Little Shops with Glass Cases

A few blocks from the Air Force base in Italy, there resides a little frame shop where I use to go buy art prints, or sometimes merely to visit them when I didn't have any money. I would thumb through the posters in plastic wrap, looking for Vermeer and Van Gogh and Dali to spruce up my dormitory room where any attempt at refinement was like a drop in a barrel, but was welcome nonetheless. The short, be-spectacled Italian also sold stationery and hand-made frames, both of which I bought my fair share.

Most glorious, though, were his shop's glass cases. He would travel to different faraway countries, continents, or worlds (it seemed to me), and brought back treasures for me to discover. Sometimes, behind the glass, there were hand-carved masks from Africa; other times there were Russian matryoshka dolls. They allowed me to feel like an archaeologist for a little while rather than the soldier that I was. The reprieve was wondrous.

One day ( a monetarily lean day it was as I recall) I wandered in after going to the Tuesday street market, I beheld this Russian kindjal dagger. The owner saw the glint in my eye a little too readily. I don't know why I was so attracted to the thing--maybe it just seemed Romantic. Like something a lover would use to rid themselves of that killing kind of love.

I visited it often to make sure that it was still there; I'd walk out of the gates of the base, down the sidewalk, into the shop, and straight to those cases to see if it was still there. On pay day, I walked there with a rushed gait, handed over my Lire, and carried it back proudly to my room, glancing every so often into my bag to make sure it was still really there.

I felt that my ownership of the thing, in combination with other fanciful objects and attitudes and people I surrounded myself with, made me a curiosity somehow to others. They made me seem Romantic and impractical and whimsical and perhaps even a little dangerous. Which was exactly how I wanted to seem. To seem and to be. I not only saw that dagger in the glass case; I saw my own reflection.

I've carried it around like an artifact with me to every residence since then. It's an artifact of me. I don't know how much money it's worth; I only know what it's worth to me. And I miss those glass cases terribly.