progress, until the glue had dried and
the picture at the bottom showed through the invisible “plastic”. I peeled it
out of the lid and voila! I attached a safety pin to the back and had myself a
pin. Not that I’d wear it anywhere, but I had one nonetheless. Next I took some
embroidery floss and formed it into a geometric swirl, covered with glue. The
mystery was in that the glue was white when wet, but it dried clear. I think
somewhere down in my basement is that groovy swirly button I made. A little
paint or food coloring mixed with the glue made lovely swirls for pendants and
other bobbles. Poor Mom. She probably wondered what happened to her supply of
glue.
I also have a thing for invisible
fishing line. Not only for the magic of faking out fish to think that the worms
I threaded on a hook at the end of the line were indigenous to the fishing
hole, but for its versatility around the house. Years ago I created a Halloween
decoration for our front porch, which included a Styrofoam wig head, a witches
hat, a plastic mask, a black negligee’ bought at a garage sale (nope, Dave
never saw it on me) and a nice long strand of ten pound invisible fishing line.
I screwed a few eye hooks into the frame of our front door and front porch
ceiling. I assembled the witch and threaded the invisible line through the Styrofoam
head, then up through the witches hat. I then threaded the line through the eye
hooks and attached the other end of the line to the top of our front door.
When
Trick or Treaters rang the doorbell, the witch rose from a heap on the ground
and swung forward on the invisible thread, scaring little costumed neighbors
nearly out of their wits. It was a grand hit! My engineer-uncle Richard thought
it so clever he suggested we should market it.
Later, when I was in charge of
bulletin boards at Knowlton Elementary, I used the same theory to create
animated bulletin boards in the school lobby. I used unfolded paper clips, embedded
in the composition board ceilings to thread fishing line attached to the school
doors. In the winter months I had little bent-kneed skiers connected to the
line. They went up and down cotton-topped mountains constructed in 3D. The fun
thing about using invisible wire in a school is there were multiple doors and could
therefore be multiple lines going to multiple skiers. Kids could stand at the
bulletin boards and watch the flow and motion as other kids opened doors. In
the spring I created colorful pots, from which little flowers would rise when
the doors were opened. And Kites that would fly up and down in the breeze of
doors opening and closing. I tell ya, I had an awful lot more fun and
fulfillment in that PTA job than when I was president. Serious fulfillment! I had
to make sure I was there when school started, or when it let out. That’s where
the joy was found! I would sort of have to make myself invisible, looking from
the corner of my eyes at those delighted seven year-olds, trying to figure out
how those flowers popped up and down.
Joy, joy joy!
I think I need to volunteer at
the elementary school again. I’m getting stale.
