LOTR moment
Thursday, September 14th, 2006 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seraiWhile I'm doing relatively mindless tasks at work, I often listen to recorded books on my headphones. Today, while I was enjoying the uncut edition of Stephen King's The Stand, I came across this passage:
There was a grandfather clock standing in the far corner of the parlor. Frannie Goldsmith had been listening to its measured ticks and tocks all of her life. It summed up the room, which she had never liked and, on days like today, actively hated. Her favorite room in the place was her father’s workshop. It was in the shed that connected house and barn. You got there through a small door which was barely five feet high, and nearly hidden behind the old kitchen woodstove.
The door was good to begin with. Small and deliciously hidden, it was like the doors you encountered in fairy tales and childhood fantasies. When she grew older and taller, she had to duck through it just as her father did. (Her mother never went out into the workshop unless she absolutely had to.) It was an Alice In Wonderland door, and for a long time her pretend game, secret even from her father, was that one day when she opened it, she would not find Peter Goldsmith’s workshop at all. Instead she would find an underground passageway leading somehow from Wonderland to Hobbiton, a low but somehow cozy tunnel with rounded earth and sides, and an earthen ceiling interlaced with sturdy roots that would give your head a good bump if you knocked it against any of them. A tunnel that smelled not of damp and wet soil and nasty bugs and worms, but one which smelled of cinnamon and baking apple pies. One which ended somewhere up ahead in the pantry of Bag End, where Mr. Bilbo Baggins was celebrating his eleventy-first birthday party.
Well, that cozy tunnel never turned out to be there. But to the Frannie Goldsmith who had grown up in this house, the workshop (sometimes called “the toolshop” by her father, and “that dirty place where your dad goes to drink beer” by her mother) had been enough.
Does the fact that hearing that made me fight back tears make me just a soft-hearted ol' loony?
There was a grandfather clock standing in the far corner of the parlor. Frannie Goldsmith had been listening to its measured ticks and tocks all of her life. It summed up the room, which she had never liked and, on days like today, actively hated. Her favorite room in the place was her father’s workshop. It was in the shed that connected house and barn. You got there through a small door which was barely five feet high, and nearly hidden behind the old kitchen woodstove.
The door was good to begin with. Small and deliciously hidden, it was like the doors you encountered in fairy tales and childhood fantasies. When she grew older and taller, she had to duck through it just as her father did. (Her mother never went out into the workshop unless she absolutely had to.) It was an Alice In Wonderland door, and for a long time her pretend game, secret even from her father, was that one day when she opened it, she would not find Peter Goldsmith’s workshop at all. Instead she would find an underground passageway leading somehow from Wonderland to Hobbiton, a low but somehow cozy tunnel with rounded earth and sides, and an earthen ceiling interlaced with sturdy roots that would give your head a good bump if you knocked it against any of them. A tunnel that smelled not of damp and wet soil and nasty bugs and worms, but one which smelled of cinnamon and baking apple pies. One which ended somewhere up ahead in the pantry of Bag End, where Mr. Bilbo Baggins was celebrating his eleventy-first birthday party.
Well, that cozy tunnel never turned out to be there. But to the Frannie Goldsmith who had grown up in this house, the workshop (sometimes called “the toolshop” by her father, and “that dirty place where your dad goes to drink beer” by her mother) had been enough.
Does the fact that hearing that made me fight back tears make me just a soft-hearted ol' loony?
