{"id":2892,"date":"2010-01-09T18:31:03","date_gmt":"2010-01-09T23:31:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/riverwriter.ca\/wordcurrents\/?p=2892"},"modified":"2010-01-10T23:46:57","modified_gmt":"2010-01-11T04:46:57","slug":"souvenir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/riverwriter.ca\/wordcurrents\/2010\/01\/09\/souvenir\/","title":{"rendered":"souvenir"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I didn&#8217;t know what I had: she had<br \/>\ngiven me three very thin, almost dry<br \/>\nblades of grass shorter than my thumb.<br \/>\nJust before class. She blushed as she<br \/>\nopened the hotel envelope and showed me.<br \/>\n<em>I reached under the fence at Graceland<br \/>\nI want you to have them.<\/em> Her voice was soft<br \/>\nand rushed, <!--more-->as if she didn&#8217;t want anyone<br \/>\nto know. She went to her seat, and I<br \/>\nshoved the envelope into my briefcase and<br \/>\nstarted the class with the typical 1961<br \/>\ninstruction: <em>Open your textbooks at page<\/em>&#8230;.<\/p>\n<p>It took that twenty-something a lot of years to understand<br \/>\nthat there was something to understand about that.<br \/>\nHe had to watch his own kids go through their own dramas,<br \/>\ndevelop belief systems different from his own, become<br \/>\nobsessed with music he couldn&#8217;t comprehend, clothes<br \/>\nand friends that made no sense; and he had to change<br \/>\ninto different clothes, music, friends and belief systems<br \/>\nthat he would have believed impossible in 1961.<br \/>\nHe had to watch his hair grow gray and his muscles sag<br \/>\nuntil they disappeared from the framing of the mirror<br \/>\nand lived more in imagination than in flesh.<br \/>\nBut even then, having understood there was something<br \/>\nto understand, he could not go back and understand it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 1961, a grade 9 student gave me three blades of grass she had plucked from under the fence at Graceland. (#1029) <a href=\"https:\/\/riverwriter.ca\/wordcurrents\/2010\/01\/09\/souvenir\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,3,416],"tags":[396,875,874,476,131,361],"class_list":["post-2892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aging","category-poetry","category-thoughts-below-ground","tag-adolescence","tag-elvis-pressley","tag-ex-student","tag-memory","tag-romance","tag-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/riverwriter.ca\/wordcurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/riverwriter.ca\/wordcurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/riverwriter.ca\/wordcurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riverwriter.ca\/wordcurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riverwriter.ca\/wordcurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/riverwriter.ca\/wordcurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2892\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/riverwriter.ca\/wordcurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riverwriter.ca\/wordcurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riverwriter.ca\/wordcurrents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}