The Footstool

Where I sit and read here in Sarasota I have a footstool, a firm sturdy well built piece which I had covered in wine velvet.  This I did when I had it in my house in Massachusetts, and here it goes very admirably with the wine carpet I recently purchased for the room and a covering of the same color for my bed.  I never look at the footstool but I think back to the circumstance of its arrival in my house.  One upon a time--and, yes, dear reader,  it has assumed a kind of mythical or legendary quality for me--there was a young man who lived in my house.  He had a been a student of mine, a kind of tough guy or, as they say, "a diamond in the rough,"  He came from Colorado, and was on some level unsophisticated and but in some way incredibly subtle and knowing.  His relationship with me was so multi-valiant I would be hard put to dissect it at all easily.  Needless to say, I fell in love with him, and after a year when he was no longer a student, but still in the vicinity, we became lovers.  It was of course a ridiculous coupling, the fifty year old gay professor and the twenty one year old straight student who was passionate, tender, and committed and would never admit to our having a relationship.  He could not demonstrate his feelings and we lived with that and I understood.  But then one day he appeared at the front door with a footstool he had found on the street in someone's trash put out for the dump truck.  "You need this," he said in his serious and determined way.  "You don't have anything to put your feet on when you read."  He cleared his throat as he always did when he had to say something that was costing him emotion.  It was a shabby piece; the fabric covering the frame was early twentieth century bad rooming house ugly which had long since suffered kicks and shoves and who knows what other abrasions.  But I loved him for it, his earnest expression as he told me how I was to use it.  He has long since gone from my life, on to the fatherhood and grown up life that he was meant for.  But I have the footstool and have covered it in velvet a little remembrance of times gone by but not forgotten