When I was a little girl, people began giving me charms. The first was silver (a car); the second, gold (a round disk engraved with the date of my baptism). My parents gave me two charm bracelets to start homes for my collections, one for silver, and one for gold, and as I grew up, went to high school, then to college, there were many more gifts of charms from my father, mother, boyfriends, and also there were school-related charms.
My first year of graduate school, my apartment was broken into and most of my jewelry stolen, including the two charm bracelets. These are things you can never replace. I don’t think I was the buyer of a single one of the charms. All gifts. All gone. My heart was broken.
Lynne had a really nice charm bracelet, and I was looking at it a few years later and wondered, Why can’t I buy my own charms? I’ll get ones that mean something to me. Maybe I’ll even find replacements for some of those lost. So I began collecting again, and other people began giving them to me, too, and suddenly there were too many for a bracelet. So I moved them to a necklace, and the charms kept coming.
Recently I decided the necklace was too heavy. I rarely wore it. It was so cluttered with charms, SERIOUSLY cluttered, that they didn’t sparkle and tinkle as charms should. I decided to move the charms to bracelets, and each bracelet would have a theme.
In all, it has taken seven bracelets to divide the charms to full advantage. (And that is leaving another eleven charms to remain on the necklace.)
I have two bracelets that I call “character charms”; that is, they are based on the first two (unpublished) novels I wrote. The wishing well charm that began this post is not on either of those bracelets. However… here, will you listen to this song and then keep reading?
This was a song that taught me early in life that songwriters are storytellers. I’d listen to this over and over and create different stories from Gordon Lightfoot’s words. And though the song wasn’t literally translated into something I wrote, when I hear it now, I understand how all the sadness and emotion and yearning and regret it evoked became a central part of two of my most important characters. There are even details from this song woven into who they are to each other, which I only recently realized as I stared at the charm and tried to recall when and where I got it.
I don’t remember. But I remember them. They remain with me for all time and I’m grateful for Gordon Lightfoot’s beautiful song as a reminder and this charm as a memento of them.
This starts a new series in which I’ll occasionally use my charms as the focal point of what I write here. Hope you enjoy.