A while back I talked about my fascination with skulls and where I thought it came from.
One of the key components of this fascination was described as follows:
“… the truck’s skull-shaped gear-shift knob. If I recall, my father purchased it at the local department store, an outlet called Alco. It was a simple, one piece design, fist-sized and cast in a milky resin of some kind, fashioned with just enough care to lend it a semi-realistic appearance. I can remember frequently fingering its eyesockets and watching my father’s large hand resting atop the smoothness of its cranium in preparation for an impending gear change.”
I called it one of the “parents of the aesthetic that continues to rule my otherwise inexplicable skull fetish.”
Just last week, my father decided to pass along the very gear-shift knob in question. I was lost for words, especially given that the implied reason given for giving it to me was his own impending cessation (he’s not ill, just realistic).
Holding it, I find myself again fingering its crevices, hefting its weight, judging its imperfections and gauging the wear from use. So doing, I am drawn once more into that mythic past whose realities, muffled to an indistinct roundness by the distortions of time, are now peopled with the legends we adults create for our childhood. Reflecting on these things, I feel my own, inevitable dwindling take one dramatic step closer.
Brother, I can see my skull: gotta move!
It looks a little worried.
Any maker’s mark?
Heh – it really does look a little worried, more so from the other side or even head on: furrowed brows.
No maker’s mark at all. It looks like my dad is the one who put the threaded nut in the base of the thing, too, As I recall, it came with just a rubber stopper-type affair, not at all unlike that which serves as my gear-shift knob.
I’ll quiz my dad a bit when I get the chance. I was too taken by the gesture at the time to do much more than mumble.