Author Archives: Alan Ilagan

Come on. 

It’s funny.

Happy Nailing!

Happy Good Friday!!!

“He wanted, as did I, to become something he’d neither yet seen nor dreamed of, something he’d recognize the moment he saw it: himself. Yet he was constantly confounded, for no matter how much he adorned himself with scarves and jewelry, he could not understand that this was himself, as was also and at the same time the boy in overalls and Keds. He was split in two pieces – as who was not? – the blond wave cresting rigidly about his close cropped- hair.” – Richard McCann, ‘Mother of Sorrows’

Engaging with a recent bout of nostalgia, and embracing all that we were, I find myself taking a brief sojourn back in time to when we were young. Writers such as Richard McCann, who wrote the featured quote above, are much more adept at evoking such memories. I can only approximate what it was like, what I was feeling, and mostly it only resonates with me. Still, most of our memories convey similar wistfulness and longing, and perhaps you can relate to reaching an age where you have just as much to look back on as you do to look forward to. I hate ending a sentence with a preposition, but sometimes you have to do things you don’t want to do. Like looking back. Now I’ve gone and muddled the day before it’s even begun. That’s what revisiting the past can do.

Parting the palms: it’s the day after Palm Sunday and high Holy Week is upon us. May this one be higher than the Empire State. It’s also a rainy Monday, which makes moving into this week extra fun. On with the recap…

Cody Christian went shirtless.

The thread of threads continued.

Tom Ford to the extreme.

The staggering beauty of Diana Vreeland.

Mad Men Zen.

From a writer who knows Dick.

Our Broadway Weekend with Mother has been finalized. 

Recalling the vintage (and my old goatee).

Returning to the scene of my crime. 

Shirtless miscellany.

Hunks of the Day included Garðar Thór Cortes, Toby Levins, and Gideon Glick.

“Hi!” he said, joining the Customer Service line behind me at Wal-Mart (the same store I had robbed a while back). It was my first time in a return line in well over a decade. I just don’t return things, even if I should. Even if they don’t fit or work. But this time, when a pair of pruning shears shit the bed after three cuts of a hydrangea, I decided to exchange the thing.

“Hi,” I said in my most-unamused tone when I finally realized he was talking to me.

“Been waiting here long?”

I had been. “Yeah, I’ve been here half an hour. Well, maybe 15 minutes, so good luck. I’ve been giving that manager dirty looks hoping she would do something,” I said nodding at the sheepish woman with a barbed-wire wrist tattoo who had been over to help for all of 30 seconds before hiding behind other cashiers and pretending to give important orders in any other part of the store.

“Whoa, that long? Hey, when is a good time to plant a garden?” he asked.

Puzzled, as I didn’t even think he saw the pruning shears in my bag, I asked him what he meant before truly ferreting out his kookiness and realizing I shouldn’t have engaged.

“Like can I start a garden now?”

“Sure.”

“But will the plants survive?”

“You can prepare the bed now and plant later.”

“I guess we can grow pot now too! It’s legal right?”

Now it was starting to make some sense. “Well, I don’t think it’s quite legal yet,” I said warily.

“But they won’t charge you, right?”

“I think if you sell it they will charge you, but if you get caught smoking it they supposedly aren’t doing much,” I said, trying to figure out how to end this inane conversation. He went on about the pot and the garden, and how he had been to Denver where it’s legal and he had a Gummy bear with pot in it only it was 100 milligrams instead of 10 milligrams and he ate the whole thing and ruined his entire vacation because he was lying in bed thinking he was dead.

“That must have been scary,” I said in as dry and dead-pan a manner as I could muster.

“Hey, I got this keyboard here for $53 and then I found it on Amazon for less,” he said, showing me a keyboard in a box.

By the grace of God, it was finally my turn at the customer service counter. I won’t be going back.

Every once in a great while, I’ll dust off a few old photo albums – the actual, physical kind that we once used – and indulge in a brief bout of nostalgic mental meandering, retreading old haunts and revisiting former moments of a glory we never quite realized at the time. The photographs here are from the 1990’s so you’ll have to forgive my goatee – I knew not what I was doing. More moving to me are the expressions of genuine happiness and hope on the faces of people who remain vitally important in my life. We were on the verge of stepping properly into our adult lives. Maybe we thought we knew more than we did; for my part, I always felt like I knew just a little less than these brilliant people I was lucky enough to count as friends. They made me better. They made me strive to be a good person. They still do that.

Back then, the world felt like perpetual summer. It laid before us with verdant avenues and beautifully winding roads, where each path held its pretty mysteries, beckoning us to try this or attempt that. I gingerly stepped with slight trepidation, wading slowly into the pool that so many of my friends were already splashing in, diving deep beneath its sparkling surface and coming up with breathless tales of accomplishment and honor.

Why did life seem so simpler and happier when looking back on then? It certainly didn’t always feel that way at the time, but our smiles and our joyful carefree countenances indicate something else. We were happy then. Life hadn’t rocked us too much, not when you look back at all that was to come afterward. Definitely not when you look at where we are now. Yet we didn’t realize it, at least, I don’t think we did. Not in a deep way. I do remember brief moments when I would stop, literally, in the middle of a Boston sidewalk, when spring was in bloom, and the air was filled with the perfume of flowering fruit trees, and think, ‘This. All of this. Take in all of this – the beauty, the air, the night, and the morning.’ Even though I would invariably return to melancholy and doubt, those moments would harden into a necklace made of memory gemstones, each carved into an exquisitely-multi-faceted jewel that would be lit from within on those dark days to come. Our home is happily littered with such jewelry. It’s not something that can ever be stolen or taken – not by anything other than forgetfulness and time, but all things are obliterated in such fashion eventually.

Looking at these pictures is like rediscovering a treasure trove of those gems – invaluable, immeasurable, inestimable in riches – adorned in beauty, bathed in light, and bound by unbreakable wisps of happiness.