Palm Sunday
C. R. Jackson
WE WERE
IN A
CELLAR looking at a boat. It was down
iD
South Jersey where we often visit and the boat was made by one
of the boys there, Ted his name was: a nice boy, modest, indus–
trious, and very intelligent in an unassuming way. That morning
his father had come over and told us about the boat, proud, but
quiet about it, and asked if we didn't want to come and see it.
So
we all went over.
It was in the cellar of a neighbor, and there we stood now,
my brother and I and our friend and Ted and his father, standing
around the boat and looking at it where it caught the light from
the three or four small windows up near the ceiling. The boat was
new and shining with varnish and Ted and his father looked at it
calmly in a very masculine way (exactly alike) as if there were
nothing remarkable about the boat and they had always been used
to it, while we stood about making appropriate comments. These
came out naturally enough as the boat was a beauty and we were
filled with genuine admiration;-at least we ourselves had never
been
a~e
to make anything half so good or even thought of it. We
might have been able to draw a better picture of it than Ted and
his father, or describe it better, but we couldn't have begun to
make the thing or even planned it out. We stood around looking at
the boat and I was thinking how different Ted's adolescence was
from what ours had been.
It
was funny that morning. I seemed unusually receptive
to
associations of the past, that day, as if I had suddenly acquired
a sixth or seventh sense, so perhaps what happened later was bound
to happen anyway, in one way or another, even if we had not gone
to see the boat or if the radio had not begun to play when it did.
As we walked over to this neighbor's cellar with Ted and his
father, things kept coming up in my mind that disturbed me and
made me want to stop and identify them, place them where they
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