Sadness
Because of its association with the grandparent who died or the lover who left or the puppy that never came home, we have been too quick to dismiss this thing we call “Sadness.” But to limit Sadness to the above would be like limiting the definition of America to baseball, hotdogs, apple pie and Chevrolet. Sadness is Nostalgia, Sadness is Reflection, Sadness is what Yeat’s called Tragic Joy. Sadness is what makes Joy so enjoyable, and Wonder so wonderful.
Dear Shareholders,
On a business trip recently in Mobile, Alabama, I walked into my room at the Motel Six, set my bag down, and noticed, sticking out from beneath the bed, two miniature legs. Upon kneeling down to investigate, I soon found that those legs belonged to a long-snouted, caped action figure. This saddened me. For I knew that 1) the cleaning staff had failed to meticulously clean what would be my week’s sleeping environs; and 2) some child had left this plastic toy behind, the child’s father having probably hurried the child to pick up his/her shit and “Get a move on!”
As I picked the stormtrooper up, I imagined that child’s tears as he/she realized, while Daddy barreled down the interstate, that the stormtrooper had been left behind in the motel darkness. “Go back, Daddy!” the child yelled through a river of tears, “Go back!” To no avail.
I also imagined that child’s shelf, now, and all its other figurines and stormtroopers and wayward aliens piled together in a kind of orgy of plastic. I knew that on that shelf was an absence, an absence that represented, to the child, the memory of all the stormtrooper’s interstellar escapades.
How sad, I thought to myself as the stormtrooper lay, like a corpse, in my hands. How sad.
“Thank you,” Buckbee said as his sad eyes pored over the miniature lost body. And then, under his breath, as he haplessly closed the door to his attic apartment, “There should be a museum.”
That particular exchange stuck with me. More and more, now, as I traverse sidewalks and parking lots and hotel hallways, I find myself noticing objects that might fuel the fires of Sadness. Just the other day, in the grate of a storm drain, I found a half-burnt picture of a young brunette, whose smile, due to the fire, had turned into a brownish rictus. Perhaps the rage of an illicit lover had kindled such an act, or maybe the girl in the picture had died in a tragic car wreck and a loved one was trying to burn her haunting smile from memory (much as her life had been burned away in the car). I pocketed the sad artifact and was sure that it would be a boon to Buckbee’s sadness.
We, here, at Buckbee, A Writer, Inc. have decided to start soliciting Sad Artifacts from you, our shareholders. These artifacts will serve two purposes: 1) they will give Buckbee sad springboards for his sad fictions; and 2) they will allow us to begin cataloguing and tagging the future constituents of the Buckbee, A Writer, Museum of Sadness.
Enclosed in the Q2R, you will find an oversized envelope in which we have placed a Sadness Evidence Bag (SEB). We would like you to deposit, in the SEB, whatever sad artifact you think worthy either of Buckbee or of the Museum of Sadness then mail that sadness to us so that we may begin to fill the shelves of both mind and museum. Whether it be a lost stormtrooper or a picture of your grandmother watching TV or a stamped out cigarette with the lipstick marks of a sad girl, we invite all sad contributions.
Please, send us your sadness.
Matthew Hargis
EVP of Personnel
