POEM: CLOSED FOR REPAIRS

Closed For Repairs

On a shop door

a sign is neatly tacked on the frame.

The handwriting is old, lettered in ink,

faded now,

with someone’s name

who once rang bells and tinkered with toys,

and polished shoe leather until it shone,

and made sandwiches with the same joy

that trees feel for their leaves.

The blinds are drawn,

the display window is empty,

save for one shelf where a single toy—

a racing car of vintage years,

a lonely entry of time’s passing, remains.

And seated there like a character

from some last-century cartoon reel

is the little driver wearing his goggles and a scarf.

His four-fingered hands grip the steering wheel

in mock endurance.

And driving forever on four wheels,

not just three,

with an engine made of wires and springs

and mechanical clamps,

and eyes painted on to see

his way around the imagined track,

he signals victory with a grin drawn wide,

premature perhaps,

because there is no going back

once the flag has been dropped.

I DON'T KNOW WHY I LIKE THIS LITTLE POEM. It seems so simple and cliché. I must have seen some sort of shop door with a sign up somewhere, and for some reason I think it must have been in Toronto, years ago, in an old neighbourhood, where small shops were still part of the landscape, where there were families who lived behind or above the shops that were their livelihood.

Now, so many of these types of businesses have given way to the box and chain store steamrollers of our modern times. Progress of a sort or a temporary dead end.

I had the image of an older man, closing his doors for the last time, putting a small notice up, as a kind of—what? prayer? that his closing up shop was temporary, that it was just for “repairs”. I thought of the years and decades this person lived behind a counter serving his friends and neighbours; of all the interactions and relationships that developed during that time. I also thought, of course, about the inevitable march of time that makes buildings and people grow old; that ‘folding in’ of things, and the inevitable fall we all must take—you know, the usual thoughts about death, decay and mortality.

The image of the little racing car and driver came to mind as a way of holding back that coursing of time. The racer is unsold, perhaps, or maybe it has been left out on display deliberately. It may simply be forgotten by someone whose eyesight is not what it once was.

Even though the first section of the poem is about the shop owner, the toy maker, who is most likely deceased, most of the poem is about the toy racer itself, its construction and what it looks like. This thing, this combination of wood and wire and springs, nuts and bolts and paint, this made thing is alive somehow. It has a function, though one it can never fulfill. Its fate or destiny is to run in a race that cannot be won. Yet all it can do is run in that race.

The poem ends with the suggestion that the racer’s goal is to ‘return’ to the starting position, to go around the track back to the beginning. But this is no longer possible; such a return will never be.

This does indeed seem like another of my ‘bummer’ poems, depressing as usual, with death ‘a knocking at the door, like the Reverend says, but the fact that the car and the racer have been built and painted by someone, and that over time, we can imagine, the wood eventually drying out and rotting, the paint flaking away, the metal of the springs and wires turning to rust; nevertheless the purpose of the racer—to go around that track, and yes, to somehow return to the starting position (to race again and yet again back to the beginning) remains. It remains until the last grain of wood and the last speck of paint have gone. (And  with it the last traces of the hands that made it. Though where they have gone is another question entirely.)

I’m not sure I'm happy with the idea of the racer seeking some kind of ‘return’ back to some sort of ‘starting point’—something that clearly will never happen—but the idea of ‘going someplace’ comes to mind, and with it is the question: Where are we going? Is our future 'infinite'? (Not in any way that we as humans can understand and relate to, I think). So if our journey is not 'ever-forward', so to speak, what is its shape?  (Hint: circles.)
Also, we think we have journeys in life that are uniquely ours alone. But is that true? Do each of us launch out on this arc, this trajectory, into the great unknown, like missiles into the night until our fuel is exhausted? Is not a circular journey of some sort a possibility, and something that is shared with our fellow travelers? (I think this idea of a shared journey warrants a larger discussion. I may have to write another poem about it!) 
Thus do we race forward toward some infinitely receding horizon, some end point we can never reach, or is our journey more of a return back from where we came, life and living being more than enough of a race for us to have won?

"In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." Genesis 3:19.

Cheers