Nostalgia

Day 67: I tell the story almost every year of how the bubble-light tree of my childhood deteriorated to the extent that my mother decided to throw it out, and how I pled with her to keep it, and how some twenty years later, I stripped it, rewired it and reconstructed it from the ground up. No part of the original tree remained but for the metal armature which held the light sockets and the base. I suppose I could have built a whole new tree more easily than executing the task I'd set for myself, but a new tree would not have carried the memories so strongly associated with the old one.

My father passed away when I was quite young, but I recall how each year when the Bubble Tree was set up on the table, he and I would talk about what made it work. I don't think we had the science entirely right, but whenever a light burned out, we almost always conducted a post-mortem of the mechanism. I was convinced that it was a chemical reaction; my dad insisted that it was physics, and to that end, we tried to determine the composition of the plug of glass-like material which lay in the bottom of each bubble tube. Was it a chemical compound as I suspected? Or was it simply a piece of frosted glass which regulated the release of bubbles as the liquid boiled under heat? Even today, I don't know for sure.

In any event, my remade Bubble Tree takes a place of honour in my home during the holidays, its spirit unchanged by the passage of time despite the ravages upon its physical being. The memories it holds are priceless, even if they are mine alone.