Nostalgia and Moving House

I‘d been clearing the attic all week, getting ready for what I was desperately hoping would be my last house move. You fell out of an old book I thought I’d lost, wearing nothing but a pair of maroon swimming trunks.
Your long legs white, skinny as draw threads, with puny muscles like knots in cotton and a grin to charm the birds from the trees. Straight black hair hung over your dark lashed left eye leaving the right one to twinkle alone into the lens of the camera that loved you, despite your obvious shortcomings.

I started to cry. Memories I thought long dead came rushing back. In retrospect I feel foolish now, the thought of my standing there in that dusty attic alone, with tears dripping off my chin, pictures of the long lost past tumbling one over the other, unasked for, unwanted yet somehow inevitable.

You looked the typical sixties rebel, hair collar length, blue stubble pointed chin. A Lawrence Harvey look alike if ever there was one, quite a dish in fact.
You knew it too, girls just adored you. It was like being married to a film star sometimes.

You never worried about having sand kicked in your face, that sort of behaviour had gone out with Victor Mature et al. The hungry look was in with the emerging Beatles and the late still great Buddy Holly. The Liverpool revolution had saved you. You were fashionable, in the swim; lean mean and hungry the world at your feet.

For some reason you had chosen me to share it with you. I was happy then, content in the perceived knowledge that you would make a great daddy, a wonderful husband; that our love was enduring and would survive anything. How naïve I was then.

Looking at the picture now through a blur of tears a rogue thought struck me, I had always been a Robert Stack fan! Why couldn't I have met someone who had looked like him? I never could stand Lawrence bloody Harvey!

I wondered vaguely what Freud would have made of that.