Belt of the Gods
My belt of twelve years broke. Twelve years. Not a nice round figure but there you go. Divisible by magic three, special to the Celts, pre-christian and post. Twelve. The buckle broke, the metal sheered and the belt, which has held up my trousers since I was 17 years old, became just a piece of black leather. Still solid, still stout, but no longer an ally and companion of my pants, no longer a place to hook my thumbs, satisfied and gazing.
I was upset about this. I realised the depth of my attachment to this belt over the course of a morning spent holding my pants up with my hand. I considered my options. I tried to repair it. I had few tools and the job did not hold. I could throw it out and buy a new one. I shuffled around the town periodically hitching up my pants. I asked people in shops, “How much is that belt?” But I could not bring myself to complete the betrayal. I went home beltless. I was going to have to buy a belt. A new one, and it would no doubt be inferior.
It is not just belts. I had a pair of trousers once the like of which I have never had since. I think of them sometimes; the most comfortable trousers in the world. They are gone now. My mother said she was too embarrassed to bring them back to the seams and stitches woman. “They are just patches now! When the next tear comes, off they go!” They finally went. When the tear came all along the buttocks they began their new life polishing tables, mantles, shoes and boots.
There was a hat too. A fisherman’s hat. I wore it everyday of my college years. Everyday. And it was a dirty white hat. It had stains to beat the band; blood stains, beer and wine stains, grass stains, and dark, damp sickly mushroom stains from that time on the golf course. I loved that hat and when it was time for it to go it was so thread bear it was see-through. I had not the heart to bin it, or even to put it out to pasture in the rag closet with the dream trousers. Instead, I gave it to a friend who agreed to dispose of the hat in China.
I was giving the hat one last great adventure. I saw it churned atop a great pile of rubbish by bulldozers driven by leathery-skinned Chinese binmen; a tiny white piece of me, stained with stories of home, in a vast landscape where the seagulls weren’t seagulls and the pickaroonies spoke Chinese. And when people asked me where it was, I could answer China, and leave that hat with the last gasp of a mystery, which I felt it had earned.
That friend did not, as I had planned, land that hat in a bin. Instead I began to receive emails from the hat. It told me it had been to see the great palace of the Qing dynasty and the mausoleum of it’s founder Nurhachi. It told me that Nurhachi had changed the family name from Manchu to ‘Qing’ meaning ‘clear’ or ‘pellucid’, a re-branding that worked because 30 years later they were in control of most of China. The hat told me it preferred my friend.
True to the saying ‘there is life in the old hat yet’ my friend used the hat to impress a local girl whom he gave the hat to, and who years later, while waiting for him in his living room, I saw smiling in a photograph with my hat on her head.
Over the years I have thought about those trousers and that hat, but the belt had never got a look in. Now it was gone though, I missed it more, for the belt was the only necessity of the three. I resigned myself to the purchase of a new, inferior belt. Good belts, the kind you can slide down ropes with and wrap around your knuckles in a bar fight are rare, as are hats with character and truly comfortable trousers. In the age of consumption things are made to break. I recall feeling humble with my head in a fifty-year-old fridge in Havana, and what a repairman from Clonee told me about today’s white goods, designed to break just after the warranty’s up, by well paid engineers.
I went to buy a new belt. As I walked out of the apartment, onto the shining square cut slabs toward the steps, my mind full of thoughts of my own wasteful habits, there, on the ground, was a black leather belt.
I stopped. I stared. It lay there. Then cautiously looking around, I picked it up and sidling through the flower bed of red carnations, I slipped into my new - inferior, but free - belt of the gods.
admin @ September 28, 2008